The Sound of Things Falling

1. One Single Long Shadow

The first hippopotamus, a male the colour of black pearls weighing a ton and a half, was shot dead in the middle of 2009. He’d escaped two years before from Pablo Escobar’s old zoo in the Magdalena Valley, and during that time of freedom had destroyed crops, invaded drinking troughs, terrified fishermen and even attacked the breeding bulls at a cattle ranch. The marksmen who caught up with him shot him once in the head and again in the heart (with.375-calibre bullets, since hippopotamus skin is thick); they posed with the dead body, the great dark wrinkled mass, a recently fallen meteorite; and there, in front of the first cameras and onlookers, beneath a ceiba tree that protected them from the harsh sun, they explained that the weight of the animal would prevent them from transporting him whole, and immediately began carving him up. I was in my apartment in Bogotá, 250 or so kilometres south, when I saw the image for the first time, printed across half a page of a national news-magazine. That’s how I learned that the entrails had been buried where the animal had fallen, and the head and legs had ended up in a biology laboratory in my city. I also learned that the hippopotamus had not escaped alone: at the time of his flight he’d been accompanied by his mate and their baby — or what, in the sentimental version of the less scrupulous newspapers, were his mate and their baby — whose whereabouts were now unknown and the search for whom immediately took on a flavour of media tragedy, the persecution of innocent creatures by a heartless system. And on one of those days, while following the hunt in the papers, I found myself remembering a man who’d been out of my thoughts for a long while, in spite of the fact that there had been a time when nothing interested me as much as the mystery of his life.

During the weeks that followed, the memory of Ricardo Laverde went from being a minor coincidence, one of those dirty tricks our minds play on us, to becoming a faithful and devoted, ever-present ghost, standing by my bed while I slept, watching from afar in the daylight hours. On the morning radio programmes and the evening news, in the opinion columns that everybody read and on the blogs that nobody read, everyone was asking if it was necessary to kill the lost hippos, if they couldn’t round them up, anaesthetize them and send them back to Africa; in my apartment, far from the debate but following it with a mixture of fascination and repugnance, I was thinking more and more intensely about Ricardo Laverde, about the days when we’d known each other, about the brevity of our acquaintance and the longevity of its consequences. While in the press and on the TV screens the authorities listed the diseases that could be spread by an artiodactyl — and they used that word: artiodactyl, new to me — and in the rich neighbourhoods of Bogotá people wore T-shirts saying Save the Hippos, in my apartment, on long drizzly nights, or walking down the street towards the city centre, I began to think stubbornly about the day Ricardo Laverde died, and even to force myself to remember the precise details. I was surprised by how little effort it took me to summon up the words I had spoken or heard, things I’d seen, pain I’d suffered and now overcome; I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training. Bit by bit I began to notice, not without some astonishment, that the death of that hippopotamus put an end to an episode of my life that had begun quite a while ago, more or less like someone coming home to close a door carelessly left open.

And that’s how this story got under way. I don’t know what good it does us to remember, what benefits or possible penalties it brings, or how what we’ve lived through can change when we remember it, but remembering Ricardo Laverde well has become an urgent matter for me. I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching: as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. The story of his life. No, I won’t tell my life story, just a few days of it that happened a long time ago, and I’ll do so fully aware that this story, as they warn in fairy tales, has happened before and will happen again.

That I’m the one who’s ended up telling it is almost beside the point.

The day of his death, at the beginning of 1996, Ricardo Laverde had spent the morning walking the narrow streets of La Candelaria, in the centre of Bogotá, between old houses with clay roof tiles and unread marble plaques with summaries of historic events, and around one in the afternoon he showed up at the billiard club on 14th Street, ready to play a couple of games with some of the regulars. He didn’t seem nervous or disturbed when he started to play: he played with the same cue and at the same table he always did, the one closest to the back wall, under the television with the sound turned down. He played three games, though I don’t remember how many he won and how many he lost, because that afternoon I didn’t play with him, but at the next table. I do remember, however, the moment Laverde settled his bets, said goodbye to the other players and headed for the corner door. He was passing between the first tables, which are usually empty because the strip-lighting cast strange shadows on the ivory balls in that part of the hall, when he stumbled as if he’d tripped over something. He turned around and came back over to where we were; waited patiently while I finished a series of six or seven cannons that I’d started, and even applauded a three-cushioned one briefly; and then, as he watched me mark my score on the board, he came over and asked me if I might not know where he could borrow a tape machine to listen to a cassette he’d just received. I’ve often wondered since what would have happened if Ricardo Laverde had asked one of the other billiard players rather than me. But it’s a meaningless question, like so much of what we wonder about the past. Laverde had good reasons to choose to ask me. Nothing can change that fact, just as nothing can change what happened afterwards.

I had met him at the end of the previous year, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I was about to turn twenty-six, I’d graduated from law school two years earlier and, although I knew very little about the real world, the theoretical world of legal studies held no secrets for me. After graduating with honours — a thesis on madness as grounds for exemption from legal responsibility in Hamlet: I still wonder today how I got them to accept it, let alone award it a distinction — I had turned into the youngest lecturer ever to teach in the faculty, or that’s what my elders had told me when proposing the idea, and I was convinced that being professor of Introduction to Law, teaching the basics of the career to generations of frightened children just out of high school, was the only possible horizon in my life. There, standing in front of a wooden lectern, facing rows and rows of baby-faced and disoriented boys and impressionable, wide-eyed girls, I received my first lessons on the nature of power. I was barely eight years older than these inexperienced students, but between us opened the double abyss of authority and knowledge, things that I had and they, recently arrived in the world, entirely lacked. They admired me, feared me a little, and I realized that one could get used to this fear and admiration, that they were like a drug. I told my students about the potholers who were trapped in a cave and after several days began to eat each other to survive: can the Law defend them or not? I told them about old Shylock, about the pound of flesh he wanted, about the astute Portia, who managed to prevent him from taking it with a pettifogging technicality: I enjoyed watching them gesticulate and shout and lose themselves in ridiculous arguments in their attempts to find, in the thicket of the anecdote, the ideas of Law and Justice. After these academic discussions I’d go to the billiard clubs on 14th Street, low-ceilinged places filled with smoke where my other life went on, a life without doctrines or jurisprudence. There, between small bets and coffee with brandy, my day would draw to a close, sometimes in the company of a colleague or two, sometimes with female students who after a few drinks might end up in my bed. I lived near by, in a tenth-floor apartment where the air was always chilly, where the view of the spiky city of bricks and cement was always good, where my bed was always open to discussions of Cesare Beccaria’s concept of crimes and punishments, or a difficult chapter of Bodenheimer, or even a simple upgrade of a mark by the quickest route. Life, in those days that now seem to have belonged to somebody else, was full of possibilities. The possibilities, as I would later discover, also belonged to somebody else: they were gradually, imperceptibly extinguished, like a tide going out, until they left me with what I am today.

