Benavides came back to life only when we arrived at his gate. The doorman came over to the car to check my identity; I opened the window and a cold wind invaded the car like a cloud of flies. “I’m here with Dr. Benavides,” I said in a loud voice. “Interior twenty-three.” When I pointed to him so the doorman could see him, Benavides opened his eyes: not like someone who’d been sleeping, but as if a couple of seconds of reflection had gone by.
“Well, here we are,” he said. “Thank you.”
The house was dark. Even the entrance light was off, the one you always leave on to pretend somebody’s home and deter thieves. In front of the door, Benavides put a hand on a small pane of glass and said: “This is the one they broke.” I did as he had: put my hand on the new pane of glass, which had replaced the broken one, and meanwhile Benavides was telling me: “They didn’t break the upper one, they didn’t break the lower one. They broke this one: the one at the exact level of the door latch.”
“All doors in the world have the latch at the same height,” I said.
But he didn’t hear me. “They walked in here,” he said, “as if they owned the place.” He turned to the right, toward the living room. “I thought at first that they’d seen my cabinet: the kaleidoscope, et cetera. And then they’d gone upstairs to see what else there was. But not anymore.”
“You don’t think so now.”
“No.”
“Now you think it was Carballo.”
“Come here, Vásquez,” said Benavides. “Come with me.”
He went up the stairs and I went up behind him, with the feeling of going over a crime scene: not a broken-into house, but the place where someone had been killed. It was cold, as if uninhabited, and everything was dark, so Benavides had to turn on lights—making the world come to life in front of us—as we went along. “What I believe is that they came first of all here, to my study,” said Benavides. “Because they already knew. They knew perfectly well what they were looking for and where to find it. And once they’d found it they had a look around, messing the place up a bit. They found some jewelry, a bit of cash, a couple of gadgets they could sell, a couple of things that looked like antiques. But that was after the main objective. That was when the main objective was already in the bag, in a manner of speaking, and it’s very possible that it might have been just a cover-up. The problem is that it’s difficult to imagine the details of the business. Imagining others is always difficult, but it’s more difficult to imagine someone we thought we knew and now it turns out we don’t know. I have tried to imagine Carballo since we left the cafeteria, but I can’t complete the picture. First I think: No, it couldn’t be him, it couldn’t have been him. Carballo, my father’s disciple. Carlos, my friend, Carlos Carballo, the friend with whom I’ve always shared an interest in things from the past . . . And then I think: The only friend with whom I share these interests. The only one who could have an interest in my inheritance from my father, in the bones of a politician assassinated sixty-six years ago. Thanks to you, the only one who could imagine where they were kept. You see, Vásquez: the only one, the only one, the only one.”
“But what for?” I asked. “Why was he going to want to steal these things now?”
“Not now. Two years ago.”
“Whatever. I told him you had these things in your possession nine years ago. If it’s true that he stole them, why did he wait seven years?”
Benavides sat down in his black chair. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “But I don’t have to find a thief’s reasons. I only have to consider the facts and make a logical deduction. Who else, Vásquez? Who else would have wanted to take it?”
“Someone who didn’t know what it was,” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Someone who saw a locked drawer and took everything inside it. Probably thinking, also logically, that nobody locks a drawer unless it has something valuable in it. This is logical, Francisco. Not thinking that a lifelong friend is going to decide to break windows and sneak into other people’s houses from one day to the next. Look, Carballo and I never hit it off. And it’s true that he’s a pathological liar and an impostor and even a forger. But from there to thinking he’s a thief is a big leap.”
“You don’t know him the way I do,” said Benavides. “You don’t know what he’s capable of. I do, because I’ve lived with him for many years now. With him and his obsessions. We all have obsessions, Vásquez, big or small. But I’ve never known anyone like Carballo, someone who organizes his entire life around a single idea. Carlos is divorced, did you know that?”
