Juan Vásquez - The Informers

So he never had left Colombia. "My dad thought you had," I told him.

"Maybe," he replied, "believing that was easier. Easier than looking for me, in any case. Easier than talking to me." He paused and then said, "But let's be fair: even if he had tried, and he didn't, he wouldn't have been able to find me. I left Bogota at the end of forty-six. What was left for me in that city? The glass factory had closed down, or rather it had gone under. A whole lifetime's capital had turned into a pocketful of small change after the business had been blacklisted for three years, after the time Papa spent in the Sabaneta. For practical purposes, I was an orphan. My friends, well, you already know about my friends. But no, it wasn't really a matter of wondering why I should stay in Bogota. It was a matter of wondering where to go. Because I didn't have a choice, you see. I hated Bogota with a hatred I can't explain to you now. Bogota was to blame for everything. Can I tell you something? I got hold of your dad's speech, in eighty-eight, the one at the Capitolio, you know? And I spent several days convinced he'd written it with me in mind, because it was everything I'd felt before, at least all the bad stuff."

"And may I presume you gave it to Sergio?"

"Why are you speaking to me so formally?"

He was right. Who was I trying to fool with these linguistic diplomacies? We'd never set eyes on each other; we'd known each other all our lives. Enrique was relaxed with me and it wasn't a problem, but the idioms of his current life hadn't completely eradicated the diction of his birthplace, and he went back and forth between the straitlaced politeness of Bogota and the offhand directness of his wife's city. "Yes, I gave it to Sergio. That's been the most difficult thing about all this, showing my son how I felt. The lengths I've gone to in order to make him understand me, to get him to sense what it was like. Because it's not enough to explain this, you can imagine, you want others to experience what happened fifty years ago. How do you do that? It's impossible really. But you try, you invent strategies. I gave him your book. The speech. What comes to the son directly from his father isn't worth anything, because children don't believe their parents, not a word, and that's how it should be. So you have to turn everything around, no? Go through another door, take them by surprise. Raising a son is tough, but explaining to him who you are, what kind of life has made you who you are, is the toughest thing in the world. Besides, there are things, I don't know how to explain it to you, I've taken this much better than he has. Obviously, because I've had half a century of it and he's just started. For him it's as if it happened yesterday. He treated you very badly, I'm sorry, you have to understand him."

In October 1946, after trying to borrow money that he knew he'd never be able to pay back from the Society of Free Germans, and receiving several negative responses, Enrique arranged to meet one of the members in the Cafe Windsor. Herr Ditterich hadn't wanted to talk about this in the presence of his colleagues, not wanting to appear sympathetic to the son of a man as suspicious as Konrad Deresser, but he knew his situation was difficult, and after all they were all emigrants, weren't they? Besides, young people had to help each other, Ditterich said to him, especially now that they were responsible for the reconstruction of the Fatherland. He gave him a letter of recommendation, told him who to ask for at the Cavalry School, and two weeks later Enrique left for Medellin. "They wanted me to talk to a German, that was all, a business matter. That's where I met Rebeca." Rebeca's father, wearing chaps, rode seven locally bred Paso Fino horses and a Lusita nian stallion, and a colonel from the school, in full uniform even though it was a Sunday, chose the stallion and five of the seven Paso Finos, and everyone went away happy. "I exchanged three sentences with the owner of the horses. I didn't have to do anything. He was a young man, it was his first time in Latin America, and it wasn't that he was mistrustful, but he needed someone to speak to him in his language. The important thing was Rebeca, a girl of sixteen, flame-haired and so skinny she looked like a matchstick. For me, at that moment, she was like an angel, and a teasing, brazen angel besides. She spent the whole lunch talking to me about her Viking ancestors like she was talking to a five-year-old, but touching my knee under the table. What am I saying 'touching' me, rubbing up against me like a cat in heat." Enrique-the Don Juan of Duitama-was talking as if now his former attractiveness surprised him, and I chose not to tell him what Sara Guterman had told me. "I asked the angel if she could get me a job, and when I went back to Bogota it was to pack up my things." It wasn't a good idea to marry the boss's daughter, said Enrique, but that's what happened a year later. "November 1947. And here we are, as if we'd just been introduced. It's grotesque, really."

"And in all those years you didn't have any more kids?"

"We didn't have any. Sergio is adopted."

"Oh, I see."

"The problem is mine. Don't ask me to explain it."

The most conventional life possible: that was what his tone of voice and his still hands seemed to suggest, in spite of the fact that supporting the penis of an imported horse or teaching it to trot to the rhythm of a Colombian folk dance weren't the most usual ways to earn a living. The conventional life had evolved with all its conventions for half a century; here, just eight hours by land from where my father had his own life, his own son, and had endured the premature death of his wife, Enrique Deresser pretended (as my father pretended) that he'd forgotten certain wartime events or that those events had never happened. "Of course I told Rebeca about my father," he said. "Everything was fresh in everyone's mind back then. In Medellin, too, there were Germans, Italians, even Japanese people who ended up more or less screwed, for more or less time, because of where they were from. There was a famous case, a certain Spadafora, an airline pilot who volunteered his services during the war against Peru. Every time he flew, the guy carried a little Indian box of saffron in his pocket. One of his aunts had bought it in a bazaar, the newspapers said, something like that. As an amulet, you know? Pilots are like that. So anyway, someone saw the little box and couldn't believe that it wasn't the same swastika as Hitler's. And the information got to where it shouldn't have. Spadafora spent a fortune on lawyers, and yes, eventually he managed to get off the blacklist. But he'd fought against Peru, he'd fought on the side of Colombia, I don't know if you see my point."

"Yeah, I do."

"The thing is I told Rebeca the whole thing, and she wasn't at all surprised. Just the opposite: she spent half her life asking me to put right what could be put right. She wanted me to look for Mama, at least. Something I never did, of course, and if Rebeca didn't it was only out of respect. I closed the door and threw away the key, as they say. What am I going to do. I've never been one to impose on others. Maybe it's a flaw, I don't know."

"But did you tell her about my dad?"

"I told her, yes. Sergio I told later, when your book about Sara came out. I don't know anything about books, but I liked the one you did about Sara. I was very sorry about her death. Although we'd never spoken again, it hit me hard. What was she like as an old lady? One time, at her family's hotel, we were arguing over something, something I said, and she made this face that I'd never seen. It was a blend of indignation and weariness, with a little bit of that personality that flees confrontations. It occurred to me that she'd look like that when she was old, and I told her. I've imagined her like that these last years, with that face. Indignant. Weary. But always agreeing with you. That's how Germans were back then. Bloss nicht auffallen , they said. Do you understand that?"