Apart from curiosity, what else did she feel?
She felt proud but also a little betrayed. Proud to be the reason for this momentary courage: yes, she had believed him, had believed that without her Gabriel Santoro would never have come to Medellin. And betrayed for stranger reasons, less explainable, that had a lot to do with jealousy. Suddenly Enrique Deresser turned into something like a lover from the past, a girlfriend Gabriel Santoro had had in his youth. Angelina listened to Gabriel and what she heard was nostalgia for an old love affair: the desire to relive those memories. Of course that's not how it was, but there, in Medellin, Angelina found herself suddenly having to compete with someone else for Gabriel's attention. Betrayal is an exaggeration, of course. She could have said jealousy, jealousy for a past that up till then had been comfortably nonexistent. The most serious betrayals happen like that, with the tiniest things that for someone else would mean nothing. The most painful betrayals happen when they find your weak spot, something that doesn't matter much to other people but does to you. Well, that's what Gabriel did: found her weak spot. So--thought Angelina--this is why he'd come here with her. Until that moment, Gabriel had been for her a sort of act of faith in her own life, the proof that at almost fifty years of age a woman could still find happiness in company, and the proof, as well, that luck existed, because their meeting (the meeting of lovers) had been a matter of luck: a convalescing man and a physiotherapist are quite likely to end up together, of course, but it's less probable that a physiotherapist would be in such need of affection as she was and that the convalescent would be so disposed to give it as he was. Gabriel, she had thought more than once, was her life raft. And there, in the hotel in Medellin, Angelina suddenly thought her life raft had been using her. And she felt a sort of secret panic that she was very careful not to reveal.
What did this secret panic consist of?
It was the difference between what she thought and what she said. Inside she thought, very much in spite of what everything seemed to prove, that it was a lie that Gabriel loved her, the affection he'd shown her was false. Inside she thought Gabriel had used her to alleviate his weakness and also his cowardice. Inside she thought for the whole week he'd been making her believe that he was enthusiastic about the idea of going to Medellin, when his intentions were quite different. False. All false. Inside she thought what Gabriel Santoro really wanted from her was not a lover, but a heart doctor, a sort of nurse mixed with a psychologist, someone who would help him to make long overdue apologies, for he had always been too cowardly to make them himself. That is, someone to wait in the hotel while he went and did his long-postponed errand, found his friend and got forgiven and had a drink to toast old times and the disappearance of all the grudges. Inside she thought she was a mere extra in this film, a substitute in the game, a consolation prize. And if that wasn't bad enough, Angelina was watching Gabriel transform before her very eyes; the wise and mature, cultured and elegant man she'd known had turned into a traitor--betrayed a friend, betrayed a lover--yes, a manipulative, disloyal liar. But she endured it, she pretended, understood that perhaps she was blinded by emotion, like in the soaps. The disillusion and humiliation were very intense, and the mockery (yes, because that's what it all boiled down to, what was happening in that Medellin hotel room: it was life mocking her, life choosing Gabriel Santoro to show her there was no possible way out, that happiness did not exist and much less with a man, and looking for it was naive, and believing you'd found it frankly stupid). Nevertheless, Angelina endured it, as she had endured all her life, because she loved Gabriel and she wanted Gabriel to go on loving her. And she knew that jealousy blinds a person and that you could also be jealous of the past, even though Gabriel was going to leave her for a few hours to go and see a friend, not a lover, from his youth. Yes, that's how she split in half: inside she thought life had sent her Gabriel Santoro to demonstrate this to her, that Gabriel Santoro was the messenger of her humiliation. And outside she'd decided to withstand it, put on a nothing-to-do-with-me face and do the only thing she could do: congratulate Gabriel, praise his valor and his will to seek forgiveness. What a hypocrite.
The praise was not genuine?
