The Sound of Things Falling (10 page)

What is Elena Fritts thinking about a minute before her death?

The cockpit alarm sounds: ‘Terrain, terrain,’ says an electronic voice. But Elena Fritts doesn’t hear it: the alarms don’t sound where she is seated, nor does she sense the dangerous proximity of the mountain. The crew turns up the power, but doesn’t disengage the brakes. The plane lifts its nose briefly. None of this is enough.

‘Oh shit,’ says the pilot. ‘Pull up, baby.’

What is Elena Fritts thinking about? Is she thinking about Ricardo Laverde? Is she thinking about the looming holiday season? Is she thinking about her children? ‘Shit,’ says the captain in the cockpit, but Elena Fritts can’t hear him. Do Elena Fritts and Ricardo Laverde have children? Where are those children, if they exist, and how had their lives been changed after their father’s absence? Do they know the reasons for that absence, have they grown up wrapped in a web of family lies, sophisticated myths, scrambled chronologies?

‘Up,’ says the captain.

‘It’s OK,’ says the first officer.

‘Pull up,’ says the captain. ‘Easy does it, easy.’ The automatic pilot has been disconnected. The stick shift begins to shake in the hands of the pilot, a sign that the plane’s speed is not enough to keep it up in the air. ‘More, more,’ says the captain.

‘OK,’ says the first officer.

And the captain, ‘Up, up, up.’

The siren sounds again.

‘
Pull up
,’ says the electronic voice.

There is a faltering scream, or something that sounds like a scream. There is a sound that I cannot or have never been able to identify: a sound that’s not human or is more than human, the sound of lives being extinguished but also the sound of material things breaking. It’s the sound of things falling from on high, an interrupted and somehow also eternal sound, a sound that didn’t ever end, that kept ringing in my head from that very afternoon and still shows no sign of wanting to leave it, that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook.

That sound is the last thing heard in the cockpit of Flight
965
.

The noise sounds, and then the recording stops.

It took me a long time to recover. There’s nothing as obscene as spying on a man’s last seconds: they should be secret, inviolable, they should die with the man who dies, and nevertheless, there in that kitchen in that old house in La Candelaria, the final words of the dead pilots came to form part of my experience, in spite of the fact that I didn’t know and still don’t know who those unfortunate men were, what they were called, what they saw when they looked in the mirror; those men, for their part, never knew of me, and yet their final moments now belong to me and will continue to belong to me. What right do I have? Their wives, their mothers, fathers and children haven’t heard these words that I’ve heard, and have perhaps lived through the last two and a half years wondering what their husband, or father or son had said before crashing into El Diluvio Mountain. I, who had no right to know, now know; they, to whom those voices belong by right, do not know. And I thought that I, deep down,
had no right to listen to that death
, because those men who died in the plane are strangers to me, and the woman who was travelling behind them
is not, will never be, one of my dead
.

However, those sounds now form part of my auditory memory. Once the tape fell silent, once the noises of the tragedy gave way to static, I knew I would have preferred not to have listened to it, and I knew at the same moment that in my memory I would go on hearing it for ever. No, those are not my dead, I had no right to hear those words ( just as I probably have no right to reproduce them in this story, undoubtedly with some inaccuracies), but the words and the voices of the dead had already swallowed me like a whirlpool in a river swallows a tired animal. The recording also had the power to modify the past, for now Laverde’s tears were not the same, couldn’t be the same ones I’d witnessed in the Casa de Poesía: now they had a density they’d previously lacked, owing to the simple fact that I’d heard what he, sitting in that soft leather armchair, heard that afternoon. Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.

With time I have found out more about black boxes. I know, for example, that they’re not black, but orange. I know that aeroplanes carry them in the empennage – the structure we profane people call the tail – because they have a better chance of surviving an accident there. And yes, I know that black boxes survive: they can withstand
2
,
250
kilograms of pressure and temperatures of
1
,
100
degrees Celsius. When they fall into the sea, a transmitter is activated; the black box then begins to pulsate for thirty days. That’s how long the authorities have to find it, to discover the reasons for an accident, to ensure that nothing similar happens again, but I don’t think anyone considers that a black box might have other fates, to fall into hands that were not part of its plan. However, that’s what happened to me with Flight
965
’s black box, which, having survived the accident, was magically transformed into a black cassette with an orange label and went through two owners before coming to form part of my memories. And that’s how this apparatus, invented to be the electronic memory of planes, has ended up turning into a definitive part of my memory. There it is, and there’s nothing I can do. Forgetting it is not possible.

I waited quite a while before leaving the house in La Candelaria, not just to listen to the recording again (which I did, not once, but twice more), but also because seeing Consu again had suddenly become urgent for me. What else did she know about Ricardo Laverde? Perhaps it had been in order not to find herself obliged to make revelations, not to be suddenly at the mercy of my interrogations, that she had left me alone in her house with her most precious possession. It was starting to get dark. I looked outside: the streetlights were already on, the white walls of the houses were changing colour. It was cold. I looked down the street to the corner, then to the other one. Consu was not around, I couldn’t see her anywhere, so I went back into the kitchen and inside a bigger bag I found a small paper bag the size of a half-bottle of
aguardiente
. My pen didn’t write very well on its surface, but I would have to make do.

Dear Consu,

I waited for almost an hour. Thank you for letting me hear the recording. I wanted to tell you in person, but it just wasn’t possible.

