The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  The Liberals accused him of treason. On the walls of Bogotá posters defaming him began to appear. An artisan called Bernardino Tovar was heard to say that the Conservatives owed their triumph to Uribe. “The general’s days are numbered,” he said. Someone called Julio Machado was heard to say that the general had turned against his own. “The tradesmen are going to assassinate him,” he said. After the new president took power, two anonymous messages arrived at Uribe’s house. One of them spoke of Concha’s election and of the “just indignation this has produced on the part of the workers of this city,” and gave him this warning: “We believe it prudent to make you aware that we will release someone’s hand to unburden you of your heart.” The second anonymous message was less poetic and more peremptory:

  Rafael Uribe Uribe: We warn you that if you do not explain in a satisfactory manner your part in the naming of the Concha cabinet, that is, without deflecting the belief that you’ve miserably sacrificed the Liberal Party, your remaining days will be very few.

  Underneath the threatening text, in a single line inclined to the right, came the signature in bombastic capital letters: TRADESMEN. Later the rumor spread that on that Thursday morning, just before leaving to walk to his session in Congress, the general had been arguing with his family about the advisability of taking a bodyguard with him. But he did not: he went out alone, looking at the ground, not noticing that two men were following him—two tradesmen—armed with hatchets and determined to bring about his death.

  According to Jesús Carvajal’s later confession, the decision had been made the night before. The assassins had met, by chance, drinking chicha in the Puerto Colombia, and from there they left together to go to Puente Arrubla, another bar they frequented. They played cards, drank, and smoked, and then, when a small band of tiple players and guitarists arrived, they danced (in the words of Carvajal) “men without women.” It was after the dance that they were left alone. They walked down Thirteenth Street to La Alhambra chicha bar. They were talking about how difficult it was to find work these days, since the Ministry of Labor employed only members of the so-called Block, the faction of the Liberal Party that followed Uribe. The general, they decided, was directly responsible for the unemployment and hunger of the workers who weren’t affiliated with his faction or who hadn’t voted according to his suggestions in the last election. They accused him of caring about workers only in times of war and forgetting about them in peacetime: of treating people like cannon fodder. “Instead of starving to death in this land,” said Carvajal or maybe Galarza, “we must punish the cause.” And so, to determine the form and strategy of the punishment, they arranged to meet in Galarza’s workshop, on Ninth Street, the next morning at eight.

  Galarza’s carpentry workshop was a small but well-located place, right in downtown Bogotá, a block and a half down from the Santa Clara Church. It had just two rooms, one for the tools and another to sleep in, and another carpenter, a wood carver, and two apprentices, one of whom was nine years old, worked there under Galarza’s orders. Later a carbine with a broken butt was found there, along with two military berets, eleven cartridges for a revolver, and a knife and its sheath, and nobody could satisfactorily explain what five carpenters might need that small arsenal for. Galarza had learned his trade from his father, a violent man with a drinking problem. He was called Pío Galarza, and in 1881 had been sentenced to ten months in prison for the premeditated shooting death of Marcelino Leiva, another carpenter. Leovigildo was not even a year old yet and he was already the son of a murderer. At the age of nineteen he was recruited by the government troops to fight, with the Villamizar Battalion, in the War of a Thousand Days; he emerged victorious and also benefited from the war, as he got work as an army carpenter when it was over. It was at this time that he met Carvajal. He hired him in his workshop; ten years later, when he decided to become independent, he proposed that they should share the lease for the place on Ninth Street. The partnership did not last long (they separated over accounting discrepancies), and they didn’t see each other again until running into each other on the evening of Wednesday, October 14, at the Puerto Colombia.

  That Thursday dawned cloudy and cold. Carvajal arrived at the workshop at eight on the dot, but Galarza wasn’t there. He went to look for him at his mistress’s place. María Arrubla was a tired little woman who’d been washing his clothes and feeding him for more than two years. He found him drinking milk soup to get over his hangover, greeted him with an affectionate insult—How’s it going, knucklehead?—and then, when he saw María, suggested they go to the shop next door for a quick aguardiente. On the way back to the carpentry shop, they reaffirmed their plan to punish the man they held responsible for their misfortune and decided to use hatchets to carry out the punishment, since they each had one of their own. Galarza took his down from the rack, noticed that it had a broken handle, and began to repair it with wood glue while Carvajal went home to get his. They sharpened them, drilled holes in the handle, and attached straps, and one of the two, Galarza or Carvajal, Carvajal or Galarza, said:

  “This is ready for chopping down eucalyptus trees.”

