The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “And what was it you were looking for,” I asked.

  “A guy with an open mind,” Carballo told me. “A guy willing to listen. Ready not to allow himself to be guided by prejudice, ready to break out of the straitjacket or the official version.”

  “I don’t remember our having discussed straitjackets,” I said.

  “No? What a shame. But I imagine you remember talking about Orson Welles.”

  I did remember, but vaguely. However, now, as I write these memories down a decade later, I have in front of me the first issue of Piedepágina, and I can look up my conversation with Moreno-Durán, confirm its exact words, and carefully transcribe them here in this narration that’s gradually coming to resemble an evidence brief. R.H., in a black suit and a purple shirt, was talking about the novel he’d just finished. The plot had come from a short story, “First Person Singular,” that told of Orson Welles’s trip to Colombia in August of 1942: a special trip, because it never actually happened. After the success of Citizen Kane, explains R.H. in our conversation, “Welles became an internationally famous figure. The United States, the Department of State, and RKO Pictures decided to send him to Latin America to make a documentary, and thus use his presence as a way of uniting Latin America’s interest to that of the United States against the Axis.” Then the interview carries on in this way:

  J.G.: They probably also wanted to get him off their backs for a while, pressured by William Randolph Hearst, the media magnate portrayed in Citizen Kane.

  R.H.: I suspect that, deep down, Welles came here to get away from Rita Hayworth, who was pretty intense. Actually, he came to make a documentary and stayed in Brazil, uninterruptedly, for seven months. Then he went to Buenos Aires for the Argentine premiere of El Ciudadano, as it was called there. He spoke to Borges. That’s where the beautiful review Borges wrote for Sur came from. Then he went to Chile, and as a farewell he passed through Lima, and on August 12 the press agencies interviewed him one last time. They asked him: And where are you going next, Los Angeles? He said: No, tomorrow I’m traveling to Bogotá, Colombia. They asked him why and he answered: I have some great friends in Colombia, I love bullfights and Colombia is a bullfighting country. And then he came out with a whole lot of clichés about our country. The next day, August 13, on the front page of El Tiempo, the headline reads: “Orson Welles Arrives in Bogotá,” and El Espectador and El Siglo followed suit. But Orson Welles never arrived in Bogotá.

  In the published conversation the question I asked him does not appear: “Why, R.H.? Why didn’t Orson Welles come to Colombia?” Nor does the crafty expression appear, the brief second when his face goes from being that of a man who’s dying of cancer to that of a boy: “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “You’re going to have to read the whole novel.” The magazine did, however, record his following words:

  R.H.: The novel is called The Man Who Dreamed Movies in Black-and-White, and tells the story of what happened to Orson Welles in Bogotá on August 13, 14, and 15, exactly eight days after Eduardo Santos handed over power and Alfonso López Pumarejo assumed it for the second time. This has a political importance that no one remembers, which is that in a conversation with the U.S. ambassador, Laureano Gómez told him that if Alfonso López did take power, he would stage a coup d’état with his friends in the Axis. The thing is that Orson Welles arrives in Bogotá, a city converted into a nest of spies and war correspondents, and with the aggravating factor that at this moment the country was completely shaken, hurt and resentful over the sinking of several Colombian frigates in the Caribbean. In that atmosphere, Orson Welles suffers a series of impressive adventures.

  J.G.: It’s another turn of the screw in the relationship between history and the novel. The novel is becoming the great instrument of historical speculation.

  R.H.: I don’t think that the novel is trying to colonize new spaces, but that all spaces belong in the novel’s territory. There is a very curious fact: during the Rio Carnival in 1942, Orson Welles met Stefan Zweig, who told him what a wondrous country this was where he was going to live because a friend had invited him. In my novel, when Orson Welles gets to Colombia, he is invited to a gathering to be introduced to some important people, and at that gathering there is one very silent man, six and a half feet tall, whom everyone calls Viator, who speaks with a Brazilian mountain accent and with whom Welles has an immediate rapport. Viator turns out to be no more and no less than João Guimarães Rosa, who lived in Bogotá at that time. He was a secretary at the embassy and had just been consul in Hamburg, where the Nazis had put him in a concentration camp. Once liberated, upon his return he was assigned to Bogotá. The Guimarães facts are reliably true. I take advantage of all these marvels though I suspect some critic will say: This guy got carried away . . . and it turns out it’s all true. Welles and Guimarães Rosa ended up becoming friends here, in Bogotá.

