Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

I thought of Leticia, of her little sleeping face. I thought of Aura. I thought of a vibrator the colour of ripe mulberries.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t have to phone anybody.’

‘One less problem,’ she said.

‘But I don’t have any clothes either.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that we can fix.’

I looked at her: her bare arms, her breasts, her square chin, her small ears with narrow lobes where a spark of light flashed every time she moved her head. Maya took a sip, rested her glass on her belly, and I did the same. ‘Look, Antonio, this is the thing,’ she said then, ‘I need you to tell me about my father, about the end of his life, about the day of his death. Nobody else saw the things that you saw. If all this is a puzzle, then you have a piece that nobody else has, if you see what I mean. Can you help me?’ I didn’t answer immediately. ‘Can you help me?’ Maya insisted, but I didn’t answer. She leaned on one elbow, anyone who’s been in a hammock knows how difficult it is to lean on one elbow, you lose your balance and get tired pretty fast. I sunk into my hammock so that I was wrapped in the material that smelled of humidity and past sweat, of a history of men and women lying here after swimming in the pool or working on the property. I stopped looking at Maya Fritts. ‘And if I tell you what you want to know,’ I said, ‘are you going to do the same?’ I was suddenly thinking about my virgin diary, about that solitary and lost question mark, and some words sketched themselves out in my head: I want to know . Maya didn’t reply, but in the shadows I saw her settled down into her hammock the same way I was in mine, and that was all I needed. I started to talk, I told Maya all that I knew and thought I knew about Ricardo Laverde, all that I remembered and what I feared I’d forgotten, all that Laverde had told me and also all that I’d found out after his death, and that’s how we stayed until after midnight, each wrapped in our hammock, each scrutinizing the roof where the bats moved, filling with words the silence of the warm night, but without ever looking at each other, like a priest and sinner in the sacrament of confession.

It was starting to get light when, exhausted and half drunk and almost hoarse, I let Maya Fritts guide me to the guest room, or what she, at that moment, called the guest room. There was no bed, just two simple and rather fragile-looking camp beds (mine let out a crack when I dropped like a dead man onto the mattress, without pulling back the thin white sheet). A fan whirred furiously above my head, and I think I had a fleeting drunken bout of paranoia when I chose the bed that wasn’t directly under the blades, in case the contraption came loose as I slept and fell on top of me. But I also remember having received certain instructions, through the fog of sleepiness and rum. Not to leave the windows open without the screens, not to leave Coke cans anywhere (the house fills up with ants), not to throw paper down the toilet. ‘That’s really important, people from the city always forget,’ she said, or I think she said. ‘Going to the toilet is one of the most automatic things in the world, nobody thinks when they’re sitting there. And I’d rather not tell you about the problems later with the septic tank.’ The discussion of my bodily functions by a complete stranger didn’t make me uncomfortable. Maya Fritts was the most natural person I’d ever met, so different from most bogotanos whose puritanism meant they were quite capable of going through life pretending never to shit. I think I agreed, don’t know if I said anything. My leg was hurting more than usual, my hip hurt. I put it down to the humidity and exhaustion after so many hours on an unpredictable and dangerous highway.

I woke up disoriented. It was the midday heat that woke me up: I was sweating and the sheet was soaked, like the sheets at the San José Hospital under the sweats of my hallucinations, and when I looked at the ceiling I realized the fan had stopped spinning. The aggressive daylight filtered through the wooden blinds and formed puddles of light on the white floor tiles. Beside the closed door, on a wicker chair, there was something like a change of clothes: two short-sleeved checked shirts, a green towel. The house was silent. In the distance I could hear voices, the voices of people working, and the sounds of their tools as they worked: I didn’t know who they were, what they were doing at that hour, in that heat, and just as I was wondering, the noises stopped, and I thought: they will have gone for a siesta. I opened the blinds and the window and peered out with my nose practically pressed against the mosquito screen, and didn’t see anybody: I saw the luminous rectangle of the pool, saw the solitary slide, I saw a ceiba tree like the ones I’d seen along the highway, specially designed to give shade to the poor creatures who inhabited this world of harsh sunshine. Beneath the ceiba was the German shepherd I’d seen on my way in. Behind the ceiba stretched the plain, and behind the plain somewhere flowed the Magdalena River, the sound of which I could easily imagine or conjecture, because I’d heard it as a child, though at other parts of its course, far from Las Acacias. Maya Fritts was not around, so I took a cold shower (I had to kill a considerable-sized spider who held out for quite a while in a corner) and I put on the bigger of the two shirts. It was a man’s shirt; I allowed myself to pretend it had belonged to Ricardo Laverde, imagined him with the shirt on; in the image I conjured up, for some reason, he looked like me. As soon as I went out into the hall a young woman approached wearing red Bermuda shorts with blue pockets and a sleeveless shirt on the front of which a butterfly and a sunflower were kissing. She had a tray in her hands and on the tray a tall glass of orange juice. In the living room as well the ceiling fans were still.

‘Señorita Maya left the things for you on the terrace,’ she told me. ‘She’ll see you for lunch.’ She smiled at me, and waited for me to take the glass from the tray.

‘Can’t we turn on the fans?’

‘The power’s gone out,’ said the woman. ‘Would you like some coffee, sir?’

‘First a telephone. To call Bogotá, if it’s no trouble.’

‘Well, the telephone’s in there,’ she said. ‘But that’s something for you to sort out with the señorita.’

It was one of those old, all-in-one phones from the late 1970s that I remembered from my childhood: a sort of small, chubby, long-necked bird with the dial on the underside and a red button. To get a dial tone you just picked it up. I dialled my number and marvelled at feeling a childish impatience while waiting for the dial to turn back before being able to start the next number. Aura answered before the second ring. ‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

Her tone changed, sounding cold and dense and heavy. ‘Where are you?’ she said.

‘In La Dorada. Visiting someone.’

‘The woman who left the message?’

‘What?’

‘The one who left the message on the answering machine?’

I wasn’t surprised by her clairvoyance (she’d shown signs of it since the beginning of our relationship). I explained the situation without going into details: Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, the documents she possessed and images stored in her memory, the possibility for me to understand so many things. I want to know, I thought, but didn’t say. While I was speaking I heard a series of short, perhaps guttural sounds, and then Aura was suddenly crying. ‘You are a son of a bitch,’ she said. She didn’t run all the words together in a more efficient and natural way, but separated them out and pronounced each letter of every word. ‘I haven’t slept a wink, Antonio. I haven’t checked the hospitals because I don’t have anyone to leave Leticia with. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of this,’ Aura said between sobs, and the way she was crying seemed almost aggressive, I’d never heard her cry like that: it was the tension, without a doubt, the tension built up throughout the night. ‘Who is that woman?’