The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Ricardo didn’t answer. A dense silence settled inside the jeep: the Nissan was the only thing audible, the rumbling of its engine, the friction of its wheels against the rough tarmac. Beside the road an immense field opened up then. Elaine thought she saw a couple of cows lying underneath a ceiba tree, the white of their horns breaking the uniform black of the pasture. In the background, above a low mist, the jagged hills stood out against the sky. The Nissan moved over the uneven road, the world was grey and blue outside the illuminated space, and then the highway went into a sort of brown and green tunnel, a corridor of trees whose branches met in the air like a gigantic dome. Elaine would always remember that image, the tropical vegetation completely surrounding them and hiding the sky, because that was the moment Ricardo told her – his eyes fixed on the road, without even glancing at Elaine, even avoiding her gaze – about the business he was doing with Mike Barbieri, about the future these business deals had and the plans this business had allowed him to make. ‘I’m not improvising, Elena Fritts,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought about all this for a long time. It’s all planned out down to the last detail. Now, your not finding out about the plans until just now is another detail, and that’s, well, because you didn’t need to. Now you do. It’s to do with you now too. I’m going to explain the whole thing. And then you can tell me if we can have a baby or not. Deal?’

  ‘OK,’ said Elaine. ‘Deal.’

  ‘Good. So let me tell you what’s going on with marijuana.’

  And he told her. He told her about the closure, the year before, of the Mexican border (Nixon trying to free the United States from the invasion of weed); he told her about the distributors whose business had been hindered, hundreds of intermediaries whose clients couldn’t wait and started looking in new directions; he told her about Jamaica, one of the alternatives closest to hand the consumers had, but most of all about the Sierra Nevada, the department of La Guajira, the Magdalena Valley. He told her about the people who had come, in a matter of months, from San Francisco, from Miami, from Boston, looking for suitable partners for a business with guaranteed profitability, and they were lucky: they found Mike Barbieri. Elaine thought briefly of the regional coordinator of volunteers for Caldas, an Episcopalian from South Bend, Indiana, who had already vetoed the sex education programmes in rural zones: what would he think if he knew? But Ricardo kept talking. Mike Barbieri, he told her, was much more than a partner: he was a real pioneer. He had taught things to the campesinos. Along with some other volunteers with agricultural skills, he’d taught them techniques, where to plant so the mountains protect the plants, what fertilizer to use, how to tell the male plants from the females. And now, well, now he had contacts with 10 or 15 hectares scattered between here and Medellín, and they could produce 400 kilos per harvest. He’d changed those campesinos’ lives, there was not the slightest doubt about that, they were earning more than ever and with less work, and all that thanks to weed, thanks to what’s going on with weed. ‘They put it in plastic bags, put the bags on a plane, we provide the simplest thing, a twin-engine Cessna. I get in the plane, take it full of one thing and bring it back with something else. Mike pays about 25 dollars for a kilo, let’s say. Ten thousand in total, and that’s just for the top-quality stuff. No matter how bad it goes, from every trip we come back with sixty, seventy grand, sometimes more. How many trips can be done? You do the maths. What I’m trying to tell you is that they need me. I was in the right place at the right time, and it was a stroke of luck. But it’s not about luck any more. They need me, I’ve become indispensable, and this is only just getting started. I’m the one who knows where to land, where you can take off. I’m the one who knows how to load one of these planes, how much it’ll take, how to distribute the cargo, how to conceal fuel tanks in the fuselage to be able to make longer journeys. And you can’t imagine, Elena Fritts, you just can’t imagine what it’s like to take off at night, the rush of adrenalin you get taking off at night in between the mountain ranges, with the river down below like a stream of molten silver, the Magdalena River on a moonlit night is the most striking thing you can ever see. And you don’t know what it’s like to see it from above and follow it, and come out over the open sea, the infinite space of the sea, when dawn hasn’t broken yet, and watch the sun come up over the sea, the horizon flares up as if it’s on fire, the light so bright it’s blinding. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far, but I know the itinerary now, I know the winds and the distances, I know the plane’s tics like I know this jeep’s. And the others are noticing. That I can take off and land that machine anywhere I want, take off from 2 metres of shoreline and land it in the stony desert of California. I can get it into spaces radar doesn’t reach: doesn’t matter how small they are, my plane fits there. A Cessna or whatever you give me, a Beechcraft, whatever. If there’s a hole between two radar beams, I’ll find it and get my plane in there. I’m good, Elena Fritts, I’m really good. And I’m going to get better every time, with every flight. It almost scares me to think about it.’

