The new Gabriel Santoro. Gabriel Santoro, corrected and improved version. The reincarnated orator stood up all of a sudden and made a beeline across the living room, arrived at the wooden bookcase, and with his left hand picked up a cardboard sleeve the size of a wedding invitation, and with the thumb of his stump he took the disk out of the sleeve, put it on the record player, and set the speed at 78 rpm and lowered the needle, and then one of the German songs Sara had made me listen to years before began to play.
Veronika, der Lenz ist da,
die Madchen singen Tralala,
die ganze Welt ist wie verhext,
Veronika, der Spargel wachst.
I had closed my eyes and leaned back on the sofa and begun to let myself drift into postlunch drowsiness, after the heaviness of the ajiaco on a Sunday afternoon, when I thought I heard my father singing and discounted the idea as impossible and unbelievable, and immediately I seemed to hear his voice again underneath the old music and static from the speakers and the 1930s instruments. I opened my eyes and saw him, with his arms around Sara (who had started washing the plates), singing in German. The fact that I hadn't heard him sing more than three times in my entire life was less odd than seeing him sing in a language he didn't know, and I immediately remembered a scene from when I was small. For a few months my father had put on a wig and changed his glasses and worn a bow tie instead of a normal tie: the fact of belonging to the Supreme Court, even though he wasn't a judge, had made him interesting, and he'd received his first threats, a couple of those calls so common in Bogota and to which we've become accustomed and don't pay much attention. Well, the first time he arrived home in disguise, he called hello from the stairs as he always did, and I went out and found myself with this unfamiliar figure and it scared me: a brief and soon dispelled fear, but fear it was. Something along the same lines happened as I watched him move his mouth and emit strange sounds. It was, in truth, another person, a second Gabriel Santoro.
Veronika, die Welt ist grun,
drum lass uns in die Walder ziehn.
Sogar der liebe, gute, alte Grosspapa,
sagt zu der lieben, guten, alten Grossmama.
When the old folks came to sit back down in the living room, one or the other noticed my shocked face, and they both started to explain that, among other things, my father had spent the last few months learning German. "Do you think it absurd?" he said. "Because I do, I confess. Learning a new language at sixty-something: What for? What for, when the one I already have isn't much use to me? I'm retired, I'm retired from my language. And this is what we retired people do, look for another job. If we are given a second life, then the urge is even stronger." That was when, in the middle of the treatise on the way of reinventing oneself, in the middle of the spectacle of his remodeled words, in the middle of these sung phrases whose meaning I would find out later, my father spoke to Sara and me about Angelina, about how he'd got to know her better in these months-it was logical, after seeing her every day for so long and benefiting from her massages-how he'd gone on seeing her after the therapy was finished and his health restored. That's what he told us. My father the survivor. My father, with the capacity to reinvent himself.
"I'm sleeping with her. We've been seeing each other for two months."
"How old is she?" asked Sara.
"Forty-four. Forty-five. I don't remember. She told me, but I don't remember."
"And she hasn't got anyone, right?"
"How do you know she hasn't got anyone?"
"Because if she did, someone would be throwing it in her face. That sleeping with old men is against the rules. The age difference. Whatever. She must have a good story."
"Oh, here we go," said my father. "There's no story."
"Of course there is-don't give me that. First of all, she's got no one to protest. Second, you get evasive when I ask you. This woman has a hell of a story. Has she suffered a lot?"
"Well, yes. You've got the makings of a great inquisitor, Sara Guterman. Yes, she's had a shitty life, poor thing. She lost her parents in the bombing of Los Tres Elefantes."
"That recently?"
"That recently."
"Did they live here?"
"No. They'd come from Medellin to visit her. They got to say hello, and then they went out to buy some nylon stockings. Her mum needed some nylon stockings. Los Tres Elefantes was the closest place. We passed by there in a taxi not long ago. I can't remember where we were going, but when we got there Angelina's hands were numb and her mouth dry. And that evening she was a bit feverish. It still hits her that hard. Her brother lives on the coast. They don't speak to each other."
"And when did she tell you all this?" I asked.
"I'm old, Gabriel. Old-fashioned. I like to talk after sex."
"All right, all right, a little decorum, if you don't mind," said Sara. "I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still right here, or have I become invisible?"
I patted my father on the knee, and his tone changed: he put aside the irony, he became docile. "I didn't know what you'd think," he said. "Do you realize?"
"What?"
"It's the first time I've ever spoken to you about anything like this," he said, "and it's to tell you what I'm telling you."
"And without giving the rest of us time to cover our ears," said Sara. And then she asked, "Has she stayed over at your house?"
"Never. And don't think I haven't suggested it. She's very independent, doesn't like sleeping in other people's beds. That's fine with me, not that I need to tell you. But now she's taken it into her head to invite me to Medellin."
"When?"
"Now. Well, to spend the holidays. We're going next weekend and coming back the second or third of January. That's if she gets the time off, of course. They exploit her like a beast, I swear. It's the last week of the year, and she has to fight tooth and nail."
He thought for a second.
"I'm going to Medellin with her," he said then. "To spend Christmas and New Year with her. I'm going with her. Damn, it does sound very odd."
"Odd, no, it sounds ridiculous," said Sara. "But what can you do? All adolescents are ridiculous."
"There is one little thing," my father said to me. "We need your car. Or rather, we don't need it, but I said to Angelina that it's silly to take a bus when you can lend us your car. If you can, that is. If you're not going to need it, if it's not a problem."
I told him I wasn't going to need it, although it was a lie; I told him it was no problem, partly because his whole being, his voice and his manner, was speaking to me with an unprecedented affection, as if he were asking a special favor of a special friend.
"Take the car and don't worry," I said. "Go to Medellin, have a good time, say hi to Angelina for me."
"Are you sure?"
"I'll stay with Sara. She'll invite me over for Christmas and New Year."
"That's right," she said. "Go along and don't worry. We won't miss you. We're going to stay here and have our own party. Drinking what you can't drink, eating saturated fats and talking about you behind your back."
"Well, that sounds perfect," said my father. "My back doesn't usually mind that."
"Are you going to drive?" said Sara.
"Not all the time. My hand tends to be a bit of a risk factor on roads like that one. She'll probably do most of the driving, I guess. I can't guarantee she's good at it, but her license is in order, and anyway, who said you have to drive well to drive in Colombia? How dangerous can it be? I'm in no position to make demands; if a Virgil falls into your life, you don't start cross-examining."