The Sound of Things Falling Read Free

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