The Informers

II. THE SECOND LIFE

That's how the inevitable perversion began, the moment one ends up becoming father to one's own father and witnesses, fascinated, the disrupted authority (power in the wrong hands) and out-of-place obedience (the one who was strong is fragile and accepts orders and impositions). Sara, of course, was with us by the time they discharged my father, so I could lean on her to get through those initial difficulties: the transfer of the patient to his own bed, the atmosphere of the apartment seeming inhospitable and even hostile compared to the elegance, the comforts, the intelligence of a hospital room. By the time we returned to his apartment, it was as if after the surgery his body was even more shrunken: the trip from the car door to his bed took us fifteen minutes because my father couldn't take two steps without having to stop to catch his breath, without feeling his heart was going to explode, and he said so, but saying so also made him short of breath, and the paranoia began all over again. His leg hurt (where they'd extracted the vein to make the graft), his chest hurt (as if the stitches were going to burst from one moment to the next), and he asked if we were sure the veins had been well sewn up (and the verb, with its connotations of manual trades, of craftsmanship, of a slapdash hobby, terrified him). As soon as we got him under the covers, he asked us to close the curtains but not to leave him alone, and he turned on his side, like a fetus or a frightened child, maybe out of habit from the tube stuck between his ribs for so many days, maybe because bodies have a way of making themselves small when there is danger.

Sara took charge of the injections at first, and I, instead of just letting her get on with it, watched her closely; with her black skirts down to her ankles, her knee-high boots and long sweaters-dressed like a forty-year-old-moving through my father's apartment with her swimmer's hips, Sara belied the three children she'd had, and from the back no one would have thought her any older if it weren't for the luminous gray of her hair, the perfect bun like a ball of nylon; her silhouette, in all its details, made the crisis my father was undergoing seem even starker. At some moment I wondered if the inescapable contrast between this woman's buoyant energy and his own crude deterioration mightn't be too much for him, but a sort of complicity soon became evident between the two of them, a current of collusion that there, in the theater of fondness and support and affection that any convalescence is, seemed to become more intense. There was more than one reason for it, as I found out later: Sara had also had her quota of impertinent physicians. Ten or so years before, she had been diagnosed with an aneurysm, and she, like the willful and skeptical woman she was, had taken a decision contrary to the one her children seemed to prefer: she refused to undergo surgery. "I'm too old to have my cranium opened," she'd said, and the impertinent one, as well as his colleagues, had conceded that it was not in any way possible to guarantee the success of the operation, and confessed that among the possible outcomes was partial paralysis or being reduced to a state of permanent stupidity for the rest of her life. That, however, wasn't the problem, but rather that Sara had also refused the other option the doctor proposed: to go and live in a warm climate, as close to sea level as possible, because in Bogota at two thousand six hundred meters the altitude multiplied the pressure with which her own blood threatened the weakened wall of one of her veins. "Suppose I've got ten years left to live," she apparently said. "Am I going to spend them on the coast, an hour by plane away from my children, from my grandchildren? Or in one of those towns, La Mesa or Girardot, where there's nothing but half-naked people and flies the size of Volkswagens?" So she'd stayed in Bogota, aware as she was that she was carrying a time bomb in her head, and frequenting the same places as ever, the same bookshops as ever, the same friends as ever.

The fact is that there was something fascinating in the showy familiarity between them. On the third day of the convalescence, as soon as the doorman announced Sara over the intercom, my father took the unused napkin out from under his plate, handed it to me, and dictated a welcome note, so when Sara came in she received the following comment, written at speed in one long blue word: From the anterior artery to the antagonistic aneurysm: long live bloody-minded blood vessels. Later there were other assonances, other alliterations, but this first note is still the one I remember best, a sort of declaration of civil conduct between the two oldies. If she was already there when I arrived to see my father, what I found was not a friend paying a visit to a sick man, with all its weight of worried questions and grateful answers, but a scene that seemed not to have moved for whole centuries: the woman sitting in a chair, her eyes fixed on the crossword puzzle she was working on, and the patient lying on his bed, as quiet and alone as the stone figure on a papal tomb. Sara didn't hug me, she didn't even stand up to say hello, she just took my face in her two dry hands and pulled it toward her and kissed me on the cheek-her smile didn't show her teeth: it was prudent, skeptical, reticent; she gave nothing away-and made me feel as if I were the visitor (not the son), as if she were the one who'd been taking care of my father all these days (and now she was grateful for my visit: how good to see you, thanks for coming, thanks for keeping us company). My father, for his part, was lost in his fog of medication and exhaustion. However, liberated from the corrugated tube that had breached his mouth, his face had now recovered some normality, and I could occasionally get the memory of his violated ribs and the draining of his lungs out of my head.

Until then, it had never seemed so evident that my father had entered his final years. He couldn't move without help, standing up on his own was out of the question, speaking left him breathless, and there Sara and I were to help him to the bathroom, to interpret his few words. Sometimes he coughed; to keep him from screaming in pain and disturbing the neighbors, Sara held a rolled-up towel, bound tight with two pieces of masking tape like a scale model of an old-fashioned sleeping bag, across his chest. In the mornings he sat in his underwear on the toilet and I helped him wash his armpits. Thus I eventually confronted the wound I had preferred to avoid out of fear of my stomach's reaction; the first time, my memory, which likes to do these things, superimposed the image of the shrunken, naked, vulnerable man with one of a certain photo from his youth in which my father appears standing like a guard, his hands crossed behind his back and his chest held high. In that image, not only was his hair black, but that black hair was everywhere: it covered his chest and his flat belly, and also-this didn't show in the photo, but I knew it-a good part of his back. For the operation, the nurses had shaved his chest and smeared a yellow liquid over it; these few days later, the hair began to grow again, but some of the pores were blocked. What I saw then was the inflamed vertical incision (an incision made not just with a scalpel, but also with a saw, although the severed bones were not visible), the same red as the two or three infected hair follicles, lifted in certain areas by the pressure of the wire with which the surgeons had closed the rupture in the sternum. At that moment I felt, without false empathy, that ineluctable pain, the puncture of the wire-a foreign body-beneath the damaged skin. Nevertheless I washed him; all those days, more successfully each time, I kept washing him. With one hand I held his arms up in the air, lifting them by the elbow, for they were incapable of lifting themselves; with the other I washed the straight, smelly hairs in his armpits. The most difficult part was rinsing the area. At first I tried to do it by cupping my hands, but all the water spilled out before it touched my father's skin, and I felt like an inexpert painter trying to paint a ceiling. Then I started using a sponge, slower but also gentler. My father, who remained silent during the whole process, out of reserve or due to the unpleasantness of the situation, one day finally asked me to put a bit of deodorant on him, please, cut out this degrading procedure, please, and get him back to bed, please, and let's pray I wouldn't have to wash even more private parts.

Every day, Sara asked him if he'd moved his bowels. (I don't know what shook me more the first time I heard her say it: the adolescent euphemism or the intimacy that the question, in spite of the euphemism, revealed.) Every day, I took charge of the simvastatin and the baby aspirin, ridiculous names like those of all medicines, and after a while began to administer the injections as well. Once a day I lifted his pajama top and pinched the loose flesh of his waist with one hand and stuck the hypodermic into it with the other. The needle disappearing into the skin, my father's shouts, my own trembling pulse-the thumb pressing the dense liquid out of the syringe (into the flesh)-all that became shockingly habitual, because the routine of inflicting pain cannot be comfortable for anyone. The injections had to be given for a week; during this time I stayed with him. I used to do it in the mornings, after my father woke up, but before that I was careful to talk to him about something, anything, for half an hour, so his day wouldn't start with a needle. A physiotherapist came mid-morning and made him sit up in bed, facing her, and imitate her movements, at first as if they were playing a mirroring game and later as if the woman were, in fact, in charge of transmitting to the patient knowledge that is innate and instinctive to everybody else and not learned in morning classes: how to raise an arm, how to straighten one's torso, how to make a pair of legs take you to the bathroom. Gradually I came to know that her name was Angelina, that she was from Medellin but had come to live in Bogota after completing her studies, and that she was over forty but under fifty ("Us, the ones on the fourth floor," she said once). I would have liked to ask her why, at her age, she wasn't married, but I was afraid she'd be offended, because the day of the first session she'd entered the apartment the way a bull enters a ring, demonstrating at once that she was here to do her work and that she didn't have time to look or any desire to be looked at, even though she wore brightly colored blouses with buttons that seemed like mother-of-pearl and even though later it didn't seem to matter too much to her if her breasts-if those buttons straining over her breasts-brushed my father's back during the massage, or if drops fell onto the faded sheet, onto the pillow from her freshly washed, very black hair.

It was one of those days, after Angelina had said good-bye until the following morning (she only had a couple more days of work with my father and his problematic muscles), that we talked about what happened after his August 6 speech. My father was learning to move again at the same time as he learned to talk to me. Having me as an interlocutor, he discovered, implied another way of speaking, different, daring, radically risky, because his way of addressing me had always been dominated by irony or omission, those strategies of protection or concealment, and now he realized he was able to look me in the eye and speak direct, clear, literal sentences. If the heart-attack scare and the operation were the prerequisites for this dialogue, I thought, then I should bless the anterior descending, raise an altar to its incriminating catheterization. That's how we started, without any warning, to talk about what had happened three years before. "I want you to forget what I said," said my father. "I want you to forget what I wrote. I'm not good at asking things like this, but that's how it is. I want you to erase my comments from your head, because what's just happened to me is special, a second chance, Gabriel. They gave me a second chance, not everyone gets so lucky, and this time I want to carry on as if I hadn't published that review, as if I hadn't actually gone as far as doing that cowardly thing I did to us." He turned over, heavy and clumsy and solemn like a warship changing direction. "Of course, it may be that those things can't be corrected, that the thing about a second chance is a pure lie, one of those things they invent to deceive the unwary. That had occurred to me; I'm not that much of an idiot. But I don't want to admit it, Gabriel, and no one can force me to; being mistaken is still one of our inalienable rights. That's how it has to be, at least if you're going to stand a chance of staying reasonably sane. Can you imagine? Can you imagine if you couldn't take back anything you said? No, it's unthinkable, I don't believe anyone could stand it. I'd take the hemlock or commit suicide in Kalavria, or any of those elegant Pan-hellenic martyrdoms." I saw him smile halfheartedly.

"Does it hurt?"

"Of course it does. But the pain is good. It keeps me aware, makes me notice things."

"What do you have to notice?"

"That I'm alive again, Gabriel. That I still have things to do around here."

