The Sound of Things Falling (19 page)

The deputy director of Peace Corps Colombia was a small, thin, distant man with thick-framed glasses like Henry Kissinger’s and a knitted tie. He received Elaine in his shirtsleeves, which would not have been odd if the man hadn’t been wearing a short-sleeved shirt as if he were in the unbearable heat of Barranquilla or Girardot instead of freezing to death up on this plateau. He used so much brilliantine in his black hair that the light from the neon strip lighting could produce the illusion of premature greying at his temples or white roots in his parting as straight as that of any military officer. She couldn’t tell if he was North American or local, or an American son of locals, or a local son of Americans; there were no clues, no posters on the walls or music playing anywhere or books on the shelves that might allow someone to guess at his life, his origins. He spoke perfect English, but his surname – the long surname that looked up at Elaine from the desk, carved in a brass sign that looked solid – was Latin American or at least Spanish, Elaine didn’t know if there was any difference. The interview was routine: all the Peace Corps volunteers had passed or would pass through this dark office, sit in this uncomfortable chair where Elaine now half-rose to smooth her long aquamarine skirt with her hands. Here, before the lean and aloof Mr Valenzuela, all those who’d been trained in the CEUCA sat sooner or later and listened to a short speech on how the training was approaching its end, how the volunteers would soon be travelling to the places where they would fulfil their mission, speeches on generosity and responsibility and the opportunity to make a difference. They listened to the words
permanent site placement
and then immediately the same question: ‘Do you have any preference?’ And the volunteers pronounced recently acquired names of unknown content: Bolívar, Valledupar, Magdalena, Guajira. Or Quindío (which they’d pronounce
Kwindio
). Or Cauca (pronounced
Coka
). Then they’d be transferred to a place near their final destination, a sort of intermediate stop where they’d spend three weeks at the side of a volunteer with more experience. Field training, it was called. All this was decided in a half-hour interview.

‘So, what’s it gonna be?’ said Valenzuela. ‘Cartagena is out, so’s Santa Marta. They’re already full. Everyone wants to go there, to be on the Caribbean.’

‘I don’t want to go to a city,’ said Elaine Fritts.

‘No?’

‘I think I can learn more in the countryside. The spirit of a people is in its
campesinos
.’

‘The spirit,’ said Valenzuela.

‘And a person can help more,’ said Elaine.

‘Well, that too. Let’s see, tropical or temperate?’

‘Wherever I can be more helpful.’

‘Help is needed all over, miss. This country is still only half-baked. Think about what you know as well, the things you do well.’

‘Things I know?’

‘Of course. You’re not going to go plant potatoes if you’ve never even seen a photo of a hoe.’ Valenzuela opened a brown folder that had been beneath his hand the whole time, turned a page, looked up. ‘George Washington University, journalism major, right?’

Elaine nodded. ‘But I have seen hoes,’ she said. ‘And I learn fast.’

Valenzuela grimaced with impatience.

‘Well, you’ve got three weeks,’ he said. ‘That, or become a burden and make a fool of yourself.’

‘I’m not going to be a burden,’ said Elaine. ‘I . . .’

Valenzuela shuffled some papers, took out a new folder. ‘Look, in three days I’m meeting with the regional leaders. I’ll find out there who needs what, and I’ll find out where you can do your field training. But what I know for sure is that there’s a place near La Dorada, do you know where I mean? The Magdalena Valley, Miss Fritts. It’s far away, but it’s not another world. In this place it’s not quite as hot as in La Dorada, because it’s a little way up the mountain. You go by train from Bogotá, it’s easy to get to and get back from, you’ll have noticed that the buses here are a public menace. Anyway, it’s a good place and not much in demand. It’d help to know how to ride a horse. It’d help to have a strong stomach. There’s a lot of work to be done with the people from Acción Comunal, community development, you know, literacy, nutrition, things like that. It’s just three weeks. If you don’t like it, it won’t be too late to change your mind.’

Elaine thought of Ricardo Laverde. Suddenly, having Ricardo a few hours away by train seemed like a good idea. She thought of the name of the place, La Dorada, and translated it in her head: The Golden One.

‘La Dorada,’ said Elaine Fritts, ‘sounds good.’

‘First the other place, then La Dorada.’

‘Yes, that place too. Thanks.’

‘OK,’ said Valenzuela. He opened a metal drawer and took out a piece of paper. ‘Look, before I forget. This is for you to fill in and return to the secretary.’

