The Sound of Things Falling (26 page)

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Starting with Dad. She invented him entirely, or rather, he was an invention of hers. A novel, understand? A flesh-and-blood novel, her novel. She did it because of me, of course, or for me.’

‘You mean you didn’t know the truth?’ I said. ‘Elaine didn’t tell you?’

‘She must have thought it would be better that way. And maybe she was right, Antonio. I don’t have children. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have children. I don’t know what a person might be capable of doing for them. My imagination doesn’t stretch that far. Have you got kids, Antonio?’

Maya asked me that. It was Sunday morning, that day Christians call Easter and on which they celebrate or commemorate the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified two days before (more or less at the same time as I began my first conversation with Ricardo Laverde’s daughter) and who from this moment on began to appear to the living: to his mother, to the Apostles and to certain women well chosen for their merit. ‘Have you got kids, Antonio?’ We’d had an early breakfast: lots of coffee, lots of freshly squeezed orange juice, lots of chunks of papaya and pineapple and sapodilla plums, and a cooked breakfast with a very hot
arepa
, which I put in my mouth too hot and left a blister on my tongue that came back to life every time my tongue touched my teeth. It wasn’t hot yet, but the world was a place that smelled of vegetation, humid and colourful, and there, at the table on the terrace, surrounded by hanging vines, talking a few metres from a trunk with some bromeliads growing out of it, I felt good, I thought I was feeling good on this Easter Sunday. ‘Have you got kids, Antonio?’ I thought of Aura and Leticia, or rather I thought of Aura taking Leticia to the closest church and showing her the candle that represented the light of Christ. She’ll take advantage of my absence to do it: in spite of several attempts, I was never able to recover the faith I had as a little boy, much less the dedication with which my family followed the rituals of these days, from the ashes on the forehead on the first day of Lent to the Ascension (which I pictured in my head according to an encyclopedia illustration, a painting full of angels that I’ve never found since). And I had therefore never wanted my daughter to grow up in this tradition, which now seemed so alien to me.
Where are you, Aura?
I thought.
Where is my family?
I looked up, let myself be dazzled by the clarity of the sky, felt a stabbing in my eyes. Maya was looking at me, waiting, hadn’t forgotten her question.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. It must be very strange, having kids. I can’t imagine it either.’

I don’t know why I did that. Maybe because it was too late to start talking about the family that was waiting for me in Bogotá; those are things you mention in the first moments of a friendship, when you introduce yourself and hand over two or three pieces of information to give the illusion of intimacy. One introduces oneself: the word must come from that, not pronouncing one’s own name and hearing the other’s name and shaking hands, not from kissing a cheek or two or bowing, but from those first minutes in which certain insubstantial pieces of information are exchanged, certain unimportant generalities, to give the other the sensation they know us, that we’re no longer strangers. We speak of our nationality; we speak of our profession, what we do to make a living, because the way we make our living is eloquent, it defines us, structures us; we talk about our family. Well anyway, that moment was already long past with Maya, and to start talking about the woman I lived with and our daughter two days after having arrived at Las Acacias would have raised unnecessary suspicions or required long explanations or stupid justifications, or simply seemed odd, and after all it wouldn’t be without consequences: Maya would lose the trust she’d felt until now, or I would lose the ground I’d gained so far, and she would stop talking and Ricardo Laverde’s past would go back to being the past, would go back to hiding in other people’s memories. I couldn’t allow that.

Or perhaps there was another reason.

Because keeping Aura and Leticia out of Las Acacias, remote from Maya Fritts and her tale and her documents, distant therefore from the truth about Ricardo Laverde, was to protect their purity, or rather avoid their contamination, the contamination that I’d suffered one afternoon in
1996
the causes of which I’d barely begun to understand now, the unsuspected intensity of which was just now beginning to emerge like an object falling from the sky. My contaminated life was mine alone: my family was still safe: safe from the plague of my country, from its afflicted recent history: safe from what had hunted me down along with so many of my generation (and others, too, yes, but most of all mine, the generation that was born with planes, with the flights full of bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequences). This world that had come back to life in the words and documents of Maya Fritts could stay there, I thought, could stay there in Las Acacias, could stay in La Dorada, could stay in the Magdalena Valley, could stay a four-hour drive from Bogotá, far from the apartment where my wife and daughter were waiting for me, perhaps with some concern, yes, perhaps with worried expressions on their faces, but pure, uncontaminated, free of our particular Colombian story, and I wouldn’t be a good father or a good husband if I brought this story to them, or allowed them to enter this story, enter Las Acacias and the life of Maya Fritts in any way, enter into contact with Ricardo Laverde. Aura had had the strange luck to be absent during the difficult years, to have grown up in Santo Domingo and Mexico and Santiago de Chile: was it not my obligation to preserve that luck, to be vigilant to keep anything from ruining that sort of exemption that the eventful life of her parents had granted her? I was going to protect her, I thought, her and my little girl, I was protecting them. This was the right thing to do, I thought, and I did so with real conviction, with almost religious zeal.

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Maya said. ‘It’s one of those things that can’t be shared, so everyone tells me. Anyway. The thing is she did it for me. She invented my dad, invented him entirely.’

‘For example?’

‘Well,’ said Maya, ‘for example, his death.’

And so, with the white light of the Magdalena Valley shining in my face, I learned about the day that Elaine or Elena Fritts explained to her daughter what had happened to her father. During the previous year, father and daughter had talked a lot about death: one afternoon, Maya had come upon the slaughter of a Cebú cow, and almost immediately began to ask questions. Ricardo had resolved the matter in four words: ‘Her years were up.’ Everyone and everything runs out of years eventually, he explained: animals, people, everyone. Armadillos? asked Maya. Yes, Ricardo told her, armadillos too. Grandpa Julio? asked Maya. Yes, Grandpa Julio too, Ricardo told her. So, one afternoon towards the end of
1976
, when the girl’s questions about her father’s absence were starting to get unbearable, Elaine Fritts sat Maya on her lap and told her, ‘Daddy’s years were up.’