  All this R.H. said in the conversation we had, and that’s what Carlos Carballo had read. But in the church, sitting in the last wooden pew, I didn’t remember these details: I didn’t remember that R.H. had talked about the Liberal presidents Santos and López, or about Laureano Gómez, the Conservative leader who admired Franco and prayed for an Axis victory, or about the Colombian frigates sunk by Nazi submarines in the Caribbean, which served as a pretext for the government to break off diplomatic relations with the Third Reich. I didn’t remember our having spoken about Stefan Zweig, whose time in Brazil has been sadly encoded in the macabre photograph of his suicide by barbiturate overdose (accompanied by his wife, Lotte, who died dressed in a kimono and nothing else), or the mention of Guimarães Rosa, who died of a heart attack in 1967 (eleven years after having described his own death, his own heart attack, in a famous novel).

  The details of the conversation had dissolved in my memory; not so, apparently, in that of Carballo, who was paraphrasing away. Outside, the downpour rattled on the roofs of empty cars and a strong wind had begun to jostle the tops of the nearby eucalyptus trees. Something moved in the depths of the church, beside the pulpit; I saw a shadow or a silhouette that was hiding; I thought someone was watching us (keeping an eye on us) from afar. Then a child dressed in black peeked out, looked at us, and disappeared again. The sound of the door banging shut reached us late, like thunder.

  “I read that conversation, and do you know what happened?” Carballo was asking me now. “Do you know what I did when I read it? It was as if the ground had shifted. Literally. I couldn’t keep working.”

  He had spent the morning in the Luis Ángel Arango Library, looking unsuccessfully for information about an author unknown to me: a certain Marco Tulio Anzola. When he found the copy of Piedepágina, he’d gone out to get some air; he had every intention of going back in to look through microfilm, but the discovery prevented him: how could he carry on scouring old newspapers, old photographs of a city that no longer existed? No, it wouldn’t have been possible: because there, in the pages of a literary magazine, something had arisen for which Carballo had been searching for a long time. “It was like an electrical charge,” he told me, “and how could I sit still at a library desk when my body wanted to shout, run around downtown, and keep shouting?”

  He immediately knew what he had to do. He began his investigations that afternoon and before the day was over he already knew that R. H. Moreno-Durán (b. Tunja, 1946), author of the trilogy Femina Suite, would soon be giving a lecture to present his latest work, the nonfiction Women of Babel. The event would be taking place at the Central University at six-thirty. Entrance was free. “It was my opportunity,” said Carballo. “I didn’t think twice.” Two days later, he grabbed his briefcase, put a few papers and the copy of the magazine in it, went to the university auditorium, bought the book at the stall by the entrance, and went to drink a fruit tea in the café next door until the lecture ended. Then he watched the people line up by a desk with a tablecloth, all with their books in hand; instead of joining the line, Carballo waited until ever
yone had left, saw Moreno-Durán say good-bye to the organizers, and leave on foot heading for Carrera Séptima. Only then did he approach him.

  “Maestro,” he said without any ado, “I’ve got the book of your dreams.”

  R.H. could have looked at him the way you look at a lunatic, but he didn’t. Then he noticed his own book, the copy of Women of Babel Carballo was carelessly carrying, and said:

  “Well, not quite the book of my dreams, but here let me sign it for you.”

  “No, no,” said Carballo. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  Carballo didn’t know how to explain the misunderstanding; he mumbled a couple of incoherent phrases, his jumbled hands moving through the air, but Moreno-Durán already had the book open to the title page. “Who is it for?”

  Carballo had to snatch it out of his grip: “No, maestro, you don’t understand. I’ve come to give you a subject, the subject of the best book you’re going to write in your life. It’s a book that nobody has done yet in Colombia. Because to make this book you need two things: information and daring. And that’s why I’ve come to propose it to you, maestro. Because only you can write this book. You and I, to be precise: I’ll supply the information and you’ll supply the daring.”

  “Ah,” sighed R.H. And then: “Well, no. Many thanks, but I’m not interested.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not,” R.H. cut him off. “But thanks.”

