Juan Vásquez - The Sound of Things Falling

The first hippopotamus, a male the colour of black pearls weighing a ton and a half, was shot dead in the middle of 2009. Hed escaped two years before from Pablo Escobars old zoo in the Magdalena Valley, and during that time of freedom had destroyed crops, invaded drinking troughs, terrified fishermen and even attacked the breeding bulls at a cattle ranch. The marksmen who caught up with him shot him once in the head and again in the heart (with.375-calibre bullets, since hippopotamus skin is thick); they posed with the dead body, the great dark wrinkled mass, a recently fallen meteorite; and there, in front of the first cameras and onlookers, beneath a ceiba tree that protected them from the harsh sun, they explained that the weight of the animal would prevent them from transporting him whole, and immediately began carving him up. I was in my apartment in Bogot, 250 or so kilometres south, when I saw the image for the first time, printed across half a page of a national news-magazine. Thats how I learned that the entrails had been buried where the animal had fallen, and the head and legs had ended up in a biology laboratory in my city. I also learned that the hippopotamus had not escaped alone: at the time of his flight hed been accompanied by his mate and their baby or what, in the sentimental version of the less scrupulous newspapers, were his mate and their baby whose whereabouts were now unknown and the search for whom immediately took on a flavour of media tragedy, the persecution of innocent creatures by a heartless system. And on one of those days, while following the hunt in the papers, I found myself remembering a man whod been out of my thoughts for a long while, in spite of the fact that there had been a time when nothing interested me as much as the mystery of his life.

During the weeks that followed, the memory of Ricardo Laverde went from being a minor coincidence, one of those dirty tricks our minds play on us, to becoming a faithful and devoted, ever-present ghost, standing by my bed while I slept, watching from afar in the daylight hours. On the morning radio programmes and the evening news, in the opinion columns that everybody read and on the blogs that nobody read, everyone was asking if it was necessary to kill the lost hippos, if they couldnt round them up, anaesthetize them and send them back to Africa; in my apartment, far from the debate but following it with a mixture of fascination and repugnance, I was thinking more and more intensely about Ricardo Laverde, about the days when wed known each other, about the brevity of our acquaintance and the longevity of its consequences. While in the press and on the TV screens the authorities listed the diseases that could be spread by an artiodactyl and they used that word: artiodactyl, new to me and in the rich neighbourhoods of Bogot people wore T-shirts saying Save the Hippos, in my apartment, on long drizzly nights, or walking down the street towards the city centre, I began to think stubbornly about the day Ricardo Laverde died, and even to force myself to remember the precise details. I was surprised by how little effort it took me to summon up the words I had spoken or heard, things Id seen, pain Id suffered and now overcome; I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training. Bit by bit I began to notice, not without some astonishment, that the death of that hippopotamus put an end to an episode of my life that had begun quite a while ago, more or less like someone coming home to close a door carelessly left open.

And thats how this story got under way. I dont know what good it does us to remember, what benefits or possible penalties it brings, or how what weve lived through can change when we remember it, but remembering Ricardo Laverde well has become an urgent matter for me. I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching: as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. The story of his life. No, I wont tell my life story, just a few days of it that happened a long time ago, and Ill do so fully aware that this story, as they warn in fairy tales, has happened before and will happen again.

That Im the one whos ended up telling it is almost beside the point.

The day of his death, at the beginning of 1996, Ricardo Laverde had spent the morning walking the narrow streets of La Candelaria, in the centre of Bogot, between old houses with clay roof tiles and unread marble plaques with summaries of historic events, and around one in the afternoon he showed up at the billiard club on 14th Street, ready to play a couple of games with some of the regulars. He didnt seem nervous or disturbed when he started to play: he played with the same cue and at the same table he always did, the one closest to the back wall, under the television with the sound turned down. He played three games, though I dont remember how many he won and how many he lost, because that afternoon I didnt play with him, but at the next table. I do remember, however, the moment Laverde settled his bets, said goodbye to the other players and headed for the corner door. He was passing between the first tables, which are usually empty because the strip-lighting cast strange shadows on the ivory balls in that part of the hall, when he stumbled as if hed tripped over something. He turned around and came back over to where we were; waited patiently while I finished a series of six or seven cannons that Id started, and even applauded a three-cushioned one briefly; and then, as he watched me mark my score on the board, he came over and asked me if I might not know where he could borrow a tape machine to listen to a cassette hed just received. Ive often wondered since what would have happened if Ricardo Laverde had asked one of the other billiard players rather than me. But its a meaningless question, like so much of what we wonder about the past. Laverde had good reasons to choose to ask me. Nothing can change that fact, just as nothing can change what happened afterwards.

I had met him at the end of the previous year, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I was about to turn twenty-six, Id graduated from law school two years earlier and, although I knew very little about the real world, the theoretical world of legal studies held no secrets for me. After graduating with honours a thesis on madness as grounds for exemption from legal responsibility in Hamlet: I still wonder today how I got them to accept it, let alone award it a distinction I had turned into the youngest lecturer ever to teach in the faculty, or thats what my elders had told me when proposing the idea, and I was convinced that being professor of Introduction to Law, teaching the basics of the career to generations of frightened children just out of high school, was the only possible horizon in my life. There, standing in front of a wooden lectern, facing rows and rows of baby-faced and disoriented boys and impressionable, wide-eyed girls, I received my first lessons on the nature of power. I was barely eight years older than these inexperienced students, but between us opened the double abyss of authority and knowledge, things that I had and they, recently arrived in the world, entirely lacked. They admired me, feared me a little, and I realized that one could get used to this fear and admiration, that they were like a drug. I told my students about the potholers who were trapped in a cave and after several days began to eat each other to survive: can the Law defend them or not? I told them about old Shylock, about the pound of flesh he wanted, about the astute Portia, who managed to prevent him from taking it with a pettifogging technicality: I enjoyed watching them gesticulate and shout and lose themselves in ridiculous arguments in their attempts to find, in the thicket of the anecdote, the ideas of Law and Justice. After these academic discussions Id go to the billiard clubs on 14th Street, low-ceilinged places filled with smoke where my other life went on, a life without doctrines or jurisprudence. There, between small bets and coffee with brandy, my day would draw to a close, sometimes in the company of a colleague or two, sometimes with female students who after a few drinks might end up in my bed. I lived near by, in a tenth-floor apartment where the air was always chilly, where the view of the spiky city of bricks and cement was always good, where my bed was always open to discussions of Cesare Beccarias concept of crimes and punishments, or a difficult chapter of Bodenheimer, or even a simple upgrade of a mark by the quickest route. Life, in those days that now seem to have belonged to somebody else, was full of possibilities. The possibilities, as I would later discover, also belonged to somebody else: they were gradually, imperceptibly extinguished, like a tide going out, until they left me with what I am today.