Juan Vásquez - The Informers

Bogota, February 1994

A year after finishing it, I published the book that you, reader, have just read. During that year several things happened; the most important, by a long way, was the death of Sara Guterman, who didn't live to see herself transformed for a second time into a character in a chronicle, and to whom I could not explain that the book's title, The Informers , referred to her as much as to my father, although the information each had supplied was of such a different nature. Her death occurred without pain or agony, just as predicted: the vein exploded, the blood inundated her brain, and in a matter of minutes Sara had died, lying in her bed and ready for a little siesta. It seems she had spent the morning rushing around from one side of Bogota to the other, trying (without success) to mediate between the Goethe Institute and the cultural attache of the German Embassy in organizing, with due anticipation, the commemorations of May 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. The German community of Bogota was divided: some wanted the Embassy to take charge of the ceremonies, as an exorcism and also an atonement, or, at least, as a strategy to improve their image; for others, decisions over the quality and size of the anniversary should be left in the hands of the Colombian government, it was not a good idea to go around stepping on toes or reminding everyone, Germans and Colombians, of what everyone would have preferred (consciously, voluntarily) to forget with the passing years. In any case, the people who had lived through the war were fewer and fewer, and those still alive were the children and grandchildren of those Germans: people who, in spite of their surnames, had no affiliation whatsoever with the other country, had never visited it or ever intended to do so, and in some cases hadn't even heard the language apart from the insults and interjections of an enraged grandfather. Among the things Sara had proposed and planned to carry out was an itinerant lecture-secondary schools, cultural associations, universities, German schools, and Hebrew schools-that we would give together on the events related in A Life in Exile and, more important, on the events not related there, for at the time of writing Sara and I had decided by mutual consent to exclude a number of subjects so as not to give her life story an inappropriate tone of grievance, but the discussion of which at a moment of anniversaries and commemorations seemed, more than permissible, pertinent and necessary. Since we thought we had time, since Sara's death occurred without any warning or decline, the only part of the lecture we'd managed to prepare was the selection of certain material. Sara looked through her Pandora's boxes and handed me a folder of well-chosen paragraphs, and well-chosen phrases underlined within those paragraphs. She intended to comment publicly on many texts that she felt had been unjustly ignored until now, among them whole sentences from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lopez de Mesa (Jews had a "parasitical orientation in life," and in Latin America there were "many undesirable elements, most of them Jews"), but thanks to the antagonistic aneurysm, none of that came to pass. Sara arrived home feeling tired one day, put a frozen chicken breast under a stream of running water, and lay down to rest. She didn't wake up again. The downstairs neighbor thought it odd that twelve hours later the pipes were still making a noise; she went upstairs to see if Sara had a problem or if the apartment was flooded, and ended up calling her sons and asking them to come with a set of keys and open the door; and the next day, as soon as was possible, Sara was buried in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery. After the Kaddish, someone, a bald man who spoke with a very pronounced accent-I'd become an expert on the subject, and knew what that implied: he was married to a German woman, not a Colombian, and he spoke to his children in German, not Spanish-said a few words that I liked: he compared Sara's life to a brick wall, and said that one could have placed a level on top and the bubble would have stayed in the very center, between the two lines, without ever moving from there. That was Sara: a solid and perfectly level wall. I felt that phrase did more justice to her memory than all the two hundred pages of my book, and I thought, for once, that it wouldn't be a bad thing to say so. But I didn't manage it, because as I tried to go over to the bald man, thinking of how to explain who I was and why I'd liked his little elegy so much, I found myself face-to-face with Sara's eldest son, who turned the tables of the situation in an unpredictable way when he broke away from those attempting to give him their condolences to greet me, to hug me and say, "I'm very sorry about your dad. My mum loved him very much, you know." At first I thought he was giving me his condolences (although rather belatedly); then I realized that he wasn't referring to my father's death but to his destroyed reputation.

