The Sound of Things Falling (11 page)

‘What kind of something?’

‘Something,’ said Aura.

She was stirring a saucepan on the stove, the extractor fan was on full blast and forced us to raise our voices, and the light from the hood bathed her face in a coppery tone. ‘You’re so lovely,’ I said. ‘I’ll never get used to it.’ She smiled, was about to say something, but at that moment Leticia appeared at the door, silent and discreet, with her chestnut hair still wet from her bath up in a ponytail. I picked her up from the floor, asked her if she was hungry, and the same coppery light shone on her face: her features were mine, not Aura’s, and that had always moved and disappointed me at the same time. That idea was strangely stuck in my head while we ate: that Leticia should be able to resemble Aura, she should have been able to inherit Aura’s beauty, and instead had inherited my rough features, my thick bones, my prominent ears. Maybe that’s why I was looking at her so closely as I took her to bed. I stayed with her a while in the darkness of her room, broken only by the small round nightlight that gives off a weak pastel-coloured light that changes its tone over the course of the night, so Leticia’s room is blue when she calls me because she’s had a nightmare, and can quite easily be pink or pale green when she calls me because she’s run out of water in her little bottle. Anyway: there in the coloured shadows, while Leticia fell asleep and the whisper of her breathing changed, I spied on her features and the genetic games in her face, all those proteins moving mysteriously to imprint my chin on hers, my hair colour in my little girl’s hair colour. And that’s what I was doing when the door opened a little and a sliver of light appeared and then Aura’s silhouette and her hand calling me.

‘Is she asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

She pulled me by the hand to the living room and we sat on the sofa. The table was already cleared and the dishwasher running in the kitchen, sounding like an old dying pigeon. (We didn’t usually spend time in the living room after dinner: we preferred to get into bed and watch some old American sitcom, something light and cheerful and soothing. Aura had got used to missing the evening news, and could joke about my boycott, but understood how seriously I took it. I didn’t watch the news, it was as simple as that. It would take me a long time to be able to endure it again, to allow my country’s news to invade my life again.) ‘Well, look,’ Aura said. Her hands disappeared behind the edge of the sofa and reappeared with a small package wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me?’ I said. ‘No, it’s not a present,’ she said. ‘Or it is, but for both of us. Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do things like this.’ Embarrassment was not a feeling that often bothered Aura, but that’s what this was, embarrassment, that’s what her gestures were full of. The next thing was her voice (her nervous voice) explaining where she had bought the vibrator, how much it had cost, how she’d paid cash for it so there would be no record of this purchase anywhere, how she’d despised at that moment her many years of religious education that had made her feel, as she entered the shop on
19
th Avenue, that very bad things were going to happen to her as punishment, that with this purchase she would end up earning a permanent place in hell. It was a purple apparatus with a creased texture, with more buttons and possibilities than I would have imagined, but it wasn’t the shape I’d assigned it in my overly literal imagination. I looked at it (there, sleeping in my hand) and Aura looked at me looking at it. I couldn’t keep the word
consolador
, which is also sometimes used for this object, from appearing in my mind: Aura as a woman in need of consoling, or Aura as a disconsolate woman. ‘What is it?’ I said. A question as stupid as questions get.

‘Well, it is what it is,’ said Aura. ‘It’s for us.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not for us.’

I stood up and dropped it on the glass-topped table and the apparatus bounced slightly (after all, it was made out of something springy). At another moment I would probably have been amused by the sound, but not there, not then. Aura grabbed my arm.

‘There’s nothing wrong with it, Antonio, it’s for us.’

‘It’s not for us.’

‘You had an accident, that’s all, I love you,’ said Aura. ‘There’s nothing wrong, we’re together.’

The purple vibrator sat there half lost among the ashtrays and coasters and coffee-table books, all chosen by Aura:
Colombia from the Air
, a big book on José Celestino Mutis and another recent one by an Argentine photographer about Paris (that one Aura hadn’t chosen, but had been given). I felt embarrassed, an absurd and childish embarrassment. ‘Do you need consoling?’ I said to Aura. My tone even surprised me.

