The Informers (6 page)

The fact is that there was something fascinating in the showy familiarity between them. On the third day of the convalescence, as soon as the doorman announced Sara over the intercom, my father took the unused napkin out from under his plate, handed it to me, and dictated a welcome note, so when Sara came in she received the following comment, written at speed in one long blue word:
From the anterior artery to the antagonistic aneurysm: long live bloody-minded blood vessels
. Later there were other assonances, other alliterations, but this first note is still the one I remember best, a sort of declaration of civil conduct between the two oldies. If she was already there when I arrived to see my father, what I found was not a friend paying a visit to a sick man, with all its weight of worried questions and grateful answers, but a scene that seemed not to have moved for whole centuries: the woman sitting in a chair, her eyes fixed on the crossword puzzle she was working on, and the patient lying on his bed, as quiet and alone as the stone figure on a papal tomb. Sara didn't hug me, she didn't even stand up to say hello, she just took my face in her two dry hands and pulled it toward her and kissed me on the cheek--her smile didn't show her teeth: it was prudent, skeptical, reticent; she gave nothing away--and made me feel as if I were the visitor (not the son), as if she were the one who'd been taking care of my father all these days (and now she was grateful for my visit: how good to see you, thanks for coming, thanks for keeping us company). My father, for his part, was lost in his fog of medication and exhaustion. However, liberated from the corrugated tube that had breached his mouth, his face had now recovered some normality, and I could occasionally get the memory of his violated ribs and the draining of his lungs out of my head.

Until then, it had never seemed so evident that my father had entered his final years. He couldn't move without help, standing up on his own was out of the question, speaking left him breathless, and there Sara and I were to help him to the bathroom, to interpret his few words. Sometimes he coughed; to keep him from screaming in pain and disturbing the neighbors, Sara held a rolled-up towel, bound tight with two pieces of masking tape like a scale model of an old-fashioned sleeping bag, across his chest. In the mornings he sat in his underwear on the toilet and I helped him wash his armpits. Thus I eventually confronted the wound I had preferred to avoid out of fear of my stomach's reaction; the first time, my memory, which likes to do these things, superimposed the image of the shrunken, naked, vulnerable man with one of a certain photo from his youth in which my father appears standing like a guard, his hands crossed behind his back and his chest held high. In that image, not only was his hair black, but that black hair was everywhere: it covered his chest and his flat belly, and also--this didn't show in the photo, but I knew it--a good part of his back. For the operation, the nurses had shaved his chest and smeared a yellow liquid over it; these few days later, the hair began to grow again, but some of the pores were blocked. What I saw then was the inflamed vertical incision (an incision made not just with a scalpel, but also with a saw, although the severed bones were not visible), the same red as the two or three infected hair follicles, lifted in certain areas by the pressure of the wire with which the surgeons had closed the rupture in the sternum. At that moment I felt, without false empathy, that ineluctable pain, the puncture of the wire--a foreign body--beneath the damaged skin. Nevertheless I washed him; all those days, more successfully each time, I kept washing him. With one hand I held his arms up in the air, lifting them by the elbow, for they were incapable of lifting themselves; with the other I washed the straight, smelly hairs in his armpits. The most difficult part was rinsing the area. At first I tried to do it by cupping my hands, but all the water spilled out before it touched my father's skin, and I felt like an inexpert painter trying to paint a ceiling. Then I started using a sponge, slower but also gentler. My father, who remained silent during the whole process, out of reserve or due to the unpleasantness of the situation, one day finally asked me to put a bit of deodorant on him, please, cut out this degrading procedure, please, and get him back to bed, please, and let's pray I wouldn't have to wash even more private parts.

