The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  ‘Here we go,’ said Captain Laverde. ‘Here comes the real thing.’

  Beside Julio there was a couple in their fifties, a man in a polka-dot bow tie and his wife, whose mousy face didn’t hide the fact that she’d once been beautiful. Julio heard the man say that he was going to go and get the car. And he also heard the wife. ‘But don’t be silly. Stay here and we’ll go afterwards. You’re going to miss the best part.’

  The Audacity of the Pilot

  At that moment, the squadron flew past at a low altitude in front of the stand and then in a straight line to the south. Applause broke out, and Julio clapped too. Captain Laverde had forgotten him: his eyes were fixed on what was happening in the sky, the dangerous designs that were taking place up there, and then Julio understood that his father had never seen anything like this before either. ‘I didn’t know the things you could do in a plane,’ he would say much later, when the episode was relived in social get-togethers, or family dinners. ‘It was as though Abadía had suspended the laws of gravity.’ Returning from the south, Captain Abadía’s Hawk fighter left the formation, or rather the rest of the Hawks peeled away from his. Julio didn’t know when Abadía had been left alone, or where the other eight pilots had gone, having disappeared all of a sudden as if the cloud had swallowed them. Then the solitary aircraft flew past in front of the stand doing a roll that drew shouts and applause. Heads followed it and saw it twist and turn over and return, this time flying lower and faster, tracing another roll with the mountains as background, then disappear once again into the northern skies, then reappear in them, as if looming out of nowhere, and heading towards the grandstands.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ said someone.

  Abadía’s Hawk was flying straight towards the spectators.

  ‘But what’s that crazy man doing?’ said someone else.

  This time the voice came from below, from one of the men with President López. Without knowing why, Julio looked at the president at that moment and saw him clutching the wooden railing with both hands, as if he wasn’t standing on a construction well planted on the ground, but at the rails of a ship on the high sea. Again Julio sensed the acrid taste in his mouth, the dizziness and also a sudden sharp pain in his forehead behind his eyes. And that was when Captain Laverde said, in a low voice to no one specifically, or just to himself, with a mixture of admiration and envy, as if watching someone else resolve an enigma, ‘Good God. He wants to grab the flag.’

  What happened next occurred for Julio as if outside of time, like a hallucination produced by the migraine. Captain Abadía’s fighter plane approached the presidential grandstand at 400 kilometres per hour, but it seemed to be floating in one place in the cool air; and a few metres away performed a roll in the air and then another one – loop the loop, Captain Laverde called it – and all in the middle of a deathly silence. Julio remembered that he had time to look around, to see faces paralysed by fear and astonishment, and mouths open as if they were screaming. But there were no screams: the world was hushed. In one instant Julio realized that his father was right: Captain Abadía had planned to finish his double roll so close to the waving flag that he could grasp the fabric in his hand, an impossible pirouette dedicated to President López the way a toreador dedicates a bull. All this he understood, and he still had time to wonder if the rest had understood too. And then he felt the shadow of the plane in his eyes, an impossibility since the sun was not shining, and he felt a gust of something that smelled burnt, and he had the presence of mind to see how Abadía’s fighter plane did a strange leap in the air, bent as if it were rubber and hastened to the ground, destroying as it did the wooden roofs of the diplomatic stand, taking the stairs of the presidential grandstand down with it and shattering into bits as it crashed against the field.

  The world exploded. There was an explosion of noise: shouts, heels against wood floors, the sound bodies make when they flee. A black cloud that didn’t look like smoke, but like dense ash, exploded down there where the plane had fallen, and remained in place for longer than it should have. From the area of impact came a wave of brutal heat that killed those who were closest to it in seconds, and the rest felt like they were being charred alive. The luckiest ones thought they were dying of asphyxiation, because the heat was consuming all the oxygen in the air. It was like being inside an oven, one of those present would say later. When the set of steps was detached from the stand, the boards and rails gave way and both the Laverdes fell to the ground, and that was when, Julio would say much later, the pain began.

  ‘Papá,’ he called, and saw Captain Laverde stand up to try to help a woman who had been trapped beneath the wood of the steps, but it was obvious the woman was beyond all help. ‘Papá, something’s wrong with me.’

  Julio heard the voice of a man calling a woman. ‘Elvia,’ he shouted, ‘Elvia.’ And Julio recognized the guy with the polka-dot bow tie who’d gone to fetch the car, walking among the fallen bodies, stepping on some of them or tripping over them. There was that burnt smell, and Julio identified it: it was the smell of meat. Captain Laverde turned around and Julio saw, reflected on his face, the disaster of what had happened. Captain Laverde took him by the hand and began to walk to get away from the catastrophe, looking for a way to get to a hospital as quickly as possible. Julio had now begun to cry, less from the pain than from the fear, when they walked past the diplomatic stand and he saw two dead bodies, and recognized the cream-coloured shoes on one of them. Then he passed out. He woke up hours later, in pain and surrounded by worried faces, in a bed in the San José Hospital.

