The Sound of Things Falling (2 page)

So all the billiard players lamented the crime with a resignation that was by then a sort of national idiosyncrasy, the legacy of our times, and then we went back to our respective games. All, I mean, except for one whose attention remained riveted to the screen, where the images had moved on to the next news item and were now showing a scene of neglect: a bullring full of weeds as high as the flagpoles (or as high as the place where flags once flew), a roof over several vintage cars that were rusting away, a gigantic tyrannosaurus whose body was falling apart revealing a complicated metal structure, sad and naked like an old mannequin. It was the Hacienda Nápoles, Pablo Escobar’s mythical territory, which had once been the headquarters of his empire, now left to its fate since the capo’s death in
1993
. The news item was about this neglect: the properties confiscated from the drug traffickers, the millions of dollars wasted by the authorities who didn’t know how to make use of these properties, all the many things that could have been done and hadn’t been done with those fairy-tale assets. And that was when one of the players at the table nearest the television, who up to that moment had not drawn attention to himself in any way, spoke as if talking to himself, but he did so out loud and spontaneously, like someone who, long used to solitude, had forgotten the very possibility of being heard.

‘Well, let’s see what they do with the animals,’ he said. ‘Poor things are starving to death and nobody cares.’

Someone asked him what animals he was talking about. The man just said: ‘It’s not their fault, anyway.’

Those were the first words I heard Ricardo Laverde say. He didn’t say anything else: he didn’t clarify which animals he was talking about, or say how he knew they were starving to death. But no one asked again, because we were all old enough to remember the Hacienda Nápoles in its better days. The zoo was a legendary place, a millionaire drug baron’s eccentricity, that promised visitors a spectacle that didn’t belong to these latitudes. I’d gone when I was twelve, during the Christmas holidays; I had gone there, of course, behind my parents’ back: the very idea of their son setting foot on the property of a recognized Mafioso would have been scandalous to them, let alone the thought of him enjoying himself there. But I couldn’t resist going to see what everyone was talking about. I accepted the invitation from the parents of a friend; one weekend we got up very early to make the six-hour drive from Bogotá to Puerto Triunfo; and once inside the ranch, after passing under the big stone gate (with the name of the property in thick blue letters), we spent the afternoon among Bengal tigers and Amazonian macaws, pygmy horses and butterflies the size of a hand and even a pair of Indian rhinoceroses which, according to a boy with a Medellín accent and camouflage flak jacket, had just recently arrived. And then there were the hippos, of course, none of which had escaped yet in those glory days. So I knew very well what animals the man was talking about; I didn’t know, however, that those few words would spring to mind almost fourteen years later. But all this I’ve thought since, obviously: that day, at the billiard club, Ricardo Laverde was just one more of so many in my country who’d followed the rise and fall of one of the most notorious Colombians of all time with astonishment, and I didn’t pay him too much attention.

What I do remember about that day is that he didn’t strike me as intimidating: he was so thin that he seemed taller than he actually was, and you had to see him standing beside a cue to see that he was barely five foot seven; his thin mousy hair and his dried-out skin and his long, dirty nails gave an impression of illness or laziness, like land gone to waste. He’d just turned forty-eight, but he looked much older. Speaking seemed to be an effort for him, as if he couldn’t get enough air; his hand was so unsteady that the blue tip of his cue always trembled in front of the ball, and it was almost miraculous that he didn’t scratch more often. Everything about him seemed tired. One afternoon, after Laverde had gone, one of the guys he’d been playing with (a man around the same age but who moved better, who breathed better, who is undoubtedly still alive today and perhaps even reading this memoir) told me the reason without my having asked. ‘It’s prison,’ he told me, revealing as he spoke the brief sparkle of a gold tooth. ‘Jail tires a person out.’

‘He was in prison?’

‘Just got out. He was in there for something like twenty years, so they say.’

‘And what’d he do?’

‘Oh, that I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘But he must have done something, no? Nobody gets that many years for nothing.’

