“Very well,” said the judge. He rang a bell that Anzola had not seen until that moment. “Let the witness approach.”
“Anzola stood and walked up there,” said Carballo, pointing with one finger. “All the way up there. The newspapers talk about the quantity of papers he had. He dropped them and picked them up. He was nervous, of course. His enemies were present: Alejandro Rodríguez Forero, Pedro León Acosta.”
“Acosta was here?”
“In the front row,” said Carballo. “The one who wasn’t here was Salomón Correal.”
“Why not?”
“He didn’t need to be,” said Carballo. “He’d sent his spies. In fact, all police officers were Correal’s spies.”
“Señor Anzola,” said the judge. “Do you swear before God to answer with the truth all that you are asked, as far as you know it, in the knowledge that if you say something untrue you can be punished with years in prison?”
“Yes,” said Anzola. “I swear. But I warn you that I am no orator. I request the public’s patience if I bore them or say something terrible. I have been an eyewitness to some of the things I am here to declare. Regarding others, I am here as a referential witness.”
“Let the record show what he has just said,” said Rodríguez.
“Record it all,” said Anzola. “Because what I shall say here, I shall not retract.”
“The facts,” said the prosecutor. “Let us look at the facts.”
“That’s where I’m going,” said Anzola. “Here I am going to show that the former prosecutor, Señor Alejandro Rodríguez Forero, mutilated the criminal dossier to favor the theory that Galarza and Carvajal acted alone. I beg the plaintiff’s prosecutor, Don Pedro Alejo Rodríguez, to turn to the Vista Fiscal. And I suggest the former prosecutor, since he’s with us here, does so as well and follows along. So he won’t get bored.”
A burst of laughter erupted in the gallery.
“The facts, Señor Anzola,” said the prosecutor.
“I am going to demonstrate a fact here: that Prosecutor Rodríguez Forero adulterated the dossier.”
“Counsel demands proof, Señor Anzola,” said Rodríguez Forero’s son. “Present it right now.”
“With great pleasure,” said Anzola. “Señor registrar, open the criminal dossier to page 1,214. Señor plaintiff’s counsel, open your father’s Vista to page 270. This refers to a meeting in the carpentry shop of the assassin Galarza fifteen days before the crime. A police officer of Salomón Correal’s force stood guard. The meeting is of high importance, because of the need to determine who attended it. Well then, in the dossier we read: ‘Fifteen days before the crime . . .’ We look to see what Señor Rodríguez Forero puts in the Vista: ‘Days before the crime . . .’ So now it’s no longer exactly fifteen days, but a vague date. And I ask: When does a prosecutor prefer vagueness to precision? And I, Your Honor, reply: When precision would put certain persons in an awkward situation, and he is trying to avoid that at all costs. This is an adulteration!”
Anzola awaited applause and the applause arrived.
“But no!” said Rodríguez. “Adulteration is removing something that figures in the proceedings or changing it with evil intent. The only thing here is an abridgment. The prosecutor can, when summing up the facts of a criminal dossier, change some words for others.”
“Can he?” said Anzola sarcastically.
“Of course he can. The prosecutor did not adulterate anything, because these words are not in quotes.”
“But it’s not just this one,” said Anzola. “There are many more mutilations.”
“Cite them all,” said Rodríguez.
“A man named Alejandrino Robayo was also in the assassin’s carpentry shop that night. In the criminal dossier, Robayo names the persons who were there with him, and includes a certain Celestino Castillo. But read the Vista, Señor registrar, read it: there the name of the man with him has disappeared, and instead it says: ‘A companion he was with at that moment . . .’ Of course, Castillo’s name has been eliminated. Why? Because he was one of Salomón Correal’s men!”
Rodríguez gesticulated. “Señor registrar,” he said, “please tell us whether that passage is in quotes.”
The registrar said: “I see no quotes.”
“Therefore, there is no adulteration.”
Anzola turned to the gallery. “I am talking to the plaintiff’s counsel about the truth, and he talks to me of quotation marks!”
The galleries erupted. The noise was deafening, but above the voices accusing him, above the open jaws of his enemies Anzola heard someone call him by name and say: “Don’t worry! The people are here ready to defend you.” The words were the backing he needed. Anzola raised his voice.
“I declare,” he exclaimed, “the prosecutor Rodríguez Forero is an accessory.”
People were standing in the galleries, fists raised, and open mouths vociferating. Anzola felt that he was in a position to provoke a riot, right there and right then, and for the first time he knew what General Uribe must have felt when giving speeches: the power over the crowd and the terrible possibility of using it. The police constables had taken up their positions in front of the galleries to preserve order, and that was seen by those who supported Anzola as a threat. “Come on!” they shouted. “Go ahead and shoot, and you’ll see the people know how to defend themselves!” The judge tried to raise his voice over the uproar, the racket of hands banging on the wooden benches. “Order!” he shouted. From a corner came a shout: “Death to the assassins!” “Death to Acosta!” came from the other side. And the judge kept ringing his little metal bell and shouting: “The session is suspended! Court is adjourned!”
“And the trial was adjourned,” Carballo told me. “So you can see what the atmosphere was like. And what happened on the first day of Anzola’s testimony kept happening on subsequent days. The uproar. The protests. The applause. The galleries divided between hostility and support, the atmosphere of an uprising about to break out . . . And Anzola there, giving his testimony. And later, when he started to call his witnesses, the atmosphere did not improve.”
“He called his witnesses? But that can’t happen in a trial, Carlos.”
“Yes, I know,” said Carballo. “You’re a lawyer too, I almost forgot. Well, yes, it was possible if the judge allowed it. Somewhere I have the number of the law and the article, in which it states that the judge is allowed to direct the debate as he sees fit. I don’t know if this is still possible, but at that time it was. And Anzola was not just any witness, because he’d written the book, because he’d announced his own thirty-six witnesses, and because he had the press on his side, or he seemed to. So they allowed him to bring them and talk to them, interrogate them, even though he was not representing either side. It was exceptional, but this whole trial was exceptional, and it was an attempt to prevent riots. So Anzola brought two guards from the Panóptico who spoke of the privileged living conditions Galarza and Carvajal enjoyed in prison and the murderers’ relationship with Salomón Correal. One of them told of a day, when he was on inspection duty, when he saw Galarza’s wife arrive to visit him. At a moment when they thought they were unobserved, the woman gave Galarza a piece of paper. He hid it in his boot. After she left, the guard ordered Galarza to show it to him.”
“And what did the paper say?” the judge asked the witness.
“The words were these,” said the witness. “I spoke with the doctor, who told me that everything was fine in the street. But remember that you two are not the only ones responsible. Don’t be so stupid as to keep taking the rap when there are others responsible.”
“The galleries shouted at those revelations, and there were several every day,” said Carballo. “And Anzola kept interrogating his witnesses and having them say in the trial everything they’d said in his book. But he realized very early that he was going to need much more than the pages
of Who Are They? to convince the jury.”
Adela Garavito, the religious daughter, said she had seen Salomón Correal beside General Uribe Uribe’s house on the morning of the crime; immediately Officer Adolfo Cuéllar, Correal’s secretary, declared that the general had spent the whole morning in his office, and the public applauded with excitement. Ana Beltrán, who said she was the mother of Carvajal’s daughter, spoke of a meeting at Galarza’s carpentry shop, and assured the court that they spoke there of killing Uribe Uribe; the judge immediately led her to confess that she had another daughter by another man, and the public laughed at her and her words magically lost all value. A witness called Villar, who had been a prisoner in the Panóptico, declared that Anzola had offered to reward him if he would testify in his favor, and even said that all Anzola’s witnesses in this trial would have been bribed. “I’m almost sure of it,” he said, “though I can’t prove it.” He didn’t need to prove it: the galleries shouted that all this was a farce. Villar was slandering him, but the galleries shouted that Anzola was a slanderer.
“And the worst thing,” said Carballo, “is that it was all for naught. The three members of the jury had one obligation: to try Galarza and Carvajal. The law was very clear: those accused in the Vista Fiscal were the ones to be tried. Nobody else. So the jury couldn’t make any decisions about those pointed out by the book: they would have had to start a whole different trial for that. What happened in the Salón de Grados was a trial in the court of public opinion, and Anzola knew it very well, and had come to accept it. His task was just one: to demonstrate that Correal, Acosta, and the Jesuits had some responsibility for the crime, and then let public opinion take care of the rest. He couldn’t do more. He carried on. And he began to pay the price.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come with me, Vásquez.” Carballo made me follow him down a corridor that bordered the old cloister. From the center of the courtyard we could hear the constant murmur of water, and rosebushes flourished between us and the fountain: it was a place that looked like a fairy-tale setting, and as in so many fables, horrible things had happened there. We arrived at a door. “This was the room for the witnesses during the hearing,” Carballo informed me. “They kept them here before they were called, so nobody could talk to them. Do you know what happened here?” But it was a rhetorical question: of course I didn’t know; of course he was going to explain it to me. “What happened here was at first just a scandal, but for Anzola it had terrible consequences later. It was six or seven days into the hearings, I don’t remember exactly. One day Anzola arrived at the Salón de Grados earlier than usual, because he wanted to talk to some of those attending the trial: journalists, sympathizers, a captain who wasn’t a witness but could be called as one. But the police constable wouldn’t let him.”
“Orders of the judge,” he said.
“This is unheard of,” said Anzola. “I cannot speak to people?”
“The judge decreed that you should go to the witness room,” said the constable. “This way, Señor Anzola, I’ll take you.”
“No,” said Anzola. “I’m not going of my own free will.”
To the astonishment of those present, the police constable grabbed his arm and tried to drag him. Anzola dug his heels in, and the constable had to call two more officers. In the struggle, Anzola fell to the floor, and the officers picked him up and shoved him, while he shouted, asking if there weren’t any Liberals around to defend him. “They’re taking me prisoner because I’ve tried to demonstrate Correal’s guilt!” he was saying. The police pushed him up against a wall and, when they searched him, found his revolver. Anzola was kept locked up in the witness room, next to the entrance hall, while the officers took the revolver to show it to the judge. Later he would hear that they’d accused him of taking out the revolver to shoot them. In front of the judge, when they finally called him, Anzola accused the officers of insulting and punching him, and also launched another accusation: he said the police officers who had dared to testify against Correal were suffering retaliation by their own corps.
“More than retaliation!” Anzola exclaimed. “It is a real repression!”
“Anzola had brought a letter from one of the retaliated-against officers,” said Carballo. “He tried to read it out, but the judge forbade it, saying he was not a prosecutor, but a witness. Then, before they could stop him, Anzola strode over to where the journalists were, handed them the letter, and asked them to publish it. The former prosecutor Rodríguez Forero stood up to protest and people shouted with him. ‘He’s trying to censor us!’ Anzola said, and could barely hear his own words. The judge ordered the room cleared. The officers carried out the order: they suddenly seemed to have multiplied, but the people in the galleries so stubbornly refused to leave that the officers ended up raising their weapons. They started doling out blows with their rifle butts, and the newspapers recount that at that moment, in the middle of the shouts, someone was heard to say: ‘They’re expelling us because things are beginning to come to light.’ That’s what Anzola must have thought as well, because that afternoon he had planned to call an extremely important witness. He must have thought: They found out, our enemies found out, and that’s why they’re attacking me, that’s why they’re adjourning the hearing. But no, the hearing was adjourned for only fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes were scarcely enough to calm spirits and avert the possibility of a catastrophe. Broken bones and bloody rifle butts could have happened, but didn’t happen. Fifteen minutes and the testimonies resumed. And Anzola, the witness Anzola, called another witness to testify. He was a young worker, in a brown suit and black scarf. He was called Francisco Sánchez, although his name doesn’t matter. What matters is what he was asked: whether it was true that Emilio Beltrán had proposed killing General Uribe.”
“Emilio Beltrán,” I said. “Rings a bell, but I don’t remember who he was.”
“Yes, he’s mentioned a couple of times in Who Are They? But when his book was published, Anzola didn’t yet know what he now knew.”
Emilio Beltrán was one of Carvajal’s drinking buddies. They saw each other frequently in chicha bars, drunk most of the time, or playing poker in El Molino Rojo. For a few months Beltrán was Carvajal’s tenant, business was going so badly for him; nevertheless, when he gave his statement, he denied all of this: that he knew Carvajal, that he’d been his tenant, that he’d played cards with him, that he’d been in Galarza’s carpentry shop the morning of the crime.
“It’s true,” said Francisco Sánchez. “I was a friend of Emilio Beltrán and that friendship ended when he suggested I help him to kill General Uribe.”
“When was that?” asked the judge.
“I don’t remember the date. But I do remember what he said: that if we went along with this business, our luck was going to change.”
“Why did you not alert the authorities?”
“Because I didn’t want to betray a friend. But I did advise him not to get involved. I told him I wasn’t an Uribe follower, but I wasn’t going to get involved in that business, and he shouldn’t either. I asked him how he could do that to his mamá.”
“And why do you think he made that suggestion to you?”
“Because he knew I wasn’t with Uribe, I guess. One day he invited me to his workshop and said: ‘Things are really bad. We’re really screwed, and it’s all General Uribe’s fault. Help me get rid of him and you’ll see.’ That’s what he told me.”
“Did he speak to you about anybody else involved in the plot?”
“I could tell there were others involved, by how sure he was of what he said. But he didn’t mention anybody by name.”
“Did he offer you money?”
“He didn’t offer it, but I understood that I would get some. And I did notice the change in his situation after the assassination. He was much better off. Before he was a carpenter, now he’s a rich man.”
Anzola inte
rvened then. “That’s true,” he said. “Beltrán now owns his own house and carpentry business. How did that happen? That’s what the public prosecutor, father of the present counsel here, did not want to investigate.”
Pedro Alejo Rodríguez shrugged his shoulders: “This is not the time . . .”
“Your Honor,” said Anzola, “I request that Señor Emilio Beltrán should please be called to the stand.”
“Beltrán was extremely elegant,” said Carballo. “Even the reporter from El Tiempo wondered how a carpenter could afford to dress in a brand-new suit and elegant hat.”
He looked nervous. The judge turned to Sánchez to ask him if he confirmed everything he’d just said about his friend Beltrán.
“Yes,” said Sánchez. “I confirm it.”
“It’s not true,” said Beltrán.
“Remember, man,” Sánchez said. “You told me that day when I went to your house to get some pieces of wood.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Of course you do, man, think back,” said Sánchez. “That day I went to your house, just before the San Juanito holiday.”
“Has the witness been to your house?” asked the judge.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 40