I was pleased to see he didn't seem bothered by the sustained murmuring of movement: the chairs against the floor, the rustle of clothing, papers torn or crumpled up. His voice, perhaps, prevailed over those trivial distractions, and also his figure. He was elegant without being solemn, firm without being authoritarian, and that was plain to see; much more so, in fact, than I was. My father had not noticed my presence. He hadn't pointed me out like he had on other occasions; he looked straight ahead at a point somewhere above my head, on the wall or out of the window. "I see we have a guest today." "I'm going to take the opportunity to introduce someone." He said none of that; then, while I listened to him explain how Demosthenes invoked the gods to begin his speech--"the intention is to create an almost religious atmosphere that will influence the state of those who are listening to him, because he should be judged by gods, not by men"--I had the unequivocal sensation of invisibility. I had stopped existing in that precise moment; I, Gabriel Santoro the younger, had just evaporated from that date in history (which I no longer remember) and from that precise place, the lecture hall of the Supreme Court of Justice, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. I saw myself suddenly tangled in that misunderstanding: maybe he hadn't seen me (after all, it was dark and I was in the last row); maybe he'd chosen to ignore me, and it wasn't possible to make myself noticed without looking ridiculous and, even worse, without interrupting the class. But I had to risk it, I thought; at that moment, knowing whether my father was ignoring me on purpose monopolized my attention, my decimated intelligence. And when I was about to ask him something, anything--why did Demosthenes insult Aeschines so brutally and call his father a slave, or why did he begin speaking, for no reason, of the ancient battles of Marathon and Salamis--when I was about to break with these questions the spell of invisibility or of nonexistence, my father had again begun to talk of other times, the times of his youth, when speaking was important and what someone said could change someone else's life, and only I knew his words were for me, that they searched me out and chased me with the relentlessness of a guided missile. Professor Santoro was speaking to me through a filter: the students were listening to him unaware that my father was using them the way a ventriloquist uses a dummy. "None of you have felt that terrible power, the power to finish someone off. I've always wanted to know what it felt like. Back then we all had that power, but we didn't all know that we had it. Only some used it. There were thousands, of course: thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed. But those thousands of informers were just a part, a tiny fraction of the people who could have informed if they'd wanted to. How do I know? I know because the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are the majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment, or, at least, of resentment according to Nietzsche: the hatred the naturally weak feel for the naturally strong." Notebooks opened, students made a note of the reference; one beside me underlined Federico Nietzsche twice, with the first name in Spanish. "I don't remember when I heard of the first case of justified denunciation. On the other hand, I clearly remember an Italian who dressed in mourning for a funeral, and was then included on the blacklist for wearing the uniform of Fascism. But I have not come here to talk of these cases but to keep quiet. I have not come to talk of my experience. I have not come to talk about the enormous error, about the misunderstanding, about how my family and I suffered for that error, that misunderstanding. The moment when my life was impounded: I have not come to talk about that. My grant suspended, my father's pension turned off like a water tap, those many months in which my mother had nothing to live on: I have not come to talk about that. I can tell you perhaps that my work as a truck driver enabled me to carry on my studies. I can tell you that Demosthenes, the great Demosthenes, enabled me to carry on my life. But I have not come to break the silence. I have not come to break the pact. I have not come to make cheap accusations, nor to set myself up as a victim of history, nor to list the many ways that life in Colombia can ruin people. A joke made at the wrong moment in front of the wrong people? I'm not going to talk about that. The inclusion of my name on that inquisitors' document? I'm not going to give details, I'm not going to delve into the subject, because that is not my intention. I have spent several years now teaching people to speak, and today I want to speak to you about what is not said, what is beyond the tale, the account, the reference. I cannot prevent other people from speaking if they believe it useful or necessary. So I shall not speak out against the parasites, those creatures who use the experience of those of us who have preferred not to speak for their own ends. I shall not speak of those second-rate writers, many of whom had not even been born when the war ended, who now go around talking about the war and about the people who suffered during the war. They do not know the courage of those who have preferred not to speak: they'll not learn of it from me. They do not know that it takes strength not to make use of one's own suffering: they'll not learn it from me. They especially do not know that making use of others is one of the lowest occupations in humanity. No, no, they'll not learn it from me. The things they do not know they'll have to learn on their own. Today I have come to keep quiet and protect the silence of those who have kept it. I shall not speak. . . ." And, in fact, he didn't speak. He didn't speak of one title in particular, or of one author; but the system of ventriloquism he'd installed in his lecture hall had suddenly transformed into a searchlight, and the violence of that dazzling beam fell on me. The accusations of the ventriloquist-searchlight had taken me by surprise, so much so that my head overlooked the revelations about my father's past--a persecuted man, a victim of unjust accusations as the result of an unimportant joke, a frivolous comment, an innocent bit of sarcasm, the content of which had already begun to take various forms in my head--and concentrated on the possible defense of my right to ask questions and, of course, Sara Guterman's right to answer them. But the auditorium was not the most conducive setting for that debate, so I started to consider the best way to escape (the way to do so without calling attention to myself, or the way to do so by calling attention but not revealing my identity to the rest of the audience, without demolishing what little dignity I had left), when my father grabbed his overcoat with a slightly clumsy movement and the lining of his sleeve got caught on the back of the chair, which crashed onto the wooden floor with an angry reverberation. Only then did I understand that the controlled tone and measured surface of my father's words concealed, or at least masked, an interior disorder, and for the first time in my life I associated the notion of recklessness with my father's behavior. But he had already left. The class was over.
