The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  I think that was the moment when I began to understand certain important things (or things that would later take on new importance), but my understanding was still too vague to put into words. I think I also had at that moment some intuition: I thought, for example, that Carballo expected a book like a Who Are They? of the Gaitán assassination from me. We had spent hours talking; time had melted or stretched, and it didn’t help that the curtains in Carballo’s apartment, closed as if ours were a secret or clandestine meeting—a meeting of conspirators—made it impossible to know with certainty if it was night or day. Had the sun already set? Had night fallen and dawn broken again? How many hours had we spent there, shut up inside that small, dark, narrow apartment, in the company of ghosts of the past?

  “And where is your father buried?” I asked Carballo.

  “Yes, there’s that,” said Carballo. “Well, that’s part of the story, of course. You’ve seen those images, I imagine: what happened on April 9 from about four in the afternoon onward. The fires, the looting, this city looked like the ruins of a bombing raid. Death, Vásquez, death washed over the city. I’ve always thought that the origin of it all was that group of people taking the dead body, no, the lynched body of the assassin to the Palace. I grew up knowing Papá was there. That one of those dozens of people, dozens who were later hundreds, was Papá. And what can I do: that changes a person’s way of seeing everything. I didn’t grow up hearing about April 9 like other people might have. I grew up hearing about the day Papá was killed. In other words: the reasons I grew up half orphaned. And then I began to find out, very gradually, that the day was what it was. It’s strange to spend your childhood thinking that the important thing about April 9 was the death of your father, not that other man who meant nothing to me, the gentleman who was a politician and who got killed like so many others have been killed. For me the essential thing about April 9 was Papá’s death, Papá getting shot and dying there, on top of other dead men, dying like one more corpse among so many, the myriad who had died by then in Bogotá. A child understands these things very slowly. I gradually understood that Papá was not the only man who died: on that day and the three days that followed some three thousand people died in Bogotá and Papá was only one of them.”

  “One of the first, all the same.”

  “Yes, but only one. And later, in my teens, I began to understand better how it had all happened. I began to understand that Papá would not have died if that man called Gaitán had not died before him. I began to understand that Papá had fallen into the cracks of an earthquake, and the epicenter of that earthquake was in front of the Agustín Nieto building, on Carrera Séptima almost at Avenida Jiménez, Bogotá, Colombia. Sometimes I think it would have been better not to have understood anything, not known anything: to have grown up with a lie, for example, that Papá had just left one fine day, or that he’d gone to fight in the Korean War, I don’t know. Yes, that would have been good, wouldn’t it? To think my papá was a war hero over in Korea, that he had gone with the Colombian Battalion and died in the Battle of Old Baldy, for example. That’s what it’s called, right?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “That’s the name of that battle.”

  “Well, that’s not what happened. They told me everything, my grandfather and Mamá. All about that day, all about Papá’s life, all that I just told you. All that led up to his death on April 9. And also all that came after.”

  “After April 9?”

  “No, the same day. Grandpa couldn’t tell it without his eyes watering. Never, not even when I was twenty, when it seemed like the old man didn’t remember things, did I ever see him talk about that without getting sad. Imagine him there, standing in front of all those dead bodies in front of the Plaza de Bolívar, in a magic moment when the shots had stopped and it no longer seemed as though the world was going to end. But it had ended in a way, because there was his son-in-law dead. Grandpa loved him, loved him a lot. Gaitán was a family thing, too, you know? Families united around Gaitán, and the promises Gaitán made. And there was my grandfather, having to decide at that very instant what to do with the body of his beloved son-in-law. Bogotá was already a city at war, that was obvious. Grandpa always told me he thought for a fraction of a second of calling a policeman, as if normal life would have still been going on, and then he thought no: that normal life had been suspended until further notice. He picked up my father’s body, balanced him across his back like a sack of potatoes, and started walking north, thinking of getting back to the neighborhood. My grandfather wasn’t strong, Vásquez, he wasn’t big, but he managed to lift up Papá and stick close to the cathedral wall so he wouldn’t be seen. He walked like that, scared to death, for a couple of blocks. He could hear gunfire in the distance, sometimes it sounded closer. But what made the biggest impression were the display windows: the destroyed windows all the way along the Séptima, the jewelry shops and department stores full of people taking things: refrigerators, radios, armfuls of clothes. He saw a guy with a machete stop another who had a radio in his hands. He took the radio and smashed it on the ground. He shouted: “We’re not here to rob! We’re here to avenge the jefe!” But the majority of people did not agree, and Grandpa felt sorry: what should have been an opportunity for a revolution had turned into a party for delinquents. They stole because they could steal, they killed because they could kill, and they were killed in turn for no rhyme or reason. Once, Grandpa summed it up for me like this: ‘They killed people just to watch them fall down dead.’

