Days later, in Sara Guterman's house, where I had gone to spend New Year's Eve, I again thought of this small tragedy and told her. Sara gave me all the sympathy she could, but obviously couldn't contradict me or disprove the fact that my father's memory would gradually disappear little by little, and his disappearance would be pinned on circumstances as impalpable as the nonexistence of a recording, at the same time as her voice had been generously consigned to remain forever on a dozen cassettes. Her television was on, because we'd agreed that we'd pay little attention to the toasts and Colombian traditions of eating grapes and wearing yellow for luck, and we'd go from one year to the next watching the celebrations in other cities, and there were the images, the black skies suddenly filling with dense and luminous fireworks like cotton candy, the noise and the kisses, the clocks playing their starring roles in Delhi, in Moscow, in Paris, in Madrid, in New York, in Bogota, and the people of those cities chanting a countdown that in those moments was the most important thing in the universe. No German city featured in the televised inventory, and I thought of asking Sara if there was anyone in Germany--or Belgium, or Austria--with whom she would have liked to celebrate, relatives or friends she'd be with right now if she didn't live here but there, if she'd never emigrated. I was about to embark on that dangerous pastime, the speculation about an alternative life, and to thank her for her company on this night that I wouldn't have been able to get through on my own, when she cut me off in midsentence and put her hand on my arm, and the longest New Year's Eve of my life was formally inaugurated at that moment: Sara began to tell me about rumors circulating in the Bogota media that week, according to which Angelina had accepted a large amount of money from an important magazine, the name of which she did not yet know, in exchange for revealing in an interview that Gabriel Santoro, the man who was honored during his funeral and would in the near future be formally decorated, the lawyer who had distinguished himself as an orator for thirty years, not only by his talent but also by the high moral standards of his conduct, was not in fact what everyone had thought: he was an impostor, a liar, and a faithless lover. "This changes everything," Sara said to me. "Because there are things I'd rather you heard from me than had to read out there."
III.
THE LIFE ACCORDING TO SARA GUTERMAN
Christmas 1946. Well, not the twenty-fourth, but just a couple of days before. Almost exactly forty-five years ago, imagine, and I'm not one to dwell on anniversaries. Nothing odd in remembering a date like that, do you think? Everybody remembers things that happen at Christmas, and so do I, even though in my house we didn't celebrate the same things or on the same days. But Mama always paid a lot of attention to Christmas, partly, I think, because she wanted to blend in with her new country, the whole recent-arrival complex. When in Rome, et cetera. It would be odd if I did forget the date, even for a second, or if I couldn't remember exactly what happened that day, what I was wearing, what was in the newspapers. The problem is that I remember what happened the day before and the day after, a month before and a month after, because it was a very unusual period, and even as I was living through it I realized my life was changing. To witness the moment when your life changes forever is a very strange thing, I swear. And I have it here in my head, it's like a film that I can't turn off, that I've seen a thousand times. Sometimes I'd like to turn off the film, lose it forever. But then I think: I can't do that to Gabriel. When it was obvious that he was going to forget it all, that his intention was to erase his part in the film come hell or high water, I thought I would become his memory, the idiotic idea of being someone else's memory occurred to me and stayed stuck in my head. Now you can go down to the corner and buy memory, right? At least my grandchildren have. They get a taxi and go to the computer shop and buy memory--I'm sure you've done it, too--I don't even know what a computer is, I haven't wanted to learn, and asking my grandchildren how these things work is to subject myself to their impatience. So anyway, I was Gabriel's memory, although I couldn't talk about that to anybody. I was and maybe still am such a terrible thing: a memory forbidden from admitting that it remembers. My sons don't let me remember either. I'm not allowed to speak to my grandchildren about what happened in those years. I thought about that just a little while ago, I'd never realized: I've gone through life heeding people who forbid me to remember; is that not the strangest thing in the world? So the film in my head ended up existing only in my head. Like those Chaplin films that were lost for so long and they now say they've found, I don't know if you saw the news anywhere. Anyway, that's what I was, a reel, a spool, a roll, I don't know what you call it, a can of film that gets lost, and no one cares that it remains lost because no one intends to show it, and if someone did show it I swear no one would go to see it. What we did go to see was Of Human Bondage, which was showing then, before Christmas. I loved Paul Henreid; we were all a little annoyed with him because he'd taken Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and hadn't left her to Rick, who was so charming. And we went to see it. Gabriel didn't like it. Of course, he'd read the novel. Who wrote the novel?"
"Somerset Maugham."
"Yes, that one. And he hadn't liked the novel either. Anyway, that was at the beginning of December. A week later, when I had managed to convince him to see it again, to see if he liked it this time, we received the news. Konrad Deresser had killed himself. Konrad, Enrique's father. I'm not even sure you know who I'm talking about."
