The Informers (11 page)

Boomerang questions began to accumulate almost immediately in my head, and I, with a negligence the rhetoric professor would have reproached me for, allowed that to happen. What was my father doing on the road to Las Palmas, that is, coming back from Medellin? Why was he driving at night, when he knew that road's terrible reputation? Why hadn't he let Angelina drive? These questions (the most physical, the most circumstantial) and the others, those concerning the blame for the accident (the most likely, I thought then, to come back and hit me in the back of the neck), came flooding in without warning when I received Sara's phone call and as I heard her tell me the news, or rather read it word for word from the newspaper, while I listened to her somewhat distractedly with the fleeting altruistic regret one tends to feel when listening to news of someone else's death in Colombia. Then she told me my father's name was in the newspaper's list. "That can't be right," I said, still standing beside the bedside table. "He's in Medellin. He's not coming back until January."

"The license plate of the car's there, Gabriel, and the name," she said. She wasn't crying but her voice sounded nasal and uneven like the voice of someone who'd only just stopped. "I wanted it to be a mistake, too. I'm very sorry, Gabriel."

"What about her? Was she with him?"

"Who knows?"

"If she wasn't with him, maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was someone else, Sara."

"It's not someone else. I'm so sorry."

In my left hand I had a white T-shirt with a doctored photo of the Caribbean and the slogan
Colombia Nuestra
, and in my right a travel iron, a fist-sized contraption that I'd got on special offer in an electrical shop in San Andresito. I'd just ironed the shirt and unplugged the iron, but after I hung up, as I sat down distractedly on the unmade bed, I rested it on my leg and the burn was brutal. By the time I got dressed, half incredulous and half dizzy, and called a taxi, an oblong blister the color of watery milk had formed above my knee. The operator who took my call gave me two numbers, a code and the identification number for my taxi, those security strategies that we ingenuous Bogotanos trust to evade criminals; but my father had just died--the pain of my burned skin did nothing but remind me, like a testimony to those two bodies, his and his lover's, perhaps burned as well, the skin converted into a single bag of white water--and as I got into the taxi I realized I'd forgotten the numbers I had to say for the taxi driver to accept me. "Code?" the driver asked and then repeated, and the glistening down on his upper lip and his narrow eyes said the same thing. I suddenly feared something was wrong with me; I began to have trouble breathing and barely had time to think, in the midst of an intense physical pain, of the loss that had just invaded my life and the darkness of what was left of my reasoning, that I was about to suffer an anxiety attack.

I got back out of the taxi. I told the driver to wait for a second, please, but he must not have heard me: as soon as he saw me lie down on the ground, he put the car in gear and pulled away. On a nearby wall were some geraniums; they reminded me, as was to be expected, of the walls of the houses you see on the way down into Medellin from Las Palmas, and as soon as that image came into my head so did the first wave of nausea. I knelt beside the wall and threw up a thin, rust-colored, almost odorless phlegm (I hadn't eaten anything that morning), and stood up as soon as I felt that my legs, which go weak when I vomit, would be able to support me, because it seemed the minimal dignity of enduring these experiences standing up--the vision of the buildings with their windows falling on top of me, the pressure of clothing on my chest--would somehow help me to get through this week, in which Sara, merciful and braver than me, would take charge of the formalities with the ease of a professional grave digger but with the kindness a grave digger would have forever lost. One of her sons called me during those days. "Why don't you take care of these things yourself?" he said over the phone. "My mum isn't up to looking after other families' deaths, that should be obvious." I thought it was a strange form of jealousy, because Sara was duplicating the measures she'd taken when her husband died; her son didn't seem to like it very much. But Sara paid him no attention. She went on doing what needed to be done. She drafted an announcement for the two Bogota newspapers, the ones we open to see what deaths we have to attend that day, and decided, for reasons she didn't seem too clear about, to leave her own name out of the text, despite my request that she include it along with mine. So Gabriel Santoro invited mourners to the funeral of Gabriel Santoro; and in the drum roll of the duplicated name and surname there was something solitary and sad, because many of those who attended the mass, people who didn't know me, had the impression of a printer's error. Sara apologized many times for not having included our second surnames, as we normally do in this country, which has always seemed strange to her. Of course, that would have prevented any confusion, but I didn't blame her, I couldn't have blamed her. She had taken on even the most trivial tasks, which are, for that very reason (because they take us away from the gravity, the solemnity, the rite) the most painful, and after an off-the-cuff comment in which I'd mentioned I'd rather have the body cremated out of fear of the renewed pain of the anniversaries and cemetery visits and flowers bought at the roadside, Sara had negotiated with the administrators of the Jardines de Paz to change the plot--the plot whose title I'd carried around in my wallet for so many years the way others carry the wrinkled telephone number of their first girlfriend--for the right to cremation.

