Citizen Kastro (with K of Kafka)

Lucas Ospina

Orson Welles - The Trial (1962). Deleted scene.

1. K.

“Don’t confuse cybernetics with fortune telling”, says a bank´s data worker to K, the main character of the film The Trial in the adaptation of Kafka´s novel that Orson Wells took to the cinema at 1962. The scene, abolished from the film, didn’t appeared on the novel, it was an analogy of what Kafka´s had just glimpse as a huge archive system, lawyers and corridors but which Wells actualized and translates into a huge Kafka´s computer machinery.

The beginning of The Trial is simple, a man wakes up victim of a metamorphosis, it is not that he has become into an insect (at least some small creatures could fly), it´s something worst: he is arrested. In his room there are two agents without ID, after that a supervisor gets in and says that he is associated to a trial for crime that hasn´t been placed, that he is on detention but even so he could work and soon he will be called by the law.

Into the abolished scene dialogues of Welles film, K wants to the powerfully bank´s computer where he works, to gives him any sign about his legacy future, the functionary that helps him is sceptical, she doesn’t have data enough and giving legacy advices is not hers land, but she affirms that even so she has something for him.

K with a willing attitude, made an apology to the apparatus impartiality, “I guess that the computer is more like a judge…and Isn´t that to move on? No more stupid mistakes, now everything is clean and precise. Different from being vain about his intelligence, as the conceited people, the lawyers must to be accurate. As the counters or Scientifics. In fact imagine a court as a laboratory…Do you think some day it will be like that?.”

When K asks for the answer, the machine throws up a little paper where is written the most probable crime he will commits. “This looks like a riddle”, says K at soon as he looks on the paper a few of dots. “Those are factors, the math of probability”. Perhaps mi case, thinks K, its over the machine but the women informs that “if the machine is feed by foolishness she only responds with silences…we only could resolve what you can formulate...by the language...Until you precise with accuracy what you want to say, you wouldn´t know what you want to know…the questions about the law or the crime are together without solution on the named moral values…consciousness, innocence, guiltiness, good, bad”, “and all of those things are foolishness? , asks K. “It´s nothing for us”.

At the end, K says that he doesn’t understand the card code, he asks for a translation, a meaning, the answer is that what the machine said is the “usual”. And the most probable crime that K will commit is the “suicide”.

2. The "cache" detention.

“Great police work for putting on detention the man who threats for death to the president´s son” It was the headline that the National Police of Colombia wrote on its webpage about the imprisonment of Nicolas Castro. The webpage, now that the case had fallen for the mediocrity police work which takes to the capture of an innocent who never threats of death to the president´s son, have fallen, changed, its content have been erased. There´s only a ghost on the net, the “cache” as it is named in computing, the “the access memory of a computer, which keeps temporarily the latest processed information”. From the specter webpage that is now, flows the photo which used to show Nicolas Castro under arrest, with the company of two agents without ID (their faces were pixelated although the same picture without this alteration had been circulated in other media).

By fortune, in the cache, the content remains. Is an involuntary auto-satire from the official optimism about the old police brutality translated to a computer language: a series of euphemisms, cunningly and chatterbox from agents who tried to justify this “falso positivo judicial”[1] in front of their superiors and them in front of their superior and them in front of their superiors until getting to the Defense Minister and the President of the Nation. A chain of loyalty that surely Alvaro Uribe will have to take into account at the moment to celebrate his patriotic orgy of money, medal, promotions and nominations, a ritual of perpetuity where the “false positives” are the blood which maintains erected the body spirit.

Now that to read this information results into a lees interest by the police, it is more important to read it. The one who is now a satire makes a sentence to itself by its own words, and that is what happened after seen the falling of the pieces of evidence, one by one, that the office of the public prosecutor and the Police, used to have for the case. And the evidence fall down not just by the way on how this data were took but also by the way on how this material were manipulated. The “queen piece of evidence”, a three hours “chat” session that Castro maintained with his girlfriend, was edited in order to be an auto-accusation which was placed to fit on the standard. Where Castro said, between humor and fear, that in that way he will have to change his identity and will have to hide in Medellin with her, the office of the public prosecutor removes the context of this phrase and puts it into a criminal novel who has the capability to take away his rake, and produces terror from any computer.

It´s worthwhile to read this punitive commercial masked of antiterrorist operation that made the police. Now, that there´s the interest to hide the document, there´re more reason to show it and to store it up.

Media image from Nicolas' arrest

3. In front of the law

“ Oh!, come up, you are the father of the victim”, said to Nicolas Castro´s father the police who was in charge of the door in the last audience, which was with the Judge #48 of Bogotá (Juez 48 Penal Municipal de Garantías de Bogotá), Mr. Javier García Prieto, who finally took the determination to give to Nicolas the “Casa por cárcel” (House as jail). The agent was in the right position, not every policeman is insensitive to the pain or is wrong, “victim” was the precise word. This policeman understood what many others couldn´t from the beginning, because they only know how to follow orders or because they´re educated just by the press. But between the people who did an opinion about the case and who affirmed to had the criteria, and also to emphasize to had the power to separate the presentation of the data and the representation of the news, there were many who failed: From “malpensantes” to professors who asked for Castro, legacy penalty and “academic punishment”. Probably one of the most notorious cases of vagueness was from a politician more opportunist than opportune, the presidential candidate Noemi Sanin, who asked for a legacy sentence to Nicolas, just at the beginning of the trial, in a radio broadcast interview. Although after the last audience the case keeps going misrepresent by simplicity: “House as jail is given to the young who create a facebook group against Jernonimo Uribe” was the title of a local magazine.

