The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “Imagine if I didn’t.”

  Surrounded by bandages and gauze, in the hustle and bustle of injections, neither Dr. Zea nor the rest of the doctors noticed that night had fallen. They looked at the clock on the wall only when Julián Uribe, the general’s brother, looked in to say the priests had arrived. They were two Jesuits with gentle manners who stayed with the general for more than an hour, despite the journalist Joaquín Achury trying to point out that Uribe would not be in agreement: after all, he had denounced the Church’s excesses till he was blue in the face and had refused its indulgences. “I’m just a doctor,” said Zea, “and these matters are not my concern. Besides, the general is unconscious.” As soon as he said it, Uribe began to shout refusals: “No, no!” he said. And also: “You! You people!” The words ended in a bloody spew of vomit. A cold sweat drenched his forehead and neck. “He’s reaching the end,” someone said. Dr. Zea moved the bottles of hot water to check the general’s temperature, and then his pulse, which had absented itself from his forearms and was now only detectable in his carotid arteries. The crowd outside was no longer shouting. And then Zea saw the wounded man open his eyes, press his head against the pillow, and repeat the same phrase three times in a terrified voice: “Lo último!” he said. “The end! The end!”

  General Rafael Uribe Uribe, fifty-five years of age, senator of the Republic, leader of the Liberal Party, and veteran of four civil wars, died at two in the morning on Friday, October 16. The windows were open in spite of the cold of the Bogotá night, and some sisters of charity had knelt to pray in a corner, beside a collection of four seashells the general had brought back from one of his trips, while two indigenous women, more diligent, began to wash the corpse. The water they poured over his head washed down over his neck, converted into a pink solution, and formed delicate pools in his eyes, which one of the women dried with light taps with a cloth, while she cried and passed her sleeve over her living eyes: a macabre echo of the other eyes, dead but also wet. Clean and with his head wrapped in bandages, the general was placed in an open coffin, and the coffin in the center of the main hall. Over the hours that followed, relatives came to see him for the last time and weep for him with those special tears wept for a murder victim: those shocked tears but also tears of pure rage, of impotence and pained surprise, those tears that are also shed against all those who could have prevented the crime and did not, against those who knew the murder victim was at risk and did not want to warn him, maybe believing that to speak of bad things is to invoke them, opening a door for them in our lives, perhaps allowing them to enter.

  * * *

  —

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINERS arrived mid-morning on October 16, just when a young artist was making a clay mask of General Uribe. Those in charge of the autopsy were two doctors, Ricardo Fajardo Vega and Julio Manrique, and three assistants from the coroner’s office; they all took notes, wrote down words like posterior biparietal zone and scalp wound, took out a measuring tape and wrote Oblique direction. Twelve centimeters. Then they cut the scalp open from one ear to the other, separated the cranial vault, and found the segment where the hatchet had destroyed the bone. Dr. Fajardo ordered the wound be measured (the result was eight and a half centimeters long by four and a half wide), and Julio Manrique requested scissors to slice the meninges, cut the medulla with a scalpel, and extracted General Uribe’s brain, with both hands, as if he were lifting a dying pigeon off the ground. He placed it on the scales. “Fifteen hundred grams,” he said. The medical examiners then reconstructed the cranium and began to examine the body. The abdomen and intestines were perfectly healthy and the lungs had not a single tubercle: to judge by the tone of the tissues, anyone would think the general hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in his entire life. Everyone agreed that he should have lived for another thirty years.

  At dawn on the seventeenth, the assassins were taken to identify the corpse. The wake was held at the Salón de Grados, a huge pile of colonial stone on Carrera Sexta that had been a religious cloister and an incipient university, and in which Francisco de Paula Santander had spent months incarcerated while he was on trial for his part in the conspiracy that led to the attempted murder of Bolívar in 1828. For the funeral chapel, the police had arranged two corridors, one an entrance and the other an exit, so the crowd could circulate without danger or disorder, and members of the army in parade uniforms arrived to escort or perhaps protect the casket. Past the catafalque streamed people of all races, of all social classes, of all occupations, who wanted no more than to leave the general their inconsolable sorrow, take a look at an illustrious dead man out of morbid curiosity, or argue, with anyone who’d listen, about their version of the crime and their theory of the reasons for the assassination. And that’s where, accompanied by a police officer and a detective, Leovigildo Galarza and Jesús Carvajal arrived.

