The Informers (32 page)

"About the lists . . ."

"Everything. All that shit, didn't spare me any of it. So, is that true what you put in this new book?"

"Which part?"

"That when you wrote the first one you didn't know anything. Is that true or pure shit?"

"It's true, Sergio," I said. "Everything is true. There's nothing that's not true in the book."

"There is, don't exaggerate."

"I'm not exaggerating. There's nothing."

"Oh no? So what's all that shit about my dad living in Cuba or Panama and I don't know where else? That's a total lie, yes or no? Or do you think we're in Panama sitting here?"

"That was speculation, not a lie. They're different things."

"No, don't get clever with me, bro. All that stuff you wrote about my dad, all that about the wife and daughter, and how he fights with the daughter, all that's pure shit. Down to the last word, yes or no? I don't know why people do that kind of thing or what for. If you don't know something, go find out, don't make it up." He stared at me with his mouth half open, as if sizing me up, the way boxers or gang members size each other up. "You don't remember me, I can see that."

"Have we met?"

"Weird, eh? Me, I remember you perfectly. I guess we're not the same."

"That's for sure," I said.

"I notice people more," he said. "You, on the other hand, do nothing but contemplate your own navel."

It was him. It was Sergio Deresser, the son of Enrique and the grandson of Konrad (that genealogy was stuck to his voice and his image, his running shoes, his tracksuit bottoms). It was him. Seven years ago, after his father, unfortunately, had given him a book called
A Life in Exile
to read and had told him
This book's about me
, though the book didn't mention him a single time; after he'd talked to him about a story of private cruelties--because such extreme cowardice is cruel, such drastic disloyalty as what Gabriel Santoro put into practice against his best friend and, to be exact, against a whole family who loved him, in whose house he'd spent more than one night, whose food he had eaten--after having got used to the transformation of his own surname and beginning to look at his father's life with fresh eyes, after all that, he ended up catching the early bus to Bogota one day, and when he arrived he'd gone into the only phone booth there was in the station. After three calls he'd found out where the new Supreme Court was and the time of Doctor Santoro's seminar. And he went to hear him: he needed to know what the guy was like, if the treachery was visible on his face, if it was true, as his father said, that he was missing a hand; he needed to see whether his voice trembled when he spoke, if he seemed convinced, after the pathetic speech he'd spewed out in front of the most respectable people in the country, of being the great citizen everyone talked about. And when he got there, well, what he saw was a washed-up, pitiful old man exercising an authority he no longer had, saying things too big for him, moving around with the self-confidence of a con man, as if he weren't the same person who'd pushed a whole family over the edge. And then the washed-up old man had begun to fabricate his own life, was there anything more ridiculous, was there any more complete or more convincing form of humiliation? "You know the rest," Sergio said to me. "Or do you forget things, too?" I hadn't forgotten. I'd spent nine days, or perhaps more, visiting my father's classroom, seeing him without being seen, and one of those days, that simple thing happened: Sergio arrived from Medellin and sat a few seats from where I was, maybe despising me in silence, praying he could one day let me know, then notice and feel his disdain. No, Sergio Andres Felipe Lazaro, I don't forget things, they simply change over time; and we who remember, we who devote ourselves to remembering as a way of life, are obliged to keep pace with memory, which never stays still, just as happens when we walk beside someone faster.

"How did you recognize me?"

"I didn't recognize you, your book doesn't have a photo. I guessed, bro, I guessed. I didn't even imagine you'd be there. That occurred to me when your dad ran out, running as if he was shit-scared, as if he knew someone could stand up and say, All that's pure shit and you know it. I thought of doing that. I thought of standing up and shouting 'You old bastard, old traitor.' And it was like he'd read my mind. Did your dad know how to do those things?"

"What things?"

"Telepathy, things like that. He didn't, did he? No, he didn't, telepathy doesn't exist, and that's why you have to invent shit to write books instead of finding out the truth, and that's why your dad didn't know that I was getting the urge to shout, 'You old traitor,' at him. A person can't read another person's mind, bro. If your dad could, he never would have gone to give that lecture. But there he was. And of course, he went running out as if he'd read my mind, and that was when someone said that's his son, what a shame, poor guy. I went out after you. I couldn't resist the urge to see your face."

