The Sound of Things Falling (23 page)

When she was thirty weeks and the size of her belly was becoming an obstacle in her work, Elaine obtained a special permit from the volunteer coordinator and then authorization from Peace Corps headquarters in Bogotá, for which she had to send a medical report by post, hurriedly and badly written by a young doctor doing his year of rural service in La Dorada and who wanted, with no knowledge of obstetrics or any medical justification at all, to give her a genital examination. Elaine, who by that point in the appointment was half undressed, objected and even got angry, and the first thing she thought was that she’d better not say anything to Ricardo, whose reactions could be unpredictable. But later, coming home in the Nissan, looking at her husband’s profile and his hands with their long fingers and dark hairs, she felt a fit of desire. Ricardo’s right hand was resting on the gear lever; Elaine grabbed his wrist and opened her legs and his hand understood, Ricardo’s hand understood. They arrived home without a word and hurried in like thieves, and closed the curtains and bolted the back door, and Ricardo threw his clothes on the floor without caring that they’d soon be covered in ants. Elaine, meanwhile, lay down on her side on top of the sheets, facing the white curtains, the illuminated square of the curtains. The daylight was so strong that there were shadows in spite of the curtains being closed; Elaine looked at her belly as big as a half-moon, her smooth, strained skin and the violet line from top to bottom as if drawn on with a felt-tip pen, and she saw the shadows that her swollen breasts made on the sheet. She thought how her breasts had never cast shadows on anything ever before and then her breasts disappeared under Ricardo’s hand. Elaine felt her darkened nipples close at the contact of those fingers and then felt Ricardo’s mouth on her shoulder and then felt him enter her from behind. And so, connected like puzzle pieces, they made love for the last time before she gave birth.

Maya Laverde was born in the Palermo Clinic in Bogotá in July
1971
, more or less at the same time President Nixon used the words
War on Drugs
for the first time in a public speech. Elaine and Ricardo had moved into the Laverdes’ house three weeks earlier, in spite of Elaine’s protests: ‘If the clinic in La Dorada is good enough for the poorest mothers,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why it’s not going to be good enough for me.’

‘Ay, Elena Fritts,’ Ricardo said, ‘why don’t you do us a favour and stop trying to change the world all the time.’

Then events proved him right: the baby girl was born with an intestinal problem and needed immediate surgery, and everyone agreed that a rural clinic would not have had either the surgeons or the neonatal instruments necessary to guarantee the child’s survival. Maya was kept under observation for several days, stuck in an incubator that had once, long ago, had transparent walls, which were now scratched and opaque like glasses that get too much use; when it was time to feed her, Elaine would sit in a chair beside the machine and a nurse would take the little girl out and put her in Elaine’s arms. The nurse was an older woman with wide hips who seemed to take her time on purpose when she was carrying Maya. She smiled down at her so sweetly that Elaine felt jealous for the first time, and was amazed that something like that – the threatening presence of another mother, the savage reaction of the blood – was possible.

A little while after the baby was discharged, Ricardo had to make another trip. But it was still too soon to take her to La Dorada, and the idea of Elaine and their daughter staying alone filled him with terror, so Ricardo suggested they stay in Bogotá, in his parents’ house, under the care of Doña Gloria and the dark-skinned woman with the long black braid who floated like a phantom through the house cleaning and putting everything in order as she went. ‘If they ask, tell them I’m transporting flowers,’ Ricardo told her. ‘Carnations, roses, even orchids. Yes, orchids, that sounds good, orchids are exported, everyone knows that. You
gringos
love orchids to death.’ Elaine smiled. They were lying in the same narrow bed where they’d talked after making love for the first time. It was very late, one or two in the morning; Maya had woken them up crying for food, crying with her thin little nasal voice, and could only calm down once she’d clamped her tiny mouth around her mother’s erect nipple. After nursing she’d fallen asleep between the two of them, forcing them to make a space for her, to balance precariously on the edge of the little bed; and that’s how they stayed, half hanging over the edge of the bed, face to face but in the dark, so each could barely see the other’s silhouette in the shadows. They were wide awake now. The baby was sleeping: Elaine smelled her scent of sweet powders, soap and new wool. She raised a hand and stroked Ricardo’s face like a blind woman and then she started to whisper. ‘I want to go with you,’ said Elaine.

