"Not him or anyone else, Angelina."
"Well, on television, I wasn't talking about him, I was talking about the other one."
"Sophist."
"What's that?"
"It's what you are. A shameless sophist."
"Is that an insult? Are you insulting me again?"
"More or less. But I don't feel like fighting."
Silence.
"Me neither. I've turned out the light now, I've got a nice buzz, I'm tucked up here as if everything were fine, as if the world were all peaceful, as if I didn't have problems, and I know I'm cold, but I don't feel it, or I feel it but it doesn't matter. . . . No, I don't want to fight either . . . it's the first time I've felt good all day. Though I am cold."
"Well, put on something else. What are your pajamas like?"
"It's a long nightgown, long, down to my knees. Light blue cotton with dark blue edging on the sleeves, really pretty."
"That explains it. Don't you even have any socks on?"
"Yeah, socks as well."
"Have you finished smoking now?"
"A while ago."
"Good. Are you sleepy?"
"Not too sleepy, no, I'm a little tired. You?"
"I'm wide awake. I have to stay and wait for my dad."
"Don't even joke about that, Gabriel, don't say those things. Look, I've got goose bumps all over now." Silence. "On my arms and on my neck." Silence. "I really loved him."
"I did too, Angelina."
"Everybody loved him. People loved him."
"Yeah."
"I'm sure his German friend loved him."
"Sure."
"So why did he do that to him? Why didn't he ever tell anyone, not even you? Why did he tell me he was coming back if he was tired of me and didn't want to see me anymore? Why did he tell us so many lies?"
"Everyone tells lies, Angelina," I said. "The worst thing is that we don't notice. That's what should never happen. Liars should be infallible."
"I don't know about infallible, but I would rather not know. Carry on, like before. Wouldn't you?"
"I'm not sure," I heard myself say. "I have wondered about that, I have."
A few days later I paid Sara a surprise visit, I dragged her out for a walk down Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, and we walked down as far as the place where they killed Gaitan. That had happened one afternoon--1948, April 9, one o'clock in the afternoon: the coordinates formed part of my life, and my life actually began more than a decade later--and twelve hours earlier my father had been listening to the dead man's last speech, the summing up in defense of Lieutenant Cortes: a man who had murdered out of jealousy, a uniformed Colombian Othello. Gaitan had been carried out of the courtroom on men's shoulders; my father, who had been waiting for this moment to approach him and try to congratulate him without his voice trembling, was repelled by the mob surrounding him. It was a whole year before my father dared to set foot again in the place where we now were; he would later return with some frequency, and each time would stop for a few seconds in silence before he went on his way. The pavement of Seventh Avenue is broken at that spot by the tram tracks (that don't go anywhere, that get lost under the pavement, because the trams, those trams with blue-tinted windows that my father told me about, haven't existed for years), and as I, standing in front of the Agustin Nieto building, read the black marble plaque that describes the assassination in more sentences than strictly necessary, Sara, thinking I wasn't looking, crouched down at the curb--I thought she was going to pick up a dropped coin--and with two fingers touched the rail as if she were taking the pulse of a dying dog. I kept pretending I hadn't seen her, so as not to interrupt her private ceremony, and after several minutes of being a hindrance in that river of people and putting up with insults and shoves, I asked her to show me exactly where the Granada Pharmacy had been in those years when a suicidal man could buy more than ninety sleeping pills there. A year and a half after Konrad Deresser's suicide, Gaitan's murderer had been taken by force inside the pharmacy to prevent the furious mob from lynching him, but he'd been dragged from the pharmacy by the furious mob, which had punched and kicked him to death and dragged his naked body to the presidential palace (there is a photograph that shows the body leaving a trail of shredded clothing behind like a snake shedding its skin: the photo isn't very good, and in it Juan Roa Sierra is barely a pale corpse, almost an ectoplasm, crossed by the black stain of his sex). There we were, standing where Josefina must have stood, facing the road along which, on that April 9, 1948, the ectoplasm of the assassin and the people who had taken it upon themselves to lynch him had gone. "No, I didn't know Enrique was alive," Sara was saying. "And see how things stand: if your dad wasn't dead, I wouldn't be able to believe it. I'd think it was one of that little woman's lies, a halfway intelligent fabrication to justify the grotesque action of selling herself for that interview. Actually, I'd prefer to be able to do what so many people do: convince myself. Convince myself that it's not true. Convince myself that it's all Angelina's invention. But I can't, and I can't for a reason: your dad is dead, and in some way he was killed for going to see him, for