Free The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page A

recovery was proceeding at a normal pace, that soon my leg would be what it used to be. No northbound taxis went by, but lots went by heading for the city centre. I had nothing to do in the centre, I thought absurdly, I hadn’t lost anything down there. And then I thought: I’d lost everything there. So, without thinking too much about it, as an act of private courage that no one not in my situation would understand, I crossed the street and got into the first taxi that came by. A few minutes later I found myself, more than two years after the event, walking towards Plaza Rosario, entering the Café Pasaje, finding a free table and from there looking towards the corner where the attack happened, like a little boy peeking with as much fascination as prudence into the dark field where a bull is grazing at night.
    My table, a brown disc with a single metal leg, was at the front: just a hand-span separated it from the window. I couldn’t see the door of the billiard club from there, but I could see the route the murderers on the motorbike had taken. The sounds of the aluminium coffee machine blended with the traffic noise of the nearby avenue, with the clicking heels of passers-by; the aroma of the ground beans blended with the smell that emerged from the toilets every time someone pushed the swinging door. People inhabited the sad square of the plaza, crossing the avenues that framed it, skirted round the statue of the city’s founder (his dark cuirass always spattered with white pigeon shit). The shoeshiners stationed in front of the university with their wooden crates, the huddles of emerald vendors: I looked at them and marvelled that they didn’t know what had happened there, so close to that pavement where their footsteps resounded right now. It was maybe while looking at them that I thought of Laverde and realized I was doing so without anxiety or fear.
    I ordered a coffee, then I ordered another. The woman who brought my second one wiped the table with a melancholy, stinking rag and then put the new cup on top of a new saucer. ‘Anything else, sir?’ she asked. I saw her dry knuckles, crisscrossed by gritty lines; a spectre of steam rose from the blackish liquid. ‘No thanks,’ I said, and tried to find a name in my memory, unsuccessfully. All my student days coming to this café, and I was unable to remember the name of the woman who, in turn, had spent her whole life serving these tables. ‘Can I ask you something?’
    ‘If you must.’
    ‘Do you know who Ricardo Laverde was?’
    ‘That depends,’ she said, drying her hands on her apron, impatient and bored. ‘Was he a customer?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘Or maybe, but I don’t think so. He was killed there, on the other side of the plaza.’
    ‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘How long ago?’
    ‘Two years,’ I said. ‘Two and a half.’
    ‘Two and a half,’ she repeated. ‘No, I don’t remember anyone dying there two and a half years ago. I’m very sorry.’
    I thought she was lying. I didn’t have any proof of that, of course, nor did I have the meagre imagination to invent a reason for her to lie, but it didn’t seem possible to me that someone could have forgotten such a recent crime. Or maybe Laverde had died and I had gone through agony and fever and hallucinations without the events becoming fixed in the world, in the past or in the memory of my city. This, for some reason, bothered me. I think that at that moment I decided something, or felt capable of something, although I don’t remember the words I used to formulate the decision. I left the café and turned right, taking the long way around to avoid the corner, and ended up crossing La Candelaria towards the place where Laverde had been living until the day he was shot and died.
    Bogotá, like all Latin American capitals, is a mobile and changing city, an unstable element of seven or eight million inhabitants: here you close your eyes for too long and you might very well open them to find