The Informers Read Online Free

applause--a tiny slice of that August 6, 1988, when Bogota turned four hundred and fifty, Colombia celebrated one hundred and sixty-nine years less a day of independence, my mother had been dead for twelve years, six months, and twenty-one days, and I, who was twenty-seven years, six months, and four days old, suddenly felt overwhelmingly convinced of my own invulnerability, and everything seemed to indicate that there where my father and I were, each in charge of his own successful life, nothing could ever happen to us, because the conspiracy of things (what we call luck) was on our side, and from then on we could expect little more than an inventory of achievements, ranks and ranks of those grandiloquent capitals: the Pride of our Friends, the Envy of our Enemies, Mission Accomplished. I don't have to say it, but I'm going to say it: those predictions were completely mistaken. I published a book, an innocent book, and then nothing was ever the same again.
     
     
     
    I don't know when it became apparent that Sara Guterman's experiences would be the material for my first book, nor when this epiphany suggested that the prestigious occupation of a chronicler of reality was designed to fit me like a glove. (It wasn't true. I was just one more member of an occupation that is never prestigious; I was an unfulfilled promise, that delicate euphemism.) At first, when I began to investigate her life, I realized that I knew very little about her; at the same time, however, my knowledge exceeded the predictable or the normal, for Sara had been a regular visitor at my house for as long as I could remember, and many anecdotes from her always generous conversation had stayed in my head. Until the moment when my project came about, I'd never heard of Emmerich, the little German town where Sara was born. The date of her birth (1924) barely seemed less superfluous than that of her arrival in Colombia (1938); the fact that her husband was Colombian and her sons were Colombian and her grandchildren were Colombian, and the fact that she had lived in Colombia for the last fifty years of her life, served to fill out a biographical record and give an inevitable sense of substance to the particulars--you can say many things about a person, but only when we expose dates and places does that person begin to exist--but their utility went no further. Dates, places, and other information took up several interviews, characterized by the ease with which Sara talked to me, without allegories or beating about the bush, as if she'd been waiting her whole life to tell these things. I asked; she, rather than answering, confessed; the exchanges ended up resembling a forensic interrogation.
     
     
    Her name was Sara Guterman, born in 1924, arrived in Colombia in 1938?
    Yes, that's all correct.
    What did she remember about her final days in Emmerich?
    A certain well-being, first of all. Her family made their living from a sandpaper factory, and not a bad living either, but rather what would have been considered quite a comfortable one. It took Sara some thirty years to realize just what a good living the factory gave them. She also remembered a lighthearted childhood. And later, maybe after the first boycott affected the factory (Sara was not yet ten, but waking up for school and finding her father still at home made a deep impression), the appearance of fear and a sort of fascination at the novelty of the emotion.
     
     
    How did they get out of Germany?
    One night in October 1937, the town's operator called the family and warned that their arrest had been scheduled for the next day. It seems she had overheard the order while transferring a call, just the way she'd found out about Frau Maier's adultery (Sara didn't remember the first name of the adulterous woman). The family fled that very night, slipped over the border into Holland to a refuge in the countryside. They stayed hidden there for several weeks. Only Sara left the refuge: she backtracked as far as