The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Anzola stopped at a corner while a Ford passed. A young woman in a hat looked up shyly, and her gaze went through Anzola as if he were invisible.

  VIII

  THE TRIAL

  Marco Tulio Anzola published his subversive book without knowing that ninety-seven years later, in a small, dark apartment of that city that had forgotten him, two readers would meet to talk about the author as if he were alive and about what he related in that book as if it had just happened, and that they would do so furthermore with his book in their hands. I couldn’t know if it had been Carballo’s intention from the start to show me the book, because the relationship between the two—the object and its reader—was at a level of intimacy I’ve never seen and perhaps never felt. I couldn’t know whether there were fears or uncertainties in his mind at the moment of placing the book in my hands, or whether he was doing so because he considered me worthy of that trust. We had been talking about Anzola, about the job Julián Uribe and Carlos Adolfo Urueta had entrusted him with; I asked Carballo how he had come to know all that he was telling me, where that information could be found. In reply, he stood up and went to his room, not to his bookshelves: it was obvious he had been rereading the book recently and it was next to his bed. He brought it back in and held it out to me with both hands.

  “What happens is that you have to read it twenty times,” he said. “Otherwise, nobody could unlock its secrets.”

  “Twenty times?”

  “Or thirty, or forty,” said Carballo. “This book is not like any old book. One must be worthy of it.”

  It was a venerable-smelling, leather-bound volume and with embossed letters on the spine. Assassination of General Rafael Uribe Uribe, it said on the first page; then, Carlos Carballo’s signature; beneath the signature, the title that, more than a title, was a declaration of paranoia: Who Are They? This line was missing the opening upside-down question mark, a punctuation mark that exists only in the Spanish language, and only since a distant day in the eighteenth century when the Royal Academy made it compulsory; beside the final, closing question mark was the inked-in silhouette of a hand: a black hand, I thought, whose index finger was pointing.

  “This is the denunciation of a conspiracy?” I asked. “Not terribly subtle, our Señor Anzola, truth be told.”

  But Carballo didn’t find my comment funny. “This book was in every library in Bogotá,” he told me coldly. “They all bought it: some for the altar, some for the bonfire. But in 1917 everybody had this book in their hand at one moment or another. I wonder when you’ll be able to do something similar.”

  “A scandalous book?” I asked.

  “A valuable book,” he said. “A book with a noble aim.” And then: “Although that’s not a word anyone of your generation uses.”

  I decided to ignore the attack. “And what is that aim, if one might know?”

  “Well, no, you cannot know,” said Carballo, “until you have certain information in your head. First you have to read this book and understand it well. In other words, move through it like a fish in the water. I’m not saying you have to read it twenty times the way I have. But four or five, at least. Until you understand it, I should say.”

  I opened Who Are They? and flipped through pages without disguising my boredom. There were three hundred pages of cramped type. I read: For those of us worthy of the honor of being friends with General Uribe Uribe and having professed the most sincere affection for such an exemplary patrician, it brings utmost satisfaction to pay a heartfelt tribute to his memory. There was everything that repelled me: the pomposity, the grandiloquence, the affected phrases Colombians adore and I detest more than the worst vices of the human species. I looked, out of an old habit, at the last page, where certain readers tend to jot down notes or impressions, and found only the date 1945, a trace of one of the many readers the book might have had in almost a century of useful life.

  “You want me to read this book four or five times?” I said.

  “To understand it,” said Carballo. “Otherwise, there’s no way to continue.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want to continue, then,” I said. “I don’t have time for this, Carlos. This is your obsession, not mine.”

  Carballo, sitting with his legs apart, elbows resting on his knees, and fingers interlaced, hung his head and I could have sworn I heard a sigh. “It’s yours too,” he said then.

  “No. It’s not mine.”

  “It’s yours too, Vásquez,” he insisted. “Believe me, it’s yours too.”

  I remember him then letting his gaze hang for an instant on the back wall, on the picture of Borges or beyond, on the darkened window covered by a white lace curtain, and then saying: “Wait a second. I’ll be right back.” I remember him disappearing behind the other door, the one that wasn’t the one to his room, and I also remember this: a long time passed, more time than I would have thought necessary to look for and find a precious object the location of which, presumably, one never forgets. Then I speculated that Carballo had repented of the whole thing—of having invited me to his house, of having let me back into his life to write the book that I, although he didn’t know it, would never write—and I imagined him thinking of plausible excuses not to show me what he was going to show me. But when he came back out, he was carrying an orange cloth that I arbitrarily associated with his garish scarves. The cloth was covering an object with an ambiguous or irregular outline (or were its unpredictable folds what prevented me from making out the precise shape of the object). Carballo sat down on the green sofa, began to unfold the cloth point by point, and uncovered its content, and it took me a brief instant to understand that what I was seeing under the intense light was a bone, a human bone, the top part of a skull. “Well, here it is,” he said. The cranium, clean and shiny under the white light that poured down from the ceiling, was broken: there was a loose piece of bone. But my attention fixed immediately on the three dark letters that seemed etched onto the frontal bone: R. U. U.

