Reputations

I

Sitting on a bench in Parque Santander, having his shoes shined before it was time for the tribute to begin, Mallarino was suddenly sure he’d just seen a long-dead political cartoonist. He had his left foot on the wooden crate and his back pressed against the cushion, so his old hernia wouldn’t start acting up, and he’d been letting the time slip by reading the local tabloids, the cheap newsprint blackening his fingers and the huge red headlines telling him of bloody crimes, sexual secrets, aliens abducting children from barrios on the south side. Reading the tabloids was a sort of guilty pleasure: something he only allowed himself when nobody was looking. That’s what Mallarino was thinking about — the hours he’d wasted here, given over to this perversion beneath the pale sunshades — when he looked up, away from the words as one does to remember, and finding his gaze met by the tall buildings, the ever-grey sky, the trees that had always been cracking the asphalt, feeling as though he were seeing it all for the first time. And then it happened.

It was just a fraction of a second: the figure crossed Seventh Avenue in his dark suit, untidy bow tie and broad-brimmed hat, and then turned the corner beside San Francisco Church and disappeared forever. In an effort not to lose sight of him, Mallarino leaned forward and stepped off the crate just as the bootblack was about to apply the shoe polish to the leather, and left an oblong mark on his grey sock: a black eye looking up at him from below accusingly, like the man’s half-closed eyes. Mallarino, who until now had only seen the bootblack from above — the shoulders of his blue overalls speckled with fresh dandruff, the crown cleared by an encroaching baldness — found himself facing a veiny nose, small protruding ears and a moustache that was white and grey, like pigeon shit. ‘Sorry,’ said Mallarino, ‘I thought I’d seen someone.’ The man went back to his work, the well-aimed strokes of his hand applying shoe polish to the instep. ‘Hey,’ he added, ‘could I ask you a question?’

‘Go ahead, chief.’

‘Did you ever hear of Ricardo Rendón?’

Silence reached him from below: one beat, then a second.

‘Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry,’ said the man. ‘If you want we can ask my colleagues after.’

His colleagues. Two or three of them were already starting to pack up their things. They were closing up chairs, folding cloths, putting brushes with scuffed-up bristles and dented tins of shoe polish away in their wooden crates, and the air, beneath the commotion of the evening traffic, filled with the banging of metal fitting together and lids being screwed on tightly. It was ten to five in the afternoon: since when had Bogotá’s bootblacks worked fixed hours? Mallarino had drawn them on a few occasions, especially in the early days, when coming downtown and going for a stroll and having his shoes shined was a way of taking the city’s pulse, of feeling that he was a direct witness of his own material. All that had changed: Mallarino had changed; the bootblacks had changed too. He almost never came into the city any more, and had grown used to seeing the world on screens or pages, to letting life come to him instead of hunting it down in its hiding places, as if he’d gradually realized that he’d earned this and now, after so many years, it was life that should come looking for him. The bootblacks, for their part, no longer ruled their workplaces — those two square metres of public space — by virtue of a pact of honour, but rather by belonging to a union: the payment of monthly dues, the possession of a laminated identity card, which they displayed at the slightest provocation. Yes, the city was different now. But it wasn’t nostalgia that overwhelmed Mallarino as he noted the changes, but a strange desire to hold back the march of chaos, as if doing so would also hold back his own interior entropy, the slow oxidation of his organs, the erosion of his memory reflected in the city’s eroded memory: as exemplified by the fact that nobody knew who Ricardo Rendón was anymore. Ricardo Rendón: the greatest political cartoonist in Colombian history, who had just walked by in spite of having been dead for seventy-nine years, had been devoured, like so many other figures, by the insatiable hunger of oblivion. They’ll forget me too one day, thought Mallarino. As he lowered his foot off the crate and raised the other one in its place, and as he shook the paper so that a wrinkled page would return to its proper place (a dexterous flick of the wrists), Mallarino thought: Yes, they’ll forget me too. Then he thought: But not for quite a while yet. And in that moment he heard himself say: ‘What about Javier Mallarino?’

The bootblack took a second to realize the question was directed at him. ‘Sir?’

‘Javier Mallarino. Do you know who he is?’

‘The guy who does the cartoons for the newspaper,’ the man said. ‘But he doesn’t come around here any more. He got tired of Bogotá, that’s what I was told. He’s been living out of town for ages now, up in the mountains.’

So there’s something that was still remembered. It shouldn’t have surprised him: his move at the beginning of the 1980s, before the years of terrorism had even begun and people had fewer reasons for leaving, had been national news. Waiting for the bootblack to say something, a question or some exclamation, Mallarino stared at the bald spot on the top of his head, that devastated territory with the odd strand of hair popping up here and there, with marks revealing the hours spent out in the sun: potentially cancerous spots, the place where a life might begin to be extinguished. But the man didn’t say anything more. He hadn’t recognized him. In a few minutes Mallarino would receive the definitive consecration, the orgasm corresponding to a forty-year-long intercourse with his trade, and this had not ceased to surprise him: people didn’t recognize him. His political cartoons had turned him into what Rendón had been in the 1930s: a moral authority for half the country, public enemy number one for the other half, and for all of them a man able to cause the repeal of a law, overturn a judge’s decision, bring down a mayor or seriously threaten the stability of a ministry, and all this with no other weapons than paper and Indian ink. And nevertheless on the street he was nobody, he could go on being nobody, since cartoons, as opposed to columns these days, were never accompanied by a photo of their perpetrator: for the average reader out on the street it was as if they drew themselves, free of any authorship, like a downpour, or an accident.

The guy who does the cartoons. Yes, that was Mallarino. Cartoon-obsessed monomaniac: that’s what he’d been called once, in a letter to the editor, by a politician whose vanity he’d wounded. Now his eyes, always tired, gazed at the inhabitants of downtown Bogotá: the lottery-ticket seller resting on the stone wall, the student waiting for a bus, walking north and looking over his shoulder, the couple stopped in the middle of the pavement, man and woman, both office workers, both dressed in dark blue suits with white shirts, holding both each other’s hands but not looking at each other. All of them would react at the mention of his name — with admiration or repugnance, never with indifference — but none of them would be able to identify him. If he committed a crime, none of them could pick him out of a police line-up of usual suspects: Yes, I’m sure, it’s number five, the bearded one, the thin one, the bald one. Mallarino, for them, didn’t have particular features, and the few readers who’d met him over the years often commented with surprise: I hadn’t imagined you bald, or thin, or bearded. His was the kind of baldness that didn’t call attention to itself; when he met someone he’d only seen once before, Mallarino often received the same disconcerted comments: ‘Have you always looked like that?’ Or: ‘How strange. I didn’t notice when we met.’ Maybe it was his expression, which devoured people’s attention the way a black hole devours light: his eyes with drooping lids looking out from behind his glasses with a sort of permanent sadness, or that beard that hid his face like an outlaw’s bandana. His beard used to be black; it was still full, but had gone grey: slightly more at the chin and sideburns, slightly less on the sides of his face. It didn’t matter: it kept him hidden. And Mallarino was still unrecognizable, an anonymous being on the teeming streets. That anonymity gave him a puerile pleasure (a child hiding in forbidden rooms), and had calmed Magdalena, his wife back then. ‘In this country they kill people for less,’ she used to say to him when a general or a drug baron came off badly in one of his drawings. ‘It’s better that no one knows who you are or what you look like. It’s better that you can go out and buy milk and I won’t worry if you take your time.’

