The Informers

IV. THE INHERITED LIFE

The life I received as my inheritance-this life in which I'm no longer the son of an admirable orator and decorated professor, or even of a man who suffers in silence and then reveals his suffering in public, but of the most despicable of all creatures: someone capable of betraying a friend and selling out his family-began one Monday, a couple of weeks after New Year, when, at about ten at night, I microwaved myself a meal, sat down cross-legged on my unmade bed, and just before taking a quick glance through that day's newspaper, got a phone call from Sara Guterman. Without even saying hello, Sara said, "They're showing it." That meant, It's happening. What we had expected was happening. These things don't usually need to be coaxed: turn on the television and feel how your life changes, and if you have a little camera, take it out and film yourself, record for posterity the transformation of your face.

I had spent the day, and the whole week, busy with the second transformation of my father's memory. The first time, a mendacious, manipulated confession had begun to move the past around; now, the potential of real events (those false dead, those cataleptic bodies) was modifying the precarious truth and also the version my father had formulated (no, imposed) through a few words improvised in a classroom. But had he really improvised them? Now I had begun to think he had probably planned them with the subtlety with which he planned his speeches, because that's what it had been, an elaborate speech, which my father had used to change his memory of events, and thus change or pretend that his own past was changed, a past in which, he had believed, Gabriel Santoro would no longer be guilty of a friend's disgrace, and he would from then on be converted into a victim, one victim among many in that time when speaking mattered and a couple of words could ruin someone. I was occasionally moved by the confidence my father had in his own phrases, the blind faith that it was enough to tell a tampered-with story-change the positions of the characters, like a magician does, transform the betrayer into the betrayed-so the exchange imposes itself over the past, more or less like that Borges character, that coward who by force of believing in his own courage manages to make it exist in the real world. "The Summa Theologica denies that God can unmake the past," says the narrator of this story; but he also says that to modify the past is not to modify a single fact, but to annul the consequences of the fact, that is, to create two universal histories. I can never reread the story without thinking of my father and of what I felt that Monday night: maybe my task, in the future, would be to reconstruct the two histories, uselessly to confront them. It occurred to me at some point that, much to my regret, I would end up devoting myself to revising memories, trying to find the inconsistencies, the contradictions, the barefaced lies with which my father protected one tiny act-or rather, pretended it did not exist-one action among thousands in a life more filled with ideas than actions.

On the sofa in my living room, lined up like infantry, were the tapes of my interviews with Sara. After our conversation on New Year's Eve-which lasted until six-thirty in the morning, since after the revelations already recorded came my questions, my protests, and then more questions-I listened to them again, pursuing in Sara's voice as well the covering up, or the complicity, or the references to other denunciations, other absurd inclusions on the blacklist, other family catastrophes that would have been caused in some remote way by that amateur inquisition. And the day of the program, before Sara's call, I'd been listening to one of the last. In the recording, I asked her if she would have ever returned to live in Germany if the opportunity had arisen, and she answered, "Never." And when I asked her how she could be so sure, she said, "Because I did go back once, so I know what it feels like." In 1968, she told me, she'd received an invitation from the municipality of Emmerich, her hometown, and she had traveled there with her father and her eldest son-by plane to Frankfurt and train to Emmerich-to attend one of those ceremonies of public atonement certain sectors of German politics used at the time to try in vain to do what we all try to do all the time: correct mistakes, alleviate the damage done. "It was strange to be there," the recorded voice was saying, "but we'd arrived by night, and I thought the next morning everything would seem even stranger to me when I saw in the light of day things I hadn't seen for thirty years. Although we didn't know if they'd still be there, because during the war Emmerich was one of the most bombed cities." Herr Strecker, the man who had helped them escape in thirty-eight, was in charge of welcoming them. Herr Strecker had also left Germany, Sara said, he'd left in thirty-nine, and he'd lived in Montevideo for a few years and then in Buenos Aires. "He and Papa embraced and almost wouldn't let go of each other," said Sara, "but on the plane my father had told us we were forbidden to cry in Germany, so I made an effort, it wasn't so difficult. Ceremonies are more or less what we know they're like. We visitors were assigned a local youngster, one for each exiled couple; since I'd gone without my husband, Papa and I were a twosome. The strangest thing was how their mouths filled up with the word exile and all its synonyms, in which the German language is generous; we have no lack of words to call those who leave. We were supposed to talk in a school or a university about our experience, and my father said, 'I don't know if there are enough schools in Emmerich for all its exiles to speak.' And just think, the same thing was happening in other cities, all over the country. I don't know, sometimes I think I don't really know what all that was in aid of. What was the aim of calling all those from abroad and reminding them of where they were from? As if they were claiming them, no? Like an absurd demand, to put it like that.

"A friend of Papa's had died three years earlier, and no one had informed us, and when we arrived they gave us the news. The widow asked us if it was worth it to go and live in Colombia. She kept repeating that she had every intention of going somewhere else, and she smiled at me and consulted Papa about the options. She asked us what Colombia was like. Sometimes she thought about Canada. What did we think of Canada? I felt sorry for her, because it was obvious she didn't want to leave. I still don't know why she tried to convince people she did. For my part, I met a school friend. It was the strangest thing in the world. I asked her what had happened to so-and-so and somebody-or-other, and most of all I asked about Barbara Wolff, who had been my best friend at Daughters of the Sacred Cross, yes, what a name, and what a school, as well: it was run by a community of aristocratic nuns; up to that moment I'd never imagined such a thing could exist. A blue-blooded nun, imagine that. Well anyway, this friend looked at me with such surprise, until she couldn't stand to hear any more praise from me about my friendship with Barbara Wolff. 'But she made you suffer so,' she said. It seems that everyone remembered how Barbara tormented me, took advantage of me, talked about me behind my back and made up stories, all those things little girls do. And I had no choice but to believe her, but it startled me, because I remembered absolutely nothing of what she told me. I had such a lovely memory of Barbara, and at that moment I didn't know what to think. I was a bit sad about that. You wouldn't expect to make such a trip to receive bad news; imagine if someone showed up now and told you your dad abused you and you don't remember. Tell me your world wouldn't start to change. Mine wasn't so serious, but almost, because in any case it was as if the world from before emigration was no longer trustworthy. I watched Papa closely, saw how necessary the journey had been for him. One of the reasons, the most obvious, was to confirm that he had made the right decision. Imagine if thirty years later you realized it would have been much better to stay. No, we needed confirmation of how bad things had been before we left, confirmation of how much the Jews who stayed had suffered. I couldn't do so with Barbara because she was living in England at the time; it seems she was or is a biologist. What would I have said if I could have called her? Let's see, Barbara, do you remember treating me badly when we were little? No, ridiculous. But still, if I did feel like crying, I'd get in the car and drive to Holland, cross the border, because I had Papa's rule very clear in my head: no crying in Germany. And I went along with the rule at all times, even when he didn't demand it. I didn't even cry when we visited the grave of my older sister, Miriam, who died of meningitis when she was seven. I barely remembered her. However it was, at those moments I began to think I understood why God had sent us to Duitama. I thought he had made us work so hard so we wouldn't dwell on bad memories. Not now, now I think that was hugely stupid, not only because Papa is dead now, too, and his presence was what allowed me that religiosity when I was young, but rather because of something more difficult to explain. One gets old and symbols lose their value, things become only what they are. One tires of representations: that this represents such-and-such and that represents something else. The ability to interpret symbols has gone for me, and God goes with that. It's as if it were extinguished. One gets tired of looking behind things. Behind a priest's glasses. Behind a communion wafer. Maybe for you young people it's hard to understand, but that's what God is for old people: a fellow we've been playing hide-and-seek with for too long. You'll have to decide if you want to leave all this nonsense in the book. Maybe you shouldn't: Who's going to be interested in this blather? Yes, it would be better if I stuck to my own story. If not, you'll get tired of my silliness and turn off the tape recorder. I don't want that to happen, I like talking about all this.

"The mayor gave the welcoming address. A real experience, because through that speech I discovered how much it cost to get out of Germany when we did. I discovered how rich my parents had been, because only the wealthy could afford to pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer. That's what they actually called it, desertion of the Reich tax. I discovered the fortune they'd left behind to go to Colombia. We went to the synagogue, a solid block of concrete with round copper domes like a Russian church. There, at some point, I accepted that Germany was no longer my country, not in the sense, at least, that a country belongs to normal people. Papa took that trip very hard. It did nothing but remind him of the laws of 1941. I told him that almost thirty years had gone by and a person has to forget about those things, but he couldn't."

"The laws of 1941?" This is my recorded voice. I don't recognize myself in it.