“No, he never told me. Nor was there ever any reason for him to tell me about his private life.”
“Well, he is. He married a woman from Cali toward the end of the 1970s. Really nice, with one of those smiles that cheer up anyone’s day. And she was also a woman with both feet on the ground. Carlos eventually left her. Do you know why? Because she didn’t understand April 9.”
“What part of it?”
“She didn’t understand that Gaitán could have been killed by more than one person. That he could have been killed by someone other than Roa Sierra. She made fun of that. She said to Carballo: ‘Tell me, my love, how many fingers fit on the trigger of a pistol?’ Carballo couldn’t stand it. He packed up his things one day and left. He spent a few weeks sleeping on my father’s sofa.”
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, Francisco.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t think so.”
I crouched down beside the violated desk drawer. I saw its broken lock, the wood splintered along the edge of the drawer, and thought of the screwdriver and hammer that would have produced this effect. Dust had accumulated inside, as if it had been left open for too many days, and an earwig was walking around in one corner. “What is a fanatic, Vásquez?” said Benavides. “A fanatic is a person who’s only good for one thing in this life, who discovers what that thing is and devotes all his time to it, down to the last second. That thing interests him for some special reason. Because he can do something with it, because it helps him to get money, or power, or a woman, or several women, or to feel better with himself, to feed his ego, to earn his path to heaven, to change the world. Of course, changing the world feeds an ego, brings money and power and women. People also do what they do for that, even the fanatic. Sometimes the fanatic does what he does for much more mysterious reasons, reasons that do not fall under any of the categories we’ve invented. With time these reasons get mixed up, confused, and converted into an obsession that borders on the irrational, a feeling or a personal and inevitable mission, of having been born for something. In any case, this person is distinguishable in many ways but one of them is extremely clear: he does what he has to do. He eliminates from his life all that does not serve the cause. If it’s useful, he does it or gets it. No matter what it takes.”
“And you think Carballo is a fanatic.”
“Well, he acts like a fanatic, at least,” said Benavides. “There are many kinds of fanatics, Vásquez. There are fanatics who kill and others who don’t. There are a thousand ways to be a fanatic, a thousand different ways, stages going from a hunger strike to keep trees from being cut down to planting a bomb because the Quran says such and such a thing. I might be wrong, but I think in that progression of stages someone who breaks into a friend’s house and steals certain things that will be useful to him fits the bill. Or someone who feels, due to some twisted mechanism, that these things belong to him, that they belong more to him than to his friend, that they should be his property and that they’re not because of life’s unfairness. Is it impossible that things happened that way? Carballo finds out by accident that Gaitán’s vertebra is here in my house, the vertebra that belonged to my father since the autopsy of 1960. He flies into a rage: those things were his maestro’s, his mentor’s, and they would be better in the hands of th
e beloved disciple than the prodigal son. What mistake, what grave mistake had his maestro committed in leaving these things in the hands of his son, who does not understand them or appreciate them as much as he, the disciple, does. For the son, they are a simple historical curiosity, a collector’s pleasure, a pastime, or a fetish in the best of cases. For the disciple, on the other hand, they are a mission. Yes, that’s it: they are part of a mission, they are things that serve a more elevated goal. And nobody else realizes. Everybody else is an amateur.”
“God gives bread to the toothless.”
“Exactly.”
“And the mission is the book?”