  “Meanwhile, Grandpa kept hoping they wouldn’t notice his presence, hoping he could pass by undetected. Two, three blocks with Papá’s weight on his back. Then four. Then five. He was sidestepping corpses as he walked, and sometimes there were so many he had to make a detour, because with the weight of Papá he couldn’t climb over them: his body weighed so much that he couldn’t lift his feet high enough to step over some of the dead bodies. They were mostly men but women too, and he saw some children too, of course. Sometimes he had to stop to rest, put Papá’s body down beside a wall and try not to look at him. He always told me that: he tried not to look at him, because he thought if he looked at him he wouldn’t have been able to go on. Meanwhile, the rebellious police kept firing, those policemen who were secret, or not-so-secret, Gaitanistas. The furious people kept setting things on fire and looting stores with Jewish names, all those jewelry shops on the Séptima. If there was a hardware store, people grabbed pipes, hacksaws, hammers, axes, whatever might help avenge the chief. If there was a liquor store, the people smashed the windows and took bottles or drank them right there. Those who ran into the Ley on Eleventh Street to shelter from the bullets bumped into those running out with their arms full of clothes. Grandpa walked past the café where he had been sitting when Gaitán was shot, and the tables and chairs were smashed up, and people came out armed with table legs and chair legs and bits of wood. But they didn’t even see him. It was as if he were invisible. Around then, he crossed paths with some military tanks driving south down the Séptima. People made way for them, and began to walk behind them, believing they were rebelling soldiers heading for the Palace to overthrow the president. Later he learned that the tanks stopped at Tenth Street, turned around, and opened fire. Grandpa didn’t see it, but would hear of it later, and he told me as if he’d seen it. In the end, he no longer knew what he’d seen and what he’d been told. I suppose that happens to all of us.

  “When he arrived at Avenida Jiménez, he couldn’t go on. He’d carried Papá’s body four or five blocks and he had no strength left. He put Papá down and rested for a few minutes, and then, with all the strength he had left, he lifted him again and tried to cross the street. But then a woman running from the regional government building caught his attention, and at that very instant he heard a burst of gunfire and the woman fell dead in the middle of the street. My grandfather saw it all: he saw the woman running, then falling as if her legs had been cut off, and then two more bodi
es falling, and the screams, and the calls for help.

  “If the dead hadn’t been those others, it would have been him: because the shots came from soldiers who were positioned at the entrance to the Pasaje Santafé and were firing indiscriminately against anyone who tried to cross the street. Grandpa waited for a long time crouching at the corner, but the soldiers didn’t stop firing. There were snipers on the rooftops there too. Grandpa thought that if he could get as far as the Hotel Granada, maybe they’d let him shelter there, maybe they’d help him find an ambulance to take Papá’s body home. He dug up strength from who knows where to pick him up one last time and went the other way, walking as fast as he could, and that’s when he felt the burning in one ankle and then the pain, and he fell with the body and all, and knew it was all fucked.

