The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “And what does Eduardo de Toro have to do with all of this?” said Anzola.

  “Oh, yes,” said Bonilla. “Señor Toro.”

  Some days after the crime, perhaps a couple of weeks, Bonilla ran into Toro coming out of the police station. “Don’t even think of going in,” said Toro. “You are persona non grata in this building.” It was starting to drizzle, so Bonilla asked Toro if he could buy him a coffee with brandy somewhere to ask him a few questions. He just wanted to confirm a few bits of information about the day of the crime. A short while later the two of them were sitting in El Oso Blanco.

  “Just as you and I are seated here,” said Bonilla. “I took out my notebook and pencil and prepared to read off a few questions I’d jotted down. But I didn’t even get to the first one.”

  Eduardo de Toro advised him not to keep attracting Salomón Correal’s attention: to stop contradicting him, to suspend his illegal investigations. “They’re not illegal,” said Bonilla. “It doesn’t matter what you think they are,” said Toro. “The man has you in his sights.” And then immediately he began to tell him of Father Berestain’s visits to the police over the past few months. Rufino Berestain, one of the city’s most influential Jesuits, was the police chaplain; and so it was not strange that he should visit occasionally, said Bonilla. “Occasionally, no,” said Toro. “I get the impression that Father Berestain spends more time at the police station than in his parish. He comes, speaks to Correal, they shut themselves away to talk for a whole hour sometimes. I am a good Catholic,” said Toro, “but I’ve never liked that holy father. And after what happened recently, even less.” On October 15, from early in the morning, Eduardo de Toro had seen Father Berestain at the police station. He was pacing back and forth, and came out into the corridors of the upper floors asking questions nobody understood very well, but which had the obvious objective of obtaining information about what was going on out in the street.

  “Or about what hadn’t happened yet,” Bonilla said to Anzola.

  After the crime, Father Berestain’s conduct had bothered a lot of people. The country was in mourning, the city was grieving for Rafael Uribe Uribe, and within the city there were those, people like Eduardo de Toro, who had followed the general or admired him or simply condemned that barbarous act. However, Father Berestain imposed his will: he managed, with the weight of his authority, to have some spiritual exercises take place that had been planned some time previously.

  “I was there,” said Eduardo de Toro. “I felt obliged, as the whole police corps did, to attend Father Rufino’s spiritual exercises.”

  For several days officers and detectives and Jesuit priests met in the Casa de Cajigas. It was the old Nineteenth Street tannery, which now, under the administration and management of the Society of Jesus, served as a place for retreats and reflection. That weekend, the house, which ordinarily received generous quantities of guests, was full to overflowing. In his final sermon, before the crème de la crème of the police force and two steps away from Commissioner Salomón Correal, Rufino Berestain asked the officers to remember the deceased friar Ezequiel Moreno Díaz, Bishop of Pasto, whom God had called to his side more than eight years earlier. He mentioned, almost in passing, General Uribe Uribe, assassinated a few days earlier, and said that today he thought it more valuable to concentrate on the sacred memory of a servant of God on the eighth anniversary of his death than on the profane memory of an enemy of the Church, even though his body was just newly in the ground. Ezequiel Moreno, said Father Berestain: What was left of that wise and brave, God-fearing man, who had come to these lands from the mother country to bring a message of resistance to the blows of atheist Liberalism? His message remains, my sons, and that legacy fell to them. Its protection fell to them; its defense was up to them. Now that the nation’s faith was weakening before the attacks of the friends of Satan, it was well to remember the saints like Brother Ezequiel, who had left the world of the living as he had passed through it: with the brave intransigence of a true shepherd of souls. Eight years, eight years had passed since his death, and the words of his last will and testament still lived, and they would live forever. Did the illustrious members of our police corps know the last will of Brother Ezequiel? They can all be summed up in one, a very simple and sadly forgotten one: Liberalism is a sin, enemy of Jesus Christ and the ruin of nations. Do they know what the saintly man requested? That they put that phrase in the hall where his lifeless body lay and also in the temple during his funeral. That’s what he left as a testament, or in exchange for his testament: the request for a sign with that eternal truth. Liberalism is a sin.

