I suddenly felt out of place, uncomfortable; talking to Lilly Ungar in the closed bookshop, I felt like an intruder. "Maybe it was a bad thing to do," I said, at the same time as I finished signing the last copy. "Maybe I shouldn't have published this book." And I told her about a strange thing that had happened to me that week: I was on the way out of one of the publicity events the book's publication compelled, when a member of the audience, the only man in a bow tie in the whole auditorium, came over and asked me how Sara was, if I didn't think it necessary to force her to undergo the surgery or at least convince her to move to a warmer climate, since her sons seemed completely uninterested in doing what they should to protect her life. I almost told him off, but then, in a matter of seconds, found myself telling him that Sara had died and about the funeral and how sad we'd been, because I thought the man was not just a reader but that he knew her, that he was a relative or a friend of hers; and when I realized that wasn't the case, it was too late to react, because my book was responsible for that intrusion and it was my fault that a stranger seemed to know or created the illusion of having known Sara. I was talking about that-of the invasions the book seemed to invite, of lost privacy, of narcissistic satisfaction, of the way the book had taken the place of my memories, of the probable embezzlement of other people's lives, among them my father's, of all those undesirable consequences of something as innocent as a confession, and of the absence, or the nonexistence, of the desirable consequences that I had foreseen-when Lilly interrupted me. "I didn't ask you here to write silly letters, dear, and much less to sign books," she said, "but I wanted to sound you out first, listen to you talk for a while. To see what state you were in, sweetie. To make sure I wasn't doing something stupid." And she turned over an envelope that had been sitting on the desk the whole time, half hidden by the magazine Semana and the huge typewriter, and read out in her strong accent and guttural rs the words written on the front, under the stamp: Senor Gabriel Santoro, care of Hans and Lilly Ungar. It was a letter from Enrique Deresser. He'd read the book and asked me to go to see him.
The next day, at eight in the morning, I drove to Medellin, taking the highway from that inscrutably named place, Siberia. There was a four-hour journey between Bogota and La Dorada, which marked the halfway point, and that was, at the time, one of the most inhospitable roads in the country, so I thought I'd do it without stopping, have lunch in La Dorada, and then complete the second stage. I think I negotiated the route and its obstacles quite well. Leaving Bogota means, among other feats, getting over a mountain range. "Let's see if we can make the journey without anybody humming 'Bolivar crosses the Andes,' " my father used to say when he took my mother and me on a trip: that was one of the few verses of the Colombian national anthem he could listen to without getting indignant. (For me, too, leaving Bogota has always been, more than tiresome, grueling and torturous, but I've never been able to explain satisfactorily why I only feel comfortable in this fucking city, why I'm incapable of spending more than two weeks in any other city in the world. Everything I need is here; what isn't here strikes me as unnecessary. Perhaps this is another inheritance from my father: the will not to be expelled by this city so deft at expulsions.) I endured the stench of the cattle ranches; I endured the cold fog of the high plateaus and the violence of the following descent, the explosion in the nostrils of the aggressive smells and the silver onslaught of the yarumo trees and the uproar of the canaries and cardinals; I endured, as I crossed the Magdalena-that river with no fishermen or nets, because it no longer has any fish-the stupefying heat and the absence of wind. The second bridge was or is a sort of giant set of false teeth, metallic when the sun shone on the rails, fragile as old wood when crunching indecently under the weight of the cars. Before crossing the Magdalena, a soldier, probably stationed at the Air Force base-his helmet so loose that his voice echoed inside it-stopped me, asked for my papers, looked at them as if they were in another language, and handed them back to me marked with the bellicose sweat of his hands, with a drop or two from his helmeted forehead. I didn't ask why he was stopping people so far from the base. He seemed young; he seemed to be afraid there, so near Honda and Cocorna and other unfortunate place names, so near the rumble, or the phantom rumble, of guerrilla attacks.
Anyone who has driven this route knows this is where you accelerate. Here, after crossing the river, cars go crazy. It's not known whether it's fear (you have to avoid being stopped, being run off the road and forced out of your car), or if it's the twenty minutes of a straight strip of good road that, though not completely smooth, is decent and serviceable. In any case, needles scale speedometers hysterically; the strongest smell is not that of cow dung from the beasts sleeping beneath the trees, but that of burned rubber: the rubber of tires ruined (tortured) by speed. I can say I did not snub tradition. It wasn't quite twelve when I parked in front of a restaurant, under a mango tree. Inside, two frenzied fans whipped the air, two white circles, almost translucent, flying a short distance from the low ceiling. The seats and tables were painted wooden boards nailed on top of four thin sticks: everything was designed to encourage the air to flow, everything willed the air to circulate because hot still air was the enemy. (The humidity condensed everywhere, and that seemed to obsess the owners of the place: that the water wouldn't evaporate.) In three-quarters of an hour I'd had lunch and started the engine again, as if I had a specific time to arrive, as if an interviewer was waiting to offer me a job. It was impossible not to think that my body, stuck in a car at eighty or a hundred kilometers per hour, was following the route that Angelina and my father had taken three years earlier, like the mime artists who follow unsuspecting people in Parque Santander. Time was a two-tiered bridge: they were on the bottom level, I was on the top. And at some point in this parallel journey, when the highway suddenly began to look familiar to me-there were landscapes I was sure I'd seen before in spite of this being the first time I'd made this journey-I thought that a fictitious memory had installed itself in my head from thinking and rethinking my father's journey while writing my book. I spent a good while trying to discover the cause of this trick of memory, until I finally figured it out: all this looked familiar to me because I'd seen it on television, a year ago. For an entire Sunday, Sara and I had been prisoners before every single news bulletin-at noon and at seven and at nine-thirty-hearing what was said without understanding, watching in silence and trembling, when a succession of figures, some with mustaches or beards, some with matte lipstick, with opinions and certainties, with rumors and eyewitness accounts, described or tried to explain how and why they'd killed him, if the own goal had been the cause or if it had been the argument in the parking lot, and how long it had taken, after six bullets from a 38-caliber pistol, for the soccer player, Andres Escobar, to bleed to death.