No, no, no, no, no. What Gabriel had done to his friend was unforgivable; that seemed perfectly clear to her and everyone will agree. Yes, a long time had passed since the events of the war, since the business of the blacklists and the groups of informers or spontaneous informers; but time does not heal all, that is an absolute lie. There are things that stay with us: a brother's desertion, a lover's disdain, the death of parents, the betrayal of a friend or of his family. No one can ever get free of something like that, and it's good that things should be that way. Traitors deserve punishment, and if they somehow manage to betray with impunity, they at least deserve to be punished by their own guilt until they die. If it were up to Angelina, if she had had the tiniest bit of power over other people's actions (which she had never had), and especially if she hadn't been so in love, Gabriel would never have left the hotel, would never have gone to see his friend.
So he did finally go to see him?
Of course he went to see him. Or at least he left the hotel saying he was going to go and see him. Like a cowboy, no? As if he were saying, I'll just go out and kill him and come right back. That was the Sunday, Angelina remembered, because she'd stayed in the hotel watching cartoons all morning.
And what happened between the two men?
That Angelina didn't know, obviously, because she hadn't gone with him, as she said. It happened like this: after the confession, Angelina got up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, because she'd seen that people look in the mirror when they want to solve their most serious problems, and in front of the mirror she said to herself, You have to look on the bright side. Depending on how you look at it, what he's doing is very nice. He's asked you for help. You're important to him. And then she managed to repress what she was feeling (what she'd been thinking deep down), and when she went back out, calmer then, the first thing she did was to embrace Gabriel and tell him, "Congratulations, I think what you're doing is very brave. You'll see, your friend will take it well. No grudge lasts a hundred years." And as soon as she said those words, she noticed how the atmosphere in the room changed. Affection once again, the tensions disappeared, yes, all that was needed was a little goodwill, control of negative emotions. And this time they could. They went back to bed: and they could. It wasn't the best sex they'd ever had, but it was good, there was the tenderness that comes when an explosive situation between a couple is diffused. Gabriel told her he loved her. She heard the words without responding but feeling that she loved him, too. And she fell asleep. She never saw him again.
He left without saying good-bye?
And why would he say good-bye, if his intention was to talk to his friend and come straight back?
She had never suspected that Gabriel wasn't going to come back? That possibility never crossed her mind?
Yes, but only when it was already too late. The next day Gabriel got up very early, and he must have left without having a shower, because Angelina didn't hear him. She didn't hear him get up, didn't hear him get dressed, didn't hear him leave the room. When she woke up she found the note. Gabriel had written it on the hotel stationery but not on the writing paper, on an envelope, probably thinking of propping it up against the lamp on the bedside table and getting it to stay upright. I might be a while. In any case, by this afternoon I'll be free again. Thanks for everything. I love you. She reread the I love you and felt happy, but there was something that made her uncomfortable. I'll be free again. Free of her? Would Angelina turn into a nuisance when her mission as companion was completed? She thought what she had never thought: He's not going to come back. No, that was impossible, Gabriel wouldn't abandon her like that, not even if he'd used her for a purpose, and that purpose had been accomplished. No, it couldn't be. She endured it as best she could: turning on the television and looking through the channels (a few U.S. channe
ls, one Spanish, even a Mexican one) for a program that might distract her, and she found that cartoons, all those hammer blows and point-blank gunshots, those explosions and free falls, that is, those caricatured cruelties precisely and carefully performed the labor of obliterating the small cruelties, the small uncertainties of real life. At midday she went down to the pool and ordered a lunch fit for three physiotherapists, all of them hungry, and asked them to charge it to the room. And it was there, in front of the wet children of a tourist from the coast, two ill-mannered little boys who splashed her as they ran past with their misted-up masks over their noses and their red water wings squeezing their biceps, that she realized as if they'd whispered it in her ear: He's not going to come back. He lied to me. He's going to do what he means to do and then he's going to go, he's going to leave me nice and comfortable in this hotel so I have a good time for a couple of days, but he's going to leave me. And that became more and more obvious as time went by, because the best proof that a person is not going to come back is that he doesn't come back, no? Angelina spent the afternoon stuck in the hotel, waiting for a call, waiting for a bellboy to come up to the room with a note, but that didn't happen, the wretched Gabriel hadn't even left her a note. And when she looked out of the window, as if she could see the road leading up to the hotel from the window, Angelina realized that she was in her city, in the place where she'd been born and lived for years and years, and that, nevertheless, she had nowhere to go. Once again, she thought. Once again men had conspired to convert a friendly city into a hostile city; to convert her, a stable woman with her feet firmly on the ground, into a stranger, an unsettled person, a foreigner.
