The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

standing like a guard, his hands crossed behind his back and his chest held high. In that image, not only was his hair black, but that black hair was everywhere: it covered his chest and his flat belly, and also--this didn't show in the photo, but I knew it--a good part of his back. For the operation, the nurses had shaved his chest and smeared a yellow liquid over it; these few days later, the hair began to grow again, but some of the pores were blocked. What I saw then was the inflamed vertical incision (an incision made not just with a scalpel, but also with a saw, although the severed bones were not visible), the same red as the two or three infected hair follicles, lifted in certain areas by the pressure of the wire with which the surgeons had closed the rupture in the sternum. At that moment I felt, without false empathy, that ineluctable pain, the puncture of the wire--a foreign body--beneath the damaged skin. Nevertheless I washed him; all those days, more successfully each time, I kept washing him. With one hand I held his arms up in the air, lifting them by the elbow, for they were incapable of lifting themselves; with the other I washed the straight, smelly hairs in his armpits. The most difficult part was rinsing the area. At first I tried to do it by cupping my hands, but all the water spilled out before it touched my father's skin, and I felt like an inexpert painter trying to paint a ceiling. Then I started using a sponge, slower but also gentler. My father, who remained silent during the whole process, out of reserve or due to the unpleasantness of the situation, one day finally asked me to put a bit of deodorant on him, please, cut out this degrading procedure, please, and get him back to bed, please, and let's pray I wouldn't have to wash even more private parts.
    Every day, Sara asked him if he'd moved his bowels . (I don't know what shook me more the first time I heard her say it: the adolescent euphemism or the intimacy that the question, in spite of the euphemism, revealed.) Every day, I took charge of the simvastatin and the baby aspirin, ridiculous names like those of all medicines, and after a while began to administer the injections as well. Once a day I lifted his pajama top and pinched the loose flesh of his waist with one hand and stuck the hypodermic into it with the other. The needle disappearing into the skin, my father's shouts, my own trembling pulse--the thumb pressing the dense liquid out of the syringe (into the flesh)--all that became shockingly habitual, because the routine of inflicting pain cannot be comfortable for anyone. The injections had to be given for a week; during this time I stayed with him. I used to do it in the mornings, after my father woke up, but before that I was careful to talk to him about something, anything, for half an hour, so his day wouldn't start with a needle. A physiotherapist came mid-morning and made him sit up in bed, facing her, and imitate her movements, at first as if they were playing a mirroring game and later as if the woman were, in fact, in charge of transmitting to the patient knowledge that is innate and instinctive to everybody else and not learned in morning classes: how to raise an arm, how to straighten one's torso, how to make a pair of legs take you to the bathroom. Gradually I came to know that her name was Angelina, that she was from Medellin but had come to live in Bogota after completing her studies, and that she was over forty but under fifty ("Us, the ones on the fourth floor," she said once). I would have liked to ask her why, at her age, she wasn't married, but I was afraid she'd be offended, because the day of the first session she'd entered the apartment the way a bull enters a ring, demonstrating at once that she was here to do her work and that she didn't have time to look or any desire to be looked at, even though she wore brightly colored blouses with buttons that seemed like mother-of-pearl and even though later it didn't