The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  "That morning, like every morning back then, Deresser had left late, around ten, to have coffee and brandy for breakfast across the square from the Molino. 'He always sat there,' said Josefina, 'to watch the students' girlfriends, I think.' But Josefina wasn't jealous, just the opposite: when she saw him off in the mornings, she said give my regards to the girls, let's hope the wind picks up and lifts one or two of their skirts. That morning he stayed longer than ever, as if someone had stood him up and he didn't know what to do. He walked back and forth across the plaza, he walked toward the Espectador building and waited to see the news on the blackboard. 'Ever since they started bringing out that board, he'd stopped buying the newspaper,' Josefina said. They stopped doing that blackboard thing later, but for many it was the perfect solution while it lasted: a guy came out of the window at certain times with the most important news items written there, by hand, as they happened, it was great. Deresser didn't have any money to buy the newspaper, and had become a regular client of the news board. That morning the street in front of the newspaper office was full, but full of ladies, who wanted to know how and where they were going to pay tributes to the Archbishop, who was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. Deresser approached them, tried to speak to one or two, and was unwelcome, of course. No one wanted to be approached by a bearded man who looked like he hadn't slept and almost always smelled of sweat and sometimes of urine, even if he did carry a leather briefcase that looked like it had seen better days, even if he did still have those green eyes that had made him famous among the women who worked at the Nueva Europa. And Deresser repeated the routine, walking back to the Garces shop and returning to the front of the newspaper offices, not once, not twice, but several times.

  "If he had arranged to meet someone there, that person didn't show up. If he was waiting for someone, that person didn't come. Deresser went into the Molino twice, walked through looking at the tables, and both times he stopped under Sancho Panza and from there looked around at all the tables again, but nothing. Nothing he wanted. So he kept walking, he crossed the plaza and went south on Sixth. 'He was walking right up against the wall,' said Josefina, 'as if the rest of the people were lepers, or he was.' Josefina saw him go into a pawnshop, the kind that used to be more common then than they are now, and come out again without his briefcase. At first she thought the obvious, that he'd just pawned that ugly briefcase for which he couldn't have got much, but later she found out that he'd also taken the last luxury he had left, and that was, in any case, a useless luxury: a record of classical music. It was useless because days before he'd pawned the turntable he used to listen to it. For Deresser that moment, the moment he pawned his last record, had to mean something terrible. People who are going to kill themselves cling to silly little things, construct symbols out of everyday items to mark a date. Pawning that record marked a date for Deresser, not just because with this gesture he marked the closure of his life, but also because it was probably that money he later used to buy the sleeping pills from the Granada Pharmacy.

  "Deresser was a failed musician but one who had taken that failure well. He'd set up a glassworks to keep his family fed when he realized that in Colombia it was going to be impossible to make a living from teaching the piano. That was back in 1920, when he'd recently arrived in Bogota. But a few years later, after meeting people in the terrible process an immigrant goes through, he gradually got into the National Radio Service, and eventually worked there. He decided what they played and when, he told the presenters about Chalia- pine or Schoenberg, and they would repeat on air what he'd told them two hours earlier. For those who knew the Deressers, that was the family's best time, a few years when no one would have imagined a personal disgrace awaited them, a time that ended or began to end in forty-one, when Santos broke with the Axis. Among the first things they went after were the broadcasters. There could not be any German or Italian or Japanese people near the airwaves. And Deresser arrived one morning to find he didn't have a job and, furthermore, some people looked down on him. The family was left as it had been before: depending on the glass they sold. And they didn't do badly, the glass made good money, and besides, Deresser stayed in contact with the two programmers at the station who didn't reject him, and they saw each other once in a while and he made recommendations. But music, at least for Deresser, was no longer a source of work. After that, between forty-one and forty-six, Deresser listened to music, though less and less, and he finally accepted that things in his life weren't going to go as he had wanted them to, accepted that someone had taken his life out of his hands. In October he found out that the first Nazis were going to be hanged in Nuremberg in the middle of that month, and the first thing he did was to get a record by Wagner, whom he'd detested all his life, and call his friends at the station. They saw him at the boardinghouse, as far as Josefina recalled, his friends came without making any comment about the place or the company he was in, but you could see the sorrow on their faces. Deresser showed them the record and talked about it with such enthusiasm, or feigning enthusiasm with such talent, that his friends left the boardinghouse promising they'd play it one of these days, thanking him for introducing them to a little-known work by a rarely broadcast composer, asking him to keep in touch, to keep making suggestions, contributions. . . . Deresser asked them one more thing. He asked them as a special favor to please broadcast it on the fifteenth of October, and he said that day was Enrique's birthday and that the Wagner piece was one of his favorites and it would be a good birthday present, and they believed the whole lie, they left feeling moved and making new promises. They fulfilled them. They played the record on the 15th of October, the day of the hangings in Germany. The Wagner piece was called The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Half the Germans in the city called up indignantly. The other half called up to ask who'd been responsible because they wanted to congratulate him. Josefina said it was the last time she saw Deresser more or less happy, although it was for mocking half the world without the other half knowing.