At the time my city was beginning to emerge from the most violent years of its recent history. I’m not talking about the violence of cheap stabbings and stray bullets, the settling of accounts between low-grade dealers, but the kind that transcends the small resentments and small revenges of little people, the violence whose actors are collectives and written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel, the Army, the Front. We bogotanos had become accustomed to it, partially because its images arrived with extraordinary regularity in our news reports and papers; that day, the images of the most recent attack had begun to appear, in the form of a breaking-news bulletin, on the television screen. First we saw the reporter presenting the news from outside the door of the Country Clinic, then we saw the image of the bullet-riddled Mercedes — through the shot-out window we saw the back seat, broken glass, smears of dried blood — and finally, when all movement had ceased at all the tables and everyone had quietened down and someone had shouted to turn up the sound, we saw, above the dates of birth and the still fresh one of his death, the face of the victim in black-and-white. It was the conservative politician Álvaro Gómez, son of one of the most controversial presidents of the century and himself candidate for the presidency more than once. Nobody asked why he’d been killed, or who by, because such questions no longer had any meaning in my city, or they were asked in a mechanical fashion, as the only way to react to the latest shock. I didn’t think so at the time, but those crimes (magnicides, they called them in the press: I learned the meaning of that little word very early) had provided the backbone of my life or punctuated it like the unexpected visits of a distant relative. I was fourteen years old that afternoon in 1984 when Pablo Escobar killed or ordered the killing of his most illustrious pursuer, the Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla (two hit men on a motorcycle, a curve on 127th Street). I was sixteen when Escobar killed or ordered the killing of Guillermo Cano, publisher of El Espectador (a few steps away from the newspaper’s offices, the assassin put eight bullets in his chest). I was nineteen and already an adult, although I hadn’t voted yet, on the day of the death of Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate, whose assassination was different or is different in our imaginations because it was seen on TV: the crowd cheering Galán, then the machine-gunfire, then the body collapsing on the wooden platform, falling soundlessly or its sound hidden by the uproar or by the first screams. And shortly afterwards there was the Avianca plane, a Boeing 727-21 that Escobar had blown up in mid-air — somewhere in the air between Bogotá and Cali — to kill a politician who wasn’t even on board.

So all the billiard players lamented the crime with a resignation that was by then a sort of national idiosyncrasy, the legacy of our times, and then we went back to our respective games. All, I mean, except for one whose attention remained riveted to the screen, where the images had moved on to the next news item and were now showing a scene of neglect: a bullring full of weeds as high as the flagpoles (or as high as the place where flags once flew), a roof over several vintage cars that were rusting away, a gigantic tyrannosaurus whose body was falling apart revealing a complicated metal structure, sad and naked like an old mannequin. It was the Hacienda Nápoles, Pablo Escobar’s mythical territory, which had once been the headquarters of his empire, now left to its fate since the capo’s death in 1993. The news item was about this neglect: the properties confiscated from the drug traffickers, the millions of dollars wasted by the authorities who didn’t know how to make use of these properties, all the many things that could have been done and hadn’t been done with those fairy-tale assets. And that was when one of the players at the table nearest the television, who up to that moment had not drawn attention to himself in any way, spoke as if talking to himself, but he did so out loud and spontaneously, like someone who, long used to solitude, had forgotten the very possibility of being heard.

‘Well, let’s see what they do with the animals,’ he said. ‘Poor things are starving to death and nobody cares.’

Someone asked him what animals he was talking about. The man just said: ‘It’s not their fault, anyway.’

Those were the first words I heard Ricardo Laverde say. He didn’t say anything else: he didn’t clarify which animals he was talking about, or say how he knew they were starving to death. But no one asked again, because we were all old enough to remember the Hacienda Nápoles in its better days. The zoo was a legendary place, a millionaire drug baron’s eccentricity, that promised visitors a spectacle that didn’t belong to these latitudes. I’d gone when I was twelve, during the Christmas holidays; I had gone there, of course, behind my parents’ back: the very idea of their son setting foot on the property of a recognized Mafioso would have been scandalous to them, let alone the thought of him enjoying himself there. But I couldn’t resist going to see what everyone was talking about. I accepted the invitation from the parents of a friend; one weekend we got up very early to make the six-hour drive from Bogotá to Puerto Triunfo; and once inside the ranch, after passing under the big stone gate (with the name of the property in thick blue letters), we spent the afternoon among Bengal tigers and Amazonian macaws, pygmy horses and butterflies the size of a hand and even a pair of Indian rhinoceroses which, according to a boy with a Medellín accent and camouflage flak jacket, had just recently arrived. And then there were the hippos, of course, none of which had escaped yet in those glory days. So I knew very well what animals the man was talking about; I didn’t know, however, that those few words would spring to mind almost fourteen years later. But all this I’ve thought since, obviously: that day, at the billiard club, Ricardo Laverde was just one more of so many in my country who’d followed the rise and fall of one of the most notorious Colombians of all time with astonishment, and I didn’t pay him too much attention.

What I do remember about that day is that he didn’t strike me as intimidating: he was so thin that he seemed taller than he actually was, and you had to see him standing beside a cue to see that he was barely five foot seven; his thin mousy hair and his dried-out skin and his long, dirty nails gave an impression of illness or laziness, like land gone to waste. He’d just turned forty-eight, but he looked much older. Speaking seemed to be an effort for him, as if he couldn’t get enough air; his hand was so unsteady that the blue tip of his cue always trembled in front of the ball, and it was almost miraculous that he didn’t scratch more often. Everything about him seemed tired. One afternoon, after Laverde had gone, one of the guys he’d been playing with (a man around the same age but who moved better, who breathed better, who is undoubtedly still alive today and perhaps even reading this memoir) told me the reason without my having asked. ‘It’s prison,’ he told me, revealing as he spoke the brief sparkle of a gold tooth. ‘Jail tires a person out.’

‘He was in prison?’

‘Just got out. He was in there for something like twenty years, so they say.’

‘And what’d he do?’

‘Oh, that I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘But he must have done something, no? Nobody gets that many years for nothing.’

I believed him, of course, because nothing allowed me to think there was an alternative truth, because there was no reason at that moment to question that first innocent and ingenuous version that someone gave me of Ricardo Laverde’s life. I thought how I’d never known an ex-convict before — the expression ex-convict, anyone would notice, is the best proof of that — and my interest in getting to know Laverde grew, or my curiosity grew. A heavy sentence always impresses a young man like I was back then. I calculated that I was barely walking when Laverde went to prison, and no one can be invulnerable to the idea of having grown up and gone to school and discovered sex and maybe death (that of a pet and then a grandfather, for example), and having had lovers and suffered painful break-ups and come to know the power of deciding, the satisfaction or regret resulting from decisions, the power to hurt and the satisfaction or guilt in doing so, and all this while a man lives the life without discoveries or apprenticeships that invariably results from a sentence of such length. A life unlived, a life that runs through one’s fingers, a life one suffers through while knowing that it belongs to someone else: to those who don’t have to suffer.

