The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Don Hernán Ricaurte did not know that a poet had forever christened that place as the best street corner in the world, but he would have agreed. He liked the view: he liked to see the San Francisco church, its dark stone corner, and the Government Palace recently cleaned for the foreigners coming for the Pan-American Conference; he liked, most of all, seeing the Agustín Nieto building, where the chief had his law office. On the occasional night, when Gaitán stayed late at the office, the comrades from La Perseverancia would station themselves there to keep an eye on him, to follow him to the place on Parque Santander where he usually left his car. Don Hernán Ricaurte, who knew Gaitán’s routines as if they were his own, thought the chief must be just about to go out for lunch, in who knows what company. Later he would remember having looked at the clock just then: it was five to one in the afternoon. He would also remember the exact location of his lunch companions: at the four-sided table, Gonzalo Castro and Jorge Antonio Higuera were sitting with their backs to the window; he and César Carballo sat across from them—the father-in-law and son-in-law who seemed more like father and son—so close to the balcony that the trams seemed to be running under their feet. He would not remember, however, what conversations filled the distracted minutes until Carballo, looking toward the street, said calmly: “Look, there’s the jefe . . .” But he didn’t finish the sentence. Ricaurte saw him open his eyes wide and stand up, and in the memory he’d keep forever, in the scene that appeared in his dreams for the rest of his life, Carballo stretched out a hand, as if to grab something, at the moment the first shot rang out.

  Ricaurte heard two more shots and saw the man with the pistol fire the fourth. He thought the shots sounded like percussion caps, like the caps the street urchins put on the tram rails to make them explode; but they weren’t percussion caps, because the chief had fallen to the ground and people were shouting. “They killed Gaitán!” somebody shrieked below them. A waitress from El Gato Negro had gone outside and was wailing and holding her head in her hands and then she dried them on her apron: “They killed Gaitancito! They killed him!”

  The four of them had lurched down the stairs, making their way through the terrorized crowd with the force of desperation, and once down on the Séptima, Ricaurte saw a policeman capture the man who had fired the shots, and who was trying to escape toward Jiménez, clumsily walking backward. From afar they scrutinized him—badly dressed, badly shaven, a mixture of fury and fear on his face—and they also noticed that the irate mob was already beginning to surround him. The chief, on the other hand, was surrounded by his friends: Ricaurte recognized Dr. Cruz and Dr. Mendoza, who asked that the wounded man be allowed some air, while the waitress from El Gato Negro crouched down and tried to get him to drink a glass of water. People, pushed by an uncontrollable impulse, approached Gaitán to touch him, and among them was Carballo: Ricaurte saw him crouch down beside the body and put a hand on Gaitán’s shoulder. It was a fleeting movement, full of intimacy but also timidity, to which Gaitán responded with a little chirp. He’s alive, thought Ricaurte; he thought, as well, that the chief would survive. He went around the huddle and arrived beside his son-in-law, whose gaze was contorted with hatred but at the same time was in command of a terrifying reason. He opened his hand and showed Ricaurte what he’d found when he crouched down beside Gaitán: it was a bullet. “Put it somewhere safe,” he said to Ricaurte. “Put it in your pocket and don’t lose it.” And then he heard him say the first of the many strange sentences he’d hear him say that day: “We have to find the other one.”

  “The other what?” asked Ricaurte. “Were there two?”

  “The other didn’t fire,” said Carballo without looking him in the eye, looking for something farther away. “He was taller, in an elegant suit with a raincoat over his arm. He was the one who signaled, Don Hernán, I saw him from up there. We have to find him.”