"You have to recover," I said. "Then there'll be time to do whatever you want, but first you have to get out of that bed. That alone is going to take you a few months."

"How many?"

"As many as it takes. You're not telling me that now you're in a hurry."

"No, no hurry, not at all," said my father. "But it's really strange, don't you think? Now that you mention it, it seems strange. It's as if it's been given to me whole."

"What has?"

"This second life."

Six months later, when my father was dead and had been cremated in the furnace of the Jardines de Paz, I remembered the atmosphere of those days as if within them were encoded all that would come afterward. When my father spoke to me about the things he had to do, I suddenly noticed he was weeping, and his tears-clinical and predictable-took me by surprise, as if they hadn't been forecast in sufficient detail by the doctors. "For him it'll be as if he'd been dead," Dr. Raskovsky had said, rather condescendingly. "He might get depressed, might not want to have the curtains open, like a child. All this is normal, the most normal thing in the world." Well, it wasn't; a weeping father almost never is. At that moment I didn't know it, but that weeping would recur several times during the days of his convalescence; it stopped shortly afterward, and in the next six months (six months that were like a premature and unsuccessful rebirth, six months that passed between the day of the operation and the day my father traveled to Medellin, six months that covered the recuperation, the beginning of the second life, and its consequences) it never happened again. But the image of my father weeping has remained irremediably associated with his desire to correct old words, and although I cannot prove that was the exact reason-I haven't been able to interrogate him for this book, and I've had to rely on other informers-I feel that it was at that moment my father thought for the first time what he thought in such detail and with such bad luck later: This is my chance. His chance to correct errors, to rectify faults, to ask for forgiveness, because he'd been granted a second life, and the second life, as everyone knows, always comes with the inconvenient obligation to correct the first one.

His errors and their corrections happened like this:

In 1988, as soon as I received my copies of A Life in Exile, I took one to my father; I left it with the doorman, and sat down to wait for a call or an old-fashioned, solemn, and perhaps moving letter. When neither the letter nor the phone call arrived, I began to wonder if the doorman had misplaced the package; but before I had time to pass by the building and find out, rumors of my father's comments began to reach me.

Were they really as unpredictable as they seemed to me? Or was it true, as I sometimes thought over the following years, that anybody would have seen them coming by simply taking off the blindfold of family relations? The prophet's kit-the tools of prediction-was within my reach. My decision to write about current things had always elicited from my father inoffensive sarcasm, which nevertheless made me feel uncomfortable; nothing caused him as much mistrust as someone concerned with things contemporary: spoken by him, the word sounded like an insult. He preferred to talk about Cicero and Herodotus; actuality seemed like a suspect practice, almost infantile, and if he didn't perpetrate his opinions in public it was out of a sort of secret shame, or rather to avoid a situation where he'd feel obliged to admit that he, too, had read, at the time, All the President's Men. But none of that allowed me to foresee his displeasure. The first of his comments, or the first, at least, that I heard of, my father made openly enough to hurt me: he didn't choose a meeting of colleagues, or even a corridor chat, but waited till he found himself in front of the whole group who attended his seminars; and he didn't even choose his own epigram (he did have some quite venomous ones) but preferred to plagiarize an eighteenth-century Englishman.

"This little book is both very original and very good," he said. "But the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good."

As had to happen, and as he perhaps hoped would happen, one of the people at the seminar repeated the comment, and the chain of breaches of confidence, which in Colombia is so efficient when it comes to damaging someone, soon reached an acquaintance of mine. Then, with the false and petty compassion common to those who inform on others, that acquaintance, a court reporter on El Siglo, very aware of the little respect I deserved, reproduced the phrase for me, enunciating like a good actor and openly studying my face for reactions. The first thing I imagined was my father's roar of laughter, his head thrown back like a neighing horse, his baritone voice resounding through the auditorium and the offices, capable of penetrating closed wooden doors; that laugh and the stump of his right hand looking for a pocket were the signs of his victory, and could be seen every time he made a good joke, along with his eyelids squeezed shut and, most of all, the disdain, the talented disdain. Like a vulture, my father could find his opponent's weak spot at a glance, the emptiness of his rhetoric and personal insecurities, and pounce on them; the unexpected thing was that he'd use that talent against me, although sometimes he wasn't wrong in his complaints. "The photos. The photos are the most irritating. Actors from soap operas and folk singers belong in magazines," he used to say to anyone who'd listen, "but a serious journalist? What the hell is a serious journalist doing in a mass-market magazine? Why do readers need to know what he looks like, if he wears glasses or not, if he's twenty or ninety years old? A country's in trouble when youth is a safe conduct, let alone a literary virtue. Have you read the reviews? The young journalist this, the young journalist that. Shit, is there no one in this country capable of saying whether he writes well or not?"

But something told me it wasn't really the photos that bothered him, that his objections ran deeper. I had touched something sacred in his life, I thought at that moment, a sort of private totem: Sara. I had got involved with Sara, and that, due to rules I hadn't managed to figure out (that is, due to rules of a game that no one had explained to me: this became the most useful metaphor when thinking about my father's reactions to my book), was unacceptable. "Is that it?" I asked Sara one day. "Are you a taboo subject, an X-rated film? Why didn't you warn me?" "Don't be silly, Gabriel," she said, as if waving away a fly. "You're acting like you don't know him. You're acting like you don't know how he gets when an apostrophe goes missing." It wasn't impossible that she was right, of course, but I wasn't satisfied (there are lots of things missing in my book, but the apostrophes are all present and accounted for). Dear Sara, I wrote on a piece of notebook paper that I put into an airmail envelope, because it was the only one I could find, and sent by local post, instead of giving it to her myself. If you're as surprised as I am by my dad's attitude, I'd like to discuss the matter with you. If you're less surprised, then I'd like to even more. In other words: after all our interviews, there is one question I forgot to ask. Why, in two hundred pages of information, does my father never appear? Answer it, please, in no more than thirty lines. Thanks. Sara replied by return of post (that's to say, her envelope reached me in three days). When I opened the envelope, I found one of her visiting cards. Yes, he does. Page 101, lines 14 to 23. And since you allowed me 30, you owe me 21. I found the book, looked up the page, and read:

It wasn't just learning a language. It was buying rice and cooking it, but also knowing what to do if someone fell ill; how to react if someone insulted you, to keep it from happening again, but also to know how far you could go in insulting them back. If Peter Guterman was called a "Polack shit," it was necessary to know the implications of the phrase. Or, as a friend of the Guterman family said, "where the geographical error ended and the scatological one began."

Beyond the fact that it was true (yes, there was my father, present only with his Cheshire-cat grin), it was obvious that Sara was not prepared to take me seriously. That was when I decided to go to the source, to take the offended party by surprise: I'd attend his seminar unannounced the following day, just as I had so many times when I was still a student, then invite him for a drink afterward at the Hotel Tequendama to talk about the book face to face and, if necessary, with the gloves off. And there I was the next day, punctually seated in the back row, by the translucent windows, by the yellow light that reflected off the International Center.

But the class ended without me daring to speak to him.

I went back the next day, and the next, and the next as well. I didn't speak to him. I couldn't speak to him.

Nine days went by, nine days of clandestine presence in my father's classroom, before something (not my will, obviously) broke the inertia of the situation. By then the rest of the students had become used to my being there; they put up with me, without recognizing me, the way initiates put up with the presence of a dilettante. That day, as far as I remember, there were fewer people than on other occasions. It seemed obvious, though, that fewer of them were current students and more were recent graduates, a collage of smooth faces with a smattering of ties, the odd briefcase, a few attentive or mature expressions. The light of the lecture hall had always been insufficient, but that day one of the fluorescent tubes flickered till it went out just after my father settled his overcoat on the back of his chair. So, in the gloomy half-light of pale neon, all the faces had bags under their eyes, including the professor's; some faces (not the professor's) yawned. One of the students, the nape of whose neck would serve as my landscape during the class, caught my attention, and it took a moment to understand why: on top of his desk was a book, and I'm sure I choked-though nobody noticed-when I realized it was mine. (The title, more than legible, was insolent; my own name seemed to be shouting at me from the too colorful rectangle of the cover.) The air was a mixture of chalk dust and accumulated sweat-the sweat of so many people listening to so many lectures all day long-my father was far away, with his good hand fingering the buttonholes of his jacket in one of his Napoleonic gestures. He greeted the room in two words. He didn't need any more to generate a wave of terrified silence, to paralyze the chairs and open all eyes.

He began the class talking about one of his favorite speeches: not only was "On the Crown" Demosthenes' best speech, it was also a revolutionary text, although that adjective is applied to other things these days, a text that had changed the vocation of public speaking as much as gunpowder had changed warfare. My father told how he'd learned it by heart when he was very young-a brief autobiographical interlude, not at all usual in this man who jealously guarded his privacy, but nothing too surprising; or that's what I thought, at least, under the strange gloom of that afternoon-and he said the best way to memorize someone else's words was to get a job far away from where you lived, as he did when he was twenty, taking advantage of simultaneous transport and oil workers' strikes, accepting a three-month job for eighty-five pesos a month, driving a fuel tanker between the Troco plants in Barrancabermeja and the buyers in Bogota. It was an anecdote that I'd already heard on several occasions; when I was a teenager, the tale had conjured up legendary images of the open road, but there was something obscene or exhibitionist in its public retelling. "On those trips I learned more than one important text by heart," he said. "I spent many hours on the road, and the assistant I'd been assigned was the closest thing to a mute I've ever met. But he wasn't an impoverished student like me, or even a miner, but the son of the truck's owner, perfectly useless, he did nothing but listen to me when he wasn't asleep. Anyway, driving a truck full of gasoline, I learned a good part of 'On the Crown,' a very particular speech, because it's the speech of a man whose political career has failed, and who finds himself at the end of his life forced to defend himself. And without wanting to, which is worse. Only because one of his political allies decided to nominate him for a prize, while another, an enemy, a certain Aeschines, opposed it. That was the situation. Demosthenes, poor guy, hadn't even wanted to be decorated. And he was faced with this terrible task-impossible for anyone, of course, except the greatest. Any senator would have been daunted. Aeschines himself would have run away in fright. Convincing the public of the nobility of one's own errors, justifying disasters one is responsible for, apologizing for a life that one might know to be mistaken, is that not the most difficult thing in the world? Did Demosthenes not deserve the crown for the mere fact of examining his past and subjecting it to trial?" My father took a smooth, perfect, luminous square out of his breast pocket, a neon handkerchief, and dried his forehead, not wiping it but with delicate little pats.

