The Sound of Things Falling (18 page)

A long time later Elaine would find out that the encounter had not been coincidental in the slightest: Ricardo Laverde had waited for her to come out of the CEUCA and had followed her for hours, spying on her from afar, hiding among the people on the street and behind the signs saying
Calley = Murderer
and
Proud To Be A Draft Dodger
and
Why Are We There, Anyway?
and soaking up all the songs a couple of metres behind the spot Elaine had stationed herself, while rehearsing different versions, various intonations, of the words he eventually said to her: ‘Well now, this is a coincidence, isn’t it? Come on, let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me all your complaints about my parents.’

Away from the Laverde house, far from the carefully arranged porcelain and the gaze of a military officer in oils and the canary’s irritating whistle, her relationship with the son of her hosts was transformed or started from scratch. There, sitting with a hot chocolate in her hands, Elaine told him things and listened to what Ricardo told her. So she found out that Ricardo had graduated from a Jesuit-run high school, that he’d started to study Economics – a sort of bequest or imposition of his father’s – and a few months earlier he’d dropped out to pursue the only thing he was actually interested in: flying planes. ‘My father doesn’t like it, of course,’ Ricardo would tell her much later, when they could confess such things to each other. ‘He’s always been resistant. But my grandfather’s on my side. I can count on my grandfather. And Papá can’t do anything. It’s not easy to contradict a war hero. Even if it was just a little war, an amateur war compared to the one that came before and the one that followed in the world, an inter-war war. But anyway, a war is a war and all wars have their heroes, right? The worth of the actor does not depend on the size of the theatre, my grandfather said. And of course, for me it was lucky. My grandfather supported me when it came to planes. When I started to get interested in learning how to fly, my grandfather was the only one who didn’t call me crazy, immature, deranged. He supported me, supported me openly, even confronting my father, and it’s not easy to say no to a hero of the air war. My father tried, that I remember perfectly, but without success. That happened a few years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. Sitting right here, my grandfather where you are, under the cage, my father where I am. My grandfather passing a hand over Dad’s scar on his face and telling him not to make me catch his fears. A lot of time would have to pass before I understood all the cruelty that gesture contained, a tired old man, although he didn’t seem so, patting the face of a strong young man, although he didn’t seem so. Not just that, of course, but the scar as well, the fact that it was the scar that received the pats . . . You’ll say that it would be quite difficult to pat my father’s face without touching his scar in some way, and yes, that may be, and more so because my grandfather was right-handed. And of course, the pats of a right hand fall on the left cheek of the person receiving them, on my father’s left cheek, his disfigured cheek.’

The conversation about the origin of the disfigured cheek would come much later, when they were already lovers and the curiosity for each other’s bodies had led to a curiosity for each other’s lives. Neither was surprised when they started having sex, which was like a piece of furniture that had been there the whole time without either of them noticing. Every night, after dinner, host and guest would keep talking for a while, then they’d say goodnight and climb the stairs together, and when they got to the second floor Elaine went to the end of the hall and into the bathroom, locked the door and minutes later came back out in a white nightgown and with her hair tied up in a long ponytail. One rainy Friday night – the water was crashing against the skylight and drowning out any other noises – Elaine came out of the bathroom as she always did, but, instead of finding the corridor dark and the glow of the streetlights shining through the skylights of the interior patio, she saw the silhouette of Ricardo Laverde leaning against the banister. Against the light she couldn’t see his face very well, but Elaine read the desire in his pose and in his tone of voice.

‘Are you going to sleep?’ Ricardo asked.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Come in and tell me about planes.’

