The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  "Yes. My father thought the same way. Can I ask you a question?"

  "Another one?"

  "How did you end up getting mixed up with my dad?"

  Silence.

  "Why? You don't think I'm good enough?"

  "No, that's not what I meant, Angelina. It's just that . . ."

  "He was such an intelligent, cultured person, no? And I'm a masseuse."

  "Masseuse?"

  "When my boyfriend wanted to insult me he used to say that: 'I don't know what I did to end up with a fucking masseuse. ' Sure, it's my own fault, because a true professional doesn't get involved with patients."

  "I asked you a question."

  "I don't know, your dad was just another patient, it's not like I get involved with all my patients. Things like that happen before you notice, you know? Suddenly, Gabriel crossed the line, and I told him no, that no one gets involved in my life, and he didn't listen to me. But he was the patient and I put up with the things he said to me."

  "Why? Why didn't you leave, if it bothered you so much, why didn't you get a replacement?"

  "Because the therapy hadn't finished. It's not for me to say, I know, but I take my work seriously, you know? And I'm good at my job because I like it. All I want is to help people move again, there's nothing simpler. Well, that's what he was, any old patient, one of so many, a block of time in my schedule--I have a schedule with all my visits--he was one more. I had no intention of letting him into my life, I swear, I'd been hurt too much by men, not that I'm so experienced either, don't get me wrong. You want to know why I opened the door to him and not to another."

  "You don't have to talk about doors."

  "I talk the way I like. If you don't like it, I'll shut up. I don't speak as well as you guys."

  "Sorry. Go on."

  "I had more than ten during those months. All men in their fifties, their sixties, two or three in their seventies. After heart surgery they need to learn how to move again, like newborn babies. So I get beside them and give them exercises to do, you feel sorry for people, I play with them a little and remind them they're not dead even if they sometimes feel like it, because they're so depressed, you feel sorry for them. . . . Anyway, it's like a gift from God, I swear, dealing with these people who've come back to life. Their bodies have them disorientated. The body thinks it's dead and you have to convince it that it's not, because--"

  "Yeah, they explained all that to me."

  "OK. I'm there for that, too, to show them they haven't died, that they're still there. If you could see me, you should see the work it takes with some of them, especially the younger ones. Sometimes I get one like that, men who have a bypass at fortysomething, like as young as me, and they don't accept it. And I explain and explain again."

  "What?"

  "That it's at their age when they're at the highest risk. Didn't you know? Because at forty, forty-five, you still feel young, and you knock back the drinks, and smoke like a chimney, and eat all that fried food. And exercise, I don't fucking need it, I'm still young. Well, your heart thinks otherwise. It's had a long time of drinks and cigarettes and doesn't want any more. And that's how accidents happen. It's good for me because it's a bit of variety, I like that they're not always so old, that I can touch bodies my own age once in a while, I'm still young. Oh, sorry, that's a bit familiar. I shouldn't be saying these things. Remind me that you're not your dad."

  "Why? You could tell him these things?"

  "Well, of course. He loved to hear me talk about my work."

  "Yeah, well, you enjoy your work and you like to talk about how much you enjoy your work. I don't see what's strange about that."

  "It's that there are jobs you shouldn't enjoy too much, Gabrielito, don't play dumb with me. Especially if you don't do them in a normal way. If you were a gynecologist you couldn't go around shouting, I love my job, I love my job. People wouldn't take it well; now you're going to tell me that's never occurred to you."

  "But you don't do what a gynecologist does. Nothing even close."

  "I like to touch. I like to feel people. You can't go around saying that out loud. Other physiotherapists sit their patients down twenty meters away and from there tell them what they have to do. I get close, I touch them, I give them massages. And saying that I touch them and that I like it is not approved of. The clients would feel uncomfortable and the doctors would kick me out. You're not going to tell anybody, are you?"

