Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

‘Yeah,’ he said. He looked at her with the same empty expression. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. He looked at her again: Elaine saw the drops running down his neck, his beard dripping like a leaky tap, the mud. ‘I came to see Ricardo. And it seems like he’s not here, right?’

‘He should have been back today. Sometimes these things happen.’

‘Sometimes he gets delayed.’

‘Yeah, sometimes. He doesn’t fly by a precise itinerary. Did he know you were coming?’

Mike didn’t answer straight away. He was concentrating on his own body, on the muddy towel. Outside, in the dark night, in that night that blended with the rocky hills and became infinite, another downpour was unleashed. ‘Well, I think so,’ said Mike. ‘Maybe I’m the one who’s confused.’ But he didn’t look at her as he spoke: he dried off with the towel and had that absent expression, like a cat cleaning itself with strokes of its tongue. And then Elaine thought that Mike might keep drying himself till the end of time if she didn’t do something. ‘Well, come in and sit down and have a drink,’ she said then. ‘Rum?’

‘OK, but no ice,’ said Mike. ‘See if it’ll warm me up. I can’t believe how cold it is.’

‘Do you want one of Ricardo’s shirts?’

‘That’s not a bad idea, Elena Fritts. That’s what he calls you, isn’t it? Elena Fritts. A shirt, yeah, not a bad idea.’

And so, wearing a shirt that wasn’t his (short-sleeved with blue checks on a white background, a breast pocket with a missing button), Mike Barbieri drank not one, but four glasses of rum. Elaine watched him. She felt comfortable with him: yes, that’s what it was, comfort. It was the language, perhaps, coming back to her language, or perhaps the codes they shared and the disappearance, while they were together, of the necessity of explaining themselves that was always there with Colombians. Being with him had something of indisputable familiarity, like coming home. Elaine had a drink too and felt accompanied and she felt that Mike Barbieri was also accompanying her daughter. They talked about their country and politics back home just as they’d done years before, before Maya existed and before Villa Elena existed, and they told stories of their families, their personal histories and also recent news, and doing so was comfortable and agreeable, like putting on a nice wool coat on a winter’s evening. Although it wasn’t easy to know where the pleasure came from in talking about the 2-dollar bill that had just been reissued back home, or about the bicentennial celebrations of independence, or about Sara Jane Moore, the muddle-headed woman who had tried to assassinate the president. It had stopped raining and a cool breeze came in from the night heavy with the scent of hibiscus. Elaine felt light-hearted, even cosy, so she didn’t hesitate for a second when Mike asked if there was a guitar around and in a matter of seconds he was tuning it up and started singing Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel songs.

It must have been two or three in the morning when something happened that didn’t shock Elaine (she’d think later) as much as it should have shocked her. Mike was singing the part of ‘America’ where the couple gets on a Greyhound bus when they heard a sound outside, in the distance, in the quiet night, and the dogs began to bark. Elaine opened her eyes and Mike stopped playing; both of them sat still, listening to the silence. ‘Don’t worry, nothing ever happens around here,’ said Elaine, but Mike was already on his feet and had gone to find the olive green knapsack he’d brought with him and taken out a big, silver-plated pistol, or a silver pistol that looked big to Elaine, and had gone outside, raised his arm and fired two shots at the sky, one, two, two explosions. Elaine’s first reaction was to protect Maya or to neutralize her unease or her fear, but when she reached her daughter’s room in four strides she found her asleep, deep in an imperturbable sleep and far from all sounds and noises and worries, incredible. When she got back to the living room, however, something had broken in the atmosphere. Mike was justifying himself with a twisted sentence: ‘If it was nothing before, now it’s even less.’ But Elaine had lost the urge to hear the song about the Greyhound bus and the New Jersey Turnpike: she felt tired; it had been a long day. She said goodnight and told Mike to sleep in the guest room, the bed was made, tomorrow they could have breakfast together. ‘Who knows, maybe even with Ricardo.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mike Barbieri. ‘With any luck.’

But when she woke up, Mike Barbieri had gone. A note, that was all he’d left, a note on a paper napkin, and in the note three words on three lines: ‘Thanks, Love, Mike.’ Later, remembering that strange and hazy night, Elaine would feel two things: first, a profound hatred towards Mike Barbieri, the most profound hatred she’d ever felt; and second, a sort of involuntary admiration for the ease with which that man had gone through the night, for the massive deception he’d carried out for so many and such intimate hours without giving himself away for a moment, for the incombustible serenity with which he’d pronounced those final words. With any luck , Elaine would think, or rather the words would repeat themselves in her head tirelessly, with any luck , that’s what Mike Barbieri had said to her without a muscle in his face twitching, a feat worthy of a champion poker player or a Russian roulette enthusiast, because Mike Barbieri knew perfectly well that Ricardo wasn’t going to return to Villa Elena that night and he’d known it from the start, from the time he arrived by motorcycle at Elaine’s house. In fact, that’s precisely why he’d come: to tell Elaine. He’d come to tell her that Ricardo wasn’t going to come back.

He knew very well.

He knew very well, he who’d been to see Ricardo days earlier to tell him about the new business opportunity they could not afford to miss, to convince him that the shipments of marijuana were bringing in pocket money compared to what they could be earning now, to explain what this coca paste that was coming in from Bolivia and Peru was and how in some magic places it was transformed into the luminous white powder for which all of Hollywood, no, all of California, no, all of the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, from Chicago to Miami, were willing to pay whatever they had to. He knew very well, having direct contact with those places, where a few Peace Corps veterans, who had just spent three years in the Cauca Valley and in Putumayo, had turned into overnight experts in ether and acetone and hydrochloric acid, and where they assembled bricks of the product that could illuminate a dark room with their phosphorescence. He knew very well, he who’d done some numbers on a piece of paper with Ricardo and calculated that any Cessna, with the passenger seats removed, could carry some twelve canvas rucksacks full of bricks, 300 kilos in total, and that, at 100 dollars a gram, a single trip could produce 90 million dollars of which the pilot, who ran so many risks and was so indispensable to the operation, could keep two. He knew very well, having listened to Ricardo’s enthusiasm, his plans to make this trip and just this trip and then retire, retire forever, retire from piloting cargo planes and also passenger planes and all piloting except flying for pleasure, retire from everything except his family, a millionaire forever before the age of thirty.

He knew very well.

He knew very well, he who accompanied Ricardo in the Nissan to a ranch in Doradal with its property lines too far away to see, this side of Medellín, and there introduced him to the Colombian side of the business, two men with wavy black hair and moustaches who spoke softly and gave the impression of feeling very much at ease with their consciences and after greeting Ricardo they attended to and entertained him as he’d never been entertained or attended to in his life. He knew very well, he who’d been at Ricardo’s side while the bosses showed him around the property, the paso fino horses and the luxurious stables, the bullring and barns, the swimming pool like a cut emerald, the fields that stretched further than the eye could see. He knew very well, having helped load the Cessna 310-R with his own hands, having taken the rucksacks out of a black Land Rover with his own hands and put them into the plane, he who couldn’t contain himself and had given Ricardo a big hug, a hug of true comrades, feeling as he did so that he’d never loved any Colombian this much. He knew very well, having watched the Cessna take off and followed it with his gaze, its white shape against the grey background of the clouds that were now threatening rain, and having watched it get smaller and smaller until it disappeared in the distance, and then got back into the Land Rover and let them drive him out to the main road where he caught the first bus heading in the direction of La Dorada.