Juan Vásquez - The Informers

It was around then that Margarita wrote a letter to the senators. She was looking for help, and someone had suggested these names to her. And my father was useful for that, because Leonardo Lozano had stayed at the hotel several times. He wasn't what you'd call a regular client, but he knew my father and he liked to go and talk to him, blunder along in German and convince himself my father understood his blunderings. So, after the holidays, as soon as the official offices reopened, Papa delivered that letter in person. Although I didn't see that one in particular, I saw dozens of similar letters during those years, letters of pure controlled desperation, letters wearing straitjackets. It was always the same procedure, so I can tell you more or less with certainty. Margarita's letter, if it resembled the ones the rest of the people wrote, would have been addressed to one or more senators of the opposition. The most privileged wrote to ex-president Santos, but that didn't always work. Sometimes it was better to appeal to less high-ranking people, because the gringos were afraid of debates in the Congress. Fear of the hostility of an important politician. Fear of disrepute, because that led, I suppose, to loss of diplomatic power. There were senators famous for their opposition to the lists and for having got several Germans removed from them. Margarita must have written to one of these. The letter would have started off saying that she was a Colombian citizen, that her father was so-and-so and her father's profession was such-and-such, the more Colombian the better. Then she explained that her husband was German, but that he'd arrived in Colombia long before the war, his roots in the country were undeniable, they even had a Colombian son. And then, the proof: We go to Catholic mass every Sunday. Spanish is spoken in the home. Her husband had adapted to the customs of our country instead of imposing those of his own. And most of all: he had never, never ever had sympathies for the Reich, not for the Fuhrer, nor for his ideas. He is convinced that the war had to be won by the Allies, he admires and respects the efforts of President Roosevelt to protect world democracy. So the inclusion of her husband (or her son) on the list is completely unjust, an aberration as a result of his nationality and surname but not of his actions or his ideas, because furthermore neither her husband nor her son had ever participated in politics, those affairs had never mattered to him, and the only thing he wanted was for the war to be over so he could carry on living in peace in this country he loved as if it were his own, et cetera, et cetera, a long et cetera. The letter would have said all that, always the same; if someone had been quick enough they could have made a fortune selling printed prototypes. A plea of Colombianisms, or of Colombiaphilia, however you want to put it. It was pathetic to read these letters, doubly so if they hadn't been written by an intermediary but by the interested party himself. And at the same time, by pulling strings or by whatever means, there were propagandists of the Reich who managed to get off the list with public apologies and bouquets of flowers from the government.

A week later, Margarita received a stamped and franked reply on official stationery. Lozano's personal secretary regretted that the senators could not be of any help, something like that. It seemed they'd done several similar favors and now everyone was appealing to them, everyone looked to those who had opposed the lists in the Senate, and there came a time when Santos tired of sending messages, of giving references, of speaking well of Germans so they would be taken off the lists. Margarita's arrived when the strings that could be pulled had worn away. Because influence wears out, too, everyone knows that. The Deressers were out of luck. They simply got there too late, that's all. If all this had happened in 1941, when the lists were new and not so radical and people did things to revoke unfair inclusions, things would have been different. But it didn't happen in 1941. It happened in 1943. Two little years. And that made all the difference. Margarita sent a couple more letters but didn't even receive replies. Well, that's not quite true: the first didn't receive a reply, but the second did. The reply was that old Konrad was going to be confined to the Hotel Sabaneta, in Fusagasuga, in the department of Cundinamarca, until the end of the war, due to his links with propagandists affiliated with the government of the Third Reich, and given that reports led to the consideration that his civic and professional activities could be prejudicial to the security of the hemisphere. With all this pomp, with all this ceremoniousness, they informed him, and two days later a bus from the General Santander School came to pick him up.

"And Margarita? What happened to her?"

"Well, she made a choice. She had two options, to go or to stay, and she made a choice. I don't remember exactly when she left home, or when we found out, rather. For some reason, that fact has disappeared from my head, me, who never forgets anything. At the end of forty-four, or was it already the next year? How long had the old man been in the Hotel Sabaneta, six months or a year? Of course, what happened was that the failure of the company and of the family was kept secret, as was normal back then. Everyone saw the decline, everyone knew when they sold the machinery and the least necessary bits of furniture, but the details weren't visible from the outside. And then Margarita left home. The first weekend after she'd gone, Papa took us to Fusagasuga, to visit old Konrad. 'And if they put me on the list for this,' he said to me, 'let them. Having friends doesn't infringe on anybody's democratic security, as far as I know. If one is forbidden from having friends, it would be better to know it once and for all.' 'But they say he's got Nazi sympathies,' my mother said. And he said, 'We don't know that. It's not been proven. If it's shown to be true, Konrad will not hear from us again. But it has still not been proven, we can still go and visit him and keep him company. His wife has left him, that's no small thing. We're not going to look the other way.' I thought he was right, of course. Also, there was a pro-Nazi demonstration during those days in Fusagasuga, a large number of students went to shout slogans against the imprisonment of the Germans, and no one did anything. There weren't even any arrests.

"Enrique didn't go, of course, even though we offered him a lift. No, he stayed home, and we didn't even try to insist. By then he'd distanced himself from everyone. He wasn't speaking to his father, didn't go to visit him even when someone offered to take him to Fusagasuga. He'd even distanced himself from us. He didn't return messages, didn't call, didn't accept any invitations. When Margarita went away, he lost the only bond he had left. 'The saddest thing,' my father said, 'is that all this will be over one day. Things are going to go back to normal again. This has to end sooner or later. And who will fix this family? Who will tell Margarita to come back, that everything will be fine from now on?' And it was true. But I don't blame her, Gabriel. I didn't blame her then, but now I blame her less. I've passed the age that she was then. Now I'm older, much older than Margarita was when she left her husband and son, and I confess that I'd have done exactly the same. I'm sure of it. One doesn't have to wait until things work themselves out, because that could take a year, but it could also take twenty. My father asked, 'Who will tell Margarita to come back?' And I thought, without saying so: If she comes back, and if she stays with them and waits, and if it turns out that the internment camps are still there fifteen years hence, and the Germans are still stuck in the Hotel Sabaneta, who's going to pay her back those lost years? Who's going to give her body back the years that it lost waiting for abstract things, a new law, the end of a war?