The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “Well, okay,” I said. “Where shall I wait for you?”

  “Come on, I’ll put you in a good spot,” he said. “So you can hear the rest of the program.”

  He showed me to a darkened studio, on the other side of the corridor, with my now empty bottle of whiskey and a plastic cup full to the brim of coffee that tasted like burned leather. It was true: the sound of his studio, the music from Night Owls, was perfectly audible. When Carballo reached a hand out to switch on the neon lights, I said no, to leave them off, that I liked it as it was. The semidarkness and the silence of two in the morning in that half-deserted building, or just occupied by ghosts of the night world, calmed and suited me, because sitting there the tension that had accumulated over the last two hours fell upon me: during that time much nonsense had been spoken, but some pertinent things had also been said, other new things and still others that had remained with me and made me feel uncomfortable without being able to know why, the way an intuition makes us uncomfortable, after a conversation when we feel someone was trying to tell us something and—out of fear, timidity, excessive caution, to spare us displeasure or sadness—they haven’t. For example, Carballo’s interest in the assassination of Rafael Uribe Uribe was news to me; in my aforementioned column it had just served as a pretext, a way to complete a more or less attractive idea one day when my columnist’s creativity was on vacation. During a break—while the voice of Maxime Le Forestier played—my host had reproached me briefly.

  “That column is the reason you’re here,” he told me. “So don’t spurn it.”

  And now someone was talking about Uribe Uribe again on the program. Having been distracted by my own meditations, I didn’t know who it was: I caught up with the conversation when it already seemed to be quite far along. Or maybe they weren’t talking about Uribe Uribe, but had just mentioned him in passing; the voices reached me clearly but at the same time from afar, perhaps through the illusion radio produces: although it was being transmitted ten meters from where I sat, the sound of Night Owls reached me as it would have if I were in Barranquilla, for example, or Barcelona, or Baltimore.

  The listener who had called in had a rough smoker’s voice, wasted and weak, mixed with the static (the bad quality of the phone line didn’t help), so only his impeccable diction allowed me to understand his words. It was he who first mentioned my name, I think. We are programmed to become alert at the sound of those syllables: we distinguish them even in the midst of a crowd or confusion, and that’s what happened to me. But my name didn’t come up again. They were now talking about someone called Anzola.

  “He did know,” said Carballo. “You, my night owls, know as well as I do that Anzola was one of us: a courageous man, a bearer of truth, someone with the ability to see the other side of things. Don’t you agree, Don Armando?” The man with the invalid’s voice was called Armando. “Of course,” said Armando. “And one has to ask, Carlos, what would have happened if Anzola’s discoveries had survived. But they fell into oblivion, because this country has no memory, or only remembers what is in its interest.” “For me it’s not a question of amnesia,” Carlos said now. “Anzola and his discoveries being forgotten is an interested forgetting. So, it’s not forgetting, it’s the suppression of an inconvenient truth. The perfect example of a successful conspiracy.” And then Armando said: “That’s what Vásquez doesn’t know.” And Carballo confirmed it: “Yes. That’s what he doesn’t know.”

  Just before four in the morning, Carballo left the last song in my list playing (the longest one; he always saved the longest for last) and said good night to the sound engineer with a half-dead embrace. He gestured to me from the hall, I stood up and followed him down dark corridors. He moved confidently as I felt my way along the walls, and in minutes we were pulling out of the side street heading north then up Eighty-fifth Street and then taking Carrera Séptima south. When we got to Avenida Chile, I decided to ask him: “Who is Anzola?”

  Carballo didn’t look at me. We were driving through a deserted and threatening city, because the early hours are always threatening in Bogotá: despite things going better than in the days before my departure, it is still a place where no one stops at a traffic light without a tinge of apprehension. Carballo had his eyes on the road, and the yellow light of the streetlamps and the red brake lights of the few vehicles played on his face. “Afterward,” he said.

  “After what? I heard you talking about me. And also talking about a certain Anzola who discovered I don’t know what. Who is he?”

