Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

‘You like it?’ said Ricardo.

‘It’s a jeep.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But do you like it?’

‘It’s big,’ Elaine said. ‘It’s white. It’s noisy.’

‘But it’s yours,’ said Ricardo. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘It’s June.’

‘No, it’s December now. You don’t notice because the weather’s the same. You really should have known, you with your Colombian ways.’

‘But where did it come from?’ said Elaine, pronouncing every syllable. ‘And how can we, when. .’

‘Too many questions. This is a horse, Elena Fritts, it just goes faster and if it rains you don’t get wet. Come on, let’s go for a spin.’

It was a 1968 Nissan Patrol, as Elaine found out, and the official colour was not white, but ivory. But this information interested her less than the two back doors and the passenger compartment, which was so spacious that a mattress could fit on the floor. Except that wouldn’t be necessary since the jeep had two fold-down cushioned beige benches on which a child could comfortably lie down. The front seat was a sort of big sofa, and Elaine made herself comfortable there, and saw the long, thin gear lever coming up from the floor and its black knob with three speeds marked on it, and she saw the white dashboard and thought it wasn’t white, but ivory, and saw the black steering wheel that Ricardo now started to move, and she grabbed hold of the handrail she found above the glove compartment. The Nissan began to move along the streets of La Dorada and soon out onto the highway. Ricardo turned in the direction of Medellín. ‘Things are going well for me,’ he said then. The Nissan left behind the lights of the town and plunged into the black night. In the beams of the headlights leafy trees sprang up and disappeared, a dog with shining eyes was startled, a puddle of dirty water twinkled. The night was humid and Ricardo opened the vents and a gust of warm air blew into the cabin. ‘Things are going well,’ he repeated. Elaine looked at his profile, saw the intense expression on his face in the darkness: Ricardo was trying to look at her at the same time as keep control of the vehicle on a road full of surprises (there could be other distracted animals, potholes that were more like craters, the odd drunk on a bicycle). ‘Things are going well,’ Ricardo said for the third time. And just when Elaine was thinking: he’s trying to tell me something , just when she was starting to get frightened by this revelation that was coming down on top of her as if out of the black night, just when she was about to change the subject out of vertigo or fear, Ricardo spoke in a tone that left no room for doubt: ‘I want to have a baby.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Elaine.

‘Why?’

Elaine’s hands started to wave around. ‘Because having a child costs money. Because I’m a Peace Corps volunteer and make barely enough money to survive on. Because first I have to finish my voluntariado .’ Voluntariado : the word gave her tongue a terribly tough time, like a racetrack full of curves, and for a moment she thought she’d got it wrong. ‘I like this,’ she said then, ‘I like what I’m doing.’

‘You can keep doing it,’ said Ricardo. ‘Afterwards.’

‘And where are we going to live? We can’t have a baby in this house.’

‘Well, we’ll move.’

‘But, with what money?’ said Elaine, and in her voice there was something resembling irritation. She was talking to Ricardo the way one talks to a stubborn child. ‘I don’t know what world you live in, cariño , but this isn’t something you improvise.’ She grabbed her long hair with both hands. Then she looked in her bag, took out an elastic band and put her hair up in a ponytail to get it off her sweaty neck. ‘Having a baby is not something you improvise. You don’t. You just don’t.’

Ricardo didn’t answer. A dense silence settled inside the jeep: the Nissan was the only thing audible, the rumbling of its engine, the friction of its wheels against the rough tarmac. Beside the road an immense field opened up then. Elaine thought she saw a couple of cows lying underneath a ceiba tree, the white of their horns breaking the uniform black of the pasture. In the background, above a low mist, the jagged hills stood out against the sky. The Nissan moved over the uneven road, the world was grey and blue outside the illuminated space, and then the highway went into a sort of brown and green tunnel, a corridor of trees whose branches met in the air like a gigantic dome. Elaine would always remember that image, the tropical vegetation completely surrounding them and hiding the sky, because that was the moment Ricardo told her — his eyes fixed on the road, without even glancing at Elaine, even avoiding her gaze — about the business he was doing with Mike Barbieri, about the future these business deals had and the plans this business had allowed him to make. ‘I’m not improvising, Elena Fritts,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought about all this for a long time. It’s all planned out down to the last detail. Now, your not finding out about the plans until just now is another detail, and that’s, well, because you didn’t need to. Now you do. It’s to do with you now too. I’m going to explain the whole thing. And then you can tell me if we can have a baby or not. Deal?’

