“No,” said Hugo.
“I have,” said Mónica. “But go on.”
“Well, Carballo was convinced of that: the man who wrote a novel about something that official history denies was the only person authorized to write his book. Why? Because his book tells something that official history denies.”
“But what is it?” said Mónica. “What does his book reveal?”
“That’s what I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. But it’s something to do with Gaitán and April 9. I met Carballo in September, at a friend’s house, and talked to him for quite a while, so I can imagine where things are heading. It’s simply a conspiracy theory, one more of the thousands already out there.”
“A conspiracy theory,” said Mónica. “How interesting.”
“And how original,” said Hugo. “As if every madman in this country didn’t have one.”
“No, no,” said Mónica. “I meant it. You haven’t read the novel.”
She stood up and we watched her disappear down the darkened corridor that led to the bedrooms and R.H.’s office. On Hugo’s face a mocking smirk had now appeared, or was it the same mocking smirk his face usually displayed: his short eyebrows raised above his nose, as if outlining a roof, and on his mouth, beneath the sparse mustache, an amused and mischievous smile, sly and melancholy at once. In moments like that, for Hugo the whole world seemed to transform into a Charlie Chaplin film: The Gold Rush, say, or City Lights.
When she came back, Mónica was carrying a red notebook. No, it wasn’t a notebook: when she sat down and set it on her lap I realized it was a manuscript bound at a stationer’s, with black rings and red cardboard covers. “It’s the Orson Welles novel,” she told us. She started leafing through the manuscript, looking for something precise, the whereabouts of which she remembered imprecisely, and from my chair I could see the printed pages, numbered by hand in black ink and with corrections in red ink, sometimes a phrase crossed out or something written in the margin, sometimes encircling whole paragraphs and murdering them with two strokes in a merciless cross incapable of pity. One page caught my attention and I asked Mónica if I could read it. There, R.H. had eliminated some lines that made me feel sorry for them: sorry for their condemnation to the hell of words that will never be read. I asked permission to take a photo with my phone.
“You writers are crazy,” she said, but didn’t object.
The lines were these:
If our times have taught us anything—said Welles all of a sudden—it’s to be aware of all the beings we have inside of us. We are multitudes within our individuality, as many men as opinions we display or moods we experience.
Meanwhile, Mónica found what she was looking for and gave it to me to read. In the scene they’re discussing the sinking of the schooner Resolute, a famous incident during the Second World War in Colombia. I knew it quite well, having come across repeated mentions of it while researching my novel The Informers, and I remembered that it had been this attack, always attributed to a Nazi submarine, which led the Colombian government to break off diplomatic relations with Germany, confine Germans in camps, confiscate their property, and close their bank accounts. All their riches—and Germans in Colombia were generally people with money—had passed into the state’s coffers, which almost always meant into the hands of the powerful corrupt and the corrupt powerful. In the novel, one character asked another: “Do you mean that the sinking of the ships in the Caribbean was nothing more than a setup so that our country would join the Allies and, along the way, to enrich a few patriots at the expense of the Germans?”
“You see?” said Mónica.
“What?” I said.
“What?” said Hugo.
“Wait,” said Mónica.
Her ringless hands turned more pages, but this time they took less time to find what they were looking for. Again she passed me the manuscript; again she asked me to read it. “What do you think about the death of Gardel?” said the narrator of the novel (but I didn’t know who that narrator was). “Many say it was no accident, but an attack, you know what I mean, someone put a bomb on board and adios, Zorzal.” A character called Salcedito replied: “That’s a perfect idea for a thriller. Besides, nobody would think it strange for such a thing to happen in our country, which is the country of death.” In this case the references were also familiar, and the epithet, as will be seen, is not gratuitous. In June 1935, while on a tour of three Colombian cities, Carlos Gardel, the most important tango singer in history, had died in a plane crash at the Olaya Herrera Airport in Medellín. His airplane, an F-31 whose nickname, “The Tin Goose,” must have worried some people, was ready to depart two minutes before three in the afternoon, but then the pilot received the news that they were going to have to carry several film canisters in the plane. There was no room in the cargo compartment, so the crew ended up stowing the reels of film under the seats. Later it would be said that this excessive weight caused the accident. In any case, the pilot (Ernesto Samper, he was called, just like a president six decades later) saw the squared flag and began to taxi. But the F-31 didn’t manage to pick up speed. “This plane is like a Lacroze tram,” it seems Gardel joked. That was when the plane started veering to the right, off the runway, and would have crashed into an office building full of people if the pilot hadn’t managed a last-second maneuver. The F-31 swerved brusquely, avoided the office building, and crashed into another plane that was waiting its turn to take off for Manizales. The two planes burst into flames immediately: fifteen men died; Gardel was one of them. The official investigation concluded that excess weight, a strong south wind, and most of all the terrible topographic situation of the airfield had caused the accident. Among the experts who signed the official report was an engineer, Epifanio Montoya, whose granddaughter would tell me in 1994 that her grandfather had been present at Gardel’s accident, and five years later would marry me.
