On 31 December, on our way to a New Year’s Eve party, Aura was going through the list of names, a yellow sheet of paper with red horizontal lines and a green double margin, covered in underlinings and crossings-out and marginal comments, that we’d started carrying with us everywhere and would take out at those dead times — in bank queues, waiting rooms, Bogotá’s famous traffic jams — when other people read magazines or imagine other people’s lives or imagine improved versions of their own lives. Few names had survived from the long column of candidates, along with the future mother’s corresponding note or prejudice.
Martina (but it’s a tennis player’s name)
Carlota (but it’s an empress’s name)
We were on the highway, driving north, under the 100th Street bridge. There was an accident up ahead and the traffic was almost completely stopped. None of that seemed to matter to Aura, involved as she was in considerations about the name of our daughter. Somewhere I could hear the ambulance’s siren; I checked the rear-view mirror, trying to find the swirling red lights demanding a way through, making its way, but I couldn’t see anything.
That was when Aura said, ‘What about Leticia? I think one of my great-grandmothers or somebody was called Leticia.’
I repeated the name once or twice, its long vowels, its consonants that mixed vulnerability and strength.
‘Leticia,’ I said. ‘Yes, sounds right.’
So I was a changed man the first working day of the year, when I arrived at the 14th Street billiard club and bumped into Ricardo Laverde, and I remember very well feeling surprised by my own emotions: sympathy for him and his wife, Señora Elena Fritts, and an intense desire, more intense than I ever would have expected, for their encounter during the holidays to have had the best possible consequences. He’d already started his game, on another table, and I started to play on my own. Laverde didn’t look at me; he was treating me as if we’d just seen each other the previous night. At some point in the afternoon, I thought, the rest of the customers would start leaving, and the usual ones would end up finishing off the evening like in musical chairs. Ricardo Laverde and I would meet, play a little and then, with any luck, we’d resume the conversation we’d started before Christmas. But that didn’t happen. When he finished his game I saw him return his cue to the rack, saw him start walking towards the door, saw him change his mind, and saw him walking over to the table where I had just finished my shot. In spite of the profuse sweat on his forehead, in spite of the tiredness bathing his face, there was nothing in his greeting that worried me. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said from a distance, ‘how were your holidays?’ But he didn’t let me answer, or rather he interrupted my answer somehow, or there was something in his tone of voice or in his gestures that let me know the question was rhetorical, one of those vacuous courtesies always exchanged by bogotanos, with no expectation of a sincere or considered response. Laverde took an old-fashioned black cassette tape out of his pocket, with an orange sticker on it and on the sticker the letters BASF. He showed it to me without moving his arm very far from his body, like someone offering some illegal merchandise, emeralds in the plaza, a folded paper of drugs beside the criminal court.
‘Hey, Yammara, I have to listen to this,’ he told me. ‘You wouldn’t know anybody who could lend me a cassette player?’
‘Doesn’t Don José have one?’
‘No, he hasn’t got anything,’ he said. ‘And this is urgent.’ He rapped on the plastic case a couple of times. ‘And it’s private as well.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is a place a couple of blocks away, couldn’t hurt to ask.’
I was thinking of the Casa de Poesía, the only plausible option in the neighbourhood at that time of day. It was the former residence of the poet José Asunción Silva, now converted into a cultural centre where they hold readings and workshops. I used to go there quite often all through my degree. One of its rooms was a unique place in Bogotá: there, all sorts of word-struck people would go to sit on soft leather sofas, near fairly modern stereo equipment, and listen to now legendary recordings: Borges reading Borges, García Márquez reading García Márquez, León de Greiff reading León de Greiff. Silva and his work were on everybody’s lips those days, for in that barely begun 1996 the centenary of his suicide was going to be commemorated. ‘This year,’ I’d read in an opinion piece by a well-known journalist, ‘statues will be raised to him all over the city, and all the politicians will mention his name, and everyone will wander around reciting his “Nocturne”, and everybody will take him flowers at the Casa de Poesía. And Silva, wherever he might be, will find this curious: this prudish society that humiliated him, that pointed their fingers at him every chance they got, paying homage to him now as if he were a head of state. The ruling class of our country, haughty charlatans, have always liked to appropriate culture. And that’s what’s going to happen with Silva: they are going to appropriate his memory. And his real readers are going to spend the whole year wondering why the hell they don’t leave him alone.’ It’s not impossible that I had that column in mind (in some dark part of my mind, deep down, very deep, in the archive of useless things) at the moment I chose that place to take Laverde.