His gaze swept over the twilight universe of Parque Santander. It took just an instant to spot three people reading the paper, his paper, and he thought that all three would soon pass or had already passed their eyes over the letters of his name in print and then his signature, that clear upper-case letter that soon deteriorated into a chaos of curves and ended up disintegrating into a corner, the sad trail of a crashing plane. Everyone knew the space where his cartoon had always been: in the very centre of the first page of opinion columns, that mythic place where Colombians go to hate their public figures or find out why they love them, that great collective couch of a persistently sick country. It was the first thing anyone’s eyes saw when they reached those pages. The black square, the slender strokes, the line of text or brief dialogue beneath the frame: the scene that left his desk each day and was praised, admired, commented on, misinterpreted, repudiated in a column of the same newspaper or another, in the irate letter of an irate reader, in a debate on some morning radio show. Yes, it was a terrible power. There was a time when Mallarino desired it more than anything else in the world; he worked hard to get it; he enjoyed it and exploited it conscientiously. And now that he was sixty-five, the very political class he’d so attacked and hounded and scorned from his redoubt, mocked without consideration or respect for the ties of family or friendship (and he’d lost quite a few friends as a result, and even a few relatives), that very same political class had decided to put the gigantic Colombian machinery of sycophancy into action to create a public homage, which for the first time in history, and perhaps for the last, would celebrate a cartoonist. ‘This is not going to happen again,’ Rodrigo Valencia, publisher of the newspaper for the last three decades, said to him, when he called, diligent messenger, to tell him about the official visit he’d just received, the accolades he’d just heard, the intentions the organizers had just revealed. ‘It’s an offer that’s not going to be repeated. It would be silly to turn it down.’

‘Who said I was going to turn it down?’ asked Mallarino.

‘Nobody,’ said Valencia. ‘Well, I did. Because I know you, Javier. And so do they, truth be told. If not, why would they come here and ask me first?’

‘Oh, I see. You’re the negotiator. You’re the one who’ll convince me.’

‘More or less,’ said Valencia. His voice was guttural and deep, one of those voices that give orders naturally, or whose demands are accepted without a fuss. He knew it; he’d grown accustomed to choosing the words that best suited his voice. ‘They want to hold it in the Teatro Colón, Javier, imagine that. Don’t let the chance slip by, don’t be an idiot. Not for you, don’t get me wrong, you don’t matter to me. For the newspaper.’

Mallarino let out a snort of annoyance. ‘Well, let me think about it,’ he said.

‘For the newspaper,’ said Valencia.

‘Call me tomorrow and we’ll talk,’ said Mallarino. And then: ‘Would it be upstairs in the sala Foyer?’

‘No, Javier, this is what I’m trying to tell you. They’re going to have it on the main stage.’

‘On the main stage?’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, man. This thing’s serious.’

They confirmed it later — Teatro Colón, main stage, the thing was serious — and the place seemed only appropriate: there, under the fresco of the six muses, behind the curtain where Ruy Blas and Romeo and Othello and Juliet shared the same enchanted space, on the same stage where he’d witnessed so many beautiful artifices since he was a boy, from Marcel Marceau to Life is a Dream, he was now getting ready to play an artifice of his own creation: the favoured son, the honoured citizen, the illustrious compatriot with lapels wide enough to hold as many medals as necessary. That’s why he’d turned down the transport the Ministry had offered to put at his disposal: a bulletproof black Mercedes with darkened windows, according to the description over the phone from a tremulous-voiced secretary, which would have picked him up at his house in the mountains and dropped him off on the stone steps of the theatre, right below the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy, a young damsel arriving at the ball where she would meet her prince. No, this afternoon Mallarino had come down to the city in his old Land Rover and left it in a car park at Fifth and Nineteenth: he wanted to arrive on foot to his own apotheosis, approach like everybody else, appear suddenly at a corner and feel that his mere presence might send a tremor through the air, spark conversations, make heads turn; he wanted to announce, with this single gesture, that he hadn’t lost a speck of his old independence: he still had the clout to make any of them a target, and that wasn’t going to be changed by power or tributes or a bulletproof Mercedes with tinted windows. Now, on the bootblack’s chair, while the brush moved over his shoes (so quickly that it turned into a thick brown line, the way fans seem to no longer have blades as they spin into whirring white circles), Mallarino found himself asking a question that hadn’t been in his head before coming into town: what would Rendón have done in his place? If what had happened to Mallarino had happened to Rendón, what would he have done? Would he have received the tribute with satisfaction, or would he have accepted it with resignation or cynicism? Would he have refused it? Ah, but Rendón had refused in his own way: on 28 October 1931 he went into La Gran Vía, ordered a beer, drew a sketch and shot himself in the temple. In seventy-nine years, nobody had been able to explain why.

‘That’s three thousand five hundred, chief,’ the bootblack said. ‘You’ve got pretty big feet, sir, you know.’

‘So I’ve been told,’ said Mallarino.

‘All the better for me, you’ll pardon my saying,’ said the man.

‘That’s for sure,’ said Mallarino. ‘Better for you.’

Mallarino reached into his trouser pockets, the front and then the back, before moving to his grey raincoat where his fingers found, tangled in a number of threads like fish in seaweed, a till receipt and a greenish wallet, worn with use and falling apart. ‘Here,’ he said to the bootblack with calculated generosity, ‘and keep the change.’ The man flattened out the note, took an old leather wallet out of his wooden crate and tucked it inside, without folding it, sliding it in with precision. Then he raised his tired face, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again: ‘Do you want to ask them, chief?’

‘Ask what?’

‘About the gentleman you were looking for. I can ask my colleagues, it’s no trouble.’

Mallarino didn’t say no, he waved his hand in the air as if erasing the last words, and stammered a thank-you. But he liked the man, his natural courtesy, his good manners: endangered species in this inelegant, sour-faced, coarse Bogotá, hardly the South American Athens it used to flatter itself as being. Who had said that in Bogotá even the bootblacks quoted Proust? Must have been some Englishman, Mallarino said to himself, only an Englishman would be capable of perpetrating such a pronouncement. Of course, it had been said some time ago: said in another city, the disappeared city, the phantom city, the city of Ricardo Rendón, the city of La Gran Vía, the entrance of which Mallarino could have seen, a few decades ago, from the spot on the pavement where he now lingered distractedly, a short step from the hostile roadway, his gaze lost between the short buses with their brightly lit windows. But the place had disappeared. Many shops and many cafés had disappeared, La Gran Vía among them. Had Rendón’s ghost emerged from that phantom door? But it wasn’t a ghost: someone dressed like Rendón, someone resembling Rendón, with the same wide-brimmed hat, with the same unruly bow tie: that was all. Maybe, thought Mallarino, it was the proximity to La Gran Vía or to its former location that had set off that vision, or maybe it was one of those false memories we all have. What a strange thing memory is, allowing us to remember what we have not experienced. Mallarino clearly remembered Rendón strolling through the centre of Bogotá, meeting León de Greiff in El Automático, arriving home, drunk and alone and sad, in the early hours. . Fictitious memories, invented memories. There was no reason to be surprised: it was impossible, on a day like today, to pretend that Rendón had no part in his thoughts. The gentleman you were looking for. No, he wasn’t actually looking for him: rather he was on his way to replace him, to occupy his throne or inherit his sceptre or whatever imbecilic metaphor like the ones he’d read in two or three opinion columns by people as well informed as they were affected, as good at remembering as at brown-nosing. ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’: some free association had brought that phrase to mind. Where was it from, and what was it referring to? But then he stopped thinking of it, because he’d glanced again at his watch and the angle of the hands turned into a reproach: was he even going to arrive late for his own coronation?

