The Sound of Things Falling (7 page)

‘Who?’

‘At the university. I don’t know, people, students.’

‘Professors?’

‘I don’t know. The students at least. Come to bed and I’ll tell you.’

‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow. I have to work now.’

‘It’s after midnight,’ said Aura. ‘We’re both tired. You’re tired.’

‘I have work to do. I have to prepare this class.’

‘But you’re tired. And you don’t sleep, and not sleeping is not a good way to prepare for class either.’ She paused, looked at me in the yellow dining-room light and said, ‘You didn’t go out today, did you?’

I didn’t answer.

‘You haven’t showered,’ she continued. ‘You didn’t get dressed all day. You’ve spent the whole day stuck in here. People say the accident changed you, Antonio, and I tell them of course it did, not to be idiots, how could it not change you. But I don’t like what I’m seeing, if you want me to tell you the truth.’

‘Well don’t,’ I barked at her. ‘Nobody’s asked you to.’

The conversation could have ended there, but Aura noticed something, I saw on her face all the movements of someone just realizing something, and asked me one question, ‘Were you waiting for me?’

I didn’t answer this time either. ‘Were you waiting for me to get home?’ she insisted. ‘Were you worried?’

‘I was preparing my class,’ I said, looking her in the eye. ‘It seems I can’t even do that now.’

‘You were worried,’ she said. ‘That’s why you stayed up.’ And then, ‘Antonio, Bogotá is not a war zone. There aren’t bullets floating around out there, the same thing’s not going to happen to all of us.’

You know nothing, I wanted to tell her, you grew up elsewhere. There is no common ground between us, I wanted to tell her as well, there’s no way for you to understand, nobody’s going to explain it to you, I can’t explain it to you. But those words didn’t come out of my mouth.

‘Nobody thinks anything’s going to happen to all of us,’ I told her instead. I was surprised that it sounded so loud when it hadn’t been my intention to raise my voice. ‘Nobody was worried because you weren’t home yet. Nobody thinks you’re going to get blown up by a bomb like the one at Tres Elefantes, or the bomb at DAS, because you don’t work at DAS, or the bomb at Centro
93
, because you never shop at Centro
93
. Besides, that era is over, isn’t it? So nobody thinks that’s going to happen to you, Aura, we’d be very unlucky, wouldn’t we? And we’re not unlucky, are we?’

‘Don’t be like that,’ said Aura. ‘I . . .’

‘I am preparing my class,’ I cut her off, ‘is it too much to ask you to respect that? Instead of talking bollocks at two in the morning, is it too much to ask that you go to bed and stop pissing me off and let me finish this fucking thing?’

As far as I remember, she didn’t start to move towards my bedroom at that moment, but went first to the kitchen, and I heard the fridge opening and closing and then a door, the door of one of those cupboards that close almost by themselves if you give them a tiny nudge. And in this series of domestic sounds (in which I could follow Aura’s movements, imagine them one by one) there was an annoying familiarity, a sort of irritating intimacy, as if Aura, instead of having taken care of me for weeks and supervised my recovery, had invaded my space without any authorization whatsoever. I saw her leave the kitchen with a glass in her hand: it was some intensely coloured liquid, one of those fizzy drinks that she liked and I didn’t. ‘Do you know how much she weighs?’ she asked me.

‘Who?’

‘Leticia,’ she said. ‘I got the test results, the baby’s enormous. If she hasn’t been born in a week, we’re going to schedule a Caesarean.’

‘In a week,’ I said.

‘The tests were all positive,’ said Aura.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Don’t you want to know how much she weighs?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ I asked.

I remember her standing still in the middle of the living room, the same distance from the kitchen door as from the threshold to the hallway, in a sort of no man’s land. ‘Antonio,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with worry. But yours is beginning to be unhealthy. You’re sick with worry. And that makes me worry.’ She left the drink she’d just poured herself on the dining-room table and locked herself in the bathroom. I heard her turn on the tap to fill the bathtub; I imagined her crying as she did so, covering her sobs with the sound of running water. When I got into bed, quite a while later, Aura was still in the tub, that place where her belly was not a burden, that happy, weightless world. I fell asleep straight away and the next morning left while she was still sleeping. I thought, I confess, that Aura wasn’t really asleep, but pretending to be so she wouldn’t have to say goodbye to me. I thought she was hating me at that moment. I thought, with something very closely resembling fear, that her hatred was justified.