  * * *

  —

  I DON’T REMEMBER if there was a certain reticence on my part, if my understanding took a bit of effort to realize what I was witnessing, and I don’t remember what I said, if I actually said anything, while Carballo showed me the object, with pride but also with nerve and at the same time with obvious preoccupation, handling it and letting me handle it as if it were not unique and irreplaceable, as if its damage (if it fell on the floor or hit something) would not have represented an irreparable loss to the world. As I came to accept the miracle, I could think only that this formerly living part of a formerly living body had been the part through which the life had escaped that body, and when Carballo separated the broken bit of bone carefully and handed it to me so that I could hold it between two fearful fingers and hold it up to the light and examine it from both sides, as if it were a precious gem, a single phrase ran through my head: Rafael Uribe Uribe died right through here.

  And Carballo, as if he had guessed my thoughts (and in the transformed atmosphere of the apartment, under the phantasmal light from the neon tube, I was not entirely able to rule out that possibility), said:

  “Through here his life went out, through this hole. Incredible, no? You should be proud, Vásquez,” he joked, “because very few people in the world have seen this. And most of them are dead. The person who gave it to me is dead, for example.”

  “Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides.”

  “May he rest in peace.”

  “He left it to you?”

  “The maestro used this in his classes. I was not only his student: I was his confidant in his final years, the person who kept him company. I was his support and also I’m the one who understands these things. I’m the one who knows how to use them. I’m the one who will benefit from them. So yes, he left it to me. Don’t be so surprised.”

  “What do you mean, these things?” I asked. “What do you mean, use them, Carlos? I
s there something else? Did Dr. Benavides leave you other things?” And then: “And also, how did the doctor come to have this? How did something like this end up in his hands, if he hadn’t even been born yet when Uribe was killed?”

  I saw him think; I could almost hear the mechanism in his head weighing risks, making estimates about my loyalty, trying to read on my face what I would or would not do with particular bits of information.

  “I think we better go step by step,” he finally said, “haste makes waste. Let’s not bite off more than we can chew.”

  “But I don’t get it. This is wonderful, Carlos, don’t misunderstand me. Holding this in my hand, being able to touch it . . . I’ll never be able to thank you enough for allowing me this. But I don’t understand how this fits in with our project.”

  “You’re really grateful?”

  “Infinitely,” I said.

  It was perhaps the most genuine word I had pronounced up till then. That’s what I felt: holding those remains in my hands, letting my living fingers pass over that bone, was provoking emotions I hadn’t felt since that night in 2005 when I saw Gaitán’s vertebra in Benavides’s house, but this time the direct contact with the relic was enriched by my own experience, by the nine years that had gone by since then. So there, sitting in that room with daylight beginning to creep in through the window, holding in my timid hands the remains of Uribe Uribe’s skull, I felt that life had led me to this moment along paths impossible to trace; but I felt, at the same time, that something was escaping me, like someone standing too close to a painting to see clearly what’s happening in it.

  “Well, this changes things,” I said. “I’ll take the book, read it as soon as I can, and come back so we can talk.”

  “Impossible,” said Carballo. “This book doesn’t leave my apartment.”

  “So then what? I come and read it here, as though it were a public library?”

  “Why does that seem so absurd to you?” said Carballo. “I get home every day at five in the morning. We meet here, you read while I sleep, and then we talk. I’m sorry, but it’s the only way. Because this book, I repeat, does not leave my apartment.”

  I was going to protest, but good sense intervened in time: what this man was offering me, believing that he was obliging me and that I was accepting reluctantly, was to spend hours in his apartment, in solitude and free from his watchful gaze, while he slept. He was offering me the possibility to scrutinize with impunity every visible corner of the place in search of the lost vertebra. It would have been stupid to refuse.

  “Shall we start tomorrow?” I asked.

  “If you’re up to it,” said Carballo.

  “I’m up to it,” I said. “But I have another doubt.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What is in Uribe’s head instead of this? Why does the autopsy say they reconstructed it?”

