Juan Vásquez - The Informers

"A few days later, even before I knew about the matter, Margarita Deresser phoned the hotel. That was Enrique's mother's name. She was from Cali, with very pale skin and very long surnames, you know what I mean. I answered. She wanted to talk to my father, she explained to me. They needed witnesses. Deresser had requested an appointment with the Consultation Committee and they'd just got back from the interview; it had been at the United States Embassy. That was a new thing. Before it was only the embassy that could decide if a person should be included on the list or not. Now there was a committee. 'It didn't do any good,' Margarita said. 'It won't do any good, you'll see. What they want is our money, Sarita. And they'll take it with or without a committee, with Doctor Santos or with Lopez or whomever. This very thing has happened a thousand times already. Not to people we know, but you hear about these things.' They'd been offered tinticos and tecitos , a little coffee, a little tea, those diminutives people in Bogota like to use to seem friendly, and they'd been asked why the gentleman thought his name should be removed from the list of nationals with their assets frozen. They'd been listened to for fifteen minutes while they tried to explain that it was all a misunderstanding, that Senor Deresser didn't have any kind of economic or personal relations that could possibly go against the interests of Colombia or the United States, that he was no supporter of the Fuhrer, far from it, he felt loyal to President Roosevelt, and all so that finally an assistant or ambassadorial secretary could tell them that Senor Deresser's relations with enemy elements were more than proven, as was his sympathy for propaganda activities. That's how it was, they were very sorry, they weren't going to be able to reconsider the matter, it wasn't up to them, but to the State Department. 'I don't know what we're going to do,' said Margarita. 'Konrad of all people, that's what bothers me. If this happened to your father I know he'd work it out. But Konrad is weak, he lets life get him down. Someone has to explain it to them, Sarita. Tell them he hasn't got anything to do with the Axis or anyone, that he doesn't know anything about politics, he's only interested in music and being able to make his panes of glass in peace. Your father has to write to them. He has to tell them what Konrad's like, what we're all like. Important people have stayed in the hotel: You're not going to tell me they can't pull some strings, are you? We have to get him off that list, Sarita. We'll do whatever it takes, but we have to get him off that list. If not, this family's going to the devil.' I asked, 'And what does Enrique say?' And she told me, 'Enrique doesn't want anything to do with it. He says that's what we get for mixing with Nazis.' "

Of course (said Sara Guterman), then I knew where it all came from. Actually, the fact that Enrique had turned his back on Konrad seemed normal to me, because they'd never got along very well. But for him to wash his hands of something so serious was not so normal, because being on the list was going to affect him as well, no doubt about it. The truth is, I couldn't understand it. "Nobody knows Enrique," your dad said to me around that time. "Not you, not me, not his mother. Nobody has any reason to expect anything from him. You find that surprising? Well, you'll just have to swallow it and learn not to expect things from people. Nobody's what they seem to be. Nobody is ever what they seem to be. Even the simplest person has another face." Yes, as a philosophy that's fine, but there was nothing in the way Enrique was, nothing in his persona or his talk that could lead anyone to expect this. For me it was a betrayal, to put it frankly. The word is very strong. Betraying your father is something that happens only in the Bible, and that's how I saw it. But suddenly what your dad said was true, and we simply hadn't looked as closely at Enrique as we should have. And we'd known him for quite a while. He'd spent Holy Week in the hotel every year since 1940, more or less, maybe earlier. Old Konrad had been granted a sort of private tender, which was how my father did things in the hotel. Out of nationalistic preferences, or immigrant solidarity, or whatever you want to call it, the fact was that from the very beginning, it was Konrad who took charge of the four hundred and fifty-nine panes of glass for the renovation of the Nueva Europa. Imagine. Every mirror and every window, every rectangle of every glass door, beveled or otherwise, smoked for the boudoirs, frosted for the bathrooms, and silvered glass for the chandelier in the dining room. In reality, Enrique didn't care a fig for the hotel and his father's glass. Other things mattered to him. For example, the hotel was full of women, and Enrique was convinced that women existed on the face of the earth only so he could pick and choose between them as if they were avocados. Of course, sometimes it seemed he wasn't wrong. He'd arrive at the hotel in his elegant Everfit suits, with his Parker 51s, carrying flowers and moving with the self-confidence of a bolero singer and looking like an archduke, and the women would melt, it was embarrassing. But he was a fascinating guy-even I could never deny that. And not only because he had foreign airs, something which has always gone down well here, or because he moved as though he'd been offered the world and declined it out of modesty, or because he was able, simply by walking into the dining room with his hair slicked back and the manners of a nobleman's son, to evoke obscene comments from the female employees and secret favors from the guests' wives, but also because his voice seemed lie-proof. Enrique's words didn't matter-his authority mattered. I swear, Enrique made his interlocutors feel they were outside their lives for an instant, as if he'd rescued them and put them on an operatic stage. (But no, Enrique didn't like opera. Just the opposite, he looked down on it, he looked down on that music to which his father devoted his free time and some of his work time, too.) And when you talked to him, he looked in your eyes and at your mouth, your eyes and mouth, with such intensity that at first people wiped their mustaches, thinking they had crumbs there, or took off their spectacles to see whether there was something on the frames. Then you'd figure out that no, it was just the attention he gave. That was what it was like to talk to him. A war could break out in the garden, and he wouldn't take his eyes off you.

Enrique never spoke German in public. He'd learned it at home, it was the language he spoke with his father, but outside, working in the glassworks or when he was at the hotel, he would answer in Bogota Spanish even though old Konrad had asked in Swabian German. For your dad all this was a sacred mystery. The first time he went to the Deressers' house for dinner, that big, comfortable house in the neighborhood of La Soledad, he thought it was so strange. When he arrived it was like his friend, when he changed languages, was no longer the same person. Enrique was talking and he didn't understand. He was talking in his presence and he had no way of knowing what he was saying. At first he was taken aback, and then he became suspicious. But later Gabriel went off thinking it was the most fascinating spectacle he'd ever seen, and the next time he asked me to go with him. As a sort of guide to German customs, or occasional interpreter. Now I think he wanted witnesses. After dinner, Enrique asked old Konrad, "Would you go back for good?" He answered evasively and immediately started to speak about the language he'd been born into and then about Spanish, which seemed so difficult to him. He'd read some poet saying that slang was like a wart on the common language. That's what stayed with me, a wart. "No matter how hard we try," he said, "that's what we immigrants are, producers of warts." Then he closed the conversation, and it was almost better that way, because Enrique was apt to say very harsh things that he'd never allow himself to say about other things, about romantic composers or Bohemian glass. Enrique said he was never going to teach his children German, and he repeated it to your dad and to me on several occasions. I understood him, of course, because my father received letters from acquaintances or colleagues or distant relatives. In them people explained to us how terrible it was talking familiarly, using the language affectionately or to say pretty things, when for all practical purposes it was the language of National Socialism.