Three of my father's colleagues helped me to lift the coffin--without a window of any kind, as advised by Sara--and carry it to the door of the church; then a squadron of men dressed in mourning cut off our path; there was a rustling of papers, the coffin rested on a gilded stand, and a stranger began to read. He held the paper with a ringed hand (rings on three fingers). The man was the spokesman for the Mayoralty of Greater Bogota; at the end of each sentence his heels lifted two or three centimeters from the ground, as if he were trying to stand on tiptoe to get a better view.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends, compatriots all:
Gabriel Santoro, notable citizen, thinker, professor, and friend, was in his advanced years the standard-bearer, or let us say, the very paragon of the impartial and honest man, because every moment of his life was distinguished by his pure and noble patriotism, his moral integrity, robust personality, and temperament, his devotion and fondness, the strict and upright fulfillment of his duties, and, furthermore, the cordial, affectionate nature of his human relations.
He was born in Santa Fe de Bogota in the bounti ful land of his illustrious ancestry. Sogamoso was the cradle of his forebears and source of the clear water of his understanding. Shaped by politics, science, and culture in a home of Christian virtues, he cultivated and assessed them with conscientious unction, as is customary in societies which practice healthy ideas with profound conviction. Religion and the principles of the philosophical ideal were the center, nerve, and motor of his intellect, projecting it with emanations of grandeur toward the immediate future. And, of course, faith grew in his spirit and brought him the intimate proximity of God; his wisdom and peace of the soul reflected the living miracle of a select, worthy, and civilized person.
And with all of this, breathing scents of eternity with the eminent breezes and incense of holy patriotic inspiration, with the joy of youth, athletic, elegant, and upstanding, transcending the classrooms of his alma mater, which received him like a beacon showing the way in these days of dark designs and ambiguous omens. Solicitous, disciplined, and diligent, with the uprightness of an honest man, Gabriel Santoro worshipped everlasting philosophy; the tranquil attitude of a great orator illuminated the born leader, fixed his eye on the horizons of the beloved country. In this setting we, the people of Bogota, single out Gabriel Santoro to place him, in honor of his illustrious trajectory, in the pantheon of the nation's notables.
For his life, from the illustrious moment when he received his honors degree in jurisprudence, was forever assuming the role of pilot in the storm, educating generations of men to honest labors and diaphanous ideas, and transmitting the most illustrious treasure of our species, the language we revere with its use each day of our lives. And for all that he shall be recognized in the annals of our nation, since in these very moments of exemplary pain the nation is preparing the official recognition, and its decrees shall honor Doctor Gabriel Santoro with the Medal of Civic Merit. So it is declared and shall be carried out by due process of the law.
Peace be upon the tomb of the famous teacher and worthy citizen, Doctor Gabriel Santoro. The festive and joyful tricolors wave in heaven, welcoming the orator and man. May the perpetual light shine on him.
Santa Fe de Bogota, the twenty-sixth day of the month of December, 1991.
At that moment, when the speech ended and the box slid across the fuchsia-colored carpet of the hearse and the driver closed the door, taking the greatest possible care to avoid my gaze, people began to walk toward me, to murmur condolences and offer open hands that emerged from black sleeves, and the leaden rhetoric of the duty-roster orator (those anacolutha, those subversive gerunds, those dangling participles) was the least of my worries. In any case, this I remember well: I didn't want to shake anyone's hand, because my own right hand was still feeling the weight of my father and his coffin, and I had got it into my head to make the pressure of the copper handle on my palm last for a few minutes. Later, by one of those curious associations a mind under pressure is capable of, I thought of the handles and the carpet of the hearse when the coffin began to enter the cemetery's crematorium. The door of the furnace was copper and the handles of the coffin were copper. The heat in the room, around the flowers and their putrid smell, the white ribbons, the gold letters on the white ribbons, was no different from the heat I'd felt in the car park of the funeral home, with the sun hitting the thick cloth of my jacket and my sweaty neck. And now, at the same time as I let myself be overwhelmed by these small annoyances, I thought about my dead father. At some point I thought I'd never, as long as I lived, be able to think about anything else. I was alone; there was no one left between me and my own death. Filling out the cremation forms, I had written, for the first time in a long while, my father's full name, and the automatism of my hand made me shudder, that it had memorized those movements over years of writing Gabriel Santoro, but always referring to myself, not to a dead man. The contents of my own name, that which seems immutable to us (although only through force of habit), were being transformed. Of all the changes we go through during our lifetimes--I thought, or I believe I thought--of all the changes imposed on us, what could be more violent?
