The Informers (37 page)

"Geraniums in biscuit tins," he said.

"What about them?"

"You mention them in your book."

And then he was silent again, as if he didn't understand something that for me was obvious: he'd begun to interpret a good part of his world through something he'd read. He yawned, once or twice, to relieve the pressure in his ears. I did the same and discovered that the altitude had blocked them a little. That can happen before you notice, because the ascent is not so drastic, and the process is quite similar, one thinks, to how an old man gradually goes deaf. Going up into Bogota causes a sudden deafness, like the result of a childhood illness; that ascent, up to Las Palmas, was like the progressive and natural deafness of old age. I was thinking about that when Enrique tapped the windshield again and told me to pull over, that we'd arrived. The car slowed down and the tires skidded on the loose gravel of the shoulder, and the unpleasant parking lights signal started beeping. On my left was the highway, which always seems more dangerous when you're still, and on my right floated the green stain of some bushes, so sparse that among their leaves you could make out the air of the valley and the violent drop of the mountainside. And that's when, maybe because of the sensation of farewell provoked by being with someone in an unmoving car, maybe because of the slightly eccentric way the surrounding landscape united us--turning us into confidants or accomplices--I asked Enrique what I'd been wanting to ask him since the night before. "Of course he spoke German," he said. "Spoke it like a native. He learned it at the Nueva Europa. That was his school. Peter, Sara, they were his teachers. The accent he picked up from them; people with a good ear have no problems, and Gabriel had a better ear than Mozart. In your book there are important things and unimportant things. Among the unimportant things, what surprised me most was that Gabriel had forgotten his German. He must have wanted to forget it. Until that day when he started singing 'Veronika,' no? Sara loved that song, I remember perfectly. And Gabriel pretending he'd started studying it in old age, that he'd only been studying the language for a few months. All that you put in the book. I read it but I couldn't believe it. The man who used to recite speeches from the Reichstag pretending he didn't know German. Don't tell me it's not ironic."

"Tell me about it. Sara didn't say much about that."

"That would be because there's not much to tell," said Enrique. "I remember very well a conversation, one of the last I witnessed between them. . . . Gabriel asked my father to explain a couple of references that came up in the speeches. My father did it gladly, like a teacher. That was the closest they ever were. It wasn't a friendship, no. Gabriel didn't betray a friendship with Papa, but he did betray something. I don't know what to call it; there has to be a name to apply to the spot where he stuck the knife in. Those speeches, I don't know if you know them. No, I wouldn't dare say that Gabriel learned German to understand them, but it would be very naive to think it wasn't one of the benefits. In any case, it's normal that Sara wouldn't have mentioned it, I think. Gabriel never committed the error of taking those guilty enthusiasms to the Nueva Europa. He was a sensible fellow, after all, and he had his head screwed on straight. He could study them, but he did it in secret and with shame. Maybe he would have liked my father to be a little more ashamed. Me too, of course. How I despised him. Oh, yes, I came to despise my father. What cowards. We were both very cowardly." It wasn't difficult to imagine that he'd been rereading old Konrad's letters the morning my father had come to visit him; I imagined how fresh the resentment would have felt, the daily updating of the disdain; I imagined Enrique going over in his head the text he knew by heart while my father performed his little speech of contrition. But most of all I imagined the course of a life encumbered with the documentary reconstruction of scenes from the other life. That's what Enrique had devoted himself to: the documents he had collected were his place in the world. I thought that was why he had thrown them at me almost en masse, because he thought I would receive the same peace, and with that Enrique turned into a sort of small messiah, an ad hoc savior, and the documents were his gospel. "Yes, Gabriel used to go to the Nueva Europa to practice his German," said Enrique, and narrowed his eyes. "Sometimes I think it might have been there. Isn't that horrible? Not just contemplating that possibility, I don't mean only that: Isn't it horrible that we'll never know where it happened? That moment weighs on us, Gabriel, and we're never going to know how it went. No matter how many of my father's letters I've saved. No matter how much information Sara Guterman might have given you, we're missing that information. Tell me something, have you imagined the scene?"

"I've tried," I told him. "But the places from those years hardly exist anymore. I never saw the Nueva Europa, for example."

