The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  People smiled in the church, and I thought: Typical of R.H. Typical of him to convert a sad, lamentable occasion into an opportunity for humor, for wordplay, for the ingenuity that spoils solemnity. I also thought of my daughters: Had I become a hostage to their fortune? Through Mónica’s mouth, R.H. was now speaking of the birth of his son, or rather was speaking to his son of his birth, and was accepting the inevitable sentimentality of every father who speaks of his children, and was telling amusing anecdotes as fathers tend to do about their sons, well aware that the anecdotes might be completely lacking in charm for anyone else. One of these anecdotes recalled the day that a Mexican friend gave Alejandro a stuffed Pegasus. R.H.’s son asked why that horse had wings, and R.H. explained that Pegasus had been born from the blood of Medusa when Perseus cut her head off, and that instead of hair she had snakes with which she paralyzed her victims. “Don’t make me laugh, Dad,” said Alejandro. “As consolation for the fool of myself I’d just made,” said R.H. in Mónica’s voice, “I knew from that moment that you’d been born with an immunity to magical realism.”

  In the nave various guffaws rang out.

  “Against what?” someone else near me asked.

  “Let me listen,” was the answer.

  “Why am I bringing up these anecdotes?” Mónica continued. “Because in some way the father, in his maturity, believes himself and wishes to be the son’s memory, for whom, at his tender age, all is ephemeral and insignificant, as if he sensed that all he has lived so far is worth very little and the only important events are those he has yet to be involved in. Childhood doesn’t exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams. That’s why we seek to become notaries of our child’s memory: of something that he will forget very swiftly but that for the father is proof that he has engendered his own posterity. How to forget that repertoire of childish philosophies with which the son, unintentionally, seeks to underline with his own concepts a world that is beginning to be his own? One night, while waiting for the news to begin, you and I were watching television. They were showing a live broadcast of the final—and most torrid—hours of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Comfortably settled on the sofa you avidly observed the ample profusion of tanned skin and flesh on display in the Sambadrome. You were five years old and I couldn’t contain myself, so I commented to you, as if we were a pair of dirty old men: ‘Alejandro, women are absolutely spectacular.’ And you, without even turning your head and as if you were an expert on the subject, answered: ‘They are, Papá. And they give milk too.’”

  This time the laughter filled the whole church. People laughed, but were still uncomfortable: Was this allowed? they all seemed to be wondering. R.H., from the past or from his absence, didn’t seem to care, or rather it must have caused him true pleasure to be provoking such inoffensive discord.

  “Dear Alejandro: If there’s one thing I regret it’s not having told my father how much I admired and loved him. My only gesture of affection was a quick kiss on the forehead two days before he died. The kiss tasted like sugar and I felt like a thief who furtively stole something that no longer belonged to anybody. Why do we hide our feelings? Out of cowardice? Out of egotism? With a mother it’s different: we cover her with flowers, gifts, and sweet phrases. What is it that prevents us from affectionately confronting our father and telling him, face-to-face, how much we love or admire him? On the other hand, why do we curse him under our breath when he puts us in our place? Why do we react with wickedness and not affection when the occasion presents itself? Why are we brave with taunts and cowards with affection? Why did I never tell my father these things but I tell them to you, who are probably too young to understand them yet? One night I wanted to speak to my father in his room but found him asleep. As I quietly began to leave the room, I heard my sleeping father, in a desperate voice, say: ‘No, Papá, no!’ What strange, agitated dream was my father experiencing with his father? And if one thing caught my attention, beyond the enigma of the dream, it was that my father was seventy-eight years old at that time and my grandfather had been dead for at least a quarter of a century. Does a man have to die to speak to his father?”

  Then a light rain began to fall. No, not a light rain, but a sparse one: a rain of thick, heavy drops but few of them. From outside its delicate rattle on the metal roofs and parked cars reached us, and from then on it was harder to understand the words Mónica was reading. My attention drifted as it tends to do; for the second time I wondered if I, too, now that my daughters had been born, was a hostage to fortune, and I didn’t know the answer or where to begin to look for one. How would they behave toward me in the future? What was a father’s relationship with his daughters like? It was undoubtedly different from that between two men, a father and son, and especially two men from different generations. But if I had had sons, I thought, male children, I would be facing similar difficulties, wouldn’t I? Would my sons hide their feelings from me? Would they react with wickedness and not affection? And why not think that my daughters might have a tense and difficult relationship with me too? All my life I’ve gotten along better with women than men, maybe because masculine camaraderie and complicity have always struck me as ridiculous: How would it be with my daughters? Then I saw Mónica pronouncing words that were obviously the final ones and folding up the pages and stepping down to men and women who received her with open arms. She did not do so amid applause, but amid the repression of that applause. R.H.’s letter to his son had broken the conventions of a funeral Mass, and the audience had felt disoriented, beautifully disoriented, and in their faces you could see they were pleased at not knowing very well how to act, of having come to say good-bye to someone by way of a ritual that everyone knows and having ended up on uncertain ground, laughing and feeling like laughing, not applauding but feeling like applauding, and maybe all thinking of their sons and daughters as I was thinking about mine.

