The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  I used to go to these classes just for the pleasure of seeing him embody Gaitan or whomever (other more or less regular characters were Rojas Pinilla and Lleras Restrepo), and I got used to watching him, seeing him squaring up like a retired boxer, his prominent jaw and cheekbones, the imposing geometry of his back that filled out his suits, his eyebrows so long they got in his eyes and sometimes seemed to sweep across his lids like theater curtains, and his hands, always and especially his hands. The left was so wide and the fingers so long that he could pick up a football with his fingertips; the right was no more than a wrinkled stump on which remained only the mast of his erect thumb. My father was about twelve, and alone in his grandparents' house in Tunja, when three men with machetes and rolled-up trousers came in through a kitchen window, smelling of cheap liquor and damp ponchos and shouting "Death to the Liberal Party," and didn't find my grandfather, who was standing for election to the provincial government of Boyaca and would be ambushed a few months later in Sogamoso, but only his son, a child who was still in his pajamas even though it was after nine in the morning. One of them chased him, saw him trip over a clump of earth and get tangled up in the overgrown pasture of a neighboring field; after one blow of his machete, he left him for dead. My father had raised a hand to protect himself, and the rusty blade sliced off his four fingers. Maria Rosa, the cook, began to worry when he didn't show up for lunch, and finally found him a couple of hours after the machete attack, in time to stop him bleeding to death. But this last part my father didn't remember; they told him later, just as they told him about his fevers and the incoherent things he said--seeming to confuse the machete-wielding men with the pirates of Salgari books--amid the feverish hallucinations. He had to learn how to write all over again, this time with his left hand, but he never achieved the necessary dexterity, and I sometimes thought, without ever saying so, that his disjointed and deformed penmanship, those small child's capital letters that began brief squadrons of scribbles, was the only reason a man who'd spent a lifetime among other people's books had never written a book of his own. His subject was the word, spoken and read, but never written by his hand. He felt clumsy using a pen and was unable to operate a keyboard: writing was a reminder of his handicap, his defect, his shame. And seeing him humiliate his most gifted students, seeing him flog them with his vehement sarcasm, I used to think: You're taking revenge. This is your revenge.

  But none of that seemed to have any consequences in the real world, where my father's success was as unstoppable as slander. The seminar became popular among experts in criminal law and postgraduate students, lawyers employed by multinationals and retired judges with time on their hands; and there came a time when this old professor with his useless knowledge and superfluous techniques had to hang on the wall, between his desk and bookshelves, a kind of kitsch, colonial shelf, upon which piled up, behind the little rail with its pudgy columns, the silver trays and the diplomas on cardboard, on watermarked paper, on imitation parchment, and the particleboard plaques with eye-catching coats of arms in colored aluminum.

  FOR GABRIEL SANTORO, IN RECOGNITION OF TWENTY YEARS OF PEDAGOGICAL LABOR . . . CERTIFIES THAT DOCTOR GABRIEL SANTORO, BY VIRTUE OF HIS CIVIL MERITS . . . THE MAYORALTY OF GREATER BOGOTA, IN HOMAGE TO DOCTOR GABRIEL SANTORO . . .

  There, in that sort of sanctuary for sacred cows, the sacred cow who was my father spent his days. Yes, that was his reputation: my father knew it when they called him from city hall to offer him the speech at the Capitolio Nacional; that is, to ask him to deliver a few commonplaces in front of bored politicians. This peaceable professor--they would have thought--ticked all the right boxes for the event. My father didn't give them anything they expected.

  He did not speak about 1538. He did not speak about our illustrious founder, Don Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, whose pigeon-shit-covered statue he passed every time he went to have a coffee and brandy in the Cafe Pasaje. He did not speak about the twelve little huts or the Chorro de Quevedo, Quevedo's stream, the spot where the city had been founded, which my father used to say he could never mention without his mind being invaded by the image of a pissing poet. Contravening the commemorative tradition in Colombia (this country that has always liked to commemorate everything), my father did not make his speech a politicized version of our childhood history primers. He did not abide by the terms of the agreement; he betrayed the expectations of a couple hundred politicians, peaceful men who desired only to be swept along for a while by the inertia of optimism and then be freed promptly to go and spend the August 7 holiday with their families. I was there, of course. I heard the words spat out into mediocre microphones; I saw the faces of those listening to him, and noticed the moment when some of them stopped looking at the orator to look at one another: the imperturbable eyebrows, the stiff necks, the hands with their wedding rings straightening their ties. Afterward, they all commented on the courage it took to pronounce those words, the act of profound contrition, of intrepid honesty there was in each one of those sentences--all of which, I'm sure, held no importance for my father, who wanted only to dust off his rifles and take his best shots in the presence of a select audience. None of them, however, could recognize the value of that exemplary model of rhetoric: a valiant introduction, because he relinquished the chance to appeal to his audience's sympathies ("I'm not here to celebrate anything"), a narrative based on confrontation ("This city has been betrayed. Betrayed by all of you for almost half a millennium"), an elegant conclusion that began with the most elegant figure of classical oratory ("There once was a time when it was possible to speak of this city"). And then that final paragraph, which would later serve as a mine of epigraphs for various official publications and was repeated in all the newspapers the way they repeat Simon Bolivar's I shall go quietly down to my grave or Colonel, you must save our nation.