"I've reconstructed it as if I'd been there. I'm walking along the upper corridor and I see him downstairs, sitting with the fellow from the embassy or the police, but I keep going to my room. How could I imagine it? I don't even stop to try to see who Gabriel's talking to. I don't even think about it. I see him without thinking. I don't wonder: Who could that be? Is he practicing his German? Gabriel would sit down to talk to the Germans, he liked to swap languages. The Germans would come away with three or four new phrases in Spanish, quite happy. So in that image I could have wondered if he was swapping languages. But I don't wonder anything. My eyes pass over Gabriel. Between those two and me there is a glass door, a whole patio, and a fountain making fountain noises. So I could say I try to hear what they're saying and I can't. But it's not like that. In the scene that I imagine, I don't try to hear anything. Normal, don't you think? You go somewhere you go every day, see your friend sitting and doing what he's been doing as long as you've known him: talking. How are you going to imagine?"

"You can't," I said.

"I know you've always wanted more details," he said. "But closer than this we can't get, I'm telling you. The details change, that's true. Sometimes there's rain splashing into the fountain's pool, other times there isn't. There are the little fishes, there are the coins people throw in. Sometimes I see Sara busy with customers at the reception desk, and I curse her for not suspecting anything either. I've been carrying this around for a long time, son. And I think you're strong. I don't think it'll hurt you to help me a little. After all, you're the one who's written about this, you're the one who's dealt with it, and the land belongs to he who works it. No one has as much information as you. Sara was the last, but she can't help me now. Use the information, Gabriel, do me that favor. In ten years, if I'm still alive, come back here, and we'll discuss our points of view, you can tell me about your scene. Tell me if your father chose the place or if he adapted to what they asked. If he informed with pleasure or if he had conflicting emotions. If in the interview he denies that he speaks German, or if it's precisely because of that, because he speaks German, that they credit what he says. Does he think of Sara? Does he feel that by accusing my father he's defending her from something? The questions are endless. I have my own hypothesis. I'm not going to tell you, so as not to influence you." There again was the impulse to make light of things that I'd witnessed the night before, the strategy that transformed everything into a game to defend himself against the pain of the facts. He had spent fifty years living with the betrayal. In those terms--I thought--I was a recent arrival. Deresser would have been planning this ambush in advance, a long while in advance--since the publication of my book, for example. And everything, the invitation to go see him, the description of my father's visit, the access he'd allowed me to all his documents, everything was paving the way to this instant: the instant when he got rid of half the weight of his life and transferred it to another person; the instant of a tiny liberty, obtained in old age and almost by chance. "This is what I wanted to request of you," he said. "
That you think
. I've spent too many years; this is as far as I've got. Now it's your turn. But I will warn you, no matter how early you get up you won't see what isn't there. No matter how much you think about that scene the sun won't come up any earlier. Anyway, you understand me now. It's impossible to complete the scene." After a while, he added, "Is there anything else you wanted to know?"

I wanted to say to him, Is there something you know for certain, by any chance? Is there anything in my father's life that has just a single aspect?

But instead I said, "For now, no. If there is anything else, I'll let you know."

"OK. So time for what we came for, don't you think?"

"I think so."

"Let's not use up the whole morning talking about the past," he said. "Let's be realistic. You and I are alone. These stories don't matter to anyone anymore."

We got out of the car and found ourselves in the noisy and too bright world of outside, and we began to walk forward, along the shoulder, skirting around the line where the mountain dropped off into the abyss and where there are no containment rails or artificial protection of any kind: men depend on the will of the stones and the tree trunks and the breeze-block or adobe houses to keep from going over the precipice. The air was dense and humid and the deciduous smell of the vegetation filled it the way a basin gets filled. I began to sweat: my palms and the back of my neck were damp, my watch strap stuck to my wrist.

We had walked thirty or forty meters when Enrique stopped me. With his hands on his hips and panting (eyebrows raised, the corners of his mouth open like the gills of a dying trout), he took a deep breath and said, "Here it is."

Here it was. Here was the place where my father's car had gone over the edge. This landscape was the last thing he'd seen in his life, with the probable exception of some lights bearing down on him or the bodywork of a bus that pushed him off the road. While I approached the edge of the slope and focused on some bushes torn out by their roots, broken branches, and disturbed soil, on the nature that had preferred not to regenerate in all those years, Enrique was looking at the road, which at that spot twisted less (or its bends were not so sharp), and was perhaps thinking, as I was thinking as I looked at it, that this was another of the illusions generated by stillness: from the side, everything seems straighter and, especially, seems
straighter for longer
, and you'd never think that something might be unpredictable for the cars passing, a barefoot pedestrian, a frightened dog. If a bus appeared around this bend, I thought Enrique was thinking, the driver of a car would see it; if he didn't see it, because of the dense darkness that must cover this road at night, or because of some distraction (the distraction that comes from a recent sadness, the disappointment of bad news), the most likely thing was that a person with normal reflexes would manage to steer out of its way. Because the width of the road, at that point, seemed to allow it; because the speed a car could have reached on its way up was not great. At that point, thought Enrique, an accident was rather improbable.

