The Sound of Things Falling

The bullet passes through Antonio’s stomach and doesn’t hit any organs. He’s taken to the San José hospital, where he undergoes three days of surgery. He’s lucky to survive. Ricardo is dead. Antonio’s parents visit him in the hospital. When they ask why people killed Ricardo, Antonio says he doesn’t know. In Bogotá, on that same night that Ricardo died, 16 other people were murdered. When Antonio returns to his apartment, Aura takes care of him. He continues to be plagued by a feeling of claustrophobia and a fear of the dark. When he’s outside, Antonio believes he’s being watched. While Aura’s pregnancy progresses, Antonio’s fear makes it impossible for him to feel any other emotions. A therapist tells him he’s experiencing post-traumatic stress. That explanation doesn’t make Antonio’s symptoms disappear, though. He begins to weep uncontrollably at seemingly random times.

One night, Aura tries to get Antonio to come with her to sleep. Antonio says he can’t because he still has work to do. Aura says he hasn’t showered all day and hasn’t left the apartment. She says she doesn’t like what she’s seen him going through recently. She says that Bogotá isn’t “a war zone” and that the same thing isn’t going to happen again. Antonio says that she doesn’t know that for sure. He then yells at Aura that he has more work to do. Aura goes into the kitchen and then comes back. She says that after getting recent test results, doctors said that the baby, Leticia, is “enormous”; they advised Aura to schedule a caesarian if Leticia isn’t born within the next week.

Antonio leaves for work the next morning before Aura is awake. In his classroom, he finds a chalk drawing of two stick figures “in obscene positions” on the board. Underneath the drawing, a caption reads, “Professor Yammara introduces her to law.” Antonio asks who made the drawing, but his voice comes out quieter than he had intended. He leaves the classroom and then loses control of his body. His heart pounds and his palms sweat. For the first time, he thinks that his life is falling apart.

Leticia is born in August. When Antonio first sees her, he knows that he’ll never love anyone as much as he loves his daughter at that moment. Antonio never returns to the billiards club. He begins to hate the city as much as he feels threatened by and afraid of it. A doctor suggests that he might have agoraphobia and recommends that Antonio keep a diary. The doctor says the diary might help Antonio question whether his fears are rational or not. Antonio thinks the idea is absurd, like something out of a self-help book rather than a recommendation befitting a doctor. Before Antonio responds, the doctor says he can tell that Antonio thinks the idea is silly and that he’s not going to do it.

In 1998, just before Leticia’s second birthday, Antonio waits for a taxi near Parque Nacional. Without planning to, Antonio takes a taxi in the opposite direction he had intended to go and ends up near the site of the attack. He sits at a café where he can see the path the murderers on the motorbike had taken. He orders a coffee and then another one. He asks the waiter if she knows who Ricardo Laverde is and explains that he died near the café two and a half years ago. The waiter doesn’t know who Ricardo is. Antonio can’t believe it, and it bothers him that such a recent murder has been so quickly forgotten. Antonio then leaves the café and walks to Ricardo’s house. He knocks on the door and Ricardo’s former landlady answers.

When Antonio says that he was a friend of Ricardo’s, the landlady says she doesn’t believe him and that she already told the journalists everything. She’s about to close the door when Antonio says that he was with Ricardo when he was killed, and he lifts his shirt to show her the scar on his stomach. The landlady, Consu, lets him inside, and the two talk for hours about that day and about Ricardo. Consu tells Antonio that she doesn’t know who killed him or why they would want to. She says that Ricardo must have done something in his past, but she doesn’t know what it was. Antonio tells her about the tape Ricardo listened to after Elena died. Antonio exaggerates and says he’s spent two and a half years thinking about that moment and about what Ricardo was listening to.

Consu asks Antonio if he liked Ricardo, and Antonio exaggerates again when says that he was very fond of him. Antonio and Ricardo hadn’t had enough time to develop that kind of affection; instead, Antonio feels driven to find out more about Ricardo because he senses that their relationship impacted his life more than it seemed like it should have. Consu gets up and brings back a radio. Inside, there’s a cassette labeled BASF. The tape is a recording of two people talking about the weather in English. Antonio thinks that they’re pilots. One of the pilots says that American Airlines flight 965 is requesting permission to descend, and Antonio understands that it’s the black box recording from the flight that crashed in El Diluvio, which Elena had been on. 

Antonio wonders what Elena was thinking about during those moments before the plane crashed. Maybe she wondered whether it was a mistake to go to Colombia and whether she and Ricardo could repair their marriage. At first, nothing seems to be amiss in the recording, but then the pilots seem confused about where they are. They try to adjust their course to go to Cali. An electronic voice says, “Terrain, terrain.” The pilots tell the plane to pull up over and over, and then there’s a scream. There’s also a sound that Antonio has never been able to identify: the sound of people dying and materials breaking apart, “the sound of things falling,” which hangs in Antonio’s memory forever. That’s the last sound Antonio hears on the recording before it stops.

It takes a long time for Antonio to recuperate after hearing the recording. He thinks he had no right to listen to those deaths because everyone involved was a stranger to him. Still, he listens to the recording two more times before leaving Consu’s house. He writes a note for Consu before he goes with his complete name. He feels extraordinarily close to Ricardo at that moment. He doesn’t want the feeling to slip away, so he walks around downtown Bogotá until he goes into a “porn house” and watches two people have sex. In 1999, nine months after Antonio met Consu, Antonio gets a message on his voicemail from someone he doesn’t know. He returns the call, and the person says that she is Maya Fritts, Elena and Ricardo’s daughter. She then invites Antonio to come to her house outside of Bogotá to talk about Ricardo.