  But the moment had filled with a fatal inertia. People had spilled out onto Carrera Séptima from El Gato Negro and the Colombia and El Inca and the Asturias, and the trams had stopped on their tracks, and onlookers, drawn by the shouting, began arriving from the side streets, and at some point there were so many that nobody knew how the two taxis had made their way through. They lifted Gaitán into one of them, black and shiny: in the middle of the confusion, the orders and counterorders and footsteps coming and going and small or huge hysterics, Ricaurte saw that his recent lunch companion Jorge Antonio Higuera was one of those who helped to lift the body, but then he didn’t see him again. “To the Central Clinic,” someone shouted. Others shouted: “Call Dr. Trías.” The taxis drove south; in the trance of the moment, several people bent down to dip their handkerchiefs in Gaitán’s blood. Ricaurte imitated them unthinkingly; he went to the place where the chief had fallen and was surprised at the size of the puddle, black on the pavement, the blood black and shiny even though it was not sunny. A student dipped a page of El Tiempo and the waitress dipped a corner of her spotless apron. “They killed the chief,” she said, and a friend who had begun to cry said no, they hadn’t killed him, the chief was strong.

  “Don’t worry, comadre,” she sobbed. “You’ll see how the doctor fixes him up.”

  Meanwhile, a commotion was going on in front of the Granada Drugstore. The shooter had been taken in there for safekeeping, and now the furious crowd was trying to enter the drugstore to drag him out. There were dozens of men who were forcing the metal shutters open any way they could: the bootblacks were banging their wooden crates against them loudly, while the deliverymen raised their iron handcarts furiously and used them as battering rams. The rest clung to the shutters as if to tear them off. “Bring out the miserable wretch!” someone roared. “He’s got to pay, make him pay for what he did!” The mob was incited: Ricaurte thought that the man who had shot Gaitán could count the minutes he had left if he fell into the hands of the irate throng. And then, just when the mob began to succeed, he saw that César Carballo was one of them, but he had an absorbed expression, as if something else was catching his attention. “He’s coming out,” someone shouted from behind, and someone else shouted: “Kill him!” Then with a screech of metal and broken glass, among shouts of dread, Gaitán’s attacker came out of the door of the Granada Drugstore, dragged by several hands, torn from his refuge. “Don’t kill me!” he begged, and Ricaurte thought he’d started to cry. From up close he looked less of a man than before: he was twenty-three, twenty-four years old? He inspired hatred and pity at once (the brown suit stained with oil or something that looked like oil, the messy, greasy hair), but he had tried to kill the chief, Ricaurte thought, and deserved the people’s revenge. A monster of violence welled up in his breast; he took a few steps toward the wretched little man, but at that moment he saw his son-in-law, who was trying to make himself heard in the midst of the rage: “Don’t kill him! We need him alive!” he said. But it was too late: an iron cart had smashed down on the shooter’s head, and the bootblacks were hitting him with their crates and the sound of breaking bones filled the air, and someone took out a fountain pen and stabbed him several times in the neck and the face. The shooter had stopped protesting: or maybe he was already dead, or he had lost consciousness from the blows or the fear. Someone suggested throwing him under a tram, and for an instant it looked like they would. Someone else said: “To the Palacio!” And the order inflamed the maddened mob, and they began to drag the body of the shooter south. Ricaurte thought of Gaitán, who by then must have been fighting for his life on a stretcher, and he went over to Carballo.

  “Come on, son, don’t get mixed up in that,” he said, taking him by the arm. “We need to be with the jefe.”

  But Carballo resisted. His attention was elsewhere, as if he were drunk. “Didn’t you see him, Don Hernán?” he said. “He was right there, didn’t you see him?”

  “Who, son?”

  “The one in the fine suit,” said Carballo. “The elegant guy.”

  Those who were taking th
e lynched body of the shooter now had an unexpected slipstream behind them, and the Séptima was filling with a furious wave dragging along all those it encountered in its way. Ricaurte could have slipped down Pasaje Santafé and turned onto Carrera Sexta to get to the Central Clinic, but a new sort of conviction had appeared in his son-in-law’s gaze that made it impossible not to walk with him: to the Presidential Palace, to take the attacker’s body to the Palace, to leave the body for the president so he can know how the Liberals reacted. From afar they could hear the first shots: But who was firing them? Against whom? “They killed the chief,” Carballo was saying, and it was the first time Ricaurte heard him say the words. “No, they didn’t kill him, the chief is strong,” Ricaurte answered, though he didn’t even believe it himself: he’d seen the injuries up close, the blood coming out of Gaitán’s mouth and the blank, lost look in his eyes, and he knew that nobody came back from those depths. But then Carballo said:

  “He was in an elegant suit.”

