The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t know they’re here.”

  “And why haven’t you told him? I saw Carballo’s face when we started talking about Gaitán. When you mentioned my uncle. His face lit up, his eyes widened, it was as if he were a child who’d been given a present. It’s obvious that he has as much interest as you do, or even more intense, if possible. Why don’t you share this with him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Benavides. “Because I have to keep something just for myself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “For my father, Carballo was not just any student,” said Benavides. “He was his favorite student. His heir, his disciple. All professors are vulnerable to admiration, Vásquez. More than that: many teach just to feel that admiration. What Carballo felt for my father went much further: it was adulation, idolatry, something almost fanatical. Or that’s how I saw it. He was also a brilliant student, this Carballo. When I met him, when my father started bringing him home for lunch, he was at the top of his class, but my father said that the class was nothing: he was the best student he’d had in his whole career. ‘What a shame he was studying to become a lawyer,’ my father said. ‘Carlitos should have been a forensic doctor.’ He had a real weakness for him. So much so that I was sometimes jealous.”

  “Jealous of Carballo, Francisco?” I laughed. The doctor laughed, too: a crooked laugh, a grimace of both complicity and embarrassment. “Jealous of that character, begging your pardon? This is something I wouldn’t have expected of you.”

  “Why not? First of all, let me tell you that he’s much less of a weak character than you think. A brilliant guy, that’s what he is, even with his ridiculous scarves, Carballo has one of the liveliest minds I’ve ever come across. It’s a shame he never practiced his profession, because he would have been a brilliant lawyer. But I think he didn’t like the law. He liked my father’s class and he was at the top of his year, but the rest of the courses he didn’t like, it was as if he were obliged to study law. In any case, this is all beside the point. Or is it that one is supposed to stop feeling things like this as an adult? None of that, Vásquez. Jealousy and envy make the world go round. Half of all decisions are taken out of such basic emotions as envy and jealousy. Feelings of humiliation, resentment, sexual dissatisfaction, inferiority complexes: there you have the engines of history, my dear patient. Right now someone is making a decision that affects you and me, and they’re making it for reasons like these: to harm an enemy, to get revenge for an affront, to impress a woman and sleep with her. That’s how the world works.”

  “Well, yes. But none of that is comparable to this business of yours. Why were you jealous? Because your father paid more attention to Carballo than to you? But you weren’t even a student in the same class.”

  “I wasn’t even a student on the same course,” Benavides said. “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even a student in the same university: I went to Javeriana, because I never wanted to take advantage of my father’s prestige to get into the National. And besides, Carballo was several years older than me—seven or eight years, depending on who you talk to. None of that mattered: I’d come home for lunch and there he’d be: sitting in my place and talking to my father.”

  “Hang on a second, Francisco,” I interrupted. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, sometimes I’d come home for lunch and there was Carballo, sitting at the dining room table, and the table would be covered in open books, notebooks, diagrams, sketches, rolls of paper.”

  “No, no. Explain to me the age difference.”

  “What?”

  “You just said that Carballo was seven or eight years older than you,” I said. “Depending on who you talk to, you just said. I don’t understand.”

  Benavides smiled. “Yes, it’s true. I’m so used to the matter that I forget how strange it is. But it’s quite simple: if you ask Carballo when he was born, he’ll tell you 1948. If you ask the civil register, you’ll discover that’s a lie: that he was born in 1947. Guess the reason for the difference. I’ll give you one chance. Guess why Carballo says he was born in 1948.”

  “To coincide with April 9.”

  “Spot on, Vásquez. Carballo no longer has any secrets from you.” He smiled again, and then I couldn’t figure out what was behind that smile: pure sarcasm, a bit of affection, a certain blend of sarcasm and comprehension and tolerance, the tolerance one has for children or madmen? I, meanwhile, remembered that García Márquez had done something similar: for many years he maintained that he was born in 1928, when he was actually born a year earlier. The reason? He wanted his birth to coincide with the famous massacre at the banana plantation, which became one of his obsessions, and which he described or reinvented in the best chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I didn’t mention this to Benavides, in order not to interrupt his tale too much.

  “Tell me more about the dining room,” I said.