The service was held on the following Thursday. The mass, in the gloomy Cristo Rey Church, was a marvel of religious vacuity, an inventory of the absurdities in which some people seem to find solace. "Our brother," said the priest, and looked back at his notes to refresh his memory, "Gabriel Santoro, has died to live in us. We, through the love of Christ, through his infinite and eternal charity, live in him." Later I found out that before the mass he'd been asking for me, looking for me to ask some questions, and Sara had dealt with him in my place. The priest had approached her with a little book bound in black leather in his hand, open and ready like a journalist's. "What was the deceased like?" he asked Sara. She, accustomed to these procedures, answered with the supposed attributes of his star sign: he was a kind, affectionate, generous family man. The priest took notes, shook Sara's hand, and she watched him return to the sacristy. "Those of us who knew Gabriel," he said later, from the microphone, "appreciated his kind and warm personality, his infinite affection for his loved ones, his boundless generosity to friends and strangers alike. May the Lord receive him in His Holy Kingdom." And the sea of heads nodded: they were all in agreement, the dead man had been a good person. "Gathering here to remember our brother is also to ask ourselves how we can perpetuate what he has left in us; it is to measure the intensity of the loss, and the consolation of the Resurrection. . . ." The priest asked in public the question I'd been asking myself privately for so long, not just since the instant I knew my father was no more, but long before, and his words felt intrusive. I thought of my father's possible legacy; I felt at first I'd received nothing, nothing but the name, nothing but the timbre of our voices; but I ended up considering that in many ways my life was no different from his: it was a mere prolongation, a strange pseudopodium.

Three of my father's colleagues helped me to lift the coffin--without a window of any kind, as advised by Sara--and carry it to the door of the church; then a squadron of men dressed in mourning cut off our path; there was a rustling of papers, the coffin rested on a gilded stand, and a stranger began to read. He held the paper with a ringed hand (rings on three fingers). The man was the spokesman for the Mayoralty of Greater Bogota; at the end of each sentence his heels lifted two or three centimeters from the ground, as if he were trying to stand on tiptoe to get a better view.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, compatriots all:

Gabriel Santoro, notable citizen, thinker, professor, and friend, was in his advanced years the standard-bearer, or let us say, the very paragon of the impartial and honest man, because every moment of his life was distinguished by his pure and noble patriotism, his moral integrity, robust personality, and temperament, his devotion and fondness, the strict and upright fulfillment of his duties, and, furthermore, the cordial, affectionate nature of his human relations.

He was born in Santa Fe de Bogota in the bounti ful land of his illustrious ancestry. Sogamoso was the cradle of his forebears and source of the clear water of his understanding. Shaped by politics, science, and culture in a home of Christian virtues, he cultivated and assessed them with conscientious unction, as is customary in societies which practice healthy ideas with profound conviction. Religion and the principles of the philosophical ideal were the center, nerve, and motor of his intellect, projecting it with emanations of grandeur toward the immediate future. And, of course, faith grew in his spirit and brought him the intimate proximity of God; his wisdom and peace of the soul reflected the living miracle of a select, worthy, and civilized person.

And with all of this, breathing scents of eternity with the eminent breezes and incense of holy patriotic inspiration, with the joy of youth, athletic, elegant, and upstanding, transcending the classrooms of his alma mater, which received him like a beacon showing the way in these days of dark designs and ambiguous omens. Solicitous, disciplined, and diligent, with the uprightness of an honest man, Gabriel Santoro worshipped everlasting philosophy; the tranquil attitude of a great orator illuminated the born leader, fixed his eye on the horizons of the beloved country. In this setting we, the people of Bogota, single out Gabriel Santoro to place him, in honor of his illustrious trajectory, in the pantheon of the nation's notables.

