Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve never left?’

‘Never,’ I said. ‘Not even during the worst years.’

‘Me neither. I was there for all of it.’

‘Who did you live with?’

‘With my mother, of course,’ said Maya. ‘A strange life, now that I think of it, the two of us alone. Then each of us chose her own path, you know how those things go.’

In 1992 she set up the first rustic hives at Las Acacias, a curious decision at the very least in a person who, according to her own confession, didn’t know any more about apiculture at that moment than I do now. But those hives barely lasted a few months: Maya couldn’t stand having to destroy the combs and kill the bees every time she collected the honey and wax, and in secret she imagined the surviving bees were escaping with a message to the whole region and one day, when she was taking her siesta in the hammock by the pool, a cloud of vengeful stingers would fall upon her. She exchanged the four rustic hives for three with removable honeycombs and never had to kill another bee.

‘But that was seven years ago,’ I said. ‘You haven’t been back to Bogotá in all those years?’

‘Well, yes. To see the lawyers. To look for that woman, Consuelo Sandoval. But I’ve never stayed overnight in Bogotá, or even till sundown. I can’t stand it, I can’t endure more than a few hours there.’

‘And that’s why you prefer the rest of us to come and see you.’

‘No one comes to see me. But yes, that’s it. That’s why I preferred you to come here.’

‘I understand.’

Maya looked up.

‘Yes, I think you do understand,’ she said. ‘People our age usually do. We have an abnormal relationship to Bogotá. Being there through the ’80s will do that to you.’

The last syllables of her sentence were drowned out by a strident buzzing. We were a few steps from the apiary. The terrain was slightly sloping, and through the veil it wasn’t easy to see where I was placing my feet, but even so I was able to witness the best spectacle in the world: a person doing their job well. Maya Fritts took me by the arm so we would approach the hives from the side, not the front, and signalled for me to give her the bottle that I’d been carrying the whole time. She lifted it up as high as her face and squeezed the bellows once, to check the mechanism, and a ghost of white smoke came out of the spout and dissolved in the air. Maya stuck the spout into an opening in the first hive and squeezed the golden bellows again, once, twice, three times, filling the hive with smoke, and then took the lid off to spray the whole interior at once. I stepped back and brought my arm up to my face out of pure instinct; but where I’d thought I’d find a swarm of hysterical bees coming out to sting anything in their path, I saw the exact opposite: the bees were quiet and calm, and their bodies were overlapping. The buzzing died down then: it was almost possible to see the wings stopping, the black and yellow rings ceasing to vibrate as if their batteries had run out.

‘What did you spray on them?’ I asked. ‘What’s in that bottle?’

‘Dry wood and cow dung,’ said Maya.

‘And the smoke puts them to sleep? What does it do to them?’

She didn’t answer. With both hands she lifted the first frame and gave it a brisk shake, and the drugged or sleeping or stunned bees fell back into the hive. ‘Pass me the brush,’ said Maya Fritts, and she used it to delicately sweep off the few stubborn ones who stayed stuck to the honey. Some bees climbed up her fingers, wandered through the soft bristles of the brush, a bit curious or perhaps drunk, and Maya pushed them off her with a smooth gesture, the stroke of a paintbrush. ‘No, sweetie,’ she said to one, ‘you’re staying home.’ Or, to another, ‘Down you get, we’re not playing today.’ The same procedure — the extraction of the combs, sweeping off the bees, the affectionate chitchat — was repeated at the rest of the hives, and Maya Fritts watched everything with her eyes wide open and was probably making mental notes of things that I, in my ignorance, was incapable of seeing. She turned over the wooden frames, looked at them straight on and from the back, a couple of times she used the smoke from the bottle again, as if she feared some unruly bee would wake up at the wrong moment, and I took the opportunity to take off one glove and stick my hand in the cloud, just to find out a little more about that cold smelly smoke. The smell, more wood than manure, stayed on my skin until well into the night. And it would remain forever associated with my long conversation with Maya Fritts.

After checking all the hives, after returning smokers and brushes and little crowbars to their places in the shed, Maya took me back to the house and surprised me with a suckling pig that her staff had been cooking all morning for us. Having acclimatized to the midday heat unawares, the first thing I felt on entering was instant relief, and as I received that sudden hit of shade and cool air I finally realized how much I’d been suffering inside the overall, gloves and mask. My back was drenched with sweat and my shirt stuck to my chest, and my body was screaming for any sort of comfort. Two fans, one over the living room and the other over the dining table, were spinning furiously. Before we sat down to eat, Maya Fritts got a box from somewhere and brought it into the dining-room. It was made of woven wicker, the size of a small suitcase, with a stiff lid and reinforced bottom, and on each end was a handle or a woven grip to make it easier to pick up and carry. Maya put it at the head of the table, like a guest, and sat opposite it. Then, while she served the salad from a wooden bowl, she asked me what I had come to know about Ricardo Laverde, if I had got to know him well.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It was just a few months.’

‘Do you mind remembering those things? Because of your accident, I mean?’

‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘But, like I said, I don’t know much. I know he loved your mother very much. I know about the flight from Miami. But I didn’t know about you.’

‘Nothing? He never talked about me?’

‘Never. Only about your mother. Elena, wasn’t it?’

‘Elaine. Her name was Elaine, the Colombians changed it to Elena and she let them. Or she got used to it.’

‘But Elena doesn’t mean Elaine.’

‘If you only knew,’ she said, ‘how many times I’d heard her explain that.’

‘Elaine Fritts,’ I said. ‘She should be a stranger to me, but she isn’t. It’s odd. Do you know about the black box?’

‘The cassette?’

‘Yes. I had no way of knowing I’d be here today, Maya. I would have tried to keep that tape. I don’t think it would have been so difficult.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Maya. ‘I’ve got it.’

‘What?’

‘Of course, what did you expect? It’s the plane my mother died on, Antonio. It took me a little longer than you. To find the tape, I mean, Ricardo’s house and the tape. You had an advantage, you were with him at the end, but anyway, I looked and finally got there. It’s not my fault either.’

‘And Consu gave you the tape.’

‘Yes, she gave it to me. And I’ve got it. The first time I heard it I was devastated. I had to let whole days go by before listening to it again, and in spite of that I think I’ve been very brave, most other people would have put it away and never listened to it again. But I did, I listened to it again and since then I haven’t stopped. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it now, twenty or thirty. At first I thought I played it again to find something in it. Then I realized that I keep playing it precisely because I know I’m not going to find anything. Dad just heard it the once, right?’