The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “Visiting a patient,” he told me.

  “And what does your patient have?”

  “A lot of pain,” was his brutal summary. “I came to see what I could do to help.” Then he changed the subject, but it didn’t seem like he was trying to avoid answering: Benavides was not the kind of person who shies away from talking about pain. “I read your novel, the one about the Germans,” he said. “Who would have imagined: my patient turned out to be a writer.”

  “Who could have imagined.”

  “And besides, he writes things for old people.”

  “Old people?”

  “Things about the forties. Things about the Second World War. April 9 and all that.”

  He was referring to a book I’d published the previous year. Its origin went back to 1999, when I met Ruth de Frank, a German Jewish woman who, after escaping the European debacle and arriving in Colombia in 1938, witnessed how the government, in alliance with the Allies, broke diplomatic relations with the Axis countries and began to imprison citizens of enemy nations—propagandists for or sympathizers with European fascism—in luxury hotels in the countryside converted into internment camps. Over the course of three days of questioning, I had the pleasure and privilege of having this woman tell me almost her whole life story, which she remembered astonishingly well, and I took notes on the excessively small pages of a squared notebook, which was the only thing I could find in the hotel in the tropical lowlands where we met. In the thrilling confusion of Ruth de Frank’s life, which spanned two continents and more than seven decades, one anecdote stood out in particular: the moment in which her Jewish family, in one of those cruel ironies of history, had ended up being persecuted in Colombia, for being German. This misunderstanding (but misunderstanding is an unfortunate and inadequate word) turned out to be the first heartbeat of a novel I called The Informers; and the life and memories of Ruth de Frank became, distorted as fiction always distorts, one of the fundamental characters of the novel, a sort of moral compass of its fictitious world: Sara Guterman.

  But the novel was about many other things. Given that its center was in the 1940s, it was inevitable that at some moment the story or its characters would come across the events of April 9, 1948. The characters of The Informers talked about that nefarious day; the narrator’s father, a professor of oratory, could not recall without admiration Gaitán’s supernatural speeches; in a couple of brief pages, the narrator goes to central Bogotá and visits the scene of the crime, as I have done many times, and Sara Guterman, who goes with him that day, crouches down and touches the rails of the tram that still ran on Carrera Séptima in the 1940s. In the white silence of the nocturnal cafeteria, each of us in front of his cup of coffee, the doctor confessed that it had been that scene—an older woman reaching down to the surface of the street in front of the place where Gaitán was shot and touching the rails of the extinct tram the way one might take the pulse of an injured animal—that led him to look me up. “I’ve done the same thing,” he said.

  “You’ve done what?”

  “Gone into town. Stopped in front of the plaques. Even crouched down to touch the rails.” He paused. Then: “How did you get the bug?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve always had it, my whole life. One of my first short stories was about April 9. It was never published, luckily. All I remember is the snow falling at the end.”

  “In Bogotá?”

  “Yes, in Bogotá. On Gaitán’s body. On the rails.”

  “I see,” he said. “No wonder I don’t like reading made-up things.”

  That’s how we started talking about April 9. I noticed that Benavides did not refer to it as the Bogotazo, the grandiloquent nickname that we Colombians gave to that legendary day a long time ago. No: Benavides always used the date, and sometimes the complete date with the year, as if it were someone’s first and last name and deserved respect, or as if using the nickname was a gesture of intolerable familiarity: after all, one cannot allow oneself to take little liberties with the venerable events of our past. He began to tell me anecdotes, and I tried to hold my own. He told me about the detectives from Scotland Yard the government hired in 1948 to supervise the investigations, and about the brief correspondence he maintained with one of them many years later: a very polite man who remembered with fresh indignation the long ago days of his visit to Colombia, when the government asked the detectives for daily results and at the same time seemed to put all the obstacles in the world in front of them. For my part, I told him about my conversation with Leticia González, my wife’s aunt, whose husband, Juan Roa Cervantes, was chased by a small band of machete-wielding Liberals who confused him with the assassin who shared his name; when I met him, he himself told me about those anguished days, but what he best remembered (making a visible effort to contain his tears) was the punishment the confused Gaitanistas inflicted on him: setting his library on fire.