  “Yes. I would arrive and there would be Carballo, chatting with my father, with the table covered in papers about the latest case. And the whole family had to wait until my father finished explaining what he was explaining to his student. To his disciple. Envy, Vásquez, is nothing more than the conviction that someone else has the place that belongs to you. And that’s what I felt about Carballo: that he supplanted me, replaced me, robbed me of my place at the dining table. It was fine for my father to stay at the university to give all his theories about the world to his favorite student. It was fine that he told him things he would never have told me. But coming to my house and carrying on with the same things, that bothered me. My father talking to him and not to me: that bothered me. If something happened to him at the university, he told him and not me. And yes, Vásquez, yes: that bothered me. It poisoned my life. I was a grown man, as they used to say, but that poisoned my life and there was nothing to be done about it. Anyway, I was still very young then. I got married when I was twenty-four, graduated as a surgeon, and got over it. I had other things to think about . . . All this to say that no, Carballo does not know that this is here. And I’d prefer it to stay that way. I’d prefer him not to find out. I don’t know if you understand why.”

  “I understand more than you think,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did your father’s relationship with Carballo remain the same?”

  “The same as ever,” said Benavides. “Master and disciple, mentor and protégé. It was as if my father had found his heir apparent. Or as if Carballo had found his father, that could also be a way to put it.”

  “Who is Carballo’s father?”

  “I don’t know,” said Benavides. “I think he was killed in the Violencia, back when so many Liberals and Conservatives were killing each other. Carballo comes from a humble family, Vásquez, he’s the first ever to go to university. Anyway, I don’t know anything about his father. Carballo has never liked talking about that.”

  “No, of course not. Understandable, then. Understandable that he stuck to Dr. Benavides and didn’t let go. A sort of substitute father.”

  “I don’t like that expression, but I suppose so. That explains it in part. They saw each other often, spoke on the phone . . . They lent each other books, or rather, my father lent him books. They carried on repairing the country by night, identifying the exact moment Colombia had screwed up. And that’s how the last five years of my father’s life went by. Five or six, let’s say. That’s how they went.”

  “Which theories?”

  “What?”

  “You said your father gave all his theories to Carballo. What theories were they?”

  Benavides poured himself another cup of coffee, took a sip, and stepped over to his desk. He opened a deep drawer full of purple folders with typed labels, but I was too far away to read them. He took out one of the files, returned to the armchair, placed it on his lap, and began to pass his ha
nd over it, stroking it as if it were a cat. “My father didn’t have a lot of hobbies,” he said then. “He was one of those fortunate men who do what they most enjoy for a living and are only happy when they’re doing it. His work was his distraction. But if there was something similar to a hobby or a pastime in his life, it was this: reconstructing famous crimes from the point of view of forensic science. One of my grandfathers was famous in the family for assembling jigsaw puzzles of two or three thousand pieces. That was his hobby: gigantic puzzles. He did them on the dining room table in his house, and while he was doing one, the family couldn’t eat at the table. Well, these forensic analyses of murders were my father’s puzzles. He got up early on Saturdays and Sundays, very early, and started studying them as if they were his most recent cases. The murder of Jean Jaurès. Archduke Franz Ferdinand. For a while he was even working on Julius Caesar, imagine. He analyzed it for months and wrote a detailed report based, among other sources, on Shakespeare’s play. There was a time when he started turning deaths that weren’t crimes into murders: I remember, for example, the months he spent trying to prove that Bolívar hadn’t been killed by his tuberculosis, but had been poisoned by his Colombian enemies . . . This is to explain that it was all a game. A serious game, like puzzles for those who do them, but a game after all. Oh, you should have seen the way that grandfather of mine would get if someone moved a piece: there would be hell to pay.

