The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “We’ll simply have to go and find her,” said Anzola.

  “That’s just the problem,” said Julián Uribe. “Señorita Díez disappeared.”

  “What do you mean disappeared?”

  “She’s not there anymore. She’s not at Galarza’s mother’s house. She’s nowhere. She’s disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “And what do the police say?” asked Anzola.

  “The police can’t find her either,” said Carlos Adolfo Urueta.

  “But you gentlemen don’t believe—”

  “We,” Julián Uribe interrupted him, “no longer know what to believe.”

  It was at that moment when he felt that the brother of General Uribe, his mentor and maestro, was about to repeat his request. And Anzola could not allow it to be said in the future that he had had to be begged to find out the truth about the general’s murder. He looked at Julián Uribe and said:

  “It will be an honor.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to help us?” asked Julián Uribe.

  “Yes,” said Anzola. “And also that it will be an honor to do so.”

  The next morning, very early, when the cold air of Bogotá still burns the nostrils, he left his house and walked the dozen blocks to the scene of the crime. The Plaza de Bolívar was calm. Anzola approached the Capitol from the north, passing in front of the cathedral and then in front of the Jesuit college, and noted the presence of several police officers in the area. He arrived at the exact spot where two months earlier Rafael Uribe Uribe had leaned against the low stone wall, with his head bleeding profusely, while the assassins were each arrested separately, a short distance away. He was able to recognize the spot because when he looked up toward the eastern wall of the Capitol, above which a timid sun was beginning to shine, he saw a marble plaque as small as a bathroom window. He thought the plaque seemed too discreet, he thought the plaque seemed to want to go unnoticed, he thought it seemed embarrassed by what it said or maybe (Anzola thought then) by what it didn’t say:

  TO RAFAEL URIBE URIBE.

  THE CONGRESS OF COLOMBIA.

  15 OCTOBER 1914

  Anzola thought that this Congress didn’t deserve to have had General Uribe. Even the country, this country where threatening another with death was routine and where these routine threats were not infrequently carried out, was undeserving of the battles General Uribe had waged for its fate and its future. Then he crouched down in front of the stone wall, just as they’d told him the general had fallen after the attack, and tried to see the world from there: Ninth Street, the Jesuit college, the cathedral, all standing out against the blue background of the morning sky. He looked along the wall for the mark, he’d been told, one of the assassin’s hatchets had left on the stone, but didn’t find it. He looked for traces of blood, a stain or the silhouette of a stain, and not only did he not find anything, but he felt stupid for believing he might have found something. But deep down it didn’t matter. He was content with himself, proud of the mission with which he’d been entrusted, sure that this imminent investigation would be the most important thing he’d done with his life. He could not have thought that he had just been thrown overboard, with that honorable decision, everything that until then had appeared in his head when he thought of his future.

  * * *

  —

  “AND THERE’S where it all begins, Vásquez,” said Carballo. At around midday he had emerged from his monster’s cave, after a murmur of running water heard through the walls, in a clean shirt and with his thin hair stuck to his temples; and like that, walking through his apartment in white socks, he’d started to talk as if picking up a conversation that had been going on for centuries. “Yes, that’s how it all begins. This whole monumental confusion, that nobody in this country of ours knows, this forgetful and credulous country, all this disorder that I’ve devoted more time to than to my own self, begins there, at the end of 1914, with that young man called Anzola: a mystery of history, a phantasm who emerged from the shadows with the crime and five years later had disappeared back into them, a man who was leading a normal and maybe happy life, and who had an obligation land on his shoulders: that of bringing to light a conspiracy. It is the noblest task a person can carry out, Vásquez: to thwart a lie the size of the world. To confront people who wouldn’t think twice before doing him harm. And to run risks, always running risks. Searching for the truth is not a hobby, Vásquez, it’s not something one does because one is idle. It was not a hobby for Anzola and it hasn’t been for me. This is not clowning around. So get ready for what you’re going to see here, with me, in these upcoming days and between these four walls. Because this story is going to change more than one of your ideas. What happened to Anzola over the next few years transformed his whole life, so don’t expect to go through this and come out unscathed. Nobody comes out of here unscathed. Nobody, nobody, not you or anybody else.”

