Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

So she stayed in Bogotá on her own, living with two girls from Barranquilla in an apartment with a few pieces of cheap furniture where everything, starting with the tenants, had a transitory quality. And she began to study Law. She was a student of mine in my first year as a professor, when I too was a novice; and we didn’t really talk again after the course finished, in spite of sharing the same corridors, in spite of frequenting the same student cafés downtown, in spite of having said hello in the Legis or the Temis, the legal bookshops with their public-office air and bureaucratic white tiles smelling of detergent. One evening in March we met at a cinema on 24th Street; it struck us as funny that we were both going to see black-and-white movies on our own (there was a series of Buñuel films, that day they were showing Simon of the Desert , and I fell asleep fifteen minutes in). We exchanged phone numbers to meet for a coffee the next day, and the next day we left our coffees half finished when we realized, in the middle of a banal conversation, that we weren’t interested in telling each other about our lives, but just wanted to be somewhere we could go to bed and spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the body we’d each been imagining since our paths had first crossed in the cold space of the classroom. I already knew the husky voice and the prominent collarbones; the freckles between her breasts surprised me (I’d imagined clear and smooth skin like that of her face) and her mouth surprised me too, as it was, for scientifically inexplicable reasons, always cold.

But then the surprises and explorations and discoveries gave way to another situation, perhaps more surprising, because it was so unexpected. Over the following days we went on seeing each other constantly and realizing that our respective worlds didn’t change much after our clandestine encounters, that our relationship didn’t affect the practical side of our lives for good or ill, but coexisted with it, like a parallel highway, like a story seen in the episodes of a television series. We realized how little we knew each other; I spent a long time discovering Aura, that peculiar woman who went to bed with me at night and came out with anecdotes about herself or others, and as she did so created for me an absolutely novel world where a friend’s house smelled of headache, for example, or where a headache could quite easily taste of guanábana ice cream. ‘It’s like living with synaesthesia,’ I told her. I’d never seen someone hold a gift to her nose before opening it, even though it was obviously a pair of shoes, or a stuffed animal, or a poor innocent ring. ‘What does a ring smell like?’ I said to Aura. ‘It doesn’t smell of anything, that’s the truth. But there’s no way to explain that to you.’

And so, I suspect, we could have gone on all our lives. But five days before Christmas Aura appeared dragging a red suitcase with tiny wheels, with pockets in every part of it. ‘I’m six weeks pregnant,’ she told me. ‘I want us to spend the holidays together, and then we’ll see what we do.’ In one of those pockets there was a digital alarm clock and a case that didn’t contain pencils, as I thought it did, but make-up; in another, a photo of Aura’s parents, who by then were well settled in Buenos Aires. She took out the photo and placed it face down on one of the nightstands, and only turned it over when I said yes, we should spend the holidays together, that’s a good idea. Then — the image is very much alive in my memory — she lay down on my bed, on top of my made bed, and closed her eyes and began to talk. ‘People don’t believe me,’ she said. I thought she meant about her pregnancy and said, ‘Who? Who’ve you told?’ ‘When I talk about my parents,’ said Aura. ‘They don’t believe me.’ I lay down beside her and crossed my arms behind my head and listened. ‘They don’t believe me, for example, when I say I don’t understand why they had me, when they already had enough in each other. They still have enough. They’re enough for each other, that’s how it is. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever been with your parents and all of a sudden you feel superfluous? It happens to me a lot, or at least since I’ve been old enough to live alone, and it’s weird, being with your folks and they start looking at each other with that look that you’ve already identified and they’re laughing over something that’s just between them and you have no idea what they’re laughing at, and worse, you feel you have no right to ask. It’s a look I learned by heart a long time ago, not complicity, it’s something way beyond that, Antonio. More than once it happened to me as a little girl, in Mexico or in Chile, more than once. At a meal, with guests they didn’t like much but invited anyway, or in the street when they met someone who said stupid things, suddenly I could fast forward five seconds and think: here comes the look , and sure enough, five seconds later their eyebrows moved, their eyes met, and I’d see on their faces that smile that no one else saw and that they used to make fun of people the way I’ve never seen anyone else make fun of other people. How do you smile without people seeing you smile? They could, Antonio, I swear I’m not exaggerating, I grew up with those smiles. Why did it bother me so much? It still bothers me. Why so much?’

There wasn’t sadness in her words, but irritation or rather anger, the anger of someone who has suffered a deceit through inattention or neglect, yes, that was it, the anger of someone who’s been led up the garden path. ‘I’ve been remembering something,’ she said then. ‘I would have been about fourteen or fifteen, and we were just about to leave Mexico. It was a Friday, a school day, and I decided to go along with some friends who weren’t really in the mood for geography or mathematics. We were walking across a park, it was San Lorenzo Park, but that doesn’t matter. And then I saw a man who looked a lot like my dad, but in a car that wasn’t my dad’s. He stopped at the corner, looking down the avenue, and then a woman got into the car who looked a lot like my mother, but dressed in clothes that my mother wouldn’t wear and with red hair, which my mother didn’t have. That happened on the far side of the park, their only option was to turn the car around very slowly and drive right past us. I don’t know what I was thinking when I signalled for them to stop, but the resemblance was too striking. So they stopped, me on the pavement and the car on the street, and up close I realized immediately that it was them, it was my parents. And I smiled at them, asked them what was going on, and that’s when the fear started: they looked at me and spoke to me as if they didn’t know me, as if they’d never seen me before. As if I was one of my friends. I later understood they were playing. A husband who picks up a pricey hooker on the street. They were playing and they couldn’t let me ruin the game. And that night, everything was normal: we had dinner as a family, watched television, everything. They didn’t say anything. And I spent a few days wondering what had happened, wondering without understanding and feeling something I’d never felt, feeling afraid, but afraid of what, isn’t it absurd?’ She took a gulp of air (her lips pressed against her teeth) and whispered, ‘And now I’m going to have a child. And I don’t know if I’m ready, Antonio. I don’t know if I’m ready.’

‘I think you are,’ I told her.

Mine was also a whisper, as far as I remember. And then came another: ‘Bring everything,’ I told her. ‘We’re ready.’ In reply, Aura began to weep with a silent but sustained crying that only ended when she fell asleep.

The end of 1995 was typical of that time of year for Bogotá, with that intense blue sky of the Andean highlands, with those early mornings when the temperature goes down to zero and the dry air ruins the potato or cauliflower crops, and then the rest of the day is sunny and warm and the light is so clear that you end up with sunburn on your cheeks and the nape of your neck. I devoted that time to Aura with the constancy — no: the obsession — of a teenager. We spent the days walking at the doctor’s recommendation and taking naps (her), reading deplorable research projects (me) or watching pirated films several days before they premiered in the meagre Bogotá listings (both of us). At night Aura accompanied me to novenas at the homes of my relatives or friends, and we danced and drank non-alcoholic beer and lit Catherine wheels and powder-keg volcanoes and launched rockets that exploded into rackets of colour in the yellowish night sky of the city, that darkness that’s never really dark. And never, never did I wonder what Ricardo Laverde might be doing at that same instant, if he was praying the novenas too, if there were fireworks and if he was setting off rockets or lighting Catherine wheels, and if he was doing so on his own or in company.