I received his reply in a matter of minutes:
go to hell
Three little words, no punctuation: that was it. I imagined Carballo with an expression blending disappointment and disdain, an intense disdain, a disdain that was almost an insult and even a threat.
I didn’t answer.
And he didn’t write again.
* * *
—
IN JANUARY 2006, our stay in Bogotá reached its end. I landed in Barcelona—the city that had been my home for the previous seven years—prepared to forget my excessively close contact with the old violence of my country, and to concentrate on the life I had in front of me, not on what I’d left behind. I must have achieved it almost without noticing, for the encounter with Benavides and Carballo soon began to recede in my memory, and after a moment I can’t pinpoint, ceased to exist, ceased to contaminate my present with images of famous murders (a head that explodes like a firecracker and a fleshy vertebra that once contained a bullet) and with preposterous stories of conspiracies that only feed our paranoia, our general sensation that the whole world is our enemy. I devoted myself to the classes that earned me my living while trying not to disappoint my daughters, for I knew that my errors would soon be in the past for me, but would mark each of them from the first moment and forever. Everyone says that the power to mold at whim the lives of our children is terrifying, but I thought the impunity I’d enjoy if I were mistaken in doing so was even more terrifying, if I wounded or deformed them or hurt them or taught them, unintentionally, to hurt others. I found it satisfying to be able to devote myself to them, without distractions, without contaminations from the past. It was a willful and conscious effort, and the results, fruit of my forgetful stubbornness. It had been a mistake to grant my time and ear to Carballo’s obsessions, and also, why not admit it, to those of Benavides. This mistake could be corrected.
But can one really forget at will? In De Oratore, Cicero tells the story of Themistocles, an Athenian whose wisdom had no equal in his time. It was said that Themistocles had received a visit from a cultured and successful man who, after a flattering introduction, offered to teach him the science of mnemonics. Themistocles, curious, asked what could be achieved by this new science, which was only just beginning to be spoken of, and the visitor assured him with pride that mnemonics would allow him to remember everything. Disappointed, Themistocles answered the visitor that the real favor wouldn’t be in teaching him how to remember everything, but in how to forget what he wanted to forget. I can think of events of my life (seen, heard, decided in some cases) without which I would be better off, because they are not useful but instead uncomfortable, shameful, or painful, but I know that willfully forgetting them is not possible, that they’ll remain hidden in my memory. It’s possible they’ll leave me in peace for some length of time, like hibernating animals, but one random day I’ll see something or hear something or make some decision that makes them return to my head; guilty or simply disturbing memories return to our recollection at the most unexpected moments. And there is then a sort of muscular reaction—a reflex action in our body—that always accompanies those returns; there are those who duck their heads between their shoulders as we do when someone throws something at us, others bang their fists on their desks or dashboards as if this brusque gesture will frighten away the undesirable memories, and others make a revealing expression, closing their eyes, tightening their jaws and lips, showing their teeth, and if we were spying on them we could even recognize those moments. There it is, we’d think: he’s just remembered something uncomfortable, or disturbing, or guilty. No, we cannot control our forgetting, we haven’t learned how to do so in spite of the fact that our minds would work better if we could: if we could somehow manage to master the way in which the past meddles in the present.
