The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page B
Authors: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Fiction - General, Historical, History, 20th Century, Latin American Novel And Short Story, Colombia - History - 20th century, Colombia
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detail, something that in the grand scheme of things we consider insignificant, to make a letter relating trivialities become something that determines our lives, to make the innocent man in the photo turn out to have always been our worst enemy.
My desk was once my mother's. The wood has softened from being smeared with so much furniture polish, but no other strategy has occurred to me to protect this block (that looks recently carved from a wet tree trunk) from woodworm attacks. There are rings from glasses and cups that nothing short of sandpaper could now shift. The corners are chipped or split, and I've got more than one splinter from carelessly brushing my hand across it. And, most of all, there are things, things whose principal function is evidential. Every once in a while I pick up one of those cassettes and make sure they're still there, that they still contain Sara Guterman's voice. I pick up a magazine from 1985 and read a paragraph: "When the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Colombia finally decided to break relations with the Axis powers. . . ." I pick up the December 1941 speech, in which Santos broke relations with the Axis: "We are with our friends, and we are firmly with them. We will fulfill the role corresponding to this policy of continental solidarity with hatred towards none. . . ." I pick up a letter from my father to Sara, a letter from Sara to my father, a speech by Demosthenes: this is my evidence. I am heir, I am executor, and I am also prosecutor, but before this I have been archivist, I have been organizer. Looking back--and back means a couple of years ago as well as half a century--events take shape, a certain design: they mean something, something that doesn't necessarily come as given. To write about my father I've been obliged to read certain things that despite his tutelage I had never read. Demosthenes and Cicero are the most obvious, almost a cliche. Julius Caesar was no less predictable. Those books are also compelling pieces of evidence, and each one of them figures in my dossier, with all the annotations my father had made in them. The problem is that interpreting them is not within my powers. When my father notes, beside Brutus's speech, "From verb to noun? Here you lost," I don't know what he might have meant. I feel more comfortable with facts; and death, of course, is the densest of facts, more meaningful, less susceptible to being perverted or misappropriated by different interpretations, relative versions, readings . The rule says that death is as definitive as anything can be on earth. That's why it's so disconcerting when a man changes after death, and that's why biographies and memoirs get written, those cheap and democratic forms of mummification.
The process of my father's mummification was only possible from December 23, 1991, when the accident happened. At that moment I was at home, comfortable and calm and in bed with a friend, T, a woman I've known since I was fifteen and she was twelve, with whom I get together every two or three months to make love and watch a movie, for although she is married and relatively content, we've always had the idea that in another life we could have been together, and we would have liked that. I still see T as a little girl, and perhaps there's a perversion there that we allow ourselves for a few hours. We touch, go to bed, watch a movie, and sometimes go back to bed after the movie, but not always, and then T has a shower, dries her hair with a hair dryer I bought just for her, and goes home. That's how it was that night: according to my calculations, we were watching the movie, and maybe Marlon Brando was dying of a heart attack in the garden in front of his grandson, but it's possible that the film had ended and I was seeking T's mouth, which is wide and always cold. Sometimes I've gone as far as considering the possibility of this coincidence: that T was sitting on top of me and sliding up and
My desk was once my mother's. The wood has softened from being smeared with so much furniture polish, but no other strategy has occurred to me to protect this block (that looks recently carved from a wet tree trunk) from woodworm attacks. There are rings from glasses and cups that nothing short of sandpaper could now shift. The corners are chipped or split, and I've got more than one splinter from carelessly brushing my hand across it. And, most of all, there are things, things whose principal function is evidential. Every once in a while I pick up one of those cassettes and make sure they're still there, that they still contain Sara Guterman's voice. I pick up a magazine from 1985 and read a paragraph: "When the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Colombia finally decided to break relations with the Axis powers. . . ." I pick up the December 1941 speech, in which Santos broke relations with the Axis: "We are with our friends, and we are firmly with them. We will fulfill the role corresponding to this policy of continental solidarity with hatred towards none. . . ." I pick up a letter from my father to Sara, a letter from Sara to my father, a speech by Demosthenes: this is my evidence. I am heir, I am executor, and I am also prosecutor, but before this I have been archivist, I have been organizer. Looking back--and back means a couple of years ago as well as half a century--events take shape, a certain design: they mean something, something that doesn't necessarily come as given. To write about my father I've been obliged to read certain things that despite his tutelage I had never read. Demosthenes and Cicero are the most obvious, almost a cliche. Julius Caesar was no less predictable. Those books are also compelling pieces of evidence, and each one of them figures in my dossier, with all the annotations my father had made in them. The problem is that interpreting them is not within my powers. When my father notes, beside Brutus's speech, "From verb to noun? Here you lost," I don't know what he might have meant. I feel more comfortable with facts; and death, of course, is the densest of facts, more meaningful, less susceptible to being perverted or misappropriated by different interpretations, relative versions, readings . The rule says that death is as definitive as anything can be on earth. That's why it's so disconcerting when a man changes after death, and that's why biographies and memoirs get written, those cheap and democratic forms of mummification.
The process of my father's mummification was only possible from December 23, 1991, when the accident happened. At that moment I was at home, comfortable and calm and in bed with a friend, T, a woman I've known since I was fifteen and she was twelve, with whom I get together every two or three months to make love and watch a movie, for although she is married and relatively content, we've always had the idea that in another life we could have been together, and we would have liked that. I still see T as a little girl, and perhaps there's a perversion there that we allow ourselves for a few hours. We touch, go to bed, watch a movie, and sometimes go back to bed after the movie, but not always, and then T has a shower, dries her hair with a hair dryer I bought just for her, and goes home. That's how it was that night: according to my calculations, we were watching the movie, and maybe Marlon Brando was dying of a heart attack in the garden in front of his grandson, but it's possible that the film had ended and I was seeking T's mouth, which is wide and always cold. Sometimes I've gone as far as considering the possibility of this coincidence: that T was sitting on top of me and sliding up and
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