And almost without my noticing we began to approach each other. At first it happened by chance: I applauded one of his cannons, for example — the man had a knack for shots off the cushion — and then I invited him to play at my table or asked for permission to play on his. He accepted reluctantly, as an initiate receives a novice, in spite of the fact that I was a better player than him and that by teaming up with me Laverde could, at last, stop losing. But then I discovered that losing didn’t matter much to him: the money he put down on the emerald-coloured felt at the end of a game, those two or three dark and wrinkled notes, was part of his daily expenditure, a debit already accepted in his budget. Billiards was not a pastime for him, or even a competition, but rather the only way Laverde had at that moment of being in society: the sound of the balls hitting each other, of the wooden counters on the scoreboard, of the blue chalk rubbing against the old leather cue tips, all this made up his public life. Outside those corridors, without a billiard cue in his hand, Laverde was unable to have a normal conversation, let alone a relationship. ‘Sometimes I think,’ he told me the only time we talked somewhat seriously, ‘I’ve never looked anyone in the eye.’ It was an exaggeration, but I’m not sure the man was exaggerating on purpose. After all, he wasn’t looking me in the eye when he said those words.

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn’t have then, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn’t hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we’re terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn’t actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.) The year was coming to an end; it was exam time and classes were finished; the routine of billiards had settled into my days, and somehow given them shape and purpose. ‘Ah,’ Ricardo Laverde said each time he saw me arrive, ‘you almost missed me, Yammara. I was just about to leave.’ Something in our encounters was changing: I knew it the afternoon Laverde didn’t say goodbye the way he always did, from the other side of the table, bringing his hand up to his forehead like a soldier and leaving me with my cue in my hand, but waited for me, watched me pay for both our drinks — four coffees with brandy and a Coca-Cola at the end — and walked out of the place beside me. He walked with me as far as the Plazoleta del Rosario, through exhaust fumes and the smell of fried arepas and open sewers; then, where a ramp descends into the dark mouth of an underground car park, he gave me a pat on the back, a fragile little pat from his fragile hand, closer to a caress than a farewell, and said, ‘OK, see you tomorrow. I’ve got an errand to run.’

I saw him dodge the huddles of emerald sellers and head down a pedestrian alley that leads into 7th Avenue, then turn the corner, and then I couldn’t see him any more. The streets were starting to be adorned with Christmas lights: Nordic wreaths and candy canes, English words, silhouettes of snowflakes in this city where it’s never snowed and where December, in particular, is the sunniest time of year. But in the daytime unlit lights do not adorn: they obstruct, sully and contaminate the view. The wires, suspended over our heads, crisscrossing the road from one side to the other, were like hanging bridges and in Bolívar Plaza they climbed the posts, the Ionic columns of the Capitol and the walls of the cathedral like ivy. The pigeons did have more wires to rest on, it’s true, and the corn vendors couldn’t keep up with the tourists who wanted to feed them, and the street photographers couldn’t keep up with demand for their services either: old men in ponchos and felt hats who seized their clients as if they were driving cattle and then, at the moment of the photo, ducked under a black cloth, not because the machine demanded it, but because their clients expected it. These photographers were also throwbacks to other times, before everybody could take their own portraits and the idea of buying a photo in the street that someone else had taken (often without them noticing) wasn’t completely absurd. Every Bogotá resident of a certain age has a street photo, most of them taken on 7th Avenue, formerly calle Real del Comercio, or Royal Commerce Street, queen of all Bogotá streets; my generation grew up looking at those photos in family albums, those men in three-piece suits, those women with gloves and umbrellas, people from another time when Bogotá was colder and rainier and tamer, but no easier. I have among my papers the photo my grandfather bought in the 1950s and the one my father bought fifteen or so years later. I don’t have, however, the one Ricardo Laverde bought that afternoon, although the image remains so clearly in my memory that I could draw every line of it if I had any talent for drawing. But I don’t. That’s one of the talents I don’t have.

So that was the errand Laverde had to run. After leaving me he walked to Bolívar Plaza and had one of those deliberately anachronistic portraits taken, and the next day he arrived at the billiard club with the result in his hand: a sepia-toned piece of paper, signed by the photographer, on which appeared a less sad or taciturn man than usual, a man of whom it might be said, if the evidence of the past few months didn’t convert the appraisal into an impudence, that he was content. The black plastic cover was still on the table, and Laverde put the image on top of it, his own image, and stared at it in fascination: his hair was combed, not a wrinkle in his suit, his right hand extended and two doves pecking at his palm; behind him you could almost make out the gaze of a couple of passers-by, both in sandals with rucksacks, and in the background, beside a corn cart enlarged by the perspective, the Palace of Justice.

‘It’s really good,’ I told him. ‘Was it taken yesterday?’

‘Yeah, just yesterday,’ he said. And then, out of the blue, he told me: ‘The thing is, my wife’s coming.’

He didn’t say the photo is a gift. He didn’t explain why such a strange gift would interest his wife. He didn’t refer to his years in prison, although it was obvious to me that this is what loomed over the whole situation, like a vulture over a dead dog. Anyway, Ricardo Laverde acted as if nobody in the billiard club knew anything about his past; I felt at that moment that this fiction preserved a delicate balance between us, and I preferred to keep it that way.

‘What do you mean coming?’ I asked. ‘Coming from where?’

‘She’s from the United States, her family lives there. My wife is, well, we could say coming to visit.’ And then, ‘Is the picture OK? Do you think it’s good?’

‘I think it’s really good,’ I told him with a bit of involuntary condescension. ‘You look very elegant, Ricardo.’

‘Very elegant,’ he said.

‘So you’re married to a gringa,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Imagine that.’

‘And she’s coming for Christmas?’

‘Hope so,’ said Laverde. ‘I hope so.’

‘Why do you hope so? It’s not for sure?’

‘Well, I have to convince her first. It’s a long story. Don’t ask me to explain.’

Laverde took the black cover off the table, not all at once, like other players do, but folding it in sections, meticulously, almost fondly, the way they fold a flag at a state funeral. We began to play. During one of his breaks he bent down over the table, stood up again, looked for the best angle, but then, after all the ceremony, shot at the wrong ball. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He went over to the board, asked how many cannons he’d made, marked them using the tip of his cue (and accidentally touched the white wall, leaving an oblong blue smudge among other blue smudges accumulated over the years). ‘Sorry,’ he said again. His head was suddenly elsewhere: his movements, his gaze fixed on the ivory balls that slowly took up their new positions on the cloth, were those of someone who’d already left, a ghost of sorts. I began to consider the possibility that Laverde and his wife were divorced, and then, like an epiphany, another harsher and therefore more interesting possibility occurred to me: his wife didn’t know that Laverde was out of prison. In a brief second, between cannon and cannon, I imagined a man coming out of a Bogotá prison — the scene in my imagination took place at Distrital, the last prison I’d seen as a student of Criminology — who keeps his release secret in order to surprise someone, like Hawthorne’s Wakefield in reverse, interested in seeing on the face of his only relative that expression of surprised love we’ve all wanted to see, or have even provoked with elaborate ruses, at some time in our lives.

‘And what’s your wife’s name?’ I asked.

‘Elena,’ he said.

‘Elena de Laverde,’ I said, trying out the name and attributing that little possessive preposition that almost all people of his generation were still using in Colombia.

‘No,’ Ricardo Laverde corrected me. ‘Elena Fritts. We never wanted her to take my surname. A modern woman, you know.’