But I didn’t mention that frivolous coincidence to Mónica and Hugo, because they had no reason to share my interest in the oddest cameos of history, and besides, it didn’t seem pertinent. What was pertinent was remembering that in the case of Gardel’s death several conspiracy theories also circulated at the time: some spoke of a rivalry between the two big Colombian airlines; others, of a rivalry between the pilots themselves; others, finally, of a flare gun, mysteriously missing a cartridge.
“Now you see, don’t you?” asked Mónica.
“I think so,” said Hugo.
“Look, I don’t know who this Carballo is,” said Mónica. “But if he needed someone to listen to him talk about conspiracies, he’d come to the right place. R.H. was sensitive to these things. He liked to think that everything had its dark side. The sinking of the schooner in the Caribbean? A conspiracy to take Germans’ property away from them. The accident that killed Gardel? A conspiracy of one airline to take business away from the competition. What can I say? He liked this sort of thing.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“Of course not. But the novel is full of things like that. We have to accept that the guy knew what kind of tree he was barking up.”
“But the guy couldn’t have read the novel,” said Hugo.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mónica. “What I mean is that R.H. was receptive to that kind of craziness. Or understanding, or curious, however you want to put it. And it doesn’t strike me as odd that he would have sat in a café listening to crazy stories, and maybe even feigning a bit of interest, to see if he could get something useful out of him to use in a novel. Now I suppose you two are going to tell me that you novelists aren’t like that: always stealing people’s stories, always taking advantage of other people’s oddness. Anyway, as I said before: I don’t know who this guy is.”
“He told me he and R.H. were very close friends.”
“Well, that I can refute. R.H. barely left the house in the last months. Any close friend I would
have seen around here. And a new one would have caught my attention, it seems to me.”
“Me too,” I said.
“There you go.”
“But this is really strange,” Hugo said. “The guy said that R.H. agreed to write the book?”
“Not just that he agreed,” I said. “That he was happy. That it was going to be his great novel, his swan song. And that he would have finished it if the illness hadn’t beaten him. That’s why he left it to me.”
“Wait a second. What does that mean?” said Mónica.
I was pleased to have foreseen this moment. I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket, where I keep a pencil and a pen, and took out the letter that Carballo had given me after the funeral. I unfolded it and handed it to Mónica; I watched her read it—saw her small eyes, which had always seemed to me to watch the world with a certain suspicion, moving like flies over the paper—and then pass it to Hugo, who read it in turn, in silence, without comment.
“He gave you this note,” said Mónica. It wasn’t a question anymore in her voice, but an affirmation. “This Carballo.”
“Yes. He told me that R.H. had left it for me. That R.H. wanted me to write the book, now that he wasn’t going to be able to.”
“Well, it’s impressive,” said Mónica.
“What is?”
“It’s fake, this letter. But it’s very well done. That’s what’s impressive: that it’s so well done.”
“And how do you know it’s fake?” asked Hugo.
“R.H. had one signature for life and one for literature,” said Mónica. “One to sign checks or contracts, for example, and another for signing books. The signature he used for letters was the same one he used for books.” She held the paper close to her face. “And this is his signature for going through life. It is perfect, though.”
“But where could he have seen it?” I said. “That’s what I can’t figure out.”
“I can,” said Hugo. “R.H. had to sign papers at every chemotherapy session. It’s not impossible . . .”
“Impossible no, but very strange.”
“Whoever copied it is an artist, in any case,” said Mónica. “But the fact is, R.H. would never have used this signature for a letter, and much less a letter about literature to a friend.”
“What you’re saying is that the letter is false,” I said.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Are you sure?”
“Completely sure. You tell me: Have you ever seen this signature on anything R.H. has ever signed for you?”
It was true: I’d never seen it. I felt relief, but also a vague frustration, and added to the frustration a shameful admiration I was very careful not to mention. I imagined him devoting several hours to studying documents and then devotedly copying the signature, navigating with difficulty its curves and corners, learning them bit by bit, inhabiting them, it occurred to me then, as Pacho Herrera allowed himself to be inhabited by the spirit of Gaitán. Yes, I admired the intensity of the lie, or rather the intensity of the desire that had justified or created the lie, and I also admired the details of the lie, the investigation that sustained and informed it (and I wondered where he’d gotten certain details, such as La Romana restaurant and the visits to the post office box; I couldn’t come up with satisfactory answers, and I admired him more). I thought that we should invent a new word for a lie so elaborate that it transcended and exceeded mere verbal deceit, that demands a complex and articulated staging, that requires certain props and the talent to manufacture them. What was Carballo? He was not a simple forger, though he was also that. What was he? He was someone capable of forging a letter from a dead man to achieve his aims, to fulfill his obsessions in the world. “He’s someone with passion,” Benavides had told me in those or other words, but I saw, more than a passion, an unhealthy obsession, a demon tormenting a human being, because only by following a demon could someone go to the extremes Carballo had gone to. And I couldn’t not respect that.
