The Informers (9 page)

The Sunday that my father told Sara and me about Angelina, the physiotherapist, and what was going on with her, wasn't just any Sunday, because the final phase of the Advent season was just about to start, and so, while in the rest of Bogota Catholics got ready to sit down beside a nativity scene and read prayers from a pink book that was once given away free with any purchase in Los Tres Elefantes, Sara insisted we get her grandchildren's Christmas tree out of the cupboard and help her set it up in a corner of the living room. "This is what I get for being a liberal," she'd said to me once. "I just wanted to raise my children without religion of any kind, and look, they end up doing the same Christian nonsense as everyone else. When it comes down to it, I might as well have carried on with my Jewish nonsense, no? Mama didn't want me to marry the way I married: you'll end up converting, you'll lose your identity. I never believed her, and now look at me: I have to put the wretched tree up. If I don't do it now, there'll be no putting up with my sons later. These things are important, Mum. Traditions, symbols. Just excuses. What they want is to save themselves the lumberjack's job of setting up one of these nuisances." And my father and I, who after my mother's death had gradually left aside these practices of trees and donkeys and oxen and mirrors that simulate lakes and moss that simulates fields and plastic babies lying on fake hay, we who had developed together an affectionate indifference toward all the paraphernalia of Christmas in Bogota, suddenly found ourselves kneeling on the carpet, putting the branches of a tree into order by size, and spreading out the instruction page across our knees. It wasn't an easy job and the amount of irony it brought with it wasn't inconsiderable either, and maybe that's why we did it with less reticence than might have been expected, along the lines of
Who would have imagined
or
If so-and-so could see us now
. Sara had started talking about her grandchildren. That was an area my book hadn't touched on, because it was inaccessible; no matter how hard Sara tried, she could never explain the distance between her own German childhood and that of her grandchildren. If her sons were strangers, her grandchildren were doubly so, people as far removed from Emmerich, and from the Emmerich synagogue, as it was possible to be. "How old is the youngest?" I asked.

"Fourteen. Thirteen. Around there."

"Fourteen," I repeated. "Same age as you when you arrived."

Sara thought for a moment; she seemed not to have noticed that before. "Exactly," she said, but then she fell silent, organizing with her aged hands the green and yellow and red spheres of fragile glass, frosted or shiny, opaque or clear, which she was going to hang on the tree when my father and I had finished it. "Other people look at their children and see themselves in them," she said. "Your dad sees himself in you, he'll see himself in your children. That'll never happen to me: we're different. I don't know if it matters."

"Well, there's genetics as well," said my father.

"How so?"

"They look like you, and, unfortunately for them, that's definitive."

That afternoon, my father seemed invulnerable to the traces of his past. He remembered the words they'd be praying all over the place that week, those verses that had always made him burst out laughing:
O King of the Gentiles and their desired One / O Emmanuel, our Protector / O Holy One of Israel / Shepherd of Thy Flock
. He recited them (for he knew them by heart, all the verses of all the days of the novena, and some of the prayers as well) and attached a branch to the tree trunk, and then he recited another one and picked up another branch and spun it round to see where it fit. And all the time he seemed happy, as if these holidays, to which he'd always been immune, suddenly affected him. And then he confirmed the feeling I'd had earlier: one of the consequences of the second life was a brutal nostalgia, the notion, so very democratic, so universally accessible and at the same time so surprising, of time lost, even though we might have suffered more in that time than in the present. I knew it thanks to my recordings, which at that moment and in that instant seemed to justify every second I'd invested in that curious fetish: conserving other people's voices.