"We were in Colombia, an ocean away from Germany, and one fine day we woke up and weren't Germans anymore. You don't know what that means until your passport expires. Because then, what are you? You're not from here, but you're not from there either. If something bad happens to you, if someone does something to you, no one's going to help you. There is no state to defend you. Wait, I'm going to show you something." There is a pause in the recording, while Sara looks among her papers for a letter my father wrote to her from Bogota dated with the inscription: 1 Av 5728. "The Jewish date was another gesture typical of that pedant of a father of yours," Sara said. "There was no way to explain to him that religion had also gradually disappeared from my life, and never came to exist in those of my children. I don't even remember what month that was, or what year."

"Can I keep it?" says my voice.

"That depends."

"Depends on what?"

"Are you going to put it in the book?"

"I don't know, Sara. Maybe, maybe not."

"You can keep it," she said, "if you don't put it in."

"Why?"

"Because I know Gabriel. He would not be amused to see himself in a book without anyone asking his permission."

"But if I need. ."

"No, no, none of that. You can take it if you promise. If not, the letter stays with me."

I decided to keep it. I have it here.

If I were you I wouldn't worry too much [my father wrote to Sara]. A person is from wherever they feel best, and roots are for plants. Everyone knows that, don't they? Ubi bene ibi patria, all those ready-made sayings. (Still, ready-made by the Romans, so they can at least qualify as antiques.) Speaking for myself, I've never even left this country, and sometimes I think I never will. And I wouldn't mind, you know. Lots of things are happening here; more than that, here is where things happen; and although I'm sometimes disappointed by the provincialism of the South American Athens-in-its-dreams, I tend to think that here human experience has a special weight. It's like a chemical density. Things people say seem to matter here as much as what they do, I suppose partly because of a reason that is quite stupid when looked at closely: everything is yet to be constructed. Here words matter. Here you can still shape your surroundings. It's a terrible power, isn't it?

I've read it several times, I'm reading it now, while I write, and I read it that night, just before Sara called me to warn me that my father's fall from grace was just starting. My father, the man who had never left this country and who never would, the man who seemed to give as much importance to words as to deeds. What would he have thought if he had seen what I was seeing on television? Would he have regretted what he wrote on 1 Av 5728? Would he have forgotten it on purpose? For me, innocent reader of that letter, it was obvious that my father, when he wrote it, must have thought of Deresser, and that would undoubtedly be one of the many inventories that I should draw up, starting with the contributions of Sara's testimony: every phrase spoken by my father, every offhand and seemingly trivial comment, every reaction to someone else's comment, would soon be on a list, the list of moments when my father was thinking of Deresser and, especially, of what he'd done to him. It's a terrible power, isn't it? Yes, Dad, it's terrible, you would know, you were remembering what you'd done, what your words had caused. (But what words, and how spoken? To whom in exchange for what? In what circumstances? How had my father played his part as informer? And I'll never know, because there were no witnesses.) And now, publicly, you are paying for your words.

So it was on television. It wasn't by means of a written interview, as Sara had believed at first and had made me believe, that Angelina was going to begin the task of bringing down, with the collaboration of the people of Bogota's hunger for sensationalism, my father's reputation; it was not a magazine that required her services, but one of those programs of rigorously local interest, of intense, late-night journalism centered on Bogota that are now so common, but in the year 1992 were still a novelty for the citizens of the illustrious capital. Some of my colleagues, I should admit, succumbed to these first programs, real journalists who managed to acquit themselves decently with a keyboard, good investigative reporters and acceptable writers, who instead ended up perpetrating little theatrical pieces for two actors (a presenter and a guest), filmed with a couple of cameras (to keep costs down) and in front of a black backdrop (to accentuate the dramatics). They were a mixture of forensic interrogation and show-business interview; the guests could be-in fact, had been-a con gressman accused of embezzlement, a beauty queen accused of being a single mother, a race car driver accused of using drugs, a city councilor accused of links to drug traffickers: all from Bogota, originally or by adoption, all susceptible to being recognized as symbols of the city. That was the program: a space to debate unproved accusations, to debunk more or less sacred figures, which, as everyone knows, is one of the Bogota viewing audience's favorite pastimes. If my father were alive, I thought, he would occupy the place of the guest: a moralist accused of betrayal. In his place was Angelina Franco, ex-lover and witness for the prosecution, the woman who had attended the fall. The dramatic plot-from glory to disgrace, all that and romance, too-was quite clear; the journalistic potential would have been obvious even to a novice, and you could almost feel the waves of the electromagnetic spectrum vibrating with Bogota's thrill at the prospect of the haughty being dishonored, the arrogant brought down a peg or two.

Angelina was sitting in a swivel chair, facing the presenter and separated from him by a modern office table, an inelegant slab that might have been particleboard or simply covered plastic; the presenter was Rafael Jaramillo Arteaga, a journalist known for his aggression (he would say his frankness) and for his lack of scruples when it came to making damaging revelations (he would say exposing hidden truths). The set was designed to intimidate: the illusion of mysterious, hidden, illegitimate things. There was Angelina, confident and complicit, dressed in one of her bright, straining blouses-this time it was fuchsia-and a skirt that seemed to be troubling her, because all the time she had to keep adjusting it, lifting up her hips and tugging at the hem. The camera was focused on the interviewer. "Not everyone remembers one of the most unclas sifiable, most paradoxical episodes of our recent history," he said. "I'm referring to the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals, regrettably famous among historians, regrettably forgotten by the wider public. During the Second World War, the U.S. State Department issued blacklists with the aim of blocking Axis funds in Latin America. But everywhere, not just in Colombia, the system lent itself to abuses, and in more than one case the just paid for sinners. Today we present the story of one of those abuses. This, esteemed viewers, is the story of a betrayal." Cut to commercials. When they return, a photo of my father appears, the same one that had appeared in El Tiempo with his obituary. A voice off-camera says, "Gabriel Santoro was a lawyer and prestigious professor here in our capital. For more than two decades he devoted his time to teaching techniques of public speaking to other lawyers as part of a program at the Supreme Court of Justice. Last year he died in a tragic traffic accident on the Bogota-Medellin highway. He had traveled to the city of eternal spring to spend the holidays in the company of his lady friend, Angelina Franco, native of that city." Then Angelina's face appeared on the screen with her name in white letters. "But as soon as they arrived, Angelina Franco realized that her companion had not told her the whole truth. She has now found out the truth and is here to tell it." And that she did: she told. She told without stopping, she told as if her life depended on it, she told as if there were someone under the table pointing a gun at her. Among the things that came out of the speakers-that dialogue between the sniper and his own rifle-there was a lot of rubbish, I supposed, a lot of barefaced invention, but there was nothing that would not help me devise a portrait of my father's lover, because even lies, even a person's rudest inventions with respect to herself, tell us valuable things about her, perhaps more valuable than the most honest truths. Transparency is the worst deception in the world, my father used to say: one is the lies one pronounces. Any journalist learns that after conducting two interviews, any lawyer after two cross-examinations, and especially, any orator after two speeches. I thought all these things; nevertheless, during the elongated hour the program lasted, the sixty minutes, including the advertisements, of the beating and careful defenestration of the memory of my father, my perplexity did not cease for one second. Why was she doing it? While Angelina told what she was telling, while she looked occasionally toward the back of the set, fascinated by the blue neon lights that formed the program's name, I could only concentrate on that question: Why was she doing this to my father?

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

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

Was she aware of Gabriel Santoro's reputation?

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

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

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

How did they get romantically involved?

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

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

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

What happened in Medellin?

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

What did she feel at that moment?

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

Apart from curiosity, what else did she feel?

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

What did this secret panic consist of?

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

The praise was not genuine?

No, no, no, no, no. What Gabriel had done to his friend was unforgivable; that seemed perfectly clear to her and everyone will agree. Yes, a long time had passed since the events of the war, since the business of the blacklists and the groups of informers or spontaneous informers; but time does not heal all, that is an absolute lie. There are things that stay with us: a brother's desertion, a lover's disdain, the death of parents, the betrayal of a friend or of his family. No one can ever get free of something like that, and it's good that things should be that way. Traitors deserve punishment, and if they somehow manage to betray with impunity, they at least deserve to be punished by their own guilt until they die. If it were up to Angelina, if she had had the tiniest bit of power over other people's actions (which she had never had), and especially if she hadn't been so in love, Gabriel would never have left the hotel, would never have gone to see his friend.

So he did finally go to see him?

Of course he went to see him. Or at least he left the hotel saying he was going to go and see him. Like a cowboy, no? As if he were saying, I'll just go out and kill him and come right back. That was the Sunday, Angelina remembered, because she'd stayed in the hotel watching cartoons all morning.

And what happened between the two men?

That Angelina didn't know, obviously, because she hadn't gone with him, as she said. It happened like this: after the confession, Angelina got up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, because she'd seen that people look in the mirror when they want to solve their most serious problems, and in front of the mirror she said to herself, You have to look on the bright side. Depending on how you look at it, what he's doing is very nice. He's asked you for help. You're important to him. And then she managed to repress what she was feeling (what she'd been thinking deep down), and when she went back out, calmer then, the first thing she did was to embrace Gabriel and tell him, "Congratulations, I think what you're doing is very brave. You'll see, your friend will take it well. No grudge lasts a hundred years." And as soon as she said those words, she noticed how the atmosphere in the room changed. Affection once again, the tensions disappeared, yes, all that was needed was a little goodwill, control of negative emotions. And this time they could. They went back to bed: and they could. It wasn't the best sex they'd ever had, but it was good, there was the tenderness that comes when an explosive situation between a couple is diffused. Gabriel told her he loved her. She heard the words without responding but feeling that she loved him, too. And she fell asleep. She never saw him again.

He left without saying good-bye?

And why would he say good-bye, if his intention was to talk to his friend and come straight back?

She had never suspected that Gabriel wasn't going to come back? That possibility never crossed her mind?

Yes, but only when it was already too late. The next day Gabriel got up very early, and he must have left without having a shower, because Angelina didn't hear him. She didn't hear him get up, didn't hear him get dressed, didn't hear him leave the room. When she woke up she found the note. Gabriel had written it on the hotel stationery but not on the writing paper, on an envelope, probably thinking of propping it up against the lamp on the bedside table and getting it to stay upright. I might be a while. In any case, by this afternoon I'll be free again. Thanks for everything. I love you. She reread the I love you and felt happy, but there was something that made her uncomfortable. I'll be free again. Free of her? Would Angelina turn into a nuisance when her mission as companion was completed? She thought what she had never thought: He's not going to come back. No, that was impossible, Gabriel wouldn't abandon her like that, not even if he'd used her for a purpose, and that purpose had been accomplished. No, it couldn't be. She endured it as best she could: turning on the television and looking through the channels (a few U.S. channels, one Spanish, even a Mexican one) for a program that might distract her, and she found that cartoons, all those hammer blows and point-blank gunshots, those explosions and free falls, that is, those caricatured cruelties precisely and carefully performed the labor of obliterating the small cruelties, the small uncertainties of real life. At midday she went down to the pool and ordered a lunch fit for three physiotherapists, all of them hungry, and asked them to charge it to the room. And it was there, in front of the wet children of a tourist from the coast, two ill-mannered little boys who splashed her as they ran past with their misted-up masks over their noses and their red water wings squeezing their biceps, that she realized as if they'd whispered it in her ear: He's not going to come back. He lied to me. He's going to do what he means to do and then he's going to go, he's going to leave me nice and comfortable in this hotel so I have a good time for a couple of days, but he's going to leave me. And that became more and more obvious as time went by, because the best proof that a person is not going to come back is that he doesn't come back, no? Angelina spent the afternoon stuck in the hotel, waiting for a call, waiting for a bellboy to come up to the room with a note, but that didn't happen, the wretched Gabriel hadn't even left her a note. And when she looked out of the window, as if she could see the road leading up to the hotel from the window, Angelina realized that she was in her city, in the place where she'd been born and lived for years and years, and that, nevertheless, she had nowhere to go. Once again, she thought. Once again men had conspired to convert a friendly city into a hostile city; to convert her, a stable woman with her feet firmly on the ground, into a stranger, an unsettled person, a foreigner.

Didn't she have any acquaintances left in Medellin?

Yes, there were people she knew, but it's not enough to know someone to ask them for a night's shelter, much less to explain the reasons why a person's been left where they were (she couldn't bring herself to say the word abandoned, it sounded pathetic to her, or at least too plaintive). She thought she could wander around the lighting displays that were everywhere in downtown Medellin at that time of year, stars and mangers and bells, all rustled up with colored lights and wires covered in green plastic; she thought of going for a walk through the city and simply looking at display windows, considering that three days before Christmas all the shops would be open and full of people, noise, garlands, decorated trees, lights, and Christmas carols; she thought of giving life an immediate chance to return to its course, to not go off the rails. She went down to the parking lot, saw that Gabriel had taken the car-and imagined him driving with his left hand and changing gears with the thumb of his mutilated hand-and found out that it had rained the night before by the rectangle of dry pavement you could still see where the car had been; and she went straight back up to the room, dumped everything of Gabriel's out of the suitcase onto the bed. That's how she spent the night, beside the clothes of the man who had left her. She didn't sleep well. At six in the morning she'd already called a taxi, and in less than fifteen minutes the taxi had picked her up and Angelina was on her way to the bus station.

So she also left without even leaving a note, without saying good-bye in any way?

Gabriel wasn't coming back, that was obvious. Why should she say good-bye? By leaving her dumped and rejected in a hotel, Gabriel had made it very clear that he didn't want to see her again: What kind of note could she have written? Of course, she didn't imagine she'd never see him again in her life; she thought back in Bogota she'd track him down to demand an explanation, or at least she'd talk to him, and she never imagined Gabriel would die in the act of leaving her, wasn't that very ironic? Yes, there are accidents that seem like punishments, not that it made her happy, that would be a disproportionate punishment. Gabriel dead after leaving her, incredible. If he'd even suspected it, he would have left in a different way. Everyone has their ways of leaving and ways of leaving depend on a thousand things: where we're leaving, why we're leaving, who we're leaving.

How did she find out about his death?

From the newspapers. Of course, the most incredible thing was that she passed the very spot a few hours later and didn't see anything. Her bus was an Expreso Bolivariano, just like the bus in the accident; it had left at seven in the morning, and Angelina was wide awake when they'd taken the road up to Las Palmas, but she hadn't noticed anything in particular, not the commotion of the morbid looking out of the window, or the traffic jams a more or less notorious accident can cause. And nothing in the world made her feel her world had changed, nothing warned her of this new absence, the disappearance, the hole in the order of things: that meant, of course, that her emotional links with Gabriel had broken completely and forever. Later, the rocking of the bus had made her sleepy, and then, half awake and half asleep, she'd thought again about the terrible story of the foreign family and their treacherous friend. At times it seemed impossible: Gabriel was too honest to act in such a cowardly way, too intelligent to do so out of ingenuousness or innocence. But maybe none of that was true, and the matter was just that simple: this man, who had used her to come to Medellin, who had slept with her, made plans for the future, told her he loved her, and all that just to leave her to her fate in a hotel room, this man was no different from his actions proved, and he'd kept the mask of a respectable person all his life at the expense of the credibility and affection of those around him. Everyone knows it: someone who betrays once will carry on betraying until he dies.

So she didn't believe in repentance?

She believed, all right, but she didn't think it possible that he had repented. Or maybe it was possible, but not unques tioningly commendable. In fact, if the repentance was genuine, and the desire to be forgiven genuine, Gabriel would not have had any reason not to carry on his relationship with her. The pretext of repentance was not a safe conduct for airing selfishness; nor did it exclude certain responsibilities or, at least, certain human priorities. We'll never know now what reasons Gabriel had for ceasing to love her, for deciding that returning to the hotel did not figure in his plans. Was he justified in hurting her that way, lying to her and deceiving her (writing that he would come back when it was perfectly clear he had no intention of doing so), laying such a cruel trap for her, and all that without taking into account the revelation of his true nature to her, who would quite happily have lived with the deception in order to keep him?

What did she think happened between Gabriel Santoro and Enrique Deresser?

Supposing that they actually saw each other, no? Because we don't know that for sure either. The possibility that Gabriel, having got as far as Medellin, had lost his nerve, is quite real, it deserves to be taken into account. Angelina had thought of that during the funeral: What if Gabriel had repented of repenting? What if the fear of confronting his friend had been stronger than the possibility of forgiveness? What if Gabriel had sacrificed her, and then had died himself in the accident, and it was all for nothing? In the cemetery, Angelina had met Gabriel's son, the journalist, and had suggested they meet the next day in the dead man's apartment with the intention of telling him everything: tell him who his father had really been; release him from deception as well. In the end, she hadn't been able to. And that was why: the possibility that Gabriel had never actually seen his friend. Because at that moment, after the violence of the cremation, the sadness of the whole ceremony, the idea that Gabriel had died coming from Medellin (after leaving her, yes, but without having carried out the object of the trip) was, more than absurd, heartless. And Angelina was not a heartless person.

And if they did actually see each other, what might have happened between them?

Angelina didn't know. To tell the truth, she wasn't interested. She'd already left all that behind. She'd already begun to forget Gabriel. She wanted to get on with her life now, start a new life. A chat between two tired old men about subjects half a century old? Please, please. Nothing could matter less to her.

