the reasons for an accident, to ensure that nothing similar happens again, but I don’t think anyone considers that a black box might have other fates, to fall into hands that were not part of its plan. However, that’s what happened to me with Flight 965 ’s black box, which, having survived the accident, was magically transformed into a black cassette with an orange label and went through two owners before coming to form part of my memories. And that’s how this apparatus, invented to be the electronic memory of planes, has ended up turning into a definitive part of my memory. There it is, and there’s nothing I can do. Forgetting it is not possible.
I waited quite a while before leaving the house in La Candelaria, not just to listen to the recording again (which I did, not once, but twice more), but also because seeing Consu again had suddenly become urgent for me. What else did she know about Ricardo Laverde? Perhaps it had been in order not to find herself obliged to make revelations, not to be suddenly at the mercy of my interrogations, that she had left me alone in her house with her most precious possession. It was starting to get dark. I looked outside: the streetlights were already on, the white walls of the houses were changing colour. It was cold. I looked down the street to the corner, then to the other one. Consu was not around, I couldn’t see her anywhere, so I went back into the kitchen and inside a bigger bag I found a small paper bag the size of a half-bottle of aguardiente . My pen didn’t write very well on its surface, but I would have to make do.
Dear Consu,
I waited for almost an hour. Thank you for letting me hear the recording. I wanted to tell you in person, but it just wasn’t possible.
Beneath these scribbled lines I wrote my complete name, that surname that’s so unusual in Colombia and that still provokes a certain timidity when I write it depending on the people, for there are many who distrust a person in my country if it’s necessary to spell out their surname. Then I smoothed out the bag with my hands and left it on top of the tape recorder, with one of its corners trapped by the cassette door. And I went out into the city with a mixture of sensations in my chest and a single certainty: I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to keep to myself what had just happened to me, the secret and its revelation that I’d just witnessed. I thought that I was never going to be as close to Ricardo Laverde’s life as I had been there, in his house, during the minutes the black box recording had lasted, and I didn’t want that curious exaltation to dissipate, so I went down 7 th Avenue and began to walk around downtown Bogotá, passing through Bolivár Plaza and continuing north, mingling with the people on the always packed pavement and letting myself be pushed by those in the most hurry and bumping into those coming towards me, and looking for less busy smaller streets and even going into the craft market on 10 th Street, I think it’s 10 th, and during all that time thinking that I didn’t want to go home, that Aura and Leticia were part of a different world from the world inhabited by the memory of Ricardo Laverde and of course different from the world in which Flight 965 had crashed. No, I couldn’t go home yet. That’s what I was thinking as I arrived at 22 nd Street, how to delay my arrival home in order to keep living in the black box, with the black box, and then my body made the decision for me and I ended up going into a porn cinema where a naked woman with long, very fair hair in the middle of a fully equipped kitchen lifted up her leg until the heel of her shoe got caught in the burners on top of the stove, and maintained this delicate balancing act while a fully dressed man penetrated her and gave her incomprehensible orders at the same time, the movements of his mouth never corresponding to the words his mouth was pronouncing.
The Thursday before Easter in
I waited quite a while before leaving the house in La Candelaria, not just to listen to the recording again (which I did, not once, but twice more), but also because seeing Consu again had suddenly become urgent for me. What else did she know about Ricardo Laverde? Perhaps it had been in order not to find herself obliged to make revelations, not to be suddenly at the mercy of my interrogations, that she had left me alone in her house with her most precious possession. It was starting to get dark. I looked outside: the streetlights were already on, the white walls of the houses were changing colour. It was cold. I looked down the street to the corner, then to the other one. Consu was not around, I couldn’t see her anywhere, so I went back into the kitchen and inside a bigger bag I found a small paper bag the size of a half-bottle of aguardiente . My pen didn’t write very well on its surface, but I would have to make do.
Dear Consu,
I waited for almost an hour. Thank you for letting me hear the recording. I wanted to tell you in person, but it just wasn’t possible.
Beneath these scribbled lines I wrote my complete name, that surname that’s so unusual in Colombia and that still provokes a certain timidity when I write it depending on the people, for there are many who distrust a person in my country if it’s necessary to spell out their surname. Then I smoothed out the bag with my hands and left it on top of the tape recorder, with one of its corners trapped by the cassette door. And I went out into the city with a mixture of sensations in my chest and a single certainty: I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to keep to myself what had just happened to me, the secret and its revelation that I’d just witnessed. I thought that I was never going to be as close to Ricardo Laverde’s life as I had been there, in his house, during the minutes the black box recording had lasted, and I didn’t want that curious exaltation to dissipate, so I went down 7 th Avenue and began to walk around downtown Bogotá, passing through Bolivár Plaza and continuing north, mingling with the people on the always packed pavement and letting myself be pushed by those in the most hurry and bumping into those coming towards me, and looking for less busy smaller streets and even going into the craft market on 10 th Street, I think it’s 10 th, and during all that time thinking that I didn’t want to go home, that Aura and Leticia were part of a different world from the world inhabited by the memory of Ricardo Laverde and of course different from the world in which Flight 965 had crashed. No, I couldn’t go home yet. That’s what I was thinking as I arrived at 22 nd Street, how to delay my arrival home in order to keep living in the black box, with the black box, and then my body made the decision for me and I ended up going into a porn cinema where a naked woman with long, very fair hair in the middle of a fully equipped kitchen lifted up her leg until the heel of her shoe got caught in the burners on top of the stove, and maintained this delicate balancing act while a fully dressed man penetrated her and gave her incomprehensible orders at the same time, the movements of his mouth never corresponding to the words his mouth was pronouncing.
The Thursday before Easter in
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