The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

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  ANZOLA BEGAN to notice that all over the country there had been a phenomenon of prophets or visionaries, diviners or witches, who predicted the crime against the general several days in advance. In Simijaca, a hundred thirty-five kilometers from Bogotá, five witnesses said that Julio Machado had announced the assassination of General Uribe forty days before it happened. After his prophecy came true, the clairvoyant Machado met a certain Delfín Delgado: “Remember what I said?” he asked. “Do you remember?” In Tena, sixty-six kilometers from Bogotá, a certain Eugenio Galarza said he was a first cousin of General Uribe’s assassin, and had known months ahead of the criminal plans. “I didn’t want to take part because I’m from a good family,” he said. Later, when he had to reaffirm what he’d said, he admitted that he’d lied about being related to the assassin, whom he knew of only by name, and denied all the rest. No, he had not confessed his previous knowledge of the crime to anybody. The witnesses had misunderstood, probably, because he’d been drunk that day.

  The most notorious of those fortune-tellers was named Aurelio Cancino. He was a mechanic by profession; at the beginning of August 1914, he’d begun to work for the Franco-Belgian Industrial Company, and in the weeks before General Uribe’s assassination he had been part of a team of engineers and workers contracted to install an electrical plant in La Cómoda, near Suaita, in the Department of Santander: some two hundred and seventy kilometers from Bogotá. Seventeen days before the crime, his coworkers heard him say that General Uribe Uribe had at most twenty days to live. “I know it and I guarantee it,” he said. After the assassination was committed they heard him speak harshly of the general: “If it had come down to me to kill him,” it was said that Cancino said, “I would have killed him and I would have drunk his blood.” He also said he knew Galarza and Carvajal, and knew very well what association they belonged to. Cancino talked freely about it. “I am also a member, and it’s a great honor. I could have been drawn. That’s why I came out here. So I wouldn’t get drawn.” A draw? someone asked. What draw are you talking about? The association, said Cancino, had some four hundred members and the sponsorship of some very grand people, and it was these people who’d drawn the names of Galarza and Carvajal. But he could assure anyone, without fear of being mistaken, that the two assassins would say nothing about the crime. “They’re under orders not to say anything else,” were Cancino’s words, according to witnesses. The same coworkers who had heard the prophecy met with Cancino later to confirm the crime in the national press, and Cancino received them with a smile and a satisfied exclamation:

  “What did I tell you, señores!”

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  IN MARCH, Cancino arrived in Bogotá to give his version of these declarations to the second judge of the circuit court. It was a wonder of simplicity and economy: he denied it all. He didn’t remember having said those words; he remembered the get-together with his workmates, but not what they discussed. He justified his lack of memory with the argument of inebriation. Several witnesses said they’d heard his predictions and his satisfaction at seeing them fulfilled, but he denied it all and his singular voice weighed as much as the several that accused him in chorus. He said they’d misinterpreted him, that he’d expressed himself awkwardly, that at no moment had he predicted the crime against General Uribe, much less boasted about his prediction coming true. If they asked him who had said that if General Uribe were resuscitated, he would kill him again, Cancino replied: “I don’t know.” If they asked him who had claimed to be capable of killing General Uribe and drinking his blood, Cancino said: “I don’t know.” He denied knowing Galarza when he was not in front of him, and later, sitting across from him, remembered that yes, he had lived next door to him two months before the assassination, that he’d met him and his friend Carvajal in the Puerto Colombia chicha bar, that he’d often heard them talk about their activities in the association they belonged to. What association was that? he was asked. The Recreational Association, said Cancino, a large group that had been organizing picnics and outings for tradesmen for many years. They asked him if the Recreational Association also devoted itself to political activity, and he replied with an emphatic no, but adding a clarification that seemed pertinent: “I don’t understand politics.” Without anyone asking him, he added that the association, to his loyal knowledge and understanding, did not devote itself to religious activities either. But the most striking thing was that he denied ever being a member of the association. “What I said,” said Cancino, “was that Galarza and Carvajal had a carpentry shop in Bogotá, and an association that they called Recreational met there, but I never knew what for.” “They met in the assassins’ carpentry shop?” asked the judge. Cancino confirmed it and then said: “To my loyal knowledge and understanding.” The judge then called the witnesses. In front of them, Aurelio Cancino maintained his version of events: he was drunk, they’d misinterpreted him, he had never said those things. The witnesses, for their part, maintained theirs.

  It seemed the matter would stay like that, but then a superior judge summoned Cancino to return, this time to give a statement in front of Prosecutor Alejandro Rodríguez Forero. For many hours he was asked the same questions he’d been asked before; he defended the same replies. But then Cancino began to lose his composure. He said there was a conspiracy against him, that the witnesses had made an agreement to get him sent to jail. The judge pressed him, asked him again about the witnesses’ statements, pointed out the contradictions in what he had said, asked him how it was possible that five distinct individuals were able to give the same version of his words. Then what nobody expected happened: Cancino admitted having talked to his coworkers after the crime.

  “What did you tell them?” asked the judge.

  “I bet them I could say who had killed Uribe Uribe.”

