Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

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No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's fascination with the life of ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde begins by casual acquaintance in a seedy Bogota billiard hall and grows until the day Ricardo receives a cassette tape in an unmarked envelope. Asking Antonio to find him somewhere private to play it, they go to a library. The first time he glances up from his seat in the next booth, Antonio sees tears running down Laverde's cheeks; the next, the ex-pilot has gone. Shortly afterwards, Ricardo is shot dead on a street corner in Bogota by a guy on the back of a motorbike and Antonio is caught in the hail of bullets. Lucky to survive, and more out of love with life than ever, he starts asking questions until the questions become an obsession that leads him to Laverde's daughter. His troubled investigation leads all the way back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living nightmare of fear and random death. Juan Gabriel Vasquez is one of the leading novelists of his generation, and The Sound of Things Falling that tackles what became of Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar is his best book to date.

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The Centro de Estudios Universitarios Colombo-Americano, or Colombian-American University Study Centre: a long pretentious name for a few rooms full of people Elaine found familiar, too familiar. Her colleagues, at this stage of training, were white, in their twenties as was she, and like her they were tired of their own country, tired of Vietnam, tired of Cuba, tired of Santo Domingo, tired of mornings catching them off guard, making small talk with their parents or their friends, and going to bed knowing they’d just witnessed a unique and regrettable day, a day that would immediately go down in the universal history of infamy: the day a sawed-off shotgun killed Malcolm X, a car-bomb killed Wharlest Jackson, a bomb in the post office killed Fred Conlon, police gunfire killed Benjamin Brown. And at the same time the coffins kept arriving from every inoffensively or picturesquely named Vietnamese operation, Deckhouse Five, Cedar Falls, Junction City. The My Lai revelations began to start popping up and soon they’d be talking about Thanh Phong, one barbarous act replaced and displaced another, rapes became interchangeable. Yes, that’s how it was: in her country, a person woke up and didn’t know what to expect, what cruel joke history might be about to play, what would be spat in her face that day. When had this happened to the United States of America? That question, which Elaine asked herself in a thousand confusing ways every day, floated in the air of the classrooms, above all the white, twenty-year-old heads, and also occupied their spare time, lunches in the cafeteria, the trips from the CEUCA to the shantytowns where the apprentice volunteers did their field work. The United States of America: who was ruining it, who was responsible for the demolition of the dream? There, in the classroom, Elaine was thinking: that’s what we’ve fled . She thought: we’re all fugitives .

The mornings were devoted to learning Spanish. For four hours, four arduous hours and with a stevedore’s tension in her shoulders, Elaine unravelled the mysteries of the new language in front of a teacher in riding boots and turtleneck sweaters, a thin, haggard woman who often brought her three-year-old son to class because she had no one to leave him with at home. To each slip-up with the subjunctive, to each mistakenly gendered word, Señora Amalia responded with a speech. ‘How are you going to work with the poor people of this country if you can’t understand them?’ she would say to them leaning on her two closed fists on her wooden desk. ‘And if you can’t get them to understand you, how do you expect to win the confidence of the community leaders? In three or four months, some of you will be going out to the coast or up to the coffee-growing region. Do you think the Acción Comunal people are going to wait while you look up words in the dictionary? Do you think the campesinos are going to sit in their villages while you lot try to figure out how to say La leche es mejor que el aguapanela ?’ But in the afternoons, during the hours taught in English that appeared in the official programme as American Studies and World Affairs , Elaine and her classmates listened to lectures from Peace Corps veterans who for one reason or another had stayed in Colombia, and from them they learned that the important phrases weren’t the ones to do with sugar-water or milk, but rather some quite different ones, the common ingredient being the word No: No, I’m not from the Alliance for Progress, No, I’m not in the CIA , and, especially, No, I’m very sorry, I don’t have any dollars .

At the end of September, Elaine wrote a long letter to her grandparents to say happy birthday to her grandmother, thank them both for the cuttings from Time , and ask her grandfather if he’d seen the new Paul Newman and Robert Redford movie, which people were already talking about in Bogotá (though the film itself would take a little longer to arrive). Then, suddenly solemn, she asked them what they knew about the crimes in Beverly Hills. ‘Everybody has an opinion here, you can’t sit down to lunch without talking about the subject. The photos are horrific. Sharon Tate was pregnant, I don’t know how anyone could do something like that. This world’s a scary place these days. Grandpa, you’ve seen worse things, haven’t you? Please tell me the world has always been like this.’ And then she changed the subject. ‘I think I already told you about the squatter neighbourhoods,’ she wrote. She explained that every class of the CEUCA is divided up into groups, and each group has its neighbourhood, that the other three members of her group are Californians: all men, very good at putting up walls and talking to the leaders of the local council (Elaine explained), and also very good at getting hold of very high-quality marijuana from La Guajira or Santa Marta at a good price for downtown Bogotá (this she didn’t explain). So anyway, she went up the mountains around Bogotá with them once a week along muddy roads where it’s not unusual to step on a dead rat, between houses made of cardboard and rotten wood, beside septic tanks open to all eyes (and noses). ‘We have a lot to do,’ Elaine wrote. ‘But I don’t want to tell you any more about the work right now, I’ll save that for the next letter. I want to tell you that I had a lucky break.’

This is what happened. One afternoon, after a long session with the neighbourhood council — talking about contaminated water, declaring the absolute necessity of building an aqueduct, agreeing there was no money to do so — Elaine’s group ending up drinking beer in a windowless shop. After a couple of rounds (the brown glass bottles accumulating on the narrow table) Dale Cartwright lowered his voice and asked Elaine if she could keep a secret for a few days. ‘Do you know who Antonia Drubinski is?’ he asked. Elaine, like everyone else, knew who Antonia Drubinski was: not only because she was one of the most senior volunteers, or because she’d already been arrested twice for civil disorder offences in the public highway — where disorder should be read as protests against the Vietnam War , and public highway should be read as in front of the US Embassy — but because Antonia Drubinski’s whereabouts were unknown, and had been for several days.

‘Anything but unknown,’ said Dale Cartwright. ‘They know where she is, the thing is they don’t want it to become news.’

‘Who doesn’t want that?’

‘The Embassy. The CEUCA.’

‘And why not? Where is she?’

Dale Cartwright looked around and dropped his head.

‘She’s gone to the mountains,’ he whispered. ‘She’s gone to join the revolution, it seems. Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that her room is free.’

‘Her room?’ said Elaine. ‘ That room?’

That room, yes. The very one that’s the envy of the whole class. And I thought maybe you’d like to get it. You know, live ten minutes away from the CEUCA, shower with hot water.’

Elaine thought for a minute.

‘I didn’t come here for material comforts,’ she finally said.

‘Hot showers,’ Dale said again. ‘Not having to manoeuvre like a quarterback to get off the bus.’

‘But the thing is the family. .’ said Elaine.

‘What about the family?’

‘I pay them 750 pesos rent,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s a third of their earnings.’

‘And what’s that got to do with it?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that money.’

‘But who do you think you are, Elaine Fritts?’ said Dale with a theatrical sigh. ‘Do you think you’re unique and irreplaceable? That’s incredible. Elaine, dear, fifteen new volunteers are arriving in Bogotá today. There’s another flight from New York on Saturday. All over the country there are hundreds, maybe thousands of gringos like you and me, and lots of them are coming to Bogotá to work. Believe me, your room will be taken before you finish packing.’

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