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "I like contact, what can I do? After a weekend alone at home, I feel the lack. A person is very alone at home; you live alone, too, don't you? Well, I miss going out to meet someone. Oh, if the San Pedro cardiologist could hear me he'd kick me out on the street, I swear he would."

  "Well, I'm no cardiologist."

  "No, but I wouldn't say these things to your face either. Just as well we're talking on the phone."

  "Just as well."

  "I like getting into a packed lift. I don't feel alone, I feel calm. In places like that men brush up against a person. My friends hate that, but I like it. I've never told anyone that, ever. My boyfriend was claustrophobic, he didn't like things like that. And a massage isn't being touched but touching, caressing. I know people like it. Perhaps they're ashamed that they like it, but they like it, men especially. I know I'm still attractive."

  "When did you know?"

  "That I'm still attractive?"

  "That this was the job for you."

  "Oh, I don't know. You're imagining nonsense now, aren't you? Well, I didn't give my dolls massages, much less my girlfriends, for your information. Don't laugh, it's true."

  "I believe you."

  "If I'd had brothers close to my age, maybe I wouldn't have felt so alone, I was a lonely child. But my brother was six years older than me, well, he still is. He was never with me. He began to notice I existed when I was about eleven, around there. One time my chest was hurting, you know, when you first start to grow, and my parents were both at work, so I told my brother. He took me into the bathroom and sat me on the washstand. He was very strong and he lifted me up from the floor like that, in one go. And he started to touch me. 'Does it hurt here? And here? Does it hurt here?' He touched my ribs--does my telling you this bother you? He touched my nipples. It hurt a lot, but I answered yes, no, a little. And then he went off to do his military service and those things didn't happen anymore. Then, the first time he came home during his military service, something very strange happened to me, like a feeling of disgust, like a small disgust. It might have been his shaved head, I don't know. I didn't like the way he was talking either, that flashy ways soldiers talk, you know? And all the bloody crap, sorry, all the silly things he told us about his new military friends, people who'd come back from Korea three or four or five years ago, who told him such interesting things, interesting to my brother at least, and he showed up repeating them like a parrot. I was bored and my brother seemed like a jerk. When I went to take a shower, I locked the door and pushed the dirty-laundry basket up against the door. It was just a latch and if someone pushed hard enough it would open, not that my brother was going to break down the door to see me naked, but still. And then my brother arrived with the news that he was leaving home. He'd got his girlfriend pregnant and he was moving out. No one even knew he had a girlfriend. She lived in Santa Marta, worked in a travel agency, or a tourism office, and she was going to get him a job. As soon as he was settled into his job and had saved a bit of money, he was going to invite us all to the coast. He promised all that, but then nothing. I remember my mum saying, 'We've lost him.' She'd done some calculations, and she was sure her grandchild must have been born by then, and my brother didn't say anything. 'He's gone and we've lost him.' That's what my mum said. For me, on the other hand, it was a relief. It's sad, but that's how it is."

  "It's not so sad. The guy was a heel, Angelina."

  "Yeah, but he was my brother. Imagine later when I told them I was leaving, too. Of course, that was a long time la
ter. I was doing my practical training, but all the same it hit them hard. I was the baby of the family. They busted their arses to send me to college, Gabriel, and what for, so I'd grab my diploma and head off to Bogota. Ungrateful brat, no? But I was really good. It's not my fault I had magic hands."

  "Teacher's pet."

  "No, as a student I kept my head down, tried not to stand out. It was later, during my internship. It was in the Leon XIII. I would have stayed there my whole life if I hadn't come to Bogota. It was the Leon XIII physiatrist who noticed I worked miracles with my hands. He assigned me an eighty-year-old patient who'd had three bypasses, and in ten days I had him doing aerobics. When they transferred him to Bogota, he practically dragged me with him. That's when we started seeing each other."

  "Name?"

