The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  It contained the statements of twelve witnesses. With varying degrees of precision and various anecdotes, the twelve described a sort of outing or visit to the Tequendama Falls by General Uribe’s murderers. The falls, a dramatic mountain gorge where the Bogotá River throws itself over a cliff, was an important local tourist destination, and there was nothing to reproach in a group of workers spending a day off there: in fact, the artisan associations that existed in Bogotá often programmed excursions, and the falls, with its spectacular cascades that took the breath away from the most jaded viewers, with its always misty air that gave the tree-covered mountainside a fairy-tale atmosphere, was the first choice of many groups. But that outing, which according to witnesses’ versions had taken place in the month of June, had not been an outing like any other, for the assassins—according to the witnesses’ versions—were not alone: they went with a man from a higher social class, wearing a dark poncho and a fine woven straw hat, who had paid out of his own pocket to hire two sprung carriages and had also provided the thousand pesos for a picnic for ten people. It was Pedro León Acosta.

  And that changed everything.

  Pedro León Acosta was a sinister man, one of the most sinister in a time and country not lacking in sinister men. His left eyelid drooped slightly, which made his gaze seem at once doubting and disquieting, and his pointed ears gave him the look of a perverse goblin: a goblin who was also a capable rider and quite a good shot. His family, with long-standing Conservative and Catholic traditions, owned vast rural estates. But Pedro León Acosta did not inspire respect, but the fear that in every good family the lost sheep inspire, those sons who have not only done damage to the world, but have broken their parents’ hearts. When a family like the Acostas produces a son like Pedro León, that accident strikes us as more frightful, for there is something gratuitously evil in such a twist of fate: almost evidence that God had forgotten them. What the people of Bogotá had not yet forgotten, however, was that the man who dressed in an elegant poncho and hat to ride out on horseback to inspect his properties, that man who was always armed even if he was only going to meet street dogs along the way, was not like the rest of the lost sheep of good families that God had abandoned. No, he was not like the rest: eight years earlier, he had tried to kill a president of the Republic of Colombia.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1905, Pedro León Acosta and his brother Miguel had joined up with the three Ortega brothers, sons of another Conservative family, to conspire against President Rafael Reyes, who they saw as too weak in the face of Liberal posturing. The plans were the fruit of long resentment. They mistrusted Reyes because he had once said his duty was to govern on behalf of the whole country, not just for his party, and the conspirators were not prepared to allow such a concession to the enemy. But the most intolerable thing was his reconciliation with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, an atheist who had risen up in arms against the party and demanded the revocation of the concordat with the Catholic Church. In the war of 1895, President Reyes had defeated him; now, it was said, he was going to allow him to form part of the government. What good was it to win wars in the name of God and Colombia if you then handed the country over to the vanquished?

  On an evening that would later be recounted the way legends are told, twenty Conservative men on horseback gathered before the valley of Sopó, and there, in front of the gigantic mountain sleeping like a beast, making the sign of the cross with thumb and index finger of their right hands and holding a glass of champagne in the left, they swore to overthrow Reyes and drank a toast to the success of the enterprise. They did not count on their plans being found out, but that’s what happened: they were found out. Nevertheless, the consequences were not what they might have feared; the heads of their two families were also friends of President Reyes. That earned the conspirators certain privileges: the president, who had heard rumors of the conspiracy, summoned them all to the Presidential Palace—the fathers, the sons, and the parish priest—and asked them, the way one speaks to naughty children, to abandon their plans. To placate the conspirators, he offered to put Acosta in charge of the national police and send his brother as government representative to a military school in Chile. In spite of the cordiality with which Acosta received the offers, in spite of the smiles and the embraces with which the meeting ended, in December President Reyes found out that the conspiracy was still going on. General Luis Suárez Castillo, commander of the army, carried out a series of arrests. But neither the Acostas nor the Ortegas—the sons of his friends—went to prison.

