On Writing The Informers

In 1999, four or five days before the end of the century, I met a woman of German-Jewish origin who had arrived in Colombia in 1938. She had fled with her family from Emmerich, her hometown, when she was thirteen; her father opened a hotel in the small provincial city of Duitama, a couple of hours from Bogotá; the hotel’s reputation, particularly among politicians, ensured them a good living. Then the war started. Colombia broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and Colombian authorities began persecuting enemy citizens—Nazi spies, Nazi sympathizers, Nazi propagandists—but also citizens who, while not declared enemies, were deemed dangerous to the security of the hemisphere. Blacklists were brought into play, informers hired, and soon a German name was cause for suspicion, and feelings of mistrust and paranoia surrounded the German community. After that, things got out of hand.

The woman told me all this. I wanted to know more; so she sat with me for three days and patiently dictated her life to me. I wrote on a hotel notepad, staggered by the story, but more so by the fact that she was telling it to me with such freedom, such eagerness. At the time, I didn’t know I would use that conversation as the narrative backbone of a novel. In fact, I seriously doubted I would use it at all: I had never before written about my country, mainly because I didn’t understand it, and I had grown up believing one should only write about what one knows. I don’t have the space to go into the details of the transformation that followed, but sometime in the middle of 2002 I realized how mistaken that presumptuous little piece of advice was. I realized not understanding something is perhaps the best reason a novelist can have to write about it; I realized my favourite novels were, with rare exceptions, novels of enquiry, of investigation. From Conrad’s Under Western Eyes to Sebald’s The Emigrants, certain works of fiction give us the sense that in writing them authors are entering an undiscovered country. They seem to know their story no better than their narrators; we read them and feel that writing, for them, is finding out.

I wanted to find out about the way the war was experienced in Colombia: about the existence of a Nazi party, about the blacklists, about the way my generation has inherited the consequences of what happened in those years. I had a life written down in notepads; my task was to transform it and then to invent other lives that would bring the historical moment to the surface. My task, in other words, was to look for that place where private secrets cross paths with public ones, and shed a little light on it. Novels, said Balzac, are the private history of nations. That idea carried me through the writing of The Informers.

Copyright © 2008 Juan Gabriel Vásquez. All rights reserved.

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