“Of course,” I said. “Jack Ruby killing Oswald. Everybody in the world has seen that photo, Francisco. Just like the Zapruder film.”
“I wasn’t asking if you’d seen the image,” said Benavides. “I was asking if you saw this image, this reproduction that El Tiempo published in 1983 and which is underlined by my father.” Benavides pointed to the underlined sentence, the second beneath the photo, and recited it without needing to read it: “At this moment doubts began,” he said, “about the true authorship of the Dallas assassination.”
“I saw the underlined sentence,” I said. “What about it?”
“I remember, Vásquez, I remember as if it were yesterday,” said Benavides. “I remember the day Carballo arrived at my office with the memoirs of García Márquez in his hand. This was two years ago, a little more. In January of 2003, I remember because New Year’s Eve had just passed. The first working day of the year, I arrived at my office and there, in the waiting room, sitting there like a patient, was Carballo. He jumped up when he saw me come in, accosted me. ‘Have you read it?’ he asked. ‘Have you read this? Your dad was right!’ During the following days, no, the weeks and months that followed, he became increasingly obsessed with the things he saw by looking at the two crimes together, one beside the other. He made me a list. He went to my office or to my house and listed them. First: the assassin. What did Juan Roa Sierra and Lee Harvey Oswald have in common? They were both accused of acting alone, of being lone wolves. Second: they both represented the enemy in their historic moment. Juan Roa Sierra was later accused of having Nazi sympathies. I don’t know if you remember that Roa worked at the German embassy and brought Nazi pamphlets home. Everybody soon found out about that. Oswald, of course, was a Communist. ‘That’s why they were chosen,’ Carballo told me, ‘because they were people who wouldn’t awaken solidarity of any kind. They were the public enemy of the moment: they represented it, they incarnated it. If it were now, they would have been Al Qaeda. That makes it much easier for people to swallow the story.’ Third: both assassins were in turn murdered almost immediately. ‘So they wouldn’t talk,’ Carballo told me, ‘isn’t it obvious?’
“And then he took out García Márquez’s memoirs and read the part where the elegantly dressed man manages to have a false assassin killed in order to protect the identity of the real one. He savored the phrase, Vásquez, he repeated it over and over, it was a spectacle to see him: an increasingly worrying spectacle, but a spectacle. In time he began to refer to that phrase at the same time as the one in the caption of the Jack Ruby photo. At this moment doubts began . . . Later he began to play with them, to interchange them, for example. ‘Wasn’t it true that Jack Ruby killed a false assassin in order to protect the identity of the real one? Wasn’t that true, Francisco? Wasn’t it true that the elegant man urging on the crowd in the Granada Drugstore was the moment when the doubts about the true authorship of that assassination began? The doctor knew it,’ he repeated. ‘Why else did he underline that sentence? Why was he obsessed with the second shooter in the Kennedy case, he who had looked for bullets from a second shooter in the body of Gaitán? Was he not getting close to something even if he didn’t know it? There are too many similarities, this cannot be a coincidence.’ I made fun of him: ‘What are you saying, Carlos? That Kennedy was killed by the same people who killed Gaitán?’ And he would say, no, of course not, that he wasn’t crazy . . . but there were still too many similarities. ‘There’s a method here. The people who killed Kennedy maybe learned from the ones who killed Gaitán. Weren’t there Gringos in Bogotá on April 9? Were there not CIA agents here? And the people who killed Gaitán had to have learned from someone else, didn’t they? Such a perfect conspiracy is not set up by an amateur.’ I told him to stop spouting nonsense, that these were nothing but coincidences. And he would say: ‘There’s no such thing as coincidences.’ He’d open his eyes wide when he said this: that coincidences didn’t exist. I never saw anyone open their eyes wider or raise their eyebrows higher.”
“But there was no second shooter in the case of Gaitán,” I said. “Your father was the one who carried out the autopsy.”
