The Sound of Things Falling

2. Never One of My Dead

I know, although I don’t remember, that the bullet passed through my gut without touching any organs but burning nerves and tendons and finally lodging itself in my hip bone a few inches from my spinal column. I know I lost a lot of blood and that, in spite of the supposed universality of my blood type, the stocks of it were low in the San José Hospital at the time, or its demand on the part of Bogotá’s afflicted society was too high, and my father and my sister had to donate some to save my life. I know I was lucky. Everyone told me so as soon as it was possible, and besides, I know, I know in an instinctive way. The notion of my luck, this I remember, was one of the first manifestations of my recovered consciousness. I don’t remember, however, the three days of surgery: they have disappeared completely, obliterated by the intermittent anaesthesia. I don’t remember the hallucinations, but I do remember that I had them; I don’t remember having fallen out of bed due to the abrupt movements that one of them provoked, and, although I don’t remember that they tied me down in the bed to prevent that from happening again, I do remember quite well the violent claustrophobia, the terrible awareness of my vulnerability. I remember the fever, the sweat that soaked my whole body at night and obliged the nurses to change the sheets, the damage I did to my throat and the corners of my very dry lips when I tried to yank out the respirator tube; I remember the sound of my own voice when I screamed and I know, although I don’t remember this either, that my screams disturbed the rest of the patients on the floor. The patients or their relatives complained, the nurses ended up moving me to another room, and in this new room, during a brief moment of lucidity, I asked about Ricardo Laverde and found out (I don’t remember from whom) that he had died. I don’t think I felt sad, or maybe I’m confusing, and always confused, the sadness at the news with the tears produced by pain, and anyway I know that there, busy as I was with the task of surviving, seeing the gravity of my own situation in the tattered expressions of those around me, I couldn’t have thought much about the dead man. I don’t remember, in any case, having blamed him for what had happened to me.

I did later. I cursed Ricardo Laverde, cursed the moment we met, and didn’t for a second even consider that Laverde might not have been directly responsible for my misfortune. I was glad he’d died: I hoped, as compensation for my own pain, that he’d had a painful death. Between the mists of my faltering consciousness I responded in monosyllables to my parents’ questions. You met him at the billiard club? Yes. You never knew what he did, if he was up to something fishy? No. Why was he killed? Don’t know. Why was he killed, Antonio? I don’t know, I don’t know. Antonio, why was he killed? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. The question was repeated insistently and my answer was always the same, and it soon became obvious that the question didn’t require an answer: it was more like a lament. The same night Ricardo Laverde was gunned down another sixteen murders were committed in diverse parts of the city and using diverse methods, and the ones that have stuck in my mind are that of Neftalí Gutiérrez, a taxi driver, beaten to death with a wheel wrench, and that of Jairo Alejandro Niño, an automotive mechanic, who received nine machete blows in a vacant lot on the west side. The Laverde crime was one of many, and it was almost arrogant or pretentious to believe that we were due the luxury of an answer.

‘But what had he done to get himself killed?’ my father asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘He hadn’t done anything.’

‘He must’ve done something,’ he’d say.

‘But what does it matter now,’ my mother would say.

‘Well, yes,’ said my father. ‘What does it matter now.’

As I began surfacing, my hatred for Laverde gave way to a hatred for my own body and what my body was feeling. And that hatred that had myself as its object transformed into a hatred for everyone else, and one day I decided I didn’t want to see anybody, and I expelled my family from the hospital and forbade them from coming back to see me until my situation improved. ‘But we worry,’ said my mother, ‘we want to take care of you.’ ‘But I don’t. I don’t want you to take care of me. I don’t want anyone taking care of me. I want you all to go.’ ‘What if you need something? What if we can help you and we’re not here?’ ‘I don’t need anything. I need to be alone. I want to be alone.’ I want to sample silence, I thought then: a line from León de Greiff, another of the poets I used to listen to at Silva’s house (poetry accosts us at the most unexpected moments). Quiero catar silencio, non curo de compaña, I want to sample silence, I won’t be cured by companionship. Leave me alone. Yes, that’s what I said to my parents. Leave me alone.

A doctor came to explain the uses of the trigger I had in my hand: when I felt too much pain, he told me, I could press the button, and a spurt of intravenous morphine would soothe me immediately. But there were limits. The first day I used up my daily dose in a third of the time (I pressed the button like a child with a new video game), and the hours that followed are, in my memory, the closest I’ve been to hell. I’m telling this because that’s how, between the hallucinations of the pain and those of the morphine, the days of my recovery went by. I fell asleep at any moment, without any apparent routine, like prisoners in stories; I opened my eyes to a landscape that was always strange, the most curious characteristic of which was that it never became familiar, I always seemed to be seeing it for the first time. At some moment I can’t manage to pinpoint, Aura appeared in that landscape, sitting there on the brown sofa when I opened my eyes, looking at me with genuine pity. It was a new sensation (or it was new to be looked at and cared for by a woman who was expecting my child), but I don’t recall having thought so at the time.

The nights. I remember the nights. The fear of the darkness began in those last days of my hospitalization, and only disappeared a year later: at six thirty in the evening, when night falls suddenly in Bogotá, my heart began to beat furiously, and at first it took the dialectic efforts of several doctors to convince me that I wasn’t about to die of a heart attack. The long Bogotá night — it always lasts more than eleven hours, no matter the time of year and much less the mental state of those who suffer it — seemed almost unendurable to me in the hospital, with its nocturnal life marked by the permanently illuminated white corridors, by the neon gloom of the white rooms; but in the bedroom of my apartment the darkness was total, for the streetlights didn’t reach my tenth floor, and the terror I felt at just imagining myself waking up in the dark obliged me to sleep with the light on, as I did when I was little. Aura put up with the illuminated nights better than I would have expected, sometimes resorting to those masks they give you on planes to create a personal darkness, sometimes giving up and turning on the television to watch an infomercial and amuse herself with machines that chop all kinds of fruit and lotions that dissolve all body fat. Her own body, of course, was transforming; a little girl called Leticia was growing in there, but I wasn’t capable of giving her the attention she deserved. I was woken up on several nights by an absurd nightmare: I’d gone back to live at my parents’ house, but with Aura, and suddenly the gas stove blew up and the whole family was dying and I realized there was nothing I could do. And, no matter what time it was, I ended up phoning my old house, just to make sure nothing had happened in reality and that the dream was just a dream. 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, wondering why Leticia wasn’t in the dream, what had Leticia done to be banished from the dream.

