The Informers (10 page)

"What an insufferable fellow you are! Something will happen to you for being so arrogant."

The new Gabriel Santoro. Gabriel Santoro, corrected and improved version. The reincarnated orator stood up all of a sudden and made a beeline across the living room, arrived at the wooden bookcase, and with his left hand picked up a cardboard sleeve the size of a wedding invitation, and with the thumb of his stump he took the disk out of the sleeve, put it on the record player, and set the speed at 78 rpm and lowered the needle, and then one of the German songs Sara had made me listen to years before began to play.

Veronika, der Lenz ist da,
die Madchen singen Tralala,
die ganze Welt ist wie verhext,
Veronika, der Spargel wachst.

I had closed my eyes and leaned back on the sofa and begun to let myself drift into postlunch drowsiness, after the heaviness of the
ajiaco
on a Sunday afternoon, when I thought I heard my father singing and discounted the idea as impossible and unbelievable, and immediately I seemed to hear his voice again underneath the old music and static from the speakers and the 1930s instruments. I opened my eyes and saw him, with his arms around Sara (who had started washing the plates), singing in German. The fact that I hadn't heard him sing more than three times in my entire life was less odd than seeing him sing in a language he didn't know, and I immediately remembered a scene from when I was small. For a few months my father had put on a wig and changed his glasses and worn a bow tie instead of a normal tie: the fact of belonging to the Supreme Court, even though he wasn't a judge, had made him
interesting
, and he'd received his first threats, a couple of those calls so common in Bogota and to which we've become accustomed and don't pay much attention. Well, the first time he arrived home in disguise, he called hello from the stairs as he always did, and I went out and found myself with this unfamiliar figure and it scared me: a brief and soon dispelled fear, but fear it was. Something along the same lines happened as I watched him move his mouth and emit strange sounds. It was, in truth, another person, a second Gabriel Santoro.

Veronika, die Welt ist grun,
drum lass uns in die Walder ziehn.
Sogar der liebe, gute, alte Grosspapa,
sagt zu der lieben, guten, alten Grossmama.

When the old folks came to sit back down in the living room, one or the other noticed my shocked face, and they both started to explain that, among other things, my father had spent the last few months learning German. "Do you think it absurd?" he said. "Because I do, I confess. Learning a new language at sixty-something: What for? What for, when the one I already have isn't much use to me? I'm retired, I'm retired from my language. And this is what we retired people do, look for another job. If we are given a second life, then the urge is even stronger." That was when, in the middle of the treatise on the way of reinventing oneself, in the middle of the spectacle of his remodeled words, in the middle of these sung phrases whose meaning I would find out later, my father spoke to Sara and me about Angelina, about how he'd got to know her better in these months--it was logical, after seeing her every day for so long and benefiting from her massages--how he'd gone on seeing her after the therapy was finished and his health restored. That's what he told us. My father the survivor. My father, with the capacity to reinvent himself.

"I'm sleeping with her. We've been seeing each other for two months."

"How old is she?" asked Sara.

"Forty-four. Forty-five. I don't remember. She told me, but I don't remember."

"And she hasn't got anyone, right?"

"How do you know she hasn't got anyone?"

"Because if she did, someone would be throwing it in her face. That sleeping with old men is against the rules. The age difference. Whatever. She must have a good story."

"Oh, here we go," said my father. "There's no story."

"Of course there is--don't give me that. First of all, she's got no one to protest. Second, you get evasive when I ask you. This woman has a hell of a story. Has she suffered a lot?"

"Well, yes. You've got the makings of a great inquisitor, Sara Guterman. Yes, she's had a shitty life, poor thing. She lost her parents in the bombing of Los Tres Elefantes."

"That recently?"

"That recently."

"Did they live here?"

"No. They'd come from Medellin to visit her. They got to say hello, and then they went out to buy some nylon stockings. Her mum needed some nylon stockings. Los Tres Elefantes was the closest place. We passed by there in a taxi not long ago. I can't remember where we were going, but when we got there Angelina's hands were numb and her mouth dry. And that evening she was a bit feverish. It still hits her that hard. Her brother lives on the coast. They don't speak to each other."

"And when did she tell you all this?" I asked.

