The Informers (19 page)

"He told me all that. But he didn't stop there. He told me about the first days. They'd been horrifying, he explained. Horrifying the first time the hotel administrator looked at him pityingly after having found out, and then, when everyone at the table must've known, horrifying the first time a letter arrived he didn't immediately recognize. He took it, sure it would be from Margarita, and it turned out to be from the Spanish Embassy, in charge of German assets during those years. They were notifying him of the state of his reserves. When he looked up he noticed that everyone else was watching him, not trying to hide it at all. They'd all stopped playing bridge or reading the paper and were watching him; they wanted to know if Margarita had come back, too. Or rather they knew the letter wasn't from Margarita and they wanted to see poor Konrad's face. 'They were making fun of me. They were laughing behind my back.' Most of the Germans that were held there were people with money, and many could allow themselves the luxury of buying a house in the village so their families could live nearby. For them things were easier. With a permit, which wasn't so difficult to obtain, they could go and sleep in their houses. They had family. They had wives, they had children. Konrad didn't have any of that anymore. 'They all looked at me with pity but inside they were laughing, they were killing themselves laughing, and I'm sure the laughter exploded as soon as I went to my room. The people in this place are the most despicable I've ever had the misfortune to know. Even the Italians, Sarita, even the Italians laugh at me. My disgrace is better than a book for them, I'm their melodrama, I keep them entertained. I'm alone here, Sarita, I don't have anybody.' Everything he would have liked to say to the Committee, to the U.S. ambassador, he said to me in the Sabaneta. And not many could endure that. There was Konrad spewing out his personal tragedy, and there's nothing less bearable than hearing disgraces one hasn't requested. Until I stood up and said, 'I'm sorry, Herr Konrad, I can't stay any longer. I'm going to find my father. We have to go back to Bogota and then on to Duitama. Think of the trip we have ahead of us. I've got work to do, you see, you know what a hotel's like,' and I left, I cut him off in midsentence and I left. It wasn't true that we were going to go back at that time, of course. We were planning to stay the night in a guesthouse in Fusagasuga that a local opportunist had opened for precisely that purpose, because there were lots of families who came from Bogota to see their fathers. We had reserved a room, we were going to return to the Sabaneta the next morning to say good-bye to the old man, but I begged that we should go straight back to Bogota. 'What an ill-mannered girl,' my father said, but I thought something worse: what a cynical girl. I had already started turning that way. Well, cynical and all, I insisted so much that in the end that's what we did. We didn't see Konrad again. After that day, I never visited him again. My father went a couple more times, but I refused. I'm quite sure I couldn't have stood it.

"The worst thing, as you can imagine, is that the old man wasn't exaggerating. Seeing him was pathetic because of his lack of courage, but all that was happening to him was real, it wasn't invented. By the time the war ended and the inmates came out of the Hotel Sabaneta, old Konrad was alone. Without Margarita, of course, and to all intents and purposes without Enrique, who wasted no time in setting up his own place, as if he'd waited his whole life to get rid of his parents. Konrad found that life had left him behind. When he got out, he couldn't sell the family home because it was still held in trust, and the house was eventually auctioned in mid-1946. The money never got to Konrad's pocket, obviously, but rather covered the expenses of his enforced vacation and also war damages, which the government claimed out of the Germans' accounts. I don't know how or when he met Josefina, but she obviously saved his life, or at least helped him postpone his death. Many of the interned left the country. Some returned to Germany, others went to Venezuela or Ecuador to do the same thing they'd been doing in Colombia but starting from scratch, and that made all the difference. Starting over again, no? That's what breaks people, the obligation to start all over again one more time. Konrad, for example, could not. He devoted himself to slowly dying over the course of a year and a half. . . . I can imagine it perfectly, lying with Josefina as if that woman were a shipwreck's raft, dividing the day between his opera records and coffee and brandy in any old cafe. Yes, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that Margarita did the right thing in leaving him. She died in Cali, in 1980, I think. She remarried, this time a Colombian, after Konrad's death. I think she had two children, a boy and a girl. A boy and a girl who are older than you and probably have their own children by now. Margarita, a grandmother, incredible. Maybe it's cruel to say, but look: What could she have done with that weakling of a husband? Could anyone have believed that Konrad might come out on top eventually? The lists stayed in effect for a year after the end of the war, and during that time Konrad fell to pieces. By the time they were abolished it was too late: the old man was already almost a beggar, but he was by no means the only one. There were those who survived the lists. I knew several. Some were in the Sabaneta, and of those a few really were Nazis. Others weren't even confined to the hotel but went broke the way the old man did. And many of them remade themselves. They never again had the life they'd had before the lists. They never got their money back, and even today they think about those losses. The old man was one of the ones who couldn't. He couldn't manage it. That's the way the world is, divided between those who can and those who can't. So don't talk to me about Margarita's responsibility or anything like that. Sure, she left her family behind, and sure, in some way the old man's suicide has something to do with her. But she managed to live, no? Or does a person get married in order to be a guardian of the weaker one? Margarita had a second life, as your father would say, and that one came out right. With children, with grandchildren. I suppose anybody would like that.

