"Tell me what you know."
"I know that Enrique's father went broke. I know he killed himself, took I don't know how many sleeping pills and washed them down with a cocktail of liquor and gunpowder. I also know that it all happened in a dive of a hotel, no, in a boardinghouse on Twelfth Street, on Twelfth around Fifth or Sixth, because one time we were walking past there and Dad told me. Look, this is where Deresser's father killed himself, he told me. I remember it very clearly, we were walking down Fifth Avenue toward Luis Angel Arango. We were going to look for a couple of books that he thought were absolutely crucial for my thesis. Longinus's On the Sublime, and The Art of Persuasion in Greece by Kennedy. He thought my thesis was for a different degree, I guess."
"That's incredible, you remember the titles? How can you? What an amazing memory."
"One always remember titles, Sara. When my mum died I was reading The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming. When I graduated I was reading Clandestine in Chile. Garcia Marquez. When they killed Lara Bonilla, I was reading Hiroshima. John Hersey. One always remembers, or at least that's how I am. Not you? Don't you remember what you were reading on important dates? Let's see, what were you reading when your husband died?"
"I don't know. I remember there was a bullfight on. It was Pepe Caceres. The bull caught him but he wasn't hurt. I saw it all from up here. And I don't even like bullfighting."
"But no books."
"No. I guess I'm not like that."
"Well, anyway, Longinus and Kennedy. Those were my authors when Dad told me about Konrad Deresser."
"I didn't know he'd told you. It's strange. Anyway, let me tell you the rest: Gabriel was in the hotel that weekend. I had kept on working in the hotel after the war, with more and more responsibilities, because suddenly the ability to speak Colombian Spanish had made me indispensable. What a word: indispensable. Your dad and I were twenty-two years old, and Enrique a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, already grown up. Twenty-two, can you imagine? Who's indispensable at the age of twenty-two? My grandson's that age, or at least somewhere around there, and I see him and think: We were that age? Weren't we children? Of course, back then we were already people at twenty-two, we were adults, and these days a thirty-year-old is still a child. But it doesn't matter, we were young. How was it that the things that happened to us happened? Aren't there things that a person only does when they're older; is there not a minimum age for doing certain things, especially the ones that mark your life? I've spent so many years asking myself these questions that the answers now matter very little to me. Now what I want is for no one to answer them, because an unexpected or strange reply would make me revise my life. And there comes a time when we're no longer up for revisions. I'm no longer up for revisions. Gabriel tried to revise, for example, and I don't know what his girlfriend thought about that, but things aren't that simple. You can't start revising your life and rest easy. It's forbidden to revise and rest easy. That should be inscribed on our birth certificates, so we know what to expect, so we don't go through life doing silly things.
"Your father was at law school, but even so he managed to come out to Boyaca every weekend. When he couldn't catch a bus, I'd look through the reservations for someone we knew, and he would always get a lift, as if guests' cars were for hire. I'd just give him the phone number, and he'd take care of the rest: he'd call, put his case in his Don Juan voice, and the guests would end up offering him a place in their car. Gabriel had this ability: he managed to get people to do things for him. It wasn't just that he knew how to talk, no. People believed him, people trusted him. Even Papa would let him stay in the hotel without paying the full rate, which would have been out of Gabriel's reach, something he might've been able to afford three times a year. And so he'd arrive with his contracts and administrative procedural textbooks, and he'd study for a while, almost always in the mornings, and then we'd go out for a walk, when my work in the hotel allowed. This wasn't during the school term, and for the holidays Gabriel would normally get some job, driving trucks all over the country as if Colombia were the size of a ranch. Of course, they hired him because he had the stamina of an ox and he could sit behind a steering wheel for twenty straight hours without sleeping, hardly even stopping to eat. That year he drove fuel tankers during the transport workers' strike. . but you know about that, don't you?"
"Yes, he told me about that several times as well. 'On the Crown.' The trucks."
"Well, that Christmas there weren't any trucks to drive, there wasn't any work, because the strike was over. Gabriel couldn't bear staying at home. He never talked to you about that, I'm sure. He couldn't stand your grandmother. And I have to say I could see why. Dona Justina was already puritanical before they killed her husband, and from that moment on she went to unbearable extremes, especially for her only child. So it was the most normal thing in the world for Gabriel to ask me for asylum, I'm not exaggerating, that's the word he used, holiday asylum, because his mother, to celebrate Christmas, got together with three old maiden aunts, and for each novena they said the rosary with such fervor that after her death the doctors found one of her kneecaps was dislocated and said it was from her spending so much time kneeling during the second half of her life. Gabriel made fun of her in public. It was a little painful to watch."
"I never knew her."
"No, of course not. When she died you would have been two or three years old, and Gabriel never wanted to take you to her house for her to see you. The old lady sent everybody to tell him that she wanted to meet her grandson, that she didn't want to die without seeing her grandson, and Gabriel didn't react at all. With time I came to realize that he was throwing it back in her face. . it's just a saying, of course, because in that family they never faced up to things, they didn't talk about illness or misunderstandings or anything. Do you know what he reproached her for? — well, what I think he reproached her for behind her back-That she should have let herself die after the death of her husband. That she buried herself alive at the age of thirty-five-because I don't think she could have been any older when they killed your grandfather. Let's see, Gabriel was ten or twelve, probably twelve, so she was just barely into her thirties, yes, she was already dead and in mourning at that age, and Gabriel said that sometimes her mourning was for her own death. He talked to me about that several times. He'd come back from his Catholic school and come home to rooms darker than those of the priests, the furniture all covered with sheets so the upholstery wouldn't get worn, an enormous crucified Christ in every room, all identical, the ones with lots of blood and open eyes, you know? The ones that usually have crosses made of corrugated wood, if you can say it like that. Have you seen those?"
"I think so, I've seen them somewhere. The ones that aren't smooth. The sort of irregular ones, like chocolate braids."
"Before they killed your grandfather, Dona Justina taught Gabriel how to make the crosses, because at the house in Tunja the child had a lot of free time and there was more than enough wood. And afterward, for a time, she still forced him to go on making them. Making wooden crosses until he was twelve or thirteen. How he hated her for that. He remembered those crosses all his life. After that he hated all manual labor, I think partly because of that. Or did you ever see him painting the house, or trying to learn how to play an instrument, or fixing the plumbing or a cupboard door, or cooking?"