  In 1906, at the beginning of February, the intelligence services brought President Reyes confirmation of the rumors: the attack would occur between the tenth and twelfth of that month. Reyes refused to limit his excursions or to increase his corps of bodyguards; on the tenth, at around eleven in the morning, he picked up his daughter Sofía at the Palacio de San Carlos and headed north with her along their usual route toward the north end of Bogotá. The carriage was almost completely closed: even though Sofía suffered from motion sickness, this time she’d insisted they only open the front, to protect her father from the wind that could give him a chill. They went down to the Plaza de Bolívar and then headed north along Calles Florián and Real. As they passed the Nieves church, the president looked up to the heavens, removed his hat, and recited a prayer. At the corner of the San Diego Park he noticed three horsemen moving in a way that suggested they were waiting for someone, and noticed that the riders also noticed him. He thought they were assassins; he thought, as well, that getting out of the carriage to confront them would only facilitate the task of assassinating him. So they kept going. When they arrived at the Magdalena quinta, in the area called Barro Colorado, he realized it was already half past eleven and time to return to the Palacio. He gave the order to the coachman; when the carriage began to turn around to take them back the way they’d come, he found that the three riders had followed them there. One stopped in front of the carriage. The other two, from behind, swept aside their ponchos, pulled out their pistols, and opened fire.

  “Shoot back at them,” Reyes shouted to his only bodyguard, Captain Faustino Pomar. And he said to the driver: “Get a move on, Vargas! Run over him!” Bernardino Vargas, the coachman, whipped the horses and the carriage lurched; seeing what was coming on top of him, the man who had blocked their way moved aside, went around the carriage, and began to fire. The president counted five shots and was disconcerted that none had wounded the attackers. “Cowards!” shouted Sofía. “Murderers!” Captain Pomar kept shooting until he ran out of bullets; then they realized the attackers were escaping, galloping north. President Reyes made sure Sofía wasn’t hurt, but discovered that they’d come very close: the landau had several holes in it, and there was one in the brim of his daughter’s hat. “God has saved us,” said the president: minutes before he had said a brief but heartfelt prayer to the Holy Sacrament of the Nieves church, and now heaven repaid him with a miracle. The next thing was to head to a telegraph office and begin to issue orders. The president had telegrams sent to La Calera, Puente, and Cajicá: all the towns the attackers might pass through in their flight. The hunt had begun.

  On February 28 the following edict was published:

  The Commissioner General of the National Police cites and summons Roberto González, Marco A. Salgar, Fernando Aguilar and Pedro León Acosta to present themselves at the Commissioner’s Office of the Directorate or at the Commissioner’s house, in terms of the distance from the place where they are now, to respond to the charges against them concerning the attack on the tenth of the present month against his Excellency Señor Presidente and his daughter Señorita Sofía Reyes de Valencia.

  If they do so, their willingness to appear will be taken into consideration, but if not, they will face the full rigor of the law.

  Any individual who hides, corresponds with, supplies knowledge or news or food to the aforementioned, shall be subject to Court
Martial and judged as accomplice, auxiliary or accessory. However, any person who gives notice of their whereabouts or refuge, or brings in those summoned, will receive a reward of 100,000 pesos for each of the first three named and $200,000 for Pedro León Acosta, and it is promised that the name of the informant will be kept secret.

  Once the attackers were identified, and a juicy reward offered, it was only a matter of time before they fell. A certain Emeterio Pedraza, seemingly a close friend of the three assailants, denounced them at the beginning of March and collected the reward. González, Salgar, and Aguilar were captured and brought before a court-martial, which designated the attack an aggravated assault by a “gang of criminals” and sentenced the condemned men “to be shot by firing squad in the same place where they committed their crime.”

