The Informers Read Online Free PDF Page B

Guterman spoke warily of the spurious national identity the popular voice had assigned him: it had cost him several years to get used to the loss of his German citizenship, as if it were some object that had gone missing by mistake, a key fallen out of a pocket. He didn't complain, but he acquired the habit of cutting out the statistics that regularly appeared on the inside pages of the Bogota newspapers: "Port: Buenaventura. Ship: Bodegraven . Jews: 47. Distribution: Germans (33), Austrians (10), Yugoslavs (3), Czechoslovakians (1)." In his scrapbook there were Finnish vessels, like the Vindlon , and Spanish ones, like the Santa Maria . Peter Guterman paid attention to this news as if part of his family was arriving on the steamers. But Sara knew that these clippings were not familial announcements but emergency telegrams, actual reports on the discomfort the new arrivals caused among the locals. What's important is that the matter ended up justifying the name of the hotel. Peter Guterman's associates were Colombians; the word Europa sounded to them like a panacea in three syllables, as if the mere mention of the so-called civilized world would bring with it the definitive solution to their Third World problems. In a letter that later passed into the family's private history, into that collection of anecdotes with which aunts and grandmothers the world over fill domestic mealtimes as if trying to transmit clean blood to their descendants, his father told them, "I can't understand why you people are so fascinated by the name of a cow." And they read the letter and laughed; and they kept reading it, and kept doubling over with laughter, for a long time.
The Hotel Nueva Europa was in one of those colonial houses that had been convents since independence and were then inherited by seminaries or religious communities with no great interest in maintaining them. All the constructions were the same: they had an interior patio, and in the center of the patio, the statue of the founder of the order or some saint. In the future hotel, Bartolome de las Casas was the presiding statue, but the friar ceded his place to a stone fountain as soon as was possible. The fountain of the Nueva Europa was a circular pool large enough for a person to lie down in--over the years, more than one drunk would do--where the water picked up the taste of the stone and the moss that accumulated along its walls. At first the water was filled with little fish, golden and dancing; then with coins that gradually rusted. Before the fish, however, there hadn't been anything: nothing except the water and a pool that filled up with birds in the mornings, so many that it was necessary to shoo them away with the broom because not all the guests liked them. And the guests had to be humored: the place was not cheap. Peter Guterman charged 2 pesos 50 for bed and board with five daily meals, while the Regis, the other hotel of the moment in the region, charged a peso less. But the Nueva Europa was always full; full, especially, of politicians and foreigners. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (who, incidentally, hated birds with the same passion he put into his speeches) and Miguel Lopez Pumarejo were among the most regular clients. Lucas Caballero was neither a politician nor foreign, but he went to the hotel whenever he could. Before arriving he'd send a telegram that was always the same, word for word:
ARRIVING NEXT THURSDAY STOP REQUEST ROOM WITHOUT BALLOONS STOP.
The balloons he was referring to were eiderdowns, which Caballero didn't like. He preferred heavy wool blankets, the kind that collect dust and make allergy sufferers sneeze. Peter Guterman would have his room made up according to these specifications, issuing orders in German so urgently that the hotel employees, girls from Sogamosa and Duitama, managed to learn some basic words. Hairpeter, they said. Yes, Hairpeter. Right away, Hairpeter. Senor Guterman, professional obsessive, understood and accepted the obsessions of