The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  "I'm sleeping with her. We've been seeing each other for two months."

  "How old is she?" asked Sara.

  "Forty-four. Forty-five. I don't remember. She told me, but I don't remember."

  "And she hasn't got anyone, right?"

  "How do you know she hasn't got anyone?"

  "Because if she did, someone would be throwing it in her face. That sleeping with old men is against the rules. The age difference. Whatever. She must have a good story."

  "Oh, here we go," said my father. "There's no story."

  "Of course there is--don't give me that. First of all, she's got no one to protest. Second, you get evasive when I ask you. This woman has a hell of a story. Has she suffered a lot?"

  "Well, yes. You've got the makings of a great inquisitor, Sara Guterman. Yes, she's had a shitty life, poor thing. She lost her parents in the bombing of Los Tres Elefantes."

  "That recently?"

  "That recently."

  "Did they live here?"

  "No. They'd come from Medellin to visit her. They got to say hello, and then they went out to buy some nylon stockings. Her mum needed some nylon stockings. Los Tres Elefantes was the closest place. We passed by there in a taxi not long ago. I can't remember where we were going, but when we got there Angelina's hands were numb and her mouth dry. And that evening she was a bit feverish. It still hits her that hard. Her brother lives on the coast. They don't speak to each other."

  "And when did she tell you all this?" I asked.

  "I'm old, Gabriel. Old-fashioned. I like to talk after sex."

  "All right, all right, a little decorum, if you don't mind," said Sara. "I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still right here, or have I become invisible?"

  I patted my father on the knee, and his tone changed: he put aside the irony, he became docile. "I didn't know what you'd think," he said. "Do you realize?"

  "What?"

  "It's the first time I've ever spoken to you about anything like this," he said, "and it's to tell you what I'm telling you."

  "And without giving the rest of us time to cover our ears," said Sara. And then she asked, "Has she stayed over at your house?"

  "Never. And don't think I haven't suggested it. She's very independent, doesn't like sleeping in other people's beds. That's fine with me, not that I need to tell you. But now she's taken it into her head to invite me to Medellin."

  "When?"

  "Now. Well, to spend the holidays. We're going next weekend and coming back the second or third of January. That's if she gets the time off, of course. They exploit her like a beast, I swear. It's the last week of the year, and she has to fight tooth and nail."

  He thought for a second.

  "I'm going to Medellin with her," he said then. "To spend Christmas and New Year with her. I'm going with her. Damn, it does sound very odd."

  "Odd, no, it sounds ridiculous," said Sara. "But what can you do? All adolescents are ridiculous."

  "There is one little thing," my father said to me. "We need your car. Or rather, we don't need it, but I said to Angelina that it's silly to take a bus when you can lend us your car. If you can, that is. If you're not going to need it, if it's not a problem."

  I told him I wasn't going to need it, although it was a lie; I told him it was no problem, partly because his whole being, his voice and his manner, was speaking to me with an unprecedented affection, as if he were asking a special favor of a special friend.

  "Take the car and don't worry," I said. "Go to Medellin, have a good time, say hi to Angelina for me."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'll stay with Sara. She'll invite me over for Christmas and New Year."

  "That's right," she said. "Go along and don't worry. We won't miss you. We're going to stay here and have our own party. Drinking what you can't drink, eating saturated fats and talking about you behind your back."

  "Well, that sounds perfect," said my father. "My back doesn't usually mind that."

  "Are you going to drive?" said Sara.

  "Not all the time. My hand tends to be a bit of a risk factor on roads like that one. She'll probably do most of the driving, I guess. I can't guarantee she's good at it, but her license is in order, and anyway, who said you have to drive well to drive in Colombia? How dangerous can it be? I'm in no position to make demands; if a Virgil falls into your life, you don't start cross-examining."

  "What do you mean?" I asked. "Was it your idea?"

  "Don't bring Virgil into this," said Sara. "Delusions of youth, that's what it's called."

  "Aha, the green-eyed monster is among us. Are you jealous, Sarita?"

