The Shape of the Ruins Read online

  At the door to the Café Pasaje—we were on our way in as a bootblack was on his way out with his wooden crate under his arm, and we stopped to let him pass—Pacho asked me what I wanted to talk about.

  “I want to know exactly how it happened,” I said. “What Gaitán’s assassination was like.”

  “Oh, well then, we won’t even sit down,” he said. “Come and we’ll walk around the block.”

  That’s what we did, and we did so without exchanging a word, both of us walking in silence, descending in silence the steps on the Jiménez side of the Plazoleta, waiting in silence for a break in the heavy traffic to cross Séptima. Pacho seemed to be in a hurry and I strained to keep up with him. He was acting like an older brother who had left home and was showing his younger sibling, who’d come to visit him, his new city. We passed in front of the marble plaques, and I was a bit surprised that Pacho didn’t stop to look at them, that he didn’t even show an awareness of their existence with a nod of his head or a wave of his hand. We arrived at the space where in the year 1948 the Agustín Nieto building stood (I realized that we were a few steps away from the spot where the bloodstain had been the day before and today only its ghost and its memory remained) and Pacho steered me to the glass door of a shop. “Touch it,” he told me.

  I took a second to understand what he was saying. “You want me to touch the door?”

  “Yes, touch the door,” Pacho insisted, and I obeyed. “Here, through this door, Gaitán emerged on April 9,” he continued. “Of course, it wasn’t this same door, because it wasn’t this same building either: it’s been a while since they demolished the Agustín Nieto to build this monstrosity. But at this moment, here, for us, this door is the door Gaitán came out of, and you’re touching it. It was one o’clock, more or less, and Gaitán was going for lunch with a couple of friends. He was in a good mood. Do you know why he was in a good mood?”

  “No, Pacho,” I said. A couple came out of the building and stopped to look at us for a second. “Tell me why.”

  “Because the night before he’d won a case. That’s why, that’s why he was happy.”

  His defense of Lieutenant Cortés, accused of having shot dead the journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa, had been less of a judicial success than a full-blown miracle. Gaitán had given an astonishing speech, one of the best in his life, alleging that the lieutenant had killed the journalist, it was true, but he’d done so in legitimate defense of his honor. The crime had occurred ten years earlier. The journalist, director of a newspaper in Manizales, had allowed the publication of an article that denounced the abusive way the lieutenant treated his troops; Cortés arrived at the newspaper office one fine day and complained about the article; when Galarza defended his reporter, saying he’d done nothing but print the truth, the lieutenant drew his pistol and shot him twice. And that’s what happened. But Gaitán used his best rhetorical weapons to speak of human passions, military honor, the sense of duty, the defense of the values of the fatherland, of proportionality between aggression and defense, of how certain circumstances dishonor a military officer but not a civilian, of how an officer who defends his honor is also defending at one and the same time the entire society. It didn’t surprise me that Pacho should know by heart the closing lines of the defense. I saw him transform himself slightly, as I’d seen him do so many times before, and I heard his changed voice, the voice that was no longer the deep and dense voice of Francisco Herrera, but the sharper voice of Gaitán, with his deep metronome breathing and his marked consonants and his exalted rhythms:

  “Lieutenant Cortés: I do not know what the jury’s verdict will be, but the multitude awaits it and feels it! Lieutenant Cortés: you are not my defendant. Your noble life, your pained life can offer me your hand, which I clench in mine knowing I shake the hand of a man of integrity, honor, and goodness!”

  “Honor and goodness,” I said.

  “What a marvel, no?” said Pacho. “What vulgar manipulation, but what a marvel. Or rather: what a marvel precisely for being such a vulgar manipulation.”

  “Vulgar but successful,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Gaitán was a magician at that.”

  “A magician, yes,” said Pacho. “He was a defender of freedoms, but had just gotten a journalist’s murderer out of prison. And nobody thought that might be contradictory. Moral: You must never believe a great orator.”