  Lucky to Survive

  No one ever knew how it happened, if the plane broke up in the air or if it came from the crash, but the fact is that Julio received a gob of motor oil full in the face, and the oil burned his skin and his flesh and it was lucky it didn’t kill him, as it did so many others. There were fifty-five dead after the accident: first among them was Captain Abadía. It was explained that the manoeuvre had produced a ball of air; that the plane, after the double roll, had entered a void; that all that caused the loss of altitude and control and the inevitable downfall. In the hospitals, the injured people received that news with indifference or amazement, and heard that the Treasury would pay for the funerals of the dead, that the poorest families would receive assistance from the city and that the president had visited all the injured the first night. He had certainly visited young Julio Laverde, at least. But he was not awake at the time and was unaware of the visit. His parents told him about it in great detail.

  The next day, his mother stayed with him while his father attended the funerals of Abadía, Captain Jorge Pardo and two cavalry soldiers stationed at Santa Ana, all buried at the Central Cemetery after a procession that included several representatives of the government and the cream of the military Air and Ground Forces. Julio, lying on the good side of his face, received morphine injections. He saw the world as if from inside an aquarium. He touched the sterilized dressing and was dying to scratch, but he couldn’t scratch. At the moments of greatest pain he hated Captain Laverde and then he said an Our Father and asked forgiveness for his evil thoughts. He also prayed that his injury wouldn’t become infected, because he had been told that it might. And then he saw the foreign girl and started talking to her. He saw himself with his burnt face. Sometimes her face was burnt too and sometimes it wasn’t, but she always had the pink scarf and the cream-coloured shoes. In those hallucinations the young woman spoke to him sometimes. She asked him how he was. She asked him if he was in pain.

  And sometimes she asked him, ‘Do you like planes?’

  Night was falling. Maya Fritts lit a scented candle to frighten off the mosquitoes. ‘They all come out at this hour,’ she said. She handed me a stick of repellent and told me to put it everywhere, but especially on my ankles, and when I tried to read the label I realized how ferociously dark it was getting. I also realized that there was now no possibility whatsoever of my returning to Bogotá, and I realized that Maya Frit
ts had realized that too, as if we’d both been working on the assumption until now that I would spend the night here, with her, like a guest of honour, two strangers sharing a roof because they weren’t such strangers, after all: they had a dead man in common. I looked at the sky, marine blue like one of those skies of Magritte’s, and before it got completely dark I saw the first bats, their black silhouettes outlined against the background. Maya stood up, put a wooden chair in between the two hammocks, and on top of the chair arranged a lit candle, a small polystyrene cooler filled with chunks of ice, a bottle of rum and a bottle of Coke. She went back to lie down in her hammock (a skilful manoeuvre of opening it and getting in with a single movement). My leg hurt. In a matter of minutes the musical scandal of crickets and cicadas burst out and a few minutes later had calmed down again, and only a few soloists chimed up here and there, interrupted every once in a while by the croak of a lost frog. The bats fluttered 3 metres above our heads, coming in and out of their refuges in the wooden roof, and the yellow light moved with the puffs of a gentle breeze, and the air was warm and the rum was going down nicely. ‘Well, someone’s not going to be sleeping in Bogotá tonight,’ said Maya Fritts. ‘If you want to call, there’s a telephone in my room.’

  I thought of Leticia, of her little sleeping face. I thought of Aura. I thought of a vibrator the colour of ripe mulberries.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t have to phone anybody.’

  ‘One less problem,’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t have any clothes either.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that we can fix.’

  I looked at her: her bare arms, her breasts, her square chin, her small ears with narrow lobes where a spark of light flashed every time she moved her head. Maya took a sip, rested her glass on her belly, and I did the same. ‘Look, Antonio, this is the thing,’ she said then, ‘I need you to tell me about my father, about the end of his life, about the day of his death. Nobody else saw the things that you saw. If all this is a puzzle, then you have a piece that nobody else has, if you see what I mean. Can you help me?’ I didn’t answer immediately. ‘Can you help me?’ Maya insisted, but I didn’t answer. She leaned on one elbow, anyone who’s been in a hammock knows how difficult it is to lean on one elbow, you lose your balance and get tired pretty fast. I sunk into my hammock so that I was wrapped in the material that smelled of humidity and past sweat, of a history of men and women lying here after swimming in the pool or working on the property. I stopped looking at Maya Fritts. ‘And if I tell you what you want to know,’ I said, ‘are you going to do the same?’ I was suddenly thinking about my virgin diary, about that solitary and lost question mark, and some words sketched themselves out in my head: I want to know. Maya didn’t reply, but in the shadows I saw her settled down into her hammock the same way I was in mine, and that was all I needed. I started to talk, I told Maya all that I knew and thought I knew about Ricardo Laverde, all that I remembered and what I feared I’d forgotten, all that Laverde had told me and also all that I’d found out after his death, and that’s how we stayed until after midnight, each wrapped in our hammock, each scrutinizing the roof where the bats moved, filling with words the silence of the warm night, but without ever looking at each other, like a priest and sinner in the sacrament of confession.