In my memory, the months that followed were a time of large fears and small discomforts. On the street I was assailed by the unmistakable certainty I was being watched; the internal injuries caused by the bullet wound forced me to use crutches for several months. A pain I’d never felt before appeared in my left leg, similar to what people feel when they’re about to have an appendicitis attack. The doctors told me how slowly nerves grow and the time it takes to recover a certain degree of autonomy, and I listened to them without understanding, or without understanding that they were talking about me; somewhere else, far from where I was, Aura listened to explanations from other doctors on very different subjects, and took folic acid tablets and received cortisone injections to help the baby’s lungs mature (in Aura’s family there was a history of premature deliveries). Her body was changing, but I didn’t notice. Aura put my hand on one side of her prominent belly button. ‘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. I imagined the faces of the murderers, hidden behind the visors; the blast of the shots and the continuous whistle in my throbbing eardrums, the sudden apparition of blood. Not even now, as I write, can I manage to remember those details without the same cold fear easing into my body. The fear, in the fantastic language of the therapist who treated me after the first problems, was called post-traumatic stress, and according to him had a lot to do with the era of bombs that had ravaged us a few years earlier. ‘So don’t worry if you have problems of an intimate nature,’ the man told me (he spoke those words, intimate nature). I didn’t say anything to that. ‘Your body is fighting something serious,’ the doctor continued. ‘It has to concentrate on this and eliminate what isn’t strictly necessary. The libido is the first to go, you see? So don’t worry. Any dysfunction is normal.’ I didn’t respond this time either. Dysfunction: the word seemed ugly to me, its sounds seemed to clash, disfiguring the atmosphere, and I thought I wouldn’t talk about the matter with Aura. 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.

I got used to my nocturnal routines: after a noise or the illusion of a noise had frightened me out of sleep (and left me at the mercy of the pain in my leg), I reached for my crutches, went to the living room, sat in the recliner and stayed there, watching the movements of the night on the hills around Bogotá, the green and red lights of planes that could be seen when the sky was clear, the dew accumulating on the windows like a white shadow when the temperature dropped in the early hours. It wasn’t only my nights that were disturbed but my waking hours as well. Months after what happened to Laverde, a backfiring exhaust pipe, a slamming door, or even a heavy book falling in a certain way onto a certain surface would be enough to set me off on an attack of anxiety and paranoia. At any moment, for no discernible reason, I might start to weep inconsolably. The tears would come upon me with no warning: at the dining-room table, in front of my parents or Aura, or with friends, and the feeling of being ill was joined by embarrassment. At first there was always someone who leapt up to hug me, there were the words one uses to comfort a child: ‘It’s all over now, Antonio, there there.’ With time people, my people, got used to these bursts of tears, and the consoling words stopped, and the hugs disappeared, and the embarrassment was then greater, because it was obvious that I, rather than moving them to pity, seemed ridiculous. With strangers, who owed me no loyalty or compassion whatsoever, it was worse. During one of the first classes I taught after going back to work, a student asked me a question about Von Ihering’s theories. ‘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 non-existent, but I didn’t manage to do so. I covered my eyes with my tie and burst into tears. The class was adjourned. On the way out, I heard the student say, ‘Poor guy. He’s not going to make it.’

It wasn’t the last time I heard that diagnosis. One night Aura came home late from a get-together with her girlfriends that in my city is called by its English name, a baby shower, in which gifts rain down on the future mother. She slipped in quietly, undoubtedly hoping not to wake me, but I was still up and writing notes on Von Ihering’s ideas, which had thrown me into crisis. ‘Why don’t you try to sleep,’ she said, but it wasn’t a question. ‘I’m working,’ I told her, ‘I’ll go to bed as soon as I finish.’ I remember her then taking off her thin overcoat (no, it wasn’t an overcoat, more like a trench coat), putting it over the back of the wicker chair, leaning on the doorframe with a hand resting on her enormous belly and running the other one through her hair, all a sort of elaborate prelude people enact when they don’t want to say what they’re going to say, when they hope some miracle is going to free them of that obligation. ‘They’re talking about us,’ said Aura.

‘Who?’

‘At the university. I don’t know, people, students.’

‘Professors?’

‘I don’t know. The students at least. Come to bed and I’ll tell you.’

‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow. I have to work now.’

‘It’s after midnight,’ said Aura. ‘We’re both tired. You’re tired.’

‘I have work to do. I have to prepare this class.’

‘But you’re tired. And you don’t sleep, and not sleeping is not a good way to prepare for class either.’ She paused, looked at me in the yellow dining-room light and said, ‘You didn’t go out today, did you?’

I didn’t answer.

‘You haven’t showered,’ she continued. ‘You didn’t get dressed all day. You’ve spent the whole day stuck in here. People say the accident changed you, Antonio, and I tell them of course it did, not to be idiots, how could it not change you. But I don’t like what I’m seeing, if you want me to tell you the truth.’

‘Well don’t,’ I barked at her. ‘Nobody’s asked you to.’

The conversation could have ended there, but Aura noticed something, I saw on her face all the movements of someone just realizing something, and asked me one question, ‘Were you waiting for me?’

I didn’t answer this time either. ‘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.

‘Nobody thinks anything’s going to happen to all of us,’ I told her instead. I was surprised that it sounded so loud when it hadn’t been my intention to raise my voice. ‘Nobody was worried because you weren’t home yet. Nobody thinks you’re going to get blown up by a bomb like the one at Tres Elefantes, or the bomb at DAS, because you don’t work at DAS, or the bomb at Centro 93, because you never shop at Centro 93. Besides, that era is over, isn’t it? So nobody thinks that’s going to happen to you, Aura, we’d be very unlucky, wouldn’t we? And we’re not unlucky, are we?’

‘Don’t be like that,’ said Aura. ‘I. .’

‘I am preparing my class,’ I cut her off, ‘is it too much to ask you to respect that? Instead of talking bollocks at two in the morning, is it too much to ask that you go to bed and stop pissing me off and let me finish this fucking thing?’

As far as I remember, she didn’t start to move towards my bedroom at that moment, but went first to the kitchen, and I heard the fridge opening and closing and then a door, the door of one of those cupboards that close almost by themselves if you give them a tiny nudge. And in this series of domestic sounds (in which I could follow Aura’s movements, imagine them one by one) there was an annoying familiarity, a sort of irritating intimacy, as if Aura, instead of having taken care of me for weeks and supervised my recovery, had invaded my space without any authorization whatsoever. I saw her leave the kitchen with a glass in her hand: it was some intensely coloured liquid, one of those fizzy drinks that she liked and I didn’t. ‘Do you know how much she weighs?’ she asked me.

‘Who?’

