The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “But there are those who think the opposite, right, Francisco? There are those who can see where others are blind. Not in your world, Vásquez. In your world there are only coincidences. It’s a coincidence that the towers collapsed when they shouldn’t have. It’s a coincidence that a man was in front of the Granada Drugstore able to get it opened without having to ask. It’s a coincidence that your uncle’s name appears fourteen pages after that incident.”

  “Okay, now I really don’t understand,” I said. “What does my uncle have to do with that guy?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carballo. “And neither do you, because you never asked him anything. Because you never talked to your uncle about April 9. Because you don’t know whether your uncle might have known the man who made them open the Granada Drugstore. Wouldn’t you like to know, Vásquez? Wouldn’t you like to know who that guy was who had Juan Roa Sierra killed in front of everyone, and then hopped into a fancy car and disappeared forever? We’re talking about the most serious thing to ever happen to your country and you seem not to care. A relative of yours participated in that historic moment and might have known who the guy was, everyone knew everyone back then. And you seem not to give a shit. You’re all the same, brother: you go live somewhere else and forget about the country. Or maybe not, now that I think about it. Maybe you’re just protecting your uncle. Maybe you don’t forget anything, but know very well what happened. You know very well that your uncle organized the Boyacá police. You know very well that the police force later turned into an assassination squad. What do you feel when you think of that? Do you worry about being well informed? Have you worried? Or don’t you give a shit, do you think that it has nothing to do with you, that it all happened a quarter of a century before you were born? Yes, that’s probably what you think, that this thing is for others to worry about, other people’s problems, not yours. Well, you know what? I’m glad destiny has forced your children to be born here, has forced your wife to give birth here: I’m glad of that. So your country can teach you a lesson, teach you not to be so selfish. So maybe your daughters can end up giving you a lesson on what it means to be Colombian. That is, if they’re born properly, right? If they don’t die right there, like sickly kittens. That would be a lesson too, now that I think of it.”

  What happened next I remember through a mist. I do remember that in the next second I no longer had the glass of whiskey in my hand; in the next I realize I’d thrown it at Carballo’s face, and I remember very well the crash of the glass as it shattered against the floor and I also remember Carballo on his knees covering his face with his hands, bleeding through his broken nose and the blood staining his cravat, red on red, dark red (black blood, the Greeks called it) on the brilliant red of a matador’s spear, and also running down the edge of his left hand, dirtying the cuff of his shirt and his watch strap, which I remember being of white fabric and therefore more vulnerable to bloodstains than a leather one. I remember Carballo’s shouts of pain, or maybe fear: there are people who are afraid of the sight of blood. I also remember Benavides taking me by the arm with a firm grip, full of authority and decisiveness (almost a decade has passed, but I can still recall the pressure of that hand on my arm, still feel it), and guiding me through the living room, the occupants of which parted to allow us to pass between incredulous or openly censorious stares, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Estela, my hostess, running toward the injured man with a bag of ice in her hand, and another woman, maybe the housekeeper, carrying a broom and dustpan with an irritated or impatient expression on her face. I had time to think that Benavides was throwing me out of his house. I had time to regret it, yes, to regret the end of a relationship that wasn’t a friendship but might have become one, and in a flash of guilt I imagined the open door and the shove out of the house. I felt tired and maybe I’d had one drink too many, though I don’t think so, but through my hazy understanding I was prepared to take responsibility for my actions, so in my head I began to rapidly sketch out excuses or justifications, and I think I’d begun speaking them when I realized Benavides was not leading me to the front door, but rather to the staircase. “Go upstairs, open the first door on the left, lock the door behind you, and wait for me there,” he said, placing a key ring in my hand. “Don’t open it for anyone else. I’ll be up as soon as I can. I think we have a lot to discuss.”

  II

  RELICS OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD

  I don’t know how long I waited in that jumbled, airless room. It was a study with no windows, obviously designed as Benavides’s territory. There was an armchair for reading under the beam of light from a large lamp, which looked more like an old-fashioned hair dryer than anything else. And there I sat after walking several times around the room without finding a place that seemed destined for visitors: the doctor’s study was not a space made for receiving anybody. Beside the chair, on top of a small table, was a pile of a dozen books that I amused myself by looking at without deciding to leaf through any of them for fear of breaking some hidden order. I saw a biography of Jean Jaurès and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and I saw Arturo Alape’s book on the Bogotazo and another leather-bound volume, this one more slender than the previous, the author’s name unreadable and a title that struck me as too much like a pamphlet: How Colombian Political Liberalism Is Not a Sin. The center of the longest wall was occupied by a desk, the surface of which was a rectangle of green leather, with two meticulous piles of paper, one of sealed envelopes and another of unfolded bills (a rare concession to practical life in this place devoted, it would appear, to various forms of contemplation), kept in place by the weight of a handcrafted pencil holder. Two pieces of equipment dominated the surface: a scanner and the screen of a computer, a huge white monster of the latest generation that occupied its place like an idol. No, I thought immediately: not like an idol, but like a great eye, like an all-seeing, all-knowing eye. Ridiculously I checked to make sure the computer was turned off, or at least that its camera was, in case anyone was spying on me.