I was pleased to see he didn't seem bothered by the sustained murmuring of movement: the chairs against the floor, the rustle of clothing, papers torn or crumpled up. His voice, perhaps, prevailed over those trivial distractions, and also his figure. He was elegant without being solemn, firm without being authoritarian, and that was plain to see; much more so, in fact, than I was. My father had not noticed my presence. He hadn't pointed me out like he had on other occasions; he looked straight ahead at a point somewhere above my head, on the wall or out of the window. "I see we have a guest today." "I'm going to take the opportunity to introduce someone." He said none of that; then, while I listened to him explain how Demosthenes invoked the gods to begin his speech-"the intention is to create an almost religious atmosphere that will influence the state of those who are listening to him, because he should be judged by gods, not by men"-I had the unequivocal sensation of invisibility. I had stopped existing in that precise moment; I, Gabriel Santoro the younger, had just evaporated from that date in history (which I no longer remember) and from that precise place, the lecture hall of the Supreme Court of Justice, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. I saw myself suddenly tangled in that misunderstanding: maybe he hadn't seen me (after all, it was dark and I was in the last row); maybe he'd chosen to ignore me, and it wasn't possible to make myself noticed without looking ridiculous and, even worse, without interrupting the class. But I had to risk it, I thought; at that moment, knowing whether my father was ignoring me on purpose monopolized my attention, my decimated intelligence. And when I was about to ask him something, anything-why did Demosthenes insult Aeschines so brutally and call his father a slave, or why did he begin speaking, for no reason, of the ancient battles of Marathon and Salamis-when I was about to break with these questions the spell of invisibility or of nonexistence, my father had again begun to talk of other times, the times of his youth, when speaking was important and what someone said could change someone else's life, and only I knew his words were for me, that they searched me out and chased me with the relentlessness of a guided missile. Professor Santoro was speaking to me through a filter: the students were listening to him unaware that my father was using them the way a ventriloquist uses a dummy. "None of you have felt that terrible power, the power to finish someone off. I've always wanted to know what it felt like. Back then we all had that power, but we didn't all know that we had it. Only some used it. There were thousands, of course: thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed. But those thousands of informers were just a part, a tiny fraction of the people who could have informed if they'd wanted to. How do I know? I know because the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are the majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment, or, at least, of resentment according to Nietzsche: the hatred the naturally weak feel for the naturally strong." Notebooks opened, students made a note of the reference; one beside me underlined Federico Nietzsche twice, with the first name in Spanish. "I don't remember when I heard of the first case of justified denunciation. On the other hand, I clearly remember an Italian who dressed in mourning for a funeral, and was then included on the blacklist for wearing the uniform of Fascism. But I have not come here to talk of these cases but to keep quiet. I have not come to talk of my experience. I have not come to talk about the enormous error, about the misunderstanding, about how my family and I suffered for that error, that misunderstanding. The moment when my life was impounded: I have not come to talk about that. My grant suspended, my father's pension turned off like a water tap, those many months in which my mother had nothing to live on: I have not come to talk about that. I can tell you perhaps that my work as a truck driver enabled me to carry on my studies. I can tell you that Demosthenes, the great Demosthenes, enabled me to carry on my life. But I have not come to break the silence. I have not come to break the pact. I have not come to make cheap accusations, nor to set myself up as a victim of history, nor to list the many ways that life in Colombia can ruin people. A joke made at the wrong moment in front of the wrong people? I'm not going to talk about that. The inclusion of my name on that inquisitors' document? I'm not going to give details, I'm not going to delve into the subject, because that is not my intention. I have spent several years now teaching people to speak, and today I want to speak to you about what is not said, what is beyond the tale, the account, the reference. I cannot prevent other people from speaking if they believe it useful or necessary. So I shall not speak out against the parasites, those creatures who use the experience of those of us who have preferred not to speak for their own ends. I shall not speak of those second-rate writers, many of whom had not even been born when the war ended, who now go around talking about the war and about the people who suffered during the war. They do not know the courage of those who have preferred not to speak: they'll not learn of it from me. They do not know that it takes strength not to make use of one's own suffering: they'll not learn it from me. They especially do not know that making use of others is one of the lowest occupations in humanity. No, no, they'll not learn it from me. The things they do not know they'll have to learn on their own. Today I have come to keep quiet and protect the silence of those who have kept it. I shall not speak. . " And, in fact, he didn't speak. He didn't speak of one title in particular, or of one author; but the system of ventriloquism he'd installed in his lecture hall had suddenly transformed into a searchlight, and the violence of that dazzling beam fell on me. The accusations of the ventriloquist-searchlight had taken me by surprise, so much so that my head overlooked the revelations about my father's past-a persecuted man, a victim of unjust accusations as the result of an unimportant joke, a frivolous comment, an innocent bit of sarcasm, the content of which had already begun to take various forms in my head-and concentrated on the possible defense of my right to ask questions and, of course, Sara Guterman's right to answer them. But the auditorium was not the most conducive setting for that debate, so I started to consider the best way to escape (the way to do so without calling attention to myself, or the way to do so by calling attention but not revealing my identity to the rest of the audience, without demolishing what little dignity I had left), when my father grabbed his overcoat with a slightly clumsy movement and the lining of his sleeve got caught on the back of the chair, which crashed onto the wooden floor with an angry reverberation. Only then did I understand that the controlled tone and measured surface of my father's words concealed, or at least masked, an interior disorder, and for the first time in my life I associated the notion of recklessness with my father's behavior. But he had already left. The class was over.

I had to take some time to recover, like someone who's just been in an accident-like a pedestrian stepping out of the shadow, the screech of brakes, the violent collision-because I felt queasy. I held my head in my hands and the noise of students getting up gradually subsided. I went out, looked for my father, and didn't see anyone. I walked around in front of the building, under the insufficient light of the walkway, and I could have sworn I saw him cross Seventh between buses and minibuses, jog with his overcoat folded over his arm despite the cold, toward the International Center, but a second later the illusion had crumbled: it wasn't him. (That momentary confusion functioned as a symbol of bad literature. That's it, I thought. Now I've started to see my father when he's not there, to confuse him with my image of him, now I've started to unlearn his silhouette, for I'd realized I would have to unlearn his life: one revelation, just one fucking revelation, and already my father is a crude hologram, a phantom in the streets.) When I turned round and began to walk south, thinking of taking the first street that went down to Seventh and thus doubling my chances of finding a taxi at that hour, I ran into a student. A streetlight lit him from the back-a saint and his halo-and it took me a second to recognize him: it was the student who had my book; at the beginning of the class the fetishistic attention he was paying my father had already bothered me, and now he seemed anxious to confirm that attention.

"You're el junior, aren't you?" he said. "Your old man's hard, brother. You're a lucky guy. Too bad there aren't more sons of bitches like him."

Half an hour later I arrived at the house of my father, el senior, the hard man, the stranger. But he must have taken a slower route, because he wasn't home yet, so I crossed the street and settled down to wait for him on the corner, sitting on one of those milestones you still find all over Bogota, those rough, angular stones that used to mark the streets and for some reason haven't been taken away, although many of them now have incorrect information (Boulevard where it should say Avenue, Nineteen where it should say Thirty). And all that time, while I was freezing to death and watching a dirty yellow cloud swallowing the night sky, I was thinking: Why has he never told me about what happened? And what had happened? What was the unfortunate joke made at the wrong time that someone had taken too seriously? Who was the humorless person who'd made the accusation; who was the informer? Had he ever told my mother? Was there anyone else who knew about this? That was the first thing I asked when he arrived with his collar undone (disorder struggling to the surface) and unenthusiastically tolerated my following him upstairs and sitting down when he sat down. I also asked him if he'd seen me; I asked him if, after seeing me, he'd recognized me. He chose to answer my questions out of order. "Of course," he said. "I saw you were there at the back, sitting there from the start. I've always seen you. Sometimes I let you know, sometimes I don't. You've been there all week, Gabriel. How do you suppose I wouldn't notice?"

"I would've liked to know," I insisted then. "You never told me. You never talked to me about that."

"And I'm never going to tell you," he said. He didn't seem to be choking anything back; nothing seemed to be moving him deep down inside, but therein lay the maladjustment, and I knew it. "Memory isn't public, Gabriel. That's what neither you nor Sara have understood. You two have made things public that many of us wanted forgotten. You two have recorded things that many of us took a long time to get out of sight. People are talking about the lists again, they're talking about the cowardice of certain informers, about the anguish of those unjustly informed on. . And those of us who'd made our peace with that past, those who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. The blacklists, the Hotel Sabaneta, the informers. All words that many people rubbed out of their dictionaries, and you come along, white knight of history, to display your courage by awakening things most people prefer to let lie. Why hadn't I told you? No, that's the wrong question: better to ask why talk about things that don't deserve attention. Why did I say what I said today? Why refuse to speak in public as I did today? Was it to teach you a lesson, so you'd realize the nobility your father keeps hidden, that schmaltz? Was it to invite people to forget your book, to act like it had never been published? I don't know, both intentions strike me as childish, absurd as well as chimerical, a lost battle. But there's one thing I want you to know: I would have done the same if I hadn't seen you there. I am not going to speak of those denunciations, but I can tell you one thing: in a parallel reality I would have denounced you and your parasitical book, your exploitative book, your intrusive book. That's the only clear thing in all of this: the men who have remained silent did not deserve to have your reportage inflicted on them. Keeping silent is not agreeable, it demands character, but you don't understand that, you, with the same arrogance as all the rest of the journalists in the world, you thought the world could not manage without Sara's life. You think you know what this country is, that this country and its people no longer hold any mysteries for you, because you believe Sara is all there is, that you've known her and you've known us all. That's why I would have denounced you, as a con man and as a liar. Yes, I would have done it even if I hadn't seen you. And anyway, what were you doing there? Why didn't you tell me you were coming? No, don't answer, I can imagine. You went so we could talk about the book, right? You went so I could give you my opinion. And that's what you're here for now; deep down you still want me to talk about you. You still think I'm going to congratulate you, I'm going to encourage you and say you were born to write about Sara's life, or rather that Sara was born and went through her whole life, through the Nazis and exile, through wartime in a strange country, through forty years of life in this city where people kill each other out of habit, so that you could come now and sit down comfortably with your tape recorder and ask her idiotic questions and write two hundred pages, and our happiness would be so irrepressible we'd all start masturbating. Aren't you good? That's what you expect people to say. That's why you wrote it, so everyone would know how good and compassionate you are, how indignant you feel when these terrible things happen to humanity, no? Look at me, admire me, I'm on the side of the good guys, I condemn, I denounce. Read me, love me, give me prizes for compassion, for goodness. Do you want my opinion? My opinion is that you've got every right to investigate, to ask questions, even to write, but not to publish. My opinion is that you should have put that manuscript in a drawer and locked it, and then tried to lose the key. My opinion is that you should have forgotten the matter and that you are going to do so now, even though it's too late, because everyone is going to, everyone is going to forget your book in less than two months. It's that simple. I've nothing more to say. My opinion is that your book is shit."