  “Later, when I was a kid, let’s say around sixteen, Grandpa started doing something he’d never done before: ask my forgiveness. To say he was sorry for not having been able to bring Papá’s body home, sorry for having left him there on Jiménez. Imagine: he was sorry for not having been able to lift Papá with a shattered ankle in the midst of a hail of bullets, and then for not having gone to find him the next day. But nobody could leave their houses the next day, you know. Anyone who broke the curfew would show up dead. My grandfather told me how they stayed shut up at home listening to the radio, and how he felt ashamed of what his own people were saying, the Liberals, on the stations they’d taken over. Calling for people to kill Conservatives, announcing happily that they’d burned down the houses of oligarchs, telling people to draw their machetes and let the blue blood flow as the red blood had been flowing before. I don’t know if you know those transmissions, but they are hair-raising.”

  “I do know them,” I said, and it was true: I think anyone who’s ever suffered an obsession with April 9 knows them. The agitators took over the radio waves right after the crime and launched their harangues, their calls for terror, to a disoriented and vulnerable people who were too ready to cling to the consolation of revenge: “War is humanity’s menstruation,” says one of those harangues. “We Colombians have had fifty years of peace. Let’s not give the impression of being the only cowards on earth.” Those incendiary speeches called for the assassination of the president and his reduction to ashes, gave instructions on how to fabricate the “clear Molotov cocktail,” and exhorted taking government positions “by blood and fire.” I thought Carballo was referring to those. But maybe he had other examples in mind, because there were many shameful instances on that day that brought out the worst in everybody.

  “Later he went back to look for him,” Carballo continued. “He told me, on the eleventh, with his broken ankle and everything, he took a couple of guys from La Perseverancia and went back into the hell of downtown to look for Papá. But he didn’t find him. The corpses had started accumulating in the arcades, one next to the other along both walls, and they were like death-scented tunnels, and the smell spilled out and filled the streets. People were walking down the middle of those arcades, trying not to step on other people’s dead and looking for their own. Grandpa went through them all, every one, looking for Papá’s body. But he didn’t find him. He never found him in any of the rest of the inventories of corpses they made over the following days. And he always blamed himself for Papá not having a tomb that we could go visit.”

  “He ended up in a mass grave,” I said.

  “It’s possible, but nobody ever told me about the mass graves. Or about the trucks full of dead bodies driving out of the city center to the pits, or the possibility that Papá was there, in one of them. I say it’s possible, but what other possibility is there? No, I got used to the idea a long time ago: Papá in a mass grave. It’s strange, the need for a tomb. It’s strange how much tranquility a known grave can bring. I’ve never had that tranquility of knowing where that body is. And not knowing where our dead are is a silent torment, an entrenched pain, and it screws up your life. Actually what really screws us up is when we don’t get to decide exactly what happens to our dead. It’s as if death were the moment when you feel you’ve lost control over something, because of course, if you could prevent a loved one’s death, you always would. Death takes away our control. And then we want to control everything up to the last detail of what happens after death. The burial, the cremation, even the fucking flowers, right? Mamá didn’t have that possibility, and that always tormented her. That’s why I understand so well what happened with Gaitán’s body. You know, I suppose, what happened with Gaitán’s body.”

  “They wouldn’t allow him to be buried in a cemetery,” I said. “They took him home.”

  At around four in the morning of the tenth, after gangs of drunks had made two attempts to force their way into the Central Clinic to take Gaitán’s body, Doña Amparo, the brave woman who had just become his widow, sent for a coffin to take him home. There are several versions, as there are of everything that happened that day: some say it was just to protect the body that had already, a few hours after the crime, turned into a relic; according to others, Gaitán’s widow didn’t want to give his enemies in government a chance to wash their hands of guilt with a state funeral. Whatever the case, Gaitán’s house filled with people in the early hours of the tenth: there, among Gaitanistas from all over the city, were the Empolvados from La Perseverancia, taking six-hour turns to watch over the chief.