In that box, behind the hatch, was his body. I could not know in what state, I could not know what damage the accident had done to him, nor had I wanted to find out the causes of death. Maybe he'd broken his neck, maybe he'd suffocated, or maybe, like one of the passengers of whom news had emerged, he'd been crushed by the chassis, or maybe the impact of the car (against the mountain, or the bus, or some tree trunk) had thrown him forward with such force that his seat belt or the steering wheel or the dashboard had broken his ribs. The doctors had said that the bones of his chest would take a year to regenerate after the operation; now the cut made by the saw irritated my imagination much less than the images summoned up by the accident. And in a few minutes, after the clothing and skin, after the soft tissues--the eyes, the tongue, the testicles--after the renewed heart, those bones would be melted by the heat of the furnace. What was the temperature in there? How long did the whole process take, the transformation of a professor of rhetoric into ashes to fill an urn? Would the wire the surgeons had used to reconnect the bones of his chest melt, too? And while I thought about this the few people who had come to the cremation spectacle kept approaching me, and the numbness of my hands and my tired words seized me again, as if to prove one more time what I've always known and never needed to prove: that I am not equipped to grieve for the dead, for no one ever taught me the words of sorrow or the conduct of mourning. Then a woman came to greet me--to convey her personal inventory of consoling phrases, of meaningful embraces, of pret-a-porter sympathy--and only when she was a meter away did I recognize Angelina, who had accompanied us in silence throughout the day, timid and half hidden, reluctant to participate in any of the ceremonies, as if embarrassed to be what she would always be: the deceased man's last lover.
She was wearing a shawl that served her well as camouflage, black and loose like a Bedouin's djellaba, and her unmade-up face, under the material, was again that of a woman any mature man might take a fancy to. She had decided to come as soon as she managed to find out that my father was, in fact, among the dead; the accident had spoiled her Christmas, she said with a certain coolness (I thought she was protecting herself from her own sadness), but she wasn't going to allow it to spoil her New Year, that was for sure, and as soon as she could she was going on holiday somewhere, as far away from all this as possible. She was the one who pointed out, on the way out of the cemetery, that I didn't have keys to my father's apartment and she did. There would surely be a few things I'd like to get, she suggested, and it was unlikely, or rather impossible, that we'd see each other again. She didn't mind going there with me and giving me the keys, she went on saying in the tone of a professional conciliator, as long as I would allow her to stay in the apartment for a while, while she packed up cardigans, rings, women's magazines, and even packets of sweetener that had piled up there over the cou
rse of six months of dates with my father and would now be pointless to waste.
"Look, the truth is I'm not really up to it right now," I said. "But why don't we meet tomorrow and then we'll have all the time we want."
And that's what we did. The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, Angelina and I went into my father's apartment together and sat down to talk with the look and feel of long-lost twins. We found the door double-locked: the door of someone who'd gone away on a trip. Inside, the impression was the same: the curtains closed, the clean plates stacked on a wooden draining rack, and one dirty glass in the sink (the orange juice one drinks before an early start, planning to have breakfast along the way). I had sat down in the ocher armchair, and she, after smoothing her skirt with her hands (a movement touching her bottom, her thighs), on one of the dining room chairs. The pale light from the street marked her face, free now of the camouflage of the djellaba, with the shadows of the window bars. When a car went past on Forty-ninth, the reflection of its windshield projected across the ceiling of the apartment, mobile, luminous, a searchlight looking for escaped prisoners. "I asked him not to go," Angelina told me. "And it went in one ear and out the other. At that hour, you know? How could he go so late? At least three buses have gone over the cliff on that road. Of course I told him. I told him and he ignored me." She was talking with her face hardened and a voice that seemed to accuse my father or suggest it was all his fault. "No, not three buses, many more, tons. The last not long ago. Everyone was killed."
"But not this time," I said. "Didn't you know? There were people who survived."
"I haven't read the papers, I didn't want to see them, it hurts too much. But they tell me things, people tell me things even though I don't want them to. There's no way to get them to respect you."
"What things?"
"Well, stupid things, that's all."
"What stupid things?"
"For example, that the bus was driving with its lights off, that it only had those little yellow lights up above turned on, you know the ones? That's the kind of shit that comes out in the newspapers. I don't know who the driver was, but I hate that son of a bitch. Maybe it was his fault."
"Don't say that. Whose fault it was . . . I don't know if it really matters."
"Well, it might not matter to you. But a person wants to know, don't you think? What if it was Gabriel's fault?"
"He's driven on highways all his life. He used to drive trucks as big as a house. I don't think it was his fault."
"What trucks?"
"Troco trucks."
"And what does that mean?"
I was talking to her now as if we were brother and sister. As if she should know as well as I did my father's whole life.
"Nothing," I said. "It's the name of a company. Like any other name. It doesn't mean anything."
Angelina thought for a second.
"Liar," she said then. "Gabriel means 'God's warrior.' "
"Oh yeah? And what does Angelina mean?"
"I don't know. Angelina is Angelina."
She closed her eyes. Squeezed them as if they stung.
"The thing is, he'd just gone out," she said. "Why did he have to go out so late? Men are so stubborn. They never listen."
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"Why weren't you with him?"
"Oh," she said. A pause. Then, "Because I wasn't."
"Why not?"
"He wouldn't let me go with him. It was his business."
"What was?"
"His business."
"What business?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Angelina, angry and a bit anxious. "Don't ask me any more questions, don't be a drag. Look, I didn't stick my nose into his business. We barely knew each other."
"But you were a couple."
It wasn't the right word, of course. Angelina didn't mock me, but she could have.
"A couple, doesn't that sound nice? Like on the soaps. Is that what people say about us, that we were a couple? It's nice, I think I'd like that, though what's it matter now? He was more worried than I was about what to call us. He was always asking me what we were."
"And what were you?"
"Incredible, you're exactly the same, chip off the old block, isn't that what they say? I don't know, we slept together once in a while, we kept each other company, I think we loved each other a little; in six months you get to love someone a little. I loved him, I know that for sure, but that's life, isn't it? You're a grown-up, Gabriel, you know a person doesn't go to bed with someone and immediately become part of their life. If he wanted to go, what was I supposed to do? Nothing, right? Let him go."
"But it was so late," I said.
"So what? Oh yeah, I would have liked to go with him and get myself killed with him, how romantic. But he didn't invite me, what do you want me to do?"
"And in Medellin. What the hell was he going to do there? He didn't even like that city, he had an aversion to it."
"He'd never been there."
"He disliked it anyway."
"Oh, that's a good one," said Angelina. "Take a dislike to places you've never been." And then, "He'd never been there."
She began to cry, discreetly, silently. I wouldn't have noticed but for the movement of her index finger that swept the line of her lashes and then wiped the mascara on her black skirt. "Silly fool," said Angelina. It was normal that she should cry, as one does cry in the days following a death, when the whole world is little more than an empty shell and the intensity of the loss seems unmanageable, but I couldn't help but think that her quiet weeping, devoid of show and all despair, had different qualities, and then it occurred to me for the first time that Angelina was hiding something from me, and immediately I saw it, I saw it as if it were written in neon lights on a dark wall: my father had hurt her. She was crying out of resentment, not sadness. My father had hurt her. It seemed incredible.
"And did you have plans?" I asked.
Angelina looked at me (or rather her piercing eyes looked at me, as if separated from her body) with something that was uncertainty but also hostility, as if she were a little girl and I was trying to cheat her in a shop.
"What plans?" she said.
"To move in together, I don't know, for him to stay in Medellin. He didn't really tell me very much, you know? One day he came out with the thing about the trip. Just like that, out of the blue. That he was going away with you to spend the holiday, that's all he told me. That was it."
"Well then, that was it. Christmas and New Year, those were the plans."
"And then?"
"Listen to this guy. Then nothing. Why are you asking me so many questions, I'd like to know."
"I'm sorry, Angelina. It's just that he . . ."
"How should I know what went through his head? What do you think I am, a fortune-teller?"
"No, of course not. I'm not asking--"
"Do you know what I'm thinking right now? Let's see, let's see if you're so great. What am I thinking?"
She's thinking of her pain, I said to myself. She's thinking everyone wants to hurt her. And the man who seemed to be different hurt her, too. But I didn't say it, among other reasons because I couldn't prove it, because it was impossible for me to imagine the circumstances of that injury.
"What am I thinking?"
"I don't know."
"You don't, do you? See, so why do you think that I can know what your dad was thinking? Sure, it would make things easier if it was like that, wouldn't it? Knowing what other people are thinking, fantastic. Well, you know what? If you could see what other people were thinking, you'd be too terrified to leave your house."
Angelina was defending herself, although it wasn't too clear what from. I, for my part, left it there; I accepted that an argument, or a grudge, or a disagreement between my father and his lover (the resolution of which was interrupted by death, that great meddler), was no concern of mine; I accepted that the least important aspect of my father's death was the fact that he'd
died in a traffic accident, and the least important aspect of the accident was its location or the distribution of responsibility. So we spent the rest of the evening doing what we'd planned. She collected her things, every sign of her passage through the life of a dead man, and said good-bye with a distant and formal handshake, perhaps thinking of what she'd said to me at the cemetery: we'd never see each other again, because there was no reason in the world why we should. I watched her walk slowly down the stairs, carrying under her left arm a cardboard box that we'd emptied of newspapers to fill up with the sweetener and the sweaters and the magazines, a baseball cap that my father had forbidden her to wear the first time he'd seen her in it, and a plastic bag full of hair conditioner, seaweed skin creams, and packets of sanitary towels. I closed the door when I heard her say good-bye to the doorman; then, for an hour or two more, I walked around the apartment, opening drawers, cupboards, doors, lifting up shirts and peering behind books, with all the movements of someone looking for a hidden treasure but with no intention of finding it: just wanting to make sure my father hadn't kept savings or valuable documents in some secret place and that later, when what was necessary was done with this place, the documents or savings wouldn't be lost among the rubbish or stolen. That's how I found an old ticket to a Leonardo Favio concert beside a half-empty box of condoms, and, in spite of the faded letters on the paper, I could see the concert had been the year my mother died, which undoubtedly explained why my father had submitted himself to the unbearable torture of popular ballads; and that's how I realized, as I went through his meager and amateur collection of similar records--some still with their tissue-paper sleeves intact--that there were no cassettes in this house, because there was no machine to play them on, and I was struck by a notion I hadn't considered until that moment: my father left behind two or three texts, but his voice was not recorded anywhere. I would never hear his voice again.
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