The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “It would be enormously useful,” said Anzola. Then he spoke to the father instead of the daughter, even though he was answering something she had said. “I’ll organize it all, General. The day after tomorrow I’ll bring the judge to take the señorita’s testimony. And yours too, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” said the general. “A gentleman’s word is a gentleman’s word, with or without witnesses.”

  “If only it were that simple,” said Anzola.

  Anzola left Julián Uribe’s house in a state of exaltation that he had not felt for a long time. He knew the optimism would last a matter of hours, but he nevertheless allowed himself those brief instants that were like an antidote to despondency. Night was falling but not all the streetlamps had been lit yet. Lights from the houses, however, were reflecting in the puddles and the cobblestones still shiny with the recent rain. The wind began to pick up. Anzola felt his hair blown around and had to fold his arms across his chest to keep the gusts of wind from opening his overcoat; it wouldn’t do to catch pneumonia at this critical moment. People must have been feeling the same cold and the same discomfort, for everyone had gone inside much earlier than usual, so Anzola’s footsteps echoed on the paving stones the way an intruder’s do through an empty house. That’s what he was thinking about when he sensed another presence in the street.

  Looking back over his shoulder, Anzola saw two men in ponchos. Was it his imagination, or were the ponchos waving as if the men were hiding something? He sped up and the sound of his steps bounced off the whitewashed walls. He turned the corner and as he did so found himself taking long strides, almost leaping, to get away from the men in ponchos without their noticing. The men turned the corner, too, and again Anzola looked over his shoulder, and again saw something under the ponchos, and wondered if what he thought he saw could be true: that one of the ponchos was blown up like the wing of a manta ray and allowed him to see, for a fleeting instant, the silver flash of a metal blade in the light of the street. Now suspecting he was in danger, he walked even faster, and the echo of his steps imitated his racing heart. He felt his chest was soaked in sweat. He saw in the depths of the night a light shining on the cobblestones, and advanced toward it and came to a chicha bar open and full of people. As he went in he glanced back at the street, but there was no one there: no men in ponchos or anybody else. Anzola felt the warmth all of a sudden, the warmth of other people’s breath. His ears were throbbing. Perhaps for that reason he was slow to answer the question:

  “What can I get for you, sir?”

  * * *

  —

  ONE MORNING, before going out, he found that someone had left him an envelope. It was a cutting from the previous day’s Gil Blas, which Anzola had not seen: not because of being shut up with the difficult company of the three thousand pages of the criminal dossier, but because he thought the Gil Blas as irresponsible and reckless as his ideological enemies. The cutting had been torn out by hand, not with scissors, so in one corner a couple of letters were missing, but that didn’t make it indecipherable. It was a letter: a letter from a prisoner in the Panóptico addressed to the editor of the newspaper and in which he declared, publicly, having been a victim of torture by Salomón Correal’s police force. The prisoner was a certain Valentín González, about whom Anzola knew nothing apart from the information contained in the page from the Gil Blas: that he was in the Panóptico accused of the theft of the Nieves monstrance. Anzola remembered the case: the monstrance had disappeared from the church of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves one day in July of the previous year; a week later, after the arrest and liberation of a Spanish citizen, a priest, and an opera singer, the police had found, in a dark corner of the church, under the statue of San Luis, part of the loot. There was the pedestal of the monstrance, some crumbs of the host, a handkerchief, cigarette butts, and footprints: the unmistakable trace of the thief. The police made six arrests; declared that they were solving the crime and society could rest easy. Like many, Anzola had wondered at the time how it was possible that so many necessary clues should be found inside the very church where the robbery had occurred eight days before, as if in all that time no one had even passed by to sweep the floor. Now, the matter was briefly back in his hands.

  “For nine days,” wrote the accused Valentín González, “I was held in a tiny cell and not allowed any food, not even bread, and without any covers of any kind; I was taken from that filthy place every night, from one to three in the morning, only to be led to an office off the patio, shivering with cold and starving to death, and there, in that office, I was subjected to the stocks torture, which consisted of tying me up by my big toes together with rifles strapped around my neck and knees.” After these torments, the superintendent in charge, Manuel Basto, had him taken back to the tiny cell, and upon arriving there the prisoner would find that officers had doused it with urine and shit water. One day, overcome by the pain, hunger, cold, and humiliations, Valentín González asked his jailers to kill him once and for all.

