The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “And by the time we got home I knew this was serious because Grandpa made me go with him to his room, and his room was a place that was off-limits to me. I sat on his bed—he’d never let me sit on his bed before—and then he knelt on the floor. He lifted the bedspread and pulled a wooden drawer out from under the bed, a drawer from some lost piece of furniture, with its lock useless because it didn’t have the rest of the cabinet around it. The drawer was full of things, shoes, papers, but mostly books. ‘Look, son, look,’ he said. ‘Your father’s books.’ He showed me a pamphlet: it was a speech Gaitán had given at the tomb of Rafael Uribe Uribe. He was sixteen years old and the speech was commissioned by the National Youth Center. ‘So you can see, my dear boy, what the chief was capable of at your age,’ my grandfather said to me. Then he showed me Gaitán’s degree thesis, Socialist Ideas in Colombia, but he said: ‘Not yet.’ And then he put a book on my lap. It was Who Are They? by Marco Tulio Anzola. On the first page Papá had written his name, C. Carballo, and on the last page the date when he finished reading it: 30.X.1945. ‘This one, son. Take it and read it as soon as you can, and then tell me if you understand the same thing I understand.’

  “That’s what my grandfather said. And it goes without saying, I imagine, that I did: I understood that same thing he understood. Maybe not the first time I read it, maybe not during the first conversation, but I came to understand it in time. That evening in 1964, the April 9 when my grandfather gave me the book that had been my papá’s, I began to read it with a single mission: to find there, in those three hundred pages, all that Papá could have remembered in the moment when they killed Gaitán. Of course, I was sixteen years old, and there’s very little I could have understood at that moment. But I understood more as the months and years went by: I understood that in Anzola’s book, in an ugly and boring book published in 1917, were the keys to what Papá had thought in the last hours of his life, on April 9, 1948. Such an idea is not easy to accept, but I worked hard at it. I read the book twice, three times, then five, then ten, and with every reading some scenes, some isolated sentences surfaced. I read that book, that damned book, and I knew it: I knew the same thing Papá knew a few minutes before he died. It was like being in his head, like seeing the world through his eyes, like being him a few minutes before he was shot. And that is a knowledge I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It is a fortune and a privilege, of course it is, but it’s a burden, a hard burden to bear. It is what has fallen to me, and it’s what I’ve devoted my life to: to bearing what Papá understood in the last minutes of his life, what my grandfather thought he understood later, that understanding I’ve inherited from them.”

  Then I said the only words I could have said at that moment in that place. They were in the form of a question, a question I would perhaps regret, but keeping quiet would have been a form of cowardice and maybe blindness.

  “And what understanding was that, Carlos? What was it that your father understood and that you now understand?”

  “That the elegant man in front of the Granada Drugstore was no different from the elegant man on Ninth Street. That the tall man in the irreproachable gray suit, as García Márquez describes him, is no different from the man in striped trousers and patent leather ankle boots, as the witness Mercedes Grau described him, and no different from the man the disappeared witness Alfredo García saw in Galarza’s carpentry shop, and is no different from the man in the top hat Anzola didn’t want to name at the trial. That the elegant man, who incited the inflamed crowd until they lynched Juan Roa Sierra, is no different from the one who asked Uribe’s assassins: ‘How’d it go? Did you kill him?’ Papá understood that the priest who hoped Uribe was in hell in 1914 is no different from another very famous priest who before the Gaitán crime called for the annihilation of Reds. Papá understood that the rumors and anonymous notes that circulated in Bogotá before April 9 were no different from the rumors and anonymous notes that circulated in Bogotá before October 15. He understood that all those people convinced that Gaitán was going to be killed were no different from those who heard, forty days in advance, that Uribe was going to be killed. He understood that, Vásquez, he understood that terrible truth: that they were killed by the same people. Of course I’m not talking about the same individuals with the same hands, no. I’m talking about a monster, an immortal monster, the monster of many faces and many names who has so often killed and will kill again, because nothing has changed here in centuries of existence and nothing ever will change, because this sad country of ours is like a mouse running on a wheel.”

  * * *

  —

  THERE ARE TWO WAYS to view or contemplate what we call history: one is the accidental vision, for which history is the fateful product of an infinite chain of irrational acts, unpredictable contingencies, and random events (life as unremitting chaos that we human beings try desperately to organize); and the other is the conspiratorial vision, a scenario of shadows and invisible hands and eyes that spy and voices that whisper in corners, a theater in which everything happens for a reason, where accidents don’t exist and much less coincidences, and where the causes of events are silenced for reasons nobody knows. “In politics, nothing happens by accident,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said. “If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” The phrase, which I haven’t been able to find quoted in any reliable source, is loved by conspiracy theorists, maybe because it comes from a man who decided so much over the course of so long (that is, who left so little space to chance or fate). But what there is in it, if one peers carefully into its foul-smelling pit, is enough to overcome the bravest among us, for the phrase shatters one of the minimal certainties on which we base our lives: that misfortunes, horror, pain, and suffering are unpredictable and inevitable, but if someone can predict or foresee them, they will do anything possible to prevent them. The idea is so terrifying that others know right now that something bad is going to happen and don’t do anything to prevent the damage, it is so horrifying even for those of us who have already lost all our innocence and left behind all illusion with respect to human morality, who tend to take this vision of events as a game, a pastime for idle or credulous people, an inveterate strategy to better fight against the chaos of history and the revelation, proven by now a thousand times, that we are their peons or their marionettes. We respond to the conspiratorial vision with our well-trained skepticism and a touch of irony, repeating that there is no proof of the conspiracies, and believers will tell us that the principal objective of every conspiracy is to hide its own existence, and that the fact of not seeing it is the best proof it is there.