  When the exercises were finished, before the men began to leave for their houses, Habacuc Arias, one of the first officers who had arrived at the scene of the crime beside the Capitol that day, dared to suggest that they also pray for the soul of General Uribe. Maybe he hadn’t been present during the sermon, maybe his ignorance didn’t allow him to understand what he was requesting: but he did request it. Rufino Berestain stood up and new shadows appeared on the harshness of his face. He looked at the officer with cold, clear eyes that no one had ever seen and that Eduardo de Toro, for his part, would never forget in what remained of his life. And then he spat out:

  “That brute should be rotting in hell.”

  VII

  WHO ARE THEY?

  Walking through the city the morning after his encounter with Lubín Bonilla, Anzola held against his chest a leather-bound notebook that Bonilla had placed on top of the tablecloth after finishing his tale. “Here are names and addresses, and some more or less legible notes,” he’d said to him. “It would be an honor if they could be of some use.” He pointed out two or three names that he should seek out immediately to try to get statements. One of them was Señor Francisco Soto, which Bonilla had underlined twice.

  Señor Soto lived in a large two-story corner house with balconies and geraniums spilling through the railings. It was the house of well-to-do people. A servant opened the door and led him into a living room to the left of an interior patio framed by terra-cotta flowerpots, and Anzola caught sight of a barefoot child who was playing a game tossing coins against a corridor wall. Francisco Soto greeted him with surprise: he was a young man, but he was accustomed to being advised beforehand by those who wanted to see him. He had just returned from a long business trip, he explained, an exhausting trip that had taken him from Caracas to Havana, from Havana to New York, and upon returning to Bogotá he had preferred not to let the newspapers announce his arrival. Many of his friends didn’t even know of his presence in the city yet. How had Señor Anzola found out?

  “It was General Lubín Bonilla,” said Anzola. “He was the one who spoke to me about you.”

  “Ah, General Bonilla,” said Soto. “That gentleman’s sharper than hunger.”

  “He told me he’d met you more than a year ago, after the assassination of General Uribe.”

  “A couple of weeks after, more or less,” said Soto. “I had gone to the office of Alberto Sicard, the lawyer. We began to talk about his detective college, which he was thinking of founding back then. I introduced myself and he recognized my name. He took out a notebook and said he’d been wanting to talk to me for some time.”

  “About the general’s murder?”

  “He had heard that I had certain information,” said Soto. “I don’t know how he knew and I still don’t know. A bloodhound, that General Bonilla. Did he set up his detective school in the end?”

  “Yes, he did,” said Anzola. “What information was it? Something to do with the Jesuits?”

  Soto half closed his eyes. “How do you know?” But he didn’t let Anzola answer. “Yes, that was it. I told him someone else had seen what I saw. Or that I knew of someone who had seen that, but I didn’t tell him it had been me. I didn’t want any problems. He said we’d meet on another day in a different place, where no police would see us.” He paused. “But we ne
ver managed to see each other, because a few days later, when I left on a trip, he still hadn’t come to find me.”

  “And to this day.”

  “Yes,” said Francisco Soto. “And I haven’t spoken of this to anybody, or almost anybody. I don’t know how you found out.”

  “And what was it you saw?”

  On the night of October 13, two nights before the crime against General Uribe, Francisco Soto was walking down Ninth Street with his friend Carlos Enrique Duarte. It was late and the street was deserted. They passed beneath the balcony of the novitiate and Francisco Soto pointed to the house on the opposite corner. “General Uribe lives there,” he told his friend. His friend didn’t say anything. They kept walking in the direction of the Capitol, but before they reached the corner of Carrera Séptima they saw two people, one in a felt hat, the other in a straw one, come out of a small door.

