The Sound of Things Falling (24 page)

The new house had white walls like the midday sky and a terrace of smooth, light tiles, so clean you could see a line of ants along the edge of the wall. The construction took longer than expected, in part because Ricardo wanted to do some of it himself, in part because the land lacked services, and not even the generous bribes that Ricardo distributed left, right and centre helped the electricity cables and water pipes arrive any faster (sewage pipes were impossible, but there, so close to the river, it was easy to dig a good septic tank). Ricardo built a stable for two horses, in case Elaine wanted to go back to horseback riding in the future; he built a swimming pool and had them put in a slide for Maya, even though the little girl wasn’t even walking yet, and had them plant
carreto
and ceiba trees where there was no shade, and watched undaunted as the workers painted the bottoms of the palm tree trunks white, in spite of Elaine’s protests. He also built a shed
12
metres from the house, or what he called a shed despite the cement walls being as solid as the house itself, and there, in that windowless cell, in three padlocked cupboards, he kept the impenetrable bags filled with
50
- and
100
-dollar bills held tightly together by elastic bands. In
1973
, shortly after the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Ricardo had a board etched and singed with the name of the property: Villa Elena. When Elaine said that it was very nice but she had nowhere to put such a big board, Ricardo had a brick gate built with two columns covered in stucco and whitewashed and a crossbeam with clay roof tiles, and had the sign hung there by two iron chains that looked like they’d been taken off a shipwreck. Then he had them put in a green-painted wooden door the size of a man and with a well-oiled bolt. It was a useless addition, since a person could just squeeze through the barbed wire to get onto the property, but it allowed Ricardo to go on his trips with the feeling – artificial and even ridiculous – that his family was protected. ‘Protected from what?’ said Elaine. ‘What’s going to happen to us here, where everybody loves us?’ Ricardo looked at her in that paternalistic way he had that Elaine loathed and said, ‘It’s not always going to be like that.’ But Elaine realized that he meant something else, that he was also telling her something else.

A long time later, remembering them for her daughter or for herself, Elaine had to accept that the next three years, the three monotonous and routine years that followed the construction of Villa Elena, were the happiest of her life in Colombia. Taking over the land that Ricardo had bought, getting used to the idea that it was theirs, wasn’t easy: Elaine used to go out walking among the palms and sit down in a hut and drink cold juice while thinking about the course her life had taken, about the unfathomable distance between her origins and this destiny. Then she would start to walk – even in full sunlight, it didn’t bother her – towards the river, and saw the neighbouring ranches far away in the distance, the
campesinos
in their sandals cut from old tyres driving the cattle with shouts, each with their own voice as unmistakable as fingerprints. The couple who worked for her now had previously made their living by driving other people’s cattle. Now they cleaned the pool, kept the whole property in good shape (fixed the hinges on the doors, got rid of a spider’s nest from the baby’s room), made fish or chicken stew on the weekends. Walking through the fields, stomping hard because they’d told her it frightened away the snakes, Elaine was pleased about having worked to improve the lot of those
campesinos
, although she’d done so for less time than planned, and then, like a shadow, like the shadow of a low-flying vulture, it crossed her mind that she had now turned into the same kind of person who, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she’d fought against indefatigably.

