The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Pacho fell silent. He opened one hand and looked up at the sky.

  “For crying out loud, it’s drizzling,” he said. “Did you need to know anything else?”

  We were no more than five steps away from the place an anonymous man had fallen a few hours before. I thought of asking Pacho if he knew, but then it struck me as a superfluous piece of information leading nowhere, and even disrespectful to the man who had made me a gift of his knowledge. I thought they were two very different deaths, Gaitán’s and that of the anonymous man, and they were separated by many years besides, but the two puddles of blood, the one where people had dipped their handkerchiefs in 1948 and the one that had dirtied the tip of my shoe in this year of 1991, were not so different really. Nothing linked them aside from my fascination or my morbid curiosity, but that was enough, for the morbid curiosity or fascination was just as strong as the visceral rejection of the city I was beginning to feel in those years, the murderous city, the cemetery city, the city where every corner had its corpse. That’s what I was discovering in myself with something like dread, the dark fascination with the dead who swarmed the city: the dead of the present and of the past as well. There I was, in the furious city, going to look at the locations of certain crimes just because they horrified me, chasing the ghosts of the dead who died violent deaths, precisely out of fear of one day being one of them. But that was not easy to explain, not even to a guy like Pacho Herrera.

  “Nothing else,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

  I watched him disappear into the crowd.

  That night I arrived home and wrote in one go the seven pages of a story that repeated or tried to repeat what Pacho Herrera had told me, standing on Carrera Séptima, on the very sidewalk where my country’s history had been overturned. I don’t think I managed to understand how Pacho’s tale had captured my imagination, nor do I think I realized how thousands of Colombians over the past forty-three years accompanied me in that. The story wasn’t good, but it was mine: it wasn’t written in a voice borrowed from García Márquez or Cortázar or Borges, like so many other attempts I made and would make around that time, but rather held, in its tone and its outlook, something that for the first time seemed all mine. I showed it to Pacho—a young man seeking approval from his elders—and at that moment began a new relationship with him, a different relationship, more complicit than before, based more on camaraderie than authority. A few days later, he asked me if I’d like to go to Gaitán’s house with him.

  “Gaitán has a house?”

  “The house where he was living when he was killed,” said Pacho. “It’s a museum now, of course.”

  And there we arrived on a sunny afternoon, a big two-story house I haven’t returned to since, surrounded by green (I remember a small lawn and a tree) and entirely occupied by the ghost of Gaitán. There was an old television downstairs that showed a documentary on his life in a continuous loop, farther on some speakers that spat out recordings of his speeches, and upstairs, at the top of the broad staircase, we encountered the square glass case in which the midnight-blue suit stood up straight. I walked around the case, looked for the bullet holes in the cloth, and found them with a shiver. Later I went to look at the grave in the garden and stood facing it for a while, remembering what Pacho had told me, lifting my face, watching the leaves of the tree rustle in the wind and feeling the afternoon Bogotá sun on my head. Then Pacho left, without giving me time to say good-bye, and got into a taxi he hailed on the street. I saw him close the door, saw his mouth move to give an address, and saw him take his glasses off, the way we do to get a speck of dust out of our eye, or an eyelash that’s bothering us, or a tear that’s clouding our vision.

  * * *

  —

  THE VISIT TO DR. BENAVIDES took place a few days after our conversation. On the Saturday, I’d spent a couple of hours in the food court of a nearby shopping center, for a break from the routine cafeteria food, and then I’d spent another while in the Librería Nacional, where I found a book by José Avellanos that I thought might be useful for a novel I was trying to write in stolen moments. It was a picaresque and capricious story about a possible visit Joseph Conrad had made to Panama, and with every sentence I realized that writing it had only one purpose: to distract or distance me from my medical anxieties. When I got back to the room, M was in the middle of one of the examinations that measured the intensity of her clandestine contractions: her belly was covered in electrodes; a robot stationed close to the bed emitted an electronic murmur and we could hear, above the murmur, the delicate sweeping of a little pen tracing lines of ink on a roll of graph paper. With each contraction the lines altered, shook, like an animal whose sleep has been disturbed. “You just had one,” said a nurse. “Did you feel it?” And M had to confess that she hadn’t, that she hadn’t felt it this time, either, and she revealed her annoyance as she did so, as if her own insensitivity absurdly bothered her. For me, on the other hand, the line on that paper was one of the first traces of my daughters in the world, and I even thought of asking the nurses if I could keep the printouts or if they could make me a copy. But then I said to myself: And what if it all goes wrong? If the delivery goes wrong and the babies don’t survive or they do but in difficult circumstances and there’s nothing in the future to commemorate, much less celebrate? That possibility had not yet lost validity; neither the doctors nor the tests had ruled it out. So the nurses left without my asking them for anything.

  “How’d the examination go?” I asked.

  “The same,” said M with half a smile. “These two are ready to come out, seems like they’ve got a date.” And then: “Someone dropped something off for you. Over there, on the table.”

