The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  What followed was a world at war. Screams of hysteria, men throwing themselves to the ground to protect their children with their bodies, uncontrolled crying, fainting. In the midst of the commotion, Zapruder, not yet entirely understanding what had just happened, was returning to his office with his secretary when a reporter from The Dallas Morning News approached him. His name was Harry McCormick; he’d seen him filming and offered to take him to a Secret Service agent, Forrest Sorrels, who would undoubtedly know how to deal with the extraordinary document he had in his hands. Zapruder agreed to hand over the film to Agent Sorrels, but he put one condition on it: that it should be used only to investigate the assassination. After reaching an agreement, the men went to the WFAA television station to develop the film, but without success: the technicians did not have the necessary equipment at the studio. So Zapruder ended up taking the film to the Kodak processing plant, waiting until 6:30 in the evening, then going immediately to the Jamieson Film Company to have two copies made, and arriving home after the most exhausting day he would ever live. That night he dreamed he returned to Manhattan, where he’d lived for his first twenty years in the United States, and when he arrived at Times Square he saw a booth advertising: “See the President’s head explode!”

  I have seen it explode. Millions of people have seen it explode (like a firecracker), and we’ve also seen what comes next, the improbable seconds when Jackie lunges to recover the fragments of her husband’s recently shattered head; and there, among Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides’s cuttings, the frames showing the elegant and well-groomed woman on top of the back of the Lincoln limousine (midnight blue, the same color as Gaitán’s suit), reaching for pieces of cranium or brain matter. What was Jackie looking for? What instinct told her to recover fragments of a body she had loved and that had now stopped living? We can speculate: we can think, for example, of an instinct that, for lack of a better word, I call completist: the urge not to allow something that was together to disintegrate. Whole, the body of John Fitzgerald Kennedy lived and worked, it was the body of a father and a husband (and also of a president, a friend, a promiscuous lover); fragmented by the impact of the bullets, broken into pieces that now slid across the midnight blue of the limousine, that living body had stopped existing. Maybe that’s what Jackie desired, even if she was unaware of it: to repair the ruined body to return it to its original state, the state it had been in seconds before, with the illusory impression that in doing so, returning the lost fragments to the destroyed body, that body would come back to life. Would the professor of forensic sciences have thought the same thing when he looked at this page of a newspaper and when he cut out the frames from Zapruder’s film? Maybe Luis Ángel Benavides read the images in a different way; maybe he had good reasons to believe that Jackie, acting the way she did, was thinking in forensic terms: collecting evidence to help the eventual investigators, the discovery of the guilty party and his efficient punishment. It’s possible that he’d had that opinion at the moment of cutting out the page and adding it to his dossier, his puzzle; it’s possible, I say, because we all see the images Zapruder’s camera captured coldly and with distance and it’s legitimate to imagine Benavides the elder seeing them like that when he cut out these pages; but believing such considerations could have passed through the consciousness of Jackie Kennedy on November 22, 1963, believing those methodical reasons inspired her in the moment of losing all her composure and climbing on top of the trunk of the Lincoln, with her husband’s blood still fresh on her tailored suit, seeping into its fabric and staining it irremediably, is to ignore the power our atavisms have over us. If a religion had formed around JFK (the idea is not preposterous), each of its threads would have become a relic as well. And we would adore it, yes, we would worship it, and we would construct altars or museums, and conserve it over time like a treasure.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS ABSORBED in those thoughts when Dr. Benavides returned. “Everybody’s asleep now,” he said, and dropped with fatigue into his reading chair. It was as if he made me notice—with his movements, with the weight of the sigh he let out—that I was tired too: my head ached a little, my eyes were beginning to sting, and the claustrophobia I’d suffered since childhood (yes, like Mr. Zapruder’s vertigo) perked up: I wanted open spaces, to go out into the cold air of the Bogotá night, to get out of that windowless room that smelled of papers from the past and leftover coffee, to get back to the clinic and see M and hear about my daughters, who were still living in a distant world incomprehensible to me. I took out my phone: there were no calls and all the bars that indicated a good signal were still there, at the corner of the screen, firm and parallel, standing up in order of stature like a children’s choir. Benavides pointed to the carpet covered in clippings and added: “Well, I see you’ve been making progress.”

  “How dedicated your father was,” I said. “Admirable.”

  “Yes, that’s what he was. But he was already old when he got feverishly determined. That was in ’83, the twentieth anniversary: at that moment his dedication turned into something more. One day he said to me: I’m not going to die without resolving the Kennedy case. He died, of course, without resolving it, but his papers are still here. Why isn’t . . . ?” He bent down, moved his hand through the papers and grabbed one. “Yes, here it is. This is from that time, look: an analysis of the hypotheses of the crime, in his own handwriting. Read it, please.”

