The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Author:Juan Gabriel Vásquez [Vásquez, Juan Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Politics, Fiction
ISBN: 9780735211155
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2015-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

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AT THE BEGINNING OF 1905, Pedro León Acosta and his brother Miguel had joined up with the three Ortega brothers, sons of another Conservative family, to conspire against President Rafael Reyes, who they saw as too weak in the face of Liberal posturing. The plans were the fruit of long resentment. They mistrusted Reyes because he had once said his duty was to govern on behalf of the whole country, not just for his party, and the conspirators were not prepared to allow such a concession to the enemy. But the most intolerable thing was his reconciliation with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, an atheist who had risen up in arms against the party and demanded the revocation of the concordat with the Catholic Church. In the war of 1895, President Reyes had defeated him; now, it was said, he was going to allow him to form part of the government. What good was it to win wars in the name of God and Colombia if you then handed the country over to the vanquished?

On an evening that would later be recounted the way legends are told, twenty Conservative men on horseback gathered before the valley of Sopó, and there, in front of the gigantic mountain sleeping like a beast, making the sign of the cross with thumb and index finger of their right hands and holding a glass of champagne in the left, they swore to overthrow Reyes and drank a toast to the success of the enterprise. They did not count on their plans being found out, but that’s what happened: they were found out. Nevertheless, the consequences were not what they might have feared; the heads of their two families were also friends of President Reyes. That earned the conspirators certain privileges: the president, who had heard rumors of the conspiracy, summoned them all to the Presidential Palace—the fathers, the sons, and the parish priest—and asked them, the way one speaks to naughty children, to abandon their plans. To placate the conspirators, he offered to put Acosta in charge of the national police and send his brother as government representative to a military school in Chile. In spite of the cordiality with which Acosta received the offers, in spite of the smiles and the embraces with which the meeting ended, in December President Reyes found out that the conspiracy was still going on. General Luis Suárez Castillo, commander of the army, carried out a series of arrests. But neither the Acostas nor the Ortegas—the sons of his friends—went to prison.

In 1906, at the beginning of February, the intelligence services brought President Reyes confirmation of the rumors: the attack would occur between the tenth and twelfth of that month. Reyes refused to limit his excursions or to increase his corps of bodyguards; on the tenth, at around eleven in the morning, he picked up his daughter Sofía at the Palacio de San Carlos and headed north with her along their usual route toward the north end of Bogotá.

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