Juan Vásquez - The Informers

"I wonder if it means something," my father said. And I was going to answer that it didn't-you know full well, I was going to say to him, in a rather impatient tone, that dreams don't mean anything, don't let the surgery fill your head with superstitions, they're electric impulses and nothing more, the synapses of a few disordered and confused neurons-when the patient took in a gulp of air, half opened his eyes and said, "Maybe we could let Sara know."

"Yes," I said. "If you want."

"Not for me," he said. "It's more for her. If we don't tell her there'll be hell to pay later."

I can't say I was surprised. The fact that we'd both thought of her in the space of a few days was less a coincidence than symptomatic of the discreet importance she had in our lives; once again I had the feeling about her that I'd had on several previous occasions, the notion that Sara Guterman was not the innocuous friend she seemed to be, that inoffensive, almost invisible foreigner, but rather someone with something more behind her image, and the confidence my father had always had in the image was moving. "I'll call her tonight," I said. "She'll be very pleased, that's for sure." I was about to say, She'll be very pleased that you've survived , but stopped myself in time, because confronting my father with the notion of survival could be even more harmful than a failed survival. That was him: a survivor. He'd survived the machete-wielding men and then his heart-that capricious muscle-and if he could talk to me about this, he'd say he'd also survived this city, where every landscape is a memento mori. Like a hostage who had been freed by his kidnappers, like a woman saved from a bomb blast by altering her itinerary at the last minute (by not doing her shopping at Los Tres Elefantes, by going for lunch with a friend instead of going to Centro 93), my father had survived. But suddenly I found myself wondering: What for? Why does a man want to keep living who at sixty-seven years of age could be said to be a superfluous element, someone who had completed his cycle, someone who had nothing pending in the world? His life didn't seem to hold much meaning anymore; at least, I thought, not the meaning that he would have wanted it to provide. Seeing him looking so small, nobody, not even his own son, would have guessed at the private revolution that was beginning to take shape inside his head.

That's how the inevitable perversion began, the moment one ends up becoming father to one's own father and witnesses, fascinated, the disrupted authority (power in the wrong hands) and out-of-place obedience (the one who was strong is fragile and accepts orders and impositions). Sara, of course, was with us by the time they discharged my father, so I could lean on her to get through those initial difficulties: the transfer of the patient to his own bed, the atmosphere of the apartment seeming inhospitable and even hostile compared to the elegance, the comforts, the intelligence of a hospital room. By the time we returned to his apartment, it was as if after the surgery his body was even more shrunken: the trip from the car door to his bed took us fifteen minutes because my father couldn't take two steps without having to stop to catch his breath, without feeling his heart was going to explode, and he said so, but saying so also made him short of breath, and the paranoia began all over again. His leg hurt (where they'd extracted the vein to make the graft), his chest hurt (as if the stitches were going to burst from one moment to the next), and he asked if we were sure the veins had been well sewn up (and the verb, with its connotations of manual trades, of craftsmanship, of a slapdash hobby, terrified him). As soon as we got him under the covers, he asked us to close the curtains but not to leave him alone, and he turned on his side, like a fetus or a frightened child, maybe out of habit from the tube stuck between his ribs for so many days, maybe because bodies have a way of making themselves small when there is danger.

Sara took charge of the injections at first, and I, instead of just letting her get on with it, watched her closely; with her black skirts down to her ankles, her knee-high boots and long sweaters-dressed like a forty-year-old-moving through my father's apartment with her swimmer's hips, Sara belied the three children she'd had, and from the back no one would have thought her any older if it weren't for the luminous gray of her hair, the perfect bun like a ball of nylon; her silhouette, in all its details, made the crisis my father was undergoing seem even starker. At some moment I wondered if the inescapable contrast between this woman's buoyant energy and his own crude deterioration mightn't be too much for him, but a sort of complicity soon became evident between the two of them, a current of collusion that there, in the theater of fondness and support and affection that any convalescence is, seemed to become more intense. There was more than one reason for it, as I found out later: Sara had also had her quota of impertinent physicians. Ten or so years before, she had been diagnosed with an aneurysm, and she, like the willful and skeptical woman she was, had taken a decision contrary to the one her children seemed to prefer: she refused to undergo surgery. "I'm too old to have my cranium opened," she'd said, and the impertinent one, as well as his colleagues, had conceded that it was not in any way possible to guarantee the success of the operation, and confessed that among the possible outcomes was partial paralysis or being reduced to a state of permanent stupidity for the rest of her life. That, however, wasn't the problem, but rather that Sara had also refused the other option the doctor proposed: to go and live in a warm climate, as close to sea level as possible, because in Bogota at two thousand six hundred meters the altitude multiplied the pressure with which her own blood threatened the weakened wall of one of her veins. "Suppose I've got ten years left to live," she apparently said. "Am I going to spend them on the coast, an hour by plane away from my children, from my grandchildren? Or in one of those towns, La Mesa or Girardot, where there's nothing but half-naked people and flies the size of Volkswagens?" So she'd stayed in Bogota, aware as she was that she was carrying a time bomb in her head, and frequenting the same places as ever, the same bookshops as ever, the same friends as ever.

The fact is that there was something fascinating in the showy familiarity between them. On the third day of the convalescence, as soon as the doorman announced Sara over the intercom, my father took the unused napkin out from under his plate, handed it to me, and dictated a welcome note, so when Sara came in she received the following comment, written at speed in one long blue word: From the anterior artery to the antagonistic aneurysm: long live bloody-minded blood vessels . Later there were other assonances, other alliterations, but this first note is still the one I remember best, a sort of declaration of civil conduct between the two oldies. If she was already there when I arrived to see my father, what I found was not a friend paying a visit to a sick man, with all its weight of worried questions and grateful answers, but a scene that seemed not to have moved for whole centuries: the woman sitting in a chair, her eyes fixed on the crossword puzzle she was working on, and the patient lying on his bed, as quiet and alone as the stone figure on a papal tomb. Sara didn't hug me, she didn't even stand up to say hello, she just took my face in her two dry hands and pulled it toward her and kissed me on the cheek-her smile didn't show her teeth: it was prudent, skeptical, reticent; she gave nothing away-and made me feel as if I were the visitor (not the son), as if she were the one who'd been taking care of my father all these days (and now she was grateful for my visit: how good to see you, thanks for coming, thanks for keeping us company). My father, for his part, was lost in his fog of medication and exhaustion. However, liberated from the corrugated tube that had breached his mouth, his face had now recovered some normality, and I could occasionally get the memory of his violated ribs and the draining of his lungs out of my head.