  One day at the end of September, during a week of unseasonal downpours when the streams flooded and several hamlets were undergoing sanitation emergencies, Elaine attended a departmental meeting of volunteers at the Peace Corps headquarters in Manizales, and was in the middle of a rather agitated debate on the constitution of cooperatives for local artisans when she felt something in her stomach. She didn’t manage to get even as far as the door: the rest of the volunteers saw her crouch down with one hand on the back of a chair and the other holding her hair and vomit a gelatinous yellow mass across the red-tile floor. Her colleagues tried to take her to a doctor, but she resisted successfully (‘There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just a woman thing, leave me alone’), and a few hours later she was sneaking into room 225 of the Escorial Hotel and calling Ricardo to come and pick her up because she didn’t feel able to get on a bus. While she waited for him she went out for a walk near the cathedral and ended up sitting down on a bench in the Plaza Bolívar and watching the passers-by, the children in their school uniforms, old men in their ponchos and vendors with their carts. A young boy with a wooden crate under his arm approached to offer her a shoe-shine, and she agreed wordlessly, to keep her accent from giving her away. She swept the square with her gaze and wondered how many of the people could tell by looking at her that she was American, how many could tell she’d been in Colombia for not much more than a year, how many could tell she’d married a Colombian, how many could tell she was pregnant. Then, with her patent-leather shoes so shiny she could see the Manizales sky reflected in the toes, she went back to the hotel, wrote a letter on the hotel’s letterhead and lay back to think of names. None occurred to her: before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep. Never had she felt so tired as on that afternoon.

  When she woke up, Ricardo was at her side, naked and asleep. She hadn’t heard him come in. It was three in the morning: what kind of doorman or night watchman do these hotels have? What right did they have to let a stranger into her room without warning her? How had Ricardo proved that she was his wife, that he had a right to be in her bed? Elaine stood up with her gaze fixed on a point on the wall, so she wouldn’t faint. She leaned out the window, saw a corner of the deserted square, placed a hand on her belly and burst into silent tears. She thought the first thing she’d do when she got back to La Dorada would be to look for someone to take in Truman, because horseback riding would be forbidden for the next few months, maybe for a whole year. Yes, that would be the first thing, and the second would be to start looking seriously for a house, a family house. She wondered if she should advise the volunteer coordinator, or even call Bogotá. She decided it wasn’t necessary, that she’d work as long as her body allowed her to, and then circumstances would dictate her strategy. She looked at Ricardo, who was sleeping open-mouthed. She approached the bed and lifted up the sheet with two fingers. She saw his sleeping penis, the curly hair. Her other hand moved to her sex and then to her belly, as if to protect it. What’s
there to live for? she thought all of a sudden, and hummed in her head: Who needs the Peace Corps? And then she went back to sleep.

  Elaine worked until she couldn’t any more. Her belly grew more than expected in the first months, but, apart from the violent tiredness that forced her to take long morning naps, her pregnancy didn’t modify her routines. Other things changed, however. Elaine started to be aware of the heat and humidity as she never had before; in fact, she started to be aware of her body, which was no longer silent and discreet and from one day to the next suddenly insisted on desperately drawing attention to itself, like a problematic teenager or a drunk. Elaine hated the pressure her own weight put on her calves, hated the tension that appeared in her thighs every time she had to climb four measly steps, hated that her small nipples, which she’d always liked, grew bigger and darker all of a sudden. Embarrassed, guilt-ridden, she began to skip meetings saying she wasn’t feeling well, and she’d go to the expensive hotel to spend the afternoon in the pool just for the pleasure of tricking gravity for a few hours, of feeling, afloat in the cool water, that her body was back to being the light thing it had always been before.

