The Sound of Things Falling (17 page)

At the end of September, Elaine wrote a long letter to her grandparents to say happy birthday to her grandmother, thank them both for the cuttings from
Time
, and ask her grandfather if he’d seen the new Paul Newman and Robert Redford movie, which people were already talking about in Bogotá (though the film itself would take a little longer to arrive). Then, suddenly solemn, she asked them what they knew about the crimes in Beverly Hills. ‘Everybody has an opinion here, you can’t sit down to lunch without talking about the subject. The photos are horrific. Sharon Tate was pregnant, I don’t know how anyone could do something like that. This world’s a scary place these days. Grandpa, you’ve seen worse things, haven’t you? Please tell me the world has always been like this.’ And then she changed the subject. ‘I think I already told you about the squatter neighbourhoods,’ she wrote. She explained that every class of the CEUCA is divided up into groups, and each group has its neighbourhood, that the other three members of her group are Californians: all men, very good at putting up walls and talking to the leaders of the local council (Elaine explained), and also very good at getting hold of very high-quality marijuana from La Guajira or Santa Marta at a good price for downtown Bogotá (this she didn’t explain). So anyway, she went up the mountains around Bogotá with them once a week along muddy roads where it’s not unusual to step on a dead rat, between houses made of cardboard and rotten wood, beside septic tanks open to all eyes (and noses). ‘We have a lot to do,’ Elaine wrote. ‘But I don’t want to tell you any more about the work right now, I’ll save that for the next letter. I want to tell you that I had a lucky break.’

This is what happened. One afternoon, after a long session with the neighbourhood council – talking about contaminated water, declaring the absolute necessity of building an aqueduct, agreeing there was no money to do so – Elaine’s group ending up drinking beer in a windowless shop. After a couple of rounds (the brown glass bottles accumulating on the narrow table) Dale Cartwright lowered his voice and asked Elaine if she could keep a secret for a few days. ‘Do you know who Antonia Drubinski is?’ he asked. Elaine, like everyone else, knew who Antonia Drubinski was: not only because she was one of the most senior volunteers, or because she’d already been arrested twice for civil disorder offences in the public highway – where
disorder
should be read as
protests against the Vietnam War
, and
public highway
should be read as
in front of the US Embassy
– but because Antonia Drubinski’s whereabouts were unknown, and had been for several days.

‘Anything but unknown,’ said Dale Cartwright. ‘They know where she is, the thing is they don’t want it to become news.’

‘Who doesn’t want that?’

‘The Embassy. The CEUCA.’

‘And why not? Where is she?’

Dale Cartwright looked around and dropped his head.

‘She’s gone to the mountains,’ he whispered. ‘She’s gone to join the revolution, it seems. Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that her room is free.’

‘Her room?’ said Elaine. ‘
That
room?’

‘
That
room, yes. The very one that’s the envy of the whole class. And I thought maybe you’d like to get it. You know, live ten minutes away from the CEUCA, shower with hot water.’

Elaine thought for a minute.

‘I didn’t come here for material comforts,’ she finally said.

‘Hot showers,’ Dale said again. ‘Not having to manoeuvre like a quarterback to get off the bus.’

‘But the thing is the family . . .’ said Elaine.

‘What about the family?’

‘I pay them
750
pesos rent,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s a third of their earnings.’

‘And what’s that got to do with it?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that money.’

‘But who do you think you are, Elaine Fritts?’ said Dale with a theatrical sigh. ‘Do you think you’re unique and irreplaceable? That’s incredible. Elaine, dear, fifteen new volunteers are arriving in Bogotá today. There’s another flight from New York on Saturday. All over the country there are hundreds, maybe thousands of
gringos
like you and me, and lots of them are coming to Bogotá to work. Believe me, your room will be taken before you finish packing.’