  "Lombana. He was the kind of guy who liked traveling and being in other places. He'd studied in the United States and he got along great, everyone liked him, he made thousands of friends. But I didn't. In this whole fucking city I only knew him, so I did what anyone would have done in my place: I fell in love. It took me three years to find out the guy was married. He was already married in Medellin. The transfer to Bogota wasn't a promotion, he'd requested it, because in Medellin he'd married a girl from here. And do you think I told him to go to hell? No, I stayed right there working away, like an idiot, meeting him almost always in my apartment, and in the motels in La Calera for special occasions. He'd take me there to weaken me: sometimes I'd get hysterical, or threaten to finish with all that shit, and that was my consolation prize. I deserve it all, for my stupidity. I like the motels in La Calera. When there aren't any clouds, when the air is clean and the pollution's not too bad, you can see the Nevado del Ruiz volcano. I used to love to see the snow-capped peak. He used to say he was going to take me there one day even though it was dangerous. Of course I didn't believe him, I'm not that naive either."

  "No."

  "And that went on for ten years. Ten years, Gabriel. It sounds like a long time but for me it went by like a shot, that's the truth. Because there wasn't the wearing down that real couples have. I've never been married, and maybe I shouldn't talk about something I don't know, but I swear Lombana fought more with his wife than with me, I haven't got the slightest doubt. Because with the wife there's a history. That's what a person had to avoid, that you build up a history with people, with friends, with lovers. You get close to a person and right there the resentments start to build up, things you say or do without meaning to, and that gets you into a history. You go to see your cardiologist and he takes out your medical history and without even meaning to he checks out everything: that you stopped smoking, yes, but not till you were forty. Your father had a heart murmur. Your great-uncle had arteriosclerosis. That's what Lombana told me, that with his wife it was like that, they went to bed and each and every grudge over their whole marriage went to bed with them. In the end he only made love to her from behind because he didn't want to look at her face. He told me all that. With every possible detail. I didn't want that to happen to me, and I suppose that's why I put up with it for ten years without doing anything, anything serious, I mean. I didn't want to do things that would later fill me up with bitterness and grudges, you know how it is. I like sex face-to-face, like normal. I'm a decent girl."

  "How did they kill him?"

  Silence.

  "Right, then, is there any part of my life Gabriel didn't tell you about? He was a newsreel, your dad. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't like talking about that."

  "Oh please, Angelina. You already told me your brother used to touch you. You just told me how you like sex."

  "That's different."

  "It was downtown," I said to her. "It was in a nightclub."

  "And what does it matter to you?"

  "It doesn't matter to me. I'm just curious."

  "Morbid."

  "Exactly, morbid curiosity, that's what it is. Was he into any dirty business, drugs?"

  "Of course not. There was a fight and guns came out and he got shot, nothing more. The most normal thing in the world."

  "Were you with him?"

  "No, Gabriel, I was not with him. I was tucked up safe in my apartment. I wasn't with him, and I wasn't with my parents later, OK? Yeah, I wish I'd been killed, too, by that fucking bomb, I wish I'd been killed in the shootout. I wasn't with him and nobody came to tell me because very few people knew I existed, and all the ones who did know preferred to respect the wife and not tell her, they killed your husband and besides he's had another woman for the last ten years, no, thirteen whole years, how about that. No, I found out on my own. He wouldn't let me phone his house and I had to go and stand there in front of it like a prostitute to ask him if he wanted to finish with me, or why had he disappeared like that, and when he didn't appear all day, then I checked into things and eventually found out, but no one informed me because you all hide under the same blanket, fucking hypocrites. So I wasn't with him, so what? Can we talk about something else?"

  "Don't be like that. It's good to talk about these things. It's therapeutic."

  "That shit again. Your dad used to say the same thing. Why are you so arrogant? Does it run in the family? Look, if you guys go through life talking about everything and that works for you, fine, but tell me one little thing, why the fuck should it be the same for me?"

  "No reason. Calm down."

  "Why would what works for you guys work for me as well?"

