The Informers (25 page)

"My condolences, Don Gabriel," the doorman said; he didn't remember, or he remembered without its mattering, that he'd already given me his condolences two or three times since the day after the funeral. He also handed me the post that had kept on arriving even though a month had passed since the death of the addressee, even though that death had received more publicity than most; and I realized I didn't know what to do with the bills and the subscriptions, with the College of Lawyers circulars and notification from the bank. Reply to them one by one? Draft a standard letter, photocopy it, and send out a mass mailing? I regret to inform you that Dr. Gabriel Santoro died . . . please be kind enough, therefore, to cancel his subscription . . . Dr. Gabriel Santoro recently passed away. He, therefore, will be unable to attend . . . The phrases were ludicrously painful, and writing them was just short of unthinkable. Sara would know how to do it; Sara would know the procedures. At her age the practical effects of death are routine and no longer intimidating. That's what I was thinking as I opened the door, and as I went in I realized that I would rather have felt something more intense or perhaps something more solemn, but what hit me first, as was to be expected given the circumstances, was my own nature. I've never been able to avoid it: I've always felt comfortable with solitude, but being alone in someone else's house is one of my fetishes, something like a perversion that I would never tell anyone about. I am the kind of person who opens doors in other people's bathrooms to see what perfumes, or what painkillers, or what kind of birth control they use; I open bedside-table drawers, I search, look, but I'm not after secrets: finding vibrators or letters from a lover interests me just as much as finding an old wallet or a blindfold. I like other people's lives; I like to make myself at home and examine them. I probably violate several principles of discretion, of trust, of good manners in doing so. It's quite probable.

A month and the place was already beginning to smell closed up. The orange juice glass I'd found on the day of my appointment with Angelina was still in the sink, and that's the first thing I did when I went in: wet the sponge and scrubbed the bottom of the glass hard to remove a bit of dried pulp. I had to turn the water supply back on, though I didn't remember having shut it off: that day, I thought, Angelina must have dealt with it. The curtains were still closed, too, and I had the feeling that if I opened them they'd release a cloud of dust, so I left them as they were. Everything was the same as the last time I'd been there, and what remained most painfully immutable was the absence of the owner; on the other hand, that owner had begun to turn into someone else since his death and would perhaps continue his transformation, because once secrets start coming out, the twenty-year-old infidelity, the white lies--yes, like a snowball--no one can stop them. Except for my own book, everything in this place seemed to suggest that my father hadn't had a childhood, and even my book only suggested it in a tacit, indirect, lateral way. But was it the same book?
The first thing Peter Guterman did when he arrived in Duitama was to paint the house and build a second floor
. First sentence.
At that time foreigners were not allowed to practice, without previous authorization, occupations other than those

they'd declared upon entering the country
. Another sentence.
In the Guterman family's hotel things happened that destroyed families, disrupted lives, ruined futures
. . . . The sentences were no longer the ones I'd written, and it wasn't because of the violent irony that had begun to fill them; their words had changed, too;
foreigner
didn't mean the same as it had before, nor did
futures
. The book, my book about Sara Guterman, was the closest thing to those years and the only thing able to suggest the (ill-fated) presence of my father; but it was also the proof a tricky prosecutor would have used to allege my father's nonexistence, the Cheshire cat.

I looked over the blue and brown spines of the oldest books, looked over the disorderly colors of the more recent ones, and didn't find a single title I didn't recognize, not a single jacket flap or flyleaf that could have contained, at this stage, the slightest surprise. My father's meticulousness, his idea that a messy environment is one of the causes of a messy thought process, had obliged him to arrange all his lecture notes, his twenty years of speaking on how to speak well, on the same shelf; I chose one of the folders at random and examined it, imagining I might find an incriminating document; I found nothing. Was there not in this place a single piece of paper that contained the dead man's youth, not a newspaper clipping about the blacklists or a book that might contain annotations, not some reference to Enrique Deresser or his family or Bogota in the 1940s? A man's private history irremediably obliterated: How could that be possible? In a manipulable world, a world susceptible to being reprogrammed by us, its demiurges, would there not have been an immediate need to remedy that? Thinking of that, I picked up my book and opened it to the Appendices, chose an example of a report from the ones I'd found during the course of my investigation--the different ones they used in the cases of real infiltrators or active propagandists, and that later came to light, were always partially censored by officials--and copied it by hand, adapting it to my uncertainties, on the blank pages that seem designed for such purposes between the printer's imprint and the flyleaf. I wrote:
Military Intelligence Division, War Department General Staff, Military Attache Report
. And then:

Interviewed in El Automatico cafe, the witness Gabriel Santoro declared that Konrad Deresser, proprietor of Cristales Deresser, has extremely close relations with supporters of the Colombian Nazi Party (with its head-quarters in Barranquilla and elements infiltrated all over the territory) and on several occasions has demonstrated anti-American attitudes in the presence of Colombian citizens. It has been determined that the witness's word is trustworthy.

I turned the page. I wrote:
In accordance with Special Order No. 7 of the Military Attache, Bogota, Colombia, investigated the references with the following results
. And then:

Interrogated in the offices of the Embassy of the United States of America, Bogota, the informant Santoro (NI. See below, Hotel Nueva Europa dossier) declared that Mr. Konrad Deresser has very close relations with known propagandists (principally Hans-Georg Bethke, KN. See below, List of Blocked Nationals, updated November 1943) and on several occasions has demonstrated anti-American attitudes in the presence of Colombian citizens, as well as his employees, whom he regularly greets in German. His declarations have been verified against those of other sources. The word of the informant has been deemed trustworthy.

I put the book back in its place and discovered the universe hadn't been transformed by my falsifying the contents of those pages. My father was still incognito in his own memory, dead but also clandestine. But perhaps what would be impossible, in my father's case, was the opposite: a hole, a gap in the art of erasing fingerprints, a defect in the rigor of the most rigorous man in the world, an inconsistency in his powerful desire to erase Deresser the way Trotsky (just one example) was erased from the photos and encyclopedias of Stalin's time. If it was about revising his history, my father--my revisionist father--had achieved it with success. But then, he'd committed the error that we all perhaps commit: telling secrets after sex. I imagined the lovers. I imagined them walking around this apartment naked, going to the kitchen to get a drink or to the bathroom to throw away used condoms, or sitting like teenagers in this chair. She is naked on my father's lap like a ventriloquist's doll, and her recently shaved legs (her shins covered in goose pimples) hang over the arm of the chair without touching the floor; he is wearing his bathrobe, because there are certain levels of decency one never loses. "Tell me about yourself, tell me about your life," says Angelina. "My life is of no interest," answers my father. "It will be to others," says Angelina. "I'm interested." And my father: "I don't know, I don't know. Maybe some other time. Yes, one day I'll tell you all about it." Maybe if we go to Medellin, thinks my father, maybe if you accompany me to do what I cannot do alone.

On my father's desk, not on his bedside table, I found his telephone book, but Angelina's surname didn't pop into my head immediately, as happens with our own acquaintances, so it took me a moment or two to find her number among the squadron of scribbles jotted down with his left hand. It was after midnight. I sat beside the pillow, on the edge of the bed, like a visitor, like the visitor I was. At the foot of the lamp there was a film of dust; or maybe it was on every surface in the apartment, but here, because of the direct and yellow light, it was more visible and indecent. I opened the drawer and rummaged through HB pencils and 200-peso coins, and then I found a cheap little book, the kind they sell in supermarkets or pharmacies (displayed beside the razors and the chewing gum), that I hadn't noticed the last time. It was a gift from Angelina.
Books for Lovers
, it said on the laminated, greenish cover, and underneath:
Kama Sutra
. I opened it at random and read: "When she holds and massages her lover's lingam with her yoni, this is Vadavaka, the Mare." Angelina the mare, massaged my father's lingam, here, in this bed, and suddenly the elaborate diatribe I'd prepared at the back of my mind began to blur, and Angelina, far from embodying my father's fall from grace, turned into a vulnerable but shameless woman, sentimental and affected but also direct, capable of giving a withdrawn professor of classics in his sixties a cheap version of an illustrated sex manual. I hesitated, thought of hanging up, but it was too late, because the phone had rung two or three times, and I was the more surprised by the question I was pronouncing. "Could I speak to Angelina Franco, please?"

