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

yourself surrounded by another world (the hardware store where yesterday they sold felt hats, the alcove where a cobbler sold lottery tickets), as if the whole city was the set of one of those practical-joke shows where the victim goes to the men’s room of a restaurant and comes back and finds himself not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. But in all Latin American cities there’s one place or sometimes several places that live outside of time, that seem immutable while the rest is transformed. That’s what La Candelaria is like. On Ricardo Laverde’s street, the corner print shop was still there, with the same sign by the doorframe and even the same wedding invitations and the same visiting cards that had served as an advertisement in December 1995 ; the walls that in 1995 were covered in cheap paper posters were still covered, two and a half years later, with other posters on the same kind of paper and in the same format, yellowing rectangles announcing funerals or a bullfight or a Council candidate where the only difference was the proper names. Everything was still the same here. Here reality adjusted – as it doesn’t often do – to the memory we have of it.
    Laverde’s house was also identical to the memory I had of it. The line of tiles was broken in two places, like teeth missing in an old man’s mouth; the paint on the door was peeling off at foot level and the wood was splintering: the exact spot where a person kicks it when arriving overburdened so the door won’t close. But everything else was the same, or that’s how it seemed to me as I listened to my knock echo through the inside of the house. When nobody answered, I took two steps backwards and looked up, hoping for a sign of human life on the roof. I didn’t find any: I saw a cat frolicking near a television aerial and a patch of moss growing near the base of the antenna, and that was all. I had started to give up when I heard some movement from the other side of the door. A woman opened. ‘What can I do for you?’ she said. And the only thing I could find to say was a marvel of awkwardness: ‘The thing is, I was a friend of Ricardo Laverde’s.’
    I saw an expression of uncertainty or suspicion. The woman spoke to me now with hostility but not surprise, as if she’d been expecting me.
    ‘I don’t have anything to say any more,’ she said. ‘All that happened a while ago, I already told everything to the journalists.’
    ‘What journalists?’
    ‘That was back then, I already told them everything.’
    ‘But I’m not a journalist,’ I said. ‘I was a friend . . .’
    ‘I already told everything,’ the woman said. ‘You people already got all that filth out of me, don’t think I’ve forgotten.’
    At that moment, a boy appeared behind her, a boy who looked a bit old to have such a dirty face. ‘What’s up, Consu? Is this gentleman bothering you?’ He leaned a little closer to the door and into the daylight: it wasn’t dirt around his mouth, but the shadow of incipient fuzz. ‘Says he was a friend of Ricardo’s,’ said Consu in a low voice. She looked me up and down, and I did the same to her: she was short and fat, had her hair up in a bun that didn’t look grey but rather divided into black and white locks like a board game, and was covered in a black dress of some elasticized material that clung to her bulges so that the knitted woollen belt was devoured by the loose flesh of her abdomen, and what one saw was a sort of thick white worm coming out of her belly button. She remembered something, or looked like she remembered something, and on her face – in the folds of her face, pink and sweaty as if Consu had just done some physical labour – a pout formed. The woman in her sixties then turned into an immense little girl who someone has refused a sweet. ‘Excuse me, señor,’ said Consu, and began to close the door.
    ‘Don’t close the door,’ I begged. ‘Let me explain.’
    ‘Get lost, brother,’ said the