  “Was,” said Carballo.

  “Who was he?”

  “Afterward,” said Carballo. “Later.”

  Carballo was giving me directions: he was one of those people who can’t give a destination at the moment of getting into the car, but has to give instructions to the driver at every corner, as if mentioning his address at the beginning would be giving away a secret: giving too much information to the enemy. And so we passed behind the Hotel Tequendama and up to Carrera Quinta and took it south and got to Eighteenth Street. At a corner, in front of a closed parking lot, a few meters past a lean-to where a couple of bodies slept under dirty blankets, Carballo’s hand moved in the darkness.

  “Here it is.” He pointed. “That’s my window. Leave the car here.”

  “Here?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen, don’t worry. We take care of each other on this street.”

  “But it’s blocking the way.”

  “There’s nobody around at this time. We’ll move it later. That parking lot opens at six or six-thirty, when the students start to arrive.”

  Carballo lived in a first-floor apartment with two small rooms and windows with bars over them as if to prevent a prisoner from escaping. The floor was practically covered in little piles of books, and it wasn’t easy to walk without tripping, but I did: I followed Carballo along the path his daily life had carved through the piles. Against one wall, in the middle of the living room, was the fridge; on top of the fridge, more books. “Do you want a drink?” he asked me, but before hearing my reply he was already pouring me a glass of Domecq brandy. As he did so I noticed the only cabinet, an unsteady structure where mugs, cups, and glasses fought for space with books, and on the top shelf books fought for space with empty bottles of Nectar aguardiente, lined up like collector’s items. Among the bottles, a portrait of Borges watched us distractedly. I pointed to it with curiosity. “Oh, yes, I interviewed him,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “That was in sixty-something. A journalist friend told me the university radio station was looking for someone to interview Borges, because someone else had canceled, a professor, I think. I accepted, of course, even though I knew nothing about how to conduct an interview. But it was Borges, you understand. They said: ‘They’ll expect you tomorrow at eleven.’ After a while I started to panic, realizing what I’d just done, and by the time I got home my stomach had begun to turn. I threw up, had diarrhea, my whole endocrine system went to shit. I wondered whether to prepare a list of questions or not. I prepared one, I tore it up, I prepared another. With the terror a famous Argentine can produce in a person, can you imagine? I arrived and Borges was already there, alone, because back then he wasn’t with María Kodama yet. I interviewed him for two and a half hours, it was broadcast, and the next day, when I went to ask for a cassette to have a copy, they’d erased it. They’d recorded a football match over it.” He handed me the glass and added:

  “Wait for me a second. I have to get something.”

  Carballo the unpredictable. Decidedly, this was an unfathomable man: as soon as I thought I had understood him, that I now knew what he was about, Carballo revealed another of his facets and made my satisfaction look ridiculous. I imagined him leaving one of Dr. Benavides’s classes to go and read Ficciones or El Aleph, or maybe the essays, yes, because the essays would have suggested more questions to an improvised interviewer than the stories, o
r at least questions less at risk of seeming silly or repetitious. Carballo, the pursuer of conspiracies, reading Borges’s reflections on Whitman or Kafka: the image, I don’t know why, struck me as irresistible. Then I remembered “The Modesty of History,” an essay by Borges that I’d always liked and that there, in that man’s apartment, seemed to acquire a mysterious pertinence, for in it Borges sustains that the most important dates in history might not be the ones that appear in books, but other hidden or private dates. What would Carballo have thought? What secret dates were more important than April 9, 1948, day of his unhealthy obsession? Or maybe my memory was distorting the essay? It was possible. But then I remembered “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” a story about conspiracies that talks about Julius Caesar, and then I remembered a poem called “Los Conjurados” (The Conspirators), the title of which invites us to think of secret conversations and espionage and assassinations, when it only talks about Swiss people gathering to create Switzerland. In any case Borges stopped seeming exotic in Carballo’s apartment: I wondered if he’d offered him his finds before offering them to R. H. Moreno-Durán. The idea didn’t seem preposterous.