I arrived at the university a few minutes before seven. On my shoulders and in my eyes I could feel the weight of the night, the few hours of sleep. I was in the habit of waiting outside the lecture hall until the students arrived, leaning on the stone banisters of the former cloister, and going in only when it was obvious that the majority of the students were already present; that morning, perhaps due to the weariness I felt in my abdomen, perhaps because when I was seated the crutches were less noticeable, I decided to wait for them sitting down. But I didn’t even manage to get close to my chair: a drawing caught my attention from the blackboard, and turning my head I found myself in front of two stick figures in obscene positions. His penis was as long as his arm; her face had no features, it was just a chalk circle with long hair. Beneath the drawing was a printed caption:

Professor Yammara introduces her to law
.

I felt faint, but I don’t think anyone noticed. ‘Who did this?’ I said out loud, but I don’t remember my voice coming out as loud as I’d intended. My students’ faces were blank: they’d been emptied of all content; they were chalk circles like the woman on the blackboard. I began to walk towards the steps, as fast as my hobbled gait would allow, and as I started down them, just as I was passing the drawing of Francisco José de Caldas, I completely lost control. Legend has it that Caldas, one of the precursors of Colombian independence, was descending those stairs on his way to the scaffold when he bent down to pick up a piece of charcoal, and his executioners saw him draw on the whitewashed wall an oval crossed by a line: a long black bisected O, which patriots like to interpret as
Oh, long and dark departure
. Beside this implausible and absurd and undoubtedly apocryphal hieroglyphic I passed with my heart pounding and my hands, pale and sweaty, closed tightly around the grips of my crutches. My tie was torturing my neck. I left the university and kept walking, paying little attention to what streets I was crossing or the people I brushed past, until my arms started to ache. At the north corner of Santander Park, the mime who’s always there began to follow me, to imitate my awkward gait and my clumsy movements, and even my panting. He wore a one-piece black suit covered in buttons, his face painted white but no other make-up of any other colour, and he moved his arms in the air with such talent that even I seemed to suddenly see his fictitious crutches. There, while that failed good actor made fun of me and provoked the laughter of passers-by, I thought for the first time that my life was falling apart, and that Leticia, ignorant little girl, could not have chosen a worse moment to come into the world.

Leticia was born one August morning. We had spent the night at the clinic, preparing for the surgery, and in the atmosphere of the room – Aura in the bed, me on the companion’s sofa – there was a sort of macabre inversion of another room, of another time. When the nurses came to take her, Aura was already giddy with anaesthetic, and the last thing she said to me was, ‘I think it was O. J. Simpson’s glove.’ I would have liked to hold her hand, not to have crutches and be able to hold her hand, and I told her so, but she was already unconscious. I went along beside her down corridors and in lifts while the nurses told me to relax, Papá, that everything was going to be fine, and I wondered what right these women had to call me Papá, much less to give me their opinion on the future. Later, in front of the huge swinging doors of the operating theatre, they showed me to a waiting room that was more like a way station with three chairs and a table with magazines on it. I left my crutches leaning in a corner, by the photograph or rather the poster of a pink baby smiling toothlessly, hugging a giant sunflower, against a blue sky in the background. I opened an old magazine, tried to distract myself with a crossword puzzle:
Threshing place. Brother of Onan. People slow to act, especially by pretence.
But I could only think of the woman who was sleeping inside there while a scalpel opened her skin and her flesh, of the gloved hands that were going to reach inside her body and take my daughter out. May those hands be careful ones, I thought, let them move with dexterity, and not touch what they shouldn’t touch. Let them not hurt you, Leticia, and don’t be scared, because there’s nothing to fear. I was on my feet when a young man came out and, without taking his mask off, told me, ‘Both your princesses are perfectly fine.’ I didn’t know when I had stood up, and my leg had started to ache, so I sat back down. I held my hands to my face out of shame, nobody likes to make a show of his tears.
People slow to act
, I thought,
especially by pretence.
And later, when I saw Leticia in a sort of bluish, translucent pool, when I saw her finally asleep and well wrapped up in little white blankets that even from a distance looked warm, I thought again of that ridiculous phrase. I concentrated on Leticia. From too far away I saw her eyes without lashes, I saw the tiniest mouth I’d ever seen, and regretted that they’d put her down with her hands hidden, because nothing seemed more urgent to me at that moment than seeing my daughter’s hands. I knew I’d never love anyone like I loved Leticia in that instant, that nobody would ever be what, there and then, that new arrival, that complete stranger was to me.

