"When dinner was served in the hotel dining room, Maria Rosa went to look for Mama and asked her what we should do with Don Gabriel's place. Should we wait for him, wasn't he going to be coming? Mama came up to my room and asked me the very same question. I didn't even know Gabriel had gone out, I thought he was still in his room. 'He went out two hours ago. He told Maria Rosa that he wouldn't be long. Why don't you put on a coat and ask her to go with you?' She had already put on a poncho, when I came down, and told me my father had already left. 'I wonder if he got hit by a car, Senorita Sara,' she said. That was just what I was afraid of, and I was not at all pleased to hear that the same idea had occurred to her. Maria Rosa started walking toward the plaza and I went the other way, like when you go to the lake by car. I walked around, asked the few people I saw, but I didn't even know what to look for, where to look, I'd never been in such a situation before. Besides, I was scared. All of Duitama knew who I was, and if so inclined I could go out alone at four in the morning, but that night I was scared. So after a little while I was back at the hotel. Mama was sitting on one of the benches on the patio, in spite of the cold, and told me as soon as I came in that Maria Rosa had found him near the church. 'He was attacked,' she said. 'He's hurt. Your father took him to Tunja; he's there with him now, so don't worry.'
"But she didn't tell me they cut four of his fingers off with a machete. She didn't tell me he'd almost bled to death. Gabriel told me all that the next day, when Papa brought him back to the hotel. He also explained the symptoms of septicemia to me. 'We have to be vigilant,' he said. All that when he was getting better, after the hours he'd spent unconscious. The Duitama doctor came, examined his injury, insisted how lucky we'd been, and I liked that he addressed us in the plural, that he saw us all together. That's how I felt, at least at that moment: I had been maimed as well. Gabriel's hand was bandaged, but just from the shape of the dressing, or rather from the shape of what was under the dressing, I could see how serious the matter was. 'But who did this to you?' I asked him. It was just a manner of speaking, one of those questions you ask just because you do, you know, not expecting a reply. But I was immediately sorry, I felt panic-stricken, because I realized that Gabriel knew who had done that to him and furthermore he knew why. 'No, don't tell me,' I said, but he'd already started talking. 'Enrique sent them,' he said. 'My friend sent them. But don't worry, I deserved it. This and much more. I killed the old man, Sara. I fucked up their lives. It's all my fault.' "
IV. THE INHERITED LIFE
The life I received as my inheritance-this life in which I'm no longer the son of an admirable orator and decorated professor, or even of a man who suffers in silence and then reveals his suffering in public, but of the most despicable of all creatures: someone capable of betraying a friend and selling out his family-began one Monday, a couple of weeks after New Year, when, at about ten at night, I microwaved myself a meal, sat down cross-legged on my unmade bed, and just before taking a quick glance through that day's newspaper, got a phone call from Sara Guterman. Without even saying hello, Sara said, "They're showing it." That meant, It's happening. What we had expected was happening. These things don't usually need to be coaxed: turn on the television and feel how your life changes, and if you have a little camera, take it out and film yourself, record for posterity the transformation of your face.
I had spent the day, and the whole week, busy with the second transformation of my father's memory. The first time, a mendacious, manipulated confession had begun to move the past around; now, the potential of real events (those false dead, those cataleptic bodies) was modifying the precarious truth and also the version my father had formulated (no, imposed) through a few words improvised in a classroom. But had he really improvised them? Now I had begun to think he had probably planned them with the subtlety with which he planned his speeches, because that's what it had been, an elaborate speech, which my father had used to change his memory of events, and thus change or pretend that his own past was changed, a past in which, he had believed, Gabriel Santoro would no longer be guilty of a friend's disgrace, and he would from then on be converted into a victim, one victim among many in that time when speaking mattered and a couple of words could ruin someone. I was occasionally moved by the confidence my father had in his own phrases, the blind faith that it was enough to tell a tampered-with story-change the positions of the characters, like a magician does, transform the betrayer into the betrayed-so the exchange imposes itself over the past, more or less like that Borges character, that coward who by force of believing in his own courage manages to make it exist in the real world. "The Summa Theologica denies that God can unmake the past," says the narrator of this story; but he also says that to modify the past is not to modify a single fact, but to annul the consequences of the fact, that is, to create two universal histories. I can never reread the story without thinking of my father and of what I felt that Monday night: maybe my task, in the future, would be to reconstruct the two histories, uselessly to confront them. It occurred to me at some point that, much to my regret, I would end up devoting myself to revising memories, trying to find the inconsistencies, the contradictions, the barefaced lies with which my father protected one tiny act-or rather, pretended it did not exist-one action among thousands in a life more filled with ideas than actions.
On the sofa in my living room, lined up like infantry, were the tapes of my interviews with Sara. After our conversation on New Year's Eve-which lasted until six-thirty in the morning, since after the revelations already recorded came my questions, my protests, and then more questions-I listened to them again, pursuing in Sara's voice as well the covering up, or the complicity, or the references to other denunciations, other absurd inclusions on the blacklist, other family catastrophes that would have been caused in some remote way by that amateur inquisition. And the day of the program, before Sara's call, I'd been listening to one of the last. In the recording, I asked her if she would have ever returned to live in Germany if the opportunity had arisen, and she answered, "Never." And when I asked her how she could be so sure, she said, "Because I did go back once, so I know what it feels like." In 1968, she told me, she'd received an invitation from the municipality of Emmerich, her hometown, and she had traveled there with her father and her eldest son-by plane to Frankfurt and train to Emmerich-to attend one of those ceremonies of public atonement certain sectors of German politics used at the time to try in vain to do what we all try to do all the time: correct mistakes, alleviate the damage done. "It was strange to be there," the recorded voice was saying, "but we'd arrived by night, and I thought the next morning everything would seem even stranger to me when I saw in the light of day things I hadn't seen for thirty years. Although we didn't know if they'd still be there, because during the war Emmerich was one of the most bombed cities." Herr Strecker, the man who had helped them escape in thirty-eight, was in charge of welcoming them. Herr Strecker had also left Germany, Sara said, he'd left in thirty-nine, and he'd lived in Montevideo for a few years and then in Buenos Aires. "He and Papa embraced and almost wouldn't let go of each other," said Sara, "but on the plane my father had told us we were forbidden to cry in Germany, so I made an effort, it wasn't so difficult. Ceremonies are more or less what we know they're like. We visitors were assigned a local youngster, one for each exiled couple; since I'd gone without my husband, Papa and I were a twosome. The strangest thing was how their mouths filled up with the word exile and all its synonyms, in which the German language is generous; we have no lack of words to call those who leave. We were supposed to talk in a school or a university about our experience, and my father said, 'I don't know if there are enough schools in Emmerich for all its exiles to speak.' And just think, the same thing was happening in other cities, all over the country. I don't know, sometimes I think I don't really know what all that was in aid of. What was the aim of calling all those from abroad and reminding them of where they were from? As if they were claiming them, no? Like an absurd demand, to put it like that.