The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  IV

  WHY SWELL'ST THOU THEN?

  In July 2012, after living for sixteen years in three different European countries, I moved back to Bogotá. One of the first things I did was to call Dr. Benavides to ask when we could see each other. Our last encounter had ended in a less than satisfactory way, and I wanted to rectify that discomfort: smooth things over, and apologize, because the error, the misjudgment, and also the poor behavior, had been mine. A sad-sounding voice told me that the doctor wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t take my call. The job of beginning a new life in a new country is no easier when it’s your own; concentrated as I was on the enigmas of arrival, on interpreting the thousand and one ways in which the mentality and temperament of my city had transformed in the years of my absence, I didn’t call Benavides back, and I didn’t even think about his health. A year and a half went by. I wrote another novel; I took what I considered to be necessary trips; slowly, habit by habit, I gradually arrived in Colombia. In that year and a half, which now stretches out in my memory, I didn’t hear anything more about Benavides. I barely thought about him. The man had opened the door of his study to me, had involved me in things he considered secret, had confided in me. What had I done to repay that confidence? One fine day it dawned on me that eight years had passed since our last uncomfortable and troubled conversation, and I thought it wasn’t the first time someone had disappeared from my life due to my own fault: due to my tendency to solitude and silence, due to my sometimes unjustifiable reserve, due to my inability to keep relationships alive (even those I have with people I love or who genuinely interest me). This has always been one of my great defects, and it has caused me more than one disappointment and has disappointed others more than once. There’s nothing I can do about it, however, because nobody changes their nature by the mere force of will.

  But at the beginning of 2014, something happened.

  * * *

  —

  ON JANUARY 1, I found myself at a nineteenth-century hacienda in the coffee-growing region, a house with wattle-and-daub walls and floors of varnished wood the name of which, Alsacia, made me think of Prussian War veterans leaving a piece of their nostalgia in the Colombian Andes. I had arrived there with the ostensible aim of seeing in the New Year in good company, but I ended up spending more time than planned worrying about the last news of the previous one: on December 24, while returning to her house in Belgrade from Sarajevo, the Serbian writer Senka Marniković, author of a book of short stories that was for me clearly a masterpiece, lost control of her car on an icy, slippery road, broke through a guardrail, skidded across a high embankment, and ended up crashing head-on into the wall of a mechanic’s workshop. The death on the other side of the world of the author of a single book, whose photo I’d never seen and whose voice I’d never heard, provoked an unexpected and surprising melancholy in me, especially as a few short years ago I had no idea of her existence.

  I came across her name in the spring of 2010, during a seventy-two-hour visit to Belgrade where I went to speak about literature to an audience of scholars of the Spanish language. My hostess, a professor of Latin American literature who was translating the poetry of César Vallejo in her spare time, took me to see the apartment of the novelist Ivo Andrić after my talk. Over the course of the following day she arranged to show me a park from which you could see the Danube as well as a dive where curious foreigners could buy devalued money from the era of the Bosnian War. It was there, in that bar, where she asked me if I’d read Fantasmas de Sarajevo. When I said not only did I not know the book but I’d never heard of the author, the professor said, in a perfect Madrid accent, “Coño, that can’t be,” and the next morning I discovered that she’d left for me at reception a copy of Marniković’s book in the only Western language into which it had so far been translated. I began to read Fântomes de Sarajevo in the Belgrade airport, and by the time I arrived home in Barcelona, after a stopover in Zurich and a delay for bad weather, I’d finished it and was rereading some of the stories, cursing the fact that I’d never found this formidable book before and feeling I hadn’t made such a marvelous discovery since the day in 1999 when I opened the strange book of a certain W. G. Sebald. And now Marniković was dead, dead at seventy-two, thirty-nine years after publishing her marvelous book, and the melancholy that I felt at that news now transformed into an almost physical need to reread it, to immerse myself in her voice that knew more things than I did, to pay attention to the world through eyes that were more attentive than mine. I took the book off my shelf and put it in my black bag, and there it was that January 1, accompanying me in the nineteenth-century hacienda, silent even in the neutral tones of its cream-colored covers, tactful as if we both had lost a common friend.

