The Informers

POSTSCRIPT, 1995

A year after finishing it, I published the book that you, reader, have just read. During that year several things happened; the most important, by a long way, was the death of Sara Guterman, who didn't live to see herself transformed for a second time into a character in a chronicle, and to whom I could not explain that the book's title, The Informers, referred to her as much as to my father, although the information each had supplied was of such a different nature. Her death occurred without pain or agony, just as predicted: the vein exploded, the blood inundated her brain, and in a matter of minutes Sara had died, lying in her bed and ready for a little siesta. It seems she had spent the morning rushing around from one side of Bogota to the other, trying (without success) to mediate between the Goethe Institute and the cultural attache of the German Embassy in organizing, with due anticipation, the commemorations of May 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. The German community of Bogota was divided: some wanted the Embassy to take charge of the ceremonies, as an exorcism and also an atonement, or, at least, as a strategy to improve their image; for others, decisions over the quality and size of the anniversary should be left in the hands of the Colombian government, it was not a good idea to go around stepping on toes or reminding everyone, Germans and Colombians, of what everyone would have preferred (consciously, voluntarily) to forget with the passing years. In any case, the people who had lived through the war were fewer and fewer, and those still alive were the children and grandchildren of those Germans: people who, in spite of their surnames, had no affiliation whatsoever with the other country, had never visited it or ever intended to do so, and in some cases hadn't even heard the language apart from the insults and interjections of an enraged grandfather. Among the things Sara had proposed and planned to carry out was an itinerant lecture-secondary schools, cultural associations, universities, German schools, and Hebrew schools-that we would give together on the events related in A Life in Exile and, more important, on the events not related there, for at the time of writing Sara and I had decided by mutual consent to exclude a number of subjects so as not to give her life story an inappropriate tone of grievance, but the discussion of which at a moment of anniversaries and commemorations seemed, more than permissible, pertinent and necessary. Since we thought we had time, since Sara's death occurred without any warning or decline, the only part of the lecture we'd managed to prepare was the selection of certain material. Sara looked through her Pandora's boxes and handed me a folder of well-chosen paragraphs, and well-chosen phrases underlined within those paragraphs. She intended to comment publicly on many texts that she felt had been unjustly ignored until now, among them whole sentences from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lopez de Mesa (Jews had a "parasitical orientation in life," and in Latin America there were "many undesirable elements, most of them Jews"), but thanks to the antagonistic aneurysm, none of that came to pass. Sara arrived home feeling tired one day, put a frozen chicken breast under a stream of running water, and lay down to rest. She didn't wake up again. The downstairs neighbor thought it odd that twelve hours later the pipes were still making a noise; she went upstairs to see if Sara had a problem or if the apartment was flooded, and ended up calling her sons and asking them to come with a set of keys and open the door; and the next day, as soon as was possible, Sara was buried in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery. After the Kaddish, someone, a bald man who spoke with a very pronounced accent-I'd become an expert on the subject, and knew what that implied: he was married to a German woman, not a Colombian, and he spoke to his children in German, not Spanish-said a few words that I liked: he compared Sara's life to a brick wall, and said that one could have placed a level on top and the bubble would have stayed in the very center, between the two lines, without ever moving from there. That was Sara: a solid and perfectly level wall. I felt that phrase did more justice to her memory than all the two hundred pages of my book, and I thought, for once, that it wouldn't be a bad thing to say so. But I didn't manage it, because as I tried to go over to the bald man, thinking of how to explain who I was and why I'd liked his little elegy so much, I found myself face-to-face with Sara's eldest son, who turned the tables of the situation in an unpredictable way when he broke away from those attempting to give him their condolences to greet me, to hug me and say, "I'm very sorry about your dad. My mum loved him very much, you know." At first I thought he was giving me his condolences (although rather belatedly); then I realized that he wasn't referring to my father's death but to his destroyed reputation.

Among the mourners were the owners of the Central Bookshop, Hans and Lilly Ungar. We said hello, I promised to go and see them one of these days, but, involved as I was in the writing of The Informers, never managed to do so. And in May, once the book was published, when I found a message on my answering machine in which Lilly invited me in a formal and rather peremptory tone to come to the bookshop, I thought the invitation was in some way related to Sara Guterman, or, at least, to that never-delivered lecture on the hidden anti-Semitism of Colombian politicians, for Hans Ungar (everyone knew this) was one of the most direct victims of the prohibitions Lopez de Mesa used to minimize the number of Jews arriving in Colombia, and he often said in interviews, but also in casual conversations, that his parents had died in German concentration camps largely due to the impossibility of obtaining a Colombian visa for them such as the one he'd obtained and with which he'd entered the country, from his native Austria, in 1938. When I arrived for the appointment I found them both, Hans and Lilly, sitting beside the solid gray table that functioned as the meeting place for the Germans of Bogota and from which, with the help of a dial telephone and an old typewriter-a Remington Rand, tall and heavy like a scale model of a coliseum-they ran the bookshop. In the main display cabinet there were three copies of my book. Lilly was wearing a burgundy-colored turtleneck sweater; Hans was wearing a tie and under his suit jacket he had put on an argyle sweater. On the table, beside a tall glass of water and a coffee cup stained with red lipstick, was the magazine Semana, which, exactly as Sara had suggested, had just published an article by way of commemoration, six pages (including an advertisement for South American Insurance) that there, lost among the rest of the news of a country not lacking in news, seemed liable to be overlooked.

The magazine was open to a page where there were two illustrations. On the left, a letter addressed to a certain Fritz Moschell, and dated July 16, 1934, and underneath: Document of the time: Everything to do with Germans was considered suspicious. Almost the entire remaining space was taken up with a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate after the bombings. The caption, in this case, was: "Berlin destroyed: In Colombia the echoes of the conflict were barely felt." It occurred to me then that this was the true reason for the meeting (for summoning me). Lilly offered me coffee; Hans, sitting beside us, seemed not to be listening to our conversation, and had his eyes fixed on the door to the bookshop and on the people who came in and out and asked for things and paid. After finishing her coffee, Lilly produced a piece of paper and I ended up helping her to correct a letter she intended to send to the magazine. "In the article entitled 'World War II Colombian Style,' published in your May 9 issue, I read that during the Second World War 'Lopez de Mesa's supposed anti-Semitism only complicated things.' To anyone familiar with the circular that the Minister of Foreign Affairs sent to the Colombian consulates in 1939, who has read therein the order to raise 'all objections humanly possible to granting visas to any more passports of Jewish elements, ' the Minister's anti-Semitism is much more than a supposition. I understand that the subject is a difficult one for Colombian citizens to discuss, but it should not be so in the media. For that reason I would like to make a small clarification. . " This was just one of the interpolations I helped her to draft; when between the two of us we had finished writing the letter, and revised it to make sure there were no errors of any kind, Lilly folded the paper and put it in one of the drawers of her desk so carelessly, with such lack of interest, that I couldn't help but wonder whether the favor she'd asked of me wasn't perhaps a pretext and the idea of composing with my help a sort of tiny and already superfluous protest an invention of Lilly or Hans to see me and to be closer to Sara Guterman, their recently deceased friend. After all, the Central Bookshop was the only bookshop that still had copies of A Life in Exile, in spite of the fact that seven years had passed since its publication. The Ungars had read the book; they'd thought it honest; Hans had even mentioned it on the radio, on an HJCK program he contributed to every once in a while. But maybe I was mistaken; maybe my visit had nothing to do with Sara; maybe these suspicions were absurd, because, all things considered, the matter of the letter was perfectly plausible. There was the magazine, there were the Ungars, there was the draft of the letter; there was no reason to suspect they hadn't asked me there to correct it, just as I'd done.

It was only a few minutes before the bookshop closed for lunch, so I stood up and began to say good-bye. But then Estela, the serious-looking woman with a commanding voice who ran the cash register, came over and placed a pile of ten or twelve copies of The Informers on the table, and while Lilly asked me to sign them, and told me she hadn't read it yet but intended to as soon as she had a free weekend, Estela turned off half the lights and left, closing the door behind her. Without the street noise, the horns and motors, the bookshop fell so silent that I could have felt intimidated. Hans had stopped beside the table of German books and through the green lenses of his glasses (the same ones he'd worn as long as I could remember) looked at them as any other customer might. "He has read it," Lilly told me quietly. "He still doesn't know what to think. That's why he hasn't told you. A friend of his was on the list. It was at the end of the war and for something very silly, like requesting a book from the Cervantes Bookshop or something like that. How do you feel? What have people said to you?" I shrugged, as if to say I'd rather not embark on that conversation, and then she said, "Hans knew them."

"Who?"

"The Deressers."

It wasn't so surprising, except that German and Austrian immigrants almost never formed part of the same circles: there were rivalries between them of the sort usual among the stateless when they notice (or believe they've noticed) that they have to dispute the right to the new territory. But it did indeed surprise me that Lilly or Hans might have known my father without my knowing. "No, we never met him," Lilly said when I asked her, looking at the keys of the Remington. "Neither Hans nor I, I'm sure of that, he's told me several times." For the second time I suffered an attack of paranoia. I thought Lilly was lying to me, that she had known my father and had also known his secret, the secret of his mistake, but over the years she'd managed to erase it from her life, to forget so completely that she could serve me as a customer in her bookshop without a single muscle in her face giving her away, she could talk to me about my first book without my noticing anything in her voice, and she could pretend, when she read my father's review of their friend Sara's life story, that she didn't know the subterranean motivations for his resentment. Was she lying? Was that possible? I wondered if I might have forever lost the capacity to trust people; whether finding out about my father's treachery and, to make it worse, having written and published the two-hundred-fifty-page confession I'd just written and published had transformed me: made me paranoid, suspicious, wary, turned me into a pitiable, pathetic creature, able to see conspiracies in the affection of a woman as transparent as Lilly Ungar. Was I doomed? Had my father's two-facedness contaminated me to the point of obliging me always to suspect deceit in the rest of humanity? Or had I been contaminated by the act of telling it in writing? Had writing The Informers been a mistake?

One of the first reviews of the book accused it, or accused me, of a deplorable mixture of narcissism and exhibitionism; and in spite of the scant respect I had for the reviewer, in spite of his bull-necked prose, the obvious paucity of his reading and his crew-cut reasoning, in spite of the fact that each of his sentences revealed a lack of rhythm, grammar, and syntax, in spite of the fact that he'd used his space for commentary to put his own inferiority complex (but calling it a "complex" would be flattery) and his literary failures (but calling them "literary" would be hyperbole) on display, in spite of his reproaches being little more than barroom gossip and his praise being cocktail-party cliches, in the days that followed I couldn't get his accusations out of my head. Maybe transforming the private into the public was a perversion-accepted, it's true, in these days of voyeurs and busybodies, of gossips, of indiscretion-and publishing a confession of any sort was, deep down, a behavior as sick as that of a man who exposes his thick cock to women in the street just for the pleasure of shocking them. After reading the book, and seeing himself included in it, my friend Jorge Mor had called me and said, "You've got every right, Gabriel, you've got every right in the world to tell whatever you like. But I felt strange, as if I'd walked into your room and seen you fucking someone. By accident, without meaning to. Reading the book I felt embarrassed, and I hadn't done anything to be ashamed of. You oblige people to know what they might not want to know. Why?" I told him that no one was obliged to read the book; that writing a memoir or any sort of autobiography implied touching on private aspects of a life, and the reader knows that. "Well, that's just it," said Jorge. "Why do you want to talk publicly about what's private? Hasn't it occurred to you that with this book you've done exactly what the girlfriend did to your dad, just more elegantly?" The attack took me by surprise, and I muttered a couple of rude replies and hung up without trying to hide my fury. How dare he make such a comparison? In my book I'd laid myself bare, I'd deliberately put myself in a position of vulnerability, I had refused to allow my father's errors to be forgotten: in many ways, I'd assumed responsibility for those errors. Because faults are inherited; guilt is inherited; one pays for what one's ancestors have done, everyone knows that. Was it not brave to confront this fact? Was it not, at least, commendable? And then my head filled with things my father had once said to me: he, too, had spoken to me about the private and the public, about the nobility of those who keep quiet and the parasitism of those who reveal. And he hadn't stopped there. That's why you wrote it, so everyone would know how good and compassionate you are. My father returned from the dead to accuse me. Look at me, admire me, I'm on the side of the good guys, I condemn, I denounce. I'd used him: I'd taken advantage, for my own exhibitionist and egocentric objectives, of the most terrible thing that happened in his life. Read me, love me, give me prizes for compassion, for goodness. At that moment I was no more than a narcissist, sublimated by the false prestige of the printed word, it's true, but a narcissist when it came right down to it. Divulging my father's disgrace was no more than a subtle, renewed betrayal: Jorge was right. I asked myself: Would I have been capable of publishing this book if my father had survived the accident in Las Palmas? The answer was clear, and also humiliating.

I suddenly felt out of place, uncomfortable; talking to Lilly Ungar in the closed bookshop, I felt like an intruder. "Maybe it was a bad thing to do," I said, at the same time as I finished signing the last copy. "Maybe I shouldn't have published this book." And I told her about a strange thing that had happened to me that week: I was on the way out of one of the publicity events the book's publication compelled, when a member of the audience, the only man in a bow tie in the whole auditorium, came over and asked me how Sara was, if I didn't think it necessary to force her to undergo the surgery or at least convince her to move to a warmer climate, since her sons seemed completely uninterested in doing what they should to protect her life. I almost told him off, but then, in a matter of seconds, found myself telling him that Sara had died and about the funeral and how sad we'd been, because I thought the man was not just a reader but that he knew her, that he was a relative or a friend of hers; and when I realized that wasn't the case, it was too late to react, because my book was responsible for that intrusion and it was my fault that a stranger seemed to know or created the illusion of having known Sara. I was talking about that-of the invasions the book seemed to invite, of lost privacy, of narcissistic satisfaction, of the way the book had taken the place of my memories, of the probable embezzlement of other people's lives, among them my father's, of all those undesirable consequences of something as innocent as a confession, and of the absence, or the nonexistence, of the desirable consequences that I had foreseen-when Lilly interrupted me. "I didn't ask you here to write silly letters, dear, and much less to sign books," she said, "but I wanted to sound you out first, listen to you talk for a while. To see what state you were in, sweetie. To make sure I wasn't doing something stupid." And she turned over an envelope that had been sitting on the desk the whole time, half hidden by the magazine Semana and the huge typewriter, and read out in her strong accent and guttural rs the words written on the front, under the stamp: Senor Gabriel Santoro, care of Hans and Lilly Ungar. It was a letter from Enrique Deresser. He'd read the book and asked me to go to see him.

The next day, at eight in the morning, I drove to Medellin, taking the highway from that inscrutably named place, Siberia. There was a four-hour journey between Bogota and La Dorada, which marked the halfway point, and that was, at the time, one of the most inhospitable roads in the country, so I thought I'd do it without stopping, have lunch in La Dorada, and then complete the second stage. I think I negotiated the route and its obstacles quite well. Leaving Bogota means, among other feats, getting over a mountain range. "Let's see if we can make the journey without anybody humming 'Bolivar crosses the Andes,' " my father used to say when he took my mother and me on a trip: that was one of the few verses of the Colombian national anthem he could listen to without getting indignant. (For me, too, leaving Bogota has always been, more than tiresome, grueling and torturous, but I've never been able to explain satisfactorily why I only feel comfortable in this fucking city, why I'm incapable of spending more than two weeks in any other city in the world. Everything I need is here; what isn't here strikes me as unnecessary. Perhaps this is another inheritance from my father: the will not to be expelled by this city so deft at expulsions.) I endured the stench of the cattle ranches; I endured the cold fog of the high plateaus and the violence of the following descent, the explosion in the nostrils of the aggressive smells and the silver onslaught of the yarumo trees and the uproar of the canaries and cardinals; I endured, as I crossed the Magdalena-that river with no fishermen or nets, because it no longer has any fish-the stupefying heat and the absence of wind. The second bridge was or is a sort of giant set of false teeth, metallic when the sun shone on the rails, fragile as old wood when crunching indecently under the weight of the cars. Before crossing the Magdalena, a soldier, probably stationed at the Air Force base-his helmet so loose that his voice echoed inside it-stopped me, asked for my papers, looked at them as if they were in another language, and handed them back to me marked with the bellicose sweat of his hands, with a drop or two from his helmeted forehead. I didn't ask why he was stopping people so far from the base. He seemed young; he seemed to be afraid there, so near Honda and Cocorna and other unfortunate place names, so near the rumble, or the phantom rumble, of guerrilla attacks.

Anyone who has driven this route knows this is where you accelerate. Here, after crossing the river, cars go crazy. It's not known whether it's fear (you have to avoid being stopped, being run off the road and forced out of your car), or if it's the twenty minutes of a straight strip of good road that, though not completely smooth, is decent and serviceable. In any case, needles scale speedometers hysterically; the strongest smell is not that of cow dung from the beasts sleeping beneath the trees, but that of burned rubber: the rubber of tires ruined (tortured) by speed. I can say I did not snub tradition. It wasn't quite twelve when I parked in front of a restaurant, under a mango tree. Inside, two frenzied fans whipped the air, two white circles, almost translucent, flying a short distance from the low ceiling. The seats and tables were painted wooden boards nailed on top of four thin sticks: everything was designed to encourage the air to flow, everything willed the air to circulate because hot still air was the enemy. (The humidity condensed everywhere, and that seemed to obsess the owners of the place: that the water wouldn't evaporate.) In three-quarters of an hour I'd had lunch and started the engine again, as if I had a specific time to arrive, as if an interviewer was waiting to offer me a job. It was impossible not to think that my body, stuck in a car at eighty or a hundred kilometers per hour, was following the route that Angelina and my father had taken three years earlier, like the mime artists who follow unsuspecting people in Parque Santander. Time was a two-tiered bridge: they were on the bottom level, I was on the top. And at some point in this parallel journey, when the highway suddenly began to look familiar to me-there were landscapes I was sure I'd seen before in spite of this being the first time I'd made this journey-I thought that a fictitious memory had installed itself in my head from thinking and rethinking my father's journey while writing my book. I spent a good while trying to discover the cause of this trick of memory, until I finally figured it out: all this looked familiar to me because I'd seen it on television, a year ago. For an entire Sunday, Sara and I had been prisoners before every single news bulletin-at noon and at seven and at nine-thirty-hearing what was said without understanding, watching in silence and trembling, when a succession of figures, some with mustaches or beards, some with matte lipstick, with opinions and certainties, with rumors and eyewitness accounts, described or tried to explain how and why they'd killed him, if the own goal had been the cause or if it had been the argument in the parking lot, and how long it had taken, after six bullets from a 38-caliber pistol, for the soccer player, Andres Escobar, to bleed to death.

Much later someone would ask me that question: Where were you when they killed Escobar? I'd been asked before: Where were you when they killed Galan, or Pizarro? I thought it was possible: a life ruled by the places a person is when someone else is murdered; yes, that life was mine, and that of many. I then remembered that date (July 4) when Sara and I devoted the day to following on television the convoy that the news programs broadcast, fifteen or twenty windowless buses and canvas-roofed trucks going to the football player's funeral. On the broadcast was the thunder of the war planes that took off from the Palanquero base, the contrast of that noise with the silence of the people, and also, at least for an obsessive observer like me, the almost lyrical detail of the air that, displaced by propulsion of the engines, etched silver crests on the surface of the River Magdalena. Going to Escobar's funeral could be compassion or morbidity, pure rage or frivolous curiosity, but it had the value of the real, and I could understand it, and I'm sure that my father, more than understanding it, would have admired it, although he'd never been interested in football, at least not like me. (I have to say that my father was able to recite the names of the Santa Fe eleven of his day, because pronouncing "Perazzo, Panzuto, Resnik, and Cam pana" was pleasing to his ear, a sort of primitive verse like the melody of a drum.) And then, facing that televised route of that imitation of a funeral cortege, I felt the lack of a more solid reference to what I was observing. This often happens: when something interests me, I immediately feel the need to know physical facts to better appreciate it, and I lose interest if I don't manage to obtain them. If I'm interested in an author, I have to find out where he was born and when; if I go to bed with a new woman, I like to measure the diameter of her areolae, the distance between her belly button and the first hairs (and the women think it's a game, it seems romantic; they lend themselves to it without putting up any resistance). So at that very moment, from Sara's apartment, from Sara's telephone, I called Angelina Franco and asked her for the information I was lacking. She didn't understand at first, she reproached me for taking as a joke something as terrible as Escobar's murder, which for her-and she was right-marked a new Now this country really is fucked in the long history of fuckups, ever more serious, or lower, or more incomprehensible, or bleaker, that had filled the last several years in Colombia, the years of our adult life. But she must have noticed something in my tone of voice, or maybe I transmitted in some involuntary but nevertheless eloquent way that our incomprehension was not so different deep down, though it might seem so from outside; for in spite of not saying so right then, for me the Escobar thing was a memorandum (a yellow card, I thought later, more flippantly) that the country was sending me to emphasize not just how impossible it was to understand Colombia, but how illusory, how ingenuous was any intention of trying to do so by writing books that very few would read and did nothing but create problems for those who wrote them. In any case, Angelina gave way in the end, and assumed her role like a true cartographer. At that moment, she seemed to believe, the cortege's destination depended on the precision of her descriptions.

"Now they're at Puerto Triunfo," she said. "Now they're passing in front of the drug lord's zoo. Now they're at La Penuela. That's where the air starts to smell like cement." I remember at that moment Sara (who wasn't looking at me as if I were crazy: Sara had an extraordinary and sometimes worrying ability to accept the most arbitrary eccentricities) had brought me a glass of lulo juice, and I vaguely remember that I drank it with pleasure, but nevertheless the cement from the factories was the only valid reality for me: the juice, in my memory, didn't taste of lulo but of cement. "They're getting close to the Cave of the Condor," Angelina was saying. "There's frost on the stalagmites, Gabriel. There are ceiba trees and cedars that also have frost on them. You have to be careful up there and go slowly because the road is slippery." Yes, the road is slippery, and carries on being slippery for quite a way: Angelina, it seems, had offered this information as if it had nothing at all to do with my father's death. "Now they're going down toward Las Palmas," she went on. "There's always a bit of mist there. On top of the walls are chamber pots and biscuit tins with geraniums. Whole lives spent planting geraniums in soda-biscuit tins, Gabriel. My parents did it, my grandparents did it, it's as if around there they hadn't yet discovered that flowerpots exist." For an instant I stopped seeing the convoy on its way to the burial and began to see my father losing control of the car because of the fog, because of the slippery road, or because of his defective hand, that hand unable to react adequately in an emergency (to control the steering wheel or put the car into second and get out of a perilous situation), and I think I actually shook my head, like in cartoons, to get rid of the images and concentrate, for once, on other people's pain. Later we saw on the news the images of people arriving at the Campos de Paz cemetery. We saw the flags-the tricolored national ones and the green and white of the team-we saw the improvised banners made from sheets and spray paint, and we heard the nationalist slogans people chanted; and we began to foresee, in the tone of the broadcasters, in the looks on the faces of neighbors and the building's doorman, and even in the traffic on the streets, that particular atmosphere we get in Bogota after a bomb or a notorious murder.

It was the last time I spoke to Angelina. At Christmas I received a horrendous card from her with a greeting in English and a Santa Claus surrounded by glittery frost. Inside the card was a single phrase, "With my best wishes for the festive season," and her signature, halfway between infantile and baroque. There was also a piece of paper folded in half. It was a newspaper clipping cut out by a meticulous pair of scissors: a color photograph of a flower-covered chair. On the back, carnations, daisies, geraniums, and hibiscus formed a figure, vague at first, which after an instant became clearer. It was the dead soccer player. Over his head, in three florid arches, was written:

HEAVEN IS FOR HUMBLE AND BRAVE LADS

LIKE ANDRES ESCOBAR.

And in the blank space in the margin:

A little memento of our last telephone encounter. 7.19.94. P.S. Let's see if we can see each other live and in person one of these days.

I was moved that she'd thought of me when she saw the photo, and also that she'd gone to the trouble of getting a pair of scissors and cutting it out and buying a card and sticking the photo in it and putting it all in an envelope and putting it in the post, the kind of everyday conscientiousness that's always been beyond me. Yes, I was grateful for the gesture; however, I never called to tell her so, nor did I ever make any attempt to see her live and in person, and Angelina disappeared from my life as so many others have: due to my inability to make contact, or to maintain it, due to my involuntary reluctance, due to that terrible ineptitude that prevents me from carrying on a sustained and constant interest-an interest that goes beyond the exchange of information, the questions I ask and the replies I expect and the articles I write with those replies-in people who appreciate me and whom I, in spite of myself, also appreciate. Only at a prudent distance can I maintain an interest in other people. If Sara hadn't died, I've thought on several occasions, we would have grown apart, too, little by little, the way the waters subsided in the civil code. It was one of my father's favorite articles, which he'd memorized as a student and tended to repeat-no, recite-as if the pomposity of Don Andres Bello, that nineteenth-century drafter of the code, was the best example of prose in the Spanish language; and now what is happening to me is that the gradual and imperceptible subsidence of the waters is so similar to the attachments in my life as to transform my life into the exposed land, which in the article is land gained by the proprietor, and in my life not so much. The gradual and imperceptible subsidence of the waters, that's the alluvium. Thus am I gradually left alone, thus have I been left alone.

Around four in the afternoon, after Puerto Triunfo and La Penuela and the smell of cement and the Cave of the Condor, I arrived in Medellin. In spite of the precise directions in the letter (the description of an Ecopetrol station, of a fried-chicken restaurant, of the shop on the corner), I had to ask people in the street a couple of times to find the gated community where Enrique Deresser lived. There were three or four gray buildings lacking any decoration whatsoever, as if the architects had decided that only ascetics would live there or maybe people used to spending as little time at home as possible. In reality they looked like prefabricated constructions: there were too many windows and too few people looking out of them onto the patio, because that's what was between the buildings, a patio, a patch of cement where a couple of little girls were playing hopscotch (the lines drawn in pink chalk, the numbers in white). Trying to guess which building might be Deresser's, and whether I'd be able to keep an eye on my car from the window, I parked in the street and entered the estate through a little waist-high gate, without any security guard or doorman asking me where I was going, or requesting I leave a document, or phoning up to announce me. There was a little hut, but there was nobody in it. One of its windows was broken in the corner, and someone had tried to fix it with newspaper and insulating tape; the door had disappeared. The girls stopped hopping to look at me, not sidelong, not trying to hide the fact, but staring straight at me, scrutinizing me as if my evil intentions were obvious. I felt, although I didn't look up to confirm it, that all the women peering out of the windows were looking at me, too. I found the building (or the interior, as it was described in the letter: interior B, apartment 501) and noticed that it had been a long time since I'd walked up so many flights of stairs, when I had to stop on the fourth-floor landing to catch my breath, leaning against the wall, doubled over with my hands on my knees, so as not to arrive at Deresser's door panting, so as not to greet him with a sticky and sweaty handshake.

And then, I don't know why, I began to feel like I'd come to take an exam and hadn't studied enough. Since anything at all might be waiting for me in Deresser's apartment, it was reasonable to assume that anything at all might be expected of me; I found myself wishing I had the folders of documents I'd relied on for the writing of The Informers in the backseat of my car. I felt vulnerable; if Deresser asked me a difficult question, Sara couldn't whisper the answer to me. Why did you write this, what's it based on, who are your witnesses, are you speculating? And I wouldn't be able to respond, because I had only written a report, while he had lived it: once again the superiority of living men over us, the simple talkers, the storytellers; we who, after all, devote ourselves to the cowardly and parasitic trade of telling other people's life stories, even if those other people are as close as a father or a good friend. When I was a child (I would have been about ten), I entered a story in a competition at school. I don't remember what it was about, but I do remember that we'd had to read Leaf Storm in Spanish class around then, and I thought it would be nice, or maybe just pretty, to put a dotted line under each paragraph in my story like in my edition of the novel, and that was enough to make the teacher accuse me of cheating and dishonesty for having entered a story in the competition that an adult had written. It took me many years to understand that the dotted lines had given the story an inadvisably professional appearance; that imitating the outward signs of literary artifice had made it more persuasive, more sophisticated, and all that together had provoked the skepticism of an embittered woman. But that wasn't the important thing, but rather the impotence-that wasted word-that overcame me as I realized it was impossible to prove my authorship of the story, since all the proofs were imaginary. I feared the same thing would happen to me with Deresser. For an instant I lost all memory of my investigations, and no longer felt sure of what I'd written. I thought: Did I make it all up? Did I exaggerate, manipulate, did I falsify reality and the lives of others? And if it was like that, why had I done it? Of course, not for my own benefit, since my father's disgrace, and that of my own name, had been confirmed in my book, although for me the confession had other and quite different effects. You're dishonest, Gabriel, a cheat. But what had been my crime? How would I be punished? Would the best strategy be to keep lying? What if Deresser read my mind? What if just by opening the door he became aware of the fraud?

But it wasn't Deresser who opened the door. It was a young man, or in any case younger than me-at least, that was what his adolescent clothes suggested: he was wearing a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, and running shoes, but it was obvious that he wasn't going jogging nor had he been-who shook my hand and made me follow him as if we already knew each other. He was one of those people able to skip over conventions and be at ease in a matter of seconds without seeming deferential or cloying. More than that: this man was curt, too severe for his age, almost hostile. He told me, in this order, to follow him and to sit down, that they'd been waiting for me, that he'd bring me a Coke straightaway, that they had no ice, he was very sorry, and that his name was Sergio, actually Sergio Andres Felipe Lazaro, but everyone called him Sergio, not even Sergio Andres, which would be normal in Medellin, where everyone used two names, so Sergio was his name and that's what I could call him, too. And after all this he paused to explain what was missing in his speech: he was Enrique Deresser's son, a pleasure, delighted to meet me. He was, however, obviously not delighted with my visit, far from it; meeting me did not actually give him any pleasure whatsoever.

Enrique Deresser's son. Old man Konrad's grandson. Sergio went to the kitchen to get me a Coke while all the laws of genetics crowded into my head. He had black eyes, black hair, thick black eyebrows; but he also had the swimmer's shoulders and small, thin mouth and perfect nose I'd always assigned to my mental image of Enrique Deresser, the seducer of the Hotel Nueva Europa, the Don Juan of Duitama. What Sergio hadn't inherited, it would seem, was his father's and his grandfather's elegance: his diction and way of moving were those of a neighborhood boxer, rough and somewhat coarse, as frank as they were crass. He was not unintelligent, that was more than apparent, but everything about him (it was obvious just watching him move, bring a glass, put it on the table, and sit), down to the most banal gestures, seemed to say: I don't stop to think, I act. "So, you're Santoro's son, the one who writes books," he said to me. We were beside the window that overlooked the patio. The window was open but covered by wisps of curtains that had been white in better days, so the light entered as if through translucent plastic, except when a breeze separated the curtains; then we could see the gray buildings across the way and a chunk of blue sky reflected in their windows. The armchair where Sergio had sat down was covered in a white sheet. The sofa where I was sitting didn't have a sheet, or it had been removed before my arrival.

"Yes, that's me," I said. "I'm really looking forward to meeting your dad."

"Him, too."

"I was very pleased that he wrote to me."

"Me, on the other hand, not so much," he said. And since I couldn't think of a way to answer that immediately, he added, "Shall I tell you the truth? If it were up to me, I would have torn that letter up. But he sent it on the sly."

I wondered if it was hostility in his voice or just discourtesy. His tracksuit bottoms had zippers at the ankles; the zippers were half open and revealed the thin gray socks of an office worker. "Is Enrique here?" I asked. "Is your dad home?"

His head answered no before his voice did.

"He went out early. He wasn't sure when you were going to come. Well, the truth is I told him you weren't going to come."

"Why?"

"Because I thought you weren't going to come. Why else?"

His logic was impeccable. "And is he coming back?" I said.

"No, sometimes he stays out to sleep under a bridge. Of course he's coming back." Pause. "You know what? I've read your books, both of them."

"Oh good," I said in my friendliest voice. "And what did you think of them?"

"The first one I read for my dad. He gave it to me and said have a look at this to see what things were like back then. But he didn't tell me that lady had been a friend of his, or anything. The rest he told me after, so as not to influence me. At first it was as if it had nothing to do with him, you see what I mean?"

"No. Explain it to me."

"My old man's a fair guy, he weighs everything, you see? That's how he wanted me to read the book. And later he told me the rest."

"About the lists. ."

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

"Which part?"

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

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

"There is, don't exaggerate."

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

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

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

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

"Have we met?"

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

"That's for sure," I said.

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

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

"How did you recognize me?"

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

"What things?"

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

"And you saw it."

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

"Did you tell Enrique?"

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

"Can you get me another Coke?"

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

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

"I didn't write lies."

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

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

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

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

"In the book he's a victim."

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

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

"You want a punch in the face?"

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

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

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

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

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

So he never had left Colombia. "My dad thought you had," I told him.

"Maybe," he replied, "believing that was easier. Easier than looking for me, in any case. Easier than talking to me." He paused and then said, "But let's be fair: even if he had tried, and he didn't, he wouldn't have been able to find me. I left Bogota at the end of forty-six. What was left for me in that city? The glass factory had closed down, or rather it had gone under. A whole lifetime's capital had turned into a pocketful of small change after the business had been blacklisted for three years, after the time Papa spent in the Sabaneta. For practical purposes, I was an orphan. My friends, well, you already know about my friends. But no, it wasn't really a matter of wondering why I should stay in Bogota. It was a matter of wondering where to go. Because I didn't have a choice, you see. I hated Bogota with a hatred I can't explain to you now. Bogota was to blame for everything. Can I tell you something? I got hold of your dad's speech, in eighty-eight, the one at the Capitolio, you know? And I spent several days convinced he'd written it with me in mind, because it was everything I'd felt before, at least all the bad stuff."

"And may I presume you gave it to Sergio?"

"Why are you speaking to me so formally?"

He was right. Who was I trying to fool with these linguistic diplomacies? We'd never set eyes on each other; we'd known each other all our lives. Enrique was relaxed with me and it wasn't a problem, but the idioms of his current life hadn't completely eradicated the diction of his birthplace, and he went back and forth between the straitlaced politeness of Bogota and the offhand directness of his wife's city. "Yes, I gave it to Sergio. That's been the most difficult thing about all this, showing my son how I felt. The lengths I've gone to in order to make him understand me, to get him to sense what it was like. Because it's not enough to explain this, you can imagine, you want others to experience what happened fifty years ago. How do you do that? It's impossible really. But you try, you invent strategies. I gave him your book. The speech. What comes to the son directly from his father isn't worth anything, because children don't believe their parents, not a word, and that's how it should be. So you have to turn everything around, no? Go through another door, take them by surprise. Raising a son is tough, but explaining to him who you are, what kind of life has made you who you are, is the toughest thing in the world. Besides, there are things, I don't know how to explain it to you, I've taken this much better than he has. Obviously, because I've had half a century of it and he's just started. For him it's as if it happened yesterday. He treated you very badly, I'm sorry, you have to understand him."

In October 1946, after trying to borrow money that he knew he'd never be able to pay back from the Society of Free Germans, and receiving several negative responses, Enrique arranged to meet one of the members in the Cafe Windsor. Herr Ditterich hadn't wanted to talk about this in the presence of his colleagues, not wanting to appear sympathetic to the son of a man as suspicious as Konrad Deresser, but he knew his situation was difficult, and after all they were all emigrants, weren't they? Besides, young people had to help each other, Ditterich said to him, especially now that they were responsible for the reconstruction of the Fatherland. He gave him a letter of recommendation, told him who to ask for at the Cavalry School, and two weeks later Enrique left for Medellin. "They wanted me to talk to a German, that was all, a business matter. That's where I met Rebeca." Rebeca's father, wearing chaps, rode seven locally bred Paso Fino horses and a Lusita nian stallion, and a colonel from the school, in full uniform even though it was a Sunday, chose the stallion and five of the seven Paso Finos, and everyone went away happy. "I exchanged three sentences with the owner of the horses. I didn't have to do anything. He was a young man, it was his first time in Latin America, and it wasn't that he was mistrustful, but he needed someone to speak to him in his language. The important thing was Rebeca, a girl of sixteen, flame-haired and so skinny she looked like a matchstick. For me, at that moment, she was like an angel, and a teasing, brazen angel besides. She spent the whole lunch talking to me about her Viking ancestors like she was talking to a five-year-old, but touching my knee under the table. What am I saying 'touching' me, rubbing up against me like a cat in heat." Enrique-the Don Juan of Duitama-was talking as if now his former attractiveness surprised him, and I chose not to tell him what Sara Guterman had told me. "I asked the angel if she could get me a job, and when I went back to Bogota it was to pack up my things." It wasn't a good idea to marry the boss's daughter, said Enrique, but that's what happened a year later. "November 1947. And here we are, as if we'd just been introduced. It's grotesque, really."

"And in all those years you didn't have any more kids?"

"We didn't have any. Sergio is adopted."

"Oh, I see."

"The problem is mine. Don't ask me to explain it."

The most conventional life possible: that was what his tone of voice and his still hands seemed to suggest, in spite of the fact that supporting the penis of an imported horse or teaching it to trot to the rhythm of a Colombian folk dance weren't the most usual ways to earn a living. The conventional life had evolved with all its conventions for half a century; here, just eight hours by land from where my father had his own life, his own son, and had endured the premature death of his wife, Enrique Deresser pretended (as my father pretended) that he'd forgotten certain wartime events or that those events had never happened. "Of course I told Rebeca about my father," he said. "Everything was fresh in everyone's mind back then. In Medellin, too, there were Germans, Italians, even Japanese people who ended up more or less screwed, for more or less time, because of where they were from. There was a famous case, a certain Spadafora, an airline pilot who volunteered his services during the war against Peru. Every time he flew, the guy carried a little Indian box of saffron in his pocket. One of his aunts had bought it in a bazaar, the newspapers said, something like that. As an amulet, you know? Pilots are like that. So anyway, someone saw the little box and couldn't believe that it wasn't the same swastika as Hitler's. And the information got to where it shouldn't have. Spadafora spent a fortune on lawyers, and yes, eventually he managed to get off the blacklist. But he'd fought against Peru, he'd fought on the side of Colombia, I don't know if you see my point."

"Yeah, I do."

"The thing is I told Rebeca the whole thing, and she wasn't at all surprised. Just the opposite: she spent half her life asking me to put right what could be put right. She wanted me to look for Mama, at least. Something I never did, of course, and if Rebeca didn't it was only out of respect. I closed the door and threw away the key, as they say. What am I going to do. I've never been one to impose on others. Maybe it's a flaw, I don't know."

"But did you tell her about my dad?"

"I told her, yes. Sergio I told later, when your book about Sara came out. I don't know anything about books, but I liked the one you did about Sara. I was very sorry about her death. Although we'd never spoken again, it hit me hard. What was she like as an old lady? One time, at her family's hotel, we were arguing over something, something I said, and she made this face that I'd never seen. It was a blend of indignation and weariness, with a little bit of that personality that flees confrontations. It occurred to me that she'd look like that when she was old, and I told her. I've imagined her like that these last years, with that face. Indignant. Weary. But always agreeing with you. That's how Germans were back then. Bloss nicht auffallen, they said. Do you understand that?"

"I don't speak German."

"Well, it's your loss. Don't stand out. Don't call attention to yourself. Go along with people. That's all contained in that phrase. It was a sort of command for them. Papa repeated it all the time. I came out different: I was mouthy and sometimes insolent, I liked conflict. It was much more than saying what I thought. I did, but pounding the table or right in the face of my opponent, if necessary. Sara, in that, was a worthy representative of the immigrant community. And then later she was a worthy representative of Bogota society. It could be a slogan for Bogota, Bloss nicht auffallen, although only to your face. Behind your back people in Bogota will tear you to shreds. Anyway, I'd like to see a photo of her, a recent one. Have you seen photos of her when she was young?"

"One or two."

"And? Did she look like herself? Had she changed much?"

"The person in the photos was her. That's not always easy to see."

"Exactly. Maybe I was right."

"How did you hear she'd died?"

"The Ungars told me. Since they opened the Central I've ordered four or five books a year, books in German, always on horses, to keep in touch with the language. That's all I read. They told me. They called me as soon as they heard, that same night. I actually considered making the trip, going to the funeral, then I realized how absurd that would have been."

"And my dad's funeral? Didn't you think of attending that one?"

"I found out too late. Just think, he was killed two or three hours after talking to me: it was the most absurd thing in the world. Even when I found out, two days after the funeral, not even then did I entirely believe it. It had to be someone else, someone with the same name. Because that Gabriel Santoro had been killed on the twenty-third, the same day your dad and I had seen each other. No, it seemed impossible. First I thought it was you who'd died. What a terrible thing to say, I'm sorry, it's probably bad luck as well, but that's how it was. Then I thought there must be more than two people with that name in Colombia. A person invents things when they don't want to believe something, it's normal. I didn't want him to be dead, at least not after we talked, what we said, especially after what I said to him, or what I didn't say, yes, that more than anything, what I refused to say to him. And three hours later, he goes and gets himself killed. Sergio said, 'That's life, Dad. You just have to accept it.' I smacked him. I'd never hit him before in my life and I hit him when he said that to me."

"I even thought maybe he'd never come here."

"Of course he came," said Enrique. "And we were sitting right here. Here where you and I are. The only difference was that it was a Sunday and daytime. It was stifling. It had rained the night before, I remember that, and there were puddles here, we were surrounded by puddles, and even this bench was still a bit damp. But I didn't want to have him in my house, I can tell you now. I didn't want him stepping on my floor and sitting on my chairs, much less eating my food. Quite primitive, no? An educated person like you must think that sounds pretty basic. Well, maybe it is. What I felt, in any case, was that letting him in, showing him the photos on the shelves, letting him pick up my books and leaf through them, showing him the rooms, the bed where I slept and made love to my wife. . All that would contaminate me in some way, contaminate us. I had conserved the purity of my life, of my family for half a century, and I wasn't going to screw it all up now as an old man, just because Gabriel Santoro decided to show up and sort out his conscience before he died. That's what I thought. Yes, the first thing that came into my head was: He's dying. He must have cancer, or even AIDS; he's dying and he wants to leave everything in order. I was disparaging toward him, Gabriel, and I regret that. I disparaged the effort he'd made. What he did, coming here to talk to me, not many people could do that. But our position at that moment was very different: he had thought a lot about me, or at least that's what he said. I, on the other hand, had erased him from my memory. I suppose that's how things go, don't you think? The one who causes the offense remembers more than the offended one. And that's why it was almost inevitable that I would be disparaging, and almost impossible for me to appreciate the enormity of what he was doing. Besides, it was enjoyable to be disparaging, why should I deny it? A person feels good, I felt good. It was a sudden satisfaction, a sort of surprise gift.

"As if that weren't enough, I didn't know about his operation. He didn't tell me, I don't know why, so I held on to the idea of his being ill. I spent our whole conversation looking at him, trying to find inflamed glands on his neck, or the shape of a colostomy bag under his shirt, those things you get used to seeing after a certain age, when every time you run into a friend it might be the last time you see him. I looked at his eyes to see if they were yellow. He thought I was giving him my whole attention. Because I looked at him, I looked at him closely, and what I looked at most, obviously, was his right hand. Gabriel had said hello when he arrived, but he hadn't offered me his hand. Of course, I knew very well why not, and at that moment I had enough tact not to look at it, but deep down, very deep down, I was shocked that he hadn't shaken my hand, I felt that he hadn't greeted me properly. If he'd offered me his left hand. . or slapped me on the back. . no, that's unthinkable. But none of that happened. There was no contact when we saw each other, and I felt it was missing. It was like the encounter started off on the wrong foot, you know? It's strange how shaking hands is so conciliatory, regardless of how we might actually feel. It's like defusing a bomb, I've always seen it like that: a handshake is a very strange ceremony, one of those things that should have died out by now, like bows and curtsies. But no, it hasn't gone out of style. We still go around all over the place squeezing other people's fingers, because it's like saying, I mean you no harm. You mean me no harm. Of course, then everyone harms everyone else, everyone betrays each other all the time, but that's beside the point. It helps. Anyway, it didn't happen like that with Gabriel. There was no conciliation to start with, the bomb remained active.

"And sitting here we began to tell each other about our lives. I told him what I've just told you. He told me about your mum, he chose to start there, I don't know why. 'I confessed everything to her,' he told me. 'When I asked her to marry me, I also asked her to forgive me. It was a two-for-one offer, as they say.' He never talked about me to anybody, he never wrote my name down anywhere, but he told her everything as soon as he could. 'Confession is a great invention,' your dad said. Half seriously, half in jest. 'Priests are pretty cunning, Enrique. Those fellows know how things work.' A person would think that the death of someone who knows an evil secret would be a liberation, just as the death of a witness frees the murderer. But your mother's death was just the opposite for Gabriel. 'It was like my reprieve had been revoked.' That's how he explained it to me. Gabriel hadn't changed at all in that respect: he said everything with a certain coolness, a certain cynicism, just like when we were young. As if it had nothing to do with him, as if he were talking about someone else. With him every word had its contents, but it was also a tool for looking down from on high, for keeping his distance. You'll know better than me what I'm talking about. When I told him I'd read your book about Sara, he said, 'Oh yes, very good, very original. But what's original isn't good, and vice versa.' The same sentence you put in The Informers, isn't it? Well, with you one already knows: everything I say can be used against me. If I wasn't so old I'd think I had to be careful. But no. What do I need to be careful of now? What can I say at this age that could matter? What can they do to me if I tell? A person gets old and impunity lands on you, Gabriel, even if you don't want it. That was one of the things I said to your dad: 'Why now? Who's going to benefit from your coming here on your knees at this stage of life?' And it was true. Was it going to do my father any good after forty years in the ground? Was it any use to my mama, who had to reinvent her life at fortysomething, have children at an age when it can kill a woman? Reinventing yourself is painful, like surgery. After a certain point the challenge is overcome, the anesthesia of the emotion, of the pride at overcoming it, wears off, and you start to feel the most savage pain, you realize you've lost a leg, or your appendix, or at least they'd opened up your skin and flesh, and that hurts even if they didn't find a tumor. I knew it because I'd been through that, too. Through a reconstruction. Through the anguish of choices. It's a whole process: you can choose how you want to be, what you want to be, and even what you want to have been. That's the most tempting thing: to be another person. I had chosen to be the same but somewhere else. Change jobs but keep my name. 'It's of use to you,' Gabriel said to me. 'It has to be of use to you to know that I've carried this all these years, that I could have forgotten and I haven't. I've remembered, Enrique, I've stayed in the hell of remembering.' I told him not to be a martyr. A whole family had been ruined for one little word of his, so not to come here boasting of his memory. 'There's something I'd like to know,' he said then. 'Was I lucky or unlucky? Did you pay them to kill me, or just to scare the shit out of me?'

"At that moment we were walking to the corner shop. Not that we needed anything, but there are conversations when you just stand up and start walking, because if you're walking you don't have to look each other in the eye all the time, and then it's just a matter of finding a destination for the stroll. Our destination was the corner shop. The closest place. Between here and there it's not very likely you'll get mugged, less so if you're not on your own, even less if it's Sunday and daytime. And the shop was neutral ground, one of those country places stuck in the middle of Medellin, with plastic tables out front, and those half bottles of cheap liquor that drunks pile up in front of them as if they collected them. 'I wanted you dead,' I told Gabriel, 'but I didn't pay them for that. I didn't even know there'd be machetes.' I didn't say anything else and he didn't ask. Never in my life could I have imagined I'd say such a thing. Then I thought Gabriel had come to get me to say all those things that must have been a sin even just to say. He was there, sitting across from me with a beer. I didn't like it, I felt sort of threatened, understand? I'd begun that visit, or whatever you call an encounter like that, thinking: He's come looking for something. I just have to give it to him and he'll leave. Then, at some point in the conversation, I thought: We have a history in common. It's true that history isn't pure and isn't virginal; more than that, our history is very promiscuous. At the shop, on the other hand, surrounded by ten or fifteen identical drunks, all with their shirts open and mustaches, all armed though some didn't flaunt it, I began to think: We're wasting our time. What imbeciles. All this was just a farce. What is happening right here, today, this twenty-third of December, the last Sunday before Christmas, is a big farce. The farce of someone who repents although he knows it's of no use. The farce of making amends that do not exist, now do you understand? Like the morphine they give to a horse with a broken leg. Yes, a great farce, or not even that: a mediocre farce. I'd told Gabriel that I'd wanted him dead. I imagine one doesn't say these things just like that. And Gabriel knew it, too, I suppose, he who had spoken so many strong words, words capable of destroying.

"I bought a packet of Pielrojas and a box of matches. I took out a cigarette and lit it before we left the shop. When we got back here, to the gate, I'd already finished it. Pielrojas don't last long. I offered Gabriel one and he told me in a reproachful tone that he'd quit and that I should quit, too. That's when he told me about his heart and his bypass. 'It's the best feeling in the world,' he told me. 'It's like being thirty again.' We were standing there, you see the security hut? We were there, I'd taken out another cigarette, and was in the process of lighting it, which isn't easy with the matches you get these days. They're not wood, they're not even cardboard, they're something like plastic. The heads fall off them, they bend in half. 'But we're not thirty years old,' I said. I kept trying to light my cigarette, although the wind blew out two matches and two more bent in half. 'What a vice,' said Gabriel. 'As well as killing yourself smoking those things, you have to be a boy scout to get one lit. Let's go in, man, it won't be such an effort inside.' And that was it: the idea of going into my house with Gabriel, Gabriel and I together, us and our promiscuous history, wouldn't fit in my head. I did what I did: what was necessary to protect me and protect my family. My reaction wasn't any more civilized than a cat marking its territory. I'm not making excuses, of course. Let's make that clear.

"I told him we should just say good-bye. That all this was futile, it had been futile from the start. Getting into his car in Bogota had been, although it was painful to admit, a mistake. 'None of this should have happened,' I said. 'It's a mistake that you're here. It's a mistake that we're talking the way we're talking. It would be a mistake, no, it would be a perversion for you to enter my house.' His face changed. It hardened, crevices appeared around his eyes. He intimidated me and I pitied him. I can't really explain it. Gabriel had turned hostile and vulnerable at the same time. But I couldn't take it back. 'It's in this life that all that happened, Gabriel, and you want to pretend it was in a different one. Well no, it's not possible. Look, I'm going to tell you the truth: I'd rather we just left it as it is.' He asked me what I meant by that. I had gone through the gate and was standing on the other side of the rail, beside the hut but inside. I was on my premises, so to speak. From inside I closed the gate (I looked up at the window of my apartment, made sure no one was watching us) and explained it as best I could: 'I'm saying don't come back and don't call me, don't try to put the world to rights, because in the world are people who aren't interested. I'm saying the world doesn't revolve around your guilt. What's the matter, don't you sleep well? Buy some pills. Ghosts wake you up? Say a prayer. No, Gabriel, it's not that easy, you're not going to buy your peace of mind so cheaply, I'm not a discount store. Like I said: don't come back, don't call me, and please, please, please, let's pretend you never came. It's too late for these rectifications. If you want to make amends, you're going to have to do it on your own.' I thought: Now he's going to speak, and I was scared. I knew all too well what he was capable of when he spoke. But he didn't, as incredible as it may seem. He didn't speak, didn't defend himself, didn't try to convince me of anything. For once in his life, he kept quiet. He accepted his failure. It was like a failed law. A law of forgive and forget, the amnesty decreed by a retreating dictator. It all collapsed on him in a matter of seconds. I won't deny he accepted it gracefully. I understood a lot of things when I read your book, Gabriel, but there was one thing in particular that shocked me at first and has continued troubling me. I'm going to tell you what I understood: I understood that looking for me, coming to Medellin, coming to see me, trying to talk to me, all that for your dad was part of his great plan for personal reconstruction, I don't know how else to say it. And I destroyed it. If I'd read your book before, if I'd known what was behind his visit, maybe I wouldn't have said what I said. But of course, that's impossible, isn't it? It's an absurd hypothesis. That's a book and the other was life. The life went first and then came the book. Does this seem stupid what I'm saying? That's how it always is. That doesn't change. Later in books we see the important things. But by the time we see them it's already too late. That's the trouble, Gabriel, forgive my frankness, but that's the fucking trouble with books."

Staying for dinner was the most natural thing in the world; also, at that hour of the night, the least reasonable. Rebeca had leaned out of the living room window (calling Enrique, with a mixture of authority and tenderness, she'd included me without mentioning me); and as soon as the old man took my arm to climb the stairs, and a whiff of sawdust and animal sweat reached my face, I thought that accepting the invitation would be reckless, because after dinner it would be too late to return to Bogota-that was obvious-but perhaps I could find a hotel. And then my head decided to do what it so often does: pretend it hadn't heard these last ideas. Curiosity, and the satisfaction of my curiosity, wasn't taking orders from any kind of cheap good sense (the danger of the road at night, the risk of not finding a room). I wanted to keep seeing, keep hearing, even when what I saw and heard during the meal was the elaborate accumulation of normality I'd expected. But nothing was normal in this man, I thought, and one would have to be especially dim not to notice that: this normal life, the prudent and bland happiness of his old age, was marred from within-I won't say poisoned, although that was the first word that occurred to me-and under the table with its lace tablecloth, and above the unbreakable plates on which the food looked like another decoration, moved the facts, the nasty facts, the facts that don't change even if everything else changes. Enrique wasn't from here; he'd fled here; by surname and by nature, though not by soil, Enrique was a foreigner. None of which prevented him from requesting with each of his gestures: be nice to them, forgive the triviality of their lives, their insignificance. And that's why watching him lift his fork to his mouth was fascinating: Enrique lifted a mound of ground beef, chewed a piece of onion, washed it down with a sip of lulo juice, smiled at Rebeca and took her hand, made banal remarks as she replied with equally banal ones, and for me it was as if they were reciting the Book of Revelation. If I blink, I'll miss a verse; if I go to the bathroom, I'll miss a whole chapter.

Sergio hadn't stayed for dinner. The disdain he felt for me (for my father, whose name I shared, for my dishonest book) had been so obvious that his parents didn't even insist when he began to say good-bye, without giving himself time to make up an excuse, and in two shakes he'd grabbed the jacket of his tracksuit and was gone. "His girlfriend's an artist, like you," said Rebeca. "She paints. She paints fruit, landscapes, you know better than I do what they call those pictures. They sell them on Sundays at Unicentro. Sergio's as proud as a peacock." While Rebeca prepared herbal tea for after the meal, Enrique went downstairs by himself to smoke a cigarette, just as he'd done, as I learned, every night for the last thirty years. "Habit's stronger than he is. If he doesn't do the same thing at the same time, his day's ruined. Like your dad." She looked at me as she said this; she didn't wink at me, but she might just as well have done. "You can't imagine what it was like watching him read your book, Gabriel. He'd suddenly close it and say, He's like me, Rebeca, Gabriel's like me. How funny. Or sometimes he'd say just the opposite: Just look at him, he's still such a bastard, look how he behaves."

"You never met him, did you?"

I already knew the answer, but I wanted her to confirm it.

"No, that one didn't want me to meet him," she said, pursing her lips, kissing the air in the direction of her husband. "He hid me away as if I had chicken pox, you know? The feeble one of the house. Look," she went on after a pause, "don't you take the blame for things he did, it's not fair. You forget that, you live your life." She wiped her hands on her apron and gave me an affectionate pat. It was the first time she'd touched me with her hand (that moment is always memorable). "You don't mind my meddling?"

"Of course not."

"Good, because that's how I am. Nothing I can do about it."

When Enrique came back up, I'd finished my tea and Rebeca had put the Yellow Pages (a brick of newsprint with card covers, the spine scratched, the corners bent with use) on my lap. "What's going on?" asked Enrique when he came in. "He wants to look for a hotel," said Rebeca. "Oh," he said, as if the idea of my leaving had never crossed his mind. "A hotel, right." I called the Intercontinental, although it was a bit expensive, because it was more likely I'd find a room available at this hour. I made the reservation, gave my credit card number, and when I hung up asked my hosts how to get there from where we were. "I'm going to draw you a little map," said Rebeca. "You have to cross the city," and she got down to work, biting her tongue while she drew streets and numbers and arrows on a piece of squared paper, putting all her weight onto the felt-tip pen. Enrique said to me, "Come here, I want to show you something while she finishes that. The poor dear takes her time with these things."

He took me to their room. It was a narrow space, so much so that there was only one bedside table; on the other side of the bed, the matching table wouldn't have fit (or it would have blocked the closet door, an unpainted particleboard, chip so flat and plain that it made me think of cartoon shipwrecks). In one corner, on a sort of drinks trolley that could be moved away from or near the bed, adjusted to the whims or myopia of old age, was a television, an old set with imitation wood grain, and on top of the television was a desk calendar with pictures of Paso Fino horses. I saw that the bedside table was Rebeca's dominion, even though the photo beneath the lamp was not of her husband, as matrimonial bedsides theoretically required, but of herself, somewhat younger but already without a trace of red left in her hair: the photo would be ten or fifteen years old, and had been taken beside a small swimming pool that didn't look too clean. "That's in Santa Fe de Antioquia," Enrique told me, as he took out of the drawer what at first appeared to be a photo album and turned out to be a ring binder. "We go every December. Some friends rent us their house." He opened the rings of the binder and took out a few pages, which weren't pages but plastic sleeves that contained the pages (or photographs, or cuttings), protected from sweaty fingers and the humidity of the atmosphere. "You already know this, although you don't know you know it," Enrique said to me. What was inside the sleeve was a typewritten, formal letter, without a single correction; to make out the letters I had to press the tip of my index finger against the plastic, and I felt like a child learning the difficult habit of following a line, interpreting it, connecting it to the next one.

Bogota,

January 6, 1944

Honorable Senators Pedro J. Navarro, Leonardo Lozano Pardo and Jose de la Vega:

My name is Margarita Lloreda de Deresser. I was born in Cali to a traditionally Liberal family. My father was the late Julio Alberto Lloreda Duque, engineer by profession and consultant on public works for the government of the late Doctor Olaya Herrera.

The reason for this letter is none other than to request your intercession on my behalf and that of my family in the light of the situation which I here relate:

In 1919 I married Konrad Deresser, a German citizen. The marriage has remained solid under the eyes of God since then and we have one son, Enrique, a young man of exemplary conduct who is now twenty-three years of age.

Due to his nationality my husband has seen his name included in the "blacklist" of the government of the United States of America, which as Your Honors undoubtedly are aware brings terrible consequences for any individual or business, and our case has not been different. In the space of the few weeks since the unjust inclusion on the "list" we have been brought to a state of crisis which appears to have no escape and will without a doubt soon bankrupt us.

However, my husband has never had, does not have, nor will he ever have any sympathy for the government currently in power in Germany, for which reason his inclusion on the list is unfair and unjustified and due to nothing but rumors without any basis in fact.

My husband is the proprietor of a small family business, Cristales Deresser, dedicated to the

"Does it end here?" I said. "Don't you have the rest?"

Enrique took out another of the plastic-sleeved pages. "Don't get in a state," he said sarcastically. "The world's not going to end just yet."

manufacture and commercial sale of window panes and all kinds of glass. The total capital does not exceed 8,000 pesos and we have no more than three full-time employees, all of whom are Colombian.

My husband, furthermore, is part of the broad German community that arrived in Colombia at the beginning of the century and since then has loyally abided by all the laws of our country. He has distinguished himself among the people of Bogota by the strictness and honesty of his morals and habits, as so often occurs with members of this race of elevated qualities. And in spite of having always felt proud of his origins my husband has never prevented me from raising my son in the religious and civic values of our Colombia, in the Catholic church and our valued democracy, which today we see under threat. Which my husband regrets as much as all Colombian citizenry of which he considers himself a part.

With all due respect I ask Your Honors, not only in my name but in the name of the rest of the German families who find themselves in analogous situations, that you intercede before the Government so that our names may be removed from the aforementioned list and our civil and economic rights may be restored. My husband and many other German citizens are suffering the consequences of the place where they were born by virtue of Providence but not of their actions or deeds. Deeds and actions that have always been in accordance with the laws and customs of this nation which has taken them in so generously.

I thank you in advance for the attention you can give this matter. And awaiting demonstrations of your goodwill, I remain,

Yours faithfully,

Margarita Lloreda de Deresser

"How did you get it?"

"By asking," said Enrique. "As simple as that. Yes, I thought it was strange, too. But then I thought: What's so strange? Those papers are of no interest to anybody. There are hundreds of letters like this, thousands, it's not like they're irreplaceable. There was a fire a few years ago. Many of them went up in smoke. Do you think anyone cared? Wastepaper, that's what those archives were. The civil servant who gave it to me confessed the truth. They cut those papers into strips and put them on the desk so people who get fingerprinted have something to wipe off the ink with."

"And you went to Bogota, you requested it, and they gave it to you?"

"You're surprised, aren't you? What did you think, that Sara Guterman was the only obsessive? No, Sara is an amateur next to me. I've taken this matter very seriously indeed. I'm no dilettante. If there were a guild of document collectors, I'd be the president, don't doubt it for a second."

"Oh, you're into that," said Rebeca as she came in. In her hand were the directions, streets and avenues that would take me to the hotel, which, of course, I now had no desire to get to. "Poor thing, he has no one to show his toys to."

"I do have," said Enrique, "but I don't want to. This isn't for any old nobody."

"I don't suppose I can take them with me," I said. "Even if I brought them back first thing tomorrow morning."

"You suppose right. These papers don't leave this house while I'm alive."

I said I understood (and I wasn't lying). But that was the letter Sara Guterman had told me about. And Enrique had it. He'd shown it to me. I had seen it. In the middle of that family archaeology, I thought the tacit agreement that Enrique and his wife had arrived at was tremendous: they both spoke of that letter lightly, as if that way they could neutralize the gravity of its contents. I, for one, didn't want to enter into the game. What was radiating from the paper, from Margarita Deresser's signature, even from the date, prevented me.

"If you lost one of these papers, if you damaged it, I'd have no choice but to kill you," said Enrique. "Like spies in movies. I like you, man, I don't want to kill you."

"Me neither," I said, handing back the second page of the letter. I stood up and went over to Rebeca to kiss her good-bye. "Well, thank you for everything-," I was saying.

"But if you want," Enrique interrupted me, "you could sleep here."

"No, no. I've already made a reservation."

"So cancel it."

"I don't want to inconvenience you."

"The inconvenience will be all yours," said Rebeca. "The sofa's hard as a rock."

"There's something else," said Enrique. "There's something else I'd like to do with you. I haven't been able to do it on my own, and who better than you to go with me?"

And he told me about how often he'd driven on the road up to Las Palmas, thinking all the time he'd go and look at the site of the accident, thinking of parking the car by the side of the road and walking down like a tourist on the mountainside, if that was possible. No, he'd never been able to: each time he'd kept on going, and a couple of times he'd reached the extreme-ridiculous, yes, he knew it-of turning up the volume on the car radio so as not to hear the urgency of his own meddling thoughts.

"What I propose is that we go there tomorrow," he said. "It's on your way to Bogota, you're going to have to pass by there in any case."

"I don't know if I want to."

"We'll leave early and we won't stay long, I promise, or we'll stay as long as you want."

"I don't know if I want to go through that, Enrique."

"And then you go home. Go and look, nothing more. To see if I can clear it up once and for all."

"Clear what up?" I asked.

"What do you think, Gabriel? The doubt, man, this damned doubt."

From the moment Enrique and Rebeca said good night, from the moment they went to their room, less than four meters from the sofa where I was spending the night, and closed the door, I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep that night. With time I've trained myself to recognize nights of insomnia long before trying to force myself to get to sleep, so I've stopped wasting the time that gets wasted like that. I turned off the living room light but not the floor lamp, and in the half darkness, sitting on the cushion that Rebeca had put in a pillowcase for me, spent a long while thinking of my father, of the forgiveness he'd been denied, of the journey he'd begun after that refusal and never finished, and I couldn't help but think that my presence that night in Enrique Deresser's house was one of the ways that life has of mocking people: the same life that had denied my father the only redemption possible, and along the way denied me the right to inherit that redemption, had now arranged that I, the disinherited, should be a guest for a night of the one who had refused to absolve us. The light poured straight down from the lampshade, illuminating only the circular space below it, and the rest of the room remained in darkness (its objects vaguely distinguishable: the dining table and its chairs in disorder, the chest of drawers at the entrance, the frames of the photos, the paintings-or rather, posters-on the walls, which in the darkness weren't white but gray); nevertheless, I had to stand up and walk around in the tiny space, because the same electricity in my eyes and limbs, the same static that kept me awake, wouldn't let me keep still.

The window exhausted its possibilities almost immediately: outside, nothing was happening, not in the windows of the other buildings, all black and blind, not in the street, where my car still survived, not on the patio, where the chalk squares of the hopscotch reflected the dusty light of the street-lamps. In the photos on top of the chest of drawers, Sergio appeared touching a pony's nose and making a disgusted face, Rebeca and Enrique posed on a bridge-I knew there was a famous bridge near Santa Fe de Antioquia, and assumed that bridge and the one in the photo were the same-and a woman, younger than them but too old to be, for example, Sergio's girlfriend, hugged Rebeca at a party, holding a little glass of anisette in her free hand. All this was difficult to see in the darkness, just as the German titles of the ten or twelve paperbacks I found in the first drawer were difficult to see (and to understand), abandoned along with sets of screwdrivers, pots of glue, packets of sugar, two or three syringes with their caps, two or three rusty buckles. In the kitchen I opened and closed cupboard doors trying not to make noise; I found a glass jar of biscuits and ate one, and I took out a bottle of cold water from the fridge and poured myself a glass (I had to go through jams and boxes of tea before I found one). On the door was a magnet in the shape of a horseshoe and another with the crest of Atletico Nacional. There wasn't anything else: no names, no lists, no messages. With my glass of cold water in my hand I went back to the illuminated corner of the sofa. It must have been almost midnight. I put Enrique's binder on the cushion, so the light would hit it at an angle and the reflection on the plastic wouldn't block out the letters, and found myself once again, like so many times in my life, involved in the examination of other people's documents, not with the impartiality of other times, but instead overexcited and nervous and at the same time tired like on the day after an intense drinking session. "Tomorrow you'll give them back to me," Enrique had said, "but tonight you can take your time over them."

"But can't I photocopy them?" I'd said, because Margarita's letter alone had stimulated me as much as if I'd come across an auction of Demosthenes' toga. "Can't I get up early, find a shop, and photocopy them?"

"These letters are mine and my family's," Enrique said. For the first time his tone of voice had a tinge of reproach. "No one else has any reason to be interested."

"They interest me. I want to have them-"

He cut me off. "You haven't understood. They're not for you to have." And after an uncomfortable silence he went on, as if apologizing for protecting his territory: "It's that I don't want them to end up in a book," he said. "Out of reserve, or privacy, call it what you will. I'm very fond of these letters, and part of my affection comes from knowing that no one else has them, that they're mine, that no one else knows them. If they were published, something would be lost, Gabriel, something very big would be lost for me. I'm not sure if I've made myself clear."

I said he had. He'd made himself clear, yes, sir, clear as day. And as soon as I opened the album and turned three or four pages I understood his anxiety, the fear of the damage this collection could suffer in careless hands. In plastic sleeves, after the one in which Margarita had asked the senators for help, were several of the letters, eight or ten, that old Konrad had sent to his family-first to his wife and then to his son-from the Hotel Sabaneta concentration camp. There wasn't more, but that was everything. "They're not for you to have," Enrique had told me: that had been his subtle way of saying, You are forbidden from appropriating them; you, who steal everything, aren't going to rob me of this. He was my host; I was his guest. By giving them to me, allowing me access to them even if only for one night, he had trusted me. But things didn't turn out the way we both would have preferred: as soon as I read the first letter I knew I'd end up betraying that trust, and when I got halfway through the second I set about the task of betraying it.

Sergio could arrive at any moment. I put my shoes back on, looked for my jacket on the chair by the entrance, and with jacket and shoes I went to the door where the Deressers were sleeping. I held my breath, to hear better, and after ten or twenty seconds I discerned the rhythmic breathing of two sleeping people; I thought it might just be one, it was possible that, like me, one of them might be having a bad night; but there was no way to confirm it, and what is not possible to confirm should never be considered. I tried to fix the door so it would look closed from the outside. When I seemed to have managed it, I went down the stairs in darkness, and on my way from the door of the building to that of my car, I walked across the chalk hopscotch by accident. I didn't know if I'd ruined it, but I didn't stop to find out. I got into my car, not through the driver's door but on the passenger side, I got my notebook out of the glove compartment and a pen out of my jacket, turned on the little roof light, and got down to work. I found that the letters were arranged backward: the most recent ones first, the oldest ones later. Only when I got to the last ones in the archive did I understand the particular effect this reading caused, this reversed chronology.

The following are the letters I transcribed:

Fusa, August 6, 1944

Son,

Today the ones who are being deported have left the hotel. Heinrich Stock, Heider and Max Focke. Stock was a propagandist, one of the hard-liners, that is what everyone said.

Last Sunday their families came as usual and everything was just like always, and on Tuesday the order arrived and today they took them. They are going to travel to Buenaventura and from there board a ship to the USA. They say that from the USA some are going to Germany and some will stay in other camps.

The only thing I do not want is to return to Germany. The war is already lost.

Senores censors, this is not a code.

It seems they are going to bring skittles. But every day we hear something different.

They said they were going to give us more than four beers a day.

Here the people have a reason to get out. What am I going to get out for?

Papa

Fusagasuga, June 25, 1944

My dear son,

Now it is five o'clock and we're all in the dining room writing our letters. Sundays are the most terrible days for me. The mass does not help me at all, just the opposite, making me think how far away God is from me. I feel confused. Which is my religion and which is my country? These are the two things a person can ask for and I do not know who I can ask for anything.

This is what is called total ABANDONMENT.

All day I speak in my language with people from my land but we are in another land. Forgive me if this seems silly to you. On Sundays I generally write silliness. On weekdays we are in the coffee plantations and we tend the gardens but on Sundays we do not. The agricultural work distracts us but on Sundays there is too much free time. Today I sat out on the terrace and watched the cars arriving from Bogota with families. Everyone sat by the pool with their families. Has ours failed forever? I don't even want to think that. Who am I without you two? Nobody. To keep myself entertained, I started thinking about how many of those people I had sold windows to. Twenty-three. Kraus still owes me, incredible. I have lost the ability to sleep. I don't want to complain too much but that's how it is. Tomorrow the bell will ring at six and I know now that I will have been awake for two hours by then. I sleep for four hours at best. From nine-thirty we cannot make noise and those hours of silence and darkness are the worst. Tell me how things are at home. Tell me if you have had news of your mother and do not lie to me about this. Please, do not abandon me as well.

Your papa,

Konrad

Fusagasuga, May 26, 1944

Dear son,

Your mama will come back sooner or later. I have taken a little while to write to you because I did not want to tell you lies. One is too optimistic in moments of emotion and your letter left me floored, I will not deny it. I could be destroyed but I am not. Do you know why? Because later when I calmed down I was thinking what was in truth most probable and I arrived at this conclusion. Your mama is going to come back because we are a family. I do not have the slightest doubt and I do not make mistakes when it comes to judging someone. Have patience that everything will come in due time with God's help.

You tell me that she went through terrible days. I have also had some terrible days because it is not easy to be separated. Of course what she did is an act of egotism and that is rare in her, always such a generous person. That is why I am sure that she will reconsider. There is nothing that time cannot fix and one day we will be together again, all three of us. I give you my word.

Your papa who loves you,

Konrad

Hotel Sabaneta, April 21, 1944

My dear and adored Marguerite,

I would like you to come and live in Fusa. Here in the hotel there are people who have their families in Fusa and they can go and see them every day and even stay and sleep with them. When they go they are escorted by a policeman and also when they come back. But they sleep with their wives and can see their children. The houses in Fusa are very expensive because now everyone wants a house in Fusa and there are people here with lots of money. But if we make an effort we can find a cheap little place for you to live. Enrique can stay in Bogota. How good it would be to sleep next to you again. I know we do not have money but something could be done, as they say hope is the last thing to die.

Here one lives without serious problems so do not worry about me. There is not much to do because it is forbidden to have a radio. They do not even let us listen to music and for me listening to music would help a little because I could be distracted. One of the employees in the hotel likes me and he is the one who helps me to write my letters. Let us see if I can ask him for a radio or if he will let me go in his room to listen to music for a while.

I love you always.

Yours,

Konrad

Hotel Sabaneta, Fusagasuga, April 9, 1944

My adored Marguerite,

You never like me to write to you in German and now you are in luck because in this place German is forbidden for correspondence. All letters must be in Spanish and have to pass through a horrible censorship. We submit them open and a person in charge reads them and asks for explanations. They will be looking for spies. But of course here we are all spies, simply for having surnames that they cannot pronounce. They gave us medical examinations as if we had contagious diseases. Being German is a contagious disease. We can still speak it. At least that is not forbidden.

There was a Catholic mass last week but I only found out today. It was Father Baumann. If they say masses here maybe it will not all be so bad, and anyway there is only one God. Father Baumann reminded me very much of Gabriel. I told Gabriel that if he wanted he could come and practice here instead of going always to the Gutermans. It would break the tedium for me. And he could hear Father Baumann because Gabriel is Catholic. Remind him, please. But do not insist if he does not want to.

Well, I hope you have not stopped looking for help. Someone has to understand that all this is a mistake and that I have done nothing wrong. This is how this country pays me back for loving it as I have loved it. Colombia is the most ungrateful country that God has placed on the face of the earth. And I am not the only one to say so. At meals this is the topic of conversation. What happens is that here there are wolves in sheep's clothing and that is the problem for those of us who have ended up here. That the others know I am not like them. My love, the important thing is that you believe me. The rest does not matter. What Enrique thinks matters very little if you believe me.

I will write to you as much as they allow here and hope I do not bore you.

Yours,

Konrad

When the last letter in the archive, the first that Konrad Deresser wrote from the Hotel Sabaneta, was transcribed into my notebook, I took a couple of minutes to recover from the blow of everydayness: the letters had been the best testimony of those ordinary days, unbearably ordinary, that in an ordinary city had been spent in an extraordinary time and place; the letters had been, for that very reason, the best testimony of the error committed by my father. This alone had forced me to steal them; as if that weren't enough, there was also this paragraph in the middle, dropped in there, between two pathetic appeals destined for a Margarita who perhaps already, at that moment, had ceased to be with her husband, that neutral paragraph like the net on a tennis court, that mentioned my father's name (which was enough to make it unique and valuable) and to me seemed to contain impossible images. Practice in that paragraph was a long and malleable verb, and a word made of burned rubber. I spent a while thinking about The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and I put the anecdote of the radio station together with the lost cover I'd found at my father's apartment. Suddenly my father had a violin pressed against his neck, and he was practicing; or rather, he received singing lessons from old Konrad or learned vocal tricks to control his diaphragm better, because old Konrad knew about things like that. I imagined my father getting on buses or into other people's cars with his violin case hanging from his shoulder, and I tried to speculate about the moment he decided to give the instrument up. I managed to think all those things before I sensed that the paragraph did not refer to the learning of instruments or breath control but of the German language.

Was that possible? My father learning German from such a young age? My head began to look for signs in the life of the Gabriel Santoro I had known, but it was late, and investigative work in the mental archives is exhausting and not always reliable. It would be better to turn to my current informer, Enrique Deresser, although that would have to wait till the next day.

I put my notebook back in the glove compartment. Before getting out of the car, I looked at all the corners of the street, making sure Sergio was nowhere to be seen. I walked back to the building as if someone were following me, and toward five, still dressed, I managed to get to sleep for a couple of hours without remembering what I'd dreamed. But maybe I dreamed of my father speaking German.

I woke up to the gurgling of a coffeemaker. I mustn't have opened my eyes straightaway, because later, when I finally managed it, Enrique Deresser was standing in front of me, asking to be taken out for a walk like a dog with a leash in its mouth; he didn't have a leash in his mouth, but a cup of coffee in his hand, and he didn't want to go for a walk, but to the place where, according to the Highways Authority reports, a friend from his youth had died in an accident. His collection of letters was no longer beside the sofa, where I had left it the night before. It was already put away, it was in a safe place now, it had been put out of reach of thieves. Enrique handed me the hot cup.

"OK, I'll wait for you downstairs," he said. "I'm going to get some bunuelos. If you want I'll get you some, too."

"Bunuelos?"

"To eat on the way. So we don't waste time having breakfast."

And that's how it went, of course: Enrique wasn't prepared to put the business off a second longer than necessary. With the steering wheel in my left hand and holding a ball of hot dough between the fingers of my right, I followed his directions and found myself, after going up some steep, urban, unevenly paved streets (concrete squares bordered with lines of tar), leaving the city and going up into the mountains. My passenger's knees banged against the glove compartment: I hadn't realized Enrique was so tall, or his legs so long, until that moment, but didn't say anything for fear of provoking a conversation that might somehow lead him to open the glove compartment and find my notebook and leaf through it out of curiosity and come across the words I'd stolen from him and his family. But that didn't seem probable: Enrique was concentrating on other things, his gaze fixed on the trucks we passed and on the curves of the road, that ribbon of dark, sinuous cement that became unpredictable a few meters in front of the car and disappeared from sight in the rearview mirror. At one point, Enrique raised his index finger and tapped the windshield.

"Geraniums in biscuit tins," he said.

"What about them?"

"You mention them in your book."

And then he was silent again, as if he didn't understand something that for me was obvious: he'd begun to interpret a good part of his world through something he'd read. He yawned, once or twice, to relieve the pressure in his ears. I did the same and discovered that the altitude had blocked them a little. That can happen before you notice, because the ascent is not so drastic, and the process is quite similar, one thinks, to how an old man gradually goes deaf. Going up into Bogota causes a sudden deafness, like the result of a childhood illness; that ascent, up to Las Palmas, was like the progressive and natural deafness of old age. I was thinking about that when Enrique tapped the windshield again and told me to pull over, that we'd arrived. The car slowed down and the tires skidded on the loose gravel of the shoulder, and the unpleasant parking lights signal started beeping. On my left was the highway, which always seems more dangerous when you're still, and on my right floated the green stain of some bushes, so sparse that among their leaves you could make out the air of the valley and the violent drop of the mountainside. And that's when, maybe because of the sensation of farewell provoked by being with someone in an unmoving car, maybe because of the slightly eccentric way the surrounding landscape united us-turning us into confidants or accomplices-I asked Enrique what I'd been wanting to ask him since the night before. "Of course he spoke German," he said. "Spoke it like a native. He learned it at the Nueva Europa. That was his school. Peter, Sara, they were his teachers. The accent he picked up from them; people with a good ear have no problems, and Gabriel had a better ear than Mozart. In your book there are important things and unimportant things. Among the unimportant things, what surprised me most was that Gabriel had forgotten his German. He must have wanted to forget it. Until that day when he started singing 'Veronika,' no? Sara loved that song, I remember perfectly. And Gabriel pretending he'd started studying it in old age, that he'd only been studying the language for a few months. All that you put in the book. I read it but I couldn't believe it. The man who used to recite speeches from the Reichstag pretending he didn't know German. Don't tell me it's not ironic."

"Tell me about it. Sara didn't say much about that."

"That would be because there's not much to tell," said Enrique. "I remember very well a conversation, one of the last I witnessed between them. . Gabriel asked my father to explain a couple of references that came up in the speeches. My father did it gladly, like a teacher. That was the closest they ever were. It wasn't a friendship, no. Gabriel didn't betray a friendship with Papa, but he did betray something. I don't know what to call it; there has to be a name to apply to the spot where he stuck the knife in. Those speeches, I don't know if you know them. No, I wouldn't dare say that Gabriel learned German to understand them, but it would be very naive to think it wasn't one of the benefits. In any case, it's normal that Sara wouldn't have mentioned it, I think. Gabriel never committed the error of taking those guilty enthusiasms to the Nueva Europa. He was a sensible fellow, after all, and he had his head screwed on straight. He could study them, but he did it in secret and with shame. Maybe he would have liked my father to be a little more ashamed. Me too, of course. How I despised him. Oh, yes, I came to despise my father. What cowards. We were both very cowardly." It wasn't difficult to imagine that he'd been rereading old Konrad's letters the morning my father had come to visit him; I imagined how fresh the resentment would have felt, the daily updating of the disdain; I imagined Enrique going over in his head the text he knew by heart while my father performed his little speech of contrition. But most of all I imagined the course of a life encumbered with the documentary reconstruction of scenes from the other life. That's what Enrique had devoted himself to: the documents he had collected were his place in the world. I thought that was why he had thrown them at me almost en masse, because he thought I would receive the same peace, and with that Enrique turned into a sort of small messiah, an ad hoc savior, and the documents were his gospel. "Yes, Gabriel used to go to the Nueva Europa to practice his German," said Enrique, and narrowed his eyes. "Sometimes I think it might have been there. Isn't that horrible? Not just contemplating that possibility, I don't mean only that: Isn't it horrible that we'll never know where it happened? That moment weighs on us, Gabriel, and we're never going to know how it went. No matter how many of my father's letters I've saved. No matter how much information Sara Guterman might have given you, we're missing that information. Tell me something, have you imagined the scene?"

"I've tried," I told him. "But the places from those years hardly exist anymore. I never saw the Nueva Europa, for example."

"I've reconstructed it as if I'd been there. I'm walking along the upper corridor and I see him downstairs, sitting with the fellow from the embassy or the police, but I keep going to my room. How could I imagine it? I don't even stop to try to see who Gabriel's talking to. I don't even think about it. I see him without thinking. I don't wonder: Who could that be? Is he practicing his German? Gabriel would sit down to talk to the Germans, he liked to swap languages. The Germans would come away with three or four new phrases in Spanish, quite happy. So in that image I could have wondered if he was swapping languages. But I don't wonder anything. My eyes pass over Gabriel. Between those two and me there is a glass door, a whole patio, and a fountain making fountain noises. So I could say I try to hear what they're saying and I can't. But it's not like that. In the scene that I imagine, I don't try to hear anything. Normal, don't you think? You go somewhere you go every day, see your friend sitting and doing what he's been doing as long as you've known him: talking. How are you going to imagine?"

"You can't," I said.

"I know you've always wanted more details," he said. "But closer than this we can't get, I'm telling you. The details change, that's true. Sometimes there's rain splashing into the fountain's pool, other times there isn't. There are the little fishes, there are the coins people throw in. Sometimes I see Sara busy with customers at the reception desk, and I curse her for not suspecting anything either. I've been carrying this around for a long time, son. And I think you're strong. I don't think it'll hurt you to help me a little. After all, you're the one who's written about this, you're the one who's dealt with it, and the land belongs to he who works it. No one has as much information as you. Sara was the last, but she can't help me now. Use the information, Gabriel, do me that favor. In ten years, if I'm still alive, come back here, and we'll discuss our points of view, you can tell me about your scene. Tell me if your father chose the place or if he adapted to what they asked. If he informed with pleasure or if he had conflicting emotions. If in the interview he denies that he speaks German, or if it's precisely because of that, because he speaks German, that they credit what he says. Does he think of Sara? Does he feel that by accusing my father he's defending her from something? The questions are endless. I have my own hypothesis. I'm not going to tell you, so as not to influence you." There again was the impulse to make light of things that I'd witnessed the night before, the strategy that transformed everything into a game to defend himself against the pain of the facts. He had spent fifty years living with the betrayal. In those terms-I thought-I was a recent arrival. Deresser would have been planning this ambush in advance, a long while in advance-since the publication of my book, for example. And everything, the invitation to go see him, the description of my father's visit, the access he'd allowed me to all his documents, everything was paving the way to this instant: the instant when he got rid of half the weight of his life and transferred it to another person; the instant of a tiny liberty, obtained in old age and almost by chance. "This is what I wanted to request of you," he said. "That you think. I've spent too many years; this is as far as I've got. Now it's your turn. But I will warn you, no matter how early you get up you won't see what isn't there. No matter how much you think about that scene the sun won't come up any earlier. Anyway, you understand me now. It's impossible to complete the scene." After a while, he added, "Is there anything else you wanted to know?"

I wanted to say to him, Is there something you know for certain, by any chance? Is there anything in my father's life that has just a single aspect?

But instead I said, "For now, no. If there is anything else, I'll let you know."

"OK. So time for what we came for, don't you think?"

"I think so."

"Let's not use up the whole morning talking about the past," he said. "Let's be realistic. You and I are alone. These stories don't matter to anyone anymore."

We got out of the car and found ourselves in the noisy and too bright world of outside, and we began to walk forward, along the shoulder, skirting around the line where the mountain dropped off into the abyss and where there are no containment rails or artificial protection of any kind: men depend on the will of the stones and the tree trunks and the breeze-block or adobe houses to keep from going over the precipice. The air was dense and humid and the deciduous smell of the vegetation filled it the way a basin gets filled. I began to sweat: my palms and the back of my neck were damp, my watch strap stuck to my wrist.

We had walked thirty or forty meters when Enrique stopped me. With his hands on his hips and panting (eyebrows raised, the corners of his mouth open like the gills of a dying trout), he took a deep breath and said, "Here it is."

Here it was. Here was the place where my father's car had gone over the edge. This landscape was the last thing he'd seen in his life, with the probable exception of some lights bearing down on him or the bodywork of a bus that pushed him off the road. While I approached the edge of the slope and focused on some bushes torn out by their roots, broken branches, and disturbed soil, on the nature that had preferred not to regenerate in all those years, Enrique was looking at the road, which at that spot twisted less (or its bends were not so sharp), and was perhaps thinking, as I was thinking as I looked at it, that this was another of the illusions generated by stillness: from the side, everything seems straighter and, especially, seems straighter for longer, and you'd never think that something might be unpredictable for the cars passing, a barefoot pedestrian, a frightened dog. If a bus appeared around this bend, I thought Enrique was thinking, the driver of a car would see it; if he didn't see it, because of the dense darkness that must cover this road at night, or because of some distraction (the distraction that comes from a recent sadness, the disappointment of bad news), the most likely thing was that a person with normal reflexes would manage to steer out of its way. Because the width of the road, at that point, seemed to allow it; because the speed a car could have reached on its way up was not great. At that point, thought Enrique, an accident was rather improbable.

Yes, that was what Enrique was thinking. No doubt about it. Who says it's not possible to read other people's minds?

The previous afternoon, his son had practically assaulted me for speculating about his life (and doing so, on top of everything, in the midst of that apology for treachery that was my book); but this time, at least, it wasn't speculation. I could read Enrique's thoughts, one by one, as if he had spat them out onto the asphalt after thinking them. Enrique was standing facing the fatal curve, and I was watching him and I could have even closed my eyes and listened to the progress of his thoughts. . but the bus, Enrique was thinking, could have appeared around the bend at the moment Gabriel was trying to find a radio station, but the bus might have had its lights turned off, to conserve energy from the battery as they often do, but Gabriel's bad hand might have been the reason his reaction hadn't been effective, but his heart might have failed from the sudden jolt of the fright, and in that case Gabriel would have been dead when his car went over the edge. . but what about the driver's intentions, what about the possibility of suicide, was it not possible that the bus driver was desperate, disappointed, a man at the end of his tether? Had the bus driver never committed any errors in his life, and was it not possible that he'd tried to mend them and someone had denied him the redress? These possibilities exist, Enrique Deresser was thinking, no one can take them away from me. By now Gabriel's son has figured it out, now he knows why I brought him here, why we've come to see the place where Gabriel swerved into the abyss, where he preferred to bring it all to a close, because it was all a farce, because his life had been a farce, that's what he felt. Nothing would have been easier for me than misleading him, telling him no, none of that, stop feeling you're so important, stop believing your guilt makes you unique, that you invented the desire to make amends, that really is arrogance, Gabriel Santoro, that really is a cheap farce, not the other thing, the other is a life with enough time, and everyone, given enough time, is going to fuck up over and over again; he'll make a mistake and put it right and make another mistake, you give anyone time and that's what you'll see, one fuckup after another, amends and more amends, fuckup and amends, fuckup and amends, until time runs out. . because we don't learn, Enrique Deresser was thinking, nobody ever learns, that's the biggest fallacy of all, that we learn; we really would be hoodwinked if we believed that one, Gabriel Santoro, and you more than anybody. You thought you'd learned, that you'd made one mistake and it was as if you'd been immunized, isn't that so? Well no, the evidence indicates the opposite, Mr. big-shot lawyer. Everything indicates that there is no possible vaccine: you stay sick and you'll be sick for your whole fucking life and your whole fucking death. Not even in death will you be freed from the fuckups you've committed. That's why you don't need to run yourself off the road and take a whole busload of people with you along with I don't know how many passengers. You won't fix anything by doing that and you'll have to bear as many crosses as there were deaths in the accident. To the dead man from the beginning you'll add the dead at the end. Is that what you want? Is fucking up the lives of a few people traveling in a bus your idea of retribution? Because if that's how it is I can't help you, Gabriel Santoro. Nothing I say will be sufficient if your idea is so strong, if you're so set on closure to bring it to a close like this. If you're ready to screw the rest of us just make sure you're good and screwed. That's what Enrique Deresser was thinking as he looked at the bend that wasn't so sharp in the road that wasn't so dangerous, while he was imagining the quantity of things that would have to happen at the same time so the accident would have been an accident instead of the voluntary closure, without pomp or circumstance, of a farcical life, of that giant blind knot that had been the undeserved life of Gabriel Santoro. That, finally, was what he was thinking, while Gabriel Santoro's son, behind him, seemed to be waiting for some sort of verdict, because he was aware that this was a trial: he was the definitive audience for the last trial of his dead father, held on the soft shoulder of a mountain road, between the smell of rotting tropical fruit and the tubercular rattles of exhausts and the abrupt gusts of passing cars that descended into Medellin at frightening speeds and those that came up toward unpredictable destinations, because after this road a thousand routes were possible and Bogota was just one of them. But it was the one that Gabriel Santoro would have taken if his car had not gone over the edge, and it would also be the one that Gabriel Santoro's son would take as soon as he confirmed that Enrique Deresser wasn't to blame: because in this trial Enrique Deresser also stood accused, and his summing-up should prove that the road was dangerous, that the night had been dark, that the bend was sharp and the visibility bad, that a mutilated hand doesn't react well in emergencies, that a recently repaired heart is fragile and cannot bear violent emotions, that a tired old man has bad reflexes, and more so when he'd lost in a single day a lover and a friend from his youth who, perhaps, between the two of them, might have been able to bring him back to life.