The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “During the 1970s, when students at the National went on strike once a month, my father brought the most valuable pieces from the museum home,” Dr. Benavides told me. “To protect them, you understand. Because one could never know what was going to happen in one of those strikes: stone-throwing, destructive impulses, confrontations with the police. Still, nothing ever happened to the museum. The students threw stones as if they were deranged, but they never touched a brick of the museum. They took care of it, they loved it. I saw it, Vásquez, I remember. Well anyway, this is one of the things my father brought home every once in a while. At that time he had a lab at the back of the house, behind the kitchen, and in that lab another museum of things that interested him gradually began to accumulate. Well, that’s where he kept the things he brought home from the university while the strikes were going on. For example, this X-ray, which was very important to him. More than once I saw him looking at it against the light in the courtyard, trying to find who knows what, and I felt what you feel when you watch a musician reading a score. It’s one of the clearest memories I have of his life: my father standing at the brightest hour of the day beside a window, trying to see through the image to a hidden truth.”

  Luis Ángel Benavides had died in 1987. “And one fine day,” Dr. Benavides told me, “one of my brothers shows up and tells me there’s an insurance policy. He tells me we have to collect on it, that we can’t let it go to waste, that we have to move quickly, that we might lose it . . . To collect on the policy, I can’t remember why, we had to take an inventory of the museum. And by then, my father’s museum had a large number of pieces: fifteen hundred, two thousand. Who could deal with all that? It was a Herculean task, but also a mere administrative formality, and neither my brothers nor I had time to spend on it. So we got in touch with a lifelong student of my father’s, a woman who worked at the Department of Administrative Security. She agreed to help us and began to compile the inventory, and was working on it when the bomb exploded.”

  The bomb at the DAS building. I was sixteen years old (in my last year of high school) when the drug traffickers Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha conspired to park a bus loaded with five hundred kilos of dynamite beside the building where the Department of Administrative Security operated. Their objective was not, in a strict sense, the state intelligence organization, but the general who directed it and symbolized, at that precise moment, the enemy the Medellín cartel had declared war on. It was December 6, 1989; it was 7:30 a.m. when the explosion shook the neighborhood of Paloquemao. I was already sitting in my classroom, on the other side of the city, and I remember well the fear on the face of the teacher who told us the news, and I remember well classes being canceled, going home, and that feeling of surprise and displacement, of incomprehension and anxiety that I would learn to associate with those days when terrorism disrupted our routines, even those who’d had the good fortune to be somewhere else. The DAS bomb killed almost eighty people and wounded more than six hundred. Among the dead were civil servants, security agents, unsuspecting passersby on whom blocks of concrete rained down. One of those killed, then, was Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides’s student. “Was she one of those killed?” I asked. “Precisely,” answered the doctor, “she was one of those killed.

  “The inventory was never finished,” Benavides told me. “And one day I went to the museum, thinking of looking over the objects there to see if I could carry on with the inventory myself, and I found it closed. This was at the beginning of 1990, but classes hadn’t begun yet. Inside there were just two guys, both dressed in suits and ties. They weren’t professors: I could see that just from looking at them. One had a repugnant little mustache, like Rudolph Valentino’s, do you remember who Valentino was? Well, that’s what his mustache was like, the kind of mustache that has always made me unsympathetic to a man who would choose to have one like that. The guy was walking back and forth, walking like this, with his hands behind his back, and saying to his colleague that this was useless, that they were going to have to close the museum. And then I got scared, because in a second I imagined all that was in there, all the beautiful things that had been so important to my father, and I imagined them stuck in boxes and rotting away in some dank and dusty basement somewhere, more or less like piling up in the cupboard under the stairs of this country of indolent people. So it cost me no effort, nor did I feel any guilt: I grabbed a bag and stuffed three things into it, the first ones I found. And I walked slowly out of there, so I wouldn’t alarm anyone or arouse suspicion. I think I did the right thing, because later they closed the museum, as they’d suggested. They really closed it: with a brick wall. Yes, they bricked it up, and with everything inside. Imagine, Vásquez, imagine the treasures that were there.”

