The Sound of Things Falling (27 page)

She thought for a moment and said, ‘Anyway, what was an armadillo doing in an apartment in La Perseverancia? How absurd, the house smelled like shit.’

‘And did you never have any suspicions?’

‘About what?’

‘That Ricardo was alive. About him being in jail.’

‘Never, no. I’ve since discovered that I wasn’t the only one, that my story wasn’t unique. In those years they were legion those who arrived in the United States and stayed there, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Those who arrived, not with shipments like my dad, though there were those as well, but as simple passengers of a commercial plane, an Avianca or American Airlines plane. And the families who were left behind in Colombia had to tell the children something, didn’t they? So they killed the father, never better said. The guy, stuck in jail in the United States, died all of a sudden without anyone ever knowing he was there. It was the easiest thing to do, easier than struggling with the shame, the humiliation of having a mule in the family. Hundreds of cases like this one. Hundreds of fictitious orphans, I was just one. That’s the great thing about Colombia, nobody’s ever alone with their fate. Shit, is it ever hot. It’s incredible. Aren’t you hot, Antonio, being from a cool climate?’

‘A little, yes. But I can take it.’

‘Here you feel every pore open. I like the early mornings, first thing. But then it gets unbearable. No matter how used to it you get.’

‘You must be pretty used to it by now.’

‘Yes, it’s true. Maybe I just like to complain.’

‘How did you end up living here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, after all that time.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Maya. ‘That’s a long story.’

Maya had just turned eleven when a classmate told her about the Hacienda Nápoles for the first time. This was the vast property, more than 3,000 hectares, that Pablo Escobar had bought towards the end of the
1970
s on which to build his personal paradise, a paradise that was an empire at the same time: a tropical lowland Xanadu, with animals instead of sculptures and armed thugs instead of a
No Trespassing
sign. The hacienda’s land stretched over two departments; a river crossed it from one side to the other. Of course that wasn’t the information Maya’s classmate gave her, for in
1982
the name Pablo Escobar was not yet on the lips of eleven-year-old children, nor did eleven-year-old children know the characteristics of the gigantic territory or the collection of antique cars that would soon be growing in special carports or the existence of several runways designed for the business (for the taking off and landing of planes like the one Ricardo Laverde had piloted), much less had they seen
Citizen Kane
. No, eleven-year-old children didn’t know about those things. But they did know about the zoo: in a matter of months the zoo became a legend on a national scale, and it was the zoo that Maya’s classmate told her about one day in
1982
. She told her about giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, huge birds of every colour; she told her about a kangaroo that kicked a football. For Maya it was a revelation so extraordinary, and it turned into a desire so important, that she had the good sense to wait until Christmas to ask to be taken to the Hacienda Nápoles as a Christmas present.

Her mother’s reply was emphatic: ‘Don’t even dream about going to see that place.’

‘But everyone in my class has been,’ said Maya.

‘Well you’re not going,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘Don’t even think of mentioning it again.’

‘And so I went on the sly,’ Maya told me. ‘What else could I do? A friend invited me and I said yes. My mom thought I was going to spend the weekend in Villa de Leyva.’

‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘You sneaked off to the Hacienda Nápoles too? How many of us must have done the same thing?’

‘Oh, so you . . .’

‘Yeah, I did too,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go, so I made up some lie too, and went to see what was forbidden. A taboo place, Hacienda Nápoles.’

‘And when did you go there?’

I made some calculations in my head, summoning up certain memories, and the conclusion made a shiver of pleasure run up my spine. ‘I was twelve. I’m a year older than you. We went there around the same time, Maya.’

‘You went in December?’

‘Yes.’

‘December 1982?’

‘Yes.’

‘We were there at the same time,’ she said. ‘Incredible. Isn’t it incredible?’

‘Well, yeah, but I’m not sure . . .’

‘We went on the same day, Antonio,’ said Maya. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘But it might have been any day.’

‘Don’t be silly. It was before Christmas, right?’

‘Right. But . . .’

‘And after school broke up, right?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Well, it had to be a weekend, otherwise there wouldn’t have been adults to take us. People work. And how many weekends are there before Christmas? Let’s say three. And what day was it, a Saturday or a Sunday? It was a Saturday, because Bogotá people always went to the zoo on Saturdays, grown-ups don’t like to make a trip like that and then have to go to the office the next day.’

‘Well, there are still three days,’ I said, ‘three possible Saturdays. Nothing guarantees we chose the same one.’

‘I know we did.’

‘Why?’

‘I just do. Don’t bug me any more. Do you want me to keep telling you?’ But Maya didn’t wait for my answer. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so, I went to see the zoo and then I went home, and the first thing I did when I walked in was to ask my mother exactly where our house was in La Dorada. I think I recognized something along the way, the landscape, I recognized a mountain or a curve in the road, or the turn-off onto the main road to Villa Elena, because to get to the Hacienda Nápoles you pass right by that road. I must have recognized something, and when I saw my mother I wouldn’t stop asking her questions. It was the first time I’d talked about it since we left, Mom was quite shocked. And as the years went by I kept asking questions, saying I wanted to go back, asking when we could go back. The house in La Dorada turned into a sort of Promised Land for me, you see? And I began little by little to do everything necessary to go back. And it all began with that visit to the zoo at the Hacienda Nápoles. And now you tell me that maybe we saw each other there, at the zoo. Without knowing you were you and I was me, without knowing we’d meet one day.’

Something happened in that instant in her gaze, her green eyes opened slightly wider, her narrow eyebrows arched as if they’d been drawn on again, and her mouth, her mouth with blood-red lips, gestured in a way I’d not seen before. I had no way of proving it, and commenting on it would have been imprudent or stupid, but at that moment I thought:
That’s a little girl’s expression. That’s what you were like when you were little
.

