The Informers (7 page)

But something told me it wasn't really the photos that bothered him, that his objections ran deeper. I had touched something sacred in his life, I thought at that moment, a sort of private totem: Sara. I had got involved with Sara, and that, due to rules I hadn't managed to figure out (that is, due to rules of a game that no one had explained to me: this became the most useful metaphor when thinking about my father's reactions to my book), was unacceptable. "Is that it?" I asked Sara one day. "Are you a taboo subject, an X-rated film? Why didn't you warn me?" "Don't be silly, Gabriel," she said, as if waving away a fly. "You're acting like you don't know him. You're acting like you don't know how he gets when an apostrophe goes missing." It wasn't impossible that she was right, of course, but I wasn't satisfied (there are lots of things missing in my book, but the apostrophes are all present and accounted for).
Dear Sara
, I wrote on a piece of notebook paper that I put into an airmail envelope, because it was the only one I could find, and sent by local post, instead of giving it to her myself.
If you're as surprised as I am by my dad's attitude, I'd like to discuss the matter with you. If you're less surprised, then I'd like to even more. In other words: after all our interviews, there is one question I forgot to ask. Why, in two hundred pages of information, does my father never appear? Answer it, please, in no more than thirty lines. Thanks
. Sara replied by return of post (that's to say, her envelope reached me in three days). When I opened the envelope, I found one of her visiting cards.
Yes, he does. Page 101, lines 14 to 23. And since you allowed me 30, you owe me 21
. I found the book, looked up the page, and read:

It wasn't just learning a language. It was buying rice and cooking it, but also knowing what to do if someone fell ill; how to react if someone insulted you, to keep it from happening again, but also to know how far you could go in insulting them back. If Peter Guterman was called a "Polack shit," it was necessary to know the implications of the phrase. Or, as a friend of the Guterman family said, "where the geographical error ended and the scatological one began."

Beyond the fact that it was true (yes, there was my father, present only with his Cheshire-cat grin), it was obvious that Sara was not prepared to take me seriously. That was when I decided to go to the source, to take the offended party by surprise: I'd attend his seminar unannounced the following day, just as I had so many times when I was still a student, then invite him for a drink afterward at the Hotel Tequendama to talk about the book face to face and, if necessary, with the gloves off. And there I was the next day, punctually seated in the back row, by the translucent windows, by the yellow light that reflected off the International Center.

But the class ended without me daring to speak to him.

I went back the next day, and the next, and the next as well. I didn't speak to him. I couldn't speak to him.

Nine days went by, nine days of clandestine presence in my father's classroom, before something (not my will, obviously) broke the inertia of the situation. By then the rest of the students had become used to my being there; they put up with me, without recognizing me, the way initiates put up with the presence of a dilettante. That day, as far as I remember, there were fewer people than on other occasions. It seemed obvious, though, that fewer of them were current students and more were recent graduates, a collage of smooth faces with a smattering of ties, the odd briefcase, a few attentive or mature expressions. The light of the lecture hall had always been insufficient, but that day one of the fluorescent tubes flickered till it went out just after my father settled his overcoat on the back of his chair. So, in the gloomy half-light of pale neon, all the faces had bags under their eyes, including the professor's; some faces (not the professor's) yawned. One of the students, the nape of whose neck would serve as my landscape during the class, caught my attention, and it took a moment to understand why: on top of his desk was a book, and I'm sure I choked--though nobody noticed--when I realized it was mine. (The title, more than legible, was insolent; my own name seemed to be shouting at me from the too colorful rectangle of the cover.) The air was a mixture of chalk dust and accumulated sweat--the sweat of so many people listening to so many lectures all day long--my father was far away, with his good hand fingering the buttonholes of his jacket in one of his Napoleonic gestures. He greeted the room in two words. He didn't need any more to generate a wave of terrified silence, to paralyze the chairs and open all eyes.

He began the class talking about one of his favorite speeches: not only was "On the Crown" Demosthenes' best speech, it was also a revolutionary text, although that adjective is applied to other things these days, a text that had changed the vocation of public speaking as much as gunpowder had changed warfare. My father told how he'd learned it by heart when he was very young--a brief autobiographical interlude, not at all usual in this man who jealously guarded his privacy, but nothing too surprising; or that's what I thought, at least, under the strange gloom of that afternoon--and he said the best way to memorize someone else's words was to get a job far away from where you lived, as he did when he was twenty, taking advantage of simultaneous transport and oil workers' strikes, accepting a three-month job for eighty-five pesos a month, driving a fuel tanker between the Troco plants in Barrancabermeja and the buyers in Bogota. It was an anecdote that I'd already heard on several occasions; when I was a teenager, the tale had conjured up legendary images of the open road, but there was something obscene or exhibitionist in its public retelling. "On those trips I learned more than one important text by heart," he said. "I spent many hours on the road, and the assistant I'd been assigned was the closest thing to a mute I've ever met. But he wasn't an impoverished student like me, or even a miner, but the son of the truck's owner, perfectly useless, he did nothing but listen to me when he wasn't asleep. Anyway, driving a truck full of gasoline, I learned a good part of 'On the Crown,' a very particular speech, because it's the speech of a man whose political career has failed, and who finds himself at the end of his life forced to defend himself. And without wanting to, which is worse. Only because one of his political allies decided to nominate him for a prize, while another, an enemy, a certain Aeschines, opposed it. That was the situation. Demosthenes, poor guy, hadn't even wanted to be decorated. And he was faced with this terrible task--impossible for anyone, of course, except the greatest. Any senator would have been daunted. Aeschines himself would have run away in fright. Convincing the public of the nobility of one's own errors, justifying disasters one is responsible for, apologizing for a life that one might know to be mistaken, is that not the most difficult thing in the world? Did Demosthenes not deserve the crown for the mere fact of examining his past and subjecting it to trial?" My father took a smooth, perfect, luminous square out of his breast pocket, a neon handkerchief, and dried his forehead, not wiping it but with delicate little pats.

