The Informers (28 page)

From the pharmacy, or from its former location, we walked toward the Plaza de Bolivar, trying to follow the elder Deresser's route, not for fetishism or even for nostalgia, but because we were in unspoken agreement that nothing, not even the most skillful tale, could replace the world's potential for truth, the world of tangible things and people who rub against you and bump into you, and the smells of piss by the walls and people's sweaty clothes, and piss in beggars' sweaty clothes. We passed in front of the Civil Court Building, where the lawyers' offices were where my father worked until, through a mixture of luck and talent, he was able to devote himself to the occupation that suited him best, and in the gallery that passes through the building, and that is usually full of peddlers selling sweets and plastic dolls and even secondhand hats, Sara wanted to look for some little present for her youngest grandson, and ended up buying a dented old toy truck the size of a cigarette lighter, a green truck with doors that opened and good shock absorbers on the back (the old man insisted on showing us how well they worked against the floor tiles of the gallery). And later, sitting on the steps of the cathedral, Sara took the little truck out of her handbag and tested its shock absorbers as she told me that once, when she was young, she had believed that in Bogota the world was about to end, because the pigeons in the Plaza de Bolivar started dying all at once, and if you were walking across the plaza during the day a pigeon could easily have a heart attack in full flight and fall on your head. Later she found out that a whole ton of corn, the corn that the women in the plaza sold in cones of newspaper so children and old folks could pass the time feeding the pigeons, had been poisoned without anyone knowing why and without those responsible ever being found, or even pursued. Bogota, Sara told me, had never stopped being a demented place, but those years were undoubtedly among the most demented of all. In those years this was a city where poisoned pigeons announced the end of the world, where aficionados, bored by a bull's docility and perhaps that of the bullfighter, would invade the ring to tear the animal apart with their bare hands, where people killed each other in protest at another's death. Three days after that April 9, Peter Guterman had brought his family to Bogota, because he thought it necessary that his daughter should see the damage, touch the broken windows, enter the burned ruins, go up to the terrace roofs, if they were allowed, where the sharpshooters had been stationed to fire on the crowds, and see the bloodstains on the same rooftops from a wounded marksman, and at least manage to glimpse all that which they'd manage to escape (they now knew) at the last moment. This sort of pedagogical expedition was normal for him, and it took Sara many years to realize that behind it there was nothing more than an impulse to justify himself: her father wanted to confirm that he'd done the right thing in leaving Germany; he hoped that the brutality of this country which was now his would condone or legitimate the right to escape from the old country, from the earlier brutality. That was why Sara hid from Peter Guterman the twenty meters of black alpaca that my father had bought for a quarter of the price after the looting and from which he had had a suit made, with a pleated skirt and short jacket, with buttons on the front, to give her as a birthday present. Of course, Peter would not have liked his daughter going around dressed in material stolen from a display window, much less stolen during riots: that had too many echoes, lent itself to too many associations. But wasn't it stupid or exaggerated--Sara had thought at the time--to see in the shop windows of Bogota a reference, reduced yet tangible, to the shop windows of Berlin? Then she'd seen photographs of the looted shops in Bogota, and had changed her mind. Kling's Jeweler's. Wassermann's Jeweler's. Glauser & Co., Swiss watches. The names weren't always legible on the broken glass; they were always, however, recognizable. Sara never wore the suit in her father's presence.

Later we looked for the boardinghouse where Konrad Deresser spent his final days, and were surprised to find it easily: in this city, which in six months can render itself unrecognizable, the probability that a building from half a century ago should still be standing was minimal, if not illusory. Nevertheless, there it was, so little changed that Sara could recognize it even though there was no longer a boardinghouse there but four floors of offices for failed or clandestine businessmen. On the white facade there were yellowing posters with red and blue lettering announcing bullfights, screenwrit ing workshops, meetings of Marxist cells, Dominican meren gue festivals, poetry readings, Russian-for-beginners courses, and football matches in the Olaya Herrera stadium. When we went up we found that Konrad and Josefina's room was now a calligraphy studio. A woman with her hair up and wearing bifocals received us, sitting in a swivel chair in front of an architect's table, under a halogen light that was the only luxury in the place. Her work was to write the names of graduates in Gothic letters for the four or five universities in central Bogota. That's how she earned her living: putting strangers' names on sheets of translucent paper. She told us she worked freelance. No, she didn't know this building used to be a boardinghouse. No, as far as she knew the layout of the offices (which had once been rooms) had never been changed. Yes, she was happy in her work, she hadn't done any formal studies and had learned this craft by correspondence course. Every semester she wrote, or rather drew, a thousand or so names, and thus supported her two small children; she couldn't complain, she even earned more than her husband, who drove a taxi, a Chevette, what did we think, one of the new ones. She shook our hands to say good-bye. She had a thick callus on the middle finger of her right hand; the callus was covered with a stain of Indian ink, dark and symmetrical like a melanoma. As we walked toward the Parque de los Periodistas, Sara and I speculated about the room: where would Konrad and Josefina's bed have been, where would they have put the record player, if the bathroom door (this was unlikely) might be the same one. The absurd and self-indulgent idea that this could be of any importance distracted us for a while. When we left, after walking a couple of blocks in silence, Sara said, for no particular reason, "During that time, we grew apart. I couldn't look him in the eye. I slighted him, I couldn't get it through my head that he could be capable of such a thing. And at the same time I understood very well, you know, the way everyone would understand. That mixture scared me, I don't know why. I can't explain what kind of fear it was. Fear of knowing I would have done the same. Or fear, precisely, of not having done it. There are many informers: you don't have to be at war to talk about someone else in certain circumstances. I grew distant from him, I pushed him aside, just like what's happening now, how this city is pushing him aside when he can't do anything about it. I started to see him as an undesirable. And suddenly I felt closer to him than to anyone else, it was that simple. I felt that from that moment on he would be able to understand me if I wanted to explain my life. That's the worst thing about being foreign." And then she fell silent again.

