The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Soon we were driving down the highway towards Medellín at the hottest hour of the day, moving along the ribbon of asphalt just as Ricardo Laverde and Elaine Fritts had done twenty-nine years earlier, and not only that, but doing so in the same bone-coloured Nissan in which they’d driven. In a country where it’s quite common to see cars from the 1960s in the streets – a Renault 4, a Fiat here and there, Chevrolet trucks that might even be fifteen years older – the survival of a jeep was neither miraculous nor extraordinary, there are hundreds like this on the roads. But anyone could see that this was not just any Nissan jeep, but rather the first big present Ricardo Laverde bought for his wife with the money from the flights, the marijuana money. Twenty-nine years before, the two of them had travelled around the Magdalena Valley as we were doing now; they had kissed while sitting on this seat; right here they’d talked about having children. And now their child and I were occupying those same places and perhaps feeling the same humid heat and the same relief at accelerating and getting air to blow in the windows, so we had to raise our voices to hear each other. It was either raise our voices or die of heat with the windows rolled up, and we preferred the former. ‘This jeep still exists,’ I said in a forced tone, sounding like an actor in a theatre that was too big.

  ‘How about that,’ said Maya. Then she raised a hand and pointed to the sky. ‘Look, military planes.’

  I heard the sound of the planes that were passing over our heads, but when I looked up I only saw a flock of turkey vultures tracing circles against the sky. ‘I try not to think of Dad when I see them,’ said Maya, ‘but I can’t help it.’ Another squadron flew over in formation and this time I saw them: the grey shadows crossing the sky, the jet engines shaking the air. ‘That was the inheritance he wanted,’ said Maya. ‘The hero’s grandson.’ The road was suddenly filled with uniformed lads armed with rifles that hung across their chests like sleeping animals. Before driving onto the bridge over the Magdalena we slowed down so much and passed so close to the soldiers that the wing mirror almost brushed the barrels of their rifles. They were boys, sweaty, scared kids whose mission, guarding the military base, seemed too big for them, just as their helmets and uniforms were, and those stiff leather boots in these cruel tropics. As we passed beside the fence that surrounded the base, a structure covered in green canvas and crowned with an elaborate labyrinth of barbed wire, I saw a green sign with white letters, No Photography, and another in black letters on a white background: Human rights, the responsibility of all. On the other side of the fence military trucks could be seen driving on a paved road; beyond them, exhibited like a relic in a museum, a Canadair Sabre balanced on a sort of pedestal. In my memory the image of this plane, which Ricardo Laverde liked so much, is forever linked to Maya’s question: ‘Where were you when they killed Lara Bonilla?’

  People of my generation do these things: we ask each other what our lives were like at the moment of those events – almost all of which occurred in the 1980s – which defined or diverted them before we knew what was happening to us. I’ve always believed that in this way, verifying that we’re not the only ones, we neutralize the consequences of having grown up in that decade, or we mitigate the feeling of vulnerability that has always accompanied us. And those conversations tend to begin with Lara Bonilla, the Minister of Justice. He had been the first public enemy of drug trafficking, and the most powerful of the legal ones; the method of the hit man on the back of a motorbike, where a teenager approaches the car in which the victim is travelling and empties a Mini Uzi into it without even slowing down, began with his murder. ‘I was in my room, doing my chemistry homework,’ I said. ‘And you?’

  ‘I was ill,’ said Maya. ‘Appendicitis, imagine, I’d just had surgery.’

  ‘Do kids get that?’

  ‘It’s so cruel, but yes. And I remember the commotion at the clinic, the nurses rushing in and out. It was like being in a war movie. Because they’d killed Lara Bonilla and everyone knew who’d done it, but no one knew that could happen.’

  ‘It was something new,’ I said. ‘I remember my dad in the dining room. His head in his hands, elbows on the table. He didn’t eat anything. He didn’t say anything either. It was something new.’

  ‘Yes, that day we went to bed changed,’ said Maya. ‘A different country, wasn’t it? At least that’s how I remember it. Mom was scared. I looked at her and saw her fear. Of course, she knew all sorts of things that I didn’t.’ Maya was quiet for a moment. ‘And when Galán was killed?’

