The Scandal of the Century Read online

  LETTERS TO UFEMIA

  “José. Bogotá,” says the envelope of one of the lost letters. The envelope has been opened, and inside it they found a two-page, handwritten letter signed by “Diógenes.” The only clue to finding its intended recipient is in its opening: “My dear Enrique.”

  Envelopes with only a name or only a surname that have arrived at the office of unclaimed letters number in the thousands. Thousands of letters for Alberto, for Isabel, for Gutiérrez and Medina and Francisco José. That’s one of the most common cases.

  In that office where absurdity is entirely natural, there is a letter in a mourning envelope, on which neither the name nor the address of the recipient has been written, instead a phrase in violet ink: “I’m sending it in a black envelope so it will arrive more lightly.”

  WHO’S WHO!

  These pieces of absurdity, multiplied ad infinitum, which would be enough to drive a normal person crazy, have not altered the nervous systems of the six civil servants who for eight hours a day do everything possible to find the intended recipients of thousands of lost letters. Hundreds of letters with no names arrive from the Agua de Dios leper colony, especially around Christmas time. They all ask for help: “To the gentleman who has a little shop on Calle 28-South, two houses past the butcher’s,” it says on the envelope. The postman discovers that not only is it impossible to find the precise store on a fifty-block-long street, but that in the entire neighborhood there is not a single butcher shop. Nevertheless, one letter from Agua de Dios does reach its destination, with the following information: “For the lady who goes to the five-thirty mass every morning at the Iglesia de Egipto.” By insisting and investigating, the employees and messengers of the unclaimed letters office managed to identify the anonymous addressee.

  IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING…

  Letters that get declared definitively dead do not constitute the majority of those arriving daily at the unclaimed letters office. Don Enrique Posada Ucrós, a phlegmatic, white-haired man, who after five years of running this office is no longer surprised by anything, has his senses sharpened by the fabulous task of finding clues where none appear to exist. He is a fanatic for order in an office that exists only by virtue of the country’s correspondents’ abysmal disorder. “Nobody goes to read the poste restante,” the head of the unclaimed letters office says. And those who go to read them constitute a very small percentage of people who really do have a letter without an address. The poste restante of the Bogotá mail department is constantly full of people expecting to receive a letter. However, on a list of 170 letters with mistaken addresses, only six were collected by their intended recipients.

  HOMONYMS

  Ignorance, carelessness, negligence, and the lack of a sense of cooperation on the part of the public are the main causes of a letter not reaching its destination. The number of Colombians who change addresses and make the corresponding announcement at the post office is very small. As long as this situation continues, the efforts of the employees of the unclaimed letters office—where to this day there is an unclaimed letter that has been there for many years, addressed in the following way: “For you, sir, sent by your fiancée”—will be in vain. And right there, packages from all over the world, with newspapers, magazines, reproductions of famous paintings, academic diplomas, and strange objects with no apparent application. Two rooms are stuffed with those unclaimed items from all over the world whose recipients it has not been possible to locate. Parcels have been seen there for Alfonso López, Eduardo Santos, Gustavo Rojas, Laureano Gómez, who are not the same citizens that anyone might imagine. And among them, a package of philosophical journals and bulletins for the lawyer and sociologist from the Caribbean coast, Luis Eduardo Nieto Artesa, currently residing in Barranquilla.

  THE POSTMAN RINGS A THOUSAND TIMES

  Not all the packages found at the lost letters office have the wrong address. Many of them have simply been refused by their intended recipients. Men and women who buy things by mail order and then change their minds obstinately refuse to receive the shipment. They won’t open the door to the messenger. They are indifferent to the telephone calls from Señor Posada Ucrós, who looks up the addressee’s number in the phone book, and implores them to receive a parcel from Germany. The messenger, accustomed to these sorts of incidents, resorts to all kinds of cunning ruses to get the addressee to sign the corresponding receipt and keep the shipment. In most cases all efforts are futile. And the package, which also in many cases has no return address, goes definitively to the archive of unclaimed objects.

  This is the same case with prohibited imports that arrive at customs, and allowable imports that are not claimed because the duties are higher than the price of the merchandise. In the last room of the cemetery of lost letters, there are nine bundles sent by the customs house at the Cúcuta border. Nine bundles containing all kinds of valuable objects, but which arrived without consignment documents and which therefore do not legally exist. Merchandise that no one knows where it came from or where it’s going.

  BROAD AND ALIEN IS THE WORLD

  Sometimes the complex mechanism of worldwide mail delivery fails and a letter or parcel that shouldn’t have traveled 100 miles, and has traveled 100,000, arrives at the Bogotá unclaimed letters office. Very often letters arrive from Japan, especially since the first group of Colombian soldiers came back from Korea. Many of them are love letters, written in an indecipherable Spanish, where Japanese characters are confusingly mixed with roman printing. “Cabo 1.º La Habana” was the only address one of those letters bore.

  Just a month ago, a letter intended for someone in a tiny, remote village in the Italian Alps, with a perfectly legible name and address, was returned to Paris.

