The Informers (24 page)

Deresser in Medellin? Had he perhaps fooled them all, had he pretended to leave Bogota and Colombia when actually he'd hidden and stayed hidden all these years? No, that was impossible. Perhaps he had really left, lived elsewhere--in Ecuador or Panama, in Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico--before returning incognito and starting life like the creature without a past, with mixed blood and no fixed nationality he sometimes, in his youth, had wanted to be? While I drove, I found myself speculating about his life, what might have happened during those forty years, how many times had he been wrong the way my father had been wrong, how many errors had he committed, how many things had he repented of doing, how many would he like to be forgiven for? The idea of Deresser being alive also transformed his image, if you could call the squalid and incomplete portrait Sara had conjured up for me an image, and it began to get saddled with the effects of having carried on acting and doing; it took away that curious virginity the disappeared have that makes them invulnerable to error. It was obvious: one who disappears loses, first of all, the ability to continue making mistakes, the capacity to betray and to lie. His character remains steady, or rather fixed, like the light on the silver of a negative. To disappear is to leave a moral portrait of oneself. Deresser, who for several days had been an abstraction for me (an abstraction that lived in two spaces: in Sara's voice and in the 1940s), now became vulnerable again. He was no longer a saint; he was no longer, or he wasn't
only
, a victim. He had been someone able to do harm like he'd done to my father; he still was, that is, he had been for half a century more. That half-century, I thought, had been given to him to carry on doing harm. And probably--no, with total certainty--he'd taken advantage of it.

He would have got married in the first country he went to, Panama or Venezuela, and in time he would have separated from his wife and also from his children because of those banal disagreements that turn into separations. Would he have changed his name when he married? In those days it wasn't too difficult, because the world was not as frightened as it is today of the identity of those who inhabit it, and Deresser could have, without much bureaucracy, called himself Javier, for example, or carried on being Enrique but changed his surname. Enrique Lopez would have struck him as common, and perhaps too common to sound convincing; Enrique Piedrahita would have worked better, a personal but inconspicuous name, idiosyncratic but not visible. And so Enrique Piedrahita would have left behind, once and for all, the detested Germanness that had caused him so many problems in Colombia, and with it he would have got rid of his father, of the memory of his father--that inherited memory that spoke of Germany as if the Kaiser were still alive, as if the Treaty of Versailles had never existed--and also the inherited faults, because Enrique Piedrahita, finally free from that nostalgic family, could not be suspected of uncomfortable relations, and no one could inform any authority of those relations: no one could accuse his family of Nazi sympathies, or of putting the safety of the hemisphere in jeopardy, or of threatening, with his nationality and his language, the interests of democracy. And if someone, on the way out of a cemetery, saw him in a black shirt, they would think he was in mourning, not accuse him of Fascism; and if someone heard him speak German, or speak fondly of the place where his father was born, they wouldn't follow him home, or go through his papers, or close his glass-and-mirror factory; and if someone found among his papers a drunken note insulting Roosevelt, and if someone . . . and if someone . . . No, none of that would happen. No one would include him on blacklists, no one would send him to a concentration camp in Fusagasuga, no one would mix him up with those who did serve the Nazi Party from positions protected by the country's conservative newspapers, no one would identify him with Laureano Gomez and his support for Franco, no one would take him for one of those heart-and-soul Nazis who had talked to him at the German Legation or in meetings of the German community before whom he'd pretended to nostalgia, patriotism, Germanness that he did not feel. And he would be free, he would be Enrique Piedrahita for the rest of his life and he would be free.

At some point, however, he would have made a mistake: out of an impulse for honesty under pressure, out of the need that, according to criminologists, pushes people into answering questions no one has asked them, he would have confessed to his wife that his surname was not Piedrahita but Deresser, and that he'd been born in Colombia, yes, just as his accent and habits and way of going through life indicated, but that half his blood was German. He would have confessed that his parents hadn't died in a plane crash--in the February 1947 accident in El Tablazo--but that his mother (whose name was Margarita) had abandoned them, and his father (whose name was Konrad, not Conrado), a coward, completely fainthearted, had chosen to kill himself rather than try to recover from failure, rather than survive the desertion. None of what he confessed had been so grave, but his wife, a timid, quiet woman who had fallen in love with Enrique as naturally as everyone falls in love, would have become aware of this terrible threat; someone who could hide something like that for so long would keep on hiding things; and, in any case, the idea of trusting him seemed impossible, and in each disagreement, each conflict they had for the rest of their lives, she would be embittered by the notion that
maybe
Enrique was lying to her,
maybe
what he was telling her now wasn't true either. No, she couldn't stand it, and would end up leaving home just as her mother-in-law had done, someone whom she suddenly understood (it would be like a bolt of lightning, that solidarity between deceived women), whom she'd belatedly start to respect although she'd never met her.