  “Well, reconstruct doesn’t mean they put the cranial vault back in its place,” said Carballo. “This became clear to me from visiting Maestro Benavides so often. Let’s say there’s a bone bank, for example. When you take bones from a corpse for the bone bank, you reconstruct the cadaver with burlap or a broomstick. Look, when I started spending time with the maestro, many years ago, I found out many things I had no idea about. For example, I discovered that in operating rooms there are freezers with saved cranial vaults. Just like this one, yes. A patient with craniocephalic trauma, for example, has a piece of his skull removed, so the brain can expand and the patient won’t die, and that piece is saved. Sometimes it can’t be stored in the freezer for whatever reason. Then the piece of cranium will be stored in the abdomen, which protects the human tissues and avoids infection. The patient can have a piece of his cranium removed and his head will still retain its shape, because there is a layer that remains. Nobody’s going to touch that man’s head to see if it’s hard. You can take out the bone and just leave the skin. I imagine that’s how Uribe will be, down in his tomb, interred in the Central Cemetery.”

  When I got home, I closed the blinds in my bedroom (neither my wife nor my daughters were home: luckily, since I didn’t have the energy or mental clarity to explain to anybody what had just happened to me), and suddenly all the sleepless night’s exhaustion fell on me at once. I put in the blue earplugs I use when I’m writing and climbed into bed. I had a moment of fear that, in spite of my exhaustion, I would have a hard time getting to sleep given my overly stimulated state. But in seconds I had lost consciousness, and slept deeply, slept as I hadn’t slept in daylight hours since I was a teenager, sunk in a sleep that was not unlike sleep under anesthesia: a place where there is no perception of time or space, a no place where we are not even someone who knows we’re asleep, where only upon waking do we begin to understand how much our body was demanding its rest. A dreamless sleep from which at first it’s hard to emerge: and there is disorientation, and a sensation of solitude, and a certain melancholy; and we want to find when we open our eyes someone to hold us and remind us with a kiss where we are, the life we’re leading, how fortunate we are that it’s this life, and not another, that we’re lucky enough to have.

  That night I phoned Dr. Benavides. When I told him what I’d seen in Carballo’s house, a deathly silence came down the line.

  “The cranial vault,” said Benavides finally. “He has it.”

  “You knew it existed?”

  Another silence. In the background, behind the static, I could hear cutlery and crockery. Benavides had been eating with his family, I supposed, and I had interrupted him. It didn’t seem to matter.

  “My father brought it home a few times. I was a child then, I would have been about seven or eight. My father showed me the cranial vault, explained things to me. He let me hold it, turn it over, look at it from all angles, turn it around. And Carballo has it?”

  “Well, yes. I’m sorry,” I said, without really knowing why.

  “With the letters, right? The initials on the frontal bone.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The initials are there: R. U. U. There they are.”

  “I remember it perfectly,” said Benavides. There was no noise anymore: he must have gone into another room and closed the door, away from the racket of the family dining room. “Those letters fascinated me, it seemed fantastic that they should be on someone’s forehead. My father thought that was very funny. He’d tell me: ‘We all have them. We all come with our initials engraved on our foreheads.’ I’d spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror, standing on a wooden step stool to get closer to the light, holding my hair aside with one hand and touching my forehead with the other to see if I could manage to feel the initials. F.B. I searched for them with my fingertip, rubbing it over my forehead looking for the F and the B, the F and the B. Then I’d go and complain to him. I’d say: ‘Papá, I can’t find them.’ And he’d touch my forehead, or more accurately, he’d caress me, and say: ‘Well, there they are, I can feel them.’ And then he’d pass his hand over his own forehead and put a concentrated look on his face, profound concentration, and he’d tell me: ‘Yes, yes, here they are as well: L.A.B. Look, see if you can feel them.’ And I’d try and I couldn’t feel them on him either, it was very frustrating. I feel like I’m reliving it: putting a concentrated look on his face, too, as I touched him, feeling his small son’s fingers touching his forehead. I’ve done the same thing with my children, Vásquez. I imagine you know what I’m talking about.”

  I had never heard such nostalgia in his voice. It seemed as if he’d grown sad, because his clear voice sounded a touch liquid, but I thought it would be impertinent not to mention futile to ask: if it were true, Benavides would never have confessed it to me. But my revelation about Uribe Uribe’s cranial vault had awakened a sleeping memory and, with it, his emotions. Childhood memories are the most powerful ones, perhaps because in those days everything is a rupture or an upheaval: every discovery forces us to relocate ourselves in the known worl
d and each show of affection fills our body: the child lives in flesh and blood, without filters or shields or defense mechanisms, fighting however he can with whatever steamrolls over him. Yes, I wanted to say to Benavides, I know what he’s talking about, I have also let my forehead be touched by my daughters, by my daughters’ hands, by those long fingers they inherited from me. Although they have never held the remains of any of the murdered men of this country, which they’ve also inherited. There are many, and there will undoubtedly be many more in the years of their lives; and one can therefore imagine that one day fate might provide them with what it provided me: the strange privilege of having in their hands the ruins of a man.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do, don’t you?” said Benavides.

  And I told him: “Yes.”

  There was another silence on the line. Benavides broke it by saying: “Bring it to me, please.”