  ‘That was at night. It was a Friday in the middle of the year. I was . . . Well, I was with a friend.’

  ‘Oh, very nice,’ said Maya with a slanted smile. ‘You having a fine old time while the country falls to pieces. Were you in Bogotá?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was she your girlfriend?’

  ‘No. Well, she was going to be. Or that’s what I thought.’

  ‘Oops, a frustrated love,’ Maya laughed.

  ‘At least we spent the night together. Even though it was obligatory.’

  ‘The After Curfew Hour Lovers,’ said Maya. ‘Not a bad title, don’t you think?’

  I liked seeing her like this, suddenly cheerful, I liked the little barely visible lines that appeared beside her eyes when she smiled. In front of us there was now a truck loaded with huge milk containers, big metal cylinders like unexploded bombs on top of which three shirtless teenagers were riding. Seeing us caused them inexplicable laughter. They waved to Maya, blew kisses at her, and she put the jeep into second gear and pulled into the other lane to overtake them. As she did so she blew a kiss back to them. It was a teasing, playful act, but there was something in the melodramatic way she closed her lips (and in the whole movie-star gesture) that filled the moment with an unexpected sensuality, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. On my side of the road, two water buffalo were bathing in a sort of marsh that opened up between the shrubs. Their wet horns glistened under the sun, their manes stuck to their faces. ‘And the day of the Avianca plane?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, the famous plane,’ said Maya. ‘That really fucked everything up, didn’t it.’

  Once the presidential candidate Galán was dead, his policies, and among them the fight against drug trafficking, were inherited by a very young provincial politician: César Gaviria. In his attempt to take Gaviria out of the picture, Pablo Escobar had a bomb planted on a passenger airline that flew – that would have flown – the Bogotá–Cali route. Gaviria, however, did not even board the plane. The bomb exploded just after take-off, and the remains of the disintegrated plane – including three passengers who were apparently not killed by the bomb but by the impact – fell over Soacha, the same place where Galán had fallen, shot on the wooden campaign platform. But I don’t think this coincidence means anything.

  ‘That’s when we knew,’ said Maya, ‘that the war was against us too. Or that was the confirmation, at least. Beyond any doubt. There’d been other bombs in public places, of course, but they’d seemed like accidents, I don’t know if the same thing happened to you. Well, I’m not entirely sure accidents is the right word either. Things that happen to people with bad luck. The plane was different. It was the same deep down, but for some reason it seemed different to me, as if they’d changed the rules of the game. I’d started university that year. Agronomy, I was going to study agronomy, I suppose I was already sure that I was going to reclaim the house in La Dorada. The fact is I’d started university. And it took me the whole year to notice.’

  ‘Notice what?’

  ‘The fear. Or rather, that this thing I got in my stomach, the occasional faint feelings, the irritation, weren’t the typical symptoms of first-year jitters, but pure fear. And Mom was scared too, of course, maybe even more than I was. And then came the rest, the other attacks, the other bombs. The DAS one with its hundred dead. That one at the shopping mall with fifteen. Then the other shopping mall with however many there were. A special time, no? Not knowing when it might be your turn. Worry
ing when someone who was supposed to arrive wasn’t there. Always knowing where the closest pay phone is to let someone know you’re OK. If there were no pay phones, knowing that anybody would lend you their phone, all you had to do was knock on a door. Living like that, always with the possibility that people close to us might be killed, always having to reassure our loved ones so they don’t think we are among the dead. Our lives were conducted inside houses, remember. We avoided public places. Friends’ houses, friends of friends, houses of distant acquaintances, any house was better than a public place. Well, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Maybe in our house it was different. We were two women on our own, after all. Maybe it wasn’t like that for you.’

  ‘It was exactly like that,’ I said.

  She turned to look at me. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘So you understand me then,’ said Maya.

  And I said a couple of words whose scope I didn’t manage to fully determine: ‘I understand you perfectly.’