  “What a name to have on that day,” said Benavides.

  Then he told me the tale he’d heard from Hernando de la Espriella, a patient from the coast who’d found himself in Bogotá when the chaos broke out, and spent the first night facedown on top of a pile of corpses to keep from being killed as well; and I told him about my visit to Gaitán’s house, which had been turned into a museum, where his midnight-blue suit was displayed on a headless mannequin in a glass case, with the bullet holes in the cloth (two or three, I don’t remember anymore), for all the world to see . . . For fifteen or twenty minutes we stayed there, in the cafeteria after the night-shift students had left, exchanging anecdotes the way boys exchange stickers for football albums. But Dr. Benavides got the feeling at a certain point of having outstayed his welcome or interrupting my silent time. That’s the impression he gave me: Benavides, like all doctors who have lived close to the pain or worries of other people, knew that patients and their relatives need moments of solitude, of not speaking to anyone and not having anyone speak to them. And so he said good-bye.

  “I live nearby, Vásquez,” he said as he shook my hand. “When you want to talk about April 9, come by my house, have a whiskey, and I’ll tell you things. I never tire of the subject.”

  I sat for a moment thinking that there are people like that in Colombia: those for whom talking about April 9 is the same as playing chess or bridge for other people, or doing crossword puzzles, or knitting, or stamp-collecting. There aren’t many left, truth be told: they’ve been dying out without replacing themselves or leaving heirs or founding a school, defeated by the implacable amnesia that has always stifled this poor country. But they still exist, and it’s normal, for the assassination of Gaitán—the lawyer of humble origins who had reached the heights of politics and was called to save Colombia from its own heartless elites, the brilliant orator able to blend in his speeches the irreconcilable influences of Marx and Mussolini—is part of our national mythology, the way the assassination of Kennedy might be for an American. Like all Colombians, I grew up hearing that Gaitán had been killed by the Conservatives, that he’d been killed by the Liberals, that he’d been killed by the Communists, that he’d been killed by foreign spies, that he’d been killed by the working classes feeling themselves betrayed, that he’d been killed by the oligarchs feeling themselves under threat; and I accepted very early, as we’ve all come to accept over time, that the murderer Juan Roa Sierra was only the armed branch of a successfully silenced conspiracy. Perhaps that’s the reason for my obsession with that day: I’ve never felt the unconditional devotion that others feel for the figure of Gaitán, who strikes me as more shadowy than is generally admitted; but I know this country would be a better place if he hadn’t been killed, and most of all would be able to look itself in the mirror more easily if the assassination were not still unsolved so many years later.

  April 9 is a void in Colombian history, yes, but it is other things besides: a solitary act that sent a whole nation into a bloody war; a collective neurosis th
at has taught us to distrust one another for more than half a century. In the time that has passed since the crime, we Colombians have tried, without success, to comprehend what happened that Friday in 1948, and many have turned it into a more or less serious entertainment, their time and energy consumed by it. There are also Americans—I know several—who spend their whole lives talking about the Kennedy assassination, its details and most recondite particulars, people who know what brand of shoes Jackie was wearing on the day of the crime, people who can recite whole sentences from the Warren Report. And yes: there are also Spaniards—I don’t know too many, but I know one, and he’s enough—who never stop talking about the failed coup on February 23, 1981, in the Chamber of Deputies in Madrid, and who could find the bullet holes in the domed ceiling with their eyes closed. People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries’ conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children’s fables, and also into a place in the memory or the imagination, a place we go to as tourists, to revive nostalgia or try to find something we’ve lost. The doctor, it struck me then, was one of those people. Was I as well? Benavides had asked me how I’d gotten the bug, and I’d told him of a story I’d written in my university years. But I hadn’t told what had provoked the story or when exactly I’d written it. I hadn’t remembered all that in a long time, and it surprised me that it should be now, in the midst of a particularly relentless present moment, that these memories should decide to return.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS DURING the arduous days of 1991. Since April 1984, when the drug lord Pablo Escobar had the minister of justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla assassinated, a war between the Medellín cartel and the Colombian state had taken my city by storm and turned it into its theater of operations. Bombs exploded in locations carefully chosen by the drug traffickers to kill anonymous citizens who had no part in the war (apart from the fact that we all had a part in the war, and it was naive and innocent to believe otherwise). The evening before Mother’s Day, to give one example, two attacks on Bogotá shopping malls left twenty-one dead; a bomb in the Medellín bullring—to give another example—killed twenty-two. The explosions blotted the calendar. With the passing months we began to understand that we weren’t free of risk, because any one of us could be caught by a bomb blast at any time and in any place. The locations of the attacks, through a sort of barely discovered atavism, began to be off-limits to pedestrians. Bits of the city were gradually lost to us or turned into a kind of memento mori of bricks and cement, and at the same time we began to glimpse this still-timid revelation: that a new type of chance (the fate that separated us from death, which is, along with the fate of love, the most considerable of all and also the most impertinent) had entered our lives in the invisible and especially unpredictable shape of a wave of explosions.