  What had happened down there? I still wasn’t completely clear about it. I was surprised at my violent reaction, in spite of the fact that I, like most people of my generation, have a suppressed undercurrent of violence as a consequence of having grown up in a time when the city, my city, had turned into a minefield, and the great violence of bombs and shoot-outs recurred among us with their insidious mechanisms: anyone will remember the alacrity with which we’d get out of our cars ready to smash somebody’s face in for a banal traffic incident, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has seen the black hole of a pistol pointing in his face more than once. I won’t be alone, either, in my fascination with scenes of violence, those football matches converted into pitched battles, those hidden cameras that register lost fistfights in the Madrid metro or a Buenos Aires gas station, scenes I look up on the internet to watch and feel the inevitable adrenaline surge. But none of that could justify what happened downstairs; however, the state of my nerves, due to lack of sleep and extreme tension, might help to explain it a little. That’s what I clung to: yes, that wasn’t me, and Dr. Benavides and his wife had to understand that: thirty blocks away, my unborn daughters were running life-or-death risks daily, and each day my well-being and that of my wife were facing the chance of a highly perilous birth. Was it not understandable that a comment like Carballo’s would make me lose my sanity for a moment?

  On the other hand, how much did Carballo know about my relationship with José María Villarreal? It was obvious he didn’t have concrete particulars, but also that he and Benavides had been talking about me in some detail. Since when? Had Benavides invited me to his house for the secret purpose of introducing me to Carballo, or so that Carballo could meet me? Why? Because I was the nephew of someone who lived through April 9 firsthand and had a key role in what happened after Gaitán’s assassination. Yes: that, at least, was true. It was a public event and formed part of official history: the governor loyal to the re
gime who sends a thousand men to control the riots. And of course, I had read García Márquez’s memoir as everyone had, and I had felt uncomfortable, as everyone had, and even alarmed at the clarity with which the country’s best novelist, as well as our most influential intellectual, suggested without foundation or euphemism the existence of a hidden truth. For that page was doing nothing else: by talking about the elegant man and suggesting his participation in the murder of the murderer, García Márquez put down in black and white his profound conviction that Juan Roa Sierra was not the sole assassin of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, but that there was an elaborate political conspiracy behind the crime. The man had managed to have a false assassin killed in order to protect the identity of the real one: the words now acquired a new luminosity. But what had not occurred to me, of course, was that my uncle might have known who the elegant man was. The idea was outlandish, even if everyone back then knew everyone within the political elites. Was it outlandish? It was. But was it? Each of Carballo’s words seemed to indicate a profound conviction: my uncle José María could have been in the position to know something that would illuminate, although in a tenuous way, the identity of the man who had had a false assassin killed in order to protect the identity of the real one.

  I was deep in these ruminations when someone knocked on the door.

  When I opened it, I found a haggard and stooped version of Dr. Benavides, as if recent events had worn him down even further. In his hands he carried a tray with two cups and a fuchsia-colored thermos like the kind runners use, except that Dr. Benavides’s thermos didn’t contain water or an energy drink, but strong black coffee. “Not for me, thank you,” I said. “Yes, for you. Thank you.” And he poured me a cup. “Oh, Vásquez,” he continued. “What a mess you got me into today.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m very sorry, Francisco. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “You don’t know? I do. It would probably have happened to anyone in your situation. Carballo got out of hand, I know that too. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a mess for me.” He walked over to a corner of the room and pressed a button on a sort of robotic vent: the temperature in the room went down several degrees and I had the impression that the air was no longer humid. “You ruined my get-together, dear friend,” said Benavides. “You ruined my party and my wife’s.”

  “I can go downstairs,” I offered. “I can apologize to everyone.”

  “Don’t worry. They all left.”

  “Carballo too.”

  “Carballo too,” said Benavides. “He went to the clinic. See if they can fix that septum.”

  Then he walked over to his desk, sat down, and turned on the computer. “Carballo is a very peculiar guy,” he said, “and he might seem mad. I don’t say he doesn’t. But he’s actually a worthwhile guy, so passionate that he sometimes goes too far. But I like passionate people. It’s a weakness, what can I do. I like people who believe what they believe with real passion. And God knows that’s how it is with Carballo.” While he was talking, Benavides was moving the mouse over the green leather of his desk, and the elements on-screen changed, windows opened one on top of the other, and behind them I managed to see the image Benavides had chosen as his desktop background. I wasn’t surprised to recognize another of Sady González’s photos: the one of a burning streetcar during the April 9 disturbances. It was an image charged with violence, and must say something about the person who chose to see it every time he turns on his computer, but I didn’t feel like thinking about that too much: it was also possible to stop seeing in that image a denunciation of the danger and destruction of that ill-fated day, and see only a spur to memory, a historical testimony. “Have you drunk your coffee?” Benavides asked.

  I showed him my empty cup, its bottom adorned only with brown rings that some (not I) know how to read and interpret. “All of it,” I said.

  “Very good. Do you feel wide awake, or shall I pour you another?”

  “I’m awake, Doctor. What happened downstairs was something else. It was . . .”