“He’s talented, even so,” I said to Hugo as we were leaving.
“Very,” said Hugo. “One could only wish for such talents.”
That night, when I got to the apartment, I immediately noticed that something wasn’t right. The girls were sleeping in our room and the baby carriage was under the stairs as if M had just come in. She didn’t have to tell me what had happened: as soon as I saw her annoyed or maybe disappointed expression, I remembered we’d had an appointment at the clinic and was ashamed of myself for not having showed up. The reason for the appointment was an oximetry that would determine whether our daughters could finally begin to breathe on their own, without the help of supplementary oxygen; in the last little while we’d had similar tests every three or four days, and the results so far had always been disappointing, so the leaving behind of the rented tanks and the need to take them everywhere had acquired a symbolic value for us: the cannulas that encircled my daughters’ faces had turned into our last obstacle to normality. This time we hadn’t got the hoped-for result either. The disappointment was palpable in the atmosphere, on my wife’s face and in her body, but I didn’t know if it was just disappointment at the results or also at my blameworthy absence. She handed me the headed paper with the results of one of the two tests:
With cannula 1/8: HR 142. SpO2 95%
Awake without oxygen: HR 146. SpO2 86%
Asleep without oxygen: HR 149. SpO2 84%
“And the other one?” I asked.
“The same,” she said. “They are actually twins.”
“So, no then?”
“So, no,” said M. “And I would have liked to find that out together. It would have been nice if you’d been there when they gave us the news.” And then: “Where were you?”
“At R.H.’s house,” I said. “Talking to Mónica. We were deciding . . . We were seeing if what Carballo said was true.”
“Carballo? The friend of Benavides?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “Sorry. I lost track of time.”
“No, you didn’t lose track of time, you forgot about the test,” said M. “It slipped your mind.” And then: “You’re not here. You’re not in this.”
“What do you mean?” I said. Although I knew perfectly well what she meant.
“That your head is somewhere else and I don’t know where. What’s happening to us is important. You have to pay attention. We still haven’t come out the other side, there are still lots of things that could go wrong, and the girls depend on us. I need you to be with me, concentrated on this, and you seem more interested in what a paranoid madman says. And it’s true, it’s not the first time you’ve been interested in a guy like that, but this time it’s different. These girls were born in a country where people kill each other all the time. That’s the way it is. But the worst thing is that those dead people are more interesting to you than they are. Maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe I’m being unfair, I don’t know anymore. I don’t want to be unfair. But now the girls are here, I don’t know if you understand me. Don’t bring those things home. You just spent all day talking about that crazy man and thinking about horrible things. Don’t bring all that to the girls, all those things in your head and hands. Don’t stop thinking about them in order to think about that. Later there’ll be time, but don’t do that now, now there are more important things.” She began to walk toward the swinging door to the kitchen. “But if you can’t, if you don’t want to put all your attention on this, you better go back to Barcelona,” she said before disappearing. “I’ll do it on my own.”
I stayed in the living room, then went up to our room and found my daughters awake, four gray eyes wide open, trying to focus on some point in space with an expression halfway between alarmed and curious. Ninety days had passed since their birth, and only now were resemblances starting to emerge in their features, only now could I detect genetic forces
doing what they do in bones and muscles, and it was a sort of miracle to see my mouth in their mouths and M’s eyebrows in their thin brows, traces of us repeated in the two symmetrical faces that couldn’t look at me yet but soon would: they would focus their lost gazes, and their eyes would no longer be gray but will have taken on the color of mine to look at me. Some Paul Éluard lines that I’d once put in a book and whose meaning had never been clear to me came to mind, though it was clear they didn’t refer to a newborn baby:
She has the shape of my hands
She has the color of my eyes
She is swallowed up by my shadow
Like a stone against the sky
I stupidly wondered whether they’d noticed my absence, if they’d reproached me for it; I wondered if I’d failed them for the first time. I thought: He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune. I seemed now to truly understand the meaning of the words, as if days ago, when I heard them during the Mass, they’d been abstract, unconnected to me, too far removed from my awareness or experience. I am a hostage to fortune, I thought. And then I went back downstairs, sat at the desk that wasn’t mine, turned on my computer, and wrote a few sure words to Carballo.
Look, Carlos, I have thought it over carefully and arrived at a decision. This is not for me. Not only because I realize that you don’t want a writer (you want a patron for your raving, someone who will give your paranoia the false prestige of the printed word), but because I don’t think you’re telling me the truth. I don’t believe that R.H. left me anything with you. I think you’re a liar and a charlatan, forgive my frankness. I am not interested in what you’re proposing, do not wish to remain in contact with you, and all I ask of you is that you respect my decision and not try to insist.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 15