He began to walk against the flow of the crowd along Seventh Avenue, crossing Jiménez Avenue and Rosario Square into Candelaria, dodging street vendors determined to sell everything that could be sold — buy cigarettes, buy cheap gold, buy toy cars or polished emeralds, buy umbrellas or shoelaces, buy lollipops with chewing gum centres, chewing gum without lollipops, chocolate-covered raisins — and thinking that in downtown Bogotá one always had the sensation of walking against the flow, the afternoon crowds like a strong wind across the bow. Determined to overcome the resistance, Mallarino lowered his head, raised his shoulders and stuck his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, the unfathomable depths of which never ceased to surprise him. And that’s what he was thinking about, the nooks of his raincoat he seemed not to have completely explored, when he heard the clicking of high heels behind him, or rather he realized he’d heard it when the heel-clicking ended with a hand on his shoulder, as delicate as a falling leaf, and turned round, half surprised and half curious, to find the face of Magdalena, her hair so fair the grey ones blended in, her slender eyebrows arched and her smile ironic: the whole landscape of features Mallarino had once known the way he now knew the view from his window.

‘I think we’re going to the same place,’ she said.

There was no resentment in her voice: rather a kindness resembling something forgiven or perhaps forgotten (but Magdalena’s voice had always been capable of all kinds of sorcery). Mallarino kissed her on the cheek and remembered her perfume and something awoke in his chest. Of course, Magdalena’s radio station was nearby.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘If you want I’ll walk you there.’ She smiled and took his arm, or linked her arm through Mallarino’s, like she did when they were married and used to go for walks together in town, before they’d allowed life, headstrong life, to have its own way.

‘Typical of you,’ she said, ‘to arrive on foot.’

She’d noticed. Magdalena always noticed: she’d always been that way. Her liquid eyes — today, for some reason, brighter than he remembered them — saw everything, took everything in.

‘What do you expect,’ said Mallarino. ‘At our age, a person’s not going to change.’

When they got married, in a small-town church with limestone walls and cobbled steps leading into the square and where one could easily turn an ankle, Mallarino had been drawing cartoons for just under a year — two a month, with luck — for a newspaper with Conservative tendencies and family capital, one of those publications that never become leaders in the field but seem to have always existed and whose editions aren’t sold by the street vendors, but show up in the drugstores and cafés when everyone’s forgotten all about them. That minor job — Mallarino thought, with involuntary scorn — did not form part of his great projects: if he’d dropped out of his architecture course before completing the second year, if he’d refused to use his father’s contacts to get a job without a diploma in one of the important firms, it had been to pursue his true vocation, or to make the most of his virtuosity, for even his parents had to bow to the evidence of his talent on the afternoon the painter Alejandro Obregón, who at that time was working on his oil paintings of doves in a third-floor apartment at Twelfth Avenue and Seventeenth Street, visited the family home, stood in front of a life-size nude Mallarino was drying with a portable hairdryer, and exclaimed a ten-word sentence that was like a bullfighter authorizing a novice to take his place in the ring: ‘But how the hell did this kid learn to paint?’

Painting was his thing. The future (the ghosts that appeared in his head when he pronounced this word) was on canvas. So at that time the political cartoons were a short-term way of earning a living, getting by while large frames piled up in the courtyard and the house filled with the smell of turpentine, and canvases covered in female forms, all more or less disguised versions of Magdalena, changed colour according to the moods of the light coming through the windows. The newspaper paid him badly and late, and only when they actually used one of his drawings: it was not unusual for Mallarino to send five or six cartoons a week and receive them back at the end of the month with a note typed by a secretary, on embossed letterhead, in which the opinion-page editor regretted in too many words not being able to use his work this time. At the age of twenty-five, Mallarino did not yet know that this was common practice in the country’s newsrooms; Magdalena didn’t know either, but she was the one to suggest sending just one cartoon and not sending another until the first was published.

‘And if they don’t publish it?’ said Mallarino.

‘We’ll just wait till they do,’ she said.

‘But the moment passes. Cartoons are like fish: if they’re not used today, they can’t be used tomorrow.’

‘Well, that may well be the case,’ said Magdalena, concluding the subject. ‘But that’s also their problem.’

And of course, she was right. Subjected to rationing, the newspaper began to publish everything Mallarino sent, and even to increase the frequency of his appearances. For five months the situation was ideal. Then, in the month of August, the Colombian President and the Chilean President signed a joint declaration in which both countries officially expressed their respect for ideological diversity. Mallarino drew them both, the Colombian with his permanent involuntary smile and the Chilean with his thick-framed, tinted glasses. ‘Look, my dear Salvador, in Colombia it doesn’t matter if you’re Liberal or Conservative,’ read the first line of the text. And the second: ‘What matters is that you come from a good family.’ The drawing was finished in one draft, and Mallarino left it at the front desk of the newspaper, well sealed inside a cardboard envelope, inside a plastic bag from the market (it had been drizzling). But the next day, when he opened the newspaper, he found that the second line of the text had disappeared, and its absence was like a crack in the earth, a drain down which everything seeps away. ‘I want someone to explain it,’ he said that afternoon in the editorial office: he’d arrived by taxi, because his urgency warranted it, with the newspaper rolled up like a telescope and wrinkled in his sweaty fist. He didn’t want his voice to tremble; to prevent it, he tried raising it, but the result was not good.

‘There’s nothing to explain,’ said the editor-in-chief. He had a double chin and small eyes; among the disproportionate features of his face, the mouth seemed to move independently from the rest of his muscles. ‘Don’t fly off the handle, Javier, this happens all the time.’

‘To whom? Who does this happen to all the time?’

‘To everyone who draws cartoons here. Hadn’t you noticed? Everyone knows that sometimes things have to be cut. Now you’re going to tell me the editor doesn’t have that right.’

‘In a column,’ said Mallarino. It was a terrible defence, but he couldn’t think of another. ‘Not in a cartoon.’

‘In cartoons too, dear boy, don’t be naïve. Because they also appear in the newspaper and they also take up space. What am I supposed to say to the advertisers? Tell me, what do I tell them?’

Mallarino said nothing.

‘This is what I’m going to tell them,’ the editor went on, starting to walk in circles, both thumbs firmly stuck in his belt. ‘I’m going to tell them: Look, my good advertisers, gentlemen who pay me thousands of pesos a year, I have a problem. I can’t print your ads, in spite of the fact that the money you pay me is what pays the journalists’ wages. And do you know why, gentlemen? Because a cartoonist doesn’t like to have the space for his drawings trimmed by even a millimetre. That eventually we’ll have to close the newspaper down doesn’t matter, but the cartoon page cannot be touched. Geniuses are like that, my dear advertisers, be grateful you don’t have to deal with any. That’s what I’ll tell them: that geniuses are like that. Would that do it, Mallarino?’

