"But I always thought that was because of his hand."
"Ah, his hand."
"That had to affect his life, no? It dictated what he could and could not do, defined his interests. He didn't even write, Sara. And he was always telling me about his childhood complexes, about the effects of the deformity on a child-"
"No, wait. One thing at a time. There wasn't any effect, nothing like that."
"How so?"
"What happened to his hand was later. And it didn't happen the way you think it did. He grew up with both his hands intact. That Christmas, his hand still existed, and it existed for a few days more. Or rather, what happened was just a little after what I'm telling you about. But I don't understand, you told me you knew about the trucks. How was he going to drive one of those monstrosities with a mutilated hand? No, no, that day, when Gabriel came down to breakfast and found out that Konrad was dead, all his fingers were intact, he was an intact man. People were gathered around the radio, I remember, not because they'd just broadcast the news, but simply because we'd got used to the idea that that was the meeting place for certain things. How I wish I knew what ever happened to that radio. It was one of those Philips that looked like a doctor's bag, the most up-to-date model, with its little wicker screen and everything. Papa told me the news and asked me to tell Gabriel. He knew how close Gabriel and Enrique were, everyone knew. It was obvious that Gabriel would have wanted to be informed. In half an hour he'd had something to eat so as not to travel on an empty stomach, packed, put on his new shoes, a pair of moccasins with leather soles as smooth as baby's skin, and he was ready to ask the first person leaving for Bogota for a lift. 'But he's already been buried,' Papa told him. 'It was almost a week ago.' Gabriel didn't pay him any attention, but it was obvious he was hurt. His friend's father had died, and no one had told him, no one had invited him to pay his last respects. He asked me to come with him, of course, and he did it there, in front of Papa: that was a measure of the confidence he had, of the trust Gabriel inspired even when he was so young. I asked what we were going for, and he said, 'What else? To pay our last respects to Senor Konrad.' 'But they've already buried him, Gabriel,' Papa said again. And Gabriel, 'Well, it doesn't matter. We'll pay our respects in the cemetery.'
"But we didn't go to the cemetery. We got to Bogota that very afternoon, around four, caught the tram at Seventy-second, but when we got to Twenty-sixth Gabriel sat still in his seat, without making the slightest move. I asked him what was going on, weren't we going to the cemetery? 'Later,' he said. 'First I have to talk to someone.' And that was how I found out that Konrad Deresser had been living with a woman at the time of his death, but what was more shocking was that Gabriel knew and I didn't. Not that he knew her, but he knew of her existence. Her name was Josefina Santamaria and she was from Riohacha. And we showed up unannounced, we showed up to visit her in the boardinghouse at Eighth and Twelfth where Deresser had lived. Josefina was a black woman, taller than Gabriel. The only thing I knew about her life was that she'd arrived in Bogota six months previously and that she went to bed for good money with members of the Jockey Club. I didn't know anything more because that afternoon we didn't talk about her but about Deresser. She was the one who told us, second by second, how he'd killed himself. 'Of course I knew, love, how could I not know,' Josefina told us. 'You could see in his face that he was half dead.' 'And why didn't you do something?' asked Gabriel. 'And how do you know I didn't? When I saw him go out that morning, I went out after him and followed him. I followed him all morning, what more was I supposed to do? What happened was that he took me by surprise. He was a lively one, my little monkey.'
"That morning, like every morning back then, Deresser had left late, around ten, to have coffee and brandy for breakfast across the square from the Molino. 'He always sat there,' said Josefina, 'to watch the students' girlfriends, I think.' But Josefina wasn't jealous, just the opposite: when she saw him off in the mornings, she said give my regards to the girls, let's hope the wind picks up and lifts one or two of their skirts. That morning he stayed longer than ever, as if someone had stood him up and he didn't know what to do. He walked back and forth across the plaza, he walked toward the Espectador building and waited to see the news on the blackboard. 'Ever since they started bringing out that board, he'd stopped buying the newspaper,' Josefina said. They stopped doing that blackboard thing later, but for many it was the perfect solution while it lasted: a guy came out of the window at certain times with the most important news items written there, by hand, as they happened, it was great. Deresser didn't have any money to buy the newspaper, and had become a regular client of the news board. That morning the street in front of the newspaper office was full, but full of ladies, who wanted to know how and where they were going to pay tributes to the Archbishop, who was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. Deresser approached them, tried to speak to one or two, and was unwelcome, of course. No one wanted to be approached by a bearded man who looked like he hadn't slept and almost always smelled of sweat and sometimes of urine, even if he did carry a leather briefcase that looked like it had seen better days, even if he did still have those green eyes that had made him famous among the women who worked at the Nueva Europa. And Deresser repeated the routine, walking back to the Garces shop and returning to the front of the newspaper offices, not once, not twice, but several times.