  The landscape repeated itself around us, green plains with grey mountains in the background, like a Gonzalo Ariza painting. My arm stretched along the back of the front seat, which in those models is bulky and undivided, so you feel like you’re sitting on a sofa. With the shifting breezes and the rolling of the Nissan, sometimes Maya’s hair brushed my hand, brushed the skin of my hand, and I liked the sensation and looked forward to it from then on. We left the straight line of cattle ranches with their drinking troughs with roofs and armies of cows lying around the trunks of the acacias. We passed over the Negrito River, a stream of dark waters and dirty banks, with clouds of foam sparkling here and there, the remains of the accumulated contamination from villages and towns upstream where they dumped their waste water into the same water in which they washed their clothes. When we got to the toll booth and the Nissan came to a stop, the sudden absence of air circulating raised the temperature inside the vehicle, and I felt – in my armpits, but also on my nose and under my eyes – that I was beginning to sweat. And when we got back in motion, as we approached another bridge over the Magdalena, Maya began to tell me about her mother, about what happened with her mother at the end of 1989. I was looking at the river beyond the bridge’s yellow railings, looking at the little sandy islands that soon, when the rainy season arrived, would be covered by brown water, and meanwhile Maya was telling me about the evening when she came home from university and found Elaine Fritts in the bathroom, so drunk she’d almost passed out and clutching the toilet bowl as if it might be leaving at any moment. ‘My baby,’ she said to Maya, ‘my baby’s home. My little girl is big now. My little girl is a big girl.’ Maya picked her up as best she could and put her to bed and stayed with her, watching her sleep and touching her forehead every once in a while; she made her a herbal tea at two in the morning; put a bottle of water on the bedside table and brought her two painkillers for her hangover; and at the end of the night heard her say that she couldn’t take it any more, that she’d tried but she couldn’t do it any longer, that Maya was a grown-up now and could make her own decisions just as she’d made hers. And six days later she boarded a plane and returned home to Jacksonville, Florida, to the same house she’d left twenty years earlier with a single idea in her head: to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia. To have an enriching experience, leave her mark, do her bit, small as it might be. All those things.

  ‘The country changed on her,’ said Maya. ‘She arrived in a place and twenty years later she no longer recognized it. There is a letter that’s always fascinated me, it’s from late 1969, one of the first. My mother says that Bogotá is a boring city. She doesn’t know how long she can live in a place where nothing ever happens.’

  ‘Where nothing ever happens.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Where nothing ever happens.’

  ‘Jacksonville,’ I said. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘North of Miami, way north. I only know from seeing it on maps, because I’ve never been. I’ve never been to the States.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was eighteen,’ Maya told me. ‘At that age life’s just starting, you’re only just discovering it. I didn’t want to leave my friends, I’d just started seeing someone . . . It’s funny because as soon as Mom left I realized Bogotá was not for me. One thing led to another, as they say in movies, and here I am, Antonio. Here I am. Twenty-eight years old, alone and single, all my body parts still in good working order and living alone with my bees. Here I am. Melting in the heat and taking a stranger to see a dead Mafioso’s zoo.’

  ‘A stranger,’ I repeated.

  Maya shrugged and said something that didn’t mean anything.

  ‘Well, no, but anyway.’

  When we got to the Hacienda Nápoles the sky had begun to cloud over and the air was sweltering. It would soon rain. The name of the property was painted in now peeling letters on the arch of the unnecessarily huge white gate – an eighteen-wheeler could easily have driven through – and on the crossbeam, precariously balanced, was a light aircraft, white and blue like the gate: it was the Piper that Escobar used during the early years and to which, he used to say, he owed his wealth. Passing beneath that plane, reading the registration number stencilled on the underside of the wing, was like entering a timeless world. Time, however, was present. To be more precise: it had wreaked havoc. Since 1993, when Escobar was shot dead on a Medellín rooftop, the property had gone into a vertiginous decline, and that, above all, was what Maya and I saw as the Nissan advanced along the paved track between the fields of lemon trees. There were no cattle grazing in these meadows, which, among other things, explained why the grass was so long. The weeds were devouring the wooden posts. That’s what I was staring at, the wooden posts, when I saw the first dinosaurs.