I was pleased to see he didn't seem bothered by the sustained murmuring of movement: the chairs against the floor, the rustle of clothing, papers torn or crumpled up. His voice, perhaps, prevailed over those trivial distractions, and also his figure. He was elegant without being solemn, firm without being authoritarian, and that was plain to see; much more so, in fact, than I was. My father had not noticed my presence. He hadn't pointed me out like he had on other occasions; he looked straight ahead at a point somewhere above my head, on the wall or out of the window. "I see we have a guest today." "I'm going to take the opportunity to introduce someone." He said none of that; then, while I listened to him explain how Demosthenes invoked the gods to begin his speech--"the intention is to create an almost religious atmosphere that will influence the state of those who are listening to him, because he should be judged by gods, not by men"--I had the unequivocal sensation of invisibility. I had stopped existing in that precise moment; I, Gabriel Santoro the younger, had just evaporated from that date in history (which I no longer remember) and from that precise place, the lecture hall of the Supreme Court of Justice, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. I saw myself suddenly tangled in that misunderstanding: maybe he hadn't seen me (after all, it was dark and I was in the last row); maybe he'd chosen to ignore me, and it wasn't possible to make myself noticed without looking ridiculous and, even worse, without interrupting the class. But I had to risk it, I thought; at that moment, knowing whether my father was ignoring me on purpose monopolized my attention, my decimated intelligence. And when I was about to ask him something, anything--why did Demosthenes insult Aeschines so brutally and call his father a slave, or why did he begin speaking, for no reason, of the ancient battles of Marathon and Salamis--when I was about to break with these questions the spell of invisibility or of nonexistence, my father had again begun to talk of other times, the times of his youth, when speaking was important and what someone said could change someone else's life, and only I knew his words were for me, that they searched me out and chased me with the relentlessness of a guided missile. Professor Santoro was speaking to me through a filter: the students were listening to him unaware that my father was using them the way a ventriloquist uses a dummy. "None of you have felt that terrible power, the power to finish someone off. I've always wanted to know what it felt like. Back then we all had that power, but we didn't all know that we had it. Only some used it. There were thousands, of course: thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed. But those thousands of informers were just a part, a tiny fraction of the people who could have informed if they'd wanted to. How do I know? I know because the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are the majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment, or, at least, of resentment according to Nietzsche: the hatred the naturally weak feel for the naturally strong." Notebooks opened, students made a note of the reference; one beside me underlined
Federico Nietzsche
twice, with the first name in Spanish. "I don't remember when I heard of the first case of justified denunciation. On the other hand, I clearly remember an Italian who dressed in mourning for a funeral, and was then included on the blacklist for wearing the uniform of Fascism. But I have not come here to talk of these cases but to keep quiet. I have not come to talk of my experience. I have not come to talk about the enormous error, about the misunderstanding, about how my family and I suffered for that error, that misunderstanding. The moment when my life was impounded: I have not come to talk about that. My grant suspended, my father's pension turned off like a water tap, those many months in which my mother had nothing to live on: I have not come to talk about that. I can tell you perhaps that my work as a truck driver enabled me to carry on my studies. I can tell you that Demosthenes, the great Demosthenes, enabled me to carry on my life. But I have not come to break the silence. I have not come to break the pact. I have not come to make cheap accusations, nor to set myself up as a victim of history, nor to list the many ways that life in Colombia can ruin people. A joke made at the wrong moment in front of the wrong people? I'm not going to talk about that. The inclusion of my name on that inquisitors' document? I'm not going to give details, I'm not going to delve into the subject, because that is not my intention. I have spent several years now teaching people to speak, and today I want to speak to you about what is not said, what is beyond the tale, the account, the reference. I cannot prevent other people from speaking if they believe it useful or necessary. So I shall not speak out against the parasites, those creatures who use the experience of those of us who have preferred not to speak for their own ends. I shall not speak of those second-rate writers, many of whom had not even been born when the war ended, who now go around talking about the war and about the people who suffered during the war. They do not know the courage of those who have preferred not to speak: they'll not learn of it from me. They do not know that it takes strength not to make use of one's own suffering: they'll not learn it from me. They especially do not know that making use of others is one of the lowest occupations in humanity. No, no, they'll not learn it from me. The things they do not know they'll have to learn on their own. Today I have come to keep quiet and protect the silence of those who have kept it. I shall not speak. . . ." And, in fact, he didn't speak. He didn't speak of one title in particular, or of one author; but the system of ventriloquism he'd installed in his lecture hall had suddenly transformed into a searchlight, and the violence of that dazzling beam fell on me. The accusations of the ventriloquist-searchlight had taken me by surprise, so much so that my head overlooked the revelations about my father's past--a persecuted man, a victim of unjust accusations as the result of an unimportant joke, a frivolous comment, an innocent bit of sarcasm, the content of which had already begun to take various forms in my head--and concentrated on the possible defense of my right to ask questions and, of course, Sara Guterman's right to answer them. But the auditorium was not the most conducive setting for that debate, so I started to consider the best way to escape (the way to do so without calling attention to myself, or the way to do so by calling attention but not revealing my identity to the rest of the audience, without demolishing what little dignity I had left), when my father grabbed his overcoat with a slightly clumsy movement and the lining of his sleeve got caught on the back of the chair, which crashed onto the wooden floor with an angry reverberation. Only then did I understand that the controlled tone and measured surface of my father's words concealed, or at least masked, an interior disorder, and for the first time in my life I associated the notion of recklessness with my father's behavior. But he had already left. The class was over.