visiting Enrique. I bet you've thought of this: if Enrique weren't alive, Gabriel's death wouldn't mean anything." Of course it had already occurred to me; I didn't need to say it, because Sara already knew. (Since our conversations for the book I got used to not saying things that to Sara would be superfluous. Sara knew: that was her mark of identity.) She went on: "Of course you can get all philosophical, ask, for example, why should his death mean anything, does any death ever mean anything. We could be very nihilistic and very elegant. But none of that matters, because Enrique isn't alive for us. If he was, he would have called me by now, or he might even have come to the funeral, no? But none of that. Alive or dead, in Medellin or in seventh heaven, it's all the same, because Enrique wants to be dead to me, he's spent fifty years willing it so. And I'm not going to be the one to spoil that now. I'm not going to be the one who meddles in his life without being invited, and much less now that your father's dead."
From the pharmacy, or from its former location, we walked toward the Plaza de Bolivar, trying to follow the elder Deresser's route, not for fetishism or even for nostalgia, but because we were in unspoken agreement that nothing, not even the most skillful tale, could replace the world's potential for truth, the world of tangible things and people who rub against you and bump into you, and the smells of piss by the walls and people's sweaty clothes, and piss in beggars' sweaty clothes. We passed in front of the Civil Court Building, where the lawyers' offices were where my father worked until, through a mixture of luck and talent, he was able to devote himself to the occupation that suited him best, and in the gallery that passes through the building, and that is usually full of peddlers selling sweets and plastic dolls and even secondhand hats, Sara wanted to look for some little present for her youngest grandson, and ended up buying a dented old toy truck the size of a cigarette lighter, a green truck with doors that opened and good shock absorbers on the back (the old man insisted on showing us how well they worked against the floor tiles of the gallery). And later, sitting on the steps of the cathedral, Sara took the little truck out of her handbag and tested its shock absorbers as she told me that once, when she was young, she had believed that in Bogota the world was about to end, because the pigeons in the Plaza de Bolivar started dying all at once, and if you were walking across the plaza during the day a pigeon could easily have a heart attack in full flight and fall on your head. Later she found out that a whole ton of corn, the corn that the women in the plaza sold in cones of newspaper so children and old folks could pass the time feeding the pigeons, had been poisoned without anyone knowing why and without those responsible ever being found, or even pursued. Bogota, Sara told me, had never stopped being a demented place, but those years were undoubtedly among the most demented of all. In those years this was a city where poisoned pigeons announced the end of the world, where aficionados, bored by a bull's docility and perhaps that
of the bullfighter, would invade the ring to tear the animal apart with their bare hands, where people killed each other in protest at another's death. Three days after that April 9, Peter Guterman had brought his family to Bogota, because he thought it necessary that his daughter should see the damage, touch the broken windows, enter the burned ruins, go up to the terrace roofs, if they were allowed, where the sharpshooters had been stationed to fire on the crowds, and see the bloodstains on the same rooftops from a wounded marksman, and at least manage to glimpse all that which they'd manage to escape (they now knew) at the last moment. This sort of pedagogical expedition was normal for him, and it took Sara many years to realize that behind it there was nothing more than an impulse to justify himself: her father wanted to confirm that he'd done the right thing in leaving Germany; he hoped that the brutality of this country which was now his would condone or legitimate the right to escape from the old country, from the earlier brutality. That was why Sara hid from Peter Guterman the twenty meters of black alpaca that my father had bought for a quarter of the price after the looting and from which he had had a suit made, with a pleated skirt and short jacket, with buttons on the front, to give her as a birthday present. Of course, Peter would not have liked his daughter going around dressed in material stolen from a display window, much less stolen during riots: that had too many echoes, lent itself to too many associations. But wasn't it stupid or exaggerated--Sara had thought at the time--to see in the shop windows of Bogota a reference, reduced yet tangible, to the shop windows of Berlin? Then she'd seen photographs of the looted shops in Bogota, and had changed her mind. Kling's Jeweler's. Wassermann's Jeweler's. Glauser & Co., Swiss watches. The names weren't always legible on the broken glass; they were always, however, recognizable. Sara never wore the suit in her father's presence.