  They were what I’d liked most on my first long-ago visit. Escobar had ordered their construction for his children, a tyrannosaurus and a brontosaurus built to scale, a friendly-looking mammoth (grey and bearded like a tired grandfather) and even a pterodactyl floating over the pond with an anachronistic snake in its talons. Now their bodies were crumbling into bits, and there was something very sad and perhaps somewhat indecent in the vision of those cement-and-iron structures out in the open. The pond itself had turned into a lifeless puddle, or at least that’s what it looked like from the path. After leaving the Nissan on a patch of neglected land, in front of a wire fence that might once have been electrified, Maya and I began to walk through the same places we had gone through in a car years ago, as children, almost teenagers, who didn’t yet understand very well what the owner of all that did for a living or why their parents wouldn’t allow them such innocent fun. ‘Back then you weren’t allowed to walk, remember? Nobody got out of their car.’

  ‘It was forbidden,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I’m shocked.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Everything seems smaller.’

  She was right. We told a soldier we wanted to see the animals and asked him where they were, and Maya openly handed him a 10,000-peso note as encouragement. And so, guided or accompanied or escorted by a beardless youngster in camouflage cap and uniform who moved lazily, his left hand resting on his rifle, we arrived at the cages in which the animals were sleeping. The humid air filled with a dirty smell, a mixture of excrement and rotting food. We saw a cheetah lying at the back of his cage. We saw a chimpanzee scratching his head and another running in circles with nothing to chase. We saw an empty cage, the door open and an aluminium basin leaning against the bars.

  But we didn’t see the kangaroo who kicked the football, or the famous parrot who could recite the line-up of the Colombian national team, or the emus, or the lions and elephants Escobar had bought from a travelling circus, or the miniature horses or the rhinoceroses, or the incredible pink dolphin Maya dreamt of for a week straight after that first visit. Where were the animals we’d seen as kids? I don’t know why our own disappointment should have surprised us, for t
he deterioration of the Hacienda Nápoles was well known, and in the years gone by since Escobar’s death various testimonies had circulated in the Colombian press, a sort of extremely slow-motion film on the rise and fall of the criminal empire. But maybe it wasn’t our disappointment that surprised us, but the way we experienced it together, the unexpected and especially unjustified solidarity that suddenly united us: we had both come to this place at the same time, this place had been a symbol of the same things for both of us. That must have been why later, when Maya asked if we could go as far as Escobar’s house, I felt as if she’d taken the words out of my mouth, and it was me who pulled out some wrinkled and grimy money to bribe the soldier with this time.

  ‘Oh no. You can’t go in there,’ he said.

  ‘And why not?’ asked Maya.

  ‘You just can’t,’ he said. ‘But you can walk around it and you can look in the windows.’

  That’s what we did. We walked around the perimeter of the construction and together saw its ruined walls, its dirty or broken windows, the splintering wood of its beams and columns, the broken and chipped tiles of the outside bathrooms. We saw the billiard tables inexplicably still there six years later: in those salons that time had darkened and dirtied, the green felt shone like jewels. We saw the pool empty of water, but full of dry leaves and pieces of bark and sticks that the wind had blown in. We saw the garage where the collection of antique cars was rotting away, we saw the flaking paint and broken headlights and dented bodywork and missing cushions and seats converted into a disorder of popping springs, and we remembered that according to legend one of these machines, a Pontiac, had belonged to Al Capone and another, again according to legend, to Bonnie and Clyde. And later we saw a car that had never been luxurious but basic and cheap, however its value was undoubtedly great: the famous Renault 4 in which the young Pablo Escobar, long before cocaine became the source of his riches, competed in local races as a novice driver. The Renault 4 Cup, that amateur trophy was called: the first time Escobar’s name appeared in the Colombian press, long before the planes and the bombs and the debates about extradition, was as a racing-car driver in this competition, a young provincial in a country that was still a small province in the world, a young trafficker who was still making the news for activities other than that incipient trafficking. And there was the car, asleep and broken and devoured by neglect and time, the bodywork cracked open, another dead animal whose skin was full of worms.