‘Leticia,’ she said. ‘I got the test results, the baby’s enormous. If she hasn’t been born in a week, we’re going to schedule a Caesarean.’

‘In a week,’ I said.

‘The tests were all positive,’ said Aura.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Don’t you want to know how much she weighs?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ I asked.

I remember her standing still in the middle of the living room, the same distance from the kitchen door as from the threshold to the hallway, in a sort of no man’s land. ‘Antonio,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with worry. But yours is beginning to be unhealthy. You’re sick with worry. And that makes me worry.’ She left the drink she’d just poured herself on the dining-room table and locked herself in the bathroom. I heard her turn on the tap to fill the bathtub; I imagined her crying as she did so, covering her sobs with the sound of running water. When I got into bed, quite a while later, Aura was still in the tub, that place where her belly was not a burden, that happy, weightless world. I fell asleep straight away and the next morning left while she was still sleeping. I thought, I confess, that Aura wasn’t really asleep, but pretending to be so she wouldn’t have to say goodbye to me. I thought she was hating me at that moment. I thought, with something very closely resembling fear, that her hatred was justified.

I arrived at the university a few minutes before seven. On my shoulders and in my eyes I could feel the weight of the night, the few hours of sleep. I was in the habit of waiting outside the lecture hall until the students arrived, leaning on the stone banisters of the former cloister, and going in only when it was obvious that the majority of the students were already present; that morning, perhaps due to the weariness I felt in my abdomen, perhaps because when I was seated the crutches were less noticeable, I decided to wait for them sitting down. But I didn’t even manage to get close to my chair: a drawing caught my attention from the blackboard, and turning my head I found myself in front of two stick figures in obscene positions. His penis was as long as his arm; her face had no features, it was just a chalk circle with long hair. Beneath the drawing was a printed caption:

Professor Yammara introduces her to law.

I felt faint, but I don’t think anyone noticed. ‘Who did this?’ I said out loud, but I don’t remember my voice coming out as loud as I’d intended. My students’ faces were blank: they’d been emptied of all content; they were chalk circles like the woman on the blackboard. I began to walk towards the steps, as fast as my hobbled gait would allow, and as I started down them, just as I was passing the drawing of Francisco José de Caldas, I completely lost control. Legend has it that Caldas, one of the precursors of Colombian independence, was descending those stairs on his way to the scaffold when he bent down to pick up a piece of charcoal, and his executioners saw him draw on the whitewashed wall an oval crossed by a line: a long black bisected O, which patriots like to interpret as Oh, long and dark departure. Beside this implausible and absurd and undoubtedly apocryphal hieroglyphic I passed with my heart pounding and my hands, pale and sweaty, closed tightly around the grips of my crutches. My tie was torturing my neck. I left the university and kept walking, paying little attention to what streets I was crossing or the people I brushed past, until my arms started to ache. At the north corner of Santander Park, the mime who’s always there began to follow me, to imitate my awkward gait and my clumsy movements, and even my panting. He wore a one-piece black suit covered in buttons, his face painted white but no other make-up of any other colour, and he moved his arms in the air with such talent that even I seemed to suddenly see his fictitious crutches. There, while that failed good actor made fun of me and provoked the laughter of passers-by, I thought for the first time that my life was falling apart, and that Leticia, ignorant little girl, could not have chosen a worse moment to come into the world.

Leticia was born one August morning. We had spent the night at the clinic, preparing for the surgery, and in the atmosphere of the room — Aura in the bed, me on the companion’s sofa — there was a sort of macabre inversion of another room, of another time. When the nurses came to take her, Aura was already giddy with anaesthetic, and the last thing she said to me was, ‘I think it was O. J. Simpson’s glove.’ I would have liked to hold her hand, not to have crutches and be able to hold her hand, and I told her so, but she was already unconscious. I went along beside her down corridors and in lifts while the nurses told me to relax, Papá, that everything was going to be fine, and I wondered what right these women had to call me Papá, much less to give me their opinion on the future. Later, in front of the huge swinging doors of the operating theatre, they showed me to a waiting room that was more like a way station with three chairs and a table with magazines on it. I left my crutches leaning in a corner, by the photograph or rather the poster of a pink baby smiling toothlessly, hugging a giant sunflower, against a blue sky in the background. I opened an old magazine, tried to distract myself with a crossword puzzle: Threshing place. Brother of Onan. People slow to act, especially by pretence. But I could only think of the woman who was sleeping inside there while a scalpel opened her skin and her flesh, of the gloved hands that were going to reach inside her body and take my daughter out. May those hands be careful ones, I thought, let them move with dexterity, and not touch what they shouldn’t touch. Let them not hurt you, Leticia, and don’t be scared, because there’s nothing to fear. I was on my feet when a young man came out and, without taking his mask off, told me, ‘Both your princesses are perfectly fine.’ I didn’t know when I had stood up, and my leg had started to ache, so I sat back down. I held my hands to my face out of shame, nobody likes to make a show of his tears. People slow to act, I thought, especially by pretence. And later, when I saw Leticia in a sort of bluish, translucent pool, when I saw her finally asleep and well wrapped up in little white blankets that even from a distance looked warm, I thought again of that ridiculous phrase. I concentrated on Leticia. From too far away I saw her eyes without lashes, I saw the tiniest mouth I’d ever seen, and regretted that they’d put her down with her hands hidden, because nothing seemed more urgent to me at that moment than seeing my daughter’s hands. I knew I’d never love anyone like I loved Leticia in that instant, that nobody would ever be what, there and then, that new arrival, that complete stranger was to me.

I did not set foot on 14th Street again, much less in the billiard club (I stopped playing entirely: standing up for too long exacerbated the pain in my leg to the point of making it unbearable). So I lost one part of the city; or, to put it a better way, a part of my city was stolen from me. I imagined a city in which the streets, the pavements gradually closed themselves off to us, like the rooms of the house in Julio Cortázar’s story, until eventually expelling us. ‘We were fine, and little by little we began to live unthinkingly,’ says the brother in that story after a mysterious presence has taken over another part of the house. And he adds, ‘You can live without thinking.’ It’s true: you can. After 14th Street was stolen from me — and after months of physiotherapy, of enduring light-headedness and my stomach destroyed by medication — I began to despise the city, to fear it, to feel threatened by it. The world seemed to me a closed place, or my life a walled-in life; the doctor talked to me about my fear of going out on the street, he proffered the word agoraphobia as if it were a delicate object that mustn’t be allowed to fall, and it was hard for me to explain that it was just the opposite, a violent claustrophobia was what was tormenting me. One day, during a session I don’t remember anything else about, that doctor recommended I try a kind of personal therapy that, according to him, had worked well for several of his patients.