  "After pawning The Mastersingers, Deresser must have known what he would spend the money on. He went down Seventh then headed north, walking slowly like a tourist. 'He stood for about half an hour in front of the Granada,' said Josefina. Not right in front of it on the same side of the street, but on the opposite sidewalk, as if he were about to shoot an elephant and was keeping an eye on it from a distance. But when he did go into the pharmacy, when he finally made up his mind, he went in and came out again in two seconds. 'I think it was when he came out that he noticed. I was really hidden. I was there in Parque Santander, behind a tree, don't know how my little monkey did it, but I think that's where he saw me.' And then again the same thing, but in reverse: again south on Seventh, passing in front of Gabriel's office, though no one can ever know if Deresser thought of Gaitan at that moment, even if purely through the power of suggestion. He kept going down to the Plaza de Bolivar, as if this time he did have an appointment. A few blocks before arriving, he could already hear the noise of the people gathered in the Plaza de Bolivar, even if those people weren't shouting or singing or protesting. The ladies were really quiet, very decent they were, all of them standing facing the cathedral and some already with rosaries in their hands, the older ones especially. For Josefina, these were strange spaces, strange and even hostile, and she didn't usually go anywhere near them. The last time she'd passed through this plaza, though it was only a few blocks from her house, she'd been like a zombie following the people who came to hear the Te Deum and to wave flags and shout things the day the war ended.

  "It was a quarter past three in the afternoon. The homage to the Archbishop had started not long before, certainly, because when the ladies at the front began to move toward the Palacio, there were a few at the back who were still feeding the pigeons little bits of bread, crouched down, holding their parasols in one hand, stretching out the other gloved hand full of crumbs. Josefina looked at them, dying of envy, because she liked pigeons but was allergic to them. And
for a second, a single second, she watched one of those ladies, one who was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with pink flowers, and who wasn't giving the pigeons bread crumbs but grains of hard yellow corn, and she stood watching the corn that bounced around, when a fat, reddish pigeon pecked at it on the ground. She was jealous of the lady with the black sun hat for the ease with which she could approach the pigeons. When Josefina, recently arrived in Bogota, had tried to do the same, her eyes had begun to water and her nose to itch so badly that she'd had to sit on the steps of the Capitolio because she couldn't see where she was going for the tears. Later, in the afternoon, she'd broken out in a terrible rash on her neck, and she didn't know and no one wanted to tell her where she could buy calamine lotion to put on to stop her scratching so much. Three days. Three days it took her to discover the Granada, which was so close to her boardinghouse. There she could get calamine when she no longer needed it, when she wasn't itchy anymore and already knew that she could never go near another pigeon in her life. And thinking about this, about the lotion and the Granada Pharmacy, she looked up again, after this briefest of seconds, and noticed that Deresser wasn't there anymore.

