The Sound of Things Falling (31 page)

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ Maya smiled: in the dawn’s blue light I saw her smile. ‘The thing is I remember perfectly, he was sitting there and we’d just been brought some
lulo
juice, because Iragorri was teetotal, and he’d added a spoonful of sugar and he was stirring it like this, slowly, when we got to the thing about the cash machine. Then he told me that of course, of course he’d lent my dad that money, but he didn’t really have money to spare. So he said look, Ricardo, don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask you how you’re going to pay me back. When you’re going to pay me back, and how? And that’s when my dad, according to Iragorri, told him, Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve just done a job that I’ll be getting good money for. I’m going to pay you all this back with interest.’

Maya stood up, took a couple of steps towards the rustic table her little stereo sat on and pressed rewind. The silence filled with that mechanical murmur, as monotonous as running water. ‘That sentence is like a hole, everything goes down it,’ said Maya. ‘
I’ve just done a job
, my dad said to Iragorri,
that I’ll be getting good money for
. Not very many words, but they’re fuckers.’

‘Because we don’t know.’

‘Exactly,’ said Maya. ‘Because we don’t know. Iragorri didn’t ask me at first, he was discreet or shy, but eventually he couldn’t help it. What kind of job would it have been, Señorita Fritts? I can see him there, looking away. See that piece of furniture, Antonio?’ Maya pointed to a wicker structure with four shelves. ‘See the pre-Columbian pieces up top?’ There was a little man sitting cross-legged with an enormous phallus; at his side, two pots with heads and prominent bellies. ‘Iragorri stared at them up there, far from my eyes, he couldn’t look at me as he said what he said, he didn’t dare. And what he said was: Your dad wouldn’t have been mixed up in something fishy? Fishy like what? I asked. And he, looking up there the whole time, looking at the pre-Columbian figurines, blushed like a child and said, well, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, what does it matter now. And you know what, Antonio? That’s what I think too: what does it matter any more?’ The murmur of the tape player stopped then. ‘Shall we listen to it again?’ said Maya. Her finger pressed a button, the dead pilots began to chat again in the distant night, in the middle of the night sky, at an altitude of
32
,
000
feet, and Maya Fritts came back to my side and put a hand on my leg and rested her head on my shoulder and I could smell her hair in which I could still detect the previous day’s rain. It wasn’t a clean smell, but I liked it, I felt comfortable with it. ‘I have to go,’ I said then.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

I stood up, looked out the big window. Outside, behind the hills, the white stain of the sun was coming up.

There is just one direct route between La Dorada and Bogotá, just one way to make this journey without unnecessary detours or delays. It’s the one used by all the transport, produce, merchandise and passengers too, for those companies rely on covering the distance in the shortest possible space of time, and that’s also why a mishap on the only route can be very damaging. You turn south and take the straight road that runs by the river that takes you to Honda, the port where travellers used to arrive when no planes flew over the Andes. From London, from New York, from Havana, Colón or Barranquilla, they would arrive by sea at the mouth of the Magdalena, and change ship there or sometimes carry on in the same one. There followed long days of sailing upriver on tired steamships, which in the dry season, when the water level fell so low that the riverbed emerged, would get stranded on the banks between crocodiles and fishing boats. From Honda each traveller would get to Bogotá however they could, by mule or by train or in a private car, depending on the era and the resources, and that last leg could also take a while, from several hours to several days, for it’s not easy to go, in barely
100
kilometres, from sea level to an altitude of
2
,
600
metres where that grey-skyed city rests. So far in my life no one has been able to explain convincingly, beyond banal historical causes, why a country should choose as its capital its most remote and hidden city. It’s not our fault that we
bogotanos
are stuffy and cold and distant, because that’s what our city is like, and you can’t blame us for greeting strangers warily, for we’re not used to them. I, of course, can’t blame Maya Fritts for having left Bogotá when she got the chance, and more than once I’ve wondered how many people of my generation had done the same, escaped, not to a tropical lowland town like Maya had, but to Lima or Buenos Aires, to New York or Mexico, to Miami or Madrid. Colombia produces fugitives, that’s true, but one day I’d like to find out how many of them were born as Maya and I were at the beginning of the
1970
s, how many like Maya or like me had a calm or protected or at least unperturbed childhood, how many traversed their teenage years and fearfully became adults while the city around them sank into fear and the sound of gunshots and bombs without anyone having declared any war, or at least not a conventional war, if such a thing exists. That’s what I’d like to know, how many left my city feeling in one way or another that they were saving themselves, and how many felt that by saving themselves they were betraying something, turning into proverbial rats fleeing the proverbial ship by the act of fleeing the city in flames.
I shall tell you that one day I saw burning between the night / a crazy city haughty and populous,
says a poem by Aurelio Arturo.
I, unblinking, watched it collapse, / fall, like a rose petal under a hoof
. Arturo published that in
1929
: he had no way of knowing what would later happen to the city of his dream, the way Bogotá would adapt itself to his lines, entering into them and fulfilling their requisites, as iron adapts to its mould, yes, as molten iron always fills the mould it’s poured into.