  It was a holiday, of course, but it was also a Wednesday: the day of the week that I had devoted during the preceding seven years to writing my column for El Espectador. I’d grown used to writing it in the morning when my head was less fuddled, but this time the New Year’s Day leisureliness (the unconscious conviction that the world has started over again and there’s no hurry for anything) had broken my discipline. So after a late lunch, when the old house with its wooden floors fell into an invincible drowsiness and nothing broke the silence except the agitation of the cicadas and parakeets, I poured myself a beer, made myself comfortable at a card table whose green cloth had been burned by cigarettes during the previous night’s revelries, and got down to work like a hunter who goes out to try his luck with no certainty he’s going to find anything. I opened Marniković’s book at random, reread the openings of a few stories, and ended up reading all of “The Long Life of Gavrilo Princip,” the best in the book and the most pertinent to this year that was just waking up. With those characters in mind I wrote the first sentences of my column; in a matter of minutes, Marniković’s tale had associated with other subjects and other characters that had touched me more closely, so the column came together around a relatively simple idea: the possible correspondences between two well-known crimes, one of universal importance and the other of more restricted consequences, that took place within a few months of each other. I gave the text the title “Memories of the Year to Come.” I wrote fairly quickly:

  This will be a year of commemorations, but not the good kind. Of course, the Panamanians will celebrate the SS Ancon’s passage through its recently inaugurated canal; of course, Julio Cortázar’s readers will remember his birth in Brussels. But I’m very much afraid that most of the following months will be spent talking about certain assassinations and their consequences. The year 1914, runs the cliché, is the true port of entry into the afflicted twentieth century, and that is not exactly because an Argentine writer was born in Belgium or a route opened between two oceans. The assassinations that took place that year were midwives to a good deal of the history that followed, and it sets one’s teeth on edge to observe, with the falsely reassuring perspective of the years, how little we imagined the debacle awaiting us around the corner. In “The Long Life of Gavrilo Princip,” one of the best pieces of fiction that has ever been written about the legacy of that year, the Serbian writer Senka Marniković invents a world in which the First World War has not happened. Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian nationalist, arrives in Sarajevo to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but his pistol jams and the archduke carries on living. Princip dies a year later, of tuberculosis, and the world is otherwise.

  But it wasn’t like that, of course. Gavrilo Princip did kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. He was about to turn twenty; he had tried to join the Black Hand guerrilla group, but was rejected because of his short stature; after learning to throw bombs and shoot pistols, he joined a group of six conspirators whose objective was to assassinate the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus force the separation of the Slavic provinces from the Empire and the creation of the great Serb nation. The conspirators joined the crowd that flanked the route the archduke would pass in a car whose roof had
been removed so the public could see their nobles. The idea was that all the conspirators, from the first to the last, would attempt the assassination. The first failed from fear. Princip, in spite of Marniković’s wonderful speculation, did not fail.

  In October of the same year, but on the other side of the world, a man who was not an archduke, but a general and a senator of the Republic of Colombia, was assassinated, not by bullets but by hatchet blows, by two poor young men like Princip. Rafael Uribe Uribe, veteran of several civil wars, uncontested leader of the Liberal Party (in those days when being a liberal meant something), and the model for the character of García Márquez’s Aureliano Buendía, was attacked at midday on the 15th by Leovigildo Galarza and Jesús Carvajal, unemployed carpenters. He died early the following morning in his house on Ninth Street, in Bogotá; beside the sidewalk where he received the murderous blows there is a plaque that nobody looks at, because it is at knee height. And nevertheless, Colombians will remember him this year. They’ll write about him, they’ll celebrate his life although they don’t know anything about it, and they’ll mourn his death even though they don’t know why he was killed. And so the time will go by; thinking of Princip and Franz Ferdinand, of Galarza and Carvajal and of Uribe Uribe; thinking of those crimes; thinking of their causes and consequences. The year is just beginning.

  The column was published on January 3. The following Monday, Epiphany, I woke up a little before first light; trying not to let the squeak of a floorboard under my feet or the creak of any hinge in the old house give me away, I got out my computer and started reading the newspapers. Many years ago I’d dropped the habit of reading the online comments my column inspired, not only from lack of interest and time, but out of the profound conviction that they displayed the worst vices of our new digital societies: intellectual irresponsibility, proud mediocrity, implausible denigration with impunity, but most of all verbal terrorism, the schoolyard bullying that the participants got involved in with incomprehensible enthusiasm, the cowardice of all those aggressors who used pseudonyms to vilify but would never repeat their insults out loud. The forum of opinion columns has turned into our modern and digital version of the Two Minutes Hate: that ritual in Orwell’s 1984 in which an image of the enemy is projected and the citizens ecstatically give themselves over to physical aggression (they throw things at the screen) and verbal aggression (they insult, shriek, accuse, defame), and then go back to the real world feeling free, unburdened, and self-satisfied. Yes, I haven’t read those comments for many years; however, that morning I did: I went over the insults with their spelling mistakes, the invariably badly punctuated libel, all those symptoms that something was rotten in the state of Colombia. Toward the end of the page, one commentary caught my attention. The signature (so to speak) was FreeSpirit. This was the text of his commentary:

  What a stupid column, who cares what happened over there!! What happened here?? We Colombians KNOW why they killed Uribe Uribe no matter how hard they try to DECEIVE us, that the truth hasn’t come to light is another matter. Gentlemen of El Espectador with columnists like this you’re losing prestige day by day. Mr. so-called columnist you’d be better off dedicating yourself to your failed novels. One day the truth will come to LIGHT!!!