"Enrique Deresser, yes. Dad's friend, no? I think he met him at your hotel. Yeah, he talked to me about Enrique Deresser a couple of times, especially when I was about twelve or thirteen, and one time he told me about the death of Konrad Deresser. But then he didn't anymore. He stopped mentioning the subject. Just like that, all of a sudden. As if Deresser was the Christ child or Santa Claus, you know? As if my father had said to me, Children talk about these things, but for an adult they are ridiculous characters. That happened with him."
"Tell me what you know."
"I know that Enrique's father went broke. I know he killed himself, took I don't know how many sleeping pills and washed them down with a cocktail of liquor and gunpowder. I also know that it all happened in a dive of a hotel, no, in a boardinghouse on Twelfth Street, on Twelfth around Fifth or Sixth, because one time we were walking past there and Dad told me. Look, this is where Deresser's father killed himself, he told me. I remember it very clearly, we were walking down Fifth Avenue toward Luis Angel Arango. We were going to look for a couple of books that he thought were absolutely crucial for my thesis. Longinus's On the Sublime, and The Art of Persuasion in Greece by Kennedy. He thought my thesis was for a different degree, I guess."
"That's incredible, you remember the titles? How can you? What an amazing memory."
"One always remember titles, Sara. When my mum died I was reading The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming. When I graduated I was reading Clandestine in Chile. Garcia Marquez. When they killed Lara Bonilla, I was reading Hiroshima . John Hersey. One always remembers, or at least that's how I am. Not you? Don't you remember what you were reading on important dates? Let's see, what were you reading when your husband died?"
"I don't know. I remember there was a bullfight on. It was Pepe Caceres. The bull caught him but he wasn't hurt. I saw it all from up here. And I don't even like bullfighting."
"But no books."
"No. I guess I'm not like that."
"Well, anyway, Longinus and Kennedy. Those were my authors when Dad told me about Konrad Deresser."
"I didn't know he'd told you. It's strange. Anyway, let me tell you the rest: Gabriel was in the hotel that weekend. I had kept on working in the hotel after the war, with more and more responsibilities, because suddenly the ability to speak Colombian Spanish had made me indispensable. What a word: indispensable. Your dad and I were twenty-two years old, and Enrique a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, already grown up. Twenty-two, can you imagine? Who's indispensable at the age of twenty-two? My grandson's that age, or at least somewhere around there,
and I see him and think: We were that age? Weren't we children? Of course, back then we were already people at twenty-two, we were adults, and these days a thirty-year-old is still a child. But it doesn't matter, we were young. How was it that the things that happened to us happened? Aren't there things that a person only does when they're older; is there not a minimum age for doing certain things, especially the ones that mark your life? I've spent so many years asking myself these questions that the answers now matter very little to me. Now what I want is for no one to answer them, because an unexpected or strange reply would make me revise my life. And there comes a time when we're no longer up for revisions. I'm no longer up for revisions. Gabriel tried to revise, for example, and I don't know what his girlfriend thought about that, but things aren't that simple. You can't start revising your life and rest easy. It's forbidden to revise and rest easy. That should be inscribed on our birth certificates, so we know what to expect, so we don't go through life doing silly things.
"Your father was at law school, but even so he managed to come out to Boyaca every weekend. When he couldn't catch a bus, I'd look through the reservations for someone we knew, and he would always get a lift, as if guests' cars were for hire. I'd just give him the phone number, and he'd take care of the rest: he'd call, put his case in his Don Juan voice, and the guests would end up offering him a place in their car. Gabriel had this ability: he managed to get people to do things for him. It wasn't just that he knew how to talk, no. People believed him, people trusted him. Even Papa would let him stay in the hotel without paying the full rate, which would have been out of Gabriel's reach, something he might've been able to afford three times a year. And so he'd arrive with his contracts and administrative procedural textbooks, and he'd study for a while, almost always in the mornings, and then we'd go out for a walk, when my work in the hotel allowed. This wasn't during the school term, and for the holidays Gabriel would normally get some job, driving trucks all over the country as if Colombia were the size of a ranch. Of course, they hired him because he had the stamina of an ox and he could sit behind a steering wheel for twenty straight hours without sleeping, hardly even stopping to eat. That year he drove fuel tankers during the transport workers' strike . . . but you know about that, don't you?"
"Yes, he told me about that several times as well. 'On the Crown.' The trucks."
"Well, that Christmas there weren't any trucks to drive, there wasn't any work, because the strike was over. Gabriel couldn't bear staying at home. He never talked to you about that, I'm sure. He couldn't stand your grandmother. And I have to say I could see why. Dona Justina was already puritanical before they killed her husband, and from that moment on she went to unbearable extremes, especially for her only child. So it was the most normal thing in the world for Gabriel to ask me for asylum, I'm not exaggerating, that's the word he used, holiday asylum, because his mother, to celebrate Christmas, got together with three old maiden aunts, and for each novena they said the rosary with such fervor that after her death the doctors found one of her kneecaps was dislocated and said it was from her spending so much time kneeling during the second half of her life. Gabriel made fun of her in public. It was a little painful to watch."
"I never knew her."