  “The X-ray was one of them,” I said.

  “One of the ones I rescued, yes.”

  “But not the only one.”

  Benavides stood up and turned to the wall on his left. He took in both hands the only frame that adorned it: it was a poster in homage to Julio Garavito, that ancestor of his who more than a hundred years ago had calculated the latitude of Bogotá and invented a method for measuring the lunar orbit: there was the man, with his thick mustache, beside an illustration of the moon on which you could see the Sea of Tranquility. Benavides unhooked the picture; on the back, stuck with a piece of masking tape on each of its four corners, was an airmail envelope, an old-fashioned envelope, with its red and blue lines along the edges. Benavides slipped two fingers carefully inside and extracted a shiny object. It was a key.

  “No, it’s not the only one,” said Benavides. “It’s not even the most important. The importance of these things cannot be measured, of course. But I’m sure you’ll agree with me. Let’s see what you think of this.”

  He used the key to open a cabinet in his desk, and a drawer, freed from its latch, slid forward as if springing to life. Benavides reached in and handed me a heavy glass jar with a pressure seal. It was meant to look utterly banal: it could have contained apricots in brandy, sundried tomatoes, or eggplant slices roasted with basil. Inside the jar, an object impossible to identify—not eggplants, tomatoes, or apricots, obviously—seemed to float in the translucent liquid. Once I’d accepted that it was the fragment of a spinal column, I understood that the shaggy bits covering it were flesh, human flesh. When an impression is so strong, only silence seems advisable: any question, one suspects, will be redundant or even an offense. (We mustn’t offend the objects of the past.) Benavides didn’t even wait for me to put into words what was rushing through my head. In the center of Gaitán’s vertebra, a black hole looked at me like the eye of a galaxy.

  “My father believed there’d been a second shooter,” said Benavides. “At least for a time.”

  He was referring to one of many conspiracy theories surrounding Gaitán’s assassination. According to this one, Juan Roa Sierra did not act alone on April 9: he was accompanied by another man, responsible for other shots and one of the lethal bullets. During the 1950s, the theory of the second shooter was gaining ground, in large part due to an incontrovertible fact: one of the bullets that killed Gaitán had not appeared in the course of the autopsy. “And of course, people’s imagination does what it does,” said Benavides. “More and more witnesses became convinced they’d seen a second assassin. Some even described him. Some even said that the missing bullet was the only truly lethal one; they decided that the missing bullet had been fired by a different gun and that therefore Roa Sierra was not even the assassin.” Since these witnesses were serious and respectable people, and since the phantoms of April 9 were still wreaking havoc among us, in 1960 an examining criminal magistrate was assigned the job of confronting the theory of the second shooter, whether to confirm it or rule it out definitively: to silence the paranoid. The judge was called Teobaldo Avendaño, and had the rare distinction of not being hated by the Liberals or the Conservatives. In this country, that was the greatest of virtues. “An
d the first thing the magistrate ordered,” said Benavides, “was the exhumation of the corpse.”

  “To look for the bullet?” I asked.

  “The thing is, the initial autopsy had been very frugal. Imagine, Vásquez, what the doctors who performed it in 1948 might have felt. Imagine what it would be like to be in front of the dead body of the great Liberal caudillo Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, hero of the people and future president of the Republic of Colombia. How could they not feel intimidated? Once the causes of death were declared, they decided not to destroy the body any further, even though they hadn’t found the other bullet. They didn’t open up his back, for example, in spite of knowing that one of the bullets had entered through it. But this happened in the early evening, just past six, and at that moment the truth was only one: a guy called Juan Roa Sierra had killed Gaitán and then the furious mob had killed him. And that was all: What did it matter how many bullets the assassin had fired? That became important only later, with the versions that arose, with the contradictions, the unanswered questions, the problems: with all the speculations that clutch at whatever they can. Conspiracy theories are like creepers, Vásquez, they grab on to whatever they can to climb up and keep growing until someone takes away what sustains them. For that they had to dig up Gaitán and open up his back and look for the missing bullet. And who did Avendaño ask to do that? Do you know who that task fell to? Well, yes: my father. Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides Carrasco.”

