The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Nothing like it had ever been seen in Bogotá. That July night, the whole neighborhood went down the hill as far as San Agustín, where they met with the other torch bearers from other neighborhoods: from San Victorino and Las Cruces, from La Concordia and San Diego. At three o’clock in the afternoon, not another soul could have fit in the plaza. The sky was cloudy but it wasn’t raining, and someone said that God must undoubtedly be a Gaitanista. The march began to move at a slow pace, as much due to the terrifying solemnity as to the quantity of men and women who could not have walked any faster without stepping on each other. People lit their torches here and there as darkness began to fall, and César Carballo would later speak of the heat they suddenly began to feel inside that beast. They were heading down Carrera Séptima in the direction of the Palace when the sky had turned purple and the eastern hills had been swallowed by darkness. When night fell, it was as if the lights of the whole city had been turned off out of timidity. It was, just as Gaitán had requested, a river of fire. Carballo, among his people, marching shoulder to shoulder beside other Gaitanistas, was sweating from the heat and his eyes stung from the smoke of the torches, but nothing would have made him abandon that privileged place. His comrades’ faces were yellow and luminous, and away from the march Bogotá was dark and the horizon blended into the sky, and silhouettes peered out of windows caught between admiration and fright, without even turning on the lights of their sitting rooms or studies, as if they were a little bit embarrassed to exist and not be there, to exist and not be marching with the march, to exist and not be part of the people able to produce this miracle. César heard Gaitán’s speech at the end of the march, but he didn’t understand much of it, because the emotion of the last few hours had made understanding expendable or perhaps superfluous. He arrived home with his clothes smelling of smoke and his face smudged, but happy, happier than Amalita had ever seen him or would ever see him again.

  The country awoke changed. The upper-class Liberals joined the Communists in labeling the chief’s march a fascist exercise; they never knew that he, in private meetings, would have agreed with them. He had seen Mussolini enter Rome and had been inspired, and the inspiration had brought him results: now they feared him, they were all afraid, they had all seen what he could awaken in his followers, and they were all wondering what might that man be capable of if they opened the doors of power to him. Later the rumor reached Carballo that Gaitán, in his office, had congratulated his deputies: “Very good, my little fascists. Who do I have to thank for this?” And somebody had mentioned Carballo’s name. The rumor was no more than that: somebody had mentioned him. For Carballo, nothing so important had ever happened in his short life. He said to Amalita: “We did this. This was done by us.” And he pressed his face against his wife’s tummy and told the same thing to the baby on the other side of the protruding belly button: “It was us, we did it for the jefe and the chief knows it.” That memory, of her young husband talking to her belly with his face illuminated as if he had a lit torch in front of him, stayed with her all her life, and twenty-five days later, when the baby was born, it was not hard to name him Carlos Eliécer: Carlos for Amalita’s paternal grandfather, who died in the Battle of Peralonso fighting under the orders of General Herrera, and Eliécer for the man who had given his father a mission on the face of the earth.

  They were days of horror. What before were the excesses of an out-of-hand Conservative police force had now turned into a frightful daily spectacle: throats slit open with machetes, women raped, pits dug in the middle of the countryside to bury nameless corpses. On the radio, the bishop of Santa Rosa de Osos exhorted agricultural laborers to be God’s soldiers and fight against Liberal atheism, and the rest of the bishops ordered them to get rid of the Red apostates. And the violence was already in the city, timid, sly, peering around the corners, coming out every once in a while to show its dangerous face. After the proclamation of Gaitán as the sole leader of the Liberal Party, Liberals, instead of celebrating, began to be afraid. An old bootblack, a man who had worked the same doorway of the same café since he was a boy, had his red tie cut with a pair of sewing scissors and then the scissors held to his throat, waiting for him to complain. A girl in a red dress was harried for blocks, first insulted and then groped, until a policeman saw what was going on, and managed to get her pursuers to disperse only by pulling out his pistol and firing three times in the air. Along the Carretera del Norte bodies began to appear with coups de grâce: they were Liberals who’d been trying to escape from neighboring Boyacá and hadn’t made it. The inventory of deaths kept mounting. The engineer of the Bogotá–Tunja line went out one Sunday at twelve noon and was stabbed to death for not being at Mass, and in the villages of Santander they heard of priests dressing as civilians, pointing out God’s enemies, whose (sometimes headless) bodies would show up in the following days under the trees of the plaza. There was terror in the letters that Liberals were writing to Gaitán, but not in the newspapers: for President Ospina’s government, those were the invisible dead. Gaitanistas were waiting for a sign from their leader to know what to do; at the beginning of 1948, Gaitán gave it. He did what he knew best: organized a multitude and spoke in front of it. But this time was not like the others.

