The Sound of Things Falling: A Novel

177 Pages·2013·1.05 MB·English

by  Juan Gabriel Vásquez

For Mariana, inventor of spaces and time
And the walls of my dream were collapsing to the ground, just as a city
collapses in screams.
Aurelio Arturo, City Dream

So you fell out of the sky too!
What planet are you from?
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Contents

1 One Single Long Shadow
2 Never One of My Dead
3 The Gaze of Absent Ones
4 We’re All Fugitives
5 What’s There to Live For?
6 Up, Up, Up

Author’s Note
A Note on the Author
A Note on the Translator
By the same author
1
One Single Long Shadow

The first hippopotamus, a male the colour of black pearls weighing a ton and a
half, was shot dead in the middle of 2009. He’d escaped two years before from
Pablo Escobar’s old zoo in the Magdalena Valley, and during that time of
freedom had destroyed crops, invaded drinking troughs, terrified fishermen and
even attacked the breeding bulls at a cattle ranch. The marksmen who caught up
with him shot him once in the head and again in the heart (with .375-calibre
bullets, since hippopotamus skin is thick); they posed with the dead body, the
great dark wrinkled mass, a recently fallen meteorite; and there, in front of the
first cameras and onlookers, beneath a ceiba tree that protected them from the
harsh sun, they explained that the weight of the animal would prevent them from
transporting him whole, and immediately began carving him up. I was in my
apartment in Bogotá, 250 or so kilometres south, when I saw the image for the
first time, printed across half a page of a national news-magazine. That’s how I
learned that the entrails had been buried where the animal had fallen, and the
head and legs had ended up in a biology laboratory in my city. I also learned that
the hippopotamus had not escaped alone: at the time of his flight he’d been
accompanied by his mate and their baby – or what, in the sentimental version of
the less scrupulous newspapers, were his mate and their baby – whose
whereabouts were now unknown and the search for whom immediately took on
a flavour of media tragedy, the persecution of innocent creatures by a heartless
system. And on one of those days, while following the hunt in the papers, I
found myself remembering a man who’d been out of my thoughts for a long
while, in spite of the fact that there had been a time when nothing interested me
as much as the mystery of his life.
During the weeks that followed, the memory of Ricardo Laverde went from
being a minor coincidence, one of those dirty tricks our minds play on us, to
becoming a faithful and devoted, ever-present ghost, standing by my bed while I
slept, watching from afar in the daylight hours. On the morning radio
programmes and the evening news, in the opinion columns that everybody read
and on the blogs that nobody read, everyone was asking if it was necessary to
kill the lost hippos, if they couldn’t round them up, anaesthetize them and send
them back to Africa; in my apartment, far from the debate but following it with a
mixture of fascination and repugnance, I was thinking more and more intensely
about Ricardo Laverde, about the days when we’d known each other, about the
brevity of our acquaintance and the longevity of its consequences. While in the
press and on the TV screens the authorities listed the diseases that could be
spread by an artiodactyl – and they used that word: artiodactyl, new to me – and
in the rich neighbourhoods of Bogotá people wore T-shirts saying Save the
Hippos, in my apartment, on long drizzly nights, or walking down the street
towards the city centre, I began to think stubbornly about the day Ricardo
Laverde died, and even to force myself to remember the precise details. I was
surprised by how little effort it took me to summon up the words I had spoken or
heard, things I’d seen, pain I’d suffered and now overcome; I was also surprised
by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of
remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our
normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for
training. Bit by bit I began to notice, not without some astonishment, that the
death of that hippopotamus put an end to an episode of my life that had begun
quite a while ago, more or less like someone coming home to close a door
carelessly left open.
And that’s how this story got under way. I don’t know what good it does us to
remember, what benefits or possible penalties it brings, or how what we’ve lived
through can change when we remember it, but remembering Ricardo Laverde
well has become an urgent matter for me. I read somewhere that a man should
tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching:
as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous
birthday arrives. The story of his life. No, I won’t tell my life story, just a few
days of it that happened a long time ago, and I’ll do so fully aware that this story,
as they warn in fairy tales, has happened before and will happen again.
That I’m the one who’s ended up telling it is almost beside the point.