  He started to walk toward Carrera Séptima. Carballo walked along with him. He noticed that his briefcase was similar to R.H.’s, both of black leather, both with metallic clasps. In this detail he saw a confirmation or at least an incentive: coincidences, in Carballo’s experience, did not exist. While he made way between the pedestrians, keeping an eye on the cracks in the sidewalk and trying to keep Moreno-Durán from escaping, Carballo kept asking him to listen to his story, please, even if only to banish doubt, even if only to keep himself from wondering for the rest of his life what that marvelous book he’d been offered might have been, even if only not to die suspecting he’d let the train pass without boarding.

  “I didn’t know what the cancer might have done to him,” he told me. “I’d never seen R.H. before in my life and had nothing to compare him to. I couldn’t think: Oh, how thin he’s become. I couldn’t think: Oh, he must be very ill.”

  But after his last words, he noticed that R.H. was looking at him differently. What was it in his look? Intrigue, contempt, the uncomfortable feeling that the most private thing in the world—a terminal illness—had just been violated? R.H. kept walking. He turned north up Séptima and Carballo turned with him. But he was no longer talking. Out of weariness or resignation, he carried on walking in silence, avoiding people, trying not to step on the blankets of the street vendors. He’ll never know if it was to fill the silence, but then R.H. asked: “And why me?” It was a simple question, but it was enough to switch on a sort of momentary lucidity in Carballo. “For the same reason I’m not writing it myself,” he said. “I could fill three hundred pages, sure I could. But that would be a failure, that would be throwing all I’ve achieved into a garbage can. No, this book cannot be written by just anyone. It has to be written by the same person who wrote The Man Who Dreamed Movies in Black-and-White.”

  It was as if a hand on his chest had stopped R.H.

  Carballo thought: This is my chance.

  “Orson Welles in Bogotá,” he said. “Who would have dared tell that story? Official history doesn’t include that visit, maestro, the official version denies it ever happened. But you dared to tell it, you gathered it up. And now, thanks to you, Orson Welles will forever be among Bogotá’s visitors. He was in Brazil with Stefan Zweig. He was in Argentina with Borges. And now he was in Bogotá with Guimarães Rosa. Your novel rescues some events that would otherwise have been lost forever. If not for you, those hidden truths would never have come to light. And I have another of those hidden truths, maestro, and I want to tell it to you. It’s taken me more than ten years, no, more than twenty, thinking about how to reveal this to the world. But now I’ve discovered it: it’s with you that I have to do it. With a book of yours. The story I want to entrust to you, the silenced truth that I want to entrust to you to turn into a book, is going to turn the world upside down.”

  “Is it, now?” R.H.’s lips curled into a sneer of brutal skepticism, and Carballo felt the weight of his authority. “And what truth might that be?”

  “Give me two hours, maestro, I won’t ask any more of you,” said Carballo. “No, I don’t even need two. One will be more than enough. In one hour I’ll explain it all and show you the documents, and then you can decide if it’s worth the trouble or not.”

  They’d arrived at Twenty-sixth Street, where Carrera Séptima turns into a viaduct and pedestrians can lean over the edge to believe, magically, that the cars disappear under the soles of their shoes. A fit of vertigo shook Carballo as R.H. said: “Look, my friend, I’m in a hurry. And you haven’t convinced me of a single thing. Either explain what you’re talking about now or we’ll leave it here.” A bus sped past, so close to the curb that the sidewalk trembled and the gust of wind in its wake almost ripped out of his hand the sealed envelope Carballo had just taken from his briefcase.

  “And what’s this?” asked R.H.

  “It’s a letter. Addressed to you. I wrote it to leave for you in case we weren’t able to talk today. No, it’s not a letter, it’s a report. Just five pages, but it’s all explained here, all that I know, all that I’ve discovered in my studies of the last forty years. As soon as you read it you’re going to realize. What we have in our hands, what we can do with this information, the turn this country will take when this becomes known. Everything will change when we bring this truth to light. It’s going to change this country’s past, of course it will, but most of all it’s going to change its future. It’s going to change the way we relate to each other. Listen to what I’m telling you, maestro: after you’ve written this book of ours, life in this country will never be the same.”