"And you saw it."

"Of course I did. You were shit-scared, too. Just like now, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Did you tell Enrique?"

"No. What for? He wouldn't have liked that. He would have given me the same old sermon: there are things a real man never does," said Sergio, but he didn't say what things he was referring to. "We would have fought and that's not what I was after, right? I don't like fighting with my dad, I have respect for my old man, for your information. I can't say the same for you, brother."

"Can you get me another Coke?"

"But of course, all you have to do is ask. That's what I'm here for, to wait on you."

He went back into the kitchen. It had a swinging door, and through the little rectangular window I managed to see him setting the glass down on the Formica table and opening an old orangish refrigerator and taking out of the white light (the image was almost magical, Sergio transformed for an instant into a sorcerer from a fairy tale) a plastic bottle. He did everything so lightly that I thought: He's enjoying himself. He's playing with me, and he's having fun, because he's been waiting for this moment for a long time. If I could get close to his face, I thought, I'd see him smiling; if I could hear his thoughts, this is what I'd hear:
A little while longer. Ten minutes, half an hour, a little while longer
. I was easy prey; I hadn't tried to defend myself; maybe I didn't know how, and nothing could be worse in Sergio's hunting ground, that was obvious. I thought of telling him, I know what's going on here, you want to keep your rage intact, you don't want anyone to touch it, and if I talk to your dad maybe your rage won't be so justified. What if your dad and I end up as friends? What if he likes me? That'd be a problem for you, wouldn't it? These tantrums are important in your life. You're not going to let someone take them away, and that's why you're receiving me like this. You're a genetic case, recessive indignation. Then Sergio came back with my glass full to the brim (the surface of the liquid sparkled, bubbled, gurgled), sat down opposite me, and invited me to drink. "What's the matter, too much of a surprise? Well, at least you know who you're dealing with now. I'm no fucking coward, I meet you head-on, I answer back. That's how it is, get it? This has to do with me, not just with my dad. He asked you to come but not so you can start writing more lies. It's to clear up a couple of things. It's so you won't talk about what you don't know about."

"I didn't write lies."

"No, sorry," he said. "
Speculations
. That's what they call them these days."

"Why did it offend you so much, Sergio? I imagined that your dad might have gone to live in Cuba or Venezuela or one of five or six countries, doesn't matter which ones, because the idea wasn't to prove anything, just to suggest his situation. It was a way of showing interest in him, in how things had turned out in his life. What's so bad about that?"

"That it's not true, bro. Like it's not true that your dad's a victim. Or a hero either, much less a martyr."

"And he doesn't come over as one in the book."

"In the book he's a victim."

"Well, I don't agree," I said. "If you interpreted it like that, it's your problem. But I wrote something very different."

"He was a bullshitter," Sergio went on as if he hadn't heard me. "When he was young and when he was old. A lifelong bullshitter."

"You want a punch in the face?"

"Don't get pissed off, Santoro. Your dad was what he was. You're not going to change anything with your fists."

Now he was getting into direct insults. For the first time I thought that this had all been a big mistake. What could I actually get out of this visit? The benefits seemed too intangible and in any case conjectural. Who was obliging me to stay? There outside was my car (it was visible from the window, I could find it just by stretching my neck). Why didn't I stand up and say good-bye, or leave without saying good-bye? Why didn't I force him to admit to Enrique Deresser that he'd thrown me out of the house with the violence of his comments, with personal attacks? Why didn't I put an end to the scene and later write an accusatory letter and let Sergio sort things out as best he could with his father? All this went through my head while I recognized how deceptive these ideas were: I would never do it, because years and years of working as a journalist had accustomed me to putting up with whatever I had to in order to get a fact, a reference, a confession, two words or a line that had some humanity or just a bit of color, which could, finally, be written down and used in whatever article I happened to be working on. There was no article possible out of this encounter--this confrontation--with Enrique Deresser's son; nevertheless, there I stayed, putting up with his exaggerated disdain, his meticulous bravado, as if the betrayal had happened in the past week. (
Week
, I thought,
past
. But did these categories exist? Was it possible to say that time had moved in our case? What could it matter when the mistake, the denunciation, and the amputation of a hand had already happened? The deeds were present; they were current, immediate, they lived among us; the deeds of our fathers accompanied us. Sergio, who talked and thought like the practical man he undoubtedly was, had realized this before I had; he had, at least, this advantage over me, and it was surely not the only one.) I thought:
It happened this past week. All through my father's life it had just happened
. I thought:
This is my inheritance. I've inherited it all
. Stupidly, I looked at my right hand; I checked that it was where it always had been; I closed my fist, opened it, stretched my fingers as if I were sitting in a donors' clinic and a nurse was taking blood; and in that instant I thought I was wasting my time and I should go, that nothing was worth this tension, hostility, and invective.