  And then right after that: “All this already happened.”

  Ricaurte didn’t understand what he was talking about, but César didn’t say anything more, so he didn’t insist or question or ask his son-in-law to repeat what he’d said. They were advancing in the direction of the Plaza de Bolívar, in the middle of a growing horde and thirty meters or so from the body of the shooter; they saw the frightened faces of the people on the sidewalks, and from that distance they also saw some of them stepping down from the sidewalk onto the pavement to kick the lifeless body, to spit on it, to shout an obscenity. As they arrived at Eleventh Street, a noisy and furious wave was coming down the eastern sidewalk. It was led by a man in a straw hat brandishing a machete and announcing, between hysterical sobs and promises of revenge, that Gaitán, the chief, had just died.

  “To the Palacio!” shouted those who followed him, joining the group dragging the shooter’s corpse. Don Hernán Ricaurte felt like he’d boarded a runaway train. Now the train of horror was pulling into the Plaza de Bolívar, heading for the Capitol where, at this tragic hour, the Pan-American leaders were all meeting at the conference. But the crowd immediately doubled back and returned to the Carrera Séptima, as if it had suddenly remembered that its true objective was not to take the dead body of an assassin—because by this time the shooter was a killer—to the steps, but to enter the Palace: enter the Presidential Palace and take revenge, enter the Palace and do to President Ospina what the assassin had done to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Ricaurte noticed that in the turn around the Plaza de Bolívar the assassin’s body had lost its jacket and shirt like a serpent shedding its skin. Those who had lynched him collected his clothes: one man had made a bundle of the shirt and jacket, and then, as they arrived at Ninth Street, another had taken his trousers off, so the body that arrived at Eighth Street was wearing only a pair of undershorts torn by being dragged over the cobblestones. From the distance, Ricaurte and Carballo watched the scene with horror: those at the front were trying to lift up the assassin and use his own clothing to tie him to the railings of the Palace gates, as if crucified. But they didn’t have time to feel pity, because at that moment a burst of gunfire came from the Palace door, and the angry mob had to flee again, to whip around and take refuge and regroup back in the Plaza de Bolívar. A timid drizzle began to fall. The square kept filling with armed men; minute by minute Bogotá was turning into a city at war.

  Toward the south, shop fronts began to burst into flames, and someone even said the Palacio de San Carlos was on fire, and on the radio they were announcing that the offices of El Siglo had burned down. Men ready for battle joined the throng from every corner: they had looted hardware stores and barracks, it was later learned, and they arrived with machetes and pipes but also with Mauser rifles and tear gas launchers to join the revolution. Then the rumor began to circulate that the battalion stationed at the Palace had come out to retake the Séptima, and in minutes the people were erecting a barricade between Ninth and Tenth Streets, where there are plaques commemorating the death of General Uribe Uribe. They took chairs and desks and small cupboards from the Capitol, the occupants of which had escaped in official cars by the back door, and behind the barricade they stationed a first line of men armed with weapons that a few minutes earlier had belonged to the police. It was a little after two in the afternoon when, seeing the Presidential Guard approaching, those entrenched behind the barricade began firing.

  The Guard shot back. Ricaurte saw a line of soldiers take positions, one knee on the ground, and open fire. From behind, protected by living bodies, he saw three and then four men fall dead on the pavement, but he didn’t recognize them: they weren’t Gaitanistas from their neighborhood. “Resist! Resist!” cried a voice from one side of the barricade. But the army’s aim was more precise, or the inexperience of the rebels too obvious, because men kept falling and those behind them kept pressing forward, stubborn and brave, as if death did not exist. Then Ricaurte looked at Carballo and saw him raise his face: something had caught his attention.

