The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

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 door frame and even the same wedding invitations

She remembered something, or looked like she remembered something, and on her face—in

think? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, that’s what I say.”

I suffered the revelation like a punch, with the same loss of balance, the same upheaval of my immediate world.

There’s nothing as obscene as spying on a man’s last seconds: they should be secret, inviolable, they should die with the man who dies,

However, those sounds now form part of my auditory memory.

I knew at the same moment that in my memory I would go on hearing it forever.

The recording also had the power to modify the past, for now Laverde’s tears were not the same, couldn’t be the same ones I’d witnessed in the Casa de Poesía:

and went through two owners before coming to form part of my memories.

be the electronic memory of planes, has ended up turning into a definitive part of my memory. There it is, and there’s nothing I can do. Forgetting it is not possible.

I didn’t remember whether the visibility

“And I’ve never regretted having left Bogotá,” she told me. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I detest that city. I’ve never been back. I wouldn’t know what it’s like now, maybe you can tell me. You live in Bogotá?”

“You’ve never left?” “Never,” I said. “Not even during the worst years.” “Me neither. I was there for all of it.” “Who did you live with?”

“A strange life, now that I think of it, the two of us alone. Then each of us chose her own path, y...

“Do you mind remembering those things? Because of your accident, I mean?”

We didn’t have a life in common or anything like that. And that’s what happened to me: I was alone, I’d been left alone, there was no longer anyone between me and my own death.

because I remembered having heard my parents talk about that television program on several occasions. The

“This is the story of one day,”

Many years later, remembering that ill-fated day, Julio Laverde would talk about the flags more than anything else. He remembered walking with his father from their family home to the Campo de Marte,

flags, repeating that a true Bogotano needed to know the significance of the city’s flag, and putting constant tests to his son about the urban culture.

And then he’d force him to recite that the red was a symbol of liberty, charity, and health, and the yellow of justice, virtue, and clemency. And Julio repeated uncomplainingly, “Justice, clemency, and virtue. Liberty, health, charity.”

all this is a puzzle, then you have a piece that nobody else has, if you see what I mean. Can you help me?”