I found out one day, without anyone taking the trouble to call and inform me, that Rosario University was going to remove my father's name from their list of illustrious alumni, that they were also going to withdraw his doctorate
honoris causa
--which my father had renounced at the end of the 1980s, when the university awarded the same distinction to Queen Sofia of Spain--and the granting of the Medal of Civic Merit would be canceled, annulled, revoked (I don't know the applicable verb). That was how it was: the award had been decreed, as it was announced at the funeral, but the formal presentation hadn't yet been made, and the presenters, realizing or discovering that there was still time to retract, preferred not to present it. I didn't call the Court; I didn't find out to whom I could appeal, whom to look for in the tangle of legislative or political bureaucracy, whom to turn to if this were legally possible, or what lawyer might be willing to take on such a case, or whom I could call, with more diplomatic intentions, to ask for explanations; I didn't demand official notification, nor a resolution, nor a copy of the decree annulling the previous decree: I preferred not to look for the document, whichever it was, that made my father the official pariah of the moment and guaranteed him what we'll all get sooner or later, his fifteen minutes as an untouchable. What I did keep is the newspaper clipping, because the incident, of course, was news: MEDAL OF CIVIC MERIT RETRACTED FOR UNBECOMING CONDUCT, ran the headline. "There are internal pressures," declared a source that preferred to remain anonymous. "The reputation of the award would be called into question and granting it now would be a dishonor to those who have received it more deservingly." I should say it didn't affect me too much, perhaps because of the anesthetic effect of the letters that had arrived at the television station during the week following Angelina's interview, and that the station had very diligently forwarded to the apartment, without attaching too much importance to the fact that the addressee no longer existed (and in some cases without attaching importance to the fact that my father wasn't even the addressee, but merely the subject). There weren't many, but they were quite varied; in any case, there were enough to surprise me with the level of interest the public takes when it comes to insulting, its skill at assuming the position of victim and reacting as is expected in a respectable society. Decent Colombians, supportive Colombians, upright and indignant Colombians, Catholic Colombians, for whom one betrayal is all betrayals: all condemned when there was condemning to be done, like good soldiers of collective morals. "Dear sir, I would like to say I thought the interviewed young lady's bravery was
admirable
and thank you for speaking the truth. The world is definitely full of
villains
and they must be unmasked." "Doctor Santoro, I do not know you, but I know some like you. You are a hypocritical snitch, fucking backstabber, I hope you rot in hell, you son of a bitch." There were some more objective letters, at once comforting and painfully disdainful. "Let us not forget, gentlemen of the press, that this whole matter was but a tiny detail in wartime. Beside the six million, this was collateral damage." There was even one addressed to me: "Santoro, rest easy, keep writing and publishing your stuff, carry on acting the part of the great writer, we all know who you are now and the sort you come from. Your dad was nothing but a mediocrity and an impostor and you're the same, at the end of the day, a chip off the old block. When's your next book coming out?" Signed: "Your fan club."

