“No, Carlos, I don’t think you’re making anything up,” I said. “But please understand. I’ve known R.H. for almost ten years. Or I knew him, rather. And the writer I knew does not fit at all with the guy you’re telling me about.”
“Don’t be naive, Vásquez. Do you really think you knew R.H. entirely? Do you really believe you can know anyone entirely?”
“You can know someone reasonably.”
“As if people had only one face,” said Carballo. “As if everyone weren’t more complicated than one might think.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but not to such an extent. Not so far as to take on board someone else’s idea for a book in the middle of Carrera Séptima. Not so far as to devote the last months of his life to a delirious idea.”
“What if it wasn’t delirious? And if the one who proposed it wasn’t a stranger?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You didn’t know R.H. when you proposed the book. Isn’t that what you just told me?”
“I’m not talking about R.H. anymore,” said Carballo. He stared at the floor and then at the stained-glass windows. “R.H. is no longer here. But the material is still here, my discoveries are still here, the truth is still waiting. The truth is patient. The book is still here, alive and kicking, and someone has to write it.”
I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming. Now, as I recall that long-ago scene in order to write, I feel the same surprise I felt then and I ask myself the same question: How did I not guess? How did I fail to read the signs? I remember I looked toward the door and noticed the rain was stopping, and as I did so, as if my body realized what was awaiting it, I felt less cold. Of course, I thought: of course this encounter is not a coincidence, of course Carlos Carballo knew he’d find me there, attending a friend’s funeral Mass. Or rather, even if he hadn’t been certain of finding me, he knew the probabilities were high and had decided to try his luck: and luck had been on his side.
“Oh, I see,” I said. “You want me to write it now.”
“Look, Vásquez, you’re not R.H., no offense,” he said. “I read your stories, the ones that happen in Belgium. Tell me, why waste your time with that bullshit? Who cares about those characters who go hunting in the woods and separate from their wives? With a civil war here at home, with more than twenty thousand dead every year, with an experience of terrorism that no other Latin American country has witnessed, with a history marked from the start by assassinations of our great men, and you’re writing about little divorces in the Ardennes. I don’t understand you. And your novel, that novel about the Germans, well, that’s better, of course. I can tell you there is something worthwhile there. But I also have to be honest: the general result is a failure. A worthy failure, especially for someone of your age, but a failure. The novel has too many words and not enough humility. But that’s not the serious thing. The most serious thing, what spoils the novel, is its cowardice.”
“Its cowardice.”
“Just what you heard. The novel passes over the great themes as if stepping on eggs. It mentions drug trafficking and even the murder of that football player, but does it go into them? It mentions Gaitán, but does it go into what happened to Gaitán? It mentions your uncle José María, but does it go any further? No, Vásquez, you lack commitment, brother, commitment to this country’s difficult issues.”
“Maybe I chose other difficulties,” I said.
“Foreigners’ things,” he said. “Not ours.”
“Well,” I said, laughing, or pretending to laugh. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“R.H. left you a note,” Carballo interrupted me. “I’m carrying out his wishes by giving it to you.”
He handed me a sheet of white paper. A professional obsession told me it was a letter-sized 80-gram sheet, the same that Moreno-Durán used to write his heterogeneous first drafts. (Only in his later years did he make the transition to a computer, and that’s why I needed only a glance to know it was a recent document.) Six sentences filled the space.
Dear Juan Gabriel,
A short time ago an extraordinary possibility fell into my hands. Or rather, I received it as a gift from an extraordinary man, who is presenting you with this letter. Life has not given me time to transform this gift into a book, but I think, given the circumstances, I have honored the obligation. Now it’s up to you to inherit this wonderful material and bring it into port. You have in hand something great and I have no doubt you’re a worthy recipient of these secrets.
As ever I send you an embrace and my friendship.
I read and reread the note with the profound emotion the words of the dead cause in us: we imagine their hands and their skin passing over the paper we’re now touching, and every line and every curve and every period is a trace of their passage through the world. There was my name and some words written with affection, and then I thought that I could no longer reply to this note as I would have done before and that’s how the dead begin to drift away: with everything we can no longer do with them.
I asked Carballo when he had received this letter.
“Three days ago,” he said. “When R.H. went into the clinic. He had me summoned, gave me back all the papers, and put this note on top of them. “Juan Gabriel is the person,” he told me.
“To write the book.”
“I don’t agree either. But R.H. must have his reasons. To trust you, I mean, to bequeath this to you. He must have seen something in you that escapes me.” He looked ahead, toward the crucifix, and said: “What do you say, Vásquez? Are you ready to take on the book you were born to write?”
I read the note again, looked again at the signature. “I need to think about it,” I told him.