‘What?’

‘That’s a
consolador
. Do you need consoling?’

‘Don’t do this, Antonio. We’re together. You had an accident and we’re together.’

‘The accident happened to me, don’t be an idiot,’ I said. ‘I was the one who was shot.’ I calmed down a little. ‘Sorry,’ I said. And then, ‘The doctor told me.’

‘But it was three years ago.’

‘That I shouldn’t worry, that the body knows how to do its things.’

‘Three years ago, Antonio. What’s happening now is something else. I love you and we’re together.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘We can find a way,’ said Aura.

I didn’t say anything.

‘There are so many couples,’ said Aura. ‘We’re not the only ones.’

But I didn’t say anything. A light bulb somewhere must have blown at that moment, because the living room was suddenly a little darker, the sofa and the two chairs and the only painting – a couple of billiard players by Saturnino Ramírez who are playing, for reasons I’ve never managed to discover, in dark glasses – had lost their contours. I felt tired and in need of a painkiller. Aura had sat back down on the sofa and was now holding her face in her hands, but I don’t think she was crying. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she said. ‘I thought I was doing a good thing.’ I turned around and left her alone, maybe even mid-sentence, and I locked myself in our bathroom. In the narrow blue cupboard I looked for my pills, the little white plastic bottle and its red lid that Leticia had once chewed on till it broke, to our great alarm (it turned out she hadn’t found the pills hidden under the cotton, but a two- or three-year-old child is at risk all the time, the whole world is a danger to her). With water straight from the tap I took three pills, a bigger dose than recommended or advisable, but my size and weight allow me these excesses when the pain is very bad. Then I took a long shower, which always makes me feel better; by the time I returned to our room Aura was asleep or pretending to be asleep, and I endeavoured not to wake her or to maintain the convenient fiction. I undressed, lay down beside her but with my back to her, and then I don’t know anything else: I fell asleep immediately.

It was very early, especially for a Good Friday, when I left the next morning. The light was not yet filling the air of the apartment. I wanted to think that was why, because of the general somnolence floating in the world, I didn’t wake anyone up to say goodbye. The vibrator was still on the table in the living room, coloured and plastic like a toy Leticia had lost there.

Up by the Alto del Trigo a thick fog descended over the road, unexpectedly as if a cloud had lost its way, and the almost complete lack of visibility forced me to slow down so much that farmworkers on bicycles were overtaking me. The fog accumulated on the glass like dew, making it necessary to turn on the windscreen wipers even though it wasn’t raining, and shapes – the car in front, a couple of soldiers flanking the roadway with machine guns across their chests, a cargo mule – emerged gradually from that milky soup that let no light through. I thought of low-flying planes: ‘Up, up, up.’ I thought of the fog and remembered the famous accident at El Tablazo, way back in the
1940
s, but I didn’t remember whether the visibility at these treacherous altitudes had been to blame. ‘Up, up, up,’ I said to myself. And then, as I descended towards Guaduas, the fog lifted the same way it had fallen, and the sky suddenly opened and a wave of heat transformed the day: there was a burst of vegetation, a burst of fragrances, fruit stalls appeared at the side of the road. I began to sweat. When I opened the window at some point, to buy one of the cans of beer slowly warming up on top of a crate full of ice, my sunglasses misted up from the blast of heat. But the sweat was what bothered me most. My body’s pores were, suddenly, at the centre of my consciousness.

I didn’t arrive in the area until past midday. After a traffic jam of almost an hour and a half near Guarinocito (a truck with a broken axle can be lethal on a two-lane highway with no hard shoulder), after the headlands arose on the horizon and my car entered the region of cattle ranches, I saw the rudimentary little school I was supposed to see, continued for the distance indicated beside a big white pipe bordering the road and turned right, towards the Magdalena River. I passed a metallic structure where once there had been a billboard, but that now, seen from far away, resembled a sort of giant abandoned corset (a few turkey vultures, perched on the struts, guarded the plot of land); I passed a trough where two cows were drinking, their bodies very close together, pushing and getting in each other’s way, their heads protected from the sun by a squalid aluminium roof. At the end of
300
metres of unpaved road, I found myself passing several groups of boys in shorts who shouted and laughed and raised a great cloud of dust as they ran. One of them stuck out a small brown hand with his thumb extended. I stopped, pulled the car onto the shoulder; now still, I felt again on my face and body the violent slap of the midday heat. I felt the humidity again; I sensed the smells. The child spoke first.