  November 1, 1954, El Espectador, Bogotá

  The Aracataca Tiger

  Aracataca, in the banana-growing region of Santa Marta, does not get many opportunities to appear in print, and not because they ran out of As for the linotype machines, but because it has been a peaceful and predictable town, since the green tempest of the banana plantations passed. These days its name has once again appeared in the newspapers relating its five repeated and frenetic vowels with the two syllables of a tiger, which might be one of the tres tristes tigres of the Spanish tongue twister, now stuck in the tongue twister of Aracataca itself.

  Even if it were true, as it undoubtedly is, the news of the Aracataca tiger does not seem to be. There are no tigers in Aracataca, and he who’s telling you has more than enough reasons to know that. The region’s tigers were killed off many years ago, and sold to make rugs in different parts of the world, when Aracataca was a cosmopolitan town where no one got down off his horse to pick up a five-peso bill. Later, when the banana fever ended and the Chinese, Russian, English, and emigrants from all over the rest of the world went somewhere else, they didn’t leave any traces of its former splendor, but they didn’t leave any tigers, either. In Aracataca they left nothing.

  Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile for the story of the tiger to be true so the linotype machines could again insist five times on the same letter and someone might remember Aracataca again—the land of Radragaz, as a professional author of jokes has said—and someone might think of it as sooner or later they think of all the municipalities of Colombia, even those with names not so difficult to forget.

  We must remember Aracataca before it gets eaten by the tiger.

  February 1, 1955, El Espectador, Bogotá

  H.H. Goes on Vacation

  (Fragment)

  The pope went on vacation. This afternoon, at five o’clock sharp, he settled into his own Mercedes, license plate SCV-7, and drove out through the Holy Office gate, to the Castel Gandolfo Palace, twenty miles from Rome. Two gigantic Swiss Guards saluted him at the gate. One of them, the taller and heftier one, is a blond teenager with a flattened nose, like a boxer’s nose, the result of a traffic accident.

  Very few touri
sts were expecting to see the papal sedan pass through Saint Peter’s Square. Discreetly, the Catholic newspapers announced His Holiness’s trip this morning. But they said the automobile would be leaving the Vatican courtyards at 6:30 in the evening, and he left at five. As always, Pius XII was early: his collective audiences, his trips, and blessings of tourists always happen a little bit before the scheduled time.

  NINETY-FIVE DEGREES IN THE SHADE

  The traveler was alone in his sedan, in the back seat, naturally. In the front seat a uniformed driver seemed indifferent to the manifestations of devotion and sympathy from Romans and tourists, who waved to the sedan as it passed over Janiculum Hill, where there are statues of Garibaldi—who looks like a pirate out of a Salgari book—and one of his wife, who also looks like a Salgari pirate, on horseback like a man.

  For the first time all year, this afternoon the pope was within reach of children, perfectly visible through the sedan’s rolled-up window. Inside the vehicle it must have been terribly hot, because the pontifical car does not have air conditioning. However, the pope did not appear uncomfortable in the temperature, in spite of not wearing what might be called “vacation clothes.” While through the streets of Rome stout workers drive like lunatics on their Vespas, in shorts and shirtless, His Holiness goes off on vacation in his hermetically sealed car imparting blessings left and right, not concerned about the heat.

  THE HOUSEKEEPER

  Another two sedans, identical to that of His Holiness, were following the pontifical car. In one of them was Sister Pascualina, the ancient and dynamic administrator of His Holiness’s private life. She is a German nun, strong in body and spirit, who takes personal charge of the pope’s clothing, supervises his diet, and exercises an inflexible sovereignty over him. She, more than anyone, and even more than His Holiness’s top doctors, can say how the pope was when he woke up. And she is the one who helped him recover from his ailments a few months ago, to such an extent that the Supreme Pontiff has now put on weight, and has recovered the spontaneity of movement in his arms. And he has gone back to working normally. The front page of today’s L’Osservatore Romano announces:

  “The office of His Holiness’s master of chambers lets it be known that, during his stay in Castel Gandolfo, the Holy Father will be so kind as to grant an audience to the faithful and to pilgrims, twice a week. These audiences will take place on Wednesdays and Saturdays, at six in the evening. Those who wish to participate in these audiences will have to obtain the usual ticket, from the office of His Holiness’s master of chambers.”

  That announcement has been taken as an indication of the pope’s good health. It is also known that in the third sedan were Vatican City officials, with a briefcase full of paperwork that His Holiness would have to study during his vacation.

  ACCIDENTS ALONG THE WAY

  The last time the pope drove along the beautiful road to Castel Gandolfo, he believed that it really would be the last time. It was at the end of last summer, and his health was alarmingly weakened. Nevertheless, today he has driven it again, and he has moved his lean, olive-skinned face close to the sedan’s windows several times to bless the many Italians who raced over on their Vespas to wait for his car to come along the highway.