And then the unthinkable happened: my father made a mistake. The man who spoke in perfect paragraphs, who communicated during the course of a normal day in quarto sheets ready for press, had mixed up his papers, confused his objectives, forgotten his speech and didn't have a prompter handy. The man who forecast the oblivion of my book lost control and ended up doing everything possible so that my book would be remembered. On its own merits, A Life in Exile would have gone unnoticed; my father-or rather his disproportionate, impetuous, unthinking reaction-took care of putting the book center stage and focusing all spotlights on it. "He's going to publish a review," Sara warned me. "Please tell him not to, tell him that's no way to behave." I replied, "I'm not saying anything. Let him do what he likes." "But he's mad. He's gone mad, I swear. The review is terrible." "I don't care." "You have to convince him; he's going to hurt you. Tell him the book was an accident. Make him see reason. Tell him that publishing the review is against his own interests. If he publishes it, it's going to attract people's attention. Explain that to him. He doesn't realize. This can be avoided." Then I asked her why she was so worried. "Because this is going to hurt you both, Gabriel. I don't like to see you hurt each other. I love you both." Her explanation struck me as odd; or rather, it struck me as superfluous, and therefore incomplete. "You'd rather the book wasn't spoken about," I said to Sara. "That's not true. I'd rather he wouldn't speak of the book. I'd rather he wouldn't speak about the book like that. He's going against you, but that's not it. It's that all this is contrary to his own intentions, don't you see?" "Of course I see. So what?" "I've never seen him react so pathologically. Who knows what'll happen afterward. This isn't Gabriel." "Tell me something, Sara. Did you know?" "Did I know what?" "Don't play the fool. Did you know? And if you knew, why isn't it in the book? Why didn't you tell me during the interviews?" It's an odd debating strategy that I've forgotten the name of: if your opponent demands something, respond with even more aggressive demands. "Why did you hide it from me? Why did you give me incomplete information?"

The review appeared a few days later:

As the subject for his first book, the journalist Gabriel Santoro has chosen one of the most difficult and, at the same time, one of the least original. Jewish emigration in the 1930s has been, for several decades, the talk of as many journalists as there are places in the journalism schools. Santoro wanted, undoubtedly, to appear audacious; he would have heard that audacity is one of the journalistic virtues. But to write a book about the Holocaust in this day and age is as audacious as shooting a sitting duck.

The author of A Life in Exile imagined that the mere announcement of his theme-a woman who escaped from Hitler as a young girl and settled permanently in our country-was sufficient to generate terror and/or pity. He imagined, as well, that a clumsy and monotonous style could pass for a direct and economical one. In short: he counted on the reader's inattentiveness. Sometimes it's sentimental: the protagonist is a woman "of fears and deliberate silences." Sometimes it's wordy: in Colombia, her father feels "distant and welcome, accepted and foreign." Anyone will notice that the metaphor and the chiasmus aim to reinforce the ideas; anyone will notice that they manage only to weaken them. These are not the only occasions where this happens.

Of course it would all work better if the intention in general wasn't so obviously opportunistic. But the author tells us that emigrating is bad, that exile is cruel, that an expatriated man (or, in this case, woman) will never be the same. The pages of this book are rife with the cliches of sociology, while more thought-provoking truths, such as the capacity of men to reinvent themselves, to remake their destiny, remain submerged. They haven't interested the author; perhaps this is why the book doesn't interest us.

Finally, A Life in Exile is little more than an exercise: a commendable exercise, some will say (although I don't know with what justification), but an exercise after all. I won't point out that its tropes are cheap, its ethos questionable, and its emotions secondhand. I will say, however, that as a whole it is a failure. This verdict is clearer and more direct than the best inventory of the book's shortcomings, the listing of which would be as futile as it would be exhausting.

The text was signed with the initials GS. There was not a single reader unaware of the name they stood for.

By December 1991, that is, three years after those words, my father's recovery was complete, and after several conversations, and the recollection of those scenes, the retraction of his mistaken words seemed definitive. On Sundays, Sara invited us over for ajiaco with chicken, not prepared by her but ordered in and delivered in separate bags like the ones they use to carry live fish, containing the cream, the capers, and the corn on the cob, all packed into a little polystyrene box. Having a regular routine arranged and having his son present, as a participant and not as a witness or prosecutor, was for my father a confirmation and almost a prize (pats on the back from a pleased teacher): "If it was necessary for me to be opened up like a frog so we could spend Sundays together, well fine, I'll happily pay that price. In fact, I'd pay double, indeed I would. I would have paid four angioplasties in order to eat this ajiaco in this company." Sara lived in an apartment that was too big for the needs of its sole occupant: it was a sort of large eagle's nest built into the fifteenth floor of a building on Twenty-eighth Street, across from, or rather above, the bullring, and it had windows on two sides, so on clear days, leaning out of the window, you could see the blot of blue tempera of the church of Monserrate, and from the other window, if you looked down, the rough, dun-colored circle of sand. The dining room had fallen into disuse, as often happens in the houses of people living on their own, and now Sara used the table to assemble three-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles of Alpine scenes, so we'd help ourselves to ajiaco in deep bowls and take it on trays to eat in the living room, and we'd switch on the radio and listen to whatever concert HJCK was broadcasting that afternoon while we ate our lunch. As the weeks went by, it gradually became more possible and less surprising that we could finish eating without having spoken during the whole meal, enjoying one another's company in ways it wasn't necessary to verbalize or even make known by the usual codes, friendly smiles or polite glances. At times like those, I used to think: These two are all I have. This is my family.

The Sunday that my father told Sara and me about Angelina, the physiotherapist, and what was going on with her, wasn't just any Sunday, because the final phase of the Advent season was just about to start, and so, while in the rest of Bogota Catholics got ready to sit down beside a nativity scene and read prayers from a pink book that was once given away free with any purchase in Los Tres Elefantes, Sara insisted we get her grandchildren's Christmas tree out of the cupboard and help her set it up in a corner of the living room. "This is what I get for being a liberal," she'd said to me once. "I just wanted to raise my children without religion of any kind, and look, they end up doing the same Christian nonsense as everyone else. When it comes down to it, I might as well have carried on with my Jewish nonsense, no? Mama didn't want me to marry the way I married: you'll end up converting, you'll lose your identity. I never believed her, and now look at me: I have to put the wretched tree up. If I don't do it now, there'll be no putting up with my sons later. These things are important, Mum. Traditions, symbols. Just excuses. What they want is to save themselves the lumberjack's job of setting up one of these nuisances." And my father and I, who after my mother's death had gradually left aside these practices of trees and donkeys and oxen and mirrors that simulate lakes and moss that simulates fields and plastic babies lying on fake hay, we who had developed together an affectionate indifference toward all the paraphernalia of Christmas in Bogota, suddenly found ourselves kneeling on the carpet, putting the branches of a tree into order by size, and spreading out the instruction page across our knees. It wasn't an easy job and the amount of irony it brought with it wasn't inconsiderable either, and maybe that's why we did it with less reticence than might have been expected, along the lines of Who would have imagined or If so-and-so could see us now. Sara had started talking about her grandchildren. That was an area my book hadn't touched on, because it was inaccessible; no matter how hard Sara tried, she could never explain the distance between her own German childhood and that of her grandchildren. If her sons were strangers, her grandchildren were doubly so, people as far removed from Emmerich, and from the Emmerich synagogue, as it was possible to be. "How old is the youngest?" I asked.

"Fourteen. Thirteen. Around there."

"Fourteen," I repeated. "Same age as you when you arrived."

Sara thought for a moment; she seemed not to have noticed that before. "Exactly," she said, but then she fell silent, organizing with her aged hands the green and yellow and red spheres of fragile glass, frosted or shiny, opaque or clear, which she was going to hang on the tree when my father and I had finished it. "Other people look at their children and see themselves in them," she said. "Your dad sees himself in you, he'll see himself in your children. That'll never happen to me: we're different. I don't know if it matters."

"Well, there's genetics as well," said my father.

"How so?"

"They look like you, and, unfortunately for them, that's definitive."

That afternoon, my father seemed invulnerable to the traces of his past. He remembered the words they'd be praying all over the place that week, those verses that had always made him burst out laughing: O King of the Gentiles and their desired One / O Emmanuel, our Protector / O Holy One of Israel / Shepherd of Thy Flock. He recited them (for he knew them by heart, all the verses of all the days of the novena, and some of the prayers as well) and attached a branch to the tree trunk, and then he recited another one and picked up another branch and spun it round to see where it fit. And all the time he seemed happy, as if these holidays, to which he'd always been immune, suddenly affected him. And then he confirmed the feeling I'd had earlier: one of the consequences of the second life was a brutal nostalgia, the notion, so very democratic, so universally accessible and at the same time so surprising, of time lost, even though we might have suffered more in that time than in the present. I knew it thanks to my recordings, which at that moment and in that instant seemed to justify every second I'd invested in that curious fetish: conserving other people's voices.

Another of those Sundays I'd tactlessly brought to Sara's house one of those cassettes that I guarded like a state secret. After we'd poured our coffee, I asked them to sit round the sound system and keep quiet, and in the open space that served as a living room, the three of us listened to Sara talking about their hotel. "The war was in the hotel, we carried it in our pockets," we heard her say. "I can't tell you all the things I saw, because there are people who are still alive, and I'm no informer; I don't want to destroy reputations or dig up anything that someone wants to keep buried. But if I could, if we were alone in the world, you and I, in this house, if a bomb had fallen and Colombia no longer existed and only we existed, and you asked me what went on, I could tell you everything. . Later you'd be sorry you knew. One gets contaminated by this kind of knowledge, Gabriel; I don't know how better to tell you, but that's how it is. If they'd asked me, I would have said, I prefer to close my eyes, not to see those things. But of course, no one asked me. Who would have had the decency? In spite of my father being the owner of the hotel, no? Because if there was any logic in the world, an angel of the Annunciation should have appeared in the Nueva Europa and warned my father that this would happen, that that would happen. No, not logic: justice. A warning would have been fair at the very least, but of course one can't count on such things, that clause is not in the contract. The contracts are written up there and you sign them without complaint, and later things happen and who do you talk to if you're not satisfied. . Anyway, I can't tell you everything, but I can tell you about the hotel, about the hotel and the war and the effects on my life, because one is also the spaces where one has grown up.

"You ask me if I regret anything. Everybody regrets something, don't they? But you ask and right there I get the image of the face of old lady Lehder in my head. She was one of the Germans from Mompos. That's what we called the German Nazis in Mompos. Some of them had been regular clients of the hotel before 1940; several of them knew Eduardo Santos. Much better than I did, as well. That's why it was so strange, Gabriel. That's why it was so surprising that woman should come looking for me. It was the beginning of 1945. She came to find me to ask me to intercede on behalf of her husband. That's how she said it, it's not my fault, she'd said intercede on his behalf. Herr Lehder had just been confined to the Hotel Sabaneta. No, I refuse to speak of a 'concentration camp'; language can't play those tricks on us. One thing is one thing and another thing is something else. The thing is that Frau Lehder was living alone in her house in Mompos, her servants had left, she'd had her electricity cut off. And her husband was in the Sabaneta. That's why she came to see me, to ask for help. I told her to go away, maybe more politely, but that's what I said to her. And she told me about her son in the Wehrmacht, a young man of your age, she said to me, he's just a boy, he fought at Leningrad until he was wounded. I just want to be allowed to listen to the radio, to know if anyone has news of my son, whether he froze to death in Leningrad, Fraulein Guterman. It seems the soldiers have to urinate in their trousers to feel a little bit of warmth. I said no. I didn't even let her sit down to listen to the radio. Later I heard that the Lehders had found a lawyer friend in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and so they were able to return to Berlin. In any case, I remember that: having refused to let old lady Lehder sit down by the radio and see if anyone mentioned her little soldier. I didn't give a damn about the little soldier or about old lady Lehder. But that wasn't the worst. The worst thing is that even today I wouldn't help her. You ask me if I regret anything and I think about that, but the way to fix it, today, would be for it not to have happened. There's no other way. Because if it happened again, I'd do the same. Yes, I wouldn't think twice. It's terrible, but that's how it is."

The power of those recordings. That afternoon, listening to them, my father aged twenty years: maybe he would have thought, as I was thinking, that Sara Guterman's every sentence evoked the treachery of which he'd been the victim, every sentence contained it but also managed to empty it of meaning, for neither Sara nor I could grasp his experience, feel what he'd felt as a young man. He never asked us to turn the machine off, or to change the cassette, nor did he stand up with some excuse to escape to the bathroom or the kitchen. He silently endured that recording, which must have been at the very least uncomfortable and sometimes even painful, because it brought back to life for him the circumstances that he'd kept secret for such a long time and to which, under the spur of my book, he had alluded in public, to the unease (and sometimes admiration) of his students; he endured it as he'd endured the catheter, with his eyes wide open and fixed on the hanging lamp, the scrawny wire, the metallic shade. When the first side finished and I asked if they wanted me to turn it over, he said no, no thanks, why didn't we put on a little music and chat for a while, Gabriel; wasn't it better to take advantage of these moments to talk? His voice, thin and raspy as a paper kite, was barely audible; in a single sentence, my father managed to complain, draw attention to himself like a badly brought-up teenager, and cast the authority of his tantrums over the atmosphere: if there were things he preferred to forget, it was incomprehensible and even obscene that others might want to remember them. And for the rest of the afternoon, the company of that bitter and pale old man, which would have annoyed me in a stranger, struck me as pitiful and pathetic. That's what I discovered that afternoon: my father was incapable of wrestling with the facts of his own life; the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in the teeth. Those conversations recorded five years earlier (about things that had happened half a century ago) damaged him from within and sucked at his blood, left him as exhausted as if he'd just come out of the operating room.

But on the afternoon I'm talking about, my father was back to being the force he used to be. His mind was again functioning as it had done at the height of his powers, and the hypothesis of the second chance seemed as much in evidence as if there were a horse in the room. I remembered the recorded words, raised my head to look at the people with whom I was sharing a meal-my family-and thought what always seems incredible: This happened to you two. This, which happened half a century ago, happened to you, and you're still alive, acting as tangible testimony to events and circumstances that will perhaps die when you die, as if you were the last human beings able to dance an Andean folk dance that no one else knows, or as if you knew by heart the words to a song that had never been written down and will be lost to the world when you two forget it. And in what physical state did these memory receptacles live? How deteriorated were they, how much time did the world have to try to extract their knowledge? Every movement, every word from my father was like a little banner saying: Don't worry, everybody calm down, nothing's happened here. And Sara, it seemed, thought the same.

"The truth is you've come out as good as new," Sara said to my father. "I wonder if I should have one of those things, too."

"No such thing as reincarnation?" my father said. "No karma? No one's going to convince me of that anymore, my dear; from here on in I declare myself a Hindu."

"I can't stand this," said Sara. "Now I look older next to you."

It was a slight exaggeration, of course, because Sara, with her loose linen slacks and a white shirt that came down to her knees, still looked solid, as though she'd been let off half her years for good behavior. She seemed to have settled into a comfortable solitude, seemed resigned to the days passing her by and content to look up, with something that might be called submission but also habit, to watch them go. Her face underlined the years she'd lived with no more responsibility than her own sustenance. Her earlobes were pierced, but she wore no earrings; she used bifocals for reading, the frames gold and discreet, the lenses a coppery color. Her body, it seemed to me, had lived at a different rhythm: it didn't show the marks of time, the tiredness of the skin; it didn't show the tensions, of course, or the way pain marks people's faces, scratches their eyes and forces them to wear glasses, contorts the corners of mouths and scores their necks like a plow. Or was it perhaps more precise to speak of memory: Sara's body accumulated time, but had no memory. Sara kept her memory apart: in boxes and files and photographs, and in the cassettes of which I was the custodian, that seemed to absorb Sara's history and at the same time withdraw it from her body. The cassettes of Dorian Guterman. The files of Sara Gray.

As for him, it was true that over these last six months his transformation had been remarkable. I knew that one of the immediate consequences of the operation was a sudden invasion of oxygen into an unaccustomed heart, and therefore levels of energy the patient had forgotten existed, but seeing him through the eyes of our hostess, watching him as his contemporary watched him, I thought that yes, the cliche was true, my father had come out as good as new. Over the last few months I would have forgotten if not for the image of the scar blazoned across his chest, that corporeal memorandum, and the restrictions imposed after the operation, still in effect-although only my father remained aware of those private disciplines-which surfaced at lunch and dinner, just as they came up that afternoon, while we ate ajiaco in that Christmassy apartment with a view of Monserrate.

"And what are you going to do now?" said Sara. "What are you going to do with your new life?"

"For the moment, not count my chickens. Or rather count them, but very quietly. I have to take good care of myself just to stay as I am. The diet is very strict but I have to stick to it. It's pretty good, though, being twenty again."

"What an insufferable fellow you are! Something will happen to you for being so arrogant."

The new Gabriel Santoro. Gabriel Santoro, corrected and improved version. The reincarnated orator stood up all of a sudden and made a beeline across the living room, arrived at the wooden bookcase, and with his left hand picked up a cardboard sleeve the size of a wedding invitation, and with the thumb of his stump he took the disk out of the sleeve, put it on the record player, and set the speed at 78 rpm and lowered the needle, and then one of the German songs Sara had made me listen to years before began to play.

Veronika, der Lenz ist da,

die Madchen singen Tralala,

die ganze Welt ist wie verhext,

Veronika, der Spargel wachst.

I had closed my eyes and leaned back on the sofa and begun to let myself drift into postlunch drowsiness, after the heaviness of the ajiaco on a Sunday afternoon, when I thought I heard my father singing and discounted the idea as impossible and unbelievable, and immediately I seemed to hear his voice again underneath the old music and static from the speakers and the 1930s instruments. I opened my eyes and saw him, with his arms around Sara (who had started washing the plates), singing in German. The fact that I hadn't heard him sing more than three times in my entire life was less odd than seeing him sing in a language he didn't know, and I immediately remembered a scene from when I was small. For a few months my father had put on a wig and changed his glasses and worn a bow tie instead of a normal tie: the fact of belonging to the Supreme Court, even though he wasn't a judge, had made him interesting, and he'd received his first threats, a couple of those calls so common in Bogota and to which we've become accustomed and don't pay much attention. Well, the first time he arrived home in disguise, he called hello from the stairs as he always did, and I went out and found myself with this unfamiliar figure and it scared me: a brief and soon dispelled fear, but fear it was. Something along the same lines happened as I watched him move his mouth and emit strange sounds. It was, in truth, another person, a second Gabriel Santoro.

Veronika, die Welt ist grun,

drum lass uns in die Walder ziehn.

Sogar der liebe, gute, alte Grosspapa,

sagt zu der lieben, guten, alten Grossmama.

When the old folks came to sit back down in the living room, one or the other noticed my shocked face, and they both started to explain that, among other things, my father had spent the last few months learning German. "Do you think it absurd?" he said. "Because I do, I confess. Learning a new language at sixty-something: What for? What for, when the one I already have isn't much use to me? I'm retired, I'm retired from my language. And this is what we retired people do, look for another job. If we are given a second life, then the urge is even stronger." That was when, in the middle of the treatise on the way of reinventing oneself, in the middle of the spectacle of his remodeled words, in the middle of these sung phrases whose meaning I would find out later, my father spoke to Sara and me about Angelina, about how he'd got to know her better in these months-it was logical, after seeing her every day for so long and benefiting from her massages-how he'd gone on seeing her after the therapy was finished and his health restored. That's what he told us. My father the survivor. My father, with the capacity to reinvent himself.

"I'm sleeping with her. We've been seeing each other for two months."

"How old is she?" asked Sara.

"Forty-four. Forty-five. I don't remember. She told me, but I don't remember."

"And she hasn't got anyone, right?"

"How do you know she hasn't got anyone?"

"Because if she did, someone would be throwing it in her face. That sleeping with old men is against the rules. The age difference. Whatever. She must have a good story."

"Oh, here we go," said my father. "There's no story."

"Of course there is-don't give me that. First of all, she's got no one to protest. Second, you get evasive when I ask you. This woman has a hell of a story. Has she suffered a lot?"

"Well, yes. You've got the makings of a great inquisitor, Sara Guterman. Yes, she's had a shitty life, poor thing. She lost her parents in the bombing of Los Tres Elefantes."

"That recently?"

"That recently."

"Did they live here?"

"No. They'd come from Medellin to visit her. They got to say hello, and then they went out to buy some nylon stockings. Her mum needed some nylon stockings. Los Tres Elefantes was the closest place. We passed by there in a taxi not long ago. I can't remember where we were going, but when we got there Angelina's hands were numb and her mouth dry. And that evening she was a bit feverish. It still hits her that hard. Her brother lives on the coast. They don't speak to each other."

"And when did she tell you all this?" I asked.

"I'm old, Gabriel. Old-fashioned. I like to talk after sex."

"All right, all right, a little decorum, if you don't mind," said Sara. "I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still right here, or have I become invisible?"

I patted my father on the knee, and his tone changed: he put aside the irony, he became docile. "I didn't know what you'd think," he said. "Do you realize?"

"What?"

"It's the first time I've ever spoken to you about anything like this," he said, "and it's to tell you what I'm telling you."

"And without giving the rest of us time to cover our ears," said Sara. And then she asked, "Has she stayed over at your house?"

"Never. And don't think I haven't suggested it. She's very independent, doesn't like sleeping in other people's beds. That's fine with me, not that I need to tell you. But now she's taken it into her head to invite me to Medellin."

"When?"

"Now. Well, to spend the holidays. We're going next weekend and coming back the second or third of January. That's if she gets the time off, of course. They exploit her like a beast, I swear. It's the last week of the year, and she has to fight tooth and nail."

He thought for a second.

"I'm going to Medellin with her," he said then. "To spend Christmas and New Year with her. I'm going with her. Damn, it does sound very odd."

"Odd, no, it sounds ridiculous," said Sara. "But what can you do? All adolescents are ridiculous."

"There is one little thing," my father said to me. "We need your car. Or rather, we don't need it, but I said to Angelina that it's silly to take a bus when you can lend us your car. If you can, that is. If you're not going to need it, if it's not a problem."

I told him I wasn't going to need it, although it was a lie; I told him it was no problem, partly because his whole being, his voice and his manner, was speaking to me with an unprecedented affection, as if he were asking a special favor of a special friend.

"Take the car and don't worry," I said. "Go to Medellin, have a good time, say hi to Angelina for me."

"Are you sure?"

"I'll stay with Sara. She'll invite me over for Christmas and New Year."

"That's right," she said. "Go along and don't worry. We won't miss you. We're going to stay here and have our own party. Drinking what you can't drink, eating saturated fats and talking about you behind your back."

"Well, that sounds perfect," said my father. "My back doesn't usually mind that."

"Are you going to drive?" said Sara.

"Not all the time. My hand tends to be a bit of a risk factor on roads like that one. She'll probably do most of the driving, I guess. I can't guarantee she's good at it, but her license is in order, and anyway, who said you have to drive well to drive in Colombia? How dangerous can it be? I'm in no position to make demands; if a Virgil falls into your life, you don't start cross-examining."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Was it your idea?"

"Don't bring Virgil into this," said Sara. "Delusions of youth, that's what it's called."

"Aha, the green-eyed monster is among us. Are you jealous, Sarita?"

"Not jealous, no, don't be silly. But I am old, and so are you. Stop pretending you're not. Eight-hour car trips. Making love with schoolgirls. You're going to have a heart attack, Gabriel."

"Well, it'll be worth it."

"Seriously," I said. "What does she think?"

"That any co-driver is a good co-driver."

"No, about your age. What does she think about your age?"

"She thinks it's fine. Well, I imagine she thinks it's fine, I haven't asked her. Fundamental rule of forensic interrogation: don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answer to, watch out for boomerang questions, as the ancients used to say. No, I don't want answers that are going to hit me in the back of the neck. I haven't asked her what she thinks about my hand either, if it bothers her, if she has to make an effort to forget it. What do you want me to say? I'm a good guy, I'm not going to hurt her, and that alone must seem like a fortune to her. It's stupid, but I feel like taking care of her. She's forty-four but I want to take care of her. She's convinced the world is shit, that everyone was born with the sole objective of giving her a hard time. It's not the first time I've heard the argument, but it's the first time it's come so close to me. And I spend all day and half the night trying to convince her of the opposite, Plato, homo homini Deus, all that stuff, and she never picks up a book even by accident. I've lived a long while, I've seen what there is to see. But this is by far the most unpredictable thing that's ever happened to me in my life."

He forgot that life likes to outdo itself. Life (the second life) waited a week before reminding him, and did so with a wealth of detail.

…

Now I like to think about that week over and over again, because it's the closest thing I've got to innocence, to a state of grace, because at the end of that week a whole idea of how the world should be ended. At that moment this book did not exist. It could not exist yet, of course, because this book is an inheritance created by the death of my father, the man who looked down on my work (writing about other people's lives) while he was alive and who after he died left me as a legacy the subject of his own life. I am my father's heir and I am also his executor.

While I write I see that, over the course of several months, instead of the things and papers that I need to reconstruct the story, it has been the things and papers that prove the existence of the story and can correct my memory, if necessary, that have been accumulating on my desk. I am not skeptical by nature, nor am I naive, and I know very well the cheap tricks memory can avail itself of when it suits; at the same time, I know that the past is not stationary, nor is it fixed, in spite of the illusion of documents: so many photographs and letters and films that allow us to think of the immutability of what we've seen, what we've heard, what we've read. No, none of that is definitive. It can take just a tiny detail, something that in the grand scheme of things we consider insignificant, to make a letter relating trivialities become something that determines our lives, to make the innocent man in the photo turn out to have always been our worst enemy.

My desk was once my mother's. The wood has softened from being smeared with so much furniture polish, but no other strategy has occurred to me to protect this block (that looks recently carved from a wet tree trunk) from woodworm attacks. There are rings from glasses and cups that nothing short of sandpaper could now shift. The corners are chipped or split, and I've got more than one splinter from carelessly brushing my hand across it. And, most of all, there are things, things whose principal function is evidential. Every once in a while I pick up one of those cassettes and make sure they're still there, that they still contain Sara Guterman's voice. I pick up a magazine from 1985 and read a paragraph: "When the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Colombia finally decided to break relations with the Axis powers. . " I pick up the December 1941 speech, in which Santos broke relations with the Axis: "We are with our friends, and we are firmly with them. We will fulfill the role corresponding to this policy of continental solidarity with hatred towards none. . " I pick up a letter from my father to Sara, a letter from Sara to my father, a speech by Demosthenes: this is my evidence. I am heir, I am executor, and I am also prosecutor, but before this I have been archivist, I have been organizer. Looking back-and back means a couple of years ago as well as half a century-events take shape, a certain design: they mean something, something that doesn't necessarily come as given. To write about my father I've been obliged to read certain things that despite his tutelage I had never read. Demosthenes and Cicero are the most obvious, almost a cliche. Julius Caesar was no less predictable. Those books are also compelling pieces of evidence, and each one of them figures in my dossier, with all the annotations my father had made in them. The problem is that interpreting them is not within my powers. When my father notes, beside Brutus's speech, "From verb to noun? Here you lost," I don't know what he might have meant. I feel more comfortable with facts; and death, of course, is the densest of facts, more meaningful, less susceptible to being perverted or misappropriated by different interpretations, relative versions, readings. The rule says that death is as definitive as anything can be on earth. That's why it's so disconcerting when a man changes after death, and that's why biographies and memoirs get written, those cheap and democratic forms of mummification.

The process of my father's mummification was only possible from December 23, 1991, when the accident happened. At that moment I was at home, comfortable and calm and in bed with a friend, T, a woman I've known since I was fifteen and she was twelve, with whom I get together every two or three months to make love and watch a movie, for although she is married and relatively content, we've always had the idea that in another life we could have been together, and we would have liked that. I still see T as a little girl, and perhaps there's a perversion there that we allow ourselves for a few hours. We touch, go to bed, watch a movie, and sometimes go back to bed after the movie, but not always, and then T has a shower, dries her hair with a hair dryer I bought just for her, and goes home. That's how it was that night: according to my calculations, we were watching the movie, and maybe Marlon Brando was dying of a heart attack in the garden in front of his grandson, but it's possible that the film had ended and I was seeking T's mouth, which is wide and always cold. Sometimes I've gone as far as considering the possibility of this coincidence: that T was sitting on top of me and sliding up and down my erection the way she often does just at the moment when my car (driven by my father) and an Expreso Bolivariano bus (driven by a certain Luis Javier Velilla) went over the cliff together a few kilometers outside Medellin, on the way to Las Palmas. The car was on its way out of Medellin; the bus was arriving. Five passengers survived the accident. I'll never understand how my father, the great survivor, was not among them.

Boomerang questions began to accumulate almost immediately in my head, and I, with a negligence the rhetoric professor would have reproached me for, allowed that to happen. What was my father doing on the road to Las Palmas, that is, coming back from Medellin? Why was he driving at night, when he knew that road's terrible reputation? Why hadn't he let Angelina drive? These questions (the most physical, the most circumstantial) and the others, those concerning the blame for the accident (the most likely, I thought then, to come back and hit me in the back of the neck), came flooding in without warning when I received Sara's phone call and as I heard her tell me the news, or rather read it word for word from the newspaper, while I listened to her somewhat distractedly with the fleeting altruistic regret one tends to feel when listening to news of someone else's death in Colombia. Then she told me my father's name was in the newspaper's list. "That can't be right," I said, still standing beside the bedside table. "He's in Medellin. He's not coming back until January."

"The license plate of the car's there, Gabriel, and the name," she said. She wasn't crying but her voice sounded nasal and uneven like the voice of someone who'd only just stopped. "I wanted it to be a mistake, too. I'm very sorry, Gabriel."

"What about her? Was she with him?"

"Who knows?"

"If she wasn't with him, maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was someone else, Sara."

"It's not someone else. I'm so sorry."

In my left hand I had a white T-shirt with a doctored photo of the Caribbean and the slogan Colombia Nuestra, and in my right a travel iron, a fist-sized contraption that I'd got on special offer in an electrical shop in San Andresito. I'd just ironed the shirt and unplugged the iron, but after I hung up, as I sat down distractedly on the unmade bed, I rested it on my leg and the burn was brutal. By the time I got dressed, half incredulous and half dizzy, and called a taxi, an oblong blister the color of watery milk had formed above my knee. The operator who took my call gave me two numbers, a code and the identification number for my taxi, those security strategies that we ingenuous Bogotanos trust to evade criminals; but my father had just died-the pain of my burned skin did nothing but remind me, like a testimony to those two bodies, his and his lover's, perhaps burned as well, the skin converted into a single bag of white water-and as I got into the taxi I realized I'd forgotten the numbers I had to say for the taxi driver to accept me. "Code?" the driver asked and then repeated, and the glistening down on his upper lip and his narrow eyes said the same thing. I suddenly feared something was wrong with me; I began to have trouble breathing and barely had time to think, in the midst of an intense physical pain, of the loss that had just invaded my life and the darkness of what was left of my reasoning, that I was about to suffer an anxiety attack.

