That's when I realized that my father had read the book as soon as he'd received it, and he'd done so with a fine-tooth comb and in record time, looking for declarations that could give him away and trying to read as fast as possible, as if it weren't already too late to remedy eventual damage, as if what he had in hand was not a published book but an uncorrected manuscript. "He didn't find anything, but he found it all," said Sara. "The whole book seemed like a giant trail leading to him, pointing at him. Every time the Hotel Sabaneta is mentioned, he felt incriminated, discovered. Every time the blacklists are discussed in the book, lives damaged or simply affected by the lists, he felt the same. 'I did something like that,' he said. 'They're going to find out. Thanks to this book of yours, they're going to find out. My life lasted this long, Sara, you two have just fucked up my life.' I tried to put his mind at ease, but there was no way to get his fears out of his head. He said, 'People who remember the Deressers are going to put two and two together. There are still people alive, people like us, who lived through all that. They're going to put two and two together. They're going to realize, Sara, they're going to know it was me, who did what I did. How could you betray me like this?' And then he insulted me, he who had always treated me like a protected little sister. 'I should have expected it from you,' he said. 'You don't care what happens to me. You've always believed I deserve to be punished for what I did to old Konrad.' And I told him it wasn't true, people make mistakes, were we never going to leave that behind? But he went on: 'Yes, you've probably even prayed for me to get my just desserts, don't play innocent. But my own son? How could he do this to me?' He got so paranoid it was frightening. I tried to explain, and it didn't do the slightest bit of good. 'He's not doing anything to you, Gabriel, because he doesn't know anything. Your son doesn't know anything and nobody's going to tell him, least of all me. I'm not going to tell him, it's something from your past, not even mine, and your past doesn't belong to me. No, I'm not going to tell him, I haven't told him. And besides, it's not in the book. There is not a single sentence in the book that points to you.' 'The whole book points to me. It's a book about the lives of Germans and how Germans suffered during the war. I'm part of that. But this is not going to stop here, Sara. This book is an attack on me, no more, no less, an attempted homicide.' 'And what are you going to do?' I asked. It was a stupid question, because it could have only one answer. He was going to do what he'd always done: speak. But this time he spoke in writing. This time he conceded that his purposes required a more extended medium than words spoken in an auditorium. You know what he was like, Gabriel, you know your father's opinion of newspapers, of newscasts. The disdain he held them in, no? The poor man would have liked to live in a world where news passed by word of mouth, and one would walk down the street talking to people, saying things like, Did you know they killed Jaime Pardo? Did you hear that Gabriel Santoro gave a magnificent speech? And nevertheless he resorted to them, he resorted to one of his despised newspapers, he made use of them. Our book seemed like an attack to him, and he thought he could exercise the legitimate right of self-defense. The only way that occurred to him was to discredit you, ridicule you, and discredit and ridicule don't even count if they're not scattered all around as gossip. You know that. The funny thing about ridicule is that everyone talks, the victim feels like everyone's staring at him in the street even though it's not really like that. If he did such a thing, he wouldn't just sink the book, but he'd call attention to himself. But you can't talk reason to a psychotic. Gabriel the psychotic, Gabriel the mad genius. Did he tell you how he wrote the review?"
"No, we didn't talk about it. We were working on the reconciliation. The details didn't matter."
"Well, I was with him. That was the day after his reading of your book and our chat. We went to the Supreme Court and he got one of the magistrates to lend him a secretary, and he took her to the hall where he gave his lectures. He asked her to sit up in the tiers, as if she were a student, and he dictated the review as if it were a class. It was fascinating to watch. Sorry for saying so, I know full well how much it hurt to see it published. But for me it was a spectacle, like seeing Baryshnikov dance. Your dad dictated it and didn't alter a single word. As if he had written a draft and was reading it out for a clean copy. With commas, full stops, dashes, parentheses, all dictated just the way it appeared in print, all in one go, without hesitating over a single word or changing an opinion or honing an idea. And the ideas in that review. The humor, the irony. The precision. The precision of the cruelty, sure, but cruelty also has its virtuosos. It was masterly."
"I know," I said. "I saw him do that a couple of times. My dad had a computer in his head."
"The worst thing is that nothing proved him wrong. Obviously, no one read between the lines, as he said, no one accused him of anything. People just noticed the book, commented on the father-and-son thing, and laughed a little. . and then what was to come came to pass. But back then nothing happened. 'You see?' he said to me later. 'I was right about my strategy. It was terrible to have to do it, but I was right. I escaped this time, Sara. I escaped by the skin of my teeth.' Like madmen, like people who are ill. Like that German joke about a fellow who snaps his fingers all day long. His family takes him to see a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist asks him, Why do you snap your fingers all the time? And he says, To scare away the elephants. And the psychiatrist: But there are no elephants in Germany, my good sir. And the madman: You see, Doctor, see how well it works? Well, that's how your dad was. Your dad was the madman of the joke."
While Sara was telling her German joke, I saw in her face the face of a little girl, the girl who had arrived in Colombia at the end of the 1930s. It was like a flash photo, a nanosecond of clarity when the wrinkles disappeared from around the smiling eyes. Yes, I had grown very fond of this woman, more than I'd ever suspected, and part of that fondness was a consequence of that which she had felt for the friend of her youth, her shadow brother, the fondness that years later had its refraction in me, preventing me, in some way, from the pathetic need to write letters to my father, turn into a beetle, ask permission to sleep in the castle. "See, Doctor, see how well it works?" Sara repeated. "I can imagine it perfectly. I think of your dad, I think of the madman of the joke, and they're the same person. The mad look on Gabriel's face sometimes." In this memorial atmosphere of a private anniversary, the best thing I could think of to do was put on the record of German songs and ask my hostess to tell me about the one my father liked so much, to translate it for me and sum it up so I could understand it, and she told me about the spring that arrives, the girls who sing, the poet Otto Licht, whose name rhymes with the word poem. 'Licht, Gedicht,' " said Sara, and laughed sadly. "How could Gabriel not like that?" Later I asked her to write out the lyrics for me; although I can't now be sure, it's possible that I was already thinking of transcribing them into this book, as in fact I did.