The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  The girls were born at 12:00 noon and 12:04. At that moment the doctors wouldn’t let me see them: the stretcher that took them from the operating room left with such urgency that for an instant I sensed a gust of impending disaster. All I could see was a mess of white cloth; from that inert bundle arose the oval and translucent air pumps, which the nurses squeezed to help my daughters take their first breaths with their cortisone-matured lungs. M was still anesthetized and would take a few minutes to come around, but I asked permission to be with her when she did, and in those minutes I thought of the disappointment that would now accompany her forever: that of not having seen her daughters as soon as they were born. She would wake up and I would tell her that everything had gone well, that the girls were in their incubators and starting to recover; but none of that would change the fact that she hadn’t seen them. That made me sad; I thought, however, that my sadness was not comparable to what she would feel. In any case, what mattered now was the obligation, after the emergency of the premature birth, to confront another task: the uncertain survival of thirty-week creatures whose bodies weren’t ready for life.

  Hours went by before I was allowed to see them for the first time. I was alone when that happened: after being immobilized for twenty-seven days, M had suffered a slight atrophy of her leg muscles, and couldn’t even stand up; so as soon as I received authorization to visit my daughters, I found the camera we’d brought for this moment (although we’d imagined this moment would be very different) and I headed for the neonatal unit. There, between six or seven other newborns that were never more than blots on the landscape to me, were the two girls, each identified with a white card, and each card affixed to the incubator with insulating tape. They were bathed in a beam of bright light; otherwise they were well wrapped up, with little fleece hats on their heads, white blindfolds over their eyes so the light wouldn’t hurt them, and oxygen masks covering their mouths. Not one of their features was visible for me to meet, learn, and begin to memorize as we do with new faces that enter our lives. One thousand four hundred and one thousand two hundred sixty grams were their exact weights, according to the card: what the pasta weighs that you cook for a dinner party. Seeing them (seeing the arms as thick as one of my fingers, the skin with its purple tones and still covered in lanugo, the electrodes that barely fit on the narrow surfaces of their chests), I had this terrifying revelation: that the survival of my daughters was not in my hands and there was nothing I could do to protect them from the troubles that lay in wait for them, because those troubles came from within. They were in immature bodies like time bombs that might or might not go off, and I knew it even though I hadn’t yet received the complete inventory of the risks. I would receive it later: as the hours and days went by, the doctors would tell me about ductus arteriosus, a duct of the heart that would require surgery if it remained open for an imprecise time period, and also what exactly cyanosis meant, the indications of oxygen saturation, the fragile retinas and risk of blindness that still threatened. I took a series of photos of terrible quality (the plastic of the incubators reflected the flashes and partially hid what was on the other side) and took them back to M.

  “There are your daughters,” I said, forcing a smile.

  “There they are,” she said.

  And then, for the first time since all this began, she burst into tears.

  Occupied as I was with the care of my daughters, I didn’t tell M what I’d seen in Benavides’s house. Something else had to happen before I did. It happened shortly before she was finally discharged; by that point she was able to walk around the clinic a bit, and together we’d begun to visit the girls as often as the neonatology department rules permitted. They were brief visits, twenty minutes maximum, during which we could take them out of the incubators, hold them for a little while, feel them and let them feel us. In those moments the nurses took off the electrodes and the unpleasant noise of the machines—that memorandum of mortality—was shut off. It wasn’t possible, however, to take out the oxygen tube that had replaced the CPAP mask of the first days: the girls had them taped to their faces (a piece of surgical tape on each side of their tiny nostrils), and we, the visitors, had to sit very close to the incubators so the tube wouldn’t tauten or run the risk of coming loose. And so, connected to the oxygen tanks, leaning back in uncomfortable positions, with those tiny bodies sleeping on our chests, we spent minutes that were at once times of timid happiness and buried concern, because never was their vulnerability so clearly evident. I held one of my daughters’ hands between my thumb and forefinger and realized perfectly how easily I could break it into pieces if I wanted; I kept an eye on the main door to the room, because I’d convinced myself that a breeze could cause havoc to their lungs; I disinfected my hands more than necessary with a transparent gel with an alcoholic smell that burned the eyes, for the immune systems of premature babies are not able to defend themselves from the most innocuous bacteria. And little by little I began to notice, with more anxiety than interest, that the whole world had turned into a threat. The presence of foreign objects and the nearness of other people made me nervous and even aggressive, even if they were acquaintances and even if those acquaintances were doctors and worked in that very clinic. I blamed these anxieties for my reaction on the day I went in to see my daughters while M packed up her things to be discharged, and I found Dr. Benavides leaning over one of their incubators and manipulating the oxygen tube with his bare hands. Without even saying hello, I asked what he was doing.

  “The little tube had slipped out,” he said, smiling but without looking at me. “I just reattached it.”

  “Take your hands out, please.”

  Benavides finished smoothing down the surgical tape with the tip of his little finger, took his hands out of the incubator, and turned toward me. “Don’t worry, it’s quite simple,” he said. “The little tube—”

  “I prefer,” I cut him off, “that people don’t put their hands into my daughters’ incubators when I’m not here. That they don’t touch them, I don’t know if you understand.”