I got back out of the taxi. I told the driver to wait for a second, please, but he must not have heard me: as soon as he saw me lie down on the ground, he put the car in gear and pulled away. On a nearby wall were some geraniums; they reminded me, as was to be expected, of the walls of the houses you see on the way down into Medellin from Las Palmas, and as soon as that image came into my head so did the first wave of nausea. I knelt beside the wall and threw up a thin, rust-colored, almost odorless phlegm (I hadn't eaten anything that morning), and stood up as soon as I felt that my legs, which go weak when I vomit, would be able to support me, because it seemed the minimal dignity of enduring these experiences standing up-the vision of the buildings with their windows falling on top of me, the pressure of clothing on my chest-would somehow help me to get through this week, in which Sara, merciful and braver than me, would take charge of the formalities with the ease of a professional grave digger but with the kindness a grave digger would have forever lost. One of her sons called me during those days. "Why don't you take care of these things yourself?" he said over the phone. "My mum isn't up to looking after other families' deaths, that should be obvious." I thought it was a strange form of jealousy, because Sara was duplicating the measures she'd taken when her husband died; her son didn't seem to like it very much. But Sara paid him no attention. She went on doing what needed to be done. She drafted an announcement for the two Bogota newspapers, the ones we open to see what deaths we have to attend that day, and decided, for reasons she didn't seem too clear about, to leave her own name out of the text, despite my request that she include it along with mine. So Gabriel Santoro invited mourners to the funeral of Gabriel Santoro; and in the drum roll of the duplicated name and surname there was something solitary and sad, because many of those who attended the mass, people who didn't know me, had the impression of a printer's error. Sara apologized many times for not having included our second surnames, as we normally do in this country, which has always seemed strange to her. Of course, that would have prevented any confusion, but I didn't blame her, I couldn't have blamed her. She had taken on even the most trivial tasks, which are, for that very reason (because they take us away from the gravity, the solemnity, the rite) the most painful, and after an off-the-cuff comment in which I'd mentioned I'd rather have the body cremated out of fear of the renewed pain of the anniversaries and cemetery visits and flowers bought at the roadside, Sara had negotiated with the administrators of the Jardines de Paz to change the plot-the plot whose title I'd carried around in my wallet for so many years the way others carry the wrinkled telephone number of their first girlfriend-for the right to cremation.

The service was held on the following Thursday. The mass, in the gloomy Cristo Rey Church, was a marvel of religious vacuity, an inventory of the absurdities in which some people seem to find solace. "Our brother," said the priest, and looked back at his notes to refresh his memory, "Gabriel Santoro, has died to live in us. We, through the love of Christ, through his infinite and eternal charity, live in him." Later I found out that before the mass he'd been asking for me, looking for me to ask some questions, and Sara had dealt with him in my place. The priest had approached her with a little book bound in black leather in his hand, open and ready like a journalist's. "What was the deceased like?" he asked Sara. She, accustomed to these procedures, answered with the supposed attributes of his star sign: he was a kind, affectionate, generous family man. The priest took notes, shook Sara's hand, and she watched him return to the sacristy. "Those of us who knew Gabriel," he said later, from the microphone, "appreciated his kind and warm personality, his infinite affection for his loved ones, his boundless generosity to friends and strangers alike. May the Lord receive him in His Holy Kingdom." And the sea of heads nodded: they were all in agreement, the dead man had been a good person. "Gathering here to remember our brother is also to ask ourselves how we can perpetuate what he has left in us; it is to measure the intensity of the loss, and the consolation of the Resurrection. . " The priest asked in public the question I'd been asking myself privately for so long, not just since the instant I knew my father was no more, but long before, and his words felt intrusive. I thought of my father's possible legacy; I felt at first I'd received nothing, nothing but the name, nothing but the timbre of our voices; but I ended up considering that in many ways my life was no different from his: it was a mere prolongation, a strange pseudopodium.

Three of my father's colleagues helped me to lift the coffin-without a window of any kind, as advised by Sara-and carry it to the door of the church; then a squadron of men dressed in mourning cut off our path; there was a rustling of papers, the coffin rested on a gilded stand, and a stranger began to read. He held the paper with a ringed hand (rings on three fingers). The man was the spokesman for the Mayoralty of Greater Bogota; at the end of each sentence his heels lifted two or three centimeters from the ground, as if he were trying to stand on tiptoe to get a better view.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, compatriots all:

Gabriel Santoro, notable citizen, thinker, professor, and friend, was in his advanced years the standard-bearer, or let us say, the very paragon of the impartial and honest man, because every moment of his life was distinguished by his pure and noble patriotism, his moral integrity, robust personality, and temperament, his devotion and fondness, the strict and upright fulfillment of his duties, and, furthermore, the cordial, affectionate nature of his human relations.

He was born in Santa Fe de Bogota in the bounti ful land of his illustrious ancestry. Sogamoso was the cradle of his forebears and source of the clear water of his understanding. Shaped by politics, science, and culture in a home of Christian virtues, he cultivated and assessed them with conscientious unction, as is customary in societies which practice healthy ideas with profound conviction. Religion and the principles of the philosophical ideal were the center, nerve, and motor of his intellect, projecting it with emanations of grandeur toward the immediate future. And, of course, faith grew in his spirit and brought him the intimate proximity of God; his wisdom and peace of the soul reflected the living miracle of a select, worthy, and civilized person.

And with all of this, breathing scents of eternity with the eminent breezes and incense of holy patriotic inspiration, with the joy of youth, athletic, elegant, and upstanding, transcending the classrooms of his alma mater, which received him like a beacon showing the way in these days of dark designs and ambiguous omens. Solicitous, disciplined, and diligent, with the uprightness of an honest man, Gabriel Santoro worshipped everlasting philosophy; the tranquil attitude of a great orator illuminated the born leader, fixed his eye on the horizons of the beloved country. In this setting we, the people of Bogota, single out Gabriel Santoro to place him, in honor of his illustrious trajectory, in the pantheon of the nation's notables.

For his life, from the illustrious moment when he received his honors degree in jurisprudence, was forever assuming the role of pilot in the storm, educating generations of men to honest labors and diaphanous ideas, and transmitting the most illustrious treasure of our species, the language we revere with its use each day of our lives. And for all that he shall be recognized in the annals of our nation, since in these very moments of exemplary pain the nation is preparing the official recognition, and its decrees shall honor Doctor Gabriel Santoro with the Medal of Civic Merit. So it is declared and shall be carried out by due process of the law.

Peace be upon the tomb of the famous teacher and worthy citizen, Doctor Gabriel Santoro. The festive and joyful tricolors wave in heaven, welcoming the orator and man. May the perpetual light shine on him.

Santa Fe de Bogota, the twenty-sixth day of the month of December, 1991.

At that moment, when the speech ended and the box slid across the fuchsia-colored carpet of the hearse and the driver closed the door, taking the greatest possible care to avoid my gaze, people began to walk toward me, to murmur condolences and offer open hands that emerged from black sleeves, and the leaden rhetoric of the duty-roster orator (those anacolutha, those subversive gerunds, those dangling participles) was the least of my worries. In any case, this I remember well: I didn't want to shake anyone's hand, because my own right hand was still feeling the weight of my father and his coffin, and I had got it into my head to make the pressure of the copper handle on my palm last for a few minutes. Later, by one of those curious associations a mind under pressure is capable of, I thought of the handles and the carpet of the hearse when the coffin began to enter the cemetery's crematorium. The door of the furnace was copper and the handles of the coffin were copper. The heat in the room, around the flowers and their putrid smell, the white ribbons, the gold letters on the white ribbons, was no different from the heat I'd felt in the car park of the funeral home, with the sun hitting the thick cloth of my jacket and my sweaty neck. And now, at the same time as I let myself be overwhelmed by these small annoyances, I thought about my dead father. At some point I thought I'd never, as long as I lived, be able to think about anything else. I was alone; there was no one left between me and my own death. Filling out the cremation forms, I had written, for the first time in a long while, my father's full name, and the automatism of my hand made me shudder, that it had memorized those movements over years of writing Gabriel Santoro, but always referring to myself, not to a dead man. The contents of my own name, that which seems immutable to us (although only through force of habit), were being transformed. Of all the changes we go through during our lifetimes-I thought, or I believe I thought-of all the changes imposed on us, what could be more violent?

In that box, behind the hatch, was his body. I could not know in what state, I could not know what damage the accident had done to him, nor had I wanted to find out the causes of death. Maybe he'd broken his neck, maybe he'd suffocated, or maybe, like one of the passengers of whom news had emerged, he'd been crushed by the chassis, or maybe the impact of the car (against the mountain, or the bus, or some tree trunk) had thrown him forward with such force that his seat belt or the steering wheel or the dashboard had broken his ribs. The doctors had said that the bones of his chest would take a year to regenerate after the operation; now the cut made by the saw irritated my imagination much less than the images summoned up by the accident. And in a few minutes, after the clothing and skin, after the soft tissues-the eyes, the tongue, the testicles-after the renewed heart, those bones would be melted by the heat of the furnace. What was the temperature in there? How long did the whole process take, the transformation of a professor of rhetoric into ashes to fill an urn? Would the wire the surgeons had used to reconnect the bones of his chest melt, too? And while I thought about this the few people who had come to the cremation spectacle kept approaching me, and the numbness of my hands and my tired words seized me again, as if to prove one more time what I've always known and never needed to prove: that I am not equipped to grieve for the dead, for no one ever taught me the words of sorrow or the conduct of mourning. Then a woman came to greet me-to convey her personal inventory of consoling phrases, of meaningful embraces, of pret-a-porter sympathy-and only when she was a meter away did I recognize Angelina, who had accompanied us in silence throughout the day, timid and half hidden, reluctant to participate in any of the ceremonies, as if embarrassed to be what she would always be: the deceased man's last lover.

