The Sound of Things Falling Read Online Free PDF Page A

might have changed what came later.
    But they’re all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.
     
    It was a long while before I saw him again. I stopped in at the billiard club a couple of times over the following days, but my routines didn’t coincide with his. Then, just when it occurred to me that I could go and visit him at his house, I found out that he’d gone away on a trip. I didn’t know where, or with whom; but one afternoon Laverde had paid his tab of drinks and games, had announced he was going on vacation and the next day had vanished like a gambler’s winning streak. So I also stopped frequenting the place, which, in the absence of Laverde, suddenly lost all interest. The university closed for the holidays, and the whole routine that spins around the department and exams was adjourned, and its spaces deserted (the voiceless halls, the offices without any hustle and bustle). It was during that interlude that Aura Rodríguez, a former student with whom I’d been going out more or less secretly, or at least cautiously, for a few months, told me she was pregnant.
    Aura Rodríguez. Among her surnames were an Aljure and a Hadad, and that Lebanese blood showed in her deep eyes and in the bridge of her thick eyebrows and the narrowness of her forehead, a combination that might have given the impression of seriousness or even bad temper in someone less extroverted and affable. Her quick smile, eyes attentive to the point of impertinence, disarmed or neutralized features that, as beautiful as they might be (and yes, they were beautiful, they were very beautiful), could turn hard or even hostile with a slight knitting of her brow, with a certain way of parting her lips to breathe through her mouth at moments of greatest tension or anger. I liked Aura, at least in part, because her biography had so little in common with mine, beginning with the uprootedness of her childhood: Aura’s parents, both from the Caribbean coast, had arrived in Bogotá with her a babe in arms, but they never managed to feel at home in this city of sly, shrewd people, and as the years went by ended up accepting an opportunity to work in Santo Domingo and then another in Mexico and then another very brief one in Santiago de Chile, so Aura left Bogotá when she was still very young and her adolescence was a sort of itinerant circus and, at the same time, a permanently inconclusive symphony. Aura’s family returned to Bogotá at the beginning of 1994 , weeks after Pablo Escobar was killed; the difficult decade had just ended, and Aura would always be ignorant of what we who lived through it had seen and heard. Later, when the rootless young woman showed up at the university for her admissions interview, the dean of the faculty asked her the same question he asked all the applicants: why Law? Aura’s answer swerved back and forth, but eventually arrived at a reason less related to the future than to the recent past: ‘To be able to stay in a single place.’ Lawyers can only practise where they’ve studied, said Aura, and she no longer felt able to postpone that kind of stability. She didn’t say so at the time, but her parents had already begun to plan the next trip and Aura had decided she wouldn’t be part of it.
    So she stayed in Bogotá on her own, living with two girls from Barranquilla in an apartment with a few pieces of cheap furniture where everything, starting with the tenants, had a transitory quality. And she began to study Law. She was a student of mine in my first year as a professor, when I too was a novice; and we didn’t really talk again after the course finished, in spite of sharing the same corridors, in spite of frequenting the same student cafés downtown, in spite of having said hello in the Legis or the Temis, the legal bookshops with their public-office air and bureaucratic white tiles smelling of detergent. One evening in March we met