  4

  We’re All Fugitives

  It was starting to get light when, exhausted and half drunk and almost hoarse, I let Maya Fritts guide me to the guest room, or what she, at that moment, called the guest room. There was no bed, just two simple and rather fragile-looking camp beds (mine let out a crack when I dropped like a dead man onto the mattress, without pulling back the thin white sheet). A fan whirred furiously above my head, and I think I had a fleeting drunken bout of paranoia when I chose the bed that wasn’t directly under the blades, in case the contraption came loose as I slept and fell on top of me. But I also remember having received certain instructions, through the fog of sleepiness and rum. Not to leave the windows open without the screens, not to leave Coke cans anywhere (the house fills up with ants), not to throw paper down the toilet. ‘That’s really important, people from the city always forget,’ she said, or I think she said. ‘Going to the toilet is one of the most automatic things in the world, nobody thinks when they’re sitting there. And I’d rather not tell you about the problems later with the septic tank.’ The discussion of my bodily functions by a complete stranger didn’t make me uncomfortable. Maya Fritts was the most natural person I’d ever met, so different from most bogotanos whose puritanism meant they were quite capable of going through life pretending never to shit. I think I agreed, don’t know if I said anything. My leg was hurting more than usual, my hip hurt. I put it down to the humidity and exhaustion after so many hours on an unpredictable and dangerous highway.

  I woke up disoriented. It was the midday heat that woke me up: I was sweating and the sheet was soaked, like the sheets at the San José Hospital under the sweats of my hallucinations, and when I looked at the ceiling I realized the fan had stopped spinning. The aggressive daylight filtered through the wooden blinds and formed puddles of light on the white floor tiles. Beside the closed door, on a wicker chair, there was something like a change of clothes: two short-sleeved checked shirts, a green towel. The house was silent. In the distance I could hear voices, the voices of people working, and the sounds of their tools as they worked: I didn’t know who they were, what they were doing at that hour, in that heat, and just as I was wondering, the noises stopped, and I thought: they will have gone for a siesta. I opened the blinds and the window and peered out with my nose practically pressed against the mosquito screen, and didn’t see anybody: I saw the luminous rectangle of the pool, saw the solitary slide, I saw a ceiba tree like the ones I’d seen along the highway, specially designed to give shade to the poor creatures who inhabited this world of harsh sunshine. Beneath the ceiba was the German shepherd I’d seen on my way in. Behind the ceiba stretched the plain, and behind the plain somewhere flowed the Magdalena River, the sound of which I could easily imagine or conjecture, because I’d heard it as a child, though at other parts of its course, far from Las Acacias. Maya Fritts was not around, so I took a cold shower (I had to kill a considerable-sized spider who held out for quite a while in a corner) and I put on the bigger of the two shirts. It was a man’s shirt; I allowed myself to pretend it had belonged to Ricardo Laverde, imagined him with the shirt on; in the image I conjured up, for some reason, he looked like me. As soon as I went out into the hall a young woman approached wearing red Bermuda shorts with blue pockets and a sleeveless shirt on the front of which a butterfly and a sunflower were kissing. She had a tray in her hands and on the tray a tall glass of orange juice. In the living room as well the ceiling fans were still.

  ‘Señorita Maya left the things for you on the terrace,’ she told me. ‘She’ll see you for lunch.’ She smiled at me, and waited for me to take the glass from the tray.

  ‘Can’t we turn on the fans?’

  ‘The power’s gone out,’ said the woman. ‘Would you like some coffee, sir?’

  ‘First a telephone. To call Bogotá, if it’s no trouble.’

  ‘Well, the telephone’s in there,’ she said. ‘But that’s something for you to sort out with the señorita.’

  It was one of those old, all-in-one phones from the late 1970s that I remembered from my childhood: a sort of small, chubby, long-necked bird with the dial on the underside and a red button. To get a dial tone you just picked it up. I dialled my number and marvelled at feeling a childish impatience while waiting for the dial to turn back before being able to start the next number. Aura answered before the second ring. ‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  Her tone changed, sounding cold and dense and heavy. ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  ‘In La Dorada. Visiting someone.’

  ‘The woman who left the message?’

  ‘What?’

  �
��The one who left the message on the answering machine?’

  I wasn’t surprised by her clairvoyance (she’d shown signs of it since the beginning of our relationship). I explained the situation without going into details: Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, the documents she possessed and images stored in her memory, the possibility for me to understand so many things. I want to know, I thought, but didn’t say. While I was speaking I heard a series of short, perhaps guttural sounds, and then Aura was suddenly crying. ‘You are a son of a bitch,’ she said. She didn’t run all the words together in a more efficient and natural way, but separated them out and pronounced each letter of every word. ‘I haven’t slept a wink, Antonio. I haven’t checked the hospitals because I don’t have anyone to leave Leticia with. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of this,’ Aura said between sobs, and the way she was crying seemed almost aggressive, I’d never heard her cry like that: it was the tension, without a doubt, the tension built up throughout the night. ‘Who is that woman?’