Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

An Uncomfortable Foreboding

Suddenly he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe it was the noise the people made, their enthusiastic greetings, their shouted conversations, or maybe the mixture of smells coming off their clothes and their breath. Whatever the case, Julio suddenly felt as if he were stuck on a merry-go-round that was spinning too fast.

‘I feel woozy,’ he said to Captain Laverde.

But Laverde didn’t pay any attention to him. Or rather, he did pay attention, but not to worry about how he was feeling but to introduce him to a man who was now approaching. He was tall, had a Rudolph Valentino-style moustache and was wearing a military uniform.

‘General De León, this is my son,’ said the captain. And then he spoke to Julio. ‘The general is the General Prefect of Security.’

‘General Prefect General,’ said the general. ‘I wish they’d change the name of the rank. Captain Laverde, the president has sent me to see you to your place. It’s so easy to get lost in this throng.’

That was Laverde: a captain who generals came to look for on behalf of the president. And that’s how the captain and his son found themselves walking towards the presidential grandstand a couple of steps behind General De León, trying to follow him, not to lose sight of him and to pay attention to the extraordinary world of the celebrations at the same time. It had rained the previous night and there were still puddles here and there, and if there wasn’t a puddle there were patches of mud where the heels of the women’s shoes were getting stuck. This happened to a young lady with a pink scarf: she lost a shoe, a cream-coloured one, and Julio bent down to retrieve it while she stood smiling, paralysed like a flamingo. Julio recognized her. He was sure he’d seen her in the society pages: she was a foreigner, he thought, the daughter of a businessman or an industrialist. He tried to find the name in his memory, but he didn’t have time, because Captain Laverde was now grabbing him by the arm and making him climb the creaking wooden steps that led up to the presidential grandstand, and over his shoulder Julio managed to see how the pink scarf and cream-coloured shoes were starting to climb another set of steps, those up to the diplomatic grandstand. They were two identical structures and they were separated by a strip of land as wide as an avenue, like two-tiered cabins constructed on thick piles, placed side by side but both facing the empty ground above which the planes would pass. Identical, yes, except for one detail: in the middle of the presidential grandstand stood an 18-metre-tall pole from which waved the Colombian flag. Years later, talking about what happened that day, Julio would say that the flag, placed in that precise space, had made him wary from the start. But it’s easy to say such things after it’s all over.

The Show Begins

The atmosphere was festive. The air smelled of fried food. People carried drinks in their hands that they were finishing before going up. Every plank of the two sets of steps was filled with people who hadn’t fitted into the grandstands, and so was the strip of ground in between the two sets of steps. Julio felt queasy and he said so, but Captain Laverde didn’t hear him. Walking between the guests was difficult: he had to greet his acquaintances at the same time as spurning social climbers, to be very careful not to snub somebody who was due a greeting while being equally careful not to honour someone who wasn’t. Making their way through the people, without getting separated for a moment, the captain and his son reached the railing. From there Julio saw two men with receding hairlines speaking with a circumspect air a few metres from the flagpole, and those he did recognize immediately: it was President López, wearing a light-coloured suit, dark tie and round-framed glasses, and President-elect Santos, wearing a dark suit, light waistcoat and round-framed glasses as well. The man on his way out and the man on his way in: the country’s destiny settled on two square metres of carpentry. A small crowd of distinguished people — the Lozanos, the Turbays, the Pastranas — divided the presidents’ box from the back part of the grandstand, the upper level, where the Laverdes were. From the distance, the captain saluted López, López returned the greeting with a smile that didn’t show his teeth, and the two of them made mute signals to each other about meeting later because the thing was starting now. Santos turned to see to whom López was gesturing; recognized Laverde, nodded slightly, and at that moment the triple-engine Junkers appeared in the sky and dragged everyone’s gaze in their slipstream.

Julio was absorbed. He had never seen such complex manoeuvres up so close. The Junkers were heavy, and their streaky bodies made them look like big prehistoric fish, but they moved with dignity. Each time they passed, the air they displaced arrived at the stand in waves, ruining the hairdos of the women not wearing hats. The cloudy Bogotá sky, that dirty sheet that seemed to have covered the city since its foundation, was the perfect screen for the projection of this film. Against a background of clouds the triple-engine planes flew past and now the six Falcons, as if from one side to the other of a giant theatre. The formation was perfectly symmetrical. Julio forgot the bitter taste in his mouth for a moment and his dizziness disappeared. His attention wandered over to the hills east of the city, their misty silhouette that extended back, long and dark like a sleeping lizard. It was raining over the hills: the rain, he thought, would soon be here. The Falcons flew past again and again he felt the tremor in the air. The thunder of the engines didn’t manage to drown out the shouts of admiration from the stands. The translucent discs of the spinning propellers threw off brief sparkles of light when the plane banked to turn. Then the fighter planes appeared. They came out of nowhere, immediately assuming a V-formation, and it was suddenly difficult to remember that they weren’t living creatures, that there was someone in command. ‘There’s Abadía,’ said a woman’s voice. Julio turned to see who had spoken, but then the same words were being repeated from another side of the stand: the star pilot’s name moved among the people like a nasty rumour. President López raised a martial arm and pointed at the sky.

‘Here we go,’ said Captain Laverde. ‘Here comes the real thing.’

Beside Julio there was a couple in their fifties, a man in a polka-dot bow tie and his wife, whose mousy face didn’t hide the fact that she’d once been beautiful. Julio heard the man say that he was going to go and get the car. And he also heard the wife. ‘But don’t be silly. Stay here and we’ll go afterwards. You’re going to miss the best part.’

The Audacity of the Pilot

At that moment, the squadron flew past at a low altitude in front of the stand and then in a straight line to the south. Applause broke out, and Julio clapped too. Captain Laverde had forgotten him: his eyes were fixed on what was happening in the sky, the dangerous designs that were taking place up there, and then Julio understood that his father had never seen anything like this before either. ‘I didn’t know the things you could do in a plane,’ he would say much later, when the episode was relived in social get-togethers, or family dinners. ‘It was as though Abadía had suspended the laws of gravity.’ Returning from the south, Captain Abadía’s Hawk fighter left the formation, or rather the rest of the Hawks peeled away from his. Julio didn’t know when Abadía had been left alone, or where the other eight pilots had gone, having disappeared all of a sudden as if the cloud had swallowed them. Then the solitary aircraft flew past in front of the stand doing a roll that drew shouts and applause. Heads followed it and saw it twist and turn over and return, this time flying lower and faster, tracing another roll with the mountains as background, then disappear once again into the northern skies, then reappear in them, as if looming out of nowhere, and heading towards the grandstands.