  Later they would talk about that February 7 in legendary tones. You have to imagine the scene: the Plaza de Bolívar, under the city’s gray sky, had filled with more than a hundred thousand people, but you could hear the footsteps of those still arriving, an old man’s cough, the crying of a tired baby on the other side of the plaza. One hundred thousand people: a fifth of the entire city’s population was there, answering their leader’s call. But the crowd didn’t shout their support or Long live anybody or Death to anybody, they didn’t light torches or raise closed fists, because the chief had asked for one thing: silence. His people were being slaughtered like beasts all over the country, he’d said, but they would not respond to violence with violence. They would give a lesson, yes: they would march in silence and their peaceful silence would be stronger and more eloquent than the fury of the people rising up. His friends had told him it was impossible, that he could not silence the indignant thousands desiring to scream their rage, that crowds could not be controlled like that. Gaitán, however, gave the order; and when the moment arrived, that uncontrollable mob, made up of poor and angry and nervous people, obeyed as if they were a single spellbound body. That’s what César Carballo heard, from his seat with his La Perseverancia comrades on the stone steps of the cathedral. From there, one or two heads above the rest of the crowd, he could see the platform from which the chief was getting ready to deliver the speech of his life. An old woman in alpargatas, taking a rest from carrying a bundle of firewood, put it in words that others would have signed: “The doctor has a pact with the devil.”

  Then Gaitán climbed up onto the platform. In the middle of that supernatural silence, in which Carballo could hear the fabric of his clothes brushing against those standing next to him, Gaitán addressed the president of the Republic to ask that the violence cease, but he did not do so with the sensationalism of other days, instead he did so quietly, with solemnity but also simplicity, as if he were speaking at a friend’s funeral. The people accompanying him today, he said, came from all over Colombia with the single intention of defending their rights, and their presence here was testimony to their discipline. “Two hours ago they began flowing into this plaza and there has not been a single shout,” he said, “but as with violent tempests, the subterranean power is much stronger.” He also said: “Here there is no applause, just thousands of black banners waving.” He also said: “This demonstration is happening because of grave events, not for trivial reasons.” And then, in the same calm tone in which he’d been speaking until then, he said something that César Carballo took a second or two to understand, but his blood then froze.

  “Here are the great majority obeying an order,” said Gaitán. “But these masses holding themselves back here wou
ld also obey the commanding voice if it told them to exercise legitimate defense.”

  César Carballo looked around, but nobody seemed surprised: not his comrades from the neighborhood, not a group of men in buttoned-up shirts even though they weren’t wearing ties, not the group on their other side, where Carballo recognized a photographer with a thin mustache he’d seen at other demonstrations or maybe at the Friday tertulias. Legitimate defense: Had he understood right? Was Gaitán issuing a threat? Was this whole thing a show of force, directed at half the country so they would know what this man was capable of? “Señor presidente,” Gaitán continued, “this multitude in mourning, these black banners, this crowded silence, this mute cry of hearts is asking you for a very simple thing: that you treat us, our mothers, our wives, our children, and our belongings as you would like to be treated yourselves, as you would like your mother, your wife, your children, and your belongings to be treated.” And the people who waved their black banners or looked down at the cobblestones seemed to hear what Gaitán was saying just as Carballo was hearing it, but nobody was furrowing their brow, nobody looked at anyone else to see if it were true what they were hearing, because nobody else seemed to understand what Carballo understood: that Gaitán had just turned, by virtue of a few dormant volcano phrases, into the most dangerous man in Colombia. Only one person echoed his secret worry, one who put into words what he was thinking after the speech ended. The people remained silent, because that was Gaitán’s order, and in silence they abandoned the Plaza de Bolívar by all four corners; but as they passed in front of the Casa del Florero, when they were no longer under the balcony, it was as if a taboo was lifted, and an individual taller than Carballo, with a dense black beard, expressed an observation that seemed casual in an accent that was not Colombian:

  “This man just signed his own death sentence.”

  The idea obsessed Carballo from that moment on. The neighborhood committees had stopped meeting, but he managed to get his father-in-law, Don Hernán Ricaurte, to persuade some of their La Perseverancia comrades, and after a few days several militants went along with him on the absurd undertaking of asking Gaitán to be careful. But they didn’t do it in person: getting an appointment with the chief, in March of that year, was an impossible task. The ninth Pan-American Conference was approaching, which would bring all the continent’s leaders together in Bogotá, and Gaitán was far too busy to deal with his faithful followers’ delusions: he had his hands full with the affront of the president, who had left him out of the Colombian delegation. Him, the sole leader of the Liberal Party! Gaitanistas were indignant. The government’s implausible argument was that Gaitán, being a brilliant penologist, was not an expert in international law; but the whole country knew the very different truth was that the president had folded to the demands of Laureano Gómez, leader of the Conservative Party, who had threatened to pull out of the conference if the Indian Gaitán were included. Laureano Gómez was the man who, during the long years when the Liberals had been in power, had suggested to the Conservatives intrepid action and the personal attack as ways of recuperating their lost country. He was a Franco sympathizer who had publicly and expressly desired the defeat of the Allies. He was the enemy, and the enemy—this was clear to Carballo and to the Empolvados of La Perseverancia—had won the battle.

  Gaitán, however, was not afraid. When they managed to get him their proposal of forming a group of bodyguards for him, Gaitán replied with the implacable logic that nobody could kill him, because his murderer would have to know that he would be immediately murdered. “That’s my life insurance,” said Gaitán. And what if the assassin didn’t mind dying? What if the murderer, as in the case of Gandhi’s, had accepted his own death? The chief paid no attention. “Things like that don’t happen to me,” he said. Carballo never got to hear those words. His father-in-law passed them on, and the word of his father-in-law was enough for him.

  In spite of the recommendations, Gaitán carried on living his life as normal. He went jogging in the Parque Nacional in the mornings, before going to the office, and he did so alone: he took off his jacket and loosened his tie, and did a loop or two around the park without anyone ever explaining why he didn’t sweat like normal people. At night he went out alone and without warning, to visit a friend or take a ride in his Buick and think about things he never revealed to anybody, and returned home late. Carballo knew it—he knew Gaitán went jogging alone in the Parque Nacional and that he went out on nocturnal excursions—because he often accompanied him without Gaitán’s knowledge, following him from afar, watching him as an assassin might have watched him. That was how it was: the Empolvados had decided to be their chief’s clandestine bodyguards. One morning, Carballo followed him to the Parque Nacional, and there he saw him leave the Buick in front of the clock and start jogging along the lower path; on the upper path, quite a ways behind, Carballo jogged at the same pace as Gaitán. But it was difficult to keep an eye on the slender figure ahead of him and the fist-sized rocks at the same time as the potentially ankle-breaking holes. Coming down the hill, almost at the end of his circuit, Gaitán accelerated. Carballo had to switch directions quickly not to lose sight of him, and as he did so he kicked a stone that fell a few steps in front of Gaitán. Carballo, from behind a eucalyptus, saw him stop and look all around, and discovered for the first time something like fear on his face. He knew in that fleeting instant, Gaitán was considering the possibility that he was being stoned and the next thing would be an ambush or an attack: an intrepid action, a personal attack. Carballo had no choice but to come out from his hiding place. On Gaitán’s face, the relief gave way to irritation.