  “You want me to read it?”

  “Please.”

  I cleared my throat. “‘Hypothesis one,’” I read. “‘Two shooters, page ninety-five.’ Page ninety-five of what?”

  “I don’t know. Some book he was consulting. Go on.”

  “‘Two shooters,’” I obeyed, “‘one in the window of the sixth floor, another on the second floor. Note: At 12:20 a film shows two silhouettes in the sixth-floor window.’ In parentheses: ‘At 12:31 the president is shot. The superintendent of the building, Roy S. Truly, going upstairs with a policeman immediately after the shots were fired, meets Oswald drinking a Coca-Cola in the second-floor hallway.’ I think that’s what it says, your father’s handwriting isn’t that easy to decipher.”

  “As if I didn’t know. Go on.”

  “‘Hypothesis two. Page ninety-seven. Oswald fired from the second-floor window and the other shooter, who was a more expert sniper, fired Oswald’s rifle from the sixth floor. Hypothesis three . . .’”

  “No, not that one. That one’s useless.”

  “It says that maybe Oswald wanted to kill the governor.”

  “Yes, exactly. It’s useless. The important thing is in the others, those contain my father’s convictions.”

  “His conclusions?”

  “No, not his conclusions, because he never had a definitive one. But he did arrive at the conviction, as definitive as it could be, that Oswald didn’t act alone. That the lone-wolf theory, as the Gringos call it, is completely false. Lone wolf, isn’t that what they say? Even the name is absurd. Nobody could have done that alone, it seems obvious. You’d have to be blind not to see it. Or rather: you have to not want to see it not to see it.”

  “You’re talking like Carballo,” I said.

  Benavides laughed. “Maybe, maybe.” Then: “You’ve seen the Zapruder film, I imagine?”

  “Several times, yes.”

  “Then you remember.”

  “What?”

  “The head, Vásquez. What else?”

  Perhaps it was because I didn’t answer immediately, or due to the tiniest instant of silence that opened up after his words, but Benavides leaped to his desk, and there, standing in front of the enormous screen of his computer (I had his chair and he didn’t ask for it back), bending over with difficulty as if taking a bow, he moved the mouse and began to type. In seconds a YouTube page opened: The Zapruder Film, I read. And there was the shiny Lincoln, advancing at that frighteningly slow pace, accompanied by whi
te-helmeted motorcyclists, and there was Kennedy. There was the president: sitting so close to the door that he could rest his right arm on it, waving to one side and the other with the same relaxed hand, swallowing up the world with his propaganda smile and his hairstyle so perfect it didn’t even get ruffled in the open air, sure of his life and his deeds or at least pretending a seamless self-confidence. The motorcade is partially hidden behind some object that might be a placard or a street sign, and when it comes out again, comes back into view, something happens that no one seems to understand: Kennedy makes a strange motion with his arms, a gesture that would not have seemed normal in anyone, much less in a president with the eyes of the world on him at that moment. He brings his fists together at his throat—in front of the knot of his tie, shall we say—and raises his elbows symmetrically like a marionette. The first shot has wounded him. The bullet came from behind and went right through, and it’s possible that Kennedy had lost consciousness in this instant, because then he closes his eyes, as if he were sleeping, and begins to lean toward Jackie. It’s horribly slow, the calmness with which death settles on the Lincoln limousine: in full view of everyone, without hiding, without arriving surreptitiously as it usually does, but intruding in broad daylight. The president’s wife doesn’t yet know what has happened; she knows something strange is happening, because she sees her husband leaning toward her, as if he suddenly felt ill, and then she tilts her head toward him (her impeccable pillbox hat, her haircut that marked a generation) and speaks to him or appears to speak to him. We can imagine her words, her apprehensive words still ignorant that he is no longer able to hear them: “Are you okay?” Jackie Kennedy might have said. Or perhaps: “What’s the matter? Do you feel all right?” And then her husband’s head explodes: yes, like a firecracker. It’s the second bullet, which shatters the occiput and scatters his bone fragments, his relics. The video lasts a few seconds more and then the screen goes black. It took me a moment to emerge from its spell. Benavides had returned to his armchair and gestured to me (with an almost imperceptible motion of his open hand) to also return to my place.

