The Informers (18 page)

It was around then that Margarita wrote a letter to the senators. She was looking for help, and someone had suggested these names to her. And my father was useful for that, because Leonardo Lozano had stayed at the hotel several times. He wasn't what you'd call a regular client, but he knew my father and he liked to go and talk to him, blunder along in German and convince himself my father understood his blunderings. So, after the holidays, as soon as the official offices reopened, Papa delivered that letter in person. Although I didn't see that one in particular, I saw dozens of similar letters during those years, letters of pure controlled desperation, letters wearing straitjackets. It was always the same procedure, so I can tell you more or less with certainty. Margarita's letter, if it resembled the ones the rest of the people wrote, would have been addressed to one or more senators of the opposition. The most privileged wrote to ex-president Santos, but that didn't always work. Sometimes it was better to appeal to less high-ranking people, because the gringos were afraid of debates in the Congress. Fear of the hostility of an important politician. Fear of disrepute, because that led, I suppose, to loss of diplomatic power. There were senators famous for their opposition to the lists and for having got several Germans removed from them. Margarita must have written to one of these. The letter would have started off saying that she was a Colombian citizen, that her father was so-and-so and her father's profession was such-and-such, the more Colombian the better. Then she explained that her husband was German, but that he'd arrived in Colombia long before the war, his roots in the country were undeniable, they even had a Colombian son. And then, the proof: We go to Catholic mass every Sunday. Spanish is spoken in the home. Her husband had adapted to the customs of our country instead of imposing those of his own. And most of all: he had never, never ever had sympathies for the Reich, not for the Fuhrer, nor for his ideas. He is convinced that the war had to be won by the Allies, he admires and respects the efforts of President Roosevelt to protect world democracy. So the inclusion of her husband (or her son) on the list is completely unjust, an aberration as a result of his nationality and surname but not of his actions or his ideas, because furthermore neither her husband nor her son had ever participated in politics, those affairs had never mattered to him, and the only thing he wanted was for the war to be over so he could carry on living in peace in this country he loved as if it were his own, et cetera, et cetera, a long et cetera. The letter would have said all that, always the same; if someone had been quick enough they could have made a fortune selling printed prototypes. A plea of Colombianisms, or of Colombiaphilia, however you want to put it. It was pathetic to read these letters, doubly so if they hadn't been written by an intermediary but by the interested party himself. And at the same time, by pulling strings or by whatever means, there were propagandists of the Reich who managed to get off the list with public apologies and bouquets of flowers from the government.

A week later, Margarita received a stamped and franked reply on official stationery. Lozano's personal secretary regretted that the senators could not be of any help, something like that. It seemed they'd done several similar favors and now everyone was appealing to them, everyone looked to those who had opposed the lists in the Senate, and there came a time when Santos tired of sending messages, of giving references, of speaking well of Germans so they would be taken off the lists. Margarita's arrived when the strings that could be pulled had worn away. Because influence wears out, too, everyone knows that. The Deressers were out of luck. They simply got there too late, that's all. If all this had happened in 1941, when the lists were new and not so radical and people did things to revoke unfair inclusions, things would have been different. But it didn't happen in 1941. It happened in 1943. Two little years. And that made all the difference. Margarita sent a couple more letters but didn't even receive replies. Well, that's not quite true: the first didn't receive a reply, but the second did. The reply was that old Konrad was going to be confined to the Hotel Sabaneta, in Fusagasuga, in the department of Cundinamarca, until the end of the war, due to his links with propagandists affiliated with the government of the Third Reich, and given that reports led to the consideration that his civic and professional activities could be prejudicial to the security of the hemisphere. With all this pomp, with all this ceremoniousness, they informed him, and two days later a bus from the General Santander School came to pick him up.

"And Margarita? What happened to her?"

