The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “And what about Berestain’s words? When he hoped Uribe was rotting in hell. What about that?”

  “Oh, Carlos, please,” I said. “In this country people wish hell for each other with astonishing ease. Everybody does it all the time. That doesn’t mean anything concrete, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

  Carballo sat back down. His face and his expression (crossing his arms, the way his knees buckled) were suffused with an intense disappointment. I told him I was very sorry for speaking to him like that, but the facts were very clear: the book is one thing and the trial is something else. I brought up the subject of the Jesuits again: Anzola hadn’t even mentioned them once during the whole trial, at least as far as he had told me. “Or did he?” I asked. “Did he produce any evidence against the Jesuits at the trial?”

  A tiny voice said: “No.”

  “So then?”

  “So they win.”

  “What?”

  “You are doing exactly what the whole country has done for a century, Vásquez. Since he didn’t win the case, since there was no ruling against those Anzola accused, then what Anzola said was a big lie. Well, yours is a very poor truth, my friend, because the truth of the courts is sometimes very different from the truth of life. You say that Anzola didn’t manage to prove anything and therefore his book is unbelievable. But have you asked yourself why he didn’t manage to prove anything in the trial? Is it not obvious that the whole trial was manipulated so that Anzola could not prove what he had? Is it not obvious that they silenced him in a very subtle way, with all the appearance of legality?”

  “But Carlos, they let him say everything he wanted to. They let him call as many witnesses as he wanted. How did they silence him?”

  “You are repeating what they said in the newspapers, I don’t know if you realize it.”

  “I am perfectly well aware,” I told him. “And let me tell you something: the commentator in El Tiempo is completely right. I don’t know who he was, it’s a shame he didn’t sign his commentary, but he’s right. He’s right when he says that Anzola wasn’t able to prove anything against either Correal or Acosta. He’s right when he says that it’s very easy to ignite suspicion but what is necessary is to prove it. Why didn’t Anzola say who the man in the top hat was? Do you really believe that he knew who it was, Carlos? If he knew, why not come out with the name right there, in front of everybody? You don’t believe that if he didn’t say it was because he didn’t know it? Tell me, Carlos, tell me sincerely: Don’t you think that Anzola was bluffing?”

  “No, he wasn’t bluffing,” said Carballo. “This is not a poker game.”

  “He doesn’t clarify anything about the Jesuits’ publications. He doesn’t clarify anything about the associations where they supposedly drew lots to see who would assassinate a man. Who can believe him? Tell me, Carlos, who is Ariston Men Hydor and that Campesino who wrote against General Uribe? Bogotá was not a city of millions back then: it was a small town. Nobody could hide that well, I imagine. So, why can’t he prove anything against a couple of fanatical columnists whose only cover is a pseudonym, two libelous madmen like those who exist all over social media? The answer: Because they’re nothing more than madmen, fanatics, and mudslingers. And as for the associations, does that really happen? Are there really groups financed by rich people who choose assassins by drawing lots and order the death of anyone who annoys them? Where does Anzola show proof of that?”

  “They win,” he muttered, or that’s what I thought I heard.

  “I don’t know who they are,” I said. “But it’s not that they win, it’s that this is the truth we have available now. There isn’t enough evidence to change it.”

  Carballo remained silent. He drew his feet up on the sofa and curled up like a frightened puppy. And then, with a voice that blended defeat and stubbornness, he began to speak. He did so without looking at me, as if thinking out loud. However, he was not thinking out loud: he was talking to me: he wasn’t talking to anybody but me.