  "Not jealous, no, don't be silly. But I am old, and so are you. Stop pretending you're not. Eight-hour car trips. Making love with schoolgirls. You're going to have a heart attack, Gabriel."

  "Well, it'll be worth it."

  "Seriously," I said. "What does she think?"

  "That any co-driver is a good co-driver."

  "No, about your age. What does she think about your age?"

  "She thinks it's fine. Well, I imagine she thinks it's fine, I haven't asked her. Fundamental rule of forensic interrogation: don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answer to, watch out for boomerang questions, as the ancients used to say. No, I don't want answers that are going to hit me in the back of the neck. I haven't asked her what she thinks about my hand either, if it bothers her, if she has to make an effort to forget it. What do you want me to say? I'm a good guy, I'm not going to hurt her, and that alone must seem like a fortune to her. It's stupid, but I feel like taking care of her. She's forty-four but I want to take care of her. She's convinced the world is shit, that everyone was born with the sole objective of giving her a hard time. It's not the first time I've heard the argument, but it's the first time it's come so close to me. And I spend all day and half the night trying to convince her of the opposite, Plato, homo homini Deus, all that stuff, and she never picks up a book even by accident. I've lived a long while, I've seen what there is to see. But this is by far the most unpredictable thing that's ever happened to me in my life."

  He forgot that life likes to outdo itself. Life (the second life) waited a week before reminding him, and did so with a wealth of detail.

  ...

  Now I like to think about that week over and over again, because it's the closest thing I've got to innocence, to a state of grace, because at the end of that week a whole idea of how the world should be ended. At that moment this book did not exist. It could not exist yet, of course, because this book is an inheritance created by the death of my father, the man who looked down on my work (writing about other people's lives) while he was alive and who after he died left me as a legacy the subject of his own life. I am my father's heir and I am also his executor.

  While I write I see that, over the course of several months, instead of the things and papers that I need to reconstruct the story, it has been the things and papers that prove the existence of the story and can correct my memory, if necessary, that have been accumulating on my desk. I am not skeptical by nature, nor am I naive, and I know very well the cheap tricks memory can avail itself of when it suits; at the same time, I know that the past is not stationary, nor is it fixed, in spite of the illusion of documents: so many photographs and letters and films that allow us to think of the immutability of what we've seen, what we've heard, what we've read. No, none of that is definitive. It can take just a tiny detail, something that in the grand scheme of things we consider insignificant, to make a letter relating trivialities become something that determines our lives, to make the innocent man in the photo turn out to have always been our worst enemy.

  My desk was once my mother's. The wood has softened from being smeared with so much furniture polish, but no other strategy has occurred to me to protect this block (that looks recently carved from a wet tree trunk) from woodworm attacks. There are rings from glasses and cups that nothing short of sandpaper could now shift. The corners are chipped or split, and I've got more
than one splinter from carelessly brushing my hand across it. And, most of all, there are things, things whose principal function is evidential. Every once in a while I pick up one of those cassettes and make sure they're still there, that they still contain Sara Guterman's voice. I pick up a magazine from 1985 and read a paragraph: "When the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Colombia finally decided to break relations with the Axis powers. . . ." I pick up the December 1941 speech, in which Santos broke relations with the Axis: "We are with our friends, and we are firmly with them. We will fulfill the role corresponding to this policy of continental solidarity with hatred towards none. . . ." I pick up a letter from my father to Sara, a letter from Sara to my father, a speech by Demosthenes: this is my evidence. I am heir, I am executor, and I am also prosecutor, but before this I have been archivist, I have been organizer. Looking back--and back means a couple of years ago as well as half a century--events take shape, a certain design: they mean something, something that doesn't necessarily come as given. To write about my father I've been obliged to read certain things that despite his tutelage I had never read. Demosthenes and Cicero are the most obvious, almost a cliche. Julius Caesar was no less predictable. Those books are also compelling pieces of evidence, and each one of them figures in my dossier, with all the annotations my father had made in them. The problem is that interpreting them is not within my powers. When my father notes, beside Brutus's speech, "From verb to noun? Here you lost," I don't know what he might have meant. I feel more comfortable with facts; and death, of course, is the densest of facts, more meaningful, less susceptible to being perverted or misappropriated by different interpretations, relative versions, readings. The rule says that death is as definitive as anything can be on earth. That's why it's so disconcerting when a man changes after death, and that's why biographies and memoirs get written, those cheap and democratic forms of mummification.