  It was a postcard that I immediately recognized, or rather a photograph the size of a postcard and with a message written on the back.

  Sady González not only had been one of the great photographers of the twentieth century but was now acknowledged as the preeminent witness of the Bogotazo. This was one of his best-known images. González had taken it in the Central Clinic, where they took Gaitán to try to save his life. By the time of the photo, the doctors’ efforts have turned out to be in vain and the injured man has been pronounced dead, spruced up a little and strangers have been allowed in, so Gaitán appears covered in a white sheet—impeccably, disturbingly white—and surrounded by people. Some of those around him are doctors: one of them has his left hand, which wears a rough-hewn ring, on top of Gaitán’s body, as if to keep him from falling; another, who might be Pedro Eliseo Cruz, is looking back, maybe at the policeman who is leaning in to appear in the photo (having sensed the importance of the moment). On the left of the frame is Dr. Antonio Arias, in profile, looking nowhere with an especially discouraged expression, or that looks especially so to me because Dr. Arias is the only one who seems to be genuinely not looking toward the photographer, and whose unaffected sadness seems to be preventing him from noticing what’s going on in the room. Between them all is Gaitán, whose head someone is raising a little—the position is not natural—so his face is very visible in the photo, for the photo was taken for this reason, as a testimony to the death of the caudillo, though for me its achievement is much greater, for what you can see on the face of Gaitán was, as a line of verse I like puts it, the flat anonymity of pain.

  I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that image before, but there, in the room in the clinic, beside my wife confined to her hospital bed, I seemed to see for the first time the girl who is behind Gaitán, the one who seems in charge of holding up the dead man’s head. I showed the photo to M and she said no, it was the man wearing glasses who was holding it up, because the girl’s hand was closed and at an angle that would make it impossible to support anything. I would have liked to believe she was right, but I could not: I saw the girl’s hand, I saw it supporting Gaitán’s head, which seemed to float above the white sheet, and that troubled me.

  On the back o
f the postcard, with a ballpoint pen (so it wouldn’t smudge on the laminated surface), Dr. Benavides had written:

  Esteemed Patient,

  Tomorrow, Sunday, I’m having a dinner party. A very petit comité, I’ll invite you in French to pretend to be cultured. I hope to see you at 8 to talk about things that no longer interest anybody else. I know you’re busy with more important things, but I promise I’ll try to make it worth your while. Even if only for the whiskey.

  Fond regards,

  FB

  That’s how the next day, September 11, I found myself heading to the north of Bogotá, where the fraying city starts to turn into a haphazard alternation of gated clusters of buildings and malls and then, with no warning, a huge wasteland, broken here and there by constructions of dubious legality.

  On the radio they were talking about the 2001 attacks in New York, and the newsreaders and commentators were doing what would soon become customary on each anniversary: remembering where they were at that moment. Where was I four years earlier? In Barcelona, finishing lunch. I didn’t have a television at the time, so I didn’t know anything about it until Enrique de Hériz phoned me: “Come over to my place right now,” he said. “The world is ending.” And now I was driving north up Carrera Novena and the station was broadcasting recordings from that day: the newscasters describing the events as they were happening, declarations full of astonishment and rage after the collapse of the first building, the reactions of politicians unable to show true indignation even in a case like this. One of the commentators said they’d deserved it. “Who?” asked another, as surprised as I was. “The United States,” said the first. “For decades of imperialism and humiliation. Finally, somebody answered back.” At that moment, as I was arriving at the address, I no longer had in mind the directions Benavides had given me to get to his house, but rather my visit to New York eight months after the attacks, my interviews with people who had lost someone and my experience of the pain of a city reacting to the attacks with solidarity and integrity. The commentator kept talking. In my head, disorderly replies were forming themselves, and I only managed to say, out loud, but to no one: “What a jerk.”

  The doctor was waiting for me, filling the entire doorframe. Although he was barely half a head taller than me, I sensed that he was one of those men who walk with their heads bent so they don’t knock themselves on low beams. He wore glasses with metal frames and tinted lenses, perhaps the kind that change color according to the intensity of the light, and there, on the threshold, beneath the swift clouds passing over our heads, he seemed like a spy out of a novel, a sort of slightly chubbier, and most of all, more melancholy George Smiley. Just fifty years old, and barely protected from the cold of the Bogotá evening in an old, unbuttoned sweater, Benavides gave me the impression of a weary man. Other people’s pain can wear us down in more or less subtle ways; Benavides had spent many years of his life fighting it, sharing patients’ suffering and their fear, and that compassion had sapped his energy. Outside their workplaces, people age suddenly, and sometimes we attribute their aging to the first thing that comes to mind: what we know of their lives, a misfortune we’ve followed from afar, an illness someone told us about. Or, as in Benavides’s case, the particular features of his work, which I knew enough about to admire him, or rather admire his dedication to others and regret the fact of not being like him.