We walked the two blocks without saying a word, with our eyes on the broken paving stones or on the dark green hills that rose in the distance, bristling with eucalyptus and telephone poles like the scales on a Gila monster. When we got to the entrance and walked up the stone steps, Laverde let me go in first: he’d never been in such a place, and he acted with the misgivings, the suspicions, of an animal in a dangerous situation. There were two high-school students in the room with the sofas, a couple of teenagers listening to the same recording and every once in a while looking at each other and laughing indecently, and a man in a suit and tie, with a faded leather briefcase on his lap, snoring shamelessly. I explained the situation to the woman at the desk, who was no doubt used to exotic requests, and she looked me over through squinting eyes, seemed to recognize me or identify me as a person who’d been there many times before, and held out her hand.
‘Let’s see, then,’ she said unenthusiastically. ‘What is it you want to play?’
Laverde handed her the cassette like a soldier surrendering his weapon, with fingers visibly smudged with blue billiard chalk. He went to sit down, submissive as I’d never seen him before, in the armchair the woman pointed him to; he put on the headphones, leaned back and closed his eyes. Meanwhile, I was looking for something to occupy my time while I waited, and my hand picked up Silva’s poems as it might have chosen any other recording (I must have given in to the superstition of anniversaries). I sat down in my chair, picked up the corresponding headphones, adjusted them over my ears with that feeling of putting myself beyond or closer to real life, of starting to live in another dimension. And when the ‘Nocturne’ began to play, when a voice I couldn’t identify — a baritone that verged on melodrama — read that first line that every Colombian has pronounced aloud at least once, I noticed that Ricardo Laverde was crying. One night all heavy with perfume, said the baritone over a piano accompaniment, and a few steps away from me Ricardo Laverde, who wasn’t listening to the lines I was listening to, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, then his whole sleeve, with murmurs and music of wings. Ricardo Laverde’s shoulders began to shake; he hung his head, brought his hands together like someone praying. And your shadow, lean and languid, said Silva in the voice of the melodramatic baritone, And my shadow, cast by the moonbeams. I didn’t know whether to look at Laverde or not, whether to leave him alone in his sorrow or go and ask him what was wrong. I remember having thought that I could at least take off my headphones, a way like any other of opening a space between Laverde and me, of inviting him to speak to me; and I remember deciding against it, having chosen the safety and silence of my recording, where the melancholy of Silva’s poem would sadden me without putting me at risk. I guessed that Laverde’s sadness was full of risks, I was afraid of what that sadness might contain, but my intuition didn’t go far enough to understand what had happened. I didn’t remember the woman Laverde had been waiting for, I didn’t remember her name, I didn’t associate him with the accident at El Diluvio, but I stayed where I was, in my chair and with the headphones on, trying not to interrupt Ricardo Laverde’s sadness, and I even closed my eyes so I wouldn’t bother him with my indiscreet gaze, to allow him a certain privacy in the middle of that public place. In my head, and only in my head, Silva said: And they were one single long shadow. In my self-contained world, where all was full of the baritone voice and Silva’s words and the decadent piano music that enveloped them, a time went by that lengthens in my memory. Those who listen to poetry know how this can happen, time kept by the lines of verse like a metronome and at the same time stretching and dispersing and confusing us like dreamtime.