The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Your papa,

  Konrad

  Fusagasuga, May 26, 1944

  Dear son,

  Your mama will come back sooner or later. I have taken a little while to write to you because I did not want to tell you lies. One is too optimistic in moments of emotion and your letter left me floored, I will not deny it. I could be destroyed but I am not. Do you know why? Because later when I calmed down I was thinking what was in truth most probable and I arrived at this conclusion. Your mama is going to come back because we are a family. I do not have the slightest doubt and I do not make mistakes when it comes to judging someone. Have patience that everything will come in due time with God's help.

  You tell me that she went through terrible days. I have also had some terrible days because it is not easy to be separated. Of course what she did is an act of egotism and that is rare in her, always such a generous person. That is why I am sure that she will reconsider. There is nothing that time cannot fix and one day we will be together again, all three of us. I give you my word.

  Your papa who loves you,

  Konrad

  Hotel Sabaneta, April 21, 1944

  My dear and adored Marguerite,

  I would like you to come and live in Fusa. Here in the hotel there are people who have their families in Fusa and they can go and see them every day and even stay and sleep with them. When they go they are escorted by a policeman and also when they come back. But they sleep with their wives and can see their children. The houses in Fusa are very expensive because now everyone wants a house in Fusa and there are people here with lots of money. But if we make an effort we can find a cheap little place for you to live. Enrique can stay in Bogota. How good it would be to sleep next to you again. I know we do not have money but something could be done, as they say hope is the last thing to die.

  Here one lives without serious problems so do not worry about me. There is not much to do because it is forbidden to have a radio. They do not even let us listen to music and for me listening to music would help a little because I could be distracted. One of the employees in the hotel likes me and he is the one who helps me to write my letters. Let us see if I can ask him for a radio or if he will let me go in his room to listen to music for a while.

  I love you always.

  Yours,

  Konrad

  Hotel Sabaneta, Fusagasuga, April 9, 1944

  My adored Marguerite,

  You never like me to write to you in German and now you are in luck because in this place German is forbidden for correspondence. All letters must be in Spanish and have to pass through a horrible censorship. We submit them open and a person in charge reads them and asks for explanations. They will be looking for spies. But of course here we are all spies, simply for having surnames that they cannot pronounce. They gave us medical examinations as if we had contagious diseases. Being German is a contagious disease. We can still speak it. At least that is not forbidden.

  There was a Catholic mass last week but I only found out today. It was Father Baumann. If they say masses here maybe it will not all be so bad, and anyway there is only one God. Father Baumann reminded me very much of Gabriel. I told Gabriel that if he wanted he could come and practice here instead of going always to the Gutermans. It would break the tedium for me. And he could hear Father Baumann because Gabriel is Catholic. Remind him, please. But do not insist if he does not want to.

  Well, I hope you have not stopped looking for help. Someone has to understand that all this is a mistake and that I have done nothing wrong. This is how this country pays me back for loving it as I have loved it. Colombia is the most ungrateful country that God has placed on the face of the earth. And I am not the only one to say so. At meals this is the topic of conversation. What happens is that here there are wolves in sheep's clothing and that is the problem for those of us who have ended up here. That the others know I am not like them. My love, the important thing is that you believe me. The rest does not matter. What Enrique thinks matters very little if you believe me.

  I will write to you as much as they allow here and hope I do not bore you.

  Yours,

  Konrad

  When the last letter in the archive, the first that Konrad Deresser wrote from the Hotel Sabaneta, was transcribed into my notebook, I took a couple of minutes to recover from the blow of everydayness: the letters had been the best testimony of those ordinary days, unbearably ordinary, that in an ordinary city had been spent in an extraordinary time and place; the letters had been, for that very reason, the best testimony of the error committed by my father. This alone had forced me to steal them; as if that weren't enough, there was also this paragraph in the middle, dropped in there, between two pathetic appeals destined for a Margarita who perhaps already, at that moment, had ceased to be with her husband, that neutral paragraph like the net on a tennis court, that mentioned my father's name (which was enough to make it unique and valuable) and to me seemed to contain impossible images. Practice in that paragraph was a long and malleable verb, and a word made of burned rubber. I spent a while thinking about The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and I put the anecdote of the radio station together with the lost cover I'd found at my father's apartment. Suddenly my father had a violin pressed against his neck, and he was practicing; or rather, he received singing lessons from old Konrad or learned vocal tricks to control his diaphragm better, because old Konrad knew about things like that. I imagined my father getting on buses or into other people's cars with his violin case hanging from his shoulder, and I tried to speculate about the moment he decided to give the instrument up. I managed to think all those things before I sensed that the paragraph did not refer to the learning of instruments or breath control but of the German language.