“I can’t think of another one,” said Benavides. “Yes, Vásquez, the book. That book that he wanted you to write. Or rather: the information or the story that book was going to bring to light. His theory of the conspiracy that killed Gaitán. That obsession he’s been turning over his whole life, like my father before him. With the difference that for my father it was a game. A serious game, but a game after all.” The same words he’d used nine years earlier. I don’t have a good memory, not for names or faces or messages, but I do remember words, their order and rhythm and secret music. And these were the same words Benavides had pronounced the night he showed me Gaitán’s vertebra. “My imagination doesn’t stretch far enough to know what’s happened over these years. Carballo does not confide in me, but then he confides in no one. Nothing changes the fact that he is such a friend of the family, or the fact that he’s such a regular visitor to my house. There is a whole part of his life still in the dark for me, a secret. Something must have happened over the years: a discovery, an idea. I don’t know, I haven’t been able to form a chronology, a logical sequence. But it does seem very coincidental that the robbery should occur just after I decided to return my father’s legacies. Better yet: right after I spoke to my family about the matter. When we all went to bed that night, the decision was already irreversible: we were going to start making contacts to bring my inheritances out into the world and try to get them exhibited in a museum, which is where they should be. And right then thieves break into the house. Is it not too big a coincidence? I think so: I think Carballo found out what we were planning to do and prevented it. I don’t know how, I don’t have that much imagination. But it’s the simplest explanation. And experience and my wife have taught me that when there is a simple explanation, it’s better not to look for a complicated one.”
“But yours is super-complicated,” I said. “The simple one is the other, Francisco. Regular, everyday burglars.”
Benavides didn’t hear me, or pretended not to hear me.
“The question now is: What do we do? What do we do to recover these things? We accept, for the sake of argument, that Carballo has them in his possession. How can we confirm it? The guy hasn’t stopped coming to my house, Vásquez. His relationship with me and my family hasn’t changed since the robbery. I didn’t tell him about the robbery, of course, because I didn’t want to tell him about my inheritances. I didn’t want to confess that I’d hidden them from him for so many years. But now that I’m suspicious of him, I start thinking of every time I’ve invited him to lunch or dinner in the last couple of years. The poker face, Vásquez, the perfect performance! Not a twitch that might have given him away, it’s impressive. I don’t know how many times he sat in the dining room and talked to me about Gaitán, about Kennedy, about the coincidences he saw between the two crimes, and all exactly as he used to before the robbery. And me feeling guilty because now, after the robbery, he was never going to have the vertebra in his hands. I never wanted to show it to him, of course, but after the robbery it wasn’t that I didn’t want to: it was that I couldn’t. And I felt bad about that, as if I’d taken something away from him. Me from him! Life’s ironies, eh? There I was, listening to him talk about Gaitán, feeling bad for depriving him of a great satisfaction unbeknownst to him, and him meanwhile knowing that when he went home he could have the vertebra in his hands, see it with his own eyes, use it for his own ends that I was unable to imagine. To contribute to the dossier of his paranoia, to the body of evidence for his conspiracy theory.”
“If he has it.”
“Yes, if he has it,” said Benavides. Then he went silent for a moment. I saw him stand up and walk around the chair, and then grip the black chair-back with both hands, like a shipwrecked man clutching a tree trunk. “Look, Vásquez, pay attention, please,” he said. “What I’m about to tell you might seem like an indiscretion, but it’s not. I was thinking about it at the clinic at the same time as I was telling you other things. I was thinking about it in the car, on the way here. I’ve been thinking about it since we got home, while we’ve been talking. The thing is: my father’s things are mine and nobody else’s. But I also know they’re my country’s patrimony and I want them to go back to being so after all these years. And what I don’t want, what I definitely do not want, is for them to serve a fanatic’s speculation about a painful past. Now, then: you are the only person who can confirm whether or not Carballo has these things or not. Life put you in this strange situation, Vásquez, and there’s nothing to be done. Carballo wanted you to write a book. I suggest you go and offer yourself. Yes, just what you heard. Track him down, offer to write his fucking book, get inside his house, and find out. Nobody else is in the position you’re in. If your friend Moreno-Durán were still alive, we’d ask him. But he’s not alive. The one who’s alive is you. And Carballo would open the doors of his house to you, he’d show you his documents, his evidence, all the material he has to reveal to the world the truth about the assassination of Gaitán. Place yourself at his side, tell him all he wants to hear, lie and act as much as you need to. And find out. I know the idea seems outlandish, but it’s not: it’s perfectly sensible. So do me this favor, Vásquez: go home, think it over tonight, and call me in the morning. And do not forget for a single moment that I am asking for your help. I need your help and I am asking for it. I am in your hands, Vásquez. I am in your hands.”