  “You see it, right?” he said then. “The first shot comes from behind and goes through Kennedy. My father believes that he was killed at that moment. The second shot comes from the front. Look at his head: it goes back and to the left, because the bullet comes from the front and to the right. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Okay. Then tell me: How is it possible that Oswald was behind the president at the moment of the first shot and in front of the president one second later? If the second bullet was fired by the same assassin as the first, the head would have been driven forward by the impact. And Jackie would not have flung herself on the back of the car to pick up pieces of his skull, because the pieces would have flown forward toward where the governor was sitting, or toward the driver’s seat. No, Vásquez, it’s not possible that both shots came from the same direction. It’s not me who says so and it’s not the conspiracy theory: it’s the laws of physics. That’s what my father said: ‘It’s a matter of physics.’ And we’ve known this for some time, although official history refuses to accept it. My father knew it too. He knew there were at least two, two shooters.”

  “In the book depository. One on the sixth floor and one on the second.”

  “Exactly. But that doesn’t explain the provenance of the shot that makes Kennedy’s head explode. My father believed that shot hadn’t come from the book depository, but from somewhere in front of the motorcade.”

  “That’s what the 1975 article says. This Groden fellow’s theory.”

  “Yes. One or two snipers fired from the front. Groden says there was one behind a pedestal and another behind a shrub. And that the one behind the shrub had a rifle. Now then: Do you know what Zapruder said after the assassination? A special agent took his statement, and Zapruder was sure the assassin was behind him. Later, in front of the Warren Commission, he retracted: he said there were too many echoes in Dealey Plaza, and that he couldn’t be sure. But in his first version, the version he gave on the very day of the assassination, he was as sure as he could be. He didn’t doubt, he didn’t say ‘I believe that,’ he didn’t say ‘It might have been like that.’ No: he was sure. And my father was also sure.”

  “But in the notes he doesn’t mention that.”

  “These notes I showed you are just a part of his studies. There are whole pages, much longer than these, but they’re not here. Do you know who has them?”

  “Don’t tell me: Carballo.”

  “Well, yes, I will tell you. Carballo has them. Why? Because he had them when my father died, as simple as that. Carballo kept many papers, and it was because my father lent them to him. Or rather: he gave them to him and never wanted them back. And although it’s hard for me to admit, I can understand why: no one was as close to him as Carballo in his final years. Carballo visited him, devoted time to him, listened to him discuss his theories, and that company, for an old man like my father, becomes the most important thing in the world. I made a mistake, Vásquez, I was mistaken and I’ll never forgive myself. I was the one who neglected my father in the last years of his life. I was very involved in my own stuff, understand. I was devoted to my career and my family, fascinated by this new stage of adult life. And with my first child, who was born the year after our wedding. When Kennedy had been dead for twenty years, my second child had just been born. My daughter. So in 1983 I had to be a father of two children, a husband, a surgeon trying to make his way in the world, and on top of that I had to take care of my father. And of course, it was very, very handy for me to have Carballo there.”

  “To keep your father distracted,” I said.

  “I’m not the only one, either, am I?” said Benavides. “All sons of widowed fathers are grateful to have someone keep them company. Carballo fulfilled this role for me: he was the perfect companion for my father, he made him feel alive and awake, and best of all he did it without thinking he was doing anyone a favor. Just the opposite, feeling privileged: feeling that my father was making him a gift of his time and his ideas. Which is pretty close to the truth, besides. ‘How I envy you,’ Carballo would say to me. ‘How I would have liked to be the son of a man like the doctor,’ he’d say. It was a perfect arrangement. I didn’t even pay him, I paid him in kind. In writings in my father’s hand. In books and documents. In a whole bunch of things that had value to me, although I only realized too late.”

  “And among those things are papers that should be in this file,” I said.

  “Exactly. But for Carballo they’re more than that: they’re clues.”

  “Clues to the Kennedy case,” I said, as if stating the obvious.

  “No,” said Benavides. “Clues to the Gaitán case. Let’s see, let’s see if you can understand: the only thing that interests Carballo is Gaitán. April 9 is his only obsession, and there’s nothing else. The Kennedy case interests him as far as it illuminates Gaitán’s. Carballo says that in the Kennedy case there are clues about Gaitán, about figuring out who murdered him and how they covered up the conspiracy. What happened to Kennedy points to what happened to Gaitán.”

  “But Kennedy was much later,” I said.

  “And you don’t think I’ve told him that? A thousand times and in every tone of voice. But he thinks everything contains clues. He finds clues in everything. And when he sees them, he jumps on them.”

  Benavides had bent down to pick up the purple file, and from his armchair, stretching his long arms so much that his cufflinks strained against his skin, he began to pick up the cuttings. He did so carefully, lifting each rectangle of paper with his thumb and index finger held in the shape of tweezers. “How yellow they’re getting, poor things,” he said with an affectionate tone, as if he was talking about a litter of newborn puppies. I also bent down and began collecting cuttings, and the whole scene was strangely intimate. Benavides separated one of the papers out and
set it on his reading table; when the rest were sorted back in the folder, he picked it up again and asked me if I’d seen it.