“Who knows.”
Then Anzola explained the reason for his visit. He pronounced the words ecchymosis and blunt and knuckle-duster. Dr. Zea listened to him politely, but didn’t seem to be granting him much consideration. He thinks I’m not worthy, Anzola said to himself. He sees me as a child, a child with a grown-up job. And then, without looking at him, the doctor said in a low voice that yes, Anzola was right.
“Explain it to me, Doctor,” said Anzola.
“It’s very simple, to tell you the truth. There is no way those injuries on his face could have been caused by the hatchets.”
“Not even by the side edge?” asked Anzola. “I don’t know what the other side is called, the part that’s not sharpened. Not even with that part of the hatchet?”
“It seems improbable to me,” said Zea. “The assassins’ hatchets weighed some eight hundred grams. Such a thing could not cause these wounds.” His finger traced the lines of the autopsy. “Look, look here. There are four lesions on the face, in a very small space of the face. Each lesion has a very small diameter in and of itself. No, my dear friend, this has a name of its own. This would be a punch if the aggressor were a super-powerful man. A monster or a giant. But there were no monsters or giants in the Plaza de Bolívar that day, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“So then there’s no other option. This is a blow from a knuckle-duster.” Anzola must have regarded him with skepticism, because then Dr. Zea added: “If you’re not convinced, go and see the coroners. Maybe they could show you the general’s bones. If you’re one of those who needs to touch everything before you can believe anything.”
“The general’s bones?”
“Well, the forensic team had to keep the cranial vault. The top piece of the skull, which has to be removed to examine the brain. In the general’s case, to examine the injury to the meninges. It was broken, of course: there was the hole made by the fatal hatchet blow. A piece of broken bone in the cranial vault. That’s where a person’s life escapes.” He remained silent for an instant. “I was there when they took it, I helped them do all that. And one of them must have kept it.”
“But is that allowed?”
“It’s practically a commandment, my dear friend. Read the autopsy: you’ll find that the fatal blow was that one. And it was just one, as far as I remember: the one that broke the skull and opened the meninges. None of the other wounds would have killed him, is that not right? Only the one that penetrated his cerebral mass, that is the only one that finally caused General Uribe’s death. And therefore, that part of the body is kept for future investigations. It’s like a witness, you see? That part, the cranial vault and its segment broken by the hatchet blow, is the witness. That’s why it must be conserved. And I think Dr. Manrique took charge of it.”
“But what do they put in the dead person’s head?” asked Anzola. “What do they fill it with?”
“My dear Anzola, please do me the favor of not asking silly questions,” said Zea. “Instead let me write you a couple of letters of recommendation. That’s what I can do to help you, which is why you’re here. I want to know as much as you do what happened that day.”
* * *
—
AND THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED. With Zea’s letters in hand, Anzola arrived one rainy morning at the office of Julio Manrique, professor of pathology at the Faculty of Medicine and coroner for the Department of Cundinamarca. The doctor had a short, pointed beard, and blue eyes that resembled those of a shy boy and immediately inspired an illusion of trust. At forty-odd years of age, Manrique was already a medical eminence in Bogotá: he had studied surgery in Paris and sensory organs in New York, researched leprosy in Great Britain and Norway, and worked in the San Juan de Dios infirmary with patients affected with ophthalmic disorders. His achievements surprised nobody, however, because Dr. Manrique was the fourth of a dynasty of illustrious physicians: his grandfather had been a doctor; his father had been a doctor; and his brother was a doctor, a sort of surgical legend in the country, a man with magical hands who had founded clinics, presided over university departments, and had time to be a parliamentarian in Bogotá and later minister plenipotentiary in France and Spain. “Do you know what happened to me that day?” he asked Anzola. “Everyone in Bogotá knows what happened to me that day. Do you know?” Anzola said no: he didn’t know.
“You don’t know?” said Manrique.
“I don’t know,” said Anzola.