Didn't she have any acquaintances left in Medellin?
Yes, there were people she knew, but it's not enough to know someone to ask them for a night's shelter, much less to explain the reasons why a person's been left where they were (she couldn't bring herself to say the word abandoned, it sounded pathetic to her, or at least too plaintive). She thought she could wander around the lighting displays that were everywhere in downtown Medellin at that time of year, stars and mangers and bells, all rustled up with colored lights and wires covered in green plastic; she thought of going for a walk through the city and simply looking at display windows, considering that three days before Christmas all the shops would be open and full of people, noise, garlands, decorated trees, lights, and Christmas carols; she thought of giving life an immediate chance to return to its course, to not go off the rails. She went down to the parking lot, saw that Gabriel had taken the car--and imagined him driving with his left hand and changing gears with the thumb of his mutilated hand--and found out that it had rained the night before by the rectangle of dry pavement you could still see where the car had been; and she went straight back up to the room, dumped everything of Gabriel's out of the suitcase onto the bed. That's how she spent the night, beside the clothes of the man who had left her. She didn't sleep well. At six in the morning she'd already called a taxi, and in less than fifteen minutes the taxi had picked her up and Angelina was on her way to the bus station.
So she also left without even leaving a note, without saying good-bye in any way?
Gabriel wasn't coming back, that was obvious. Why should she say good-bye? By leaving her dumped and rejected in a hotel, Gabriel had made it very clear that he didn't want to see her again: What kind of note could she have written? Of course, she didn't imagine she'd never see him again in her life; she thought back in Bogota she'd track him down to demand an explanation, or at least she'd talk to him, and she never imagined Gabriel would die in the act of leaving her, wasn't that very ironic? Yes, there are accidents that seem like punishments, not that it made her happy, that would be a disproportionate punishment. Gabriel dead after leaving her, incredible. If he'd even suspected it, he would have left in a different way. Everyone has their ways of leaving and ways of leaving depend on a thousand things: where we're leaving, why we're leaving, who we're leaving.
How did she find out about his death?
From the newspapers. Of course, the most incredible thing was that she passed the very spot a few hours later and didn't see anything. Her bus was an Expreso Bolivariano, just like the bus in the accident; it had left at seven in the morning, and Angelina was wide awake when they'd taken the road up to Las Palmas, but she hadn't noticed anything in particular, not the commotion of the morbid looking out of the window, or the traffic jams a more or less notorious accident can cause. And nothing in the world made her feel her world had changed, nothing warned her of this new absence, the disappearance, the hole in the order of things: that meant, of course, that her emotional links with Gabriel had broken completely and forever. Later, the rocking of the bus had made her sleepy, and then, half awake and half asleep, she'd thought again about the terrible story of the foreign family and their treacherous friend. At times it seemed impossible: Gabriel was too honest to act in such a cowardly way, too intelligent to do so out of ingenuousness or innocence. But maybe none of that was true, and the matter was just that simple: this man, who had used her to come to Medellin, who had slept with her, made plans for the future, told her he loved her, and all that just to leave her to her fate in a hotel room, this man was no different from his actions proved, and he'd kept the mask of a respectable person all his life at the expense of the credibility and affection of those around him. Everyone knows it: someone who betrays once will carry on betraying until he dies.