The Peace Corps. Elaine got back in touch with the Bogotá office when she thought she could leave Maya in good hands and go back to work; by telephone, deputy director Valenzuela listened to her explanations, congratulated her on her new family and told her to call back in a few days, after he’d had a chance to talk to head office back in the United States, not wanting to violate protocol. When Elaine did so, Valenzuela’s secretary told Elaine that the deputy director had gone away unexpectedly and would phone her when he got back, but days passed and the call didn’t come. Elaine didn’t let that discourage her, and one day she went out herself and found the Acción Comunal people, who welcomed her as if barely a day had passed, and she started working again in a matter of hours on two new projects: a fishing cooperative and the construction of latrines. During the hours she spent with the community leaders – or with the fishermen, or drinking beer on the terraces of La Dorada, because that’s how business got done – she left Maya with her cook’s little boy, or brought her with her to work so she could play with other babies, but she didn’t tell Ricardo, who had very fixed opinions about the indiscriminate mixing of social classes. She began to use English again, so her daughter would not be deprived of her own language, and Maya would drop Spanish perfectly naturally when talking to her, going into and coming out of each of her languages as if she were going into or coming out of a game. She had turned into a lively and clever and bold little girl: she had long, narrow eyebrows and a cheekiness about her that could disarm anyone, but she also had her own world, and would go off among the
carreto
trees and reappear with a lizard in a glass, or completely naked having left her clothes, out of solidarity, on top of an egg. It was around that time when Ricardo, coming back from one of his trips to the Bahamas, brought her a gift of a three-banded armadillo in a cage full of fresh shit. He never explained how he’d got it, but he spent several days telling Maya the same things, obviously, that he’d been told: armadillos live in holes they dig with their own claws, armadillos roll up into a ball when they’re scared, armadillos can stay under water for more than five minutes. Maya looked at the animal with the same fascination – her mouth half open, eyebrows arched – with which she listened to her father. After seeing her get up early to feed the creature, seeing her spend hours snuggled up to him with a shy hand on the rough shell, Elaine asked, ‘So, what’s your armadillo’s name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name,’ said Maya.

‘What do you mean? He’s yours. You have to name him.’

Maya looked up, looked at Elaine, blinked twice. ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘He’s called Mike the armadillo.’

And that’s how Elaine found out that Barbieri had come to visit a couple of weeks earlier, while she was out managing projects with no future with the departmental boss. Ricardo hadn’t said anything to her: why? She asked him as soon as she could, and he fended her off with three simple words: ‘Because I forgot.’ Elaine didn’t let it go at that. ‘But what did he come for?’

‘To say hello, Elena Fritts,’ said Ricardo. ‘And he might come again, so don’t be surprised. As if he wasn’t a friend of ours.’

‘But the thing is he’s not a friend of ours.’

‘He’s a friend of mine,’ said Ricardo. ‘He is my friend.’

Just as Ricardo had announced, Mike Barbieri visited them again. But the circumstances of the visit were not ideal. During the month of April in
1976
, the rainy season had turned into a civil disaster: in the shantytowns of all the big cities houses were collapsing and burying the squatters who’d built them, on the mountain roads the landslides blocked traffic and isolated towns, and in one case there was the cruel paradox of a village, which had no system of rainwater collection, being left with no drinking water while a flood of biblical proportions rained down on them. The Miel River flooded and Elaine and Ricardo were helping to open ditches to clear the water from the flooded houses. From the television screen, the weather forecaster told them of trade winds and chaos in the Pacific currents, of hurricanes with stupid names that were beginning to form in the Caribbean, and the relationship that all that had with the downpours that were devastating Villa Elena, disrupting the household routines and also their domestic lives. The humidity was so intense that their clothes would never dry once they were washed and the drainpipes got clogged with fallen leaves and drowned insects and the terrace flooded three or four times, so that Elaine and Ricardo had to get up in the middle of the night to defend themselves, naked but for the rags and brooms, from the water that was already threatening to invade the dining-room. At the end of the month Ricardo had to go on one of his trips, and Elaine had to struggle alone against the threat of water. Afterwards she’d go back to bed to try to get a bit more sleep, but she never could, and would turn on the television to watch, as if hypnotized, a screen where another rain rained, an electrical rain in black and white whose static sound had a curious sedative effect on her.