For his life, from the illustrious moment when he received his honors degree in jurisprudence, was forever assuming the role of pilot in the storm, educating generations of men to honest labors and diaphanous ideas, and transmitting the most illustrious treasure of our species, the language we revere with its use each day of our lives. And for all that he shall be recognized in the annals of our nation, since in these very moments of exemplary pain the nation is preparing the official recognition, and its decrees shall honor Doctor Gabriel Santoro with the Medal of Civic Merit. So it is declared and shall be carried out by due process of the law.

Peace be upon the tomb of the famous teacher and worthy citizen, Doctor Gabriel Santoro. The festive and joyful tricolors wave in heaven, welcoming the orator and man. May the perpetual light shine on him.

Santa Fe de Bogota, the twenty-sixth day of the month of December, 1991.

At that moment, when the speech ended and the box slid across the fuchsia-colored carpet of the hearse and the driver closed the door, taking the greatest possible care to avoid my gaze, people began to walk toward me, to murmur condolences and offer open hands that emerged from black sleeves, and the leaden rhetoric of the duty-roster orator (those anacolutha, those subversive gerunds, those dangling participles) was the least of my worries. In any case, this I remember well: I didn't want to shake anyone's hand, because my own right hand was still feeling the weight of my father and his coffin, and I had got it into my head to make the pressure of the copper handle on my palm last for a few minutes. Later, by one of those curious associations a mind under pressure is capable of, I thought of the handles and the carpet of the hearse when the coffin began to enter the cemetery's crematorium. The door of the furnace was copper and the handles of the coffin were copper. The heat in the room, around the flowers and their putrid smell, the white ribbons, the gold letters on the white ribbons, was no different from the heat I'd felt in the car park of the funeral home, with the sun hitting the thick cloth of my jacket and my sweaty neck. And now, at the same time as I let myself be overwhelmed by these small annoyances, I thought about my dead father. At some point I thought I'd never, as long as I lived, be able to think about anything else. I was alone; there was no one left between me and my own death. Filling out the cremation forms, I had written, for the first time in a long while, my father's full name, and the automatism of my hand made me shudder, that it had memorized those movements over years of writing Gabriel Santoro, but always referring to myself, not to a dead man. The contents of my own name, that which seems immutable to us (although only through force of habit), were being transformed. Of all the changes we go through during our lifetimes--I thought, or I believe I thought--of all the changes imposed on us, what could be more violent?

In that box, behind the hatch, was his body. I could not know in what state, I could not know what damage the accident had done to him, nor had I wanted to find out the causes of death. Maybe he'd broken his neck, maybe he'd suffocated, or maybe, like one of the passengers of whom news had emerged, he'd been crushed by the chassis, or maybe the impact of the car (against the mountain, or the bus, or some tree trunk) had thrown him forward with such force that his seat belt or the steering wheel or the dashboard had broken his ribs. The doctors had said that the bones of his chest would take a year to regenerate after the operation; now the cut made by the saw irritated my imagination much less than the images summoned up by the accident. And in a few minutes, after the clothing and skin, after the soft tissues--the eyes, the tongue, the testicles--after the renewed heart, those bones would be melted by the heat of the furnace. What was the temperature in there? How long did the whole process take, the transformation of a professor of rhetoric into ashes to fill an urn? Would the wire the surgeons had used to reconnect the bones of his chest melt, too? And while I thought about this the few people who had come to the cremation spectacle kept approaching me, and the numbness of my hands and my tired words seized me again, as if to prove one more time what I've always known and never needed to prove: that I am not equipped to grieve for the dead, for no one ever taught me the words of sorrow or the conduct of mourning. Then a woman came to greet me--to convey her personal inventory of consoling phrases, of meaningful embraces, of pret-a-porter sympathy--and only when she was a meter away did I recognize Angelina, who had accompanied us in silence throughout the day, timid and half hidden, reluctant to participate in any of the ceremonies, as if embarrassed to be what she would always be: the deceased man's last lover.