  “And who did you say had killed Uribe Uribe?” asked the judge.

  “General Pedro León Acosta,” said Cancino. “He was the one who sent the assassins.”

  “And on what do you base that statement?” asked the judge.

  And Cancino replied: “Well, that’s what the Gil Blas said.”

  The Gil Blas. A sensationalist newspaper that printed irresponsible rumors and the toughest satire, and did not respect the sacred values of religion or the dignity of high-born members of society, that had published images of children run over by trams and corpses dismembered after a political dispute. A tabloid with neither dignity nor shame: Cancino hurled his reckless accusations based on reading such a rag.

  The judge and prosecutor immediately rejected them.

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  THE CABLES that arrived from Europe filled the newspapers with news of the Great War. In Bogotá society the majority prayed at Mass for the triumph of France, and people who had never heard of Reims tore at their clothes over the destruction of its cathedral, and people who didn’t know where the Ardennes were were of the opinion that the Boche had behaved like savages there. There were those who followed with admiration the advances of the German army, and others who praised Germanic civilization and said something of their temperament would do us good, see if we might finally save ourselves from the harmful influence of so many blacks and so many Indians. In the middle of May, a vague rumor became news and then a sort of legend: a Colombian had died fighting in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion. Nothing would ever have been known, beyond the curiosity that the fact awoke among newspaper readers, if the dead man had not been a favored son of the bourgeoisie of the capital city. But he was; and during a few days, while Anzola was carrying out his investigations, his death in the Battle of Artois, where the Second Regimental Combat Team of the First Foreign Regiment had the mission of taking control of the White Works, taking Hill 140 and holding it, was the favorite topic of conversation in all the cafés, and all of society’s salons and at all upper-class dining tables.


  Was that what the people of Bogotá needed to emerge for some days or weeks from the atmosphere of claustrophobia and contained paranoia that the murder of Rafael Uribe Uribe had provoked? In any case, the death of Hernando de Bengoechea (as well as the short life that preceded it) occupied people’s attention, and was told in obituaries, celebrated in poems published in magazines, expounded upon in scattered memoirs by his friends. In La Patria, Joaquín Achury spoke of the pain the death of Hernando had caused his sister Elvira, who appeared in a chronicle praising those who give their lives “not for a nation, but for an entire civilization.” In London his disappearance was noted in the magazine Hispania by the diplomat and writer Santiago Pérez Triana. In Paris, Léon-Paul Fargue, a good friend of the dead young man, devoted intense pages to him and published his Colombian friend’s poems as a posthumous homage. And the people of Bogotá discovered that Hernando de Bengoechea was a great poet; yes, sir, at just twenty-six years of age he had already become a great poet, and would have inherited José Asunción Silva’s mantle if a heroic death had not taken him so young.

  Marco Tulio Anzola took an interest in the story of the poet soldier. During those days in mid-1915 he thought of him often; he began to follow what was published about him the way one follows a novel published in installments. He didn’t really know where this exotic interest, like that of a collector, came from: maybe it was just strange that a Colombian dying far away should be so newsworthy, given that here so many died every day without anyone taking any notice; maybe it was a generational matter, for Hernando de Bengoechea was just two years older than he was, and Anzola could not help thinking the absurd thought we all think at least once in our lives: It could have been me. In another life or in a parallel life, Anzola could have been Bengoechea. With a tiny change of fortune, with a minimal displacement of causes and fates, the young man fallen on the fields of France could have been him, Anzola, and not Hernando de Bengoechea. If his father had been a successful businessman of a moneyed family, if he’d studied at Yale and found business opportunities in Paris, if he’d settled there the way so many other Latin Americans had at the end of the century, maybe Anzola would have been born in Paris as Bengoechea had been, maybe he’d speak French and Spanish with equal fluency, maybe he would have read Flaubert and Baudelaire as Bengoechea had read them, maybe he would write essays for Parisian Spanish-language magazines: the Revue de l’Amérique Latine, for example, where all Bengoechea’s essays appeared, writings about Impressionist art, Russian ballet, Nicaraguan poetry written in Parisian boulevards, or German operas played by fantastical orchestras with Firmin Touche playing saxophone. Anzola went on talking to witnesses who sent him to other witnesses, he went on receiving confused statements that tried to clarify, he went on interviewing people of unknown standing who said they’d seen such and such an enemy of General Uribe in such and such a compromising circumstance, and meanwhile Anzola was thinking about Bengoechea, reading about Bengoechea, pitying Bengoechea’s parents who would perhaps be regretting the moment they decided to stay in Paris, and then wondering where in Bogotá the rest of the Bengoechea family lived and pitying them as well.

