Juan Vásquez - The Informers

The fact is that during those first years the war was something heard on the radio, a sad spectacle from elsewhere. "The blacklists came later, and the hotels turned into luxurious jails," says Sara, referring to the concentration camps for citizens of the Axis nations. "Yes, that happened later. It was later that the war on the other side of the ocean came home to those of us on this side. We were so innocent, we thought we were safe. Anyone can confirm it for you. Everyone remembers it perfectly well: it was very difficult to be German at that time." In the Guterman family's hotel things happened that destroyed families, disrupted lives, ruined futures; but none of that was visible until much later, when time had gone by and the ruined futures and disrupted lives began to be noticed. Everywhere-in Bogota, in Cucuta, in Barranquilla, in miserable towns like Santander de Quilichao-it was the same; there were places, however, that seemed to work like black holes, invoking chaos, absorbing the worst of a person. The Gutermans' hotel, especially at a certain point in time, had been one of them. "Just thinking of it makes me sad," Sara Guterman says now, calling up those events forty-five years later. "Such a beautiful place, so dear to people, where such horrible things could happen." And what things were those? "It was as it says in the Bible. Brother shall betray brother, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents."

Of course, writing words such as Auswanderer or blacklists demands or should demand some sort of guarantee on the part of the one writing them. These were unreliable words and the book was full of them. I know this now, but then I barely suspected it: in manuscript, these pages had appeared so pacific and neutral that I never considered them capable of making anyone uncomfortable, much less of provoking disputes; the printed and bound version, however, was a sort of Molotov cocktail ready to land in the middle of the Santoro household.

"Ah, Santoro," said Dr. Raskovsky when a nurse intercepted him to ask how the surgery had gone. "Gabriel, isn't it? Yes, it went very well. Wait here. In a moment we can go in and see the patient." Then it had gone well? The patient was alive? "Not just alive, much more than that," said the doctor, already on his way and spouting automatic phrases. "You should see the heart he's got, just like new." And after the sort of dizziness that hit me when I heard the news, something strange happened: I didn't know if my name, pronounced by the doctor, referred to the patient or the patient's son. I looked for a bathroom to wash my face before going into intensive care. I did it thinking of my father, not wanting him to see me like this, because I couldn't remember the last time one of us had seen the other looking so out of sorts. In front of the mirror I took off my jacket. I saw two butterflies of sweat under my arms, and surprised myself by thinking of Dr. Raskovsky's armpits, as if we were close friends; and later, as I waited for my father to wake up, that intimacy I'd been seeking seemed detestable, perhaps because my father himself had taught me never to feel in debt to anyone. Not even to the one responsible for his still being alive.

Despite the doctor's having spoken in the plural, I went into intensive care, that torture chamber, by myself. The monitors blinked like owls on the surrounding walls and tables; there were six beds, arranged with odious symmetry and separated by opaque partition walls like the ones in public lavatories, with aluminum rails that reflected glints of neon light. The monitors each beeped in their own rhythm, the respirators breathed, and in one of those beds, the last one on the left, the only one that faced the board where the nurses wrote the day's instructions in red and black markers, was my father, breathing through a grayish corrugated tube that filled his mouth. I lifted his gown and saw for the second time in one day (after never having seen it in my whole life) my father's penis resting on his groin, almost at the level of his mutilated hand, and circumcised, unlike mine. They'd fitted him with a catheter so he wouldn't have to be disturbed when he needed to urinate. That was how it was: my father was communicating with the world through plastic tubes. And through electrodes arranged like patches on an animal's coat across his chest, on his forehead. And through needles: the one that was injecting him with tranquilizers and antibiotics disappeared into his neck, the one for the drip into the vein of his left arm. I sat on a round stool and said hello. "Hi, Dad. It's all over now, everything's fine." He couldn't hear me. "I told you, remember? I told you everything would be fine, and now it is. It's all over. We got through this." His respirator was working, his monitor kept beeping, but he had absented himself. The tube in his neck was taped to his face, and stretched the loose flesh of his cheeks (his sixty-seven-year-old cheeks). The effect underlined the tiredness of his skin, of his tissues, and I, closing my eyes a little, could see the speeded-up film of his decomposition. There was another image I tried to summon up, to see what I could learn from it: that of a first-sized plastic heart, which had sat for a whole month on my biology teacher's desk.