  I was caught up in these reflections when Carballo came out. He was carrying a file folder in his hands.

  “I have my routine at this hour,” he said. “I get home, heat up some soup, and go to bed, because if not, the rest of my day is ruined. But today is a special day, and before going to bed I have to get you comfortably settled. But I hope we’ll later drink a toast: we’ll drink to our project. Are we in agreement so far?”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “I understand that if you’re here, that’s why. For our project. To write this book that so wants to be written. Do I understand, or am I mistaken?”

  “You’re not mistaken.”

  “Well then, we have to start as soon as possible,” he said. He handed me the folder he was carrying and ordered: “We’ll start here.”

  It was the same kind of folder I’d seen years ago in Francisco Benavides’s house. It was labeled with three figures: 15.10.1914. Nothing else was written on it, no words, no names, no tags of any sort, but I recognized the date.

  “The Uribe Uribe crime,” I said. “Why, Carlos? What does it have to do with this?”

  “Start reading,” he said. “Right now, because all the rest is withheld until you know certain things. I’m going to sleep, if you don’t mind. If I don’t get a few hours’ sleep, how will I prepare tonight’s program? And if I don’t sleep at this hour, what sense will I make to my night owls, how will I lend them my ears and my attention, which is so important to them? These people depend on me, Vásquez, and I cannot let them down. I owe it to them, you understand.”

  “I understand, Carlos.”

  “I’m not so sure, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll repeat what I said earlier: make yourself at home. There’s a pitcher of water in the fridge. You can make coffee if you want, because what’s in the pot is no longer drinkable. I ask you one favor: Don’t make noise. Don’t wake me up. I can get very annoyed if I get woken.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said.

  “When you have to go, leave the file there for me, on the table. Make sure the doors are closed, mine as well but especially the main door to the building. We don’t want thieves getting in.”

  And he closed the door—the one on the right, at the back—and I didn’t hear any more from him. I found myself alone in Carlos Carballo’s living room, alone in the place of the mission a friend had entrusted to me. So I didn’t start to read the contents of the folder with the date that was now echoing in my head, but rather to look for the vertebra in the jar of formaldehyde. I looked in the fridge, I looked among the books on the shelves and behind the empty aguardiente bottles, I looked in the drawers of a sort of bureau that someone seemed to have abandoned in a corner, and I went so far as to scrutinize the spaces between the towers of books that grew like weeds beside all the walls. But I didn’t find it anywhere. There were no locked drawers or cupboards that could hide anything. Everything was within sight in this place. I soon thought Carballo would not have left me alone and at my leisure in the same room where he kept a stolen object; and then I thought that maybe Carballo hadn’t stolen it and that Francisco Benavides was completely mistaken and this whole business was a cheap farce, grotesque as well as unfair. Carballo was a paranoid eccentric, but not a thief. Did he not have hundreds of people who adored him, who listened to him every night with the devotion of worshippers? Was his program not a sort of nocturnal church, a clandestine work of charity and empathy? While my hands took books off shelves to check behind them, where all readers hide things, I thought of these words and was soon ashamed of my thoughts. Charity and empathy: the arrogance of thinking myself superior to those solitary insomniacs: the insufferable paternalism of thinking they were living mistaken lives, or that their lives revolved around fantasies or speculations, while mine . . .

  After a few minutes I gave up. My brief burglary had produced nothing of interest: neither the missing objects nor clues or signs that might lead to them. I returned to the folder and opened it unenthusiastically; I planned, I think I remember, to leaf through it enough to be able to lie to Carballo later, and thus preserve my right to be here, in his house, which was more like a fort. The folder contained a meticulous chronology: hour by hour, everything that happened on the day Rafael Uribe Uribe died. I took off my shoes and lay back on the sofa so the light would shine directly on the pages. I noticed that the curtains were drawn, so the dawn would not come through the windows, or perhaps would enter timidly around the edges. It must have been just after five when, armed with a fresh pot of coffee (and a mug where Mafalda had hung a sign warning her world: Caution: Irresponsible people at work), I began to read; it must have been six or almost six when I understood the contents of what I had in my hands, that opened like a secret to reveal to me the extent of my ignorance of that fateful day, the first of so many that marked the last century in my country. I began taking notes, and those notes are in front of me now, serving me as guides and memoranda to give those documents the form of a story and the illusion—but it’s only an illusion—of an order and a meaning.