  Meanwhile, I had started to study for a law degree at a university in central Bogotá, an old seventeenth-century cloister that had served as a prison for the Independence revolutionaries, some of whom descended its staircase to the scaffold, and its thick-walled classrooms had produced several presidents, not a few poets, and, in certain unfortunate cases, some president poets. In our classes we barely spoke about what was happening outside: we argued over whether a group of speleologists, trapped in a cave, have the right to eat one another; we argued whether Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, had the right to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body, and whether it was legitimate for Portia to prevent him from doing so on a cheap technicality. In other classes (in most of the classes) I was bored with an almost physical boredom, a sort of disquiet in my chest, similar to a light anxiety attack. During the ineffable tedium of procedural or property law I started to sit in the back row of the lecture hall, and there, protected by the motley bodies of the other students, I’d take out a book by Borges or Vargas Llosa, or by Flaubert on Vargas Llosa’s recommendation, or by Stevenson or Kafka on Borges’s recommendation. I soon reached the conclusion that it was not worth attending classes to play out this elaborate ritual of academic imposture; I began to skip classes, to waste my time playing billiards and talking about literature, or listening to recordings of poetry by León de Greiff or Pablo Neruda in the room filled with leather sofas in the Casa Silva, or walking around the neighborhood of my university, without a routine or method or destination, going from the shoe-shine stands in the square to the café beside the Chorro de Quevedo fountain, from the noisy benches in the Parque Santander to the tucked-away and quiet ones in the Palomar del Príncipe, or from the Centro Cultural del Libro, with its one-square-meter stalls and their crowded-together booksellers who could get their hands on every single novel of the Latin American boom, to the Templo de la Idea, a three-story house where they bound books for private libraries and where one could sit on the stairs and read other people’s books while inhaling the fumes of the binder’s glue and hearing the noisy machines. I wrote abstract stories with the poetic excesses of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and others in which I imitated Cortázar’s saxophonist punctuation from “Bestiary,” for example, or “Circe.” At the end of my second year I understood something I’d been incubating for several months: that my law studies were of no interest or use to me whatsoever, for my only obsession was reading fiction and, finally, learning how to write it.

  One of those days, something happened.

  In a History of Political Ideas class, we were talking about Hobbes or Locke or Montesquieu when two detonations were heard outside. Our classroom was on the eighth floor of a building that overlooked Carrera Séptima and from our window we had a privileged view of the street and the western sidewalk. I was sitting in the last row, with my back against the wall, and I was the first to stand up and look out the window: and there, on the sidewalk, in front of the windows of the Panamericana stationery shop, the body that had just been shot was lying and bleeding in plain sight. I looked for the shooter, without success: nobody seemed to have a pistol in hand, nobody seemed to be running to vanish behind a complicit corner, and in any case there were no heads turned in the direction of someone fleeing, or curious gazes or pointing fingers, because the people of Bogotá had learned not to get mixed up in other people’s business. The wounded man wore a business suit but no tie; the jacket had opened when he fell and revealed the white shirt stained with blood. He wasn’t moving. I thought: He’s dead. Then two passersby lifted the body up; someone else stopped the driver of a white flatbed truck. They put the body in the back of the truck, and one of those who had carried him got in beside him. I wondered if he knew him or if he’d just recognized him at that moment, if he’d been walking with him when he was shot (if he was his partner, for example, in who knows what dodgy business) or if he was simply moved by solidarity or contagious pity. Without waiting for the light on Avenida Jiménez to change to green, the white truck pulled out of the traffic, turned abruptly left (I imagined they were taking the wounded man to the San José hospital), and disappeared from view.