Later we looked for the boardinghouse where Konrad Deresser spent his final days, and were surprised to find it easily: in this city, which in six months can render itself unrecognizable, the probability that a building from half a century ago should still be standing was minimal, if not illusory. Nevertheless, there it was, so little changed that Sara could recognize it even though there was no longer a boardinghouse there but four floors of offices for failed or clandestine businessmen. On the white facade there were yellowing posters with red and blue lettering announcing bullfights, screenwrit ing workshops, meetings of Marxist cells, Dominican meren gue festivals, poetry readings, Russian-for-beginners courses, and football matches in the Olaya Herrera stadium. When we went up we found that Konrad and Josefina's room was now a calligraphy studio. A woman with her hair up and wearing bifocals received us, sitting in a swivel chair in front of an architect's table, under a halogen light that was the only luxury in the place. Her work was to write the names of graduates in Gothic letters for the four or five universities in central Bogota. That's how she earned her living: putting strangers' names on sheets of translucent paper. She told us she worked freelance. No, she didn't know this building used to be a boardinghouse. No, as far as she knew the layout of the offices (which had once been rooms) had never been changed. Yes, she was happy in her work, she hadn't done any formal studies and had learned this craft by correspondence course. Every semester she wrote, or rather drew, a thousand or so names, and thus supported her two small children; she couldn't complain, she even earned more than her husband, who drove a taxi, a Chevette, what did we think, one of the new ones. She shook our hands to say good-bye. She had a thick callus on the middle finger of her right hand; the callus was covered with a stain of Indian ink, dark and symmetrical like a melanoma. As we walked toward the Parque de los Periodistas, Sara and I speculated about the room: where would Konrad and Josefina's bed have been, where would they have put the record player, if the bathroom door (this was unlikely) might be the same one. The absurd and self-indulgent idea that this could be of any importance distracted us for a while. When we left, after walking a couple of blocks in silence, Sara said, for no particular reason, "During that time, we grew apart. I couldn't look him in the eye. I slighted him, I couldn't get it through my head that he could be capable of such a thing. And at the same time I understood very well, you know, the way everyone would understand. That mixture scared me, I don't know why. I can't explain what kind of fear it was. Fear of knowing I would have done the same. Or fear, precisely, of not having done it. There are many informers: you don't have to be at war to talk about someone else in certain circumstances. I grew distant from him, I pushed him aside, just like what's happening now, how this city is pushing him aside when he can't do anything about it. I started to see him as an undesirable. And suddenly I felt closer to him than to anyone else, it was that simple. I felt that from that moment on he would be able to understand me if I wanted to explain my life. That's the worst thing about being foreign." And then she fell silent again.