"Of course Margarita didn't come to Konrad's funeral. Understandable, no? After all that had happened, to have to deal with a suicide and a concubine . . .
Concubine
is a pretty word; it's a shame people don't use it anymore. Now they say
lover
and leave it at that.
Concubine, cohabitation
, they're pretty, don't you think? They're pretty sounds. Maybe that's why--people don't like that such a pretty word means such a thing.
Suicide
, on the other hand, isn't pretty.
Selbstmord
, in German, and I don't like that either. Sure, I say these things as if they're my ideas, when in reality it was your dad who made me appreciate it. We'd only just said good-bye to Josefina when he was already saying to me, '
Concubine
sounds better than
lover
, don't you think? I wonder why that is.' But he said it sadly. Not cold or distant, not at all; not indifferent to everything we'd found out that afternoon, old Konrad's terrible death, the idea of the pain he must have felt, all that . . . It made a very deep impression on me. He didn't deserve such a death, I'm quite sure of that, but who says what kind of death we deserve? How is that measured? Does it depend on the good you've done, on your merits, or on what you did wrong, your mistakes? Or is it a balance? You atheists have a really hard time on this one; that's why it's good to be a believer. The arguments I used to have with your dad about this. He always won, I don't need to tell you. For a long time he used to use Konrad as an example. 'The old man turned Catholic, and what good did it do him? You know thousands of Germans who converted in order to get along better in Colombia, to be more accepted by their wives and their mothers-in-law and their friends. And did it help them at all?' And I would say nothing, because it occurred to me, although I could never have proved it, that if old Konrad had remained a Protestant he would have committed suicide all the same. Not just that, he would have committed suicide
sooner
. I mean, it was his Protestant side that said, Take those pills, get yourself out of this mess. But who can prove that? And anyway, what good would it do, what damn difference would it make?

"That night, after talking to Josefina, we stayed at your dad's house, because it was too late by then even to think about getting back to Duitama. Your grandmother, wrapped in a black shawl as always, made up the bed in the guest room for me. She said hello and looked after me with that sad face that ghosts have in films, while Gabriel went upstairs and locked himself in his room, almost without a word. The house was in Chapinero, above Caracas Avenue. It was one of those two-story houses, with staircases covered in worn red carpeting tamped down with copper rods. I'm not going to say, Shame you never knew it, or anything like that, because that house gave me the creeps. The silliest things made me uncomfortable, like those copper rods and rings that held the carpet in place, or the parrot on the back patio who shouted 'Roberto, Roberto,' and no one knew who Roberto was or where the parrot had got hold of that name. In any case, that night I had a hard time getting to sleep, because I wasn't used to the noise of traffic either. What do you expect, I was a small-town girl; a city like Bogota was a terrible change for me. And in your grandmother's house it was as if everything were working against me, as if everything were hostile. All the furniture in my room was covered in sheets and you could still smell the dust. It was as if the whole house were in mourning, and we had just been talking to Josefina, and all that mixed together. . . . I don't know, I eventually got to sleep but it was very late. And when I woke up, your father had gone out and come back with the news that Enrique was not at home. 'What do you mean he's not there? Is he lost?' 'No. I mean he's gone. He left everything and went away. And no one knows where.' I asked him who told him and he got impatient. 'The policeman on his block, who heard from the girls who work for the Cancinos. What does it matter who told me? His father has just killed himself, his mother left a while ago, it seems logical that Enrique's gone, too. He wasn't going to stay in that house by himself.' 'But without saying good-bye.' 'Saying good-bye, saying good-bye. This isn't a cocktail party, Sara. Don't be so silly.'