"No, of course not. When she died you would have been two or three years old, and Gabriel never wanted to take you to her house for her to see you. The old lady sent everybody to tell him that she wanted to meet her grandson, that she didn't want to die without seeing her grandson, and Gabriel didn't react at all. With time I came to realize that he was throwing it back in her face . . . it's just a saying, of course, because in that family they never faced up to things, they didn't talk about illness or misunderstandings or anything. Do you know what he reproached her for?--well, what I think he reproached her for behind her back--That she should have let herself die after the death of her husband. That she buried herself alive at the age of thirty-five--because I don't think she could have been any older when they killed your grandfather. Let's see, Gabriel was ten or twelve, probably twelve, so she was just barely into her thirties, yes, she was already dead and in mourning at that age, and Gabriel said that sometimes her mourning was for her own death. He talked to me about that several times. He'd come back from his Catholic school and come home to rooms darker than those of the priests, the furniture all covered with sheets so the upholstery wouldn't get worn, an enormous crucified Christ in every room, all identical, the ones with lots of blood and open eyes, you know? The ones that usually have crosses made of corrugated wood, if you can say it like that. Have you seen those?"
"I think so, I've seen them somewhere. The ones that aren't smooth. The sort of irregular ones, like chocolate braids."
"Before they killed your grandfather, Dona Justina taught Gabriel how to make the crosses, because at the house in Tunja the child had a lot of free time and there was more than enough wood. And afterward, for a time, she still forced him to go on making them. Making wooden crosses until he was twelve or thirteen. How he hated her for that. He remembered those crosses all his life. After that he hated all manual labor, I think partly because of that. Or did you ever see him painting the house, or trying to learn how to play an instrument, or fixing the plumbing or a cupboard door, or cooking?"
"But I always thought that was because of his hand."
"Ah, his hand."
"That had to affect his life, no? It dictated what he could and could not do, defined his interests. He didn't even write, Sara. And he was always telling me about his childhood complexes, about the effects of the deformity on a child--"
"No, wait. One thing at a time. There wasn't any effect, nothing like that."
"How so?"
"What happened to his hand was later. And it didn't happen the way you think it did. He grew up with both his hands intact. That Christmas, his hand still existed, and it existed for a few days more. Or rather, what happened was just a little after what I'm telling you about. But I don't understand, you told me you knew about the trucks. How was he going to drive one of those monstrosities with a mutilated hand? No, no, that day, when Gabriel came down to breakfast and found out that Konrad was dead, all his fingers were intact, he was an intact man. People were gathered around the radio, I remember, not because they'd just broadcast the news, but simply because we'd got used to the idea that that was the meeting place for certain things. How I wish I knew what ever happened to that radio. It was one of those Philips that looked like a doctor's bag, the most up-to-date model, with its little wicker screen and everything. Papa told me the news and asked me to tell Gabriel. He knew how close Gabriel and Enrique were, everyone knew. It was obvious that Gabriel would have wanted to be informed. In half an hour he'd had something to eat so as not to travel on an empty stomach, packed, put on his new shoes, a pair of moccasins with leather soles as smooth as baby's skin, and he was ready to ask the first person leaving for Bogota for a lift. 'But he's already been buried,' Papa told him. 'It was almost a week ago.' Gabriel didn't pay him any attention, but it was obvious he was hurt. His friend's father had died, and no one had told him, no one had invited him to pay his last respects. He asked me to come with him, of course, and he did it there, in front of Papa: that was a measure of the confidence he had, of the trust Gabriel inspired even when he was so young. I asked what we were going for, and he said, 'What else? To pay our last respects to Senor Konrad.' 'But they've already buried him, Gabriel,' Papa said again. And Gabriel, 'Well, it doesn't matter. We'll pay our respects in the cemetery.'
"But we didn't go to the cemetery. We got to Bogota that very afternoon, around four, caught the tram at Seventy-second, but when we got to Twenty-sixth Gabriel sat still in his seat, without making the slightest move. I asked him what was going on, weren't we going to the cemetery? 'Later,' he said. 'First I have to talk to someone.' And that was how I found out that Konrad Deresser had been living with a woman at the time of his death, but what was more shocking was that Gabriel knew and I didn't. Not that
he knew her, but he knew of her existence. Her name was Josefina Santamaria and she was from Riohacha. And we showed up unannounced, we showed up to visit her in the boardinghouse at Eighth and Twelfth where Deresser had lived. Josefina was a black woman, taller than Gabriel. The only thing I knew about her life was that she'd arrived in Bogota six months previously and that she went to bed for good money with members of the Jockey Club. I didn't know anything more because that afternoon we didn't talk about her but about Deresser. She was the one who told us, second by second, how he'd killed himself. 'Of course I knew, love, how could I not know,' Josefina told us. 'You could see in his face that he was half dead.' 'And why didn't you do something?' asked Gabriel. 'And how do you know I didn't? When I saw him go out that morning, I went out after him and followed him. I followed him all morning, what more was I supposed to do? What happened was that he took me by surprise. He was a lively one, my little monkey.'
The Informers Page 10
