Juan Vásquez - The Informers

"After pawning The Mastersingers , Deresser must have known what he would spend the money on. He went down Seventh then headed north, walking slowly like a tourist. 'He stood for about half an hour in front of the Granada,' said Josefina. Not right in front of it on the same side of the street, but on the opposite sidewalk, as if he were about to shoot an elephant and was keeping an eye on it from a distance. But when he did go into the pharmacy, when he finally made up his mind, he went in and came out again in two seconds. 'I think it was when he came out that he noticed. I was really hidden. I was there in Parque Santander, behind a tree, don't know how my little monkey did it, but I think that's where he saw me.' And then again the same thing, but in reverse: again south on Seventh, passing in front of Gabriel's office, though no one can ever know if Deresser thought of Gaitan at that moment, even if purely through the power of suggestion. He kept going down to the Plaza de Bolivar, as if this time he did have an appointment. A few blocks before arriving, he could already hear the noise of the people gathered in the Plaza de Bolivar, even if those people weren't shouting or singing or protesting. The ladies were really quiet, very decent they were, all of them standing facing the cathedral and some already with rosaries in their hands, the older ones especially. For Josefina, these were strange spaces, strange and even hostile, and she didn't usually go anywhere near them. The last time she'd passed through this plaza, though it was only a few blocks from her house, she'd been like a zombie following the people who came to hear the Te Deum and to wave flags and shout things the day the war ended.

"It was a quarter past three in the afternoon. The homage to the Archbishop had started not long before, certainly, because when the ladies at the front began to move toward the Palacio, there were a few at the back who were still feeding the pigeons little bits of bread, crouched down, holding their parasols in one hand, stretching out the other gloved hand full of crumbs. Josefina looked at them, dying of envy, because she liked pigeons but was allergic to them. And for a second, a single second, she watched one of those ladies, one who was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with pink flowers, and who wasn't giving the pigeons bread crumbs but grains of hard yellow corn, and she stood watching the corn that bounced around, when a fat, reddish pigeon pecked at it on the ground. She was jealous of the lady with the black sun hat for the ease with which she could approach the pigeons. When Josefina, recently arrived in Bogota, had tried to do the same, her eyes had begun to water and her nose to itch so badly that she'd had to sit on the steps of the Capitolio because she couldn't see where she was going for the tears. Later, in the afternoon, she'd broken out in a terrible rash on her neck, and she didn't know and no one wanted to tell her where she could buy calamine lotion to put on to stop her scratching so much. Three days. Three days it took her to discover the Granada, which was so close to her boardinghouse. There she could get calamine when she no longer needed it, when she wasn't itchy anymore and already knew that she could never go near another pigeon in her life. And thinking about this, about the lotion and the Granada Pharmacy, she looked up again, after this briefest of seconds, and noticed that Deresser wasn't there anymore.

"She looked all around, swept the plaza with her gaze. She circled round the little group of women who were now moving. She went among them and endured their insults. They called her everything, insulted her the way those on the inside usually insult someone on the outside. But she didn't see him, she couldn't find him, she'd lost him. All she could see were black hats and dresses as if she were suddenly in the middle of a funeral, everyone wearing gloves, as if touching each other disgusted them, but among these easily disgusted people she didn't manage to find Deresser, only two or three faces that looked at her in horror, two or three mouths that said, A negress, a negress. She went all around the square, twice passed the window out of which Bolivar had leaped to keep from being cut to pieces in his own bed, but she didn't think of Bolivar or of anyone other than Konrad Deresser, a man who was fleeing from her, who was hiding from her, but at no point did it occur to her to recover her dignity, be guided by pride and stop looking for someone who at that moment did not want to be with her. It didn't occur to her that Deresser might have gone off with another woman, because that had never mattered to them, so he had no reason to hide such a thing from her. It didn't occur to her that Deresser might be mixed up in some shady business, because, in spite of having reasons to go mad with fury against this crazy country, which had broken his life and his family into pieces, in spite of all that, Deresser had never been one of those who take matters into their own hands. Quite the contrary, he was gentle, gentle as a lamb, too gentle for the world he got stuck with after forty-one. No, none of that occurred to her. Looking for him through La Candelaria and then down Seventh, Josefina was thinking about him the way you think about a lost child: more worried about him than about herself, less worried about losing him than about the fright the child will get when he realizes he's lost.

"She arrived back at the boardinghouse just after five in the afternoon. On her way she'd passed a group of men going to pay homage to the Archbishop just as their wives had done a couple of hours earlier, and she thought how odd the people of Bogota were, that they did everything like that, the men on one side, the women on the other, it was a miracle they hadn't gone extinct. Among the men she'd seen Don Federico Alzate, with whom she had an appointment later, and she acted as she always did when she ran into one of her clients in the street, looking down at her sandals and her white toenails, counting her toes, because she thought that this way, thinking about something else and not about pretending, the other's shame and her own pretense would no longer be visible in her face. And now in her room she lay down to wait. She couldn't wait by the window, because her room didn't have any windows. 'I realized that people without windows wait differently,' she told us later. At ten to seven, when Federico Alzate arrived, she was still waiting. Josefina normally insisted her clients take her somewhere else, out of a tacit agreement with Deresser and because it also seemed wrong to her to sleep in the same bed she used to earn the money to pay for it. But this time she chose to stay. She had time to get the job done. It was hours later, when her client had left and Josefina was washing, that she heard shouts on the stairs. It was the owner of the hardware store on the ground floor. He came repeating like a parrot what he'd just been told: Deresser had been seen laid out on Jimenez Avenue, three blocks from there, swimming in his own vomit.

"He wasn't dead, but when Josefina found him there was nothing to be done. The smell was that of a dead man, in any case, or at least that's the memory she was left with. Josefina discovered then that she'd grabbed the money she'd just earned on her way out the door, and she wanted to give the ironmonger a peso to help her get Deresser to a hospital, but the ironmonger was already walking away and pretending not to hear. Josefina stopped two taxis, and neither of them wanted to take her even though she offered them the whole three pesos she had in her hand. Then she felt something on her leg and, lifting up her skirt, discovered she hadn't put on any underwear, and a mixture of water and semen was running down her thigh, making her kneel down and retch, and at the same time, as if the world had come to an agreement, a fellow with an open umbrella though it wasn't raining came over and said to her, 'Don't trouble yourself, baby. You can see from here he's already on the other side.' Later, when it was dark, when first the police had come and then the detectives to take the body away, a journalist was listening to the statements of a witness. 'I saw him running over there,' he said and pointed toward Third, 'as if he was drunk, and covered in sick, and shouting, he was shouting that his stomach hurt.' It seems, as was later discovered, that Deresser had gone to sit in the Chorro de Quevedo, presumably after giving Josefina the slip, and in all likelihood it was there that he took the pills, although no one knows or ever will who got the gunpowder-laced alcohol for him. It's incredible that he actually managed to walk from the Chorro to the place where they found him, near the Parque de los Periodistas. That's what had the most effect on Gabriel, the image of Konrad Deresser running half asleep and feeling the mixture burning his guts instead of anesthe tizing him and killing him silently as he'd expected. 'He must have been very frightened, and sleeping pills take longer to work in a frightened person,' years later a doctor told Gabriel, after he'd explained the case, without naming any names, as a hypothetical case, just out of interest. 'And would it be very painful?' asked Gabriel. 'Oh, yes,' replied the doctor. 'It would hurt worse than death.'