And with those false words — the year 1996 would not exist for Elaine Fritts — Maya went back to remembering, back to the exhausting work of memory. Was it for my benefit, Maya Fritts, or maybe you’d discovered you could use me, that nobody else would allow you this return to the past, that nobody but me would invite those memories, listen to them with the discipline and dedication I listened to them? And so she told me of the December afternoon she came back into the house, after a long day of work in the apiary, ready to take a shower. She’d had an outbreak of acariasis in the beehives and had spent the week trying to minimize the damage and preparing concoctions of anemone and coltsfoot; she still had the intense odour of the mixture on her hands and was desperate for a wash. ‘Then the phone rang,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t answer it. But I thought: what if it’s important? I heard Mom’s voice and actually thought, well, at least it’s not that. It’s nothing important. Mom always called at Christmas, that’s one thing we hadn’t lost in spite of the years. We talked five times a year: on her birthday, on mine, at Christmas, on New Year’s Day and on Dad’s birthday. The birthday of the deceased, you understand, that the living mark because he’s not here to celebrate it. That time we were talking for quite a while, telling each other unimportant things, and at some point my mother said look, we have to talk.’ And that’s how Maya found out, during a long-distance telephone call, down the line from Jacksonville, Florida, the truth about her father. ‘He hadn’t died when I was five. He was alive. He’d been in prison, and now he was out. He was alive, Antonio. And not only that, but he was in Bogotá. And not only that but he’d tracked down my mother, who knows how. And he wanted us all to get together.’ ‘Pretty night, huh?’ says the captain from the black box. And the first officer, ‘Yeah, it is. Looking nice out here.’ ‘For us to get together, Antonio, get that,’ said Maya. ‘As if he’d gone out for a couple of hours to pick up some groceries.’ And the captain, ‘Feliz Navidad, señorita.’
I don’t know if there are any studies of people’s reactions to revelations such as that one, how a person behaves in the face of such a brutal change in circumstances, in the face of the disappearance of the world as they’d known it. One might think that in many cases a gradual readjustment would follow, the search for a new place in the elaborate system of our lives, a re-evaluation of our relationships and of what we call the past. Perhaps that might be the most difficult and least acceptable aspect, the change to the past, which we used to believe was fixed. In Maya Fritts’s case the first thing was incredulity, but that didn’t last long: in a matter of seconds she had yielded to the evidence. This was followed by a sort of contained fury, partially caused by the vulnerability of this life in which a mere phone call can topple everything in such a brief space of time: all you have to do is pick up the receiver and a new fact comes through it into the house, something we’ve neither sought nor requested and that sweeps us along like an avalanche. And the contained fury was followed by open fury, the shouts down the telephone, and the insults. And the open fury was followed by hatred and hateful words: ‘I don’t want to see anybody,’ Maya said to her mother. ‘Whether he believes it or not, I’m warning you. If he shows up here, I’ll shoot him.’ Maya spoke with a broken voice, very different from what it must have been then, what I was now seeing on the sofa, the soft even serene sobbing. ‘Uh, where are we?’ asked the first officer on the black box, and in his voice there is some alarm, the anticipation of what’s to come. ‘This is where it starts,’ Maya said to me. And she was right, it was starting there. ‘Where we headed?’ said the first officer. ‘I don’t know,’ said the captain. ‘What’s this? What happened here?’ And there, with the first disoriented lurches of the Boeing 757, with its movements of a lost bird at 13,000 feet in the Andean night, Elaine Fritts’s death was beginning. There were those voices again that have now realized something, those voices that feign serenity and control when they’ve lost all control and serenity is a façade. ‘Left turn. So you want a left turn back around?’ ‘Naw. . Hell no, let’s press on to. .’ ‘Press on to where, though?’ ‘Tuluá.’ ‘That’s a right.’ ‘Where we going? Come to the right. Let’s go to Cali. We got fucked up here, didn’t we?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘How did we get fucked up here? Come to the right, right now. Come to the right, right now.’
‘They fucked up here,’ Maya said or rather whispered. ‘And Mom was on board.’
‘But she didn’t know what was going on,’ I said. ‘She didn’t know the pilots were lost. At least she wouldn’t have been scared.’
Maya considered the idea. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘At least she wasn’t scared.’
‘What would she have been thinking of?’ I said. ‘Have you ever wondered, Maya? What would Elaine have been thinking of at that moment?’
Sounds of anguish began to be heard. An electronic voice delivered desperate warnings to the pilots: ‘Terrain, terrain.’ ‘I’ve asked myself a thousand times,’ said Maya. ‘I had told her quite clearly that I didn’t want to see him, that my dad had died when I was five and that was that, nothing was going to change that. Not to try to change things for me at this stage. But then I was a wreck for several days. I got sick. I had a fever, a high fever, and feverish and all I still went out to work in the hives out of fear of being home when my dad arrived. What would she have been thinking? Maybe that it was worth a try. That my dad had loved me very much, had loved us both, and that it was worth trying. She called back another time and tried to justify what my dad had done, said that in those days everything was different, the world of drug trafficking, all that. That they were a bunch of innocents, that’s what she told me. Not that they were innocent, no, that they were innocents, I’m not sure if you realize what a distance there is between the two concepts. Anyway, it’s the same. As if innocence might exist in this country of ours. . Anyway, that was when my mother decided to get on a plane and fix things up in person. She told me she was going to get on the first flight she could. That if her own daughter was going to shoot her, well she’d just take it. That’s what she said to me, her own daughter. That she was just going to endure it, but she wasn’t going to be left wondering what might have happened, full of doubts. Oh, now we’re at this part. It’s so painful, incredible, after all this time.’ ‘Shit,’ said the pilot on the recording. ‘Up, baby,’ said the pilot. ‘Up.’
‘The plane is crashing,’ said Maya.
‘Up,’ said the captain in the black box.
‘It’s OK,’ said the first officer.
‘They’re going to be killed,’ said Maya, ‘and there’s nothing to be done.’
‘Up,’ said the captain. ‘Easy does it, easy.’
‘And I didn’t get to say goodbye,’ said Maya.
‘More, more,’ said the captain.
‘OK,’ said the first officer.
‘How was I supposed to know?’ said Maya. ‘How could I have known, Antonio?’
And the captain, ‘Up, up, up.’
The cool early morning filled up with Maya’s weeping, soft and fine, and also with the singing of the first birds, and also with the sound that was the mother of all sounds, the sound of lives disappearing as they pitch over the edge into the abyss, the sound made by Flight 965 and all it contained as they fall into the Andes and that in some absurd way was also the sound of Laverde’s life, tied irremediably to that of Elena Fritts. And my life? Did my own life not begin to throw itself to the ground at this very instant, was that sound not the sound of my own downfall, which began there without my knowledge? ‘So you fell out of the sky, too?’ the Little Prince asks the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I’d fallen out of the sky too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde’s fall, human lives don’t have these technological luxuries to fall back on. ‘Maya, how is it that we’re hearing this?’ I said. She looked at me in silence (her eyes red and flooded, her mouth looking devastated). I thought she hadn’t understood me. ‘I don’t mean. . What I want to know is how this recording came. .’ Maya took a deep breath. ‘He always liked maps,’ she said.