  By that time there were few people left in the hall, but the ones still there would have been enough to provoke a real catastrophe: at any moment the general’s supporters, wounded men with a desire for revenge, could have jumped the assassins and lynched them in front of everybody. But nothing happened in the Salón de Grados; the assassins were not victims of any attack, any blows, any hanging, any tearing of their clothes, any dragging down the city streets, or any humiliation whatsoever. They arrived at the side of the body of their victim and cast their slippery gazes over the dead face as if they were any other two visitors. By then, their responsibility for the crime was already an established fact, since the officers who arrested them recognized them without hesitation in police lineups—the ponchos, the straw hats—and immediately supplied the corroborating evidence: the hatchets with holes in the handles and straps in the holes, and the general’s recently dried blood on the blades. And nevertheless there, in the Salón de Grados, in front of the lifeless body of their victim, the two assassins responded to the detective’s questions, denying their responsibility for the events.

  Yes, they had met the general.

  No, they didn’t know what had caused his death.

  No, they had not attacked him.

  No, they didn’t know who might have attacked him.

  After the legal recognition, the detective and police officer led the murderers to the exit. The officer walked on the left, holding the arm of one of the assassins, and the detective did the same, walking on the right. They were so distracted, said a witness, that the murderers could have run away: it was as if no one was looking after them: it was as if they trusted them.

  It was the most lavish funeral the country had seen in a long time. Someone later wrote, with that grandiloquence so characteristic of Bogotá, that the city had dressed as Rome to bid farewell to its Julius Caesar. (The simile was not a fortunate one: as someone else replied in the newspapers on the following days, Julius Caesar was assassinated for being a tyrant.) The articles in the press would speak of a ceremony with pennants and flags and words from the archbishop, and then a funeral march surrounding the casket to carry it to the cemetery, and then carriages with wreaths passing in strict order: first the president, then the apostolic delegation, then those of congress and the supreme court of justice, then the dead man’s party. There were so many wreaths that the plaza filled with the smell of flowers, and the scent followed the cortège down the Calle Real and then along Florián. From the adjacent streets more and more people came to join the retinue; someone said that during those moments Uribe was more important than Bolívar. From all the balconies, black-clad women and children watched, sad children faithfully following the instruction of sadness. At the cemetery, nine orators, from senators and congressmen to journalists and soldiers, delivered eulogies at the tops of their voices, and thus the people of Bogotá discovered that the country had left aside party hatreds and wept with a single cry for the memory of the great sacrificed man and that before the casket men’s passions fell silent. But the truth was very different: beneath the calm surface, the silenced passions a
nd unanimous weeping, the close relatives of the Uribe family began to realize that very strange things were going on around them.

  First of all, there was the annoying matter of the investigation. It had been started, as it should, on the day after the crime; it had fallen, according to legal procedures, to the top municipal inspector, a lawyer who had previously worked as a public prosecutor and whose aptitude, therefore, was well proven. But as soon as he began to work, he received notice that the case no longer fell within his jurisdiction: the president of the Republic had personally requested Salomón Correal, the police commissioner, to take charge of it. Since when could the president assign whomever he wished to a criminal investigation? How was it possible, furthermore, that he should assign the investigation to a man who did not have the education or the knowledge or the experience to carry out the sort of investigation required? But the most disturbing thing was that there was no record of the presidential decision anywhere. It was not written in any document, did not appear in any official letter, there was no tangible proof of it. It did not exist.

  The police commissioner, Salomón Correal, was a man of recognized Conservative sympathies and authoritarian temperament. His reputation had followed him since the beginning of the century, when he participated in the intrigues that a group of Conservatives carried out in order to withdraw the government from the legitimate president, the octogenarian Manuel Sanclemente, and replace him with one more in line with their thinking. Legends and truth blended in people’s memories, but one terrible version told that Correal, as prefect of the town of Guaduas, had arrested Sanclemente, had tied him to a chair, had insulted and beaten him as if he were a thief picked up off the street rather than a president in his eighties, and had then locked him in a glass case and left that case out under the midday sun, all to force him to resign from power. When they went to take him out of the glass case, the walls of which had steamed up under the violence of the heat, the elderly Sanclemente had fainted from exhaustion or dehydration, but never gratified his torturers with his resignation. Rumors of this ruthlessness had spread all around the country, and when Sanclemente died, two years after the macabre events, people agreed that he had not died a natural death: the humiliations and pain inflicted by his enemies had killed him. And among his enemies, Salomón Correal.

  So his presence in the proceedings did not inspire any confidence among General Uribe’s followers. Everything Correal did was surrounded by obscurity: as soon as he received the order from the president to take charge of the case, he assigned the head of the police investigations department the task of collecting statements from witnesses to the crime; three days later, however, he had dismissed him with worrying efficiency and without giving him the right to the slightest protest. The head of investigations was called Lubín Bonilla, and he was a civil servant recognized for his integrity and also for his stubbornness, so his dismissal seemed difficult to justify. But Salomón Correal accused him of “underhandedly divulging insidious rumors against the government, which he later repeated in a telegram.” And he took him off the case.