Beneath these scribbled lines I wrote my complete name, that surname that’s so unusual in Colombia and that still provokes a certain timidity when I write it depending on the people, for there are many who distrust a person in my country if it’s necessary to spell out their surname. Then I smoothed out the bag with my hands and left it on top of the tape recorder, with one of its corners trapped by the cassette door. And I went out into the city with a mixture of sensations in my chest and a single certainty: I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to keep to myself what had just happened to me, the secret and its revelation that I’d just witnessed. I thought that I was never going to be as close to Ricardo Laverde’s life as I had been there, in his house, during the minutes the black box recording had lasted, and I didn’t want that curious exaltation to dissipate, so I went down
7
th Avenue and began to walk around downtown Bogotá, passing through Bolivár Plaza and continuing north, mingling with the people on the always packed pavement and letting myself be pushed by those in the most hurry and bumping into those coming towards me, and looking for less busy smaller streets and even going into the craft market on
10
th Street, I think it’s
10
th, and during all that time thinking that I didn’t want to go home, that Aura and Leticia were part of a different world from the world inhabited by the memory of Ricardo Laverde and of course different from the world in which Flight
965
had crashed. No, I couldn’t go home yet. That’s what I was thinking as I arrived at
22
nd Street, how to delay my arrival home in order to keep living in the black box, with the black box, and then my body made the decision for me and I ended up going into a porn cinema where a naked woman with long, very fair hair in the middle of a fully equipped kitchen lifted up her leg until the heel of her shoe got caught in the burners on top of the stove, and maintained this delicate balancing act while a fully dressed man penetrated her and gave her incomprehensible orders at the same time, the movements of his mouth never corresponding to the words his mouth was pronouncing.

The Thursday before Easter in
1999
, nine months after my encounter with Ricardo Laverde’s landlady and eight before the end of the millennium, I arrived at my apartment and found a woman’s voice and a phone number on the answering machine. ‘This is a message for Antonio Yammara,’ said the voice, a young but melancholy voice, a voice that was both tired and sensual, the voice of one of those women who has had to grow up prematurely. ‘Señora Consuelo Sandoval gave me your name. I looked up your number. I hope I’m not bothering you, but you’re in the phone book. Please call me. I need to speak with you.’ I dialled the number immediately. ‘I was waiting for your call,’ said the woman.

‘With whom am I speaking?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Maya Fritts. I’m not sure if my surname means anything to you. Well, it’s not my original surname, it’s my mother’s, my real one is Laverde.’ And since I remained silent, the woman added what was by then unnecessary: ‘I’m the daughter of Ricardo Laverde. I need to ask you some things.’ I think I said something then, but it’s possible I simply repeated the name, the two names, her name and that of her father. Maya Fritts, Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, kept talking. ‘But listen, I live far away and I can’t go to Bogotá. It’s a long story. So the favour is a double favour, because I want to invite you to spend the day here, at my house, with me. I want you to come and talk to me about my father, to tell me everything you know. It’s a big favour, I know, but it’s warm here and the food’s good, I promise you won’t regret coming. So, it’s up to you, Señor Yammara. If you have a pencil and paper, I’ll tell you right now how to get here.’

3

The Gaze of Absent Ones

At seven the next morning I found myself driving down
80
th Street, having had nothing but a black coffee for breakfast, heading for the city’s western exit routes. It was an overcast and cold morning, and the traffic at that hour was already dense and even aggressive; but it didn’t take me too long to get to the outskirts of the city, where the urban landscapes change and the lungs perceive a sudden absence of contamination. The exit had changed over the years, wide, recently paved roads flaunting the brilliant white of their signposts, zebra crossings and intermittent lines on the tarmac. I don’t know how many times I made similar trips as a child, how many times I went up the mountains that surround the city to then make that precipitous descent, and thus pass in a matter of three hours from our cold and rainy
2
,
600
metres down into the Magdalena Valley, where the temperatures can approach
40
degrees Celsius in some ill-fated spots. That was the case in La Dorada, the city that marks the halfway point between Bogotá and Medellín and that often serves as a stop or meeting point for those who make that trip, or occasionally even as a place for a swim. On the outskirts of La Dorada, somewhere that sounded quite separate from the city, from the hustle and bustle of its roads and heavy traffic, lived Maya Fritts. But now, instead of thinking of her and the strange circumstances that had brought us together, I spent the four hours of the trip thinking of Aura or, more specifically, about what had happened with Aura the previous night.

After taking down Maya Fritts’s directions and ending up with a badly drawn map on the back of a piece of paper (on the other side were notes for one of my upcoming classes: we would discuss what right Antigone had to break the law in order to bury her brother), I had gone through the evening routine with Aura in the most peaceable way possible, the two of us making dinner while Leticia watched a movie, telling each other about our respective days, laughing, touching as we crossed paths in the narrow kitchen.
Peter Pan
, Leticia was very fond of that movie, and also
The Jungle Book
, and Aura had bought her two or three videos of
The Muppets
, less for our little girl’s pleasure than to satisfy her own private nostalgia, her affection for Count von Count, her glib contempt for Miss Piggy. But no, it wasn’t the Muppets that we could hear that evening from the television in our room, but one of those films.
Peter Pan
, yes: it was
Peter Pan
that was playing – ‘All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,’ said the anonymous narrator – when Aura, wrapped in a red apron with an anachronistic image of Santa Claus, said without looking me in the eye, ‘I bought something. Remind me to show you later.’