Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

It was around that time that she killed the armadillo. Maya didn’t remember the absence of her father upsetting her too much: she didn’t remember any bad feelings, any aggression, any desire for revenge, but one day (she would have been about eight) she grabbed the armadillo and took him to the laundry patio. ‘It was one of those old-fashioned patios apartments used to have, you know, uncomfortable and tiny, with a stone sink and clothes lines and a window. Do you remember those laundry sinks? On one side was where you scrubbed the clothes against the ridged surface, on the other was a sort of tank, for a child it was like a deep well of cold water. I brought a bench over from the kitchen, leaned over the water and pushed Mike down with both hands, without letting go of him, and I put both my hands on his back so he wouldn’t move. I’d been told that armadillos could spend a long time under water. I wanted to see how long. The armadillo started struggling, but I held him down there, pressed against the bottom of the sink with my whole body weight, an armadillo is strong, but not that strong, I was already a good-sized girl. I wanted to see how long he could stay under water, that was all, it seemed to me that’s all it was. I remember the roughness of his body very well, my hands hurt from the pressure and then they went on hurting, it was like holding a knotty tree trunk in place so the current wouldn’t carry it off. What a struggle the creature put up, I remember perfectly. Until he stopped struggling. The maid found him later, you should have heard her scream. I was punished. Mom slapped me hard and cut my lip with her ring. Later she asked me why I’d done it and I said, To see how many minutes he could stay under. And Mom answered, Then why didn’t you have a watch? I didn’t know what to say. And that question hasn’t completely gone away, Antonio, it still runs around my head every once in a while, always at the worst moments, when life isn’t working out for me. This question appears to me and I’ve never been able to answer it.’

She thought for a moment and said, ‘Anyway, what was an armadillo doing in an apartment in La Perseverancia? How absurd, the house smelled like shit.’

‘And did you never have any suspicions?’

‘About what?’

‘That Ricardo was alive. About him being in jail.’

‘Never, no. I’ve since discovered that I wasn’t the only one, that my story wasn’t unique. In those years they were legion those who arrived in the United States and stayed there, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Those who arrived, not with shipments like my dad, though there were those as well, but as simple passengers of a commercial plane, an Avianca or American Airlines plane. And the families who were left behind in Colombia had to tell the children something, didn’t they? So they killed the father, never better said. The guy, stuck in jail in the United States, died all of a sudden without anyone ever knowing he was there. It was the easiest thing to do, easier than struggling with the shame, the humiliation of having a mule in the family. Hundreds of cases like this one. Hundreds of fictitious orphans, I was just one. That’s the great thing about Colombia, nobody’s ever alone with their fate. Shit, is it ever hot. It’s incredible. Aren’t you hot, Antonio, being from a cool climate?’

‘A little, yes. But I can take it.’

‘Here you feel every pore open. I like the early mornings, first thing. But then it gets unbearable. No matter how used to it you get.’

‘You must be pretty used to it by now.’

‘Yes, it’s true. Maybe I just like to complain.’

‘How did you end up living here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, after all that time.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Maya. ‘That’s a long story.’

Maya had just turned eleven when a classmate told her about the Hacienda Nápoles for the first time. This was the vast property, more than 3,000 hectares, that Pablo Escobar had bought towards the end of the 1970s on which to build his personal paradise, a paradise that was an empire at the same time: a tropical lowland Xanadu, with animals instead of sculptures and armed thugs instead of a No Trespassing sign. The hacienda’s land stretched over two departments; a river crossed it from one side to the other. Of course that wasn’t the information Maya’s classmate gave her, for in 1982 the name Pablo Escobar was not yet on the lips of eleven-year-old children, nor did eleven-year-old children know the characteristics of the gigantic territory or the collection of antique cars that would soon be growing in special carports or the existence of several runways designed for the business (for the taking off and landing of planes like the one Ricardo Laverde had piloted), much less had they seen Citizen Kane . No, eleven-year-old children didn’t know about those things. But they did know about the zoo: in a matter of months the zoo became a legend on a national scale, and it was the zoo that Maya’s classmate told her about one day in 1982. She told her about giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, huge birds of every colour; she told her about a kangaroo that kicked a football. For Maya it was a revelation so extraordinary, and it turned into a desire so important, that she had the good sense to wait until Christmas to ask to be taken to the Hacienda Nápoles as a Christmas present.

Her mother’s reply was emphatic: ‘Don’t even dream about going to see that place.’

‘But everyone in my class has been,’ said Maya.

‘Well you’re not going,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘Don’t even think of mentioning it again.’

‘And so I went on the sly,’ Maya told me. ‘What else could I do? A friend invited me and I said yes. My mom thought I was going to spend the weekend in Villa de Leyva.’

‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘You sneaked off to the Hacienda Nápoles too? How many of us must have done the same thing?’

‘Oh, so you. .’

‘Yeah, I did too,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go, so I made up some lie too, and went to see what was forbidden. A taboo place, Hacienda Nápoles.’

‘And when did you go there?’

I made some calculations in my head, summoning up certain memories, and the conclusion made a shiver of pleasure run up my spine. ‘I was twelve. I’m a year older than you. We went there around the same time, Maya.’

‘You went in December?’

‘Yes.’

‘December 1982?’

‘Yes.’

‘We were there at the same time,’ she said. ‘Incredible. Isn’t it incredible?’

‘Well, yeah, but I’m not sure. .’

‘We went on the same day, Antonio,’ said Maya. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘But it might have been any day.’

‘Don’t be silly. It was before Christmas, right?’

‘Right. But. .’

‘And after school broke up, right?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Well, it had to be a weekend, otherwise there wouldn’t have been adults to take us. People work. And how many weekends are there before Christmas? Let’s say three. And what day was it, a Saturday or a Sunday? It was a Saturday, because Bogotá people always went to the zoo on Saturdays, grown-ups don’t like to make a trip like that and then have to go to the office the next day.’

‘Well, there are still three days,’ I said, ‘three possible Saturdays. Nothing guarantees we chose the same one.’

‘I know we did.’

‘Why?’

‘I just do. Don’t bug me any more. Do you want me to keep telling you?’ But Maya didn’t wait for my answer. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so, I went to see the zoo and then I went home, and the first thing I did when I walked in was to ask my mother exactly where our house was in La Dorada. I think I recognized something along the way, the landscape, I recognized a mountain or a curve in the road, or the turn-off onto the main road to Villa Elena, because to get to the Hacienda Nápoles you pass right by that road. I must have recognized something, and when I saw my mother I wouldn’t stop asking her questions. It was the first time I’d talked about it since we left, Mom was quite shocked. And as the years went by I kept asking questions, saying I wanted to go back, asking when we could go back. The house in La Dorada turned into a sort of Promised Land for me, you see? And I began little by little to do everything necessary to go back. And it all began with that visit to the zoo at the Hacienda Nápoles. And now you tell me that maybe we saw each other there, at the zoo. Without knowing you were you and I was me, without knowing we’d meet one day.’