"Well, she made a choice. She had two options, to go or to stay, and she made a choice. I don't remember exactly when she left home, or when we found out, rather. For some reason, that fact has disappeared from my head, me, who never forgets anything. At the end of forty-four, or was it already the next year? How long had the old man been in the Hotel Sabaneta, six months or a year? Of course, what happened was that the failure of the company and of the family was kept secret, as was normal back then. Everyone saw the decline, everyone knew when they sold the machinery and the least necessary bits of furniture, but the details weren't visible from the outside. And then Margarita left home. The first weekend after she'd gone, Papa took us to Fusagasuga, to visit old Konrad. 'And if they put me on the list for this,' he said to me, 'let them. Having friends doesn't infringe on anybody's democratic security, as far as I know. If one is forbidden from having friends, it would be better to know it once and for all.' 'But they say he's got Nazi sympathies,' my mother said. And he said, 'We don't know that. It's not been proven. If it's shown to be true, Konrad will not hear from us again. But it has still not been proven, we can still go and visit him and keep him company. His wife has left him, that's no small thing. We're not going to look the other way.' I thought he was right, of course. Also, there was a pro-Nazi demonstration during those days in Fusagasuga, a large number of students went to shout slogans against the imprisonment of the Germans, and no one did anything. There weren't even any arrests.

"Enrique didn't go, of course, even though we offered him a lift. No, he stayed home, and we didn't even try to insist. By then he'd distanced himself from everyone. He wasn't speaking to his father, didn't go to visit him even when someone offered to take him to Fusagasuga. He'd even distanced himself from us. He didn't return messages, didn't call, didn't accept any invitations. When Margarita went away, he lost the only bond he had left. 'The saddest thing,' my father said, 'is that all this will be over one day. Things are going to go back to normal again. This has to end sooner or later. And who will fix this family? Who will tell Margarita to come back, that everything will be fine from now on?' And it was true. But I don't blame her, Gabriel. I didn't blame her then, but now I blame her less. I've passed the age that she was then. Now I'm older, much older than Margarita was when she left her husband and son, and I confess that I'd have done exactly the same. I'm sure of it. One doesn't have to wait until things work themselves out, because that could take a year, but it could also take twenty. My father asked, 'Who will tell Margarita to come back?' And I thought, without saying so: If she comes back, and if she stays with them and waits, and if it turns out that the internment camps are still there fifteen years hence, and the Germans are still stuck in the Hotel Sabaneta, who's going to pay her back those lost years? Who's going to give her body back the years that it lost waiting for abstract things, a new law, the end of a war?

"That day at the Hotel Sabaneta was one of the strangest experiences of my life. It was a luxurious place. In normal times it must have been more expensive than ours, and that was saying something. Well, I don't know, I can't be sure, but it was a first-class place. Of course, it's hot over there, and that changes everything. Where we had a fireplace and heavy ponchos for the guests, they had enormous gardens with people sunning themselves in bathing suits. There was a huge swimming pool, something I'd hardly ever seen, and even fewer times had I seen so many blond heads atop seminaked bodies; it was a holiday resort like the French Riviera. Since the men spent most of their time alone, they saw no reason not to lie in the sun almost completely naked, and on visiting days the wives would find themselves with these people red as beets, some of them almost had sunstroke. That day the place was full. Imagine, a hundred and fifty families in a hotel where there was normally room for no more than fifty. It was like being in a bazaar, Gabriel. No one would have called those fellows prisoners of war. But that's what they were, no? Prisoners of war taking the sun. Prisoners of war sitting on a blanket eating roast chicken, an enviable picnic. Prisoners of war strolling with their daughters and wives along the most picturesque little gravel paths. Prisoners of war doing calisthenics in the gymnasium. Among them were some older men who walked around all day long properly dressed in white suits and ties, felt hats. Old Konrad was one of those, wearing a collar and tie in spite of the heat. The only ones more overdressed than him were the police on guard duty, with their police caps and sabers at their waists, the most pathetic little figures. Konrad was sitting on a balcony on the second floor. There was another person sitting about two meters away from him. Papa recognized him: 'Shit, I didn't know Thieck was here.' That's what he said, he said it in German, complete with vulgarity. He was very startled to see that Thieck. He was one of the important men of the Barranquilla colony. He worked at Bayer. He must've stayed at the hotel once or twice, I don't remember anymore, but the important thing is that he was sitting two meters away from Konrad and not a word passed between them, and a place like the Sabaneta really fostered sociability. Anyway, Konrad was there, with his back turned to the other man. We waved to him as soon as we got out of the car, as enthusiastically as possible, and he didn't even lift his hand, as though the newspaper were weighing him down.