V
THE MAJOR WOUND
One Sunday night I wrote to Carlos Carballo—to an address that Benavides gave me, since the one I had saved on my computer was long out of date—and told him I needed to talk to him. He answered immediately, and he did so with his customary disdain for those features of more conventional mind-sets: grammar, punctuation. Cordial regards Juan Gabriel, I read. And what do I owe the surprise to? I told him that many things had happened since our last encounter; that I had changed and my circumstances had changed; in the last few years, I explained, some curiosities that didn’t previously exist had manifested themselves (that’s what I said: “manifested themselves”), and bit by bit I had reached the conclusion that the book he had once offered me was part of my destiny (that’s what I said: “part of my destiny”). I thought this rhetoric would fulfill Carballo’s expectations; I felt like an impostor, but I also felt that this pretense was part of the mission Francisco Benavides had entrusted to me, and that the end, therefore, justified the means. Then, seeing that Carballo didn’t reply, I began to think that I’d shown my hand, and that this expert cardsharp had guessed or glimpsed my true intentions. I went to bed with that idea, thinking already of a subsidiary plan to carry out my mission without giving myself away. But at half past six in the morning my telephone rang. It was him.
“How did you get this number?” I asked.
Carballo didn’t answer me. “So glad to hear you,” he said. “Are you busy on Friday night?”
“No,” I said. It was true, but I would have canceled any engagement anyway. “We could have dinner, if you want.”
“No, not dinner,” he answered. “I’m inviting you to come on my program.”
That’s how I found out about this unpredictable man’s new incarnation. Carballo had managed to get his own radio program, a four-hour broadcast every night that went on air at midnight on which he interviewed (although that word was to
o professional for what happened in that space) one and sometimes two guests. For the last five years, Night Owls had enjoyed the presence of politicians, football players, conceptual artists, retired military officers, singers, soap opera actors, novelists, poets, poets who were also novelists, politicians who thought of themselves as poets, and singers who thought they were actors. It took me only a brief internet search to come to realize that this program I’d never heard anyone mention was for its faithful audience a sort of radio institution, valued even more for its necessarily minority and, so to speak, clandestine character. Guests received two assignments: bring their own music—ten or so songs to personalize the broadcast—and their own drinks, which could be a thermos of coffee, a flask of aguardiente or rum, or a water bottle. Apart from that, all he asked them to bring was an open mind and an appetite for conversation, for their participation took up the first two hours of Night Owls. During this time, Carballo talked with his guest and took calls from his listeners; during the following two hours, now on his own in the studio, he went on taking calls, often to comment on the guests’ contribution after their departure, and he played music and delivered monologues over the airwaves; and thus he had become in recent years company for insomniacs and solitary people, those who stayed up all night by vocation or for work and also those who got up extremely early. Now he was inviting me to be part of that; it didn’t seem too high a price to pay to be accepted back into his life.
So the next Friday, at half past eleven on a cold night, I was parking my car in front of the Todelar studios, and asking a bored doorman under a yellow light where I could find Carlos Carballo. He hesitated, looked in a ring binder; this man was apparently not part of Night Owls’ captive audience. I listened to his imprecise directions, walked up a dim stairway to the second floor and down a carpeted and deserted corridor, barely lit by the occasional neon tube and the brightness from the occupied studios. I had a small bottle of whiskey in my hand; in the pocket of my jacket, on a memory stick, were my ten favorite songs, and as I handed the small plastic cylinder to Carballo I realized that every one of them, from “Eleanor Rigby” to “Las Ciudades,” from one by Paul Simon to one by Serrat, spoke of solitude.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 21