The Sound of Things Falling (21 page)

And it was. The honeymoon blended into the arrival at the permanent site, the first sanctioned shagging blended into the new volunteer’s first missions: the first steps towards extending the sewer system, the first meetings with Acción Comunal. Elaine and Ricardo allowed themselves the luxury, courtesy of her CEUCA class, to spend a couple of nights in a tourist inn in La Dorada, surrounded by families from Bogotá or Antioquia cattle ranchers, and during those days even had time to find a single-storey house at a price that seemed reasonable. The house – a clear improvement, now that they were a married couple, compared to the little room in Caparrapí – was salmon pink and had an overgrown,
9
-square-metre patio that nobody had taken any care of for a long time and that Elaine immediately set about salvaging. She discovered that now, in her new life, mornings had taken on a new character, and she started waking up at first light just to feel the freshness of the air before the brutal heat began to devour the day. ‘I wash early in the morning with cold water,’ she wrote to her grandparents, ‘after all my griping about the cold water in Bogotá. We use a hollow gourd called a
totuma
to shower with. I’m sending a photo.’ In the first days she acquired something that would prove to be essential: a horse to take her to neighbouring villages. He was called Tapahueco, but Elaine found the name so hard to pronounce that she ended up calling him Truman, and he had three speeds: a slow trot, a fast trot and a gallop. ‘For
50
pesos a month,’ Elaine wrote, ‘a
campesino
looks after him for me and feeds him and brings him to me every morning at eight o’clock. I have blisters on my rear and every muscle in my body aches, but I’m learning to ride better all the time. Truman knows more than I do and is helping to teach me. We understand each other, and that’s what matters. With a horse a person learns to manage time better. I don’t have to depend on anyone and it’s cheaper. I’m not one of the Magnificent Seven, but I haven’t lost my enthusiasm.’

She also spent time making contacts: with the help of her predecessor, a volunteer from Ohio who was on his way home and who Elaine looked down on from the first moment (he had an apostle’s beard, but never took any initiative), she compiled a list of thirty notable locals: there was the priest, the heads of the most influential families, the mayor, the landowners who resided in Bogotá and Medellín, absent powers of a sort who had land but were never on it, and lived off it but never paid the taxes they should have: Elaine complained about this at night, in her matrimonial bed, and then complained that in Colombia all the citizens were political but no politician wanted to do anything for the citizens. Ricardo, who was now acting as if he knew it all, was openly amused and called her ingenuous and naïve and a gullible
gringa
, and after making fun of her and her pretensions to be a social missionary, a Good Samaritan for the Third World, he’d put on an unbearably paternalistic expression and sing, in a terrible accent,
What’s there to live for? Who needs the Peace Corps?
And the more annoyed Elaine got – she no longer found the song’s sarcasm amusing – the more enthusiastically he’d sing:

I’m completely stoned,

I’m hippy and I’m trippy,

I’m a gypsy on my own.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ she’d tell him, and he understood perfectly.

A couple of days before Christmas, after a long and frustrating meeting with a local doctor, Elaine arrived home dying for a shower to wash off the dust and sweat, and found they had visitors. The sun was setting and the faint lights of the neighbours’ windows were beginning to come on. She tied Truman to the nearest post and, going through the little garden, in the kitchen door, and while she looked for a Coke in the propane refrigerator the voices reached her ear. Since they came from the living room, and since they were male voices, she supposed that they were some acquaintances who’d shown up to ask the
gringa
for something. This had already happened on several occasions: Colombians, Elaine complained, thought the Peace Corps’ work was to do anything they couldn’t be bothered to do or found difficult. ‘It’s the colonial mentality,’ she used to say to Ricardo when they talked about the subject. ‘So many years of being used to other people doing things for them can’t be erased just like that.’ Suddenly the idea of having to greet one of these people, the idea of having to go through a series of banalities and ask about their family and children and get out the rum or the beer (because one never knew when that person might be useful in the future, and because in Colombia things didn’t get done through hard work but through real or feigned friendship), made her feel infinitely tired. But then she heard an accent in one of the voices, a vague tone that sounded familiar, and when she leaned round the corner, still unseen, she recognized first Mike Barbieri and then, almost automatically, Carlos, the harelipped man who’d helped them so much in Caparrapí. Then the men must have heard her or sensed her presence, because all three turned their heads at the same time.