"Then his bad mood passed and we were able to have breakfast in peace, without speaking but in peace, and before noon we caught the train at Sabana Station. It was a foul day, it rained the whole way home. It was raining in Bogota, raining on the way out of the station, raining when we arrived back in Duitama. And all the time I was thinking of reasons someone might have to go away like that, leave everything behind without even saying good-bye to their friends. I didn't say anything because your dad would've been at my throat; he was very upset, you could see that. In the train he pretended to sleep, but I looked at his closed eyes, and his eyelids were moving very quickly, trembling the way a person's eyelids tremble when they're very worried. Seeing him like that made me feel bad. I loved him like a brother then. Gabriel was like a brother to me, and we'd only known each other for about five years, but you see, I stayed at his house, he stayed at the hotel . . . always keeping up appearances, of course. I was a young lady with a reputation to take care of, et cetera. But rules were bent as far as they possibly could be, it seems to me. And that's because we were like brother and sister. In the train, when I saw he was pretending to sleep, I fell asleep myself. I leaned my head on his shoulder, closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew Gabriel was waking me up because we'd arrived in Duitama. He woke me up with a kiss on my hair, 'We're here, Sarita,' and I felt like crying, I suppose from so much stress, or from the contrast, no? Stress on one side, affection on the other. Or on one side worry for your father, who might have lost a friend forever, and on the other the way he had of taking care of me as if I had been the one who'd suffered a loss. Yes, I almost burst into tears. But I held them back. I've always been good at holding back tears, always, since I was a little girl. Papa made fun of me until he died of old age. He made fun of my pride, which wouldn't even allow me to look sad or angry in public, let alone cry. A woman crying in public has always seemed to me absolutely pathetic. Yes, sir, that's me: champion at suffering in silence.

"When we arrived at the hotel it was still raining, and the sky was so dark that all the lights were on though it was midafternoon. It was that typical gray sky of Boyaca, you feel like you could touch it if you stood on tiptoes, and the water kept falling as if something had given way up above. Your dad refused to share my umbrella. He let me walk ahead while he got soaked walking behind. I'm sure it had been raining all day there in Duitama, too, because the fountain was full to the brim; at any moment the water was going to spill over the edges. But it was pretty to see the rain hitting the water in the fountain. And even prettier if we were watching it from the dining room, nice and dry and drinking hot chocolate. Papa was there with a guest. He introduced us to him, saying he was Jose Maria Villarreal and that he was just leaving. I immediately knew who he was because Papa had spoken of him several times. "He's a
godo
to watch out for," he told me once, showing more respect than usual. They'd been seeing a lot of each other because they shared a sort of passion for Simon Bolivar, and Villarreal didn't seem to mind coming from Tunja once in a while to talk about the subject, believe it or not. We exchanged greetings with the
godo
to watch out for and sat down, Gabriel and I, to warm up our hands with a cup of hot chocolate by the glass door to the dining room. There was a fire in the grate, outside it was still pouring rain, and in the dining room it felt wonderful. Even my father seemed content seeing his friend to the door and probably talking about the Pantano de Vargas or one of those things. He was like a child with a new toy. Incredible, no? Incredible that we were such a short time away from disaster, Gabriel. I think about it and wonder why the world didn't stop at that moment. Who did we have to bribe to get the world to stay still just there, when we were all fine, when each of us seemed to have survived the things that life had thrown at us? Who should we have asked to pull those strings? Or were those strings worn out, too?