The Informers (22 page)

I would have liked to have known then what I later found out. Nothing new, nothing original: it happens to us all, and it happens all the time. To understand that little piece of theater, the fall from grace of a semipublic figure, the disenchanted physiotherapist's impromptu, I would first have to understand other things, and those things, as often happens, would only arrive later, when they were less useful or less compelling, because life is not as orderly as it seems in a book. Now that I know what I know, my question seems almost naive. The reasons Angelina had for doing what she was doing were no different, no more elegant or subtle or bookish or sophisticated than anyone else's, by which I mean to say that her motivations responded to the same concerns we all have, no matter how elegant and subtle and sophisticated we consider ourselves. My formulation had been,
Why was she doing this to my father?
but I could have asked, simply,
Why was she doing this?
She was doing it because a man (an anonymous man, whichever; if it hadn't been my father, it would have been whoever took his place) came to embody for her everything in her life that was dreadful and odious, and she wanted revenge. She was doing it out of revenge, a posthumous revenge, the benefit of which only Angelina could perceive. She was doing it because my father condensed, involuntarily, every little tragedy Angelina had suffered in her life. How do I know? I know because she told me herself. She gave me the information, and I, out of some sort of already inevitable addiction, agreed to receive it.

But first I had to put up with more blows: these came from the screen, from the interviewer and the interviewee. I have reconstructed them as follows.

Was she aware of Gabriel Santoro's reputation?

No. Well, when Angelina met him, Gabriel was tucked up in bed like a baby, and that doesn't enhance anybody's appearance, even the president would look diminished and common reduced to pajamas and bedclothes. Angelina knew, however (or rather in time she gradually came to know), that her patient was a very cultured person, but cultured in a good way, able to explain anything with great patience. With her, in any case, he had a lot of patience: he would explain things to her two or three times if necessary, and in this Angelina saw the mark of a good teacher. Of course, he had already retired when they met, but one never stops being a teacher, or at least that's what he said. But prestige, local fame, she'd only found out about all that after he died. Gabriel didn't talk about those things; when they spent a whole evening together in his apartment, for example, Angelina would snatch up those prizes they'd given him one by one and ask him for explanations. And what's this one for? And this one? That's how she found out about the Capitolio speech, that's how she heard about all those strange things Gabriel said about Bogota. That's how she found out who Plato was and that Bogota was four hundred and fifty years old. That's how she found out many people had thought that speech was very good and that Gabriel could have been a very important judge if he'd accepted the offers. Anyway, that didn't mean he was an important person.

But she did know that Santoro was going to be decorated?

Yes, but that didn't mean much to her. She didn't know what sorts of people got decorated, or why. For her, the medal was something that happened at his funeral, one more ritual, something false that everybody agreed to take as true. Just like the things the priest said.

How did they get romantically involved?

The same way anybody did. They were both very lonely people, and lonely people are interested in other lonely people and try to see if, with other lonely people, they can be less lonely. It's very simple. Gabriel was a very simple person, when all was said and done. He was interested in the same things everybody was interested in: being recognized for what he'd done well, being forgiven for what he'd done wrong, and being loved. Yes, that most of all, being loved.

How did she find out about what he'd done in his youth?

He told her all about it himself. But that was in Medellin already, when everything seemed to be going well, when it didn't seem likely that telling her old stories could affect the relationship they had. And it did affect her, of course, although right now Angelina couldn't explain things step-by-step, who can do that, see the chain of decisions that end up tipping a relationship into the shit? It had been like this: Angelina had invited him to her city, she wanted to show it to him, take him around, partly out of the impulse lovers get to entrust their old life to the other, and partly because Gabriel very rarely got out of Bogota, and in the last twenty years hadn't been farther than four hours away by car. In a cultured person, that seemed almost an aberration to Angelina. And one day, after they'd been going out together for several weeks--they said
going out
although the scene of their encounters was never outside but divided between his apartment and hers, two shoeboxes--Angelina came up with the idea and presented him with a gift-wrapped manila envelope adorned with a red fake-taffeta bow. In the envelope was a suggested itinerary: the thick stroke of a black felt-tip pen that roughly imitated the road, marked with perfect round points set out as a Tour of Colombia. Stage 1: Siberia traffic circle. Fill up the car and have a kiss. Stage 2: Medellin. I show you my parents' house and we have a kiss. Gabriel accepted immediately, asked his son if they could borrow his car, and one Friday in December, very early, they set off. At a prudent speed and making all the stops that Gabriel's health required, it took them less than ten hours to get there.

What happened in Medellin?

At first everything was going fine, with no problems. Gabriel insisted they stay in a hotel, as long as it wasn't too expensive--after all, what good was his pension if he couldn't treat them to a bit of luxury every once in a while--and the first night they crossed the street and ate dinner in a tourist restaurant decked out like a mule drivers' canteen: consciously down-to-earth and chaotic. The next day they crossed the city to look for the house Angelina had left at the age of eighteen, and found, on the first floor, where the living room used to be, a shop selling woolen stockings, and on the second, where the room she'd shared with her brother had been, a secondhand clothing storeroom. There were three little alleyways formed by long aluminum tubes that served as racks, and hanging from the tubes were sweaters, coats, jackets, sequined dresses, overalls, frock coats for hire, and even fancy dress cloaks, smelling of dust and mothballs in spite of their plastic covers. And so, talking about empty clothes, blouses stiff with so much starch, coats hanging like carcasses in a butcher's shop, they returned to the hotel, tried to make love but Gabriel couldn't, and Angelina thought of the normal reasons, the combination of age and fatigue, but it never occurred to her that Gabriel might be nervous for reasons that had nothing to do with his physical state or hers, or that by then his anxiety (anxiety about what he had planned) was so intense as to spoil a few minutes of good sex. That was when he talked to her of Enrique Deresser. He didn't call him that, because she, of course, couldn't care less about the name of this long-ago friend of the sixty-something man lying in bed with her, naked and now revealing secrets she hadn't asked to know. Gabriel told her the whole thing, told her what had happened forty years before, of his obsession to be forgiven; and so, with a politician's ease, talking the way most people breathe (but he was breathing with difficulty and pain), like someone shooing a fly away with a hand (even if it was an incomplete hand), he told her that his friend Enrique lived in Medellin, had been there for more than twenty years, and he, out of cowardice, had never decided to do what he was doing now: contemplating the possibility of leaping across forty years to talk to a man whose life he'd ruined.