‘Oh, finally,’ said Ricardo. ‘Come in, come in, don’t just stand there. These people are here to see you.’

A long time later, remembering that day, Elaine still marvelled at the certainty with which she knew, without any proof or reason to suspect, that Ricardo had lied to her. No, they hadn’t come to see her: Elaine knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth. It was a shiver, an uncomfortable feeling as she shook Carlos’s hand while Carlos didn’t meet her gaze, a certain anxiousness or mistrust at greeting Mike Barbieri in Spanish, asking him how he was, how things were going, why he hadn’t been at the last departmental meeting. Ricardo was sitting in a wicker rocking chair they’d got for a good price at a handicrafts market; the two guests, on wooden stools. In the centre, on the glass top of the table, were some papers that Ricardo snatched up, but on which Elaine managed to see a disorganized drawing, a sort of big ectoplasm in the shape of the American continent, or the shape of the American continent drawn by a child. ‘Hi. What’s up?’ asked Elaine.

‘Mike’s coming to spend Christmas with us,’ said Ricardo.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Mike.

‘No, of course not,’ said Elaine. ‘And are you coming on your own?’

‘Yeah, just me,’ said Mike. ‘With the two of you, who else could I need?’

Then Carlos stood up, offered Elaine his seat and mumbled something that might or might not have been goodbye, and, raising a fat-fingered hand, began to walk towards the door. A big sweat stain ran down his back. Elaine looked him up and down and noticed that he’d missed a belt loop of his well-pressed trousers and the noise his sandals made and the grey colour of the skin on his heels. Mike Barbieri stayed a while longer, long enough to drink two rum and Cokes and to tell them that a volunteer from Sacramento had come to spend Thanksgiving with him, and showed him how to call the United States with a ham radio. It was magic, pure magic. You had to find a radio buff here and another one in the United States, friendly people willing to lend their radio set and telephone to make the connection, and that way you could talk to your family back home without paying a cent, but it was completely legal, not fraudulent at all, or maybe a little, but who cares: he had talked to his younger sister, to a friend he owed some money and even with an ex-girlfriend from university days, who once threw him out of her life and who now, with time and distance, had forgiven him his worst sins. And all completely free, wasn’t it amazing?

Mike Barbieri spent Christmas Eve with them, and Christmas Day as well, and the rest of the week as well, and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day too, and on
2
January he said goodbye as if he were saying goodbye to his family, with tears in his eyes and whole sentences devoted to thanking them for their hospitality, company, affection and the rum and Cokes. They were long days for Elaine, who couldn’t manage to get excited by the holidays in the absence of candy canes and stockings hung by the fireplace and still couldn’t quite understand at what moment this disoriented
gringo
had settled in with them. But Ricardo seemed to have a marvellous time: ‘He’s the brother I never had,’ he’d say, hugging him. In the evenings, after a couple of drinks, Mike Barbieri took out the weed and rolled a joint, Ricardo would turn on the fan and the three of them would start talking politics, about Nixon and Rojas Pinilla and Misael Pastrana and Edward Kennedy, whose car went off the bridge and into the water, and about Mary Jo Kopechne, the poor girl who was with him and who drowned. Finally Elaine, exhausted, would go to bed. For her, as for the
campesinos
in her zone, the last week of the year was not a holiday, and she still had to leave the house as early as she could to get to her appointments. When she came home in the evening, dirty and frustrated by the lack of progress and with her calves aching from the hours spent on top of Truman, Ricardo and Mike were waiting for her with a meal almost ready. And after dinner, the same routine: windows wide open, rum, marijuana, Nixon, Rojas Pinilla, the Sea of Tranquillity and how it would change the world, the death of Ho Chi Minh and how it would change the war.