It is hard to believe the imprecision: it´s clear that Castro hasn´t create the group, by the pieces of evidence presented in this and the last audience to a specialized judge, he just made an opinion and he did it under his name, he didn´t assume a fake identity and about the sons president he wrote the next on the facebook wall: “This guy with his Colombian handicrafts doesn’t do anything different than to exploit the work of indigenous and poor people, and also he´s accused of plagiarism at Los Andes University, and is well-known for silence this and other kind of problems that he has had into the Universiy, making threats to kill anyone who deal with him…son of a bitch”. And so, if telling the true is “instigation to commit crimes” and a rude remark an act of “terrorism”, the jails could not shape to the people.

In this point, the judge Garcia Prieto, who is not a “recurrence functionary” as the first judge that Castro has, being a carefully interpreter of the law talked in an interview: “The judges couldn’t do what the President made in Buenaventura when he ordered the capture of government workers just because they were apparently involved into a crime. We could not act by impulse and the President couldn’t do those kinds of things”. And about the work of the office of the public prosecutor he mentioned: “In the early days the public prosecutor is who made the accusation, he is who have to come to the trial with a theory of the case in order to demonstrate it, if he doesn’t do it the only way is to acquit. If the evidence failed, we have to release and set free”. And that is what happened in the last audience in the case of Nicolas Castro: The law made what it was supposed to do, not acting by impulse, the evidence took value, not the spirit of the body. And that attitude remains in the conclusion of the audience: although the judge Garcia Prieto looks positive in the decision to liberate Castro, he denied to revoke the detention that asks the lawyer of Nicolas because at that moment there didn’t exist a legal paper that could certify the favorable sentence, which took place in the last audience.

In the audience the defense showed all kind of favorable testimonies from friends and professors of Castro. These things pointed in how he was a mediator in conflicts where were involved the academic program of the Fine Arts Faculty – his text “where there aren’t villains or heroes” (" Donde no hay ni villano ni héroes") is a prove of that – and even things like “Nicolas is a vegetarian”. The Judge Garcia Prieto affirmed that those kind of statements were mediated by the friendship, he preferred to focus his decision based on a series of institutional data which were compiled after his detention: the academic qualifications of the student in the university. “4.1, 4.3, 4.2, 4.2” he read and concluded: “this grades doesn´t seem to be from a terrorist”.

The lawyer who represents Jeronimo Uribe, the son of the president who by the way, talking about academic grades, has a problem in the university for plagiarism and when he was accused for doing that by a professor, he couldn’t be prosecuted – for a procedure mistake –have just said that to his clients – as in the case of the academic plagiarism – doesn’t have the interest to keep going on the trial. Although the office of the fiscal prosecutor by proceedings, or by ineffectiveness, insists to maintain the case open, there aren’t pieces of evidence and what it should be doing is to focus its energy into signs of latent criminality, otherwise there will be happening facts as the case of Ana María Chavez, who was getting in touch – through their facebook friends – by a couple of criminals who kill her, and that if her´s brother hadn’t do anything researching in the case, there wouldn’t be any justice; One of the murderers was so sure about the ineptitude and computing illiteracy of the office of the public prosecutor, that in the moment when he was detained he said to the authorities: “I thought you would never caught me”.

Orson Welles - The Trial (1962). Deleted scene.

4. The End…

In an interview made in La Picota jail, the journalist asked to Nicolas what he was reading at that moment: “Discipline and Punish from the philosopher Michel Foucault. The book talked about the jails, the way that the justice is given and how the people is watched or guarded. I´m also reading The Trial by Kafka. I read a lot about this thing of the machine that is in charge to give justice”

Surely he would remark the page of the first scene of this novel, when K is taking under arrest:

“K. found himself, without intending it, in a mute dialogue with Franz, but then slapped his hand down on his papers and said, "Here are my identity documents." "And what do you want us to do about it?" replied the big policeman, loudly. "The way you're carrying on, it's worse than a child. What is it you want? Do you want to get this great, bloody trial of yours over with quickly by talking about ID and arrest warrants with us? We're just coppers, that's all we are. Junior officers like us hardly know one end of an ID card from another, all we've got to do with you is keep an eye on you for ten hours a day and get paid for it. That's all we are. Mind you, what we can do is make sure that the high officials we work for find out just what sort of person it is they're going to arrest, and why he should be arrested, before they issue the warrant. There's no mistake there. Our authorities as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don't go out looking for guilt among the public; it's the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That's the law. Where d'you think there'd be any mistake there?" "I don't know this law," said K. "So much the worse for you, then," said the policeman. "It's probably exists only in your heads," said K., he wanted, in some way, to insinuate his way into the thoughts of the policemen, to re-shape those thoughts to his benefit or to make himself at home there. But the policeman just said dismissively, "You'll find out when it affects you." Franz joined in, and said, "Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn't know the law and at the same time insists he's innocent." "You're quite right, but we can't get him to understand a thing," said the other.“

Castro complete The Trial, a novel that Kafka never finished but in which he reach to write an ending chapter where K, different from the most readers of this history, couldn’t avoid a tragic conclusion.

Translated by Carlos Felipe Guzman

Notes:

[1] “Falso positivo” is a term that in Colombia describes the use of innocent people by the government military institutions, which they kill taking them from daily life and putting into the mask of guerrilla or delinquency in order to receive benefits as money or promotion.