  Was that possible? My father learning German from such a young age? My head began to look for signs in the life of the Gabriel Santoro I had known, but it was late, and investigative work in the mental archives is exhausting and not always reliable. It would be better to turn to my current informer, Enrique Deresser, although that would have to wait till the next day.

  I put my notebook back in the glove compartment. Before getting out of the car, I looked at all the corners of the street, making sure Sergio was nowhere to be seen. I walked back to the building as if someone were following me, and toward five, still dressed, I managed to get to sleep for a couple of hours without remembering what I'd dreamed. But maybe I dreamed of my father speaking German.

  I woke up to the gurgling of a coffeemaker. I mustn't have opened my eyes straightaway, because later, when I finally managed it, Enrique Deresser was standing in front of me, asking to be taken out for a walk like a dog with a leash in its mouth; he didn't have a leash in his mouth, but a cup of coffee in his hand, and he didn't want to go for a walk, but to the place where, according to the Highways Authority reports, a friend from his youth had died in an accident. His collection of letters was no longer beside the sofa, where I had left it the night before. It was already put away, it was in a safe place now, it had been put out of reach of thieves. Enrique handed me the hot cup.

  "OK, I'll wait for you downstairs," he said. "I'm going to get some bunuelos. If you want I'll get you some, too."

  "Bunuelos?"

  "To eat on the way. So we don't waste time having breakfast."

  And that's how it went, of course: Enrique wasn't prepared to put the business off a second longer than necessary. With the steering wheel in my left hand and holding a ball of hot dough between the fingers of my right, I followed his directions and found myself, after going up some steep, urban, unevenly paved streets (concrete squares bordered with lines of tar), leaving the city and going up into the mountains. My passenger's knees banged against the glove compartment: I hadn't realized Enrique was so tall, or his legs so long, until that moment, but didn't say anything for fear of provoking a conversation that might somehow lead him to open the glove compartment and find my notebook and leaf through it out of curiosity and come across the words
I'd stolen from him and his family. But that didn't seem probable: Enrique was concentrating on other things, his gaze fixed on the trucks we passed and on the curves of the road, that ribbon of dark, sinuous cement that became unpredictable a few meters in front of the car and disappeared from sight in the rearview mirror. At one point, Enrique raised his index finger and tapped the windshield.

  "Geraniums in biscuit tins," he said.

  "What about them?"

  "You mention them in your book."

  And then he was silent again, as if he didn't understand something that for me was obvious: he'd begun to interpret a good part of his world through something he'd read. He yawned, once or twice, to relieve the pressure in his ears. I did the same and discovered that the altitude had blocked them a little. That can happen before you notice, because the ascent is not so drastic, and the process is quite similar, one thinks, to how an old man gradually goes deaf. Going up into Bogota causes a sudden deafness, like the result of a childhood illness; that ascent, up to Las Palmas, was like the progressive and natural deafness of old age. I was thinking about that when Enrique tapped the windshield again and told me to pull over, that we'd arrived. The car slowed down and the tires skidded on the loose gravel of the shoulder, and the unpleasant parking lights signal started beeping. On my left was the highway, which always seems more dangerous when you're still, and on my right floated the green stain of some bushes, so sparse that among their leaves you could make out the air of the valley and the violent drop of the mountainside. And that's when, maybe because of the sensation of farewell provoked by being with someone in an unmoving car, maybe because of the slightly eccentric way the surrounding landscape united us--turning us into confidants or accomplices--I asked Enrique what I'd been wanting to ask him since the night before. "Of course he spoke German," he said. "Spoke it like a native. He learned it at the Nueva Europa. That was his school. Peter, Sara, they were his teachers. The accent he picked up from them; people with a good ear have no problems, and Gabriel had a better ear than Mozart. In your book there are important things and unimportant things. Among the unimportant things, what surprised me most was that Gabriel had forgotten his German. He must have wanted to forget it. Until that day when he started singing 'Veronika,' no? Sara loved that song, I remember perfectly. And Gabriel pretending he'd started studying it in old age, that he'd only been studying the language for a few months. All that you put in the book. I read it but I couldn't believe it. The man who used to recite speeches from the Reichstag pretending he didn't know German. Don't tell me it's not ironic."

  "Tell me about it. Sara didn't say much about that."