  The process of my father's mummification was only possible from December 23, 1991, when the accident happened. At that moment I was at home, comfortable and calm and in bed with a friend, T, a woman I've known since I was fifteen and she was twelve, with whom I get together every two or three months to make love and watch a movie, for although she is married and relatively content, we've always had the idea that in another life we could have been together, and we would have liked that. I still see T as a little girl, and perhaps there's a perversion there that we allow ourselves for a few hours. We touch, go to bed, watch a movie, and sometimes go back to bed after the movie, but not always, and then T has a shower, dries her hair with a hair dryer I bought just for her, and goes home. That's how it was that night: according to my calculations, we were watching the movie, and maybe Marlon Brando was dying of a heart attack in the garden in front of his grandson, but it's possible that the film had ended and I was seeking T's mouth, which is wide and always cold. Sometimes I've gone as far as considering the possibility of this coincidence: that T was sitting on top of me and sliding up and down my erection the way she often does just at the moment when my car (driven by my father) and an Expreso Bolivariano bus (driven by a certain Luis Javier Velilla) went over the cliff together a few kilometers outside Medellin, on the way to Las Palmas. The car was on its way out of Medellin; the bus was arriving. Five passengers survived the accident. I'll never understand how my father, the great survivor, was not among them.

  Boomerang questions began to accumulate almost immediately in my head, and I, with a negligence the rhetoric professor would have reproached me for, allowed that to happen. What was my father doing on the road to Las Palmas, that is, coming back from Medellin? Why was he driving at night, when he knew that road's terrible reputation? Why hadn't he let Angelina drive? These questions (the most physical, the most circumstantial) and the others, those concerning the blame for the accident (the most likely, I thought then, to come back and hit me in the back of the neck), came flooding in without warning when I received Sara's phone call and as I heard her tell me the news, or rather read it word for word from the newspaper, while I listened to her somewhat distractedly with the fleeting altruistic regret one tends to feel when listening to news of someone else's death in Colombia. Then she told me my father's name was in the newspaper's list. "That can't be right," I said, still standing beside the bedside table. "He's in Medellin. He's not coming back until January."

  "The license plate of the car's there, Gabriel, and the name," she said. She wasn't crying but her voice sounded nasal and uneven like the voice of someone who'd only just stopped. "I wanted it to be a mistake, too. I'm very sorry, Gabriel."

  "What about her? Was she with him?"

  "Who knows?"

  "If she wasn't with him, maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was someone else, Sara."

  "It's not someone else. I'm so sorry."

  In my left hand I had a white T-shirt with a doctored photo of the Caribbean and the slogan Colombia Nuestra, and in my right a travel iron, a fist-sized contraption that I'd got on special offer in an electrical shop in San Andresito. I'd just ironed the shirt and unplugged the iron, but after I hung up, as I sat down distractedly on the unmade bed, I rested it on my leg and the burn was brutal. By the time I got dressed, half incredulous and half dizzy, and called a taxi, an oblong blister the color of watery milk had formed above my knee. The operator who took my call gave me two numbers, a code and the identification number for my taxi, those security strategies that we ingenuous Bogotanos trust to evade criminals; but my father had just died--the pain of my burned skin did nothing but remind me, like a testimony to those two bodies, his and his lover's, perhaps burned as well, the skin converted into a single bag of white water--and as I got into the taxi I realized I'd forgotten the numbers I had to say for the taxi driver to accept me. "Code?" the driver asked and then repeated, and the glistening down on his upper lip and his narrow eyes said the same thing. I suddenly feared something was wrong with me; I began to have trouble breathing and barely had time to think, in the midst of an intense physical pain, of the loss that had just invaded my life and the darkness of what was left of my reasoning, that I was about to suffer an anxiety attack.

