Reputations

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Reputations is a work of fiction; any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. Having fulfilled this convention, which no reader should take completely seriously, I wish to thank those who gave me their time and offered me anecdotes from their lives or ideas about their trade, especially Vladimir Flórez, Vladdo, and Andrés Rábago, El Roto. Other political cartoonists lent me, unknowingly, more or less concrete information, and I’d also like to recognize my debt — more ambiguous and less direct — to Antonio Caballero, Héctor Osuna and José María Pérez González, Peridis. In order to write about the death of Ricardo Rendón, I found the book 5 en humor, by María Teresa Ronderos, very useful. I would also like to acknowledge my unpayable debt to Jorge Ruffinelli and Héctor Hoyos, of Stanford University, for the invitation and the hospitality that allowed me to finish this novel in an apartment on Oak Creek Drive, in Palo Alto, California. Finally, I’d like once more to give myself the pleasure (and put on record the infinite good fortune) of finishing a book by writing the name Mariana.