  “I was putting the tube back in.”

  “I don’t care what you were doing, Francisco. I don’t want you touching them. Even if you are a doctor.”

  The doctor was genuinely shocked. He walked over to the door and pressed the disinfectant lever once and then again. “I came to say hello,” he said, “and to see how your daughters were doing. To put myself at your disposal, rather.”

  “Well, thanks, but we’re fine. This isn’t your specialty, Doctor.”

  “Excuse me, Daddy,” said a nurse who arrived at my side.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You know you can’t be in here without a gown on, rules are rules.”

  I was given a pale blue bundle that still had the warm scent of freshly ironed clothes. By the time I had put on the sterile gown and cap, Benavides had gone. I treated him badly, I thought, offended him; and then I thought: Screw him. He didn’t cross paths with M, who came to sit beside me a few minutes later, well wrapped up in her gown and cap, ready to receive the other baby. She must have seen something in my face because she asked me if I was all right. And I was about to tell her the whole story at that moment—tell her about Benavides, his father, Carballo, Gaitán’s vertebra—but I couldn’t. “Nothing, nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” she said, having always had infallible instincts, “something’s up with you.” And I told her yes, something had happened, but I’d tell her later, when we left: because it was uncomfortable for me to talk with one of our girls lying on my chest, and because my voice and my breath might even bother her and disturb her sleep, the most peaceful and silent sleep I’d ever seen. None of that was true, of course, but I was unable to pinpoint the reasons why I didn’t want to tell her there. The few bits of self-knowledge we manage to collect never arrive in time; I, for the moment, had to wait several days to realize that M was completely right
when she said, after hearing my detailed and slightly contrite tale of my clash with Dr. Benavides, these simple words about our daughters: “What it is, is that you don’t want dirty people near them.”

  I was going to answer that the adjective did not apply to Dr. Benavides, who from the start had struck me as one of the most honest and most transparent—yes: cleanest—people I’d ever met, but then I realized she meant something else: not Francisco Benavides’s moral condition, but what Benavides brought with him like a snail’s shell: the legacy of his father. In other words, the too-present probability that the hand that had smoothed the surgical tape on my daughter’s left cheek had held, in some moment of its past, the vertebra of a man who’d been shot dead, and not just any man, but one whose crime was still living among us Colombians, and fed in obscure ways the multiple wars in which we keep killing each other fifty-seven years later. I wondered if it wasn’t possible that a door might open in my life and the monsters of violence enter through it, able to invent strategies and ruses to get into our lives, into our houses and our rooms and our children’s beds. Nobody is ever safe, I remember having suspected, and then I remember having promised, with the secret anxiety of unwitnessed promises, that my daughters would be. I told myself that every day, whether visiting the girls, taking them out of their incubators, letting them take turns sleeping on my chest, whether it was at my in-laws’ house—a chilly studio with a terrace overlooking an army of eucalyptus trees—while I added a page or two to the file of my novel about Joseph Conrad in Panama. (That one, for example, in which the narrator’s baby girl is born after six and a half months of pregnancy, and he says she’s so small his two hands could cover her completely, so scrawny her legs still showed the curve of her bones, and her muscles so weak that she was unable to feed from her mother’s breasts.) And one night, while M was trying to stimulate the girls’ sucking reflex by putting the knuckle of her little finger of her right hand in their mouths, I realized I was thinking not about my daughters but about Francisco Benavides, not about the mother’s milk we had to leave for them to get through the night but about the X-ray of a torso with a bullet inside, not about the jabs in a minuscule heel or about blood tests, but about the luminous tones of a vertebra preserved in formaldehyde. “It’s turning into an obsession,” M reproached me one night. “I can see it in your face.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I don’t know. But I wish it wouldn’t happen to you now. All this is exhausting, I’m exhausted, you’re exhausted. And I’d rather not have to do this alone. The girls, I mean. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’d rather you were here, with me, and that we do this together.”

  “We are doing it together.”

  “But something’s going on with you.”

  “Nothing’s going on with me,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  III

  A WOUNDED ANIMAL

  Carballo reappeared in my life at the end of November. My daughters had emerged from their incubators and were now spending the nights with us, in M’s family home (where we always stayed when we visited), in the room that had been M’s before she left for Europe: we’d prepared a crib with adjustable railings big enough for both of them, one on each side, each connected to her own medicinal oxygen tank, which watched over her through the rails like a silent relative, and each with her own little plastic tube covering her upper lip. On the twenty-first, around six o’clock, in the middle of a diaper change, I received a call from a friend who gave me a piece of news: Rafael Humberto Moreno-Durán, one of the most notable novelists of his generation and my friend for the last several years, had died that morning. “He died already,” she said, putting all the weight of her voice on the resigned adverb, and then she told me the time of the funeral, the name of the church, and its exact address. And there I was the next morning, sharing with the family and friends of R.H. (as we all called him) sadness but also relief, for the illness had been difficult, more intense than long, but in any case very painful, although he’d borne it with humor and something I can only call courage.