  "Calm down. No one's saying that."

  Silence.

  "You need to respect other people more, Gabriel."

  "Respect other people."

  "We're not all the same."

  "We're very different."

  Silence.

  "Besides, I'm the therapist."

  "Yes."

  "Don't give me that shit."

  "No."

  Silence.

  "Well, at least we're in agreement. Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait . . . OK. Right, what were you saying?"

  "What happened?"

  "I was rolling a joint."

  "At this hour?"

  "Yeah, right now. After what happened to my parents, this was the only way I could get to sleep."

  "And you rolled it there, in bed, without dropping the phone? What a pair of hands you've got, it's true."

  "I hold the phone with my shoulder, that's all. It's not that hard. Do you sleep well?"

  "I suppose. I wake up early, though. Five in the morning and that's it, my brain wakes up in one second and keeps running all day. Or I get up to go to the bathroom. But everyone else can go back to sleep, I can't. While I'm pissing I think of my dad and then there's nothing for it. It'll last for a while, I guess, and then things'll go back to normal. Because things normalize, don't they?"

  "Yes. Don't worry about that, Gabriel, things go back to normal. Here, have a puff of marijuana down the phone."

  "I can smell it from here, I'm so jealous."

  Silence.

  "So, you're in your dad's apartment, eh? Sitting on your dad's bed. It's a little strange, to tell you the truth, you've got your strange side, you have."

  "What are you wearing, Angelina?"

  "Oh no, but not so strange after all."

  "Are you under the covers?"

  "No, I'm stark naked on top of the bedspread and I've got a red lamp shining on me. Of course I'm under the covers, it's fucking freezing in this fucking city. As usual. And you?"

  "I'm taking my jeans off and getting under the covers, too. It is cold. I think I'm going to stay here, I've never slept in this bed."

  "Aren't you scared?"

  "Of what?"

  "What do you think? That you'll get your feet pulled."

  "Angelina, what a thing to say. And you, a woman of science believing in such superstitions."

  "Science, my arse, I've had mine pulled. A friend from college died three years ago, of kidney failure, you know, one of those things they discover one day and three days later there's nothing to be don
e. And it was as if the poor thing hadn't had time to say good-bye to her friends. I was here, totally relaxed and sound asleep, and I swear she pulled them. Dead people like to say good-bye to me."

  "Well, no one's ever said good-bye to me. And no one's ever come to pull my feet."

  "But in a dead man's bed. It's impossible that it doesn't make a bit of an impression on you. I couldn't do it. You're very brave. What sheets are on the bed?"

  "They're white with checks."

  "I gave those sheets to your dad. He hadn't bought himself new sheets for ten years."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "Those are the last sheets Gabriel slept in."

  "OK, don't get mystical on me. I'm going to stay here and my dad's not going to come to scare me, I swear he's got better things to do."

  "Can I tell you something?"

  "Tell me something."

  "You're very good, Gabriel, a lot better than I was. You're going to get over this quickly."

  "Don't be fooled. I act like I'm fine, but it's a defense mechanism. I'm an expert at that, everybody knows it. A poker face is a defense mechanism. Cynicism is a defense mechanism."

  "And isn't it hard to keep pretending?"

  "I play poker in my spare time."

  "Sure, you make jokes about it, but I'm jealous. What I wouldn't give for a bit of a poker face. Can you learn that? Where do they teach it? No, I swear, it hit me really hard being alone, after the bomb, being on my own at night. Then your dad showed up and it was like he rescued me, I held on really tight to him. Maybe that was my mistake. And then to see that he left me, too. That he was also capable of hurting me. The truth is that hit me pretty hard. Who told me to build up my hopes? Who told me to be so naive? But it was really hard."

  "I know. Enough to make you stab him in the back. And on television."

  "You think what you like, my conscience is clear. I only know one thing, that Gabriel was someone else. In the end he wasn't the person we thought he was."