The magazine was open to a page where there were two illustrations. On the left, a letter addressed to a certain Fritz Moschell, and dated July 16, 1934, and underneath: Document of the time: Everything to do with Germans was considered suspicious. Almost the entire remaining space was taken up with a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate after the bombings. The caption, in this case, was: "Berlin destroyed: In Colombia the echoes of the conflict were barely felt." It occurred to me then that this was the true reason for the meeting (for summoning me). Lilly offered me coffee; Hans, sitting beside us, seemed not to be listening to our conversation, and had his eyes fixed on the door to the bookshop and on the people who came in and out and asked for things and paid. After finishing her coffee, Lilly produced a piece of paper and I ended up helping her to correct a letter she intended to send to the magazine. "In the article entitled 'World War II Colombian Style,' published in your May 9 issue, I read that during the Second World War 'Lopez de Mesa's supposed anti-Semitism only complicated things.' To anyone familiar with the circular that the Minister of Foreign Affairs sent to the Colombian consulates in 1939, who has read therein the order to raise 'all objections humanly possible to granting visas to any more passports of Jewish elements, ' the Minister's anti-Semitism is much more than a supposition. I understand that the subject is a difficult one for Colombian citizens to discuss, but it should not be so in the media. For that reason I would like to make a small clarification. . " This was just one of the interpolations I helped her to draft; when between the two of us we had finished writing the letter, and revised it to make sure there were no errors of any kind, Lilly folded the paper and put it in one of the drawers of her desk so carelessly, with such lack of interest, that I couldn't help but wonder whether the favor she'd asked of me wasn't perhaps a pretext and the idea of composing with my help a sort of tiny and already superfluous protest an invention of Lilly or Hans to see me and to be closer to Sara Guterman, their recently deceased friend. After all, the Central Bookshop was the only bookshop that still had copies of A Life in Exile, in spite of the fact that seven years had passed since its publication. The Ungars had read the book; they'd thought it honest; Hans had even mentioned it on the radio, on an HJCK program he contributed to every once in a while. But maybe I was mistaken; maybe my visit had nothing to do with Sara; maybe these suspicions were absurd, because, all things considered, the matter of the letter was perfectly plausible. There was the magazine, there were the Ungars, there was the draft of the letter; there was no reason to suspect they hadn't asked me there to correct it, just as I'd done.
It was only a few minutes before the bookshop closed for lunch, so I stood up and began to say good-bye. But then Estela, the serious-looking woman with a commanding voice who ran the cash register, came over and placed a pile of ten or twelve copies of The Informers on the table, and while Lilly asked me to sign them, and told me she hadn't read it yet but intended to as soon as she had a free weekend, Estela turned off half the lights and left, closing the door behind her. Without the street noise, the horns and motors, the bookshop fell so silent that I could have felt intimidated. Hans had stopped beside the table of German books and through the green lenses of his glasses (the same ones he'd worn as long as I could remember) looked at them as any other customer might. "He has read it," Lilly told me quietly. "He still doesn't know what to think. That's why he hasn't told you. A friend of his was on the list. It was at the end of the war and for something very silly, like requesting a book from the Cervantes Bookshop or something like that. How do you feel? What have people said to you?" I shrugged, as if to say I'd rather not embark on that conversation, and then she said, "Hans knew them."
"Who?"
"The Deressers."
It wasn't so surprising, except that German and Austrian immigrants almost never formed part of the same circles: there were rivalries between them of the sort usual among the stateless when they notice (or believe they've noticed) that they have to dispute the right to the new territory. But it did indeed surprise me that Lilly or Hans might have known my father without my knowing. "No, we never met him," Lilly said when I asked her, looking at the keys of the Remington. "Neither Hans nor I, I'm sure of that, he's told me several times." For the second time I suffered an attack of paranoia. I thought Lilly was lying to me, that she had known my father and had also known his secret, the secret of his mistake, but over the years she'd managed to erase it from her life, to forget so completely that she could serve me as a customer in her bookshop without a single muscle in her face giving her away, she could talk to me about my first book without my noticing anything in her voice, and she could pretend, when she read my father's review of their friend Sara's life story, that she didn't know the subterranean motivations for his resentment. Was she lying? Was that possible? I wondered if I might have forever lost the capacity to trust people; whether finding out about my father's treachery and, to make it worse, having written and published the two-hundred-fifty-page confession I'd just written and published had transformed me: made me paranoid, suspicious, wary, turned me into a pitiable, pathetic creature, able to see conspiracies in the affection of a woman as transparent as Lilly Ungar. Was I doomed? Had my father's two-facedness contaminated me to the point of obliging me always to suspect deceit in the rest of humanity? Or had I been contaminated by the act of telling it in writing? Had writing The Informers been a mistake?
One of the first reviews of the book accused it, or accused me, of a deplorable mixture of narcissism and exhibitionism; and in spite of the scant respect I had for the reviewer, in spite of his bull-necked prose, the obvious paucity of his reading and his crew-cut reasoning, in spite of the fact that each of his sentences revealed a lack of rhythm, grammar, and syntax, in spite of the fact that he'd used his space for commentary to put his own inferiority complex (but calling it a "complex" would be flattery) and his literary failures (but calling them "literary" would be hyperbole) on display, in spite of his reproaches being little more than barroom gossip and his praise being cocktail-party cliches, in the days that followed I couldn't get his accusations out of my head. Maybe transforming the private into the public was a perversion-accepted, it's true, in these days of voyeurs and busybodies, of gossips, of indiscretion-and publishing a confession of any sort was, deep down, a behavior as sick as that of a man who exposes his thick cock to women in the street just for the pleasure of shocking them. After reading the book, and seeing himself included in it, my friend Jorge Mor had called me and said, "You've got every right, Gabriel, you've got every right in the world to tell whatever you like. But I felt strange, as if I'd walked into your room and seen you fucking someone. By accident, without meaning to. Reading the book I felt embarrassed, and I hadn't done anything to be ashamed of. You oblige people to know what they might not want to know. Why?" I told him that no one was obliged to read the book; that writing a memoir or any sort of autobiography implied touching on private aspects of a life, and the reader knows that. "Well, that's just it," said Jorge. "Why do you want to talk publicly about what's private? Hasn't it occurred to you that with this book you've done exactly what the girlfriend did to your dad, just more elegantly?" The attack took me by surprise, and I muttered a couple of rude replies and hung up without trying to hide my fury. How dare he make such a comparison? In my book I'd laid myself bare, I'd deliberately put myself in a position of vulnerability, I had refused to allow my father's errors to be forgotten: in many ways, I'd assumed responsibility for those errors. Because faults are inherited; guilt is inherited; one pays for what one's ancestors have done, everyone knows that. Was it not brave to confront this fact? Was it not, at least, commendable? And then my head filled with things my father had once said to me: he, too, had spoken to me about the private and the public, about the nobility of those who keep quiet and the parasitism of those who reveal. And he hadn't stopped there. That's why you wrote it, so everyone would know how good and compassionate you are. My father returned from the dead to accuse me. Look at me, admire me, I'm on the side of the good guys, I condemn, I denounce. I'd used him: I'd taken advantage, for my own exhibitionist and egocentric objectives, of the most terrible thing that happened in his life. Read me, love me, give me prizes for compassion, for goodness. At that moment I was no more than a narcissist, sublimated by the false prestige of the printed word, it's true, but a narcissist when it came right down to it. Divulging my father's disgrace was no more than a subtle, renewed betrayaclass="underline" Jorge was right. I asked myself: Would I have been capable of publishing this book if my father had survived the accident in Las Palmas? The answer was clear, and also humiliating.