Then, accompanied by his wife, in walked Enrique Deresser.

"I suppose that meeting her was my salvation. But that's how she is, Gabriel. She goes through life saving lives without even noticing. I've never known anyone like her: she doesn't have a single drop of wickedness in her head. If she wasn't as good in bed as she is in life, I probably would have got bored of her ages ago."

We were outside, on the big patio inside the estate, very close to the chalk hopscotch the little girls had left; we'd sat down on a green bench--wrought-iron frame, wooden slats--that had its legs set into the pavement and its back to the window from which (I imagined) Sergio was spying on us with binoculars and a rum and Coke in his hand, trying to read our lips and make out our gestures. It wasn't completely dark yet; the streetlights and the outdoor lights of the estate had come on, and the sky was no longer blue, but not black yet either, so you couldn't quite say that the lights were illuminating, but if they were turned off we would have been completely in the dark. The world, just then, was an indecisive thing; but Enrique Deresser had suggested we go downstairs, saying that talking about the past brings good luck if it's done in the open air, and making some falsely casual comment about the agreeable temperature, the sweet evening air, the calm of the patio now that the children had gone in and the adults hadn't yet come out to party. Rebeca, his wife, had greeted me with a kiss on the cheek when she introduced herself; unlike how I usually react, I'd liked the immediate intimacy at that moment, but I'd liked even more the carefree apology the woman offered in her Medellin accent: "Forgive the familiarity, dear, but I've got my hands full." She was carrying two plastic bags in her left hand and a string bag of oranges in her right; almost without stopping she went straight through to the kitchen. And before I knew it Enrique had taken me gently by the elbow and was leaning slightly on my arm to walk down the stairs, in spite of nothing in his body seeming to need it, while I did some quick sums in my head and came to the conclusion that this man was or was soon to be seventy-five years old. He hunched over a bit as he walked and seemed smaller than he was; he was wearing light cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with two pockets (a cheap pen stuck out of the left pocket, and in the right was a shape I couldn't identify), and suede ankle boots with rubber soles (the ends of the laces were beginning to unravel). I didn't know if it was his shoes or his clothes, but Enrique gave off an animal smell that wasn't strong or unpleasant but was very noticeable. To play it safe, I didn't ask about it, and later learned that this smell was a mixture of horse sweat, stable sawdust, and saddle leather. Since arriving in Medellin, Deresser had worked with Paso Fino horses, at first as a jack-of-all-trades (he wrote letters in German to breeders in the Black Forest, but he also brushed the horses' tails and manes and supported the penis for stallions servicing brood mares) and eventually, when he'd learned the trade, as a trainer. He didn't do it anymore, he explained, because his back had aged badly, and after an afternoon of riding or of standing in front of a young mare circling round a post, the muscles in his shoulders and waist protested for a whole week. But he still liked to spend time at the stables, talk to the new hands, and give the animals sugar. It was sugar he had in his breast pocket: little packets that his rich friends stole from fine restaurants to give to him, which he emptied into the palm of his hand so a horse's pink tongue would lick it off in one go as if the whole ritual were the best pastime in the world. "Rebeca was the one who got me into horses," said Enrique. "Yes, it's no exaggeration to say that I owe everything to her. Her father was a great trainer. He worked for people with lots of money. In time it became drug money, of course. He died before he had to see that. Almost all horse people have touched drug money. But you look the other way, carry on doing your job, looking after your animals."