Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

Or perhaps there was another reason.

Because keeping Aura and Leticia out of Las Acacias, remote from Maya Fritts and her tale and her documents, distant therefore from the truth about Ricardo Laverde, was to protect their purity, or rather avoid their contamination, the contamination that I’d suffered one afternoon in 1996 the causes of which I’d barely begun to understand now, the unsuspected intensity of which was just now beginning to emerge like an object falling from the sky. My contaminated life was mine alone: my family was still safe: safe from the plague of my country, from its afflicted recent history: safe from what had hunted me down along with so many of my generation (and others, too, yes, but most of all mine, the generation that was born with planes, with the flights full of bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequences). This world that had come back to life in the words and documents of Maya Fritts could stay there, I thought, could stay there in Las Acacias, could stay in La Dorada, could stay in the Magdalena Valley, could stay a four-hour drive from Bogotá, far from the apartment where my wife and daughter were waiting for me, perhaps with some concern, yes, perhaps with worried expressions on their faces, but pure, uncontaminated, free of our particular Colombian story, and I wouldn’t be a good father or a good husband if I brought this story to them, or allowed them to enter this story, enter Las Acacias and the life of Maya Fritts in any way, enter into contact with Ricardo Laverde. Aura had had the strange luck to be absent during the difficult years, to have grown up in Santo Domingo and Mexico and Santiago de Chile: was it not my obligation to preserve that luck, to be vigilant to keep anything from ruining that sort of exemption that the eventful life of her parents had granted her? I was going to protect her, I thought, her and my little girl, I was protecting them. This was the right thing to do, I thought, and I did so with real conviction, with almost religious zeal.

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Maya said. ‘It’s one of those things that can’t be shared, so everyone tells me. Anyway. The thing is she did it for me. She invented my dad, invented him entirely.’

‘For example?’

‘Well,’ said Maya, ‘for example, his death.’

And so, with the white light of the Magdalena Valley shining in my face, I learned about the day that Elaine or Elena Fritts explained to her daughter what had happened to her father. During the previous year, father and daughter had talked a lot about death: one afternoon, Maya had come upon the slaughter of a Cebú cow, and almost immediately began to ask questions. Ricardo had resolved the matter in four words: ‘Her years were up.’ Everyone and everything runs out of years eventually, he explained: animals, people, everyone. Armadillos? asked Maya. Yes, Ricardo told her, armadillos too. Grandpa Julio? asked Maya. Yes, Grandpa Julio too, Ricardo told her. So, one afternoon towards the end of 1976, when the girl’s questions about her father’s absence were starting to get unbearable, Elaine Fritts sat Maya on her lap and told her, ‘Daddy’s years were up.’

‘I don’t know why she chose that moment, I don’t know if she got tired of waiting for something, I don’t know anything,’ Maya told me. ‘Maybe some news arrived from the United States. From the lawyers or from my dad.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘There aren’t any letters from that time, my mother burnt them all. What I’m telling you is what I imagine happened: she got some news. From my dad. From the lawyers. And decided to change her life, or that her life with my dad was over and she was going to start another different one.’

She explained that Ricardo had got lost in the sky. Sometimes that happened to pilots, she explained: it’s rare, but it happened. The sky was very big and the sea was very big too and a plane was a very small thing and the planes that Daddy flew were the smallest ones of all, and the world was full of planes like those, little white planes that took off and flew over the land and then went out and flew over the sea, and went far, very far away, far from everything, completely alone, without anyone to tell them how to get back to land again. And sometimes something happened, and they got lost. They forgot where ahead was and where was back, or they got confused and started flying in circles without knowing which way was ahead and which was back, where the left was and where the right, until the plane ran out of gasoline and fell into the sea, fell out of the sky like a little girl diving into a pool. And it sank without a sound or a noise, sank unseen because out in those places there isn’t anyone to see, and out there, at the bottom of the sea, pilots ran out of years. ‘Why don’t they swim?’ asked Maya. And Elena Fritts said, ‘Because the sea is very deep.’ And Maya, ‘But Daddy’s out there?’ And Elena Fritts, ‘Yes, Daddy’s there. At the bottom of the sea. His plane fell, Daddy fell asleep and his years ran out.’

Maya Fritts never questioned that version of events. That was the last Christmas they spent at Villa Elena, the last time Elaine had them cut down a yellowing shrub to decorate with the fragile coloured balls the little girl loved, with reindeer and sleighs and fake candy canes that bent the branches with their weight. In January 1977 several things happened: Elaine received a letter from her grandparents telling her that it had snowed in Miami for the first time in history; President Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam draft dodgers; and Mike Barbieri — who Elaine had always secretly considered a draft dodger — showed up dead in La Miel River, shot in the back of the neck, his naked body thrown face down on the riverbank, the water playing with his long hair, his beard wet and reddened with blood. The campesinos who found him went in search of Elaine even before they went to the authorities: she was the other gringa in the region. Elaine had to be present at the first judicial proceedings, had to go to a municipal court with open windows and fans that messed up the records to say that yes, she knew him, and that no, she didn’t know who might have killed him. The next day she packed up the Nissan with everything she could fit in it, her clothes and her daughter’s, the suitcases full of money and an armadillo with the name of a murdered gringo , and went to Bogotá.

‘Twelve years, Antonio,’ Maya Fritts said to me, ‘twelve years I lived with my mother, just the two of us, practically in hiding. She didn’t just take my dad away from me, but my grandparents too. We didn’t see them again. They just came to visit a couple of times, and it would always end in a fight, I didn’t understand why. But other people came. It was a tiny little apartment, in La Perseverancia. Lots of people came to visit us, the house was always full of gringos , people from the Peace Corps, people from the Embassy. Did Mom talk to them about drugs, about what was happening with drugs? I don’t know, I wouldn’t have been aware of something like that. It’s perfectly possible they talked about cocaine. Or about the volunteers who had taught the campesinos to process the coca paste just as they’d taught them techniques for growing better marijuana before. But the business wasn’t yet what it became later. How would I have known? A child doesn’t catch things like that.’

‘And no one asked about Ricardo? None of those visitors spoke of him?’

‘No, nobody. Incredible, isn’t it? Mom constructed a world in which Ricardo Laverde didn’t exist, that takes talent. As difficult as it is to maintain a little tiny lie, she built up something huge, an actual pyramid. I imagine her giving instructions to all her visitors: in this house we don’t speak of the dead. What dead? Well, the dead. The dead who are dead.’