‘One day,’ said Ricardo.

‘I want to see what you do. To know it’s not dangerous. Would you tell me if it was dangerous?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Ask me something.’

‘What happens if they catch you?’

‘They’re not going to catch me.’

‘But what happens if they do?’

Ricardo’s voice changed, there was a note of falsetto in it, something projected. ‘People want a product,’ he said. ‘There are people who grow that product. Mike gives it to me, I take it in a plane, someone receives it and that’s all. We give people what people want.’ He kept quiet for a second and then added, ‘Also, it’s going to be legalized sooner or later.’

‘But it’s hard for me to imagine,’ said Elaine. ‘When you’re not here I think about you, try to imagine what you’re doing, where, and I can’t. And that’s what I don’t like.’

Maya sighed so quietly and briefly that it took them an instant to realize where it had come from. ‘She’s dreaming,’ said Elaine. She saw Ricardo bring his big face – his hard chin, his thick lips – up close to the baby’s tiny face; she saw him give her an inaudible kiss, and then another. ‘My little girl,’ she heard him say. ‘Our little girl.’ And then, with no segue whatsoever, she saw him start to talk about the trips, about a cattle ranch that stretched out from the banks of the Magdalena and on the pastures of which an airport could be built, about a Cessna
310
Skyknight that over the last little while had become Ricardo’s favourite ride. That’s how he put it: ‘My favourite ride. They don’t make that model any more, Elena Fritts, that baby’s going to be a relic before we know it.’ He also told her about the solitude he felt while he was in the air, and how different a plane loaded with cargo felt to an empty one: ‘The air gets cold, it’s noisier, you feel more alone. Even if someone’s there. Yeah, even if there’s someone with you.’ He told her of the enormity of the Caribbean and of the fear of getting lost, the fear of the mere idea of getting lost over such a huge thing as the sea, even someone like him, who never ever got lost. He told her of the detour he had to take to avoid Cuban airspace – ‘so they don’t shoot me down thinking I’m a
gringo
,’ he said – and how familiar, how curiously familiar, everything seemed to him from there on, as if he were coming home instead of about to land in Nassau. ‘In Nassau?’ said Elaine. ‘In the Bahamas?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ricardo, ‘the only Nassau there is,’ and went on to say that there, in the airport, before the air-traffic controllers who saw without seeing (their vision and memories conveniently modified by a few thousand dollars), an olive-coloured Chevrolet pick-up truck and a big strong
gringo
, who looked just like Joe Frazier, were waiting to take him to a hotel where the only luxury was the lack of questions. The arrival always fell on a Friday. After spending two nights there – the function of those two nights was not to arouse suspicion, to turn Ricardo into just another millionaire who comes to spend a weekend with friends or lovers – after two nights of living shut up in a charmless hotel, drinking rum and eating fish and rice, Ricardo returned to the airport, admired the controllers’ blindness again, requested permission to take off for Miami like any other millionaire returning home with his mistress, and in minutes he was in the air, but not in the direction of Miami, but rather skirting around the coast and going in over the beaches of Beaufort and flying over a pattern of disperse rivers like the veins on an anatomy diagram. Then it was a matter of exchanging the cargo for dollars and taking off again and heading south, towards the Caribbean coast of Colombia, towards Barranquilla and the grey waters of Bocas de Ceniza and the brown serpent that moves through a green background, towards a town in the interior, that town placed there, between two mountain ranges, placed in the wide valley like a die that a player has dropped, that town with its unbearable climate where the hot air burns your nostrils, where the bugs are capable of biting through a mosquito net, and where Ricardo arrives with his heart in his hands, because in that town the two people he loves most in the world are waiting for him.

‘But those two people are not in that town,’ said Elaine. ‘They’re here, in Bogotá.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘Frankly, they’re freezing to death. They’re in a house that isn’t theirs.’

‘Not for much longer.’