  We’d met when I was a law student whose only intention was to learn how to write novels, just as he’d been three decades earlier, and we started to become friends without my really knowing how; he visited me in Barcelona, the city where he had arrived in the early seventies and where he had spent twelve happy years, and I visited him in Bogotá whenever I had the chance, sometimes for lunch at his house, sometimes to accompany him on his daily walk to pick up his mail from his post office box. It was a sacred routine for him: arrive on foot at the Avianca building, enter the tunnels lined with locked boxes, and come out with letters and magazines. It was on one of those walks that he told me of his illness. He told me that one afternoon, climbing the stairs of his building, he’d lost his breath all of a sudden, his vision had clouded over—the world turned into a black space—and he was on the brink of fainting right there, on the hard brick steps. The doctors didn’t take long to diagnose anemia and find its cause, a cancer that had been living clandestinely for a long time in his esophagus and which, at the time of that encounter, had obliged him to undergo various treatments and had disrupted his appetite. His alien, he called it. “I have an alien,” he told people who asked about his sudden weight loss. And when he was gloomy or irritable, he’d apologize: “It’s just that my alien isn’t behaving today.” Now, not much more than a year after the diagnosis, he’d lost the battle against that fucking disease that respects neither dignity nor truces.

  And there we were, his acquaintances and friends, filing into the spacious nave of the church, looking for a free spot on the wooden pews, moving within the four walls while we greeted people in that half voice we use on sad occasions. But most of all we were freezing to death, for around the church rose up a conspiracy of office towers and dense eucalyptus trees that wouldn’t let a single heartbroken ray of sunshine through. We were all there: I mean, those who loved R.H., those who respected him, those who neither loved nor respected him but admitted to admiring his books, those who admired his books but didn’t admit it out of envy, those who had once been the target of his derision or his direct attacks and now came to rejoice, in their corner of silent bitterness, that R.H. was no longer here to throw their mediocrity in their faces. In few places is there such a high concentration of hypocrisy as at a writer’s funeral: there, in the church, surrounding the coffin where R.H.’s body rested, there was in those moments at least one person devoting himself to the old art of pretense, of pretending sadness or desolation or depression, when deep down they were thinking that neither R.H. nor his books would be around anymore to cast a shadow.

  While I made myself comfortable in my place, a seat next to the aisle of a pew in the middle (not so close to the coffin to feel like an intruder, not so far away as to feel like a mere onlooker), I was trying to remember the last time I attended a religious farewell to someone who didn’t believe in religion. Would R.H. have drawn nearer to God in his last days, as happened to so many agnostics? Those metamorphoses of souls occur in places one’s friends don’t even see, so I couldn’t even speculate, but someone should study the number of conversions due to cancer (of course the thing does not work the other way: I don’t know of any illness that leads to apostasy). When the priest began to speak, a man who was sitting on one of the front benches, on the edge of the central aisle, caught my attention as his silhouette nodded at the end of every phrase that came out of the speakers, like a campaign director approving his candidate’s oratory. But then there was a movement in the church nave, murmurs and heads turning, because Mónica Sarmiento, R.H.’s wife, had stood up after a slight nod from the priest, and was advancing toward the pulpit. She adjusted the microphone, took off her dark glasses and passed her hand over her tired eyes, and announced, with integrity and strength drawn from the unfathomable depths of her sadness, that she was going to read a letter that R.H. had left for Alejandro.

  “W
ho’s Alejandro?” someone beside me asked.

  “I don’t know,” said someone else. “A son, I imagine.”

  “Dear Alejandro,” said Mónica. A silence fell over us. “It’s very likely that now, about to turn eleven years old as you are, you won’t yet understand the reasons I’m writing you this letter. But I’m doing it to be on the safe side. I’ll explain: sooner or later every son comes down with the Kafka syndrome, that is, he feels the need to write a letter to his father, give him a piece of his mind, reproach him for how arbitrary and egotistical he is or has been, for his lack of compassion and tolerance. Because the son, at a certain age, believes himself to be the king of creation and asks only for devotion and attention and if his father does not offer them he opts for retaliation, personal ill will, disobedience, antagonism, or, as in Kafka’s case, terrible, vindictive writing. So, to be on the safe side, this letter is a possible preventative measure. Many years ago I read something that now regains all its meaning. I’ll never forget the first line of one of the essays by Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England—a moralist so wise that he did the exact opposite of all that he preached—which says: ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.’ And I think, my dear Alejandro, that today I am a hostage to fortune, to fate, to the chance that involves us one with the other; that my will is not what it was in my times of wandering the world, when nothing and nobody limited my liberty and when everything was for me a wide map of open roads. I believed myself to be eternally young and indomitable and I was convinced—I swear—that life began at eighteen and all who don’t reach that age belong to the order of protozoa. Children were for me the eleventh plague of Egypt, to the point of my initials’ almost turning into an infanticidal slogan: R.H. didn’t stand for Rafael Humberto, but for that famous king, Rey Herod. Until the day that you were born and that was when I discovered that Francis Bacon’s phrase hid unexpected surprises: when you were born I became a hostage to your fortune.”