"That visit was terrible. The old man was disturbing us all with his unbearable repetition of the same old story: 'I have not done anything, I swear, I am a friend to Colombia and to democracy, I am an enemy of all the dictatorships of the world, I am an enemy of the tyrant, I love this country that has been my host,' et cetera, et cetera. And he showed us a shadow he had under his eye. It seems he had come to blows with someone who dared to speak of Himmler with respect. There was no way to make him shut up for a second, or for him to see a stranger and not immediately leap on him to tell him his woes and convince him of his innocence. It was a lamentable spectacle. And all the time he was carrying that briefcase he carried till his death, he took it everywhere, all around the hotel, and if you weren't careful he'd sit down beside you and take out all the documents concerning his case and show them to you. He'd take out the letters he'd written explaining the misunderstandings, the letters his wife had written, the replies they'd received, the newspaper from the day his name appeared on the list. He carried all that everywhere he went, 'In case I run into a good lawyer by chance,' he said. That time it was our turn; for the old man we were the closest thing to confidants. We were sitting on that balcony, above a climbing bougainvillea, watching the people swimming in the pool and spreading towels on the grass to sun themselves. Our rented paradise, no? Then at some point my father got up to go over to talk to another of the internees, a Jewish man from Cali he knew by name. The old man was speaking in German, as he always did when he spoke of emotions, of feelings, since he felt less vulnerable in his native tongue. 'In these papers there's one thing missing, Sarita. Do you know what that is? I'll let you guess. Go on, guess. I've got everything here, see, things about myself that even I didn't know. Let's see if you knew, Sarita, did you know that I'm connected to platinum traffickers? I bet you didn't, did you? But that's how it is, Cristales Deresser is suspected of collaborating in the trafficking of platinum to Hamburg, ah yes, see what a well-organized business we've set up. The platinum comes from Cali, arrives in Bogota, and by way of Cristales Deresser gets sent to Barranquilla and then shipped to Europe. It seems I'm linked to my associates in Barranquilla by mutual friendship with Herr Bethke. What it is to have friends in common, eh? It's good to be with your own people abroad; the language is our homeland and all that. Let's see what else I have here . . . I can always find more interesting documents, this briefcase is infinite. Look, I can tell you that my company is mentioned in letters from the Legation, yes, the Bogota Legation writes to the Lima Legation and mentions me, I must be important. Of course I also have documents that don't mention me but rather my good friends, you know who I'm referring to.
El Siglo
. November of the year of Our Lord 1943. Yes, we do get the newspapers here, don't think they keep us uninformed. Let's see, under B for Bethke, let's see what the list says, yes, B for Barranquilla. Did you know he was a member of the German Club? Did you know he lives in El Prado? Yes, here in my briefcase I've got all this, but something's missing, can't you guess what it is? I'm going to tell you and don't be startled. It's a letter of farewell.' Then he went from irony to tears. You should have seen him, he seemed like a lost child. 'I don't care if it's written in pencil on a paper napkin, there is no note here that says I'm going. You don't know what that means, arriving home one day and that happens. . . . Living with someone is many things, one day you'll find out, but one of them is waiting for homecoming time, because everyone has a time they get home, everyone who has a house has a time for coming home to it. It's not a routine, it's something that gradually takes over. I suppose it must be an animal instinct, no? A person wants to get to the place where he's safe, where it's least likely something bad will happen to him.' Enrique had written to him a few days earlier to tell him that Margarita had left. 'One day she didn't come home, Sarita, just like that. How could she do that to her family? I close my eyes and imagine Enrique awake and waiting for her, Sarita, hearing noises, and then the telephone rings and it's her, Sarita, there she is telling her son she's not coming home anymore, that she'll write to me later to say good-bye. Like that, nothing more, she left me a message, she left me a message and she went away, and of course she never did say good-bye, not even a letter of farewell. I don't know where she is, or who with, I don't know what her life's like anymore, I'm never going to know ever again. I pray to heaven nothing like this ever happens to you, Sarita. I wouldn't wish this on anybody.'