‘That’s modern?’

‘Well, at that time it was modern. Not changing your name. And since she was American people forgave her.’ Then, with a rapid or recovered light-heartedness, ‘So, are we having a drink?’

Our afternoon dwindled away in drink after drink of cheap white rum that left an aftertaste of surgical spirit in the back of the throat. By about five, billiards had stopped mattering to us, so we left the cues on the table, put the three balls in the cardboard rectangle of their box and sat down in the wooden chairs, like spectators or escorts or tired players, each of us with his tall glass of rum in hand, swirling it around every once in a while so the fresh ice would mix in, smearing them more and more, our fingers dirty with sweat and chalk dust. From there we overlooked the bar, the entrance to the washrooms and the corner where the television was mounted, and we could even comment on the play on a couple of tables. At one of them four players we’d never seen before, with silk gloves and their own cues, bet more on one game than the two of us spent in a month. It was there, sitting side by side, that Ricardo Laverde told me he never looked anyone in the eye. It was also there that something began to trouble me about Ricardo Laverde: a deep discrepancy between his diction and his manners, which were never less than elegant, and his dishevelled appearance, his precarious finances, his very presence in these places where people look for a bit of stability when their lives, for whatever reason, are unstable.

‘How strange, Ricardo,’ I said. ‘I’ve never asked you what you do.’

‘It’s true, never,’ said Laverde. ‘And I’ve never asked you either. But that’s because I imagine you’re a professor, like everybody else around here. There’re too many universities downtown. Are you a professor, Yammara?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I teach Law.’

‘Oh great,’ said Laverde with a sideways smile. ‘More lawyers is just what this country needs.’

It seemed like he was going to say something else. He didn’t say anything.

‘But you haven’t answered me,’ I then insisted. ‘What do you do?’

There was a silence. What must have passed through his head in those two seconds: now, with time, I can understand. What calculations, what denials, what reticence.

‘I’m a pilot,’ said Laverde in a voice I’d never heard. ‘I was a pilot, I should say. What I am is a retired pilot.’

‘What kind of pilot?’

‘A pilot of things that need piloting.’

‘Well, yeah, but what things? Passenger planes? Surveillance helicopters? The thing about this is I. .’

‘Look, Yammara,’ he cut me off in a deliberate, firm tone of voice, ‘I don’t tell my life story to just anyone. Do me a favour and don’t confuse billiards with friendship.’

He might have offended me, but he didn’t: in his words, behind the sudden and rather gratuitous aggressiveness, there was a plea. After the rude reply came those gestures of repentance and reconciliation, a child seeking attention in desperate ways, and I forgave the rudeness the way one forgives a child. Every once in a while Don José, the manager of the place, came over: a heavy-set, bald man in a butcher’s apron, who topped up our glasses with rum and with ice and then went back to his aluminium stool beside the bar, to tackle El Espacio’s crossword puzzle. I was thinking of his wife, Elena Fritts de Laverde. One day of some year, Ricardo left her life and went to jail. But what had he done to deserve it? And hadn’t his wife visited him in all those years? And how did a pilot end up spending his days in a downtown billiard club and his money on bets? Maybe that was the first time the idea, though intuitive and rudimentary in form, passed through my head, the same idea that would later reiterate itself, embodied in different words or sometimes without any need for words: This man has not always been this man. This man used to be another man.

It was already dark when we left. I don’t know exactly how much we drank at the billiard club, but I know that the rum had gone to our heads, and the pavements of La Candelaria had become even narrower. They were barely passable: people were flowing out of the thousands of downtown offices on their way home, or into the department stores to buy Christmas presents, or coagulating at the corners, while waiting for a bus. The first thing Ricardo Laverde did on the way out was to bump into a woman in an orange suit (or a suit that looked orange there, under the yellow lights). ‘Watch where you’re going, idiot,’ the woman said, and then it seemed obvious to me that letting him find his own way home in that state would be irresponsible or even risky. I offered to walk with him and he accepted, or at least didn’t refuse in any perceptible way. In a matter of minutes we were passing in front of the big closed front door of La Bordadita Church, and then we began to leave the crowds behind, as if we’d entered another city, a city under curfew. Deepest Candelaria is a place out of time: in all of Bogotá, only on certain streets in this part of town is it possible to imagine what life was like a century ago. And it was during this walk that Laverde talked to me for the first time the way one talks to a friend. At first I thought he was trying to ingratiate himself with me after the gratuitous discourtesy (alcohol tends to provoke this kind of repentance, this kind of private guilt); then it seemed to me there was something more, an urgent task the motivations of which I couldn’t quite understand, a pressing duty. I humoured him, of course, the way one humours all the drunks in the world when they start to tell their drunken stories. ‘That woman is all I have,’ he said.

‘Elena?’ I said. ‘Your wife?’

‘She’s everything, all I have. Don’t ask me to give you details, Yammara, it’s not easy for anyone to talk about his mistakes. I’ve made some, like everyone has. I’ve fucked up, yeah. I really fucked up. You’re very young, Yammara, so young that maybe you’re still a virgin of these kinds of mistakes. I don’t mean fooling around on your girlfriend, not that, I don’t mean having fucked your best friend’s girlfriend, that’s kids’ stuff. I’m talking about real mistakes, Yammara, this is something you don’t know about yet. And a good thing too. Enjoy it, Yammara, enjoy it while you can: a person’s happy until they fuck it up somehow, then there’s no way to get back to what you used to be. Well, that’s what I’m going to find out in the next couple of days. Elena’s going to come and I’m going to try to get back what there used to be. Elena was the love of my life. And we separated, we didn’t want to separate, but we separated. Life separated us, life does that kind of thing. I fucked up. I fucked up and we were separated. But the important thing isn’t fucking it all up, Yammara, listen carefully, the important thing isn’t fucking up, but knowing how to fix the fuck-up. Even though time has passed, however many years, it’s never too late to fix what you’ve broken. And that’s what I’m going to do. Elena’s coming now and that’s what I’m going to do, no mistake can last for ever. All this was a long time ago, a long, long time ago. You hadn’t even been born yet, I don’t think. Let’s say 1970, more or less. When were you born?’

‘In 1970,’ I said. ‘Exactly.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘You weren’t born in ’71?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘In ’70.’

‘Well, anyway. Lots of things happened that year. In the following years too, of course, but mostly that year. That year our life changed. I let us be separated, but that’s not the important thing, Yammara, listen up, the important thing isn’t that, but what’s going to happen now. Elena’s coming now and that’s what I’m going to do, fix things. It can’t be that hard, can it? How many people do you know who’ve made up for going the wrong way halfway down the road? Lots, no? Well, that’s what I’m going to do. It can’t be that hard.’