It burned like a thigh between forests of fire,

and cupolas were falling and walls fell

over the beloved voices as over wide mirrors

. . . ten thousand shrieks of pure brilliance.

The beloved voices. I was thinking of them that strange Monday, when after the weekend at Maya Fritts’s house, I found myself coming into Bogotá from the west, passing under the planes taking off from El Dorado Airport, passing over the river, and then driving up
26
th Street. It was just after ten in the morning and the trip had gone without mishaps or collapses or traffic jams or accidents that would have held me up on a road so narrow in places that vehicles had to take it in turns to pass. I was thinking through everything I’d heard over the weekend and about the woman who had told it to me, and also about what I’d seen at the Hacienda Nápoles, whose cupolas and walls were falling down too, and also, of course, I was thinking about Arturo’s poem and about my family, my family and Arturo’s poem, my city and the poem and my family, the beloved voices of the poem, Aura’s voice and Leticia’s voice, which had filled my recent years, which in more than one sense had rescued me.

And the flames were like my own hair,

red panthers loose in the young city,

and the walls of my dream were collapsing to the ground,

just as a city collapses in screams.

I drove into the parking garage of my building as if returning after a lengthy absence. Through the window a doorman I’d never seen before waved me in; I had to perform more manoeuvres than usual to get into my space. When I got out I felt cold, and I thought that the car’s interior had conserved the warm air of the Magdalena Valley and that this contrast had undoubtedly led to the violent shutting of my pores. It smelled of cement (cement has a cold smell) and of fresh paint: they were doing some work I hadn’t remembered they were starting over the weekend. But the workers had left, and there, in the parking garage of my building, in another car’s space, was a gasoline barrel cut in half, and in it the remains of the fresh cement. As a child I had liked the feeling of wet cement on my hands, so I looked around – to make sure no one would see me and think I was crazy – and I approached the barrel and stuck two fingers carefully into the now almost hardened mixture. And I went up in the lift like that, looking at my dirty fingers and smelling them and enjoying that cold smell, and so I went up the ten floors to my apartment, and was about to ring the bell with the dirty fingers. I didn’t, and not only so I wouldn’t get the bell or the wall dirty, but because something (a quality of the silence on this high floor, the darkness of the panes of smoked glass in the door) told me that there was no one home to open the door for me.

Now, there is something that has happened to me all my life when I return from sea level to the altitude of Bogotá. It’s not just me, of course, but happens to many and even the majority, but since I was little it always seemed that my symptoms were more intense than other people’s. I’m talking about a certain difficulty in breathing for the first two days after my return, a slight tachycardia unleashed by efforts as minimal as climbing the stairs or getting down a suitcase, and that lasts while my lungs get used to this rarefied air again. That’s what happened to me as I opened with my own keys the door to my apartment. My eyes mechanically registered the clean dining table (no envelopes to open, no letters or bills), the telephone table where the red light of the answering machine was blinking and the little screen indicated that there were four new messages, the swinging door into the kitchen (it had been left stuck half open, I should oil the hinges). All this I saw while feeling the lack of oxygen that my heart was demanding. What I didn’t see, however, were any toys at all. Not in the carpeted corners or abandoned on the chairs or lost in the hall. There were none, not the plastic fruit in its basket, not the chipped little teacups, not the chalk for the board or any coloured paper. Everything was perfectly orderly, and that was when I took two steps towards the telephone and played the messages. The first was the dean’s office, asking why I hadn’t taught my
7
a.m. class, and asking me to report as soon as possible. The second was Aura.

