The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page B

next six months (six months that were like a premature and unsuccessful rebirth, six months that passed between the day of the operation and the day my father traveled to Medellin, six months that covered the recuperation, the beginning of the second life, and its consequences) it never happened again. But the image of my father weeping has remained irremediably associated with his desire to correct old words, and although I cannot prove that was the exact reason--I haven't been able to interrogate him for this book, and I've had to rely on other informers--I feel that it was at that moment my father thought for the first time what he thought in such detail and with such bad luck later: This is my chance . His chance to correct errors, to rectify faults, to ask for forgiveness, because he'd been granted a second life, and the second life, as everyone knows, always comes with the inconvenient obligation to correct the first one.
     
     
     
    His errors and their corrections happened like this:
    In 1988, as soon as I received my copies of A Life in Exile , I took one to my father; I left it with the doorman, and sat down to wait for a call or an old-fashioned, solemn, and perhaps moving letter. When neither the letter nor the phone call arrived, I began to wonder if the doorman had misplaced the package; but before I had time to pass by the building and find out, rumors of my father's comments began to reach me.
    Were they really as unpredictable as they seemed to me? Or was it true, as I sometimes thought over the following years, that anybody would have seen them coming by simply taking off the blindfold of family relations? The prophet's kit--the tools of prediction--was within my reach. My decision to write about current things had always elicited from my father inoffensive sarcasm, which nevertheless made me feel uncomfortable; nothing caused him as much mistrust as someone concerned with things contemporary: spoken by him, the word sounded like an insult. He preferred to talk about Cicero and Herodotus; actuality seemed like a suspect practice, almost infantile, and if he didn't perpetrate his opinions in public it was out of a sort of secret shame, or rather to avoid a situation where he'd feel obliged to admit that he, too, had read, at the time, All the President's Men . But none of that allowed me to foresee his displeasure. The first of his comments, or the first, at least, that I heard of, my father made openly enough to hurt me: he didn't choose a meeting of colleagues, or even a corridor chat, but waited till he found himself in front of the whole group who attended his seminars; and he didn't even choose his own epigram (he did have some quite venomous ones) but preferred to plagiarize an eighteenth-century Englishman.
    "This little book is both very original and very good," he said. "But the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good."
    As had to happen, and as he perhaps hoped would happen, one of the people at the seminar repeated the comment, and the chain of breaches of confidence, which in Colombia is so efficient when it comes to damaging someone, soon reached an acquaintance of mine. Then, with the false and petty compassion common to those who inform on others, that acquaintance, a court reporter on El Siglo , very aware of the little respect I deserved, reproduced the phrase for me, enunciating like a good actor and openly studying my face for reactions. The first thing I imagined was my father's roar of laughter, his head thrown back like a neighing horse, his baritone voice resounding through the auditorium and the offices, capable of penetrating closed wooden doors; that laugh and the stump of his right hand looking for a pocket were the signs of his victory, and could be seen every time he made a good joke, along with his eyelids squeezed shut and, most of all, the disdain, the talented disdain. Like a vulture, my father could find his opponent's weak spot at a