  “That wouldn’t be any fun,” they told him. “We do have to, but little by little.”

  And to that, apparently, they devoted their days. Valentín González spoke of the assaults of the secret police, who frequently took him out of his cell, tied his hands, threw sawdust in his eyes, and punched him and tripped him, while the loud laughter of the other officers echoed around the yard. After several days of that routine they took him out of the tiny cell and put him in a dungeon, where he was held incommunicado for two days. Now, according to what he said, his fingers were covered in wounds from the tortures, and the dampness of the dungeon had left him with cruelly painful rheumatism. “I asked, insistently but futilely, that they bring me a doctor,” he wrote in his letter. “Señor Basto didn’t think it was advisable for anyone to find out about my situation.” And he finished by saying that anyone could come to the Panóptico to confirm the truth of these accusations: there were the scars on his fingers, for anyone who wanted to see them. He didn’t declare himself innocent of the theft of the monstrance, Anzola noted. That didn’t matter to him: what mattered was that the outside world should know of his suffering.

  Anzola read the cutting and then reread it. The first thing he thought was that all was not lost if these things still happened: if anonymous citizens, good people, took the time and trouble to compile and send the necessary proof to denounce in the court of public opinion the true face of the police, to divest Salomón Correal of his masks. If only everyone on his side would do the same, all those looking for the truth about the crime! If the conspirators felt the pressure of public indignation! Oh, yes, how grateful he was for the anonymous shadow who had left this envelope for him perhaps running grave risks, perhaps hiding from the secret police . . . That’s what Anzola was thinking when he retrieved the envelope, to see if he could find some clue to the identity of his benefactor, and instead found a piece of yellowing paper he hadn’t noticed at first. He read the few handwritten words feeling like the victim of a childish prank, but not just any childish prank, rather one in which the other boy has a machete in his hand and a liquid darkness in his eyes.

  Doctor Anzola: so you can see the kinds of things that can happen to you if you don’t stop looking for what you haven’t lost.

  Later he would realize that much more had happened in this moment than was apparent. The first thing was fear; the second, and he hadn’t foreseen it, the fear of his own fear. What if he gave in? What if he let himself be defeated by the threat, by the prospect of physical pain and a violent death? What would be left of all these efforts, of putting others at risk and taking risks himself, of looking for a confused idea of truth and justice in the mud of conspiracy? All this had changed brutally on the night in 1914 when Julián Uribe and Carlos Adolfo Urueta came to visit him to ask him a favor. The world was simpler then, but only for him: for General Uribe the written threats had turned into a real attack that had taken his life. There were tw
o ways to think about this: one was that it would be a foolish man who, knowing firsthand the possible consequences of an action, continued with its execution; the other was that yielding to the threats would be to dishonor the memory of the assassinated general. Anzola did not save the threatening note with his documents, but threw it on the fire. The cutting from Gil Blas, however, he put on his desk with the intention of transcribing it later. Although he didn’t realize it, this simple action already contained his hidden decision to carry on. Some weeks later, a casual encounter decreed it irremediably.

  Anzola attended a conference on the European war organized by a group called Friends of the Entente, which gathered more than three hundred people in the Salón Olympia. For two long hours he listened to people talking about what was happening in Europe now that this war had been going on for three years: this hell that had devoured strong countries, and in its five million dead one could see the decimation of an entire generation. He heard talks about the French ambassadors in the United States, about the latest battles in Ypres, about the miles of trenches the Germans had won on the Belgian border, and heard a Spanish citizen say that the Liberals were making efforts to bring Spain into the war as well, so that later they would not be ashamed for having stayed out of the struggle against barbarism. He didn’t know who revealed that up in the front rows were the relatives of the soldier Hernando de Bengoechea; or maybe it wasn’t necessary for anyone to tell him, because each of the speakers in turn was looking at them from the platform, praising the young soldier’s bravery and the outstanding quality of his poems. Then the audience burst into applause; in the front rows two silhouettes stood up, and then the entire theater stood up, and Anzola found himself feeling moved.

