Read Online The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Free Book Online
Authors: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Fiction - General, Historical, History, 20th Century, Latin American Novel And Short Story, Colombia - History - 20th century, Colombia
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glance, the emptiness of his rhetoric and personal insecurities, and pounce on them; the unexpected thing was that he'd use that talent against me, although sometimes he wasn't wrong in his complaints. "The photos. The photos are the most irritating. Actors from soap operas and folk singers belong in magazines," he used to say to anyone who'd listen, "but a serious journalist? What the hell is a serious journalist doing in a mass-market magazine? Why do readers need to know what he looks like, if he wears glasses or not, if he's twenty or ninety years old? A country's in trouble when youth is a safe conduct, let alone a literary virtue. Have you read the reviews? The young journalist this, the young journalist that. Shit, is there no one in this country capable of saying whether he writes well or not?"
But something told me it wasn't really the photos that bothered him, that his objections ran deeper. I had touched something sacred in his life, I thought at that moment, a sort of private totem: Sara. I had got involved with Sara, and that, due to rules I hadn't managed to figure out (that is, due to rules of a game that no one had explained to me: this became the most useful metaphor when thinking about my father's reactions to my book), was unacceptable. "Is that it?" I asked Sara one day. "Are you a taboo subject, an X-rated film? Why didn't you warn me?" "Don't be silly, Gabriel," she said, as if waving away a fly. "You're acting like you don't know him. You're acting like you don't know how he gets when an apostrophe goes missing." It wasn't impossible that she was right, of course, but I wasn't satisfied (there are lots of things missing in my book, but the apostrophes are all present and accounted for). Dear Sara , I wrote on a piece of notebook paper that I put into an airmail envelope, because it was the only one I could find, and sent by local post, instead of giving it to her myself. If you're as surprised as I am by my dad's attitude, I'd like to discuss the matter with you. If you're less surprised, then I'd like to even more. In other words: after all our interviews, there is one question I forgot to ask. Why, in two hundred pages of information, does my father never appear? Answer it, please, in no more than thirty lines. Thanks . Sara replied by return of post (that's to say, her envelope reached me in three days). When I opened the envelope, I found one of her visiting cards. Yes, he does. Page 101, lines 14 to 23. And since you allowed me 30, you owe me 21 . I found the book, looked up the page, and read:
It wasn't just learning a language. It was buying rice and cooking it, but also knowing what to do if someone fell ill; how to react if someone insulted you, to keep it from happening again, but also to know how far you could go in insulting them back. If Peter Guterman was called a "Polack shit," it was necessary to know the implications of the phrase. Or, as a friend of the Guterman family said, "where the geographical error ended and the scatological one began."
Beyond the fact that it was true (yes, there was my father, present only with his Cheshire-cat grin), it was obvious that Sara was not prepared to take me seriously. That was when I decided to go to the source, to take the offended party by surprise: I'd attend his seminar unannounced the following day, just as I had so many times when I was still a student, then invite him for a drink afterward at the Hotel Tequendama to talk about the book face to face and, if necessary, with the gloves off. And there I was the next day, punctually seated in the back row, by the translucent windows, by the yellow light that reflected off the International Center.
But the class ended without me daring to speak to him.
I went back the next day, and the next, and the next as well. I didn't speak to him. I couldn't speak to him.
Nine days went by, nine days of clandestine presence in my father's classroom, before something (not my will, obviously) broke the
But something told me it wasn't really the photos that bothered him, that his objections ran deeper. I had touched something sacred in his life, I thought at that moment, a sort of private totem: Sara. I had got involved with Sara, and that, due to rules I hadn't managed to figure out (that is, due to rules of a game that no one had explained to me: this became the most useful metaphor when thinking about my father's reactions to my book), was unacceptable. "Is that it?" I asked Sara one day. "Are you a taboo subject, an X-rated film? Why didn't you warn me?" "Don't be silly, Gabriel," she said, as if waving away a fly. "You're acting like you don't know him. You're acting like you don't know how he gets when an apostrophe goes missing." It wasn't impossible that she was right, of course, but I wasn't satisfied (there are lots of things missing in my book, but the apostrophes are all present and accounted for). Dear Sara , I wrote on a piece of notebook paper that I put into an airmail envelope, because it was the only one I could find, and sent by local post, instead of giving it to her myself. If you're as surprised as I am by my dad's attitude, I'd like to discuss the matter with you. If you're less surprised, then I'd like to even more. In other words: after all our interviews, there is one question I forgot to ask. Why, in two hundred pages of information, does my father never appear? Answer it, please, in no more than thirty lines. Thanks . Sara replied by return of post (that's to say, her envelope reached me in three days). When I opened the envelope, I found one of her visiting cards. Yes, he does. Page 101, lines 14 to 23. And since you allowed me 30, you owe me 21 . I found the book, looked up the page, and read:
It wasn't just learning a language. It was buying rice and cooking it, but also knowing what to do if someone fell ill; how to react if someone insulted you, to keep it from happening again, but also to know how far you could go in insulting them back. If Peter Guterman was called a "Polack shit," it was necessary to know the implications of the phrase. Or, as a friend of the Guterman family said, "where the geographical error ended and the scatological one began."
Beyond the fact that it was true (yes, there was my father, present only with his Cheshire-cat grin), it was obvious that Sara was not prepared to take me seriously. That was when I decided to go to the source, to take the offended party by surprise: I'd attend his seminar unannounced the following day, just as I had so many times when I was still a student, then invite him for a drink afterward at the Hotel Tequendama to talk about the book face to face and, if necessary, with the gloves off. And there I was the next day, punctually seated in the back row, by the translucent windows, by the yellow light that reflected off the International Center.
But the class ended without me daring to speak to him.
I went back the next day, and the next, and the next as well. I didn't speak to him. I couldn't speak to him.
Nine days went by, nine days of clandestine presence in my father's classroom, before something (not my will, obviously) broke the
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