The day of his death, at the beginning of 1996, Ricardo Laverde had spent the
morning walking the narrow streets of La Candelaria, in the centre of Bogotá,
between old houses with clay roof tiles and unread marble plaques with
summaries of historic events, and around one in the afternoon he showed up at
the billiard club on 14th Street, ready to play a couple of games with some of the
regulars. He didn’t seem nervous or disturbed when he started to play: he played
with the same cue and at the same table he always did, the one closest to the
back wall, under the television with the sound turned down. He played three
games, though I don’t remember how many he won and how many he lost,
because that afternoon I didn’t play with him, but at the next table. I do
remember, however, the moment Laverde settled his bets, said goodbye to the
other players and headed for the corner door. He was passing between the first
tables, which are usually empty because the strip-lighting cast strange shadows
on the ivory balls in that part of the hall, when he stumbled as if he’d tripped
over something. He turned around and came back over to where we were; waited
patiently while I finished a series of six or seven cannons that I’d started, and
even applauded a three-cushioned one briefly; and then, as he watched me mark
my score on the board, he came over and asked me if I might not know where he
could borrow a tape machine to listen to a cassette he’d just received. I’ve often
wondered since what would have happened if Ricardo Laverde had asked one of
the other billiard players rather than me. But it’s a meaningless question, like so
much of what we wonder about the past. Laverde had good reasons to choose to
ask me. Nothing can change that fact, just as nothing can change what happened
afterwards.
I had met him at the end of the previous year, a couple of weeks before
Christmas. I was about to turn twenty-six, I’d graduated from law school two
years earlier and, although I knew very little about the real world, the theoretical
world of legal studies held no secrets for me. After graduating with honours – a
thesis on madness as grounds for exemption from legal responsibility in Hamlet:
I still wonder today how I got them to accept it, let alone award it a distinction –
I had turned into the youngest lecturer ever to teach in the faculty, or that’s what
my elders had told me when proposing the idea, and I was convinced that being
professor of Introduction to Law, teaching the basics of the career to generations
of frightened children just out of high school, was the only possible horizon in
my life. There, standing in front of a wooden lectern, facing rows and rows of
baby-faced and disoriented boys and impressionable, wide-eyed girls, I received
my first lessons on the nature of power. I was barely eight years older than these
inexperienced students, but between us opened the double abyss of authority and
knowledge, things that I had and they, recently arrived in the world, entirely
lacked. They admired me, feared me a little, and I realized that one could get
used to this fear and admiration, that they were like a drug. I told my students
about the potholers who were trapped in a cave and after several days began to
eat each other to survive: can the Law defend them or not? I told them about old
Shylock, about the pound of flesh he wanted, about the astute Portia, who
managed to prevent him from taking it with a pettifogging technicality: I enjoyed
watching them gesticulate and shout and lose themselves in ridiculous arguments
in their attempts to find, in the thicket of the anecdote, the ideas of Law and
Justice. After these academic discussions I’d go to the billiard clubs on 14th
Street, low-ceilinged places filled with smoke where my other life went on, a life
without doctrines or jurisprudence. There, between small bets and coffee with
brandy, my day would draw to a close, sometimes in the company of a colleague
or two, sometimes with female students who after a few drinks might end up in
my bed. I lived near by, in a tenth-floor apartment where the air was always
chilly, where the view of the spiky city of bricks and cement was always good,
where my bed was always open to discussions of Cesare Beccaria’s concept of
crimes and punishments, or a difficult chapter of Bodenheimer, or even a simple
upgrade of a mark by the quickest route. Life, in those days that now seem to
have belonged to somebody else, was full of possibilities. The possibilities, as I
would later discover, also belonged to somebody else: they were gradually,
imperceptibly extinguished, like a tide going out, until they left me with what I
am today.
At the time my city was beginning to emerge from the most violent years of its
recent history. I’m not talking about the violence of cheap stabbings and stray
bullets, the settling of accounts between low-grade dealers, but the kind that
transcends the small resentments and small revenges of little people, the violence
whose actors are collectives and written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel,
the Army, the Front. We bogotanos had become accustomed to it, partially
because its images arrived with extraordinary regularity in our news reports and
papers; that day, the images of the most recent attack had begun to appear, in the
form of a breaking-news bulletin, on the television screen. First we saw the
reporter presenting the news from outside the door of the Country Clinic, then
we saw the image of the bullet-riddled Mercedes – through the shot-out window
we saw the back seat, broken glass, smears of dried blood – and finally, when all
movement had ceased at all the tables and everyone had quietened down and
someone had shouted to turn up the sound, we saw, above the dates of birth and
the still fresh one of his death, the face of the victim in black-and-white. It was
the conservative politician Álvaro Gómez, son of one of the most controversial
presidents of the century and himself candidate for the presidency more than
once. Nobody asked why he’d been killed, or who by, because such questions no
longer had any meaning in my city, or they were asked in a mechanical fashion,
as the only way to react to the latest shock. I didn’t think so at the time, but those
crimes (magnicides, they called them in the press: I learned the meaning of that
little word very early) had provided the backbone of my life or punctuated it like
the unexpected visits of a distant relative. I was fourteen years old that afternoon
in 1984 when Pablo Escobar killed or ordered the killing of his most illustrious
pursuer, the Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla (two hit men on a
motorcycle, a curve on 127th Street). I was sixteen when Escobar killed or
ordered the killing of Guillermo Cano, publisher of El Espectador (a few steps
away from the newspaper’s offices, the assassin put eight bullets in his chest). I
was nineteen and already an adult, although I hadn’t voted yet, on the day of the
death of Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate, whose assassination was
different or is different in our imaginations because it was seen on TV: the crowd
cheering Galán, then the machine-gunfire, then the body collapsing on the
wooden platform, falling soundlessly or its sound hidden by the uproar or by the
first screams. And shortly afterwards there was the Avianca plane, a Boeing 727-
21 that Escobar had blown up in mid-air – somewhere in the air between Bogotá
and Cali – to kill a politician who wasn’t even on board.
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: