The Sound of Things Falling Read Online Free Page A

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