  Never had an execution been documented so exhaustively. There they would remain, in a well-known photo, the bodies of the three assailants plus the instigator Juan Ortiz, who had been seen with the three assailants the Saturday before the attack, toasting with aguardiente in the Bodega de San Diego. Yes, there they all were, seated on wooden stools and already dead, their hands tied behind their backs and their bodies splayed, and one of them, at least, with his eyes covered by a white blindfold. In another photo you can see the rest of the conspirators, part of whose sentence was to witness the execution. How many would have looked away? How many would have wished for a white blindfold covering their own eyes? Would any of them have seen the death of the others? Would he have briefly thought I could have been that man who is now dead or maybe Now a man dies and it’s not me? We cannot know with certainty, but there they are: also seated on stools and surrounded by police, in a scene that could have been part of a public fiesta, of a theatrical performance in the middle of the street. There are all those who conspired against the president. All, that is, except one. Pedro León Acosta was not there. He had slipped through the police net.

  How was it possible? It was possible because Pedro León Acosta was not short of friends among the powerful people of Bogotá, many of whom shared his antagonism toward soft or cowardly Conservatives, all those who were handing the country over to the atheist Liberals. The very day of the attack Colonel Abelardo Mesa had called to tell him that he was being sought, and in a matter of hours Acosta had ridden down Thirteenth Street and left the city across the western fields. He couldn’t hide at El Salitre, because he found the gate closed with an unbreakable lock, but he ended up reaching the hills of the San Bernardo estate and disappearing among the trees, where they would never think to look for him. It was one of the coldest and dampest spots in those mountains, and Pedro León Acosta had to stay there while moods calmed down in Bogotá. He found a cave in the mountains: it was true that to get into it he had to drag himself like a beast, and it was true that the back of the cave was the darkest place he’d ever known, but it was far from any path and from any habitation, and there he would be safe.

  During those days, not falling ill seemed like a miracle; later, hidden in a hut others had built for him, he paid close attention to the information that reached him, and knew how many men they’d sent out to find him and also knew the price on his head. He realized he’d begun to distrust everyone. Traveling alone and at night, he managed to reach his home; his intention was to see his wife one last time, eat a hot meal, and rest a little beneath a woolen blanket before resuming his long flight. But the visit gave him another idea. He rummaged around in his wife’s wardrobe; he found an ample dress that wasn’t too tight. Disguised as a woman, always traveling at night, he reached the Magdalena River, boarded a United Fruit Company freighter that was sailing for Panama, and in a matter of days he had reached the place that would be his refuge—his exile, he said—until the end of Reyes’s term of office: San José de Costa Rica.

  Nothing more was heard of him.

  Years later, when President Rafael Reyes handed over power, forgiveness and forgetfulness (or a mixture of the two) gradually extended to and benefited his old enemies. When Pedro León Acosta secretly returned to the country in 1909, he realized that his former sins had become legends: they were something he could boast of in public. And he did: he tended to say, sometimes in person and sometimes in print, that he had never regretted conspiring against General Reyes, and that it had been the cowardice of others who hadn’t followed him, as well as the more than likely disloyalty of those who would have betrayed him if he’d stayed in Colombia, that forced him to leave. By 1914 not only was he not a fugitive, but many Colombians, from all walks of life and not necessarily with similar political affiliations, regarded him with respect: with the respect reserved since the beginning of time for conspirators who get away with it.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE END OF NOVEMBER, Julián Uribe met with Carlos Adolfo Urueta, the late General Uribe’s son-in-law, to make a decision about that worrying situation. Correal was manipulating the proceedings and no one seemed to care; Pedro León Acosta had been seen in the company of Galarza and Carvajal and this lead had not been followed up, nor had any investigation been carried out, and of the twelve witnesses who said they had seen Pedro León Acosta with General Uribe’s assassins, only two had been asked to testify. One of them, who had initially been sure he’d recognized Galarza from the photos in the newspapers, retracted this in his new statement without any explanation, and only remembered having spoken of tradesmen in general, not having identified them specifically. The other, who lived near Tequendama station and rented carriages for a living, confirmed that Acosta had been one of his customers, and had taken the carriage he’d hired to Tequendama Falls, but said nothing of his companions. For Julián Uribe, all of that proved an obvious fact: even if the witnesses could not or did not want to identify Galarza and Carvajal, it had been proven that Pedro León Acosta had been in that place in the company of a group of tradesmen, and there was more than a probable indication that Galarza and Carvajal could have been among them. Was it not simply logical to carry on inquiring along these lines, confirming the identity of all the members of the group and finding out if it was true, as the other ten witnesses said, that the assassins had been there? But none of that had been done. It was as if the prosecutor of the case, the famous Alejandro Rodríguez Forero, wanted to avoid their testimony being taken into consideration in the indictment: as if he wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. And on that November evening, Julián Uribe and Carlos Adolfo Urueta decided that, in light of the circumstance, there was only one option left to them: to conduct their own investigation.