Every day, Sara asked him
if he'd moved his bowels
. (I don't know what shook me more the first time I heard her say it: the adolescent euphemism or the intimacy that the question, in spite of the euphemism, revealed.) Every day, I took charge of the simvastatin and the baby aspirin, ridiculous names like those of all medicines, and after a while began to administer the injections as well. Once a day I lifted his pajama top and pinched the loose flesh of his waist with one hand and stuck the hypodermic into it with the other. The needle disappearing into the skin, my father's shouts, my own trembling pulse--the thumb pressing the dense liquid out of the syringe (into the flesh)--all that became shockingly habitual, because the routine of inflicting pain cannot be comfortable for anyone. The injections had to be given for a week; during this time I stayed with him. I used to do it in the mornings, after my father woke up, but before that I was careful to talk to him about something, anything, for half an hour, so his day wouldn't start with a needle. A physiotherapist came mid-morning and made him sit up in bed, facing her, and imitate her movements, at first as if they were playing a mirroring game and later as if the woman were, in fact, in charge of transmitting to the patient knowledge that is innate and instinctive to everybody else and not learned in morning classes: how to raise an arm, how to straighten one's torso, how to make a pair of legs take you to the bathroom. Gradually I came to know that her name was Angelina, that she was from Medellin but had come to live in Bogota after completing her studies, and that she was over forty but under fifty ("Us, the ones on the fourth floor," she said once). I would have liked to ask her why, at her age, she wasn't married, but I was afraid she'd be offended, because the day of the first session she'd entered the apartment the way a bull enters a ring, demonstrating at once that she was here to do her work and that she didn't have time to look or any desire to be looked at, even though she wore brightly colored blouses with buttons that seemed like mother-of-pearl and even though later it didn't seem to matter too much to her if her breasts--if those buttons straining over her breasts--brushed my father's back during the massage, or if drops fell onto the faded sheet, onto the pillow from her freshly washed, very black hair.

It was one of those days, after Angelina had said good-bye until the following morning (she only had a couple more days of work with my father and his problematic muscles), that we talked about what happened after his August 6 speech. My father was learning to move again at the same time as he learned to talk to me. Having me as an interlocutor, he discovered, implied another way of speaking, different, daring, radically risky, because his way of addressing me had always been dominated by irony or omission, those strategies of protection or concealment, and now he realized he was able to look me in the eye and speak direct, clear,
literal
sentences. If the heart-attack scare and the operation were the prerequisites for this dialogue, I thought, then I should bless the anterior descending, raise an altar to its incriminating catheterization. That's how we started, without any warning, to talk about what had happened three years before. "I want you to forget what I said," said my father. "I want you to forget what I wrote. I'm not good at asking things like this, but that's how it is. I want you to erase my comments from your head, because what's just happened to me is special, a second chance, Gabriel. They gave me a second chance, not everyone gets so lucky, and this time I want to carry on as if I hadn't published that review, as if I hadn't actually gone as far as doing that cowardly thing I did to us." He turned over, heavy and clumsy and solemn like a warship changing direction. "Of course, it may be that those things can't be corrected, that the thing about a second chance is a pure lie, one of those things they invent to deceive the unwary. That had occurred to me; I'm not that much of an idiot. But I don't want to admit it, Gabriel, and no one can force me to; being mistaken is still one of our inalienable rights. That's how it has to be, at least if you're going to stand a chance of staying reasonably sane. Can you imagine? Can you imagine if you couldn't take back anything you said? No, it's unthinkable, I don't believe anyone could stand it. I'd take the hemlock or commit suicide in Kalavria, or any of those elegant Pan-hellenic martyrdoms." I saw him smile halfheartedly.

"Does it hurt?"

"Of course it does. But the pain is good. It keeps me aware, makes me notice things."

"What do you have to notice?"

"That I'm alive again, Gabriel. That I still have things to do around here."

"You have to recover," I said. "Then there'll be time to do whatever you want, but first you have to get out of that bed. That alone is going to take you a few months."

"How many?"

"As many as it takes. You're not telling me that now you're in a hurry."

"No, no hurry, not at all," said my father. "But it's really strange, don't you think? Now that you mention it, it seems strange. It's as if it's been given to me whole."

"What has?"

"This second life."

