The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

“Two or three times,” said Beltrán.

  “Well then, remember, there’s no reason to deny it. Remember when you suggested we should kill General Uribe.”

  “I don’t remember that,” said Beltrán. “That’s a slander this man has been making against me for days.”

  “Beltrán, is it true that you used to work at Galarza’s carpentry shop?” asked Anzola.

  “That’s true.”

  “And at that time, you were in a bad situation?”

  “Yes, sir. In a bad situation.”

  “And now how are you?”

  “Now I’m in a worse situation.”

  “But it’s very strange that in that time you had no money and now you’re a property owner.”

  Beltrán didn’t say anything. Anzola asked him about the events of October 15. The interrogation was an hour of torture, because Beltrán insisted on responding in monosyllables, and his monosyllables, most of the time, were forgetful ones. Nothing was brought to light: there were long exchanges about when the assassins came in and out, about hatchets being sharpened and how to repair broken handles, about commentaries made while hatchets were sharpened, about places where the assassins had lunch, and about the ratchet brace they pawned.

  “However, it was clear,” said Carballo.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Don’t you see?” said Carballo. “But it’s as clear as water: there, sitting on the bench, was the third attacker.”

  “The one with the knuckle-duster?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” said Carballo. “The one who was going to use the third hatchet, the one they found by accident. He didn’t use it, he used the knuckle-duster. And there he was.”

  “But did Anzola manage to prove that?”

  “No,” said Carballo. “But what he did manage was almost as good.”

  At the end of his declaration, Anzola felt he had enough circumstantial evidence to maintain in public that Emilio Beltrán’s complicity was proven. “He was close friends with Galarza and Carvajal,” he said. “He lived with them, made threatening statements against General Uribe, and finally proposed to another man that he help to assassinate the general.” And he concluded: “This man should be confined to prison. To order the imprisonment of an individual requires corpus delicti, concrete evidence of a crime, and serious circumstantial evidence. In our case we have corpus delicti and there is very serious evidence linking Beltrán to the crime.” Anzola then addressed Dr. Murillo, the assassins’ defense lawyer. “Do you not think Beltrán should be confined to prison?” In other words: Why should your clients be in prison and this man free? Did the lawyer not think Beltrán should be in the same place as Galarza and Carvajal? The gallery applauded when Murillo said yes. And then Anzola lifted his face, as if he were addressing the high ceilings and the roof beams, and said in a victorious voice:

  “By all of what has been said, we have arrived at the conclusion that there does indeed exist a third accused. The Vista Fiscal is therefore demolished.”

  “The public exploded as if it were a village holiday,” said Carballo. “Imagine, Vásquez, imagine what it was like: Anzola had just demonstrated that the Vista Fiscal was a defective document. That was half the victory. Until now, the true culprits had been safe because the Vista Fiscal declared them innocent and left them out of the trial. But if the Vista Fiscal was not entirely reliable, then what was left of that immunity? In other words: Acosta and Correal had hidden behind the shield of the Vista Fiscal. But Anzola had just taken their shield away. Now anything could happen. And Anzola began to put all his determination into ensuring that it did. He was extremely excited, my boy was extremely excited. And do you know what? I think that’s why he screwed it up in the end. He felt he had it all in hand. Something went wrong for him then and he lost control. I have to say the same thing would have happened to me.”

  * * *

  —

  ANZOLA’S DOWNFALL HAPPENED in the following way.

  After his victory against the Vista Fiscal, Anzola must have felt the path was clear for him to go after those accused in his book: Pedro León Acosta, Salomón Correal, and the Jesuits. He decided to begin with Acosta, since the publication of Who Are They? had brought him an interesting encounter. In the month of February, according to what Carballo had been able to find out, an Italian named Veronesi had approached Anzola to tell him three things: first, that he’d read his book; second, that he was merely a guest in the great nation of Colombia and didn’t want to get into trouble with anybody; third, that this had not prevented him from hearing the things people said about the Uribe Uribe assassination. And one of those people worked for him. Her name was Dolores Vásquez and she had seen something important. Maybe Señor Anzola would consider it important too.

  Dolores Vásquez was an old woman who wore a dark shawl, had a thin voice and calm manners, one of those women who seem to live at a certain resigned distance from the world and observe the evil of men. She had been working for the Italian off and on for several years and lived close to the Puerto Colombia, the chicha bar where the assassins had met the night before the crime. We can imagine that Anzola would have been pleased to have discovered her. Since long before publishing his book, he had suspected that the assassins had met in that bar many other times, and other people had met with them there to talk about killing General Uribe, but he hadn’t been able to gather testimony to prove it. Dolores Vásquez told him about well-dressed men who met with the assassins in the Puerto Colombia, and among them she frequently mentioned one in particular who wore a top hat and overcoat, and who showed up there shortly before the crime looking for Galarza. Anzola, it seems, asked her if it had been General Pedro León Acosta, and she said she didn’t know the general. Anzola found an old newspaper photo, from the time of the attempt against President Rafael Reyes, and took it to Veronesi’s shop, and she looked at the yellowed cutting and said she wasn’t sure, but maybe she’d recognize him if she saw him with her own eyes. Anzola decided he would bring about such an encounter, and that it would happen in the Salón de Grados.