  Then, realizing they didn’t even have enough money for another drink, they headed over to La Comercial, a pawnshop, with a nickel-plated ratchet brace that might get them a good loan. They asked for a hundred pesos, and were given fifty. Carvajal signed the receipt with Galarza’s name. From there they went to drink a shot of aguardiente, one more in another bar, and returning to the workshop they found that María Arrubla had sent Galarza a tray of food. They polished it off between the two of them, sharing the portions of rice and boiled potatoes, sharing the fragrant coriander broth, and sharing the cutlery, and at half past eleven they went to look for the general.

  What was Uribe Uribe doing at that moment, while his murderers were spying on his front door? It would be ascertained later that he spent a few minutes in his study, going over the documents he needed to take to the senate session. Had he looked out the window? Had his gaze swept over the two poncho-clad figures lying in wait for him like hunters at the edge of a forest? As for Galarza and Carvajal, what would they have seen at that moment? Who would have seen General Uribe first? Who would have given the other the heads-up? The assassins had gone into the shop at the corner and, supposing the general was having lunch in his house, decided they had time for a couple of beers; just after one, they walked a few meters in the direction of Carrera Séptima, and stopped when they reached the gateway to the novitiate to get a better view of the door from there. But they didn’t see him leave; they didn’t see the instant the door opened. When they saw Uribe Uribe walking down the street, he was already passing right in front of them. “There goes my man,” said Galarza, or maybe it was Carvajal.

  They followed him. Carvajal was walking just behind the general, four or five meters away on the sidewalk, and Galarza down the middle of the road, facing straight ahead so as not to arouse suspicion. They were still like that when the general turned north on Séptima and crossed over to the western sidewalk, the one on the Capitol side. The assassins were still concerned with keeping the same formation, and one has to wonder what would have happened if Uribe Uribe had turned around—thinking he heard a noise, for example—and surprised the man who was following him so closely, who might not have been able to keep walking that closely without giving himself away somehow. But that did not happen: Uribe Uribe didn’t turn around. He continued along the sidewalk in front of the atrium of the Capitol. Carvajal would later declare that at that moment he had intended to signal to Galarza that they should desist with the attack. “I said to myself: If he turns and looks at me, I’ll motion to him that we should turn back,” he explained. But Galarza didn’t turn around, didn’t look at him, didn’t feel his eyes on him: if he had, would General Uribe’s life have been spared? A suspender came loose from one of Carvajal’s socks, and he knelt down for a minute to fix it (an observer would later describe his dark, hairless skin). Ri
ght after that the attack began.

  It was Carvajal who stepped down onto the road, quickened his pace, and, at the moment of overtaking the general, did something to catch his attention. Some say he whistled and others that he called him by his title. According to the version that initially prevailed, he burst out with a complaint: “You’re the one who screwed us up,” he said. At that instant, when the general stopped to respond to the shout or answer the accusation or perhaps just surprised, Galarza approached from behind and delivered the first blow to the head, with enough force that Uribe fell to his knees. The first screams rang out (some calling for the police, others just horrified), a cart stopped on the tramway tracks, and then the witnesses, already aware of what was happening, already aware of being witnesses, saw Carvajal approach the fallen man—“as if to look at his face,” one of them said—raise his small hand, and strike more than once, with such force that the sound of the hatchet crashing against the skull was perfectly audible, the delicate noise of bones breaking. “Now they can kill me,” Carvajal was heard to say. “I’ve done my duty to that son of a bitch.”