I, of course, felt just the opposite. During the single hour of the broadcast more things seemed to have happened than during all my thirty years, or, to put it another way, from that moment on, it seemed like nothing except that local television program had happened in my life, and so many windows opened on to so many new rooms, so many traps, that instead of turning off the television and phoning Sara to talk about what Angelina had just revealed, which would have been the most logical thing to do, I allowed something resembling vertigo to take me outside, and I found myself driving down Seventh toward the bullring at eleven at night. Half my head was thinking of arriving unannounced at Sara's house, and the other half felt indignant, thought it almost treacherous (yes, the word had settled into my vocabulary, like a new font in a word processor) that Sara hadn't told me about Enrique Deresser. Enrique Deresser was alive; Enrique Deresser was in Medellin. Was it possible that she didn't know either? Was it possible he'd also hidden it from her, as Angelina had suggested? On television his lover had elevated herself to the level of supreme confi dante, the only person on earth my father trusted, or trusted sufficiently at least, to share the secret with and ask for her help. And what had she done? After declaring that she understood him, telling him she admired his contrition and his bravery, the courage a man of his age with the life he'd led would need to undertake a ten-hour trip with the sole intention of asking for forgiveness, after all that, what had she done? She had thought about herself. She didn't know, any more than the rest of the world, the reasons my father had had for ending their relationship (in a rather inelegant way, it's true, but elegance belongs to those with self-respect, elegance is part of a lifestyle that my father, at that moment, had renounced). In a man's struggle with his errors, Angelina had seen only the man who'd walked out of her life without saying good-bye, and had decided to respond to the humiliation. That's what she'd done: she'd informed on him. After his death, when he could no longer defend himself, she'd informed on him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My condolences, Don Gabriel," the doorman said; he didn't remember, or he remembered without its mattering, that he'd already given me his condolences two or three times since the day after the funeral. He also handed me the post that had kept on arriving even though a month had passed since the death of the addressee, even though that death had received more publicity than most; and I realized I didn't know what to do with the bills and the subscriptions, with the College of Lawyers circulars and notification from the bank. Reply to them one by one? Draft a standard letter, photocopy it, and send out a mass mailing? I regret to inform you that Dr. Gabriel Santoro died. . please be kind enough, therefore, to cancel his subscription. . Dr. Gabriel Santoro recently passed away. He, therefore, will be unable to attend. . The phrases were ludicrously painful, and writing them was just short of unthinkable. Sara would know how to do it; Sara would know the procedures. At her age the practical effects of death are routine and no longer intimidating. That's what I was thinking as I opened the door, and as I went in I realized that I would rather have felt something more intense or perhaps something more solemn, but what hit me first, as was to be expected given the circumstances, was my own nature. I've never been able to avoid it: I've always felt comfortable with solitude, but being alone in someone else's house is one of my fetishes, something like a perversion that I would never tell anyone about. I am the kind of person who opens doors in other people's bathrooms to see what perfumes, or what painkillers, or what kind of birth control they use; I open bedside-table drawers, I search, look, but I'm not after secrets: finding vibrators or letters from a lover interests me just as much as finding an old wallet or a blindfold. I like other people's lives; I like to make myself at home and examine them. I probably violate several principles of discretion, of trust, of good manners in doing so. It's quite probable.

A month and the place was already beginning to smell closed up. The orange juice glass I'd found on the day of my appointment with Angelina was still in the sink, and that's the first thing I did when I went in: wet the sponge and scrubbed the bottom of the glass hard to remove a bit of dried pulp. I had to turn the water supply back on, though I didn't remember having shut it off: that day, I thought, Angelina must have dealt with it. The curtains were still closed, too, and I had the feeling that if I opened them they'd release a cloud of dust, so I left them as they were. Everything was the same as the last time I'd been there, and what remained most painfully immutable was the absence of the owner; on the other hand, that owner had begun to turn into someone else since his death and would perhaps continue his transformation, because once secrets start coming out, the twenty-year-old infidelity, the white lies-yes, like a snowball-no one can stop them. Except for my own book, everything in this place seemed to suggest that my father hadn't had a childhood, and even my book only suggested it in a tacit, indirect, lateral way. But was it the same book? The first thing Peter Guterman did when he arrived in Duitama was to paint the house and build a second floor. First sentence. At that time foreigners were not allowed to practice, without previous authorization, occupations other than those

they'd declared upon entering the country. Another sentence. In the Guterman family's hotel things happened that destroyed families, disrupted lives, ruined futures. . The sentences were no longer the ones I'd written, and it wasn't because of the violent irony that had begun to fill them; their words had changed, too; foreigner didn't mean the same as it had before, nor did futures. The book, my book about Sara Guterman, was the closest thing to those years and the only thing able to suggest the (ill-fated) presence of my father; but it was also the proof a tricky prosecutor would have used to allege my father's nonexistence, the Cheshire cat.

I looked over the blue and brown spines of the oldest books, looked over the disorderly colors of the more recent ones, and didn't find a single title I didn't recognize, not a single jacket flap or flyleaf that could have contained, at this stage, the slightest surprise. My father's meticulousness, his idea that a messy environment is one of the causes of a messy thought process, had obliged him to arrange all his lecture notes, his twenty years of speaking on how to speak well, on the same shelf; I chose one of the folders at random and examined it, imagining I might find an incriminating document; I found nothing. Was there not in this place a single piece of paper that contained the dead man's youth, not a newspaper clipping about the blacklists or a book that might contain annotations, not some reference to Enrique Deresser or his family or Bogota in the 1940s? A man's private history irremediably obliterated: How could that be possible? In a manipulable world, a world susceptible to being reprogrammed by us, its demiurges, would there not have been an immediate need to remedy that? Thinking of that, I picked up my book and opened it to the Appendices, chose an example of a report from the ones I'd found during the course of my investigation-the different ones they used in the cases of real infiltrators or active propagandists, and that later came to light, were always partially censored by officials-and copied it by hand, adapting it to my uncertainties, on the blank pages that seem designed for such purposes between the printer's imprint and the flyleaf. I wrote: Military Intelligence Division, War Department General Staff, Military Attache Report. And then:

Interviewed in El Automatico cafe, the witness Gabriel Santoro declared that Konrad Deresser, proprietor of Cristales Deresser, has extremely close relations with supporters of the Colombian Nazi Party (with its head-quarters in Barranquilla and elements infiltrated all over the territory) and on several occasions has demonstrated anti-American attitudes in the presence of Colombian citizens. It has been determined that the witness's word is trustworthy.

I turned the page. I wrote: In accordance with Special Order No. 7 of the Military Attache, Bogota, Colombia, investigated the references with the following results. And then:

Interrogated in the offices of the Embassy of the United States of America, Bogota, the informant Santoro (NI. See below, Hotel Nueva Europa dossier) declared that Mr. Konrad Deresser has very close relations with known propagandists (principally Hans-Georg Bethke, KN. See below, List of Blocked Nationals, updated November 1943) and on several occasions has demonstrated anti-American attitudes in the presence of Colombian citizens, as well as his employees, whom he regularly greets in German. His declarations have been verified against those of other sources. The word of the informant has been deemed trustworthy.

I put the book back in its place and discovered the universe hadn't been transformed by my falsifying the contents of those pages. My father was still incognito in his own memory, dead but also clandestine. But perhaps what would be impossible, in my father's case, was the opposite: a hole, a gap in the art of erasing fingerprints, a defect in the rigor of the most rigorous man in the world, an inconsistency in his powerful desire to erase Deresser the way Trotsky (just one example) was erased from the photos and encyclopedias of Stalin's time. If it was about revising his history, my father-my revisionist father-had achieved it with success. But then, he'd committed the error that we all perhaps commit: telling secrets after sex. I imagined the lovers. I imagined them walking around this apartment naked, going to the kitchen to get a drink or to the bathroom to throw away used condoms, or sitting like teenagers in this chair. She is naked on my father's lap like a ventriloquist's doll, and her recently shaved legs (her shins covered in goose pimples) hang over the arm of the chair without touching the floor; he is wearing his bathrobe, because there are certain levels of decency one never loses. "Tell me about yourself, tell me about your life," says Angelina. "My life is of no interest," answers my father. "It will be to others," says Angelina. "I'm interested." And my father: "I don't know, I don't know. Maybe some other time. Yes, one day I'll tell you all about it." Maybe if we go to Medellin, thinks my father, maybe if you accompany me to do what I cannot do alone.