  “You’re early,” the doctor said. He led me into the interior patio, where there was still a bit of slanted evening light; in a few minutes of excited conversation he spoke to me again of my novel, asked how my wife was doing and about possible names for my daughters, and told me that he, for his part, had two children in their twenties, a boy and a girl; he then told me that the bench I was sitting on was a railway tie that he’d put legs on himself. The chair he was sitting in, he went on to tell me, had come from a hotel in Popayán that collapsed during the earthquake of 1983, and the only ornament on the table was part of a propeller from a merchant ship. “I still don’t know how I put up with all these things, but I do,” he said. I’ve since thought that the doctor was testing me at that moment: trying to find out if I shared that irrational interest in objects from the past, those silent phantoms.

  “Well, let’s go inside, the dew’s catching up with us,” his now invisible or blurred features said through the growing darkness. “It seems people are finally starting to arrive.”

  It turned out the comité was not as petit as Benavides had suggested. The small house was full of guests, most of them my host’s age: they were, I thought without any proof, his colleagues. People clustered around the dining room table, each with a plate in hand, maintaining a precarious balance as they served themselves more cold meats, or attacked the potato salad, or tried to tame some unmanageable asparagus that fell from forks. Invisible speakers whispered the voice of Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin.

  Benavides introduced me to his wife: Estela was a small woman with a pronounced bone structure and an Arabian nose, whose generous smile compensated to some extent for her permanently ironic gaze. Then we made the rounds of the room (through its air now rarefied by smoke), for Benavides wanted to introduce me to some of my fellow guests. He began with a man wearing thick glasses who looked a lot like the one M thought was holding Gaitán’s head in the photo, and another, short, bald man with a mustache, who had to make an effort to let go of the hand of a woman with dyed hair in order to shake mine. “A patient of mine,” said Benavides to introduce me, and I thought it amused him to deliver this unimportant lie.

  Meanwhile, I had begun to feel uncomfortable and uneasy and it wasn’t hard to figure out why: some part of my consciousness had begun to wonder how my still-future family was, those girls growing precariously in my wife’s womb. There, wandering around Benavides’s house, I began to feel a new anxiety; I wondered if this—this sudden sensation of solitude, this conviction that the worst things happen in our absence—was what fatherhood amounted to; and I regretted having come to talk about banalities in society instead of staying with M to keep her company and help in whatever way I could. Someone, behind me, was reciting some lines of verse:

  This rose was witness

  To this, which if not love,

  No other love could be.

  This rose was witness

  When you gave yourself to me!

  It was León de Greiff’s worst poem, or in any case the one that had always struck me as the least worthy of his fantastic oeuvre, but the one all Colombians invariably know and which never takes long to crop up at certain types of gatherings. It seemed the gathering in Benavides’s house was one of those. And again I regretted having come. Beneath a hanging fern, beside a sliding door that led to a small garden, now black in the night, there were two cupboards with glass doors that immediately caught my attention, for their contents were arranged like pieces in an exhibit. I stopped in front of the doors, looking without seeing, with the initial intention of escaping the social obligations occurring behind me. But little by little the contents of the cupboards began to arouse my curiosity. What was all this?

  “That’s a copper kaleidoscope,” said Benavides. He had arrived stealthily at my side and seemed to have heard my thoughts, maybe from being used to first-time visitors stopping in front of this cabinet and starting to ask questions. “That’s a real stinger of an Amazon scorpion. That is an 1856 LeMat revolver. That is the skeleton of a rattlesnake. Small, yes, but you know size doesn’t matter.”

  “Your private museum,” I said.

  He looked at me with evident satisfaction. “More or less,” he said. “They are things I’ve accumulated over the years.”

  “No, I meant the whole house. The whole house is your museum.”

  Here Benavides smiled a wide smile and pointed to the wall above the piece of furniture: two frames adorned it (though I don’t know if I should say adorned in this case, since the intention of these objects was not aesthetic
). “That’s the cover of a Sidney Bechet album,” said Benavides. Bechet had signed and dated it on May 2, 1959. “And that,” he said, pointing to a small piece almost hidden beside the cupboard, “that’s a set of scales someone once brought me from China.”

  “Is it original?” I asked stupidly.

  “Down to the last piece,” Benavides told me. It was a beautiful instrument: it had a carved wooden frame, and from the crossbar hung an inverted T with two bowls. “See that lacquered box? That’s where I keep the lead weights, the prettiest thing there is. Here, I want to introduce you to someone.”

  Only at that moment did I realize there was someone with him. Behind my host, hidden as if out of shyness or prudence, a pale-skinned man with a glass of fizzy water in his left hand was waiting. He had large bags under his eyes, although he didn’t look, in other respects, much older than Benavides, and in his strange getup—brown corduroy jacket, high-collared starched shirt—what most attracted one’s gaze was a red cravat, red like the red of a bullfighter’s cape. The man in the red cravat held out a soft, damp hand and introduced himself in a low voice, perhaps insecure, perhaps effeminate, the kind of voice that forces other people to lean closer to understand.