Another of those Sundays I'd tactlessly brought to Sara's house one of those cassettes that I guarded like a state secret. After we'd poured our coffee, I asked them to sit round the sound system and keep quiet, and in the open space that served as a living room, the three of us listened to Sara talking about their hotel. "The war was in the hotel, we carried it in our pockets," we heard her say. "I can't tell you all the things I saw, because there are people who are still alive, and I'm no informer; I don't want to destroy reputations or dig up anything that someone wants to keep buried. But if I could, if we were alone in the world, you and I, in this house, if a bomb had fallen and Colombia no longer existed and only we existed, and you asked me what went on, I could tell you everything. . . . Later you'd be sorry you knew. One gets contaminated by this kind of knowledge, Gabriel; I don't know how better to tell you, but that's how it is. If they'd asked me, I would have said, I prefer to close my eyes, not to see those things. But of course, no one asked me. Who would have had the decency? In spite of my father being the owner of the hotel, no? Because if there was any logic in the world, an angel of the Annunciation should have appeared in the Nueva Europa and warned my father that this would happen, that that would happen. No, not logic: justice. A warning would have been fair at the very least, but of course one can't count on such things, that clause is not in the contract. The contracts are written up there and you sign them without complaint, and later things happen and who do you talk to if you're not satisfied. . . . Anyway, I can't tell you everything, but I can tell you about the hotel, about the hotel and the war and the effects on my life, because one is also the spaces where one has grown up.

"You ask me if I regret anything. Everybody regrets something, don't they? But you ask and right there I get the image of the face of old lady Lehder in my head. She was one of the Germans from Mompos. That's what we called the German Nazis in Mompos. Some of them had been regular clients of the hotel before 1940; several of them knew Eduardo Santos. Much better than I did, as well. That's why it was so strange, Gabriel. That's why it was so surprising that woman should come looking for me. It was the beginning of 1945. She came to find me to ask me to intercede on behalf of her husband. That's how she said it, it's not my fault, she'd said
intercede on his behalf
. Herr Lehder had just been confined to the Hotel Sabaneta. No, I refuse to speak of a 'concentration camp'; language can't play those tricks on us. One thing is one thing and another thing is something else. The thing is that Frau Lehder was living alone in her house in Mompos, her servants had left, she'd had her electricity cut off. And her husband was in the Sabaneta. That's why she came to see me, to ask for help. I told her to go away, maybe more politely, but that's what I said to her. And she told me about her son in the Wehrmacht, a young man of your age, she said to me, he's just a boy, he fought at Leningrad until he was wounded. I just want to be allowed to listen to the radio, to know if anyone has news of my son, whether he froze to death in Leningrad, Fraulein Guterman. It seems the soldiers have to urinate in their trousers to feel a little bit of warmth. I said no. I didn't even let her sit down to listen to the radio. Later I heard that the Lehders had found a lawyer friend in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and so they were able to return to Berlin. In any case, I remember that: having refused to let old lady Lehder sit down by the radio and see if anyone mentioned her little soldier. I didn't give a damn about the little soldier or about old lady Lehder. But that wasn't the worst. The worst thing is that even today I wouldn't help her. You ask me if I regret anything and I think about that, but the way to fix it, today, would be for it not to have happened. There's no other way. Because if it happened again, I'd do the same. Yes, I wouldn't think twice. It's terrible, but that's how it is."

The power of those recordings. That afternoon, listening to them, my father aged twenty years: maybe he would have thought, as I was thinking, that Sara Guterman's every sentence evoked the treachery of which he'd been the victim, every sentence contained it but also managed to empty it of meaning, for neither Sara nor I could grasp his experience, feel what he'd felt as a young man. He never asked us to turn the machine off, or to change the cassette, nor did he stand up with some excuse to escape to the bathroom or the kitchen. He silently endured that recording, which must have been at the very least uncomfortable and sometimes even painful, because it brought back to life for him the circumstances that he'd kept secret for such a long time and to which, under the spur of my book, he had alluded in public, to the unease (and sometimes admiration) of his students; he endured it as he'd endured the catheter, with his eyes wide open and fixed on the hanging lamp, the scrawny wire, the metallic shade. When the first side finished and I asked if they wanted me to turn it over, he said no, no thanks, why didn't we put on a little music and chat for a while, Gabriel; wasn't it better to take advantage of these moments to talk? His voice, thin and raspy as a paper kite, was barely audible; in a single sentence, my father managed to complain, draw attention to himself like a badly brought-up teenager, and cast the authority of his tantrums over the atmosphere: if there were things he preferred to forget, it was incomprehensible and even obscene that others might want to remember them. And for the rest of the afternoon, the company of that bitter and pale old man, which would have annoyed me in a stranger, struck me as pitiful and pathetic. That's what I discovered that afternoon: my father was incapable of wrestling with the facts of his own life; the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in the teeth. Those conversations recorded five years earlier (about things that had happened half a century ago) damaged him from within and sucked at his blood, left him as exhausted as if he'd just come out of the operating room.