On my father's desk, not on his bedside table, I found his telephone book, but Angelina's surname didn't pop into my head immediately, as happens with our own acquaintances, so it took me a moment or two to find her number among the squadron of scribbles jotted down with his left hand. It was after midnight. I sat beside the pillow, on the edge of the bed, like a visitor, like the visitor I was. At the foot of the lamp there was a film of dust; or maybe it was on every surface in the apartment, but here, because of the direct and yellow light, it was more visible and indecent. I opened the drawer and rummaged through HB pencils and 200-peso coins, and then I found a cheap little book, the kind they sell in supermarkets or pharmacies (displayed beside the razors and the chewing gum), that I hadn't noticed the last time. It was a gift from Angelina. Books for Lovers, it said on the laminated, greenish cover, and underneath: Kama Sutra. I opened it at random and read: "When she holds and massages her lover's lingam with her yoni, this is Vadavaka, the Mare." Angelina the mare, massaged my father's lingam, here, in this bed, and suddenly the elaborate diatribe I'd prepared at the back of my mind began to blur, and Angelina, far from embodying my father's fall from grace, turned into a vulnerable but shameless woman, sentimental and affected but also direct, capable of giving a withdrawn professor of classics in his sixties a cheap version of an illustrated sex manual. I hesitated, thought of hanging up, but it was too late, because the phone had rung two or three times, and I was the more surprised by the question I was pronouncing. "Could I speak to Angelina Franco, please?"

"Speaking," said the voice at the other end of the line, sleepy and a little irritated. "Who is this?"

"Do you have any idea what time it is? You're crazy, Gabriel, calling at this time of night. You scared the hell out of me."

It was true. Her voice was thick and accelerated. She coughed, took a deep breath.

"Did I wake you?"

"Well, of course you woke me up, it's after midnight. What do you expect? Look, if it's to give me a hard time. ."

"Partly, yeah. But don't worry, I'm not going to shout at you."

"No? Well, thanks a lot. The one who should be shouting here is me. The nerve!"

"Look, Angelina, I don't know how things were with my dad. But people don't do things like what you did to him, that seems obvious. Was it for the money? — "

She cut me off. "All right, all right. No insults."

"How much did they pay you? I would have paid you as much to keep quiet."

"Oh yeah? And I would have been just as happy? I don't think so, dear, I don't think so. Do you want me to tell you the truth? I would have done it for free, yes, sir. People need to be told things as they are."

"People don't give a damn, Angelina. What you did-"

"Look, I have to go to sleep. It's late and I have to get up early. Don't call me again, Gabriel. I don't have to explain myself to you or to anybody. Ciao."

"No, wait."

"What?"

"Don't hang up on me. You know where I am?"

"Why should I care? No, really, don't tell me you called me to talk crap? I'm going to hang up. Bye."

"I'm in my dad's apartment."

"Great. What else?"

"I swear."

"I don't believe you."

"I swear," I said. "I came here to find your phone number. I was going to phone you to insult you."

"My phone number?"

"In my dad's phone book, I don't have your number."

"Oh. Right, very interesting, but I need to go to sleep. We'll talk some other time. Bye."

"Did you watch the program tonight? Did you see yourself on television?"

"No, I didn't watch the program," said Angelina, obviously annoyed. "No, I didn't see myself on television. They didn't call me, they said they'd call before showing it and they didn't call me, they lied to me, too, OK? Can we hang up, please?"

"It's just that I need to know a couple of things."

"What things, Gabriel? Come on, don't be a drag. I'm going to hang up. I don't want to hang up on you, hanging up on people is rude, but if you force me to I will."

"What you did to my dad is serious. He-"

"No, no, wait a second. What he did to me, that was serious. Leaving without saying anything, dumping me there like an old rag. That is what you don't do to a person."

"Let me speak. He trusted you, Angelina. Not even I knew those things, he hadn't even told me the things he told you. And that, obviously, affects me as well. All those things he told you. All the things you said on television. So I want to know if it's true, that's all. If you made some of it up or if it's all true. It's important, I don't have to explain why."

"Oh, so now you're accusing me of lying."

"I'm asking you."

"With what right?"

"Without any. Hang up if you want."

"I'm going to hang up."

"Hang up, go on, hang up, don't worry," I said. "It's all lies, isn't it? You know what I think? I think my dad hurt you, I don't know how, but he hurt you, leaving you, getting tired of you, and you're getting even like this. Women can't stand anyone getting tired of them, and this is how they get even, like you're doing. Taking advantage of the fact that he's dead and can't defend himself. You've got a chip on your shoulder, that's all, that's what I think. You betrayed him in the most cowardly way, and all because the old man decided that this relationship wasn't worth carrying on, something anyone has the right to do in this bitch of a world. This is slander, Angelina, it's a crime and you can go to jail for it; of course you're the only one who knows if you're slandering him or not. What do you feel when you think about it, Angelina? Tell me, tell me what you feel. Do you feel strong, do you feel powerful? Sure, it's like sending an anonymous threat, like insulting someone under a pseudonym. All cowards are the same, it's incredible. The power of slander, eh? The power of impunity. Yes, slander is a crime, although no one's ever going to prove it in your case. That's you, Angelina, you are the lowest of the low: a thief who got away with it."

She was crying. "Don't be mean," she said. "You know full well I didn't make any of it up."

"No, the truth is I don't know. The only thing I know is that my dad's dead and you're dragging his name through the mud all over Bogota. And I want to know why."

"Because he left me in the worst way. Because he took advantage of me."

"Please, don't be trite. My dad's incapable of taking advantage of anybody. He was incapable."

"Well, that's what you think; it's not for me to tell you any different. But no one ever left you, you can see that for miles. I know what happened in Medellin, I know what he made me believe. He made me think he was coming back and he didn't come back, he told me to wait for him and left me there waiting, I know all that, and that was from the start, he planned all that, he needed my support and he thought: Well, she can come with me and once we get there and she's no use to me anymore, I'll leave her there. He made me believe-"

"What did he make you believe?"

"That we were going away together. That we were a couple and we were spending Christmas together."

"And didn't you go away together?"

"No, we went so he could take care of a little business. And once I'd completed my function I turned into a nuisance."

"They're two separate things."

"What are?"

"One: asking for help. Two: wanting to be helped."

"Oh no, don't give me that crap. All men-"

"Where are your parents, Angelina?"

"What?"

"Where is your family?"

"No, just a moment. That's out of bounds, watch it."

"How long has it been since you spoke to your brother? Years, right? And wouldn't you like to speak to him again, have someone who reminded you of your parents? Of course you would, but you don't because you've been estranged for a long time, and now it's hard to get close again. You'd like to, but it's difficult. Getting close to people is always difficult. People who are distant are frightening, it's completely normal. But you know what? It would be easier if someone helped you, like if I went with you to Cartagena."

"Santa Marta."

"If I went with you to Santa Marta and sat and had something to drink while you went and met your brother and talked out what you need to discuss. If things went well, there I'd be for you to tell me. If they went badly, if your brother told you to go to hell and said he didn't want anything to do with you, to go back where you came from, there I'd be. And we could go to the hotel, or wherever, and we'd lie down and watch television, if that helped you, or we'd get drunk, or screw all night, whatever. But there is another possibility: after going to see him, you decided for other reasons you didn't want to come back. That's something else, it wouldn't be a reason for me to go around slandering you afterward. Get the message or shall I explain it more clearly?"

"I don't want to see my brother."

"Don't be an idiot. It's an example, an analogy."

"It might be what you say. But all the same, I don't want to see him."

"That's not what we're talking about. Oh please, what an idiot. We're talking about my dad."

"I have no interest in seeing my brother. Maybe he did, but I don't."

Silence.

"OK," I said. "How do you know he's not interested?"

"No, I don't know, I imagine."

"Why do you imagine that?"

"He didn't come to my parents' funeral. What else does that prove?"

"Don't cry, Angelina."

"I'm not crying now, don't mess with my life, OK? And if I feel like crying, what's it to you? Leave me alone or I'm hanging up right now, let me be-"

"Can I tell you something odd?"

"Or I'll slam the phone down."

"I went to give blood. The day of that bomb, when they blew up Los Tres Elefantes."

Silence.

"What blood type are you?" she said after a while.

"O positive."

Another silence.

Then: "Like my dad. Did you really donate blood that day?"

"Yes, I went with a friend who's a doctor," I said. "The person who would have operated on my dad if Social Security didn't exist. He forced me to go. I didn't want to."

"Where did you go?"

"Most of the wounded were at the Santa Fe and the Shaio. The clinics closest to the store, and the best equipped, I imagine. I went to the Santa Fe."

"Where do you give blood in the Santa Fe?"

"On the second floor. Or the third. Up some stairs, in any case."

"And what's the place like?"

"Are you testing me?"

"Tell me what the clinic's like."

"It's a big room with coffee-colored sofas, I think, and there are little windows," I said. "You talk to a nurse, then they send you in."

"To the back on the left?"

"No, Angelina, to the back on the right. There are cubicles, lots of people giving blood at the same time. They make you sit in very high chairs."

"Those high chairs," Angelina said. "You gave blood. Gabriel never told me."

"I'm sure he didn't know. He didn't follow my life that closely."

"Amazing," she said. "I remember when Gabriel asked me about my parents and I told him, I got upset, he said so many nice things. He talked to me a lot that day, he even told me about his wife's illness, but he never told me this. How amazing, I'm amazed."

"It's not such a big deal. Everyone in this city has given blood."

"But it's the connection, you know what I mean? It's amazing, I swear. I don't know what my dad's cause of death was, I didn't want to know whether it was a blow, or. . but if you. ."

"Take it easy. Don't talk about that if you don't want to."

"My mum was A positive. That's more difficult."

"Did you get along well?"

"Average. Fine, I think. But not too close. They were there and I was here."

"I guess people grow apart."

"Yes, that's right. And the one time they come to visit me, they get hit by a drug lord's bomb. What rotten luck, man, I must be jinxed."

"No, not really. Sooner or later it hits us all, and sorry for saying such stupid things. Are you happy here?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter, there're bombs in Medellin, too, bombs wherever a person goes, Gabriel." And then laughing: "Like the moon."

"But if they were alive, wouldn't you consider going back to Medellin?"

"I've been here for quite a few years now, I'm used to it. Moving is no fun, it's awful. I don't know about you, but people who are always moving don't seem trustworthy, like. . like untrustworthy, that's the only word, I can't put it any better. To go away from where you were born isn't normal, is it? And going away twice from where a person's from, or leaving your own country, you know? Going to a country where they speak something else, I don't know, it's for strange people; rootless people can do bad things."

"Yes. My father thought the same way. Can I ask you a question?"

"Another one?"

"How did you end up getting mixed up with my dad?"

Silence.

"Why? You don't think I'm good enough?"

"No, that's not what I meant, Angelina. It's just that. ."

"He was such an intelligent, cultured person, no? And I'm a masseuse."

"Masseuse?"

"When my boyfriend wanted to insult me he used to say that: 'I don't know what I did to end up with a fucking masseuse. ' Sure, it's my own fault, because a true professional doesn't get involved with patients."

"I asked you a question."

"I don't know, your dad was just another patient, it's not like I get involved with all my patients. Things like that happen before you notice, you know? Suddenly, Gabriel crossed the line, and I told him no, that no one gets involved in my life, and he didn't listen to me. But he was the patient and I put up with the things he said to me."

"Why? Why didn't you leave, if it bothered you so much, why didn't you get a replacement?"

"Because the therapy hadn't finished. It's not for me to say, I know, but I take my work seriously, you know? And I'm good at my job because I like it. All I want is to help people move again, there's nothing simpler. Well, that's what he was, any old patient, one of so many, a block of time in my schedule-I have a schedule with all my visits-he was one more. I had no intention of letting him into my life, I swear, I'd been hurt too much by men, not that I'm so experienced either, don't get me wrong. You want to know why I opened the door to him and not to another."

"You don't have to talk about doors."

"I talk the way I like. If you don't like it, I'll shut up. I don't speak as well as you guys."

"Sorry. Go on."

"I had more than ten during those months. All men in their fifties, their sixties, two or three in their seventies. After heart surgery they need to learn how to move again, like newborn babies. So I get beside them and give them exercises to do, you feel sorry for people, I play with them a little and remind them they're not dead even if they sometimes feel like it, because they're so depressed, you feel sorry for them. . Anyway, it's like a gift from God, I swear, dealing with these people who've come back to life. Their bodies have them disorientated. The body thinks it's dead and you have to convince it that it's not, because-"

"Yeah, they explained all that to me."

"OK. I'm there for that, too, to show them they haven't died, that they're still there. If you could see me, you should see the work it takes with some of them, especially the younger ones. Sometimes I get one like that, men who have a bypass at fortysomething, like as young as me, and they don't accept it. And I explain and explain again."

"What?"

"That it's at their age when they're at the highest risk. Didn't you know? Because at forty, forty-five, you still feel young, and you knock back the drinks, and smoke like a chimney, and eat all that fried food. And exercise, I don't fucking need it, I'm still young. Well, your heart thinks otherwise. It's had a long time of drinks and cigarettes and doesn't want any more. And that's how accidents happen. It's good for me because it's a bit of variety, I like that they're not always so old, that I can touch bodies my own age once in a while, I'm still young. Oh, sorry, that's a bit familiar. I shouldn't be saying these things. Remind me that you're not your dad."

"Why? You could tell him these things?"

"Well, of course. He loved to hear me talk about my work."

"Yeah, well, you enjoy your work and you like to talk about how much you enjoy your work. I don't see what's strange about that."

"It's that there are jobs you shouldn't enjoy too much, Gabrielito, don't play dumb with me. Especially if you don't do them in a normal way. If you were a gynecologist you couldn't go around shouting, I love my job, I love my job. People wouldn't take it well; now you're going to tell me that's never occurred to you."

"But you don't do what a gynecologist does. Nothing even close."

"I like to touch. I like to feel people. You can't go around saying that out loud. Other physiotherapists sit their patients down twenty meters away and from there tell them what they have to do. I get close, I touch them, I give them massages. And saying that I touch them and that I like it is not approved of. The clients would feel uncomfortable and the doctors would kick me out. You're not going to tell anybody, are you?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I like contact, what can I do? After a weekend alone at home, I feel the lack. A person is very alone at home; you live alone, too, don't you? Well, I miss going out to meet someone. Oh, if the San Pedro cardiologist could hear me he'd kick me out on the street, I swear he would."

"Well, I'm no cardiologist."

"No, but I wouldn't say these things to your face either. Just as well we're talking on the phone."

"Just as well."

"I like getting into a packed lift. I don't feel alone, I feel calm. In places like that men brush up against a person. My friends hate that, but I like it. I've never told anyone that, ever. My boyfriend was claustrophobic, he didn't like things like that. And a massage isn't being touched but touching, caressing. I know people like it. Perhaps they're ashamed that they like it, but they like it, men especially. I know I'm still attractive."

"When did you know?"

"That I'm still attractive?"

"That this was the job for you."

"Oh, I don't know. You're imagining nonsense now, aren't you? Well, I didn't give my dolls massages, much less my girlfriends, for your information. Don't laugh, it's true."

"I believe you."

"If I'd had brothers close to my age, maybe I wouldn't have felt so alone, I was a lonely child. But my brother was six years older than me, well, he still is. He was never with me. He began to notice I existed when I was about eleven, around there. One time my chest was hurting, you know, when you first start to grow, and my parents were both at work, so I told my brother. He took me into the bathroom and sat me on the washstand. He was very strong and he lifted me up from the floor like that, in one go. And he started to touch me. 'Does it hurt here? And here? Does it hurt here?' He touched my ribs-does my telling you this bother you? He touched my nipples. It hurt a lot, but I answered yes, no, a little. And then he went off to do his military service and those things didn't happen anymore. Then, the first time he came home during his military service, something very strange happened to me, like a feeling of disgust, like a small disgust. It might have been his shaved head, I don't know. I didn't like the way he was talking either, that flashy ways soldiers talk, you know? And all the bloody crap, sorry, all the silly things he told us about his new military friends, people who'd come back from Korea three or four or five years ago, who told him such interesting things, interesting to my brother at least, and he showed up repeating them like a parrot. I was bored and my brother seemed like a jerk. When I went to take a shower, I locked the door and pushed the dirty-laundry basket up against the door. It was just a latch and if someone pushed hard enough it would open, not that my brother was going to break down the door to see me naked, but still. And then my brother arrived with the news that he was leaving home. He'd got his girlfriend pregnant and he was moving out. No one even knew he had a girlfriend. She lived in Santa Marta, worked in a travel agency, or a tourism office, and she was going to get him a job. As soon as he was settled into his job and had saved a bit of money, he was going to invite us all to the coast. He promised all that, but then nothing. I remember my mum saying, 'We've lost him.' She'd done some calculations, and she was sure her grandchild must have been born by then, and my brother didn't say anything. 'He's gone and we've lost him.' That's what my mum said. For me, on the other hand, it was a relief. It's sad, but that's how it is."

"It's not so sad. The guy was a heel, Angelina."

"Yeah, but he was my brother. Imagine later when I told them I was leaving, too. Of course, that was a long time later. I was doing my practical training, but all the same it hit them hard. I was the baby of the family. They busted their arses to send me to college, Gabriel, and what for, so I'd grab my diploma and head off to Bogota. Ungrateful brat, no? But I was really good. It's not my fault I had magic hands."

"Teacher's pet."

"No, as a student I kept my head down, tried not to stand out. It was later, during my internship. It was in the Leon XIII. I would have stayed there my whole life if I hadn't come to Bogota. It was the Leon XIII physiatrist who noticed I worked miracles with my hands. He assigned me an eighty-year-old patient who'd had three bypasses, and in ten days I had him doing aerobics. When they transferred him to Bogota, he practically dragged me with him. That's when we started seeing each other."

"Name?"

