Juan Vásquez: The Informers

And that was how, at the end of 1987, I wrote a couple of pages, and was surprised to find, while looking through old papers, the index card on which I'd written, years earlier, a sort of quick writing course provided by my father upon discovering that I had started to write up my degree thesis. "First: everything that sounds good to the ear is good for the text. Second: in case of doubt, see first point." Just as when I was writing up my thesis, that card, pinned to the wall above my desk, served as an amulet, an incantation against fear. Those pages contained barely a fragment of that recounted life; there, for example, was the way the soldiers imprisoned Sara's father, Peter Guterman; there were the soldiers who smashed a plaster bust against the wall and sliced open the leather armchairs with their knives, to no avail, because the identity cards they were searching for were nowhere in that house, but rather creased inside her mother's corset and, eight days later, when Peter Guterman was released but his passport was not, allowed them to cross the border and embark, with their car and everything, at IJmuiden, a port on the canal a few minutes from Amsterdam. But the most important thing about those two pages was something else: within them was the confirmation that all could be told, the suggestion that I could be the one to tell it, and the promise of a strange satisfaction-giving shape to other people's lives, stealing what's happened to them, which is always disordered and confused, and putting it in order on paper; justifying, in some more or less honorable way, the curiosity I've always felt for all the emanations of other bodies (from ideas to menses), which has driven me, by a sort of internal compulsion, to violate secrets, reveal confidences, show interest in others the way a friend should, when deep down I'm just interviewing them like a vulgar reporter. But then I've never known where friendship stops and reporting starts.

With Sara, of course, things were no different. Over the course of several days I kept interrogating her, and did so with such devotion, or such morbid insistence, that I began to divide in two, to live the substitute and vicarious life of my interviewee and my original daily life as if they were distinct, and not a tale set in a reality. I witnessed the fascinating spectacle of memory preserved in storage: Sara kept file folders full of documents, a sort of testimony of her passage through the world as legitimate and material as a shed constructed with wood from her own land. There were open plastic folders, plastic folders with flaps, cardboard folders, both with and without elastic closures, pastel-colored folders and others that were white but dirty and others that were black, folders that slept there with no specific plans but prepared and very willing to exercise their role as second-rate Pandora's boxes. In the evenings, almost always toward the end of the conversation, Sara would put the folders away, take the cassette on which I'd recorded her voice over the last few hours out of the machine, put on a record of German songs from the thirties ("Veronika, der Lenz ist Da" or perhaps "Mein Kleiner Gruner Kaktus"), and offer me a drink, which we'd sip in silence listening to the old music. I liked to think that from outside, from an apartment whose curious tenant was spying on us, this would be the image: a fluorescent rectangle and two figures, a woman well settled into the imminence of old age and a younger man, a student or perhaps a son, in any case someone who was listening and was used to doing so. That was me: I kept my mouth shut and listened, but I wasn't her son; I took notes, because that was my job. And I thought later, at the right moment, when the raw material of her tale had finished, when the notes had been taken and the documents seen and the opinions heard, I would sit before the dossier of the case, of my case, and impose order: Was that not the chronicler's single privilege?

One of those days, Sara asked me why I wanted to write about her life, and I thought it would have been easy to evade the question or throw out any old witticism, but to answer with something approaching the truth was as essential to me as it seemed to be, at that moment, to her. I could have said that there were things I needed to come to understand. That certain areas of my experience (in my country, with my people, at this time that I happened to be living) had escaped me, generally because my attention was taken up with other more banal ones, and I wanted to keep that from continuing to happen. To become aware: that was my intention, at once simple and pretentious; and to think about the past, oblige someone to remember it, was one way of doing it, arm wrestling against entropy, an attempt to make the disorder of the world, whose only destiny was a more intense disorder, stop, be put in shackles, for once defeated. I could have said that or part of it; in my favor I point out that I avoided these grandiloquent lies and chose more humble lies, or rather, incomplete lies. "I want his approval, Sara," I told her. "I want him to look at me with respect. It matters more than anything ever has." I was going to complete the incomplete truth, to speak to Sara of the phrase with which my father once described her-"She is my sister in the shadows," he told me. "Without her I wouldn't have survived a week in this world of madness"-but I didn't manage to. Sara interrupted me. "I understand," she said. "I understand perfectly." And I didn't insist, because it seemed only normal that the shadow sister should understand everything without detailed explanations; but I noted on an index card: Chapter title: Sister in the Shadows. I never managed to use it, however, because my father was not mentioned in the interviews or in the book itself, despite having formed an important part-at least as far as could be seen-of Sara Guterman's exile.

I published A Life in Exile in November 1988, three months after my father's famous speech. The following is the first chapter of the book. It was titled, in bold italics, with four words that have been filling up across the years and that today, as I write, threaten to overflow: The Hotel Nueva Europa.

The first thing Peter Guterman did when he arrived in Duitama was to paint the house and build a second floor. There, separated by a narrow landing, were his office and his bedroom, arranged just as they had been in the house in Emmerich. He had always liked to keep his work and his family within a few meters of each other; furthermore, the idea of starting a new life in an old place seemed like taking his luck for granted. And so, he set about refurbishing. Meanwhile, other Germans, those in Tunja or those in Sogamoso, advised him time and again not to do so much work on a house that didn't belong to him.

"As soon as you have it looking nice," they told him, "the owner will ask for it back. You have to be careful here; these Colombians are cunning."

And that's how it went: the owner demanded the house back; he alleged a fictitious buyer and barely even apologized for the inconvenience. The Guterman family, who hadn't been in Colombia for six months yet, had to move again already. But then came the first stroke of luck. In those days something was going on in Tunja. The city was full of important people. A Swiss businessman from Berne, who was negotiating setting up pharmaceutical laboratories in Colombia, had become a friend of the family. One day, at around ten in the morning, he arrived at the house unexpectedly.

"I need an interpreter," he said to Peter Guterman. "It's more than an important negotiation. It's a matter of life or death."

Peter Guterman could think of no better solution than to offer his daughter, the only one in the family who could speak Spanish as well as understand it. Sara had to obey the Swiss man. She knew perfectly well that the will of an adult, and an adult who was a friend of her father's, was law to an adolescent like herself. On the other hand, she always felt insecure in that sort of situation: she had never managed to feel at ease with the unspoken rules of the host society. This man was European, like her. How had crossing the Atlantic changed his ways? Should she greet him as she would have greeted him in Emmerich? But this man, in Emmerich, would not have looked her in the face. Sara had not forgotten the occasional snubs she'd received over the last few years, or what happened to Gentiles' faces when they spoke of her father.