‘Do you keep a diary, Antonio?’

I said no, that diaries had always seemed ridiculous to me, a vanity or an anachronism: the fiction that our life matters.

He replied, ‘Well start one. I’m not suggesting a diary-diary, but a notebook to ask yourself questions.’

‘Questions,’ I repeated. ‘Like what?’

‘Like, for example: what dangers are real in Bogotá? What are the chances of what happened to you happening again? If you want I could pass you some statistics. Questions, Antonio, questions. Why what happened to you happened to you, and whose fault it was, if it was yours or not. If this would have happened to you in another country. If this would have happened to you in another time. If these questions have any pertinence. It’s important to distinguish the pertinent questions from the ones that are not, Antonio, and one way to do that is to put them down in writing. When you’ve decided which ones are pertinent and which are silly attempts to find an explanation for what can’t be explained, ask yourself other questions: how to get better, how to forget without kidding yourself, how to go back to having a life, to be good to the people who love you. What to do to not be afraid, or to have a reasonable amount of fear, like everyone has. What to do to carry on, Antonio. Lots of them will be things that have occurred to you before, sure, but a person sees the questions on paper and it’s quite different. A diary. Keep one for the next two weeks and then we’ll talk.’

It seemed an inane recommendation to me, more suited to a self-help book than to a professional with grey hair at his temples, headed notepaper on his desk and diplomas in several languages on his wall. I didn’t say so to him, of course, nor was it necessary, because I soon saw him stand up and walk over to his bookshelves (the books leather-bound and homogeneous, the family photos, a childish drawing framed and signed illegibly). ‘You’re not going to do any such thing, I can see that,’ he said as he opened a drawer. ‘You think all these things I’m saying are stupid. Well, I suppose they might be. But do me a favour, take this.’ He pulled a spiral notebook out of the drawer, like the ones I’d used in college, with those ridiculous covers that looked like denim; he tore four, five or six pages out of the front and looked at the last page, to make sure there weren’t any notes there; he handed it to me, or rather he put it on the desk, in front of me. I picked it up and, for something to do, opened it and flipped through it as if it were a novel. The paper in the notebook was squared: I always hated grid-ruled notebooks. On the first page I could make out the pressure of the writing from the torn-out page, those phantom words. A date, an underlined word, the letter Y. ‘Thanks,’ I said, and left. That very night, in spite of my initial scepticism at the strategy, I locked the door to my room (an absurd security measure), opened the notebook and wrote: Dear diary. My sarcasm fell into the void. I turned the page and tried to begin:

What

Why

But that was it. And so, with my pen in mid-air and my gaze sunk in the isolated words, I remained for a few long seconds. Aura, who had been suffering from a slight but annoying cold all week, was sleeping with her mouth open. I looked at her, tried to make a sketch of her features and failed. I ran through a mental inventory of the next day’s obligations, which included a vaccination for Leticia, who was sleeping quietly beside us in her cot. Then I closed the notebook, put it away in the nightstand and turned off the light.

Outside, in the depths of the night, a dog barked.

One day in 1998, shortly after the World Cup finished in France and shortly before Leticia’s second birthday, I was waiting for a taxi somewhere around Parque Nacional. I don’t remember where I was coming from but I know I was heading north, to one of those endless check-ups with which the doctors tried to reassure me, to tell me that my recovery was proceeding at a normal pace, that soon my leg would be what it used to be. No northbound taxis went by, but lots went by heading for the city centre. I had nothing to do in the centre, I thought absurdly, I hadn’t lost anything down there. And then I thought: I’d lost everything there. So, without thinking too much about it, as an act of private courage that no one not in my situation would understand, I crossed the street and got into the first taxi that came by. A few minutes later I found myself, more than two years after the event, walking towards Plaza Rosario, entering the Café Pasaje, finding a free table and from there looking towards the corner where the attack happened, like a little boy peeking with as much fascination as prudence into the dark field where a bull is grazing at night.

My table, a brown disc with a single metal leg, was at the front: just a hand-span separated it from the window. I couldn’t see the door of the billiard club from there, but I could see the route the murderers on the motorbike had taken. The sounds of the aluminium coffee machine blended with the traffic noise of the nearby avenue, with the clicking heels of passers-by; the aroma of the ground beans blended with the smell that emerged from the toilets every time someone pushed the swinging door. People inhabited the sad square of the plaza, crossing the avenues that framed it, skirted round the statue of the city’s founder (his dark cuirass always spattered with white pigeon shit). The shoeshiners stationed in front of the university with their wooden crates, the huddles of emerald vendors: I looked at them and marvelled that they didn’t know what had happened there, so close to that pavement where their footsteps resounded right now. It was maybe while looking at them that I thought of Laverde and realized I was doing so without anxiety or fear.

I ordered a coffee, then I ordered another. The woman who brought my second one wiped the table with a melancholy, stinking rag and then put the new cup on top of a new saucer. ‘Anything else, sir?’ she asked. I saw her dry knuckles, crisscrossed by gritty lines; a spectre of steam rose from the blackish liquid. ‘No thanks,’ I said, and tried to find a name in my memory, unsuccessfully. All my student days coming to this café, and I was unable to remember the name of the woman who, in turn, had spent her whole life serving these tables. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘If you must.’

‘Do you know who Ricardo Laverde was?’

‘That depends,’ she said, drying her hands on her apron, impatient and bored. ‘Was he a customer?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or maybe, but I don’t think so. He was killed there, on the other side of the plaza.’

‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘How long ago?’

‘Two years,’ I said. ‘Two and a half.’

‘Two and a half,’ she repeated. ‘No, I don’t remember anyone dying there two and a half years ago. I’m very sorry.’

I thought she was lying. I didn’t have any proof of that, of course, nor did I have the meagre imagination to invent a reason for her to lie, but it didn’t seem possible to me that someone could have forgotten such a recent crime. Or maybe Laverde had died and I had gone through agony and fever and hallucinations without the events becoming fixed in the world, in the past or in the memory of my city. This, for some reason, bothered me. I think that at that moment I decided something, or felt capable of something, although I don’t remember the words I used to formulate the decision. I left the café and turned right, taking the long way around to avoid the corner, and ended up crossing La Candelaria towards the place where Laverde had been living until the day he was shot and died.