  “Murderers! Murderers! They killed General Uribe!” The shouts began to ring out from corner to corner, as if fleeing the scene of the crime, like the expanding rings a stone makes when it falls into still water. Desperate, those who had seen what happened tried to find help. “Police! Police!” somebody screamed, and somebody else cried: “Officer! Officer!” This was María del Carmen Rey, a passerby who later testified to having felt actual vertigo: “Not one police officer turned up,” she would say.

  Uribe Uribe’s hair and face were covered in blood. Someone had leaned him up against the Capitol atrium, and many would later boast of having wiped away the blood with their handkerchiefs, or of being the owners of handkerchiefs that had wiped away the wounded man’s blood. Carvajal looked at him, looked at Uribe, and the witnesses looked at him looking, and in his look was contempt, but a serene contempt. Nevertheless, he appeared disoriented. At first, after dealing the blow to the general, he went north, toward the Plaza de Bolívar, but then he turned around and came back toward the victim, as if to strike him again. One of those present confronted him: “What’s going on?” Carvajal hesitated and turned to walk away again, but the expression on his face, according to the witness, was one of “defiance,” of “satisfied rage.” He did not put up any resistance when Habacuc Osorio Arias, a police officer, apprehended him and twisted his arm to take away the bloodied hatchet, and those who saw said he didn’t even seem worried about his fate.

  Galarza, meanwhile, escaped to the south and turned west on Novena, as if going around the back of the Capitol, but he was already being pursued at a certain distance by several witnesses and some army officers. Those pursuing him saw him stop to speak briefly with a worker by the name of Andrés Santos (he asked him if he had a job and Santos said no; Santos asked him if he had a job, and Galarza said no). They saw him then keep walking toward the Santa Clara Church and stop in front of the wall to read, or pretend to read, the notices posted there. Officer José Antonio Pinilla, alerted by the witnesses, caught up to him then, and right there, in front of the wall covered in papers, seized and began to search him. Galarza, according to Officer Pinilla, had in his left hand a hatchet with “blood on the handle and on the flat part of the head that can be used as a hammer,” and in his pockets, a small knife and a wallet with documents in it. While Pinilla was frisking him, a man approached Galarza and punched him in the face, breaking his nose, and Galarza would later try to use that unforeseen attack to justify the blood that was smeared on the handle of his hatchet. Why, if he had a hatchet in his hand, did he not try to defend himself? asked the prosecutor. Galarza replied with another strange sentence, the strangeness of which nobody observed.

  “Because I never use that,” he said, “because I haven’t been a murderer.”

  Meanwhile, Carvajal had already been sent to the police station, and Officer Osorio, who had detained him, was helping General Uribe to stand up. The general was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to his head as if he were afraid it would fall to the ground, and, with his gaze lost among the trails of blood running down his face, he tried to walk, but his legs would not obey. Officer Osorio and some of the witnesses lifted him onto a cart to take him back to his house, jogging alongside as if they wanted to prevent the wounded man from arriving alone at his destination or as if something important might start without them.

  At that very same moment, on the opposite side of the Plaza de Bolívar, Dr. Luis Zea—one of the country’s most reputable surgeons, a skilled taster of French wines, and a reader of poetry able to recite Victor Hugo and Whitman—was on his way to his office, and as he passed in front of the Capitol saw the crowd that had gathered on the east side of the building. For the rest of his life, Dr. Zea would tell how he heard a stranger say that General Uribe Uribe had been murdered, how he rushed to Uribe’s house, how he was praying silently that the rumors were not true, how he made his way through the bystanders and crossed the threshold and ran up the steps (tripping on the last one) and found the wounded man in the room off the front hall, lying on a cot, surrounded by family and strangers and barely aware of what was happening to him.

  They had ripped his clothes open, tearing the fine fabric that was now no more than a long scab, leaving his torso naked. The general’s head was propped up by a pile of pillows and his expression distorted by the contusions; his face, drained of blood, was pale and hardened, and contrasted with the dark red of the liquid bathing it and gave him the frightening look of a wax statue. Dr. Zea noted the presence of some colleagues he respected and calmed down as he did so; then he requested gauze, boiling water, and cotton, and he proceeded to clean the wounds and inspect the extent of the damage the way an explorer enters a jungle not knowing what dangers lurk therein. He put his hands into the curly hair, which did not stop dripping blood, to apply the first cotton compress. His fingers found a circular wound that went as far as the cranium, and he realized the blade had sliced cleanly through the soft tissue, as if cutting the flesh of a fruit. He carried on examining the head by touch, trying not to allow his nervous fingers to get caught in the locks of hair sticky with coagulated blood, and then, getting near the crown, above the right parietal bone, he found the wound that was bleeding the most: the major wound.