  When the class ended, I walked down the eight flights of stairs to the university entrance hall and then out into the Plazoleta del Rosario, where there was a statue of the city’s founder, Don Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, whose armor and sword appear in my memory eternally coated with pigeon shit. I walked down the narrow alley of Fourteenth Street, which was always cold because the sun reaches it only in the early morning and never after nine, and crossed Carrera Séptima at Panamericana. The bloodstain was the size of an open hand. I got close enough to see it between my feet, as if to protect it from the footsteps of the others, and then I did exactly that: I stepped in it.

  I did so with care, with barely the tip of my shoe, like a child dipping his toes in the water to check the temperature. The clean and well-defined outline of the blood was damaged. Then I must have felt a sudden shame, because I looked up to see if anyone was watching me and silently condemning my behavior (which was somehow disrespectful or profane), and I walked
away from the stain trying not to draw attention to myself. A few steps from there were the marble plaques that commemorated the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. I stopped to read them or pretend to read them; then I crossed Carrera Séptima along Jiménez, walked around the block, went into Café Pasaje, ordered a black coffee, and used a paper napkin to clean the tip of my shoe. I could have left the napkin there, on the café table, under the porcelain saucer, but I preferred to take it with me, taking care all the time not to touch with my bare hand the man’s dried blood. I threw the napkin away in the first bin I saw. I didn’t speak to anybody about it, not that day and not in the days that followed.

  However, the next morning, I returned to the sidewalk. Barely a trace of the stain remained on the gray concrete. I wondered what had happened to the wounded man: if he’d survived, if he would now be recovering in the company of his wife or children, or if he’d died and at this very moment his wake was being held in some part of the furious city. Just like the previous day, I took a couple of steps toward Jiménez and stopped in front of the marble plaques, but this time I read them in their entirety, every line of each of the plaques, and I realized I’d never done so before. Gaitán, the man who had formed part of the conversations in my family as far back as I could remember, was still virtually unknown to me, a silhouette passing through the vague idea I had of Colombian history. That afternoon I waited for Professor Francisco Herrera at the end of his oratory class and asked him if I could buy him a beer so he could tell me about April 9.

  “Better make it a coffee,” he said. “I can’t go home with beer on my breath.”

  Francisco Herrera—Pacho, to his friends—was a thin man, with large black-rimmed glasses and a reputation as an eccentric, whose baritone voice didn’t prevent him from perfecting imitations of almost any of our politicians. His main subject was the philosophy of law, but his knowledge of rhetoric and most of all his talent as an impersonator had enabled him to organize an evening class in which we listened to and deconstructed the great speeches of political oratory, from Antony in Julius Caesar to Martin Luther King. Not infrequently, the class ended up serving as a prelude to some of his students accompanying him to a nearby café and exchanging his best impressions for a brandy-laced coffee, to the curiosity, amusement, and sometimes sarcasm of the neighboring tables. He was especially good at imitating Gaitán, since his aquiline nose and his black slicked-back hair gave the illusion of resemblance, but also because his exhaustive knowledge of Gaitán’s life and work, which had enabled him to publish a brief biography with a university press, filled each of the phrases he pronounced with a precision that made him seem more like a medium in a spiritualism session: Gaitán coming back to life through his voice. Once, I told him that: it seemed like Gaitán possessed him when he pronounced his speeches. I saw him smile the way a person might smile when he’s devoted his life to an extravagance and just realized, to his own slight surprise, that it hasn’t been a waste of time.