Bogotá, like all Latin American capitals, is a mobile and changing city, an unstable element of seven or eight million inhabitants: here you close your eyes for too long and you might very well open them to find yourself surrounded by another world (the hardware store where yesterday they sold felt hats, the alcove where a cobbler sold lottery tickets), as if the whole city was the set of one of those practical-joke shows where the victim goes to the men’s room of a restaurant and comes back and finds himself not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. But in all Latin American cities there’s one place or sometimes several places that live outside of time, that seem immutable while the rest is transformed. That’s what La Candelaria is like. On Ricardo Laverde’s street, the corner print shop was still there, with the same sign by the doorframe and even the same wedding invitations and the same visiting cards that had served as an advertisement in December 1995; the walls that in 1995 were covered in cheap paper posters were still covered, two and a half years later, with other posters on the same kind of paper and in the same format, yellowing rectangles announcing funerals or a bullfight or a Council candidate where the only difference was the proper names. Everything was still the same here. Here reality adjusted — as it doesn’t often do — to the memory we have of it.

Laverde’s house was also identical to the memory I had of it. The line of tiles was broken in two places, like teeth missing in an old man’s mouth; the paint on the door was peeling off at foot level and the wood was splintering: the exact spot where a person kicks it when arriving overburdened so the door won’t close. But everything else was the same, or that’s how it seemed to me as I listened to my knock echo through the inside of the house. When nobody answered, I took two steps backwards and looked up, hoping for a sign of human life on the roof. I didn’t find any: I saw a cat frolicking near a television aerial and a patch of moss growing near the base of the antenna, and that was all. I had started to give up when I heard some movement from the other side of the door. A woman opened. ‘What can I do for you?’ she said. And the only thing I could find to say was a marvel of awkwardness: ‘The thing is, I was a friend of Ricardo Laverde’s.’

I saw an expression of uncertainty or suspicion. The woman spoke to me now with hostility but not surprise, as if she’d been expecting me.

‘I don’t have anything to say any more,’ she said. ‘All that happened a while ago, I already told everything to the journalists.’

‘What journalists?’

‘That was back then, I already told them everything.’

‘But I’m not a journalist,’ I said. ‘I was a friend. .’

‘I already told everything,’ the woman said. ‘You people already got all that filth out of me, don’t think I’ve forgotten.’

At that moment, a boy appeared behind her, a boy who looked a bit old to have such a dirty face. ‘What’s up, Consu? Is this gentleman bothering you?’ He leaned a little closer to the door and into the daylight: it wasn’t dirt around his mouth, but the shadow of incipient fuzz. ‘Says he was a friend of Ricardo’s,’ said Consu in a low voice. She looked me up and down, and I did the same to her: she was short and fat, had her hair up in a bun that didn’t look grey but rather divided into black and white locks like a board game, and was covered in a black dress of some elasticized material that clung to her bulges so that the knitted woollen belt was devoured by the loose flesh of her abdomen, and what one saw was a sort of thick white worm coming out of her belly button. She remembered something, or looked like she remembered something, and on her face — in the folds of her face, pink and sweaty as if Consu had just done some physical labour — a pout formed. The woman in her sixties then turned into an immense little girl who someone has refused a sweet. ‘Excuse me, señor,’ said Consu, and began to close the door.

‘Don’t close the door,’ I begged. ‘Let me explain.’

‘Get lost, brother,’ said the young man. ‘You’ve got no business here.’

‘I knew him,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Consu.

‘I was with him when he was killed,’ I said then. I lifted up my shirt and showed the woman the scar on my belly. ‘One of the bullets hit me,’ I said.

Scars can be eloquent.

For the next few hours I talked to Consu about that day, about meeting Laverde at the billiard club, about the Casa de Poesía and about what happened afterwards. I told her what Laverde had told me and that I still didn’t understand why he’d told me that. I also told her about the recording, about the distress that had swept over Laverde while he listened to it, about the speculations that crossed my mind at that moment about its possible contents, about what could be said to produce that effect on a more or less hardened adult. ‘I can’t imagine,’ I told her. ‘And I’ve tried, I swear, but I can’t figure it out. I just can’t.’ ‘You can’t, can you?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said. By this point we were in the kitchen, Consu sitting in a white plastic chair and me on a wooden stool with a broken rung, so close to the gas cylinder that we could have touched it by simply stretching out an arm. The inside of the house was just as I’d imagined it: the patio, the wooden beams visible on the ceiling, the green doors of the rented rooms. Consu listened to me and nodded, put her hands between her knees and clamped her legs together as if she didn’t want her hands to escape. After a while, she offered me a black coffee, which she made by putting the ground coffee beans into a piece of a nylon stocking and then putting the stocking into a little brass pot covered in grey dents, and when I finished it she offered me another and repeated the procedure, and each time the air became impregnated with the smell of gas and then of the burnt match. I asked Consu which was Laverde’s room, and she pursed her lips and pointed with them, moving her head like an uncomfortable colt. ‘That one there,’ she said. ‘Now it’s occupied by a musician, such a nice guy, you should see him, he plays guitar at the Camarín del Carmen.’ She fell quiet, looking at her hands, and eventually said, ‘He had a combination lock, because Ricardo didn’t like carrying keychains around with him. I had to break it when he was killed.’

The police had arrived, by chance, at the same time Ricardo Laverde usually came home, and Consu, thinking it was him, opened the door before they knocked. She found herself facing two officers, one with grey hair who lisped when he spoke and another who stayed two steps behind and didn’t say a single word. ‘You could see the grey hair was premature, who knows what that man had seen,’ said Consu. ‘They showed me an ID card and asked me if I recognized the individual, that’s how he put it, the individual, what a strange word for a dead man. And the truth is, I didn’t recognize him,’ said Consu, crossing herself. ‘The thing is he’d really changed. I had to read the card to tell them yes, the man was called Ricardo Laverde and he’d been living here since whatever month. First I thought: he’s got himself into trouble. They’re going to put him away again. I felt sorry for him, because Ricardo complied with all that stuff since he got out.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Things convicts have to do. When they get out of prison.’

‘So you knew,’ I said.

‘Of course, dear. Everybody knew.’

‘And did you know what he’d done, too?’

‘No, not that,’ said Consu. ‘Well, I never tried to find out. That would have messed up our relationship, don’t you think? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, that’s what I say.’

The police followed her to Laverde’s room. Using a hammer as a lever, Consu shattered the aluminium semicircle, and the lock landed in one of the little ditches in the central patio. When she opened the door she found a monk’s cell: the perfect rectangle of the mattress, the impeccable sheet, the pillow in its unwrinkled pillowcase, without the curves and avenues that a head leaves over the course of the nights. Beside the mattress, an untreated wooden board on top of two bricks; on the board a glass of water that looked cloudy. The next day that image, that of the mattress and the improvised bedside table, came out in the tabloids beside the smear of blood on the pavement of 14th Street. ‘Since that day no journalist sets foot in this house,’ said Consu. ‘Those people have no respect.’