Mallarino said nothing.

‘We’ll stop paying our journalists. Or if you like, we’ll stop paying you. Fair enough?’

Mallarino said nothing.

‘Look, go home and have a shot of aguardiente. And calm down: next time, someone will call young sir and ask his permission. So he won’t have a tantrum, for crying out loud, which is tiring for all of us.’ He pointed to the interior window of his office, a huge fresco of faces pretending not to look, a constellation of sidelong glances: ‘Look at these people. As if this were a market square, how embarrassing.’

And then Mallarino said his final words: ‘Would you give me back the original, please?’

He went out to find himself in a darkened city — the low clouds, the black suits of the passers-by and the metallic whisper of umbrellas opening all around — a downpour soaked him before he had time to get home. Hair plastered to his scalp and shoulders hunched under the weight of the rain, he didn’t seem to notice he’d turned into a high-plains scarecrow. Next time: the two words kept echoing in his head, ricocheting off the walls of his skull, when he recounted the whole episode to Magdalena. ‘Next time,’ she said, handing him a mauve towel as if handing him a declaration of war for his approval and signature. ‘Next time. Well, it seems to me like there isn’t going to be any next time.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Mallarino.

‘Just what you heard,’ said Magdalena. ‘We’ll tell them to go to hell, teach them a lesson.’

Magdalena was a couple of years younger than him, but she went through life like an overseer strolling around a plantation. She possessed an intelligence as brutal as her obstinacy and was not hindered by the fact that her surname was that of the founder of a legendary legal firm — two carpeted floors of a building overlooking the Parque Nacional — although she’d always declared herself in rebellion against the surname, against her father and against everyone’s expectations: instead of enrolling in the Faculty of Law to carry on the family tradition, Magdalena had become one of the best-paid serial actresses on national radio, the voice that, from Kalimán the Incredible first and then Arandú, Jungle Prince, held the whole country spellbound at twelve noon. Those melodramas had been a natural step for her, a prolongation of the advertisements she’d read since adolescence, when publicity firms began vying for the privilege of hiring her voice. Magdalena’s voice: husky and smooth at the same time, one of those voices that paralyse the hand of someone about to turn a dial, that translate the chaos of the world and convert its obscure jargon into a diaphanous tongue. ‘A cello that speaks,’ Mallarino called her, and now that voice was saying: We’ll tell them to go to hell, and Mallarino was thinking: Yes, to hell, and he was also thinking: Teach them a lesson. The most difficult times, in Mallarino’s experience, were reduced to their simplest expression when Magdalena spoke of them, and that’s what happened that afternoon: after the conversation, after the hot shower Mallarino took to warm up after getting chilled by the rain, after the improvised sex and the well-planned meal, everything was clear.

Magdalena took the plates and cutlery and coloured sisal place mats into the kitchen while Mallarino brought a piece of paper, a quill pen and a bottle of ink to the table, still warm from the heat of the serving dishes. In twenty minutes, while she put away the leftovers and covered the containers with a meticulous sheet of tinfoil, he quickly drew a self-portrait and put it in the envelope with the drawing of the presidents. He amused himself caricaturing himself for the first time: the premature baldness, the bushy black beard he’d inherited from his father and the thick angular glasses, two little boxes of black acetate that did not manage to hide his wary eyes, his studiedly helpless gaze. Where his mouth would be, a gag straight out of the movies; beneath the drawing, the caption. The oligarchy doesn’t like to be talked about, ran the first line. And then: They wouldn’t want us noticing that they’re still right there. In the envelope there was another document: a handwritten letter to Pedro León Valencia. He was the editor-in-chief of El Independiente, the oldest Liberal newspaper in the country, and a man of strong convictions. ‘I’d like to offer you a package,’ wrote Mallarino in his own diploma writer’s calligraphy, but with words dictated by Magdalena. ‘I’m sending one original cartoon, one censored cartoon and one cartoon on censorship. If you can publish them all together, the package is yours; if not, return it and I’ll look for another paper.’ Magdalena insisted on delivering the envelope, so Mallarino wouldn’t appear needy (she never lost sight of these strategies of life in society), and that very evening both the telephones in their house began to ring in a hysterical chorus. It was the editor of the opinion page, a man Mallarino knew and had never liked: he was one of those professional victims incapable of delivering good news without disguising his envy. And Mallarino knew he was phoning to give him good news: he could sense it in the hostility of his tone, in his words with syllables cut off as if with a machete; Mallarino was surprised his rancour didn’t make the receiver splutter.

‘The boss wants to offer you a permanent position,’ said the little man.

‘But I don’t want that,’ said Mallarino. ‘I don’t want to be on anyone’s staff.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mallarino. A staff position is what every cartoonist dreams of. A guaranteed salary, maybe you don’t get it.’

‘I get it,’ said Mallarino. ‘But I don’t want it. Pay me the same, but without being on the staff. I promise I won’t draw for anyone else. And you people promise you’ll publish what I send even if it’s sometimes against your friends. Go ask your boss, and tell me.’

It was a risky move, but it worked: the three drawings appeared the next day, and so, temporarily disguised as a comic strip, calling the reader so eloquently from the centre spread, no longer the mere protest of a young man who fancied himself an artist, they became an elaborate narrative of media betrayal, a condemnation of censorship and a noisy mocking of bourgeois vulnerability, all done by one of that bourgeoisie’s most representative sons. ‘Your husband’s gone mad,’ Magdalena’s father told her. ‘Or maybe he’s turned into a communist and nobody’s noticed yet.’ She passed on the message to Mallarino raising her left eyebrow and with a slightly crooked smile, a sign of evident satisfaction that there, in the semi-darkness of their room, at the end of a day full of tensions and worries, was almost erotic. Mallarino turned on the radio, to see if he could find a repeat broadcast of the day’s episode of Kalimán, but Magdalena, who detested hearing herself, covered her ears with histrionic gestures, and he found himself forced to look for something else. Magdalena found it impossible to recognize herself in the actual broadcast: that voice that wasn’t her voice, she said, rather there was a national conspiracy to wait for her to leave the studio and then rerecord, with another, better-trained actress, everything she had recorded. Mallarino held his arm out and Magdalena leant her head on his chest, put her arms around him and let out a couple of cat-like noises that he didn’t manage to understand. After a few seconds of silence, Mallarino noticed that Magdalena’s body changed weight — her forearm and her elbow, her clean-smelling head — and knew she’d fallen asleep. He found a football match on the radio, and before falling asleep as well, lulled by his wife’s quiet snores and the monotonous commentaries from the reporters, he heard Apolinar Paniagua score twice for Millonarios and thought of something completely unrelated to those goals, but to do with the drawing in El Independiente: he thought that he couldn’t prove it, that he couldn’t have said how or why, but his place in the world had just changed irrevocably.