Would Enrique have kept in touch with his mother? It wasn't very likely. No, it was downright impossible. But maybe he had written to her on a couple of occasions, first to reproach her for the desertion that had pushed his father into suicide, and then sending out tentative probes to size up the possibility of a re-encounter; or maybe it would have been she who had looked for him, who had hunted him through the German consulates in all the capitals of Latin America until finding him and writing a letter that Enrique would not have deigned to read or answer (he would have recognized her handwriting; he would have torn up the letter without opening the envelope). And over time the voluntarily exiled memory of his mother would gradually fade like an old photo, and Enrique wouldn't even hear of Margarita's death, for no one had been able to find him to give him the news, and one day he would estimate the amount of time passed and the very high possibility that his mother, grown old who knew where and in what company, would be ill or would be dying or would have already died. And Enrique Piedrahita, who by that time would have constructed a different life in Venezuela or in Ecuador, with friends and associates and enemies, too, earned without great fault on his part--because, in spite of his having done all he could to go unnoticed, no one is exempt from slander and treachery, no one is immune from unwarranted hatred--would begin to consider what he had never considered: returning to Colombia.

He wouldn't have decided all of a sudden, of course, but after several days, several weeks of uncertainty, and perhaps he'd spent entire years before eventually deciding that the return was feasible. At some point he would have loathed this life full of decisions and possibilities and options: he would have been satisfied with a quiet, sedentary life in which he never had to ask himself where to go now or whether he should stay, what risks or what benefits awaited him if he moved. He would have doubted. And losing his friends? And losing the reputation acquired with the effort of the recent arrival, the foreigner, the immigrant, with that effort he had learned, through a sort of burlesque paradox, from his immigrant, foreigner father? All this he would have wondered about, and then he would have thought: Why not? None of his friends would compel him to stay, that was certain, he had never interested them that much; and the one who did would perhaps be the one who would later undermine him irreparably, would steal money from the firm, sleep with his new wife. Nothing tied him anywhere, and Enrique, out of fear of feeling exiled and stateless, would invent a pretext for leaving and perhaps invent a destination: he was going to the United States; that's what he would have said. And he wouldn't have to justify it, because the reasons that everybody goes are always clear to those closest to them, and according to rumors (those same friends and relations would think sadly, because it's always sad when someone leaves, but also with the absurd envy of those who stay not out of choice but from lack of options), the United States is a country made to receive everyone, even exiles like him.

But he would discover when he arrived in Bogota that this city was no longer his, that by going to Ecuador or Peru he had lost it forever and a kind of gigantic ravine, a grand canyon of hostilities and bad memories and bloated resentments, separated him from it. Staying away for twenty years has its consequences, of course; and Enrique would have realized that the only way to ease his absence was by not returning to the place he'd left, just as the best way to correct a lie was by insisting on it, not by telling the truth. In Bogota he would have found out that many of the Germans from Barranquilla had been able to return after the war, when the measures that forbade Axis citizens from living in coastal zones were lifted. But Barranquilla was not for him, not just because Barranquilla in his mind was the city of the Nazi Party, not just because the Bethkes had come from Barranquilla and might still be alive and remember that dinner when they talked about difficult subjects in front of Gabriel Santoro--who later informed those who wanted to be told about those subjects--but also because his blood was Bogota blood and he was used to the constant cold and rain and the gray faces of the people of Bogota, and would never feel comfortable where it was forty degrees in the shade. And then, just when the weight of uprootedness began to be too much, something had happened. Enrique Piedrahita or Deresser, who at forty-something years of age was still as attractive as a Colombian Paul Henreid, would have fallen in love, or rather, a woman--maybe separated, or maybe a widow in spite of her youth--would have fallen in love with him, and he would have clearly understood that for exiles the best way to appropriate a city is to fall in love, that the feeling of belonging is one of the more abstruse consequences of sex. And then, in secret and almost incognito, he would have appropriated the city that fell into his lap this time without a moment's hesitation.

