The Sound of Things Falling (22 page)

‘But where did it come from?’ said Elaine, pronouncing every syllable. ‘And how can we, when . . .’

‘Too many questions. This is a horse, Elena Fritts, it just goes faster and if it rains you don’t get wet. Come on, let’s go for a spin.’

It was a
1968
Nissan Patrol, as Elaine found out, and the official colour was not white, but ivory. But this information interested her less than the two back doors and the passenger compartment, which was so spacious that a mattress could fit on the floor. Except that wouldn’t be necessary since the jeep had two fold-down cushioned beige benches on which a child could comfortably lie down. The front seat was a sort of big sofa, and Elaine made herself comfortable there, and saw the long, thin gear lever coming up from the floor and its black knob with three speeds marked on it, and she saw the white dashboard and thought it wasn’t white, but ivory, and saw the black steering wheel that Ricardo now started to move, and she grabbed hold of the handrail she found above the glove compartment. The Nissan began to move along the streets of La Dorada and soon out onto the highway. Ricardo turned in the direction of Medellín. ‘Things are going well for me,’ he said then. The Nissan left behind the lights of the town and plunged into the black night. In the beams of the headlights leafy trees sprang up and disappeared, a dog with shining eyes was startled, a puddle of dirty water twinkled. The night was humid and Ricardo opened the vents and a gust of warm air blew into the cabin. ‘Things are going well,’ he repeated. Elaine looked at his profile, saw the intense expression on his face in the darkness: Ricardo was trying to look at her at the same time as keep control of the vehicle on a road full of surprises (there could be other distracted animals, potholes that were more like craters, the odd drunk on a bicycle). ‘Things are going well,’ Ricardo said for the third time. And just when Elaine was thinking:
he’s trying to tell me something
, just when she was starting to get frightened by this revelation that was coming down on top of her as if out of the black night, just when she was about to change the subject out of vertigo or fear, Ricardo spoke in a tone that left no room for doubt: ‘I want to have a baby.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Elaine.

‘Why?’

Elaine’s hands started to wave around. ‘Because having a child costs money. Because I’m a Peace Corps volunteer and make barely enough money to survive on. Because first I have to finish my
voluntariado
.’
Voluntariado
: the word gave her tongue a terribly tough time, like a racetrack full of curves, and for a moment she thought she’d got it wrong. ‘I like this,’ she said then, ‘I like what I’m doing.’

‘You can keep doing it,’ said Ricardo. ‘Afterwards.’

‘And where are we going to live? We can’t have a baby in this house.’

‘Well, we’ll move.’

‘But, with what money?’ said Elaine, and in her voice there was something resembling irritation. She was talking to Ricardo the way one talks to a stubborn child. ‘I don’t know what world you live in,
cariño
, but this isn’t something you improvise.’ She grabbed her long hair with both hands. Then she looked in her bag, took out an elastic band and put her hair up in a ponytail to get it off her sweaty neck. ‘Having a baby is not something you improvise. You don’t. You just don’t.’

Ricardo didn’t answer. A dense silence settled inside the jeep: the Nissan was the only thing audible, the rumbling of its engine, the friction of its wheels against the rough tarmac. Beside the road an immense field opened up then. Elaine thought she saw a couple of cows lying underneath a ceiba tree, the white of their horns breaking the uniform black of the pasture. In the background, above a low mist, the jagged hills stood out against the sky. The Nissan moved over the uneven road, the world was grey and blue outside the illuminated space, and then the highway went into a sort of brown and green tunnel, a corridor of trees whose branches met in the air like a gigantic dome. Elaine would always remember that image, the tropical vegetation completely surrounding them and hiding the sky, because that was the moment Ricardo told her – his eyes fixed on the road, without even glancing at Elaine, even avoiding her gaze – about the business he was doing with Mike Barbieri, about the future these business deals had and the plans this business had allowed him to make. ‘I’m not improvising, Elena Fritts,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought about all this for a long time. It’s all planned out down to the last detail. Now, your not finding out about the plans until just now is another detail, and that’s, well, because you didn’t need to. Now you do. It’s to do with you now too. I’m going to explain the whole thing. And then you can tell me if we can have a baby or not. Deal?’

‘OK,’ said Elaine. ‘Deal.’

‘Good. So let me tell you what’s going on with marijuana.’

