The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  We got out of the car and found ourselves in the noisy and too bright world of outside, and we began to walk forward, along the shoulder, skirting around the line where the mountain dropped off into the abyss and where there are no containment rails or artificial protection of any kind: men depend on the will of the stones and the tree trunks and the breeze-block or adobe houses to keep from going over the precipice. The air was dense and humid and the deciduous smell of the vegetation filled it the way a basin gets filled. I began to sweat: my palms and the back of my neck were damp, my watch strap stuck to my wrist.

  We had walked thirty or forty meters when Enrique stopped me. With his hands on his hips and panting (eyebrows raised, the corners of his mouth open like the gills of a dying trout), he took a deep breath and said, "Here it is."

  Here it was. Here was the place where my father's car had gone over the edge. This landscape was the last thing he'd seen in his life, with the probable exception of some lights bearing down on him or the bodywork of a bus that pushed him off the road. While I approached the edge of the slope and focused on some bushes torn out by their roots, broken branches, and disturbed soil, on the nature that had preferred not to regenerate in all those years, Enrique was looking at the road, which at that spot twisted less (or its bends were not so sharp), and was perhaps thinking, as I was thinking as I looked at it, that this was another of the illusions generated by stillness: from the side, everything seems straighter and, especially, seems straighter for longer, and you'd never think that something might be unpredictable for the cars passing, a barefoot pedestrian, a frightened dog. If a bus appeared around this bend, I thought Enrique was thinking, the driver of a car would see it; if he didn't see it, because of the dense darkness that must cover this road at night, or because of some distraction (the distraction that comes from a recent sadness, the disappointment of bad news), the most likely thing was that a person with normal reflexes would manage to steer out of its way. Because the width of the road, at that point, seemed to allow it; because the speed a car could have reached on its way up was not great. At that point, thought Enrique, an accident was rather improbable.

  Yes, that was what Enrique was thinking. No doubt about it. Who says it's not possible to read other people's minds?

  The previous afternoon, his son had practically assaulted me for speculating about his life (and doing so, on top of everything, in the midst of that apology for treachery that was my book); but this time, at least, it wasn't speculation. I could read Enrique's thoughts, one by one, as if he had spat them out onto the asphalt after thinking them. Enrique was standing facing the fatal curve, and I was watching him and I could have even closed my eyes and listened to the progress of his thoughts . . . but the bus, Enrique was thinking, could have appeared around the bend at the moment Gabriel was trying to find a radio station, but the bus might have had its lights turned off, to conserve energy from the battery as they often do, but Gabriel's bad hand might have been the reason his reaction hadn't been effective, but his heart might have failed from the sudden jolt of the fright, and in that case Gabriel would have been dead when his car went over the edge . . . but what about the driver's intentions, what about the possibility of suicide, was it not possible that the bus driver was desperate, disappointed, a man at the end of his tether? Had the bus driver never committed any errors in his life, and was it not possible that he'd tried to mend them and someone had denied him the redress? These possibilities exist, Enrique Deresser was thinking, no one can take them away from me. By now Gabriel's son has figured it out, now he knows why I brought him here, why we've come to see the place where Gabriel swerved into the abyss, where he preferred to bring it all to a close, because it was all a farce, because his life had been a farce, that's what he felt. Nothing would have been easier for me than misleading him, telling him no, none of that, stop feeling you're so important, stop believing your guilt makes you unique, that you invented the desire to make amends, that really is arrogance, Gabriel Santoro, that really is a cheap farce, not the other thing, the other is a life with enough time, and everyone, given enough time, is going to fuck up over and over again; he'll make a mistake and put it right and make another mistake, you give anyone time and that's what you'll see, one fuckup after another, amends and more amends, fuckup and amends, fuckup and amends, until time runs out . . . because we don't learn, Enrique Deresser was thinking, nobody ever learns, that's the biggest fallacy of all, that we learn; we really would be hoodwinked if we believed that one, Gabriel Santoro, and you more than anybody. You thought you'd learned, that you'd made one mistake and it was as if you'd been immunized, isn't that so? Well no, the evidence indicates the opposite, Mr. big-shot lawyer. Everything indicates that there is no possible vaccine: you stay sick and you'll be sick for your whole fucking life and your whole fucking death. Not even in death will you be freed from the fuckups you've committed. That's why you don't need to run yourself off the road and take a whole busload of people with you along with I don't know how many passengers. You won't fix anything by doing that and you'll have to bear as many crosses as there were deaths in the accident. To the dead man from the beginning you'll add the dead at the end. Is that what you want? Is fucking up the lives of a few people traveling in a bus your idea of retribution? Because if that's how it is I can't help you, Gabriel Santoro. Nothing I say will be sufficient if your idea is so strong, if you're so set on closure to bring it to a close like this. If you're ready to screw the rest of us just make sure you're good and screwed. That's what Enrique Deresser was thinking as he looked at the bend that wasn't so sharp in the road that wasn't so dangerous, while he was imagining the quantity of things that would have to happen at the same time so the accident would have been an accident instead of the voluntary closure, without pomp or circumstance, of a farcical life, of that giant blind knot that had been the undeserved life of Gabriel Santoro. That, finally, was what he was thinking, while Gabriel Santoro's son, behind him, seemed to be waiting for some sort of verdict, because he was aware that this was a trial: he was the definitive audience for the last trial of his dead father, held on the soft shoulder of a mountain road, between the smell of rotting tropical fruit and the tubercular rattles of exhausts and the abrupt gusts of passing cars that descended into Medellin at frightening speeds and those that came up toward unpredictable destinations, because after this road a thousand routes were possible and Bogota was just one of them. But it was the one that Gabriel Santoro would have taken if his car had not gone over the edge, and it would also be the one that Gabriel Santoro's son would take as soon as he confirmed that Enrique Deresser wasn't to blame: because in this trial Enrique Deresser also stood accused, and his summing-up should prove that the road was dangerous, that the night had been dark, that the bend was sharp and the visibility bad, that a mutilated hand doesn't react well in emergencies, that a recently repaired heart is fragile and cannot bear violent emotions, that a tired old man has bad reflexes, and more so when he'd lost in a single day a lover and a friend from his youth who, perhaps, between the two of them, might have been able to bring him back to life.