Yes, that was what Enrique was thinking. No doubt about it. Who says it's not possible to read other people's minds?

The previous afternoon, his son had practically assaulted me for speculating about his life (and doing so, on top of everything, in the midst of that apology for treachery that was my book); but this time, at least, it wasn't speculation. I could read Enrique's thoughts, one by one, as if he had spat them out onto the asphalt after thinking them. Enrique was standing facing the fatal curve, and I was watching him and I could have even closed my eyes and listened to the progress of his thoughts . . . but the bus, Enrique was thinking, could have appeared around the bend at the moment Gabriel was trying to find a radio station, but the bus might have had its lights turned off, to conserve energy from the battery as they often do, but Gabriel's bad hand might have been the reason his reaction hadn't been effective, but his heart might have failed from the sudden jolt of the fright, and in that case Gabriel would have been dead when his car went over the edge . . . but what about the driver's intentions, what about the possibility of suicide, was it not possible that the bus driver was desperate, disappointed, a man at the end of his tether? Had the bus driver never committed any errors in his life, and was it not possible that he'd tried to mend them and someone had denied him the redress? These possibilities exist, Enrique Deresser was thinking, no one can take them away from me. By now Gabriel's son has figured it out, now he knows why I brought him here, why we've come to see the place where Gabriel swerved into the abyss, where he preferred to bring it all to a close, because it was all a farce, because his life had been a farce, that's what he felt. Nothing would have been easier for me than misleading him, telling him no, none of that, stop feeling you're so important, stop believing your guilt makes you unique, that you invented the desire to make amends, that really is arrogance, Gabriel Santoro, that really is a cheap farce, not the other thing, the other is a life with enough time, and everyone, given enough time, is going to fuck up over and over again; he'll make a mistake and put it right and make another mistake, you give anyone time and that's what you'll see, one fuckup after another, amends and more amends, fuckup and amends, fuckup and amends, until time runs out . . . because we don't learn, Enrique Deresser was thinking, nobody ever learns, that's the biggest fallacy of all, that we learn; we really would be hoodwinked if we believed that one, Gabriel Santoro, and you more than anybody. You thought you'd learned, that you'd made one mistake and it was as if you'd been immunized, isn't that so? Well no, the evidence indicates the opposite, Mr. big-shot lawyer. Everything indicates that there is no possible vaccine: you stay sick and you'll be sick for your whole fucking life and your whole fucking death. Not even in death will you be freed from the fuckups you've committed. That's why you don't need to run yourself off the road and take a whole busload of people with you along with I don't know how many passengers. You won't fix anything by doing that and you'll have to bear as many crosses as there were deaths in the accident. To the dead man from the beginning you'll add the dead at the end. Is that what you want? Is fucking up the lives of a few people traveling in a bus your idea of retribution? Because if that's how it is I can't help you, Gabriel Santoro. Nothing I say will be sufficient if your idea is so strong, if you're so set on closure to bring it to a close like this. If you're ready to screw the rest of us just make sure you're good and screwed. That's what Enrique Deresser was thinking as he looked at the bend that wasn't so sharp in the road that wasn't so dangerous, while he was imagining the quantity of things that would have to happen at the same time so the accident would have been an accident instead of the voluntary closure, without pomp or circumstance, of a farcical life, of that giant blind knot that had been the undeserved life of Gabriel Santoro. That, finally, was what he was thinking, while Gabriel Santoro's son, behind him, seemed to be waiting for some sort of verdict, because he was aware that this was a trial: he was the definitive audience for the last trial of his dead father, held on the soft shoulder of a mountain road, between the smell of rotting tropical fruit and the tubercular rattles of exhausts and the abrupt gusts of passing cars that descended into Medellin at frightening speeds and those that came up toward unpredictable destinations, because after this road a thousand routes were possible and Bogota was just one of them. But it was the one that Gabriel Santoro would have taken if his car had not gone over the edge, and it would also be the one that Gabriel Santoro's son would take as soon as he confirmed that Enrique Deresser wasn't to blame: because in this trial Enrique Deresser also stood accused, and his summing-up should prove that the road was dangerous, that the night had been dark, that the bend was sharp and the visibility bad, that a mutilated hand doesn't react well in emergencies, that a recently repaired heart is fragile and cannot bear violent emotions, that a tired old man has bad reflexes, and more so when he'd lost in a single day a lover and a friend from his youth who, perhaps, between the two of them, might have been able to bring him back to life.