The Sound of Things Falling Read Free Page B

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