“Please, Your Honor,” replied Anzola, “clear the galleries.”
“I ask the galleries to keep their composure,” said the lawyer Murillo. “So the judge will not lose patience.”
Anzola, I think, had to know at that moment that he could not keep quiet: his silence was now the silence of defeat. He needed a smoke screen, a distraction, so he did what he did best: he protested. He complained that the whole trial seemed designed to hinder his cause. He complained that the testimonies that helped it were left inconclusive; he was allowed to interrogate witnesses only when the judge wished to allow it; now he wanted to force him to reveal his cards—publicly confess an identity that was better kept secret—and thus lose the small advantage he had been able to gain. In contrast, the judge had refused to order the presence of Salomón Correal, to counteract what witnesses had said against him face-to-face. “Why?” Anzola asked, and immediately answered his own question: “Because that would harm the police commissioner.”
But his strategy did not succeed. Rodríguez Forero’s son, who until then had remained still and silent in his chair, stood up.
“Your Honor,” he said, “the private prosecution demands Señor Anzola name the famous gentleman in the top hat right this moment, and requests you to oblige him to do so.”
“Oblige him!” shouted the galleries.
“You cannot oblige me to do that,” said Anzola. “Until I finish an investigation that I am carrying out, I am not going to give it and you cannot oblige me. You’re not going to take away my evidence to then bring in hired policemen to contradict it. Very pretty that.”
“Out!” roared a voice from the gallery.
“Señor Anzola,” said the prosecutor, “you have an obligation to respect us. You cannot come here to offend us with charges like these.”
“You are a witness,” said Carvajal’s lawyer. “As a witness, you must supply the name if you know it. Otherwise, you will face trial as an accessory after the fact.”
“You will have the name,” said Anzola, “the day I bring my evidence to the courtroom.”
“If you don’t want to give the name in public, you must give it to the judge privately.”
“I shall not give it to anyone. And nobody can force me to.”
The uproar from the galleries was so great, and there was so much hostility, that the judge decreed a ten-minute recess. Anzola did not leave: the courtyard with the fountain and the brick arcades were full of men who would not hesitate for a second, not a fraction of a second, before hurting him if the occasion presented itself. It was not impossible that among the public that day were the men in ponchos who, as he recounted in his book, had followed him threateningly through the streets. What would he have been thinking at that moment? It is possible that he might have seen, as if in cinematic images, the whole path that remained to be covered in this stubborn labor. It remained for Pedro León Acosta to return to court to be identified; it remained for him to call for the testimonies that placed the Jesuits center stage. Many pages of his book remained to be gone through, many of the thirty-six witnesses he had recruited had yet to be called.
Then the judge came out. To the surprise of all, he did not even take his seat. He waved his bell, waited for silence, and crossed himself lengthily while looking up at the crucifix.
“Everything that has happened here today is a mockery,” he said. “And as I cannot continue to permit Señor Anzola to mock everyone, I have decided to set him a deadline. Señor Anzola has four days, until next Tuesday, to present all the rest of his witnesses and make all the rest of his statements. After that point, he will no longer be allowed to speak.”
“You cannot do that,” said Anzola.
“Of course I can,” said the judge.
“I am speaking here by virtue of a decree of yours, sir. I might not know much about the law, but I know that judicial decrees are the law in a trial. So you cannot come in here now and tell me for how long I can speak.”
“You are speaking here because I have a discretionary power to direct the debates,” replied the judge. “And when I want to I can, discretionarily, order you to be silent.”
“Shut him up!” shouted the galleries.
“I don’t care about those who shout,” said Anzola. “Tomorrow I will publish in the newspaper the list of those making such a ruckus. They are civil servants and police officers who have left their posts to come here and insult me, and they do so under orders from Correal.”
“You will please restrict yourself to the charges you have come to make,” said Judge Garzón. “And know that if you do not respect me, I am going to fine you.”
“Before that, let’s clarify the time period you’ve imposed.”
“No, sir. Bring your charges. Then I shall summon the witnesses that are confirmed.”
“I have huge evidence against people you cannot even imagine,” said Anzola. “But I will not say their names yet, so they don’t bring false witnesses here to contradict them. I shall assert my evidence to an impartial judge. What I have on Emilio Beltrán, on the man in the top hat, and on all the rest.”
“Fraud!” they shouted at him.
The prosecutor demanded of Anzola, once more and in the name of the people, the full name of the so-often-mentioned man in the top hat.
“If you do not give it,” he said, “I am going to ask the judge to fine you.”
The judge did not wait to be asked.
“Under a fine of ten gold pesos,” he said, “tell us the name of that gentleman in the top hat who you believe to be involved in the murder of General Uribe.”
“If I do not give it,” answered Anzola, “it is the fault of all of you here.” He realized he had to strain his throat if he wanted to be heard over all the shouting, the insults, the hands banging on the railings; he also realized that he was losing control over the development of the hearing. “I cannot give that name because I do not have confidence that the evidence I have against him will be followed up. As for the fine, I shall pay it with great pleasure. But first I shall have to demonstrate to the country who the accessories to the real assassins of General Uribe were. Your Honor, issue a judicial decree that will allow me to give my sworn statement before an impartial judge, and then I shall bring my evidence!”
It was a desperate gesture. I know it, though I’m not sure he knew it. To whom was he going to take what he hadn’t been able to demonstrate there? Then the prosecutor stood up. He said the charges leveled by Anzola were extremely grave; that Anzola had complained a lot about the thuggishness of the rest of them even though no one had kept him from talking about whatever he liked there. And this was true. He said there should be a demand that he be required to present all his evidence immediately; not doing so suggested that Anzola, far from searching for things to come to light in this trial, was seeking confusion, by all means possible. This also could seem true. He said that Señor Anzola had not brought, up to that moment, a single piece of concrete evidence. And that was incontrovertibly true. He said that Anzola had wanted to display himself here as a standard bearer of justice, and instead he had brought about a farce. And the public shouted, insulted him, and had begun to threaten him: how they loved that word, farce, how many times had it been thrown in his face during the hearings. And everything the prosecutor said was true. Had Anzola wondered if he was right? Had he come to doubt his own certainties?
“If Anzola does not present his evidence,” said the prosecutor, “His Honor will be obligated to expel him from the hearings. If he does not present it, he cannot allege that he was not allowed to speak, much less that there is a cover-up going on in this trial.”
The chronicles recount that Judge Garzón leaned over to the three jurors and shielded his mouth while talking to them, and the jurors shielded their mouths while answering him. When he sat back in his seat, he announced:
“In accordance with th
e jury, it has been decided to submit you, Señor Anzola, to an interrogation. You are required to articulate all the charges against people you believe to be involved in the assassination of General Uribe. You are also required to say their names.”
“I cannot,” said Anzola.
“You are required to say the names of those you consider responsible.”
“I cannot,” said Anzola.
“For the last time, will you or will you not give the names?”
“I cannot give them,” said Anzola.
“Very well, then. Your presence here is useless. Your intervention here is concluded. You can no longer speak.”
The hearing ended like a street demonstration, seized with a similar clenched violence, the same sensation of a lit fuse. Another identical demonstration awaited Anzola outside, on the pavement of Carrera Sexta, and it was so ferocious that the journalist Joaquín Achury tried to block his way and advise him not to go out. “Wait a moment,” it seems he said, “wait for them to go. Do yourself a favor.” But Anzola didn’t listen to him. When he went through the big wooden door, an avalanche of threats hit him: they were going to kill him, he was a son of a bitch, and they were going to kill him. Bastard, they shouted from the corners; son of a whore, they called him, and others said he was a traitor, and others, finally, accused him of having robbed and murdered and bribed. He lowered his head so their spit would not land on his face; a squad of police surrounded him, which was the only reason the furious crowd did not pounce on him and tear him apart with their bare hands. One of those hands managed to reach over the officers and punch him between the shoulders, and another knocked his hat off with a slap that would have hurt if it had caught him on the face. Among his aggressors were many of those who had cheered him a week earlier: Would Anzola have recognized them? Like that, surrounded by police, in the middle of that hallucinatory violence, without taking part in any decisions about his movements, he reached the Plaza de Bolívar. The journalist Achury, from afar, saw a car appear out of nowhere and a door open, and saw Anzola shoved into it and heard a voice order:
“Take him home. And don’t stop, don’t stop no matter what.”
There are no witnesses to what happened next. We can only deduce it from the next news we have about Anzola: his arrest and imprisonment. It must have been immediate, for the following morning found him already in the police jail cells; it is reasonable to suppose that the car that had orders to take him home actually took him straight to police headquarters. I imagine Anzola in those seconds prior to his arrest: I imagine him thinking he’s about to arrive home and take refuge in his bed, under the wool blankets, and suddenly realizing that he wasn’t in front of his house, but in front of police headquarters. Two policemen come up on either side of him on the sidewalk, seize him, and begin dragging him inside the building. A third, whose face Anzola never manages to see, tells him he’s under arrest.
“Under what charges?” shouts Anzola, trying to resist. “What are the charges?”
“Disrespecting authority,” a rude voice tells him. “And trying to use a firearm against a police constable.”
That’s how it could have happened. The charges under which the arrest was made were a week old: they stemmed from the incident in the corridors of the Salón de Grados, when a police constable had tried to take Anzola by force to the witness room. The only one injured in the incident had been Anzola, who fell to the floor and was shoved down the corridor. But now they were charging him over that; and, most absurdly, they accused him of having tried to use his revolver, when the police constable had removed it from him during the search. This was their revenge; this was the revenge of the whole police force, of every officer discredited by the statements of his witnesses. This was Correal, yes, Salomón Correal, explaining to him that you do not mess with the police of this country.
* * *
—
I DON’T KNOW how many days Anzola spent in jail, because there’s no record of it, but I do know that the trial went on without him in the Salón de Grados, that place where Anzola was now unwelcome, where his name was disgraced. I don’t know if any of the officers guarding him might have done him the favor of telling him how the hearings were going, or if he received visits from anyone—Julián Uribe, for example—who could have brought him recent newspapers as a form of information charity. If he could have seen them, he would have known what they thought of him in that world, the outside world, the world to which he had sought to restore a little bit of justice (perhaps clumsily, perhaps believing that he could prove in practice the convictions he had acquired in the most private part of his soul). Under the headline “Impressions of the Trial,” the reporter for a newspaper had written some paragraphs that were like a broken mirror: Anzola could have seen himself there during the days of his imprisonment, feeling reflected but at the same time distorted or incomplete, while obscure nameless forces decided—slowly, sullenly—how to dispose of his life.
Señor Anzola Samper has stopped attending the hearings of the trial of the assassins of General Uribe Uribe. For thirteen days he was the figure of such a sensational cause; thirteen sessions were taken up with hearing his witnesses and carrying out the confrontations he demanded, and after all of that this anxious young man finished off his performance himself by refusing to lay charges and make frank accusations. He presented himself before the jury as an exponent of the truth and the light, and he retired from it wrapped in shadows, refusing to give the names of those responsible he claims to know, clearly refusing to make the terrible accusations we all expected to hear from his lips. After that refusal his presence in court no longer made any sense, and he no longer had anything to do there.
Let’s see him, let’s try to see him. In the mornings, very early, a tired and irritable officer wakes Anzola up, grumpy from having been on guard duty all night. He takes him to the lavatory—allows him to enter alone—and waits for him on the other side of a half-open door with a disabled latch, and Anzola has to do contortions to crouch over a stinking hole in the floor without losing his balance. Luckily, the scant food and the effects of disgust have unregulated his stomach’s habits, so that he has gone three days without relieving himself. Sometimes he is allowed to wash his hands, but not always. His clothes begin to smell of urine and rancid sweat, and he is getting used to his own stink when the same officer who arrested him shows up, hands him a paper package tied with string, and says: “Be grateful you have friends.” It is a change of clothes. Nobody tells him who brought it; Anzola buries his face in it and inhales deeply: he has never felt such pleasure at rubbing recently ironed cloth against his skin. When he changes, the starched collar rubs against the back of his neck all day. He doesn’t care. When night falls, he has a painful rash, but he notices that concentrating on that banal discomfort keeps him from thinking too much about his disgrace.
During the thirteen days of his intense intervention, Señor Anzola did not manage to prove anything; his witnesses insinuated suspicions of certain facts, magnified some details, or destroyed some legends as unsustainable as those related to General Pedro León Acosta, who perhaps in this whole trial has done nothing but atone for his participation in the February 10 attack, since only because of it could he be implicated in a crime in which not the slightest nor the furthest blame could be proven against him. The big witnesses, those who saw General Correal, accompanied by another man, conversing with the assassins three hours before the crime, in broad daylight, on the doorstep of the illustrious victim and giving them instructions there, had no other difficulty than that of saying things that were purely and simply implausible, because those statements indicated in General Correal, more than his complicity, a monumental stupidity, a flippancy so enormous, such lack of foresight, that are simply not credible in the most oblivious illiterate, let alone in a Police Commissioner. It could be affirmed as axiomatic that precisely if General Correal had participated in some way in the horrendous crime,
he would never have allowed himself to be seen conversing publicly in the street with the assassins the day of the crime and in front of the victim’s house. That is elemental and obvious.
After a few days—three, maybe four—they move him to the Panóptico. It can’t be said his jailers lack a sense of humor: his cell is a few doors down from the ones previously occupied by the assassins Galarza and Carvajal, who had now been transferred, awaiting their sentence. A couple of times they allow him to go to the chapel alone to pray. As soon as he closes the wooden door, he kneels down on the cold stone floor, and in the semidarkness his lips try to form the Our Father, but then his mind interrupts: Anzola thinks that the assassins did the same thing with the Jesuit priests. Yes, the ones who came to visit them, to demand their restraint and recommend readings; the ones who left no trace apart from a few articles written under pseudonyms and a few rumors, what somebody said that somebody heard that somebody said. They had remained in the shadows, those priests, they had come out of the plot against Uribe victorious . . . but who are they? Anzola has not even seen their faces: he could not even recognize them if he ran into them in the street.
At night it was cold; Anzola wraps himself in his blanket and draws his knees up to his chest, and has enormous trouble falling asleep, perhaps for having spent the day inactive: reading the papers, taking pointless notes out of long habit, commenting on what, according to the newspapers, they’re saying in the Salón de Grados. They call him disloyal, a liar, a slanderer, and the public applauds, happy to be rid of him, yes, happy to have dismissed him. Anzola, meanwhile, goes out into the yard at the same time as the rest of the prisoners, receives the same food as the rest of the prisoners, and uses the lavatory at the same times. Sometimes he visits the construction projects he supervised during his fictitious employment; sometimes he talks with other prisoners. One of them, that man called Zalamea who gave him generous information about the assassins and their privileges, approaches him one morning and talks to him the way one talks to a child: “Oh, my dear friend, it could only occur to you,” he says. “Only to you could such a thing occur.”
The Shape of the Ruins Page 42