Juan Vásquez - The Informers

What did she think happened between Gabriel Santoro and Enrique Deresser?

Supposing that they actually saw each other, no? Because we don't know that for sure either. The possibility that Gabriel, having got as far as Medellin, had lost his nerve, is quite real, it deserves to be taken into account. Angelina had thought of that during the funeral: What if Gabriel had repented of repenting? What if the fear of confronting his friend had been stronger than the possibility of forgiveness? What if Gabriel had sacrificed her, and then had died himself in the accident, and it was all for nothing ? In the cemetery, Angelina had met Gabriel's son, the journalist, and had suggested they meet the next day in the dead man's apartment with the intention of telling him everything: tell him who his father had really been; release him from deception as well. In the end, she hadn't been able to. And that was why: the possibility that Gabriel had never actually seen his friend. Because at that moment, after the violence of the cremation, the sadness of the whole ceremony, the idea that Gabriel had died coming from Medellin (after leaving her, yes, but without having carried out the object of the trip) was, more than absurd, heartless. And Angelina was not a heartless person.

And if they did actually see each other, what might have happened between them?

Angelina didn't know. To tell the truth, she wasn't interested. She'd already left all that behind. She'd already begun to forget Gabriel. She wanted to get on with her life now, start a new life. A chat between two tired old men about subjects half a century old? Please, please. Nothing could matter less to her.

I, of course, felt just the opposite. During the single hour of the broadcast more things seemed to have happened than during all my thirty years, or, to put it another way, from that moment on, it seemed like nothing except that local television program had happened in my life, and so many windows opened on to so many new rooms, so many traps, that instead of turning off the television and phoning Sara to talk about what Angelina had just revealed, which would have been the most logical thing to do, I allowed something resembling vertigo to take me outside, and I found myself driving down Seventh toward the bullring at eleven at night. Half my head was thinking of arriving unannounced at Sara's house, and the other half felt indignant, thought it almost treacherous (yes, the word had settled into my vocabulary, like a new font in a word processor) that Sara hadn't told me about Enrique Deresser. Enrique Deresser was alive; Enrique Deresser was in Medellin. Was it possible that she didn't know either? Was it possible he'd also hidden it from her, as Angelina had suggested? On television his lover had elevated herself to the level of supreme confi dante, the only person on earth my father trusted, or trusted sufficiently at least, to share the secret with and ask for her help. And what had she done? After declaring that she understood him, telling him she admired his contrition and his bravery, the courage a man of his age with the life he'd led would need to undertake a ten-hour trip with the sole intention of asking for forgiveness, after all that, what had she done? She had thought about herself. She didn't know, any more than the rest of the world, the reasons my father had had for ending their relationship (in a rather inelegant way, it's true, but elegance belongs to those with self-respect, elegance is part of a lifestyle that my father, at that moment, had renounced). In a man's struggle with his errors, Angelina had seen only the man who'd walked out of her life without saying good-bye, and had decided to respond to the humiliation. That's what she'd done: she'd informed on him. After his death, when he could no longer defend himself, she'd informed on him.

Deresser in Medellin? Had he perhaps fooled them all, had he pretended to leave Bogota and Colombia when actually he'd hidden and stayed hidden all these years? No, that was impossible. Perhaps he had really left, lived elsewhere-in Ecuador or Panama, in Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico-before returning incognito and starting life like the creature without a past, with mixed blood and no fixed nationality he sometimes, in his youth, had wanted to be? While I drove, I found myself speculating about his life, what might have happened during those forty years, how many times had he been wrong the way my father had been wrong, how many errors had he committed, how many things had he repented of doing, how many would he like to be forgiven for? The idea of Deresser being alive also transformed his image, if you could call the squalid and incomplete portrait Sara had conjured up for me an image, and it began to get saddled with the effects of having carried on acting and doing; it took away that curious virginity the disappeared have that makes them invulnerable to error. It was obvious: one who disappears loses, first of all, the ability to continue making mistakes, the capacity to betray and to lie. His character remains steady, or rather fixed, like the light on the silver of a negative. To disappear is to leave a moral portrait of oneself. Deresser, who for several days had been an abstraction for me (an abstraction that lived in two spaces: in Sara's voice and in the 1940s), now became vulnerable again. He was no longer a saint; he was no longer, or he wasn't only , a victim. He had been someone able to do harm like he'd done to my father; he still was, that is, he had been for half a century more. That half-century, I thought, had been given to him to carry on doing harm. And probably-no, with total certainty-he'd taken advantage of it.

He would have got married in the first country he went to, Panama or Venezuela, and in time he would have separated from his wife and also from his children because of those banal disagreements that turn into separations. Would he have changed his name when he married? In those days it wasn't too difficult, because the world was not as frightened as it is today of the identity of those who inhabit it, and Deresser could have, without much bureaucracy, called himself Javier, for example, or carried on being Enrique but changed his surname. Enrique Lopez would have struck him as common, and perhaps too common to sound convincing; Enrique Piedrahita would have worked better, a personal but inconspicuous name, idiosyncratic but not visible. And so Enrique Piedrahita would have left behind, once and for all, the detested Germanness that had caused him so many problems in Colombia, and with it he would have got rid of his father, of the memory of his father-that inherited memory that spoke of Germany as if the Kaiser were still alive, as if the Treaty of Versailles had never existed-and also the inherited faults, because Enrique Piedrahita, finally free from that nostalgic family, could not be suspected of uncomfortable relations, and no one could inform any authority of those relations: no one could accuse his family of Nazi sympathies, or of putting the safety of the hemisphere in jeopardy, or of threatening, with his nationality and his language, the interests of democracy. And if someone, on the way out of a cemetery, saw him in a black shirt, they would think he was in mourning, not accuse him of Fascism; and if someone heard him speak German, or speak fondly of the place where his father was born, they wouldn't follow him home, or go through his papers, or close his glass-and-mirror factory; and if someone found among his papers a drunken note insulting Roosevelt, and if someone. . and if someone. . No, none of that would happen. No one would include him on blacklists, no one would send him to a concentration camp in Fusagasuga, no one would mix him up with those who did serve the Nazi Party from positions protected by the country's conservative newspapers, no one would identify him with Laureano Gomez and his support for Franco, no one would take him for one of those heart-and-soul Nazis who had talked to him at the German Legation or in meetings of the German community before whom he'd pretended to nostalgia, patriotism, Germanness that he did not feel. And he would be free, he would be Enrique Piedrahita for the rest of his life and he would be free.