The Sound of Things Falling (16 page)

‘It’s Papá,’ she said.

Then I heard Aura’s distant voice. ‘Yes,’ she told her. ‘But listen, listen to hear what he says.’

‘Hello?’ Leticia said again.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Who am I?’

‘Papá,’ she said, pronouncing the second P forcefully, taking her time over it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m the big bad wolf.’

‘The big bad wolf?’

‘I’m Peter Pan.’

‘Peter Pan?’

‘Who am I, Leticia?’

She thought for a moment. Then she said, ‘Papá.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. I heard her laugh: a short little laugh, the wing beat of a hummingbird. And then I said, ‘Are you looking after Mamá?’

‘Aha,’ said Leticia.

‘You have to take good care of Mamá. Are you looking after her?’

‘Aha,’ said Leticia. ‘Here she is.’

‘No, wait,’ I tried to say, but it was too late, she’d got rid of the phone and left me in Aura’s hands, my voice in Aura’s hands, and my nostalgia hanging in the warm air: the nostalgia for things that weren’t yet lost. ‘OK, go and play,’ I heard Aura say in her sweetest tone of voice, speaking to her almost in whispers, a lullaby in five syllables. Then she spoke to me and the contrast was violent: there was sadness in her voice, as close as she sounded to me; there was disenchantment and also a veiled reproach. ‘Hello,’ said Aura.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘For putting Leticia on the phone.’

‘She’s scared of the hallway,’ said Aura.

‘Leticia?’

‘She says there are things in the hallway. Yesterday she didn’t want to go from the kitchen to her bedroom by herself. I had to go with her.’

‘It’s just a phase,’ I said. ‘All her fears will pass.’

‘She wanted to sleep with the light on.’

‘It’s a phase.’

‘Yes,’ said Aura.

‘The paediatrician told us.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s just at the nightmare age.’

‘The thing I don’t want is . . .’ said Aura. ‘I don’t want us to go on like this, Antonio.’ Before I could answer she added, ‘It’s not good for anyone. It’s not good for Leticia, it’s not good for anyone.’

So that was it. ‘I get it now,’ I said. ‘So it’s my fault.’

‘Nobody said anything about anyone’s fault.’

‘It’s my fault Leticia’s afraid of the hallway.’

‘Nobody said that.’

‘Oh please, what nonsense. As if fear was hereditary.’

‘Not hereditary,’ said Aura, ‘contagious.’ And then immediately, ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’ And then, ‘You know what I mean.’

My hands were sweating, especially the one holding the phone, and I had an absurd fear: I thought the receiver could slip out of my sweaty fist and fall to the floor, and the call would be cut off against my will. By accident: accidents do happen. Aura was talking to me about our past, about the plans we’d had before a bullet that didn’t have my name on it hit me by chance, and I was listening to her carefully, I swear I was, but no memory formed in my mind.
In the mind’s eye
, as is sometimes said. My mind’s eye tried to see Aura before the death of Ricardo Laverde; it tried to see myself; but it was in vain. ‘I have to hang up,’ I heard myself say, ‘I’m on a borrowed phone.’ Aura – this I remember well – was saying that she loved me, that we could get through this together, that we were going to work to achieve it. ‘I have to hang up,’ I said.

‘When are you coming back?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s information here, there are things I want to know.’

There was silence on the line.

‘Antonio,’ Aura said then, ‘are you coming back?’

‘What kind of question is that?’ I said. ‘Of course I’m coming back, I don’t know where you think I am.’

‘I don’t think anything. Tell me when.’

‘I don’t know. As soon as I can.’

‘When, Antonio?’

‘As soon as I can,’ I said. ‘But don’t cry, it’s not a big deal.’

‘I’m not crying.’

‘It’s not what you think. Leticia’s going to get worried.’

‘Leticia, Leticia,’ Aura repeated. ‘Go to hell, Antonio.’

‘Aura, please.’

‘Go to hell,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you when you can make it.’