  When the conference was over, he walked toward the front, against the direction of the audience trying to leave the theater. He wanted to meet Bengoechea’s family, shake their hands and hear what their voices sounded like, and he was not disappointed to find that it was not the whole family, but just Elvira, the soldier’s sister, who had attended the conference with Diego Suárez Costa and a chaperone. Suárez, it seemed, had been the soldier’s greatest Colombian friend; Anzola didn’t understand whether he was passing through Bogotá or lived here, but wasn’t overly interested either, because his attention was focused on Elvira. She was a young woman with large eyes and a thick chignon and at her throat she wore a brooch of the French flag. “I would have liked to know your brother,” Anzola said to her when they were introduced. He took her hand, lifting it like a fallen handkerchief, and brought his closed lips near to her fingers without touching them. “Marco Tulio Anzola,” he added.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “You’re the one who writes those things that have us so worried.”

  “Forgive me,” he began. “I don’t—”

  “My brother would have liked to know you as well,” Elvira interrupted him. “At least, that’s what they say in my family.”

  They speak of me, thought Anzola. And also: He would have liked to know me.

  He remembered that brief dialogue absurdly in the months that followed, while he was sinking all his time and energy into writing the final version of his book. Sometimes he thought that the words of the young Elvira contained a vindication; other times he thought they were a demand. Sometimes, while he was writing a paragraph denouncing Salomón Correal or Pedro León Acosta, he thought that at his age Hernando de Bengoechea was already dead, but his mere twenty-six years had been enough to write pages that are now applauded publicly and to die a heroic death in defense of eternal values. And he, thought Anzola, what had he done in his twenty-six years? And this book that he was writing, this book that was not poetry but vulgar prose, this book the only intention of which was to denounce a murderous plot with no more embellishments than the precision of the law and the crude rhetoric of common sense, could it effectively bring on his death? Was Anzola digging his own grave, paragraph after paragraph, article after article, testimony after dense testimony? On each handwritten page, each draft that Anzola filled with his sloping calligraphy, exploded a subversive revelation or he made a denunciation that was like a bomb or a torpedo. Yes, thought Anzola, that was how it was: the manuscript was a submarine and certain paragraphs were torpedoes aimed at the ocean liner of Colombian power, ready to open a big hole below the waterline so they’d all sink in the sea never to be seen again.

  To test the force of what he was writing, he kept publishing columns in La Patria, but by this time they weren’t made up of material he would later transform into the book, but with whole fragments of the definitive manuscript. He took out pages to show them to the people who were on his side, sometimes to ask a witness to confirm their version of events, sometimes so that a more skilled professional—a criminologist more qualified than he was, an expert on procedural law—could correct a vulnerable theory or a misinterpretation of the law. In an article in the press, Rodríguez Forero had declared that the Uribe family was angry about the work of Señor Anzola—they judged him to be a hopeless mythomaniac, and disapproved of the course his investigation had taken. And when Anzola went to see Julián Uribe, he found him looking embarrassed and unable to meet his gaze when he gave him the news.

  “The family has just named their lawyer for the trial,” he said. “I want you to know it had nothing to do with me.”

  “Who is it?” asked Anzola.

  “Pedro Alejo Rodríguez,” said Julián Uribe. “And no, I don’t under-stand it either.”

  Something incomprehensible had happened. Pedro Alejo Rodríguez, a young lawyer, was the son of Prosecutor Alejandro Rodríguez Forero. Naming him as legal representative of the Uribe family in the trial of the general’s assassins was not a clumsy mistake: it was a formal commitment to suicide. But that was the news brought by the general’s brother, who obviously had not wanted to be the messenger: Pedro Alejo Rodríguez was officially the lawyer of the victim’s family, in spite of being the son of one of the conspirators, or someone who had put all the means within his reach at the disposal of the conspirators. No, it was not possible that Julián Uribe had fallen into such a vulgar trap. Anzola held his head in his hands, but dignity prevented him from saying all that he wished to.

