I stayed with him until six or seven and then went home, thinking during the whole trip about what had just happened, about the strange twist of a son's seeing his father's home for the first time. Was it just the two rooms-the living room and bedroom-or was there a study somewhere? I couldn't see more than a cheap white bookcase leaning carelessly against the wall that ran parallel to Forty-ninth Street, beside a barred window that hardly let in any light. Where were his books? Where were the plaques and silver trays with which others had insisted on distinguishing his career over the years? Where did he work, where did he read, where did he listen to that record-The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, a title I wasn't familiar with-the sleeve of which was lying on the kitchen table? The apartment seemed stuck in the 1970s: the orange and brown carpet; the white fiberglass chair I sank into as my father recalled and described for me the map of his catheterization (its narrow highways, its back roads); the closed, windowless bathroom, lit only by a couple of transparent plastic rectangles on the ceiling (one of which was broken, and through the hole I could see two neon tubes in their death throes). There was soapy foam in the green washbasin, the shower was dark and didn't smell too good, and from its aluminum frame hung two pairs of recently washed underpants. Had he washed them himself? Didn't anyone come to help him? I opened drawers and doors held shut with magnets and found some aspirin, a box of Alka-Seltzer, and a rusty shaving brush that no one had used for a long time. There were drops of urine on the toilet bowl and on the floor: yellow, smelly drops, telltale signs of a worn-out prostate. And there, on top of the tank, under a box of Kleenex, was a copy of my book. I wondered, of course, if this might not be his way of suggesting that his opinion had not changed over the years. "Journalism aids intestinal transit," I imagined him telling me. "Didn't they teach you that at the university?"
When I got home I made a few calls, although it was too late to cancel the operation or to pay any attention to second opinions, especially those formulated over the phone and without the benefit of documents, test results, and X-rays. In any case, talking to Jorge Mor, a cardiologist at the Shaio Clinic who'd been a friend of mine since school, didn't do much to calm me down. When I called him, Jorge confirmed what the doctor at San Pedro Claver had said: he confirmed the diagnosis as well as the necessity of operating urgently, and also the luck of having discovered the matter by chance, before my father's asphyxiated heart did what it was thinking of doing and suddenly stopped without warning. "Rest easy, brother," Jorge told me. "It's the simplest version of a difficult operation. Worrying from now till Thursday won't do anyone any good." "But what could go wrong?" I insisted. "Everything can go wrong, Gabriel, everything can go wrong in any operation in the world. But this is one that's got to be done, and it is relatively simple. Do you want me to come over and explain it to you?" "Of course not," I said. "Don't be ridiculous." But maybe if I'd accepted his offer I would have kept talking to Jorge until it was time to go to bed. We would have talked about the operation; I would have gone to sleep late, after one or two soporific drinks. Instead, I ended up going to bed at ten, and just before three in the morning I realized I was still awake and more frightened than I'd thought.
I got out of bed, felt in the pockets of my jeans for the shape of my wallet, and dumped its contents into the pool of lamplight. A few months before I turned eighteen, my father had presented me with a rectangular card, dark blue on one side and white on the other, which gave him the right to be buried with my mother in the Jardines de Paz-and there was the cemetery's logo, letters like lilies-and asked me to keep it in a safe place. At that moment, like any other teenager, I couldn't think of anywhere better to put it than in my wallet; and there it had stayed all that time, between my ID card and my military card, with its funereal aspect and the name typed on an adhesive strip now wearing away. "One never knows," my father had said when he gave it to me. "We could get blown up any day and I want you to know what to do with me." The time of bombs and attacks, a whole decade of living every day with the knowledge that arriving home each night was a matter of luck, was still in the distance; if he had in fact been blown up, the possession of that card wouldn't have made things any clearer to me as to how to deal with the dead. Now it struck me that the card, yellowed and worn, looked like the mock-ups that come in new wallets, and no stranger would have seen it for what it actually was: a laminated tomb. And so, considering the possibility that the moment to use it had arrived, not due to any bombs or attacks but through the predictable misdeeds of an old heart, I fell asleep.
They admitted him at five o'clock the next afternoon. Throughout those first hours, already in his green dressing gown, my father answered the anesthesiologist's questions and signed the white Social Security forms and the tricolor life insurance ones (a faded national flag), and throughout Tuesday and Wednesday he spoke and kept speaking, demanding certainties, asking for information and in his turn informing, sitting on the high, regal mattress of the aluminum bed but nevertheless reduced to the vulnerable position of one who knows less than the person with whom he's speaking. I stayed with him those three nights. I assured him, time and time again, that everything was going to be fine. I saw the bruise on his thigh in the shape of the province of La Guajira, and assured him that everything was going to be fine. And on Thursday morning, after they shaved his chest and both legs, three men and a woman took him to the operating room on the second floor, lying down and silent for the first time and ostentatiously naked beneath the disposable gown. I accompanied him until a nurse, the same one who'd looked blatantly and more than once at the patient's comatose genitals, asked me to get out of the way and gave me a little ammonia-smelling pat, saying the same thing I'd said to him: "Don't worry, sir. Everything's going to be fine." Except she added, "God willing."
Almost anyone would recognize my father's name, and not only because it's the same as the one on the front of this book (yes, my father was a perfect example of that predictable species: those who are so confident of their life's achievements that they have no fear of baptizing their children with their own names), but also because Gabriel Santoro was the man who taught, for more than twenty years, the famous Seminar on Judicial Oratory at the Supreme Court, and the man who, in 1988, delivered the commemoration address on the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Bogota, that legendary text that came to be compared with the finest examples of Colombian rhetoric, from Bolivar to Gaitan. GABRIEL SANTORO, HEIR TO THE LIBERAL CAUDILLO, was the headline in an official publication that few know and no one reads, but which gave my father one of the great satisfactions of his life in recent years. Quite right, too, because he'd learned everything from Gaitan: he'd attended all his speeches; he'd plagiarized his methods. Before he was twenty, for example, he'd started wearing my grandmother's corsets to create the same effect as the girdle that Gaitan wore when he had to speak outdoors. "The girdle put pressure on his diaphragm," my father explained in his classes, "and his voice would come out louder, deeper, and stronger. You could be two hundred meters from the podium when Gaitan was speaking with no microphones whatsoever, pure lung power, and you could hear him perfectly." The explanation came accompanied by the dramatic performance, because my father was an excellent mimic (but where Gaitan raised the index finger of his right hand, pointing to the sky, my father raised his shiny stump). "People of Colombia: For the moral restoration of the Republic! People of Colombia: For your victory! People of Colombia: For the defeat of the oligarchy!" Pause; ostensibly kind question from my father: "Who can tell me why this series of phrases moves us, what makes it effective?" An incautious student: "We're moved by the ideas of-" My father: "Nothing to do with ideas. Ideas don't matter, any brute can have ideas, and these, in particular, are not ideas but slogans. No, the series moves and convinces us through the repetition of the same phrase at the beginning of the clauses, something that you will all, from now on, do me the favor of calling anaphora. And the next one to mention ideas will be shot."