Elaine took a sip of her beer. Much later, when everything had happened, she’d remember that beer, the gloomy atmosphere in the shop, the reflection of the last rays of twilight in the panes of the aluminium-topped counter. That’s where it all started, she would think. But at that moment, at Dale Cartwright’s transparent offer, she did a quick calculation in her head. She smiled.

‘And how do you know I make quarterback manoeuvres to get off the bus?’ she finally said.

‘All is known in the Peace Corps, my dear,’ he said. ‘All is known.’

And that’s how three days later Elaine Fritts travelled for the last time from out near the racetrack, but this time weighed down with luggage. She would have liked it if the family had seemed a little sad, she couldn’t deny it, she would have liked a sincere hug, perhaps a going-away present like the one she’d given them, a musical box that began to spew out the notes of the theme song to
The Sting
when it was opened. There was none of that: they asked her for the key and saw her to the door, more out of mistrust than courtesy. The father left in a hurry, so it was just the mother, a woman whose figure filled the doorframe and who watched her go down the stairs and out to the street without offering any help with her luggage. At that moment the little boy appeared (he was an only child, his shirt was untucked and he was carrying a blue-and-red wooden toy truck), and asked something she didn’t really understand. The last thing Elaine heard before turning round was her hostess’s reply.

‘She’s leaving, son, she’s going to live in a rich folks’ house,’ said the woman. ‘Ungrateful
gringa
.’

A rich folks’ house
. It wasn’t true, because rich folks didn’t take in Peace Corps volunteers, but at that moment Elaine didn’t have the arguments to embark on a debate about the economy of her second family. Her new accommodation, she had to confess, had luxuries that would have seemed unimaginable to Elaine a few weeks earlier: it was a comfortable construction on Caracas Avenue, with a narrow façade, but very long inside, with a little garden at the back and a fruit tree in a corner of the garden, beside a tiled wall. The façade was white, the wooden window frames painted green, and to get in you had to open an iron gate that separated the front garden from the pavement and that let out a squeal whenever someone arrived. The main door led into a dark but pleasant corridor. On the left-hand side were French doors that opened onto the living room, and further along was the dining room, and further along the corridor skirted the narrow interior patio where the geraniums grew in hanging planters; on the right, the bottom of the staircase was the first thing one saw. Elaine understood it all at a glimpse of the wooden steps: the red carpet had once been a fine one, but was now worn from use (on certain steps the grey threads of the base weave were beginning to show through); the copper rods that kept the carpet in place had lost their rings, or rather the rings had broken free of the wooden floor, and sometimes, when you went up quickly, you’d feel a slip and hear the brief jingle of loose metal. The staircase, for Elaine, was like a memorandum or a witness to what this family had been and no longer was. ‘A respectable family who’d come down in the world’, the man at the Embassy had said when Elaine went to complete the paperwork for the move. Come down in the world: Elaine thought a lot about those words, tried to translate them literally, failed in the attempt. Only when she noticed the carpet on the staircase did she understand, but she understood instinctively, without organizing it into coherent phrases, without making a scientific diagnosis in her head. In time it would all make sense, because Elaine had seen similar cases several times in her life: families with fine pasts who one day notice that the past doesn’t bring in money.

The family was called Laverde. The mother was a woman with plucked eyebrows and sad eyes whose abundant red hair – exotic in this country, or perhaps it was dyed – was eternally fixed in a perfect coiffure that smelled of freshly applied hairspray. Doña Gloria was a housewife who never wore an apron: Elaine never saw her wielding a duster, and nevertheless the dressing tables, the bedside tables, the porcelain ashtrays, never had a trace of the yellow dust one breathed out in the street: everything cared for with the obsession of those who depend entirely on appearances. Don Julio, the father, had a scar on his face, not straight and thin as a cut would have left, but extended and asymmetrical (Elaine thought, mistakenly, of some skin ailment). Actually it wasn’t just the cheek: the damage extended down beneath the line of his beard, it was like a stain trickling over his jaw and bathing his neck, and it was very difficult not to stare at it. Don Julio was an actuary by profession, and one of the first conversations in the dining room, under the bluish light of the chandelier, was devoted to telling their guest about insurance policies and probabilities and statistics.