  The crowd exploded in applause and men carried Gaitán out on their shoulders, like a bullfighter. It was ten past one in the morning. Gaitán, tired but triumphant, ended up accepting the obligatory celebrations, drinking toasts with friends and strangers and arriving home at four a.m. But five hours later he was already back at his office, impeccably combed and dressed in a three-piece suit: a dark blue, almost black suit with very fine white pinstripes. He received a client or two; took calls from journalists. Toward one some friends had gathered in Gaitán’s office just to congratulate him: Pedro Eliseo Cruz, Alejandro Vallejo, Jorge Padilla were there. One of them, Plinio Mendoza Neira, invited everyone out to lunch, for the events of the previous night had to be celebrated.

  “Agreed,” laughed Gaitán. “But I’m warning you, Plinio, I’m expensive.”

  “They came down in an elevator that would have been about there, more or less,” Pacho told me, pointing at the entrance to the building. “The elevator didn’t always work, because there wasn’t always power in the Agustín Nieto. That day there was. That’s where they came down, look.” I looked. “And they came outside. Plinio Mendoza took Gaitán by the arm, like this.” Pacho took me by the arm and made me walk ahead, away from the door of the building toward the edge of Carrera Séptima. Unprotected by the building’s wall, Pacho had to speak up and lean closer to me to overcome the noise of the vehicular and pedestrian traffic. “There, on the other side of the street, was a poster for the Faenza cinema. They were showing Rome, Open City, the Rossellini film. Gaitán had studied in Rome, and it’s not impossible that the poster might have caught his attention. But that we’ll never know: we can’t know what goes on in a man’s head just before he dies, what buried memories might surface, what associations of ideas. Whatever the case, thinking of Rome or not, thinking of Rossellini or not, Plinio Mendoza took a couple of steps to distance them from their other friends. As if he had something confidential to discuss with Gaitán. And, you know what? Maybe he did.”

  “What I wanted to tell you is something really stupid,” said Mendoza.

  Then he saw Gaitán stop short, begin to back up toward the door and hold his hands to his face, as if to protect himself. Three quick shots rang out; a fraction of a second later, there was a fourth. Gaitán collapsed on his back.

  “What’s the matter, Jorge?” said Mendoza.

  “What a stupid question,” said Pacho. “But who could think of anything more original at a moment like that.”

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “Mendoza managed to see the assassin,” said Pacho, “and grabbed him. But the assassin pointed his pistol at him and Mendoza had to back off. He thought he was going to be shot too and tried to get back to the building, to the door of the building, to hide or take cover.”

  Pacho took me by the arm again. We returned to the vanished door of the Agustín Nieto. We turned around, looking toward the traffic on Séptima, and Pacho raised his right hand to point out the place on the sidewalk where Gaitán had fallen. “From his head a trickle of blood spilled down onto the pavement. Juan Roa Sierra, the assassin, was over there. It seems he had been waiting for Gaitán beside the door of the Agustín Nieto building. This is not certain, of course. After the crime, witnesses thought they’d remembered him because they’d seen him enter the building and go up and down in the elevator more times than normal. They’d noticed that, rather. But it’s not possible that they were sure: after such a serious event, a person starts to think he saw something, that something struck him as sus
picious . . . Some said later that Roa was wearing an old, worn-out, gray striped suit. Others, that the suit was striped, but brown. Others said nothing about any stripes. You have to imagine the confusion, everyone shouting, people running. How was anybody going to notice anything? Anyway: Mendoza saw the assassin from here, where we are now. He saw him lower the revolver and point it at Gaitán again, as if to finish him off. According to Mendoza, Roa didn’t fire. Another witness says that yes he did fire, that the bullet had ricocheted off the pavement, like this, and that it almost killed Mendoza. Roa began to look around everywhere, to look for a way to escape. There, on the corner,” said Pacho, moving his hand in the air toward Avenida Jiménez, “was a policeman. Mendoza saw him hesitate for a second, a very brief second, and then draw his pistol to shoot Roa Sierra. Roa began to run toward the north, up there, see.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Then he turned around, as if to threaten those who accompanied Gaitán, I don’t know if you understand, as if to cover his getaway. And that was when the people in the street pounced on him. Some say that the policeman also pounced on him, the one who was going to shoot him or maybe another one. Others say that the policeman came up behind him and stuck his gun in his back, and that was when Roa put his hands up and the rest of the people pounced on him. Other people say that he tried to cross Séptima, over to the east side. They grabbed him there, at that point on the sidewalk, before he made it across. When Gaitán’s friends saw that they’d grabbed the assassin, they went back to Gaitán, to see if they could help him. His hat had fallen off and was a step away from the body. The body was like this,” said Pacho, drawing horizontal lines in the air. “He was parallel to the road. But the confusion was such that each one of his friends later gave a different version. Some said that Gaitán’s head was pointing south and his feet north, others the exact opposite. They agreed on one thing: that his eyes were open and horribly still. Someone, maybe Vallejo, noticed he was bleeding from his mouth. Someone else shouted to bring water. On the main floor of the building was El Gato Negro, and a waitress came out with a glass of water. ‘They killed Gaitancito,’ it seems they were shouting. People approached Gaitán, bent down to touch him the way people touch a saint: his clothes, his hair. Then Pedro Eliseo Cruz arrived, who was a doctor, and crouched down beside him and tried to find a pulse.”