He was not mistaken. That was the first day of the most intense period of his life, a decade in which he went from anonymity to having a reputation and then notoriety, all at the pace of one cartoon a day. His work was the metronome that regulated his life: just as others measured time by World Cups or film premières, Mallarino associated every important event in his life with the cartoon he was working on at the time (the eyeless cheekbones of the guerrilla fighter Tirofijo, kidnapper of the Dutch Consul, would always evoke his father’s first bout of cancer; the aged and infirm Francisco Franco’s goose neck and non-existent chin, the birth of his daughter Beatriz). His routine was unassailable. He got up a little before first light, and while he made the coffee he heard the whisper of two newspapers sliding halfway under the door, the doorman’s judicious retreating footsteps, the machinery of the lift — its regretful electronic grumble — coming back to life. He read the papers standing up at the kitchen counter, with the pages spread open over the surface, so he could mark the interesting subjects with a rough charcoal circle. When he finished, with the cold light of the Andean morning timidly filling the living room, he took the radio into the bathroom and listened to the news while giving his body over to the consecutive pleasures of shitting and showering, a ritual that cleansed his intestines, yes, but especially his head: cleansed it of the muck accumulated the previous day, all the critiques trying to be intelligent that were nothing but resentful, all the opinions that should only have seemed idiotic but actually struck him as criminal, all the collisions with that strange country of brotherly hatred where mediocrity was rewarded and excellence assassinated. In the shower, with the hot water flowing over his skin and producing delicate shivers of pores closing and opening up again, sometimes he couldn’t even make out the words from the radio; but some mechanism of his imagination allowed him to guess or intuit them, and when he turned off the water and pushed open the sliding door — two or three extra movements, since the aluminium edge invariably stuck in its frame — it was as if he hadn’t missed anything. Seconds later, emerging from the steamy bathroom, the day’s image fully conceived in his head, Mallarino had only to draw it.

It was, and would go on being for a long time, the happiest moment of the day: a half-hour, or a whole one, or two, when nothing existed outside the friendly rectangle of card and the world that was being born within it, invented or cast by the lines and marks, by the to and fro of Indian ink. During those minutes Mallarino even forgot the indignation or irritation or mere anti-establishment impatience that had given rise to the drawing in the first place, and all his attention, just as happened in the middle of sex, concentrated on an attractive form — a pair of ears, an exaggerated set of teeth, a lock of hair, a deliberately ridiculous bow tie — outside of which nothing else existed. It was total abandonment, only broken when the drawing turned out to be difficult or stubborn: on those rare occasions Mallarino locked himself in the guest bathroom with a copy of Playboy in one hand and some quick relief with the other left him ready to finish his battle with the drawing, always victoriously. In the end, he stood up, took a step back and looked at the paper like a general overlooking a battle; then he signed it and only then did the drawing begin to form part of the world of real things. By some useful spell, his cartoons were free of consequences while he was doing them, as if no one was ever going to see them, as if they existed for him alone, and only when he signed them did Mallarino realize what he’d just done or said. Then he put the card in an envelope, without staring intently at it — ‘like Perseus putting the Medusa’s head in the silver bag’, Mallarino would tell a journalist years later — and the envelope in a scruffy leather briefcase that Magdalena had bought him at a flea market; he took a bus to the newspaper offices, a sort of bunker where all the inhabitants, from the cleaning women to the photographers, seemed to be the colour of concrete; he handed in the envelope and went back to his life without really knowing what to do with his hands, as if dispossessed, wondering why he was still doing what he did, what real effect his cartoon would have on the out-of-focus and remote world that began at the edge of his work table, that slim wooden precipice. Was it disenchantment he was feeling, a sense of emptiness, or had he simply lost his bearings? Was he falling into the old trap of having more ire than ink? The world around him was changing: Pedro León Valencia, legendary publisher, had stepped aside in favour of his eldest son, and Mallarino recognized that part of the pleasure of working for El Independiente had been working with a legend, being the discovery or invention of a legend. As the novelty of the early years started to wear off, the egocentric urge to open the newspaper every morning and see his name in black-and-white faded, and Mallarino was beginning to wonder if it had been worthwhile giving up his oils and canvases for this: for the adrenalin rush he no longer felt, for the imaginary reactions of imaginary readers he never got to meet, for this vague and perhaps false sensation of public importance that only caused him private trouble: relatives who greeted him less warmly, friends who no longer invited them out to dinner. For what?

That’s when he received, in a single prodigious day, the answer to all his questions. He’d acquired the habit of walking around downtown in the afternoons, buying his daughter absurd stickers for an absurd album Magdalena insisted she fill up, or getting his shoes shined and talking politics with the bootblacks, or simply watching life with a sort of hunger that demanded he stay out on the streets instead of returning to his morning seclusion, take off his jacket and feel his arms brush up against other arms and pick up the smell of living bodies, of the food they eat and the piss they leave in corners. That afternoon was a Tuesday, which was the day of the week Mallarino would go to the Avianca building to collect his mail from his postbox (the metallic, grey and deep little box that brought him boundless pleasure, like a magician’s hat for a child) and later sit in some nearby café to read his magazines, answer his letters. He arrived at Seventh Avenue by the National Library and from there, along the eastern pavement, began to walk south, sometimes noticing the noisy, disorderly, relentless city, sometimes so distracted that the building came into view almost unexpectedly, its long straight lines penetrating the sky and struck, on a sunny afternoon, by a dense light that seemed not of this world. As he went in, his hand would already be feeling for his key ring in his pocket and separating out the postbox key, so he wouldn’t have to search for it in front of the wall of postal niches. And that’s how it had gone that time: Mallarino made his way through the corridors (through its whitish light that drew circles under everyone’s eyes) and turned to the little grey door; he stretched out his arm and his precise hand, that hand that could draw exact ninety-degree angles without any instruments, placed the tip of the key into the lock the way a medieval knight would have put the tip of his lance against his rival’s chest. But the key did not go in.

He thought at first that he’d gone to the wrong box. He leaned down towards the little door and looked at the number on the metal tag with all its digits, the same as ever, the ones Mallarino knew by heart. He hadn’t got it wrong. The revelation arrived late, like a careless guest: there was a shadow or a texture, something made him look more closely at the metallic surface, and only when he was inches away from the lock did he realize it had been blocked up with chewing gum. It was a hardened paste (it must have been there for several days) that filled the slot without overflowing the edges: a conscientious piece of work. Mallarino touched the paste with the tip of the key, probed, pushed, scratched a little, tried a carving movement with his wrist, but got nowhere: the dried gum paste remained firm. ‘Hey, what a nasty trick to play on someone,’ said a voice, and Mallarino turned his head to find a gold tooth glinting in the middle of an unshaven face. ‘No way to fix that, huh? People have no respect these days.’ And Mallarino soon found himself climbing a mottled stairway, walking till he reached a counter, handing over his ID and watching as a petite woman went through books, opened drawers and closed them again, produced a photocopy of a form from somewhere and asked if Mallarino would be paying in cash or by cheque, turned a deaf ear when Mallarino protested and said he hadn’t lost the key, that someone had put chewing gum in the lock, and the woman told him it was all the same to her and how was he paying: cash or cheque? Then there were stamps in purple ink, carbon paper and pastel-colour receipts, time wasted in a hard and hostile plastic chair and, finally, a shout ringing against the cement walls: ‘Mallarino? Javier Mallarino?’