I had to take some time to recover, like someone who's just been in an accident--like a pedestrian stepping out of the shadow, the screech of brakes, the violent collision--because I felt queasy. I held my head in my hands and the noise of students getting up gradually subsided. I went out, looked for my father, and didn't see anyone. I walked around in front of the building, under the insufficient light of the walkway, and I could have sworn I saw him cross Seventh between buses and minibuses, jog with his overcoat folded over his arm despite the cold, toward the International Center, but a second later the illusion had crumbled: it wasn't him. (That momentary confusion functioned as a symbol of bad literature. That's it, I thought. Now I've started to see my father when he's not there, to confuse him with my image of him, now I've started to unlearn his silhouette, for I'd realized I would have to unlearn his life: one revelation, just one fucking revelation, and already my father is a crude hologram, a phantom in the streets.) When I turned round and began to walk south, thinking of taking the first street that went down to Seventh and thus doubling my chances of finding a taxi at that hour, I ran into a student. A streetlight lit him from the back--a saint and his halo--and it took me a second to recognize him: it was the student who had my book; at the beginning of the class the fetishistic attention he was paying my father had already bothered me, and
now he seemed anxious to confirm that attention.
"You're el junior, aren't you?" he said. "Your old man's hard, brother. You're a lucky guy. Too bad there aren't more sons of bitches like him."
Half an hour later I arrived at the house of my father, el senior, the hard man, the stranger. But he must have taken a slower route, because he wasn't home yet, so I crossed the street and settled down to wait for him on the corner, sitting on one of those milestones you still find all over Bogota, those rough, angular stones that used to mark the streets and for some reason haven't been taken away, although many of them now have incorrect information (Boulevard where it should say Avenue, Nineteen where it should say Thirty). And all that time, while I was freezing to death and watching a dirty yellow cloud swallowing the night sky, I was thinking: Why has he never told me about what happened? And what had happened? What was the unfortunate joke made at the wrong time that someone had taken too seriously? Who was the humorless person who'd made the accusation; who was the informer? Had he ever told my mother? Was there anyone else who knew about this? That was the first thing I asked when he arrived with his collar undone (disorder struggling to the surface) and unenthusiastically tolerated my following him upstairs and sitting down when he sat down. I also asked him if he'd seen me; I asked him if, after seeing me, he'd recognized me. He chose to answer my questions out of order. "Of course," he said. "I saw you were there at the back, sitting there from the start. I've always seen you. Sometimes I let you know, sometimes I don't. You've been there all week, Gabriel. How do you suppose I wouldn't notice?"
"I would've liked to know," I insisted then. "You never told me. You never talked to me about that."
"And I'm never going to tell you," he said. He didn't seem to be choking anything back; nothing seemed to be moving him deep down inside, but therein lay the maladjustment, and I knew it. "Memory isn't public, Gabriel. That's what neither you nor Sara have understood. You two have made things public that many of us wanted forgotten. You two have recorded things that many of us took a long time to get out of sight. People are talking about the lists again, they're talking about the cowardice of certain informers, about the anguish of those unjustly informed on. . . . And those of us who'd made our peace with that past, those who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. The blacklists, the Hotel Sabaneta, the informers. All words that many people rubbed out of their dictionaries, and you come along, white knight of history, to display your courage by awakening things most people prefer to let lie. Why hadn't I told you? No, that's the wrong question: better to ask why talk about things that don't deserve attention. Why did I say what I said today? Why refuse to speak in public as I did today? Was it to teach you a lesson, so you'd realize the nobility your father keeps hidden, that schmaltz? Was it to invite people to forget your book, to act like it had never been published? I don't know, both intentions strike me as childish, absurd as well as chimerical, a lost battle. But there's one thing I want you to know: I would have done the same if I hadn't seen you there. I am not going to speak of those denunciations, but I can tell you one thing: in a parallel reality I would have denounced you and your parasitical book, your exploitative book, your intrusive book. That's the only clear thing in all of this: the men who have remained silent did not deserve to have your reportage inflicted on them. Keeping silent is not agreeable, it demands character, but you don't understand that, you, with the same arrogance as all the rest of the journalists in the world, you thought the world could not manage without Sara's life. You think you know what this country is, that this country and its people no longer hold any mysteries for you, because you believe Sara is all there is, that you've known her and you've known us all. That's why I would have denounced you, as a con man and as a liar. Yes, I would have done it even if I hadn't seen you. And anyway, what were you doing there? Why didn't you tell me you were coming? No, don't answer, I can imagine. You went so we could talk about the book, right? You went so I could give you my opinion. And that's what you're here for now; deep down you still want me to talk about you. You still think I'm going to congratulate you, I'm going to encourage you and say you were born to write about Sara's life, or rather that Sara was born and went through her whole life, through the Nazis and exile, through wartime in a strange country, through forty years of life in this city where people kill each other out of habit, so that you could come now and sit down comfortably with your tape recorder and ask her idiotic questions and write two hundred pages, and our happiness would be so irrepressible we'd all start masturbating. Aren't you good? That's what you expect people to say. That's why you wrote it, so everyone would know how good and compassionate you are, how indignant you feel when these terrible things happen to humanity, no? Look at me, admire me, I'm on the side of the good guys, I condemn, I denounce. Read me, love me, give me prizes for compassion, for goodness. Do you want my opinion? My opinion is that you've got every right to investigate, to ask questions, even to write, but not to publish. My opinion is that you should have put that manuscript in a drawer and locked it, and then tried to lose the key. My opinion is that you should have forgotten the matter and that you are going to do so now, even though it's too late, because everyone is going to, everyone is going to forget your book in less than two months. It's that simple. I've nothing more to say. My opinion is that your book is shit."