  “Is he alive?” asked Alejandro Vallejo.

  “Just call a taxi,” said Cruz.

  “But the taxi, a black taxi, had approached without anyone having to call,” said Pacho. “People fought over the right to lift Gaitán up and put him in the car. Before they lifted him, Cruz caught sight of the wound on the back of his head. He tried to examine the wound, but when he moved Gaitán’s head he made him vomit blood. Someone asked Cruz how he saw the situation.”

  “He’s lost,” said Cruz.

  “Gaitán emitted a series of moans,” said Pacho. “Sounds that were like moans.”

  “So he was alive,” I said.

  “Still alive, yes,” said Pacho. “Another waitress from one of the other cafés around here, El Molino or El Inca, later swore that she’d heard him say: ‘Don’t let me die.’ But I don’t believe it. I believe more in what Cruz says: that Gaitán was already beyond all help. At that moment a guy with a camera showed up and started taking photos.”

  “What, Pacho?” I said. “There are photos of Gaitán here, after the shots?”

  “So they say. I’ve never seen them, but it seems there are. Or rather: someone took some, that is known. Whether or not they have survived is another matter. One can’t imagine that something so important might have been misplaced, but they might have been lost in a move, or something like that. But it’s quite likely that’s what happened. Otherwise, why haven’t they reached us? Of course, it’s also possible that someone destroyed them. Since there are so many mysteries about that day . . . Anyway: it seems that’s what happened. The photographer pushed his way through the crowd and began to take pictures of Gaitán.”

  One of the witnesses present got indignant. “The dead man doesn’t matter,” he told the photographer. “Take a picture of the assassin.”

  “But the photographer didn’t,” said Pacho. “People were already lifting Gaitán to put him in the taxi. Cruz got in with him, and the rest of Gaitán’s friends got into another one that had pulled up behind it. And they all drove off south to the Central Clinic. They say at that moment several people crouched down in the place where the body had been, took out their handkerchiefs, and soaked them in Gaitán’s blood. Then somebody came with a Colombian flag to do the same.”

  “And Roa Sierra?” I asked.

  “A policeman grabbed Roa Sierra, remember?”

  “Yes. There, beside the building.”

  “Almost at the corner. Roa Sierra was backing away toward Jiménez when a policeman came up behind him and stuck his pistol in his ribs.”

  “Don’t kill me, Corporal, sir,” said Roa.

  It turned out to be a private just coming on duty. He disarmed Roa (took a nickel-plated pistol from him and put it in the pocket of his trousers) and seized him by the arm.