A skinny, grief-stricken locksmith — his overalls had the smell of improperly dried clothes — went back with him to face the rebellious postbox, took a series of unnameable tools from his leather belt, and the metals gave off sparks under the neon lights, followed by the violation of the lock, or what Mallarino perceived as a violation, a violent and treacherous penetration of his private life, in spite of the fact that he’d given his authorization and consent, in spite of having been present during the whole process. He felt something like physical pain at the breaking of the lock, at the snap of the little door; he was saddened by the vulnerability of his collection of magazines looking at him imploringly from the shadowy depths: the latest Alternativa, the latest New Yorker, a back issue of Canard enchaîné a Parisian colleague had sent him. He wanted to leave and be home already, in his refuge, reading with a glass of beer, and hearing or sensing the reassuring presence of his wife and daughter. But he still had to witness the installation of the new lock and get the new keys and sign more papers and put tips in faceless hands before going back out onto Seventh Avenue carrying his leather bag slung across his chest, the back of his neck sweaty and his eyes tired from so much darkness. Later he would think it had all begun with that tiredness, or the disorientation that always overwhelmed him after contending with the senseless bureaucracy of this country, or simply the white colour of the envelope, that immaculate white, with no address or writing of any kind, no stamps, no blue-and-red stripes that revealed letters arriving from abroad. He’d begun to take the magazines out of his bag (impatient to begin leafing through them) and had his hand stuck inside, fingers moving as if through a card catalogue, head down, trying to see the covers, when he noticed the corner sticking out between the pages. He stopped in the middle of the square, looked at the front and back of the envelope, then opened it. ‘Javier Mallarino’, said the typed text of the letter, with neither date nor address. ‘With your warping of the truth you have assaulted and discredited the Armed Forces of our Republic, playing into the hands of the enemy, you are an UNPATRIOTIC LIAR and we hereby notify you that the patience of those who are LOYAL to our beloved country is wearing thin, we know where you live and where your daughter goes to school, we will not hesitate to punish with the harshest severity any further infringements against our honour.’ On the last line, over to the right with no ‘Regards’, no ‘Sincerely’, no ‘Yours faithfully’, a single word that seemed to be shouting from the page: PATRIOTS.

The first thing he did when he got home was to show Magdalena the letter, and he knew she was genuinely worried when she started making fun of the wording and grammar. Between the two of them they tried to remember the last cartoon he’d drawn on a military subject; they had to go back several weeks to a series of three drawings in which a disconsolate horse was talking to a woman who was handling some iron structures. Mallarino had drawn those scenes after Feliza Bursztyn, a Bogotá sculptor famous for working with scrap iron, had been accused of subversive activities, imprisoned in the Army’s stables, manhandled and humiliated and later forced into exile. Magdalena and Mallarino propped the originals up on the long living-room sofa and spent a good while looking at them, as if wishing they could vanish from the recent past. That night they were so frightened that they dragged a mattress into their bedroom so Beatriz, who had just turned six, could go to bed there and the family slept like that, heaped up in the insufficient space, breathing stale air all night and with their pressed-wood door securely locked. Days of paranoia would follow, looking over his shoulder on the city’s streets, returning home before dark, but later, when the memory of the threat began to fade away, what they’d remember would be the reaction of Rodrigo Valencia, who burst out laughing down the other end of the phone line when Magdalena called him at the newspaper, the day after Mallarino had received the note, to tell him what had happened. Mallarino watched Magdalena furrow her brow with the telephone stuck to her ear, and then heard her faithfully relay the message:

‘Rodrigo says congratulations, you’ve finally made it. He says you’re nobody in this country until somebody wants to hurt you.’

* * *

On the left-hand side of the stage, hidden in the wing between backdrops, Mallarino was waiting. The organizers of the tribute had asked him not to move from the spot until he was announced, and he, obediently, amused himself looking at the velvet curtains and the grain of the wooden floorboards, but also watching the hustle and bustle of people walking without tripping over the beams, the mysterious cables, the abandoned props like the remains of old battles. The Teatro Colón was immersed in semi-darkness. The audience, that audience who’d come to see him, had their eyes fixed on the back of the stage, on the images projected on a white screen, while the voice of a professional announcer recounted the highlights of his career over rather cheesy background music. Mallarino tried to peek out without being seen. The impossible angle didn’t prevent him from recognizing himself painting in his parents’ courtyard, or speaking to President Betancur, or opening the door to some cameramen who were making a documentary in his house up in the mountains, or posing beside an old drawing on the day of his first retrospective exhibition, at the beginning of the 1990s. It was a caricature of Mikhail Gorbachev; Mallarino remembered it as if he’d drawn it yesterday; the classic bald head, and on it, instead of the by-then famous birthmark, maps of Nicaragua and Iran. Behind Gorbachev, you could see a worried and pensive Ronald Reagan asking: ‘Mikhail, are you saying I ran contraband?’ ‘No, Ronald,’ Gorbachev answers. ‘I’m saying you’re with the Iran-Contra band.’ The whole drawing had taken him just over an hour, but the easy joke had always left him dissatisfied, and now Mallarino relived that dissatisfaction and wrote new draft attempts in his head, different combinations of the same words, less obvious puns. He was busy with that when he heard himself announced, and he had to go onstage, suffer the assault of the lights, feel the explosion of applause like a gust of wind and hear its uproar like a deluge.

Mallarino raised a hand by way of greeting; his mouth moved imperceptibly. He saw his vacant seat as if it were in fog; he saw faces greeting him, attentive hands outstretched to shake his and then go back to applauding, quick like those of a bootblack brushing shoes. Out of habit — but where did it come from, when had it started — he took two pens and his note-taking pencil out of his pocket and placed them on the table in front of him, three perfectly parallel lines. The theatre was full: in a flash he remembered previous visits, and in his head a Les Luthiers concert got mixed up with a zarzuela that he’d enjoyed a lot even though Luisa Fernanda, no less, had hit a false note in the first song. He looked for the box he’d sat in then, fourth to the right of the presidential, and found it occupied by a group of six young people applauding on their feet. Only when the rest of the audience gradually began to sit down, making delicate little waves on the sea of the orchestra section, did he realize that the entire audience had been standing up until a moment before: they’d welcomed him to the stage with a standing ovation. In the front row was Rodrigo Valencia, hands clasped over his belly, elbows invading the seats next to him: Valencia always gave the impression that chairs were too small for him. A voice came through the speakers. Mallarino had to look around for its source, first at the table, then at the cheap wooden lectern bearing the Colombian coat of arms. Behind the lectern, the Minister — Mallarino had seen her on the news and had read her declarations: her intentions were as laudable as her ignorance was vast — began to speak.

‘Were I to be asked what ex-President Pastrana looks like,’ she said, ‘just as if I were asked what Franco or Arafat looked like, the image that forms in my head is not a photograph but a drawing by Maestro Mallarino. My idea of many people is what he has drawn, not what I have seen. It’s possible, no it’s certain that the same thing happens to many people here tonight.’ Mallarino listened to her with his gaze glued to the table, feeling people’s gazes on him like a hand, fidgeting with a non-existent ring: the ring that was once on his left ring finger and that Mallarino still felt the way amputees feel a missing limb. ‘In a sense,’ the Minister went on, ‘to be caricatured by Javier Mallarino is to have a political life. The politician who disappears from his drawings no longer exists. They go on to a better life. I’ve known many who have even told me: life after Mallarino is much better.’ The witticism was rewarded with a brief ripple of laughter. So the little lady has a sense of humour, thought Mallarino, and looked up; and in that instant, just as we will spot our own name lost in the middle of any page, Mallarino found Magdalena’s luminous face in the middle of the smiling multitude. She was smiling too, but hers was a melancholy smile, the smile of things lost. What was going on in her life? They hadn’t talked seriously for many years: they had agreed, with the solemnity of an international treaty, that mutual revelations about their private lives would only serve to complicate everything: to accelerate, like a bacteria, the decomposition of good memories, and to embitter Beatriz, whose adolescence had been a painstaking martyrdom in which she felt guilty about every one of the family’s misfortunes, and the rest of her life had been a stubborn and speedy headlong escape. For Mallarino, his daughter’s life choices — her Catholic, provincial husband, her career with Médecins Sans Frontières — were nothing but a sophisticated way to escape from her family, from that surname that always touched off embarrassing reactions, but also the painful experience of growing up as the daughter of a failed or broken couple. The only blemish on this night was the absence of Beatriz, who just that week had been obliged to make an unexpected trip to La Paz, and in a few days she’d be on a longer, more planned one to an unpronounceable village in Afghanistan, and between the two she’d drop by to see him or call so they could meet for lunch, and Mallarino knew, after that visit or that lunch, a desert of months and months without seeing her again would open before him. The Minister was suddenly talking about Greek glasses and essential strokes, using words like symbol, allegory and attribute, and Mallarino was remembering in the meantime a journalism seminar on editorial and opinion pages — with a pompous title and some grandiloquent guest speakers — where he was asked what he would change about his life and all he could think of was his relationship with Beatriz.

‘With the passage of time, over the forty years we’re here to celebrate today,’ the Minister was saying meanwhile, ‘the great Mallarino’s drawings have been getting sadder. His characters have hardened. His gaze has become more intransigent, more critical. And his cartoons, in general, have become more indispensable. I can’t imagine a life without Javier Mallarino’s daily cartoon, but nor can I imagine a country that could give itself the luxury of not having him.’ This, Mallarino admitted, had come out nicely: I wonder who writes her speeches. ‘And so today we are paying him this homage, a tiny recognition of an artist who has turned into the country’s critical conscience. Today we present him with this medal, the highest honour our nation confers, but we present him with something else too, Maestro: we have a little surprise for you.’ Behind the table, at the back of the stage, the white screen appeared again, and illuminated on it was an image: it was the caricature of himself that Mallarino had drawn forty years earlier, that ironic self-portrait that he’d used to defend himself from being censored and to begin his career at El Independiente. But there, on the screen, the image had a serrated frame, and above Mallarino’s bearded face, at the level of his glasses, there was a price. It was a stamp. ‘Maestro Mallarino,’ said the Minister, ‘allow me to present you with the first-day cover of the National Post Office’s new stamp, so that from now on letters mailed in our cities will also be a homage to your life and work.’ Mallarino saw the long hair spilling over her shoulders, the chest rising with nervous breaths, the hand that unleashed a jangle of bracelets as she handed him a black frame. From old habit, Mallarino identified the wood of the frame, the frosted glass and the foam-core board. In the centre of an enormous black space, deep as the night sky, was the stamp. The frame changed hands and the deluge of applause burst out for a second time. Mallarino noticed a slight tickle at the nape of his neck and the pit of his stomach. As he approached the lectern with the Colombian coat of arms, the flanks of which stuck out from behind like a bat’s ears, he realized he was moved.

‘Forty years,’ he said, leaning down towards the microphone that suddenly looked like a fly’s compound eye. ‘Forty years and more than ten thousand cartoons. And let me confess something to you all: I still don’t understand anything. Or perhaps things haven’t changed so much. In these forty years, it occurs to me now, there are at least two things that haven’t changed: first, what worries us; second, what makes us laugh. That’s still the same, it’s still the same as it was forty years ago, and I’m very much afraid that it’ll still be the same forty years from now. Good cartoons have a special relationship with time, with our time. Good caricatures seek and find the constant in a person: something that never changes, that stays the same and allows us to recognize someone we haven’t seen in a thousand years. Even if a thousand years go by, Tony Blair will still have big ears and Julio César Turbay will still wear a bow tie. They’re characteristics a person is grateful for. When a new politician has one of those characteristics, one immediately thinks: Please let him do something, let him do something so I can use it, so that feature won’t be lost to the world’s memory. One thinks: Please, don’t let him be honest, don’t let him be prudent, don’t let him be a good politician, because then I won’t be able to use him so frequently.’ A whisper of laughter could be heard, thin like the sound before a scandal. ‘Of course, there are politicians without distinctive features: absent faces. They’re the most difficult, because they have to be invented, and so I do them a favour: they have no personality, and I give them one. They should be grateful. I don’t know why, but they almost never are.’ Sudden guffaws bubbled up around the theatre. Mallarino waited until the auditorium returned to respectful silence again. ‘No, they almost never are. But one has to get the idea out of one’s head that it might matter. Great caricaturists don’t expect applause from anyone, and that’s not what they draw for: they draw to annoy, to embarrass, to be insulted. I have been insulted, I’ve been threatened, I’ve been declared persona non grata, I’ve been denied entry to restaurants, I’ve been excommunicated. And the only thing I always say, my only response to the complaints and aggression, is this: political cartoons might exaggerate reality, but they can’t invent it. They can distort, but never lie.’ Mallarino paused theatrically, awaited applause and the applause arrived. He raised his eyes, looked up at the gods and remembered having sat up there, at eighteen, the first time he brought a date to the Colón (a production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera), and then he looked back at the orchestra, searching for Magdalena, wanting to see the admiration on her face that he’d seen from time to time, that unconditional admiration that had once been his nourishment and objective. His gaze fluttered around in space like a moth.

‘Don’t ever die, Mallarino!’ shouted a woman’s voice from somewhere in the front rows, possibly to his left, and Mallarino came out of his reverie. The voice that shouted was a mature voice, perhaps worn by cigarettes, perhaps by a lifetime of shouting out in theatres, and her peremptory tone was immediately celebrated by the audience with loud laughter. ‘Never!’ shouted someone at the back. Mallarino feared for a second that the tribute was going to turn into a political rally.

‘Ricardo Rendón, my master,’ he hurried to say, ‘once compared the caricature to a stinger, but dipped in honey. I have that phrase mounted above my desk, more or less the way a sailor has a compass. A stinger dipped in honey. The identity of the caricaturist depends on the measures he uses of the two ingredients, but both ingredients always have to be there. There are no political cartoons that don’t sting, and none without honey. There’s no caricature if there’s no subversion, because every memorable image of a politician is by nature subversive: it throws the solemn man off balance and reveals the impostor. But there’s no cartoon either if it doesn’t bring a smile, even if it’s a bitter smile, to the reader’s face. .’ Mallarino was saying this when his marooned gaze found Magdalena’s eyes, with those slender eyebrows that only arched like that, the way they were arched now, when Magdalena was really paying attention: she was one of those women who could not feign interest, not even flirtatiously. A sudden urgency invaded him, a brutal desire to get down off the stage and be with her, to hear that voice that wasn’t of this world, to speak in whispers with the past.