  "She looked all around, swept the plaza with her gaze. She circled round the little group of women who were now moving. She went among them and endured their insults. They called her everything, insulted her the way those on the inside usually insult someone on the outside. But she didn't see him, she couldn't find him, she'd lost him. All she could see were black hats and dresses as if she were suddenly in the middle of a funeral, everyone wearing gloves, as if touching each other disgusted them, but among these easily disgusted people she didn't manage to find Deresser, only two or three faces that looked at her in horror, two or three mouths that said, A negress, a negress. She went all around the square, twice passed the window out of which Bolivar had leaped to keep from being cut to pieces in his own bed, but she didn't think of Bolivar or of anyone other than Konrad Deresser, a man who was fleeing from her, who was hiding from her, but at no point did it occur to her to recover her dignity, be guided by pride and stop looking for someone who at that moment did not want to be with her. It didn't occur to her that Deresser might have gone off with another woman, because that had never mattered to them, so he had no reason to hide such a thing from her. It didn't occur to her that Deresser might be mixed up in some shady business, because, in spite of having reasons to go mad with fury against this crazy country, which had broken his life and his family into pieces, in spite of all that, Deresser had never been one of those who take matters into their own hands. Quite the contrary, he was gentle, gentle as a lamb, too gentle for the world he got stuck with after forty-one. No, none of that occurred to her. Looking for him through La Candelaria and then down Seventh, Josefina was thinking about him the way you think about a lost child: more worried about him than about herself, less worried about losing him than about the fright the child will get when he realizes he's lost.

  "She arrived back at the boardinghouse just after five in the afternoon. On her way she'd passed a group of men going to pay homage to the Archbishop just as their wives had done a couple of hours earlier, and she thought how odd the people of Bogota were, that they did everything like that, the men on one side, the women on the other, it was a miracle they hadn't gone extinct. Among the men she'd seen Don Federico Alzate, with whom she had an appointment later, and she acted as she always did when she ran into one of her clients in the street, looking down at her sandals and her white toenails, counting her toes, because she thought that this way, thinking about something else and not about pretending, the other's shame and her own pretense would no longer be visible in her face. And now in her room she lay down to wait. She couldn't wait by the window, because her room didn't have any windows. 'I realized that people without windows wait differently,' she told us later. At ten to seven, when Federico Alzate arrived, she was still waiting. Josefina normally insisted her clients take her somewhere else, out of a tacit agreement with Deresser and because it also seemed wrong to her to sleep in the same bed she used to earn the money to pay for it. But this time she chose to stay. She had time to get the job done. It was hours later, when her client had left and Josefina was washing, that she heard shouts on the stairs. It was the owner of the hardware store on the ground floor. He came repeating like a parrot what he'd just been told: Deresser had been seen laid out on Jimenez Avenue, three blocks from there, swimming in his own vomit.

  "He wasn't dead, but when Josefina found him there was nothing to be done. The smell was that of a dead man, in any case, or at least that's the memory she was left with. Josefina discovered then that she'd grabbed the money she'd just earned on her way out the door, and she wanted to give the ironmonger a peso to help her get Deresser to a hospital, but the ironmonger was already walking away and pretending not to hear. Josefina stopped two taxis, and neither of them wanted to take her even though she offered them the whole three pesos she had in her hand. Then she felt something on her leg and, lifting up her skirt, discovered she hadn't put on any underwear, and a mixture of water and semen was running down her thigh, making her kneel down and retch, and at the same time, as if the world had come to an agreement, a fellow with an open umbrella though it wasn't raining came over and said to her, 'Don't trouble yourself, baby. You can see from here he's already on the other side.' Later, when it was dark, when first the police had come and then the detectives to take the body away, a journalist was listening to the statements of a witness. 'I saw him running over there,' he said and pointed toward Third, 'as if he was drunk, and covered in sick, and shouting, he was shouting that his stomach hurt.' It seems, as was later discovered, that Deresser had gone to sit in the Chorro de Quevedo, presumably after giving Josefina the slip, and in all likelihood it was there that he took the pills, although no one knows or ever will who got the gunpowder-laced alcohol for him. It's incredible that he actually managed to walk from the Chorro to the place where they found him, near the Parque de los Periodistas. That's what had the most effect on Gabriel, the image of Konrad Deresser running half asleep and feeling the mixture burning his guts instead of anesthe tizing him and killing him silently as he'd expected. 'He must have been very frightened, and sleeping pills take longer to work in a frightened person,' years later a doctor told Gabriel, after he'd explained the case, without naming any names, as a hypothetical case, just out of interest. 'And would it be very painful?' asked Gabriel. 'Oh, yes,' replied the doctor. 'It would hurt worse than death.'