  But the day Dolores Vásquez was to recognize Pedro León Acosta, something happened. According to a version published in the Bogotá press, Anzola was waiting to be allowed into the Salón de Grados when a man with gloves and a cane approached him. “Congratulations,” he said scornfully. “You are now reaping the fruits of your labors.” It turned out that Pedro León Acosta’s mother had just died. People blamed him, but that wasn’t the worst thing; the worst was that the court registrar began the session by reading a telegram that Acosta had sent to one of his close friends:

  ONLY THE AGONY OF MY MOTHER, WHO THIS MORNING AT 10 A.M. MADE HER FINAL FAREWELL, LEAVING US IN SUPREME PAIN, COULD EXEMPT ME FROM FULFILLING MY PUBLIC DUTY. SHOW THIS TO THE JUDGE.

  So Acosta was not in court when Dolores Vásquez was called to testify. Anzola’s frustration must have been unbearable. Nowhere are his emotions recorded, but I can imagine his anticipation when arriving at the Salón de Grados, perhaps believing that day would mark the beginning of the end for the real culprits—their definitive and indisputable unmasking—and that this country’s justice system would have no choice but to confront the powerful, as he had; thinking, finally, that today would be the culmination of his last four years of difficulties and sacrifices, and that destiny, which does not tend to record its debts, would pay him what he was owed for having taken so much of his time in exchange for turning him into a pariah in his own city. But no: destiny had not wanted to play it that way. Or maybe, Anzola must have thought, the ones who hadn’t wanted it were his enemies.

  (That, in any case, was what Carballo believed: that the information had filtered out, they found out that Dolores Vásquez was going to testify, they knew who Dolores Vásquez was and what she might say, and the puppet masters of the world had pulled their strings so that Pedro León Acosta would not show up. Slightly emba
rrassed, because he was the one who had done all the investigating and had all the documents, I told him that nobody fakes their mother’s death to get out of attending a hearing at such a notorious trial. “These people are capable of that and much worse,” said Carballo.)

  Anzola’s frustration was increased by the fact that Dolores Vásquez turned out to be a formidable witness, the kind that seduces the public and disarms the opposition. She said that for months before the assassination she had been working every night at Señor Veronesi’s shop, on Ninth Street by the Nuñez bridge. In those days she lived in an alleyway adjoining the Puerto Colombia chicha bar and three doors down from the room where Jesús Carvajal was then living. The night of October 1, at around eleven, she finished her cleaning duties at Señor Veronesi’s shop, locked the door, and headed for home. When she arrived at the alley she met a neighbor who lived in the same building; and the two of them were standing there, waiting together for someone to open their door, when Dolores Vásquez saw a man in an elegant overcoat and a top hat who walked briskly and knocked on Carvajal’s door. He was accompanied by a boy who was carrying a shapeless package under his arm. Carvajal’s door opened and the two men, the man in the top hat and his assistant or whatever he was, stepped quickly inside.

  “Did you recognize the man in the top hat?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Could you identify him if you saw him?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Good. Let’s move on to something else. You knew Carvajal?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the woman. “I knew him from seeing him in the Puerto Colombia.”

  “And what did you do that night?”

  “I told my neighbor what I’d just seen and he went up to Carvajal’s house. Later he told me he’d heard several voices.”

  “That is to say, that there were other people.”

  “Yes, sir. A large meeting, according to my neighbor.”

  “And what was the meeting about?”

  “My neighbor didn’t tell me. He told me he couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but they were important people. And I thought it strange that important people would go inside a tradesman’s house, almost at midnight, as if not wanting to be seen.”

  “Please, Your Honor,” said the plaintiff’s counsel, “can the witness please abstain from interpretations.”

  “The witness is describing a behavior that struck her as suspicious,” said Anzola. “She has every right to do so.”

  “Let the witness continue,” said the judge.

  “Where were you on the eve of the assassination of General Uribe?” asked Anzola.

  “You mean October 14?” asked the woman.

  “Yes, the night of October 14.”

  “Oh, yes. I was working at Señor Veronesi’s shop.”

  “And what did you see there?”

  “I saw a group of about fifteen tradesmen come in and order a round of drinks. We were suspicious. And when a man saw that we weren’t pouring, he pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and said: ‘See, I do have cash. I’m going to pay, see. Do me the favor of serving us what we ordered.’ I took a good look at him, because it seemed odd for a tradesman to have so much cash. And when all those boys were leaving, I said to the patrolman to check to see if anybody had been robbed, because I’d seen all that cash. The officer left with him and after a while came back and told me: ‘I left him there in the carpentry shop. Don’t worry, señora. They won’t rob anyone.’”

  “Could you please repeat that? Where did the patrolman leave him?”

  “In the carpentry shop.”

  “And the next day, what happened?”

  “The next day General Uribe was killed. And three or four days later I saw the photos in the papers of the assassins, and I was really surprised to realize that one of them was Carvajal. And his partner was the same one who I’d seen: the one with all the cash in the shop.”