"Lombana. He was the kind of guy who liked traveling and being in other places. He'd studied in the United States and he got along great, everyone liked him, he made thousands of friends. But I didn't. In this whole fucking city I only knew him, so I did what anyone would have done in my place: I fell in love. It took me three years to find out the guy was married. He was already married in Medellin. The transfer to Bogota wasn't a promotion, he'd requested it, because in Medellin he'd married a girl from here. And do you think I told him to go to hell? No, I stayed right there working away, like an idiot, meeting him almost always in my apartment, and in the motels in La Calera for special occasions. He'd take me there to weaken me: sometimes I'd get hysterical, or threaten to finish with all that shit, and that was my consolation prize. I deserve it all, for my stupidity. I like the motels in La Calera. When there aren't any clouds, when the air is clean and the pollution's not too bad, you can see the Nevado del Ruiz volcano. I used to love to see the snow-capped peak. He used to say he was going to take me there one day even though it was dangerous. Of course I didn't believe him, I'm not that naive either."

"No."

"And that went on for ten years. Ten years, Gabriel. It sounds like a long time but for me it went by like a shot, that's the truth. Because there wasn't the wearing down that real couples have. I've never been married, and maybe I shouldn't talk about something I don't know, but I swear Lombana fought more with his wife than with me, I haven't got the slightest doubt. Because with the wife there's a history. That's what a person had to avoid, that you build up a history with people, with friends, with lovers. You get close to a person and right there the resentments start to build up, things you say or do without meaning to, and that gets you into a history. You go to see your cardiologist and he takes out your medical history and without even meaning to he checks out everything: that you stopped smoking, yes, but not till you were forty. Your father had a heart murmur. Your great-uncle had arteriosclerosis. That's what Lombana told me, that with his wife it was like that, they went to bed and each and every grudge over their whole marriage went to bed with them. In the end he only made love to her from behind because he didn't want to look at her face. He told me all that. With every possible detail. I didn't want that to happen to me, and I suppose that's why I put up with it for ten years without doing anything, anything serious, I mean. I didn't want to do things that would later fill me up with bitterness and grudges, you know how it is. I like sex face-to-face, like normal. I'm a decent girl."

"How did they kill him?"

Silence.

"Right, then, is there any part of my life Gabriel didn't tell you about? He was a newsreel, your dad. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't like talking about that."

"Oh please, Angelina. You already told me your brother used to touch you. You just told me how you like sex."

"That's different."

"It was downtown," I said to her. "It was in a nightclub."

"And what does it matter to you?"

"It doesn't matter to me. I'm just curious."

"Morbid."

"Exactly, morbid curiosity, that's what it is. Was he into any dirty business, drugs?"

"Of course not. There was a fight and guns came out and he got shot, nothing more. The most normal thing in the world."

"Were you with him?"

"No, Gabriel, I was not with him. I was tucked up safe in my apartment. I wasn't with him, and I wasn't with my parents later, OK? Yeah, I wish I'd been killed, too, by that fucking bomb, I wish I'd been killed in the shootout. I wasn't with him and nobody came to tell me because very few people knew I existed, and all the ones who did know preferred to respect the wife and not tell her, they killed your husband and besides he's had another woman for the last ten years, no, thirteen whole years, how about that. No, I found out on my own. He wouldn't let me phone his house and I had to go and stand there in front of it like a prostitute to ask him if he wanted to finish with me, or why had he disappeared like that, and when he didn't appear all day, then I checked into things and eventually found out, but no one informed me because you all hide under the same blanket, fucking hypocrites. So I wasn't with him, so what? Can we talk about something else?"

"Don't be like that. It's good to talk about these things. It's therapeutic."

"That shit again. Your dad used to say the same thing. Why are you so arrogant? Does it run in the family? Look, if you guys go through life talking about everything and that works for you, fine, but tell me one little thing, why the fuck should it be the same for me?"

"No reason. Calm down."

"Why would what works for you guys work for me as well?"

"Calm down. No one's saying that."

Silence.

"You need to respect other people more, Gabriel."

"Respect other people."

"We're not all the same."

"We're very different."

Silence.

"Besides, I'm the therapist."

"Yes."

"Don't give me that shit."

"No."

Silence.

"Well, at least we're in agreement. Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait. . OK. Right, what were you saying?"

"What happened?"

"I was rolling a joint."

"At this hour?"

"Yeah, right now. After what happened to my parents, this was the only way I could get to sleep."

"And you rolled it there, in bed, without dropping the phone? What a pair of hands you've got, it's true."

"I hold the phone with my shoulder, that's all. It's not that hard. Do you sleep well?"

"I suppose. I wake up early, though. Five in the morning and that's it, my brain wakes up in one second and keeps running all day. Or I get up to go to the bathroom. But everyone else can go back to sleep, I can't. While I'm pissing I think of my dad and then there's nothing for it. It'll last for a while, I guess, and then things'll go back to normal. Because things normalize, don't they?"

"Yes. Don't worry about that, Gabriel, things go back to normal. Here, have a puff of marijuana down the phone."

"I can smell it from here, I'm so jealous."

Silence.

"So, you're in your dad's apartment, eh? Sitting on your dad's bed. It's a little strange, to tell you the truth, you've got your strange side, you have."

"What are you wearing, Angelina?"

"Oh no, but not so strange after all."

"Are you under the covers?"

"No, I'm stark naked on top of the bedspread and I've got a red lamp shining on me. Of course I'm under the covers, it's fucking freezing in this fucking city. As usual. And you?"

"I'm taking my jeans off and getting under the covers, too. It is cold. I think I'm going to stay here, I've never slept in this bed."

"Aren't you scared?"

"Of what?"

"What do you think? That you'll get your feet pulled."

"Angelina, what a thing to say. And you, a woman of science believing in such superstitions."

"Science, my arse, I've had mine pulled. A friend from college died three years ago, of kidney failure, you know, one of those things they discover one day and three days later there's nothing to be done. And it was as if the poor thing hadn't had time to say good-bye to her friends. I was here, totally relaxed and sound asleep, and I swear she pulled them. Dead people like to say good-bye to me."

"Well, no one's ever said good-bye to me. And no one's ever come to pull my feet."

"But in a dead man's bed. It's impossible that it doesn't make a bit of an impression on you. I couldn't do it. You're very brave. What sheets are on the bed?"

"They're white with checks."

"I gave those sheets to your dad. He hadn't bought himself new sheets for ten years."

"I'm not surprised."

"Those are the last sheets Gabriel slept in."

"OK, don't get mystical on me. I'm going to stay here and my dad's not going to come to scare me, I swear he's got better things to do."

"Can I tell you something?"

"Tell me something."

"You're very good, Gabriel, a lot better than I was. You're going to get over this quickly."

"Don't be fooled. I act like I'm fine, but it's a defense mechanism. I'm an expert at that, everybody knows it. A poker face is a defense mechanism. Cynicism is a defense mechanism."

"And isn't it hard to keep pretending?"

"I play poker in my spare time."

"Sure, you make jokes about it, but I'm jealous. What I wouldn't give for a bit of a poker face. Can you learn that? Where do they teach it? No, I swear, it hit me really hard being alone, after the bomb, being on my own at night. Then your dad showed up and it was like he rescued me, I held on really tight to him. Maybe that was my mistake. And then to see that he left me, too. That he was also capable of hurting me. The truth is that hit me pretty hard. Who told me to build up my hopes? Who told me to be so naive? But it was really hard."

"I know. Enough to make you stab him in the back. And on television."

"You think what you like, my conscience is clear. I only know one thing, that Gabriel was someone else. In the end he wasn't the person we thought he was."

"Not him or anyone else, Angelina."

"Well, on television, I wasn't talking about him, I was talking about the other one."

"Sophist."

"What's that?"

"It's what you are. A shameless sophist."

"Is that an insult? Are you insulting me again?"

"More or less. But I don't feel like fighting."

Silence.

"Me neither. I've turned out the light now, I've got a nice buzz, I'm tucked up here as if everything were fine, as if the world were all peaceful, as if I didn't have problems, and I know I'm cold, but I don't feel it, or I feel it but it doesn't matter. . No, I don't want to fight either. . it's the first time I've felt good all day. Though I am cold."

"Well, put on something else. What are your pajamas like?"

"It's a long nightgown, long, down to my knees. Light blue cotton with dark blue edging on the sleeves, really pretty."

"That explains it. Don't you even have any socks on?"

"Yeah, socks as well."

"Have you finished smoking now?"

"A while ago."

"Good. Are you sleepy?"

"Not too sleepy, no, I'm a little tired. You?"

"I'm wide awake. I have to stay and wait for my dad."

"Don't even joke about that, Gabriel, don't say those things. Look, I've got goose bumps all over now." Silence. "On my arms and on my neck." Silence. "I really loved him."