  In the days that followed, I couldn’t shake the ridiculous certainty that I had found Carlos Carballo again. Then I thought it wasn’t like that: I hadn’t found him, but rather he had put himself deliberately in my path. Then I thought it was neither one nor the other, but the truth was simpler and even more annoying: Carlos Carballo had never gone away. In these eight long years that had passed since our encounter in the church, Carballo had not lost sight of me for an instant: it was not impossible that he would have read my books, I thought, and he had surely followed my columns, leaving after many of them his anonymous smears. Then I thought that FreeSpirit might, incredibly, not be Carlos Carballo, but any other of the millions of individuals who populate the republics of paranoia in a country with a convulsive history like ours. What I should do, I thought, was to call Francisco Benavides, inquire about his health and whether he’d been in touch with Carballo recently, whether Carballo had talked about me, if he’d told him what he’d proposed to me in the church and what my response had been. I called him; he didn’t answer; I left a message with the secretary at his office. He didn’t call me back.

  My brief stay at the nineteenth-century hacienda came to an end. I returned with my family to Bogotá, ready to get back into my work routine, but I didn’t try to contact Benavides. Two things distracted me: on the one hand, a novel that I’d been trying to write for five years, that seemed to have come unstuck now, after many false starts, and from which it had been very difficult to tear myself away to go on holiday; on the other hand, the search for information about Senka Marniković, whose death had turned her into someone interesting all of a sudden. But the internet, which knows everything, knew very little about Senka Marniković. As tends to happen to us when something preoccupies us or obsesses us, life seemed to suddenly be conspiring so that everything, directly or indirectly, referred to or reminded me of her. And so, a Spanish couple I’d just met, Asier and Ruth, turned out to have lived in the Balkans, and talked to me nostalgically of those days and offered to lend me books on the siege of Sarajevo, and a friendship started to grow. And so, the novelist Miguel Torres wrote to me saying he’d read my column and asking me who this Serbian writer was, if her books had been translated into Spanish, and where he could find them, for he was very interested in fictions that change or twist the real course of history. I didn’t answer him: it was rude and an act of egotism, especially considering it concerned a colleague I appreciate (whose novels about April 9 are among the best that have ever come out of my country); but one of the mysteries of the life of a fiction reader is that possessiveness that sometimes takes us over with respect to the books or authors that have told us something important and new, something we’d never heard before. I didn’t want to talk about Senka Marniković because Senka Marniković belonged only to me. It was a primitive emotion, but that’s what I felt at the time.

  At the beginning of February, I finally wrote to Dr. Benavides. I told him that I regretted the silence we’d fallen into for so many years; I told him I took responsibility for that silence and its consequences, but that I’d very much like to get back in touch. This time he replied immediately.

  Esteemed patient:

  I was very pleased to receive your message, why should I deny it. Every once in a while I think of those long-ago days and also regret that we’d lost touch. I’ve heard that you’re now honoring us with your presence as a resident, are you not? Tell me when you want to get together and we’ll catch up. Life has not been kind to me and I think I’d like to talk to somebody who understands my troubles (insert melodramatic music here). Anyway, for various reasons that I won’t go into here, at this moment you are that someone. I’m working late shifts these days, I’m usually at the clinic until eight. Let me know one way or another before you come.

  Warm regards,

  Francisco

  I went to see him the following Friday. Since the days of my daughters’ birth, when I spent long nocturnal hours of uncertainty and anguish, arriving at a medical building at night makes me feel immediately uncomfortable. We had made an appointment, furthermore, in a place that reminded me of those days as if I were reliving them: the cafeteria in the basement, that windowless space that filled, at mealtimes, with two types of people: either relatives of patients with their permanent masks of uneasiness, or the usual and occasionally idle doctors and nurses. When Benavides arrived, two minutes after the hour, I saw on his face the ravages of time, and then, like an epiphany, I remembered the reasons I’d appreciated him with an appreciation that approached admiration. For it was not just the passing of years etched on Benavides’s tired face, but also the wear produced by other people’s suffering, that kind of reciprocal labor he’d taken on years before and that
consisted basically of keeping the dying company. He came wrapped in his white coat and carrying a green book in his hand; before arriving at the table where I was waiting for him he had to greet four different people who stood up as he came through the glass doors, and he received all of them with the same kindness of a tired man, shaking hands with pleasure but with a sort of invisible weight on his shoulders. Now he wore frameless glasses, two lenses that would have seemed to be floating in front of his eyes if it hadn’t been for the bright red of the arms and the bridge over his nose.

  “I brought you this,” he said as he sat down.

  It was a university publication with a frightening title: Looking Death in the Eye: Eight Perspectives.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Variations on a theme,” he said. “There are philosophers, theologians, literary writers, people you might be interested in. The doctor’s me.” After a modest silence he added: “For when you don’t have anything else to read.”