It was a questionnaire, or rather a carbon copy of a questionnaire. The heading was just one question, typed in capital letters:
What are some of the things which you have found different about your home in Bogotá?
Below the question were several subheadings separated by generous spaces, ostensibly to be filled in by the volunteers with as much detail as possible. Elaine answered the questionnaire in a motel in Chapinero, lying on her stomach on an unmade bed that smelled of sex, using a telephone directory to support the page and covering her bum with the sheet to protect it from Ricardo’s hand, its risqué roving, its obscene incursions. Under the subheading
Physical Discomforts and Inconveniences
, she wrote: ‘The men of the household never lift the seat when they use the toilet.’ Ricardo told her she was a spoilt, fussy girl. Under
Restrictions on Guests’ Freedom
she wrote: ‘The door is barred at nine, and I always have to wake up my señora.’ Ricardo told her she was too much of a night-owl. Under
Communication Problems
she wrote: ‘I don’t understand why they speak so formally with their children, calling them
usted
instead of
tú
.’ Ricardo told her she still had a lot to learn. Under
Behaviour of Family Members
she wrote: ‘The son likes to bite my nipples when he comes.’ Ricardo didn’t say anything.

The whole family accompanied her to catch the train at Sabana Station. It was a large solemn building with fluted columns and a carved stone condor on the high point of the façade, wings extended as if it were about to take off in flight and carry away the attic in its talons. Doña Gloria had given Elaine a bouquet of white roses, and now, as she crossed the foyer with her suitcase in one hand and her handbag across her chest, the flowers had turned into a hateful nuisance, a sort of duster that crashed against other travellers leaving a trail of sad petals on the stone floor, and the thorns stabbed Elaine every time she tried to get a better grip on the stems and protect them from the hostility of the environment. The father, for his part, had waited until they arrived at the platform before presenting his gift, and now, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of people and the cries of the shoeshine boys and the importuning of beggars, he explained that it was a book by a journalist that had come out a couple of years ago but was still selling, that the guy was uncouth but the book, from what he’d heard, wasn’t bad. Elaine tore off the wrapping paper, saw a design of nine blue frames with trimmed corners, and inside the frames saw bells, suns, Phrygian caps, floral sketches, moons with women’s faces, skulls and crossbones and dancing demons, and it all seemed a bit absurd and gratuitous, and the title,
Cien años de soledad
, exaggerated and melodramatic. Don Julio put a long fingernail over the E of the last word, which was backwards. ‘I didn’t notice till I’d already bought it,’ he apologized. ‘If you want we can try to exchange it.’ Elaine said it didn’t matter, that she wasn’t going to get on the train with nothing to read because of a silly typo. And days later, in a letter to her grandparents, she wrote: ‘Send me something to read, please, I get bored at night. The only thing I have here is a book the señor gave me as a going-away present, and I’ve tried to read it, I swear I’ve tried, but the Spanish is very difficult and everybody has the same name. It’s the most tedious thing I’ve read in a long time, and there’s even a typo on the cover. It’s incredible, it’s in its fourteenth printing and they haven’t corrected it. When I think of you reading the latest Graham Greene, it doesn’t seem fair.’

The letter goes on:

Well, let me tell you a bit about where I am and where I’m going to be for the next two weeks. There are three mountain ranges in Colombia: the Eastern Cordillera, the Central and (you guessed it) the Western Cordillera. Bogotá is
8
,
500
feet up in the first. What my train did was descend the mountain down to the Magdalena River, the largest in the country. The river runs through a beautiful valley, one of the prettiest landscapes I’ve ever seen in my life, a real paradise. The journey here was also impressive. I’ve never before seen so many birds and so many flowers. How I envied Uncle Philip! I envied his knowledge, of course, but also his binoculars. He’d love it here! Tell him I send my best regards.

So, let me tell you about the river. In times gone by passenger steamships would come down from the Mississippi and even from London, that’s how important the river was. And there are still ships here that look straight out of
Huckleberry Finn
, I’m not exaggerating. My train arrived in a town called La Dorada, which is where I’m going to be stationed permanently. But according to the Peace Corps’ arrangements the volunteers have to do three weeks of field training in a different place from our permanent site, in the company of another volunteer. Theoretically the other volunteer should have more experience, but that’s not always the case. I’ve been lucky. They placed me in a municipality a few miles from the river, in the foothills of the Cordillera. It’s called Caparrapí, a name that seems designed to make me look ridiculous trying to pronounce it. It’s hot and very humid, but liveable. And the volunteer I’ve been assigned to is a terribly nice guy and knows a lot of things, particularly things I’m entirely ignorant of. His name’s Mike Barbieri, he’s a University of Chicago drop-out. One of those guys who makes you feel at ease immediately, two seconds and you feel like you’ve known him your whole life. There are some people who are just naturally charismatic. Life in other countries is easier for them, I’ve noticed. These are the people who eat up the world, who aren’t going to have any problems surviving. If only I could be more like that.

