The Informers

I. THE INADEQUATE LIFE

On the morning of April 7, 1991, when my father telephoned to invite me to his apartment in Chapinero for the first time, there was such a downpour in Bogota that the streams of the Eastern Hills burst their banks, and the water came pouring down, dragging branches and mud, blocking the sewers, flooding the narrowest streets, lifting small cars with the force of the current, and even killing an unwary taxi driver who somehow ended up trapped under the chassis of his own vehicle. The phone call itself was at the very least surprising, but on that day seemed nothing less than ominous, not only because my father had stopped receiving visitors a long time before, but also because the image of the water-besieged city, the motionless traffic jams and broken stoplights and marooned ambulances and unattended emergencies, would have sufficed under normal circumstances to convince anyone that going out to visit someone was imprudent, and asking someone to come to visit almost rash. The scenes of Bogota in chaos attested to the urgency of his call and made me suspect that the invitation was not a matter of courtesy, suggesting a provisional conclusion: we were going to talk about books. Not just any old book, of course; we'd talk about the only one I'd then published, a piece of reportage with a TV-documentary title-A Life in Exile, it was called-that told or tried to tell the life story of Sara Guterman, daughter of a Jewish family and lifelong friend of ours, beginning with her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s. When it appeared in 1988, the book had enjoyed a certain notoriety, not because of its subject or its debatable quality, but because my father, a professor of rhetoric who never deigned to sully his hand with any form of journalism, a reader of classics who disapproved of the very act of commenting on literature in print, had published a savage review of it in the Sunday magazine of El Espectador. It's perhaps understandable that later, when my father sold the family home at a loss and took a lease on a refuge for the inveterate bachelor he pretended to be, I wasn't surprised to hear the news from someone else, even if it was from Sara Guterman, my least distant someone else.

So the most natural thing in the world, the afternoon I went to see him, was to think it was the book he wanted to discuss with me: that he was going to make amends, three years late, for that betrayal, small and domestic though it may have been, but no less painful for that. What happened was very different. From his domineering, ocher-colored armchair, while he changed channels with the solitary digit of his mutilated hand, this aged and frightened man, smelling of dirty sheets, whose breathing whistled like a paper kite, told me, in the same tone he'd used all through his life to recount an anecdote about Demosthenes or Gaitan, that he'd spent the last three weeks making regular visits to a doctor at the San Pedro Claver Clinic, and that an examination of his sixty-seven-year-old body had revealed, in chronological order, a mild case of diabetes, a blocked coronary artery-the anterior descending-and the need for immediate surgery. Now he knew how close he'd been to no longer existing, and he wanted me to know, too. "I'm all you've got," he said. "I'm all you've got left. Your mother's been buried for fifteen years. I could have not called you, but I did. You know why? Because after me you're on your own. Because if you were a trapeze artist, I'd be your only safety net." Well then, now that sufficient time has passed since my father's death and I've finally decided to organize my head and desk, my documents and notes, to get this all down in writing, it seems obvious that I should begin this way: remembering the day he called me, in the middle of the most intense winter of my adult life, not to mend the rift between us, but in order to feel less alone when they opened his chest with an electric saw and sewed a vein extracted from his right leg into his ailing heart.

It had begun with a routine check-up. The doctor, a man with a soprano's voice and a jockey's body, had told my father that a mild form of diabetes was not entirely unusual or even terribly worrying at his age: it was merely a predictable imbalance and wasn't going to require insulin injections or drugs of any kind, but he would need to exercise regularly and observe a strict diet. Then, after a few days of sensible jogging, the pain began, a delicate pressure on his stomach, rather resembling a threat of indigestion or something strange my father might have swallowed. The doctor ordered new tests, still general ones but more exhaustive, and among them was a test of strength; my father, wearing underpants as long and baggy as chaps, first walked then jogged on the treadmill, and then returned to the tiny changing room (in which, he told me, he'd felt like stretching his arms, and, realizing the place was so small he could touch the facing walls with his elbows, suffered a brief attack of claustrophobia), and when he'd just put on his flannel trousers and begun to button up the cuffs of his shirt, already thinking about leaving and waiting for a secretary to call him to pick up the results of his electrocardiogram, the doctor knocked on the door. He was very sorry, he said, but he hadn't liked what he'd seen in the initial results: they were going to have to do a cardiac catheterization immediately to confirm the risks. And they did, of course, and the risks (of course) were confirmed: there was an obstructed artery.

"Ninety-nine percent," said my father. "I would have had a heart attack the day after tomorrow."

"Why didn't they admit you there and then?"

"Because the fellow thought I looked really nervous, I suppose. He thought it'd be better if I went home. He did give me a very specific set of instructions, though. Told me not to move all weekend. Avoid any kind of excitement. No sex at all, especially. That's what he said to me, believe it or not."

"And what did you say to him?"

"That he didn't need to worry about that. I wasn't about to tell him my life story."

As he left the office and hailed a taxi amid the confusion of Twenty-sixth Street, my father had barely begun to confront the idea that he was ill. He was going to be admitted to the hospital without a single symptom that would betray the urgency of his condition, with no discomfort beyond the frivolous pain in the pit of his stomach, and all because of an incriminating catheter. The doctor's arrogant spiel kept running through his head: "If you'd waited three more days before coming to see me, we'd probably be burying you in a week." It was a Friday; the operation was scheduled for the following Thursday at six in the morning. "I spent the night thinking I was going to die," he told me, "and then I phoned you. That surprised me, of course, but now I'm even more surprised you've come." It's possible he was exaggerating: my father knew no one was apt to consider his death as seriously as his own son, and we devoted that Sunday afternoon to such considerations. I made a couple of salads, made sure there was juice and water in the fridge, and began to look over his latest income-tax return with him. He had more money than he needed, which isn't to say he had a lot, just that he didn't need much. His only income came from his pension from the Supreme Court, and his capital-that is, the money he'd received when he'd sold off the house where I'd grown up and my mother had died-had been invested in savings bonds, and the interest from them was enough to cover his rent and living expenses for the most ascetic lifestyle I'd ever seen: a lifestyle in which, as far as I could tell, no restaurants, concerts, or any other means, more or less onerous, of entertainment entered into the picture. I'm not saying that if my father had spent the occasional night with a hired lover I would have found out about it; but when one of his colleagues tried to get him out of the house, to take him out for a meal with some woman, my father refused once and then left the phone off the hook for the rest of the day. "I've already met the people I had to meet in this life," he told me. "I don't need anyone new." One of those times, the person who invited him was a trademark and patents lawyer young enough to be his daughter, one of those large-breasted girls who don't read and seem to go through an inevitable phase of curiosity about sex with older men. "And you turned her down?" I asked. "Of course I turned her down. I told her I had a political meeting. 'What party?' she asked. 'The Onan ist Party,' I told her. And off she went quietly home and never bothered me again. I don't know if she found a dictionary in time, but she seems to have decided to leave me alone because she hasn't invited me to anything since. Or who knows, maybe there's a lawsuit against me, no? I can almost see the headlines: PERVERTED PROFESSOR ASSAULTS YOUNG WOMAN WITH BIBLICAL POLYSYLLABLES."

I stayed with him until six or seven and then went home, thinking during the whole trip about what had just happened, about the strange twist of a son's seeing his father's home for the first time. Was it just the two rooms-the living room and bedroom-or was there a study somewhere? I couldn't see more than a cheap white bookcase leaning carelessly against the wall that ran parallel to Forty-ninth Street, beside a barred window that hardly let in any light. Where were his books? Where were the plaques and silver trays with which others had insisted on distinguishing his career over the years? Where did he work, where did he read, where did he listen to that record-The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, a title I wasn't familiar with-the sleeve of which was lying on the kitchen table? The apartment seemed stuck in the 1970s: the orange and brown carpet; the white fiberglass chair I sank into as my father recalled and described for me the map of his catheterization (its narrow highways, its back roads); the closed, windowless bathroom, lit only by a couple of transparent plastic rectangles on the ceiling (one of which was broken, and through the hole I could see two neon tubes in their death throes). There was soapy foam in the green washbasin, the shower was dark and didn't smell too good, and from its aluminum frame hung two pairs of recently washed underpants. Had he washed them himself? Didn't anyone come to help him? I opened drawers and doors held shut with magnets and found some aspirin, a box of Alka-Seltzer, and a rusty shaving brush that no one had used for a long time. There were drops of urine on the toilet bowl and on the floor: yellow, smelly drops, telltale signs of a worn-out prostate. And there, on top of the tank, under a box of Kleenex, was a copy of my book. I wondered, of course, if this might not be his way of suggesting that his opinion had not changed over the years. "Journalism aids intestinal transit," I imagined him telling me. "Didn't they teach you that at the university?"

When I got home I made a few calls, although it was too late to cancel the operation or to pay any attention to second opinions, especially those formulated over the phone and without the benefit of documents, test results, and X-rays. In any case, talking to Jorge Mor, a cardiologist at the Shaio Clinic who'd been a friend of mine since school, didn't do much to calm me down. When I called him, Jorge confirmed what the doctor at San Pedro Claver had said: he confirmed the diagnosis as well as the necessity of operating urgently, and also the luck of having discovered the matter by chance, before my father's asphyxiated heart did what it was thinking of doing and suddenly stopped without warning. "Rest easy, brother," Jorge told me. "It's the simplest version of a difficult operation. Worrying from now till Thursday won't do anyone any good." "But what could go wrong?" I insisted. "Everything can go wrong, Gabriel, everything can go wrong in any operation in the world. But this is one that's got to be done, and it is relatively simple. Do you want me to come over and explain it to you?" "Of course not," I said. "Don't be ridiculous." But maybe if I'd accepted his offer I would have kept talking to Jorge until it was time to go to bed. We would have talked about the operation; I would have gone to sleep late, after one or two soporific drinks. Instead, I ended up going to bed at ten, and just before three in the morning I realized I was still awake and more frightened than I'd thought.

I got out of bed, felt in the pockets of my jeans for the shape of my wallet, and dumped its contents into the pool of lamplight. A few months before I turned eighteen, my father had presented me with a rectangular card, dark blue on one side and white on the other, which gave him the right to be buried with my mother in the Jardines de Paz-and there was the cemetery's logo, letters like lilies-and asked me to keep it in a safe place. At that moment, like any other teenager, I couldn't think of anywhere better to put it than in my wallet; and there it had stayed all that time, between my ID card and my military card, with its funereal aspect and the name typed on an adhesive strip now wearing away. "One never knows," my father had said when he gave it to me. "We could get blown up any day and I want you to know what to do with me." The time of bombs and attacks, a whole decade of living every day with the knowledge that arriving home each night was a matter of luck, was still in the distance; if he had in fact been blown up, the possession of that card wouldn't have made things any clearer to me as to how to deal with the dead. Now it struck me that the card, yellowed and worn, looked like the mock-ups that come in new wallets, and no stranger would have seen it for what it actually was: a laminated tomb. And so, considering the possibility that the moment to use it had arrived, not due to any bombs or attacks but through the predictable misdeeds of an old heart, I fell asleep.

They admitted him at five o'clock the next afternoon. Throughout those first hours, already in his green dressing gown, my father answered the anesthesiologist's questions and signed the white Social Security forms and the tricolor life insurance ones (a faded national flag), and throughout Tuesday and Wednesday he spoke and kept speaking, demanding certainties, asking for information and in his turn informing, sitting on the high, regal mattress of the aluminum bed but nevertheless reduced to the vulnerable position of one who knows less than the person with whom he's speaking. I stayed with him those three nights. I assured him, time and time again, that everything was going to be fine. I saw the bruise on his thigh in the shape of the province of La Guajira, and assured him that everything was going to be fine. And on Thursday morning, after they shaved his chest and both legs, three men and a woman took him to the operating room on the second floor, lying down and silent for the first time and ostentatiously naked beneath the disposable gown. I accompanied him until a nurse, the same one who'd looked blatantly and more than once at the patient's comatose genitals, asked me to get out of the way and gave me a little ammonia-smelling pat, saying the same thing I'd said to him: "Don't worry, sir. Everything's going to be fine." Except she added, "God willing."

Almost anyone would recognize my father's name, and not only because it's the same as the one on the front of this book (yes, my father was a perfect example of that predictable species: those who are so confident of their life's achievements that they have no fear of baptizing their children with their own names), but also because Gabriel Santoro was the man who taught, for more than twenty years, the famous Seminar on Judicial Oratory at the Supreme Court, and the man who, in 1988, delivered the commemoration address on the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Bogota, that legendary text that came to be compared with the finest examples of Colombian rhetoric, from Bolivar to Gaitan. GABRIEL SANTORO, HEIR TO THE LIBERAL CAUDILLO, was the headline in an official publication that few know and no one reads, but which gave my father one of the great satisfactions of his life in recent years. Quite right, too, because he'd learned everything from Gaitan: he'd attended all his speeches; he'd plagiarized his methods. Before he was twenty, for example, he'd started wearing my grandmother's corsets to create the same effect as the girdle that Gaitan wore when he had to speak outdoors. "The girdle put pressure on his diaphragm," my father explained in his classes, "and his voice would come out louder, deeper, and stronger. You could be two hundred meters from the podium when Gaitan was speaking with no microphones whatsoever, pure lung power, and you could hear him perfectly." The explanation came accompanied by the dramatic performance, because my father was an excellent mimic (but where Gaitan raised the index finger of his right hand, pointing to the sky, my father raised his shiny stump). "People of Colombia: For the moral restoration of the Republic! People of Colombia: For your victory! People of Colombia: For the defeat of the oligarchy!" Pause; ostensibly kind question from my father: "Who can tell me why this series of phrases moves us, what makes it effective?" An incautious student: "We're moved by the ideas of-" My father: "Nothing to do with ideas. Ideas don't matter, any brute can have ideas, and these, in particular, are not ideas but slogans. No, the series moves and convinces us through the repetition of the same phrase at the beginning of the clauses, something that you will all, from now on, do me the favor of calling anaphora. And the next one to mention ideas will be shot."

I used to go to these classes just for the pleasure of seeing him embody Gaitan or whomever (other more or less regular characters were Rojas Pinilla and Lleras Restrepo), and I got used to watching him, seeing him squaring up like a retired boxer, his prominent jaw and cheekbones, the imposing geometry of his back that filled out his suits, his eyebrows so long they got in his eyes and sometimes seemed to sweep across his lids like theater curtains, and his hands, always and especially his hands. The left was so wide and the fingers so long that he could pick up a football with his fingertips; the right was no more than a wrinkled stump on which remained only the mast of his erect thumb. My father was about twelve, and alone in his grandparents' house in Tunja, when three men with machetes and rolled-up trousers came in through a kitchen window, smelling of cheap liquor and damp ponchos and shouting "Death to the Liberal Party," and didn't find my grandfather, who was standing for election to the provincial government of Boyaca and would be ambushed a few months later in Sogamoso, but only his son, a child who was still in his pajamas even though it was after nine in the morning. One of them chased him, saw him trip over a clump of earth and get tangled up in the overgrown pasture of a neighboring field; after one blow of his machete, he left him for dead. My father had raised a hand to protect himself, and the rusty blade sliced off his four fingers. Maria Rosa, the cook, began to worry when he didn't show up for lunch, and finally found him a couple of hours after the machete attack, in time to stop him bleeding to death. But this last part my father didn't remember; they told him later, just as they told him about his fevers and the incoherent things he said-seeming to confuse the machete-wielding men with the pirates of Salgari books-amid the feverish hallucinations. He had to learn how to write all over again, this time with his left hand, but he never achieved the necessary dexterity, and I sometimes thought, without ever saying so, that his disjointed and deformed penmanship, those small child's capital letters that began brief squadrons of scribbles, was the only reason a man who'd spent a lifetime among other people's books had never written a book of his own. His subject was the word, spoken and read, but never written by his hand. He felt clumsy using a pen and was unable to operate a keyboard: writing was a reminder of his handicap, his defect, his shame. And seeing him humiliate his most gifted students, seeing him flog them with his vehement sarcasm, I used to think: You're taking revenge. This is your revenge.

But none of that seemed to have any consequences in the real world, where my father's success was as unstoppable as slander. The seminar became popular among experts in criminal law and postgraduate students, lawyers employed by multinationals and retired judges with time on their hands; and there came a time when this old professor with his useless knowledge and superfluous techniques had to hang on the wall, between his desk and bookshelves, a kind of kitsch, colonial shelf, upon which piled up, behind the little rail with its pudgy columns, the silver trays and the diplomas on cardboard, on watermarked paper, on imitation parchment, and the particleboard plaques with eye-catching coats of arms in colored aluminum.

FOR GABRIEL SANTORO, IN RECOGNITION OF TWENTY YEARS OF PEDAGOGICAL LABOR. . CERTIFIES THAT DOCTOR GABRIEL SANTORO, BY VIRTUE OF HIS CIVIL MERITS. . THE MAYORALTY OF GREATER BOGOTA, IN HOMAGE TO DOCTOR GABRIEL SANTORO. .

There, in that sort of sanctuary for sacred cows, the sacred cow who was my father spent his days. Yes, that was his reputation: my father knew it when they called him from city hall to offer him the speech at the Capitolio Nacional; that is, to ask him to deliver a few commonplaces in front of bored politicians. This peaceable professor-they would have thought-ticked all the right boxes for the event. My father didn't give them anything they expected.

He did not speak about 1538. He did not speak about our illustrious founder, Don Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, whose pigeon-shit-covered statue he passed every time he went to have a coffee and brandy in the Cafe Pasaje. He did not speak about the twelve little huts or the Chorro de Quevedo, Quevedo's stream, the spot where the city had been founded, which my father used to say he could never mention without his mind being invaded by the image of a pissing poet. Contravening the commemorative tradition in Colombia (this country that has always liked to commemorate everything), my father did not make his speech a politicized version of our childhood history primers. He did not abide by the terms of the agreement; he betrayed the expectations of a couple hundred politicians, peaceful men who desired only to be swept along for a while by the inertia of optimism and then be freed promptly to go and spend the August 7 holiday with their families. I was there, of course. I heard the words spat out into mediocre microphones; I saw the faces of those listening to him, and noticed the moment when some of them stopped looking at the orator to look at one another: the imperturbable eyebrows, the stiff necks, the hands with their wedding rings straightening their ties. Afterward, they all commented on the courage it took to pronounce those words, the act of profound contrition, of intrepid honesty there was in each one of those sentences-all of which, I'm sure, held no importance for my father, who wanted only to dust off his rifles and take his best shots in the presence of a select audience. None of them, however, could recognize the value of that exemplary model of rhetoric: a valiant introduction, because he relinquished the chance to appeal to his audience's sympathies ("I'm not here to celebrate anything"), a narrative based on confrontation ("This city has been betrayed. Betrayed by all of you for almost half a millennium"), an elegant conclusion that began with the most elegant figure of classical oratory ("There once was a time when it was possible to speak of this city"). And then that final paragraph, which would later serve as a mine of epigraphs for various official publications and was repeated in all the newspapers the way they repeat Simon Bolivar's I shall go quietly down to my grave or Colonel, you must save our nation.

Somewhere in Plato we read: "Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me, but the people of a city most certainly do." Citizens, I propose we learn from ours, I propose we undertake the political and moral reconstruction of Bogota. We shall achieve resurrection through our industry, our perseverance, our will. On her four hundred and fiftieth birthday, Bogota is a young city yet to be made. To forget this, citizens, is to endanger our own survival. Do not forget, citizens, nor let us forget.

My father spoke about reconstruction and morals and perseverance, and he did so without blushing, because he focused less on what he said than on the device he used to say it. Later he would comment: "The last sentence is nonsense, but the alexandrine is pretty. It fits nicely there, don't you think?"

The whole speech lasted sixteen minutes and twenty seconds-according to my stopwatch and not including the fervent applause-a tiny slice of that August 6, 1988, when Bogota turned four hundred and fifty, Colombia celebrated one hundred and sixty-nine years less a day of independence, my mother had been dead for twelve years, six months, and twenty-one days, and I, who was twenty-seven years, six months, and four days old, suddenly felt overwhelmingly convinced of my own invulnerability, and everything seemed to indicate that there where my father and I were, each in charge of his own successful life, nothing could ever happen to us, because the conspiracy of things (what we call luck) was on our side, and from then on we could expect little more than an inventory of achievements, ranks and ranks of those grandiloquent capitals: the Pride of our Friends, the Envy of our Enemies, Mission Accomplished. I don't have to say it, but I'm going to say it: those predictions were completely mistaken. I published a book, an innocent book, and then nothing was ever the same again.

I don't know when it became apparent that Sara Guterman's experiences would be the material for my first book, nor when this epiphany suggested that the prestigious occupation of a chronicler of reality was designed to fit me like a glove. (It wasn't true. I was just one more member of an occupation that is never prestigious; I was an unfulfilled promise, that delicate euphemism.) At first, when I began to investigate her life, I realized that I knew very little about her; at the same time, however, my knowledge exceeded the predictable or the normal, for Sara had been a regular visitor at my house for as long as I could remember, and many anecdotes from her always generous conversation had stayed in my head. Until the moment when my project came about, I'd never heard of Emmerich, the little German town where Sara was born. The date of her birth (1924) barely seemed less superfluous than that of her arrival in Colombia (1938); the fact that her husband was Colombian and her sons were Colombian and her grandchildren were Colombian, and the fact that she had lived in Colombia for the last fifty years of her life, served to fill out a biographical record and give an inevitable sense of substance to the particulars-you can say many things about a person, but only when we expose dates and places does that person begin to exist-but their utility went no further. Dates, places, and other information took up several interviews, characterized by the ease with which Sara talked to me, without allegories or beating about the bush, as if she'd been waiting her whole life to tell these things. I asked; she, rather than answering, confessed; the exchanges ended up resembling a forensic interrogation.

Her name was Sara Guterman, born in 1924, arrived in Colombia in 1938?

Yes, that's all correct.

What did she remember about her final days in Emmerich?

A certain well-being, first of all. Her family made their living from a sandpaper factory, and not a bad living either, but rather what would have been considered quite a comfortable one. It took Sara some thirty years to realize just what a good living the factory gave them. She also remembered a lighthearted childhood. And later, maybe after the first boycott affected the factory (Sara was not yet ten, but waking up for school and finding her father still at home made a deep impression), the appearance of fear and a sort of fascination at the novelty of the emotion.

How did they get out of Germany?

One night in October 1937, the town's operator called the family and warned that their arrest had been scheduled for the next day. It seems she had overheard the order while transferring a call, just the way she'd found out about Frau Maier's adultery (Sara didn't remember the first name of the adulterous woman). The family fled that very night, slipped over the border into Holland to a refuge in the countryside. They stayed hidden there for several weeks. Only Sara left the refuge: she backtracked as far as Hagen, where her grandparents lived, to tell them what was happening (the family thought that a thirteen-year-old girl had a better chance of traveling unimpeded). She remembered one particular detail about the train-it was the fast train of its day-she was given consomme to drink, which was quite a novelty at the time, and the process of the little cube's dissolving in the hot water fascinated her. They settled her into a compartment where everyone was smoking, and a black man sat down beside her and told her that he didn't smoke but he always sat where he saw smoke, because smokers were better conversationalists and people who don't smoke often don't talk during the entire journey.

Wasn't it dangerous to go back into Germany?

Oh yes, very. Just before arriving she noticed that a young man of about twenty had gone into the next compartment and that he'd followed her each time she'd escaped to the dining car to drink consomme. She feared, of course, that it was someone from the Gestapo, because that's what people feared at that time, and when she got to Hagen Station she left the train and walked past her uncle, who was waiting for her, and instead of greeting him, asked him where the ladies' room was, and he, luckily, understood what was going on, went along with the act, accompanied her to the back of the station, and despite the protests of two women went in with her. There, Sara told her uncle that the family was safe but nevertheless her father had now decided to leave Germany for good. It was the first time the idea of leaving was mentioned. While he listened to the news, her uncle scratched at a poster that someone, probably a traveler with too much luggage, had stuck there: Munchener Fasching. 300 Kunstlerfeste. Sara asked her uncle if she needed to change trains to go from Hagen to Munich, or if there was a direct train. Her uncle didn't say anything.

Why Colombia?

Because of an advertisement. Months earlier, Sara's father had seen the sale of a cheese factory in Duitama (an unknown city), Colombia (a primitive country), advertised in a newspaper. Taking advantage of the fact that he still could, that the laws did not yet prevent him from doing so, he decided to travel to see the factory in person and returned to Germany saying that it was an almost unimaginable business, that the factory was rudimentary and employed only three girls, and that, nevertheless, it was going to be necessary to consider the voyage. And when the emergency happened, the voyage was considered. In January 1938, Sara and her grandmother arrived by ship in Barranquilla and waited for the rest of the family; there they received news of the persecutions, arrests of friends and acquaintances, all the things they'd been spared and-which seemed even more surprising-would continue to be spared in exile. A couple of weeks later they flew from Barranquilla to Bogota's Techo Airport (in a twin-engine Boeing plane of the SCADTA fleet, as she was later informed, when at sixteen or seventeen years old she began to ask questions and reconstruct their first days in the country), and then, from Sabana Station, they took the train that left them in what for the moment was nothing more than the village of cheeses.

What did she remember about the rail journey across Colombia?

Her aunt Rotem, an old, almost bald woman, whose authority, in Sara's eyes, was diminished by her lack of hair, complained during the whole trip. The poor old woman never understood why first class, in this train, was at the back; she never understood why the girl, traveling by land across the new country, kept her nose in an album of contemporary art, a book with translucent pages that had been her cousin's and had got into her luggage by mistake, instead of commenting on the mountains and plantations and the color of the rivers. The girl looked at the reproductions and didn't know that in some cases-that of Chagall, for example-the originals no longer existed because they'd been incinerated.

What were her first impressions upon arrival in Duitama?

She liked several things: the mud that built up at the door to the house, the name of the cheese factory (Corcega, that word with its French flavor, which also summoned up the charms of a sea so close to her birthplace, the Mediterranean that she'd seen on postcards), the paint they had to rub onto the Gouda cheese to distinguish it from the others, the very slight mockery her classmates subjected her to during the initial months, and the fact that the nuns of La Presentacion College, who didn't seem able to comprehend the stubborn ignorance of the little girl, went wild with joy talking about the Death and the Resurrection, Good Friday and the Coming of Our Lord, but on the other hand choked on scandalized gasps when they found Sara explaining circumcision to the daughters of Barreto, a barrister and old friend of former president Olaya Herrera.

And that was how, at the end of 1987, I wrote a couple of pages, and was surprised to find, while looking through old papers, the index card on which I'd written, years earlier, a sort of quick writing course provided by my father upon discovering that I had started to write up my degree thesis. "First: everything that sounds good to the ear is good for the text. Second: in case of doubt, see first point." Just as when I was writing up my thesis, that card, pinned to the wall above my desk, served as an amulet, an incantation against fear. Those pages contained barely a fragment of that recounted life; there, for example, was the way the soldiers imprisoned Sara's father, Peter Guterman; there were the soldiers who smashed a plaster bust against the wall and sliced open the leather armchairs with their knives, to no avail, because the identity cards they were searching for were nowhere in that house, but rather creased inside her mother's corset and, eight days later, when Peter Guterman was released but his passport was not, allowed them to cross the border and embark, with their car and everything, at IJmuiden, a port on the canal a few minutes from Amsterdam. But the most important thing about those two pages was something else: within them was the confirmation that all could be told, the suggestion that I could be the one to tell it, and the promise of a strange satisfaction-giving shape to other people's lives, stealing what's happened to them, which is always disordered and confused, and putting it in order on paper; justifying, in some more or less honorable way, the curiosity I've always felt for all the emanations of other bodies (from ideas to menses), which has driven me, by a sort of internal compulsion, to violate secrets, reveal confidences, show interest in others the way a friend should, when deep down I'm just interviewing them like a vulgar reporter. But then I've never known where friendship stops and reporting starts.

With Sara, of course, things were no different. Over the course of several days I kept interrogating her, and did so with such devotion, or such morbid insistence, that I began to divide in two, to live the substitute and vicarious life of my interviewee and my original daily life as if they were distinct, and not a tale set in a reality. I witnessed the fascinating spectacle of memory preserved in storage: Sara kept file folders full of documents, a sort of testimony of her passage through the world as legitimate and material as a shed constructed with wood from her own land. There were open plastic folders, plastic folders with flaps, cardboard folders, both with and without elastic closures, pastel-colored folders and others that were white but dirty and others that were black, folders that slept there with no specific plans but prepared and very willing to exercise their role as second-rate Pandora's boxes. In the evenings, almost always toward the end of the conversation, Sara would put the folders away, take the cassette on which I'd recorded her voice over the last few hours out of the machine, put on a record of German songs from the thirties ("Veronika, der Lenz ist Da" or perhaps "Mein Kleiner Gruner Kaktus"), and offer me a drink, which we'd sip in silence listening to the old music. I liked to think that from outside, from an apartment whose curious tenant was spying on us, this would be the image: a fluorescent rectangle and two figures, a woman well settled into the imminence of old age and a younger man, a student or perhaps a son, in any case someone who was listening and was used to doing so. That was me: I kept my mouth shut and listened, but I wasn't her son; I took notes, because that was my job. And I thought later, at the right moment, when the raw material of her tale had finished, when the notes had been taken and the documents seen and the opinions heard, I would sit before the dossier of the case, of my case, and impose order: Was that not the chronicler's single privilege?

One of those days, Sara asked me why I wanted to write about her life, and I thought it would have been easy to evade the question or throw out any old witticism, but to answer with something approaching the truth was as essential to me as it seemed to be, at that moment, to her. I could have said that there were things I needed to come to understand. That certain areas of my experience (in my country, with my people, at this time that I happened to be living) had escaped me, generally because my attention was taken up with other more banal ones, and I wanted to keep that from continuing to happen. To become aware: that was my intention, at once simple and pretentious; and to think about the past, oblige someone to remember it, was one way of doing it, arm wrestling against entropy, an attempt to make the disorder of the world, whose only destiny was a more intense disorder, stop, be put in shackles, for once defeated. I could have said that or part of it; in my favor I point out that I avoided these grandiloquent lies and chose more humble lies, or rather, incomplete lies. "I want his approval, Sara," I told her. "I want him to look at me with respect. It matters more than anything ever has." I was going to complete the incomplete truth, to speak to Sara of the phrase with which my father once described her-"She is my sister in the shadows," he told me. "Without her I wouldn't have survived a week in this world of madness"-but I didn't manage to. Sara interrupted me. "I understand," she said. "I understand perfectly." And I didn't insist, because it seemed only normal that the shadow sister should understand everything without detailed explanations; but I noted on an index card: Chapter title: Sister in the Shadows. I never managed to use it, however, because my father was not mentioned in the interviews or in the book itself, despite having formed an important part-at least as far as could be seen-of Sara Guterman's exile.

I published A Life in Exile in November 1988, three months after my father's famous speech. The following is the first chapter of the book. It was titled, in bold italics, with four words that have been filling up across the years and that today, as I write, threaten to overflow: The Hotel Nueva Europa.

The first thing Peter Guterman did when he arrived in Duitama was to paint the house and build a second floor. There, separated by a narrow landing, were his office and his bedroom, arranged just as they had been in the house in Emmerich. He had always liked to keep his work and his family within a few meters of each other; furthermore, the idea of starting a new life in an old place seemed like taking his luck for granted. And so, he set about refurbishing. Meanwhile, other Germans, those in Tunja or those in Sogamoso, advised him time and again not to do so much work on a house that didn't belong to him.

"As soon as you have it looking nice," they told him, "the owner will ask for it back. You have to be careful here; these Colombians are cunning."

And that's how it went: the owner demanded the house back; he alleged a fictitious buyer and barely even apologized for the inconvenience. The Guterman family, who hadn't been in Colombia for six months yet, had to move again already. But then came the first stroke of luck. In those days something was going on in Tunja. The city was full of important people. A Swiss businessman from Berne, who was negotiating setting up pharmaceutical laboratories in Colombia, had become a friend of the family. One day, at around ten in the morning, he arrived at the house unexpectedly.

"I need an interpreter," he said to Peter Guterman. "It's more than an important negotiation. It's a matter of life or death."

Peter Guterman could think of no better solution than to offer his daughter, the only one in the family who could speak Spanish as well as understand it. Sara had to obey the Swiss man. She knew perfectly well that the will of an adult, and an adult who was a friend of her father's, was law to an adolescent like herself. On the other hand, she always felt insecure in that sort of situation: she had never managed to feel at ease with the unspoken rules of the host society. This man was European, like her. How had crossing the Atlantic changed his ways? Should she greet him as she would have greeted him in Emmerich? But this man, in Emmerich, would not have looked her in the face. Sara had not forgotten the occasional snubs she'd received over the last few years, or what happened to Gentiles' faces when they spoke of her father.

She went to the lunch, and it turned out that the man for whom she was to convert the Swiss man's words into Spanish was President Eduardo Santos, recognized friend of the German colony; and there was Santos, who had so much respect for Sara's father, squeezing the hand of the adolescent interpreter, asking her how she was, congratulating her on the quality of her Spanish. "From that moment I felt committed to the Liberal Party forever," Sara would say many years later, with a sharply ironic tone. "I've always been like that. Three set phrases and I'm overcome." She interpreted during a two-hour lunch (and in another two she'd completely forgotten the content of the words she'd interpreted), and afterward she mentioned the move to Santos.

"We're getting tired of moving from one house to another," she said. "It's like living in shifts."

"Well, set up a hotel," said Santos. "Then you can be the ones to evict people."

But the matter couldn't be so simple. At that time foreigners were not allowed to practice, without previous authorization, occupations other than those they'd declared upon entering the country. Sara pointed this out to the president.

"Oh, don't worry about that," was the answer. "I'll take care of the permission."

And a year later, the cheese factory sold at a generous profit, they opened the Hotel Pension Nueva Europa in Duitama. When the president of the republic attended the opening of a hotel (everyone thought), that hotel was destined to be successful.

Sara's father had intended to baptize the hotel with his name, Hotel Pension Guterman, but his associates let him know that a surname like his at a time like that was the worst start you could give to a business. Just a few months earlier, a Bogota taxi company had contracted seven Jewish refugees as drivers; the taxi drivers of Bogota organized an elaborate campaign against them, and all over the place, in the shop windows downtown, in the windows of cabs and even some trams, could be seen posters with the slogan: We support the taxi drivers in their campaign against the Poles. That was the first sign that the new life wasn't going to be much easier than the old. When the Gutermans heard about the taxi drivers, Sara's father's despair was so intense that the family reached the point of fearing something serious. (After all, one of his friends had already hanged himself in his house in Bonn, shortly after the pogrom of 1938.) Peter Guterman spoke warily of the spurious national identity the popular voice had assigned him: it had cost him several years to get used to the loss of his German citizenship, as if it were some object that had gone missing by mistake, a key fallen out of a pocket. He didn't complain, but he acquired the habit of cutting out the statistics that regularly appeared on the inside pages of the Bogota newspapers: "Port: Buenaventura. Ship: Bodegraven. Jews: 47. Distribution: Germans (33), Austrians (10), Yugoslavs (3), Czechoslovakians (1)." In his scrapbook there were Finnish vessels, like the Vindlon, and Spanish ones, like the Santa Maria. Peter Guterman paid attention to this news as if part of his family was arriving on the steamers. But Sara knew that these clippings were not familial announcements but emergency telegrams, actual reports on the discomfort the new arrivals caused among the locals. What's important is that the matter ended up justifying the name of the hotel. Peter Guterman's associates were Colombians; the word Europa sounded to them like a panacea in three syllables, as if the mere mention of the so-called civilized world would bring with it the definitive solution to their Third World problems. In a letter that later passed into the family's private history, into that collection of anecdotes with which aunts and grandmothers the world over fill domestic mealtimes as if trying to transmit clean blood to their descendants, his father told them, "I can't understand why you people are so fascinated by the name of a cow." And they read the letter and laughed; and they kept reading it, and kept doubling over with laughter, for a long time.

The Hotel Nueva Europa was in one of those colonial houses that had been convents since independence and were then inherited by seminaries or religious communities with no great interest in maintaining them. All the constructions were the same: they had an interior patio, and in the center of the patio, the statue of the founder of the order or some saint. In the future hotel, Bartolome de las Casas was the presiding statue, but the friar ceded his place to a stone fountain as soon as was possible. The fountain of the Nueva Europa was a circular pool large enough for a person to lie down in-over the years, more than one drunk would do-where the water picked up the taste of the stone and the moss that accumulated along its walls. At first the water was filled with little fish, golden and dancing; then with coins that gradually rusted. Before the fish, however, there hadn't been anything: nothing except the water and a pool that filled up with birds in the mornings, so many that it was necessary to shoo them away with the broom because not all the guests liked them. And the guests had to be humored: the place was not cheap. Peter Guterman charged 2 pesos 50 for bed and board with five daily meals, while the Regis, the other hotel of the moment in the region, charged a peso less. But the Nueva Europa was always full; full, especially, of politicians and foreigners. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (who, incidentally, hated birds with the same passion he put into his speeches) and Miguel Lopez Pumarejo were among the most regular clients. Lucas Caballero was neither a politician nor foreign, but he went to the hotel whenever he could. Before arriving he'd send a telegram that was always the same, word for word:

ARRIVING NEXT THURSDAY STOP REQUEST ROOM WITHOUT BALLOONS STOP.

The balloons he was referring to were eiderdowns, which Caballero didn't like. He preferred heavy wool blankets, the kind that collect dust and make allergy sufferers sneeze. Peter Guterman would have his room made up according to these specifications, issuing orders in German so urgently that the hotel employees, girls from Sogamosa and Duitama, managed to learn some basic words. Hairpeter, they said. Yes, Hairpeter. Right away, Hairpeter. Senor Guterman, professional obsessive, understood and accepted the obsessions of his most valued guests. (When he was expecting Gaitan, he'd have a scarecrow set up among the roof tiles of the mansion, even though he thought it detracted from the roof's folkloric charm.) Sara had to intervene all the time, serve as translator and conciliator, because Spanish was a terrible effort for her father from the start, and he never did master it very well; and, since we're also talking about a man accustomed to impossible levels of efficiency, he very often lost his temper, and would occasionally roar like a caged animal, leaving his employees in tears all afternoon. Peter Guterman was not a nervous man; but it would make him nervous to see the president, candidates to the presidency, and the capital's most important journalists fighting over the rooms in his hotel. Sara, who with time had begun to get a better sense of her new country, tried to explain to her father that they were the nervous ones; that this was a country where a man ruled the roost simply by virtue of coming from the north; that for the majority of his guests, pompous and ambitious as they were, staying in the hotel was somehow like being abroad. That's how it was: a room in the Guterman family's hotel was, for the majority of those pretentious Creoles, the only opportunity to see the world, the only important role they could have in their minuscule play.

Because the Nueva Europa was, first and foremost, a meeting place for foreigners: North Americans, Spaniards, Germans, Italians, people from all over. Colombia, which had never been a country of immigrants, at that moment and in that place seemed to be one. There were those who arrived at the beginning of the century in search of money, because they'd heard that in those South American countries everything was still to be done; there were those who arrived escaping from the Great War, most of them Germans who'd been scattered around the world trying to make a living, because in their country this had become impossible; there were the Jews. So this turned out to be, no more no less, a country of escapees. And that whole persecuted country had ended up in the Hotel Nueva Europa, as if it were the true House of Representatives for the displaced world, a Universal Museum of the Auswanderer; and sometimes it felt like that in reality, because the hotel guests gathered each evening in the reception room downstairs to listen to the news of the war on the radio. There were confrontations, words exchanged, as was to be expected, but always prudently, because Peter Guterman managed quite early to convince people to leave their politics at the reception desk. That was his phrase; everyone remembered it, because it was one of the few things the hotel owner learned to say fluently: "Bitte, leave your politics at reception," he would say to people arriving, without even giving them time to set down their suitcases to sign the register, and people accepted this pact because the momentary truce was more comfortable for everyone than coming to blows with the people at the next table every time they sat down for a meal. But maybe that wasn't the reason. Maybe it was true that there, in that hotel on the other side of the world, people could share a table with people who in their country of origin would have thrown stones through the reception windows. What brought them together? What neutralized the merciless hatreds that arrived at the Nueva Europa like news from another life?

The fact is that during those first years the war was something heard on the radio, a sad spectacle from elsewhere. "The blacklists came later, and the hotels turned into luxurious jails," says Sara, referring to the concentration camps for citizens of the Axis nations. "Yes, that happened later. It was later that the war on the other side of the ocean came home to those of us on this side. We were so innocent, we thought we were safe. Anyone can confirm it for you. Everyone remembers it perfectly well: it was very difficult to be German at that time." In the Guterman family's hotel things happened that destroyed families, disrupted lives, ruined futures; but none of that was visible until much later, when time had gone by and the ruined futures and disrupted lives began to be noticed. Everywhere-in Bogota, in Cucuta, in Barranquilla, in miserable towns like Santander de Quilichao-it was the same; there were places, however, that seemed to work like black holes, invoking chaos, absorbing the worst of a person. The Gutermans' hotel, especially at a certain point in time, had been one of them. "Just thinking of it makes me sad," Sara Guterman says now, calling up those events forty-five years later. "Such a beautiful place, so dear to people, where such horrible things could happen." And what things were those? "It was as it says in the Bible. Brother shall betray brother, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents."

Of course, writing words such as Auswanderer or blacklists demands or should demand some sort of guarantee on the part of the one writing them. These were unreliable words and the book was full of them. I know this now, but then I barely suspected it: in manuscript, these pages had appeared so pacific and neutral that I never considered them capable of making anyone uncomfortable, much less of provoking disputes; the printed and bound version, however, was a sort of Molotov cocktail ready to land in the middle of the Santoro household.

"Ah, Santoro," said Dr. Raskovsky when a nurse intercepted him to ask how the surgery had gone. "Gabriel, isn't it? Yes, it went very well. Wait here. In a moment we can go in and see the patient." Then it had gone well? The patient was alive? "Not just alive, much more than that," said the doctor, already on his way and spouting automatic phrases. "You should see the heart he's got, just like new." And after the sort of dizziness that hit me when I heard the news, something strange happened: I didn't know if my name, pronounced by the doctor, referred to the patient or the patient's son. I looked for a bathroom to wash my face before going into intensive care. I did it thinking of my father, not wanting him to see me like this, because I couldn't remember the last time one of us had seen the other looking so out of sorts. In front of the mirror I took off my jacket. I saw two butterflies of sweat under my arms, and surprised myself by thinking of Dr. Raskovsky's armpits, as if we were close friends; and later, as I waited for my father to wake up, that intimacy I'd been seeking seemed detestable, perhaps because my father himself had taught me never to feel in debt to anyone. Not even to the one responsible for his still being alive.

Despite the doctor's having spoken in the plural, I went into intensive care, that torture chamber, by myself. The monitors blinked like owls on the surrounding walls and tables; there were six beds, arranged with odious symmetry and separated by opaque partition walls like the ones in public lavatories, with aluminum rails that reflected glints of neon light. The monitors each beeped in their own rhythm, the respirators breathed, and in one of those beds, the last one on the left, the only one that faced the board where the nurses wrote the day's instructions in red and black markers, was my father, breathing through a grayish corrugated tube that filled his mouth. I lifted his gown and saw for the second time in one day (after never having seen it in my whole life) my father's penis resting on his groin, almost at the level of his mutilated hand, and circumcised, unlike mine. They'd fitted him with a catheter so he wouldn't have to be disturbed when he needed to urinate. That was how it was: my father was communicating with the world through plastic tubes. And through electrodes arranged like patches on an animal's coat across his chest, on his forehead. And through needles: the one that was injecting him with tranquilizers and antibiotics disappeared into his neck, the one for the drip into the vein of his left arm. I sat on a round stool and said hello. "Hi, Dad. It's all over now, everything's fine." He couldn't hear me. "I told you, remember? I told you everything would be fine, and now it is. It's all over. We got through this." His respirator was working, his monitor kept beeping, but he had absented himself. The tube in his neck was taped to his face, and stretched the loose flesh of his cheeks (his sixty-seven-year-old cheeks). The effect underlined the tiredness of his skin, of his tissues, and I, closing my eyes a little, could see the speeded-up film of his decomposition. There was another image I tried to summon up, to see what I could learn from it: that of a first-sized plastic heart, which had sat for a whole month on my biology teacher's desk.