‘I’m going where you’re going, sir.’

‘I’m going to Las Acacias,’ I said. ‘If you know where it is, I’ll take you that far.’

‘Oh well, that’s no good to me then, sir,’ the boy said without his smile disappearing for a second. ‘It’s just down there, you see. That dog’s from there. He doesn’t bite, don’t worry.’

It was a black, tired-looking German shepherd with a white mark on his tail. He noticed my presence, raised his ears and looked at me without interest; then he walked a couple of times around a mango tree, his nose to the ground and tail stuck to his ribs like a feather duster, and finally lay down beside the trunk and began licking a paw. I felt sorry for him: his fur was not designed for this climate. I drove a bit further, beneath the trees whose dense foliage didn’t let any light through, until I arrived in front of a gate of solid columns and a wooden crossbeam from which hung a board that looked recently rubbed with furniture oil, and on the board appeared, etched and singed, the graceless and bland name of the property. I had to get out to open the gate, the original bolt of which seemed to have been stuck in its place since the beginning of time; I continued on quite a way along a track across an open field made simply by driving across it, two strips of earth separated by a crest of stiff grass; and finally, beyond a post where a small vulture perched, I arrived in front of a one-storey white house.

I called out but nobody appeared. The door was open: a glass-topped dining table and a living room with light-coloured armchairs, all dominated by ceiling fans whose blades seemed animated by a sort of inner life of their own, a private mission against high temperatures. On the terrace hung three brightly coloured hammocks, and under one of them someone had left a half-eaten guava that was now being devoured by ants. I was about to ask at the top of my lungs if there was anybody at home when I heard a whistle, and then another, and it took me a couple of seconds to discover, beyond the bougainvillea bushes that flanked the house, beyond the
guanábana
trees that grew behind the bougainvilleas, the silhouette moving its arms as if asking for help. There was something monstrous in that overly white figure with too big a head and legs too thick; but I couldn’t look closely as I walked towards her, because all my attention was concentrated on not breaking my ankle on the stones or uneven ground, on not getting my face scratched by the low branches of the trees. Behind the house sparkled the rectangle of a swimming pool that didn’t look well cared for: a blue slide with the paint bleached by the sun, a round table with its parasol folded down, the skimmer net leaning against a tree as if it had never been used. That’s what I was thinking when I arrived beside the white monster, but by that time the head had turned into a veiled mask, and the hand into a glove with thick fingers. The woman took off the mask, passed a hand quickly through her hair (light brown, cut with intentional clumsiness, styled with genuine carelessness), greeted me without smiling and explained that she’d had to interrupt the inspection of her hives to come and receive me. Now she had to get back to work. ‘It’s stupid for you to have to go get bored in the house waiting for me,’ she said, pronouncing every letter, almost one at a time, as if her life depended on it. ‘Have you ever seen a honeycomb up close?’

I immediately realized she was about the same age as me, more or less, although I couldn’t say what secret generational communication there was between the two of us, or if such a thing really exists: an ensemble of gestures or words or a certain tone of voice, a way of saying hello or thanks or of moving or crossing our legs when we sit down, that we share with other members of our litter. She had the palest green eyes I’d ever seen and on her face a girl’s skin met a mature and careworn woman’s expression: her face was like a party that everyone had left. There were no adornments, except for two sparks of diamonds (I think they were diamonds) barely visible on her slender earlobes. Dressed in her beekeeper’s suit that hid her shape, Maya Fritts took me to a shed that might once have been a manger: a room that smelled of manure with two masks and a pair of white overalls hanging on the wall.