‘What?’
‘Maps,’ said Maya. ‘He always liked them.’
Ricardo Laverde had always liked maps. In school he always did well (always in the top three of his class), but he did nothing as well as he drew maps, those exercises in which the student had to draw, with a soft leaded pencil or a nib or a drawing pen, on tracing paper and sometimes on wax paper, the geographies of Colombia. He liked the sudden straight line of the Amazon trapezoid, he liked the tempered Pacific coast like a bow without an arrow, he could draw from memory the peninsula of La Guajira and blindfolded he could stick a pin in a sketch, as others might pin the tail on the donkey, without a second thought, to show the exact location of the Nudo de Almaguer. In all of Ricardo’s scholastic history, the only calls from the discipline prefect came when they had to draw maps, for Ricardo would finish his in half the allotted time and for the rest of the class he’d draw his friends’ maps in exchange for a 50-centavo coin, if it was a map of the political administrative division of Colombia, or a peso, if it was hydrography or a distribution of thermic levels.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said. ‘What’s it got to do with?’
When he came back to Colombia, after nineteen years in prison, and had to find work, the most logical thing was to look where there were planes. He knocked on various doors: flying clubs, aviation academies and found them all closed. Then, following a sort of epiphany, went to the Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute. They gave him a couple of tests, and two weeks later he was flying a twin-engine Commander 690A whose crew was composed of a pilot and co-pilot, two geographers, two specialized technicians and sophisticated aero-photography equipment. And that’s what he was doing for the last months of his life: taking off in the early morning from El Dorado Airport, flying over Colombian airspace while the camera in the back took 23 by 23 negatives that would eventually, after a long laboratory and classification process, end up in the atlases from which thousands of children would learn the tributaries of the River Cauca and where the Occidental Cordillera begins. ‘Children like our children,’ said Maya, ‘if either of us ever has any kids.’
‘They’ll study Ricardo’s photos.’
‘It’s nice to think,’ said Maya. And then, ‘My father had made good friends with his photographer.’
His name was Iragorri. Francisco Iragorri, but everyone called him Pacho. ‘A skinny guy, about our age, more or less, one of those with the features of the baby Jesus, pink cheeks, upturned nose, not a single hair to shave.’ Maya tracked him down and called him and invited him to come to Las Acacias at the beginning of 1998, and he was the one who told her what happened on Ricardo Laverde’s last night. ‘They always flew together, after the flight they’d have a beer and say goodbye. And a couple of weeks later they’d meet up at the Institute, at the Institute laboratory, and work together on the photos. Or rather Iragorri would work and let my father watch and learn. To do photo finishing. To analyse a photo in three dimensions. How to use a stereoscopic viewfinder. My father enjoyed all that with childlike enthusiasm, Iragorri told me.’ The day before he was killed Ricardo Laverde had showed up at the lab looking for Iragorri. It was late. Iragorri thought the visit wasn’t to do with work, and a couple of sentences, a couple of glances later, understood that the pilot was going to ask him for a loan: nothing easier than anticipating financial favours. But he wouldn’t have guessed the reason in a thousand years: Laverde was going to buy a recording, a black box recording. He explained to Iragorri what flight it was from. He explained who had died on that flight.
‘The money was for some bureaucrat who was going to get him a copy of the cassette,’ said Maya. ‘It seems something like that is not so difficult if you have the right contacts.’
The problem was the amount of the loan: Laverde needed a lot of money, more, obviously, than anyone would have on hand, but also more than a person could withdraw from a cash machine. So the two friends, the pilot and the photographer, made a decision: they stayed there, wasting time in the facilities of the Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute, in the darkroom and the restoration offices, amusing themselves with old contact sheets or fixing the topography on a job they were behind on or rectifying wrong coordinates, and at about eleven thirty they went to the nearest cash machine to withdraw the maximum amount allowed and did so twice: once before and once after midnight. So they tricked the machine’s computer, that poor apparatus that only understands digits; that’s how Ricardo Laverde acquired the amount of money he needed. ‘Iragorri told me all that. It was the last piece of information I could find,’ Maya told me, ‘until I learned that my father was not alone when he was shot.’
‘Until you learned that I existed.’
‘Yes. Until I found that out.’
‘Well Ricardo never spoke to me about that job,’ I said. ‘Never mentioned maps or aerial photos or a twin-engine Commander.’
‘Never?’
‘Never. And not because I didn’t ask.’
‘I see,’ said Maya.
But it was obvious: she was seeing something that escaped me. In the living-room window the trees were beginning to appear, the silhouettes of their branches were beginning to detach themselves from the dark background of that long night, and also inside, around us, things recovered the lives they had during the day. ‘What do you see?’ I asked Maya. She seemed tired. We were both tired, I thought; I thought that under my eyes there would also be grey circles like the ones under Maya’s eyes. ‘Iragorri sat there the day he came,’ she said. She pointed at the empty armchair across from us, the nearest to the stereo system from which no sound was now coming. ‘He just stayed for lunch. He didn’t ask me to tell him anything in return. Or to show him my family’s papers. Much less sleep with me.’ I looked down, guessed that she was doing the same. And Maya added, ‘The truth is that you, my dear friend, are a user.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ Maya smiled: in the dawn’s blue light I saw her smile. ‘The thing is I remember perfectly, he was sitting there and we’d just been brought some lulo juice, because Iragorri was teetotal, and he’d added a spoonful of sugar and he was stirring it like this, slowly, when we got to the thing about the cash machine. Then he told me that of course, of course he’d lent my dad that money, but he didn’t really have money to spare. So he said look, Ricardo, don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask you how you’re going to pay me back. When you’re going to pay me back, and how? And that’s when my dad, according to Iragorri, told him, Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve just done a job that I’ll be getting good money for. I’m going to pay you all this back with interest.’
Maya stood up, took a couple of steps towards the rustic table her little stereo sat on and pressed rewind. The silence filled with that mechanical murmur, as monotonous as running water. ‘That sentence is like a hole, everything goes down it,’ said Maya. ‘I’ve just done a job, my dad said to Iragorri, that I’ll be getting good money for. Not very many words, but they’re fuckers.’