Ricardo Laverde told me all that. We were alone by the time we got to his street, so alone that we’d obliviously started to walk down the middle of the road. A cart overflowing with old newspapers and pulled by a famished-looking mule passed us, and the man holding the reins (the knotted rope that served as reins) had to whistle loudly at us to get out of his way. I remember the smell of the animal’s shit, though I don’t remember it shitting at that precise moment, and I also remember the staring eyes of a child who was in the back, sitting on the wooden planks with his feet hanging down over the edge. And then I remember stretching out a hand to say goodbye to Laverde and being left with my hand in mid-air, more or less like that other hand covered in pigeons in the photo from Bolívar Plaza, because Laverde turned his back on me and, opening a big door with a key from another era, said to me, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to go now. Come in and we’ll have a nightcap, young man, since we’re having such a good talk.’

‘I really have got to go, Ricardo.’

‘A person doesn’t have to do anything but die,’ he said, his tongue a little thick. ‘One drink, no more, I swear. Since you’ve already come as far as this godforsaken place.’

We’d arrived in front of an old, colonial, one-storey house, not carefully preserved like a cultural or historical site, but sad and dilapidated, one of those properties that pass from generation to generation as the families get poorer, until the last one of the line sells it to pay off a debt or puts it to work as a boarding house or brothel. Laverde was standing on the threshold and holding the door open with his foot, in one of those precarious balances that only a good drunk can pull off. Behind him I could see a brick-floored corridor and then the smallest colonial patio I’d ever seen. In the centre of the patio, instead of the traditional fountain, there was a clothes line, and the whitewashed walls of the corridor had been decorated with calendars of naked women. I had been in similar houses before, so I could imagine what was beyond the dark corridor: I imagined rooms with green wooden doors that close with a padlock like a shed, and I imagined that in one of those 3- by 2-metre sheds, rented by the week, lived Ricardo Laverde. But it was late, I had to hand in my marks the next day (to meet the unbearable, bureaucratic demands of the university, which gave no respite), and walking through that neighbourhood, after a certain time of night, was too much like tempting fate. Laverde was drunk and he’d embarked on a series of confidences I hadn’t foreseen, and I realized at this moment that it was one thing to ask the guy what kind of planes he flew and something else entirely to go into his tiny room with him while he wept over his lost loves. Emotional intimacy has never been easy for me, much less with other men. Everything Laverde was going to tell me then, I thought, he could tell me the next day in the open air or in public places, without any vacuous camaraderie or tears on my shoulder, without any superficial masculine solidarity. The world’s not going to end tomorrow, I thought. Nor is Laverde going to forget his life story.

So I wasn’t too surprised to hear myself say, ‘No really, Ricardo. It’ll have to be another time.’

He remained quiet for an instant.

‘OK then,’ he said. If he was greatly disappointed, he didn’t show it. He just turned his back and, closing the door behind him, muttered, ‘Another time it’ll have to be.’

Of course if I’d known then what I know now, if I could have foreseen the way that Ricardo Laverde would mark my life, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Since then I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d accepted the invitation, what Laverde would have told me if I’d gone in for one last drink, which is never only just one, how that might have changed what came later.

But they’re all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

It was a long while before I saw him again. I stopped in at the billiard club a couple of times over the following days, but my routines didn’t coincide with his. Then, just when it occurred to me that I could go and visit him at his house, I found out that he’d gone away on a trip. I didn’t know where, or with whom; but one afternoon Laverde had paid his tab of drinks and games, had announced he was going on vacation and the next day had vanished like a gambler’s winning streak. So I also stopped frequenting the place, which, in the absence of Laverde, suddenly lost all interest. The university closed for the holidays, and the whole routine that spins around the department and exams was adjourned, and its spaces deserted (the voiceless halls, the offices without any hustle and bustle). It was during that interlude that Aura Rodríguez, a former student with whom I’d been going out more or less secretly, or at least cautiously, for a few months, told me she was pregnant.

Aura Rodríguez. Among her surnames were an Aljure and a Hadad, and that Lebanese blood showed in her deep eyes and in the bridge of her thick eyebrows and the narrowness of her forehead, a combination that might have given the impression of seriousness or even bad temper in someone less extroverted and affable. Her quick smile, eyes attentive to the point of impertinence, disarmed or neutralized features that, as beautiful as they might be (and yes, they were beautiful, they were very beautiful), could turn hard or even hostile with a slight knitting of her brow, with a certain way of parting her lips to breathe through her mouth at moments of greatest tension or anger. I liked Aura, at least in part, because her biography had so little in common with mine, beginning with the uprootedness of her childhood: Aura’s parents, both from the Caribbean coast, had arrived in Bogotá with her a babe in arms, but they never managed to feel at home in this city of sly, shrewd people, and as the years went by ended up accepting an opportunity to work in Santo Domingo and then another in Mexico and then another very brief one in Santiago de Chile, so Aura left Bogotá when she was still very young and her adolescence was a sort of itinerant circus and, at the same time, a permanently inconclusive symphony. Aura’s family returned to Bogotá at the beginning of 1994, weeks after Pablo Escobar was killed; the difficult decade had just ended, and Aura would always be ignorant of what we who lived through it had seen and heard. Later, when the rootless young woman showed up at the university for her admissions interview, the dean of the faculty asked her the same question he asked all the applicants: why Law? Aura’s answer swerved back and forth, but eventually arrived at a reason less related to the future than to the recent past: ‘To be able to stay in a single place.’ Lawyers can only practise where they’ve studied, said Aura, and she no longer felt able to postpone that kind of stability. She didn’t say so at the time, but her parents had already begun to plan the next trip and Aura had decided she wouldn’t be part of it.

So she stayed in Bogotá on her own, living with two girls from Barranquilla in an apartment with a few pieces of cheap furniture where everything, starting with the tenants, had a transitory quality. And she began to study Law. She was a student of mine in my first year as a professor, when I too was a novice; and we didn’t really talk again after the course finished, in spite of sharing the same corridors, in spite of frequenting the same student cafés downtown, in spite of having said hello in the Legis or the Temis, the legal bookshops with their public-office air and bureaucratic white tiles smelling of detergent. One evening in March we met at a cinema on 24th Street; it struck us as funny that we were both going to see black-and-white movies on our own (there was a series of Buñuel films, that day they were showing Simon of the Desert, and I fell asleep fifteen minutes in). We exchanged phone numbers to meet for a coffee the next day, and the next day we left our coffees half finished when we realized, in the middle of a banal conversation, that we weren’t interested in telling each other about our lives, but just wanted to be somewhere we could go to bed and spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the body we’d each been imagining since our paths had first crossed in the cold space of the classroom. I already knew the husky voice and the prominent collarbones; the freckles between her breasts surprised me (I’d imagined clear and smooth skin like that of her face) and her mouth surprised me too, as it was, for scientifically inexplicable reasons, always cold.

But then the surprises and explorations and discoveries gave way to another situation, perhaps more surprising, because it was so unexpected. Over the following days we went on seeing each other constantly and realizing that our respective worlds didn’t change much after our clandestine encounters, that our relationship didn’t affect the practical side of our lives for good or ill, but coexisted with it, like a parallel highway, like a story seen in the episodes of a television series. We realized how little we knew each other; I spent a long time discovering Aura, that peculiar woman who went to bed with me at night and came out with anecdotes about herself or others, and as she did so created for me an absolutely novel world where a friend’s house smelled of headache, for example, or where a headache could quite easily taste of guanábana ice cream. ‘It’s like living with synaesthesia,’ I told her. I’d never seen someone hold a gift to her nose before opening it, even though it was obviously a pair of shoes, or a stuffed animal, or a poor innocent ring. ‘What does a ring smell like?’ I said to Aura. ‘It doesn’t smell of anything, that’s the truth. But there’s no way to explain that to you.’