‘I’m calling so you won’t worry,’ said that voice, the beloved voice. ‘We’re fine, Antonio. Leticia and I are fine. It’s Sunday now, eight o’clock at night, and you haven’t come back. And I don’t know where we can go from here. You and me, I mean, I don’t know where you and I can go, what’s left after what’s happened to us. I’ve tried, I’ve tried hard, you know I have. And I’m tired of trying, even I get tired. I can’t do it any more. Forgive me, Antonio, but I can’t do it any longer, and it’s not fair on our little girl.’ She said this:
It’s not fair on our little girl
. And then she said other things, but the time the answering machine gave her had run out and her message was cut off. The next message was also from her: ‘I got cut off,’ she said with a broken voice, as if she’d been crying in between the two messages. ‘Well, I don’t have anything else to say anyway. I hope you’re fine too, that you got home OK, and that you forgive me. I just can’t do it any more. I’m sorry.’ Then came the last message: it was the university again, but not the dean’s office this time, but the secretary. They were asking if I’d supervise a thesis, an absurd project on revenge as a legal prototype in the
Iliad
.

I had listened to the messages standing by the phone with my eyes open but without looking at anything, and now I played them again so I could hear Aura’s beloved voice while I walked around the apartment. I walked slowly, because I couldn’t get enough air: no matter how deeply I breathed, I couldn’t get the feeling of breathing comfortably, and my closed lungs made themselves felt effortlessly, my rebellious bronchial tubes, my self-sabotaging alveoli refusing to receive the oxygen. In the kitchen there was not even one single dirty plate, not a glass or a piece of cutlery out of place. Aura’s voice was saying she was tired, and I walked down the hall towards Leticia’s room, and Aura’s voice was saying it wasn’t fair on our little girl and I sat down on Leticia’s bed and thought that what would be fair would be that Leticia were here with me, so I could take care of her as I’d taken care of her until now.

I want to take care of you
, I thought,
I want to take care of both of you, together we’ll be protected, together nothing will happen to us
.

I opened the wardrobe: Aura had taken all of Leticia’s clothes, a child of Leticia’s age goes through several outfits a day, you have to be washing clothes all the time. My head hurt all of a sudden. I attributed it to the lack of oxygen. I thought I’d lie down for a few minutes before going to find a painkiller, because Aura was always complaining about my tendency to take medication at the first symptoms, and not give the body the chance to defend itself on its own. ‘Forgive me,’ said Aura’s voice out there in the living room, from the other side of the wall. Aura was not in the living room, of course, and I had no way of knowing where she was. But she was fine, and Leticia was fine, and that’s what mattered. Maybe, with a little luck, she’d phone back. I lay down on this bed that was too small for me, on which my long grown-up body did not fit, and my eyes focused on the mobile that hung from the ceiling, the first image that Leticia saw when she woke up in the morning, the last thing she probably saw when she went to bed at night. From the ceiling hung an aquamarine egg, four arms stuck out from the egg and from each arm hung a figure: an owl with big spiral eyes, a ladybird, a dragonfly with muslin wings, a smiling bee with long antennae. There, concentrating on the forms and colours that were moving in an imperceptible way, I thought of what I’d say if Aura called back. Would I ask her where she was, if I could go and pick her up or if I had the right to hope she’d come back? Would I keep quiet so she could realize she’d made a mistake abandoning our life? Or would I try to convince her, tell her that together we could defend ourselves better from the evil of the world, or that the world was too risky a place to be wandering on our own, without anyone waiting for us at home, who worries about us when we don’t show up and who can go out to look for us?