It was cold, the wood of the bed creaked with every single movement of their bodies, and also it was a little girl’s bed, too narrow and short for these games, so Elaine ended up pulling off the bedspread with one tug and spreading it out on top of the carpet, beside her felt slippers. There, on the woollen bedspread, freezing to death, they had a quick and to-the-point encounter. Elaine thought her breasts seemed smaller in Ricardo Laverde’s hands, but she didn’t tell him that. She put her nightgown back on to go out to the bathroom, and there, sitting on the toilet, thought she’d give Ricardo time to go back to his own room. She also thought she’d enjoyed being with him, that she’d do it again if the occasion arose, and that what had just happened must be forbidden in the statutes of the Peace Corps. She washed in the bidet, looked in the mirror and smiled, turned off the bathroom light before opening the door, and returning to her bedroom in the dark, walking slowly so she wouldn’t trip, she found that Ricardo had not left, but had rather remade the bed and was waiting for her there, lying on his side, resting on his elbow, leaning his head on his hand like the leading man of some terrible Hollywood movie.

‘I want to sleep alone,’ said Elaine.

‘I don’t want to sleep, I want to talk,’ he said.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘And what shall we talk about?’

‘Whatever you want, Elena Fritts. You suggest a topic and I’ll follow.’

They talked about everything except themselves. They were naked and Ricardo let his hand wander over Elaine’s belly, his fingers through her straight hair, and they talked of intentions and projects, convinced, as only new lovers can be, that saying what you wanted was the same as saying who you were. Elaine talked about her mission in the world, about youth as a weapon of progress, of the obligation to confront worldly powers. And she asked Ricardo questions: Did he like being Colombian? Would he like to live in another part of the world? Did he hate the United States? Had he read any of the New Journalists? But it took another seven couplings over the next two weeks before Elaine dared to ask the question that had intrigued her since the first day: ‘What happened to your father’s face?’ ‘How prudent the señorita is,’ said Ricardo. ‘It’s never taken anybody so long to ask me that question.’ They were going up to Monserrate in the cable car when Elaine asked: Ricardo had waited for her to come out of the CEUCA and told her it was time for some tourism, that a person couldn’t come to Colombia just to work, that she should stop behaving like such a Protestant, for the love of God. And now Elaine was holding onto Ricardo (her head glued to his chest, her hands clenched around his elbows) every time a gust of wind shook the cabin on its cable and the tourists all gasped at the same time. And over the course of the afternoon, suspended in the air or sitting in the pews of the church, wandering in circles around the gardens of the sanctuary or seeing Bogotá from an altitude of
3
,
000
metres, Elaine began to listen to the story of an aerial exhibition in a year as distant as
1938
, she heard talk of pilots and acrobatics and of an accident and the half a hundred dead the accident left. And when she woke up the next morning a package was waiting for her next to her recently served breakfast. Elaine tore off the wrapping paper and found a magazine in Spanish with a leather bookmark stuck between the pages. She started to think the bookmark was the gift, but then she opened the magazine and saw the surname of her hosts and a note from Ricardo:
So you’ll understand
.

Elaine devoted herself to understanding. She asked questions and Ricardo answered them. His father’s burnt face, Ricardo explained over the course of several conversations, that map of skin darker and rougher and more jagged than the desert of Villa de Leyva, had formed part of the landscape that surrounded him his whole life; but not even as a child, when one asks everything and assumes nothing, did Ricardo Laverde take an interest in the causes of what he saw, the difference between his father’s face and everyone else’s. Although it was also possible (Laverde said) that his family hadn’t even given him time to feel that curiosity, for the tale of the accident at Santa Ana had floated among them ever since it happened and never evaporated, being repeated in the most diverse situations and thanks to the widest range of narrators, and Laverde remembered versions heard at Christmas novenas, versions from Friday-afternoon tea parties and others on Sundays at the football stadium, versions on the way to bed in the evening and others on the way to school in the mornings. They talked about the accident, yes, and they did so in every tone of voice and with all sorts of intentions, to demonstrate that planes were dangerous, unpredictable things like rabid dogs (according to his father), or that planes were like Greek gods, always putting people in their place and never tolerating men’s arrogance (according to his grandfather). And many years later he, Ricardo Laverde, would tell of the accident as well, adorning and adulterating it until he realized that it wasn’t necessary. At school, for example, telling the origins of his father’s burnt face was the best way to capture his classmates’ attention. ‘I tried with my grandfather’s war exploits,’ said Laverde. ‘Then I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else’s misery.’ And that’s what he would remember, the faces of his classmates when he told them about the accident at Santa Ana and then showed them pictures of his father and his scarred face so they’d see he wasn’t lying.

