The Informers

Начало книги

On the morning of April 7, 1991, when my father telephoned to invite me to his apartment in Chapinero for the first time, there was such a downpour in Bogota that the streams of the Eastern Hills burst their banks, and the water came pouring down, dragging branches and mud, blocking the sewers, flooding the narrowest streets, lifting small cars with the force of the current, and even killing an unwary taxi driver who somehow ended up trapped under the chassis of his own vehicle. The phone call itself was at the very least surprising, but on that day seemed nothing less than ominous, not only because my father had stopped receiving visitors a long time before, but also because the image of the water-besieged city, the motionless traffic jams and broken stoplights and marooned ambulances and unattended emergencies, would have sufficed under normal circumstances to convince anyone that going out to visit someone was imprudent, and asking someone to come to visit almost rash. The scenes of Bogota in chaos attested to the urgency of his call and made me suspect that the invitation was not a matter of courtesy, suggesting a provisional conclusion: we were going to talk about books. Not just any old book, of course; we'd talk about the only one I'd then published, a piece of reportage with a TV-documentary title-A Life in Exile, it was called-that told or tried to tell the life story of Sara Guterman, daughter of a Jewish family and lifelong friend of ours, beginning with her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s.

Читать дальше →