The day of the autopsy, Dr. Julio Manrique told him, he had arrived at General Uribe’s house in the company of Dr. Ricardo Fajardo Vega and three assistants. One of them, a young man who was just starting out, could not contain his emotion and burst into tears. Manrique understood fundamentally—because opening up the head of a man like General Rafael Uribe Uribe is not something you do every day—but could not allow that kind of attitude and ended up evicting the young man from the room. “Come back when you’ve calmed down,” he said. And meanwhile he cut the skin, made use of the saw, separated the cranial vault, examined the cerebral mass, and together with Dr. Fajardo extracted the brain, weighed it and noted down its weight, and stopped for a moment to think, as everybody would have thought, of what had occurred in that brain during the last few years. The assistants helped to cut open the general’s abdomen and remove his viscera and examine them; they helped to break the sternum to examine the heart and lungs. And in the end, when they began to close up the body and he was preparing to reconstruct the head, the expelled young man came in and said, I beg your pardon, Dr. Manrique, but someone needs you outside. Without looking at him, with something like involuntary contempt, the doctor responded: “Well, tell them that I’m busy.” And he added a question that was more of an admonition or simply a complaint: “Or have you not noticed what it is we’re doing here?”
“It’s just that it’s urgent, Doctor,” said the youngster.
“So is this,” said the doctor. “And furthermore it’s important.”
“They’ve brought you some news,” said the youngster.
That’s how the doctor learned that his brother had died. After his diplomatic jobs, Juan Evangelista Manrique had continued to practice medicine in Paris. For two years he was a sort of great-uncle to Colombians who lived in France: attending them, consoling them, seeing them fall ill and, in a few cases, die. But then the war broke out. When Germany invaded the neutral territory of Belgium and their army headed for Paris, Juan Evangelista Manrique, and his wife and her sister, chose to pack their things and take refuge, like so many others who could afford it, in Spanish territory. He crossed the northern border and settled in San Sebastián. That was the last his brother Julio knew of him: a letter that mentioned the fall of Longwy, which he called the gateway to Paris, and then the capture of the fortifications of Liège. “They are barbarous,” his brother wrote of the German army. Now this news reached Julio: Juan Evangelista had fallen ill with bronchial pneumonia, most likely during the border crossing, and his weak heart had further complicated his fragility. His lungs had ceased to respond on the night of the thirteenth. Juan Evangelista did not know that at the moment of his death, in his distant city, someone was planning the assassination of General Uribe, whom he greatly admired. Nor could he have imagined that his brother Julio would learn of his death while, with an artisan’s skill, he sewed up the general’s head.
“The Bogotá newspapers published the information,” said Julio Manrique. “But who’s going to care about the death of a doctor on another continent, when here one of the most important men of recent decades has just been hacked to death?”
“And you in the middle of doing his autopsy,” said Anzola.
“Right in the middle,” said Manrique. He remained silent for a moment, looking in on his own recondite sadness. Then he spoke again. “So you want to see General Uribe’s remains.”
“It’s about the autopsy,” said Anzola.
“What about the autopsy?”
“The autopsy talks about a blow with a blunt object, not a sharp one,” said Anzola. “A blow the hatchets could not have caused.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, I see where you want to go with this,” said Manrique. “What I’m going to show you, my esteemed Anzola, won’t help you. But I’m going to show it to you anyway. So you won’t say later that I wasted your time.”
Dr. Manrique stood up and opened a cabinet. He took out the cranial vault and set it down on his wooden desk. The bone was smaller than Anzola had expected, and it was clean, clean as though it had never been covered by the skin and the flesh of a man. Anzola thought it looked more like a bowl for drinking chicha in the countryside than the remains of a military leader who had changed the course of history. Then he was ashamed of that thought.
On the front of the cranial vault the three initials were engraved: R. U. U.
“Is that always done?” Anzola asked.