  The newspapers the next day agreed: Anzola was winning small battles. Seeing it all a century later, I can interpret what happened next as the proof that his enemies were noticing the same thing. Well, the next day (it was a Friday) Anzola arrived at the hearing and he found a different public. The galleries of the Salón de Grados, which in previous sessions had harbored as many of Anzola’s friends as enemies, the galleries whose applause and booing had been evenly distributed, from one day to the next came to be occupied only by those the press had started calling anti-Anzolistas. They were all men, all capable of deafening whistles, all quick to raise their fists and snarl menacingly, all capable, by way of the simple gesture of stretching a hand in Anzola’s direction, pointing at him with one finger while spitting an incomprehensible insult, of filling the place with a hitherto unheard-of hatred. They were disguised policemen. They were united by the same clandestine condition: three-quarters of the public was now composed of members of General Correal’s secret police. They had taken over the enclosure: they were intimidating, frightening, and distracting.

  And then the witness Luis Rendón took the stand. His should have been a testimony like so many others in those days: the declaration of a prisoner in the Panóptico about the privileges conceded to Galarza and Carvajal by the guards. Rendón, a man with slanting eyes, had caught his lover with another man, who he’d murdered, and then he’d attacked her in the course of his hearing, during a face-to-face encounter that could not have gone worse. For these crimes he had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison, but he acted as though he’d been sentenced to life: he was violent and unkempt, and more than once he had been sent into solitary confinement for immoral conduct or insulting the authorities. And this was the man Anzola had chosen to continue demonstrating, to the jury, General Correal’s corruption.

  After a series of insipid exchanges, Carvajal’s lawyer asked Rendón about the meal plan of the accused. Rendón spoke of the meat and lard they were brought from outside; of the candles they were given to light their cells until whatever time they wished; of the money Galarza and Carvajal gave to other prisoners for various reasons, which were not always clear. Then he said that Galarza and Carvajal behaved well in prison, that they almost never left their cells, and that in any case there was an order from the management: anyone offending them would receive serious punishment. “They are protected,” said Rendón.

  Then, in an attempt to discredit the testimony, the registrar read out his sentence for murder. A voice shouted from the back of the gallery:

  “And Anzola defends him.”

  It was a taunt, of course: an allusion to the witnesses Anzola had brought from the prison on previous days. He defended himself as well as he could, trying not to give in to the provocation.

  “That’s not what this is about, gentlemen,” he said. “It’s not about defending witnesses who have been charged with more or less serious crimes. What does that matter? What does it matter that a witness has committed a crime if he’s telling the truth? Do you people want me, for a crime hatched in the Puerto Colombia chicha bar, to call witnesses from the diplomatic corps? You want me to summon ministers from their offices to testify about what goes on inside the Panóptico? No: when we come to talk about the moment of the crime itself, I will bring ministers who were present there. For now, I have to appeal to the criminal underworld. And I will even bring the backroom girls from the chichería if I think they might bring me closer to the truth.”

  Those on his side applauded shyly.

  “Anzola, do me the favor of not making speeches here,” said the judge.

  And then it happened. Now, as I write, I wonder what could have gone through Marco Tulio Anzola’s head to make him say what he said next, what dirty trick his emotions could have played on him to make him lose control of his own rhetoric.

  “I have to go back over all the incidents that have been seen here,” he said, “so that the public will understand their consequences. I h
ave to demonstrate that Pedro León Acosta was at Tequendama Falls four times, not two, as he said here. I have to tell you about the gentleman in the top hat who went to find Galarza in the Puerto Colombia. Because I should tell you, sirs, that I now have very precise information on who that man is.”

  As soon as he pronounced the words he knew he should not have done so. That’s what I believe, because it’s not possible that he mightn’t have known, it’s not possible that he wouldn’t have realized that he’d just lied: for he did not have any precise information on the man in the top hat. It seems to me that in his head there was some kind of swap: so many years of working with the witness statements, so many years of studying the facts of the crime to the extent of writing a book about them, had allowed him to confide in his instinct; and his instinct, since Dolores Vásquez talked to him about the man she’d seen in a top hat, had put Pedro León Acosta in his mind. Who else could it be? Anzola would have thought. He was magically, superstitiously, sure that the man in the top hat who had gone to look for Galarza in the Puerto Colombia, who had visited Carvajal in his house after eleven at night, was the same man who the disappeared witness Alfredo García had seen that night at the door to the carpentry shop, and the same man as well who on the day of the crime had been seen by Mercedes Grau elegantly dressed, with striped trousers and patent leather ankle boots, and asking one of the assassins: “How’d it go? Did you kill him?” But that unproven certainty had just played a dirty trick on him. In any case, he had just fallen into a trap, and the fact that he’d laid the trap for himself made it no less serious.

  “Let’s have the name!” furious voices shouted from the gallery. “The name, Anzola!”

  Others joined in the chorus: “The name, if you’re capable.”

  “Señor Anzola, say the name of that individual immediately,” said the prosecutor. “Under penalty of being charged with concealing evidence.”

  “You are required, Señor Anzola,” said the judge, “to specify the charges you have just made, within three days.”