The Sound of Things Falling Read Online Free

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