I believed him, of course, because nothing allowed me to think there was an alternative truth, because there was no reason at that moment to question that first innocent and ingenuous version that someone gave me of Ricardo Laverde’s life. I thought how I’d never known an ex-convict before – the expression
ex-convict
, anyone would notice, is the best proof of that – and my interest in getting to know Laverde grew, or my curiosity grew. A heavy sentence always impresses a young man like I was back then. I calculated that I was barely walking when Laverde went to prison, and no one can be invulnerable to the idea of having grown up and gone to school and discovered sex and maybe death (that of a pet and then a grandfather, for example), and having had lovers and suffered painful break-ups and come to know the power of deciding, the satisfaction or regret resulting from decisions, the power to hurt and the satisfaction or guilt in doing so, and all this while a man lives the life without discoveries or apprenticeships that invariably results from a sentence of such length. A life unlived, a life that runs through one’s fingers, a life one suffers through while knowing that it belongs to someone else: to those who don’t have to suffer.

And almost without my noticing we began to approach each other. At first it happened by chance: I applauded one of his cannons, for example – the man had a knack for shots off the cushion – and then I invited him to play at my table or asked for permission to play on his. He accepted reluctantly, as an initiate receives a novice, in spite of the fact that I was a better player than him and that by teaming up with me Laverde could, at last, stop losing. But then I discovered that losing didn’t matter much to him: the money he put down on the emerald-coloured felt at the end of a game, those two or three dark and wrinkled notes, was part of his daily expenditure, a debit already accepted in his budget. Billiards was not a pastime for him, or even a competition, but rather the only way Laverde had at that moment of being in society: the sound of the balls hitting each other, of the wooden counters on the scoreboard, of the blue chalk rubbing against the old leather cue tips, all this made up his public life. Outside those corridors, without a billiard cue in his hand, Laverde was unable to have a normal conversation, let alone a relationship. ‘Sometimes I think,’ he told me the only time we talked somewhat seriously, ‘I’ve never looked anyone in the eye.’ It was an exaggeration, but I’m not sure the man was exaggerating on purpose. After all, he wasn’t looking me in the eye when he said those words.

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn’t have then, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn’t hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we’re terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn’t actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.) The year was coming to an end; it was exam time and classes were finished; the routine of billiards had settled into my days, and somehow given them shape and purpose. ‘Ah,’ Ricardo Laverde said each time he saw me arrive, ‘you almost missed me, Yammara. I was just about to leave.’ Something in our encounters was changing: I knew it the afternoon Laverde didn’t say goodbye the way he always did, from the other side of the table, bringing his hand up to his forehead like a soldier and leaving me with my cue in my hand, but waited for me, watched me pay for both our drinks – four coffees with brandy and a Coca-Cola at the end – and walked out of the place beside me. He walked with me as far as the Plazoleta del Rosario, through exhaust fumes and the smell of fried
arepas
and open sewers; then, where a ramp descends into the dark mouth of an underground car park, he gave me a pat on the back, a fragile little pat from his fragile hand, closer to a caress than a farewell, and said, ‘OK, see you tomorrow. I’ve got an errand to run.’

I saw him dodge the huddles of emerald sellers and head down a pedestrian alley that leads into
7
th Avenue, then turn the corner, and then I couldn’t see him any more. The streets were starting to be adorned with Christmas lights: Nordic wreaths and candy canes, English words, silhouettes of snowflakes in this city where it’s never snowed and where December, in particular, is the sunniest time of year. But in the daytime unlit lights do not adorn: they obstruct, sully and contaminate the view. The wires, suspended over our heads, crisscrossing the road from one side to the other, were like hanging bridges and in Bolívar Plaza they climbed the posts, the Ionic columns of the Capitol and the walls of the cathedral like ivy. The pigeons did have more wires to rest on, it’s true, and the corn vendors couldn’t keep up with the tourists who wanted to feed them, and the street photographers couldn’t keep up with demand for their services either: old men in ponchos and felt hats who seized their clients as if they were driving cattle and then, at the moment of the photo, ducked under a black cloth, not because the machine demanded it, but because their clients expected it. These photographers were also throwbacks to other times, before everybody could take their own portraits and the idea of buying a photo in the street that someone else had taken (often without them noticing) wasn’t completely absurd. Every Bogotá resident of a certain age has a street photo, most of them taken on
7
th Avenue, formerly calle Real del Comercio, or Royal Commerce Street, queen of all Bogotá streets; my generation grew up looking at those photos in family albums, those men in three-piece suits, those women with gloves and umbrellas, people from another time when Bogotá was colder and rainier and tamer, but no easier. I have among my papers the photo my grandfather bought in the
1950
s and the one my father bought fifteen or so years later. I don’t have, however, the one Ricardo Laverde bought that afternoon, although the image remains so clearly in my memory that I could draw every line of it if I had any talent for drawing. But I don’t. That’s one of the talents I don’t have.