  VI

  THE INVESTIGATION

  During the last days of 1914 and the first of the following year, while the city tried to celebrate the birth of Jesus at the same time as it mourned the death of General Uribe, Marco Tulio Anzola devoted his time and energy to finding out as much as he could about the witnesses to the events: those who saw the crime, those who didn’t see it but were nearby, those who’d said important words that the prosecutor decided to ignore. The first thing he noticed was predictable: neither the prosecutor Rodríguez Forero nor the police commissioner, Salomón Correal, seemed too pleased that a fresh-faced young man was starting to stick his nose into such a delicate procedure. But Anzola started asking questions and saw that people answered them. He moved around and about the city, wrote letters and received replies, and thus gradually discovered various worrying things. The first was the nickname the people in the street had invented for Salomón Correal: General Hatchet. He was called that everywhere, always carefully, to not be heard by officers or friends of the police commissioner; and even though a popular nickname had no importance within the investigation Anzola was carrying out, it was also true that the people have a reason for why they say what they say, and it’s also true, as Julián Uribe once said, that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

  “General Hatchet,” Anzola repeated. “I don’t know whether the voice of the people is the voice of God, but at least they don’t mince their words.”

  Strange things kept happening with the proceedings. In spite of the prosecutor knowing what the witness Alfredo García had seen in Galarza’s carpentry shop the night before the crime, in spite of knowing about the document that had been drawn up and signed on the counter of Tomás Silva’s cobbler’s shop, he still had not called García in to make an official statement that would have legal validity in the trial. Why not? Yes, it was true what Julián Uribe had said: sometimes it seemed as if the prosecutor was determined to prevent or hinder any version of the crime other than that of two lone assassins, or the admittance into the preliminary investigation of any bit of information that might complicate the simplest story. Tomás Silva went to look for him on every third day, almost accosting him in the street when he saw him, begging him in vain to take that statement. The prosecutor answered evasively; he said he hadn’t received any document from García; he said he’d already asked for it. And the days went by without his investigating who those six well-dressed men talking to the assassins on the night of October 14 might have been.

  Meanwhile, one question bothered Anzola: Where was Ana Rosa Díez? What had happened to the alleged card that an alleged Jesuit priest had allegedly left for Galarza’s mother? What significance could that piece of paper have, such that Ana Rosa Díez had tried to hand it over to Tomás Silva? And how was that significance related to the woman’s disappearance? Anzola looked for her everywhere. He went to Señora Barragán’s house, and did not find her. He spoke to Eloísa Barragán, Galarza’s mother, who struck him as a more astute woman than she let on, and
could only find out that Ana Rosa Díez had gone without giving notice, like a thief, and she’d left owing two weeks’ rent. Her room had been let out immediately, of course, but the new tenant was not in at the moment, and Anzola could not look inside the room. He then thought of looking for her at Galarza’s place, at number 205A Sixteenth Street, but when he got there, three days before Christmas, he found a municipal inspector finishing up an eviction. Galarza’s belongings and those of his concubine, María Arrubla, had ended up in the street: their furniture was still there, cases and the sad spectacle of clothing strewn on the curb, waiting for someone to pick it up. Anzola would later find out that the eviction process had turned up an important find. Behind some wooden boxes, well hidden, the third municipal inspector had found a sharpened hatchet and, a few meters from the hatchet, a wooden handle with a braided cord. It was an identical tool to the ones used by the assassins to attack General Uribe. The strange thing was that the police officers who had searched Galarza’s room exhaustively on the afternoon of the crime hadn’t found it then.

  “It’s new,” the municipal inspector said to Anzola. “Never been used.”

  “It’s sharp,” said Anzola.

