“All right,” I said.
“That cranial vault is mine as well, just like the vertebra, just like the X-ray.”
“But you told me the opposite, Francisco. That these things were not yours, that they were everybody’s, that they were going to a museum. You’re not changing your mind?”
“Bring it all to me, please. Promise?”
“It won’t be easy,” I said. “But I promise I’ll try.”
“Will you promise me, Vásquez?”
“Yes, Francisco. I promise.”
“Well, I hope you’ll fulfill that promise,” said Benavides, and he suddenly turned very, very serious. “Look,” he added, “the remains of a dead human body shouldn’t be lying around just anywhere. Human remains are potent weapons, and anyone could use them for things that neither you nor I could imagine. We can’t allow them to be in the wrong hands.”
I said of course, I understood. And then I didn’t say anything else.
It was three days, three days in reverse that I followed the same unlikely routine. I woke up at four in the morning, left my house at half past four, and arrived at Eighteenth Street at five or a few minutes before five—a time when this inhospitable city seems friendlier, because the scant traffic produces the illusion that human beings are in charge—and there was Carballo, drinking a weak coffee in spite of his intention to go to sleep in a few minutes. He left me alone with the Marco Tulio Anzola book and I read the way I tend to read when I’m working on one of my own books: with my black notebook open beside it and a fine-leaded pencil on top of the notebook. I took notes and organized chronologies, struggling with the chaos of the book, taming its crude indignation, and little by little among the chronologies and notes a profile of the indignant author began to come to life, that bold young man who had defied the most powerful men in the country. Anzola caused me to feel both fascination and mistrust at once; his bravery was indisputable, however it seemed obvious that the accusations in his book were not all well founded, for no judicious reader could find in the Jesuits of Who Are They? the responsibility he attributed to them (that Berestain, for example, was an intolerant and unpleasant guy, but nothing in Anzola’s book demonstrated that he was a murderer). At midday the murmur of the water pipes started up, and after a while Carballo would emerge from his room, ready to start his day, always in white socks and sometimes with a cravat already tied at his throat. He told me things that weren’t in Anzola’s book; he showed me other documents. And thus, one afternoon at a time, I ended up finding out about what happened after the publication of Who Are They? or, I should say, due to its publication.
The book came out in November 1917. The responses of Anzola’s enemies soon followed, and in many cases were tougher than he himself—even when most dismayed—could have predicted. At the same time, Anzola began to realize that many of those who were attacking him had not read the book. They were mere hit men of the printed word, sent by powerful men to discredit his book and his personality, although sometimes they acted in their own name, sad figures moved by envy and resentment. In El Nuevo Tiempo they went so far as to make this confession without the slightest shame: “We do not have to sully our gaze with the contents of this work to know it is the fruit of an overheated imagination and an aimless education,” wrote a columnist who signed as Aramis. The Conservative press in general called him an anarchist, moral assassin, and salaried defamer; in long prominent articles, implausible pseudonyms called him an enemy of the Catholic Church, a paladin of immorality, and even a messenger of the devil. Anzola was consoled by the thought that the same charges had been leveled against General Uribe, and kept awake nights wondering how he would have responded to one or another especially painful or unjust affront. “Some who pretend to be Christians,” the man who signed his articles Miguel de Maistre wrote in La Sociedad, “have given themselves the mission on this earth of staining the good name of the Holy Mother Church, attacking representatives of God among us with immoral libels, and in doing so attacking every single upstanding man, every single one of our chaste women, every single one of our innocent children. From pages that have been factors in our internecine wars sowing discord, these messengers of evil aim for the conversion of the country to atheistic socialism. But they will find that the warriors of God are more numerous than they think; and that we are prepared to defend our faith, if the time comes, with the blessed force of arms.” During the following weeks, Anzola had to endure a Bogotá writer calling his book a “mere criminalist novel” and him, an “exaggerated detective”; he had to endure whispering whenever he entered a café; he learned to avoid crowds in which he would find himself unprotected.