And then the unthinkable happened: my father made a mistake. The man who spoke in perfect paragraphs, who communicated during the course of a normal day in quarto sheets ready for press, had mixed up his papers, confused his objectives, forgotten his speech and didn't have a prompter handy. The man who forecast the oblivion of my book lost control and ended up doing everything possible so that my book would be remembered. On its own merits, A Life in Exile would have gone unnoticed; my father--or rather his disproportionate, impetuous, unthinking reaction--took care of putting the book center stage and focusing all spotlights on it. "He's going to publish a review," Sara warned me. "Please tell him not to, tell him that's no way to behave." I replied, "I'm not saying anything. Let him do what he likes." "But he's mad. He's gone mad, I swear. The review is terrible." "I don't care." "You have to convince him; he's going to hurt you. Tell him the book was an accident. Make him see reason. Tell him that publishing the review is against his own interests. If he publishes it, it's going to attract people's attention. Explain that to him. He doesn't realize. This can be avoided." Then I asked her why she was so worried. "Because this is going to hurt you both, Gabriel. I don't like to see you hurt each other. I love you both." Her explanation struck me as odd; or rather, it struck me as superfluous, and therefore incomplete. "You'd rather the book wasn't spoken about," I said to Sara. "That's not true. I'd rather he wouldn't speak of the book. I'd rather he wouldn't speak about the book like that. He's going against you, but that's not it. It's that all this is contrary to his own intentions, don't you see?" "Of course I see. So what?" "I've never seen him react so pathologically. Who knows what'll happen afterward. This isn't Gabriel." "Tell me something, Sara. Did you know?" "Did I know what?" "Don't play the fool. Did you know? And if you knew, why isn't it in the book? Why didn't you tell me during the interviews?" It's an odd debating strategy that I've forgotten the name of: if your opponent demands something, respond with even more aggressive demands. "Why did you hide it from me? Why did you give me incomplete information?"
The review appeared a few days later:
As the subject for his first book, the journalist Gabriel Santoro has chosen one of the most difficult and, at the same time, one of the least original. Jewish emigration in the 1930s has been, for several decades, the talk of as many journalists as there are places in the journalism schools. Santoro wanted, undoubtedly, to appear audacious; he would have heard that audacity is one of the journalistic virtues. But to write a book about the Holocaust in this day and age is as audacious as shooting a sitting duck.
The author of A Life in Exile imagined that
the mere announcement of his theme--a woman who escaped from Hitler as a young girl and settled permanently in our country--was sufficient to generate terror and/or pity. He imagined, as well, that a clumsy and monotonous style could pass for a direct and economical one. In short: he counted on the reader's inattentiveness. Sometimes it's sentimental: the protagonist is a woman "of fears and deliberate silences." Sometimes it's wordy: in Colombia, her father feels "distant and welcome, accepted and foreign." Anyone will notice that the metaphor and the chiasmus aim to reinforce the ideas; anyone will notice that they manage only to weaken them. These are not the only occasions where this happens.
Of course it would all work better if the intention in general wasn't so obviously opportunistic. But the author tells us that emigrating is bad, that exile is cruel, that an expatriated man (or, in this case, woman) will never be the same. The pages of this book are rife with the cliches of sociology, while more thought-provoking truths, such as the capacity of men to reinvent themselves, to remake their destiny, remain submerged. They haven't interested the author; perhaps this is why the book doesn't interest us.
Finally, A Life in Exile is little more than an exercise: a commendable exercise, some will say (although I don't know with what justification), but an exercise after all. I won't point out that its tropes are cheap, its ethos questionable, and its emotions secondhand. I will say, however, that as a whole it is a failure. This verdict is clearer and more direct than the best inventory of the book's shortcomings, the listing of which would be as futile as it would be exhausting.
The Informers Page 6