“Oh, how ridiculous!” he exclaimed with a snort. “This bullshit way of thinking and thinking. You people think too much.”
“It’s not that easy, Carlos. Yes, you found three or four banal coincidences between two assassinations. I don’t know how strange that is, when they were in plain sight. Two assassinations of important people resemble each other. Very good. But from there to thinking they’ve really got something to do with each other is a big stretch, don’t you think? Or how many different ways are there to kill a politician?”
Carballo started. “Who told you that?”
“Dr. Benavides, who else. What’s the matter, isn’t it true? That’s your theory, isn’t it? That the Gaitán and Kennedy assassinations have too much in common?”
“Of course not,” he said with a misunderstood-artist’s pout. “That is a gross simplification of something much more complicated. Obviously my dear friend has understood nothing, has inherited nothing from his father. What a disappointment. What else did our little doctor tell you?”
“We talked about the second shooter,” I said. “In the Kennedy case, but also in the Gaitán case. We talked about your teacher, Carlos: Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides. The great Luis Ángel Benavides, yes, the ballistics expert who discovered the presence in Dallas of more than one shooter. And without anyone’s help. But who also exhumed Gaitán in 1960 and confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the missing bullet came from the same pistol. That Gaitán, unlike Kennedy, had been killed by a single person.”
“But that wasn’t confirmed.”
“Of course it was confirmed.”
“It was not confirmed.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t? Didn’t he do the autopsy? There’s the evidence, Carlos, no matter how much you want to deny it.”
“The evidence disappeared,” said Carballo, lowering his voice. “Yes, Vásquez, just as you heard. The doctor did the autopsy, extracted the vertebra that had been struck by the missing bullet, and found the bullet. But neither the vertebra nor the bullet exists anymore. They’ve disappeared. Who knows where they are, or whether they’ve been destroyed. You have to wonder why those pieces of evidence disappeared, don’t y
ou think? You have to wonder in whose interest it might be that they could no longer be consulted after a certain time. You have to wonder who realized that science was advancing and the evidence to a past crime was beginning to reveal more things. The fact is they succeeded, Vásquez, like they always do, and now we’ll never again have that evidence to examine by the light of new scientific discoveries, and who knows what it would have told us, what revelations it might still hold. Ballistics has really come a long way. Forensic sciences have made major advances. But it’s no use to us, because those with power have made the evidence disappear. And so they’re winning, Vásquez, they’re hiding the truth from us, they—”
“Oh, Carlos, shut up for a moment,” I blurted out.
“What, certainly not,” he protested. “That’s no way to—”
“Gaitán’s vertebra is at Benavides’s house,” I said.
“What?”
“Nobody has made it disappear, there’s no conspiracy. Francisco took it home when they were going to close the museum, and that’s all there is to it. He took it so it wouldn’t be lost, not to hide it from anybody. I’m sorry to spoil your theories, but someone had to tell you one day that Santa Claus was your parents.”
This time the cruelty I spoke with was deliberate, and I was very aware I was talking to someone whose father had disappeared. Was there some relationship between his father’s disappearance and Carballo’s tendency to believe in ghosts? I considered it briefly, but then I was distracted by the expression on his face: I had never seen anything like it. I saw him crumble in a second and then manage, who knows with what interior efforts, to recover his composure.
He’s wounded, I thought, he’s a wounded animal.
Watching it was painful and at the same time captivating, but most of all eloquent: for something in that fleeting struggle with himself, something in that attempt to hide his disappointment or disillusion, showed me I’d been mistaken in making that revelation. By telling Carballo about the vertebra—the clandestine vertebra, I thought—I’d betrayed Benavides’s trust, and there was no use alleging the doctor had not expressly forbidden me from telling him, since during our conversation in his study, as much by his tone as by his words, his intention to hide from Carballo the existence or survival of the vertebra and the X-ray had been obvious. Now I had betrayed that secret. I had done so on an impulse, carried away by a moment’s instinct, but these excuses didn’t even seem reasonable to me. What was going through Carballo’s head, what disappointments, what memories of conversations when Benavides had lied to him about the vertebra, to a man who’d always considered himself his brother and the spiritual heir of Dr. Luis Ángel Benavides? Would Carballo be nursing his own feelings of betrayal, different from mine but perhaps even more valid? The sky began to clear and daylight to enter the church more strongly; a strange optical illusion made it look like Carballo had gone pale. He had his gaze fixed on the crucifix behind the altar. It didn’t seem like he was going to speak again. I folded the piece of paper he’d given me in thirds, the way you fold a letter, and put it in my breast pocket. “I’ll think about it,” I said, and stood up.