I found out one day, without anyone taking the trouble to call and inform me, that Rosario University was going to remove my father's name from their list of illustrious alumni, that they were also going to withdraw his doctorate honoris causa--which my father had renounced at the end of the 1980s, when the university awarded the same distinction to Queen Sofia of Spain--and the granting of the Medal of Civic Merit would be canceled, annulled, revoked (I don't know the applicable verb). That was how it was: the award had been decreed, as it was announced at the funeral, but the formal presentation hadn't yet been made, and the presenters, realizing or discovering that there was still time to retract, preferred not to present it. I didn't call the Court; I didn't find out to whom I could appeal, whom to look for in the tangle of legislative or political bureaucracy, whom to turn to if this were legally possible, or what lawyer might be willing to take on such a case, or whom I could call, with more diplomatic intentions, to ask for explanations; I didn't demand official notification, nor a resolution, nor a copy of the decree annulling the previous decree: I preferred not to look for the document, whichever it was, that made my father the official pariah of the moment and guaranteed him what we'll all get sooner or later, his fifteen minutes as an untouchable. What I did keep is the newspaper clipping, because the incident, of course, was news: MEDAL OF CIVIC MERIT RETRACTED FOR UNBECOMING CONDUCT, ran the headline. "There are internal pressures," declared a source that preferred to remain anonymous. "The reputation of the award would be called into question and granting it now would be a dishonor to those who have received it more deservingly." I should say it didn't affect me too much, perhaps because of the anesthetic effect of the letters that had arrived at the television station during the week following Angelina's interview, and that the station had very diligently forwarded to the apartment, without attaching too much importance to the fact that the addressee no longer existed (and in some cases without attaching importance to the fact that my father wasn't even the addressee, but merely the subject). There weren't many, but they were quite varied; in any case, there were enough to surprise me with the level of interest the public takes when it comes to insulting, its skill at assuming the position of victim and reacting as is expected in a respectable society. Decent Colombians, supportive Colombians, upright and indignant Colombians, Catholic Colombians, for whom one betrayal is all betrayals: all condemned when there was condemning to be done, like good soldiers of collective morals. "Dear sir, I would like to say I thought the interviewed young lady's bravery was admirable and thank you for speaking the truth. The world is definitely full of villains and they must be unmasked." "Doctor Santoro, I do not know you, but I know some like you. You are a hypocritical snitch, fucking backstabber, I hope you rot in hell, you son of a bitch." There were some more objective letters, at once comforting and painfully disdainful. "Let us not forget, gentlemen of the press, that this whole matter was but a tiny detail in wartime. Beside the six million, this was collateral damage." There was even one addressed to me: "Santoro, rest easy, keep writing and publishing your stuff, carry on acting the part of the great writer, we all know who you are now and the sort you come
from. Your dad was nothing but a mediocrity and an impostor and you're the same, at the end of the day, a chip off the old block. When's your next book coming out?" Signed: "Your fan club."
I didn't talk to Sara about this, as it would have annoyed her, and she, who had found out on her own about the matter of the medal, also decided not to mention it to me, in spite of our circuit through the streets of the center--that retreat, somewhere between tourism and superstition, to the events of the 1940s--seeming to permit those subjects or even demand them. No, we didn't talk about that: not about the dishonor, or about the untouchable, or about the possible consequences the dishonor could have on the son of the untouchable. We didn't talk about the past my father had once tried to modify, in front of his rhetoric class, with the sole objective of defending himself against my book. We didn't talk about my father's death or about other dead people we would have liked to have with us then; we didn't talk anymore about Enrique, the living person who wanted to be dead to Sara. When we returned to her apartment and she invited me to stay for lunch, and she went into the kitchen to fry some slices of plantain while she heated up a sort of goulash she'd made that morning, I thought, for no other reason than being back in her apartment, that Sara and I were alone, true, but we had each other, and what invaded me like a fever was a feeling of gratitude so strong I had to sit down on one of the sofas in the living room to wait for the heaviness, the dizziness to pass. And while we were having lunch, so late that Sara's head was starting to ache, this kind woman seemed to have noticed, because she looked at me with half a smile (the complicit glance of lovers who meet by chance at a dinner party). The complicity was a new feeling, at least for me: the sharing of interests and also of worries, having loved the same person so much had linked us in this way, had tied us, and ironically underlined the fact that Sara had been the one to prophesy the terrible deeds of the past, a sort of reverse Cassandra. I didn't know that could happen between two people, and the experience, that afternoon, was disconcerting, because it revealed the great lack I'd suffered growing up without a mother and how much I'd unknowingly missed. Sara was talking to me about the day I'd dropped off a copy of my book for my father. "He called me immediately," she told me. "I had to go over to his house, I thought he was going to have some sort of attack or something, I hadn't seen him that bad since your mother's death."
The Informers Page 22