  I don’t know what else happened during that Mass. I don’t remember the communion I didn’t take or the peace that, out of distraction, I didn’t wish anyone. The coffin containing R.H.’s body passed before me and I waited for it to pass, and I allowed myself to be devoured by the river of mourners, by the noisy silence in which they advanced. I couldn’t take my eyes off the coffin; the coffin, for its part, moved stubbornly toward the rectangle of light of the main door, rising and falling according to the movements of the pallbearers. From behind I saw it exit into the midday air and go down the steps toward the hearse, its hatch open like a mouth. I waited, watching in silence from the first step, until the driver closed the hatch, and then I saw, written in golden letters on a sash with a purple background, the name I’d seen so often on book covers and spines, in interview headlines, at the bottom of reviews in the newspapers. When had Rafael Humberto decided to be R.H.? The first edition of his first novel, Juego de Damas, had appeared in 1977 with his complete name on its cover and spine, and in the dedication he wrote in my copy twenty years later, while we had pasta with too much sauce for lunch in La Romana restaurant, are all four of his names. When had his name decided to become its initials, as if preparing to fit onto a purple sash on a hearse? The church was slowly emptying, people were going down into the parking lot and getting into their cars and the cars began to emerge in single file; and we, those who remained on the top step, were watching the convoy leave with its terrifying discipline. Very few people were still there—in my memory, there were six or seven people—when the rain began to get worse. I was getting ready to go down the steps and across the adjacent park to hail a taxi on Carrera 11 before the downpour broke, but at that instant I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder, and turning around I found myself face-to-face with Carballo.

  It was him. It was the man who had caught my attention before the reading of R.H.’s letter to his son. Why hadn’t I
recognized him then? What had changed in his appearance? I wasn’t able to pinpoint it, but at the same time I had the invincible conviction that he had recognized me immediately. More than that: I knew or thought I knew that Carballo had been aware of my presence during the entire funeral and had been keeping an eye on me from a distance, following me like a spy and standing beside me, intruding on my casual conversations, waiting for the opportune moment to enact an unexpected encounter. And his infallible instinct, his predatory instinct, had told him this was the best moment to attack his prey. He’s like a bloodhound, Benavides had told me.

  And also: You’re a clue.

  And now I was thinking: I’m his clue. He’s a bloodhound. I’m his prey.

  * * *

  —

  “FANCY MEETING YOU HERE,” said Carballo. “I certainly didn’t expect this.”

  I had absolutely no doubt he was lying. But what for? Impossible to know and I couldn’t think of any question that might reveal it. In fact, just then, I couldn’t think of a better option than lying too. (There is almost never a better option: the lie has a thousand uses, it’s as malleable and submissive as a child: it does what we ask of it, it’s always prepared to serve us, it’s neither pretentious nor egotistical and it never asks for anything in return. Without it, we could not survive for a second in the jungle of social life.) “You were here, at the funeral?” I asked. “I didn’t see you. Where were you hidden?”

  “I arrived early.” He waved his arm in the air. “I was up front, on that side.”

  “I didn’t know you and R.H. knew each other.”

  “We were very close,” Carballo told me.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yes I do. It was one of those brief but fruitful friendships, you see. Look, why don’t we sit inside? It’s really starting to come down.”

  It was true. The day had darkened and the rain intensified against the church; the thick drops lashed the paving stones and began to form the first puddles, and immediately splashed in the puddles and spattered our shoes, socks, and the bottoms of our trousers. If we remained standing there, I thought, we’d end up drenched from head to toe. And so we decided to cross the threshold of the church and sit down in the last pew, the two of us alone in the nave empty of mourners, so far from the altar that we couldn’t make out the features on the crucifix. The moment had for me the curious familiarity of a scene from a movie: a clandestine meeting between Italian mafiosi, for example. Carballo took a seat toward the middle of the long wooden pew; I stayed as close to the center aisle as possible. Our voices sounded distorted by the echoes, but also by the racket of the rain falling outside, and after a while we noticed that we’d imperceptibly been moving closer, to be able to hear each other without shouting. I noticed the plaster on his nose. I counted the days since the incident at Benavides’s house, and it seemed to me that no septum in the world takes more than two months to heal. “How’s the nose?” I asked.

  He raised a hand to his face, but didn’t touch it. “I don’t bear you a grudge,” he said.

  “But you still need to wear that bandage?”