  NOTES

  2 Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (1898-1948): Leader of the Liberal Party and presidential candidate, famous for his talents as an orator. His assassination on April 9, 1948, split Colombian history in two, and for many is the origin of the violence the country would experience during the rest of the twentieth century.

  10 Simon Bolivar (1783-1830): Known in Latin America as The Liberator, Bolivar is the most notable of the leaders who led the Latin American colonies to independence from Spain during the first decades of the nineteenth century. He died in Santa Marta, Colombia, and his final journey from Bogota is recounted in The General in his Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

  11 Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1900-75): General of the Colombian army who, after taking power by means of a coup d'etat, installed a dictatorship that lasted from 1953 to 1957.

  11 Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1908-94): Liberal
politician. Minister of the Treasury between 1942 and 1944 and President of Colombia from 1966 to 1970.

  20 SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aereos): Colombian-German Air Transport Society. One of the first aviation companies in Latin America, founded in 1919 by Colombian and German partners. During World War II, the fact that there were German citizens among the shareholders was a source of concern to the Colombian and U.S. governments.

  21 Enrique Olaya Herrera (1880-1937): Liberal politician. President of Colombia from 1930 to 1934.

  30 Lucas Caballero (1914-81): Colombian writer, journalist, and caricaturist whose opinion columns, published under the pseudonym Klim, were among the most read of the time.

  41 Los Tres Elefantes: Department store with branches in several Colombian cities. In 1990 the branch in the Niza shopping center in Bogota was the target of one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks committed by the Medellin Cartel, leaving twenty people dead.

  41 Centro 93: Bogota shopping center. It was the target of a terrorist attack in 1993, attributed to the Medellin Cartel, which killed eleven people.

  57 Troco (Tropical Oil Company): U.S.-owned petroleum company that operated in Colombia from 1921 to 1951, when its concession reverted to the Colombian state.

  140 Buss und Bettag: Wednesday, eleven days before Advent, observed in Germany as a day of penance.

  146 La Voragine (The Vortex): Atmospheric protest novel concerning the Amazon rubber industry, by Jose Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928), published in 1924. It is probably the most important Colombian novel prior to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  147 Emil Pruefert: Head of the Nazi Party of Colombia from 1936 to 1941.

  148 German Arciniegas (1900-99): Renowned Colombian historian and essayist. He was Minister of Education in Eduardo Santos's government, from 1941 to 1942, and again during Alfonso Lopez's second government, from 1945 to 1946.

  172 Jose Maria Villarreal (1910-99): Conservative politician. Governor of Boyaca during the final years of World War II and later Minister of Commerce under Laureano Gomez. He was also Colombia's ambassador in London and Tokyo.

  172 godo: Formerly derogatory slang term for Conservative.

  172 Pantano de Vargas: Site of the battle on July 25, 1819, in which Simon Bolivar, in command of the Colombian army, defeated the Spanish general Jose Maria Barreiro and thereby achieved independence from Spain.

  213 Laureano Gomez (1889-1965): Principal Conservative politician of the war years, famous for his ferocious opposition to U.S. policies and for his sympathy for the regime of Francisco Franco. He was President of Colombia from 1950 to 1953 and was deposed by the coup d'etat that brought General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power.

  224 NI (No Information), KN (Known Nazi): Secret codes used in the intelligence reports on possible subversive activities, according to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's instructions. Other codes were: BN (Believed Nazi), BF (Believed Fascist), KF (Known Fascist), BSL (British Statutory List).

  281 Andres Escobar (1967-94): Colombian soccer player murdered in confusing circumstances. During the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Escobar scored an own goal that resulted in Colombia's elimination from the tournament. Back in Medellin he was murdered after a fight in a bar, apparently occasioned by an argument about the goal.

  281 Luis Carlos Galan (1943-89): Liberal politician and presidential candidate on two occasions. He was assassinated on August 18, 1989.

  281 Carlos Pizarro Leongomez (1951-90): Commander in chief of M-19, the Colombian guerrilla group that was active from late 1973 or early 1974 to 1990. He led M-19 to demobilization and disarmament, and was to stand as a presidential candidate. He was assassinated on April 26, 1990.

  288 Leaf Storm (La Hojarasca): Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first novel, released in 1954.

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR

  Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Julio Cortazar, Ignacio Martinez de Pison, Evelio Rosero, and Tomas Eloy Martinez. Her translations of Javier Cercas's novels have been short-listed for the IMPAC award and have received the Premio Valle-Inclan and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.