“Always,” Dr. Manrique told him. “So they don’t get lost or mixed up. Touch it, don’t be shy.”
Anzola obeyed. He brushed a finger along the edge of the wound, where the bone broken by the hatchet blow was no longer smooth but rough, and then he touched the inside, as if visiting ruins, and he felt that you could cut something with the edge of a broken skull. “This wound was done by a hatchet,” said Manrique. “The wounds with the blunt object affected the right cheek, if I’m not mistaken, and part of the eye socket. That is, everything below this line.” With these words he lifted the cranial vault and drew in the air an imaginary border, as if there, in the space, began the rest of General Uribe’s cranium. “They were wounds that don’t leave a mark on the bones. But if they had left one, that bone’s buried. With the rest of the general, I mean.”
“They’re not here,” said Anzola.
“I’m afraid not,” said Manrique. “But if it’s any consolation, I saw them.”
“That’s not much use to me.”
“No, of course not,” said Manrique. And after a silence: “May I ask you something?”
“Go ahead, Doctor.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Anzola looked at the skull. “Because I want to know,” he said. “Because someone I respect asked me to. I don’t know, Doctor. Because of what could happen if nobody does these things. I know it’s difficult to understand.”
“It seems very simple to me,” said Manrique. “And very admirable, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
On his way out, Anzola realized he wasn’t disappointed. He left empty-handed, it’s true, but he also left with the sensation of having touched a piece of the mystery. It was a falsified sensation, of course: falsified by the contact with a dead man’s bones, falsified by the curious solemnity of the moment, falsified by the sudden and fleeting contact between that violent moment and a great moment of another violence, a distant violence, a war occurring right now thousands of kilometers away that had come to touch us. That made him stupidly emotional. He looked at his hands, rubbed his fingers that had been on the fragment of cranium, its peaceful terra-cotta landscape. But no, it was not peaceful: something violent had occurred on it. The cranial vault that had been perforated with a trepan, the piece of bone detached where, as the doctor had said, a life had slipped out. Anzola thought that few people had seen what he had seen. It was like a religious experience, yes, it was like the proximity to a relic. Like religious experiences, it was profoundly incommunicable: a void opened up between him and everyone else, he thought, just for having seen what he’d seen, for having touched what he’d touched.
He went to the Café Windsor, ordered a coffee with brandy, noticed people looking at him. It seemed as if they were talking about him and later he was able to confirm it. But he didn’t care and it surprised him that he didn’t care.
* * *
—
THE NEXT PERSON who came to speak to him—yes: now people were approaching him, telling him stories—was Mercedes Grau. The day of the crime, Señorita Grau had been waiting for a tram on the corner by La Torre de Londres, on Ninth Street. While she was waiting, an elegant man who was standing a few meters away, and seemed to be waiting for something, caught her attention. He looked familiar, though she couldn’t remember where she had seen him before. The man was wearing fine patent leather ankle boots, fancy black trousers with white stripes, and a light gray poncho. Yes, it was the same man Mercedes Grau had seen on other occasions: she recognized the mustache and the small eyes, and she noticed, by the clear tone of his skin, that the man was freshly shaven. Then she remembered: she had seen him several times in the cathedral, attending Mass, and she’d even seen him once at a cinematographic gathering at the Salón Olympia (maybe The Count of Monte Cristo, maybe The Three Musketeers, maybe one of those shorts the Di Domenico brothers had filmed in other cities: she didn’t remember for certain). She was wondering whether she ought to acknowledge him with some gesture, not to be rude, when the elegant man turned to another, clearly a tradesman or a worker, and said:
“Here comes General Uribe.”