  That Friday, February 28, 2014, almost a hundred years after one of the crimes and almost sixty-six since the other one, I was living in a world like that, ironic, skeptical, a world ruled by chance, chaos, accidents, and coincidences. And what Carlos Carballo was asking me was to come out for a moment and live in another world, and then return to mine to tell what I’d seen. He was asking me so that the vision of his father would not be lost. I remembered his words about truths that don’t happen in visible places, truths that don’t happen in the world of what a journalist or historian can recount, those small or fragile truths that sink into oblivion because those in charge of recounting history never manage to see them or to find out about their modest existence. And I thought that Carballo’s desire was not just to save from oblivion a truth that had never been born in the world of historical things, but also to give his father an existence he hadn’t ever had until now. He might not have a tomb, perhaps, and his bones might never have a stone with his name, but he would have a place to exist with his name and his memory. That is, with his life: his acts and his loves and work and enthusiasms, his affiliations and descendants, his ideas and emotions, his projects and illusions and plans for the future. No, Carballo didn’t want me to write a Who Are They? of the Gaitán crime; he wanted me to make a mausoleum of words where his father could dwell, and he also wanted the last two h
ours his father lived to be documented just as he understood them, because that way his father would not just have a place in the world, but would have played a part in history.

  I understood this and I had an idea. I told him:

  “I’m going to write it, Carlos.”

  He looked up, straightened barely perceptibly, and I noticed there was a slight trace of tears in his eyes. Or maybe he was just tired, just as I was after twenty-four hours (or maybe it was more: impossible to know at this stage) of continuous conversation and arduous memories. It must not have been February 28 anymore when I said this: we’d spent so much time shut up in there by then that we must have been well into the first day of March.

  “You’re going to write it?” he said.

  “Yes. But in order to do it, I’m going to need to trust you. I need to know you’re telling me the truth. I’m going to ask you one question, and I’m only going to ask you once: Do you have the vertebra? Did you take Gaitán’s vertebra out of Francisco Benavides’s drawer?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Let me put this another way, Carlos,” I insisted. “I need to take Gaitán’s vertebra and Uribe Uribe’s skull fragment. I need to return them to Francisco, who is the legitimate heir to those bones. If I take them, I’ll write the book. If I don’t take them, I won’t. It’s that simple.”

  “But he’s not the legitimate heir,” said Carballo. “The maestro gave the cranium to me.”

  “And the vertebra? Did he give you that too?”

  “Francisco wants to give them up,” he said.

  “He doesn’t want to give them up. He wants them to be in a museum, so people can see them. Look, Carlos, those bones don’t belong to him or to you: those bones belong to everyone, because the past they contain is all of ours. I want to be able to go to see them when I want. I want my daughters to be able to go see them when they want. More than that: I want to take my daughters to a public place and show them those bones behind glass and explain to them all that those bones can tell.”

  “But they are evidence,” said Carballo. “They’re the proof of something we don’t see but that might be there. On the skull fragment there might be the sign of a knuckle-duster. In the vertebra there might—”

  “That’s bullshit,” I interrupted him. “Don’t talk shit to me. What is in the vertebra? A bullet from a second shooter? You already know that’s not the case, and if you don’t remember, I’ll tell you again what your maestro discovered in his 1960 autopsy: There was no second shooter. So in that vertebra there is nothing. And as for the famous knuckle-duster, no trace of that is visible on that piece of bone. The knuckle-duster lives in Anzola’s theory, but not in this bone. These bones have not been forensic evidence for a long time. They are not proof, not anymore. They are simply human remains, ruins, yes, the ruins of noble men.”

  When I went out into the Bogotá morning—that Saturday morning, that March morning—I was carrying Francisco Benavides’s possessions in my black knapsack. I put it beside me in the car, on the passenger seat, and I realized, as I drove toward home and my present life with a certain sensation of unreality, that once in a while it occurred to me to take a look at them while I was driving, as if to confirm that all that had happened over the preceding hours was not a product of my morbid imagination. The ruins of noble men: the line from Julius Caesar had assailed me (or perhaps I should say: had come to my rescue) as had happened to me so many times before with old Will, whose words helped me give shape and order to the chaos of experience. In that scene, Julius Caesar has just died in the Capitol, stabbed twenty-three times by the conspirators’ swords, bled at the foot of Pompey’s statue, and Anthony, his friend and protégé, is left alone beside his dead body. “O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,” Anthony says to him, “That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! Thou art the ruins of the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times.”