But on the afternoon I'm talking about, my father was back to being the force he used to be. His mind was again functioning as it had done at the height of his powers, and the hypothesis of the second chance seemed as much in evidence as if there were a horse in the room. I remembered the recorded words, raised my head to look at the people with whom I was sharing a meal--my family--and thought what always seems incredible:
This happened to you two
. This, which happened half a century ago, happened to you, and you're still alive, acting as tangible testimony to events and circumstances that will perhaps die when you die, as if you were the last human beings able to dance an Andean folk dance that no one else knows, or as if you knew by heart the words to a song that had never been written down and will be lost to the world when you two forget it. And in what physical state did these memory receptacles live? How deteriorated were they, how much time did the world have to try to extract their knowledge? Every movement, every word from my father was like a little banner saying:
Don't worry, everybody calm down, nothing's happened here
. And Sara, it seemed, thought the same.

"The truth is you've come out as good as new," Sara said to my father. "I wonder if I should have one of those things, too."

"No such thing as reincarnation?" my father said. "No karma? No one's going to convince me of that anymore, my dear; from here on in I declare myself a Hindu."

"I can't stand this," said Sara. "Now I look older next to you."

It was a slight exaggeration, of course, because Sara, with her loose linen slacks and a white shirt that came down to her knees, still looked solid, as though she'd been let off half her years for good behavior. She seemed to have settled into a comfortable solitude, seemed resigned to the days passing her by and content to look up, with something that might be called submission but also habit, to watch them go. Her face underlined the years she'd lived with no more responsibility than her own sustenance. Her earlobes were pierced, but she wore no earrings; she used bifocals for reading, the frames gold and discreet, the lenses a coppery color. Her body, it seemed to me, had lived at a different rhythm: it didn't show the marks of time, the tiredness of the skin; it didn't show the tensions, of course, or the way pain marks people's faces, scratches their eyes and forces them to wear glasses, contorts the corners of mouths and scores their necks like a plow. Or was it perhaps more precise to speak of memory: Sara's body accumulated time, but had no memory. Sara kept her memory apart: in boxes and files and photographs, and in the cassettes of which I was the custodian, that seemed to absorb Sara's history and at the same time withdraw it from her body. The cassettes of Dorian Guterman. The files of Sara Gray.

As for him, it was true that over these last six months his transformation had been remarkable. I knew that one of the immediate consequences of the operation was a sudden invasion of oxygen into an unaccustomed heart, and therefore levels of energy the patient had forgotten existed, but seeing him through the eyes of our hostess, watching him as his contemporary watched him, I thought that yes, the cliche was true, my father had come out
as good as new
. Over the last few months I would have forgotten if not for the image of the scar blazoned across his chest, that corporeal memorandum, and the restrictions imposed after the operation, still in effect--although only my father remained aware of those private disciplines--which surfaced at lunch and dinner, just as they came up that afternoon, while we ate
ajiaco
in that Christmassy apartment with a view of Monserrate.

"And what are you going to do now?" said Sara. "What are you going to do with your new life?"

"For the moment, not count my chickens. Or rather count them, but very quietly. I have to take good care of myself just to stay as I am. The diet is very strict but I have to stick to it. It's pretty good, though, being twenty again."