And so, I suspect, we could have gone on all our lives. But five days before Christmas Aura appeared dragging a red suitcase with tiny wheels, with pockets in every part of it. ‘I’m six weeks pregnant,’ she told me. ‘I want us to spend the holidays together, and then we’ll see what we do.’ In one of those pockets there was a digital alarm clock and a case that didn’t contain pencils, as I thought it did, but make-up; in another, a photo of Aura’s parents, who by then were well settled in Buenos Aires. She took out the photo and placed it face down on one of the nightstands, and only turned it over when I said yes, we should spend the holidays together, that’s a good idea. Then — the image is very much alive in my memory — she lay down on my bed, on top of my made bed, and closed her eyes and began to talk. ‘People don’t believe me,’ she said. I thought she meant about her pregnancy and said, ‘Who? Who’ve you told?’ ‘When I talk about my parents,’ said Aura. ‘They don’t believe me.’ I lay down beside her and crossed my arms behind my head and listened. ‘They don’t believe me, for example, when I say I don’t understand why they had me, when they already had enough in each other. They still have enough. They’re enough for each other, that’s how it is. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever been with your parents and all of a sudden you feel superfluous? It happens to me a lot, or at least since I’ve been old enough to live alone, and it’s weird, being with your folks and they start looking at each other with that look that you’ve already identified and they’re laughing over something that’s just between them and you have no idea what they’re laughing at, and worse, you feel you have no right to ask. It’s a look I learned by heart a long time ago, not complicity, it’s something way beyond that, Antonio. More than once it happened to me as a little girl, in Mexico or in Chile, more than once. At a meal, with guests they didn’t like much but invited anyway, or in the street when they met someone who said stupid things, suddenly I could fast forward five seconds and think: here comes the look, and sure enough, five seconds later their eyebrows moved, their eyes met, and I’d see on their faces that smile that no one else saw and that they used to make fun of people the way I’ve never seen anyone else make fun of other people. How do you smile without people seeing you smile? They could, Antonio, I swear I’m not exaggerating, I grew up with those smiles. Why did it bother me so much? It still bothers me. Why so much?’

There wasn’t sadness in her words, but irritation or rather anger, the anger of someone who has suffered a deceit through inattention or neglect, yes, that was it, the anger of someone who’s been led up the garden path. ‘I’ve been remembering something,’ she said then. ‘I would have been about fourteen or fifteen, and we were just about to leave Mexico. It was a Friday, a school day, and I decided to go along with some friends who weren’t really in the mood for geography or mathematics. We were walking across a park, it was San Lorenzo Park, but that doesn’t matter. And then I saw a man who looked a lot like my dad, but in a car that wasn’t my dad’s. He stopped at the corner, looking down the avenue, and then a woman got into the car who looked a lot like my mother, but dressed in clothes that my mother wouldn’t wear and with red hair, which my mother didn’t have. That happened on the far side of the park, their only option was to turn the car around very slowly and drive right past us. I don’t know what I was thinking when I signalled for them to stop, but the resemblance was too striking. So they stopped, me on the pavement and the car on the street, and up close I realized immediately that it was them, it was my parents. And I smiled at them, asked them what was going on, and that’s when the fear started: they looked at me and spoke to me as if they didn’t know me, as if they’d never seen me before. As if I was one of my friends. I later understood they were playing. A husband who picks up a pricey hooker on the street. They were playing and they couldn’t let me ruin the game. And that night, everything was normal: we had dinner as a family, watched television, everything. They didn’t say anything. And I spent a few days wondering what had happened, wondering without understanding and feeling something I’d never felt, feeling afraid, but afraid of what, isn’t it absurd?’ She took a gulp of air (her lips pressed against her teeth) and whispered, ‘And now I’m going to have a child. And I don’t know if I’m ready, Antonio. I don’t know if I’m ready.’

‘I think you are,’ I told her.

Mine was also a whisper, as far as I remember. And then came another: ‘Bring everything,’ I told her. ‘We’re ready.’ In reply, Aura began to weep with a silent but sustained crying that only ended when she fell asleep.

The end of 1995 was typical of that time of year for Bogotá, with that intense blue sky of the Andean highlands, with those early mornings when the temperature goes down to zero and the dry air ruins the potato or cauliflower crops, and then the rest of the day is sunny and warm and the light is so clear that you end up with sunburn on your cheeks and the nape of your neck. I devoted that time to Aura with the constancy — no: the obsession — of a teenager. We spent the days walking at the doctor’s recommendation and taking naps (her), reading deplorable research projects (me) or watching pirated films several days before they premiered in the meagre Bogotá listings (both of us). At night Aura accompanied me to novenas at the homes of my relatives or friends, and we danced and drank non-alcoholic beer and lit Catherine wheels and powder-keg volcanoes and launched rockets that exploded into rackets of colour in the yellowish night sky of the city, that darkness that’s never really dark. And never, never did I wonder what Ricardo Laverde might be doing at that same instant, if he was praying the novenas too, if there were fireworks and if he was setting off rockets or lighting Catherine wheels, and if he was doing so on his own or in company.

The morning that followed one of those novenas, a cloudy, dark morning, Aura and I had our first ultrasound. Aura had been on the verge of cancelling it, and I would have done if that hadn’t meant waiting another twenty days to find out about the child, with the risks that might entail. It wasn’t just any old morning, it wasn’t a 21 December like any other 21 December of any other year: since the early hours of the morning the radio and television and newspaper had been telling us that American Airlines Flight 965, which departed from Miami for Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in the city of Cali, had crashed into the west side of El Diluvio Mountain the previous night. It was carrying one hundred and fifty-five passengers, many of whom weren’t even going to Cali, but were expecting to catch the last flight of the evening to Bogotá. At the time the news came out they’d found only four survivors, all with serious injuries, and the figure would not go any higher. I knew the inevitable details — that the plane was a 757, that the night was clear and starry, that they were starting to talk about human error — from the news broadcasts on all stations. I regretted the accident, felt all the sympathy I’m capable of for the people waiting for their relatives, and for those who, in their seats on the plane, understood from one moment to the next that they would not arrive, that they were living their last seconds. But it was an ephemeral and distracted sympathy, and I’m sure it had died out by the time we entered the narrow cubicle where Aura, lying down and half undressed, and I, standing by the screen, received the news that our little girl (Aura was magically sure it was a girl), who at that moment measured 7 millimetres, was in perfect health. On the screen was a sort of luminous universe, a confusing constellation in movement where, the woman in the white coat told us, our little girl was: that island in the sea — every one of her 7 millimetres — was her. Beneath the electric brightness of the screen I saw Aura smile, and I’m very afraid I won’t forget that smile as long as I live. Then I saw her put a finger on her belly to smear it with the blue gel the nurse had used. And then I saw her put her finger to her nose, to smell it and classify it according to the rules of her world, and seeing that was absurdly satisfying, like finding a coin in the street.

