Enrique never spoke German in public. He'd learned it at home, it was the language he spoke with his father, but outside, working in the glassworks or when he was at the hotel, he would answer in Bogota Spanish even though old Konrad had asked in Swabian German. For your dad all this was a sacred mystery. The first time he went to the Deressers' house for dinner, that big, comfortable house in the neighborhood of La Soledad, he thought it was so strange. When he arrived it was like his friend, when he changed languages, was no longer the same person. Enrique was talking and he didn't understand. He was talking in his presence and he had no way of knowing what he was saying. At first he was taken aback, and then he became suspicious. But later Gabriel went off thinking it was the most fascinating spectacle he'd ever seen, and the next time he asked me to go with him. As a sort of guide to German customs, or occasional interpreter. Now I think he wanted witnesses. After dinner, Enrique asked old Konrad, "Would you go back for good?" He answered evasively and immediately started to speak about the language he'd been born into and then about Spanish, which seemed so difficult to him. He'd read some poet saying that slang was like a wart on the common language. That's what stayed with me, a wart. "No matter how hard we try," he said, "that's what we immigrants are, producers of warts." Then he closed the conversation, and it was almost better that way, because Enrique was apt to say very harsh things that he'd never allow himself to say about other things, about romantic composers or Bohemian glass. Enrique said he was never going to teach his children German, and he repeated it to your dad and to me on several occasions. I understood him, of course, because my father received letters from acquaintances or colleagues or distant relatives. In them people explained to us how terrible it was talking familiarly, using the language affectionately or to say pretty things, when for all practical purposes it was the language of National Socialism.
Of course, Enrique began to realize that his father's language was dying in his head, not only because he didn't use it outside the home, but because he didn't speak it with people his own age, and his idioms, sayings, and set phrases were all thirty years out of date. That's how he saw the contradictory and even unbearable situation of being enclosed in a language that didn't think like he did but like his father: that's where those desires to rebel against his own home came from. It was very strange. It was like a will to be a character without a landscape, you know? Someone with no relation whatsoever between his body and the carpet, between his body and the dining room walls. In the house there was a piano rented by the day and a portrait of a Prussian military officer, some illustrious ancestor, I think. Enrique didn't want to have anything to do with that. He wanted to be a character with no backdrop. A flat, two-dimensional creature with no past. And when he went out, it was like he wanted to be new. Language was just one of the things that allowed it. With his looks, speaking Colombian Spanish was like putting on a wet suit and diving into the water, that feeling of comfort, of being in a strange medium but one in which you could move more easily than in your own. He was always going to make the most of it, no? Even if he was a fool. Enrique, for the first time, found out what your dad always knew: you are what you say, you are how you say it. For old Konrad things were exactly the opposite.
Margarita would sit me down in one of the velvet armchairs in the living room and offer me tea and biscuits or one of the cakes from Frau Gallenmuller's shop, the one at Nineteenth and Third, and talk to me about that; she'd start getting nostalgic right there, talking about her husband, and always end up telling me how different he was when he first arrived in Colombia, how he'd changed since then. She said time had betrayed him. It had betrayed both of them, everyone. Instead of returning to her husband the security that everyone feels in their own land, and that an exile gradually gains little by little, time had taken it away from Konrad. He had been forbidden spontaneity, Margarita said, the capacity to react unthinkingly, to make a joke or ironic remark, all the things that people who live in their own language can do. Partly because of this, old Konrad never had a normal relationship with a Colombian. What he said was too meditated or stilted to forge a friendship with anybody. Or complicity, at least. Complicity is very gratifying, but it's impossible if you don't speak properly. Enrique was lucky enough to figure that out and understand it, in spite of being very young. Konrad Deresser was always a very insecure person, and Enrique, from a very early age, became obsessed with creating the opposite sort of mask, inventing himself as someone able to trust in himself, develop the security that would allow him to talk to others as he did later talk to them. Without blinking. Without stuttering. Without thinking twice about a word. I've never known who learned it from whom, whether he learned it from your dad or your dad from him. At the beginning of 1942, a family of Germans came to live in Bogota from Barranquilla. You have to imagine what it meant to someone like the old man to talk to people from his country. I know, I can imagine, because my father felt the same way for a long time. Exactly the same. He'd run into a German and be in heaven. It was the best thing that could happen to him. Speaking continuously, fluently, without noticing his own grammatical mistakes on the other person's face, his clumsy conjugations, without thinking his pronunciation was going to make his neighbor burst out laughing from one moment to the next, without fearing rs and js more than thieves, without that feeling of vertigo every time he put the stress on the wrong syllable.
The family that arrived was called Bethke, husband and very young wife. He was about thirty, maybe a bit older, about the age you are now, and she would have been twenty, like us. Hans and Julia Bethke. It was at the time of the first restrictions. Citizens of the Axis nations out of the radio stations. Axis citizens off the newspapers. Axis citizens away from the coasts. Yes, that's how it was. All the Germans who lived in Buenaventura or Barranquilla or Cartagena had to go and live in the interior. Some went to Cali, others to Medellin, others came to Bogota. Bogota filled up with new Germans at that time. It was wonderful for the hotel; Papa was happy. Well anyway, the Bethkes were among these, from Barranquilla. For Buss und Bettag in 1943, the Deressers organized a small dinner, very low-key. Your dad was very surprised that they invited us. We were both about to turn twenty, but we were still babes, that's obvious; at that age one feels like the savior of the world, and it's a miracle we survive our own mistakes. There are those who don't survive, of course, there are those who at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen commit the only mistake they'll ever make and they're wound up for the rest of their lives. At that age you realize that everything they've told you up to then is pure rubbish, that the world is another entirely different thing. But does anyone give you up-to-date instructions, or at least a guarantee? Not at all. Figure it out as best you can. That's the cruelty of the world. It's not being born that's cruel-that's psychoanalysis for beginners. Nor losing your family in an accident. Accidents don't mean anything. What's cruel is that they let you reach the conclusion that you know how things work. Because that's the age of majority. A woman gets her period, and four or five years later feels sure there'll be no more surprises. And that's when the world arrives and tells you, None of that, Miss, you don't know a thing.