  “Very sharp,” said the municipal inspector. “Strange that it should be here. This is not a carpentry tool.”

  “Desjarretadoras,” said Anzola.

  “What?”

  “That’s what they’re called,” said Anzola. “And no, the strange thing is not that it’s here. The strange thing is that it’s never been used.”

  It was from that day on that Anzola began to suffer from two obsessions: first, that the crime had been planned for much longer than the assassins claimed, who still insisted on having made the decision the night before, after meeting in the chicha bar; second, that the third hatchet must belong to a third attacker, someone who, for reasons impossible to guess, had never come to use it. Had there been another attacker prepared to assault General Uribe that day?

  Anzola began to speak of the third man whenever he interrogated anybody, trying to reconstruct the moment of the crime through new witnesses or a new reading of the existing testimony. He realized that the scene of the crime changed the way our memories changed: with each new day, with each new conversation, with each minuscule discovery, the images that appeared in his mind became diaphanous, and men appeared in places on Carrera Séptima that had been empty before, and then on Ninth Street some silhouette that he had thought fixed would disappear. He began to notice that people looked at him out of the corners of their eyes: the people of Bogotá began to hear about the job the murdered general’s family had entrusted to him. “That’s him,” he heard someone say behind his back one afternoon, in the Café Windsor. “Who knows why they give grown-ups’ jobs to children.” And a third concluded: “Well, I don’t think that boy will make it to the New Year.” When Anzola turned around, all he saw were people reading newspapers. It was as if nobody had been speaking.

  He did make it to the New Year. He spent those days (the holiday that goes from one year to the next) going over witness statements, trying to find a reference, even if indirect, to an aggressor other than Galarza or Carvajal. Witnesses spoke of the attack, of the assassins, of the victim; they spoke of those who called for help, and of those who helped. But Anzola couldn’t get anything clear. At the beginning of January, however, his investigations led him to two men whose statements hadn’t been taken by anyone before, in spite of the importance of what they had to say.

  They approached him, and not the other way around. Anzola was walking up the street when a man in a bow tie came up and started walking beside him. He said his name was José Antonio Lema and that he’d been trying to make himself heard by the prosecutors of the Uribe case, but without success. “I haven’t come to tell you what I saw,” Lema told him, “but what another person saw. I hope you believe me.” The other person was a certain Tomás Cárdenas, an employee of the Senate, who was coming out of the Capitol shortly before the crime, and managed to see everything. “Everything?” said Anzola. “Yes, everything,” said Lema. Cárdenas had told him and other friends in a café, and he had done so with such clarity that it was impossible not to take him at his word. “And what was it that he saw?” said Anzola. Lema answered: “That there was someone else with the two assassins.”

  “Oh, really?” said Anzola. “And who was it?”

  “Cárdenas didn’t recognize him,” said Lema. “He was the first to strike the general. Cárdenas saw the weapon, although from a distance, and he thought it was a knuckle-duster. He went to tell the police, but they wouldn’t take his statement.”

  “What did they say?”

  “That this information wasn’t useful,” said Lema. “That it distorted the matter.”

  In the middle of February, Señor Tomás Cárdenas confirmed all that Lema had told him. He told Anzola that on the day of the crime, at about one in the afternoon, he was looking at the posters on the wall beside El Oso Blanco when he saw General Uribe (although at that moment he didn’t know it was General Uribe) walking along the eastern sidewalk of the Capitol. Then he saw that he wasn’t alone: a man with a mustache, in a black suit and bowler hat, was following very closely behind him. The man in the hat picked up his pace behind General Uribe, raised his hand, and punched him hard in the face. Cárdenas saw something shiny on his raised fist and he thought it was a knuckle-duster.

  “And you tried to give this information to the police?” asked Anzola.

  “Yes,” said Cárdenas, “but they wouldn’t take it. They said it would skew the matter.”