After hanging up I went out to the terrace. There, resting beneath the hammock like a pet, was the wicker box; there, on the paper, were the lives of Elaine Fritts and Ricardo Laverde, letters they wrote to each other, letters they’d written to other people. The air was perfectly still. I settled into the hammock that Maya Fritts had used the night before and there, with my head on a cushion with a white, embroidered cover, I took out the first folder and set it on my stomach, and from the folder took out the first letter. It was a piece of greenish, almost see-through paper. ‘Dear Grandpa & Grandma,’ it opened. And then the first line, independent and on its own, leaning on the paragraph that followed like a suicidal person on a cornice.

Nobody warned me Bogotá was going to be like this.

I forgot the humid heat, forgot the orange juice, forgot how uncomfortable I was in that position (and, of course, didn’t imagine the agonizing stiff neck it would cause). Lying in Maya’s hammock I forgot myself. Later I tried to remember the last time I had experienced something like that, unceremoniously blocking out the real world, my consciousness absolutely sequestered, and came to the conclusion that nothing similar had happened to me since childhood. But that reasoning, that effort, would come much later, during the hours I spent talking to Maya to fill the voids left by the letters, so she could tell me everything the letters didn’t tell but only hinted at; all that they didn’t reveal, but hid or kept quiet. That would be later, as I said, that conversation could only take place later, when I had already been through the documents and their revelations. There, in the hammock, while I read them, I felt other things, some of them inexplicable and an especially confusing one: the discomfort of knowing that this story in which my name did not appear spoke of me in each and every one of its lines. All this I felt, and in the end all my feelings were reduced to a tremendous solitude, a solitude without a visible cause and therefore without remedy. The solitude of a child.

The story, as far as I could reconstruct it and as it exists in my memory, began in August of
1969
, eight years after President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps, when after five weeks’ training at Florida State University, Elaine Fritts, future volunteer number
139372
, landed in Bogotá ready to carry out various clichés: to have an enriching experience, leave her mark, do her share, no matter how small. The journey didn’t start too well, for the gusts of wind shaking the aircraft, an old Avianca DC-
4
, forced her to put out her cigarette and to do something she hadn’t done since she was fifteen: cross herself. (But it was a quick blessing, just a careless sketch across her unmade-up face and chest with two strings of wooden beads. No one saw.) Before she left, her grandmother had talked to her about a passenger plane that had crashed the previous year as it arrived in Bogotá from Miami, and there, while hers began its descent towards the greenish grey of the mountains, while it emerged from the low clouds in the midst of gusts of wind and with its windows marked by highways of thick rain, Elaine tried to remember if all the passengers on the plane that crashed had died. She hung on to her knees – the wrinkled, sweaty trace of her hands on her trouser legs – and closed her eyes when the plane, with a shudder of crunching tin, touched down. It still seemed miraculous to her that she’d survived the landing, and she thought she’d write her first letter to her grandparents as soon as she could sit down at a table somewhere warm. I’ve arrived, I’m well, the people are very friendly. There is lots of work to be done. Everything’s going to be great.

Elaine’s mother had died in childbirth, and she had been raised by her grandparents since her father, on a reconnaissance mission near Old Baldy, stepped on an anti-personnel mine and returned from Korea with his right leg amputated at the hip and lost to life. He hadn’t been back for a whole year yet when he went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. They never heard from him again. Elaine was a baby when that happened, so she didn’t really notice the absence, and her grandparents took charge of her education and also of her happiness as meticulously as they had with their own children, but with much more experience. So the adults in Elaine’s life were these two figures from another time, and she herself grew up with notions of responsibility unlike those of most other children. On social occasions she would hear opinions from her grandfather that filled her with pride and sadness at the same time: ‘This is how my daughter should have turned out.’ When Elaine decided to postpone her journalism degree to volunteer for the Peace Corps, her grandfather, who had worn black for nine months after Kennedy’s assassination, was her biggest supporter. ‘With one condition,’ he said. ‘That you don’t stay down there, like so many others. It’s good to lend a hand, but your country needs you more.’ She agreed.