  In those days he spoke with two nuns, who swore they’d seen Galarza and Carvajal watching General Uribe’s house from the ground floor of the novitiate in the days before the crime (they gave him another piece of evidence, consequently, that the crime had not been improvised the night before it happened). Anzola found out that for Bengoechea his Colombian nationality had been a decision: at the age of twenty-one, obliged to choose one or the other of his two nations, he’d chosen that of his parents, that of his mother tongue. The newspapers held him up as an insuperable example of patriotism, and when they found out that he’d also been a devout Catholic, their admiration knew no bounds. In La Unidad, a columnist known as Miguel de Maistre sang the highest praises of the dead soldier, for it must not have been easy to keep his faith in that country of unbelievers, in that republic of atheism that had declared war on Catholics. The article referred extensively to the French law of 1905, which decreed the separation of Church and State, and said that path led peoples to hell. It also referred to the encyclical Vehementer Nos, in which Pope Pius X condemned that subversive law and accused it of denying the supernatural order of things. And it ended by saying that also among us there were those who attempted to deny the role of the eternal Holy Mother Church, violate the traditional values of our people and unilaterally abrogate the Concordat, source of our perseverance and guardian of our consciences, and for that God, who does not punish with clubs or whips, had made of them a lamentable example.

  Anzola read this with terrified fascination. In the space of a few lines, this Miguel de Maistre had managed to go from praising the soldier killed in France to a tacit diatribe against the general assassinated in Bogotá. Yes, La Unidad’s column was speaking of Rafael Uribe Uribe, and Anzola had to read it again to make sure there were no more hidden allusions, as if suddenly the death of young Bengoechea had become for the columnist a mere pretext for other things. And who was this Miguel de Maistre? He wasn’t the first nor would he be the last to justify the general’s assassination in some way: similar opinions had appeared in other newspapers, which had treated the general brutally in the months leading up to his death, and now allowed themselves the odd ambiguous commentary on the ways God has of writing straight on twisted lines. For Anzola, all that rhetoric was sadly familiar. Weeks before the death of the soldier Bengoechea, he had heard the tale of a bootblack in the Plaza de Bolívar, an adolescent called Cortés who had wanted to talk about what he’d seen and heard on October 15. When the assassins attacked the general, the bootblack was working on the shoes of a client at the corner of the atrium of the Capitol, in front of Enrique Leytón’s café. The client, a fat, short man, with a big, red nose and black, curly hair, stood up enthusiastically.

  “That’s how to kill that swine,” he said, passing a gloved hand over his frock coat. “Not with a club, not with whips or bullets, but with a hatchet as he should be killed.”

  The boy Cortés watched him run away toward the Capitol, forgetting, in his sudden haste, that he had only had one shoe shined.

  He never found out who that man was who’d demonstrated such satisfaction at the assassination of General Uribe. But it didn’t really matter: there were many like him, Anzola thought, in Bogotá: many who had cheered, considering that the murder of General Uribe was not a crime, but a punishment; many like that columnist Miguel de Maistre who condoned the assassination or tolerated it in a more or less covert way. How alone General Uribe had been in his final days! How this dishonest city had turned its back on him! Anzola remembered the procession that had carried General Uribe’s coffin to its burial and thought: All liars, all hypocrites. Then he felt unfair, for it was true that in that crowd there were also others, those who had defended Uribe or had accompanied him silently and, what was saddest, without his knowledge. Those who had looked after him on October 15, holding his wounded head, mopping up his blood with their handkerchiefs, and later keeping the handkerchiefs the way they keep relics; those who had prayed for him in the entrance hall of his house; those who in the months since had sought out Anzola to give him some information or share a suspicion that might allow him to proceed toward the light amid the mud of lies and distortions. Yes, they existed as well, and Anzola owed to them the little he had managed to figure out so far. He owed this to the witnesses, yes: to Mercedes Grau, to Lema and Cárdenas, to the bootblack, to the doctors Zea and Manrique. There were also other witnesses later, whose names he would finally forget, in the still-distant future when all this could be forgotten. They were voices, voices that had spoken to him or would speak to him of the crime against General Uribe, friendly or selfish or crude or rough voices, precise or forgetful voices, voices like an army marching through Bogotá to confront another army: one of lies, distortion, and concealment.

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  ONE O
F THOSE VOICES, one of the most important, was that of Alfredo García, the man who had seen six well-dressed strangers talking to Galarza and Carvajal on the eve of the crime, the man who had heard the assassins say that they were going to do this very well and that you gentlemen were going to see this very well done. Tomás Silva, the shoemaker who had taken García’s testimony when no authorities wanted to take it, arrived at Anzola’s office one day. This happened in the month of October, while the Third Battle of Artois was raging and the German army, the Austro-Hungarian army, and the Bulgarian army joined forces to invade Serbia. The shoemaker Silva was worried, but not about what was happening in Europe. “He wants to sell,” he said.

  “Who?” asked Anzola. “Who wants to sell what?”

  “García, the witness. He’s a decent guy, but poor. And now he’s telling me that he can’t wait any longer. That if the prosecution is not interested in what he has to tell, maybe Pedro León Acosta will be interested.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Anzola.

  “The guy’s broke,” said Tomás Silva. “He can’t afford to buy food. I’ve given him five and ten pesos now and then to get by on, Dr. Anzola, and my employees have fixed his shoes free of charge. And now he thinks that Pedro León Acosta can pay him for his testimony. ‘With Dr. Acosta I can do better than with the indictment,’ he told me. Like that, in those words: ‘I can do better.’ The guy is desperate, and desperate men do things like that.”