  Ricardo devoted himself to her: he made only one trip during the entire pregnancy, but it must have been a big shipment, because he came back with a tennis bag – dark blue imitation leather, gold zipper, a white panther leaping up – full of bundles of dollar notes so clean and shiny they looked fake, like the toy money of a board game. Not just the bag was full, but also the racket cover, which in this particular bag was sewn to the outside as a separate compartment. Ricardo locked it up in the tool cupboard he’d built himself and a couple of times a month he’d go up to Bogotá to change some of the dollars into pesos. He showered Elaine with attention. He drove her everywhere and picked her up in the Nissan, he went with her to her doctor’s appointments, he watched her step onto the scales and saw the hesitant needle and wrote down the latest result in a notebook, as if the doctor’s annotation might be imprecise or less reliable. He also went with her to work: if there was a school to be built, he would willingly pick up a trowel and put cement on the bricks, or carry wheelbarrow loads of gravel from one place to another, or fix with his own hands the broken mesh of a sieve; if she had to talk to Acción Comunal people, he would sit at the back of the room and listen to his wife’s ever-improving Spanish and sometimes offer the translation of a word Elaine didn’t remember. On one occasion Elaine had to visit a community leader in Doradal, a man with a luxuriant moustache and shirt open to his belly button who, in spite of his paisa snake oil hawker’s patter, couldn’t get a polio-vaccination campaign approved. It was a bureaucratic matter, things were going slowly and the children couldn’t wait. They said goodbye with a feeling of failure. Elaine climbed laboriously into the jeep, leaning on the door handle, grabbing hold of the back of the seat, and was just getting comfortable when Ricardo said, ‘Wait for me a moment, I’ll be right back.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ll be right back. Wait one second.’ And she saw him walk back in and say something to the man in the open shirt, and then they both disappeared behind a door. Four days later, when Elaine got the news that the campaign had been approved in record time, an image came into Elaine’s head: that of Ricardo reaching into his pocket, taking out an incentive for public functionaries and promising more. She could have confirmed her suspicions, confronted Ricardo and demanded a confession, but she decided not to. The objective, after all, had been achieved. Children, think of the children. Children were what mattered.

  When she was thirty weeks and the size of her belly was becoming an obstacle in her work, Elaine obtained a special permit from the volunteer coordinator and then authorization from Peace Corps headquarters in Bogotá, for which she had to send a medical report by post, hurriedly and badly written by a young doctor doing his year of rural service in La Dorada and who wanted, with no knowledge of obstetrics or any medical justification at all, to give her a genital examination. Elaine, who by that point in the appointment was half undressed, objected and even got angry, and the first thing she thought was that she’d better not say anything to Ricardo, whose reactions could be unpredictable. But later, coming home in the Nissan, looking at her husband’s profile and his hands with their long fingers and dark hairs, she felt a fit of desire. Ricardo’s right hand was resting on the gear lever; Elaine grabbed his wrist and opened her legs and his hand understood, Ricardo’s hand understood. They arrived home without a word and hurried in like thieves, and closed the curtains and bolted the back door, and Ricardo threw his clothes on the floor without caring that they’d soon be covered in ants. Elaine, meanwhile, lay down on her side on top of the sheets, facing the white curtains, the illuminated square of the curtains. The daylight was so strong that there were shadows in spite of the curtains being closed; Elaine looked at her belly as big as a half-moon, her smooth, strained skin and the violet line from top to bottom as if drawn on with a felt-tip pen, and she saw the shadows that her swollen breasts made on the sheet. She thought how her breasts had never cast shadows on anything ever before and then her breasts disappeared under Ricardo’s hand. Elaine felt her darkened nipples close at the contact of those fingers and then felt Ricardo’s mouth on her shoulder and then felt him enter her from behind. And so, connected like puzzle pieces, they made love for the last time before she gave birth.

  Maya Laverde was born in the Palermo Clinic in Bogotá in July 1971, more or less at the same time President Nixon used the words War on Drugs for the first time in a public speech. Elaine and Ricardo had moved into the Laverdes’ house three weeks earlier, in spite of Elaine’s protests: ‘If the clinic in La Dorada is good enough for the poorest mothers,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why it’s not going to be good enough for me.’

  ‘Ay, Elena Fritts,’ Ricardo said, ‘why don’t you do us a favour and stop trying to change the world all the time.’

  Then events proved him right: the baby girl was born with an intestinal problem and needed immediate surgery, and everyone agreed that a rural clinic would not have had either the surgeons or the neonatal instruments necessary to guarantee the child’s survival. Maya was kept under observation for several days, stuck in an incubator that had once, long ago, had transparent walls, which were now scratched and opaque like glasses that get too much use; when it was time to feed her, Elaine would sit in a chair beside the machine and a nurse would take the little girl out and put her in Elaine’s arms. The nurse was an older woman with wide hips who seemed to take her time on purpose when she was carrying Maya. She smiled down at her so sweetly that Elaine felt jealous for the first time, and was amazed that something like that – the threatening presence of another mother, the savage reaction of the blood – was possible.