  “But there are other truths, Vásquez,” he said. “There are truths that do not come out in the papers. There are truths that are no less true due to the fact that nobody knows them. Maybe they happened in a strange place where journalists and historians can’t go. And what do we do with them? Where can we give them space to exist? Do we let them rot, only because they weren’t able to be born into life correctly, or because they let bigger forces win? There are weak truths, Vásquez, truths as fragile as a premature baby, truths that can’t be defended in the world of proven facts, newspapers, and history books. Truths that exist even though they might have collapsed in a trial or even though people’s memories forget them. Or are you going to tell me that known history is the only version of things? No, please, don’t be so naive. What you call history is no more than the winning story, Vásquez. Someone made that story win, and not any of the others, and that’s why we believe it today. Or rather: we believe it because it got written down, because it wasn’t lost in the endless hole of words that only get said, or even worse, that aren’t even spoken, but are only thought. The journalist shows up, the twentieth-century historian shows up, and they put something in writing: it might be the Uribe crime, it might be men landing on the moon, it might be whatever you like: the atomic bomb or the Spanish Civil War or the secession of Panama. And that’s the truth, but it’s only true because it happened in a place that can be told and someone told it in concrete words. And I repeat: There are truths that don’t happen in those places, truths that nobody writes down because they’re invisible. There are millions of things that happen in special places, and I repeat: they are places that are not within the reach of historians or journalists. They are not invented places, Vásquez, they are not fictions, they are very real: as real as anything told in the newspapers. But they don’t survive. They stay there, without anybody to tell them. And that’s unfair. It’s unfair and it’s sad.”

  And that’s when he began to speak of his father. He did so without fuss or sentimentalism, perhaps with a bit of melancholy, but he told a complex story without stumbling, and this allowed me to perceive that one of two things was true: either he’d told this story many times or he’d waited his whole life to tell it. I decided on the second, and it turned out that I was right.

  I’ve corrected the few instances in which Carballo’s prodigious memory misfired or mixed something up, and I’ve completed his tale with information necessary to understand or appreciate it better. Apart from that, I’ve tried to remember that my task was that of a notary, because it is more than likely I’ll never come across a similar story again in my life. My job, very difficult and simple at the same time, is to do it justice or at least not misappropriate it.

  The story is as follows.

  * * *

  —

  CÉSAR CARBALLO WAS BORN in a house in the neighborhood of La Perseverancia, in eastern Bogotá, eleven or twelve blocks north of the street where his son would live (and where he would tell me all this) many years later. In that year, 1924, his mother, Rosa María Peña, worked as a laundress for people who lived in the rich neigborhoods, which she would get to by walking down the hill, crossing Carrera Séptima and then the railway line, and walking a few blocks north: those neighborhoods she could see from the flat rooftops of her street on clear mornings, when she’d chat with the women from her block, helping each other to hang up wet clothes on pita-fiber cords, which scratched the more delicate material. César’s father was the only cobbler in that neighborhood inhabited mostly by tradesmen: mechanics and bricklayers and carpenters. Barely into his teens, Benjamín Carballo had begun to learn the trade in the shoemaking shop of Don Alcides Malagón, an old man who looked like he’d been born when the city had and seemed to have every intention of dying with it. When old man Malagón died, Benjamín Carballo was twenty-two years old, with a wife and a lot of common sense, so he took over the shoe shop without asking himself to
o many questions. Later he was glad of it, because as the years went by he became convinced that the art of making shoes was just that, an art, and there was no more dignity in sculpting a statue than in making a shoe to fit: in exploring the irregularities of a foot, taking a plaster mold that was precise and clean, constructing the lasts, reproducing in them the characteristic features of the living model, for no two feet are the same, and drying the leather over the lasts, so they don’t lose their precise relationship. He had devoted his whole life to learning his trade; he hoped his son César would learn it from him.

  He had good reasons to wish for that, because César handled the calipers and curved ruler like a professional, and he could trace perfect patterns by the age of ten. The problem—the problem for his father, who would have liked to have him as a helper eight hours a day—is that he was also an excellent pupil. His school was a place with badly patched roofs where classes couldn’t be held when it rained, where there weren’t enough notebooks to go around and books were a luxury item, but it was presided over by a woman with an indisputable vocation who noticed the boy’s potential very early on. The teacher, who knew very well how things worked in this neighborhood, persuaded Rosa María to let the boy finish his studies, but she did so much earlier than they would have begun to consider taking him out of school to help the family. Rosa María paid attention to the teacher. César would always talk about how hard his parents worked so that neither he nor his little brother would have to drop out of school. It was there, in a dirt-floored classroom, where César Carballo first saw Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

  At the time, Gaitán had only been mayor of Bogotá for a few months, but he had already been all over the city, seeing and being seen, cultivating his image as a man of the people. He was thirty-three years old at that point and had an extraordinary appetite for power and a fabled résumé: he came from humble origins, son of a schoolteacher and a secondhand-book dealer, but he had spent fifteen years shaking up the political world with the most ferocious eloquence anyone had heard in these parts since Rafael Uribe Uribe. At eighteen he had given such a fiery speech in support of a Liberal candidate that his enemies shot at him from the crowd; the bullet passed under his gesticulating arm, and Gaitán kept the jacket with the bullet hole and took it as a gift to his candidate.

  In Rome, during the doctoral studies he took with Maestro Enrico Ferri, he had discovered and admired and learned the ways Mussolini had of hypnotizing crowds of thousands of people. He had a natural talent for improvisation, but taught himself a virtuoso handling of pauses and silences, and found a mysterious alchemy between the language of the street and the most high-toned rhetoric. The result was an orator capable of defeating any antagonist on a public platform, for Colombian politicians, convinced that they did not have to seduce their audiences, but simply intimidate them, began their speeches by mentioning Pallas Athena or Cicero or Demosthenes, and then Gaitán showed up and started firing his ferocious phrases with an archer’s precision, and everything changed. Gaitán went into a trance; the whole audience seemed ready to follow him to that place he was talking from. Sometimes it didn’t seem to matter what Gaitán was saying: what mattered was that it was him who was saying it. This was what his audiences felt, with their fraying hats and smell of old sweat. He was one of their own, but nobody (much less one of their own) had ever talked to them like that.

  With that same tremendous oratory he had launched one of the toughest congressional debates a Colombian president had ever had to endure. In 1928, after a failed strike, the army had killed an indeterminate or secret number of banana plantation workers in the Caribbean region of the country. Gaitán denounced that event, which everyone knew very well; but when he did so it seemed as if the massacre had just taken place or the country was actually seeing it for the first time. Later someone referred to the moment when the orator, this Indian with slicked-back hair whom the high-class congressmen were mocking, devoured the chamber with a disturbing speech and finished his words with dramatic effect: taking out and showing everyone a skull, a bare human skull, the skull of one of the victims of the banana worker massacre. It was the skull of a child.

  Seven years later, the agitator turned mayor visited a public school. The whole of La Perseverancia neighborhood was paralyzed by his visit. They saw him arrive on foot, with his double-breasted suit and fedora, and walk up the steep, dusty streets from Carrera Quinta, at a good pace, without sweating or fretting, surrounded by a committee who very soon mixed in with the curious and the needy onlookers. They heard him congratulate the teacher on her labor, heard him remind the throng that his own mother was a schoolteacher, heard him say that there was no more beautiful or nobler profession in the world than that of educator. They heard him promise the creation of school cafeterias, because children learn better on full stomachs. They heard him ask a boy why he’d come to school barefoot and heard him promise that shoes would be free and obligatory for public school pupils. Among those listening to his improvised speech was the shoemaker Benjamín Carballo, who had never heard a politician speak of shoes, and who spent the rest of the day and week and month remembering how his son César had interrupted the mayor’s words to shout an offer in his changing adolescent voice: “My papá can make them!” Gaitán smiled but didn’t say anything. Afterward, when his visit was finished, he crossed paths with César at the door of the school. Almost without looking at him, he said: “The shoemaker’s kid.” And he headed on down the hill.

  César Carballo would later say that was the moment he began to be a Gaitanista. He saw himself in Gaitán as if in a mirror; as the years went on, Gaitán became his model, the pattern on which to trace the design of his life. If a man from Las Cruces, a neighborhood not very different from La Perseverancia, had managed to become a congressman and mayor, why could he not follow a similar path with the sole force of discipline and study? César Carballo wanted to study law, like Gaitán, at the National University, like Gaitán. But when he finished school reality came crashing down on him with its full weight: there was no money to send him to university. He was sixteen years old.

  In January 1941, less than a year after Gaitán was named minister of education, César Carballo woke up very early one morning, put on a clean shirt, and walked to the offices of the ministry, on Carrera Sexta at Tenth Street. He asked for Gaitán and was told he wasn’t in. He went back an hour later and asked for him again, and they told him again that he wasn’t in. He looked around—three children with their mothers, a young man with books under his arm, an older man with glasses and a cane—and he realized that he wasn’t the only one who’d asked to see the minister with the obvious intention of asking him for a favor. Then he had a hunch: he walked around the block and stationed himself beside the back door, thinking that Gaitán, when he came out, would leave that way so he wouldn’t have to fight his way through so many people’s requests. At one in the afternoon he saw him leave, approached him, and said: “I’m the shoemaker’s kid.” He gabbled out that he wanted to go to university, needed a grant, and had heard that Minister Gaitán could award him one. Gaitán was walking with two well-dressed gentlemen; César Carballo saw a sarcastic smile on their faces and thought he was wasting his time. “I am a Liberal,” he said, without really knowing what good that would do him. Gaitán looked at his companions, looked at him, and said: “That doesn’t matter. Hunger isn’t liberal or conservative. The urge to get ahead isn’t, either.” He looked at his watch and added: “Come back later and we’ll see what we can do.”

  That’s what César did. Gaitán received him in his office, offered him a coffee, and treated him like a son, or at least that’s what César would tell everyone for the rest of his life. He would also say that he’d seen the law degree from the National and had been enthralled, thinking one day he’d have one like it, but the real impression came from one of the other frames adorning the office wall: a photo of a twenty-five-year-old Gaitán standing beside his teacher, the great crim
inal law specialist Enrico Ferri. The photo was personally dedicated by Maestro Ferri to his student Jorge Gaitán, who had written a distinguished and much-admired thesis in Rome. César asked what his thesis had been on and Gaitán explained in three incomprehensible sentences. Of course César, a humble tradesman’s son, not yet of age, had no way of understanding what premeditation was at that moment, much less how mitigating circumstances could be related to it, but Gaitán’s phrases sounded like spells, and the very fact that the great man had tried to explain them to him allowed him to overcome the next disappointment: there were no grants left. But César Carballo saw Gaitán make a real effort: he saw him call his secretary, ask if the deadline had passed, and hear that it had, yes, Doctor, the deadline had passed; then he heard him ask his secretary whether any of the most recent grantees had not taken up their awards, as often happened, and in such a case whether we could give that grant to this lad, and heard the secretary say no, Doctor, there were no unclaimed grants this year, they’d all been accepted already. And then Gaitán said: “You see, young man. I’m very sorry. If you come back next year, before the deadline, I’ll make personally sure you get your grant.”

  But a conspiracy of fate crossed César Carballo’s path. When Gaitán, five weeks after meeting him there, left the ministry of education prematurely, César saw just another obstacle: he said to himself that life had never made things easy for him, that he was capable of winning a grant with or without the help of a politician, and he would apply in November and the following year he would be starting his new life. But he did not apply. One afternoon in May, just before he turned sixteen, César arrived at the workshop and found his father lying on the floor, among papers with sketches on them and with his measuring tape still around his neck. Apparently, he’d just taken a customer’s foot size and was calculating the pattern, but the customer had left when the heart attack overcame him, and in any case everyone agreed there was little he could have done. César Carballo took over the shop and, of course, the support of his little brother. The job took up all his time and almost all his attention. Any idea about studying at university was unworkable now. César Carballo forgot those hopes, or filed them away in a deep part of his conscience and devoted himself to his lasts and forms and the leather he bought from a saddler on Eighth Street, down the road from the observatory. The next few years went by like that.