The power of those recordings. That afternoon, listening to them, my father aged twenty years: maybe he would have thought, as I was thinking, that Sara Guterman's every sentence evoked the treachery of which he'd been the victim, every sentence contained it but also managed to empty it of meaning, for neither Sara nor I could grasp his experience, feel what he'd felt as a young man. He never asked us to turn the machine off, or to change the cassette, nor did he stand up with some excuse to escape to the bathroom or the kitchen. He silently endured that recording, which must have been at the very least uncomfortable and sometimes even painful, because it brought back to life for him the circumstances that he'd kept secret for such a long time and to which, under the spur of my book, he had alluded in public, to the unease (and sometimes admiration) of his students; he endured it as he'd endured the catheter, with his eyes wide open and fixed on the hanging lamp, the scrawny wire, the metallic shade. When the first side finished and I asked if they wanted me to turn it over, he said no, no thanks, why didn't we put on a little music and chat for a while, Gabriel; wasn't it better to take advantage of these moments to talk? His voice, thin and raspy as a paper kite, was barely audible; in a single sentence, my father managed to complain, draw attention to himself like a badly brought-up teenager, and cast the authority of his tantrums over the atmosphere: if there were things he preferred to forget, it was incomprehensible and even obscene that others might want to remember them. And for the rest of the afternoon, the company of that bitter and pale old man, which would have annoyed me in a stranger, struck me as pitiful and pathetic. That's what I discovered that afternoon: my father was incapable of wrestling with the facts of his own life; the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in the teeth. Those conversations recorded five years earlier (about things that had happened half a century ago) damaged him from within and sucked at his blood, left him as exhausted as if he'd just come out of the operating room.
But on the afternoon I'm talking about, my father was back to being the force he used to be. His mind was again functioning as it had done at the height of his powers, and the hypothesis of the second chance seemed as much in evidence as if there were a horse in the room. I remembered the recorded words, raised my head to look at the people with whom I was sharing a meal-my family-and thought what always seems incredible: This happened to you two. This, which happened half a century ago, happened to you, and you're still alive, acting as tangible testimony to events and circumstances that will perhaps die when you die, as if you were the last human beings able to dance an Andean folk dance that no one else knows, or as if you knew by heart the words to a song that had never been written down and will be lost to the world when you two forget it. And in what physical state did these memory receptacles live? How deteriorated were they, how much time did the world have to try to extract their knowledge? Every movement, every word from my father was like a little banner saying: Don't worry, everybody calm down, nothing's happened here. And Sara, it seemed, thought the same.
"The truth is you've come out as good as new," Sara said to my father. "I wonder if I should have one of those things, too."
"No such thing as reincarnation?" my father said. "No karma? No one's going to convince me of that anymore, my dear; from here on in I declare myself a Hindu."
"I can't stand this," said Sara. "Now I look older next to you."
It was a slight exaggeration, of course, because Sara, with her loose linen slacks and a white shirt that came down to her knees, still looked solid, as though she'd been let off half her years for good behavior. She seemed to have settled into a comfortable solitude, seemed resigned to the days passing her by and content to look up, with something that might be called submission but also habit, to watch them go. Her face underlined the years she'd lived with no more responsibility than her own sustenance. Her earlobes were pierced, but she wore no earrings; she used bifocals for reading, the frames gold and discreet, the lenses a coppery color. Her body, it seemed to me, had lived at a different rhythm: it didn't show the marks of time, the tiredness of the skin; it didn't show the tensions, of course, or the way pain marks people's faces, scratches their eyes and forces them to wear glasses, contorts the corners of mouths and scores their necks like a plow. Or was it perhaps more precise to speak of memory: Sara's body accumulated time, but had no memory. Sara kept her memory apart: in boxes and files and photographs, and in the cassettes of which I was the custodian, that seemed to absorb Sara's history and at the same time withdraw it from her body. The cassettes of Dorian Guterman. The files of Sara Gray.
As for him, it was true that over these last six months his transformation had been remarkable. I knew that one of the immediate consequences of the operation was a sudden invasion of oxygen into an unaccustomed heart, and therefore levels of energy the patient had forgotten existed, but seeing him through the eyes of our hostess, watching him as his contemporary watched him, I thought that yes, the cliche was true, my father had come out as good as new. Over the last few months I would have forgotten if not for the image of the scar blazoned across his chest, that corporeal memorandum, and the restrictions imposed after the operation, still in effect-although only my father remained aware of those private disciplines-which surfaced at lunch and dinner, just as they came up that afternoon, while we ate ajiaco in that Christmassy apartment with a view of Monserrate.
"And what are you going to do now?" said Sara. "What are you going to do with your new life?"
"For the moment, not count my chickens. Or rather count them, but very quietly. I have to take good care of myself just to stay as I am. The diet is very strict but I have to stick to it. It's pretty good, though, being twenty again."
"What an insufferable fellow you are! Something will happen to you for being so arrogant."