I was successful, in any case. During the six years that followed, I didn’t think again of those crimes. It was as if I’d never visited the house of Francisco Benavides: the forgetting was a solid triumph. I wrote and taught and took what I considered necessary trips, translated sentences by Hemingway or books of conversations with Al Pacino, taught literature classes to North Americans in their twenties and tried, sometimes successfully, to interest them in Rulfo and Onetti, read Under the Volcano and The Great Gatsby feeling that they wanted to teach me valuable lessons and that I was too dim to understand them; and meanwhile I let time pass over me. Cities, like the face of a child, give us back what we show them: the Barcelona of those years welcomed and embraced me, but that was only a reflection of my private satisfaction, the strange equilibrium that family life had supplied to my days. I began to live without being aware of it, which must be one of the metaphors of happiness. My daughters learned to walk in the long corridor of our apartment on Plaza Tetuán, whose living room windows overlooked some palm trees agitated all year round by parakeets, and later, when we moved to a ground-floor apartment on Córcega Street, they already spoke with a hybrid accent that would turn them into little foreigners in either of their two homelands, and in the process their language turned into a rare mirror that reflected my feeling of strangeness or foreignness. I wondered, more seriously than ever, if I wouldn’t return to live in my city, if the years gone by since my departure (which were now getting to be quite a few) would be taking me further and further away irremediably, until they made a return impossible. A good friend summed it up with a linguistic twist that contained a profound truth:
“It’s not that we Colombians leave Colombia,” he said. “We’re just always leaving.”
But where was the limit to all this? How long was it possible to spend as an inquiline before losing the sacred right to go home? In English dictionaries the word inquiline is defined as an animal that exploits the nest or den of another species; the definition helped me begin to explain my situation without recourse to the grandiloquences that harass us, for I was not an “exile,” being an “ex-pat” bored me with its simple-mindedness, and not even by force would I have agreed to belong to a “diaspora.” But for a while I lost sleep wondering whether the condition of inquiline could be inherited, if my daughters, no matter how settled in their Barcelona lives, were inevitably condemned to be from elsewhere, to continue to belong to another species. No, maybe this wasn’t their den as it wasn’t mine, as comfortable as I felt in it, as fond as I was of its people and its bends and curves. Never had I felt so at ease as during the years of my life in Barcelona, watching my children and my friends’ children grow and reading books I’d never read and wondering how I’d gone through life without reading them. I took long nocturnal walks, sometimes after having a drink with friends or coming home with M from the Méliès cinema after seeing a Hitchcock or Welles or Howard Hawks movie. I’d return home to give my daughters a kiss on the forehead, for a moment watch them sleep under the blue glow from their night-light, check that the windows and doors were locked, and go to bed as well. There was in all that the impression of having left behind the shadow line that Conrad spoke of, that age when we become adults once and for all, we take our place in the world and begin to unearth our secrets. By thirty-three, it had been at least five years since I’d crossed that imaginary frontier, and I felt capable of confronting whatever came. And all this seemed to me mysteriously inseparable from the luck, the immense good fortune, of having been able to escape.
Yes, that was it. It was as if I’d escaped, yes, it seemed right to me to put it in those terms, because that’s what all Colombians do: our lives get used up in trying to escape or wondering why we don’t, in arriving on good terms with life elsewhere or struggling with the decision not to pursue that life. And so it happens that some of us inhabit Barcelona or Madrid, as we’ve done New York, the city with the third-largest Colombian population in the world, some of us end up in Miami or Paris or Lima or Mexico City, filling requirements as water fills the spaces it is let into. During that time I began to translate The Tunnel, an extraordinary novel by William
Gass, whose epigraph didn’t impress me then as much as it should have and most of all as much as it does now:
Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he lay dying in a foreign land, “The descent to hell is the same from every place.”
No, Colombian violence is not escapable and I should have known that. Nobody escapes, but much less the people of my generation, who were born with the drug trade and reached adulthood as the country was shipwrecked in the blood of the war Pablo Escobar declared on it. One can leave the country as I left in 1996 and believe it left behind, but that would be deceit, we’d all be deceiving ourselves. The teacher that life chose to show me this lesson, when it could have chosen so many other ways, would never cease to amaze me: a hunted hippopotamus.
