"And sitting here we began to tell each other about our lives. I told him what I've just told you. He told me about your mum, he chose to start there, I don't know why. 'I confessed everything to her,' he told me. 'When I asked her to marry me, I also asked her to forgive me. It was a two-for-one offer, as they say.' He never talked about me to anybody, he never wrote my name down anywhere, but he told her everything as soon as he could. 'Confession is a great invention,' your dad said. Half seriously, half in jest. 'Priests are pretty cunning, Enrique. Those fellows know how things work.' A person would think that the death of someone who knows an evil secret would be a liberation, just as the death of a witness frees the murderer. But your mother's death was just the opposite for Gabriel. 'It was like my reprieve had been revoked.' That's how he explained it to me. Gabriel hadn't changed at all in that respect: he said everything with a certain coolness, a certain cynicism, just like when we were young. As if it had nothing to do with him, as if he were talking about someone else. With him every word had its contents, but it was also a tool for looking down from on high, for keeping his distance. You'll know better than me what I'm talking about. When I told him I'd read your book about Sara, he said, 'Oh yes, very good, very original. But what's original isn't good, and vice versa.' The same sentence you put in The Informers, isn't it? Well, with you one already knows: everything I say can be used against me. If I wasn't so old I'd think I had to be careful. But no. What do I need to be careful of now? What can I say at this age that could matter? What can they do to me if I tell? A person gets old and impunity lands on you, Gabriel, even if you don't want it. That was one of the things I said to your dad: 'Why now? Who's going to benefit from your coming here on your knees at this stage of life?' And it was true. Was it going to do my father any good after forty years in the ground? Was it any use to my mama, who had to reinvent her life at fortysomething, have children at an age when it can kill a woman? Reinventing yourself is painful, like surgery. After a certain point the challenge is overcome, the anesthesia of the emotion, of the pride at overcoming it, wears off, and you start to feel the most savage pain, you realize you've lost a leg, or your appendix, or at least they'd opened up your skin and flesh, and that hurts even if they didn't find a tumor. I knew it because I'd been through that, too. Through a reconstruction. Through the anguish of choices. It's a whole process: you can choose how you want to be, what you want to be, and even what you want to have been. That's the most tempting thing: to be another person. I had chosen to be the same but somewhere else. Change jobs but keep my name. 'It's of use to you,' Gabriel said to me. 'It has to be of use to you to know that I've carried this all these years, that I could have forgotten and I haven't. I've remembered, Enrique, I've stayed in the hell of remembering.' I told him not to be a martyr. A whole family had been ruined for one little word of his, so not to come here boasting of his memory. 'There's something I'd like to know,' he said then. 'Was I lucky or unlucky? Did you pay them to kill me, or just to scare the shit out of me?'
"At that moment we were walking to the corner shop. Not that we needed anything, but there are conversations when you just stand up and start walking, because if you're walking you don't have to look each other in the eye all the time, and then it's just a matter of finding a destination for the stroll. Our destination was the corner shop. The closest place. Between here and there it's not very likely you'll get mugged, less so if you're not on your own, even less if it's Sunday and daytime. And the shop was neutral ground, one of those country places stuck in the middle of Medellin, with plastic tables out front, and those half bottles of cheap liquor that drunks pile up in front of them as if they collected them. 'I wanted you dead,' I told Gabriel, 'but I didn't pay them for that. I didn't even know there'd be machetes.' I didn't say anything else and he didn't ask. Never in my life could I have imagined I'd say such a thing. Then I thought Gabriel had come to get me to say all those things that must have been a sin even just to say. He was there, sitting across from me with a beer. I didn't like it, I felt sort of threatened, understand? I'd begun that visit, or whatever you call an encounter like that, thinking: He's come looking for something. I just have to give it to him and he'll leave. Then, at some point in the conversation, I thought: We have a history in common. It's true that history isn't pure and isn't virginal; more than that, our history is very promiscuous. At the shop, on the other hand, surrounded by ten or fifteen identical drunks, all with their shirts open and mustaches, all armed though some didn't flaunt it, I began to think: We're wasting our time. What imbeciles. All this was just a farce. What is happening right here, today, this twenty-third of December, the last Sunday before Christmas, is a big farce. The farce of someone who repents although he knows it's of no use. The farce of making amends that do not exist, now do you understand? Like the morphine they give to a horse with a broken leg. Yes, a great farce, or not even that: a mediocre farce. I'd told Gabriel that I'd wanted him dead. I imagine one doesn't say these things just like that. And Gabriel knew it, too, I suppose, he who had spoken so many strong words, words capable of destroying.