  I got back out of the taxi. I told the driver to wait for a second, please, but he must not have heard me: as soon as he saw me lie down on the ground, he put the car in gear and pulled away. On a nearby wall were some geraniums; they reminded me, as was to be expected, of the walls of the houses you see on the way down into Medellin from Las Palmas, and as soon as that image came into my head so did the first wave of nausea. I knelt beside the wall and threw up a thin, rust-colored, almost odorless phlegm (I hadn't eaten anything that morning), and stood up as soon as I felt that my legs, which go weak when I vomit, would be able to support me, because it seemed the minimal dignity of enduring these experiences standing up--the vision of the buildings with their windows falling on top of me, the pressure of clothing on my chest--would somehow help me to get through this week, in which Sara, merciful and braver than me, would take charge of the formalities with the ease of a professional grave digger but with the kindness a grave digger would have forever lost. One of her sons called me during those days. "Why don't you take care of these things yourself?" he said over the phone. "My mum isn't up to looking after other families' deaths, that should be obvious." I thought it was a strange form of jealousy, because Sara was duplicating the measures she'd taken when her husband died; her son didn't seem to like it very much. But Sara paid him no attention. She went on doing what needed to be done. She drafted an announcement for the two Bogota newspapers, the ones we open to see what deaths we have to attend that day, and decided, for reasons she didn't seem too clear about, to leave her own name out of the text, despite my request that she include it along with mine. So Gabriel Santoro invited mourners to the funeral of Gabriel Santoro; and in the drum roll of the duplicated name and surname there was something solitary and sad, because many of those who attended the mass, people who didn't know me, had the impression
of a printer's error. Sara apologized many times for not having included our second surnames, as we normally do in this country, which has always seemed strange to her. Of course, that would have prevented any confusion, but I didn't blame her, I couldn't have blamed her. She had taken on even the most trivial tasks, which are, for that very reason (because they take us away from the gravity, the solemnity, the rite) the most painful, and after an off-the-cuff comment in which I'd mentioned I'd rather have the body cremated out of fear of the renewed pain of the anniversaries and cemetery visits and flowers bought at the roadside, Sara had negotiated with the administrators of the Jardines de Paz to change the plot--the plot whose title I'd carried around in my wallet for so many years the way others carry the wrinkled telephone number of their first girlfriend--for the right to cremation.

  The service was held on the following Thursday. The mass, in the gloomy Cristo Rey Church, was a marvel of religious vacuity, an inventory of the absurdities in which some people seem to find solace. "Our brother," said the priest, and looked back at his notes to refresh his memory, "Gabriel Santoro, has died to live in us. We, through the love of Christ, through his infinite and eternal charity, live in him." Later I found out that before the mass he'd been asking for me, looking for me to ask some questions, and Sara had dealt with him in my place. The priest had approached her with a little book bound in black leather in his hand, open and ready like a journalist's. "What was the deceased like?" he asked Sara. She, accustomed to these procedures, answered with the supposed attributes of his star sign: he was a kind, affectionate, generous family man. The priest took notes, shook Sara's hand, and she watched him return to the sacristy. "Those of us who knew Gabriel," he said later, from the microphone, "appreciated his kind and warm personality, his infinite affection for his loved ones, his boundless generosity to friends and strangers alike. May the Lord receive him in His Holy Kingdom." And the sea of heads nodded: they were all in agreement, the dead man had been a good person. "Gathering here to remember our brother is also to ask ourselves how we can perpetuate what he has left in us; it is to measure the intensity of the loss, and the consolation of the Resurrection. . . ." The priest asked in public the question I'd been asking myself privately for so long, not just since the instant I knew my father was no more, but long before, and his words felt intrusive. I thought of my father's possible legacy; I felt at first I'd received nothing, nothing but the name, nothing but the timbre of our voices; but I ended up considering that in many ways my life was no different from his: it was a mere prolongation, a strange pseudopodium.