It was a beast weighing a ton and a half that had spent two years on the loose after escaping from the Hacienda Nápoles, the property that had been Pablo Escobar’s headquarters and also a zoo open to the public. It was summer when I saw the photo, the dense and hot summer of 2009. One of the many guests we had during that time had forgotten a copy of Semana magazine, but several days had to go by—the magazine tumbling around like a lost soul—before I opened it mechanically in an idle moment, having taken a cold beer out of the fridge. The effect, however, was immediate. The image of the soldiers who had shot the hippopotamus, dark men in uniform who stood around the body with their weapons pointing at the sky and a rude smile of victory on their faces, caused me an impression I couldn’t have foreseen, a sort of unease that had nothing to do with the present moment, the inexplicable sensation that something was wrong. What was going on? It took me a long while of staring at the photo, of reading and rereading the account of the escape and hunt in the magazine, to comprehend it: the image of the hippopotamus surrounded by his hunters had capriciously superimposed itself over that of Pablo Escobar, pursued and shot dead on the rooftops of Medellín, his body surrounded by his own hunters, all uniformed men pointing their own weapons at the sky, all with their own victorious smiles, and one of them lifting the corpse by his shirt, as if to show the cameras and onlookers the bearded face of the man who had flooded the country with blood for a decade.
Suddenly I recalled the visit I made, in the company of a friend from school and his parents, to the Hacienda Nápoles zoo, a fabled place that held, as well as hippopotami, pink Amazonian dolphins, several pairs of giraffes, gray rhinoceroses and African elephants, zebras that gathered together to create in the observer the mirage of a herd, an army of flamingos that colonized several different lakes as their numbers swelled (drawing a long pink line beneath the gigantic palm trees), a kangaroo that knew how to kick a football, and a parrot that recited the starting eleven of the national team. The year was 1985; it must have been July, because school holidays had just begun; so I would have been twelve years old when I went through the gate into the hacienda, passing beneath the small white plane that Pablo Escobar had mounted there, above the entrance, to commemorate his first coronation, as they called a successful delivery of a shipment of drugs into the United States; a pawn crossing the lines of defense and turning into an opulent queen, upon arrival. Later I would learn that plane—HK-617 was its registration number: one of those fragments of perfectly useless information that persist in my capricious memory—was a replica of the original, which had been lost at sea with a shipment of drugs. But at that moment, passing beneath the wings with my friend and his parents, I felt a twinge of childish guilt, for I knew very well that my own parents would not have been amused by my visit to the property of the man who was by then the most notorious drug trafficker in the country: the man who, since April of the previous year, was known to be responsible, as yet unpunished, for the assassination of the minister of justice.
All these memories arrived in my head with meridian clarity. The impulse was irresistible: I reached for my notebook and began to record memories: about life in those years, about the zoo, about what my parents would have thought if they’d known I’d been there. No, it would not have amused them; and I, at twelve years of age, already had the necessary principles to understand why not: the assassination of Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla had destroyed in a single blow their idea of the country they lived in. “Things like this hadn’t happened since Gaitán,” my father said during those days, or at least he says it in my memory. They—the generation of those in their forties at that time—had grown up in a country where that didn’t happen anymore. A few months before the assassination, during a weekend get-together at the house of one of our neighbors, some grown-up stated his opinion that the minister better be more careful, because if he kept annoying them, the drug barons were going to kill him. The whole party—four couples of parents who were playing cards and drinking aguardiente wrapped in ponchos from Nobsa—burst out laughing, because it was unimaginable to all of them that it could happen, and those who remembered the Bogotazo (in their own memories or inherited memories) held on to the illusion that it would never happen again. But the illusion broke apart on April 30. Rodrigo Lara left his office that evening, and it was dark by the time the hit men caught up with him. The one with the machine gun shot in the shape of a cross, as he’d been taught at the sicario school an Israeli mercenary had set up in Sabaneta, south of Medellín. When he was killed, Lara had with him a hardback book called Dictionary of Colombian History.
