Juan Vásquez - The Informers

The review appeared a few days later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Fourteen. Thirteen. Around there."

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

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

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

"How so?"

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

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