“Yes,” said Carballo, without looking at me. I could suddenly hear, in the midst of his precise and convinced voice, an uncontrolled note, the imbalance of someone who gets shoved in the street. “Think it over, Vásquez. But don’t think lightly of it. I’ll tell you the same thing I told R.H.: Don’t let this opportunity slip away.”
“What opportunity?” I asked. “To make history?”
The question sounded sarcastic, but that wasn’t my intention. I asked him because I really wanted to know: to know whether that was what was within reach.
Carballo, staring at the crucifix behind the altar, didn’t answer.
* * *
—
IN THE MIDDLE of December, three weeks after the funeral, I called Mónica and asked if I could visit her. During this time, Carballo wrote me two e-mail messages (I’ll never know how he managed to get my address), but I didn’t answer either of them. Then he wrote a third message: Cordial greetings Juan Gabriel, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that this book is meant for you, don’t squander the chance, regards, CC. This one also went unanswered.
When I arrived at what had been R.H.’s apartment, I found that someone else had also had the idea of visiting Mónica. Hugo Chaparro was a guy with a brown mustache and freckles spattered across his pale skin; he’d seen all the films in the world and written about most of them, and his relationship with R.H. during the last months of his life had been very close: Hugo had accompanied him to chemotherapy, had helped him organize his papers, had gone with him to collect his mail at the Avianca building, had showed up at his house anytime R.H. needed help related to his work. The apartment was a spacious place in the northern sector of Bogotá with fine large windows through which all the sounds of the noisy city rushed in. We had lunch there, talking about R.H.’s books and what should be done with them, but also about his illness—which he’d always discussed freely, with a mixture of bravery and disdain, without portraying himself as a victim but wanting to be heard—and the same conversation continued without interruption in the small open study R.H. used for reading, in front of the dark wooden bookcase where he kept the first editions of his books, all bound, due to an old superstition, in real leather. Hugo was looking at books: he went shelf by shelf, reading spines, taking some down and putting them back, as if it were the first time he’d visited that library. Mónica was sitting in a wicker rocking chair, but without rocking, the heels of her shoes securely planted on the carpet; behind her head there was a narrow, vertical window that looked out onto an interior patio, and a cold, tired sun, which would soon be disappearing, a reticent sun of a city in the Andes shone through that window.
“Well, now,” said Mónica in her firm voice. “What was it you wanted to tell me?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s silly, but just to make sure, do you know a guy called Carlos Carballo?”
A brief silence. “No. Who is he?”
“A guy,” I said, “an acquaintance of R.H. Well, I don’t know if he was an acquaintance. At least, a guy who said he knew him. I was wondering if you’d heard of him.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Mónica.
“Are you sure?” I said. “He told me they knew each other well. He wanted R.H. to write a book.”
As soon as I said the last sentence, Hugo straightened up and turned toward us. “Oh, I know who he is,” he said. “That book guy, yeah, I know. A pain in the neck, an impertinent beast.”
“Carlos Carballo,” I said to be sure.
“Yeah, yeah, that guy,” said Hugo. “He followed us all the time, he was unbearable. We’d arrive for chemotherapy and there he’d be, as if he were R.H.’s long-lost brother. You know him too?”
I didn’t give them all the details, but enough so they’d understand. “He approached me after the funeral Mass,” I told them. “He told me he’d read my conversation in Piedepágina, and that conversation led him to R.H. Or rather, that he’d read what R.H. said about his Orson Welles novel and had thought that this was the guy he needed.”
“What for?” asked Mónica.
This time Hugo answered. “He says he knows things that nobody else knows. He says he has some research about Gaitán, apparently, about April 9. Isn’t that it? Something like that. And he followed us even into the chemotherapy ward, sat there, beside R.H., calling him maestro, saying: ‘You have to write it, no one else can write it, you have to write it.’ Toward the end it was almost scary, I swear. R.H. said he’d turned into a Hollywood producer.”
“Why?”
“Because now he had an alien and a stalker.”
Mónica laughed. It was a sad laugh.
“But R.H. didn’t agree to do it?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Hugo. “He was close to calling
the police, the guy was really troubling.”
“Well, he told me he’d agreed. That he’d even started writing the book.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Mónica. “Why did it have to be R.H.? Why did it have to be him?”
“I don’t know if I can explain it,” I said. “This guy, this Carballo, read my conversation with R.H. In the conversation R.H. talks about his Welles novel and tells me that Welles was never in Bogotá. That the newspapers of the time announced his trip, but the trip never took place. And nevertheless, R.H. tells it, he describes that trip, the three days Welles spent in Bogotá, and he tells them in minute detail. The novel describes what happened to Welles when he spent those three days in Bogotá, the people he met, the political strife of the moment, et cetera. At least, that’s what R.H. told me in that conversation. I don’t know whether it’s true, because I haven’t read the manuscript. Have either of you read it?”
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