What did she remember about the rail journey across Colombia?
Her aunt Rotem, an old, almost bald woman, whose authority, in Sara's eyes, was diminished by her lack of hair, complained during the whole trip. The poor old woman never understood why first class, in this train, was at the back; she never understood why the girl, traveling by land across the new country, kept her nose in an album of contemporary art, a book with translucent pages that had been her cousin's and had got into her luggage by mistake, instead of commenting on the mountains and plantations and the color of the rivers. The girl looked at the reproductions and didn't know that in some cases-that of Chagall, for example-the originals no longer existed because they'd been incinerated.
What were her first impressions upon arrival in Duitama?
She liked several things: the mud that built up at the door to the house, the name of the cheese factory (Corcega, that word with its French flavor, which also summoned up the charms of a sea so close to her birthplace, the Mediterranean that she'd seen on postcards), the paint they had to rub onto the Gouda cheese to distinguish it from the others, the very slight mockery her classmates subjected her to during the initial months, and the fact that the nuns of La Presentacion College, who didn't seem able to comprehend the stubborn ignorance of the little girl, went wild with joy talking about the Death and the Resurrection, Good Friday and the Coming of Our Lord, but on the other hand choked on scandalized gasps when they found Sara explaining circumcision to the daughters of Barreto, a barrister and old friend of former president Olaya Herrera.
And that was how, at the end of 1987, I wrote a couple of pages, and was surprised to find, while looking through old papers, the index card on which I'd written, years earlier, a sort of quick writing course provided by my father upon discovering that I had started to write up my degree thesis. "First: everything that sounds good to the ear is good for the text. Second: in case of doubt, see first point." Just as when I was writing up my thesis, that card, pinned to the wall above my desk, served as an amulet, an incantation against fear. Those pages contained barely a fragment of that recounted life; there, for example, was the way the soldiers imprisoned Sara's father, Peter Guterman; there were the soldiers who smashed a plaster bust against the wall and sliced open the leather armchairs with their knives, to no avail, because the identity cards they were searching for were nowhere in that house, but rather creased inside her mother's corset and, eight days later, when Peter Guterman was released but his passport was not, allowed them to cross the border and embark, with their car and everything, at IJmuiden, a port on the canal a few minutes from Amsterdam. But the most important thing about those two pages was something else: within them was the confirmation that all could be told, the suggestion that I could be the one to tell it, and the promise of a strange satisfaction-giving shape to other people's lives, stealing what's happened to them, which is always disordered and confused, and putting it in order on paper; justifying, in some more or less honorable way, the curiosity I've always felt for all the emanations of other bodies (from ideas to menses), which has driven me, by a sort of internal compulsion, to violate secrets, reveal confidences, show interest in others the way a friend should, when deep down I'm just interviewing them like a vulgar reporter. But then I've never known where friendship stops and reporting starts.
With Sara, of course, things were no different. Over the course of several days I kept interrogating her, and did so with such devotion, or such morbid insistence, that I began to divide in two, to live the substitute and vicarious life of my interviewee and my original daily life as if they were distinct, and not a tale set in a reality. I witnessed the fascinating spectacle of memory preserved in storage: Sara kept file folders full of documents, a sort of testimony of her passage through the world as legitimate and material as a shed constructed with wood from her own land. There were open plastic folders, plastic folders with flaps, cardboard folders, both with and without elastic closures, pastel-colored folders and others that were white but dirty and others that were black, folders that slept there with no specific plans but prepared and very willing to exercise their role as second-rate Pandora's boxes. In the evenings, almost always toward the end of the conversation, Sara would put the folders away, take the cassette on which I'd recorded her voice over the last few hours out of the machine, put on a record of German songs from the thirties ("Veronika, der Lenz ist Da" or perhaps "Mein Kleiner Gruner Kaktus"), and offer me a drink, which we'd sip in silence listening to the old music. I liked to think that from outside, from an apartment whose curious tenant was spying on us, this would be the image: a fluorescent rectangle and two figures, a woman well settled into the imminence of old age and a younger man, a student or perhaps a son, in any case someone who was listening and was used to doing so. That was me: I kept my mouth shut and listened, but I wasn't her son; I took notes, because that was my job. And I thought later, at the right moment, when the raw material of her tale had finished, when the notes had been taken and the documents seen and the opinions heard, I would sit before the dossier of the case, of my case, and impose order: Was that not the chronicler's single privilege?
One of those days, Sara asked me why I wanted to write about her life, and I thought it would have been easy to evade the question or throw out any old witticism, but to answer with something approaching the truth was as essential to me as it seemed to be, at that moment, to her. I could have said that there were things I needed to come to understand. That certain areas of my experience (in my country, with my people, at this time that I happened to be living) had escaped me, generally because my attention was taken up with other more banal ones, and I wanted to keep that from continuing to happen. To become aware: that was my intention, at once simple and pretentious; and to think about the past, oblige someone to remember it, was one way of doing it, arm wrestling against entropy, an attempt to make the disorder of the world, whose only destiny was a more intense disorder, stop, be put in shackles, for once defeated. I could have said that or part of it; in my favor I point out that I avoided these grandiloquent lies and chose more humble lies, or rather, incomplete lies. "I want his approval, Sara," I told her. "I want him to look at me with respect. It matters more than anything ever has." I was going to complete the incomplete truth, to speak to Sara of the phrase with which my father once described her-"She is my sister in the shadows," he told me. "Without her I wouldn't have survived a week in this world of madness"-but I didn't manage to. Sara interrupted me. "I understand," she said. "I understand perfectly." And I didn't insist, because it seemed only normal that the shadow sister should understand everything without detailed explanations; but I noted on an index card: Chapter title: Sister in the Shadows. I never managed to use it, however, because my father was not mentioned in the interviews or in the book itself, despite having formed an important part-at least as far as could be seen-of Sara Guterman's exile.
I published A Life in Exile in November 1988, three months after my father's famous speech. The following is the first chapter of the book. It was titled, in bold italics, with four words that have been filling up across the years and that today, as I write, threaten to overflow: The Hotel Nueva Europa.