The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

young man. ‘You’ve got no business here.’
    ‘I knew him,’ I said.
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Consu.
    ‘I was with him when he was killed,’ I said then. I lifted up my shirt and showed the woman the scar on my belly. ‘One of the bullets hit me,’ I said.
    Scars can be eloquent.
     
    For the next few hours I talked to Consu about that day, about meeting Laverde at the billiard club, about the Casa de Poesía and about what happened afterwards. I told her what Laverde had told me and that I still didn’t understand why he’d told me that. I also told her about the recording, about the distress that had swept over Laverde while he listened to it, about the speculations that crossed my mind at that moment about its possible contents, about what could be said to produce that effect on a more or less hardened adult. ‘I can’t imagine,’ I told her. ‘And I’ve tried, I swear, but I can’t figure it out. I just can’t.’ ‘You can’t, can you?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said. By this point we were in the kitchen, Consu sitting in a white plastic chair and me on a wooden stool with a broken rung, so close to the gas cylinder that we could have touched it by simply stretching out an arm. The inside of the house was just as I’d imagined it: the patio, the wooden beams visible on the ceiling, the green doors of the rented rooms. Consu listened to me and nodded, put her hands between her knees and clamped her legs together as if she didn’t want her hands to escape. After a while, she offered me a black coffee, which she made by putting the ground coffee beans into a piece of a nylon stocking and then putting the stocking into a little brass pot covered in grey dents, and when I finished it she offered me another and repeated the procedure, and each time the air became impregnated with the smell of gas and then of the burnt match. I asked Consu which was Laverde’s room, and she pursed her lips and pointed with them, moving her head like an uncomfortable colt. ‘That one there,’ she said. ‘Now it’s occupied by a musician, such a nice guy, you should see him, he plays guitar at the Camarín del Carmen.’ She fell quiet, looking at her hands, and eventually said, ‘He had a combination lock, because Ricardo didn’t like carrying keychains around with him. I had to break it when he was killed.’
    The police had arrived, by chance, at the same time Ricardo Laverde usually came home, and Consu, thinking it was him, opened the door before they knocked. She found herself facing two officers, one with grey hair who lisped when he spoke and another who stayed two steps behind and didn’t say a single word. ‘You could see the grey hair was premature, who knows what that man had seen,’ said Consu. ‘They showed me an ID card and asked me if I recognized the individual, that’s how he put it, the individual, what a strange word for a dead man. And the truth is, I didn’t recognize him,’ said Consu, crossing herself. ‘The thing is he’d really changed. I had to read the card to tell them yes, the man was called Ricardo Laverde and he’d been living here since whatever month. First I thought: he’s got himself into trouble. They’re going to put him away again. I felt sorry for him, because Ricardo complied with all that stuff since he got out.’
    ‘What stuff?’
    ‘Things convicts have to do. When they get out of prison.’
    ‘So you knew,’ I said.
    ‘Of course, dear. Everybody knew.’
    ‘And did you know what he’d done, too?’
    ‘No, not that,’ said Consu. ‘Well, I never tried to find out. That would have messed up our relationship, don’t you think? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, that’s what I say.’
    The police followed her to Laverde’s room. Using a hammer as a lever, Consu shattered the aluminium semicircle, and the lock landed in one of the little ditches in the central patio. When she opened the door she found a monk’s cell: