The Informers (35 page)

In 1919 I married Konrad Deresser, a German citizen. The marriage has remained solid under the eyes of God since then and we have one son, Enrique, a young man of exemplary conduct who is now twenty-three years of age.

Due to his nationality my husband has seen his name included in the "blacklist" of the government of the United States of America, which as Your Honors undoubtedly are aware brings terrible consequences for any individual or business, and our case has not been different. In the space of the few weeks since the unjust inclusion on the "list" we have been brought to a state of crisis which appears to have no escape and will without a doubt soon bankrupt us.

However, my husband has never had, does not have, nor will he ever have any sympathy for the government currently in power in Germany, for which reason his inclusion on the list is unfair and unjustified and due to nothing but rumors without any basis in fact.

My husband is the proprietor of a small family business, Cristales Deresser, dedicated to the

"Does it end here?" I said. "Don't you have the rest?"

Enrique took out another of the plastic-sleeved pages. "Don't get in a state," he said sarcastically. "The world's not going to end just yet."

manufacture and commercial sale of window panes and all kinds of glass. The total capital does not exceed 8,000 pesos and we have no more than three full-time employees, all of whom are Colombian.

My husband, furthermore, is part of the broad German community that arrived in Colombia at the beginning of the century and since then has loyally abided by all the laws of our country. He has distinguished himself among the people of Bogota by the strictness and honesty of his morals and habits, as so often occurs with members of this race of elevated qualities. And in spite of having always felt proud of his origins my husband has never prevented me from raising my son in the religious and civic values of our Colombia, in the Catholic church and our valued democracy, which today we see under threat. Which my husband regrets as much as all Colombian citizenry of which he considers himself a part.

With all due respect I ask Your Honors, not only in my name but in the name of the rest of the German families who find themselves in analogous situations, that you intercede before the Government so that our names may be removed from the aforementioned list and our civil and economic rights may be restored. My husband and many other German citizens are suffering the consequences of the place where they were born by virtue of Providence but not of their actions or deeds. Deeds and actions that have always been in accordance with the laws and customs of this nation which has taken them in so generously.

I thank you in advance for the attention you can give this matter. And awaiting demonstrations of your goodwill, I remain,

Yours faithfully,

Margarita Lloreda de Deresser

"How did you get it?"

"By asking," said Enrique. "As simple as that. Yes, I thought it was strange, too. But then I thought: What's so strange? Those papers are of no interest to anybody. There are hundreds of letters like this, thousands, it's not like they're irreplaceable. There was a fire a few years ago. Many of them went up in smoke. Do you think anyone cared? Wastepaper, that's what those archives were. The civil servant who gave it to me confessed the truth. They cut those papers into strips and put them on the desk so people who get fingerprinted have something to wipe off the ink with."

"And you went to Bogota, you requested it, and they gave it to you?"

"You're surprised, aren't you? What did you think, that Sara Guterman was the only obsessive? No, Sara is an amateur next to me. I've taken this matter very seriously indeed. I'm no dilettante. If there were a guild of document collectors, I'd be the president, don't doubt it for a second."

"Oh, you're into that," said Rebeca as she came in. In her hand were the directions, streets and avenues that would take me to the hotel, which, of course, I now had no desire to get to. "Poor thing, he has no one to show his toys to."

"I do have," said Enrique, "but I don't want to. This isn't for any old nobody."

"I don't suppose I can take them with me," I said. "Even if I brought them back first thing tomorrow morning."

"You suppose right. These papers don't leave this house while I'm alive."

I said I understood (and I wasn't lying). But that was the letter Sara Guterman had told me about. And Enrique had it. He'd shown it to me.
I had seen it
. In the middle of that family archaeology, I thought the tacit agreement that Enrique and his wife had arrived at was tremendous: they both spoke of that letter lightly, as if that way they could neutralize the gravity of its contents. I, for one, didn't want to enter into the game. What was radiating from the paper, from Margarita Deresser's signature, even from the date, prevented me.

"If you lost one of these papers, if you damaged it, I'd have no choice but to kill you," said Enrique. "Like spies in movies. I like you, man, I don't want to kill you."

"Me neither," I said, handing back the second page of the letter. I stood up and went over to Rebeca to kiss her good-bye. "Well, thank you for everything--," I was saying.

"But if you want," Enrique interrupted me, "you could sleep here."

"No, no. I've already made a reservation."

"So cancel it."

"I don't want to inconvenience you."

"The inconvenience will be all yours," said Rebeca. "The sofa's hard as a rock."

"There's something else," said Enrique. "There's something else I'd like to do with you. I haven't been able to do it on my own, and who better than you to go with me?"

And he told me about how often he'd driven on the road up to Las Palmas, thinking all the time he'd go and look at the site of the accident, thinking of parking the car by the side of the road and walking down like a tourist on the mountainside, if that was possible. No, he'd never been able to: each time he'd kept on going, and a couple of times he'd reached the extreme--ridiculous, yes, he knew it--of turning up the volume on the car radio so as not to hear the urgency of his own meddling thoughts.

"What I propose is that we go there tomorrow," he said. "It's on your way to Bogota, you're going to have to pass by there in any case."

"I don't know if I want to."

"We'll leave early and we won't stay long, I promise, or we'll stay as long as you want."

"I don't know if I want to go through that, Enrique."

"And then you go home. Go and look, nothing more. To see if I can clear it up once and for all."

"Clear what up?" I asked.

"What do you think, Gabriel? The doubt, man, this damned doubt."

From the moment Enrique and Rebeca said good night, from the moment they went to their room, less than four meters from the sofa where I was spending the night, and closed the door, I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep that night. With time I've trained myself to recognize nights of insomnia long before trying to force myself to get to sleep, so I've stopped wasting the time that gets wasted like that. I turned off the living room light but not the floor lamp, and in the half darkness, sitting on the cushion that Rebeca had put in a pillowcase for me, spent a long while thinking of my father, of the forgiveness he'd been denied, of the journey he'd begun after that refusal and never finished, and I couldn't help but think that my presence that night in Enrique Deresser's house was one of the ways that life has of mocking people: the same life that had denied my father the only redemption possible, and along the way denied me the right to inherit that redemption, had now arranged that I, the disinherited, should be a guest for a night of the one who had refused to absolve us. The light poured straight down from the lampshade, illuminating only the circular space below it, and the rest of the room remained in darkness (its objects vaguely distinguishable: the dining table and its chairs in disorder, the chest of drawers at the entrance, the frames of the photos, the paintings--or rather, posters--on the walls, which in the darkness weren't white but gray); nevertheless, I had to stand up and walk around in the tiny space, because the same electricity in my eyes and limbs, the same static that kept me awake, wouldn't let me keep still.

The window exhausted its possibilities almost immediately: outside, nothing was happening, not in the windows of the other buildings, all black and blind, not in the street, where my car still survived, not on the patio, where the chalk squares of the hopscotch reflected the dusty light of the street-lamps. In the photos on top of the chest of drawers, Sergio appeared touching a pony's nose and making a disgusted face, Rebeca and Enrique posed on a bridge--I knew there was a famous bridge near Santa Fe de Antioquia, and assumed that bridge and the one in the photo were the same--and a woman, younger than them but too old to be, for example, Sergio's girlfriend, hugged Rebeca at a party, holding a little glass of anisette in her free hand. All this was difficult to see in the darkness, just as the German titles of the ten or twelve paperbacks I found in the first drawer were difficult to see (and to understand), abandoned along with sets of screwdrivers, pots of glue, packets of sugar, two or three syringes with their caps, two or three rusty buckles. In the kitchen I opened and closed cupboard doors trying not to make noise; I found a glass jar of biscuits and ate one, and I took out a bottle of cold water from the fridge and poured myself a glass (I had to go through jams and boxes of tea before I found one). On the door was a magnet in the shape of a horseshoe and another with the crest of Atletico Nacional. There wasn't anything else: no names, no lists, no messages. With my glass of cold water in my hand I went back to the illuminated corner of the sofa. It must have been almost midnight. I put Enrique's binder on the cushion, so the light would hit it at an angle and the reflection on the plastic wouldn't block out the letters, and found myself once again, like so many times in my life, involved in the examination of other people's documents, not with the impartiality of other times, but instead overexcited and nervous and at the same time tired like on the day after an intense drinking session. "Tomorrow you'll give them back to me," Enrique had said, "but tonight you can take your time over them."

"But can't I photocopy them?" I'd said, because Margarita's letter alone had stimulated me as much as if I'd come across an auction of Demosthenes' toga. "Can't I get up early, find a shop, and photocopy them?"

"These letters are mine and my family's," Enrique said. For the first time his tone of voice had a tinge of reproach. "No one else has any reason to be interested."

"They interest me. I want to have them--"

He cut me off. "You haven't understood. They're not for you to have." And after an uncomfortable silence he went on, as if apologizing for protecting his territory: "It's that I don't want them to end up in a book," he said. "Out of reserve, or privacy, call it what you will. I'm very fond of these letters, and part of my affection comes from knowing that no one else has them, that they're mine, that no one else knows them. If they were published, something would be lost, Gabriel, something very big would be lost for me. I'm not sure if I've made myself clear."

I said he had. He'd made himself clear, yes, sir, clear as day. And as soon as I opened the album and turned three or four pages I understood his anxiety, the fear of the damage this collection could suffer in careless hands. In plastic sleeves, after the one in which Margarita had asked the senators for help, were several of the letters, eight or ten, that old Konrad had sent to his family--first to his wife and then to his son--from the Hotel Sabaneta concentration camp. There wasn't more, but that was everything. "They're not for you to have," Enrique had told me: that had been his subtle way of saying, You are forbidden from appropriating them; you, who steal everything, aren't going to rob me of this. He was my host; I was his guest. By giving them to me, allowing me access to them even if only for one night, he had trusted me. But things didn't turn out the way we both would have preferred: as soon as I read the first letter I knew I'd end up betraying that trust, and when I got halfway through the second I set about the task of betraying it.

Sergio could arrive at any moment. I put my shoes back on, looked for my jacket on the chair by the entrance, and with jacket and shoes I went to the door where the Deressers were sleeping. I held my breath, to hear better, and after ten or twenty seconds I discerned the rhythmic breathing of two sleeping people; I thought it might just be one, it was possible that, like me, one of them might be having a bad night; but there was no way to confirm it, and what is not possible to confirm should never be considered. I tried to fix the door so it would look closed from the outside. When I seemed to have managed it, I went down the stairs in darkness, and on my way from the door of the building to that of my car, I walked across the chalk hopscotch by accident. I didn't know if I'd ruined it, but I didn't stop to find out. I got into my car, not through the driver's door but on the passenger side, I got my notebook out of the glove compartment and a pen out of my jacket, turned on the little roof light, and got down to work. I found that the letters were arranged backward: the most recent ones first, the oldest ones later. Only when I got to the last ones in the archive did I understand the particular effect this reading caused, this reversed chronology.