“I said that to him too. I reminded him that my father had done ballistic tests. That he’d confirmed what had been said from the beginning, since the investigation of 1948: all the bullets that killed Gaitán came from Roa Sierra’s pistol. But Carballo looked away or made one of his incredulous expressions. Of course, for him everything the ’48 investigation said was a lie. ‘What happened is that on April 9 we didn’t have a Zapruder,’ he’d say. ‘If we’d had a Zapruder, another cock would have crowed in this country.’ Yes, it’s difficult to talk to him. I imagine you noticed that this evening. In any case, what happened this evening corresponds to that obsession. Carballo desperately wants to know who the elegant man at the Granada Drugstore was. He wants to know who made the crowd kill Roa Sierra. Why? Because then he can compare him to Jack Ruby, I suppose, and then see if they had things in common. What he really wants is to know what happened on April 9, to reach the depths of the matter. And if you think about it, Vásquez, isn’t that what we all want?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But within reasonable limits, I would say.”
“People like Carballo we can call crazy, paranoid, unhinged, whatever you want. But these people devote their whole lives to discovering the truth about something important. They might use the wrong means. Their passion might lead them to commit excesses and convince themselves of stupid nonsense. But they’re doing something that neither you nor I could do. Yes, they might be inconvenient, might ruin get-togethers with their outbursts or their politically incorrect opinions. They might be socially clumsy, put their foot in it more than occasionally, be impertinent or even insulting. But they are doing us a service, it seems to me, because they remain vigilant, because they don’t swallow everything, even if what they imagine is preposterous. And the problem with this theory, the problem with thinking that Kennedy’s and Gaitán’s assassinations have a lot in common, is precisely that: that none of this, if you look closely, is really preposterous.”
“Nothing seems preposterous, because everything is,” I said. “It’s like talking to the Mad Hatter.”
“Well, that’s what you think. Each person can think what they like.”
“But you can’t take this seriously, Francisco.”
“As serious as it seems to me is the least of it. Don’t kid yourself, Vásquez. Dig deep. Learn to see beyond the obvious. For Carballo this is his life’s mission. It’s not just time and energy, but money too. He’s spent more money than he’s ever had on this, because he believes in his vision. Other times he’s told me: my mission is my vision. Or the other way around, I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. For him, if there is a truth in these assassinations, it’s this: we haven’t been told the truth about them. And can we say he’s wrong? No, Vásquez, everyone knows we haven’t been told the truth. Only an innocent or someone who knows nothing of history believes that Juan Roa Sierra did it without anyone’s help or instigation. At this point, only an innocent thinks that Lee Harvey Oswald fired all the expert sniper’s shots that killed Kennedy. So, what can we do with this coincidence? Leave it alone or do something about it? Yes, I realize that for you Carballo is nothing but a nutcase, an irresponsible nutcase. But ask yourself, Vásquez, look yourself in the mirror and wonder if Carballo disgusts you because he’s absurd or because he’s dangerous. Does he irritate you or does he frighten you? Ask yourself, look at yourself. Maybe I should never have introduced the two of you, I now realize, maybe I was mistaken. If that’s the case, forgive me. I have to confess something to you, Vásquez: he asked me to, as a favor. He wanted to meet you, and he asked me to introduce the two of you. He’s convinced you can tell him something, I imagine. He’s like that with April 9: if he finds a clue he hasn’t explored, he lunges after it like a bloodhound. And you, with your uncle being who he was . . . that’s what you
are, a clue. Maybe what happened this evening was also my fault, for not gauging things properly. In any case, don’t worry: I don’t think you’ll see him again. Today you met for the first time. I don’t think there’ll be a second. What happened happened, and it was a rather unfortunate accident, it was. But you can relax, Vásquez. You two don’t lead the sorts of lives whose paths are likely to cross.”
I hope he’s right, I thought as I left his house. I hope I never see that man ever again.
* * *
—
I THOUGHT about our conversation that night and I still thought about it the following day, although for different and unpredictable reasons: because nothing could have presaged the contradictory mixture of repugnance and fascination, of seduction and rejection that I was going to feel when I remembered what I’d seen and heard in Benavides’s house: remembering Carlos Carballo and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Lee Harvey Oswald and Juan Roa Sierra and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. There was not a single hour that went by after I left Benavides’s house in which I did not think of those men and their sad fate, and nor did I do a single thing to banish those images and that information from my memory but rather I flirted with them, enriching them with my own imagination, constructing stories in my mind to give them a verbal beginning. Tuesday morning I went out early to the neighborhood of Candelaria, in central Bogotá, for no other reason than to stand in the place where Gaitán fell and remember the tale that Pacho Herrera had told me one afternoon in 1991. I then repeated the walks I’d taken when I was a law student, from Quevedo’s fountain to the Palomar del Príncipe, from the benches in Parque Santander to the steps of the Primada Cathedral; in those days the walks had been disorderly and haphazard, willfully given over to chance and the whim of each day (which are never the same), but after a certain point they began to impose some sort of order on themselves, and that order, which I’ve gradually refined over successive visits to Colombia, was now a fixed routine. Drawn over the map of the neighborhood, my route was a parallelogram, the vertices of which, like in “Death and the Compass,” were points of violent events, except that in the Borges story they’re conscious artifices plotted out by a literary bandit, and mine answer more to the pitiless contingencies of history.
I tend to begin at the Café Pasaje, by drinking a coffee with a dash of brandy, and then I cross the Plaza del Rosario and walk east along Fourteenth Street, passing along the high sidewalks in front of the house where the poet José Asunción Silva shot himself in the heart in 1896; then I continue south and down Tenth Street, taking careful steps on the cobblestones that cover that street like dead turtles, and walking slowly beside the window Simón Bolívar jumped out of on that nefarious night in 1828 when a band of conspirators burst into that house brandishing swords and tried to kill him in his own bedroom; I come out onto Carrera Séptima at the Capitol, and twenty steps away from there, in 1914, in front of two marble plaques that, with a certain awkward redundancy, regret the General Rafael Uribe Uribe crime; then I walk four more blocks north, until I arrive at the site of the disappeared Agustín Nieto building, or rather the spot on the sidewalk where the slain Jorge Eliécer Gaitán fell. Sometimes (but not always) I finish a few meters farther on, where in 1931 there was a bar where the cartoonist Ricardo Rendón, whose drawings I’d admired without understanding them since I was a boy, made a sketch of a head with a bullet entering it, drank a last beer, and then shot himself in the temple for reasons no one has ever been able to confirm.
I repeated all this on that Tuesday, September 13, but this time I didn’t do it thinking of these deaths we’ve inherited, who fell in such a small area over so many years and make up part of our landscape whether we know it or not, and it shocks me that people should pass by the plaques without ever stopping to glance at them and in all probability without devoting the briefest of thoughts to them. We living are cruel.
I did this very early, as I used to when I was wrestling with my legal studies and had seven a.m. classes every morning. But this time I returned to a place I hadn’t been—hadn’t even thought of—for the last twelve years. One day near the beginning of 1993, I had gone out to walk around downtown, as I frequently did, to escape the mortal boredom of my law classes. That morning I was in search of the two-volume Último Round by Julio Cortázar, in the Siglo XXI edition that had become so hard to find; after stopping in at the Librería Lerner I decided to take a stroll around the Centro Cultural del Libro, an unusual building that seemed like an industrial storehouse: three stories of brick walls with narrow cubicles where you could find almost any secondhand book you might want. But before getting lost in its labyrinths, I remembered a bookshop embedded in a school supply shop on the other side of the street on the same block, and I thought I’d try my luck there first. I didn’t remember that the new school year had just begun that day and I was annoyed to find myself, when I got to the shop window, among a crowd of unruly children shouting their heads off among the skirts of their innumerable mothers. No: there’d be time some other day to come here. I carried on walking, turned the corner heading east, and was approaching the next corner, where I’d have to turn south to find the first entrance to the bookshop storehouse, when a huge noise I’d never heard before but recognized immediately, shook the walls. I was amazed the building hadn’t collapsed, for the explosion was so loud that many of us wondered if the bomb had gone off right there. I ran toward Avenida Jiménez with one single thought in my head: to make my way through the people running in contradictory directions, get to the university, make sure my sister was all right, and get away from the area as fast as possible. It was only later when, watching the evening news, I found out the explosion had left dozens dead and injured (as well as a huge crater in the pavement), and that several of the victims were mothers and children who’d been buying school supplies at a local stationery shop.