At the beginning of December a workers’ demonstration was organized in the Plaza de Bolívar; Anzola had to take a long detour to get home, for the memory of what had been about to happen to him in another plaza was still vivid. He had never felt so alone. He knew his name was on everyone’s lips but noticed how they all avoided his gaze. At Christmas he received a parcel from Julián Uribe, and when he opened it he found a small box of Equitativa chocolates and a card that said “Happy Holidays,” and that was the first sign that the family had not exiled him from their lives. So he let the days pass, going from his home to his office, from his office to his home. Inspecting the building works in the extensive city, between Christmas and New Year’s, he had to revise the repairs to a bridge over the San Francisco River. They explained that a woman had fallen from the bridge in the past and smashed up her face on the slippery stones. Anzola listened to these explanations, but he didn’t pay attention to or sympathize with them, because he was thinking about the latest lie that had been told about him in the press, about the last time an article had spat a gob of ink at him. That’s what occupied him during the first weeks of 1918: the observation of what was happening to him, a real defamation campaign the only objective of which was that Anzola would not reach the date of the trial in one piece.
Or at least that’s what I imagined. When I spoke to Carballo, he agreed: yes, that’s how it must have been. “Yes, it’s true that one part of the city had declared war on him, and it was the most powerful part,” he told me. “Neither you nor I can imagine what the boy must have been going through.” Carballo called him a boy, as if he were his son, or the son of someone he knew, and every time he did so I remembered Anzola’s age: when the book was published he was either twenty-six years old, or just about to turn twenty-six. In the month of November of my twenty-sixth year I was arriving in Barcelona, after publishing two novels that had given me a sensation of disorientation first and then failure, and I was preparing to start over again, start a new life in a new country, start to try to be a writer for the second time. Anzola, for his part, had not only published a book that had turned him into the most troublesome man in a country where troublesome men tend to suffer various kinds of retaliation, but he was also preparing to be a witness in the trial of the most notorious crime in recent history. The crime of the century, many called it, in spite of the fact that the century was still just getting under way and had already offered us several candidates for that dubious honor. They would say the same of the Gaitán crime, but also, years later, that of Lara Bonilla and that of Luis Carlos Galán. My country has been bountiful that way.
“The crime of the century,” Carballo said, laughing, at some point. “They had no idea what was coming.”
* * *
—
THE TRIAL AGAINST Leovigildo Galarza and Jesús Carvajal, accused of the assassination of General Rafael Uribe Uribe, began in the month of May 1918. It came preceded by the denunciations of Anzola, who had not settled for just publishing Who Are They? but had announced his intention of bringing thirty-six witnesses to the trial and revealing, according to what he said in the press, unknown details about the crime against General Uribe. The lawyer for the plaintiff, Pedro Alejo Rodríguez, asked that those testimonies be declared inadmissible and that Anzola
be barred from participating in the trial in any way.
“Pedro Alejo Rodríguez,” I said. “Oh, yes, the son of the public prosecutor who had brought the pretrial proceedings. The son of the enemy, to put it a better way.”
“Exactly,” said Carballo. “He asked that Anzola not be permitted to take part in the trial, even as a witness. And the judge agreed.”
But Anzola was not intimidated. On the appointed day, he left his house at midday and headed to the Salón de Grados, the authority of which was so great and so old that no one thought it odd to be trying the general’s murderers in the same space where they had held his wake four years earlier. He carried a bundle of papers under his arm, and never, the entire way there, did he stop wishing he’d brought them in a briefcase. He walked the long blocks under a drizzle too faint to get anyone wet, feeling at each step that he was dragging his fearful feet over the paving stones, but also that not showing up would be giving in or giving up. Before reaching Carrera Sexta, the clamor of the crowd filled the street like the buzzing of a swarm of tropical bees. Anzola went down Tenth Street; he passed in front of the window through which Simón Bolívar escaped the conspirators—men who murdered one of his guards before finding his room empty and his bed still warm—and carried on walking with his eyes on the ground, to make sure he didn’t trip, until he reached the end of the wall. He stopped. Among the documents he carried was a copy of Who Are They? Anzola didn’t know whether it had been a mistake to bring it. He took a deep breath, quickly crossed himself. And then turning the corner was like entering the arena, confronting the beasts and feeling that a large gate was closing behind him.
“There he is!” someone shouted. “There’s the one who wrote that book!”
Anzola felt the eyes in the crowd as one, a single monster with a single eye that had detected him. “Go away!” a furious chorus shouted. “Go away! Go away!” Other voices came from elsewhere, closer to Ninth Street, as if from the nuns’ balconies: “Let him in! Let him come in!” Anzola made his way through the crowd, meeting the gazes of some of them so they wouldn’t sense his anxiety, and arrived at the thick wooden door with its large solid iron knockers and sacred air. Beneath the sculpted stone coat of arms, one of the two police officers guarding the entrance stepped in front of him: “Banned,” he said.
“And why is that?” asked Anzola.
“Judge’s orders.”
Then Anzola cleared his throat and said to the police officer, so that everyone could hear:
“The people who should be in there are not inside.”
The crowd began to shout. “Slanderer! Atheist!” From beneath the nuns’ balconies, others were still saying he should be let in, and they were doing so in such a belligerent tone that Anzola feared for a moment becoming the cause of pitched battle. The efforts of those faceless voices were futile, in any case, for the policemen’s orders were clear. Anzola could not enter.
“But the next day,” said Carballo, “he had better luck.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“Nothing and everything,” said Carballo. He sat thinking about something. “Have you been in, Vásquez? Have you gone inside the place where the Salón de Grados used to be?”
“Never,” I said.
“Oh, well then, I suggest we take a walk,” he said. “Nobody says we’re obliged to stay in this apartment all the time.”
We went outside and began to walk south along Carrera Quinta. I asked Carballo again what had changed, what had happened so that Anzola was allowed into court the day after he was forbidden from doing so.
“The press,” said Carballo. “All the journalists protested Anzola’s exclusion. All the day’s editorials came out in favor of the author of Who Are They? and his right to present his thirty-six witnesses. And the people joined the protest. There was such a scandal that Judge Garzón, against all expectations, found himself forced to recant. I don’t know: maybe thinking the whole thing could blow up if he insisted on refusing him entry.” We were crossing Avenida Jiménez and we passed by Aventino’s billiards bar, where I had spent so many idle hours, and we came to the wall of Fourteenth Street, in front of which Ricardo Laverde was murdered one afternoon in 1996, then we turned right and continued south along Carrera Sexta. “The next day Anzola returned to the Salón de Grados. The newspapers covered every day of the trial, transcribing the interrogations and then giving their opinions on them, and that’s how we can know in some detail what went on. One newspaper talked about Anzola: it described him arriving with a bundle of papers under his arm. Books, notebooks, loose papers. I don’t have any of that now, but other times I’ve come here bringing it all with me, to go in and study the scene and try to see what my boy would have seen at that moment.”
My boy, Carballo had said. We were walking up to the corner of Tenth Street, where the stone pile begins that a century ago housed the Salón de Grados, and only then did a revelation hit me that should have arisen much earlier: the intense relationship between Carballo and Anzola, or rather the profound link Carballo felt for that other conspiracy hunter. My boy. I watched him without his awareness while I walked behind him on the narrow sidewalk. He must believe in reincarnations, I thought mockingly, which I later regretted. Then we arrived at the imposing carved stone arch and huge wooden door, and crossed the dark entrance to emerge into a bright courtyard, one of those courtyards with rose bushes and a carved fountain in the middle, and I thought that Carballo must have felt or wanted to feel what Anzola had felt at the time, walking through those corridors with their solemn colonnades: for example, entering the spacious nave with its high ceilings where the hearings took place; for example, listening to the noise of the crowds that reached him from the galleries like a chorus of things shaken during a tremor.
“It was here?” I asked.
“It was here,” said Carballo.
It was a space big enough to hold hundreds of people on wooden benches. That’s why it was called the Salón de Grados, of course, the graduation hall: because long ago it had been the most important part of a university that operated there. Carballo told me about the photos that came out in the press during those days. From the door of the cold enclosure, he explained where Anzola would have sat, and he said that at the back, on an imposing throne above which a canopy darkened the space below, Dr. Julio C. Garzón, second superior court justice of Bogotá, would have sat. The jury accompanied him, and above their four heads hung a wooden crucifix whose Christ was as big as a five-year-old child. In front of them, at a different table, sheltered behind a stack of papers four hands high, was the court registrar. The day Anzola entered for the first time to testify, he learned that Pedro León Acosta had fought with clubs and bare knuckles with a citizen who accused him in the middle of the street of having had something to do with the crime. The fight had been so violent that a police officer had to break it up, and would have taken them to spend the night in a cell had he not noticed in time that one of them was an illustrious man.
“I imagine Anzola thinking: My book did that. I imagine him looking up, seeing how he was being insulted or applauded from the galleries, and thinking that his book had done that. In any case, he must have seen the public prosecutor Rodríguez Forero sitting as if he were just one more onlooker. Most likely Rodríguez Forero had sat there, in the gallery, because he was no longer participating in the trial. He had written the Vista Fiscal and published it, but then he had been replaced in his prosecutor’s duties by someone else. And his son was acting for the Uribe family, another reason he couldn’t participate, right. He would have had to recuse himself.”
“And where would the assassins have been?”
“There, look.”
I looked where Carballo was pointing. I could practically see Galarza and Carvajal sitting against a side wall, on a bench with no back, surrounded by police officers. They attended without showing any interest in what was going on, as if not
hing was going to happen to them, and what showed on their faces, instead, was the paucity of their understanding. They both wore scarves knotted around their necks, so thick that their faces were obscured every time they tilted their heads. Galarza was bald, as if he’d recently had his head shaved, and Carvajal had in his eyes the liquid gaze of a very tired man. He turned every once in a while to see the time on the clock hanging on the otherwise bare wall. Regarding the expression of his entire body, a journalist wrote that he wasn’t tired, he was bored.
As soon as the judge declared the court in session, the Uribe family lawyer asked for the floor. Pedro Alejo Rodríguez’s forehead was too wide and his receding hairline had already made deep inroads on his temples in spite of his barely thirty years of age, and his heavily lidded eyes always seemed dozy, and his high voice sounded like the whining of a spoiled child. He pointed a finger at Carvajal and Galarza, and said:
“These are the murderers. We are not going to talk about anybody else here or accuse anybody else.”
People began to whistle; hands banged against the wood.
“Silence in the court,” said the judge.
“The jury is here to rule on the responsibility of Galarza and Carvajal,” Rodríguez continued. “In reality, justice has nothing to do with any other individuals. We prepared ourselves for this trial, but then this man turned up in the court.”
He pointed at Anzola. Murmurs came from the upper gallery. “Get him out!” someone shouted.
“Silence,” said the judge.
“This gentleman,” said Rodríguez, “turned up at court and asked to be called to testify here. And not just him, but thirty-six more witnesses. But Señor Anzola is not just any witness: he is the author of a tract in which implications are leveled at persons other than Galarza and Carvajal. And it is very likely, Your Honor, that he has come here to make those same accusations. Well then, we shall hear the witnesses, as required by law. And their testimonies will lead us to one of two conclusions: either the new evidence will be perfect in the face of the law, or it will be mere suspicion that should not be taken into consideration, as it will not lead to any conclusions. We, for our part, shall comply with the wishes of the general’s family.” He picked up one of his folders and took out a piece of paper. “This,” he said, “is a letter sent to us from Washington by Dr. Carlos Adolfo Urueta, the general’s son-in-law. It says: ‘You know what our desire has been in relation to the investigation. That everything possible be brought to light, but without futile scandals and most of all without the general’s name being taken as an instrument of defamation against anybody.’ And that, Your Honor, is what we shall do as the prosecution.”
The Shape of the Ruins Page 39