Mercedes Grau looked in the direction the elegant man had indicated and saw that, in effect, General Rafael Uribe Uribe was coming down Ninth Street. The artisan, who until that moment occupied the corner of the San Bartolomé building, watched him walk past toward Carrera Séptima, so close that he almost had to get out of his way, and began to follow him. He moved his hands under his old poncho, said Mercedes Grau, and took short steps. The elegant man, for his part, did not move: it was as if he were nailed to the pavement of the sidewalk. The tradesman followed General Uribe, who had crossed Carrera Séptima and began to walk along the sidewalk by the Capitol, beside the stone wall; that was when Mercedes Grau noticed that farther on, at the corner of the same wall, another man appeared, also in an untidy poncho and also with the look of a tradesman. He brought a hand out from under his poncho and leaped on General Uribe, delivering two blows to the head so the general fell back against the stone wall. “Oh, he broke his neck,” she heard someone say. The man who had been following the general from the beginning moved in then and hit him again. Someone else shouted: “Police!” And at that moment the first attacker, who had fled but without hurrying toward the south, walked past her, past Mercedes Grau, and she, in terror, could only exclaim: “How they kill people in Bogotá!”
“That’s how it’s done,” the attacker replied.
Mercedes Grau did not feel able to look him in the eye, but she did manage to see his weapon—a knife, maybe; no, a small machete—shining under his black poncho. And then the attacker approached or made as if to approach the elegant man, the one in the patent leather boots, who when the attacker was closer spoke to him in a horrible voice, a voice Mercedes Grau would never forget: a calm voice that seemed to come out of a mouth that wasn’t moving: a voice that gave Mercedes Grau shivers each time she summoned it up in her head.
“How’d it go?” said the man. “Did you kill him?”
Without looking at him, or looking at him out of the corner of his eye, the attacker said:
“Yes, I killed him.”
And then he turned the corner heading west, as if to pass behind the Capitol. The man in the patent leather ankle boots, however, began to walk up Ninth Street, toward the hills. Mercedes Grau took a couple of steps into the street to keep him in view; she saw him meet another man halfway up the block, more thickset than him but well dressed, wearing a felt hat. The one in the patent leather boots did not greet him the way you greet someone you run into in the street, but the two came together as if one had been waiting for the other. And they carried on walking up the street, passing in front of the Uribe family home and under the balcony of the novitiate, while the general, lying on the sidewalk, bled to death in full view, among cries, shouts for help, and people running up the avenue.
Anzola wondered: Who was the man in the patent le
ather boots? Who could have asked Galarza if he’d killed him yet and, hearing the affirmative reply, walked away from the site of the attack? Neither the police nor the prosecutor had been interested in discovering the identity of that man. Since the day of the attack Mercedes Grau had thought she’d seen him several times, but had never been able to find out who he was. She saw him or thought she saw him from a distance in the procession following General Uribe to the cemetery; she saw him or thought she saw him in the delegation that affixed the commemoration plaque on the eastern wall of the Capitol. But on both occasions she was alone, with no one to ask, and the man disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. Had she imagined him? The imagination can do these things, Anzola knew that, and imaginations in Bogotá were feverish in those days, like frenetic, ferocious, uncontrolled animals. Whatever the case, Mercedes Grau had not imagined the man in the patent leather boots. That, at least, was a tiny certainty. That man was real, had a real voice and real ankle boots, and was the proof that Galarza and Carvajal had not acted alone: that this was something bigger, much bigger, than Salomón Correal and Prosecutor Rodríguez Forero wanted to believe. No, thought Anzola, Leovigildo Galarza and Jesús Carvajal were not solitary assassins. The crime against his mentor General Rafael Uribe Uribe, whose broken cranium he’d held in his hands and caressed with his fingers, had not been the improvised work of a couple of disgruntled unemployed tradesmen. It was something else. A third attacker had participated, who did not carry a hatchet but wore a knuckle-duster, and an observer, better dressed than the assassins and well shaven, who had advised Carvajal when their victim was approaching and who had asked Galarza about the result of their mission. Anzola thought of a plot and then he thought conspiracy and the words resonated uncomfortably in his head, like an insult from someone who loves us, and made him close his eyes.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 28