  “To the expert,” I said, “in Ballistics and Forensic Sciences.”

  “Exactly. They kept the date and time of the proceedings secret. Gaitán was buried beside his house, in Santa Teresita. Have you been to that neighborhood, to Gaitán’s house? Well, that’s where he’s buried. They disinterred the coffin and put it in the courtyard of the house. I don’t know where, but I imagine in that small courtyard at the back of the main floor. There was my father. How many times he told me that story, Vásquez: thirty, forty, fifty times in my life, since I was a boy. ‘Papá, tell me about when they exhumed Gaitán,’ I used to say, and off he’d go with the story. Anyway, my father waited for the casket and asked that it be opened in his presence, and he was surprised at how well preserved Gaitán’s body was. Some bodies last longer, some not so long. Twelve years after his death, Gaitán looked as though they’d embalmed him . . . But as soon as the air touched him, he began to decompose. The house filled with the smell of death. My father said the entire neighborhood filled with the smell of death. Apparently it was unbearable. Those present began to leave one by one. Pale, queasy, hiding their faces in their coat sleeves. And after a while they’d come back as if nothing had happened, fresh and healthy-looking. My father found out later that Felipe González Toledo, the only journalist present, took them to a nearby bar and had them rub aguardiente in their nostrils, so they could stand it. González Toledo knew all the tricks. That’s why he was the best chronicler the crime pages of this country ever had.”

  “And did he write about that day?”

  “Of course. The chronicle’s out there for you to look up and read, with my father’s name in black and white. The chronicle describes the moment that my father and the coroner removed the bullet. But he doesn’t tell any details, and I know them, I know they found the vertebra where the bullet was lodged, I know they extracted the vertebra and reburied Gaitán. They didn’t want some madman to decide to steal the body.”

  “And the vertebra?”

  “They took it to the institute.”

  “To the Legal Medicine Institute,” I said.

  “And there they confirmed, or my father, who was the one who knew about these things, confirmed that the bullet had come from the same pistol.”

  “Juan Roa Sierra’s pistol?”

  “Yes,” said Benavides. “The same pistol as the rest of the bullets. You must know how it works, because these things are on television every night, so I’m not going to explain what the barrel bore is, or how rifling of any gun leaves a virtually unmistakable trace on a bullet. You just need to know that my father did the analyses, took the images, and concluded that they’d come out of the same gun. So there was no second shooter. At least according to that. And then, obviously, the vertebra with the bullet was not returned to Gaitán’s body. They stored it securely away. Or my father did, who used it for years during his classes at the university. This is the other image I have of my father, on the trolley bus route. He never liked driving, and to go from home to the university and the university home, he took the trolley. Did you know the Bogotá trolley buses, Vásquez? Well, imagine the scene, a regular guy, because my father was the most regular guy on earth, getting onto the trolley with his briefcase in his hand. Looking at him, nobody would ever have imagined that inside his briefcase were the bones of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Sometimes I went with him, a boy hand in hand with his father, and my father would then have a living boy in one hand and a briefcase of dead bones in the other. Bones, furthermore, for which anyone would have killed right there. And he took them out and brought them home on the trolley bus, safe and sound in his leather briefcase.”

  “And that’s how the vertebra ended up in this house.”

  “From the university to the museum, from the museum home, and from there to your hands, courtesy of yours truly.”

  “And the liquid?”

  “Formaldehyde in a solution of five percent.”

  “No, no, I’m asking if it’s the same.”

  “I change it every once in a while. So it doesn’t get cloudy, you know? So it can be seen clearly.”