  But not all of them waited on the road. Most were concentrated in Castel Gandolfo’s narrow little square, a little square surrounded by trees and with stores displaying their eye-catching merchandise on the doorframes, like in Girardot. The pope arrived at the palace shortly before six. His trip had a ten-minute interruption: an enormous truck loaded with bricks was blocking traffic on the Vía Apia Nuova. When the pope’s sedan reached that spot, a colossal driver in his underwear was swearing in the middle of the road.

  SATURDAY IN TOLIMA

  No one in Castel Gandolfo noticed which entrance the pope took into his holiday palace. He entered from the west side, into a garden with an avenue bordered by hundred-year-old trees. The little town square was full of banners, like the Espinal square on Saint Peter’s Day. And exactly like in Espinal before the bullfights start, the authorities are in a wooden box for distinguished persons and the musicians in another. When they found out His Holiness was in the palace, the band—a typical papayera rural—burst out playing at full volume. Except they didn’t play a bunde from Tolima, but a moving hymn: “Blanco Padre.” Schoolchildren, sweating buckets in their woolen uniforms, were waving yellow-and-white pennants—Vatican colors—on a Saturday afternoon that was no vacation for them because they had to attend the pope’s vacation.

  A WOMAN’S HEAD

  Traditionally His Holiness begins his rest period in the early days of July. This time he’s almost a month late, and people’s interpretations of that delay are numerous and very wide-ranging. One of those interpretations has a lot to do with a gory article from the local crime pages. Twenty days ago the decapitated body of a woman appeared on the shore of Lake Albano in Castel Gandolfo. The police put the body in deep-freeze. It was examined inch by inch, and the details of three hundred missing women were studied in recent days. One by one, the three hundred women have been appearing. Unintentionally, many things have been discovered, as an additional benefit of the investigative activity: adultery, rapes, runaways. But the head of the decapitated woman of Castel Gandolfo has not appeared anywhere in spite of the government divers, working around the clock every day, sounding out the lake inch by inch.

  Tomorrow, on his first day of vacation, the pope will lean out the window of his summer palace to contemplate the blue surface of Castel Gandolfo’s beautiful lake. And even if we have no news that His Holiness takes an interest in the bountiful and scandalous crime pages of the Rome newspapers, he might not be able to avoid the sight of the police boats and divers. And he might just be the only person who can observe—from a window that overlooks the whole surface of the lake—what all Romans are desperate to see: the head that, sooner or later, the divers will recover from the waters of Castel Gandolfo.

  August 8, 1955, El Espectador, Bogotá

  The Scandal of the Century

  In Death Wilma Montesi Walks the Earth

  The night of Thursday, April 9, 1953, the carpenter Rodolfo Montesi was waiting for his daughter Wilma to come home. The carpenter lived with his wife, Petti María, with his seventeen-year-old son, Sergio, and with another unmarried daughter, Wanda, who was twenty-five, at number 76 Vía Tagliamento, in Rome. It is an enormous three-story residence, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, with four hundred apartments constructed around a beautiful circular courtyard, full of flowers and with a small fountain in the center. There is only one entrance to the building: a gigantic gate with an archway of broken and dusty little windows. To the left of the entrance is the concierge’s room, and above her door, an image of the Heart of Jesus, illuminated by an electric lightbulb. From six in the morning until eleven at night the concierge keeps a rigorous eye on access to the building.

  THE FIRST STEP

  Rodolfo Montesi waited for his twenty-one-year-old daughter Wilma until 8:30. Her prolonged absence was alarming, because the girl had been out since the afternoon. Tired of waiting, the carpenter headed first to the nearby general hospital, where there was no news of any accidents that day. Later, on foot, he headed to the Lungotevere, where he looked for his daughter for two hours along the banks of the Tiber. At 10:30, tired of his fruitless search and fearing a calamity, Rodolfo Montesi went to the police station on Vía Salaria, a few blocks from his house, to ask for help in locating Wilma.

  “I DON’T LIKE THAT MOVIE”

  The carpenter told the officer on duty, Andrea Lomanto, that after lunch that day, at approximately one o’clock, he had returned as usual to his carpentry workshop, located at number 16 Vía de Sebino. He said his whole family had been home when he left, and when he came back, his wife and his daughter Wanda had told him that Wilma had not yet returned. According to the carpenter, the two women told him they had g
one to the Excelsior Theater, on nearby Viale Liegi, to see a movie called The Golden Coach. They left the house at 4:30, but Wilma did not want to go with them because, as she said, she didn’t like that kind of picture.

  At 5:30—according to what Rodolfo Montesi said at the police station—the concierge saw Wilma leave, alone, with a black leather purse. Unusually, Wilma was not wearing the pearl earrings and necklace her fiancé had given her a few months earlier. Wilma’s fiancé was Angelo Giuliani, a police officer in Potenza.

  A STRANGER’S CALL

  Since his daughter had gone out without fixing herself up, contrary to her habits, and also without any money or her identification documents, Rodolfo Montesi came up with the hypothesis at the police station that Wilma had committed suicide. The girl had, according to her father, a motive for suicide: she was in despair at the prospect of having to abandon her family and move to Potenza, after her imminent marriage to the police officer.