  “And what the hell’s this?” he shouted. “What are you doing back there?”

  “Here I am, Jefecito, following your example, Chief,” said Carballo.

  “Don’t be silly, Carballo,” said Gaitán furiously. “What example. Go and get us some votes instead of wasting your time.”

  He got in his Buick and drove off south. Carballo was happy because the chief knew or remembered his name, but at the same time a revelation appeared in his mind: He thinks they want to kill him too. The chief has begun to suspect that someone’s lying in wait for him.

  He had no proof, of course. But when he talked about his concerns with his comrades in La Perseverancia, he discovered that many of them had begun to think frequently of the possibility that their chief might suffer an attack, and one of them had even received a badly written note meant to say: Tell Gaitán he should take care. They were not alone in their apprehensions: Bogotá had begun to breathe an air of paranoia. It was true that the Pan-American Conference had them all nervous: the police had swept through all the neighborhoods arresting and locking up prostitutes and beggars, cleaning up the city so the international delegates would find it tidy and decent, with the only result being that the inhabitants of those neighborhoods found them spectral and tense: a place on the border of a curfew. Everything was changing. The Panóptico, the prison that had first been a convent, had been converted into a museum, as if to try to say that in this city there were no wrongdoers, only artists and philosophers. But outside the peaceful city, the war was still alive.

  Its news arrived by irregular channels. People commented that the Boyacá police were planting bombs in the doorways of Liberal houses, and that a Liberal from Duitama had been taken to a nearby cliff and thrown off. Fantasists said that Peronistas had arrived in Bogotá from Argentina to help overthrow the government; other voices said that it was Yankees who had arrived, and were swarming over the city disguised as businessmen or journalists, who in reality were intelligence agents trained to combat the threat of communism. All these things were discussed in the cafés. César Carballo and Hernán Ricaurte were at all the debates and meetings, more like father and son than in-laws. It’s safe to assume that each found in the other what he lacked, for they became inseparable in those days: they were together at the Café Asturias when a group of l
eft-wing students, from the Free University, denounced the Pan-American Conference as a veiled way to impose a Marshall Plan on Colombia; they were together in the Café San Moritz when another group of students, from La Salle University, denounced the presence in Bogotá of agents provocateurs in the service of international socialism. It’s not surprising that they should also have been together on the night of April 8, when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán defended Lieutenant Cortés, the man who had murdered for the honor of the army. At around one in the morning, when Gaitán got the verdict of innocence and emerged on the shoulders of a very mixed crowd blending military officers with revolutionaries, Cesár Carballo and Don Hernán Ricaurte shouted their vivas and applauded until their hands hurt, and then walked back to La Perseverancia. They said good night without solemnities. It was a victorious night, yes, but it was also just another night. They had no way of knowing the next day would change their lives.

  As Don Hernán Ricaurte, the only witness to the events of that day or to their sequence, would later recount, that morning he had been working on a rosewood-colored Studebaker, and shortly before midday he walked down to Carrera Séptima to find someone to have lunch with. He walked south along the joyful or jubilant avenue, which had its lampposts adorned with the flags of the conference and the cleanest sidewalks in the world. The sky was starting to cloud over: it would rain in the afternoon. When he reached the Hotel Granada, Hernán Ricaurte decided to cross Parque Santander to Avenida Jiménez: he would read the news on El Espectador’s chalkboard, be angered by what they didn’t say as much as by what they did, and then he’d look for a table of Gaitanistas, have an unhurried lunch (it was Friday), and go back to the garage. But he didn’t even have to find his comrades: his comrades found him. They were coming out of a hardware shop on Avenida Jiménez, laughing their heads off like a gang of teenagers; they said hello without stopping, and the habit of other days directed their feet toward the Café El Inca, whose balcony had a privileged view over Carrera Séptima.