‘OK,’ said Elaine. ‘Deal.’

‘Good. So let me tell you what’s going on with marijuana.’

And he told her. He told her about the closure, the year before, of the Mexican border (Nixon trying to free the United States from the invasion of weed); he told her about the distributors whose business had been hindered, hundreds of intermediaries whose clients couldn’t wait and started looking in new directions; he told her about Jamaica, one of the alternatives closest to hand the consumers had, but most of all about the Sierra Nevada, the department of La Guajira, the Magdalena Valley. He told her about the people who had come, in a matter of months, from San Francisco, from Miami, from Boston, looking for suitable partners for a business with guaranteed profitability, and they were lucky: they found Mike Barbieri. Elaine thought briefly of the regional coordinator of volunteers for Caldas, an Episcopalian from South Bend, Indiana, who had already vetoed the sex education programmes in rural zones: what would he think if he knew? But Ricardo kept talking. Mike Barbieri, he told her, was much more than a partner: he was a real pioneer. He had taught things to the campesinos . Along with some other volunteers with agricultural skills, he’d taught them techniques, where to plant so the mountains protect the plants, what fertilizer to use, how to tell the male plants from the females. And now, well, now he had contacts with 10 or 15 hectares scattered between here and Medellín, and they could produce 400 kilos per harvest. He’d changed those campesinos ’ lives, there was not the slightest doubt about that, they were earning more than ever and with less work, and all that thanks to weed, thanks to what’s going on with weed. ‘They put it in plastic bags, put the bags on a plane, we provide the simplest thing, a twin-engine Cessna. I get in the plane, take it full of one thing and bring it back with something else. Mike pays about 25 dollars for a kilo, let’s say. Ten thousand in total, and that’s just for the top-quality stuff. No matter how bad it goes, from every trip we come back with sixty, seventy grand, sometimes more. How many trips can be done? You do the maths. What I’m trying to tell you is that they need me. I was in the right place at the right time, and it was a stroke of luck. But it’s not about luck any more. They need me, I’ve become indispensable, and this is only just getting started. I’m the one who knows where to land, where you can take off. I’m the one who knows how to load one of these planes, how much it’ll take, how to distribute the cargo, how to conceal fuel tanks in the fuselage to be able to make longer journeys. And you can’t imagine, Elena Fritts, you just can’t imagine what it’s like to take off at night, the rush of adrenalin you get taking off at night in between the mountain ranges, with the river down below like a stream of molten silver, the Magdalena River on a moonlit night is the most striking thing you can ever see. And you don’t know what it’s like to see it from above and follow it, and come out over the open sea, the infinite space of the sea, when dawn hasn’t broken yet, and watch the sun come up over the sea, the horizon flares up as if it’s on fire, the light so bright it’s blinding. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far, but I know the itinerary now, I know the winds and the distances, I know the plane’s tics like I know this jeep’s. And the others are noticing. That I can take off and land that machine anywhere I want, take off from 2 metres of shoreline and land it in the stony desert of California. I can get it into spaces radar doesn’t reach: doesn’t matter how small they are, my plane fits there. A Cessna or whatever you give me, a Beechcraft, whatever. If there’s a hole between two radar beams, I’ll find it and get my plane in there. I’m good, Elena Fritts, I’m really good. And I’m going to get better every time, with every flight. It almost scares me to think about it.’