"I bought a packet of Pielrojas and a box of matches. I took out a cigarette and lit it before we left the shop. When we got back here, to the gate, I'd already finished it. Pielrojas don't last long. I offered Gabriel one and he told me in a reproachful tone that he'd quit and that I should quit, too. That's when he told me about his heart and his bypass. 'It's the best feeling in the world,' he told me. 'It's like being thirty again.' We were standing there, you see the security hut? We were there, I'd taken out another cigarette, and was in the process of lighting it, which isn't easy with the matches you get these days. They're not wood, they're not even cardboard, they're something like plastic. The heads fall off them, they bend in half. 'But we're not thirty years old,' I said. I kept trying to light my cigarette, although the wind blew out two matches and two more bent in half. 'What a vice,' said Gabriel. 'As well as killing yourself smoking those things, you have to be a boy scout to get one lit. Let's go in, man, it won't be such an effort inside.' And that was it: the idea of going into my house with Gabriel, Gabriel and I together, us and our promiscuous history, wouldn't fit in my head. I did what I did: what was necessary to protect me and protect my family. My reaction wasn't any more civilized than a cat marking its territory. I'm not making excuses, of course. Let's make that clear.
"I told him we should just say good-bye. That all this was futile, it had been futile from the start. Getting into his car in Bogota had been, although it was painful to admit, a mistake. 'None of this should have happened,' I said. 'It's a mistake that you're here. It's a mistake that we're talking the way we're talking. It would be a mistake, no, it would be a perversion for you to enter my house.' His face changed. It hardened, crevices appeared around his eyes. He intimidated me and I pitied him. I can't really explain it. Gabriel had turned hostile and vulnerable at the same time. But I couldn't take it back. 'It's in this life that all that happened, Gabriel, and you want to pretend it was in a different one. Well no, it's not possible. Look, I'm going to tell you the truth: I'd rather we just left it as it is.' He asked me what I meant by that. I had gone through the gate and was standing on the other side of the rail, beside the hut but inside. I was on my premises, so to speak. From inside I closed the gate (I looked up at the window of my apartment, made sure no one was watching us) and explained it as best I could: 'I'm saying don't come back and don't call me, don't try to put the world to rights, because in the world are people who aren't interested. I'm saying the world doesn't revolve around your guilt. What's the matter, don't you sleep well? Buy some pills. Ghosts wake you up? Say a prayer. No, Gabriel, it's not that easy, you're not going to buy your peace of mind so cheaply, I'm not a discount store. Like I said: don't come back, don't call me, and please, please, please, let's pretend you never came. It's too late for these rectifications. If you want to make amends, you're going to have to do it on your own.' I thought: Now he's going to speak, and I was scared. I knew all too well what he was capable of when he spoke. But he didn't, as incredible as it may seem. He didn't speak, didn't defend himself, didn't try to convince me of anything. For once in his life, he kept quiet. He accepted his failure. It was like a failed law. A law of forgive and forget, the amnesty decreed by a retreating dictator. It all collapsed on him in a matter of seconds. I won't deny he accepted it gracefully. I understood a lot of things when I read your book, Gabriel, but there was one thing in particular that shocked me at first and has continued troubling me. I'm going to tell you what I understood: I understood that looking for me, coming to Medellin, coming to see me, trying to talk to me, all that for your dad was part of his great plan for personal reconstruction, I don't know how else to say it. And I destroyed it. If I'd read your book before, if I'd known what was behind his visit, maybe I wouldn't have said what I said. But of course, that's impossible, isn't it? It's an absurd hypothesis. That's a book and the other was life. The life went first and then came the book. Does this seem stupid what I'm saying? That's how it always is. That doesn't change. Later in books we see the important things. But by the time we see them it's already too late. That's the trouble, Gabriel, forgive my frankness, but that's the fucking trouble with books."