  Dr. Zea washed his hands with boiled water, put a layer of sterile cotton over the wound, and began to cut off the hair. Uribe shook, tried to sit up, mumbled incoherently. “But man!” he said. “What’s this? Leave me! Leave me alone!” In the middle of his struggle against nobody, he lost consciousness and fell back against the pillows. Someone thought he’d died, and a stifled cry from a corner filled the room. Dr. José María Lombana Barreneche took his pulse. “He’s still with us,” he said quietly, as if not wanting to drown out the murmur escaping the wounded man’s dry half-opened lips. Then the general came to again, shuddered again, shouted again. “Leave me alone! What is this? What is this? Leave me!” Dr. Zea prepared to explore the major wound. He found that the blade had broken the cranium horizontally, and thought the attacker, instead of attacking from the front, had taken the time to choose one of the sides, the better to injure him. He would have to trepan. But there, in the general’s rooms, there were no instruments to carry out the operation, and he had to send to the medical center for them.

  The wait was a torment. Dr. José Tomás Henao took the general’s pulse so frequently that Uribe got annoyed, but his tone of angry complaint had the content of official documents: “Honorable sir, I do not share your opinion,” Uribe said. Carlos Adolfo Urueta, the general’s son-in-law, had retired to one of the adjoining rooms to let the doctors work and to console his wife, who must have heard the attentive silence that had fallen over the house. From outside, from the street, arrived cheers of Long live Uribe, and in the patio of the house strangers paced nervously, but the second floor was quiet. So Urueta went to the room wher
e Uribe was, and on his way he noticed that the police commissioner had arrived, General Salomón Correal with his luxuriant mustache, acting as if he owned the house; he was talking to those present, trying perhaps to anticipate the reactions of a furious or frustrated crowd. Urueta was not pleased by Correal’s presence, among other reasons, because he knew General Uribe would not have liked it, but he preferred not to say anything at that moment: Correal, after all, was the authority. He unknotted his tie and went into the room. He suggested, in a tearful voice, that they give the general ice chips with brandy. The general reacted as if he’d suddenly recovered his lucidity: “Not brandy,” he said. “Water, pure water, to quench my thirst.” They brought him water in an earthenware jar. They gave him injections of saline solution. They prepared him for surgery.

  At ten past three the envoys from the medical center arrived. They set up an operating table, awkward and square like an overloaded mule, while Dr. Zea washed his hands again. The chloroformist Helí Bahamón put the general to sleep; Dr. Rafael Ucrós shaved his head around the injury with a straight razor. “Viva Rafael Uribe!” shouted the crowd from Eleventh Street, and Dr. Zea separated the soft tissues and exposed the lesion to the cranium, and the crowd answered from the Plaza de Bolívar, “Viva!” and the doctor extracted a splinter and with his fingers separated the cerebral substance, viscous and warm, and ascertained that the blade of the weapon had penetrated more than an inch into the meninges. The wound kept filling up with blood, which made the operation difficult. “But where is all the blood coming from?” someone asked. “Viva General Uribe Uribe!” they shouted from Sixth Street. “Here it is, here it is,” said Dr. Zea when he found the cut in the superior sagittal sinus. “Put some gauze on, more gauze,” said Dr. Henao, and outside they shouted: “Viva!” While the practitioners applied injections of strychnine and camphor to the tired body, the general complained in words nobody understood, let out whistles as if he were singing, or called for his wife, who on one of those occasions approached, her face and neck drenched with tears, and asked the wounded man what he wanted. The general replied with the frankness of the dying: “How should I know.” Minutes later, Dr. Putnam asked him if he felt any pain, and the general was up to a snide remark: