The Sound of Things Falling Read Online Free Page B

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