  “Don’t call me Doctor, Vásquez, I beg you. First of all because the word is so devalued in this country. Everyone, everyone gets called doctor. Second, I’m not your physician. Third, you and I are friends. Aren’t we friends?”

  “Yes, Doctor. Francisco. Yes, Francisco.”

  “And friends don’t use formulas like that with each other. Do they?”

  “No, Francisco.”

  “I could call you doctor too, Vásquez. You decided to devote yourself to writing, but first you graduated from law school. And lawyers also get called doctor in this country, don’t they?”

  “They do.”

  “And do you know why I don’t call you doctor?”

  “Because we’re friends.”

  “Exactly. Because we’re friends. And because we’re friends, I trust you. And you trust me, I imagine.”

  “Yes, Francisco. I trust you.”

  “Exactly. And because we trust each other, I’m about to do something I only do with people I trust. I’m doing it with you because I trust you and I feel I owe you an explanation. You owe me a whiskey glass and a dinner party with my friends, but I owe you an explanation. And even if I didn’t, I would give it to you. I think you can understand what I’m going to show you. Understand it and appreciate it. There are not many people who can. I think you can. I hope I’m not mistaken. Come here,” he said, pointing an authoritative finger to the space beside his chair, in front of the desk with his papers. “Stand here.”

  Obeying him, I found the computer screen transformed. Occupying it entirely, apart from the colorful icons that run along the bottom, was an image I immediately recognized as an X-ray of a thorax; in the middle of the X-ray, embraced by the shadows of the ribs, resting on the spinal column, a black stain in the shape of a bean. I asked, “What’s that bean?” and Benavides told me it wasn’t a bean but a bullet deformed by its impact with the vertebrae: one of the four bullets that had killed Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948.

  * * *

  —

  GAITÁN’S BONES. The bullet that had killed Gaitán. I was seeing them: there they were. I felt the privilege, the rare privilege of being there. I thought of Gaitán, of the famous photo of his lifeless face and of my visit to his house in my student days, when I began to be interested in his life story and his death and what that death and that life said about us Colombians. I remembered the glass case and the three-piece suit Gaitán was wearing when he was killed: I remembered the perforations in the dark cloth caused by the assassin Juan Roa Sierra’s bullets. Now I was seeing one of those bullets inside the body, the now lifeless body. Benavides made comments and notations like a good professor, counted vertebrae and pointed out invisible organs and recited, as if they were poems, entire phrases someone had written on Gaitán’s autopsy. One of them, “the heart intact without malicious signs of any cardiac arrest,” struck me as worthy of a better destiny (it would have been those malicious signs, señales aviesas, that struck me as fantastic), but this was not a moment for making literature. I could only ask inwardly how it was possible that this was in his hands. Until I stopped wondering inwardly and asked out loud:

  “How is it possible? How is it possible that you have this?”

  “The original is in a locked drawer,” said Benavides, answering a question no one had asked. “Only normal, no? Although nobody knows it’s here.”

  “But why is it here?”

  Benavides allowed something approaching a smile to appear on his face. “My father brought it,” he said. He didn’t say “papá,” as we Colombians tend to say even when we’re adults and talking to another adult, even to strangers. In other Spanish-speaking countries, an adult talking about one’s papá to another adult is an inevitable sign of affectedness or infantilism. Not so in Colombia. And nevertheless, Dr. Benavides always referred to his as his father. For some reason, I liked tha
t.

  “He brought it?” I asked. “Where did he bring it from? Why did he have it?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” said Benavides. “Now have patience, and allow me to tell you the whole story.”

  He dragged the chair he’d been sitting in—a modern black desk chair on wheels, with a sort of elastic webbing as a back and umpteen levers and switches for unknown functions—and moved it over beside the armchair. Benavides made a sign to me: You sit here. He sat in the armchair, crossed his hands over the buttons of his sweater, and began to tell me his father’s story.

  Don Luis Ángel Benavides had studied bacteriology at the National University. His scant vocation for the science did not prevent him from getting the best marks in his discipline, and during the final year of his studies he received a visit that changed his life: on the recommendation of his professor, the legendary Guillermo Uribe Cualla, the university authorities invited him to found the forensic laboratory. He never opened another bacteriology book. He traveled to the United States to specialize in ballistics and forensic sciences, and returned to Colombia ready to become the campus celebrity and great professor of his day. “He taught classes at the Institute of Penal Sciences in the Faculty of Law,” Benavides told me. “A lot of capital letters for a couple of rooms, don’t you think? In any case, there are twenty years’ worth of Colombian judges whose only knowledge of forensic science comes from what my father taught them.” Over the course of his long career, the first Dr. Benavides collected objects—objects he used for his classes, but also rare or odd things that his innumerable disciples or colleagues gave him: firearms, old swords, a lunar rock, a Homo habilis skull—and one day he arrived at his dominion in the university and looked around melancholically. “Damn it,” he said. “This is like living in a museum.” And at that moment he decided: as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he founded and began running, within the facilities of the National University, the Luis Ángel Benavides Carrasco Museum of Forensic Sciences.