  There are some of us who see clearly, I remembered. I held the jar up to the light and looked at it. Flesh, bone, formaldehyde in a solution of five percent: human remains, yes, but most of all objects from the past. I have always been sensitive to them, sensitive or even vulnerable, and I accept that in my relationship with such things there is an aspect of fascination or fetishism, and also something (impossible to deny) of an ancient superstition: I know that some part of me sees them and has always seen them as relics, and that’s why the cult in which believers profess to a splinter of wood from the cross of their Lord or a certain famous shroud where the image of a man has been imprinted by magic has never seemed incomprehensible or, much less, exotic to me. I can understand very well the devotion with which the first Christians, persecuted and murdered, began to conserve and venerate the mortal remains of their martyrs: the chains that bound them, the swords that fatally wounded them, the instruments of torture that inflicted pain on them for long hours of captivity. Those early Christians who watched their fellows die in the arena, who from a distance watched the condemned bleed to death after the attacks of beasts or lances, threw themselves on top of bodies at grave risk to their own lives to soak their rags in the still-fresh blood. That night, in Dr. Benavides’s study and with Gaitán’s vertebra before my eyes, I could not help remembering the Bogotá witnesses to the April 9 crime doing the same thing: falling to their knees on the paving stones of Carrera Séptima, in front of the Agustín Nieto building, a few steps from the streetcar tracks and therefore risking their own lives, to collect the black blood of the dead leader, the spreading pool of blood spilled by Juan Roa Sierra’s four shots. An atavistic instinct urges us to these desperate acts, I thought with Gaitán’s vertebra in my hand.

  Yes, that’s what the vertebra was: a relic. That energy I felt through the glass and the formaldehyde: what perhaps the early Christians felt, let’s say Saint Augustine, holding in his hands the remains of a martyred body: let’s say Saint Stephen. Augustine even speaks—though I no longer remember where I read this—of one of the stones that killed Stephen; this stone had also been preserved in his day, that murderous stone was also a relic. And where was the bullet that had killed Gaitán? Where was the bullet I’d just seen in the X-ray, the bullet blunted after exploding against the bones? Where was the bullet that had penetrated Gaitán’s body through his back, and that had been e
xtracted and analyzed by Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides after it had been deformed by the impact? Where was the bullet that, again according to Dr. Benavides, was no longer lodged in that vertebra? Benavides watched me looking through the jar and the formaldehyde. The lights of the room played with the dense liquid; in the glass of the jar danced brief sparkles of colors that weren’t in the vertebra, colors that came from the light broken by the prism: phantom colors. And I thought of the stone that killed Saint Stephen and the bullet that killed Gaitán. “Where is the bullet?” I finally asked.

  “Oh, yes, the bullet,” said Benavides. “Well, there’s no way of knowing.”

  “They didn’t keep it?”

  “Maybe they did, maybe someone thought of keeping it. Maybe it’s put away somewhere, gathering dust. But I don’t think my father kept it.”

  “But it would have been useful to him,” I said. “For his classes, at least.”

  “Yes, that’s true. For his classes. What can I tell you, Vásquez, I’ve thought the same thing. And yes, it is entirely logical that my father would have wanted to keep it. But I never saw it. Maybe he did keep it and even used it in his classes before I was aware of any of this. But he never brought it home as far as I know.” There was a silent pause. “Although one could fill whole books with all that I don’t know.”

  “Who else has seen these things?”

  “Since I’ve had them, you’re the first. Outside of my family, of course. My wife and children know that these things exist and they know they’re here, in my safe. For my children it’s as if they didn’t exist. For my wife, they’re a crazy pastime.”

  “And Carballo?”

  “Carballo knows they exist. More than that: he knew long before I did. My father talked to him about these things. He talked to him about the 1960 autopsy. It’s possible, though I don’t know, that Carballo had seen them in his classes. But he doesn’t know I have them.”