I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde there, during the ultrasound, while Aura and I, perfectly astonished, listened to the sound of an accelerated little heartbeat. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde later, while Aura and I listed girls’ names on the same white envelope in which the hospital had given us the written report of the ultrasound. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde while reading this report out loud, discovering that our little girl was in a fundal intrauterine position and she was a normal oval shape, words that made Aura erupt into violent fits of laughter in the middle of the restaurant. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde even when I made a mental inventory of all the fathers of daughters that I knew, a little to see if the birth of a daughter had a predictable effect on people, or to start looking for sources of advice or possible support, as if I guessed that what I was heading into was the most intense, most mysterious, most unpredictable experience I’d ever live through. Actually, I don’t remember with any certainty what thoughts passed through my head that day or the days that followed — while the world went through its slow and lazy passage from one year to the next — other than those of my impending paternity. I was expecting a daughter, at the age of twenty-six I was expecting a daughter, and faced with the vertigo of my youth the only thing that occurred to me was to think of my father, who at my age had already had me and my sister, and that was after my mother and he had already lost their first baby. I didn’t yet know that an old Polish novelist had spoken a long time before of the shadow-line, that moment when a young man becomes the proprietor of his own life, but that was what I was feeling while my little girl was growing inside Aura’s womb: I felt that I was about to become a new and unknown creature whose face I couldn’t manage to see, whose powers I could not measure, and I also felt that after the metamorphosis there would be no turning back. To put it in other words and without so much mythology: I felt that something very important and also very fragile had become my responsibility, and I felt, improbably, that my abilities were equal to the challenge. It doesn’t surprise me that I barely have any vague notion of living in the real world during those days, for my fickle memory has drained them of all meaning or relevance other than that related to Aura’s pregnancy.

On 31 December, on our way to a New Year’s Eve party, Aura was going through the list of names, a yellow sheet of paper with red horizontal lines and a green double margin, covered in underlinings and crossings-out and marginal comments, that we’d started carrying with us everywhere and would take out at those dead times — in bank queues, waiting rooms, Bogotá’s famous traffic jams — when other people read magazines or imagine other people’s lives or imagine improved versions of their own lives. Few names had survived from the long column of candidates, along with the future mother’s corresponding note or prejudice.

Martina (but it’s a tennis player’s name)

Carlota (but it’s an empress’s name)

We were on the highway, driving north, under the 100th Street bridge. There was an accident up ahead and the traffic was almost completely stopped. None of that seemed to matter to Aura, involved as she was in considerations about the name of our daughter. Somewhere I could hear the ambulance’s siren; I checked the rear-view mirror, trying to find the swirling red lights demanding a way through, making its way, but I couldn’t see anything.

That was when Aura said, ‘What about Leticia? I think one of my great-grandmothers or somebody was called Leticia.’

I repeated the name once or twice, its long vowels, its consonants that mixed vulnerability and strength.

‘Leticia,’ I said. ‘Yes, sounds right.’

So I was a changed man the first working day of the year, when I arrived at the 14th Street billiard club and bumped into Ricardo Laverde, and I remember very well feeling surprised by my own emotions: sympathy for him and his wife, Señora Elena Fritts, and an intense desire, more intense than I ever would have expected, for their encounter during the holidays to have had the best possible consequences. He’d already started his game, on another table, and I started to play on my own. Laverde didn’t look at me; he was treating me as if we’d just seen each other the previous night. At some point in the afternoon, I thought, the rest of the customers would start leaving, and the usual ones would end up finishing off the evening like in musical chairs. Ricardo Laverde and I would meet, play a little and then, with any luck, we’d resume the conversation we’d started before Christmas. But that didn’t happen. When he finished his game I saw him return his cue to the rack, saw him start walking towards the door, saw him change his mind, and saw him walking over to the table where I had just finished my shot. In spite of the profuse sweat on his forehead, in spite of the tiredness bathing his face, there was nothing in his greeting that worried me. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said from a distance, ‘how were your holidays?’ But he didn’t let me answer, or rather he interrupted my answer somehow, or there was something in his tone of voice or in his gestures that let me know the question was rhetorical, one of those vacuous courtesies always exchanged by bogotanos, with no expectation of a sincere or considered response. Laverde took an old-fashioned black cassette tape out of his pocket, with an orange sticker on it and on the sticker the letters BASF. He showed it to me without moving his arm very far from his body, like someone offering some illegal merchandise, emeralds in the plaza, a folded paper of drugs beside the criminal court.

‘Hey, Yammara, I have to listen to this,’ he told me. ‘You wouldn’t know anybody who could lend me a cassette player?’

‘Doesn’t Don José have one?’

‘No, he hasn’t got anything,’ he said. ‘And this is urgent.’ He rapped on the plastic case a couple of times. ‘And it’s private as well.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is a place a couple of blocks away, couldn’t hurt to ask.’

I was thinking of the Casa de Poesía, the only plausible option in the neighbourhood at that time of day. It was the former residence of the poet José Asunción Silva, now converted into a cultural centre where they hold readings and workshops. I used to go there quite often all through my degree. One of its rooms was a unique place in Bogotá: there, all sorts of word-struck people would go to sit on soft leather sofas, near fairly modern stereo equipment, and listen to now legendary recordings: Borges reading Borges, García Márquez reading García Márquez, León de Greiff reading León de Greiff. Silva and his work were on everybody’s lips those days, for in that barely begun 1996 the centenary of his suicide was going to be commemorated. ‘This year,’ I’d read in an opinion piece by a well-known journalist, ‘statues will be raised to him all over the city, and all the politicians will mention his name, and everyone will wander around reciting his “Nocturne”, and everybody will take him flowers at the Casa de Poesía. And Silva, wherever he might be, will find this curious: this prudish society that humiliated him, that pointed their fingers at him every chance they got, paying homage to him now as if he were a head of state. The ruling class of our country, haughty charlatans, have always liked to appropriate culture. And that’s what’s going to happen with Silva: they are going to appropriate his memory. And his real readers are going to spend the whole year wondering why the hell they don’t leave him alone.’ It’s not impossible that I had that column in mind (in some dark part of my mind, deep down, very deep, in the archive of useless things) at the moment I chose that place to take Laverde.

We walked the two blocks without saying a word, with our eyes on the broken paving stones or on the dark green hills that rose in the distance, bristling with eucalyptus and telephone poles like the scales on a Gila monster. When we got to the entrance and walked up the stone steps, Laverde let me go in first: he’d never been in such a place, and he acted with the misgivings, the suspicions, of an animal in a dangerous situation. There were two high-school students in the room with the sofas, a couple of teenagers listening to the same recording and every once in a while looking at each other and laughing indecently, and a man in a suit and tie, with a faded leather briefcase on his lap, snoring shamelessly. I explained the situation to the woman at the desk, who was no doubt used to exotic requests, and she looked me over through squinting eyes, seemed to recognize me or identify me as a person who’d been there many times before, and held out her hand.

