ARRIVING NEXT THURSDAY STOP REQUEST ROOM WITHOUT BALLOONS STOP.
The balloons he was referring to were eiderdowns, which Caballero didn't like. He preferred heavy wool blankets, the kind that collect dust and make allergy sufferers sneeze. Peter Guterman would have his room made up according to these specifications, issuing orders in German so urgently that the hotel employees, girls from Sogamosa and Duitama, managed to learn some basic words. Hairpeter, they said. Yes, Hairpeter. Right away, Hairpeter. Senor Guterman, professional obsessive, understood and accepted the obsessions of his most valued guests. (When he was expecting Gaitan, he'd have a scarecrow set up among the roof tiles of the mansion, even though he thought it detracted from the roof's folkloric charm.) Sara had to intervene all the time, serve as translator and conciliator, because Spanish was a terrible effort for her father from the start, and he never did master it very well; and, since we're also talking about a man accustomed to impossible levels of efficiency, he very often lost his temper, and would occasionally roar like a caged animal, leaving his employees in tears all afternoon. Peter Guterman was not a nervous man; but it would make him nervous to see the president, candidates to the presidency, and the capital's most important journalists fighting over the rooms in his hotel. Sara, who with time had begun to get a better sense of her new country, tried to explain to her father that they were the nervous ones; that this was a country where a man ruled the roost simply by virtue of coming from the north; that for the majority of his guests, pompous and ambitious as they were, staying in the hotel was somehow like being abroad. That's how it was: a room in the Guterman family's hotel was, for the majority of those pretentious Creoles, the only opportunity to see the world, the only important role they could have in their minuscule play.
Because the Nueva Europa was, first and foremost, a meeting place for foreigners: North Americans, Spaniards, Germans, Italians, people from all over. Colombia, which had never been a country of immigrants, at that moment and in that place seemed to be one. There were those who arrived at the beginning of the century in search of money, because they'd heard that in those South American countries everything was still to be done; there were those who arrived escaping from the Great War, most of them Germans who'd been scattered around the world trying to make a living, because in their country this had become impossible; there were the Jews. So this turned out to be, no more no less, a country of escapees. And that whole persecuted country had ended up in the Hotel Nueva Europa, as if it were the true House of Representatives for the displaced world, a Universal Museum of the Auswanderer; and sometimes it felt like that in reality, because the hotel guests gathered each evening in the reception room downstairs to listen to the news of the war on the radio. There were confrontations, words exchanged, as was to be expected, but always prudently, because Peter Guterman managed quite early to convince people to leave their politics at the reception desk. That was his phrase; everyone remembered it, because it was one of the few things the hotel owner learned to say fluently: "Bitte, leave your politics at reception," he would say to people arriving, without even giving them time to set down their suitcases to sign the register, and people accepted this pact because the momentary truce was more comfortable for everyone than coming to blows with the people at the next table every time they sat down for a meal. But maybe that wasn't the reason. Maybe it was true that there, in that hotel on the other side of the world, people could share a table with people who in their country of origin would have thrown stones through the reception windows. What brought them together? What neutralized the merciless hatreds that arrived at the Nueva Europa like news from another life?
The fact is that during those first years the war was something heard on the radio, a sad spectacle from elsewhere. "The blacklists came later, and the hotels turned into luxurious jails," says Sara, referring to the concentration camps for citizens of the Axis nations. "Yes, that happened later. It was later that the war on the other side of the ocean came home to those of us on this side. We were so innocent, we thought we were safe. Anyone can confirm it for you. Everyone remembers it perfectly welclass="underline" it was very difficult to be German at that time." In the Guterman family's hotel things happened that destroyed families, disrupted lives, ruined futures; but none of that was visible until much later, when time had gone by and the ruined futures and disrupted lives began to be noticed. Everywhere-in Bogota, in Cucuta, in Barranquilla, in miserable towns like Santander de Quilichao-it was the same; there were places, however, that seemed to work like black holes, invoking chaos, absorbing the worst of a person. The Gutermans' hotel, especially at a certain point in time, had been one of them. "Just thinking of it makes me sad," Sara Guterman says now, calling up those events forty-five years later. "Such a beautiful place, so dear to people, where such horrible things could happen." And what things were those? "It was as it says in the Bible. Brother shall betray brother, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents."
Of course, writing words such as Auswanderer or blacklists demands or should demand some sort of guarantee on the part of the one writing them. These were unreliable words and the book was full of them. I know this now, but then I barely suspected it: in manuscript, these pages had appeared so pacific and neutral that I never considered them capable of making anyone uncomfortable, much less of provoking disputes; the printed and bound version, however, was a sort of Molotov cocktail ready to land in the middle of the Santoro household.
"Ah, Santoro," said Dr. Raskovsky when a nurse intercepted him to ask how the surgery had gone. "Gabriel, isn't it? Yes, it went very well. Wait here. In a moment we can go in and see the patient." Then it had gone well? The patient was alive? "Not just alive, much more than that," said the doctor, already on his way and spouting automatic phrases. "You should see the heart he's got, just like new." And after the sort of dizziness that hit me when I heard the news, something strange happened: I didn't know if my name, pronounced by the doctor, referred to the patient or the patient's son. I looked for a bathroom to wash my face before going into intensive care. I did it thinking of my father, not wanting him to see me like this, because I couldn't remember the last time one of us had seen the other looking so out of sorts. In front of the mirror I took off my jacket. I saw two butterflies of sweat under my arms, and surprised myself by thinking of Dr. Raskovsky's armpits, as if we were close friends; and later, as I waited for my father to wake up, that intimacy I'd been seeking seemed detestable, perhaps because my father himself had taught me never to feel in debt to anyone. Not even to the one responsible for his still being alive.
Despite the doctor's having spoken in the plural, I went into intensive care, that torture chamber, by myself. The monitors blinked like owls on the surrounding walls and tables; there were six beds, arranged with odious symmetry and separated by opaque partition walls like the ones in public lavatories, with aluminum rails that reflected glints of neon light. The monitors each beeped in their own rhythm, the respirators breathed, and in one of those beds, the last one on the left, the only one that faced the board where the nurses wrote the day's instructions in red and black markers, was my father, breathing through a grayish corrugated tube that filled his mouth. I lifted his gown and saw for the second time in one day (after never having seen it in my whole life) my father's penis resting on his groin, almost at the level of his mutilated hand, and circumcised, unlike mine. They'd fitted him with a catheter so he wouldn't have to be disturbed when he needed to urinate. That was how it was: my father was communicating with the world through plastic tubes. And through electrodes arranged like patches on an animal's coat across his chest, on his forehead. And through needles: the one that was injecting him with tranquilizers and antibiotics disappeared into his neck, the one for the drip into the vein of his left arm. I sat on a round stool and said hello. "Hi, Dad. It's all over now, everything's fine." He couldn't hear me. "I told you, remember? I told you everything would be fine, and now it is. It's all over. We got through this." His respirator was working, his monitor kept beeping, but he had absented himself. The tube in his neck was taped to his face, and stretched the loose flesh of his cheeks (his sixty-seven-year-old cheeks). The effect underlined the tiredness of his skin, of his tissues, and I, closing my eyes a little, could see the speeded-up film of his decomposition. There was another image I tried to summon up, to see what I could learn from it: that of a first-sized plastic heart, which had sat for a whole month on my biology teacher's desk.