The Shape of the Ruins
Page 50
I should mention, however, what happened on my return trip. I traveled by way of New York, since it was cheaper than other routes and for other, less practical reasons that aren’t relevant, and ended up spending two days in the city instead of the anticipated few hours. I could have spent the time in secondhand-book stores or movie theaters, but the obsession with the events and characters of my still-embryonic book wouldn’t allow me an instant of freedom, and I ended up spending a morning feeding it: looking for the places Rafael Uribe Uribe had been when he arrived in the city at the beginning of 1901, in the middle of the War of a Thousand Days. I had no luck: my searches led nowhere. But then I remembered Carballo’s theory, stemming from a book called Secrets of Roulette and Its Technical Tricks, that Marco Tulio Anzola had escaped to the United States after the trial, and had probably done so with the help of Carlos Adolfo Urueta, Uribe’s son-in-law, who was then a diplomat in Washington.
If Anzola had come to New York in those years, I thought, there would be a record of him in the Ellis Island archives, which were open to the public. Idleness is creative: one sunny morning, before going back to the airport to return to Bogotá, I boarded the ferry that takes tourists and other people with time on their hands to the island where the country’s immigrants used to arrive, and began to investigate. I didn’t have to spend more than an hour searching: there, on the computer screen, was the record of Anzola’s entry. His ship, the Brighton, had set sail from the Colombian port of Santa Marta. The date of his arrival in New York was January 3, 1919; among his companions was Carlos Adolfo Urueta. The register also records his twenty-eight years of age, the color of his eyes—dark brown—his distinguishing marks—a mole on his left cheek—and his civil status: married. What did Anzola do in New York? How long did he stay in the United States? Who was his wife? Why was he able to write a book on gambling? Months after that book was published, Gaitán was shot dead in Bogotá. Would Anzola have heard about the crime? What conspiracy theory would he have designed or considered then? I took a couple of careless photos and felt like I’d just seen a ghost. I also felt that Anzola had not completely left my life yet. True obsessions don’t go so easily.
I returned to Bogotá at the beginning of April. And that was when, one of my first nights back, I caught that late-night news item and saw the image of Carballo at the moment of his arrest, climbing into the police van with the look on his face of a startled prankster. His hands were cuffed behind his back, but he looked relaxed; his head was down between his shoulders, but not to hide, just to avoid bumping it on the edge of the van’s doorframe. On the news they accused him of trying to steal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s serge suit, but I knew that wasn’t the case. When the journalist described what had happened, when he said Carballo had used a knuckle-duster to break the glass case within which the suit was exhibited, when he explained in detail that the museum guard had detained Carballo at the moment he laid a hand on the shoulder of the suit jacket, only I knew his intention was not to steal it, but to feel with the palm of his hand the same cloth his father’s hand had touched on that fatal day. Relics are that, too, I thought in front of the television, a way of communicating with our dead, and at that moment I noticed that my wife had fallen asleep at my side and I could not discuss the whole business with her. And then I got up out of bed and went to my daughters’ room, where they were also asleep, and closed the door and sat down in their green chair decorated with birds and I stayed there, in the darkness of the peaceful room, watching with envy the serenity of their bodies, letting myself be surprised by how much they’d changed since their difficult birth, trying to hear their soft breathing amid the noises of the city: that city that began on the other side of the window and that can be so cruel in this country sick with hatred, that city and that country my daughters would inherit as I had: with its sense and its excesses, its rights and its wrongs, its innocence and its crimes.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Shape of the Ruins is a work of fiction. Characters, incidents, documents, and episodes from past or present reality are used here in a novelized form and with the liberties characteristic of the literary imagination. Readers who wish to find coincidences with real life in this book do so at their own risk.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the three years I spent writing this novel, many relatives, friends, and acquaintances lent me their time, their spaces, their knowledge, their advice or provided a punctual piece of help to solve a problem, and I’d like to put my gratitude on record here. They are: Alfredo Vásquez, the Passa Porta Foundation of Brussels, the Casanovas & Lynch Agency (Mercedes Casanovas, Nuria Muñoz, Sandra Pareja, Ilse Font, and Nathalie Eden), Inés García and Carlos Rovira, Rafael Dezcallar and Karmele Miranda, Javier Cercas, Tatiana de Germán Ribón, Catalina Gómez, Enrique de Hériz, Camilo Hoyos and the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Gabriel Iriarte, Álvaro Jaramillo and Clarita Pérez de Jaramillo, Alberto Manguel, Patricia Martínez, Jorge Orlando Melo, Hernán Montoya and Socorro de Montoya, Elkin Rivera, Ana Roda, Mónica Sarmiento and Alejandro Moreno Sarmiento, Andrés Enrique Sarmiento, and Fanny Velandia. But my biggest debt is to Mariana, the first recipient of these pages, whose visible or invisible presence gives this book (and the life of its author) something mysteriously resembling harmony.
J.G.V.
Bogotá, September 2015
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
Juan Gabriel Vásquez's previous books include the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner and national bestseller, The Sound of Things Falling, as well as the award-winning Reputations, The Informers, The Secret History of Costaguana, and the story collection Lovers on All Saints' Day. Vásquez's novels have been published in twenty-eight languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium, and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.
Anne McLean translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings. She has twice won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán, and received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with Juan Gabriel Vásquez for his novel The Sound of Things Falling. She lives in Toronto.
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