  A little while after the baby was discharged, Ricardo had to make another trip. But it was still too soon to take her to La Dorada, and the idea of Elaine and their daughter staying alone filled him with terror, so Ricardo suggested they stay in Bogotá, in his parents’ house, under the care of Doña Gloria and the dark-skinned woman with the long black braid who floated like a phantom through the house cleaning and putting everything in order as she went. ‘If they ask, tell them I’m transporting flowers,’ Ricardo told her. ‘Carnations, roses, even orchids. Yes, orchids, that sounds good, orchids are exported, everyone knows that. You gringos love orchids to death.’ Elaine smiled. They were lying in the same narrow bed where they’d talked after making love for the first time. It was very late, one or two in the morning; Maya had woken them up crying for food, crying with her thin little nasal voice, and could only calm down once she’d clamped her tiny mouth around her mother’s erect nipple. After nursing she’d fallen asleep between the two of them, forcing them to make a space for her, to balance precariously on the edge of the little bed; and that’s how they stayed, half hanging over the edge of the bed, face to face but in the dark, so each could barely see the other’s silhouette in the shadows. They were wide awake now. The baby was sleeping: Elaine s
melled her scent of sweet powders, soap and new wool. She raised a hand and stroked Ricardo’s face like a blind woman and then she started to whisper. ‘I want to go with you,’ said Elaine.

  ‘One day,’ said Ricardo.

  ‘I want to see what you do. To know it’s not dangerous. Would you tell me if it was dangerous?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Ask me something.’

  ‘What happens if they catch you?’

  ‘They’re not going to catch me.’

  ‘But what happens if they do?’

  Ricardo’s voice changed, there was a note of falsetto in it, something projected. ‘People want a product,’ he said. ‘There are people who grow that product. Mike gives it to me, I take it in a plane, someone receives it and that’s all. We give people what people want.’ He kept quiet for a second and then added, ‘Also, it’s going to be legalized sooner or later.’

  ‘But it’s hard for me to imagine,’ said Elaine. ‘When you’re not here I think about you, try to imagine what you’re doing, where, and I can’t. And that’s what I don’t like.’

  Maya sighed so quietly and briefly that it took them an instant to realize where it had come from. ‘She’s dreaming,’ said Elaine. She saw Ricardo bring his big face – his hard chin, his thick lips – up close to the baby’s tiny face; she saw him give her an inaudible kiss, and then another. ‘My little girl,’ she heard him say. ‘Our little girl.’ And then, with no segue whatsoever, she saw him start to talk about the trips, about a cattle ranch that stretched out from the banks of the Magdalena and on the pastures of which an airport could be built, about a Cessna 310 Skyknight that over the last little while had become Ricardo’s favourite ride. That’s how he put it: ‘My favourite ride. They don’t make that model any more, Elena Fritts, that baby’s going to be a relic before we know it.’ He also told her about the solitude he felt while he was in the air, and how different a plane loaded with cargo felt to an empty one: ‘The air gets cold, it’s noisier, you feel more alone. Even if someone’s there. Yeah, even if there’s someone with you.’ He told her of the enormity of the Caribbean and of the fear of getting lost, the fear of the mere idea of getting lost over such a huge thing as the sea, even someone like him, who never ever got lost. He told her of the detour he had to take to avoid Cuban airspace – ‘so they don’t shoot me down thinking I’m a gringo,’ he said – and how familiar, how curiously familiar, everything seemed to him from there on, as if he were coming home instead of about to land in Nassau. ‘In Nassau?’ said Elaine. ‘In the Bahamas?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ricardo, ‘the only Nassau there is,’ and went on to say that there, in the airport, before the air-traffic controllers who saw without seeing (their vision and memories conveniently modified by a few thousand dollars), an olive-coloured Chevrolet pick-up truck and a big strong gringo, who looked just like Joe Frazier, were waiting to take him to a hotel where the only luxury was the lack of questions. The arrival always fell on a Friday. After spending two nights there – the function of those two nights was not to arouse suspicion, to turn Ricardo into just another millionaire who comes to spend a weekend with friends or lovers – after two nights of living shut up in a charmless hotel, drinking rum and eating fish and rice, Ricardo returned to the airport, admired the controllers’ blindness again, requested permission to take off for Miami like any other millionaire returning home with his mistress, and in minutes he was in the air, but not in the direction of Miami, but rather skirting around the coast and going in over the beaches of Beaufort and flying over a pattern of disperse rivers like the veins on an anatomy diagram. Then it was a matter of exchanging the cargo for dollars and taking off again and heading south, towards the Caribbean coast of Colombia, towards Barranquilla and the grey waters of Bocas de Ceniza and the brown serpent that moves through a green background, towards a town in the interior, that town placed there, between two mountain ranges, placed in the wide valley like a die that a player has dropped, that town with its unbearable climate where the hot air burns your nostrils, where the bugs are capable of biting through a mosquito net, and where Ricardo arrives with his heart in his hands, because in that town the two people he loves most in the world are waiting for him.