Four days later he came to pick them up. He parked the Nissan in front of the iron gate and the little brick wall, jumped out quickly as if he were blocking traffic and opened the passenger door for Elaine. She, who was carrying Maya wrapped in white shawls and with her face covered so she wouldn’t get chilled from the wind, walked right past him. ‘No, not in the front seat,’ she said. ‘We girls are sitting in the back.’ And so, sitting on one of the fold-down seats, with the baby in her arms and her feet resting on the other seat, looking at Ricardo from behind (the hairs on the back of his neck, below the line of his well-cut hair, were like triangular table legs), she travelled from Bogotá to La Dorada. They only stopped once, halfway there, at a roadside restaurant where three empty tables looked at them from a terrace of polished cement. Elaine went into the bathroom and found an open oval hole in the floor and two footprints to indicate where she should place her feet; she crouched down and peed, holding up her skirt in both hands and smelling her own urine; and there she realized, with a bit of a start, that it was the first time since the birth that she hadn’t had any other women around. She was alone in a world of men, she and Maya were on their own, and she’d never thought that before, she’d been in Colombia for more than two years and she’d never had such a thought before.

When they were coming down into the Magdalena Valley and the heat burst in on them, Ricardo opened both windows and conversation was no longer possible, so they covered the last stretch to La Dorada in silence. The plains appeared on both sides, the hills like sleeping hippopotami, the grazing cows, the vultures tracing circles in the air and smelling something that Elaine neither smelled nor saw. She felt a drop of sweat, then another, slip down her side and disappear into her still-thick waist; Maya had started to sweat too, so she took off the blankets and stroked her chubby little thighs with one finger, the folds of her pale skin, and stared for a moment at those grey eyes that weren’t looking at her, or rather looked at everything with the same alarmed disregard. When she looked up again she saw a landscape she didn’t recognize. Had they passed the entrance to the town without her noticing? Did Ricardo have something to do before going home? She called to him from the back, ‘Where are we? What’s going on?’ But he didn’t answer, or he hadn’t been able to hear her questions over the noise. They had turned off the main road and were now driving through some meadows, following a track made by the passing of cars, going under trees that didn’t let the light through, driving along the edge of a property marked by fences: wooden stakes – some leaning so far over they were almost touching the ground – barbed wire that, when it was taut, served as a perch for colourful birds. ‘Where are we going?’ said Elaine. ‘The baby’s hot, I need to give her a bath.’ Then the Nissan stopped and, in the absence of a breeze, the inside of the jeep immediately felt a jolt of the tropics. ‘Ricardo?’ she said. He got out without looking at her, walked around to the other side of the jeep, opened the door. ‘Come on out,’ he said.

‘What for? Where are we, Ricardo? I have to get home, I’m thirsty, and so is the baby.’

‘Come out for a second.’

‘And I have to pee.’

‘We won’t be long,’ he said. ‘Come on out, please.’

She obeyed. Ricardo reached out a hand, but then realized Elaine had her hands full. Then he put a hand on her back (Elaine felt the sweat that was already soaking through her shirt) and led her to the edge of the track, where the fence turned into a wooden frame, a square made of thin tree trunks that served as a gate. With great difficulty Ricardo lifted the structure to make it swing open. ‘Come in,’ he said to Elaine.

‘In where?’ she asked. ‘Into this pasture?’

‘It’s not a pasture, it’s a house. It’s our house. It’s just that we haven’t built it yet.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There are
6
hectares, with access to the river. I’ve already paid half and I’ll pay the other half in six months. We’ll start building as soon as you know.’

‘As soon as I know what?’

‘How you want your house to be?’

Elaine tried to look as far into the distance as she could and realized only the grey shadow of the mountain range blocked the view. The land, their land, was gently sloped, and there, behind the trees, a hill began to roll gently down towards the wide valley, towards the bank of the Magdalena. ‘It can’t be,’ she said. She felt the heat on her forehead and cheeks and knew she was blushing. She looked up at the cloudless sky. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath; she felt, or thought she felt, a breeze on her face. She leaned over to Ricardo and kissed him. Briefly, because Maya had started to cry.