  “Jiménez he was called,” said Pacho. “Private Jiménez walking the Avenida Jiménez beat: sometimes I think history is lacking a little imagination. Well, anyway, the private was taking Roa Sierra prisoner when a guy on the street jumped on him and punched him, I don’t know if it was with a fist or a crate, and Roa Sierra was smashed up against the shop window and he stayed right here.” Pacho pointed at the door next to the Agustín Nieto building. “This building was called Faux, I think, and there was a display window here that shattered, a Kodak shop, I seem to recall, though I’m not sure. We don’t know whether from the blow he received or from crashing through the glass, but Roa Sierra began to bleed from his nose.”

  Seeing that people had begun to surround them, Private Jiménez sought refuge. He walked south, passing in front of the facade of the building. “That’s him,” the mob shouted, “that’s the one who killed Dr. Gaitán.” The private, leading Roa Sierra by the arm, began to move toward the door of the Granada Drugstore, but in that short distance he couldn’t prevent the bootblacks from landing blows with their heavy wooden crates.

  “Roa was scared to death,” Pacho told me. “The people who’d seen him fire, Vallejo and Mendoza, said later they’d seen a terrible expression of hatred on his face: that they’d seen a fanatic’s hatred. Everyone also said that at the moment of firing, Roa had behaved with total self-control. But later, when he was already surrounded by enraged bootblacks, when he was being beaten and thinking, I imagine, these people want to lynch me . . . then no longer, then there was no fanaticism or self-control. Pure fear. The change was so shocking that many thought they were two different guys, the fanatic and the fearful one.”

  Gaitán’s assassin was pale. He had olive-colored skin and an angular face; his straight hair was too long and his mediocre shave had left dirty shadowy patches on his face. His general appearance was that of a stray dog. Some witnesses testified that he looked like a mechanic or a manual laborer, and one even said he had an oil stain on his sleeve. “Let’s lynch the assassin!” someone shouted. With his nose broken from one of the blows, Roa let himself be shoved inside the Granada Drugstore. Pascal del Vecchio, a friend of Gaitán’s, asked the pharmacist to protect the assassin so he wouldn’t be lynched. They got Roa inside; he seemed resigned to his fate and didn’t put up any resistance, and they saw him crouch down in a corner of the drugstore that wasn’t visible from the street. Someone lowered the metal shutters. One of the pharmacist’s employees went over to him then:

  “Why did you kill Dr. Gaitán?” he asked him.

  “Oh, señor,” said Roa, “powerful things that I can’t tell you.”

  “People began to try to break through the metal shutters,” said Pacho. “The owner was frightened or didn’t want his place damaged, and en
ded up opening them himself.”

  “The people are going to lynch you,” said the employee. “Tell me who sent you.”

  “I can’t,” said Roa.

  “Roa tried to hide behind the counter, but they grabbed him before he could get to the other side,” said Pacho. “The bootblacks pounced on him and dragged him out. But before getting him outside, someone found a dolly, you know those little iron carts for moving stacks of boxes. Well, someone grabbed that dolly and dropped it on top of Roa. I’ve always thought that was when Roa lost consciousness. People dragged him out onto the cobblestones. They kept hitting him: fists, kicks, smashing their crates on him. They say someone showed up and stabbed him with a pen several times. They started dragging him south, toward the Presidential Palace. There’s a photo, a famous photo that someone took from an upper story of some building farther up, when the mob was almost at Plaza de Bolívar. You can see the people dragging Roa and you can see Roa, or his dead body. Along the way he has lost his clothing and he’s almost naked. It’s one of the most horrible photos that came out of that horrible day. Roa is already dead by then, and that means he died at some point between there and the Granada Drugstore. Sometimes I think that Roa died at the same moment as Gaitán. Do you know exactly what time Gaitán died? At five minutes to two. One fifty-five p.m. It’s not impossible that he might have died in the same instant as his assassin, is it? I don’t know why it’s important, or rather, I don’t know that it is important, but sometimes I think about that. From here they took Roa Sierra. This is where the Granada Drugstore was and they took him from here. Maybe when he passed this point where you and I are standing now he was already dead. Maybe he died later. We don’t know and we’ll never know.”