"I'm old, Gabriel. Old-fashioned. I like to talk after sex."

"All right, all right, a little decorum, if you don't mind," said Sara. "I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still right here, or have I become invisible?"

I patted my father on the knee, and his tone changed: he put aside the irony, he became docile. "I didn't know what you'd think," he said. "Do you realize?"

"What?"

"It's the first time I've ever spoken to you about anything like this," he said, "and it's to tell you what I'm telling you."

"And without giving the rest of us time to cover our ears," said Sara. And then she asked, "Has she stayed over at your house?"

"Never. And don't think I haven't suggested it. She's very independent, doesn't like sleeping in other people's beds. That's fine with me, not that I need to tell you. But now she's taken it into her head to invite me to Medellin."

"When?"

"Now. Well, to spend the holidays. We're going next weekend and coming back the second or third of January. That's if she gets the time off, of course. They exploit her like a beast, I swear. It's the last week of the year, and she has to fight tooth and nail."

He thought for a second.

"I'm going to Medellin with her," he said then. "To spend Christmas and New Year with her. I'm going with her. Damn, it does sound very odd."

"Odd, no, it sounds ridiculous," said Sara. "But what can you do? All adolescents are ridiculous."

"There is one little thing," my father said to me. "We need your car. Or rather, we don't need it, but I said to Angelina that it's silly to take a bus when you can lend us your car. If you can, that is. If you're not going to need it, if it's not a problem."

I told him I wasn't going to need it, although it was a lie; I told him it was no problem, partly because his whole being, his voice and his manner, was speaking to me with an unprecedented affection, as if he were asking a special favor of a special friend.

"Take the car and don't worry," I said. "Go to Medellin, have a good time, say hi to Angelina for me."

"Are you sure?"

"I'll stay with Sara. She'll invite me over for Christmas and New Year."

"That's right," she said. "Go along and don't worry. We won't miss you. We're going to stay here and have our own party. Drinking what you can't drink, eating saturated fats and talking about you behind your back."

"Well, that sounds perfect," said my father. "My back doesn't usually mind that."

"Are you going to drive?" said Sara.

"Not all the time. My hand tends to be a bit of a risk factor on roads like that one. She'll probably do most of the driving, I guess. I can't guarantee she's good at it, but her license is in order, and anyway, who said you have to drive well to drive in Colombia? How dangerous can it be? I'm in no position to make demands; if a Virgil falls into your life, you don't start cross-examining."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Was it your idea?"

"Don't bring Virgil into this," said Sara. "Delusions of youth, that's what it's called."

"Aha, the green-eyed monster is among us. Are you jealous, Sarita?"

"Not jealous, no, don't be silly. But I am old, and so are you. Stop pretending you're not. Eight-hour car trips. Making love with schoolgirls. You're going to have a heart attack, Gabriel."

"Well, it'll be worth it."

"Seriously," I said. "What does she think?"

"That any co-driver is a good co-driver."

"No, about your age. What does she think about your age?"

"She thinks it's fine. Well, I imagine she thinks it's fine, I haven't asked her. Fundamental rule of forensic interrogation: don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answer to, watch out for boomerang questions, as the ancients used to say. No, I don't want answers that are going to hit me in the back of the neck. I haven't asked her what she thinks about my hand either, if it bothers her, if she has to make an effort to forget it. What do you want me to say? I'm a good guy, I'm not going to hurt her, and that alone must seem like a fortune to her. It's stupid, but I feel like taking care of her. She's forty-four but I want to take care of her. She's convinced the world is shit, that everyone was born with the sole objective of giving her a hard time. It's not the first time I've heard the argument, but it's the first time it's come so close to me. And I spend all day and half the night trying to convince her of the opposite, Plato,
homo homini Deus
, all that stuff, and she never picks up a book even by accident. I've lived a long while, I've seen what there is to see. But this is by far the most unpredictable thing that's ever happened to me in my life."

He forgot that life likes to outdo itself. Life (the second life) waited a week before reminding him, and did so with a wealth of detail.

...