Six months later, when my father was dead and had been cremated in the furnace of the Jardines de Paz, I remembered the atmosphere of those days as if within them were encoded all that would come afterward. When my father spoke to me about the things he had to do, I suddenly noticed he was weeping, and his tears--clinical and predictable--took me by surprise, as if they hadn't been forecast in sufficient detail by the doctors. "For him it'll be as if he'd been dead," Dr. Raskovsky had said, rather condescendingly. "He might get depressed, might not want to have the curtains open, like a child. All this is normal, the most normal thing in the world." Well, it wasn't; a weeping father almost never is. At that moment I didn't know it, but that weeping would recur several times during the days of his convalescence; it stopped shortly afterward, and in the next six months (six months that were like a premature and unsuccessful rebirth, six months that passed between the day of the operation and the day my father traveled to Medellin, six months that covered the recuperation, the beginning of the second life, and its consequences) it never happened again. But the image of my father weeping has remained irremediably associated with his desire to correct old words, and although I cannot prove that was the exact reason--I haven't been able to interrogate him for this book, and I've had to rely on other informers--I feel that it was at that moment my father thought for the first time what he thought in such detail and with such bad luck later:
This is my chance
. His chance to correct errors, to rectify faults, to ask for forgiveness, because he'd been granted a second life, and the second life, as everyone knows, always comes with the inconvenient obligation to correct the first one.

His errors and their corrections happened like this:

In 1988, as soon as I received my copies of
A Life in Exile
, I took one to my father; I left it with the doorman, and sat down to wait for a call or an old-fashioned, solemn, and perhaps moving letter. When neither the letter nor the phone call arrived, I began to wonder if the doorman had misplaced the package; but before I had time to pass by the building and find out, rumors of my father's comments began to reach me.

Were they really as unpredictable as they seemed to me? Or was it true, as I sometimes thought over the following years, that anybody would have seen them coming by simply taking off the blindfold of family relations? The prophet's kit--the tools of prediction--was within my reach. My decision to write about current things had always elicited from my father inoffensive sarcasm, which nevertheless made me feel uncomfortable; nothing caused him as much mistrust as someone concerned with things contemporary: spoken by him, the word sounded like an insult. He preferred to talk about Cicero and Herodotus; actuality seemed like a suspect practice, almost infantile, and if he didn't perpetrate his opinions in public it was out of a sort of secret shame, or rather to avoid a situation where he'd feel obliged to admit that he, too, had read, at the time,
All the President's Men
. But none of that allowed me to foresee his displeasure. The first of his comments, or the first, at least, that I heard of, my father made openly enough to hurt me: he didn't choose a meeting of colleagues, or even a corridor chat, but waited till he found himself in front of the whole group who attended his seminars; and he didn't even choose his own epigram (he did have some quite venomous ones) but preferred to plagiarize an eighteenth-century Englishman.

"This little book is both very original and very good," he said. "But the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good."

As had to happen, and as he perhaps hoped would happen, one of the people at the seminar repeated the comment, and the chain of breaches of confidence, which in Colombia is so efficient when it comes to damaging someone, soon reached an acquaintance of mine. Then, with the false and petty compassion common to those who inform on others, that acquaintance, a court reporter on
El Siglo
, very aware of the little respect I deserved, reproduced the phrase for me, enunciating like a good actor and openly studying my face for reactions. The first thing I imagined was my father's roar of laughter, his head thrown back like a neighing horse, his baritone voice resounding through the auditorium and the offices, capable of penetrating closed wooden doors; that laugh and the stump of his right hand looking for a pocket were the signs of his victory, and could be seen every time he made a good joke, along with his eyelids squeezed shut and, most of all, the disdain, the talented disdain. Like a vulture, my father could find his opponent's weak spot at a glance, the emptiness of his rhetoric and personal insecurities, and pounce on them; the unexpected thing was that he'd use that talent against me, although sometimes he wasn't wrong in his complaints. "The photos. The photos are the most irritating. Actors from soap operas and folk singers belong in magazines," he used to say to anyone who'd listen, "but a serious journalist? What the hell is a serious journalist doing in a mass-market magazine? Why do readers need to know what he looks like, if he wears glasses or not, if he's twenty or ninety years old? A country's in trouble when youth is a safe conduct, let alone a literary virtue. Have you read the reviews? The young journalist this, the young journalist that. Shit, is there no one in this country capable of saying whether he writes well or not?"