When they invited us, I explained the obvious to Gabrieclass="underline" that Konrad Deresser owed heaven and earth to my family. If it hadn't been for my father, who gave him the contract for all the glass in the hotel, old man Deresser wouldn't even have enough money to eat, let alone to invite people to dinner. When they dismissed him from the radio station, my father paid the cook's son to find the twenty or thirty smallest windows in the hotel and break them without being seen. And then he ordered new ones from Deresser and paid the full price for them, and he also had to pay for two stitches to the boy's thumb, which he cut while trying to break a window in a bathroom on the second floor. So of course I was invited, since I was the daughter of Herr Guterman. Herr Guterman, by the way, was also invited. How could he not be. But he said no, no thank you. He sent me to be polite, and Gabriel came with me, but Papa made excuses because he was perfectly aware the Bethkes were Nazis. There are photos of meetings in Barranquilla, a swastika the size of a cinema screen and these people on their white-painted wooden chairs, all with their hair very neat. And on the platform or stage, whatever you call it, people in their well-pressed brown shirts, hands behind their backs, standing to attention. Or in meetings, all sitting round a table with its embroidered tablecloth, drinking beer. The Bethkes right there, he in white suit and tie, with his armband, and she with a brooch on her chest. In the photo you can barely see it but I remember perfectly: the eagle was gold and the swastika was onyx, a very well-made piece of jewelry. And I went to dine with these people one evening. It wasn't such an odd thing, believe it or not. I dined with swastika brooches, with armbands on several occasions. It wasn't exactly a regular occurrence at the hotel, of course, but before 1941 no one hid, none of them concealed anything, so it wasn't the most unusual thing in the world either.
So, why did he send me? If Papa preferred not to go himself, for the very understandable reason of disagreeable company, why didn't he mind my going? I wondered at the time, and later the answer was obvious. My father was an idealist. Only an idealist goes so confidently to a country like Colombia. People say the idealists are all dead, because they were the ones who stayed, hoping things would sort themselves out. I've never agreed. Those were the unfortunate ones, that's all. Or the ones who didn't have money. Or the ones who didn't get the papers to enable them to leave Germany or visas for the United States or wherever. On the other hand, the idealists packed their bags one night and said life's better somewhere we've never been. My father was a rich man in Germany. And one night he said, I'm sure we'll be better off selling cheese in the jungle. Because that's what Colombia was to a fellow like Papa, the jungle. Some of my school friends wrote me letters asking if there were lifts to take us up to the treetops, I swear. That is idealism, and that's why it seemed necessary to him that I represent the family and sit beside a fellow they said had a portrait of Hitler hanging in his living room. Here in Colombia it's another life, here we're all Germans, he'd say, here there are no Jews or Aryans, he'd say in the hotel, and in the hotel it worked for him. Yes, you'd have to be very naive, very shortsighted, I know. What about his friends hanged in the public squares in Germany? And those who'd spent years by then with a yellow star sewn on their clothes? Oh, yes, my father wasn't often wrong, but he was wrong about that. He believed, like so many other Jews, that Nazism abroad was a game, that exiles couldn't seriously be Nazis, no matter how many meetings they held, how much propaganda they spouted, how much evidence there was. We helped to build this country, didn't we? People were fond of us, no? Spirits were tempered here, people became more civilized and rational. Who could prove to him that the opposite was the case? Anyway, he wasn't the only one. The Jewish community was expert in denying the hatred of others, or whatever you want to call it. Of course, there would always be some guest to confirm those stupid ideas, because hotel guests aren't going to tell the owner what they think of his nose, are they? Guests aren't going to paint a swastika on the walls of their room, are they? No, at that time my father was a lamb. Old man Seeler, a horrible fellow, one of the patriarchs of anti-Semitism in Bogota, stayed in the hotel one time, and my father accommodated him with the excuse that he saw him arrive with Isaac's novel Maria in his hand. And I could give you thousands of examples like that. What can I say? From the beginning he thought he couldn't raise me to be resentful, he told me that often, that with me they'd have to cut their losses and start afresh, and besides (he didn't tell me this, but I can well imagine), he couldn't send out the idea that there were people with whom you do not sit, much less Germans like us. Like us, you see. In Colombia the enemy was less of an enemy. That's what the lamb my father sometimes was would have thought. Besides, remember in Colombia nothing was ever said about the camps in Europe, about the trains or the ovens. All that just was not in the Colombian press. We found out about it later, and those who knew about it while it was happening were on their own; the newspapers paid no attention to them. The fact is I served as ambassador for Herr Guterman the idealist, and that's how I ended up sitting between your dad and Herr Bethke, and facing Enrique Deresser, who was seated between the two women, Julia Bethke and Dona Margarita. At the head of the table, presiding but without any authority, was old Konrad, who looked smaller than he was when he was sitting down, but maybe it was the company that made him shrink.
Hans Bethke's perfectly shaven face, his little spectacles, everything about him said: I'll smile at you, but turn round and I'll stab you in the back. He had curly, blond, slicked-down hair, and it formed little spirals at his temples. His whole head was a whirl, like sharing a table with one of van Gogh's trees. And the tree talked. It talked a mile a minute. He used the little he'd done in his life to put down anyone else. Before we'd finished our drinks in the living room, we already knew that Bethke had traveled to Germany when he was twenty, for a short stay, sent by his family to get to know the land of his ancestors, and he'd returned to Colombia more German than the Kaiser. You would have said he wore his passport on his sleeve if his passport wasn't still Colombian. He had very small hands, so small that the salad fork looked like the one for the main course when he held it. Small hands, I don't know why, always make me sort of suspicious. Not just me, your father feels the same way. It was as if they were made to slip into the pockets of the people sitting next to him. But he didn't slip them anywhere. Bethke handled his cutlery as if he were playing the harp. But when he spoke it was something else. Bethke had a column in La Nueva Colombia, although I only found that out later. And hearing him talk was like hearing that, a column in a Fascist newspaper. Yes, that's what the man on my right was, a talking newspaper. Don't tell me it's not the height of irony.