Juan Vásquez - The Informers

Days later, in Sara Guterman's house, where I had gone to spend New Year's Eve, I again thought of this small tragedy and told her. Sara gave me all the sympathy she could, but obviously couldn't contradict me or disprove the fact that my father's memory would gradually disappear little by little, and his disappearance would be pinned on circumstances as impalpable as the nonexistence of a recording, at the same time as her voice had been generously consigned to remain forever on a dozen cassettes. Her television was on, because we'd agreed that we'd pay little attention to the toasts and Colombian traditions of eating grapes and wearing yellow for luck, and we'd go from one year to the next watching the celebrations in other cities, and there were the images, the black skies suddenly filling with dense and luminous fireworks like cotton candy, the noise and the kisses, the clocks playing their starring roles in Delhi, in Moscow, in Paris, in Madrid, in New York, in Bogota, and the people of those cities chanting a countdown that in those moments was the most important thing in the universe. No German city featured in the televised inventory, and I thought of asking Sara if there was anyone in Germany-or Belgium, or Austria-with whom she would have liked to celebrate, relatives or friends she'd be with right now if she didn't live here but there, if she'd never emigrated. I was about to embark on that dangerous pastime, the speculation about an alternative life, and to thank her for her company on this night that I wouldn't have been able to get through on my own, when she cut me off in midsentence and put her hand on my arm, and the longest New Year's Eve of my life was formally inaugurated at that moment: Sara began to tell me about rumors circulating in the Bogota media that week, according to which Angelina had accepted a large amount of money from an important magazine, the name of which she did not yet know, in exchange for revealing in an interview that Gabriel Santoro, the man who was honored during his funeral and would in the near future be formally decorated, the lawyer who had distinguished himself as an orator for thirty years, not only by his talent but also by the high moral standards of his conduct, was not in fact what everyone had thought: he was an impostor, a liar, and a faithless lover. "This changes everything," Sara said to me. "Because there are things I'd rather you heard from me than had to read out there."

Christmas 1946. Well, not the twenty-fourth, but just a couple of days before. Almost exactly forty-five years ago, imagine, and I'm not one to dwell on anniversaries. Nothing odd in remembering a date like that, do you think? Everybody remembers things that happen at Christmas, and so do I, even though in my house we didn't celebrate the same things or on the same days. But Mama always paid a lot of attention to Christmas, partly, I think, because she wanted to blend in with her new country, the whole recent-arrival complex. When in Rome, et cetera. It would be odd if I did forget the date, even for a second, or if I couldn't remember exactly what happened that day, what I was wearing, what was in the newspapers. The problem is that I remember what happened the day before and the day after, a month before and a month after, because it was a very unusual period, and even as I was living through it I realized my life was changing. To witness the moment when your life changes forever is a very strange thing, I swear. And I have it here in my head, it's like a film that I can't turn off, that I've seen a thousand times. Sometimes I'd like to turn off the film, lose it forever. But then I think: I can't do that to Gabriel. When it was obvious that he was going to forget it all, that his intention was to erase his part in the film come hell or high water, I thought I would become his memory, the idiotic idea of being someone else's memory occurred to me and stayed stuck in my head. Now you can go down to the corner and buy memory, right? At least my grandchildren have. They get a taxi and go to the computer shop and buy memory-I'm sure you've done it, too-I don't even know what a computer is, I haven't wanted to learn, and asking my grandchildren how these things work is to subject myself to their impatience. So anyway, I was Gabriel's memory, although I couldn't talk about that to anybody. I was and maybe still am such a terrible thing: a memory forbidden from admitting that it remembers. My sons don't let me remember either. I'm not allowed to speak to my grandchildren about what happened in those years. I thought about that just a little while ago, I'd never realized: I've gone through life heeding people who forbid me to remember; is that not the strangest thing in the world? So the film in my head ended up existing only in my head. Like those Chaplin films that were lost for so long and they now say they've found, I don't know if you saw the news anywhere. Anyway, that's what I was, a reel, a spool, a roll, I don't know what you call it, a can of film that gets lost, and no one cares that it remains lost because no one intends to show it, and if someone did show it I swear no one would go to see it. What we did go to see was Of Human Bondage , which was showing then, before Christmas. I loved Paul Henreid; we were all a little annoyed with him because he'd taken Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and hadn't left her to Rick, who was so charming. And we went to see it. Gabriel didn't like it. Of course, he'd read the novel. Who wrote the novel?"

"Somerset Maugham."

"Yes, that one. And he hadn't liked the novel either. Anyway, that was at the beginning of December. A week later, when I had managed to convince him to see it again, to see if he liked it this time, we received the news. Konrad Deresser had killed himself. Konrad, Enrique's father. I'm not even sure you know who I'm talking about."

"Enrique Deresser, yes. Dad's friend, no? I think he met him at your hotel. Yeah, he talked to me about Enrique Deresser a couple of times, especially when I was about twelve or thirteen, and one time he told me about the death of Konrad Deresser. But then he didn't anymore. He stopped mentioning the subject. Just like that, all of a sudden. As if Deresser was the Christ child or Santa Claus, you know? As if my father had said to me, Children talk about these things, but for an adult they are ridiculous characters. That happened with him."

"Tell me what you know."

"I know that Enrique's father went broke. I know he killed himself, took I don't know how many sleeping pills and washed them down with a cocktail of liquor and gunpowder. I also know that it all happened in a dive of a hotel, no, in a boardinghouse on Twelfth Street, on Twelfth around Fifth or Sixth, because one time we were walking past there and Dad told me. Look, this is where Deresser's father killed himself, he told me. I remember it very clearly, we were walking down Fifth Avenue toward Luis Angel Arango. We were going to look for a couple of books that he thought were absolutely crucial for my thesis. Longinus's On the Sublime , and The Art of Persuasion in Greece by Kennedy. He thought my thesis was for a different degree, I guess."

"That's incredible, you remember the titles? How can you? What an amazing memory."

"One always remember titles, Sara. When my mum died I was reading The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming. When I graduated I was reading Clandestine in Chile . Garcia Marquez. When they killed Lara Bonilla, I was reading Hiroshima . John Hersey. One always remembers, or at least that's how I am. Not you? Don't you remember what you were reading on important dates? Let's see, what were you reading when your husband died?"

"I don't know. I remember there was a bullfight on. It was Pepe Caceres. The bull caught him but he wasn't hurt. I saw it all from up here. And I don't even like bullfighting."