  The telegram Correal referred to in his version was already the talk of Bogotá society. Shortly after his dismissal, Bonilla had sent it to an acquaintance; this person, without warning or asking permission, had it published in a newspaper. The telegram contained an accusation that was not to be taken lightly—WHEN LIGHT BEGAN TO SHINE, TOOK ME OFF INVESTIGATION—and in Bogotá people wondered if Bonilla had been on the verge of receiving some important revelation. Here and there, in casual conversations that had been repeated and distorted, Bonilla complained that they’d taken him off the case just when he was going to arrange a face-to-face meeting between the two assassins; he had also been heard to say that Señor Correal had interfered in the investigation, imposing his presence during the interrogations in spite of the law forbidding it, and even holding a finger to his lips when a question was asked, as if instructing the assassin to keep quiet. But these weren’t the most serious rumors circulating around the police commissioner, for by the time of the dismissal of Bonilla, the Uribe family had found out about a very grave matter from a mysterious witness: a man called Alfredo García.

  He was just over thirty, with disheveled clothes and straight hair, and a gold tooth gleamed in his otherwise toothless mouth. Along with other of the general’s sympathizers, Alfredo García had gone to his house the night of his agony, and from the start made himself comfortable on the landing of the stairway, speaking quietly and discussing with the rest what had just happened. They all had their own speculations about the crime and its culprits; they said them out loud and the house was filling with conjectures. Señor Tomás Silva, family friend of the Uribes’, owner of a shop that had sold boots to the general on more than one occasion, was passing the stairs when he heard García say this sentence to no one in particular:

  “If they knew who Galarza’s and Carvajal’s comrades are in this incident, it would be something else altogether.”

  Tomás Silva interrogated him immediately: “What do you mean? What do you know?”

  “You have to tell everything you know to the police,” they told him.

  They went to see the investigating official. The officer listened with interest, but told them that so late at night no statements could be taken, that they should return the next day. That’s what they did: the next morning, very early, García and Silva returned to the police station. The commissioner was waiting for them in the entrance hall.

  “I already know what you’ve come to tell me,” he told them. He patted Silva on the shoulder: “We have to talk about this matter.” And then: “Wait for me and we’ll talk.”

  He went inside the building and left them alone. Silva and García thought he’d gone to get some paper, or to find a secretary to take a statement, and they waited for him to return. They waited for ten, twenty minutes, an hour, two hours. But General Correal never came back out. At eleven o’clock at night, García and Silva realized that General Correal, for reasons no one understood, had preferred not to receive their statement.

  For a few days they wondered what to do. Finally, a lawyer suggested that Tomás Silva should bring two witnesses and put the statement down in writing. Silva convened Señor García and two citizens called Vásquez and Espinosa at his shoe shop. Once they were there, he brought out a loose-leaf notebook and a pen and placed them on the counter. He said (but it was more like an order) to García:

  “Now then, write down what you saw.”

  It was this: The evening before the crime, García was passing Galarza’s carpentry workshop, after having gone for a soft drink in the shop next door, when he saw the two assassins, Galarza and Carvajal, talking to a group of men in elegant suits, with bowler hats on their heads. It was dark and García did not register the faces of the men in the group, but it did seem odd that such well-dressed people should be conversing with two workers at that hour of the night. As he passed the group, García could hear Galarza. “If you give us what we’re asking for, we’ll do it,” he said. “If not, there’s nothing to talk about.” “Keep your voice down,” one of the gentlemen demanded, “there’s somebody eavesdropping over there.” They all went inside Galarza’s place and closed the door. García was more curious than sleepy, and waited for almost an hour leaning against the house of Señor Francisco Borda, walking up and down the street, freezing to death. When he finally saw them come out, he hid behind the corner and from there heard the polite voice of one of the gentlemen: “All set, then.” “No worries,” answered Galarza or maybe Carvajal. “We’re going to do this really well.” And Carvajal or maybe Galarza added: “You gentlemen will see this very well done.” The witness read out loud what he’d just written and then put his signature to it with more arabesques than necessary. But none of this interested Correal. He never found out who the men who spoke with the assassins that night were; he never investigated the validity of García’s testimony.

&nb
sp; That disregard soon reached the ears of Julián Uribe, the general’s older brother. He was a man with a long neck and a straight mustache, and he’d always acted more like a second father than a companion. On his relaxed brow there was something serene that the general had never had, as if rather than two years he was two lifetimes older. From the beginning he got involved in the criminal proceedings, following them closely, taking an interest in their particulars, and he also had his own worries, his own qualms about the way everything had been carried out. At the beginning of the month of November, he had gone to Salomón Correal’s office. He took with him a document written in his own hand: a draft detailing certain information he had obtained himself after several days of investigation. Since he himself had compiled that material, he himself had put it down in writing and he wanted to hand it personally to the police commissioner, because it seemed to him to be of sufficient significance and because he had realized he could not trust messengers.