  “The San Bartolomé building has a little door that opens onto Ninth Street, a sort of back door,” Soto told Anzola. “That’s where they came out. The one in the felt hat I recognized immediately: it was Leovigildo Galarza. I couldn’t see the other person very well, but it was a taller person who looked better dressed.”

  He’d met Galarza at El Meeting bar, back in 1909; his friend Carlos Enrique Duarte also knew him: Galarza had done some carpentry jobs for his mother a few months earlier. They both thought it odd to see Galarza at this hour of the night, in the company of a man not of his class, coming out of the Jesuit college by the back door. But they didn’t mention it again until Galarza’s photo appeared in the newspapers. “Galarza killed General Uribe!” Duarte said to Francisco Soto the Friday of that week. “It was him!” he said, and repeated, “It was him!”

  They didn’t go to the police immediately. The day of the funeral, Soto and Duarte formed part of the mourning crowd that accompanied General Uribe from the basilica to the Central Cemetery, and realizing then the magnitude of what had happened, and watching from afar the priests who were walking with the victim’s family, they spoke of the possibility that the Jesuits had known about the crime. The public and vocal antipathy they professed for the assassinated general was a secret to no one; Francisco Soto had seen, as had everyone in Bogotá, the violent campaign to discredit him over the past few years from the pages of La Unidad and those of Sansón Carrasco, their two favorite megaphones (Francisco Soto said: their two mercenaries); and having seen one of the assassins coming out of the San Bartolomé seemed like too much of a coincidence. He and his friend Duarte remembered that Father Rufino Berestain, Bogotá’s highest-ranking Jesuit and also its most implacable, was the chaplain of the police force. (The Rasputin of the police force, said Francisco Soto. Duarte did not laugh at his joke.) And right there, walking as part of the black-clothed procession bidding farewell to the deceased, they said to each other that it would be best to keep quiet, because a crime involving the police and the Jesuits was a crime that was best not to get involved in. Later they were pleased, as over the course of the weekend a rumor began to circulate that anyone coming forward with information was being arrested. They saw this later with their own eyes: people they knew, people whose good reputations went without saying, had to spend hours or a night in jail, like delinquents, for committing the error of saying what they saw.

  “Those poor folks didn’t know there are things you see but don’t say,” said Francisco Soto. “Especially these days.”

  “But now you can say them,” said Anzola. “Now we need you to tell these things. If people like you don’t talk, the ones who did this are going to get away with it.”

  “Have you been to see them?”

  “Who?”

  “The murderers. Have you gone to the Panóptico?”

  He had. Last December, shortly after arriving from his long business trip, he thought that he hadn’t entered that building since his father was a prisoner. “Your father was a prisoner in the Panóptico?” asked Anzola. Yes, said Soto: that was after the last war. His father, Don Teófilo Soto, was a militant Liberal, on the losing side of that odious war like the thousands of losers who filled the prisons of Colombia. Don Teófilo raised his son on war stories: stories of heroism when Francisco was a boy, stories of pain and failure and truncated hopes as he was growing up.

  “Well, I realized I’d never visited the prison as an adult,” said Francisco Soto. “And I thought I should.”

  He arrived at the Panóptico on a sunny morning. In the yard, prisoners were basking in the light. Soto walked through, looking left and right, asking questions of the guards, putting up with the smell of urine and rotting food. He realized it had all changed since the war, but also that he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what had changed. Maybe, he thought, what had changed was him, who had come to visit his father as a boy, and now he was a man and the spaces of the prison, its corridors and walls, its rooms seen from outside, seemed smaller. The whole place now seemed less impressive than it had back then; but of course, then it had also been a place of fear and anguish, because nobody had explained to the boy that his father was not going to die locked up there, that he wasn’t witnessing his final days. So Francisco Soto went along, passing through that place of sadness like a tourist in a museum, when he recognized, sitting in their cells, General Uribe’s assassins.