And now, arriving at the spot where the bomb exploded according to my fallible memory, looking for the stationery shop I’d almost gone into (and finding that it was gone, like so many things in my inconstant city), I remembered that day, the pain in my eardrums, and the revelation, which I accepted without blowing it out of proportion or romanticizing, that I could easily have been one of the dead. And I relived those difficult early months of 1993: the bomb on Séptima and Seventy-second, the one at 100th and Thirty-third, the other two that exploded downtown, one on Trece at Fifteenth and the other at Twenty-fifth and Novena, and the one that exploded at the mall in the north, on Ninety-third Street.
Now no trace remains, of course, of that bomb, or of its twenty-three dead. I was thinking not of ruins or physical traces of destruction, but of some plaque like the ones that reminded us of the famous or important individuals, public figures whose deaths had repercussions in other people’s lives. No, this had undoubtedly been one of terrorism’s successes in my country: group deaths (what a dreadful expression), collective deaths (no, that’s no better), were never remembered, didn’t seem to merit the tiniest homage on the walls of buildings, maybe because the plaque would inevitably be large (to fit twenty-three names, imagine, or triple that in the case of the DAS bomb), maybe because marble plaques are reserved by some implicit or silent tradition for those who drag others to their deaths, those whose unexpected fall can take down a whole society and often does, and that’s why we protect them—and that’s why we fear their deaths. In ancient times no one would have hesitated to give their life for their prince or their king or their queen, for all knew that their downfalls, whether due to madness or conspiracy or suicide, could well push the whole kingdom into the abyss.
That happened with Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, I thought, whose death we could maybe have averted, and I don’t think there is a single Colombian who hasn’t wondered what would have happened if we had averted it: we Colombians don’t agree on many things, but we do all think that Gaitán’s murder was the direct cause of the Bogotazo, with its three thousand casualties, as well as the opening shot of the p
olitical violence that would end eight years and three hundred thousand deaths later. If Gaitán had not been killed, how many anonymous deaths might we have been spared? What sort of country would we have today? Since memory behaves unpredictably, always doing what it wants, a phrase appeared in mine that is attributed to Napoleon: “To understand a man, you have to understand the world he lived in at age twenty.” The world at twenty, for me who was born in 1973, was this one: the one of bombs from January to April, the death of Pablo Escobar, who fell under a hail of bullets on a Medellín rooftop. But I didn’t know what that could mean about my own life.
I turned the corner and went inside the brick building, but I’d barely started looking through the stalls when my cell phone rang (there at last was the call I’d been fearing for days). With a firm voice, undoubtedly trying to transmit to me the tranquility she obviously wasn’t feeling, M told me that her water had broken. The doctors had explained that an emergency cesarean would begin in an hour. I asked if I’d be able to see her before.
“I think so,” she said. “But hurry, please.”
* * *
—
WHEN I ARRIVED I found the clinic in a state of shock. There were lines at all the entrances: lines of cars to get into the parking lot, lines of people to get through the glass doors of the building. An armed guard was looking through women’s purses and men’s briefcases and anything that looked like a bag. After I passed through that control another guard stopped me, asked me to lift my arms and started to frisk me. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Security measures,” he told me. “President Turbay just died.” But the security measures had held me up for several minutes, and walking quickly down the corridors of the clinic, avoiding unhurried people (obviously free of the rush that was overwhelming me), I thought I was going to be late, that I wouldn’t manage to see my wife before she went into surgery, that I wouldn’t be able to make her feel my company or my vigilance, and then—a head under pressure functions in strange ways, and the tension flows in the most unexpected directions—I despised Turbay with a puerile and violent resentment of which I’m now ashamed, a private and brief tantrum that soon disappeared, leaving just an uncomfortable sensation of degradation that wasn’t even justified. For despite the lines, despite the searches and frisking, I ended up arriving in time. M, lying on a cot that blocked a dimly lit corridor, answering the anesthetist’s questions while waiting for someone to arrive to take her into the operating room, was pale and her palms were sweating, but on her face was an expression of someone in control of the situation, and I could do nothing but admire her.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 10