Thirty years. Thirty years he would have lived in Medellin with his last wife and with a daughter, just one, because his wife knew that after a certain age more than one pregnancy is dangerous and even irresponsible. And many times, over those thirty years, he would think of Sara and Gabriel, and to avoid the urge to phone them he would have to remember the betrayal and the suicide and he would have to remember the faces of the men with their machetes when he paid them forty pesos so they would do what they did (but Enrique wouldn't know the final result; for him, the aggression had an abstract character; in his imagination there were no amputated fingers or stump or solitary thumb). In those thirty years he would have written many letters; many times he would have written on an envelope--
Senorita Sara Guterman, Hotel Pension Nueva Europa, Duitama, Boyaca
--and on a blank sheet of paper he would have repeated different openings, some of them resentful and others conciliatory, some of them pitiful and others insulting, sometimes talking only to Sara, sometimes including a separate letter for Gabriel Santoro, the treacherous friend, the informer. In it he would ask, not cleverly but sarcastically, if he still considered that Konrad Deresser was a threat to Colombian democracy merely for having welcomed a fanatic into his home, for listening to stupidities without raising objections, for adding his own nostalgia and cheap patriotism to these stupidities, for being German but also a coward; and whether those falsely altruistic conjectures were sufficient to ruin the lives of those who had cared for him; and whether he'd accepted money in exchange for the information he'd given the American ambassador or whomever it had been, or if he'd turned it down when they offered it, convinced he was acting according to the principles of civic-minded valor, of political duty, of a citizen's responsibility. But he would never send that letter or any of the others (dozens, hundreds of drafts) he wrote as a hobby. And after thirty years the arrival of Gabriel Santoro had surprised him less, much less, than he would have imagined. Enrique would have agreed to see him, of course; he would have understood, with slight panic, that with time the resentment had disappeared, the disdainful phrases were no longer at the tip of his tongue, that the revenge had expired like the rights over unused premises; and above all, he would have accepted against his will that remembering Gabriel Santoro gave him an illegitimate and almost abnormal urge to see him and talk to him again.

That's how things would have gone, I thought, and meanwhile, without noticing, I had passed Sara's building. When I got to the bullring on Fifth Avenue, instead of turning left I ended up, out of distraction and a few seconds of indecision, heading down that narrow, dark corridor that leads to Twenty-sixth Street, and I thought of taking Seventh northbound and coming back a few blocks to go up to Sara's again. But that didn't seem to make much sense anymore, or maybe I just couldn't see any in it, because if I kept going on Twenty-sixth I could get on to Caracas, and that was the route I'd taken from the center each time I went to visit my father during the first few days of his convalescence, the route Sara would have taken for the same purpose, and the route that at this hour of the night would take me most quickly to his apartment. It was, to put it one way, a conspiracy of coincidences; and in a few minutes of speed and total disrespect for traffic lights--at a red light in Bogota we take our foot off the accelerator, put the car into second, and make sure no one's coming, but fear keeps us from actually stopping--I found myself in front of his building. Since my father's death I'd never driven that way, and I was impressed by how easy it was at that hour of the night to get through those streets, which during the day are impossible. I thought the daytime traffic would remain associated with my father's recuperation, while the ease of the night, on the other hand, with this visit to the apartment of a dead man, more or less the way my father's death would always be associated with my old car, while this one, bought secondhand from a garage with the insurance money, would always remind me that my own life (my material and practical life, everyday life, the life where I eat and sleep and work) would go on even though it might sometimes weigh me down. There was just one window with lights on and a silhouette, or perhaps a shadow, crossed it once and then back again before the light went out. The doorman raised his head, recognized me, and relaxed again. Who would have said I'd end up coming here, alone and in the middle of the night? Nevertheless, that's what had happened. A brief distraction--not turning left but going straight on--a vague respect for the inertia of coincidences, and there I was, entering the last place inhabited by my last living relative, and doing so with a very clear idea in my head: to look for Angelina's phone number in the only place I might be able to find it. It wasn't like a flash of inspiration, but a sudden and dictatorial necessity; to doubt her, who'd given me so much information, was foolish and even ungrateful. Angelina. Look up her number, call her, confront her.