Free The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page A

queasy. I held my head in my hands and the noise of students getting up gradually subsided. I went out, looked for my father, and didn't see anyone. I walked around in front of the building, under the insufficient light of the walkway, and I could have sworn I saw him cross Seventh between buses and minibuses, jog with his overcoat folded over his arm despite the cold, toward the International Center, but a second later the illusion had crumbled: it wasn't him. (That momentary confusion functioned as a symbol of bad literature. That's it, I thought. Now I've started to see my father when he's not there, to confuse him with my image of him, now I've started to unlearn his silhouette, for I'd realized I would have to unlearn his life: one revelation, just one fucking revelation, and already my father is a crude hologram, a phantom in the streets.) When I turned round and began to walk south, thinking of taking the first street that went down to Seventh and thus doubling my chances of finding a taxi at that hour, I ran into a student. A streetlight lit him from the back--a saint and his halo--and it took me a second to recognize him: it was the student who had my book; at the beginning of the class the fetishistic attention he was paying my father had already bothered me, and now he seemed anxious to confirm that attention.
    "You're el junior , aren't you?" he said. "Your old man's hard, brother. You're a lucky guy. Too bad there aren't more sons of bitches like him."
    Half an hour later I arrived at the house of my father, el senior , the hard man, the stranger. But he must have taken a slower route, because he wasn't home yet, so I crossed the street and settled down to wait for him on the corner, sitting on one of those milestones you still find all over Bogota, those rough, angular stones that used to mark the streets and for some reason haven't been taken away, although many of them now have incorrect information ( Boulevard where it should say Avenue , Nineteen where it should say Thirty ). And all that time, while I was freezing to death and watching a dirty yellow cloud swallowing the night sky, I was thinking: Why has he never told me about what happened? And what had happened ? What was the unfortunate joke made at the wrong time that someone had taken too seriously? Who was the humorless person who'd made the accusation; who was the informer? Had he ever told my mother? Was there anyone else who knew about this? That was the first thing I asked when he arrived with his collar undone (disorder struggling to the surface) and unenthusiastically tolerated my following him upstairs and sitting down when he sat down. I also asked him if he'd seen me; I asked him if, after seeing me, he'd recognized me. He chose to answer my questions out of order. "Of course," he said. "I saw you were there at the back, sitting there from the start. I've always seen you. Sometimes I let you know, sometimes I don't. You've been there all week, Gabriel. How do you suppose I wouldn't notice?"
    "I would've liked to know," I insisted then. "You never told me. You never talked to me about that."
    "And I'm never going to tell you," he said. He didn't seem to be choking anything back; nothing seemed to be moving him deep down inside, but therein lay the maladjustment, and I knew it. "Memory isn't public, Gabriel. That's what neither you nor Sara have understood. You two have made things public that many of us wanted forgotten. You two have recorded things that many of us took a long time to get out of sight. People are talking about the lists again, they're talking about the cowardice of certain informers, about the anguish of those unjustly informed on. . . . And those of us who'd made our peace with that past, those who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. The blacklists, the Hotel Sabaneta, the informers. All words that many people rubbed out of their dictionaries, and you come along, white