‘I don’t know why she chose that moment, I don’t know if she got tired of waiting for something, I don’t know anything,’ Maya told me. ‘Maybe some news arrived from the United States. From the lawyers or from my dad.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘There aren’t any letters from that time, my mother burnt them all. What I’m telling you is what I imagine happened: she got some news. From my dad. From the lawyers. And decided to change her life, or that her life with my dad was over and she was going to start another different one.’

She explained that Ricardo had got lost in the sky. Sometimes that happened to pilots, she explained: it’s rare, but it happened. The sky was very big and the sea was very big too and a plane was a very small thing and the planes that Daddy flew were the smallest ones of all, and the world was full of planes like those, little white planes that took off and flew over the land and then went out and flew over the sea, and went far, very far away, far from everything, completely alone, without anyone to tell them how to get back to land again. And sometimes something happened, and they got lost. They forgot where ahead was and where was back, or they got confused and started flying in circles without knowing which way was ahead and which was back, where the left was and where the right, until the plane ran out of gasoline and fell into the sea, fell out of the sky like a little girl diving into a pool. And it sank without a sound or a noise, sank unseen because out in those places there isn’t anyone to see, and out there, at the bottom of the sea, pilots ran out of years. ‘Why don’t they swim?’ asked Maya. And Elena Fritts said, ‘Because the sea is very deep.’ And Maya, ‘But Daddy’s out there?’ And Elena Fritts, ‘Yes, Daddy’s there. At the bottom of the sea. His plane fell, Daddy fell asleep and his years ran out.’

Maya Fritts never questioned that version of events. That was the last Christmas they spent at Villa Elena, the last time Elaine had them cut down a yellowing shrub to decorate with the fragile coloured balls the little girl loved, with reindeer and sleighs and fake candy canes that bent the branches with their weight. In January
1977
several things happened: Elaine received a letter from her grandparents telling her that it had snowed in Miami for the first time in history; President Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam draft dodgers; and Mike Barbieri – who Elaine had always secretly considered a draft dodger – showed up dead in La Miel River, shot in the back of the neck, his naked body thrown face down on the riverbank, the water playing with his long hair, his beard wet and reddened with blood. The
campesinos
who found him went in search of Elaine even before they went to the authorities: she was the other
gringa
in the region. Elaine had to be present at the first judicial proceedings, had to go to a municipal court with open windows and fans that messed up the records to say that yes, she knew him, and that no, she didn’t know who might have killed him. The next day she packed up the Nissan with everything she could fit in it, her clothes and her daughter’s, the suitcases full of money and an armadillo with the name of a murdered
gringo
, and went to Bogotá.

‘Twelve years, Antonio,’ Maya Fritts said to me, ‘twelve years I lived with my mother, just the two of us, practically in hiding. She didn’t just take my dad away from me, but my grandparents too. We didn’t see them again. They just came to visit a couple of times, and it would always end in a fight, I didn’t understand why. But other people came. It was a tiny little apartment, in La Perseverancia. Lots of people came to visit us, the house was always full of
gringos
, people from the Peace Corps, people from the Embassy. Did Mom talk to them about drugs, about what was happening with drugs? I don’t know, I wouldn’t have been aware of something like that. It’s perfectly possible they talked about cocaine. Or about the volunteers who had taught the
campesinos
to process the
coca
paste just as they’d taught them techniques for growing better marijuana before. But the business wasn’t yet what it became later. How would I have known? A child doesn’t catch things like that.’

‘And no one asked about Ricardo? None of those visitors spoke of him?’

‘No, nobody. Incredible, isn’t it? Mom constructed a world in which Ricardo Laverde didn’t exist, that takes talent. As difficult as it is to maintain a little tiny lie, she built up something huge, an actual pyramid. I imagine her giving instructions to all her visitors: in this house we don’t speak of the dead. What dead? Well, the dead. The dead who are dead.’

It was around that time that she killed the armadillo. Maya didn’t remember the absence of her father upsetting her too much: she didn’t remember any bad feelings, any aggression, any desire for revenge, but one day (she would have been about eight) she grabbed the armadillo and took him to the laundry patio. ‘It was one of those old-fashioned patios apartments used to have, you know, uncomfortable and tiny, with a stone sink and clothes lines and a window. Do you remember those laundry sinks? On one side was where you scrubbed the clothes against the ridged surface, on the other was a sort of tank, for a child it was like a deep well of cold water. I brought a bench over from the kitchen, leaned over the water and pushed Mike down with both hands, without letting go of him, and I put both my hands on his back so he wouldn’t move. I’d been told that armadillos could spend a long time under water. I wanted to see how long. The armadillo started struggling, but I held him down there, pressed against the bottom of the sink with my whole body weight, an armadillo is strong, but not that strong, I was already a good-sized girl. I wanted to see how long he could stay under water, that was all, it seemed to me that’s all it was. I remember the roughness of his body very well, my hands hurt from the pressure and then they went on hurting, it was like holding a knotty tree trunk in place so the current wouldn’t carry it off. What a struggle the creature put up, I remember perfectly. Until he stopped struggling. The maid found him later, you should have heard her scream. I was punished. Mom slapped me hard and cut my lip with her ring. Later she asked me why I’d done it and I said, To see how many minutes he could stay under. And Mom answered, Then why didn’t you have a watch? I didn’t know what to say. And that question hasn’t completely gone away, Antonio, it still runs around my head every once in a while, always at the worst moments, when life isn’t working out for me. This question appears to me and I’ve never been able to answer it.’