The Sound of Things Falling

The first hippopotamus, a male the color of black pearls, weighing a ton and a half, was shot dead in the middle of 2009. He’d escaped two years before from Pablo Escobar’s old zoo in the Magdalena Valley, and during that time of freedom had destroyed crops, invaded drinking troughs, terrified fishermen, and even attacked the breeding bulls at a cattle ranch. The marksmen who finally caught up with him shot him once in the head and again in the heart (with .375-caliber bullets, since hippopotamus skin is thick); they posed with the dead body, the great dark, wrinkled mass, a recently fallen meteorite; and there, in front of the first cameras and onlookers, beneath a ceiba tree that protected them from the harsh sun, explained that the weight of the animal would prevent them from transporting him whole, and they immediately began carving him up.

I also learned that the hippopotamus had not escaped alone: at the time of his flight he’d been accompanied by his mate and their baby—or what, in the sentimental version of the less scrupulous newspapers, were his mate and their baby—whose whereabouts were now unknown, and the search for whom immediately took on a flavor of media tragedy, the persecution of innocent creatures by a heartless system.

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.

Emotional intimacy had never been easy for me, much less with other men. Everything Laverde was going to tell me then, I thought, he could tell me the next day in the open air or in public places, without any vacuous camaraderie or tears on my shoulder, without any superficial masculine solidarity. The world’s not going to end tomorrow, I thought. Nor is Laverde going to forget his life story.

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

Aura tried to calm me down. She stared at me, I could feel her looking at me. “It’s nothing,” I told her. And only at the end of the night would I manage to sleep for a few hours, coiled up like a dog frightened by fireworks.

“There, there she is. Did you feel?” “But what does it feel like?” I asked. “I don’t know, like a butterfly, like tiny wings brushing against your skin. I don’t know if you understand.” And I told her I did, that I understood perfectly, although it was a lie. I didn’t feel anything: I was distracted: the fear distracted me.

The doctor kept talking, there was no way to make him stop talking. Fear was the main ailment of Bogotanos of my generation, he told me. My situation, he told me, was not at all unusual: it would eventually pass, as it had passed for all the others who had visited his office. All this he told me. He never managed to comprehend that I wasn’t interested in the rational explanation or much less the statistical aspect of these violent palpitations, or the instantaneous sweating that in another context would have been comical, but in the magic words that would make the sweating and palpitations disappear, the mantra that would allow me to sleep through the night.

“Justice,” I began to say, “has a double evolutionary base: the struggle of the individual to have his rights respected and that of the state to impose, among its associates, the necessary order.” “So,” the student asked me, “could we say that the man who reacts, feeling himself threatened or infringed, is the true creator of the law?” and I was going to tell him of the time when all law was incorporated within religion, those remote times when distinctions between morals and hygiene, public and private, were still nonexistent, but I didn’t manage to do so. I covered my eyes with my tie and burst into tears.

“Were you waiting for me to get home?” she insisted. “Were you worried?” “I was preparing my class,” I said, looking her in the eye. “It seems I can’t even do that now.” “You were worried,” she said. “That’s why you stayed up.” And then: “Antonio, Bogotá is not a war zone. There aren’t bullets floating around out there, the same thing’s not going to happen to all of us.” You know nothing, I wanted to tell her, you grew up elsewhere. There is no common ground between us, I wanted to tell her as well, there’s no way for you to understand, nobody’s going to explain it to you, I can’t explain it to you. But those words didn’t come out of my mouth.

There is a faltering scream, or something that sounds like a scream. There is a sound that I cannot or have never been able to identify: a sound that’s not human or is more than human, the sound of lives being extinguished but also the sound of material things breaking. It’s the sound of things falling from on high, an interrupted and somehow also eternal sound, a sound that didn’t ever end, that kept ringing in my head from that very afternoon and still shows no sign of wanting to leave it, that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook.

Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather sympathy we learn to feel for the pain of others.

Her face was like a party that everyone had left.

I started to talk, I told Maya all that I knew and thought I knew about Ricardo Laverde, all that I remembered and what I feared I’d forgotten, all that Laverde had told me and also all that I’d found out after his death, and that’s how we stayed until after midnight, each wrapped in a hammock, each scrutinizing the roof where the bats moved, filling with words the silence of the warm night, but without ever looking at each other, like a priest and sinner in the sacrament of confession.

“The thing I don’t want is . . .” said Aura. “I don’t want us to go on like this, Antonio.” Before I could answer, she added: “It’s not good for anyone. It’s not good for Leticia, it’s not good for anyone.”

So that was it. “I get it now,” I said. “So it’s my fault.”

“Nobody said anything about anyone’s fault.”

“It’s my fault Leticia’s afraid of the hallway.”

“Nobody said that.”

“Oh, please, what nonsense. As if fear was hereditary.”

“Not hereditary,” said Aura, “contagious.”

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.

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).

“Living like that, always with the possibility that people close to us might be killed, always having to reassure our loved ones so they don’t think we are among the dead. Our lives were conducted inside houses, remember. We avoided public places. Houses of friends, of friends of friends, distant acquaintances—any house was better than a public place. Well, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Maybe in our house it was different. We were two women on our own, after all. Maybe it wasn’t like that for you.”

“It was exactly like that,” I said.

She turned to look at me. “Really?”

“Really.”

“So you understand me, then,” said Maya.

And I said a couple of words whose scope I didn’t manage to fully determine: “I understand you perfectly.”

“[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.

I thought of what I’d say if Aura called back. Would I ask her where she was, if I could go and pick her up or if I had the right to hope she’d come back? Would I keep quiet so she could realize she’d made a mistake abandoning our life? Or would I try to convince her, tell her that together we could defend ourselves better from the evil of the world, or that the world was too risky a place to be wandering on our own, without anyone waiting for us at home, who worries about us when we don’t show up and who can go out to look for us?