The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “Carlos Carballo,” said the character alliteratively. “At your service.”

  “Carlos is a friend of the family,” said Benavides. “Old, very old. I don’t even remember when he wasn’t here.”

  “I was a friend of his father’s first, you see,” said the man.

  “First a student, then a friend,” said Benavides. “And then my friend. An inheritance, rather, like a pair of shoes.”

  “Student?” I asked. “Student of what?”

  “My father was a professor at the National,” said Benavides. “He taught forensic science to law students. One day I’ll tell you about it, Vásquez. He had more than a few anecdotes.”

  “More than a few,” said, or corroborated, Carballo. “He was the best professor in the world, if only you could have seen him. I think he changed the lives of several of us.” His face grew solemn and he even seemed to stand taller as he said: “A first-rate mind.”

  “When did he die?” I asked.

  “In ’87,” said Benavides.

  “Almost twenty years,” said Carballo. “How time flies.”

  It unsettled me that someone who would wear that cravat—that affront of fine silk—should also speak in clichés and set phrases. But Carballo was, evidently, an unpredictable guy; perhaps for that reason he interested me more than the rest of the guests, and I didn’t flee from his company or invent an excuse to escape that corner. I took my phone out of my pocket, checked the intensity of the small black bars and the absence of missed calls, and put it away again. Someone caught Benavides’s attention then. I looked in the direction he was looking and saw Estela, who was waving her arms at the opposite end of the room (and the sleeves of her loose blouse bunched up and her arms looked as pale as a frog’s belly). “I’ll be right back,” said Benavides. “It’s one of two things: either my wife is drowning or we’ve run out of ice.” Carballo was now talking about how much he missed his maestro—that’s what he called him now, maestro, and perhaps in his head the word was capitalized—especially in those moments when one needs someone to teach one how to read the truth of things. The phrase was a gem found in the mud: at last, something that matched the cravat.

  “Read the truth of things?” I asked. “What are you referring to?”

  “Oh, it happens to me all the time,” said Carballo. “Doesn’t it to you?”

  “What?”

  “Not knowing what to think. Needing some guidance. Like today, for example. I was listening to the car radio on my way here, you know, the evening programs. And they were talking about September 11.”

  “I was listening to that too,” I said.

  “And I was thinking: how much we miss Maestro Benavides. To help us see the truth hidden behind the political manipulation, behind the criminal complicity of the media. He would not have swallowed that fairy tale. He would have known how to uncover the deceit.”

  “The deceit?”

  “All this is a deceit, don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed. Al Qaeda. Bin Laden. Pure bullshit, pardon my French. These things don’t happen like that. Does anyone believe that buildings like the Twin Towers can collapse just like that, because they get nailed by an airplane? No, no: this was an inside job, a controlled demolition. Maestro Benavides would have realized at once.”

  “Wait a second, let’s see,” I said, halfway between interested and morbidly curious. “Tell me about this demolition.”

  “It’s quite simple. Buildings like those, with perfectly straight lines, only collapse the way those collapsed if someone sets off an explosion from below. You have to take their legs out, not shoot them in the head. The laws of physics are the laws of physics: Or have you seen a tree fall when you cut the top branches?”

  “But a building is not a tree. The planes crashed into them, the fire spread and weakened the structures, and the towers came down. Wasn’t that what happened?”

  “Well,” said Carballo. “If you want to believe it.” He took a sip of his drink. “But a building like that doesn’t fall in its entirety, doesn’t fall so perfectly. The collapse of the towers was like a commercial, don’t tell me it wasn’t.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No, of course not,” sighed Carballo. “It doesn’t mean anything if one doesn’t want to see it. There is definitively no worse blindness than not wanting to see.”

  “Don’t talk to me in silly proverbs,” I said. I don’t know where this unusual discourtesy came from. I dislike willful irrationality and I can’t stand people hiding behind language, especially if it involves the thousand and one formulas language has invented to protect our human tendency to believe without proof. Even so, I try to control my worst impulses, and that’s what I then did. “I’ll allow myself to be convinced if you convince me, but up to now you haven’t convinced me of anything.”

  “So it doesn’t all strike you as strange?”

  “What’s strange? The way the towers fell? I’m not sure. I’m not an engineer, I wouldn’t know . . .”

  “Not just that. What about the air force not being in a state of readiness on that very morning? Or the air space defense system being turned off on that very morning. That the attacks led directly to such a necessary war, or a war so necessary at that moment to maintain the status quo.”

  “But they’re two different things, Carlos, don’t tell me I have to explain that,” I said. “It’s one thing that Bush used the attack as a pretext for a war he’d been wanting to wage for a while. His allowing the deaths of three thousand civilians is quite another.”

  “That’s exactly how it seems. They seem to be two separate things. That’s the great triumph of such people: to make us believe we should separate things that are actually right together. Nowadays, only a dupe believes that Princess Diana died in an accident.”

  “Princess Diana? But what does she have to do . . . ?”