  “And that file is one of his puzzles?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Benavides. “The puzzle of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I don’t know when he got into it, but this was one of his toys, if you allow me the frivolity, that accompanied him for his whole life. Every five or six years, he’d get out the file again, put the puzzle together again, or try to. Look at these papers, for example: they’re clippings from Colombian newspapers that refer to the Kennedy assassination. Look at the dates: February 4, 1975. This other one, from El Espacio, is from 1983. The date can be seen on one corner, but besides, it was published on the anniversary: ‘Twenty Years Since the Kennedy Assassination,’ you can clearly read. Imagine my father reading a rag like El Espacio! But everything he saw about Kennedy ended up in this file. Here are, I don’t know, twenty or thirty pieces, some more important, others less so. But all part of my father’s hobby. That’s why I keep them, that’s why they’re valuable to me. I don’t think they’d have any value for anyone else.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “That’s why I got them out. I want you to see them.” He stood up and arched his back: the movement of those who have back trouble. “Have a look at these while I go see what’s going on in the rest of the house. Would you like anything from the kitchen?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “Can I ask you a question, Francisco?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why this folder and not another? You’ve got a drawer full of file folders. Is there any reason for choosing this one to show me instead of any other one?”

  “Of course there’s a reason, Vásquez. This one has a lot to do with Carballo. And we’re here talking about Carballo, we’ve been talking about Carballo the whole time, even if you haven’t realized. To put it a better way: have a look at that. I’ll be right back to tell you more things.”

  And after saying that, he closed the door and left me alone.

  * * *

  —

  I OPENED THE FILE still sitting in the revolving desk chair. But the papers slipped out, some fell on the floor or forced me to catch others with my left hand while trying to flip through the rest with my right, so I ended up sitting right on the floor, on the carpet the color of untreated wool, to spread them out there, one beside the other. “L. H. Oswald Did Not Kill J. F. Kennedy,” the oldest of the cuttings shouted at me from the carpet. Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides had noted its date, but not its source; I thought I recognized, however, the typography of El Tiempo. The news item spoke of a film that had just been shown in Chicago that reached an irrefutable conclusion: President Kennedy had been shot at by “as many as four, possibly five persons.” The film, the newspaper article informed us, was the work of Robert Groden, “a New York photographer and optical expert”; a political activist named Dick Gregory declared that the film “will change the destiny and fate of the world.” They were both new names to me, but the rest of the article allowed me to deduce that the film in question was that of Abraham Zapruder: the famous eight-millimeter film clip shot by an amateur the day of the assassination, those twenty-seven seconds that are still the most direct witness we’ve ever had of what happened and the source of all the conspiracy theories that have been born since. Zapruder’s film clip is now part of the twentieth century’s popular consciousness (its frames live on our retinas and we identify them immediately), but at the date of the news item, it wasn’t yet: it was still more or less secret, or it was known by just a few, and that’s why the reporter didn’t even give the name by which we now know it. The way the article is written, it was even possible that the writer attributed the authorship of the film to Mr. Groden, when the truth was that Groden—photographer, optical expert—had only been responsible for enlarging it, examining it, and denouncing in strong words what he saw in it: that is, the one responsible for arriving at the hair-raising conclusions that were going to change the destiny and fate of the world.

  “The film,” I read, “shows the moment in which the bullet reaches President Kennedy’s head. According to Groden, the force of the projectile threw Kennedy back and to the left, which indicates it was shot from in front of and not behind the president, as had been thought up till now.” It was fascinating: in the world of the article, the world of February 4, 1975, those revelations were still revelations. Now they are a commonplace: we all know that the movements of Kennedy’s head flagrantly contradict the official version, and are the principal stone in the shoe of those who still maintain that Oswald acted alone. The article continued: “Two men are also seen in the film, according to Groden, who are firing at Kennedy. One from behind a pedestal, on a grassy knoll, in front of the motorcade. The other is half hidden under a low tree and also in front of the motorcade, pointing a rifle, according to Groden.” The repetition of those three words, according to Groden, was like a window through which you could see the attitude of the journalist: cautious, fearful, careful to underline (in the name of the newspaper, perhaps) that those subversive revelations belonged exclusively to the protagonist of the news. How much that word, according, had changed in the thirty years since: how it had filled with new meanings, how it had cast aside vacillations and assumed certainty. It’s always difficult, I thought, the exercise of reading a document from another time with the eyes of those who read it in the moment of its appearance. There are those who never manage it, I thought; and that’s why they’ll never communicate with the past: they will remain forever deaf to the whispers, the secrets it tells us, to the comprehension of its mysterious mechanisms.