  “Grandpa was one of them,” said Carballo. “He did his shift and then went back out to keep looking for Papá. Later he heard that they’d buried Gaitán right there, in the garden. Every year, on the anniversary of the crime, the comrades from La Perseverancia put on their best clothes and went down to visit the place where the chief was buried. I don’t remember how old I was when they took me for the first time, but I was still a child: I might have been nine or ten, but no older than that. No, I think I was nine, yes, nine years old. Of course, visiting Gaitán’s grave was what we did instead of visiting Papá’s. We went to Gaitán’s house and said prayers in the garden and left flowers because we couldn’t pray or leave flowers on Papá’s grave. But you can see how long it took for me to understand this, and especially how naturally we did so. It doesn’t seem odd to me to visit another dead person and pray for my own at the same time. Yes, I knew that the man buried there wasn’t Papá, but we said prayers first for Papá and then for him. A child does what he’s told and gets used to whatever he’s taught, right? Well, we went as a family, we went down the hill from home to Gaitán’s house. It was a long walk but we did it as a ritual, it was part of the ritual. Grandpa, Mamá, and I walked, and in the early days other Gaitanistas went, too, but in time they stopped going and it would just be us: the family.

  “On those walks, they both told me things. Sometimes, if there was money, they’d buy me an ice cream cone and I’d eat it walking along the street listening to the stories. We always ended up talking about April 9. At one point or another, usually on the way home, but sometimes on the way there, I would say: ‘Tell me about the day when Papá went to heaven.’ And they would tell me. They told me, I imagine, what they thought suitable for a child my age. Later I grew up, of course, and they gradually added details, and April 9 was no longer the day when Papá went to heaven but the day Papá was killed.

  “And on one of those April ninths, Grandpa told me for the first time about his theory. That’s how I put it now, his theory, but that’s not how we referred to it in my family. It was simply what Grandpa thinks. That was how it went, those were the phrases we used. ‘You know what Grandpa thinks . . .’ ‘Well, speaking about what Grandpa thinks . . .’ ‘What Grandpa thinks has to do with this . . .’ And you didn’t have to say anything else, because what we were talking about was clear.

  “It was 1964. I was going to turn seventeen and was about to finish school. I was at the top of my class, Vásquez, and I’d already received the news my whole family was expecting: a grant to study at the National University. I was going to study law,
which was, according to my family, what Papá would have wanted. More important, it was what Papá would have wanted to do because Gaitán had done it. I had begun to read newspapers as if I were going to die the next day. Grandpa would look at me and say: ‘Just like his papá.’ I had also become truly interested in politics. My grandfather noticed, I suppose, because if not there wouldn’t have been much reason to tell me what he thought at that moment. That day, April 9, 1964, we were walking back home, and somewhere around Avenida Caracas he suddenly came out with: ‘Well, what I think, son, is that your papá knew.’ I asked: ‘Knew what?’ And he looked at me as if I were an idiot, with one of those withering looks older people sometimes employ. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘He knew who killed our jefe.’

  “And he began to tell me about what he had seen on my father’s face that day, about all the strange phrases he heard him say in a matter of minutes, about his reaction after the shots were fired, which seemed somewhere between suicidal and deranged. He began to tell me that Papá had seen someone else, an accomplice or companion of the assassin who carried a raincoat and wasn’t like him: he was dressed elegantly. He said that from there, from the moment he saw him, Papá had begun to behave strangely: he was strange on the Séptima, while they walked behind the body of Gaitán’s killer, Roa Sierra, and he was strange later, when they’d set up the barricade. He repeated several times the phrase he’d heard Papá say: ‘It’s like it’s happening all over again.’ At that moment, my grandfather didn’t understand a thing. That was the last thing Papá said before the sniper’s bullet killed him, but Grandpa didn’t understand, he couldn’t have understood at that moment. That’s what he told me: ‘At that moment, I didn’t understand. But I’ve come to understand, though it hasn’t been easy. And now I want you, son, to understand as well.’