‘It’s really good,’ I told him. ‘Was it taken yesterday?’
‘Yeah, just yesterday,’ he said. And then, out of the blue, he told me: ‘The thing is, my wife’s coming.’
He didn’t say the photo is a gift. He didn’t explain why such a strange gift would interest his wife. He didn’t refer to his years in prison, although it was obvious to me that this is what loomed over the whole situation, like a vulture over a dead dog. Anyway, Ricardo Laverde acted as if nobody in the billiard club knew anything about his past; I felt at that moment that this fiction preserved a delicate balance between us, and I preferred to keep it that way.
‘What do you mean coming?’ I asked. ‘Coming from where?’
‘She’s from the United States, her family lives there. My wife is, well, we could say coming to visit.’ And then, ‘Is the picture OK? Do you think it’s good?’
‘I think it’s really good,’ I told him with a bit of involuntary condescension. ‘You look very elegant, Ricardo.’
‘Very elegant,’ he said.
‘So you’re married to a gringa,’ I said.
‘Yeah. Imagine that.’
‘And she’s coming for Christmas?’
‘Hope so,’ said Laverde. ‘I hope so.’
‘Why do you hope so? It’s not for sure?’
‘Well, I have to convince her first. It’s a long story. Don’t ask me to explain.’
Laverde took the black cover off the table, not all at once, like other players do, but folding it in sections, meticulously, almost fondly, the way they fold a flag at a state funeral. We began to play. During one of his breaks he bent down over the table, stood up again, looked for the best angle, but then, after all the ceremony, shot at the wrong ball. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He went over to the board, asked how many cannons he’d made, marked them using the tip of his cue (and accidentally touched the white wall, leaving an oblong blue smudge among other blue smudges accumulated over the years). ‘Sorry,’ he said again. His head was suddenly elsewhere: his movements, his gaze fixed on the ivory balls that slowly took up their new positions on the cloth, were those of someone who’d already left, a ghost of sorts. I began to consider the possibility that Laverde and his wife were divorced, and then, like an epiphany, another harsher and therefore more interesting possibility occurred to me: his wife didn’t know that Laverde was out of prison. In a brief second, between cannon and cannon, I imagined a man coming out of a Bogotá prison — the scene in my imagination took place at Distrital, the last prison I’d seen as a student of Criminology — who keeps his release secret in order to surprise someone, like Hawthorne’s Wakefield in reverse, interested in seeing on the face of his only relative that expression of surprised love we’ve all wanted to see, or have even provoked with elaborate ruses, at some time in our lives.
‘And what’s your wife’s name?’ I asked.
‘Elena,’ he said.
‘Elena de Laverde,’ I said, trying out the name and attributing that little possessive preposition that almost all people of his generation were still using in Colombia.
‘No,’ Ricardo Laverde corrected me. ‘Elena Fritts. We never wanted her to take my surname. A modern woman, you know.’
‘That’s modern?’
‘Well, at that time it was modern. Not changing your name. And since she was American people forgave her.’ Then, with a rapid or recovered light-heartedness, ‘So, are we having a drink?’
Our afternoon dwindled away in drink after drink of cheap white rum that left an aftertaste of surgical spirit in the back of the throat. By about five, billiards had stopped mattering to us, so we left the cues on the table, put the three balls in the cardboard rectangle of their box and sat down in the wooden chairs, like spectators or escorts or tired players, each of us with his tall glass of rum in hand, swirling it around every once in a while so the fresh ice would mix in, smearing them more and more, our fingers dirty with sweat and chalk dust. From there we overlooked the bar, the entrance to the washrooms and the corner where the television was mounted, and we could even comment on the play on a couple of tables. At one of them four players we’d never seen before, with silk gloves and their own cues, bet more on one game than the two of us spent in a month. It was there, sitting side by side, that Ricardo Laverde told me he never looked anyone in the eye. It was also there that something began to trouble me about Ricardo Laverde: a deep discrepancy between his diction and his manners, which were never less than elegant, and his dishevelled appearance, his precarious finances, his very presence in these places where people look for a bit of stability when their lives, for whatever reason, are unstable.
‘How strange, Ricardo,’ I said. ‘I’ve never asked you what you do.’
‘It’s true, never,’ said Laverde. ‘And I’ve never asked you either. But that’s because I imagine you’re a professor, like everybody else around here. There’re too many universities downtown. Are you a professor, Yammara?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I teach Law.’
‘Oh great,’ said Laverde with a sideways smile. ‘More lawyers is just what this country needs.’
It seemed like he was going to say something else. He didn’t say anything.
‘But you haven’t answered me,’ I then insisted. ‘What do you do?’
There was a silence. What must have passed through his head in those two seconds: now, with time, I can understand. What calculations, what denials, what reticence.
‘I’m a pilot,’ said Laverde in a voice I’d never heard. ‘I was a pilot, I should say. What I am is a retired pilot.’
‘What kind of pilot?’
‘A pilot of things that need piloting.’
‘Well, yeah, but what things? Passenger planes? Surveillance helicopters? The thing about this is I. .’
‘Look, Yammara,’ he cut me off in a deliberate, firm tone of voice, ‘I don’t tell my life story to just anyone. Do me a favour and don’t confuse billiards with friendship.’
He might have offended me, but he didn’t: in his words, behind the sudden and rather gratuitous aggressiveness, there was a plea. After the rude reply came those gestures of repentance and reconciliation, a child seeking attention in desperate ways, and I forgave the rudeness the way one forgives a child. Every once in a while Don José, the manager of the place, came over: a heavy-set, bald man in a butcher’s apron, who topped up our glasses with rum and with ice and then went back to his aluminium stool beside the bar, to tackle El Espacio’s crossword puzzle. I was thinking of his wife, Elena Fritts de Laverde. One day of some year, Ricardo left her life and went to jail. But what had he done to deserve it? And hadn’t his wife visited him in all those years? And how did a pilot end up spending his days in a downtown billiard club and his money on bets? Maybe that was the first time the idea, though intuitive and rudimentary in form, passed through my head, the same idea that would later reiterate itself, embodied in different words or sometimes without any need for words: This man has not always been this man. This man used to be another man.
It was already dark when we left. I don’t know exactly how much we drank at the billiard club, but I know that the rum had gone to our heads, and the pavements of La Candelaria had become even narrower. They were barely passable: people were flowing out of the thousands of downtown offices on their way home, or into the department stores to buy Christmas presents, or coagulating at the corners, while waiting for a bus. The first thing Ricardo Laverde did on the way out was to bump into a woman in an orange suit (or a suit that looked orange there, under the yellow lights). ‘Watch where you’re going, idiot,’ the woman said, and then it seemed obvious to me that letting him find his own way home in that state would be irresponsible or even risky. I offered to walk with him and he accepted, or at least didn’t refuse in any perceptible way. In a matter of minutes we were passing in front of the big closed front door of La Bordadita Church, and then we began to leave the crowds behind, as if we’d entered another city, a city under curfew. Deepest Candelaria is a place out of time: in all of Bogotá, only on certain streets in this part of town is it possible to imagine what life was like a century ago. And it was during this walk that Laverde talked to me for the first time the way one talks to a friend. At first I thought he was trying to ingratiate himself with me after the gratuitous discourtesy (alcohol tends to provoke this kind of repentance, this kind of private guilt); then it seemed to me there was something more, an urgent task the motivations of which I couldn’t quite understand, a pressing duty. I humoured him, of course, the way one humours all the drunks in the world when they start to tell their drunken stories. ‘That woman is all I have,’ he said.