The next day there was a special silence in the streets, the silence that settles on a house where someone is dying. Later, when I asked my elders about it, they all repeated the same idea: yes, it was a different city, the city had woken up unhinged. The country was also different, of course: something had broken in it, something had changed, but it was not yet possible to know that it had changed forever, we couldn’t yet know that a dark decade had begun that night, nine years, seven months, and a number of days whose effects we would try to elucidate for the rest of our lives. A dark decade, yes, a zone of shadows, the stinking pit of our history. The Colombian government had to react in some way, and it did so by hitting the drug cartels where it hurt them most, by announcing, with great media hype, that it would immediately start extraditing drug traffickers. The extradition treaty between Colombia and the United States, signed in 1979 by Jimmy Carter and Julio César Turbay, came back out onto the streets like a zombie, frightening the narcos. For there was one thing they knew very well: a Colombian judge could be bought or killed—plata o plomo, money or lead, was their famous slogan—but that was more difficult to do abroad, far from their stashes of dollars and hungry sicarios. That was when the first bomb exploded, or at least the first that I remember. It happened in front of the American embassy and killed one person. Two months later, the United States received the flights with the first extradited prisoners. Escobar and his associates, determined that the same thing would not happen to them, formed a group with its own name, the Extraditables, and their own war cry: Give us a grave in Colombia rather than a jail cell in the USA. And they proceeded, with admirable perseverance, to dig graves for their fellow citizens.
A long time later I was able to hear a recording of Escobar’s voice issuing what is almost a manifesto and leaves no room for doubt:
“We have to create real fucking chaos so they’ll beg us for peace,” he says. “If we take it to the politicians, burn down their houses and make a real bloody civil war, then they’ll have to call us to peace talks and our problems will be fixed.”
But it wasn’t just politicians, it was all of us who saw our houses burned down, who saw ourselves involved in that civil war, which wasn’t a civil war, of course, but a cowardly and merciless and devious massacre of vulnerable and innocent people.
* * *
—
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS after my visit to the zoo, there I was, remembering from Barcelona all that I’d seen in those years, spending long hours on the internet to collect all the information possible (videos of the blood-covered upholstery of Lara’s car or Galán collapsing on the wooden platfor
m), talking on the telephone with friends or family members to ask them what they remembered and also remembering other victims, as if I’d be committing an injustice by not doing so, as if someone might be watching over my shoulder ready to reproach me for not remembering their dead, and also remembering that city discombobulated by bombs, that city that woke up after every attack converted into a chicken with its head chopped off still running around in circles. And I wondered what had happened to us: to all Bogotanos, of course, but in particular to those of us who were children when it all started and who learned how to live in that difficult decade. We pretended that it was normal to crisscross our windows with masking tape, so pieces of glass, if a bomb went off, wouldn’t turn into lethal shards. We pretended it was normal to sleep in other people’s houses each time that, after a bomb exploded or a politician was murdered, a curfew was declared before we’d managed to get home.
A year and a half. For a year and a half I filled page after page with memories like those, with notes and facts, in a desperate attempt to transfigure them by way of the imagination, that illuminates everything, and through storytelling, which sees further than we do, and thus finally understand what happened during that decade: understand the public and visible events, of course, the legions of images and tales that were stored up in chronicles and histories and the memory-laden labyrinths of the internet, but also to understand the private and invisible events, which are not contained anywhere because not even the best historian, or the best journalist, can tell what goes on in someone else’s soul. A year and a half, yes. It was a year and a half I spent ceaselessly remembering those days, a year and a half remembering the dead, living with them, talking to them, listening to their laments and lamenting in turn not being able to do anything to alleviate their suffering. But most of all thinking of us, the living, who continue to try to understand what happened, who so many years later continue telling stories to explain it to one another. That’s what I did: I tried to explain it, I told a story, I wrote a book. And I swear that I thought, after finishing The Sound of Things Falling, that I had settled my debts with the violence it had fallen to me to live through. Now it seems incredible that I hadn’t understood that our violences are not only the ones we had to experience, but also the others, those that came before, because they are all linked even if the threads that connect them are not visible, because past time is contained within present time, or because the past is our inheritance without the benefit of an inventory and in the end we eventually receive it all: the sense and the excesses, the rights and the wrongs, the innocence and the crimes.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 16