  "That day we ended up leaving the boardinghouse very late. We realized we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, and of course Josefina had nothing to offer us. Although it was obvious, I said to Gabriel that it was too late to go to the cemetery, and asked him if he wanted to go the next day. But his mind was elsewhere. He didn't look at me, didn't hear me, and he was walking three steps ahead of me as if I were his body-guard. I thought he was going to suggest we go to the Parque de los Periodistas, or to look for the physical space where Deresser had died, but he didn't. And then I began to think what I later managed to put into words: Gabriel hadn't taken me to see Josefina to find out what she knew, or at least that wasn't his only reason. We'd gone to see her, and had listened to her talk and talk and talk for a whole afternoon, to confirm what she didn't know. Because it was perfectly obvious that this woman had lived all those months with Konrad Deresser without it mattering a damn to her where he came from or where he was going or why he was in the mess he was in or how he thought he'd get out of it. If she hadn't asked, we were both thinking, why was he going to explain. 'If he didn't explain it to her,' Gabriel said to me then, 'that means he hadn't explained it to anyone.' That's what he said. And I agreed, of course. It was the most logical explanation. And in spite of being so logical, and in spite of my agreeing, I didn't ask Gabriel why all that seemed so important to him. Most of all, why confirming that had seemed more urgent than going straight out to find his friend. Although the following day he did. He went to look
for Enrique and didn't find him, he didn't find anybody. Much later we found out that Enrique had left home. Later, that he'd left Colombia. That was what your dad found out. But he didn't find out where he'd gone.

  "I didn't want to go with him that time. I was too overwhelmed by all that had happened. I'd seen more than one case like that, of course. I'd seen my fair share of failures, of people who'd gone under, but this was different. I'd never seen anything like that up close and never anyone who'd killed himself. Yes, I'd heard of people who'd killed themselves; in those years it wasn't such an exotic thing. News from Germany, but also from immigrants. But what do you want me to say? When something like that happens to someone you know, who you've spoken to and seen and touched, it's like finding out for the first time. As if up to that moment you didn't know that was possible, to kill yourself because of problems. Konrad's case stood out, not because it was odd, but because it was close. Thousands of Germans went through the same thing with the blacklists, then their assets were frozen and put into trusts. Thousands were left absolutely ruined, watched for five years as their money went up in a puff of smoke. Thousands. After the blacklists, getting sent to the Fusagasuga internment camp was child's play; for old Konrad it was almost a rest, because by the time they sent him there his inclusion on the blacklist had left him almost bankrupt. Those interned in the camps were fed, and they didn't have to worry about utility bills and all those things. In theory, the government took their expenses out of their accounts, but if the internee had no money, what were they going to do, starve him to death? No, they went on giving him what they gave the others, and that's what must've happened with the old man. In any case, these ones were almost lucky; that's what you can see over time. One hundred and fifty, two hundred Germans, almost all upper class, were guests of the state under the pretext of having links with the Nazis or spreading propaganda or whatever, and of course, sometimes it was true. In that place there were people of the worst sort just as there were harmless little men who wouldn't hurt a fly. Some had already been on the lists, but not always. The old man had, and that's what matters. The punishment of the lists was suffered by thousands, like I said, but we only saw one fall from start to finish like that, like a plane, like a duck that had been shot, and that was Enrique's dad. Old Konrad, who wasn't old. We called him that because his hair was gray, but he was only about fifty-five when he killed himself. I've known people just starting out at that age.