  The image of the man with the knuckle-duster would not leave Anzola. His presence did not appear in the first reports of the crime: he was like a phantom. Was he the man who was supposed to have had the third hatchet, the one discovered among Galarza’s stuff? And why, if that were the case, had he decided to change weapons before the attack? In any case, one thing was confirmed regarding the man with the knuckle-duster: even though it was not possible to know his identity, it was possible to know he was neither Galarza nor Carvajal: that he was, therefore, a third man.

  When he got home, Anzola shut himself up in the dining room to review the autopsy. A blow from a fist wearing a knuckle-duster was not the same as a hatchet blow, and there must be evidence of that difference in the forensic exam: unless, of course, Cárdenas had lied, or thought he saw something he didn’t see, or imposed on the scene his own anxieties. But no: there, in the autopsy, in black and white, was the possible mark of a knuckle-duster on the skin and the bones of General Uribe. On the face, read Anzola, at the level of the left inferior orbital fissure, there is an oblique wound, 4 centimeters in length, in the skin and part of the soft tissues, and it has the characteristics of a wound inflicted with a sharp object. Over the left frontal region is an abrasion of the skin, with ecchymosis, in a circular shape, and a diameter of 3 centimeters; this lesion was caused by blunt trauma. In the right malar region, there is a wound on the skin a centimeter and a half in diameter, caused by blunt trauma, and a similar lesion on the right cheek. On the side of the nose is an abrasion of the skin a centimeter long caused by blunt trauma. Each time the word blunt appeared, Anzola thought of the knuckle-duster, of a hand wearing one crashing into General Uribe’s face, preparing him for other beasts to arrive with their hatchets and finish the job, to butcher the victim.

  Here it was: here was the proof that someone else had attacked the general, for the wounds caused by a blunt instrument could in no way have been produced by one of the hatchets the assassins Galarza and Carvajal were carrying. Anzola could have felt vindicated, but he felt sad. He felt alone.

  To keep from running the risk of making mistaken judgments, he went to see Dr. Luis Zea, one of the doctors who had tried to save General Uribe’s life. In the consultation room, while he waited, Anzola examined the skeleton, the diagrams on the walls, the glass case, and the beveled glass of the door
s, which played colorful games with the white light. He didn’t know Luis Zea well, but Julián Uribe had spoken of him in such favorable terms that Anzola felt he was in the presence of a friend. No: an ally. The world was beginning to divide itself between those who were with him and those who were against him. On one side, those who were searching for the truth; on the other, those who wanted to hide it, bury it. He also felt that the world around him was behaving in unfathomable ways.

  Around that time, a newspaper published an advertisement by the Di Domenico brothers, Italians who showed foreign films in the Salón Olympia. The Di Domenico company offered to pay one hundred francs for a script concerning the life of General Uribe. Anzola couldn’t imagine the result of that announcement, but something about it smelled fishy to him. Here he was, trying to find out the truth about an object of national mourning, and meanwhile in the newspapers people were offering money to someone who would invent a story about the same man.

  “Everything is up for sale in this country,” he said to Dr. Zea when he arrived at his surgery. “Even the death of its illustrious leaders.”

  To his surprise, the doctor was very well aware of the advertisement in the newspaper, and furthermore informed him of a surprising revelation: the Di Domenico brothers had been present the day of the attack. Not on the street, the doctor clarified, but in Uribe’s actual house, at the time when the general was fighting for his life (struggling between life and death, said Dr. Zea) under the surgical instruments of the doctors who were trying to save him. “They were there?” Anzola exclaimed. And the doctor said yes, that there they had been mixing with the people with their black box that took images of uncertain purpose. Dr. Zea then asked if Anzola liked cinematography, and he had to confess that he’d only gone to see a projection once. Then he tried to return to that revelation that had felt upsetting: “They, the Di Domenico brothers, had been in the general’s house during his agony?” he asked again, and Dr. Zea again replied: “Yes, they had been there.” “Doing what?” Anzola asked, and Dr. Zea shrugged: