The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “The guest has arrived!” Carballo exclaimed, to nobody. “Come in, come in, make yourself at home.”

  Carballo was wearing faded jeans and a shirt that his belt didn’t quite manage to control, and around his neck a black-and-white-checked scarf, although it wasn’t cold. He looked paler than before, and I immediately associated this pallor with his current job: he had become a man who lives by night and sleeps during the day, and therefore sees little sunlight. That was undoubtedly the reason for the olive-colored circles under his eyes, the blue veins very visible through the stubble on his cheeks. Carballo did not ask me the questions people usually ask each other—what’s up, how’s it going, how’ve you been—but had me follow him straight into the studio and asked me to make myself comfortable in front of a microphone adorned with a tiny Colombian flag, while he closed the padded door and bent over the sound technician to give him a series of inaudible explanations. When he came back and took his seat and put on his headphones, motioning me with his long fingers to do the same, I thought he was being evasive on purpose: perhaps he wanted us to be on air when our conversation began, so we wouldn’t have to go through frivolities or false courtesies. I thought he’d grown impatient with the formulas of social life. I also thought he’d grown shy or reserved. But I never thought he was setting a trap for me.

  “Today we have a very special guest,” he said. There was the Carballo I remembered: mixed in with his eccentricities, clichés flourished like weeds among his words. He introduced me in a perfunctory manner, and then told his listeners that this was not the first time we’d spoken. “Do my listeners, my night owls, know how we met?” asked Carballo, lowering his voice, adopting with no effort an intimacy that was, visibly, one of his tricks. “He broke my nose with a glass tumbler. That’s how we met. This is the first time I’ve brought someone who has sent me to the hospital on the show. And I hope it’ll be the last, don’t you?” He let out a complicit little laugh, but it wasn’t directed at me: before my eyes, Carballo was inventing a private relationship with the thousands of anonymous people listening to us at this moment. It was fascinating. “That was nine years ago now, nine years less a few months. And here we are, dear listeners, night owls: here we are as casual as can be. Do you know why? Because everything happens for a reason. How are you, Juan Gabriel?”

  “Fine, thanks, Carlos,” I said. “I wanted . . .”

  “You are the author of several books, but you’re also a columnist for El Espectador. And as a columnist you surprised us at the beginning of the year revealing an interest we didn’t know you had: the assassination of Rafael Uribe Uribe.”

  That caught me off guard. By that point, I had almost completely forgotten that improvised column, but in a flash I remembered the commentary of an unhappy reader behind whose pseudonym lurked, I speculated, Carlos Carballo. Now I thought I must have been right.

  “Well, actually the column was not only about Uribe Uribe,” I said. “It was, most of all, about a book I liked. Ghosts of Sarajevo, it’s called, and I recommend it to everyone. Furthermore, the column was about two different anniversaries, two crimes that happened—”

  “How did you come to be interested in Uribe Uribe?” the host of the program interrupted me.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s a recent interest.”

  “Oh, really? But you mention it at the beginning of one of your novels, The Secret History of Costaguana. You mention Uribe Uribe and Galarza and Carvajal, his murderers. That was seven years ago now, so your interest can’t be that recent.”

  “That’s true. I’d forgotten about that, but it’s true. I don’t know, Carlos, I’m interested in that crime the way all Colombians are. I . . .”

  “Do you think so? I’m not so sure. I don’t know how many of my listeners, my night owls, know about Rafael Uribe Uribe. How many know how he died. Do you know how he died? Do you know how that happened?”

  I knew something. That’s what I would have liked to tell him: that I knew something, but it wasn’t much. Mere generalities, a more or less fixed scene that my memory stored without knowing how it had come to be formed there: that’s how we know the past. I knew, of course, what I had written in my column: that on October 15, 1914, a hundred years less eight months before that radio conversation, General Rafael Uribe Uribe was walking along the eastern sidewalk of Carrera Séptima when he was fatally wounded with hatchet blows by two carpenters. Yes, this I knew, and I’d known it since I was a child. I must have been nine or ten when my father took me to the place where it had happened, showed me the sad marble plaque that commemorated the event and told me about the assassins. Galarza and Carvajal: the music of those two surnames had been with me since then, like the chorus of a popular song, though it must have been some years before their respective first names would accompany them, before my juvenile awareness would finally separate them and begin to imagine the owners of those names as two individuals, not as a mysterious insoluble unity, a two-headed monster. I don’t know how I thought of them as a boy there, walking with my family across Plaza de Bolívar, nor can I remember how I imagined the cruel and brutal scene that Bogotanos must have seen in 1914. I realized that my ignorance, beyond these generalities, had decorated the scene with falsehoods and inexactitudes.

  I could have explained all that to Carballo, but I didn’t. I just talked about Galarza and Carvajal and the sidewalk on the east side of the Capitol building. My interviewer grimaced with displeasure (invisible to his listeners, luckily) and kept talking.

  “That’s what history tells us,” he mocked. “But my listeners know that history can be, how shall we put it, a tiny bit of a liar. Isn’t that true, my dear Juan Gabriel?” Now his tone was sickly-sweet or condescending, or both at once. “The truth might be different, right? Just like the truth about Gaitán’s assassination, as a random example, is different from the one we’ve been sold in our school textbooks.”

  “Yes, I wondered how long it was going to take you to bring up Gaitán,” I said, trying to regain control of the conversation with a bit of humor. I thought: Gaitán, whose vertebra you’ve stolen. “You know, my dear Carlos, that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories very much. I know they are popular, I know that people—”

  “One moment,” he interrupted me again. “We have a call.” He took his eyes off me (I felt like I was freed from a weight) and said with his gaze focused on the void: “Yes, good evening, with whom do I have the pleasure?”

  “Good evening, Carlitos,” said a man’s voice. “Ismael, at your service.”

  “Don Ismael, what do you want to tell us tonight?”

  “I also read young Velásquez’s column,” said Ismael’s voice, distorted by static. Carballo didn’t correct him on my name; I wasn’t going to interrupt him to do so. “And I want to tell him something: if he’s so interested in the First World War, he shouldn’t rule out what he calls ‘conspiracy theories’ with such disdain.”

  “But it’s not disdain,” I tried to intervene. “It’s—”

  “In the column, you spoke of Franz Ferdinand,” said Ismael. “You spoke of Gavrilo Princip. You said that the First World War began with that. May I ask you a question?”

  I tried to be affable. “As many as you wish, Ismael.”

  “Do you know how the United States entered the war?”

  It was unbelievable. I looked at my watch: not half an hour of the program had gone by and already I was being forced to sit through a sort of telephonic Western history exam. Carballo’s eyes were wide open and he wore an expression of absolute seriousness, as if the most important thing in the world at that moment was the reason I was going to give for the United States joining the First World War, which at that moment was not the first, since they were unaware of the possibility of a second, but the Great War. That’s what they called it: the Great War. They also called it, with populist optimism, the War to End All Wars. The name of that con
flict has changed over the years, as perhaps has its nature or the explanation we’ve invented to talk about it. Our capacity to name things is limited, and those limits are that much more sensitive or cruel if the things we’re trying to name have disappeared forever. That’s what the past is: a tale, a tale constructed over another tale, an artifice of verbs and nouns where we might be able to capture human pain, fear of death and eagerness to live, homesickness while battling in the trenches, worry for the soldier who has gone to the fields of Flanders and who might already be dead when we remember him.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “President Wilson, if I’m not mistaken, declared war against Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania. It was a passenger steamer sunk by a German submarine. More than a thousand people died in the attack. Wilson didn’t declare war immediately, but soon afterward he did.”

  “Okay, and tell me something,” asked Ismael. “When was the Lusitania sunk?”

  “I don’t remember the exact date,” I defended myself. “It must have been—”

  “May 7, 1915,” said Ismael. “And when did the English decipher the German codes?”

  “When what?”

  “The German codes. The secret military codes. When did the British crack the code?”

  “I don’t know, Ismael.”

  “In December of 1914,” said the voice. “Some five months before the Lusitania went down. So tell me, then: if Sir Winston Churchill, who was then the First Lord of the Admiralty, was able to know the location of all German submarines, how could one of those submarines get close enough to a passenger liner to torpedo it? The Lusitania was anchored in the channel, near the port, when it was hit by the German torpedo. Do you know why it was there, what it was waiting for? It was waiting for the boat that would escort it into the English port. That boat was the Juno. And it never arrived: it never arrived because Winston Churchill ordered it back to port. And there’s the question I want to put to our guest: Why? Why did Winston Churchill give the order for the Juno to return to port before it reached the Lusitania? Why did Churchill, who knew of the presence of three German submarines in those waters, voluntarily leave the Lusitania exposed? Tell me. Why?”

  I suddenly felt tired, very tired, and it was not because it was so late. As if a door opened a crack, I saw in the depths of the night a long series of monologues reproaching me, from anonymous places, for my unbelief or my ingenuousness. I looked at Carballo, thinking I’d see an amused grin: that of someone who has laid a trap and returns to find his prey has fallen in. But I didn’t discover any such thing on his face, but rather a genuine interest in Ismael’s information and in my next response. Maybe Carlos Carballo’s audience was entirely composed of people like this Ismael, an army of night owls: it took me no effort to imagine those solitary people who carry out unsatisfying functions during the day and only really come back to life at night, when, in the solitude of their small apartments, surrounded by books that are not on shelves but in piles, turn on their computer or their radio and wait for midnight: then, the opposite of what happens to Cinderella, the magic begins. In Carballo’s company, or that of his voice, these men and women will dedicate hours to examining the underside of the world, the truth of things that have been silenced by official history, and will find in the camaraderie of paranoia, in the pleasure of those shared indignations, the thing that can most unite two people, even if they don’t know each other or have never seen each other—the feeling of sharing a persecutor. All this occurred to me in a fraction of a second, and only now, when I write it, does what happened next make sense. I understood something: I understood why Ismael had phoned in so quickly, as if he knew beforehand my opinion of conspiracy theories; I also understood why Carballo had invited me onto his program. Of course it wasn’t out of any interest in my opinions, much less in my books. He had invited me to test me. To put it a better way: he hadn’t invited me because of my past books, but to find out if I deserved, beyond all doubt, a certain future book. The clarity of the revelation dazzled me. I hastened to reply.

  “Because he expected them to sink it,” I said.

  “What?” said Carballo.

  “Of course,” I said. “It was to get the United States to join the war, wasn’t it? But the United States was not in the habit of getting involved in foreign conflicts, that was a sort of tradition since the Founding Fathers. I think even Washington made it clear as a kind of national philosophy.” This was a vague memory from long ago and undoubtedly inexact readings. But I didn’t think anyone was going to discredit me. Nobody did. “Nevertheless, it was in many people’s interest for the United States to join the war because war generates profit. Everybody knows that the rich of the United States wanted their country to go to war, for the opportunities it would offer. But President Wilson stubbornly refused to get involved. An act of violence against U.S. citizens was needed, an act that would inflame public opinion and line it up behind the president, demanding retribution, demanding revenge.”

  Carballo had leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms behind his head and observed.

  “Have you heard of the papers of Colonel House?” asked Ismael.

  I could not reveal the truth: that I didn’t have the slightest idea what they were. But I knew that wouldn’t be necessary, for Ismael wanted to talk, he was dying to talk. So I let him.

  “Who hasn’t heard of Colonel House’s papers?” I said.

  “Exactly: Who hasn’t?” said Ismael. “Well then, in those documents, as you know, there is a very eloquent conversation.”

  “But let’s explain to the listeners,” I said, “let’s explain to our night owls who Colonel House was.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Ismael. “Colonel House was President Wilson’s most trusted adviser, his right-hand man. His papers record a conversation with Sir Edward Grey, Great Britain’s Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. This occurred shortly before the Lusitania went down. Grey asked him what the United States would do if Germany sank a transatlantic liner full of Gringo passengers.”

  “We say North Americans here,” said Carballo.

  “Sorry, North American passengers. What the United States would do if the Germans sank a boat full of North Americans. And Colonel House answered that he thought the public indignation would be so great, that it would drive them into the war. That’s more or less what he answered.”

  “And that’s what happened,” I said. “Without any more or less.”

  “Many people got rich from the United States joining the war. The Rockefellers earned more than two hundred million dollars. J. P. Morgan received more than a hundred million in loans from the Rothschilds. And you know, of course, what cargo the Lusitania was carrying.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But tell them, Ismael, tell our night owls.”

  “Ammunition,” said Ismael. “Six million bullets, property of J. P. Morgan himself. If you made these things up, nobody would believe it.”

  “But we don’t have to make them up,” I said.

  “No. Because there they are.”

  “In the history nobody tells.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you have to know how to see it.”

  “Know how to see it,” Ismael repeated.

  “You have to read,” I said, “the truth of things.”

  Carballo—on his face the expression of a professor or a father or a leader of a sect—looked at me with approval.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE REST of my spell on Night Owls, I had time to argue how the French Revolution was actually a bourgeois plot, how the Illuminati secret society had declared war on all the world’s religions, how the true origin of Nazi philosophy—someone used that expression, Nazi philosophy—could be traced back to 1919, the year that Adolf Hitler joined a secret society called Thule. Toward the end of the program I heard it said that evolution was one of th
e tools socialism used to penetrate our civilizations and that the United Nations was a front for those who wanted to impose a new world order. I also learned that the war on drugs, proclaimed by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, was the most successful imperialist strategy in the history of the United States, because it had enabled them to impose their laws on Latin America, at the same time as the black market money of the drug trade financed their economy. And then around two, while the program took a break and a Van Morrison song played and then one by Jacques Brel, I thanked Carballo and held out my hand to say good-bye. My hand hung in the air for an instant; it was a brief instant, but it gave me time to feel a change in Carballo’s gaze, as if the approval I’d felt a while ago had disappeared. That wasn’t so: it had just turned reflective and tenuous, like a candle flame.

  “Well, I’m going to get going,” I said. “But I’m ready to write the book, so give me a call when it suits you.”

  I began to walk away, but Carballo grabbed my arm.

  “No, no,” he said. “Wait for me. I’ll finish the program and then you can drive me home.”

  “Carlos, I’m not a night owl,” I said, trying not to offend him. “It’s too late for me. We better see each other another day.”

  “None of that. You’ve heard the expression worth the wait? Well, that’s what it is. Patience, my friend, patience. Believe me when I say you won’t regret it.”

  Were his words the promise of a stolen vertebra? Nobody could ask me to keep the idea from crossing my mind. And that vertebra, after all, was my sole mission. Carballo was inviting me to his house: that would be after four in the morning, but still, how could I refuse?