I did not set foot on
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th Street again, much less in the billiard club (I stopped playing entirely: standing up for too long exacerbated the pain in my leg to the point of making it unbearable). So I lost one part of the city; or, to put it a better way, a part of my city was stolen from me. I imagined a city in which the streets, the pavements gradually closed themselves off to us, like the rooms of the house in Julio Cortázar’s story, until eventually expelling us. ‘We were fine, and little by little we began to live unthinkingly,’ says the brother in that story after a mysterious presence has taken over another part of the house. And he adds, ‘You can live without thinking.’ It’s true: you can. After
14
th Street was stolen from me – and after months of physiotherapy, of enduring light-headedness and my stomach destroyed by medication – I began to despise the city, to fear it, to feel threatened by it. The world seemed to me a closed place, or my life a walled-in life; the doctor talked to me about my fear of going out on the street, he proffered the word
agoraphobia
as if it were a delicate object that mustn’t be allowed to fall, and it was hard for me to explain that it was just the opposite, a violent claustrophobia was what was tormenting me. One day, during a session I don’t remember anything else about, that doctor recommended I try a kind of personal therapy that, according to him, had worked well for several of his patients.

‘Do you keep a diary, Antonio?’

I said no, that diaries had always seemed ridiculous to me, a vanity or an anachronism: the fiction that our life matters.

He replied, ‘Well start one. I’m not suggesting a diary-diary, but a notebook to ask yourself questions.’

‘Questions,’ I repeated. ‘Like what?’

‘Like, for example: what dangers are real in Bogotá? What are the chances of what happened to you happening again? If you want I could pass you some statistics. Questions, Antonio, questions. Why what happened to you happened to you, and whose fault it was, if it was yours or not. If this would have happened to you in another country. If this would have happened to you in another time. If these questions have any pertinence. It’s important to distinguish the pertinent questions from the ones that are not, Antonio, and one way to do that is to put them down in writing. When you’ve decided which ones are pertinent and which are silly attempts to find an explanation for what can’t be explained, ask yourself other questions: how to get better, how to forget without kidding yourself, how to go back to having a life, to be good to the people who love you. What to do to not be afraid, or to have a reasonable amount of fear, like everyone has. What to do to carry on, Antonio. Lots of them will be things that have occurred to you before, sure, but a person sees the questions on paper and it’s quite different. A diary. Keep one for the next two weeks and then we’ll talk.’

It seemed an inane recommendation to me, more suited to a self-help book than to a professional with grey hair at his temples, headed notepaper on his desk and diplomas in several languages on his wall. I didn’t say so to him, of course, nor was it necessary, because I soon saw him stand up and walk over to his bookshelves (the books leather-bound and homogeneous, the family photos, a childish drawing framed and signed illegibly). ‘You’re not going to do any such thing, I can see that,’ he said as he opened a drawer. ‘You think all these things I’m saying are stupid. Well, I suppose they might be. But do me a favour, take this.’ He pulled a spiral notebook out of the drawer, like the ones I’d used in college, with those ridiculous covers that looked like denim; he tore four, five or six pages out of the front and looked at the last page, to make sure there weren’t any notes there; he handed it to me, or rather he put it on the desk, in front of me. I picked it up and, for something to do, opened it and flipped through it as if it were a novel. The paper in the notebook was squared: I always hated grid-ruled notebooks. On the first page I could make out the pressure of the writing from the torn-out page, those phantom words. A date, an underlined word, the letter Y. ‘Thanks,’ I said, and left. That very night, in spite of my initial scepticism at the strategy, I locked the door to my room (an absurd security measure), opened the notebook and wrote:
Dear diary
. My sarcasm fell into the void. I turned the page and tried to begin: