The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  But the new culprits? They appeared clearly nowhere. It is a simple and very easy labor to suggest, in any sort of matter, vague and sinister complicities; the popular spirit is very fertile soil for those kinds of seeds; in it suspicion catches, even the most absurd, marvelously fast; but that wasn’t what was expected of Señor Anzola, but proof and concrete accusations, and the country was left waiting. We felt, as we listened to Señor Anzola, the sensation that he, deep down in his spirit, did not know for certain more than the judge, the prosecutor, and the great public knew. That is why he could barely manage a few hours in civic awareness; his apparition as an audacious, decisive, brave accuser seduced many and attracted the attention of all, but his fall was irremediable, because the pedestal he perched upon was made of nothing but vagueness, and in the light of debate it came undone. The anguished intensity of the first sessions became an amusing farce in the last ones, and people who had begun by feeling the chilly breath of Nemesis above their heads, ended up smiling or yawning.

  When Anzola is released, after a series of judicial maneuvers and called-in favors on the part of Julián Uribe, the first thing he does is go home and take a hot bath, so long that his servant has to leave two extra jugs by the bathroom door. When he comes out Anzola notices, with surprise, that his briefcase has been returned: it is lying beside his office chair, like a pet dog. It stays there for the following days, without Anzola picking it up or organizing its contents: the briefcase is a memento of his failure, an archive of wasted years. He spends some days shut up at home, a prisoner of the hatred of the citizens of Bogotá, without even looking out the window to see the cobbled street, for he fears encountering a finger pointing at him or a contemptuous sneer. But the first time he goes out, forcing himself to recover his life, almost on his way into the drugstore to buy some pills, he runs into Señorita Adela Garavito. He greets her by raising a hand to his hat and takes a step toward her, but Adela Garavito dissuades him. “You made us look like liars,” she says in a tone of voice that has gone through repugnance and now settled comfortably into bitterness and resentment. “Señorita, I . . .” Anzola tries, but she cuts off his justification. “Do not come near my house,” she said, “or my papá will shoot you.” She speeds up, as if Anzola had leprosy, and disappears around the nearest corner. Marco Tulio Anzola no longer feels capable of going as far as the drugstore.

  And meanwhile the speeches are still going on in the Salón de Grados, the eternal long-winded spiels that appeared in the newspapers, taking up sixteen columns of tightly packed type, the orators of which all seem to have a secret objective: to sink Marco Tulio Anzola in the mire of opprobrium. In the speeches of the prosecutor and the assassins’ lawyers, Anzola is a fanatic Liberal with an irrepressible desire for vengeance or a shyster longing for fleeting glory, and in any case irresponsible, an attacker of other people’s reputations, a pyromaniac loose on the altars of the nation, and a violator of the sacred values of truth, justice, and honor. For a week Bogotá is a bonfire ready to burn Anzola, everyone’s enemy. The speeches—with which the lawyers of one side and the other are closing the trial—call him a coward, a vulgar backstabber, an opportunist whose pettiness hides him from the gaze of honorable men. Once or twice during the course of a night of insomnia (or when a dog wakes him from his light and disturbed sleep), Anzola wonders, as has tended to occur to him lately, if they’re not right.

  When the trial finished in the Salón de Grados, the court registrar turned to the three members of the jury, who sat up straight in their seats, and read out two questions: “Is the accused Leovigildo Galarza guilty of having willfully and premeditatedly brought about the death of Señor General Rafael Uribe Uribe, by way of the injuries caused by a sharp and offensive instrument, on Carrera Séptima of this city, block 10, on October 15, 1914? Is the accused Leovigildo Galarza guilty of having committed the offense mentioned in the previous question, with the following circumstances, or some or part of them: (1) with previous subterfuge, (2) with malice aforethought, treacherously and sure of having caught the victim off guard, defenseless, and unprepared?” He then read the same thing over again, but exchanging the name of Leovigildo Galarza for that of Jesús Carvajal. The jury unanimously answered yes. Yes to everything. Yes in both cases.

  On June 25, 1918, in the afternoon, Judge Garzón read out the sentences against Jesús Carvajal and Leovigildo Galarza. For the assassination of General Rafael Uribe Uribe they were condemned to twenty years in prison, deprivation of their political rights, and a fine of eight thousand gold pesos, plus the court costs. The galleries exploded in applause, in cries of “Long live the prosecutor” and “Death to Anzola and his book.” Commenting on the sentence, and using the same words the judge had employed to do so, a newspaper said:

  This verdict will not satisfy those who have wanted to use the crime to bring serious charges against their political rivals. It will not satisfy those who have wanted to ventilate partisan passions through the abuse of the pain of a whole people. This verdict will, however, satisfy genuine patriots, as some, in attempting to stain the flag of the parties with a great man’s blood, also threatened to stain that of the nation with dishonor. This verdict, Colombians, returns honor to all of you, gives you the gift of justice, frees you of an uncertain past, and makes you a gift of a future in peace.

  IX

  THE SHAPE OF THE RUINS

  I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that I’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place where I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of which jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write about the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early youth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of perplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.

  It is possible that these ideas were in my head that day, the day of the revelations. It was the last day of February, a Friday; I arrived at Carballo’s apartment at lunchtime, when that night owl would be, I calculated, already showered and ready to begin his convoluted routine. And so it was: I found him dressed, not with the care he usually put into his outfits and accessories, but in a loose and comfortable gray sweatsuit that had seen better days. He looked ready to go out for a run, like one of those old men who has suffered a pre–heart attack and gets obsessed too late with exercise, so they never look at ease in their sports clothes: they look like intruders, impostors, actors disguised for a role they detest. That’s how Carlos Carballo looked that day. Was it his appearance that made me perceive a kind of melancholy in the air, or was it the melancholy t
hat had dictated and in some way produced his appearance? I saw him, for the first time, looking really tired; I thought that the work of remembering tires us out, even when we’re concerned with pasts not our own (when we’re concerned with our pasts, it not only tires us out, but wears us the way water wears away a rock). That’s what I thought when I arrived: that Carballo was tired from looking so hard, for my information and benefit, at this country’s hidden past. When I put my empty black knapsack on the floor, beside a tower of detective novels, and sat down like a diligent understudy, I could not have imagined that the most memorable day of all those we’d shared was about to begin. I could not have imagined that we were going to spend that February 28 very far from the present, plunged into another day in a remote year, watching the terrifying spectacle of a man who remembers what hurts and stings him, and not doing so because he wants to, but because he has no other choice.

  By that point I had lost track of how many hours I’d spent stuck in Who Are They?, scrutinizing its pages, questioning its conclusions, telling myself on occasion that it was all false, that things like this could not have happened in my city, and the proof was that nobody knew about or talked about them: that this foolish denunciation had not survived. And then I thought: It’s true precisely because it hadn’t survived, because history has proved a thousand times its extraordinary capacity to hide uncomfortable versions or to change the language with which things are told, so that terrible and inhumane things end up turning into the most normal, or desirable, or even laudable thing in the world. And then I would think again: It hasn’t survived, nobody talks about it, it has sunk into oblivion and therefore it’s false, for history, which has its own rules, filters and selects like the natural selection of species, and that’s how the versions that try to distort the truth, lie to us, or deceive us, get left behind, and only the ones that stand up to our questioning, our skepticism as citizens, survive. And then I didn’t know what to think anymore, for the fact that Anzola had disappeared into the cesspool of Colombian history would not stop tormenting me. The man who had been at the center of the news for a month, appearing every day on the front pages of the papers and seeing his words published there on a daily basis; the man who for the previous four years divided the citizenry with the promise (some said with the threat) of his investigation and his book, disappears from the public stage as of June 1918. After he went to prison, the media do not mention him again. There is no news of him, his name is not mentioned except to denigrate him, and after the ruling he’s not even mentioned for that. The only thing Carballo had been able to find after years of following the trail of that young man, the only miserable crumb of information that had crossed his path, was a mysterious bibliographical note in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. It dated from 1947 and this was the information:

  SAMPER, MARCO TULIO ANZOLA, 1892– ©, New York. Secrets of Roulette and Its Technical Tricks: Revelations of a Croupier, 32 p., illus.

  Everything in those lines seemed strange to Carballo and also seemed strange to me: the alphabetical classification of the author (listed under his second surname, rather than his first), the length of the work (a short illustrated booklet), and finally, its unpredictable subject (I couldn’t imagine the author of Who Are They? writing a manual for compulsive gamblers). In our last conversation we spent a long time speculating about that old discovery. I asked if he hadn’t tried, but really truly tried, with the force of an obsession, to find Secrets of Roulette; I asked if he’d really hunted for it, even though the revelations of a croupier had nothing to do with Rafael Uribe Uribe or Jorge Eliécer Gaitán or with the violence or the politics or the political violence of our sad country. In short: even though it was of no use.

  “Of course I have,” he answered. “For a time I looked for that damned little book over land and sea. I called all the bibliophiles I know and asked for help contacting all the rare and secondhand-book dealers. And of course I called the Library of Congress. And nothing. The book does not exist. It’s not in the Library, and it’s supposed to have a copy of everything with pages in this stinking world. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been of any use to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I began asking myself about the place of publication,” said Carballo. “New York. Why New York? I had always thought Anzola’s disappearance was too total, too perfect. Nobody disappears like that. Or rather: there is only one way to disappear so completely from the Colombian media after having been so much of a presence.”

  “Leave Colombia.”

  “Yes. And it’s logical, no? What would you have done? If you’d written a book like Who Are They?, if you’d participated in the most notorious trial in history, and if your book and your participation in the trial had turned you, in your early twenties, into the most hated man in Colombia . . . You would have left too, Vásquez, and so would I, I would have left too. I thought of that and then I thought: And where would a young man like Anzola go? Somewhere where he knows someone, where he has some contacts at least. And then I remembered that Carlos Adolfo Urueta was a diplomat in Washington. I thought: The United States. Anzola went to the United States. I still think that’s what happened.”

  “Oh, you’re not sure?”

  “A hundred percent sure, no,” said Carballo. “But it’s logical, isn’t it? And anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why doesn’t it matter?” I said. I had begun listening to his reasoning expecting a revelation: Now he’ll tell me he followed the lead, I even thought, he’ll tell me he found his trail in New York, and he’ll surprise me. I didn’t hide my disappointment. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter, Carlos? There’s a story there, don’t you think? There’s a hole in the story. Wouldn’t you like to fill it? Wouldn’t you like to know what happened to Anzola?”

  “I’d like to, but it doesn’t matter to me. They’re two different things.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “Well, no,” said Carballo. “I can imagine the situation very well: Anzola left the country the way so many people leave Colombia when they speak a truly troublesome truth. He became uncomfortable and he had to leave: just like so many. If we started making lists, we’d never finish. Well, Anzola is an old example, not the oldest, but one of them. And that’s that, we don’t have to keep wondering about it. I believe that’s how it was and that’s enough for me, because Anzola’s life doesn’t really matter to me. Or to put it a better way, what matters is his book, understand? What matters to me is that he wrote his book. So a reader would find it, right? That’s when things begin to happen.”

  I can’t say at that moment I noticed that last phrase, the profound significance of which would have been impossible for me to guess or foresee in the moment I heard it. I took it as a cliché, maybe; maybe I believed that Carballo was revealing the miracles of encounter between any reader and any book. I didn’t think he had in mind a particular reader when he pronounced those words, or a specific book, nor did I think the imaginary and even abstract encounter might occur in a definite place and on a concrete date. But that’s how it was. I then asked an innocent question, more out of courtesy than genuine curiosity:

  “Carlos, don’t you think Anzola’s departure might have any simpler explanations?”

  Carballo passed a hand over his new beard. “Like what,” he said curtly.

  “Maybe Anzola didn’t leave because he was persecuted. Maybe he left Colombia simply because he failed.”

  He half closed his eyes and a scornful look appeared on his face. I didn’t care. I told him what I thought was an incontrovertible truth: that beyond what had happened in reality, beyond the accusations he’d made in his book, the fact was that Marco Tulio Anzola had not been able to demonstrate anything in that trial. And then Carballo got angrier than I’d ever seen him.

  “What do you mean?” he said, standing up. “What do you mean Anzola didn’t prove anything? Are the witnesses not the
re?”

  “Don’t blow up at me, Carlos,” I said. “The witnesses are there, but they don’t prove anything. The book is very convincing, and I would love to give in to a three-hundred-page conspiracy theory. But what matters isn’t the theory of the book, but what happened at the trial, and the trial was a failure. A total failure: a spectacular and even humiliating failure. A disappointment, in other words, a betrayal of all the people who supported Anzola. The poor guy had nothing more than clues about the men he accused: that Correal was seen here, that Pedro León Acosta was seen there. Both those characters strike me as fairly evil, but that doesn’t mean they did what Anzola said in his book. Agreed: Acosta tried to murder a president a few years earlier. Agreed: Correal mistreated and even tortured another. But that’s not proof of anything, except of their pasts. And what can you tell me about the Jesuits? Against the Jesuits, who are also accused in the book, there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the trial. They’re not even mentioned.”

  “Because Anzola didn’t get that far!” shouted Carballo. “Because they kicked him out before he could get to the Jesuits!”

  “Fine, that makes it easy. ‘Yes, they’re guilty, but it’s just that I was going to prove it later.’ That’s not serious.”

  “I can’t believe it,” said Carballo, lowering his voice.

  “Well, apparently,” I said sarcastically, “neither could the jury.”

  “And what about Father Berestain’s meetings with Correal? What about the witness statements of the people who saw the murderers come out of the San Bartolomé door?”

  “They remain just that, Carlos: meetings and witness statements. But Anzola didn’t prove that it led to anything.”