And he told her. He told her about the closure, the year before, of the Mexican border (Nixon trying to free the United States from the invasion of weed); he told her about the distributors whose business had been hindered, hundreds of intermediaries whose clients couldn’t wait and started looking in new directions; he told her about Jamaica, one of the alternatives closest to hand the consumers had, but most of all about the Sierra Nevada, the department of La Guajira, the Magdalena Valley. He told her about the people who had come, in a matter of months, from San Francisco, from Miami, from Boston, looking for suitable partners for a business with guaranteed profitability, and they were lucky: they found Mike Barbieri. Elaine thought briefly of the regional coordinator of volunteers for Caldas, an Episcopalian from South Bend, Indiana, who had already vetoed the sex education programmes in rural zones: what would he think if he knew? But Ricardo kept talking. Mike Barbieri, he told her, was much more than a partner: he was a real pioneer. He had taught things to the
campesinos
. Along with some other volunteers with agricultural skills, he’d taught them techniques, where to plant so the mountains protect the plants, what fertilizer to use, how to tell the male plants from the females. And now, well, now he had contacts with
10
or
15
hectares scattered between here and Medellín, and they could produce
400
kilos per harvest. He’d changed those
campesinos
’ lives, there was not the slightest doubt about that, they were earning more than ever and with less work, and all that thanks to weed, thanks to what’s going on with weed. ‘They put it in plastic bags, put the bags on a plane, we provide the simplest thing, a twin-engine Cessna. I get in the plane, take it full of one thing and bring it back with something else. Mike pays about
25
dollars for a kilo, let’s say. Ten thousand in total, and that’s just for the top-quality stuff. No matter how bad it goes, from every trip we come back with sixty, seventy grand, sometimes more. How many trips can be done? You do the maths. What I’m trying to tell you is that they need me. I was in the right place at the right time, and it was a stroke of luck. But it’s not about luck any more. They need me, I’ve become indispensable, and this is only just getting started. I’m the one who knows where to land, where you can take off. I’m the one who knows how to load one of these planes, how much it’ll take, how to distribute the cargo, how to conceal fuel tanks in the fuselage to be able to make longer journeys. And you can’t imagine, Elena Fritts, you just can’t imagine what it’s like to take off at night, the rush of adrenalin you get taking off at night in between the mountain ranges, with the river down below like a stream of molten silver, the Magdalena River on a moonlit night is the most striking thing you can ever see. And you don’t know what it’s like to see it from above and follow it, and come out over the open sea, the infinite space of the sea, when dawn hasn’t broken yet, and watch the sun come up over the sea, the horizon flares up as if it’s on fire, the light so bright it’s blinding. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far, but I know the itinerary now, I know the winds and the distances, I know the plane’s tics like I know this jeep’s. And the others are noticing. That I can take off and land that machine anywhere I want, take off from
2
metres of shoreline and land it in the stony desert of California. I can get it into spaces radar doesn’t reach: doesn’t matter how small they are, my plane fits there. A Cessna or whatever you give me, a Beechcraft, whatever. If there’s a hole between two radar beams, I’ll find it and get my plane in there. I’m good, Elena Fritts, I’m really good. And I’m going to get better every time, with every flight. It almost scares me to think about it.’

One day at the end of September, during a week of unseasonal downpours when the streams flooded and several hamlets were undergoing sanitation emergencies, Elaine attended a departmental meeting of volunteers at the Peace Corps headquarters in Manizales, and was in the middle of a rather agitated debate on the constitution of cooperatives for local artisans when she felt something in her stomach. She didn’t manage to get even as far as the door: the rest of the volunteers saw her crouch down with one hand on the back of a chair and the other holding her hair and vomit a gelatinous yellow mass across the red-tile floor. Her colleagues tried to take her to a doctor, but she resisted successfully (‘There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just a woman thing, leave me alone’), and a few hours later she was sneaking into room
225
of the Escorial Hotel and calling Ricardo to come and pick her up because she didn’t feel able to get on a bus. While she waited for him she went out for a walk near the cathedral and ended up sitting down on a bench in the Plaza Bolívar and watching the passers-by, the children in their school uniforms, old men in their ponchos and vendors with their carts. A young boy with a wooden crate under his arm approached to offer her a shoe-shine, and she agreed wordlessly, to keep her accent from giving her away. She swept the square with her gaze and wondered how many of the people could tell by looking at her that she was American, how many could tell she’d been in Colombia for not much more than a year, how many could tell she’d married a Colombian, how many could tell she was pregnant. Then, with her patent-leather shoes so shiny she could see the Manizales sky reflected in the toes, she went back to the hotel, wrote a letter on the hotel’s letterhead and lay back to think of names. None occurred to her: before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep. Never had she felt so tired as on that afternoon.