‘Who killed him?’

‘Oh, if only I knew. I don’t know, I don’t know who killed him, when he was so nice. One of the nicest people I’ve known, I swear. Even if he might have done bad things.’

‘What things?’

‘That I don’t know,’ said Consu. ‘He must’ve done something.’

‘He must’ve done something,’ I repeated.

‘Anyway, what does it matter now,’ said Consu. ‘Or is finding out going to bring him back?’

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘Where is he buried?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I don’t know. To pay a visit. Take him flowers. What was the funeral like?’

‘Small. I organized it, of course. I was the closest thing Ricardo had to a relative.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘His wife had just been killed.’

‘Ah,’ Consu said. ‘You know a few things too, who would have thought.’

‘She was coming to spend Christmas with him. He’d had this absurd picture taken to give to her.’

‘Absurd? Why absurd? I thought it was sweet.’

‘It was an absurd picture.’

‘The picture with the pigeons,’ said Consu.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The picture with the pigeons.’ And then, ‘It must have had to do with that.’

‘What did?’

‘What he was listening to. I’ve always thought that what he was listening to had something to do with her, with his wife. I imagine maybe a recorded letter, I don’t know, a poem she liked.’

For the first time, Consu smiled. ‘You imagined that?’

‘I don’t know, something like that.’ And then, I don’t know why, I lied or exaggerated. ‘I’ve spent two and a half years thinking about that, it’s funny how a dead person can take up so much space even when we didn’t even know them. Two and a half years thinking about Elena de Laverde. Or Elena Fritts, or whatever her name was. Two and a half years,’ I said. I felt good saying it.

I don’t know what Consu saw in my face, but her expression changed, and even her way of sitting changed.

‘Tell me one thing,’ she said, ‘but tell me the truth. Did you like him?’

‘What?’

‘Were you fond of him?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was very fond of him.’

That wasn’t true either, of course. Life hadn’t given us the time for affection, and what was driving me was neither sentiment nor emotion, but the intuition we sometimes have that some events have shaped our lives more than they should or appear to have. But I’ve learned very well that these subtleties don’t cut any ice in the real world, and must often be sacrificed, tell the other person what the other person wants to hear, don’t get too honest (honesty is inefficient, it gets you nowhere). I looked at Consu and I saw a lonely woman, as lonely as I am. ‘Very much,’ I repeated. ‘I was very fond of him.’

‘OK,’ she said, standing up. ‘Wait here, I’m going to show you something.’

She disappeared for a few moments. I could follow her movements by their sounds, the shuffling of her flip-flops, the brief exchange with her tenant — ‘It’s late, papito’; ‘Ay, Doña Consu, don’t stick your nose into what’s none of your business’ — and for a moment I thought our chat had finished and the next thing would be the boy with the sparse moustache asking me to leave with some affected phrase, I’ll see you to the door or Thank you for your visit, señor. But then I saw her coming back looking distracted, glancing at the nails of her left hand: once again the little girl I’d seen at the door to her house. In the other hand (her fingers made themselves delicate to hold it, as if it were a sick pet) she was carrying a football too small to be a football and that very soon revealed itself to be an old radio in the shape of a football. Two of the black hexagons were speakers; in the top part was a little window showing the cassette player; in the cassette player was a black cassette. A black cassette with an orange label. On the label, a single word: BASF.

‘It’s just side A,’ Consu told me. ‘When you finish listening to it, leave it all beside the stove. There where the matches are. And make sure the door’s closed properly when you leave.’

‘Just a moment, one moment,’ I said. Questions were flooding my mouth. ‘You have this?’

‘I have this.’

‘How did you get it? Aren’t you going to listen to it with me?’

‘It’s what they call personal effects,’ she said. ‘The police brought me everything Ricardo had in his pockets. And no, I’m not going to listen to it. I know it off by heart, and I don’t want to hear it any more, this cassette has nothing to do with Ricardo. And really it has nothing to do with me either. Strange, isn’t it? One of my most cherished possessions, and it’s got nothing to do with my life.’

‘One of your most cherished possessions,’ I repeated.

‘You know how people get asked what they’d take from their house if it was on fire. Well, I’d take this cassette. It must be because I never had children, and there aren’t any photo albums here or anything like that.’

‘The boy I met at the door?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s not family?’

‘He’s a tenant,’ said Consu, ‘like any other.’ She thought for a moment and added, ‘My tenants are my family.’

With those words (and with a perfect sense of melodrama) she went out the front door and left me alone.

What was on the recording was a dialogue in English between two men: talking about weather conditions, which were good, and then talking about work. One of the men explained to the other the regulation about the number of hours they were allowed to fly before their obligatory rest. The microphone (if it was a microphone) picked up a constant buzzing and, over the white noise of the buzzing, a shuffling of papers.

‘I got this chart,’ said the first man.

‘Well, you see what you come up with,’ said the second. I’ll watch the plane and the radio. OK?’

‘OK. All I see on this little chart they handed out is duty-on time, but it doesn’t say anything about rest period.’

‘That’s another very confusing thing.’

I remember very well having listened to the conversation for several minutes — all my attention focused on finding a reference to Laverde — before establishing, half disconcerted and half perturbed, that the people talking had nothing at all to do with Ricardo Laverde’s death, and, what’s more, that Ricardo Laverde wasn’t mentioned there at any moment. One of the men started to talk about the 136 miles to go to the VOR, of the 32,000 feet they had to descend, and they had to slow down as well, so they might as well get started. At that moment the other man says the words that change everything: ‘Bogotá, American nine six five request descent.’ And it seemed unbelievable that it had taken me so long to comprehend that in a few minutes this flight would crash into El Diluvio, and that among the dead would be the woman who was coming to spend the holidays with Ricardo Laverde.

‘American Airlines operations at Cali, this is American nine six five, do you read?’

‘Go ahead, American nine six five, this is Cali ops.’

‘All right, Cali. We will be there in just about twenty-five minutes from now.’

This was what Ricardo Laverde had been listening to shortly before being murdered: the black box recording of the flight on which his wife had died. I suffered the revelation like a punch, with the same loss of balance, the same upheaval of my immediate world. But how had he got hold of it? I then wondered. Was that possible, requesting the recording of a crashed flight and obtaining it like you might obtain, I don’t know, a document from the Land Registry? Did Laverde speak English, or at least did he understand enough to listen to and understand and regret — yes, especially regret — that conversation? Or maybe it wasn’t necessary to understand any of it to regret it, because nothing in the conversation referred to Laverde’s wife: was not the awareness, the terrible awareness, of the proximity between these two pilots speaking and one of their passengers regrettable enough? Two and a half years later, those questions remained unanswered. Now the captain asked about the arrival gate (it was number two), and now the runway (it was zero one), now he put on the headlights because there was a lot of visual traffic in the area, now they were talking about a position 47 miles north of Rio Negro and looking for it on the flight plan. . And now, finally, came the announcement over the loudspeaker: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have begun our descent.’