So she didn't believe in repentance?
She believed, all right, but she didn't think it possible that he had repented. Or maybe it was possible, but not unques tioningly commendable. In fact, if the repentance was genuine, and the desire to be forgiven genuine, Gabriel would not have had any reason not to carry on his relationship with her. The pretext of repentance was not a safe conduct for airing selfishness; nor did it exclude certain responsibilities or, at least, certain human priorities. We'll never know now what reasons Gabriel had for ceasing to love her, for deciding that returning to the hotel did not figure in his plans. Was he justified in hurting her that way, lying to her and deceiving her (writing that he would come back when it was perfectly clear he had no intention of doing so), laying such a cruel trap for her, and all that without taking into account the revelation of his true nature to her, who would quite happily have lived with the deception in order to keep him?
What did she think happened between Gabriel Santoro and Enrique Deresser?
Supposing that they actually saw each other, no? Because we don't know that for sure either. The possibility that Gabriel, having got as far as Medellin, had lost his nerve, is quite real, it deserves to be taken into account. Angelina had thought of that during the funeral: What if Gabriel had repented of repenting? What if the fear of confronting his friend had been stronger than the possibility of forgiveness? What if Gabriel had sacrificed her, and then had died himself in the accident, and it was all for nothing? In the cemetery, Angelina had met Gabriel's son, the journalist, and had suggested they meet the next day in the dead man's apartment with the intention of telling him everything: tell him who his father had really been; release him from deception as well. In the end, she hadn't been able to. And that was why: the possibility that Gabriel had never actually seen his friend. Because at that moment, after the violence of the cremation, the sadness of the whole ceremony, the idea that Gabriel had died coming from Medellin (after leaving her, yes, but without having carried out the object of the trip) was, more than absurd, heartless. And Angelina was not a heartless person.
And if they did actually see each other, what might have happened between them?
Angelina didn't know. To tell the truth, she wasn't interested. She'd already left all that behind. She'd already begun to forget Gabriel. She wanted to get on with her life now, start a new life. A chat between two tired old men about subjects half a century old? Please, please. Nothing could matter less to her.
I, of course, felt just the opposite. During the single hour of the
broadcast more things seemed to have happened than during all my thirty years, or, to put it another way, from that moment on, it seemed like nothing except that local television program had happened in my life, and so many windows opened on to so many new rooms, so many traps, that instead of turning off the television and phoning Sara to talk about what Angelina had just revealed, which would have been the most logical thing to do, I allowed something resembling vertigo to take me outside, and I found myself driving down Seventh toward the bullring at eleven at night. Half my head was thinking of arriving unannounced at Sara's house, and the other half felt indignant, thought it almost treacherous (yes, the word had settled into my vocabulary, like a new font in a word processor) that Sara hadn't told me about Enrique Deresser. Enrique Deresser was alive; Enrique Deresser was in Medellin. Was it possible that she didn't know either? Was it possible he'd also hidden it from her, as Angelina had suggested? On television his lover had elevated herself to the level of supreme confi dante, the only person on earth my father trusted, or trusted sufficiently at least, to share the secret with and ask for her help. And what had she done? After declaring that she understood him, telling him she admired his contrition and his bravery, the courage a man of his age with the life he'd led would need to undertake a ten-hour trip with the sole intention of asking for forgiveness, after all that, what had she done? She had thought about herself. She didn't know, any more than the rest of the world, the reasons my father had had for ending their relationship (in a rather inelegant way, it's true, but elegance belongs to those with self-respect, elegance is part of a lifestyle that my father, at that moment, had renounced). In a man's struggle with his errors, Angelina had seen only the man who'd walked out of her life without saying good-bye, and had decided to respond to the humiliation. That's what she'd done: she'd informed on him. After his death, when he could no longer defend himself, she'd informed on him.
The Informers Page 18
