“These wretches dress better than I do.”
Meanwhile, Anzola leafed through the assassins’ books and notebooks as if the revealed truth were in them, and transcribed his finds. When he had finished doing that, shortly before one, he went out into the corridor; but instead of speaking to the assassins, he crossed the yard and confronted a guard with a phrase that could have been a question, but came out sounding like an accusation:
“You people advised them we were coming.”
“No, sir,” said a broken voice. “It was last night that the general was here, I didn’t do anything.”
The guard he’d questioned was called Carlos Riaño. From his statement they found out that the previous night, shortly before midnight, Salomón Correal had arrived at the Panóptico along with one of his most trusted men, Officer Guillermo Gamba. The warden of the Panóptico accompanied them in person to the assassins’ cells, and then left them alone with them. The meeting lasted half an hour, but neither the guard nor the warden nor any of the prisoners knew what they talked about.
“And who advised Correal?” said Anzola. “The only ones who knew about this were you lot and us. And it wasn’t us.”
“The general has ears everywhere, sir,” said Riaño. “Especially when it comes to Carvajal and Galarza. There is nothing that happens around here he doesn’t find out about. Each time those two have a fight, either the general shows up or Father Tenorio appears. I swear, it’s as if they could see everything in the Panóptico.”
It seemed that Galarza and Carvajal, he told them, had been behaving for several months like a mismatched married couple. Only the intervention of Correal or the priest allowed them to reconcile. The last incident had happened just a few days earlier: Riaño was in the room next to the assassins, playing chess with a few other guards, or watching them play on the wooden board. Then they heard the first shouts. Carvajal told the other one that it was his fault they were stuck in here, that it was because he’d gotten involved with those people and he didn’t know why he’d listened to him, when everything was so good before. And Galarza began spitting insults. “Shut up, you son of a bitch,” he said. “And let’s see you loosen that tongue so I can slit your throat.” Carvajal responded with the screams of an offended woman that he wasn’t scared, but it was obvious the opposite was true. It was at that moment that Galarza went to get his knife and, in full view of everybody, put it in the pocket of his trousers. Carvajal ran to hide in the lavatory.
“And Correal found out about all this?”
“I don’t know if he found out, but the next day Father Tenorio arrived, took them to the chapel, and closed the door. That’s what always happens. And from there, from the chapel, they come out as if nothing ever happened,” said Riaño. And then he added: “They do say that confession eases the burdens of the soul.”
“So they say,” said Anzola. And then he asked: “Did they take anything away last night? Correal and his subordinates, I mean. Did they remove anything from the cells?”
“Not that I saw,” said Riaño.
Anzola made certain recommendations to the director general of penitentiaries: that they take the rope and tools away from the assassins, to prevent them from harming themselves or harming others, or trying to escape, and that they also confiscate the fedoras, for the assassins could use them to disguise themselves in the case of someone letting them out. All this was done. When he got home, Anzola was satisfied and at the same time worried: for he had verified firsthand what he knew from the testimonies: that General Hatchet and the Jesuits had become, for all practical purposes, the godfathers or protectors of the assassins. Did they so fear what they could say? Confession eases the burdens of the soul, the guard Riaño had said, and Anzola thought no: it wasn’t the confessions of the assassins, but the promises of their superiors. The reason for that nocturnal visit was the same as the one the books full of libelous allegations against Uribe Uribe had arrived at the cells, and the pamphlets declaring him an enemy of God and of the Church. Anzola wrote: Stiffen the assassins’ resolve. He wrote: Quieten their consciences. He also wrote: Assure them they will not go to hell.
Some days after the search, a package arrived for the assassins, care of the prison chaplain. When they opened it, they found two new pairs of ankle boots and a bundle of underwear. Carvajal chose the yellow leather boots, and Galarza had the white canvas ones, and they divided the new undershirts and underpants between them. The guard Riaño told Anzola all this. He also told him that one day, in the afternoon, he’d seen the assassins return to their cells carrying two piles of good clothes. He didn’t know who or where they came from, but he said that Galarza put his bundle away in the trunk without looking at it, as if he didn’t need it, but Carvajal started unfolding his new garments and holding them up to take a better look at them, and then noticed Riaño watching him, shoved it all in his trunk, and slammed the lid down insolently. Anzola listened to this testimony, and there was so much envy and resentment he detected in the words, the contempt for these inmates who lived better than their guards was so obvious, that he had a vexing illumination. He thought that all it would take was the offer of a couple of coins for Galarza and Carvajal to die one night in their sleep, with their throats cut, bleeding over the embroidered edges of their fine cushions.
Some days ago, accompanied by the Director General of Penitentiaries, we went to the Panóptico with the aim of carrying out a surprise search of the cells of Jesús Carvajal and Leovigildo Galarza. How surprised we were to realize that General Salomón Correal, police commissioner, had mysteriously found out about our visit, and had himself visited the assassins on the eve of our arrival just before midnight. Readers of La Patria will wonder, as we wondered ourselves, what the police commissioner has to do at such hours in the cells of the self-confessed assassins of General Rafael Uribe Uribe. One doesn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect that the intentions of someone who receives information from spies and acts secretly and nocturnally were not honorable ones.
But now we’ll leave aside the accusations, which are many and very sinister, against the man whom the people in their wisdom have baptized General Hatchet. We wish to present to the public certain findings fortune offered us on the aforementioned visit, and let the public assign the value their consciences dictate. The first is a notebook belonging to Jesús Carvajal, from which someone had torn out seven pages before our visit, without our being able to discover what information they contained. But the accomplice’s hands could not tear out all the pages, and sufficient information was found on other pages. For example, this note from the first of June 1916: “I bought from José García Lozano a woolen blanket for four hundred and fifty pesos ($450) cash.” The most obtuse mind, faced with such proof, would wonder: How does a prisoner get hold of such a generous sum? As the sadly famous Vista Fiscal states, Galarza and Carvajal were so poor at the moment of the crime that they’d been forced to pawn a carpenter’s brace for fifty pesos. Now, by what we’ve been able to investigate, they spend hundreds of pesos on clothing and amenities, and they have money to lend to other prisoners as usurers. What a mysterious change of fortune! But none of this has been judged worthy of attention by the Prosecutor Rodríguez.
Let us observe now what has happened in these past couple of years to those around the assassins. Galarza’s mother has held several interviews with the police commissioner; according to testimony the Prosecutor has not wanted to take into consideration, during one of these interviews she declared her worry about the fact that her son, who supported and cared for her, was in jail; General Correal asked her not to worry and assured her he would find a way to get money to her. María Arrubla, Galarza’s concubine, went from living a life of poverty to hiring servants and hosting picnics for her neighbors. Señorita Arrubla was detained for a time in the Good Shepherd women’s prison, while her judicial situation was clarified; and there, according to witnesses, she enjoyed unusual privileges,
being put in charge of the rest of the inmates and receiving a liter of milk daily and a food basket that no one else had a right to. One witness has stated: “I swear that before the assassination of General Uribe Uribe, María Arrubla dressed poorly, in chintz dresses and alpargatas, and that afterward I saw her wearing ankle boots, with silk shawls and tweed skirts, and she also started using two surnames.” Does this situation not deserve any investigation on the part of the Prosecutor? We will surprise no one if we state that none has been carried out.
Carvajal’s relatives have had similar luck. In the aforementioned notebook we found the following annotation: “On May 19 Alejandro left Bogotá, heading for Tolima.” The subject mentioned is Alejandro Carvajal, the brother of the assassin Jesús, who was present at the scene of the crime—mysterious coincidence, which the Prosecutor has not wished to explore—to protect him from the possible fury of the crowd. Having made our own inquiries, the ones the Prosecutor could not or did not wish to make, we discovered that the assassin’s brother, once solemnly poor, is now a prosperous merchant in Ibagué, operating under the name of Alejandro Barbosa. Readers can judge for themselves whether there isn’t something profoundly suspicious in such a sudden change of fortune, and whether someone who changes their name does not wish, of necessity, to conceal and hide.
And despite all of this, the Prosecutor in his Vista rejects the probable motive of financial gain in the case of the Rafael Uribe Uribe crime. The clues and the testimony swarmed around him from the beginning of the proceedings, but the Prosecutor has made superhuman efforts not to find out. Why? Because if he should come to admit that the assassins acted in pursuit of profit, he would ipso facto have to look for the source of that money and ask who was paying it. To shape his fable of the crime, his Vista had to ignore any clue that would lead him down other paths; now we know it was not simple negligence, but unmistakable will to conceal the real culprits: the black hands that, with bloodstained money, contracted and paid for the assassination of a man and split in two the history of a people. We continue to ask: Who are those black hands?
Who are they?
* * *
—
IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY, Julián Uribe sent for Anzola. “I have another testimony,” he told him, “but it is not just any other. If this doesn’t convince the judge, then nothing will.”
And now Anzola was here, sitting in Julián Uribe’s drawing room, just as he so often had in recent years, sometimes feeling himself in an oasis of peace while, outside, a country was collapsing into war, sometimes feeling like a plotter confronting from this secret place the other plot, the murderous plot of the powerful. Outside, a light rain had begun to fall and the wind was driving it against the beveled glass. In one chair, the nearest to the front window, sat Julián Uribe, smoking a thick cigar the glowing tip of which drew shapes in the shadows; across from Anzola, sitting on the edge of the velvet cushions of matching wicker chairs, were Adela Garavito and her father. General Elías Garavito was a man with a dense gray beard and shaved chin, as was more common in earlier times. He was also an old member of the Colombian Guard, who had known and admired General Uribe. It was he who spoke first.
“Tell him, my dear,” he whispered. “Tell him what we know.”
His daughter was a shy and religious woman in her forties, with long black skirts and chaste manners, who went to Mass much more than her Liberal father would have liked. It was a good while before she dared to look Anzola in the eye, but in this way, avoiding his gaze, speaking more to the carpet than to her interlocutor, she told him out loud things that someone more worldly, more spirited, or more courageous would have kept to themselves out of fear.
Her tale took place on October 15, 1914.
“The day of the crime,” said Anzola.
“For me,” said Señorita Adela, “the day of Saint Teresa of Ávila.”
After going to the nine o’clock Mass at the Chapel of the Sagrario, Señorita Adela was returning home, walking up Ninth Street, where she thought she recognized General Salomón Correal, who was making another police officer enter the entrance hall of a house that looked abandoned. The lady took a couple of steps and saw that it was indeed Correal, for she knew him well; the other wore a sword and jacket, but she couldn’t identify him. She had never seen him before.
“Were they in the house next door?” asked Anzola. “Next to General Uribe’s house, I mean?”
“Yes,” said Señorita Adela. “It was from there that they signaled to the others.”
“Who?” asked Anzola.
From the entrance of the neighboring house, after bringing in the police officer with him, Correal leaned out, looked toward the corner of Carrera Quinta, and began to wave one arm. At the corner, a few steps up from General Uribe’s door, there were two men who looked poor, both wearing ponchos and straw hats. Even from a distance, Señorita Adela could tell that the whole situation was abnormal: the men on the corner seemed worried, and seemed to be looking at each other wondering what they should do. Trying at the same time not to seem impertinent or nosy, Señorita Adela carried on walking up the street, until she passed the two tradesmen. That was when she noticed they were hiding something under their ponchos.
“Both of them?” asked Anzola. “Are you sure?”
“My daughter neither lies nor exaggerates,” said General Garavito.
“I didn’t mean to suggest that she would,” said Anzola. “I’m just asking if she’s sure. It’s been two years.”
“As sure as God exists,” said Adela Garavito. “Both had their hands hidden under their ponchos and were moving something. Both had something hidden.”
“The hatchets,” said Anzola.
“That I don’t know,” said the señorita. “But they were nervous, that could be seen from a mile away.”
At that moment she crossed paths with Señora Etelvina Posse, who was in such a rush she didn’t stop to say hello though they knew each other well. “She didn’t even notice it was me,” said Adela Garavito. Doña Etelvina had never been in her good books: people said she was too friendly with Correal, and that her husband, however, hated the police commissioner; they also said that Correal had recruited her into the secret police, an army of citizens who informed on other citizens. Adela Garavito turned around covertly, and saw Doña Etelvina stop and speak to General Correal. She couldn’t hear what they said, because she had turned the corner by then, but when she got home, half a block farther south, she told her father what she’d seen.
In the afternoon, the news reached them: General Uribe had been attacked with hatchets by two tradesmen. General Garavito ran out into the street to see what he could find out and arrived at General Uribe’s house, but in the chaos of the entrance hall couldn’t find any relatives. He spoke to two or three Liberals he recognized, but everybody was as disoriented as he was, so his instinct was to return home to be with his family in these moments when the world seemed about to end. He barged into his daughter’s room without knocking, not caring if she saw the tears in his eyes. He did not have to explain what he meant when he sat down on her bed, pushing aside the cushions, and spoke as if someone might be listening in.
“Do not repeat what you told me this morning,” he said. “They might go so far as to poison us.”
She obeyed. Days later she ran into Doña Etelvina Posse again, but this time she did stop to chat and Doña Etelvina ended up showing her the newspaper she was carrying, open at the photos of Galarza and Carvajal.
“I recognize them,” said Adela Garavito. “They’re the same ones who were standing there, at the corner, the day they killed him.”
Her words took Doña Etelvina by surprise. “It was as if she’d suddenly understood she’d been wrong about me,” said Adela Garavito. “It was as if she’d believed I was with her, or with those who were happy about the death of General Uribe. It hadn’t occurred to her that I wasn’t one of them. Her face
changed.”
“Standing where?” asked Doña Etelvina.
“There, at the corner of General Uribe’s house,” said Adela. “And General Correal was signaling them from the neighbor’s house. It seemed odd.”
“Salomón wasn’t here that day,” she said.
“Of course he was,” said Adela Garavito. “I saw him with my own eyes.”
“Well, I didn’t see anything.”
“And he wasn’t alone,” said Adela. “There was someone with him, they were signaling to the assassins.”
Without looking at her, Doña Etelvina handed her the newspaper.
“Here, child, I’ve already read it,” she said, and began to walk away. “Excuse me.”
“Who else have you told this to?” asked Julián Uribe.
“Nobody else,” said General Garavito. “Everyone was saying in those days that the police were mistreating people who went in to give witness statements. That they were harassed, intimidated. And I knew several of them: people who went to tell what they’d seen and ended up spending two or three nights in jail. So I ordered Adelita not to say anything, and she has obeyed me.”
Julián Uribe stood up and walked to the center of the room. In the half darkness of six o’clock in the evening, his figure seemed to stretch.
“And you would testify?” he asked.
Adela Garavito looked at her father and saw in his face something that Anzola could not see.
“If it will do any good,” she said.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 36