  “Only a dupe believes that there are no points in common with her death and that of Marilyn. But there are some of us who see clearly.”

  “Oh, don’t talk nonsense,” I spat out. “That’s not clairvoyance, that’s pointless speculation.”

  Benavides approached us at that moment, and heard the last sentence. I felt embarrassed, but found no words to make apologies. My irritation was exaggerated, of course, and I didn’t quite know what mechanism had produced it: no matter how impatient I might be with those who read the whole world as a code of conspiracies, that didn’t justify my rudeness. I remembered a novel by Ricardo Piglia where he says that even paranoid people have enemies. Contact sustained with other people’s paranoias, which are multifarious and lie hidden behind the most tranquil personalities, work on us without our noticing, and if you don’t watch out, you can end up investing your energy in silly arguments with people who devote their lives to irresponsible conjectures. Or perhaps I was being unfair to Carballo: perhaps Carballo was only a skillful reiterater of information obtained in the sewers of the internet, or even one of those men who has an involuntary addiction to more or less subtle provocation, to the scandal of easily shocked people. Or maybe it was all even simpler: Carballo was a damaged man, and his beliefs were defense mechanisms against the unpredictability of life—the life that at some unfathomable moment had done him harm.

  Benavides had noticed the bad atmosphere; and also recognized that the bad atmosphere could transform into something else, after my rude reaction. He held out a glass of whiskey, apologizing as he handed it to me, “It took me so long to get from one side of the house to the other that the napkin is damp.” I took the glass without a word and felt its solid weight in my hand, its hard crystal edges. Carballo didn’t say anything, either: he was looking at the floor. After a long uncomfortable silence, Benavides said, “Carlos, guess who Vásquez is a nephew of.”

  Carballo grumpily answered the riddle. “Who?”

  “José María Villarreal,” said Ben
avides.

  Carballo’s eyes moved, or at least that was my impression. I can’t say that they widened, according to the conventional expression of surprise or admiration we’ve come to accept, but there was something in them that interested me: not for what they showed, I also need to make that clear, but for the obvious attempt not to show too much.

  “José María Villarreal was your uncle?” said Carballo.

  He was alert again, just as when he’d been talking about the Twin Towers, while I was wondering how Benavides knew about that kinship. It wasn’t too surprising given that my great-uncle José María had been an important member of the Conservative Party, and in Colombian politics everyone always knows everyone. In any case, that relationship was the sort of thing that might have come up in our first conversation, in the hospital cafeteria. Why hadn’t Benavides mentioned it then? Why was Carballo interested in it? I couldn’t know then. It was obvious that Benavides, mentioning my uncle, was trying to defuse the hostility he’d found. It was also obvious that he’d immediately achieved it.

  “And did you know each other?” asked Carballo. “You and your uncle, I mean. Did you know him well?”

  “Less well than I would have liked,” I said. “I was twenty-three when he died.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “I don’t know. Old age.” I looked at Benavides. “And how is it that you two know of him?”

  “How wouldn’t we know of him,” said Carballo. He was no longer hunched over; his voice had recovered its previous vivacity; our clash had never taken place. “Francisco, bring the book and we’ll show him.”

  “Not now, hombre. We’re in the midst of a dinner party.”

  “Bring the book. Please. Do it for me.”

  “What book?” I asked.

  “Bring it and we’ll show him,” said Carballo.

  Benavides made a comical grimace, like a child who has to run an errand, which is really a whim of his parents. He disappeared into the next room and returned in a flash: it hadn’t taken him long to find the book in question; perhaps it was the one he was currently reading, perhaps he had his bookshelves rigorously ordered so he could find a title without looking through all the rest, without passing uncertain fingers over the impatient spines. I recognized the red slipcase long before the doctor handed the book to Carballo: it was Living to Tell the Tale, the memoir Gabriel García Márquez had published three years earlier, copies of which had then flooded all Colombian bookshops and a good part of those elsewhere. Carballo took the book and began to flip through, looking for the page he was interested in, and before he found it, my memory (and instinct) had already suggested what he would show me. I should have known: we were going to talk about April 9, 1948.

  “Yes, here it is,” said Carballo.

  He handed me the book and pointed out the passage: it was on page 352 of that edition, the same one I had at home in Barcelona. In the chapter in question, García Márquez was remembering the Gaitán assassination, which had caught him in Bogotá, studying law with no vocation for it and living from hand to mouth in a pensión on Carrera Octava downtown, less than two hundred steps from the place where Roa Sierra fired those four fateful shots. Speaking of the riots, the fires, and the violent and generalized chaos that the assassination provoked (as well as the efforts the Conservative government took to maintain control), García Márquez wrote: “In the neighboring department of Boyacá, famous for its historic Liberalism and its harsh Conservatism, the governor José María Villarreal—a hard-nosed Goth—not only had repressed local disturbances at the start but was dispatching better-armed troops to subdue the capital.” A hard-nosed Goth: García Márquez’s words about my uncle were even gentle, since they were about the man who, on the orders of President Ospina, had authorized a police corps whose members were chosen by the single criterion of their Conservative Party affiliation. Shortly before April 9 that overly politicized police force had already gotten out of hand, and it would soon turn into a repressive organization with pernicious consequences.

  “Did you know about this, Vásquez?” Benavides asked me. “Did you know your uncle was mentioned in here?”

  “I knew, yes,” I said.

  “‘A hard-nosed Goth,’” said Carballo.

  “We never talked about politics,” I said.

  “No? You never talked about April 9?”

  “Not that I recall. There were stories.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” said Carballo. “Isn’t it, Francisco? We’re interested in this, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are,” said Benavides.

  “Tell us, let’s hear,” said Carballo.

  “Well, I don’t know. There are several. There was that time when a Liberal friend visited at dinnertime. ‘My dear Chepe,’ he told him, ‘I need you to go find somewhere else to sleep.’ ‘Why?’ asked my uncle. And the Liberal friend told him: ‘Because tonight we’re going to kill you.’ He told me things like that, about the attempts on his life.”

  “And about April 9?” asked Carballo. “Didn’t he ever talk to you about April 9?”

  “No,” I said. “He gave a few interviews, I think, nothing else. I didn’t talk to him about it.”

  “But he must have known tons of things, no?”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Well, he was governor of Boyacá that day. Everybody knows that. He received information and that’s why he sent the police to Bogotá. One imagines that he would have continued finding out what was going on. He would have asked questions, he would have talked to the government, isn’t that true? And over the course of his long life he would have talked to many people, one imagines, he would have known a lot about things that happen, how to put it, out of the public eye.”

  “I don’t know. He never told me.”

  “I see,” said Carballo. “Look, and did your uncle never talk to you about the elegant man?”

  He wasn’t looking at me when he asked me this question. I remember well because I, for my part, looked toward Benavides, and found his gaze absent or maybe evasive: I found him making an effort to appear distracted, as if the conversation had suddenly stopped interesting him. I later realized that it interested him more than ever in that second, but I had no reason to suspect hidden intentions in that apparently casual dialogue.

  “What elegant man?” I asked.

  Carballo’s fingers started leafing back through the pages of Living to Tell the Tale again. They soon found what they were looking for.

  “Read this,” Carballo told me, putting the tip of his index finger on top of a word. “From here.”

  After killing Gaitán, García Márquez wrote, Juan Roa Sierra was chased by a furious mob, and had no choice but to hide in the Granada Drugstore to avoid being lynched. Some policemen and the owner of the drugstore were in there with him, so Roa Sierra must have thought himself safe. Then the unexpected began to happen. A tall man wearing an irreproachable gray suit as if he were going to a wedding incited the crowd, and his words were so effective, and his presence was so authoritative, that the owner of the pharmacy raised the iron shutters and let the bootblacks force their way in, hitting out with their wooden crates, and dragged away the terrified assassin. Right there, in the middle of Carrera Séptima, under the eyes of the police and at the urgings of the elegant, well-dressed man, they beat him to death. The elegant man—in his irreproachable gray suit—began to shout: “To the Palacio!” García Márquez wrote:

  “Fifty years later, my memory is still fixed on the image of the man who seemed to incite the crowd outside the pharmacy, and I have not found him in any of the countless testimonies I have read about that day. I had seen him up close, with his expensive suit, his alabaster skin, and a millimetric control of his actions. He attracted my attention so much that I kept an eye on him until he was picked up by too new a car as soon as the assassin’s corpse was dragged aw
ay, and from then on he seemed to be erased from historical memory. Even mine, until many years later, in my days as a reporter, when it occurred to me that the man had managed to have a false assassin killed in order to protect the identity of the real one.”

  “To protect the identity of the real one,” repeated Carballo at the same time as I did, so that we sounded like a bad choir in the middle of the racket of the party. “How strange, don’t you think?”

  “Strange, yes,” I said.

  “It’s García Márquez talking, not any old idiot. And he says it in his memoir. Don’t tell me it’s not strange. Don’t tell me there’s not something to this guy. To the fact that he’s been swallowed up by oblivion.”

  “Of course there’s something to it,” I said. “A still unresolved murder. A murder surrounded by conspiracy theories. It doesn’t surprise me that this interests you, Carlos: I’ve already seen that this is your world. But I don’t know if you should latch on to a novelist’s isolated paragraph as if it were the revealed truth. Even if he is García Márquez.”

  Carballo, more than disappointed, was annoyed. He took a step back (there are disagreements so strong that we feel assaulted, and little keeps us from raising our fists like boxers), closed the book, and, without yet putting it down or back in its red slipcase, crossed his hands behind his back. “I see,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “And what do you think, Francisco? How can I get out of this world of mine where we’re all crazy?”

  “Now, Carlos, don’t get offended. What he meant was . . .”

  “I know very well what he meant to say. He already said it: that I’m an idle speculator.”

  “No, no, forgive me for that,” I said. “That’s not what . . .”