Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

It wasn’t the last time I heard that diagnosis. One night Aura came home late from a get-together with her girlfriends that in my city is called by its English name, a baby shower, in which gifts rain down on the future mother. She slipped in quietly, undoubtedly hoping not to wake me, but I was still up and writing notes on Von Ihering’s ideas, which had thrown me into crisis. ‘Why don’t you try to sleep,’ she said, but it wasn’t a question. ‘I’m working,’ I told her, ‘I’ll go to bed as soon as I finish.’ I remember her then taking off her thin overcoat (no, it wasn’t an overcoat, more like a trench coat), putting it over the back of the wicker chair, leaning on the doorframe with a hand resting on her enormous belly and running the other one through her hair, all a sort of elaborate prelude people enact when they don’t want to say what they’re going to say, when they hope some miracle is going to free them of that obligation. ‘They’re talking about us,’ said Aura.

‘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.