At four in the afternoon they asked me to leave, although I'd spent no more than ten minutes with the patient, but I went back the next day, first thing, and after confronting the aggressive bureaucracy of the San Pedro Clinic-the trip to the administrator's office, the request for a permanent-access pass that included my name and identity card and which I should keep well visible on my chest, the declaration that I was the patient's only relative and, therefore, only visitor-I stayed until after twelve, when I was kicked out by the same nurse who'd kicked me out the night before: a woman with thick makeup whose forehead was always sweaty. By my second visit, my father was beginning to wake up. That was one of the changes. The other was told to me by the nurse as if she were answering exam questions. "There was an attempt to remove the respirator. He didn't respond well. Fluid collected in his lungs, he lost consciousness, but he's a bit better now." There was one more tube wounding my father's body: it filled with bloody fluid and emptied into a bag with numbers on it to measure the quantity. Fluid had gotten into his lungs, and they were draining it off. He moaned about different pains, but none as intense as that from the tube inserted between his ribs, which obliged him to lie almost on his side despite the fact that this was precisely the most painful position for the incision in his chest. He couldn't speak for the pain: sometimes his face would contract into dreadful grimaces; sometimes he rested, making no sounds about what he was feeling, not looking at me. He didn't speak; and the tube in his mouth gave his complaints a tone that in other circumstances would have been comical. The nurse came, changed his oxygen, checked the drainage bag, and left again. One time she stayed for three minutes exactly, while she took his temperature, and asked me what had happened to my father's hand.

"What does it matter to you?" I said. "Just do your job and don't be nosy."

She didn't ask me any more questions, not that first day or in the days that followed, during which the routine was repeated. I took up all the visiting hours, exploiting the fact that my father had insisted on keeping the operation secret, so no relatives or friends came to lend support. Nevertheless, something seemed to indicate that this wasn't ideal. "Isn't there anyone outside?" was the first thing he asked me on the morning of the third day, as soon as they took the tube out of his mouth. "No, Dad, no one." And when the evening visiting hours began, he pointed to the door again and asked, through the haze of the drugs, if anyone had come. "No," I said. "No one's come to bother you." "I've been left all alone," he said. "I've managed to end up all alone. That's what I've endeavored to do, I've put all my efforts into it. And look, it's come out perfectly, not just anyone could manage it, look in the waiting room, quod erat demonstrandum." He remained silent for a while because it was an effort to speak. "How I wish she were here," he said then. It took me a second to realize he was referring to my mother, not to Sara. "She would have kept me company, she was a good companion. She was so good, Gabriel. I don't know if you remember, why would you remember, I don't know if a child realizes these things. But she was wonderful. And a fellow like me with her, imagine. The way life goes. I never deserved her. She died and I never had time to deserve her. That's the first thing I think about when I think of her." I, on the other hand, thought about a misdiagnosed pneumonia, I thought about the clandestine maneuvers of the cancer; I thought, most of all, of the day my parents received the final diagnosis. I had been masturbating over a lingerie catalog, and the impression made by the coincidence of the illness and one of my first ejaculations was so powerful that I was feverish that whole night; and the following Sunday, when I stepped inside a church for the first time in my life, I had the bad idea to confess, and the priest thought it obvious that my perversions were responsible for what was happening to my mother. Only much later, well into, even comfortable in, what they call the age of majority, could I accept my innocence and understand that the illness had not been a punishment from on high or the chastisement that corresponded to my sin. But I'd never spoken of that to my father, and the variegated scene of intensive care, that seedy hotel of bad omens, didn't seem the ideal setting for such frankness. "I dreamed about her," my father was saying. "You don't have to tell me," I said. "Rest, don't talk so much." But it was too late: he'd started talking. "I dreamed I went to the cinema," he said. In the stalls, sitting three rows in front, was a woman who looked very much like my mother. The film was Of Human Bondage, which seemed incongruous given the cinema and also the audience; during the scene where Paul Henreid walks by himself in a poor area of London (it's a silent, nocturnal scene), my father could stand it no longer. From the darkness of the aisle, kneeling to keep out of people's way, he made out his wife's profile in the intermittent light from the film. "Where were you?" he asked her. "We thought you had died." "I'm not dead, Gabriel; what silly things you say." "But that's what we believed. We thought you had died of cancer." "You're both so silly," said my mother. "When I'm going to die I'll let you know." One of the darkest frames then appeared on the screen, maybe the black sky or a brick wall. The stalls went dark. When daylight reappeared in the film, my mother was walking between the rows toward the exit, without touching the knees of the people in the seats. Her sculptured face turned to look at my father before she left, and she waved good-bye.

"I wonder if it means something," my father said. And I was going to answer that it didn't-you know full well, I was going to say to him, in a rather impatient tone, that dreams don't mean anything, don't let the surgery fill your head with superstitions, they're electric impulses and nothing more, the synapses of a few disordered and confused neurons-when the patient took in a gulp of air, half opened his eyes and said, "Maybe we could let Sara know."

"Yes," I said. "If you want."

"Not for me," he said. "It's more for her. If we don't tell her there'll be hell to pay later."

I can't say I was surprised. The fact that we'd both thought of her in the space of a few days was less a coincidence than symptomatic of the discreet importance she had in our lives; once again I had the feeling about her that I'd had on several previous occasions, the notion that Sara Guterman was not the innocuous friend she seemed to be, that inoffensive, almost invisible foreigner, but rather someone with something more behind her image, and the confidence my father had always had in the image was moving. "I'll call her tonight," I said. "She'll be very pleased, that's for sure." I was about to say, She'll be very pleased that you've survived, but stopped myself in time, because confronting my father with the notion of survival could be even more harmful than a failed survival. That was him: a survivor. He'd survived the machete-wielding men and then his heart-that capricious muscle-and if he could talk to me about this, he'd say he'd also survived this city, where every landscape is a memento mori. Like a hostage who had been freed by his kidnappers, like a woman saved from a bomb blast by altering her itinerary at the last minute (by not doing her shopping at Los Tres Elefantes, by going for lunch with a friend instead of going to Centro 93), my father had survived. But suddenly I found myself wondering: What for? Why does a man want to keep living who at sixty-seven years of age could be said to be a superfluous element, someone who had completed his cycle, someone who had nothing pending in the world? His life didn't seem to hold much meaning anymore; at least, I thought, not the meaning that he would have wanted it to provide. Seeing him looking so small, nobody, not even his own son, would have guessed at the private revolution that was beginning to take shape inside his head.