They’ve begun the descent. One of those ladies is Elena Fritts, who’s coming from seeing her sick mother in Miami, or from her grandmother’s funeral, or simply from visiting her friends (from spending Thanksgiving with them). No, it’s her mother, her sick mother. Elena Fritts is perhaps thinking of her sick mother, worrying about having left her, wondering if leaving had been the right thing to do. She’s also thinking about Ricardo Laverde, her husband. Is she thinking about her husband? She’s thinking about her husband, who’s been released from prison. ‘I’d like to wish everyone a very, very happy holiday and a healthy and prosperous 1996. Thank you for flying with us.’ Elena Fritts thinks about Ricardo Laverde. She thinks that now they can pick up their life where they left off. Meanwhile, in the cabin, the captain offers the first officer some peanuts. ‘No thank you,’ says the first officer. The captain says, ‘Pretty night, huh?’ And the first officer, ‘Yeah it is, looking nice out here.’ Then they address the control tower, request permission to descend to a lower altitude, the tower tells them to descend to flight level two zero zero, and then the captain says, with a heavy American accent, ‘Feliz Navidad, señorita.’

What is Elena Fritts thinking about back in her seat? I imagine her, I don’t know why, sitting in a window seat. I’ve imagined that moment a thousand times, a thousand times I’ve reconstructed it like a stage designer constructs a scene, and I’ve filled it with speculations about everything: from what Elena Fritts might be wearing — a pale blue light blouse and shoes without stockings — to her opinions and prejudices. In the image I’ve formed and that’s imposed itself on me, the window is on her left; to her right, a sleeping passenger (hairy arms, jagged snoring). The seatback table is open; Elena Fritts had wanted to put it up when the captain announced the descent, but no one’s come past yet to collect her little plastic glass. Elena Fritts looks out the window and sees a clear sky; she doesn’t know her plane is going down to 20,000 feet; it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know. She’s tired: it’s past nine at night, and Elena Fritts has been travelling since early morning, because her mother’s house is not in Miami itself, but in a suburb. Or even in some completely other place, Fort Lauderdale, for example, or Coral Springs, one of those small cities in Florida that are more like gigantic geriatric homes, where the old people from all across the country move to spend their final years far from the cold and the stress and the resentful eyes of their children. So Elena Fritts had to get up early this morning; a neighbour who had to go to Miami anyway has given her a lift to the airport, and Elena has had to cover one or two or three hours with him on those straight highways famous the world over for their anaesthetic powers. Now she’s only thinking about getting to Cali, catching her connection on time, getting to Bogotá as tired as passengers who take this flight to catch this connection have always arrived, but happier than the other passengers, because a man who loves her is waiting for her there. She thinks of that and then of taking a nice shower and going to bed. Down below, in Cali, a voice says, ‘American nine six five, distance now?’

‘Uh, what did you want, sir?’

‘Distance DME.’

‘OK,’ says the captain, ‘the distance from, uh, Cali is, uh, 38.’

‘Where are we?’ asks the first officer. ‘We’re going out to. .’

‘Let’s go right to, uh, Tuluá first of all, OK?’

‘Yeah. Where we headed?’

‘I don’t know. What’s this? What happened here?’

The Boeing 757 had descended 3,000 feet turning to the right first and then to the left, but Elena Fritts doesn’t notice. It’s night-time, a dark though clear night, and below the contours of the mountains can already be seen. In the little plastic window Elena sees the reflection of her face, wonders what she’s doing here, if it had been a mistake to come to Colombia, if her marriage can really be repaired or if what her mother said in her tone of an apocalyptic fortune-teller was true, ‘Going back to him will be the last of your idealisms.’ Elena Fritts is prepared to accept her idealistic character, but that, she thinks, is no reason to condemn an entire life of mistaken decisions: idealists also get it right occasionally. The lights go out, the face in the window disappears, and Elena Fritts thinks that she doesn’t care what her mother says: not for anything in the world would she have forced Ricardo to spend his first Christmas Eve in freedom on his own.

‘Just doesn’t look right on mine,’ says the captain. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Left turn. So you want a left turn back around?’

‘Naw. . Hell no, let’s press on to. .’

‘Where to?’

‘Tuluá.’

‘That’s a right.’

‘Where’re we going? Come to the right now. Let’s go to Cali first of all. We got fucked up here, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How did we get fucked up here? Come to the right, right now, to the right, right now.’

Elena Fritts, sitting in her economy-class seat, doesn’t know that something’s going wrong. If she had any aeronautical knowledge she might find the changes in the route suspicious, she could have recognized that the pilots have deviated from the established course. But no: Elena Fritts does not know anything about aeronautics, and doesn’t imagine that descending to less than 10,000 feet in mountainous terrain can entail risks if one doesn’t know the zone. What is she thinking about then?

What is Elena Fritts thinking about a minute before her death?

The cockpit alarm sounds: ‘Terrain, terrain,’ says an electronic voice. But Elena Fritts doesn’t hear it: the alarms don’t sound where she is seated, nor does she sense the dangerous proximity of the mountain. The crew turns up the power, but doesn’t disengage the brakes. The plane lifts its nose briefly. None of this is enough.

‘Oh shit,’ says the pilot. ‘Pull up, baby.’

What is Elena Fritts thinking about? Is she thinking about Ricardo Laverde? Is she thinking about the looming holiday season? Is she thinking about her children? ‘Shit,’ says the captain in the cockpit, but Elena Fritts can’t hear him. Do Elena Fritts and Ricardo Laverde have children? Where are those children, if they exist, and how had their lives been changed after their father’s absence? Do they know the reasons for that absence, have they grown up wrapped in a web of family lies, sophisticated myths, scrambled chronologies?

‘Up,’ says the captain.

‘It’s OK,’ says the first officer.

‘Pull up,’ says the captain. ‘Easy does it, easy.’ The automatic pilot has been disconnected. The stick shift begins to shake in the hands of the pilot, a sign that the plane’s speed is not enough to keep it up in the air. ‘More, more,’ says the captain.

‘OK,’ says the first officer.

And the captain, ‘Up, up, up.’

The siren sounds again.

‘Pull up,’ says the electronic voice.

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.

