"What I propose is that we go there tomorrow," he said. "It's on your way to Bogota, you're going to have to pass by there in any case."
"I don't know if I want to."
"We'll leave early and we won't stay long, I promise, or we'll stay as long as you want."
"I don't know if I want to go through that, Enrique."
"And then you go home. Go and look, nothing more. To see if I can clear it up once and for all."
"Clear what up?" I asked.
"What do you think, Gabriel? The doubt, man, this damned doubt."
From the moment Enrique and Rebeca said good night, from the moment they went to their room, less than four meters from the sofa where I was spending the night, and closed the door, I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep that night. With time I've trained myself to recognize nights of insomnia long before trying to force myself to get to sleep, so I've stopped wasting the time that gets wasted like that. I turned off the living room light but not the floor lamp, and in the half darkness, sitting on the cushion that Rebeca had put in a pillowcase for me, spent a long while thinking of my father, of the forgiveness he'd been denied, of the journey he'd begun after that refusal and never finished, and I couldn't help but think that my presence that night in Enrique Deresser's house was one of the ways that life has of mocking people: the same life that had denied my father the only redemption possible, and along the way denied me the right to inherit that redemption, had now arranged that I, the disinherited, should be a guest for a night of the one who had refused to absolve us. The light poured straight down from the lampshade, illuminating only the circular space below it, and the rest of the room remained in darkness (its objects vaguely distinguishable: the dining table and its chairs in disorder, the chest of drawers at the entrance, the frames of the photos, the paintings-or rather, posters-on the walls, which in the darkness weren't white but gray); nevertheless, I had to stand up and walk around in the tiny space, because the same electricity in my eyes and limbs, the same static that kept me awake, wouldn't let me keep still.
The window exhausted its possibilities almost immediately: outside, nothing was happening, not in the windows of the other buildings, all black and blind, not in the street, where my car still survived, not on the patio, where the chalk squares of the hopscotch reflected the dusty light of the street-lamps. In the photos on top of the chest of drawers, Sergio appeared touching a pony's nose and making a disgusted face, Rebeca and Enrique posed on a bridge-I knew there was a famous bridge near Santa Fe de Antioquia, and assumed that bridge and the one in the photo were the same-and a woman, younger than them but too old to be, for example, Sergio's girlfriend, hugged Rebeca at a party, holding a little glass of anisette in her free hand. All this was difficult to see in the darkness, just as the German titles of the ten or twelve paperbacks I found in the first drawer were difficult to see (and to understand), abandoned along with sets of screwdrivers, pots of glue, packets of sugar, two or three syringes with their caps, two or three rusty buckles. In the kitchen I opened and closed cupboard doors trying not to make noise; I found a glass jar of biscuits and ate one, and I took out a bottle of cold water from the fridge and poured myself a glass (I had to go through jams and boxes of tea before I found one). On the door was a magnet in the shape of a horseshoe and another with the crest of Atletico Nacional. There wasn't anything else: no names, no lists, no messages. With my glass of cold water in my hand I went back to the illuminated corner of the sofa. It must have been almost midnight. I put Enrique's binder on the cushion, so the light would hit it at an angle and the reflection on the plastic wouldn't block out the letters, and found myself once again, like so many times in my life, involved in the examination of other people's documents, not with the impartiality of other times, but instead overexcited and nervous and at the same time tired like on the day after an intense drinking session. "Tomorrow you'll give them back to me," Enrique had said, "but tonight you can take your time over them."
"But can't I photocopy them?" I'd said, because Margarita's letter alone had stimulated me as much as if I'd come across an auction of Demosthenes' toga. "Can't I get up early, find a shop, and photocopy them?"
"These letters are mine and my family's," Enrique said. For the first time his tone of voice had a tinge of reproach. "No one else has any reason to be interested."
"They interest me. I want to have them-"
He cut me off. "You haven't understood. They're not for you to have." And after an uncomfortable silence he went on, as if apologizing for protecting his territory: "It's that I don't want them to end up in a book," he said. "Out of reserve, or privacy, call it what you will. I'm very fond of these letters, and part of my affection comes from knowing that no one else has them, that they're mine, that no one else knows them. If they were published, something would be lost, Gabriel, something very big would be lost for me. I'm not sure if I've made myself clear."
I said he had. He'd made himself clear, yes, sir, clear as day. And as soon as I opened the album and turned three or four pages I understood his anxiety, the fear of the damage this collection could suffer in careless hands. In plastic sleeves, after the one in which Margarita had asked the senators for help, were several of the letters, eight or ten, that old Konrad had sent to his family-first to his wife and then to his son-from the Hotel Sabaneta concentration camp. There wasn't more, but that was everything. "They're not for you to have," Enrique had told me: that had been his subtle way of saying, You are forbidden from appropriating them; you, who steal everything, aren't going to rob me of this. He was my host; I was his guest. By giving them to me, allowing me access to them even if only for one night, he had trusted me. But things didn't turn out the way we both would have preferred: as soon as I read the first letter I knew I'd end up betraying that trust, and when I got halfway through the second I set about the task of betraying it.
Sergio could arrive at any moment. I put my shoes back on, looked for my jacket on the chair by the entrance, and with jacket and shoes I went to the door where the Deressers were sleeping. I held my breath, to hear better, and after ten or twenty seconds I discerned the rhythmic breathing of two sleeping people; I thought it might just be one, it was possible that, like me, one of them might be having a bad night; but there was no way to confirm it, and what is not possible to confirm should never be considered. I tried to fix the door so it would look closed from the outside. When I seemed to have managed it, I went down the stairs in darkness, and on my way from the door of the building to that of my car, I walked across the chalk hopscotch by accident. I didn't know if I'd ruined it, but I didn't stop to find out. I got into my car, not through the driver's door but on the passenger side, I got my notebook out of the glove compartment and a pen out of my jacket, turned on the little roof light, and got down to work. I found that the letters were arranged backward: the most recent ones first, the oldest ones later. Only when I got to the last ones in the archive did I understand the particular effect this reading caused, this reversed chronology.
The following are the letters I transcribed:
Fusa, August 6, 1944
Son,