Now I like to think about that week over and over again, because it's the closest thing I've got to innocence, to a state of grace, because at the end of that week a whole idea of how the world should be ended. At that moment this book did not exist. It could not exist yet, of course, because this book is an inheritance created by the death of my father, the man who looked down on my work (writing about other people's lives) while he was alive and who after he died left me as a legacy the subject of his own life. I am my father's heir and I am also his executor.

While I write I see that, over the course of several months, instead of the things and papers that I need to reconstruct the story, it has been the things and papers that
prove the existence
of the story and can correct my memory, if necessary, that have been accumulating on my desk. I am not skeptical by nature, nor am I naive, and I know very well the cheap tricks memory can avail itself of when it suits; at the same time, I know that the past is not stationary, nor is it fixed, in spite of the illusion of documents: so many photographs and letters and films that allow us to think of the immutability of what we've seen, what we've heard, what we've read. No, none of that is definitive. It can take just a tiny detail, something that in the grand scheme of things we consider insignificant, to make a letter relating trivialities become something that determines our lives, to make the innocent man in the photo turn out to have always been our worst enemy.

My desk was once my mother's. The wood has softened from being smeared with so much furniture polish, but no other strategy has occurred to me to protect this block (that looks recently carved from a wet tree trunk) from woodworm attacks. There are rings from glasses and cups that nothing short of sandpaper could now shift. The corners are chipped or split, and I've got more than one splinter from carelessly brushing my hand across it. And, most of all, there are things, things whose principal function is evidential. Every once in a while I pick up one of those cassettes and make sure they're still there, that they still contain Sara Guterman's voice. I pick up a magazine from 1985 and read a paragraph: "When the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Colombia finally decided to break relations with the Axis powers. . . ." I pick up the December 1941 speech, in which Santos broke relations with the Axis: "We are with our friends, and we are firmly with them. We will fulfill the role corresponding to this policy of continental solidarity with hatred towards none. . . ." I pick up a letter from my father to Sara, a letter from Sara to my father, a speech by Demosthenes: this is my evidence. I am heir, I am executor, and I am also prosecutor, but before this I have been archivist, I have been organizer. Looking back--and back means a couple of years ago as well as half a century--events take shape, a certain design: they mean something, something that doesn't necessarily come as given. To write about my father I've been obliged to read certain things that despite his tutelage I had never read. Demosthenes and Cicero are the most obvious, almost a cliche.
Julius Caesar
was no less predictable. Those books are also compelling pieces of evidence, and each one of them figures in my dossier, with all the annotations my father had made in them. The problem is that interpreting them is not within my powers. When my father notes, beside Brutus's speech, "From verb to noun? Here you lost," I don't know what he might have meant. I feel more comfortable with facts; and death, of course, is the densest of facts, more meaningful, less susceptible to being perverted or misappropriated by different interpretations, relative versions,
readings
. The rule says that death is as definitive as anything can be on earth. That's why it's so disconcerting when a man changes after death, and that's why biographies and memoirs get written, those cheap and democratic forms of mummification.

The process of my father's mummification was only possible from December 23, 1991, when the accident happened. At that moment I was at home, comfortable and calm and in bed with a friend, T, a woman I've known since I was fifteen and she was twelve, with whom I get together every two or three months to make love and watch a movie, for although she is married and relatively content, we've always had the idea that in another life we could have been together, and we would have liked that. I still see T as a little girl, and perhaps there's a perversion there that we allow ourselves for a few hours. We touch, go to bed, watch a movie, and sometimes go back to bed after the movie, but not always, and then T has a shower, dries her hair with a hair dryer I bought just for her, and goes home. That's how it was that night: according to my calculations, we were watching the movie, and maybe Marlon Brando was dying of a heart attack in the garden in front of his grandson, but it's possible that the film had ended and I was seeking T's mouth, which is wide and always cold. Sometimes I've gone as far as considering the possibility of this coincidence: that T was sitting on top of me and sliding up and down my erection the way she often does just at the moment when my car (driven by my father) and an Expreso Bolivariano bus (driven by a certain Luis Javier Velilla) went over the cliff together a few kilometers outside Medellin, on the way to Las Palmas. The car was on its way out of Medellin; the bus was arriving. Five passengers survived the accident. I'll never understand how my father, the great survivor, was not among them.