Among the mourners were the owners of the Central Bookshop, Hans and Lilly Ungar. We said hello, I promised to go and see them one of these days, but, involved as I was in the writing of The Informers , never managed to do so. And in May, once the book was published, when I found a message on my answering machine in which Lilly invited me in a formal and rather peremptory tone to come to the bookshop, I thought the invitation was in some way related to Sara Guterman, or, at least, to that never-delivered lecture on the hidden anti-Semitism of Colombian politicians, for Hans Ungar (everyone knew this) was one of the most direct victims of the prohibitions Lopez de Mesa used to minimize the number of Jews arriving in Colombia, and he often said in interviews, but also in casual conversations, that his parents had died in German concentration camps largely due to the impossibility of obtaining a Colombian visa for them such as the one he'd obtained and with which he'd entered the country, from his native Austria, in 1938. When I arrived for the appointment I found them both, Hans and Lilly, sitting beside the solid gray table that functioned as the meeting place for the Germans of Bogota and from which, with the help of a dial telephone and an old typewriter-a Remington Rand, tall and heavy like a scale model of a coliseum-they ran the bookshop. In the main display cabinet there were three copies of my book. Lilly was wearing a burgundy-colored turtleneck sweater; Hans was wearing a tie and under his suit jacket he had put on an argyle sweater. On the table, beside a tall glass of water and a coffee cup stained with red lipstick, was the magazine Semana , which, exactly as Sara had suggested, had just published an article by way of commemoration, six pages (including an advertisement for South American Insurance) that there, lost among the rest of the news of a country not lacking in news, seemed liable to be overlooked.

The magazine was open to a page where there were two illustrations. On the left, a letter addressed to a certain Fritz Moschell, and dated July 16, 1934, and underneath: Document of the time: Everything to do with Germans was considered suspicious . Almost the entire remaining space was taken up with a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate after the bombings. The caption, in this case, was: "Berlin destroyed: In Colombia the echoes of the conflict were barely felt." It occurred to me then that this was the true reason for the meeting (for summoning me). Lilly offered me coffee; Hans, sitting beside us, seemed not to be listening to our conversation, and had his eyes fixed on the door to the bookshop and on the people who came in and out and asked for things and paid. After finishing her coffee, Lilly produced a piece of paper and I ended up helping her to correct a letter she intended to send to the magazine. "In the article entitled 'World War II Colombian Style,' published in your May 9 issue, I read that during the Second World War 'Lopez de Mesa's supposed anti-Semitism only complicated things.' To anyone familiar with the circular that the Minister of Foreign Affairs sent to the Colombian consulates in 1939, who has read therein the order to raise 'all objections humanly possible to granting visas to any more passports of Jewish elements, ' the Minister's anti-Semitism is much more than a supposition. I understand that the subject is a difficult one for Colombian citizens to discuss, but it should not be so in the media. For that reason I would like to make a small clarification. . " This was just one of the interpolations I helped her to draft; when between the two of us we had finished writing the letter, and revised it to make sure there were no errors of any kind, Lilly folded the paper and put it in one of the drawers of her desk so carelessly, with such lack of interest, that I couldn't help but wonder whether the favor she'd asked of me wasn't perhaps a pretext and the idea of composing with my help a sort of tiny and already superfluous protest an invention of Lilly or Hans to see me and to be closer to Sara Guterman, their recently deceased friend. After all, the Central Bookshop was the only bookshop that still had copies of A Life in Exile , in spite of the fact that seven years had passed since its publication. The Ungars had read the book; they'd thought it honest; Hans had even mentioned it on the radio, on an HJCK program he contributed to every once in a while. But maybe I was mistaken; maybe my visit had nothing to do with Sara; maybe these suspicions were absurd, because, all things considered, the matter of the letter was perfectly plausible. There was the magazine, there were the Ungars, there was the draft of the letter; there was no reason to suspect they hadn't asked me there to correct it, just as I'd done.