  I don’t know if Uribe Uribe and Gaitán were the noblest men of their times, but their ruins, accompanying me on my trip home, had that nobility. Those human ruins were memoranda of our past errors, and at some point they were also prophecies. I remembered, for example, the statement of one of the lawyers of the private prosecution in the Uribe trial. After discounting the participation of anyone other than the two assassins and describing the political nature of the crime as anarchist, he concluded by saying: “Fortunately, the case of General Uribe Uribe has been and must be, God willing, unique in Colombia.” He was mistaken, and at my side was the material testimony of that error, but the important thing for me was not that memory of the bones, but what contact with them had caused in the lives of these men: Carlos Carballo, Francisco Benavides, and his now-dead father. And in mine, of course. In mine as well.

  Since it was Saturday, I thought it might be all right to show up unannounced at Dr. Benavides’s house. He answered the door with his reading glasses still on and a book in his hand; from inside, as if from the back of the house, a sad cello welled up. I didn’t have to explain the reason for my visit. He had me go straight upstairs, to his treasure room where all this had started nine years earlier, and received his relics. We talked: I told him about the last hours, omitting a lot, grossly summarizing what I had discovered, for telling the whole thing seemed like a disloyalty to me at that moment, like violating a secret, or maybe because Carballo had made his revelations to me or because they had a single objective, which was to live on in my future book. I told Benavides about the agreement I’d made with Carballo. It was a last-minute deal, when, already saying good-bye, both of us standing on the threshold of his door, he said: “And how do I know you are going to keep your side of the bargain? You’re taking these things now and Francisco is going to return them, as you two put it, to donate them to some museum or whatever. How do I know that you’re still going to write it afterward?” I then proposed to persuade Benavides to put them out into the world only once my book, Carballo’s book, had been published: when it was already living out in the real world, filling it with the stories he had told me and one of them in particular. There, in Benavides’s house, I told him, and he agreed; but I noted in his manners that his relationship with Carlos Carballo, his lifelong friend, his father’s disciple, had broken forever. And I felt as sorry as if it had been me who had lost an old friend.

  Several days later I flew to Belgium to spend a few weeks there, a visit that had been scheduled a long while before to work on a novel. The idea of shutting myself up in an apartment in downtown Brussels to cohabit day and night with my fictional characters and their invented destinies, with no obligation to talk to anyone or answer the phone, had seemed impossible to refuse even if I didn’t have dear friends in Belgium who I like to visit whenever I can, for some of them are now of sufficient age that I wonder, after each new visit, if I’ll see them alive again next time. But now that the trip was looming, my circumstances had changed: it would no longer be the fictional characters of that novel who would occupy my solitude, but a true story that showed me at every step how little I had understood until this moment my country’s past, which laughed in my face, as if making me feel the pettiness of my narrative resources before the disorder of what had happened so many years ago. It would no longer be the conflicts of characters who depended on my will, but my attempts to understand, truly and forever, what Carlos Carballo had revealed over the course of several encounters that were now blending in my memory.

  And that’s what I did for thirty days and nights. The apartment on the Place du Vieux Marché aux Grains had a studio that overlooked a cobblestone street; beside the wall, between two high windows that let in the cold northern light, there was a desk (with a black leather top and drawers full of worn-down pencils and envelopes from previous users), but I never wrote there, for when I walked in the first day I found myself in a living room the perimeter of which was lined with white cupboards about a meter high, and the next morning that almost continuous sur
face had been covered with all the papers I’d brought on the trip—copies of old newspapers, photos, books, and notebooks—and the checkered dining table had turned into my workplace. On top of all the surfaces, and on the marble mantelpiece of the unlit fireplace, the documents changed places: little by little, in the early spring days, a possible version of Carballo’s story began to come to light: and during my nights of insomnia I read and reread the furious notes I’d taken, until the events that could be seen there, combined with my solitude and exhaustion, provoked something similar to paranoia.

  When I went outside for a walk I found a city whose museums, bookshops, and ad-covered walls were all flooded with the memory of the Grande Guerre, and I saw those images I’d seen a thousand times, the barbed wire, the helmeted soldiers in trenches, those faces covered in mud, those big open holes in the ground where shells had exploded. And it occurred to me that two hours away by train Jean Jaurès had been killed (and why not take that train) and that the soldier Hernando de Bengoechea had died a three-hour drive from there (and why not rent a car), but I never managed to make those trips: I hastened back to my cobbled street and my study because I realized I couldn’t stop thinking about my Colombian crimes, and I also realized that nothing in that memorious city, or in the possible trips to the past the region could offer, interested me as much as continuing to remember in writing my conversations with the man who believed in conspiracy theories. Other things happened to me in those days, I thought of and discovered other things. For example, I met a man who had been the lover of the writer Senka Marniković. But those anecdotes cannot form part of this book.