I didn't talk to Sara about this, as it would have annoyed her, and she, who had found out on her own about the matter of the medal, also decided not to mention it to me, in spite of our circuit through the streets of the center--that retreat, somewhere between tourism and superstition, to the events of the 1940s--seeming to permit those subjects or even demand them. No, we didn't talk about that: not about the dishonor, or about the untouchable, or about the possible consequences the dishonor could have on the son of the untouchable. We didn't talk about the past my father had once tried to modify, in front of his rhetoric class, with the sole objective of defending himself against my book. We didn't talk about my father's death or about other dead people we would have liked to have with us then; we didn't talk anymore about Enrique, the living person who wanted to be dead to Sara. When we returned to her apartment and she invited me to stay for lunch, and she went into the kitchen to fry some slices of plantain while she heated up a sort of goulash she'd made that morning, I thought, for no other reason than being back in her apartment, that Sara and I were alone, true, but we had each other, and what invaded me like a fever was a feeling of gratitude so strong I had to sit down on one of the sofas in the living room to wait for the heaviness, the dizziness to pass. And while we were having lunch, so late that Sara's head was starting to ache, this kind woman seemed to have noticed, because she looked at me with half a smile (the complicit glance of lovers who meet by chance at a dinner party). The complicity was a new feeling, at least for me: the sharing of interests and also of worries, having loved the same person so much had linked us in this way, had tied us, and ironically underlined the fact that Sara had been the one to prophesy the terrible deeds of the past, a sort of reverse Cassandra. I didn't know that could happen between two people, and the experience, that afternoon, was disconcerting, because it revealed the great lack I'd suffered growing up without a mother and how much I'd unknowingly missed. Sara was talking to me about the day I'd dropped off a copy of my book for my father. "He called me immediately," she told me. "I had to go over to his house, I thought he was going to have some sort of attack or something, I hadn't seen him that bad since your mother's death."

That's when I realized that my father had read the book as soon as he'd received it, and he'd done so with a fine-tooth comb and in record time, looking for declarations that could give him away and trying to read as fast as possible, as if it weren't already too late to remedy eventual damage, as if what he had in hand was not a published book but an uncorrected manuscript. "He didn't find anything, but he found it all," said Sara. "The whole book seemed like a giant trail leading to him, pointing at him. Every time the Hotel Sabaneta is mentioned, he felt incriminated, discovered. Every time the blacklists are discussed in the book, lives damaged or simply affected by the lists, he felt the same. 'I did something like that,' he said. 'They're going to find out. Thanks to this book of yours, they're going to find out. My life lasted this long, Sara, you two have just fucked up my life.' I tried to put his mind at ease, but there was no way to get his fears out of his head. He said, 'People who remember the Deressers are going to put two and two together. There are still people alive, people like us, who lived through all that. They're going to put two and two together. They're going to realize, Sara, they're going to know it was me, who did what I did. How could you betray me like this?' And then he insulted me, he who had always treated me like a protected little sister. 'I should have expected it from you,' he said. 'You don't care what happens to me. You've always believed I deserve to be punished for what I did to old Konrad.' And I told him it wasn't true, people make mistakes, were we never going to leave that behind? But he went on: 'Yes, you've probably even prayed for me to get my just desserts, don't play innocent. But my own son? How could he do this to me?' He got so paranoid it was frightening. I tried to explain, and it didn't do the slightest bit of good. 'He's not doing anything to you, Gabriel, because he doesn't know anything. Your son doesn't know anything and nobody's going to tell him, least of all me. I'm not going to tell him, it's something from your past, not even mine, and your past doesn't belong to me. No, I'm not going to tell him, I haven't told him. And besides, it's not in the book. There is not a single sentence in the book that points to you.' 'The whole book points to me. It's a book about the lives of Germans and how Germans suffered during the war. I'm part of that. But this is not going to stop here, Sara. This book is an attack on me, no more, no less, an attempted homicide.' 'And what are you going to do?' I asked. It was a stupid question, because it could have only one answer. He was going to do what he'd always done: speak. But this time he spoke in writing. This time he conceded that his purposes required a more extended medium than words spoken in an auditorium. You know what he was like, Gabriel, you know your father's opinion of newspapers, of newscasts. The disdain he held them in, no? The poor man would have liked to live in a world where news passed by word of mouth, and one would walk down the street talking to people, saying things like, Did you know they killed Jaime Pardo? Did you hear that Gabriel Santoro gave a magnificent speech? And nevertheless he resorted to them, he resorted to one of his despised newspapers, he made use of them. Our book seemed like an attack to him, and he thought he could exercise the legitimate right of self-defense. The only way that occurred to him was to discredit you, ridicule you, and discredit and ridicule don't even count if they're not scattered all around as gossip. You know that. The funny thing about ridicule is that everyone talks, the victim feels like everyone's staring at him in the street even though it's not really like that. If he did such a thing, he wouldn't just sink the book, but he'd call attention to himself. But you can't talk reason to a psychotic. Gabriel the psychotic, Gabriel the mad genius. Did he tell you how he wrote the review?"