She was wearing a shawl that served her well as camouflage, black and loose like a Bedouin's djellaba, and her unmade-up face, under the material, was again that of a woman any mature man might take a fancy to. She had decided to come as soon as she managed to find out that my father was, in fact, among the dead; the accident had spoiled her Christmas, she said with a certain coolness (I thought she was protecting herself from her own sadness), but she wasn't going to allow it to spoil her New Year, that was for sure, and as soon as she could she was going on holiday somewhere, as far away from all this as possible. She was the one who pointed out, on the way out of the cemetery, that I didn't have keys to my father's apartment and she did. There would surely be a few things I'd like to get, she suggested, and it was unlikely, or rather impossible, that we'd see each other again. She didn't mind going there with me and giving me the keys, she went on saying in the tone of a professional conciliator, as long as I would allow her to stay in the apartment for a while, while she packed up cardigans, rings, women's magazines, and even packets of sweetener that had piled up there over the course of six months of dates with my father and would now be pointless to waste.

"Look, the truth is I'm not really up to it right now," I said. "But why don't we meet tomorrow and then we'll have all the time we want."

And that's what we did. The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, Angelina and I went into my father's apartment together and sat down to talk with the look and feel of long-lost twins. We found the door double-locked: the door of someone who'd gone away on a trip. Inside, the impression was the same: the curtains closed, the clean plates stacked on a wooden draining rack, and one dirty glass in the sink (the orange juice one drinks before an early start, planning to have breakfast along the way). I had sat down in the ocher armchair, and she, after smoothing her skirt with her hands (a movement touching her bottom, her thighs), on one of the dining room chairs. The pale light from the street marked her face, free now of the camouflage of the djellaba, with the shadows of the window bars. When a car went past on Forty-ninth, the reflection of its windshield projected across the ceiling of the apartment, mobile, luminous, a searchlight looking for escaped prisoners. "I asked him not to go," Angelina told me. "And it went in one ear and out the other. At that hour, you know? How could he go so late? At least three buses have gone over the cliff on that road. Of course I told him. I told him and he ignored me." She was talking with her face hardened and a voice that seemed to accuse my father or suggest it was all his fault. "No, not three buses, many more, tons. The last not long ago. Everyone was killed."

"But not this time," I said. "Didn't you know? There were people who survived."

"I haven't read the papers, I didn't want to see them, it hurts too much. But they tell me things, people tell me things even though I don't want them to. There's no way to get them to respect you."

"What things?"

"Well, stupid things, that's all."

"What stupid things?"

"For example, that the bus was driving with its lights off, that it only had those little yellow lights up above turned on, you know the ones? That's the kind of shit that comes out in the newspapers. I don't know who the driver was, but I hate that son of a bitch. Maybe it was his fault."

"Don't say that. Whose fault it was. . I don't know if it really matters."

"Well, it might not matter to you. But a person wants to know, don't you think? What if it was Gabriel's fault?"

"He's driven on highways all his life. He used to drive trucks as big as a house. I don't think it was his fault."

"What trucks?"

"Troco trucks."

"And what does that mean?"

I was talking to her now as if we were brother and sister. As if she should know as well as I did my father's whole life.

"Nothing," I said. "It's the name of a company. Like any other name. It doesn't mean anything."

Angelina thought for a second.

"Liar," she said then. "Gabriel means 'God's warrior.' "

"Oh yeah? And what does Angelina mean?"

"I don't know. Angelina is Angelina."

She closed her eyes. Squeezed them as if they stung.

"The thing is, he'd just gone out," she said. "Why did he have to go out so late? Men are so stubborn. They never listen."

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"Why weren't you with him?"

"Oh," she said. A pause. Then, "Because I wasn't."

"Why not?"

"He wouldn't let me go with him. It was his business."

"What was?"

"His business."

"What business?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Angelina, angry and a bit anxious. "Don't ask me any more questions, don't be a drag. Look, I didn't stick my nose into his business. We barely knew each other."

"But you were a couple."

It wasn't the right word, of course. Angelina didn't mock me, but she could have.

"A couple, doesn't that sound nice? Like on the soaps. Is that what people say about us, that we were a couple? It's nice, I think I'd like that, though what's it matter now? He was more worried than I was about what to call us. He was always asking me what we were."

"And what were you?"

"Incredible, you're exactly the same, chip off the old block, isn't that what they say? I don't know, we slept together once in a while, we kept each other company, I think we loved each other a little; in six months you get to love someone a little. I loved him, I know that for sure, but that's life, isn't it? You're a grown-up, Gabriel, you know a person doesn't go to bed with someone and immediately become part of their life. If he wanted to go, what was I supposed to do? Nothing, right? Let him go."

"But it was so late," I said.

"So what? Oh yeah, I would have liked to go with him and get myself killed with him, how romantic. But he didn't invite me, what do you want me to do?"

"And in Medellin. What the hell was he going to do there? He didn't even like that city, he had an aversion to it."

"He'd never been there."

"He disliked it anyway."

"Oh, that's a good one," said Angelina. "Take a dislike to places you've never been." And then, "He'd never been there."

She began to cry, discreetly, silently. I wouldn't have noticed but for the movement of her index finger that swept the line of her lashes and then wiped the mascara on her black skirt. "Silly fool," said Angelina. It was normal that she should cry, as one does cry in the days following a death, when the whole world is little more than an empty shell and the intensity of the loss seems unmanageable, but I couldn't help but think that her quiet weeping, devoid of show and all despair, had different qualities, and then it occurred to me for the first time that Angelina was hiding something from me, and immediately I saw it, I saw it as if it were written in neon lights on a dark wall: my father had hurt her. She was crying out of resentment, not sadness. My father had hurt her. It seemed incredible.

"And did you have plans?" I asked.

Angelina looked at me (or rather her piercing eyes looked at me, as if separated from her body) with something that was uncertainty but also hostility, as if she were a little girl and I was trying to cheat her in a shop.

"What plans?" she said.

"To move in together, I don't know, for him to stay in Medellin. He didn't really tell me very much, you know? One day he came out with the thing about the trip. Just like that, out of the blue. That he was going away with you to spend the holiday, that's all he told me. That was it."

"Well then, that was it. Christmas and New Year, those were the plans."

"And then?"

"Listen to this guy. Then nothing. Why are you asking me so many questions, I'd like to know."

"I'm sorry, Angelina. It's just that he. ."

"How should I know what went through his head? What do you think I am, a fortune-teller?"

"No, of course not. I'm not asking-"

"Do you know what I'm thinking right now? Let's see, let's see if you're so great. What am I thinking?"

She's thinking of her pain, I said to myself. She's thinking everyone wants to hurt her. And the man who seemed to be different hurt her, too. But I didn't say it, among other reasons because I couldn't prove it, because it was impossible for me to imagine the circumstances of that injury.

"What am I thinking?"

"I don't know."

"You don't, do you? See, so why do you think that I can know what your dad was thinking? Sure, it would make things easier if it was like that, wouldn't it? Knowing what other people are thinking, fantastic. Well, you know what? If you could see what other people were thinking, you'd be too terrified to leave your house."

Angelina was defending herself, although it wasn't too clear what from. I, for my part, left it there; I accepted that an argument, or a grudge, or a disagreement between my father and his lover (the resolution of which was interrupted by death, that great meddler), was no concern of mine; I accepted that the least important aspect of my father's death was the fact that he'd died in a traffic accident, and the least important aspect of the accident was its location or the distribution of responsibility. So we spent the rest of the evening doing what we'd planned. She collected her things, every sign of her passage through the life of a dead man, and said good-bye with a distant and formal handshake, perhaps thinking of what she'd said to me at the cemetery: we'd never see each other again, because there was no reason in the world why we should. I watched her walk slowly down the stairs, carrying under her left arm a cardboard box that we'd emptied of newspapers to fill up with the sweetener and the sweaters and the magazines, a baseball cap that my father had forbidden her to wear the first time he'd seen her in it, and a plastic bag full of hair conditioner, seaweed skin creams, and packets of sanitary towels. I closed the door when I heard her say good-bye to the doorman; then, for an hour or two more, I walked around the apartment, opening drawers, cupboards, doors, lifting up shirts and peering behind books, with all the movements of someone looking for a hidden treasure but with no intention of finding it: just wanting to make sure my father hadn't kept savings or valuable documents in some secret place and that later, when what was necessary was done with this place, the documents or savings wouldn't be lost among the rubbish or stolen. That's how I found an old ticket to a Leonardo Favio concert beside a half-empty box of condoms, and, in spite of the faded letters on the paper, I could see the concert had been the year my mother died, which undoubtedly explained why my father had submitted himself to the unbearable torture of popular ballads; and that's how I realized, as I went through his meager and amateur collection of similar records-some still with their tissue-paper sleeves intact-that there were no cassettes in this house, because there was no machine to play them on, and I was struck by a notion I hadn't considered until that moment: my father left behind two or three texts, but his voice was not recorded anywhere. I would never hear his voice again.

Days later, in Sara Guterman's house, where I had gone to spend New Year's Eve, I again thought of this small tragedy and told her. Sara gave me all the sympathy she could, but obviously couldn't contradict me or disprove the fact that my father's memory would gradually disappear little by little, and his disappearance would be pinned on circumstances as impalpable as the nonexistence of a recording, at the same time as her voice had been generously consigned to remain forever on a dozen cassettes. Her television was on, because we'd agreed that we'd pay little attention to the toasts and Colombian traditions of eating grapes and wearing yellow for luck, and we'd go from one year to the next watching the celebrations in other cities, and there were the images, the black skies suddenly filling with dense and luminous fireworks like cotton candy, the noise and the kisses, the clocks playing their starring roles in Delhi, in Moscow, in Paris, in Madrid, in New York, in Bogota, and the people of those cities chanting a countdown that in those moments was the most important thing in the universe. No German city featured in the televised inventory, and I thought of asking Sara if there was anyone in Germany-or Belgium, or Austria-with whom she would have liked to celebrate, relatives or friends she'd be with right now if she didn't live here but there, if she'd never emigrated. I was about to embark on that dangerous pastime, the speculation about an alternative life, and to thank her for her company on this night that I wouldn't have been able to get through on my own, when she cut me off in midsentence and put her hand on my arm, and the longest New Year's Eve of my life was formally inaugurated at that moment: Sara began to tell me about rumors circulating in the Bogota media that week, according to which Angelina had accepted a large amount of money from an important magazine, the name of which she did not yet know, in exchange for revealing in an interview that Gabriel Santoro, the man who was honored during his funeral and would in the near future be formally decorated, the lawyer who had distinguished himself as an orator for thirty years, not only by his talent but also by the high moral standards of his conduct, was not in fact what everyone had thought: he was an impostor, a liar, and a faithless lover. "This changes everything," Sara said to me. "Because there are things I'd rather you heard from me than had to read out there."