Juan Vásquez - The Informers

He left without saying good-bye?

And why would he say good-bye, if his intention was to talk to his friend and come straight back?

She had never suspected that Gabriel wasn't going to come back? That possibility never crossed her mind?

Yes, but only when it was already too late. The next day Gabriel got up very early, and he must have left without having a shower, because Angelina didn't hear him. She didn't hear him get up, didn't hear him get dressed, didn't hear him leave the room. When she woke up she found the note. Gabriel had written it on the hotel stationery but not on the writing paper, on an envelope, probably thinking of propping it up against the lamp on the bedside table and getting it to stay upright. I might be a while. In any case, by this afternoon I'll be free again. Thanks for everything. I love you . She reread the I love you and felt happy, but there was something that made her uncomfortable. I'll be free again . Free of her? Would Angelina turn into a nuisance when her mission as companion was completed? She thought what she had never thought: He's not going to come back . No, that was impossible, Gabriel wouldn't abandon her like that, not even if he'd used her for a purpose, and that purpose had been accomplished. No, it couldn't be. She endured it as best she could: turning on the television and looking through the channels (a few U.S. channels, one Spanish, even a Mexican one) for a program that might distract her, and she found that cartoons, all those hammer blows and point-blank gunshots, those explosions and free falls, that is, those caricatured cruelties precisely and carefully performed the labor of obliterating the small cruelties, the small uncertainties of real life. At midday she went down to the pool and ordered a lunch fit for three physiotherapists, all of them hungry, and asked them to charge it to the room. And it was there, in front of the wet children of a tourist from the coast, two ill-mannered little boys who splashed her as they ran past with their misted-up masks over their noses and their red water wings squeezing their biceps, that she realized as if they'd whispered it in her ear: He's not going to come back. He lied to me. He's going to do what he means to do and then he's going to go, he's going to leave me nice and comfortable in this hotel so I have a good time for a couple of days, but he's going to leave me. And that became more and more obvious as time went by, because the best proof that a person is not going to come back is that he doesn't come back, no? Angelina spent the afternoon stuck in the hotel, waiting for a call, waiting for a bellboy to come up to the room with a note, but that didn't happen, the wretched Gabriel hadn't even left her a note. And when she looked out of the window, as if she could see the road leading up to the hotel from the window, Angelina realized that she was in her city, in the place where she'd been born and lived for years and years, and that, nevertheless, she had nowhere to go. Once again, she thought. Once again men had conspired to convert a friendly city into a hostile city; to convert her, a stable woman with her feet firmly on the ground, into a stranger, an unsettled person, a foreigner.

Didn't she have any acquaintances left in Medellin?

Yes, there were people she knew, but it's not enough to know someone to ask them for a night's shelter, much less to explain the reasons why a person's been left where they were (she couldn't bring herself to say the word abandoned , it sounded pathetic to her, or at least too plaintive). She thought she could wander around the lighting displays that were everywhere in downtown Medellin at that time of year, stars and mangers and bells, all rustled up with colored lights and wires covered in green plastic; she thought of going for a walk through the city and simply looking at display windows, considering that three days before Christmas all the shops would be open and full of people, noise, garlands, decorated trees, lights, and Christmas carols; she thought of giving life an immediate chance to return to its course, to not go off the rails. She went down to the parking lot, saw that Gabriel had taken the car-and imagined him driving with his left hand and changing gears with the thumb of his mutilated hand-and found out that it had rained the night before by the rectangle of dry pavement you could still see where the car had been; and she went straight back up to the room, dumped everything of Gabriel's out of the suitcase onto the bed. That's how she spent the night, beside the clothes of the man who had left her. She didn't sleep well. At six in the morning she'd already called a taxi, and in less than fifteen minutes the taxi had picked her up and Angelina was on her way to the bus station.

So she also left without even leaving a note, without saying good-bye in any way?

Gabriel wasn't coming back, that was obvious. Why should she say good-bye? By leaving her dumped and rejected in a hotel, Gabriel had made it very clear that he didn't want to see her again: What kind of note could she have written? Of course, she didn't imagine she'd never see him again in her life; she thought back in Bogota she'd track him down to demand an explanation, or at least she'd talk to him, and she never imagined Gabriel would die in the act of leaving her, wasn't that very ironic? Yes, there are accidents that seem like punishments, not that it made her happy, that would be a disproportionate punishment. Gabriel dead after leaving her, incredible. If he'd even suspected it, he would have left in a different way. Everyone has their ways of leaving and ways of leaving depend on a thousand things: where we're leaving, why we're leaving, who we're leaving.

How did she find out about his death?

From the newspapers. Of course, the most incredible thing was that she passed the very spot a few hours later and didn't see anything. Her bus was an Expreso Bolivariano, just like the bus in the accident; it had left at seven in the morning, and Angelina was wide awake when they'd taken the road up to Las Palmas, but she hadn't noticed anything in particular, not the commotion of the morbid looking out of the window, or the traffic jams a more or less notorious accident can cause. And nothing in the world made her feel her world had changed, nothing warned her of this new absence, the disappearance, the hole in the order of things: that meant, of course, that her emotional links with Gabriel had broken completely and forever. Later, the rocking of the bus had made her sleepy, and then, half awake and half asleep, she'd thought again about the terrible story of the foreign family and their treacherous friend. At times it seemed impossible: Gabriel was too honest to act in such a cowardly way, too intelligent to do so out of ingenuousness or innocence. But maybe none of that was true, and the matter was just that simple: this man, who had used her to come to Medellin, who had slept with her, made plans for the future, told her he loved her, and all that just to leave her to her fate in a hotel room, this man was no different from his actions proved, and he'd kept the mask of a respectable person all his life at the expense of the credibility and affection of those around him. Everyone knows it: someone who betrays once will carry on betraying until he dies.

So she didn't believe in repentance?

She believed, all right, but she didn't think it possible that he had repented. Or maybe it was possible, but not unques tioningly commendable. In fact, if the repentance was genuine, and the desire to be forgiven genuine, Gabriel would not have had any reason not to carry on his relationship with her. The pretext of repentance was not a safe conduct for airing selfishness; nor did it exclude certain responsibilities or, at least, certain human priorities. We'll never know now what reasons Gabriel had for ceasing to love her, for deciding that returning to the hotel did not figure in his plans. Was he justified in hurting her that way, lying to her and deceiving her (writing that he would come back when it was perfectly clear he had no intention of doing so), laying such a cruel trap for her, and all that without taking into account the revelation of his true nature to her, who would quite happily have lived with the deception in order to keep him?