  Somewhere in Plato we read: "Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me, but the people of a city most certainly do." Citizens, I propose we learn from ours, I propose we undertake the political and moral reconstruction of Bogota. We shall achieve resurrection through our industry, our perseverance, our will. On her four hundred and fiftieth birthday, Bogota is a young city yet to be made. To forget this, citizens, is to endanger our own survival. Do not forget, citizens, nor let us forget.

  My father spoke about reconstruction and morals and perseverance, and he did so without blushing, because he focused less on what he said than on the device he used to say it. Later he would comment: "The last sentence is nonsense, but the alexandrine is pretty. It fits nicely there, don't you think?"

  The whole speech lasted sixteen minutes and twenty seconds--according to my stopwatch and not including the fervent applause--a tiny slice of that August 6, 1988, when Bogota turned four hundred and fifty, Colombia celebrated one hundred and sixty-nine years less a day of independence, my mother had been dead for twelve years, six months, and twenty-one days, and I, who was twenty-seven years, six months, and four days old, suddenly felt overwhelmingly convinced of my own invulnerability, and everything seemed to indicate that there where my father and I were, each in charge of his own successful life, nothing could ever happen to us, because the conspiracy of things (what we call luck) was on our side, and from then on we could expect little more than an inventory of achievements, ranks and ranks of those grandiloquent capitals: the Pride of our Friends, the Envy of our Enemies, Mission Accomplished. I don't have to say it, but I'm going to say it: those predictions were completely mistaken. I published a book, an innocent book, and then nothing was ever the same again.

  I don't know when it became apparent that Sara Guterman's experiences would be the material for my first book, nor when this epiphany suggested that the prestigious occupation of a chronicler of reality was designed to fit me like a glove. (It wasn't true. I was just one more member of an occupation that is never prestigious; I was an unfulfilled promise, that delicate euphemism.) At first, when I began to investigate her life, I realized that I knew very little about her; at
the same time, however, my knowledge exceeded the predictable or the normal, for Sara had been a regular visitor at my house for as long as I could remember, and many anecdotes from her always generous conversation had stayed in my head. Until the moment when my project came about, I'd never heard of Emmerich, the little German town where Sara was born. The date of her birth (1924) barely seemed less superfluous than that of her arrival in Colombia (1938); the fact that her husband was Colombian and her sons were Colombian and her grandchildren were Colombian, and the fact that she had lived in Colombia for the last fifty years of her life, served to fill out a biographical record and give an inevitable sense of substance to the particulars--you can say many things about a person, but only when we expose dates and places does that person begin to exist--but their utility went no further. Dates, places, and other information took up several interviews, characterized by the ease with which Sara talked to me, without allegories or beating about the bush, as if she'd been waiting her whole life to tell these things. I asked; she, rather than answering, confessed; the exchanges ended up resembling a forensic interrogation.

  Her name was Sara Guterman, born in 1924, arrived in Colombia in 1938?

  Yes, that's all correct.

  What did she remember about her final days in Emmerich?

  A certain well-being, first of all. Her family made their living from a sandpaper factory, and not a bad living either, but rather what would have been considered quite a comfortable one. It took Sara some thirty years to realize just what a good living the factory gave them. She also remembered a lighthearted childhood. And later, maybe after the first boycott affected the factory (Sara was not yet ten, but waking up for school and finding her father still at home made a deep impression), the appearance of fear and a sort of fascination at the novelty of the emotion.

  How did they get out of Germany?

  One night in October 1937, the town's operator called the family and warned that their arrest had been scheduled for the next day. It seems she had overheard the order while transferring a call, just the way she'd found out about Frau Maier's adultery (Sara didn't remember the first name of the adulterous woman). The family fled that very night, slipped over the border into Holland to a refuge in the countryside. They stayed hidden there for several weeks. Only Sara left the refuge: she backtracked as far as Hagen, where her grandparents lived, to tell them what was happening (the family thought that a thirteen-year-old girl had a better chance of traveling unimpeded). She remembered one particular detail about the train--it was the fast train of its day--she was given consomme to drink, which was quite a novelty at the time, and the process of the little cube's dissolving in the hot water fascinated her. They settled her into a compartment where everyone was smoking, and a black man sat down beside her and told her that he didn't smoke but he always sat where he saw smoke, because smokers were better conversationalists and people who don't smoke often don't talk during the entire journey.

  Wasn't it dangerous to go back into Germany?