What did she feel at that moment?

On the one hand, curiosity, a frivolous curiosity, quite similar to what anyone would have felt in her place. What was in his friend's head? Why hadn't he got in touch with Gabriel in all these years? Was there that much hatred, that much resentment? The reasons the reverse hadn't occurred were more obvious: according to what Gabriel had told her, at the beginning of the 1970s, when he found out his friend was in Medellin, he felt an urge to look him up, but he was scared. His wife was still alive then, and his only son was about ten; whether it was reasonable or not, Gabriel felt that approaching Enrique was the most dangerous thing he could do, something like staking the lives of his whole family on a game of blackjack. Of course he wasn't betting on anyone's life, but rather on something as personal as his own image. But she couldn't judge him for that. A person gets used to the way other people look at him--and everything contained in that look: admiration or respect, commiseration or pity--and doing something to change that look was impossible for ninety percent of humanity. And Gabriel was human, after all. Well anyway, at that moment and after those explanations the naked man said to her, "I've never dared to do it, and now I'm finally going to do it. And it's thanks to you. I owe it to you. You're the one who gives me this strength, I'm sure of that. I wouldn't do it if I weren't with you. This is what I've been waiting for all this time, Angelina. I've been waiting for your support and your company, everything no one else could give me." Yes, Gabriel said all that, he foisted those responsibilities on her.

Apart from curiosity, what else did she feel?

She felt proud but also a little betrayed. Proud to be the reason for this momentary courage: yes, she had believed him, had believed that without her Gabriel Santoro would never have come to Medellin. And betrayed for stranger reasons, less explainable, that had a lot to do with jealousy. Suddenly Enrique Deresser turned into something like a lover from the past, a girlfriend Gabriel Santoro had had in his youth. Angelina listened to Gabriel and what she heard was nostalgia for an old love affair: the desire to relive those memories. Of course that's not how it was, but there, in Medellin, Angelina found herself suddenly having to compete with someone else for Gabriel's attention. Betrayal is an exaggeration, of course. She could have said jealousy, jealousy for a past that up till then had been comfortably nonexistent. The most serious betrayals happen like that, with the tiniest things that for someone else would mean nothing. The most painful betrayals happen when they find your weak spot, something that doesn't matter much to other people but does to you. Well, that's what Gabriel did: found her weak spot. So--thought Angelina--this is why he'd come here with her. Until that moment, Gabriel had been for her a sort of act of faith in her own life, the proof that at almost fifty years of age a woman could still find happiness in company, and the proof, as well, that luck existed, because their meeting (the meeting of lovers) had been a matter of luck: a convalescing man and a physiotherapist are quite likely to end up together, of course, but it's less probable that a physiotherapist would be in such need of affection as she was and that the convalescent would be so disposed to give it as he was. Gabriel, she had thought more than once, was her life raft. And there, in the hotel in Medellin, Angelina suddenly thought her life raft had been using her. And she felt a sort of secret panic that she was very careful not to reveal.

What did this secret panic consist of?

It was the difference between what she thought and what she said. Inside she thought, very much in spite of what everything seemed to prove, that it was a lie that Gabriel loved her, the affection he'd shown her was false. Inside she thought Gabriel had used her to alleviate his weakness and also his cowardice. Inside she thought for the whole week he'd been making her believe that he was enthusiastic about the idea of going to Medellin, when his intentions were quite different. False. All false. Inside she thought what Gabriel Santoro really wanted from her was not a lover, but a heart doctor, a sort of nurse mixed with a psychologist, someone who would help him to make long overdue apologies, for he had always been too cowardly to make them himself. That is, someone to wait in the hotel while he went and did his long-postponed errand, found his friend and got forgiven and had a drink to toast old times and the disappearance of all the grudges. Inside she thought she was a mere extra in this film, a substitute in the game, a consolation prize. And if that wasn't bad enough, Angelina was watching Gabriel transform before her very eyes; the wise and mature, cultured and elegant man she'd known had turned into a traitor--betrayed a friend, betrayed a lover--yes, a manipulative, disloyal liar. But she endured it, she pretended, understood that perhaps she was blinded by emotion, like in the soaps. The disillusion and humiliation were very intense, and the mockery (yes, because that's what it all boiled down to, what was happening in that Medellin hotel room: it was life mocking her, life choosing Gabriel Santoro to show her there was no possible way out, that happiness did not exist and much less with a man, and looking for it was naive, and believing you'd found it frankly stupid). Nevertheless, Angelina endured it, as she had endured all her life, because she loved Gabriel and she wanted Gabriel to go on loving her. And she knew that jealousy blinds a person and that you could also be jealous of the past, even though Gabriel was going to leave her for a few hours to go and see a friend, not a lover, from his youth. Yes, that's how she split in half: inside she thought life had sent her Gabriel Santoro to demonstrate this to her, that Gabriel Santoro was the messenger of her humiliation. And outside she'd decided to withstand it, put on a nothing-to-do-with-me face and do the only thing she could do: congratulate Gabriel, praise his valor and his will to seek forgiveness. What a hypocrite.

The praise was not genuine?