At four in the afternoon they asked me to leave, although I'd spent no more than ten minutes with the patient, but I went back the next day, first thing, and after confronting the aggressive bureaucracy of the San Pedro Clinic-the trip to the administrator's office, the request for a permanent-access pass that included my name and identity card and which I should keep well visible on my chest, the declaration that I was the patient's only relative and, therefore, only visitor-I stayed until after twelve, when I was kicked out by the same nurse who'd kicked me out the night before: a woman with thick makeup whose forehead was always sweaty. By my second visit, my father was beginning to wake up. That was one of the changes. The other was told to me by the nurse as if she were answering exam questions. "There was an attempt to remove the respirator. He didn't respond well. Fluid collected in his lungs, he lost consciousness, but he's a bit better now." There was one more tube wounding my father's body: it filled with bloody fluid and emptied into a bag with numbers on it to measure the quantity. Fluid had gotten into his lungs, and they were draining it off. He moaned about different pains, but none as intense as that from the tube inserted between his ribs, which obliged him to lie almost on his side despite the fact that this was precisely the most painful position for the incision in his chest. He couldn't speak for the pain: sometimes his face would contract into dreadful grimaces; sometimes he rested, making no sounds about what he was feeling, not looking at me. He didn't speak; and the tube in his mouth gave his complaints a tone that in other circumstances would have been comical. The nurse came, changed his oxygen, checked the drainage bag, and left again. One time she stayed for three minutes exactly, while she took his temperature, and asked me what had happened to my father's hand.

"What does it matter to you?" I said. "Just do your job and don't be nosy."

She didn't ask me any more questions, not that first day or in the days that followed, during which the routine was repeated. I took up all the visiting hours, exploiting the fact that my father had insisted on keeping the operation secret, so no relatives or friends came to lend support. Nevertheless, something seemed to indicate that this wasn't ideal. "Isn't there anyone outside?" was the first thing he asked me on the morning of the third day, as soon as they took the tube out of his mouth. "No, Dad, no one." And when the evening visiting hours began, he pointed to the door again and asked, through the haze of the drugs, if anyone had come. "No," I said. "No one's come to bother you." "I've been left all alone," he said. "I've managed to end up all alone. That's what I've endeavored to do, I've put all my efforts into it. And look, it's come out perfectly, not just anyone could manage it, look in the waiting room, quod erat demonstrandum ." He remained silent for a while because it was an effort to speak. "How I wish she were here," he said then. It took me a second to realize he was referring to my mother, not to Sara. "She would have kept me company, she was a good companion. She was so good, Gabriel. I don't know if you remember, why would you remember, I don't know if a child realizes these things. But she was wonderful. And a fellow like me with her, imagine. The way life goes. I never deserved her. She died and I never had time to deserve her. That's the first thing I think about when I think of her." I, on the other hand, thought about a misdiagnosed pneumonia, I thought about the clandestine maneuvers of the cancer; I thought, most of all, of the day my parents received the final diagnosis. I had been masturbating over a lingerie catalog, and the impression made by the coincidence of the illness and one of my first ejaculations was so powerful that I was feverish that whole night; and the following Sunday, when I stepped inside a church for the first time in my life, I had the bad idea to confess, and the priest thought it obvious that my perversions were responsible for what was happening to my mother. Only much later, well into, even comfortable in, what they call the age of majority, could I accept my innocence and understand that the illness had not been a punishment from on high or the chastisement that corresponded to my sin. But I'd never spoken of that to my father, and the variegated scene of intensive care, that seedy hotel of bad omens, didn't seem the ideal setting for such frankness. "I dreamed about her," my father was saying. "You don't have to tell me," I said. "Rest, don't talk so much." But it was too late: he'd started talking. "I dreamed I went to the cinema," he said. In the stalls, sitting three rows in front, was a woman who looked very much like my mother. The film was Of Human Bondage , which seemed incongruous given the cinema and also the audience; during the scene where Paul Henreid walks by himself in a poor area of London (it's a silent, nocturnal scene), my father could stand it no longer. From the darkness of the aisle, kneeling to keep out of people's way, he made out his wife's profile in the intermittent light from the film. "Where were you?" he asked her. "We thought you had died." "I'm not dead, Gabriel; what silly things you say." "But that's what we believed. We thought you had died of cancer." "You're both so silly," said my mother. "When I'm going to die I'll let you know." One of the darkest frames then appeared on the screen, maybe the black sky or a brick wall. The stalls went dark. When daylight reappeared in the film, my mother was walking between the rows toward the exit, without touching the knees of the people in the seats. Her sculptured face turned to look at my father before she left, and she waved good-bye.