  Oh yes, very. Just before arriving she noticed that a young man of about twenty had gone into the next compartment and that he'd followed her each time she'd escaped to the dining car to drink consomme. She feared, of course, that it was someone from the Gestapo, because that's what people feared at that time, and when she got to Hagen Station she left the train and walked past her uncle, who was waiting for her, and instead of greeting him, asked him where the ladies' room was, and he, luckily, understood what was going on, went along with the act, accompanied her to the back of the station, and despite the protests of two women went in with her. There, Sara told her uncle that the family was safe but nevertheless her father had now decided to leave Germany for good. It was the first time the idea of leaving was mentioned. While he listened to the news, her uncle scratched at a poster that someone, probably a traveler with too much luggage, had stuck there: Munchener Fasching. 300 Kunstlerfeste. Sara asked her uncle if she needed to change trains to go from Hagen to Munich, or if there was a direct train. Her uncle didn't say anything.

  Why Colombia?

  Because of an advertisement. Months earlier, Sara's father had seen the sale of a cheese factory in Duitama (an unknown city), Colombia (a primitive country), advertised in a newspaper. Taking advantage of the fact that he still could, that the laws did not yet prevent him from doing so, he decided to travel to see the factory in person and returned to Germany saying that it was an almost unimaginable business, that the factory was rudimentary and employed only three girls, and that, nevertheless, it was going to be necessary to consider the voyage. And when the emergency happened, the voyage was considered. In January 1938, Sara and her grandmother arrived by ship in Barranquilla and waited for the rest of the family; there they received news of the persecutions, arrests of friends and acquaintances, all the things they'd been spared and--which seemed even more surprising--would continue to be spared in exile. A couple of weeks later they flew from Barranquilla to Bogota's Techo Airport (in a twin-engine Boeing plane of the SCADTA fleet, as she was later informed, when at sixteen or seventeen years old she began to ask questions and reconstruct their first days in the country), and then, from Sabana Station, they took the train that left them in what for the moment was nothing more than the village of cheeses.

  What did she remember about the rail journey across Colombia?

  Her aunt Rotem, an old, almost bald woman, whose authority, in Sara's eyes, was diminished by her lack of hair, complained during the whole trip. The poor old woman never understood why first class, in this train, was at the back; she never understood why the girl, traveling by land across the new country, kept her nose in an album of contemporary art, a book with translucent pages that had been her cousin's and had got into her luggage by mistake, instead of commenting on the mountains and plantations and the color of the rivers. The girl looked at the reproductions and didn't know that in some cases--that of Chagall, for example--the originals no longer existed because they'd been incinerated.

  What were her first impressions upon arrival in Duitama?

  She liked several things: the mud that built up at the door to the house, the name of the cheese factory (Corcega, that word with its French flavor, which also summoned up the charms of a sea so close to her birthplace, the Mediterranean that she'd seen on postcards), the paint they had to rub onto the Gouda cheese to distinguish it from the others, the very slight mockery her classmates subjected her to during the initial months, and the fact that the nuns of La Presentacion College, who didn't seem able to comprehend the stubborn ignorance of the little girl, went wild with joy talking about the Death and the Resurrection, Good Friday and the Coming of Our Lord, but on the other hand choked on scandalized gasps when they found Sara explaining circumcision to the daughters of Barreto, a barrister and old friend of former president Olaya Herrera.

  And that was how, at the end of 1987, I wrote a couple of pages, and was surprised to find, while looking through old papers, the index card on which I'd written, years earlier, a sort of quick writing course provided by my father upon discovering that I had started to write up my degree thesis. "First: everything that sounds good to the ear is good for the text. Second: in case of doubt, see first point." Just as when I was writing up my thesis, that card, pinned to the wall above my desk, served as an amulet, an incantation against fear. Those pages contained barely a fragment of that recounted life; there, for example, was the way the soldiers imprisoned Sara's father, Peter Guterman; there were the soldiers who smashed a plaster bust against the wall and sliced open the leather armchairs with their knives, to no avail, because the identity cards they were searching for were nowhere in that house, but rather creased inside her mother's corset and, eight days later, when Peter Guterman was released but his passport was not, allowed them to cross the border and embark, with their car and everything, at IJmuiden, a port on the canal a few minutes from Amsterdam. But the most important thing about those two pages was something else: within them was the confi
rmation that all could be told, the suggestion that I could be the one to tell it, and the promise of a strange satisfaction--giving shape to other people's lives, stealing what's happened to them, which is always disordered and confused, and putting it in order on paper; justifying, in some more or less honorable way, the curiosity I've always felt for all the emanations of other bodies (from ideas to menses), which has driven me, by a sort of internal compulsion, to violate secrets, reveal confidences, show interest in others the way a friend should, when deep down I'm just interviewing them like a vulgar reporter. But then I've never known where friendship stops and reporting starts.