  "That would be because there's not much to tell," said Enrique. "I remember very well a conversation, one of the last I witnessed between them. . . . Gabriel asked my father to explain a couple of references that came up in the speeches. My father did it gladly, like a teacher. That was the closest they ever were. It wasn't a friendship, no. Gabriel didn't betray a friendship with Papa, but he did betray something. I don't know what to call it; there has to be a name to apply to the spot where he stuck the knife in. Those speeches, I don't know if you know them. No, I wouldn't dare say that Gabriel learned German to understand them, but it would be very naive to think it wasn't one of the benefits. In any case, it's normal that Sara wouldn't have mentioned it, I think. Gabriel never committed the error of taking those guilty enthusiasms to the Nueva Europa. He was a sensible fellow, after all, and he had his head screwed on straight. He could study them, but he did it in secret and with shame. Maybe he would have liked my father to be a little more ashamed. Me too, of course. How I despised him. Oh, yes, I came to despise my father. What cowards. We were both very cowardly." It wasn't difficult to imagine that he'd been rereading old Konrad's letters the morning my father had come to visit him; I imagined how fresh the resentment would have felt, the daily updating of the disdain; I imagined Enrique going over in his head the text he knew by heart while my father performed his little speech of contrition. But most of all I imagined the course of a life encumbered with the documentary reconstruction of scenes from the other life. That's what Enrique had devoted himself to: the documents he had collected were his place in the world. I thought that was why he had thrown them at me almost en masse, because he thought I would receive the same peace, and with that Enrique turned into a sort of small messiah, an ad hoc savior, and the documents were his gospel. "Yes, Gabriel used to go to the Nueva Europa to practice his German," said Enrique, and narrowed his eyes. "Sometimes I think it might have been there. Isn't that horrible? Not just contemplating that possibility, I don't mean only that: Isn't it horrible that we'll never know where it happened? That moment weighs on us, Gabriel, and we're never going to know how it went. No matter how many of my father's letters I've saved. No matter how much information Sara Guterman might have given you, we're missing that information. Tell me something, have you imagined the scene?"

  "I've tried," I told him. "But the places from those years hardly exist anymore. I never saw the Nueva Europa, for example."

  "I've reconstructed it as if I'd been there. I'm walking along the upper corridor and I see him downstairs, sitting with the fellow from the embassy or the police, but I keep going to my room. How could I imagine it? I don't even stop to try to see who Gabriel's talking to. I don't even think about it. I see him without thinking. I don't wonder: Who could that be? Is he practicing his German? Gabriel would sit down to talk to the Germans, he liked to swap languages. The Germans would come away with three or four new phrases in Spanish, quite happy. So in that image I could have wondered if he was swapping languages. But I don't wonder anything. My eyes pass over Gabriel. Between those two and me there is a glass door, a whole patio, and a fountain making fountain noises. So I could say I try to hear what they're saying and I can't. But it's not like that. In the scene that I imagine, I don't try to hear anything. Normal, don't you think? You go somewhere you go every day, see your friend sitting and doing what he's been doing as long as you've known him: talking. How are you going to imagine?"

  "You can't," I said.

  "I know you've always wanted more details," he said. "But closer than this we can't get, I'm telling you. The details change, that's true. Sometimes there's rain splashing into the fountain's pool, other times there isn't. There are the little fishes, there are the coins people throw in. Sometimes I see Sara busy with customers at the reception desk, and I curse her for not suspecting anything either. I've been carrying this around for a long time, son. And I think you're strong. I don't think it'll hurt you to help me a little. After all, you're the one who's written about this, you're the one who's dealt with it, and the land belongs to he who works it. No one has as much information as you. Sara was the last, but she can't help me now. Use the information, Gabriel, do me that favor. In ten years, if I'm still alive, come back here, and we'll discuss our points of view, you can tell me about your scene. Tell me if your father chose the place or if he adapted to what they asked. If he informed with pleasure or if he had conflicting emotions. If in the interview he denies that he speaks German, or if it's precisely because of that, because he speaks German, that they credit what he says. Does he think of Sara? Does he feel that by accusing my father he's defending her from something? The questions are endless. I have my own hypothesis. I'm not going to tell you, so as not to influence you." There again was the impulse to make light of things that I'd witnessed the night before, the strategy that transformed everything into a game to defend himself against the pain of the facts. He had spent fifty years living with the betrayal. In those terms--I thought--I was a recent arrival. Deresser would have been planning this ambush in advance, a long while in advance--since the publication of my book, for example. And everything, the invitation to go see him, the description of my father's visit, the access he'd allowed me to all his documents, everything was paving the way to this instant: the instant when he got rid of half the weight of his life and transferred it to another person; the
instant of a tiny liberty, obtained in old age and almost by chance. "This is what I wanted to request of you," he said. "That you think. I've spent too many years; this is as far as I've got. Now it's your turn. But I will warn you, no matter how early you get up you won't see what isn't there. No matter how much you think about that scene the sun won't come up any earlier. Anyway, you understand me now. It's impossible to complete the scene." After a while, he added, "Is there anything else you wanted to know?"

  I wanted to say to him, Is there something you know for certain, by any chance? Is there anything in my father's life that has just a single aspect?

  But instead I said, "For now, no. If there is anything else, I'll let you know."

  "OK. So time for what we came for, don't you think?"

  "I think so."

  "Let's not use up the whole morning talking about the past," he said. "Let's be realistic. You and I are alone. These stories don't matter to anyone anymore."