So that was the errand Laverde had to run. After leaving me he walked to Bolívar Plaza and had one of those deliberately anachronistic portraits taken, and the next day he arrived at the billiard club with the result in his hand: a sepia-toned piece of paper, signed by the photographer, on which appeared a less sad or taciturn man than usual, a man of whom it might be said, if the evidence of the past few months didn’t convert the appraisal into an impudence, that he was content. The black plastic cover was still on the table, and Laverde put the image on top of it, his own image, and stared at it in fascination: his hair was combed, not a wrinkle in his suit, his right hand extended and two doves pecking at his palm; behind him you could almost make out the gaze of a couple of passers-by, both in sandals with rucksacks, and in the background, beside a corn cart enlarged by the perspective, the Palace of Justice.

‘It’s really good,’ I told him. ‘Was it taken yesterday?’

‘Yeah, just yesterday,’ he said. And then, out of the blue, he told me: ‘The thing is, my wife’s coming.’

He didn’t say
the photo is a gift
. He didn’t explain why such a strange gift would interest his wife. He didn’t refer to his years in prison, although it was obvious to me that this is what loomed over the whole situation, like a vulture over a dead dog. Anyway, Ricardo Laverde acted as if nobody in the billiard club knew anything about his past; I felt at that moment that this fiction preserved a delicate balance between us, and I preferred to keep it that way.

‘What do you mean coming?’ I asked. ‘Coming from where?’

‘She’s from the United States, her family lives there. My wife is, well, we could say coming to visit.’ And then, ‘Is the picture OK? Do you think it’s good?’

‘I think it’s really good,’ I told him with a bit of involuntary condescension. ‘You look very elegant, Ricardo.’

‘Very elegant,’ he said.

‘So you’re married to a
gringa
,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Imagine that.’

‘And she’s coming for Christmas?’

‘Hope so,’ said Laverde. ‘I hope so.’

‘Why do you hope so? It’s not for sure?’

‘Well, I have to convince her first. It’s a long story. Don’t ask me to explain.’

Laverde took the black cover off the table, not all at once, like other players do, but folding it in sections, meticulously, almost fondly, the way they fold a flag at a state funeral. We began to play. During one of his breaks he bent down over the table, stood up again, looked for the best angle, but then, after all the ceremony, shot at the wrong ball. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He went over to the board, asked how many cannons he’d made, marked them using the tip of his cue (and accidentally touched the white wall, leaving an oblong blue smudge among other blue smudges accumulated over the years). ‘Sorry,’ he said again. His head was suddenly elsewhere: his movements, his gaze fixed on the ivory balls that slowly took up their new positions on the cloth, were those of someone who’d already left, a ghost of sorts. I began to consider the possibility that Laverde and his wife were divorced, and then, like an epiphany, another harsher and therefore more interesting possibility occurred to me: his wife didn’t know that Laverde was out of prison. In a brief second, between cannon and cannon, I imagined a man coming out of a Bogotá prison – the scene in my imagination took place at Distrital, the last prison I’d seen as a student of Criminology – who keeps his release secret in order to surprise someone, like Hawthorne’s Wakefield in reverse, interested in seeing on the face of his only relative that expression of surprised love we’ve all wanted to see, or have even provoked with elaborate ruses, at some time in our lives.