The Sound of Things Falling

I didn’t think so at the time, but those crimes […] had provided the backbone of my life or punctuated it like the unexpected visits of a distant relative. I was fourteen years old that afternoon in 1984 when Pablo Escobar killed or ordered the killing of his most illustrious pursuer, the Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla (two hit men on a motorcycle, a curve on 127th Street). I was sixteen when Escobar killed or ordered the killing of Guillermo Cano, publisher of El Espectador (a few steps away from the newspaper’s offices, the assassin put eight bullets in his chest). […] And shortly afterward there was the Avianca plane, a Boeing 727-21 that Escobar had blown up in midair—somewhere in the air between Bogotá and Cali—to kill a politician who wasn’t even on board.

This man has not always been this man. This man used to be another man.

Laverde handed her the cassette like a soldier surrendering his weapon.

There, in the hammock, while I read [Elena’s letters], I felt other things, some of them inexplicable and an especially confusing one: the discomfort of knowing that this story in which my name did not appear spoke of me in each and every one of its lines. All this I felt, and in the end all my feelings were reduced to a tremendous solitude, a solitude without a visible cause and therefore without remedy. The solitude of a child.

Four days later, when Elaine got the news that the campaign had been approved in record time, an image came into Elaine’s head: that of Ricardo reaching into his pocket, taking out an incentive for public functionaries, and promising more. She could have confirmed her suspicions, confronted Ricardo and demanded a confession, but she decided not to. The objective, after all, had been achieved. Children, think of the children. Children were what mattered.

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.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has. When it arrives we receive it without too much surprise, for no one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions.

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 and the bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequences).

“[Elena] called […] and tried to justify what my dad had done, said that in those days everything was different, the world of drug trafficking, all that. That they were a bunch of innocents, that’s what she told me. Not that they were innocent, no, that they were innocents, I’m not sure if you realize what a distance there is between the two concepts. Anyway, it’s the same. As if innocence might exist in this country of ours . . .”

I’d fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde’s fall, human lives don’t have these technological luxuries to fall back on.