  “There are people in the tower,” he said.

  It was true. In the tower of San Bartolomé College, the Jesuit headquarters, several silhouettes were firing at the crowd. But then, looking around, Carballo and Ricaurte realized there were snipers on every roof, so that in a matter of seconds it became impossible to know where the shots were coming from; it also became impossible to protect themselves. They were penned in: the Guard was advancing from the south and to the north was the San Bartolomé tower, and from the rooftops of Ninth Street more snipers were fearlessly opening fire. The strange thing, Ricaurte would later say, is that nobody seemed to even consider the possibility of fleeing: the whole mob, blinded by the desire for revenge, stayed where it was. Ricaurte realized they had no way out of the cordon. In that precise second, a shot out of nowhere ripped into the chest of the man standing next to him, who hit the ground with a thud and lay there with one leg bent behind the other.

  “Get down, son!” Ricaurte shouted.

  But Carballo did not obey. Later, telling the story of that day to his daughter and much later to his grandson, Don Hernán Ricaurte would talk about what happened on his son-in-law’s face, and he’d try to describe it in detail, with his humble tradesman’s vocabulary, the arduous light he saw in Carballo’s eyes and on his forehead when he heard him say the last of his incomprehensible phrases.

  “Shit,” said his son-in-law. “It’s like it’s happening all over again.”

  Then a burst of gunfire came from the north, a burst of sniper fire, and Ricaurte dove to the ground. He landed facedown on top of a dead man he didn’t recognize; his face found a space that allowed him to hide and breathe at the same time. He felt Carballo drop down beside him: Ricaurte felt his presence (a pressure against his legs) but could not tell what position his body was in. He closed his eyes. There, in that singular space smelling of sweat and damp clothing, the world was quieter and less terrifying than out of it, where bullets whistled through the air. He just had to endure, and that’s what Ricaurte did: he endured. He didn’t count the minutes, but not too much time passed before the miracle. It had started to rain.

  It was a downpour worthy of the month, with fat drops that Ricaurte felt on the nape of his neck and on his back like the fingers of someone trying to get his attention in the street. He thought that God, the God he barely believed in, was at his side, because such a rain was the only thing that could have dispersed the two sides of that battle. Incredibly, he was right: the shots began to taper off as the rain intensified, as if intimidated by the rattle of the water against the tiles, the windows of the bell tower, the stone of the steps. Ricaurte lifted his head very slowly and felt dizzy when he stood up, but he knew that this was his opportunity. He called Carballo, whose weight he still felt on his legs: Carballo didn’t answer. Ricaurte found himself alone on top of a pile of three bodies. None of them belonged to his son-in-law. He looked around and then he saw him: he was three
or four steps farther south, as if he’d started to walk toward the barricade, and he wasn’t facedown, but looking at the sky with his eyes wide open, with his face bathed in rain and a rosette of blood covering the center of his chest. The blood wasn’t black, like Gaitán’s, because the rain had watered it down: it was pink, a deep pink, and it seemed to be spreading across his white shirt.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU DON’T KNOW how many times he told me all that,” said Carlos Carballo, César’s son, grandson of Don Hernán Ricaurte. “I don’t remember when he told me for the first time, but that’s the best proof that he must’ve started telling me when I was really small. I don’t remember having had to ask where my papá was, or anything like that: I think Mamá started explaining things to me long before I ever asked her. That’s what I think now, of course, because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t already live with what happened on April 9. With those images I now know as well as if I’d lived through them. With those ghosts, Vásquez, those ghosts who accompany me and stalk me and talk to me. I don’t know if you talk to the dead, but I do. With time I’ve become used to it. Before I just talked to Papá, and sometimes, I won’t deny it, to Gaitán. I’d say: Papá knew they were going to kill you, Jefecito, why didn’t you listen? In those conversations I always called Gaitán ‘little chief.’ I, who was a few months old when they killed him, talked to him the way I’m sure Papá talked to him. Well, there are worse madnesses, don’t you think? There are more dangerous madmen.”