Juan Vásquez - The Informers

It was only a few minutes before the bookshop closed for lunch, so I stood up and began to say good-bye. But then Estela, the serious-looking woman with a commanding voice who ran the cash register, came over and placed a pile of ten or twelve copies of The Informers on the table, and while Lilly asked me to sign them, and told me she hadn't read it yet but intended to as soon as she had a free weekend, Estela turned off half the lights and left, closing the door behind her. Without the street noise, the horns and motors, the bookshop fell so silent that I could have felt intimidated. Hans had stopped beside the table of German books and through the green lenses of his glasses (the same ones he'd worn as long as I could remember) looked at them as any other customer might. "He has read it," Lilly told me quietly. "He still doesn't know what to think. That's why he hasn't told you. A friend of his was on the list. It was at the end of the war and for something very silly, like requesting a book from the Cervantes Bookshop or something like that. How do you feel? What have people said to you?" I shrugged, as if to say I'd rather not embark on that conversation, and then she said, "Hans knew them."

"Who?"

"The Deressers."

It wasn't so surprising, except that German and Austrian immigrants almost never formed part of the same circles: there were rivalries between them of the sort usual among the stateless when they notice (or believe they've noticed) that they have to dispute the right to the new territory. But it did indeed surprise me that Lilly or Hans might have known my father without my knowing. "No, we never met him," Lilly said when I asked her, looking at the keys of the Remington. "Neither Hans nor I, I'm sure of that, he's told me several times." For the second time I suffered an attack of paranoia. I thought Lilly was lying to me, that she had known my father and had also known his secret, the secret of his mistake, but over the years she'd managed to erase it from her life, to forget so completely that she could serve me as a customer in her bookshop without a single muscle in her face giving her away, she could talk to me about my first book without my noticing anything in her voice, and she could pretend, when she read my father's review of their friend Sara's life story, that she didn't know the subterranean motivations for his resentment. Was she lying? Was that possible? I wondered if I might have forever lost the capacity to trust people; whether finding out about my father's treachery and, to make it worse, having written and published the two-hundred-fifty-page confession I'd just written and published had transformed me: made me paranoid, suspicious, wary, turned me into a pitiable, pathetic creature, able to see conspiracies in the affection of a woman as transparent as Lilly Ungar. Was I doomed? Had my father's two-facedness contaminated me to the point of obliging me always to suspect deceit in the rest of humanity? Or had I been contaminated by the act of telling it in writing? Had writing The Informers been a mistake?

One of the first reviews of the book accused it, or accused me, of a deplorable mixture of narcissism and exhibitionism; and in spite of the scant respect I had for the reviewer, in spite of his bull-necked prose, the obvious paucity of his reading and his crew-cut reasoning, in spite of the fact that each of his sentences revealed a lack of rhythm, grammar, and syntax, in spite of the fact that he'd used his space for commentary to put his own inferiority complex (but calling it a "complex" would be flattery) and his literary failures (but calling them "literary" would be hyperbole) on display, in spite of his reproaches being little more than barroom gossip and his praise being cocktail-party cliches, in the days that followed I couldn't get his accusations out of my head. Maybe transforming the private into the public was a perversion-accepted, it's true, in these days of voyeurs and busybodies, of gossips, of indiscretion-and publishing a confession of any sort was, deep down, a behavior as sick as that of a man who exposes his thick cock to women in the street just for the pleasure of shocking them. After reading the book, and seeing himself included in it, my friend Jorge Mor had called me and said, "You've got every right, Gabriel, you've got every right in the world to tell whatever you like. But I felt strange, as if I'd walked into your room and seen you fucking someone. By accident, without meaning to. Reading the book I felt embarrassed, and I hadn't done anything to be ashamed of. You oblige people to know what they might not want to know. Why?" I told him that no one was obliged to read the book; that writing a memoir or any sort of autobiography implied touching on private aspects of a life, and the reader knows that. "Well, that's just it," said Jorge. "Why do you want to talk publicly about what's private? Hasn't it occurred to you that with this book you've done exactly what the girlfriend did to your dad, just more elegantly?" The attack took me by surprise, and I muttered a couple of rude replies and hung up without trying to hide my fury. How dare he make such a comparison? In my book I'd laid myself bare, I'd deliberately put myself in a position of vulnerability, I had refused to allow my father's errors to be forgotten: in many ways, I'd assumed responsibility for those errors. Because faults are inherited; guilt is inherited; one pays for what one's ancestors have done, everyone knows that. Was it not brave to confront this fact? Was it not, at least, commendable? And then my head filled with things my father had once said to me: he, too, had spoken to me about the private and the public, about the nobility of those who keep quiet and the parasitism of those who reveal. And he hadn't stopped there. That's why you wrote it, so everyone would know how good and compassionate you are . My father returned from the dead to accuse me. Look at me, admire me, I'm on the side of the good guys, I condemn, I denounce . I'd used him: I'd taken advantage, for my own exhibitionist and egocentric objectives, of the most terrible thing that happened in his life. Read me, love me, give me prizes for compassion, for goodness . At that moment I was no more than a narcissist, sublimated by the false prestige of the printed word, it's true, but a narcissist when it came right down to it. Divulging my father's disgrace was no more than a subtle, renewed betrayal: Jorge was right. I asked myself: Would I have been capable of publishing this book if my father had survived the accident in Las Palmas? The answer was clear, and also humiliating.

I suddenly felt out of place, uncomfortable; talking to Lilly Ungar in the closed bookshop, I felt like an intruder. "Maybe it was a bad thing to do," I said, at the same time as I finished signing the last copy. "Maybe I shouldn't have published this book." And I told her about a strange thing that had happened to me that week: I was on the way out of one of the publicity events the book's publication compelled, when a member of the audience, the only man in a bow tie in the whole auditorium, came over and asked me how Sara was, if I didn't think it necessary to force her to undergo the surgery or at least convince her to move to a warmer climate, since her sons seemed completely uninterested in doing what they should to protect her life. I almost told him off, but then, in a matter of seconds, found myself telling him that Sara had died and about the funeral and how sad we'd been, because I thought the man was not just a reader but that he knew her, that he was a relative or a friend of hers; and when I realized that wasn't the case, it was too late to react, because my book was responsible for that intrusion and it was my fault that a stranger seemed to know or created the illusion of having known Sara. I was talking about that-of the invasions the book seemed to invite, of lost privacy, of narcissistic satisfaction, of the way the book had taken the place of my memories, of the probable embezzlement of other people's lives, among them my father's, of all those undesirable consequences of something as innocent as a confession, and of the absence, or the nonexistence, of the desirable consequences that I had foreseen-when Lilly interrupted me. "I didn't ask you here to write silly letters, dear, and much less to sign books," she said, "but I wanted to sound you out first, listen to you talk for a while. To see what state you were in, sweetie. To make sure I wasn't doing something stupid." And she turned over an envelope that had been sitting on the desk the whole time, half hidden by the magazine Semana and the huge typewriter, and read out in her strong accent and guttural r s the words written on the front, under the stamp: Senor Gabriel Santoro, care of Hans and Lilly Ungar . It was a letter from Enrique Deresser. He'd read the book and asked me to go to see him.