  “So it’s true,” he said. “They no longer trust me.”

  “I don’t know exactly how this happened, my dear Anzola,” said Uribe. “It was up to Doña Tulia. Who knows what they’ll have told the poor woman.”

  “Widows should never decide anything ever,” said Anzola.

  “Careful, my friend,” said Uribe. “That widow is my sister-in-law. And she is still owed our respect.”

  “Well, with all due respect, that widow just ruined everything,” said Anzola. “What do the children think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And Dr. Urueta? He entrusted me with this just as you did. He has a right . . .”

  “Dr. Urueta is in Washington.”

  “What? And what is he doing there?”

  “They appointed him to the legation,” said Uribe. “And he went, what else was he going to do.”

  “Well, that doesn’t matter. A minister can just as easily disagree with this.”

  Julián Uribe began to grow impatient. “As I said, I am as surprised as you are. But it’s also true that we do not know the young Rodríguez. We have no reason to expect the worst.”

  “But we do, Dr. Uribe, we do,” said Anzola. “The worst and then some.”

  The news left him so upset that he shut himself away for three weeks to finish his book, to keep the disappointment and disillusionment from making him give up on it. He was about to do so: Why risk his reputation and even his life on an endeavor that could no longer count on the admiration, or even the simple solidarity, of General Uribe’s family? Nonetheless, he kept on writing, allowing the schedule of his days to become inverted, sleeping late and working through the nights, with bad light and aching eyes. The
criminal dossier with its three thousand pages of irrefutable facts accompanied him, and also the Vista Fiscal with its three hundred thirty of lies and distortions. He no longer felt indignation by then, and he had even forgotten the reason he had accepted this job one distant evening, when he wrote, in the early hours of a September morning, the word Conclusions, which on paper seemed longer than usual. And underneath it:

  1st. That Leovigildo Galarza and Jesús Carvajal are, solely, in the assassination of the Liberal caudillo, General Uribe Uribe, the material instruments of the deed.

  2nd. That the assassination of the great patriot was concocted by the group of Conservative Carlists who count among their victims President of the Republic Dr. Manuel María Sanclemente, who made an attempt on the life of President of the Republic General Rafael Reyes, and who will surely continue their series of crimes against all those who in their superior conditions place themselves in the situation to direct the country toward democracy; and

  3rd. That the soul of this grim and sinister group is the so-called Society of Jesuit Priests.

  Then he wrote the words THE END, in six well-spaced, capital letters, so thick that the delicate tip of his Waterman scratched the paper. He thought it would not be worth wasting his time offering it to the National Printing Press, which wouldn’t take it if the Pope himself ordered them to. So he decided he would take the book, as soon as he could, to Tipografía Gómez and pay for the print run out of his own pocket. He went to bed, but his excitement kept him from falling asleep. The next morning, at first light, he grabbed a new sheet of paper and wrote the title:

  Who Are They?

  He put it all in a leather briefcase and went out into the recently awakened city. It was cold and the wind was biting. Anzola took a deep breath and felt the cold air burning his nostrils and prompting a teardrop in his eye. Everything seemed normal. But nothing was anymore. He was completing the job assigned to him three years ago by the Uribe family, and now the family no longer supported him; he was raising an accusatory finger against all those who were powerful in this country, and no one could assure him they weren’t going to do him harm. He could still change his mind, switch directions at the next corner, walk around the block, sit down and drink a hot chocolate, and forget all about this, go back to his old life and live in peace. But he carried on, thinking about what the people who watched him pass would see: a solitary, but not completely defeated, young man, already without illusions, dragging his feet. Would the fatal decision he was carrying within be visible on the outside? And if somebody were able to recognize it, would they try to dissuade him? But they would not succeed, no. He had to resist, had to carry on, and thus one day he would be able to say he had fulfilled the promise he had made to Julián Uribe: he had written his book, he had told everything, and now all that was left for him to do was to sit down and wait for the heavens to fall on his head.