Barbieri had already been in the Peace Corps in Colombia for two years, but before that he’d spent another two in Mexico, working with
campesinos
between Ixtapa and Puerto Vallarta and before Mexico he’d spent several months in the poor neighbourhoods of Managua. He was tall, wiry, fair but tanned, and it wasn’t unusual to find him shirtless (a wooden crucifix hanging invariably round his neck), wearing Bermuda shorts and leather sandals and nothing else. He’d welcomed Elaine with a beer in one hand and in the other a plate of small
arepas
of a texture that was new to her. Elaine had never met anyone so talkative and at the same time so sincere, and in a few minutes she found out he was about to turn twenty-seven, his team was the Cubs, he hated
aguardiente
and that that was a problem here, that he was afraid, no, absolutely terrified of scorpions and he advised Elaine to buy open shoes and check them carefully every morning before putting them on. ‘Are there a lot of scorpions here?’ asked Elaine. ‘There can be, Elaine,’ said Barbieri in the voice of a fortune-teller. ‘There can be.’

The apartment had two bedrooms, a living room and hardly any furniture, and was on the second floor of a house with sky-blue walls. On the first floor there was a shop with two aluminium tables and a counter – caramel candies, corn cakes, Pielroja cigarettes – and behind the shop, where as if by magic the world became a domestic one, lived the couple who ran it. Their surname was Villamil; their age was somewhere above sixty. ‘My señores,’ said Barbieri when he introduced them to Elaine, and, realizing that his señores hadn’t understood the name of the new tenant, he told them in good Spanish: ‘She’s a
gringa
, like me, but she’s called Elena.’ And that’s how the Villamils referred to her: that’s what they called her to ask if she had enough water, or to get her to come and say hello to the drunks. Elaine put up with it stoically, missed the Laverdes’ house, was ashamed of her spoilt little girl thoughts. In any case, she avoided the Villamils whenever possible. A concrete stairway on the exterior wall of the building allowed her to leave without being seen. Barbieri, affable to the point of impertinence, never used it: there was never a day he didn’t stop in at the shop to tell them about his day, his achievements and failures, to hear the anecdotes the Villamils and even their customers had to tell, and to try to explain to those old
campesinos
the situation of the blacks in the United States or the theme of a song by The Mamas & the Papas. Elaine, in spite of herself, watched him do this and admired him. She took longer than she should have to discover why: in a way, this extroverted and curious man, who looked at her brazenly and talked as if the world owed him something, reminded her of Ricardo Laverde.

For twenty days, the twenty hot days that her rural apprenticeship lasted, Elaine worked shoulder to shoulder with Mike Barbieri, but also beside the local leader of Acción Comunal, a short, quiet man whose moustache covered his harelip. He had a simple name, for a change: he was called Carlos, just Carlos, and there was something hermetic or menacing in that simplicity, in that lack of a surname, in the phantasmal way he’d appear to collect them in the mornings and disappear again in the afternoons, after dropping them off. Elaine and Barbieri, out of some sort of previous agreement, had lunch at Carlos’s house, an interregnum between two intensive work sessions with the
campesinos
in the surrounding villages, interviews with local politicians, ever fruitless negotiations with landowners. Elaine discovered that all the work in the countryside was done by talking: to teach the
campesinos
to raise chickens with tender flesh (keeping them in enclosures instead of letting them run around wild), to convince the politicians to build a school using local resources (since nobody expected anything of the central government) or to try to get the rich to see them as more than simply anticommunist crusaders, they first had to sit round a table and drink, drink until they didn’t understand the words any more. ‘So I spend my days on the backs of decrepit horses or talking to half-drunk people,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘But I think I’m learning, although without really noticing. Mike explained that in Colombian Spanish this is called
cogerle el tiro
of something. Understanding how things work, knowing how to get them done, all that. Getting the hang of things, we might say. That’s what I’m doing. Oh, one little thing: don’t write to me here any more, send the next letter to Bogotá. I’m going back to Bogotá soon and will spend a month there on the final details of my training. Then to La Dorada. There I start the serious stuff.’