  * * *

  —

  ON OCTOBER 15, 1914, at about half past one in the afternoon, General Rafael Uribe Uribe, indisputable leader of the Liberal Party, senator of the Republic of Colombia, and veteran of four civil wars, left his house at 111 Ninth Street and began to walk down the middle of the road, in the direction of the National Capitol. He was wearing a black suit and a bowler hat, his customary attire for days when the senate was in session, and clutched under one arm some papers that contained, according to those who knew him, a proposal for a law on work-related accidents. He knew the offices would be closed at this hour, but he always liked to arrive early: the general used the quiet times to prepare his fearsome speeches. He reached the corner of Carrera Séptima, crossed the street, and walked a few meters along the western sidewalk heading north, without noticing that two men wearing ponchos and straw hats were following him. Later their names would be known: Leovigildo Galarza, in the black poncho, was the taller one, with a lighter complexion and a copper-colored mustache; the one in the brown poncho—the shorter of the two, with a dark mustache and more slanted eyes, whose dark skin had the greenish tinge of illness—was called Jesús Carvajal. It would later be known, as well, that they were tradesmen, or, more precisely, carpenters by trade, and that they’d spent the morning preparing the hatchets they each carried beneath their ponchos: sharpening the blades, drilling holes in the wooden handles, threading a loop of rope through the hole to go around their wrists so the hatchets wouldn’t slip at the crucial moment: they undoubtedly foresaw sweaty palms. And there, a few steps ahead of them, walking along his street as he had so many times before, was General Uribe Uribe, deaf to the prophecies that had been announcing an attempt on his life for months.

 
The threats had accompanied him for the last several years. The general had become used to them: since the war of 1899, when he had to sign a humiliating peace accord to keep the whole country from sinking into a bloodbath, he had lived with the feeling of being hated by his enemies, yes, but also by some of his friends. The Conservative press had blamed him for the hundred thousand dead of that war, perhaps because they didn’t know that he blamed himself. But that’s how it was. And the blame, or something like it, had transformed him: in the last decade, General Uribe, emblem of the most recalcitrant Liberalism, had suffered a metamorphosis that seemed scandalous to his supporters. It wasn’t just that he had forever laid down his weapons or that he’d sworn never again to pronounce a word against one group of Colombians or in favor of another, but seeing him devoted to the defense of old enemies, exercising diplomatic labors in favor of Conservative presidents, and giving long speeches in which he repeated, over and over again, that he’d moved to more tranquil regions and that peace in Colombia was his only objective.

  The army of his enemies, which in wartime had been very visible, in peace became as hazy as a ghost. It was impossible to know who endorsed it or what its intentions were, but Uribe began to hear hostile rumors, veiled threats, and friendly messages of alarm, which for some reason seemed different from those he’d always received. Friends told him to take care, that they’d heard strange things; his family asked him not to go out alone. For his staunchest supporters, he continued to be the symbol of progress, the defender of the workers and the last bastion of true Liberalism; for others, the perfect incarnation of moral decadence and the enemy of tradition and faith. For Conservatives, Uribe was a propagator of corrupting doctrines and was condemned to Eternal Fire as a Liberal; for half of the Liberals he was a Conservative, a traitor to his party and their cause. This last accusation, which must have seemed the strangest one to him, took on new life during the presidential elections of that year of 1914. Senator Uribe—the diplomat, the conciliator, the man of peace whose only obsession was to achieve the country’s reconciliation—gave his support to the Conservative candidate. José Vicente Concha, as was predictable after such backing, came out victorious. General Uribe could not know it, but that would be the last election of his life.