  “There were Galarza and Carvajal,” he said.

  Galarza recognized him. He shook his hand but without standing up, and looking not at his eyes, but at his tie or the buttons on his vest: “How are you, Señor Soto.” He asked the assassins, without crouching down, how they were, if they were being well treated, if they were bored.

  “Now you see, Doctor,” said Galarza. “They get us into these things and then they won’t even look at us.”

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE THE YEAR ENDED, the mysterious Alfredo García, that disappeared witness, had written a letter from Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast, announcing his definitive trip to Costa Rica, signing himself Alfredo García A. Anzola and others commented that it was strange that the initial of his second surname should be A, for he had never used it in his signature before; but they didn’t dwell on it, because in any case that defector was no use to them now. But in February, the Medellín newspaper Etcétera published a strange letter. It was signed by Alfredo García, but the initial of his second surname had changed. “García B.,” Anzola read, and a crease appeared on his brow as if the text contained a discourtesy or an insult. The letter, furthermore, was dated from Bogotá, which meant that Alfredo García had not ended up traveling to Costa Rica. Had he changed plans? Was it possible that he was in Bogotá clandestinely? Or had the announcement of the trip been to throw off the investigators, proof that García had not been paid just to disappear but also to confuse those seeking justice? The contents of the letter were explosive: its author denounced the suspicious behavior of certain individuals related to the Uribe crime, and did so in terms that left not the least shadow of a doubt. The letter was like the ruling Anzola would have written if he had been a judge. It was, as Julián Uribe said, a dream come true.

  The author of the letter began by accusing General Pedro León Acosta: “I saw that man on October 11, 1914, at the Hotel Bogotacito, owned by Señor Benjamín Velandia, around half past eleven in the morning, in the company of Galarza and Carvajal. The three of them, after a few short words that I could not hear, continued to Tequendama Falls.” He immediately involved the Jesuits: “On the thirteenth of the same month I saw, with my own eyes, at around ten at night, Pedro León Acosta and his companions Galarza and Carvajal, enter the college of San Bartolomé through a small door the convent has at the back on Ninth Street.” He even went so far as to mention the famous card that Ana Rosa Díez had wanted to hand to Tomás Silva before she disappeared off the face of the earth: “Later I heard from a Señora Rosa, close friend of Galarza’s mother, that she had received a card from a friar whose name I cannot yet say.” Alfredo Ga
rcía then allowed himself the liberty of paraphrasing the card, as if he had seen it. “The card referred to says more or less the following: ‘The reverend father recommends to you, in a very special way, to this lady, that she remain at home for some time, while we figure out how to organize certain things.’” And he finished by referring to General Hatchet: “I also know positively that Galarza’s mother went to see General Salomón Correal and said he should see about looking out for her well-being and her life; that they had her son in prison, and he was the only one who took care of her; that it was not fair that she was having a rough time. Señor Correal answered that she shouldn’t worry, that he would go and talk with some gentlemen so they would give her a monthly sum of money, by a third hand, to attend to her necessities.”

  The Etcétera revelations in Medellín shook the proceedings in Bogotá. The public prosecutor began to move as he hadn’t moved in the year and a half since the crime. Pedro León Acosta wrote to the court to request they find out who the author of the letter was; the prosecutor summoned Acosta, Galarza, and Carvajal to testify; finally, he decided to search desperately for Alfredo García, and in order to find him began to send communiqués to various cities. One afternoon toward the end of February, the newspaper was passed from hand to hand in Julián Uribe Uribe’s house while the almojábanas got cold and a thin skin formed on top of the hot chocolate. Tomás Silva and Carlos Adolfo Urueta were present, having been called to celebrate the incident as if it were the conviction of the real murderers. “It’s all here,” said Tomás Silva. And Julián Uribe ran excitedly around the dining table saying yes, finally, here it all was. The page of Etcétera, thought Anzola, had arrived at the Uribe house the way news of the end of the war would have arrived at French households.