  But who could take charge of it? Who would be bold enough to confront Salomón Correal and Rodríguez Forero, and shout to the four winds that the nation’s authorities were carrying out the most famous criminal case in Colombian history with irresponsibility and negligence? Who would be rash enough to accept this job? Who would be, as well as rash, loyal enough to the memory of General Uribe to get involved in such a mess? It had to be a convinced Liberal; it had to be a lawyer, who knew legal procedure and investigation techniques; it had to be a sympathizer and even unconditional supporter of General Uribe, and much better if it were also a friend of his. It was Carlos Adolfo Urueta who said it first; but when the name floated in the air of the room, they both felt that it seemed to have always been there: Marco Tulio Anzola.

  Anzola was twenty-three years old at that moment. He was a young lawyer, but one with a well-established professional reputation since his days as a civil servant in public works. He was, more than anything else, a bold nonconformist, and he had been friends with General Uribe in recent years—or rather General Uribe had been his mentor and his patron and his godfather, had taken him under his wing and gotten him his first positions. He had dark hair already receding far too much for his age, an undistinguished mustache, and eyes that didn’t seem particularly bright at first glance, but Julián Uribe had not the slightest doubt he was the man for this mission.

  So, at the beginning of
December, on a night as cold as Bogotá nights get when the sky is clear, Julián Uribe and Carlos Adolfo Urueta arrived at Marco Tulio Anzola’s house with a briefcase full of papers. Over the course of an hour they told him about Alfredo García, about the well-dressed men who had visited the assassins on the eve of the crime, about the witnesses who had told them about the trip to Tequendama Falls, about Pedro León Acosta and the brief Julián Uribe had drawn up to explain his suspicions to General Salomón Correal, the police commissioner. They told him that various events had convinced them that the investigation into General Uribe’s murder was being manipulated to prevent any version getting into the case file that didn’t corroborate Prosecutor Rodríguez Forero’s version: that Galarza and Carvajal had acted alone. But they believed this was not so, and they believed they had gathered sufficient evidence to cast doubt on the official investigation.

  “We wish to request that you, young Anzola, carry out a parallel investigation,” Julián Uribe finally said. “To follow up Alfredo García’s leads. To follow the Tequendama Falls leads. To follow up with Ana Rosa Díez.”

  “Who is Ana Rosa Díez?” asked Anzola.

  She was a very poor young woman who had been washing Alfredo García’s clothes for the last few months. But that wasn’t the important thing: the important thing was that she lived with Eloísa Barragán, Galarza’s mother. Shortly after having written his testimony in Tomás Silva’s loose-leaf notebook, García brought Señorita Díez to the cobbler’s shop and asked her to repeat what she had just told him. Ana Rosa obeyed. Several days earlier, she told Silva, in the house where she was living, a Jesuit priest knocked on the door and asked to see the mother of Leovigildo Galarza. When Ana Rosa Díez told him the lady was not at home, the priest took out a card, scribbled a few words on it, and asked Ana Rosa to give it to her. And what did the card say? asked Tomás Silva. That he would have to see with his own eyes, said Ana Rosa Díez. And where was the card? asked Silva. She could bring it to the shoe shop, said Ana Rosa Díez: she would try to take it without the lady noticing. But four days later, when Ana Rosa Díez finally came to show him the card, he’d gone out. The cobbler’s employees saw the card, but Ana Rosa did not want to leave it there. She took it with her and said she would bring it back later. And she never came back.