When she woke up, Ricardo was at her side, naked and asleep. She hadn’t heard him come in. It was three in the morning: what kind of doorman or night watchman do these hotels have? What right did they have to let a stranger into her room without warning her? How had Ricardo proved that she was his wife, that he had a right to be in her bed? Elaine stood up with her gaze fixed on a point on the wall, so she wouldn’t faint. She leaned out the window, saw a corner of the deserted square, placed a hand on her belly and burst into silent tears. She thought the first thing she’d do when she got back to La Dorada would be to look for someone to take in Truman, because horseback riding would be forbidden for the next few months, maybe for a whole year. Yes, that would be the first thing, and the second would be to start looking seriously for a house, a family house. She wondered if she should advise the volunteer coordinator, or even call Bogotá. She decided it wasn’t necessary, that she’d work as long as her body allowed her to, and then circumstances would dictate her strategy. She looked at Ricardo, who was sleeping open-mouthed. She approached the bed and lifted up the sheet with two fingers. She saw his sleeping penis, the curly hair. Her other hand moved to her sex and then to her belly, as if to protect it.
What’s there to live for?
she thought all of a sudden, and hummed in her head:
Who needs the Peace Corps?
And then she went back to sleep.

Elaine worked until she couldn’t any more. Her belly grew more than expected in the first months, but, apart from the violent tiredness that forced her to take long morning naps, her pregnancy didn’t modify her routines. Other things changed, however. Elaine started to be aware of the heat and humidity as she never had before; in fact, she started to be aware of her body, which was no longer silent and discreet and from one day to the next suddenly insisted on desperately drawing attention to itself, like a problematic teenager or a drunk. Elaine hated the pressure her own weight put on her calves, hated the tension that appeared in her thighs every time she had to climb four measly steps, hated that her small nipples, which she’d always liked, grew bigger and darker all of a sudden. Embarrassed, guilt-ridden, she began to skip meetings saying she wasn’t feeling well, and she’d go to the expensive hotel to spend the afternoon in the pool just for the pleasure of tricking gravity for a few hours, of feeling, afloat in the cool water, that her body was back to being the light thing it had always been before.

Ricardo devoted himself to her: he made only one trip during the entire pregnancy, but it must have been a big shipment, because he came back with a tennis bag – dark blue imitation leather, gold zipper, a white panther leaping up – full of bundles of dollar notes so clean and shiny they looked fake, like the toy money of a board game. Not just the bag was full, but also the racket cover, which in this particular bag was sewn to the outside as a separate compartment. Ricardo locked it up in the tool cupboard he’d built himself and a couple of times a month he’d go up to Bogotá to change some of the dollars into pesos. He showered Elaine with attention. He drove her everywhere and picked her up in the Nissan, he went with her to her doctor’s appointments, he watched her step onto the scales and saw the hesitant needle and wrote down the latest result in a notebook, as if the doctor’s annotation might be imprecise or less reliable. He also went with her to work: if there was a school to be built, he would willingly pick up a trowel and put cement on the bricks, or carry wheelbarrow loads of gravel from one place to another, or fix with his own hands the broken mesh of a sieve; if she had to talk to Acción Comunal people, he would sit at the back of the room and listen to his wife’s ever-improving Spanish and sometimes offer the translation of a word Elaine didn’t remember. On one occasion Elaine had to visit a community leader in Doradal, a man with a luxuriant moustache and shirt open to his belly button who, in spite of his
paisa
snake oil hawker’s patter, couldn’t get a polio-vaccination campaign approved. It was a bureaucratic matter, things were going slowly and the children couldn’t wait. They said goodbye with a feeling of failure. Elaine climbed laboriously into the jeep, leaning on the door handle, grabbing hold of the back of the seat, and was just getting comfortable when Ricardo said, ‘Wait for me a moment, I’ll be right back.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ll be right back. Wait one second.’ And she saw him walk back in and say something to the man in the open shirt, and then they both disappeared behind a door. 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.