‘Let’s see, then,’ she said unenthusiastically. ‘What is it you want to play?’

Laverde handed her the cassette like a soldier surrendering his weapon, with fingers visibly smudged with blue billiard chalk. He went to sit down, submissive as I’d never seen him before, in the armchair the woman pointed him to; he put on the headphones, leaned back and closed his eyes. Meanwhile, I was looking for something to occupy my time while I waited, and my hand picked up Silva’s poems as it might have chosen any other recording (I must have given in to the superstition of anniversaries). I sat down in my chair, picked up the corresponding headphones, adjusted them over my ears with that feeling of putting myself beyond or closer to real life, of starting to live in another dimension. And when the ‘Nocturne’ began to play, when a voice I couldn’t identify — a baritone that verged on melodrama — read that first line that every Colombian has pronounced aloud at least once, I noticed that Ricardo Laverde was crying. One night all heavy with perfume, said the baritone over a piano accompaniment, and a few steps away from me Ricardo Laverde, who wasn’t listening to the lines I was listening to, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, then his whole sleeve, with murmurs and music of wings. Ricardo Laverde’s shoulders began to shake; he hung his head, brought his hands together like someone praying. And your shadow, lean and languid, said Silva in the voice of the melodramatic baritone, And my shadow, cast by the moonbeams. I didn’t know whether to look at Laverde or not, whether to leave him alone in his sorrow or go and ask him what was wrong. I remember having thought that I could at least take off my headphones, a way like any other of opening a space between Laverde and me, of inviting him to speak to me; and I remember deciding against it, having chosen the safety and silence of my recording, where the melancholy of Silva’s poem would sadden me without putting me at risk. I guessed that Laverde’s sadness was full of risks, I was afraid of what that sadness might contain, but my intuition didn’t go far enough to understand what had happened. I didn’t remember the woman Laverde had been waiting for, I didn’t remember her name, I didn’t associate him with the accident at El Diluvio, but I stayed where I was, in my chair and with the headphones on, trying not to interrupt Ricardo Laverde’s sadness, and I even closed my eyes so I wouldn’t bother him with my indiscreet gaze, to allow him a certain privacy in the middle of that public place. In my head, and only in my head, Silva said: And they were one single long shadow. In my self-contained world, where all was full of the baritone voice and Silva’s words and the decadent piano music that enveloped them, a time went by that lengthens in my memory. Those who listen to poetry know how this can happen, time kept by the lines of verse like a metronome and at the same time stretching and dispersing and confusing us like dreamtime.

When I opened my eyes Laverde was no longer there.

‘Where did he go?’ I said with the headphones still on. My voice reached me from afar, and my absurd reaction was to remove the headphones and repeat the question, as if the woman behind the desk wouldn’t have heard it properly the first time.

‘Who?’ she asked.

‘My friend,’ I said. It was the first time I described him as such, and I suddenly felt ridiculous: no, Laverde was not my friend. ‘The guy who was sitting there.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, he didn’t say,’ she replied. Then she turned away, checked the sound equipment; mistrustfully, as if I were complaining about something she’d done, she added, ‘And I gave the cassette back to him, OK? You can ask him.’

I left the room and looked quickly through the building. The house where José Asunción Silva had spent his final days had a bright patio in the middle, separated from the corridors that framed it in narrow glass windows that wouldn’t have existed in the poet’s time and now protected the visitors from the rain: my footsteps, in those silent corridors, resounded without echoes. Laverde was not in the library, or sitting on the wooden benches, or in the conference room. He must have left. I walked towards the narrow front door to the house, past a security guard in a brown uniform (he wore a tilted cap, like a thug in a movie), past the room where the poet had shot himself in the chest a hundred years earlier, and as I came out onto 14th Street I saw that the sun was now hidden behind the buildings of 7th Avenue, saw that the yellow streetlights were timidly starting to come on, and saw Ricardo Laverde, in his long coat, his head down, walking two blocks from where I was, already almost at the billiard club. I thought: And they were one single long shadow, absurdly the line came back to mind; and in that same instant I saw a motorbike that had been still until now on the pavement. Maybe I saw it because its two riders had made a barely perceptible movement: the feet of the one on the back rising up onto the stirrups, his hand disappearing inside his jacket. Both of them were wearing helmets, of course; and the visors of both, of course, were dark, a large rectangular eye in the middle of the large head.

I shouted to Laverde, but not because I already knew what was going to happen to him, not because I wanted to warn him of anything: at that moment my only ambition was to catch up to him, ask him if he was all right, perhaps offer my help. But Laverde didn’t hear me. I started to take bigger steps, avoiding people walking along the narrow pavement, which at that point is almost knee-high, stepping down onto the road if necessary to walk faster, and thinking unthinkingly: And they were one single long shadow, or rather tolerating the line like a jingle we can’t get out of our head. At the corner of 4th Avenue, the dense afternoon traffic progressed slowly in a single lane, towards the exit onto Jiménez. I found a space to cross the street in front of a green bus, whose headlights, just turned on, had brought to life the dust of the street, the fumes from an exhaust pipe, an incipient drizzle. That’s what I was thinking about, the rain I’d have to protect myself from in a little while, when I caught up to Laverde, or rather I got so close to him I could see how the rain was darkening the shoulders of his overcoat. ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ I said: a stupid thing to say, because I didn’t know what everything was, much less whether or not it was going to be all right. Ricardo looked at me with his face contorted in pain. ‘Elena was there,’ he told me. ‘Was where?’ I asked. ‘On the plane,’ he answered. I think in a brief moment of confusion Aura had the name Elena, or I imagined Elena with Aura’s face and pregnant body, and I think at that moment I experienced a new feeling that couldn’t have been fear, not yet, but was quite similar to it. Then I saw the motorbike dropping down onto the road like a bucking horse, saw it accelerate to approach like a tourist looking for an address, and at the precise moment when I grabbed Laverde’s arm, when my hand clutched at the sleeve of his coat by his left elbow, I saw the faceless heads looking at us and the pistol pointed towards us as naturally as a metal prosthesis, and saw two shots, and heard the explosions and felt the sudden tremor in the air. I remember having raised my arm to protect myself just before feeling the sudden weight of my body. My legs no longer held me up. Laverde fell to the ground and I fell with him, two bodies falling without a sound, and people started to shout and a continuous buzzing appeared in my ears. A man came over to Laverde’s body to try to lift him up, and I remember the surprise I felt when another came over to help me. I’m fine, I said or remember having said, there’s nothing wrong with me. From the ground I saw someone else jump out into the road waving his arms like a castaway and standing in front of a white pick-up truck that was turning the corner. I said Ricardo’s name a couple of times; I noticed a warmth in my belly; the possibility occurred to me fleetingly that I’d wet myself, and I immediately discovered that it wasn’t piss soaking through my grey T-shirt. A short while later I lost consciousness, but the last image that I have is still quite clear in my memory: it’s that of my body lifted into the air and the effort of the men who put me into the back of the truck, who put me down beside Laverde like one shadow next to another, leaving on the bodywork a bloodstain, which at that hour, with so little light, was as black as the night sky.