Juan Vásquez - The Informers

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, compatriots all:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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