The first Monday of
1970
– a dry, tough, hot day, a day of so much light that the heavens seemed white instead of blue – Elaine rode off on Truman in the direction of Guarinocito, where they were building a school and she was going to talk about a literacy programme the volunteers in the department had begun to coordinate, and when she came around a corner she thought she saw Carlos and Mike Barbieri in the distance. That evening, when she got home, Ricardo had news for her: they’d got him a job, he was going to be away for a couple of days. He was going to bring a couple of televisions from San Andrés, nothing easier, but he would have to sleep over at the destination. That’s how he put it, ‘at the destination’. Elaine was pleased that he was starting to get work: maybe, after all, it wasn’t going to be so hard to make a living as a pilot. ‘Everything’s going well,’ Elaine wrote at the beginning of February. ‘Of course, it’s a thousand times easier to fly a light aircraft once you know how to read the instruments than to make village politicians cooperate with each other.’ She added: ‘And harder still for a woman.’ And then:

One thing I have learned: since the people are used to being told what to do, I have begun to act like a
patrón
. I’m very sorry to have to report that it gets results. I got the women of Victoria (a nearby village) to demand the doctor organize a nutrition and dental-health campaign. Yes, it’s odd to see the two together, but feeding themselves on sugar-water would destroy anyone’s teeth. So, at least I’ve accomplished something. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

Ricardo is happy, that’s for sure. Like a kid in a candy store. He’s starting to get jobs, not a lot, but enough. He doesn’t have the flying hours to become a commercial pilot yet, but that’s better, because he charges less and they prefer him for that (in Colombia everything’s better if it’s done under the counter). Of course, I see less of him. He leaves very early, flying out of Bogotá and these jobs eat up his day. Sometimes he has to sleep over at his old house, at his parents’ house, on his way out or on his way back, or both. And me here by myself. Sometimes it’s infuriating but I have no right to complain.

Between workdays Ricardo had weeks of leisure time, so in the evenings, when Elaine got home from her frustrating attempts to change the world, Ricardo had had time to get bored and bored again and to start doing things around the house with his toolbox, and the house began to look like a construction site. In March Ricardo built Elaine a shower stall in the patio, which was now a little garden: a wooden cubicle attached to the outside wall of the house that allowed Elaine to take a hose and have a shower under the night sky. In May he built a tool cupboard, and put an impregnable lock the size of a deck of cards on it to discourage any thieves. In June he didn’t build anything, because he was away more than usual: after talking it over with Elaine, he decided to go back to the Flying Club to get his commercial pilot’s licence, which would allow him to transport cargo and, most importantly, passengers. ‘So we’re going to take a serious step,’ he said. Obtaining the licence meant getting almost a hundred more flying hours, as well as ten hours of flying instruction with dual controls, so he spent the weekdays in Bogotá (slept at his old house, got his parents’ news, gave them news of his newlywed life, they all drank a toast and were happy) and went back to La Dorada on Friday afternoons, by train or by bus and once in a chartered taxi. ‘That must have cost a fortune,’ said Elaine. ‘What does it matter,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to see my wife.’ One of those days he arrived after midnight, not by bus or train or even by taxi, but in a white jeep that invaded the tranquillity of the street with the roar of its engine and the glare of its headlights. ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Elaine said. ‘It’s late, I was worried.’ She gestured towards the jeep. ‘Whose is that?’

‘You like it?’ said Ricardo.

‘It’s a jeep.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But do you like it?’

‘It’s big,’ Elaine said. ‘It’s white. It’s noisy.’

‘But it’s yours,’ said Ricardo. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘It’s June.’

‘No, it’s December now. You don’t notice because the weather’s the same. You really should have known, you with your Colombian ways.’