"I did too, Angelina."

"Everybody loved him. People loved him."

"Yeah."

"I'm sure his German friend loved him."

"Sure."

"So why did he do that to him? Why didn't he ever tell anyone, not even you? Why did he tell me he was coming back if he was tired of me and didn't want to see me anymore? Why did he tell us so many lies?"

"Everyone tells lies, Angelina," I said. "The worst thing is that we don't notice. That's what should never happen. Liars should be infallible."

"I don't know about infallible, but I would rather not know. Carry on, like before. Wouldn't you?"

"I'm not sure," I heard myself say. "I have wondered about that, I have."

A few days later I paid Sara a surprise visit, I dragged her out for a walk down Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, and we walked down as far as the place where they killed Gaitan. That had happened one afternoon-1948, April 9, one o'clock in the afternoon: the coordinates formed part of my life, and my life actually began more than a decade later-and twelve hours earlier my father had been listening to the dead man's last speech, the summing up in defense of Lieutenant Cortes: a man who had murdered out of jealousy, a uniformed Colombian Othello. Gaitan had been carried out of the courtroom on men's shoulders; my father, who had been waiting for this moment to approach him and try to congratulate him without his voice trembling, was repelled by the mob surrounding him. It was a whole year before my father dared to set foot again in the place where we now were; he would later return with some frequency, and each time would stop for a few seconds in silence before he went on his way. The pavement of Seventh Avenue is broken at that spot by the tram tracks (that don't go anywhere, that get lost under the pavement, because the trams, those trams with blue-tinted windows that my father told me about, haven't existed for years), and as I, standing in front of the Agustin Nieto building, read the black marble plaque that describes the assassination in more sentences than strictly necessary, Sara, thinking I wasn't looking, crouched down at the curb-I thought she was going to pick up a dropped coin-and with two fingers touched the rail as if she were taking the pulse of a dying dog. I kept pretending I hadn't seen her, so as not to interrupt her private ceremony, and after several minutes of being a hindrance in that river of people and putting up with insults and shoves, I asked her to show me exactly where the Granada Pharmacy had been in those years when a suicidal man could buy more than ninety sleeping pills there. A year and a half after Konrad Deresser's suicide, Gaitan's murderer had been taken by force inside the pharmacy to prevent the furious mob from lynching him, but he'd been dragged from the pharmacy by the furious mob, which had punched and kicked him to death and dragged his naked body to the presidential palace (there is a photograph that shows the body leaving a trail of shredded clothing behind like a snake shedding its skin: the photo isn't very good, and in it Juan Roa Sierra is barely a pale corpse, almost an ectoplasm, crossed by the black stain of his sex). There we were, standing where Josefina must have stood, facing the road along which, on that April 9, 1948, the ectoplasm of the assassin and the people who had taken it upon themselves to lynch him had gone. "No, I didn't know Enrique was alive," Sara was saying. "And see how things stand: if your dad wasn't dead, I wouldn't be able to believe it. I'd think it was one of that little woman's lies, a halfway intelligent fabrication to justify the grotesque action of selling herself for that interview. Actually, I'd prefer to be able to do what so many people do: convince myself. Convince myself that it's not true. Convince myself that it's all Angelina's invention. But I can't, and I can't for a reason: your dad is dead, and in some way he was killed for going to see him, for visiting Enrique. I bet you've thought of this: if Enrique weren't alive, Gabriel's death wouldn't mean anything." Of course it had already occurred to me; I didn't need to say it, because Sara already knew. (Since our conversations for the book I got used to not saying things that to Sara would be superfluous. Sara knew: that was her mark of identity.) She went on: "Of course you can get all philosophical, ask, for example, why should his death mean anything, does any death ever mean anything. We could be very nihilistic and very elegant. But none of that matters, because Enrique isn't alive for us. If he was, he would have called me by now, or he might even have come to the funeral, no? But none of that. Alive or dead, in Medellin or in seventh heaven, it's all the same, because Enrique wants to be dead to me, he's spent fifty years willing it so. And I'm not going to be the one to spoil that now. I'm not going to be the one who meddles in his life without being invited, and much less now that your father's dead."

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

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

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

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

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

"No, we didn't talk about it. We were working on the reconciliation. The details didn't matter."

"Well, I was with him. That was the day after his reading of your book and our chat. We went to the Supreme Court and he got one of the magistrates to lend him a secretary, and he took her to the hall where he gave his lectures. He asked her to sit up in the tiers, as if she were a student, and he dictated the review as if it were a class. It was fascinating to watch. Sorry for saying so, I know full well how much it hurt to see it published. But for me it was a spectacle, like seeing Baryshnikov dance. Your dad dictated it and didn't alter a single word. As if he had written a draft and was reading it out for a clean copy. With commas, full stops, dashes, parentheses, all dictated just the way it appeared in print, all in one go, without hesitating over a single word or changing an opinion or honing an idea. And the ideas in that review. The humor, the irony. The precision. The precision of the cruelty, sure, but cruelty also has its virtuosos. It was masterly."

"I know," I said. "I saw him do that a couple of times. My dad had a computer in his head."

"The worst thing is that nothing proved him wrong. Obviously, no one read between the lines, as he said, no one accused him of anything. People just noticed the book, commented on the father-and-son thing, and laughed a little. . and then what was to come came to pass. But back then nothing happened. 'You see?' he said to me later. 'I was right about my strategy. It was terrible to have to do it, but I was right. I escaped this time, Sara. I escaped by the skin of my teeth.' Like madmen, like people who are ill. Like that German joke about a fellow who snaps his fingers all day long. His family takes him to see a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist asks him, Why do you snap your fingers all the time? And he says, To scare away the elephants. And the psychiatrist: But there are no elephants in Germany, my good sir. And the madman: You see, Doctor, see how well it works? Well, that's how your dad was. Your dad was the madman of the joke."

While Sara was telling her German joke, I saw in her face the face of a little girl, the girl who had arrived in Colombia at the end of the 1930s. It was like a flash photo, a nanosecond of clarity when the wrinkles disappeared from around the smiling eyes. Yes, I had grown very fond of this woman, more than I'd ever suspected, and part of that fondness was a consequence of that which she had felt for the friend of her youth, her shadow brother, the fondness that years later had its refraction in me, preventing me, in some way, from the pathetic need to write letters to my father, turn into a beetle, ask permission to sleep in the castle. "See, Doctor, see how well it works?" Sara repeated. "I can imagine it perfectly. I think of your dad, I think of the madman of the joke, and they're the same person. The mad look on Gabriel's face sometimes." In this memorial atmosphere of a private anniversary, the best thing I could think of to do was put on the record of German songs and ask my hostess to tell me about the one my father liked so much, to translate it for me and sum it up so I could understand it, and she told me about the spring that arrives, the girls who sing, the poet Otto Licht, whose name rhymes with the word poem. 'Licht, Gedicht,' " said Sara, and laughed sadly. "How could Gabriel not like that?" Later I asked her to write out the lyrics for me; although I can't now be sure, it's possible that I was already thinking of transcribing them into this book, as in fact I did.

Because it was after that day-after walking down Seventh Avenue and visiting what had been Konrad Deresser's boardinghouse; after passing in front of the pharmacy that no longer existed, which didn't make it invisible, where the old man had bought his pills; after sitting on the steps of the cathedral where they sang the Te Deum the day that, thousands of kilometers from the Plaza de Bolivar, the Second World War ended; after having been in the places I'd been in a thousand times but nevertheless didn't know and had never seen, which were as opaque and uncertain to me as the life of Gabriel Santoro-it was after all that, I say, that the idea of this report came into my head for the first time. That night I took a few notes, I sketched out a couple of lists of contents; I followed the few habits I've picked up, less as an aid than as an amulet, over the course of my journalistic career. And several months later, the notes had already filled a whole notebook and there were reams of documents piling up on my desk. One of those notes said: Nothing would be as it is if they hadn't operated on him. I read it two or three times, with the computer already turned on, and it seemed to me, looking back, that the phrase contained some truth, for perhaps my father would still be alive if he hadn't received the gift of the second life, accompanied, of course, by the obligation to make the most of it, by the need to redeem himself. It was that process I was interested in getting down in writing: the reasons a man who has been mistaken in his youth tries in old age to rectify his error, and the consequences that attempt can have on him and those around him, and above all the consequences it had for me, his son, the only person in the world liable to inherit his faults but also his redemption. And in the process of doing so, I thought, in the process of writing about him, my father would stop being the false figure he himself had taken on, and would reclaim his position before me as our dead all do: leaving me as an inheritance the obligation to discover him, to interpret him, to find out who he had really been. And thinking about this, the rest came with the clarity of an explosion. I closed the notebook, as if I had this book memorized, and began to write about my father's sick heart.

Bogota, February 1994