‘Now I’m sure,’ said Laverde. ‘If nowadays I want to be a pilot, if there’s nothing else that interests me in the world, it’s Santa Ana’s fault. If I end up killing myself in a plane, it’ll be Santa Ana’s fault.’

That story is to blame, said Laverde. It was that story’s fault that he’d accepted his grandfather’s first invitations. It was that story’s fault that he’d started to go to the runways of the Guaymaral Aeroclub to fly with the heroic veteran and to feel alive, more alive than ever. He walked between the Canadian Sabres and managed to get to sit in the cockpits (his surname opened them all), and then managed (again his surname) to get the best flying instructors at the Aeroclub to devote more hours than they’d been paid for to him: the story of Santa Ana was to blame for all that. He would never feel so much like a dauphin as he’d felt during those times, would never again know what it’s like to have a little inherited power. ‘I’ve made good use of it, Elena, I swear,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned well, been a good student.’ His grandfather always said he had the makings of a good pilot. His instructors were veterans too: mostly of the war with Peru, but some who’d flown in Korea and been decorated by the
gringos
, or at least that’s what was said. And they all agreed that this boy was good, that he had a rare instinct and golden hands and, what was most important, that the planes respected him. And the planes were never wrong.

‘And so that’s how it’s been till now,’ said Laverde. ‘It kills my father, but I’m now the boss of my own life, with one hundred flying hours you become boss of your own life. He spends his days guessing the future, but it’s other people’s future, Elena, my father doesn’t know what’s in mine, and his formulas and statistics can’t tell him either. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to find out, and only now, in the last few days, have I come to understand the relationship between my life and my dad’s face, between the accident at Santa Ana and this person you see before you, who is going to do great things in life, a grandson of a hero. I’m going to get out of this mediocre life, Elena Fritts. I’m not afraid, I’m going to restore the name Laverde to its rightful place in aviation history. I’m going to be better than Captain Abadía and my family’s going to be proud of me. I’m going to leave this mediocre life and get out of this house where we suffer every time another family invites us for dinner because we’ll have to invite them over in return. I’m going to stop counting centavos as my mother does every morning. I’m not going to have to offer a bed to a
gringo
so my family will have enough to eat, sorry, no offence, I didn’t mean to offend you. What do you want, Elena Fritts, I’m the grandson of a hero, I’m made for better things. Great things, that’s how it is, I say it and I mean it. No matter whether people like it or not.’

They were on their way down in the cable car, the same way they’d gone up. The sun was setting, and the sky over Bogotá had turned into a gigantic violet blanket. Below them, in the fading light, the pilgrims who’d walked up and were walking down looked like coloured drawing pins on the stone steps. ‘What strange light this city has,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘You close your eyes for a second and it’s already night by the time you open them.’ A gust of wind shook the cabin, but this time the tourists didn’t cry out. It was cold. The wind sighed as it blew through the cabin. Elaine, her arm around Ricardo Laverde, leaning on the horizontal bar that protected the window, found herself suddenly in the dark. The heads of the other passengers were vague silhouettes against the background of the sky, black on black. Ricardo’s breathing reached her in waves, a smell of tobacco and clean water, and there, floating over the eastern hills, watching the city light itself up for the night, Elaine wished the cabin would never reach the bottom. She thought, perhaps for the first time, that a person like her could live in a country like this. In more than one sense, she thought, this country was still just starting, barely discovering its place in the world, and she wanted to be part of that discovery.