The Embassy staff, Elaine Fritts said in her letter, found her a room in a two-storey house out near the racetrack, half an hour north of Bogotá, in a collection of badly paved streets that turned to mud whenever it rained. The world where she would spend the next twelve weeks was a grey place still under construction: most of the houses didn’t have roofs because the roof was the most expensive part and was left for last, and the daily traffic was made of big orange mixers as noisy as bees in a nightmare, dump trucks that emptied mountains of gravel in any old place, workers with sponge cake in one hand and a soda pop in the other who whistled obscenely at her as soon as she walked out of the house. Elaine Fritts – the palest green eyes that had ever been seen in this place, her long, straight, chestnut-coloured hair sweeping like a curtain down to her waist, her nipples standing out under her flowered blouse in the morning chill – kept her eyes fixed on the puddles, on the reflection of the grey skies, and only raised her head when she got to the open field that separated the neighbourhood from the Autopista Norte, more than anything to make sure the two cows that grazed there were a comfortable distance away. Then she had to climb aboard a small yellow bus with unpredictable timetables and no predetermined stops and start, from the first moment, to elbow her way through the thick soup of passengers. ‘The rest was very simple,’ she wrote. ‘You just have to get off in time.’ In the half-hour of the journey, Elaine had to get from the aluminium turnstile at the front door (which she learned to move by bumping it with her hips, without needing to use her hands) to the back door, and get off the bus without knocking off the two or three passengers who were hanging on with one foot in the air. All this required an apprenticeship, of course, and during the first week it was normal to go a mile or two beyond the place she needed to get off and arrive at the CEUCA several minutes after her eight o’clock class had already started, soaked through by the persistent drizzle, walking down unknown streets.

The Centro de Estudios Universitarios Colombo-Americano, or Colombian-American University Study Centre: a long pretentious name for a few rooms full of people Elaine found familiar, too familiar. Her colleagues, at this stage of training, were white, in their twenties as was she, and like her they were tired of their own country, tired of Vietnam, tired of Cuba, tired of Santo Domingo, tired of mornings catching them off guard, making small talk with their parents or their friends, and going to bed knowing they’d just witnessed a unique and regrettable day, a day that would immediately go down in the universal history of infamy: the day a sawed-off shotgun killed Malcolm X, a car-bomb killed Wharlest Jackson, a bomb in the post office killed Fred Conlon, police gunfire killed Benjamin Brown. And at the same time the coffins kept arriving from every inoffensively or picturesquely named Vietnamese operation, Deckhouse Five, Cedar Falls, Junction City. The My Lai revelations began to start popping up and soon they’d be talking about Thanh Phong, one barbarous act replaced and displaced another, rapes became interchangeable. Yes, that’s how it was: in her country, a person woke up and didn’t know what to expect, what cruel joke history might be about to play, what would be spat in her face that day. When had this happened to the United States of America? That question, which Elaine asked herself in a thousand confusing ways every day, floated in the air of the classrooms, above all the white, twenty-year-old heads, and also occupied their spare time, lunches in the cafeteria, the trips from the CEUCA to the shantytowns where the apprentice volunteers did their field work. The United States of America: who was ruining it, who was responsible for the demolition of the dream? There, in the classroom, Elaine was thinking:
that’s what we’ve fled
. She thought:
we’re all fugitives
.

The mornings were devoted to learning Spanish. For four hours, four arduous hours and with a stevedore’s tension in her shoulders, Elaine unravelled the mysteries of the new language in front of a teacher in riding boots and turtleneck sweaters, a thin, haggard woman who often brought her three-year-old son to class because she had no one to leave him with at home. To each slip-up with the subjunctive, to each mistakenly gendered word, Señora Amalia responded with a speech. ‘How are you going to work with the poor people of this country if you can’t understand them?’ she would say to them leaning on her two closed fists on her wooden desk. ‘And if you can’t get them to understand you, how do you expect to win the confidence of the community leaders? In three or four months, some of you will be going out to the coast or up to the coffee-growing region. Do you think the Acción Comunal people are going to wait while you look up words in the dictionary? Do you think the
campesinos
are going to sit in their villages while you lot try to figure out how to say
La leche es mejor que el aguapanela
?’ But in the afternoons, during the hours taught in English that appeared in the official programme as
American Studies
and
World Affairs
, Elaine and her classmates listened to lectures from Peace Corps veterans who for one reason or another had stayed in Colombia, and from them they learned that the important phrases weren’t the ones to do with sugar-water or milk, but rather some quite different ones, the common ingredient being the word
No: No, I’m not from the Alliance for Progress
,
No, I’m not in the CIA
, and, especially,
No, I’m very sorry, I don’t have any dollars
.