  Another of the cuttings had six stills from the Zapruder film. The newspaper had laid out the illustration like a strip of film, and Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides had numbered the blank spaces, although I wasn’t sure what the numeration corresponded to. The doctor hadn’t bothered to identify the cutting, so it wasn’t possible to know where it came from or when it had been published, but I imagined it was quite a bit later than the item about Robert Groden, for several years had to have passed since that exhibition of Zapruder’s film in Chicago before any media outlet in the world would have the right to reproduce its content. Those photograms. That film. There, sitting on the floor of Benavides’s study, I thought: I would never get accustomed to them. I thought: They’ll never stop being extraordinary. What heap of coincidences were necessary for a man with a good camera to find himself in the perfect spot and manage to film from there one of the defining events of our time? In our day of tablets and smartphones everybody now has a camera in their hand all the time, and there is no scandal or public event, as innocuous
as can be, able to escape those public witnesses who see all, those ubiquitous digital gossips who film everything and make everything immediately available on the Web, solicitous but unscrupulous, indignant but indiscreet. However, in November 1963 it still seemed strange, or fortuitous, that an unexpected moment of life should be filmed by anonymous men with private equipment. And that’s what Zapruder was: an anonymous man, a man in the crowd, by nature but also by his own volition. A man who had no reason to be where he was at midday on November 22, with a movie camera in his hand.

  Zapruder could very easily not have been there. If his Ukrainian family had not emigrated in 1920, expelled by the violence of the civil war, if he’d died in the Russian Revolution or chosen a different country in which to seek exile, Zapruder would not have been there. If he hadn’t learned to cut patterns for clothing in Manhattan shops, Zapruder would not have been hired by Nardis, a Dallas sportswear factory, and he wouldn’t have been there. If he hadn’t liked cameras and hadn’t bought the latest model Bell & Howell the previous year, he wouldn’t have filmed what he filmed. We now know that the film very nearly did not exist. We know that Mr. Zapruder had planned to film the presidential motorcade from the beginning, but when he saw that it was raining that morning, he left his camera at home and went to work without it; we know that it was his assistant who pointed out the cleared sky and suggested he go home for his camera, to not miss that important event. And it was an important event—it was—but Mr. Zapruder could very easily have refused, or not bothered, or not had time, or not wanted to leave his workplace, or had other errands to run . . . Why did he do it? Why did he rush home from work to pick up his Bell & Howell?

  I imagine Zapruder as a shy, bald man in his fifties, with large black-framed glasses and a slight Russian accent, who just wanted to work quietly in his sportswear shop and feel like an American. One might think that in those days, after the installation of the missiles in Cuba and the confrontation with Khrushchev, neither his origins nor his accent would be feeling too comfortable. Was his admiration for President Kennedy a way of being in the middle of what surrounded him, a display of loyalty to the United States in those days of the Cold War? When he followed his assistant’s advice and returned home for his camera, was he demonstrating that Kennedy’s visit was also important to him, that he too felt committedly democratic, that he too was participating in the patriotic celebration of the presidential visit? How big a part did his deep, old immigrant’s insecurities play—even if he’d been in the United States for four decades—in the fact that he decided to go down to Dealey Plaza, bring out his Model 414 PD Bell & Howell, and start filming? Ah, but that could also have happened another way: for we know that Mr. Zapruder initially thought to film from the window of his office, and it was only at the last minute when he decided to look for a better angle and went down to Elm Street; once there, thinking of the route the motorcade would cover, he realized the ideal vantage point would be from the top of a concrete abutment at the north end of the street, near the viaduct, above a small hill covered in well-kept grass. He went there, climbed up on the abutment with the help of his secretary, Marilyn Sitzman, and asked her to keep hold of his raincoat to neutralize the vertigo he’d suffered since he was young. When the presidential motorcade appeared from Houston Street, Zapruder forgot his vertigo, forgot the hand clutching the back of his coat, forgot everything except his Bell & Howell camera, and began to film the 27 seconds, the 486 frames that registered forever, for the only time in the history of humanity, the moment when several bullets destroyed the head of a leader of a nation. “Like a firecracker,” he would later say. “His head exploded like a firecracker.”