The day Ricardo should have come home went by without Ricardo arriving. It wasn’t the first time it had happened – delays of two and even three days were acceptable, since Ricardo’s business was not without its unforeseen contingencies – and she mustn’t worry about them. After eating a plate of rice and fish and a few slices of fried plantain, Elaine put Maya to bed, read her a few pages of
The Little Prince
(the part about drawing the sheep, which made Maya laugh and laugh) and, when the little girl turned over and fell asleep, Elaine kept reading out of inertia. She liked Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations and she liked, because it reminded her of Ricardo, the passage where the Little Prince asks the pilot what that thing is and the pilot says, ‘It’s not a thing. It flies. It’s a plane. My plane.’ And she was reading the Little Prince’s alarmed reaction, the moment when he asks the pilot if he fell out of the sky too, when she heard an engine and a man’s voice, a greeting, a shout. But when she came out she didn’t find Ricardo, but Mike Barbieri, who had arrived by motorcycle and was drenched from head to toe, his hair stuck to his forehead, his shirt stuck to his chest, his legs and back and the insides of his forearms covered in big gobs of fresh mud.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Elaine said to him.

Mike Barbieri was standing on the terrace dripping wet and rubbing his hands together. The olive green knapsack he’d brought was lying beside him on the floor, like a dead dog, and Mike was staring at Elaine with a blank expression on his face, like the way the
campesinos
looked at her, Elaine thought, they looked without seeing. After a couple of long seconds, he seemed to wake up, to snap out of the torpor his journey had brought on. ‘I’ve come from Medellín,’ he said, ‘I never expected to get caught in a downpour like this. My hands feel like they’re falling off from the cold. I don’t know how it can be so cold in such a hot place. The world must be coming to an end.’

‘From Medellín,’ said Elaine, but not as a question. ‘And you’re here to see Ricardo.’

Mike Barbieri was going to say something (she was perfectly well aware that he was going to say something) but he didn’t. His gaze left her face and glided past her like a paper plane; Elaine, turning around to see what he was looking at, found Maya, a little ghost in a lace nightie. In one hand she had a stuffed animal – a rabbit with very long ears and a ballerina’s tutu that had once been white – and with the other she was pushing her chestnut hair off her face. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ said Mike, and Elaine was surprised by the sweetness in his tone. ‘Hello, sweetie,’ she said to her. ‘What happened? Did we wake you up? Can’t you sleep?’

‘I’m thirsty,’ said Maya. ‘Why is Uncle Mike here?’

‘Mike came to see Daddy. Go to your room, I’ll bring you a glass of water.’

‘Is Daddy back?’

‘No, he’s not back yet. But Mike came to see all of us.’

‘Me too?’

‘Yes, you too. But now it’s time to sleep, say goodnight, you’ll see him another day.’

‘Goodbye, Uncle Mike.’

‘Goodnight, lovely,’ said Mike.

‘Sleep tight,’ said Elaine.

‘She’s so big,’ said Mike. ‘How old is she now?’

‘Five. She’s about to turn five.’

‘Holy smoke. How time flies.’

The cliché annoyed Elaine. Annoyed her more than it should have, it almost made her angry, it was like an affront, and suddenly her annoyance turned into surprise: at her disproportionate reaction, at the strangeness of the scene with Mike Barbieri, at the fact that her daughter had called him Uncle. She asked Mike to wait for her there, because the floor was too slippery and if he came in soaking wet he risked hurting himself; she brought him a towel from the servants’ bathroom and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen.
Uncle Mike
, she was thinking,
what’s he doing here?
And she thought it in Spanish too,
what the hell is he doing here?
And suddenly there was that song again,
What’s there to live for? Who needs the Peace Corps?
When she walked into Maya’s room, when she breathed in her scent that was different from all others, she felt an inexplicable desire to spend the night with her, and thought that later, when Mike had left, she’d carry Maya to her bed so she could keep her company until Ricardo got back. Maya had fallen asleep again. Elaine bent down over the head of her bed, looked at her, brought her face up close, breathed in her breath. ‘Here’s your water,’ she said, ‘do you want a sip?’ But the little girl didn’t say anything. Elaine left the glass on her bedside table, beside the string merry-go-round where a horse with a broken head was trying, slowly but tirelessly, to catch up with a clown. And then she went back to the front of the house.