And then I heard her say, ‘And have you been back since then? Because I haven’t, I’ve never been back. The place is falling to pieces, from what I’ve heard. But we could go anyway, see what’s there, see what we remember. How’s that sound?’

Soon we were driving down the highway towards Medellín at the hottest hour of the day, moving along the ribbon of asphalt just as Ricardo Laverde and Elaine Fritts had done twenty-nine years earlier, and not only that, but doing so in the same bone-coloured Nissan in which they’d driven. In a country where it’s quite common to see cars from the
1960
s in the streets – a Renault
4
, a Fiat here and there, Chevrolet trucks that might even be fifteen years older – the survival of a jeep was neither miraculous nor extraordinary, there are hundreds like this on the roads. But anyone could see that this was not just any Nissan jeep, but rather the first big present Ricardo Laverde bought for his wife with the money from the flights, the marijuana money. Twenty-nine years before, the two of them had travelled around the Magdalena Valley as we were doing now; they had kissed while sitting on this seat; right here they’d talked about having children. And now their child and I were occupying those same places and perhaps feeling the same humid heat and the same relief at accelerating and getting air to blow in the windows, so we had to raise our voices to hear each other. It was either raise our voices or die of heat with the windows rolled up, and we preferred the former. ‘This jeep still exists,’ I said in a forced tone, sounding like an actor in a theatre that was too big.

‘How about that,’ said Maya. Then she raised a hand and pointed to the sky. ‘Look, military planes.’

I heard the sound of the planes that were passing over our heads, but when I looked up I only saw a flock of turkey vultures tracing circles against the sky. ‘I try not to think of Dad when I see them,’ said Maya, ‘but I can’t help it.’ Another squadron flew over in formation and this time I saw them: the grey shadows crossing the sky, the jet engines shaking the air. ‘That was the inheritance he wanted,’ said Maya. ‘The hero’s grandson.’ The road was suddenly filled with uniformed lads armed with rifles that hung across their chests like sleeping animals. Before driving onto the bridge over the Magdalena we slowed down so much and passed so close to the soldiers that the wing mirror almost brushed the barrels of their rifles. They were boys, sweaty, scared kids whose mission, guarding the military base, seemed too big for them, just as their helmets and uniforms were, and those stiff leather boots in these cruel tropics. As we passed beside the fence that surrounded the base, a structure covered in green canvas and crowned with an elaborate labyrinth of barbed wire, I saw a green sign with white letters,
No Photography
, and another in black letters on a white background:
Human rights, the responsibility of all
. On the other side of the fence military trucks could be seen driving on a paved road; beyond them, exhibited like a relic in a museum, a Canadair Sabre balanced on a sort of pedestal. In my memory the image of this plane, which Ricardo Laverde liked so much, is forever linked to Maya’s question: ‘Where were you when they killed Lara Bonilla?’

People of my generation do these things: we ask each other what our lives were like at the moment of those events – almost all of which occurred in the
1980
s – which defined or diverted them before we knew what was happening to us. I’ve always believed that in this way, verifying that we’re not the only ones, we neutralize the consequences of having grown up in that decade, or we mitigate the feeling of vulnerability that has always accompanied us. And those conversations tend to begin with Lara Bonilla, the Minister of Justice. He had been the first public enemy of drug trafficking, and the most powerful of the legal ones; the method of the hit man on the back of a motorbike, where a teenager approaches the car in which the victim is travelling and empties a Mini Uzi into it without even slowing down, began with his murder. ‘I was in my room, doing my chemistry homework,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘I was ill,’ said Maya. ‘Appendicitis, imagine, I’d just had surgery.’

‘Do kids get that?’

‘It’s so cruel, but yes. And I remember the commotion at the clinic, the nurses rushing in and out. It was like being in a war movie. Because they’d killed Lara Bonilla and everyone knew who’d done it, but no one knew that could happen.’

‘It was something new,’ I said. ‘I remember my dad in the dining room. His head in his hands, elbows on the table. He didn’t eat anything. He didn’t say anything either. It was something new.’

‘Yes, that day we went to bed changed,’ said Maya. ‘A different country, wasn’t it? At least that’s how I remember it. Mom was scared. I looked at her and saw her fear. Of course, she knew all sorts of things that I didn’t.’ Maya was quiet for a moment. ‘And when Galán was killed?’

‘That was at night. It was a Friday in the middle of the year. I was . . . Well, I was with a friend.’

‘Oh, very nice,’ said Maya with a slanted smile. ‘You having a fine old time while the country falls to pieces. Were you in Bogotá?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was she your girlfriend?’

‘No. Well, she was going to be. Or that’s what I thought.’

‘Oops, a frustrated love,’ Maya laughed.

‘At least we spent the night together. Even though it was obligatory.’

‘The After Curfew Hour Lovers,’ said Maya. ‘Not a bad title, don’t you think?’

I liked seeing her like this, suddenly cheerful, I liked the little barely visible lines that appeared beside her eyes when she smiled. In front of us there was now a truck loaded with huge milk containers, big metal cylinders like unexploded bombs on top of which three shirtless teenagers were riding. Seeing us caused them inexplicable laughter. They waved to Maya, blew kisses at her, and she put the jeep into second gear and pulled into the other lane to overtake them. As she did so she blew a kiss back to them. It was a teasing, playful act, but there was something in the melodramatic way she closed her lips (and in the whole movie-star gesture) that filled the moment with an unexpected sensuality, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. On my side of the road, two water buffalo were bathing in a sort of marsh that opened up between the shrubs. Their wet horns glistened under the sun, their manes stuck to their faces. ‘And the day of the Avianca plane?’ I said.

‘Oh, the famous plane,’ said Maya. ‘That really fucked everything up, didn’t it.’