  * * *

  —

  “AND HE AGREED?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t believe it either at first,” Carballo told me. “But R.H. was a believer, you know? He believed. Great writers are like that: they have intuition, they have the faith that goes with that intuition. They know how to recognize the truth when you put it in front of them. And they fight, they fight to the death to make the truth known. No, R.H. didn’t disappoint me.” He paused and said: “But death took him before he had a chance to finish the work.”

  Could what he was saying be true? Everything, everything about Carballo made me distrust him. Each of his words sounded fraudulent; however, I didn’t manage to do what I should have done: stand up and denounce his lie out loud. But was it a lie? Apart from the mystical rhetoric about believers, about the truth, about death taking a person before he’d finished the work, was Carballo lying to me? What for? Again this thought passed through my head: If all this was a lie, then Carballo was the best liar in the world. If all this was a performance, this man was the best actor. He’s a histrionic, I thought again, he’s his own character, and then it occurred to me for the first time that this man was ill. A page of The Emigrants came to mind in which Sebald talks about Korsakov’s syndrome, that disease of the memory that consists of inventing memories to replace true ones that have been lost, and I wondered if it weren’t possible that Carballo suffered from something similar. Wasn’t that more likely than the crazy story of stalking and accosting a well-known writer, giving him a letter in the middle of the street, and the clandestine agreement about a crazy book? Wasn’t it more plausible than imagining R.H., a serious and dedicated novelist, as the voluntary ghostwriter of a conspiracy theory enthusiast?

  “Oh, so he died before finishing the book,” I said. “But he did start it?”

  “Of course he started it,” said Carballo. “He thanked me eve
ry time we saw each other. ‘This is going to be my swan song,’ he told me. ‘And to think I was about to tell you to go to hell, Carlitos.’ Yes, that’s what he called me, Carlitos. He was working on the book up until the end. I only wish I’d known more about his illness. To appreciate his effort as much as he deserved.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “Sometimes at La Romana. A restaurant on Jiménez, I don’t know if you know it.”

  “Yes, I know it. Where else?”

  “Sometimes he asked me to walk with him to pick up his mail. He had a post box.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. And where else?”

  “What’s the matter, Vásquez? Are you testing me?”

  “Where else did you see him?”

  “Once he invited me to his house, to have lunch with his friends.”

  “Oh, yeah? And who was there?”

  He looked at me sadly. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “I see that now. You think I’m making it up.”

  It was like shaking a venetian blind: I managed to see, for the briefest instant, an expression of vulnerability that I’d never seen before and in any case was not an impostor’s vulnerability. I had a sort of revelation: to get rid of him once and for all, I had only to say yes. Yes, Carlos, I think you’re making the whole thing up. I think you’re lying, I think you’re deceiving me, I think you’re talking nonsense or you’re ill. But I didn’t. I was dissuaded by La Romana restaurant, by the walks to pick up the mail, details Carballo could not have known without direct and close contact with R.H.; but I was also dissuaded more than anything by curiosity, the terrible curiosity that has gotten me into so many scrapes without my ever having been able to learn my lesson, the curiosity I’ve always felt for other people’s lives in general and in particular for those of tormented people, for all that works in the secret of their solitude, everything that happens, to put it another way, behind the blinds. We all live hidden lives, but sometimes the blind is shaken and we glimpse an action or a gesture and we suspect that there’s something behind there, and we don’t ever know if what’s hidden interests us because we can’t manage to see it or because of the immense effort someone’s made to prevent us from seeing it. It doesn’t matter what secret it is (it doesn’t matter if it’s banal or if it’s defined a whole life), keeping a secret is always a difficult task, full of tactics and strategies, which demand memory and narrative arts, conviction and even a degree of good luck. And that’s why lies make people interesting: because no lie is perfect and monolithic; because if we just watch for a sustained period of time or with a stubborn and constant attention, the blinds will move and what the other person doesn’t want us to see will be briefly visible. That happened there, in the church pew, when Carlos Carballo realized I didn’t believe him. And that’s how I knew, with the same instinct wild animals have, that a word of mine at that moment would be enough to destroy him (or destroy our relationship) and get rid of him forever. And I decided not to do it. It wasn’t out of compassion, but simple curiosity. Or rather: curiosity converts the best emotions—compassion, solidarity, altruism—into instruments to achieve its twisted aims.