"If he had arranged to meet someone there, that person didn't show up. If he was waiting for someone, that person didn't come. Deresser went into the Molino twice, walked through looking at the tables, and both times he stopped under Sancho Panza and from there looked around at all the tables again, but nothing. Nothing he wanted. So he kept walking, he crossed the plaza and went south on Sixth. 'He was walking right up against the wall,' said Josefina, 'as if the rest of the people were lepers, or he was.' Josefina saw him go into a pawnshop, the kind that used to be more common then than they are now, and come out again without his briefcase. At first she thought the obvious, that he'd just pawned that ugly briefcase for which he couldn't have got much, but later she found out that he'd also taken the last luxury he had left, and that was, in any case, a useless luxury: a record of classical music. It was useless because days before he'd pawned the turntable he used to listen to it. For Deresser that moment, the moment he pawned his last record, had to mean something terrible. People who are going to kill themselves cling to silly little things, construct symbols out of everyday items to mark a date. Pawning that record marked a date for Deresser, not just because with this gesture he marked the closure of his life, but also because it was probably that money he later used to buy the sleeping pills from the Granada Pharmacy.
"Deresser was a failed musician but one who had taken that failure well. He'd set up a glassworks to keep his family fed when he realized that in Colombia it was going to be impossible to make a living from teaching the piano. That was back in 1920, when he'd recently arrived in Bogota. But a few years later, after meeting people in the terrible process an immigrant goes through, he gradually got into the National Radio Service, and eventually worked there. He decided what they played and when, he told the presenters about Chalia- pine or Schoenberg, and they would repeat on air what he'd told them two hours earlier. For those who knew the Deressers, that was the family's best time, a few years when no one would have imagined a personal disgrace awaited them, a time that ended or began to end in forty-one, when Santos broke with the Axis. Among the first things they went after were the broadcasters. There could not be any German or Italian or Japanese people near the airwaves. And Deresser arrived one morning to find he didn't have a job and, furthermore, some people looked down on him. The family was left as it had been before: depending on the glass they sold. And they didn't do badly, the glass made good money, and besides, Deresser stayed in contact with the two programmers at the station who didn't reject him, and they saw each other once in a while and he made recommendations. But music, at least for Deresser, was no longer a source of work. After that, between forty-one and forty-six, Deresser listened to music, though less and less, and he finally accepted that things in his life weren't going to go as he had wanted them to, accepted that someone had taken his life out of his hands. In October he found out that the first Nazis were going to be hanged in Nuremberg in the middle of that month, and the first thing he did was to get a record by Wagner, whom he'd detested all his life, and call his friends at the station. They saw him at the boardinghouse, as far as Josefina recalled, his friends came without making any comment about the place or the company he was in, but you could see the sorrow on their faces. Deresser showed them the record and talked about it with such enthusiasm, or feigning enthusiasm with such talent, that his friends left the boardinghouse promising they'd play it one of these days, thanking him for introducing them to a little-known work by a rarely broadcast composer, asking him to keep in touch, to keep making suggestions, contributions. . Deresser asked them one more thing. He asked them as a special favor to please broadcast it on the fifteenth of October, and he said that day was Enrique's birthday and that the Wagner piece was one of his favorites and it would be a good birthday present, and they believed the whole lie, they left feeling moved and making new promises. They fulfilled them. They played the record on the 15th of October, the day of the hangings in Germany. The Wagner piece was called The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Half the Germans in the city called up indignantly. The other half called up to ask who'd been responsible because they wanted to congratulate him. Josefina said it was the last time she saw Deresser more or less happy, although it was for mocking half the world without the other half knowing.