‘How do you know what kind of life insurance a man should buy?’ the father said. ‘The insurers need to know these types of things, of course, it’s not fair that a man in his thirties in good health should pay the same as an old man who’s already had two heart attacks. That’s where I come in, Señorita Fritts: to look into the future. I’m the one who says when this man will die, when this other one will die, what is the probability that this car will crash on these highways. I work with the future, Señorita Fritts, I’m the one who knows what is going to happen. It’s a question of numbers: the future is in the numbers. Numbers tell us everything. Numbers tell me, for example, if the world considers that I’ll die before I’m fifty. And you, Señorita Fritts, do you know when you’re going to die? I can tell you. If you give me some time, a pencil and paper and a margin of error, I can tell you when it’s most likely that you’ll die, and how. Our societies are obsessed with the past. But you
gringos
aren’t interested in the past at all, you look forward, you’re only interested in the future. You’ve understood it better than us, better than the Europeans: the future is what we have to focus on. Well, that’s what I do, Señorita Fritts: I earn my living by keeping my eye on the future, I support my family by telling people what’s going to happen. Today these people are insurers, of course, but one fine day there will be other people interested in this talent, it’s impossible there won’t be. In the United States they understand better than anyone. That’s why you people are going forwards, Señorita Fritts, and that’s why we’re so far behind. Tell me if you think I’m mistaken.’

Elaine didn’t say anything. From the other side of the table the couple’s younger son was looking at her, a sideways mocking smile, long thick eyelashes that gave his black eyes a vaguely feminine quality. He’d looked at her like this from the start, with an insolence that, for some reason, she felt flattered by. Nobody in Colombia had looked at her like that: months after her arrival, Elaine still hadn’t slept with anyone who wasn’t North American, who didn’t have orgasms in English.

‘Ricardo doesn’t believe in the future,’ said Don Julio.

‘Of course I do,’ said the son. ‘But in my future I won’t be asking to borrow money.’

‘Now then, let’s not start that,’ said Doña Gloria with a smile. ‘What’s our guest going to think, having just arrived, and all.’

Ricardo Laverde: too many Rs for Elaine’s obstinate accent. ‘OK, Elena, say my name,’ Ricardo had ordered her while showing her the bathroom that went with the room she’d be staying in, pastel-coloured bedside table and the dresser with three drawers and the canopied bed that had been his older sister’s until she got married (there was a studio photo of the girl: her hair with a straight centre parting, her gaze lost in the distance, the photographer’s baroque signature). The guest room: legions of
gringos
like her had passed through there. ‘Say my name three times and I’ll give you an extra blanket,’ this Ricardo Laverde said to her. It was a game, but a hostile one. Uncomfortably, Elaine entered into the game.

‘Ricardo,’ she said with her tongue tangled up. ‘Laverde.’

‘Bad, very bad,’ said Ricardo. ‘But it doesn’t matter, Elena, your mouth looks pretty saying it.’

‘My name’s not Elena,’ said Elaine.

‘I don’t understand, Elena,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to practise, I’ll help you if you want.’

Ricardo was a couple of years younger than her, but he acted as if he had far more experience of the world. At first they would meet at dusk, when Elaine got back from her classes at the CEUCA, and they’d exchange a few phrases in the sitting room on the second floor, almost under Paco the canary’s cage:
How are you, How did you get on, What did you learn today, Say my name three times without getting tongue-tied. ‘Bogotanos
are very good at talking without saying anything,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘I’m drowning in small talk.’ But one afternoon they met on
7
th Avenue, and it struck them as such a remarkable coincidence that they had both just spent the morning shouting slogans outside the US Embassy, calling Nixon a criminal and singing, ‘End it Now, End it Now, End it Now!’