That sound is the last thing heard in the cockpit of Flight 965.

The noise sounds, and then the recording stops.

It took me a long time to recover. There’s nothing as obscene as spying on a man’s last seconds: they should be secret, inviolable, they should die with the man who dies, and nevertheless, there in that kitchen in that old house in La Candelaria, the final words of the dead pilots came to form part of my experience, in spite of the fact that I didn’t know and still don’t know who those unfortunate men were, what they were called, what they saw when they looked in the mirror; those men, for their part, never knew of me, and yet their final moments now belong to me and will continue to belong to me. What right do I have? Their wives, their mothers, fathers and children haven’t heard these words that I’ve heard, and have perhaps lived through the last two and a half years wondering what their husband, or father or son had said before crashing into El Diluvio Mountain. I, who had no right to know, now know; they, to whom those voices belong by right, do not know. And I thought that I, deep down, had no right to listen to that death, because those men who died in the plane are strangers to me, and the woman who was travelling behind them is not, will never be, one of my dead.

However, those sounds now form part of my auditory memory. Once the tape fell silent, once the noises of the tragedy gave way to static, I knew I would have preferred not to have listened to it, and I knew at the same moment that in my memory I would go on hearing it for ever. No, those are not my dead, I had no right to hear those words (just as I probably have no right to reproduce them in this story, undoubtedly with some inaccuracies), but the words and the voices of the dead had already swallowed me like a whirlpool in a river swallows a tired animal. The recording also had the power to modify the past, for now Laverde’s tears were not the same, couldn’t be the same ones I’d witnessed in the Casa de Poesía: now they had a density they’d previously lacked, owing to the simple fact that I’d heard what he, sitting in that soft leather armchair, heard that afternoon. Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.

With time I have found out more about black boxes. I know, for example, that they’re not black, but orange. I know that aeroplanes carry them in the empennage — the structure we profane people call the tail — because they have a better chance of surviving an accident there. And yes, I know that black boxes survive: they can withstand 2,250 kilograms of pressure and temperatures of 1,100 degrees Celsius. When they fall into the sea, a transmitter is activated; the black box then begins to pulsate for thirty days. That’s how long the authorities have to find it, to discover the reasons for an accident, to ensure that nothing similar happens again, but I don’t think anyone considers that a black box might have other fates, to fall into hands that were not part of its plan. However, that’s what happened to me with Flight 965’s black box, which, having survived the accident, was magically transformed into a black cassette with an orange label and went through two owners before coming to form part of my memories. And that’s how this apparatus, invented to be the electronic memory of planes, has ended up turning into a definitive part of my memory. There it is, and there’s nothing I can do. Forgetting it is not possible.

I waited quite a while before leaving the house in La Candelaria, not just to listen to the recording again (which I did, not once, but twice more), but also because seeing Consu again had suddenly become urgent for me. What else did she know about Ricardo Laverde? Perhaps it had been in order not to find herself obliged to make revelations, not to be suddenly at the mercy of my interrogations, that she had left me alone in her house with her most precious possession. It was starting to get dark. I looked outside: the streetlights were already on, the white walls of the houses were changing colour. It was cold. I looked down the street to the corner, then to the other one. Consu was not around, I couldn’t see her anywhere, so I went back into the kitchen and inside a bigger bag I found a small paper bag the size of a half-bottle of aguardiente. My pen didn’t write very well on its surface, but I would have to make do.

Dear Consu,

I waited for almost an hour. Thank you for letting me hear the recording. I wanted to tell you in person, but it just wasn’t possible.

Beneath these scribbled lines I wrote my complete name, that surname that’s so unusual in Colombia and that still provokes a certain timidity when I write it depending on the people, for there are many who distrust a person in my country if it’s necessary to spell out their surname. Then I smoothed out the bag with my hands and left it on top of the tape recorder, with one of its corners trapped by the cassette door. And I went out into the city with a mixture of sensations in my chest and a single certainty: I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to keep to myself what had just happened to me, the secret and its revelation that I’d just witnessed. I thought that I was never going to be as close to Ricardo Laverde’s life as I had been there, in his house, during the minutes the black box recording had lasted, and I didn’t want that curious exaltation to dissipate, so I went down 7th Avenue and began to walk around downtown Bogotá, passing through Bolivár Plaza and continuing north, mingling with the people on the always packed pavement and letting myself be pushed by those in the most hurry and bumping into those coming towards me, and looking for less busy smaller streets and even going into the craft market on 10th Street, I think it’s 10th, and during all that time thinking that I didn’t want to go home, that Aura and Leticia were part of a different world from the world inhabited by the memory of Ricardo Laverde and of course different from the world in which Flight 965 had crashed. No, I couldn’t go home yet. That’s what I was thinking as I arrived at 22nd Street, how to delay my arrival home in order to keep living in the black box, with the black box, and then my body made the decision for me and I ended up going into a porn cinema where a naked woman with long, very fair hair in the middle of a fully equipped kitchen lifted up her leg until the heel of her shoe got caught in the burners on top of the stove, and maintained this delicate balancing act while a fully dressed man penetrated her and gave her incomprehensible orders at the same time, the movements of his mouth never corresponding to the words his mouth was pronouncing.

The Thursday before Easter in 1999, nine months after my encounter with Ricardo Laverde’s landlady and eight before the end of the millennium, I arrived at my apartment and found a woman’s voice and a phone number on the answering machine. ‘This is a message for Antonio Yammara,’ said the voice, a young but melancholy voice, a voice that was both tired and sensual, the voice of one of those women who has had to grow up prematurely. ‘Señora Consuelo Sandoval gave me your name. I looked up your number. I hope I’m not bothering you, but you’re in the phone book. Please call me. I need to speak with you.’ I dialled the number immediately. ‘I was waiting for your call,’ said the woman.

‘With whom am I speaking?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Maya Fritts. I’m not sure if my surname means anything to you. Well, it’s not my original surname, it’s my mother’s, my real one is Laverde.’ And since I remained silent, the woman added what was by then unnecessary: ‘I’m the daughter of Ricardo Laverde. I need to ask you some things.’ I think I said something then, but it’s possible I simply repeated the name, the two names, her name and that of her father. Maya Fritts, Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, kept talking. ‘But listen, I live far away and I can’t go to Bogotá. It’s a long story. So the favour is a double favour, because I want to invite you to spend the day here, at my house, with me. I want you to come and talk to me about my father, to tell me everything you know. It’s a big favour, I know, but it’s warm here and the food’s good, I promise you won’t regret coming. So, it’s up to you, Señor Yammara. If you have a pencil and paper, I’ll tell you right now how to get here.’