Juan Vásquez - The Informers

I used to go to these classes just for the pleasure of seeing him embody Gaitan or whomever (other more or less regular characters were Rojas Pinilla and Lleras Restrepo), and I got used to watching him, seeing him squaring up like a retired boxer, his prominent jaw and cheekbones, the imposing geometry of his back that filled out his suits, his eyebrows so long they got in his eyes and sometimes seemed to sweep across his lids like theater curtains, and his hands, always and especially his hands. The left was so wide and the fingers so long that he could pick up a football with his fingertips; the right was no more than a wrinkled stump on which remained only the mast of his erect thumb. My father was about twelve, and alone in his grandparents' house in Tunja, when three men with machetes and rolled-up trousers came in through a kitchen window, smelling of cheap liquor and damp ponchos and shouting "Death to the Liberal Party," and didn't find my grandfather, who was standing for election to the provincial government of Boyaca and would be ambushed a few months later in Sogamoso, but only his son, a child who was still in his pajamas even though it was after nine in the morning. One of them chased him, saw him trip over a clump of earth and get tangled up in the overgrown pasture of a neighboring field; after one blow of his machete, he left him for dead. My father had raised a hand to protect himself, and the rusty blade sliced off his four fingers. Maria Rosa, the cook, began to worry when he didn't show up for lunch, and finally found him a couple of hours after the machete attack, in time to stop him bleeding to death. But this last part my father didn't remember; they told him later, just as they told him about his fevers and the incoherent things he said-seeming to confuse the machete-wielding men with the pirates of Salgari books-amid the feverish hallucinations. He had to learn how to write all over again, this time with his left hand, but he never achieved the necessary dexterity, and I sometimes thought, without ever saying so, that his disjointed and deformed penmanship, those small child's capital letters that began brief squadrons of scribbles, was the only reason a man who'd spent a lifetime among other people's books had never written a book of his own. His subject was the word, spoken and read, but never written by his hand. He felt clumsy using a pen and was unable to operate a keyboard: writing was a reminder of his handicap, his defect, his shame. And seeing him humiliate his most gifted students, seeing him flog them with his vehement sarcasm, I used to think: You're taking revenge. This is your revenge .

But none of that seemed to have any consequences in the real world, where my father's success was as unstoppable as slander. The seminar became popular among experts in criminal law and postgraduate students, lawyers employed by multinationals and retired judges with time on their hands; and there came a time when this old professor with his useless knowledge and superfluous techniques had to hang on the wall, between his desk and bookshelves, a kind of kitsch, colonial shelf, upon which piled up, behind the little rail with its pudgy columns, the silver trays and the diplomas on cardboard, on watermarked paper, on imitation parchment, and the particleboard plaques with eye-catching coats of arms in colored aluminum.

FOR GABRIEL SANTORO, IN RECOGNITION OF TWENTY YEARS OF PEDAGOGICAL LABOR. . CERTIFIES THAT DOCTOR GABRIEL SANTORO, BY VIRTUE OF HIS CIVIL MERITS. . THE MAYORALTY OF GREATER BOGOTA, IN HOMAGE TO DOCTOR GABRIEL SANTORO. .

There, in that sort of sanctuary for sacred cows, the sacred cow who was my father spent his days. Yes, that was his reputation: my father knew it when they called him from city hall to offer him the speech at the Capitolio Nacional; that is, to ask him to deliver a few commonplaces in front of bored politicians. This peaceable professor-they would have thought-ticked all the right boxes for the event. My father didn't give them anything they expected.

He did not speak about 1538. He did not speak about our illustrious founder, Don Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, whose pigeon-shit-covered statue he passed every time he went to have a coffee and brandy in the Cafe Pasaje. He did not speak about the twelve little huts or the Chorro de Quevedo, Quevedo's stream, the spot where the city had been founded, which my father used to say he could never mention without his mind being invaded by the image of a pissing poet. Contravening the commemorative tradition in Colombia (this country that has always liked to commemorate everything), my father did not make his speech a politicized version of our childhood history primers. He did not abide by the terms of the agreement; he betrayed the expectations of a couple hundred politicians, peaceful men who desired only to be swept along for a while by the inertia of optimism and then be freed promptly to go and spend the August 7 holiday with their families. I was there, of course. I heard the words spat out into mediocre microphones; I saw the faces of those listening to him, and noticed the moment when some of them stopped looking at the orator to look at one another: the imperturbable eyebrows, the stiff necks, the hands with their wedding rings straightening their ties. Afterward, they all commented on the courage it took to pronounce those words, the act of profound contrition, of intrepid honesty there was in each one of those sentences-all of which, I'm sure, held no importance for my father, who wanted only to dust off his rifles and take his best shots in the presence of a select audience. None of them, however, could recognize the value of that exemplary model of rhetoric: a valiant introduction, because he relinquished the chance to appeal to his audience's sympathies ("I'm not here to celebrate anything"), a narrative based on confrontation ("This city has been betrayed. Betrayed by all of you for almost half a millennium"), an elegant conclusion that began with the most elegant figure of classical oratory ("There once was a time when it was possible to speak of this city"). And then that final paragraph, which would later serve as a mine of epigraphs for various official publications and was repeated in all the newspapers the way they repeat Simon Bolivar's I shall go quietly down to my grave or Colonel, you must save our nation .

Somewhere in Plato we read: "Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me, but the people of a city most certainly do." Citizens, I propose we learn from ours, I propose we undertake the political and moral reconstruction of Bogota. We shall achieve resurrection through our industry, our perseverance, our will. On her four hundred and fiftieth birthday, Bogota is a young city yet to be made. To forget this, citizens, is to endanger our own survival. Do not forget, citizens, nor let us forget.

My father spoke about reconstruction and morals and perseverance, and he did so without blushing, because he focused less on what he said than on the device he used to say it. Later he would comment: "The last sentence is nonsense, but the alexandrine is pretty. It fits nicely there, don't you think?"

The whole speech lasted sixteen minutes and twenty seconds-according to my stopwatch and not including the fervent applause-a tiny slice of that August 6, 1988, when Bogota turned four hundred and fifty, Colombia celebrated one hundred and sixty-nine years less a day of independence, my mother had been dead for twelve years, six months, and twenty-one days, and I, who was twenty-seven years, six months, and four days old, suddenly felt overwhelmingly convinced of my own invulnerability, and everything seemed to indicate that there where my father and I were, each in charge of his own successful life, nothing could ever happen to us, because the conspiracy of things (what we call luck) was on our side, and from then on we could expect little more than an inventory of achievements, ranks and ranks of those grandiloquent capitals: the Pride of our Friends, the Envy of our Enemies, Mission Accomplished. I don't have to say it, but I'm going to say it: those predictions were completely mistaken. I published a book, an innocent book, and then nothing was ever the same again.