  “That’s why I said hello,” he carried on as if he hadn’t heard me. “To prove it with irrefutable, as they say, actions. That I bear you no grudge, I mean. I won’t even tell you how much I’ve spent on painkillers. And the days off work.”

  “Oh. Well, send me the bills, I’ll . . .”

  “No, no,” he cut me off. “Don’t insult me, please.”

  “Sorry. I thought . . .”

  “No, no, sir. I came here to say good-bye to a friend, not to charge you for a couple of painkillers.”

  I’d offended him: his feeling of offense seemed genuine. Who was this guy? With every word he inspired more aversion but also more intrigue. I thought, not without some involuntary cynicism, that the plaster on his nose was part of an elaborate disguise, or rather a sophisticatedly simple disguise: I thought it must help him obtain things. What things? I couldn’t imagine. Carballo had begun to talk about R.H. His death was very sad, although he couldn’t say it had taken him by surprise, because this disease was hell, and it was hellish precisely because of that: because it gave notice. No matter how short it was, how sudden, it always spent several months with the person, giving notice. That’s why it was cruel. It had treated R.H. brutally, it had to be said: it was always brutal to the best people. No, we were definitely nothing, and when you win the lottery, well, it’s your turn and there’s nothing to be done . . . There it was, I thought: there was the same indiscriminate mixture of clichés and unusual perceptions I’d witnessed during our first encounter.

  “The death of R.H. is a loss for national literature,” he said. And he added: “It’s not like a Moreno-Durán is born every day.”

  “Well, that is certainly true,” I said.

  “Isn’t it, though? These things have to be said. The Chancellor’s Felines, what a novel! Mambrú, what a novel! You reviewed it, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “For the Banco de la República magazine,” said Carballo. “A really good review. I mean, very positive. Although for my taste, it didn’t go far enough.”

  My review of Mambrú had appeared in 1997. In that stage of my youth, book reviews for Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico del Banco de la República—a quarterly publication that allowed me to review up to four books per issue—had become my main source of income. In the Boletín you could praise anything to the skies, not that it was a publication with massive distribution: it was read in academic circles, among library users and fanatical bookworms. Had Carballo been researching me? How much did he know about me, and why? Was it just, as Benavides had said, out of the interest awoken by my being related to José María Villarreal, important witness to the events of April 9? Although it was also possible that he was what he appeared to be: an intelligent guy with too much time on his hands, an irrational obsession . . . and similar literary tastes to mine: for the two novels he’d mentioned out of R. H. Moreno-Durán’s prolific oeuvre were just the ones I would have chosen. Now Carballo had begun indiscriminate praise of R.H. “And what can you say about his opening sentences? Oh, those first sentences! ‘Bride’s perspiration is the Arabic name for talcum powder.’ That’s from The Gentleman of the Undefeated. ‘When you and I made love, death won a chess match against the Knight of the Seventh Seal.’ That’s from Diana’s Touch. ‘Like a salmon leaping in the night, that’s dawn in Manhattan . . .’ Oh, those first phrases, Vásquez, always those openings! A person picks up a book like that and doesn’t put it down again! At least I don’t, I who read to be told a well-told story well. I’m what they call a hedonic reader.” And he went on like that, alternating stock phrases with perceptiveness that seemed to belong to someone else, when he said something that gleamed in the middle of his chatter like a fire on a mountainside at night.

  “Wait a second,” I interrupted him. “Say that again.”

  “He was a writer capable of slipping us clues about the life of the nation. He was capable of speaking between the lines of the most difficult things. He was a master of allusion.”

  “No, not that,” I said. “You just said something about what remained to be written.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Carballo. “I know something about that and I think you do too, although you know less than I do. And in any case, what I do know I owe to you. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. If it weren’t for that conversation, R.H. would never have enriched my life like he did. Although now there’s nothing left of that.”

  “What conversation?”

  “You really don’t know?” he said, exaggerating his surprise. (I thought: He’s an actor, a histrionic. I thought: Don’t believe a single word he says.) “I’m going to have to spoon-feed it all to you. The conversation in the new magazine, Vásquez. ‘The Contemporary Novel and Other Illnesses,’ wasn’t that what it was called?”r />
  Yes, that’s exactly what it was called. Carballo was full of surprises. In August of the previous year, Moisés Melo, publisher of the recently founded magazine Piedepágina, had invited us to his house to talk about what was happening to R.H. since his cancer diagnosis: his illness and his pain seen through literature. It was a two-hour conversation that could be distinguished from our normal conversations only by the lack of whiskey, the presence of a running tape recorder, and an editorial process that organized our words to give them a coherence and purpose they don’t always have. The magazine came out in December; between Christmas and New Year, Carballo, who was consulting certain documents in the Luis Ángel Arango Library, came across it by accident on a table in the cafeteria. “I almost fell off my chair,” he said. “In that interview I found everything I was looking for.”