"Speaking," said the voice at the other end of the line, sleepy and a little irritated. "Who is this?"

"Do you have any idea what time it is? You're crazy, Gabriel, calling at this time of night. You scared the hell out of me."

It was true. Her voice was thick and accelerated. She coughed, took a deep breath.

"Did I wake you?"

"Well, of course you woke me up, it's after midnight. What do you expect? Look, if it's to give me a hard time . . ."

"Partly, yeah. But don't worry, I'm not going to shout at you."

"No? Well, thanks a lot. The one who should be shouting here is me. The nerve!"

"Look, Angelina, I don't know how things were with my dad. But people don't do things like what you did to him, that seems obvious. Was it for the money?--"

She cut me off. "All right, all right. No insults."

"How much did they pay you? I would have paid you as much to keep quiet."

"Oh yeah? And I would have been just as happy? I don't think so, dear, I don't think so. Do you want me to tell you the truth? I would have done it for free, yes, sir. People need to be told things as they are."

"People don't give a damn, Angelina. What you did--"

"Look, I have to go to sleep. It's late and I have to get up early. Don't call me again, Gabriel. I don't have to explain myself to you or to anybody.
Ciao
."

"No, wait."

"What?"

"Don't hang up on me. You know where I am?"

"Why should I care? No, really, don't tell me you called me to talk crap? I'm going to hang up. Bye."

"I'm in my dad's apartment."

"Great. What else?"

"I swear."

"I don't believe you."

"I swear," I said. "I came here to find your phone number. I was going to phone you to insult you."

"My phone number?"

"In my dad's phone book, I don't have your number."

"Oh. Right, very interesting, but I need to go to sleep. We'll talk some other time. Bye."

"Did you watch the program tonight? Did you see yourself on television?"

"
No
, I didn't watch the program," said Angelina, obviously annoyed. "
No
, I didn't see myself on television. They didn't call me, they said they'd call before showing it and they didn't call me, they lied to me, too, OK? Can we hang up, please?"

"It's just that I need to know a couple of things."

"What things, Gabriel? Come on, don't be a drag. I'm going to hang up. I don't want to hang up on you, hanging up on people is rude, but if you force me to I will."

"What you did to my dad is serious. He--"

"No, no, wait a second. What he did to me, that was serious. Leaving without saying anything, dumping me there like an old rag.
That
is what you don't do to a person."

"Let me speak. He trusted you, Angelina. Not even I knew those things, he hadn't even told me the things he told you. And that, obviously, affects me as well. All those things he told you. All the things you said on television. So I want to know if it's true, that's all. If you made some of it up or if it's all true. It's important, I don't have to explain why."

"Oh, so now you're accusing me of lying."

"I'm asking you."

"With what right?"

"Without any. Hang up if you want."

"I'm going to hang up."

"Hang up, go on, hang up, don't worry," I said. "It's all lies, isn't it? You know what I think? I think my dad hurt you, I don't know how, but he hurt you, leaving you, getting tired of you, and you're getting even like this. Women can't stand anyone getting tired of them, and this is how they get even, like you're doing. Taking advantage of the fact that he's dead and can't defend himself. You've got a chip on your shoulder, that's all, that's what I think. You betrayed him in the most cowardly way, and all because the old man decided that this relationship wasn't worth carrying on, something anyone has the right to do in this bitch of a world. This is slander, Angelina, it's a crime and you can go to jail for it; of course you're the only one who knows if you're slandering him or not. What do you feel when you think about it, Angelina? Tell me, tell me what you feel. Do you feel strong, do you feel powerful? Sure, it's like sending an anonymous threat, like insulting someone under a pseudonym. All cowards are the same, it's incredible. The power of slander, eh? The power of impunity. Yes, slander is a crime, although no one's ever going to prove it in your case. That's you, Angelina, you are the lowest of the low: a thief who got away with it."