Mallarino furrowed his brow (again the buffoon, he thought, again playing a part) and leaned in close to the microphone. ‘I would like to finish off,’ he said, ‘by remembering a certainty we often forget: life is the best caricaturist. Life turns us into caricatures of ourselves. You have, we all have, the obligation to make the best caricature possible, to camouflage what we don’t like and exalt what we like best. You’ll understand that I’m not just talking about physical attributes, but of the mysterious traces life leaves on our features, the moral landscape, if you will, that’s the only thing to call it, that moral landscape that gets drawn on our face as life goes by, as we go along making mistakes or getting things right, as we wound others or strive not to, as we lie or deceive or persist, sometimes at the cost of great sacrifices, in the ever difficult task of telling the truth. Many thanks.’

The newspapers on the following day contained a litany of hackneyed praise. APOTHEOSIS IN THE COLÓN, was El Tiempo’s headline in the culture section and El Espectador kept the matter on the front page: JAVIER MALLARINO GOES DOWN IN HISTORY, it read, the words floating over a grainy black-and-white photo with sharp contrasts, taken from a low angle by a good student of Orson Welles. That’s what Mallarino said: ‘A good student of Orson Welles.’ Magdalena, whose face was emerging unhurriedly from sleep, the delicate muscles moving and settling in her forehead and her cheeks and her grin, all filling up with expression as a clay mask takes shape as it dries, looked at the image of Mallarino speaking behind the lectern with his arms open wide, and gave her opinion that if the photographer was thinking of Citizen Kane, the subject was thinking of Titanic. Leaning back on a disorderly pile of pillows, Mallarino could only wonder how they had ended up here, in his house in the mountains, waking up together and naked in the same bed as they hadn’t done for several lifetimes, and each keeping a careful silence: not the habitual, daily silence, but the apprehensive silence people keep in order not to break — with clumsiness, with an inopportune question, with a sarcastic comment — the fragile equilibrium of reunions. Was this a reunion? The word was heavy on the tongue, like a flavour stuck there from the last meal: no, they mustn’t talk about what had happened, mustn’t commit that beginner’s error. They talked about other things: her work at the university radio station, the musical programme she’d been producing and presenting for the last few years, so agreeable because she never had to fight with any living people, with their vanities and pretensions. Magdalena recorded her programme in a small studio with ochre walls, and in that fictitious solitude (because on the other side of the glass was the sound technician, and behind the technician, the noise of the world) she read the text that she herself, often with the help of those who knew more, had written. The stories of the songs, that’s what Magdalena’s programme was about: telling people who Jude and Michelle were, what misfortunes lay behind L’Aigle noir, what marital breakdown was referred to in Graceland. All this she told him now with her mouth hidden under the white duvet, protecting herself from the morning cold. It was cold, the house in the mountains: it would have been a scientific inaccuracy to say it was on the highland plateau, but it was close; if you went out for a walk, tall trees gradually disappeared and it wasn’t impossible to run into some frailejón plants. Mallarino also liked the idea of living up at those altitudes, and frequently used it to impress the gullible, even if it was an exaggeration: my house in the Bogotá highlands. He lifted the duvet to take a peek at Magdalena’s body, and she slapped it down making a tiny feather fly through the air.

‘Don’t start,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to get going.’

It was all strange: it was strange, in the first place, that Magdalena recognized how strange it all was, that she understood in the same way or seemed to understand, and the weight of her body in this bed was also strange, different from other bodies and curiously her own, and the familiarity was strange, the insolent familiarity they felt in spite of so many years of not being together, and, in particular, Mallarino’s capacity to anticipate Magdalena’s movements was very strange.

‘I’ve got a terrible day ahead of me,’ she said, ‘but let’s see each other tomorrow, shall we? I’ll take you out to lunch in town, so you don’t get out of the habit.’

‘Not in town,’ said Mallarino. ‘It makes our eyes water, us mountain folk.’

‘What a weakling,’ said Magdalena. ‘A little pollution never hurt anybody.’ And then: ‘Will you come and pick me up at the station?’ And then: ‘Let’s say one o’clock.’

Mallarino said OK, they’d have lunch in town tomorrow, that he’d pick her up at one at the station, that a little pollution never hurt anybody, and at the same time he was making private predictions: now she’ll roll over on her side, turning her back on him, looking nowhere, and now she’ll get out of bed in a single agile movement, slipping out without even pausing to sit on the edge and stretch, and now she’ll walk towards the bathroom without looking back, or rather allowing herself to be looked at, sure that Mallarino would be looking at her the way he was looking at her, comparing her body to the one he’d known years before and seeing the stretch marks on her hips and shadows on her buttocks and being jealous of them, because the shadows and stretch marks weren’t shadows and stretch marks, but messengers of all that had happened in his absence: all that Mallarino had missed. The night before had been like making love with a memory, with the memory of a woman, and not with the woman who was present, the way we keep feeling, after stepping barefoot on a stone, the shape of the stone in the arch of our foot. That’s what Magdalena was: a sharp reminder. He saw her close the bathroom door and knew (an uncomfortable knowledge as well as so satisfactory) that he wouldn’t see her come out again for a good quarter of an hour. And finding himself there, in front of a picture window looking out into the cloud forest, surrounded by papers filled with news of his triumph and waiting for his regained wife to come back to him, Mallarino felt a rare calm. He wondered if this was what happy people felt, and he was sure that it was a few hours later, after Magdalena had said goodbye with a kiss on the lips and he had been working on the next cartoon, when the dogs barked and the doorbell buzzed and Mallarino found himself with the young journalist from the previous evening, who had asked him for an interview for some blog he’d never heard of, and showing her into the living room and offering her something to drink he noticed, not without surprise, that he had not the slightest intention of seducing her.

Her name was Samanta Leal. During the cocktail party the previous evening in the bar of the Teatro Colón to toast Mallarino and his award, she had approached, one of dozens, to ask him to autograph a copy of his most recent book. She brought it over still sealed in the unpleasant plastic Colombian books come in, and which seems designed to discourage the reader and humiliate the author who, like Mallarino, tries to open it to write an inscription. Mallarino, his fingers wet from the condensation on his whisky glass, failed spectacularly at the task; when the interested party took the book in both hands and held it to her mouth and bit a corner of the plastic, Mallarino noticed the long fingers without any rings and then the parted lips and then the teeth that bit and then the whole mouth, which got into trouble with the bitten-off corner of plastic and tried to spit it out politely with comical movements of a very pink tongue (Mallarino thought: A little girl’s tongue). It must have been the emotion of the moment, but it all seemed so sensual to him, so concrete, that he focused especially on the young woman’s name as he wrote it. ‘For Samanta Leal,’ he said, pronouncing both the Ls carefully, as if to retain them, as if they were going to escape. ‘What do you want me to put?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘put whatever you want.’ And he wrote: ‘For Samanta Leal, whatever you want.’ None of what would happen with Magdalena had begun yet — she had congratulated him affectionately, but then she’d sat down on a red velvet chair and was laughing her head off with a writer from the coast — and Mallarino felt free to fantasize about an attractive thirtysomething and to act on those fantasies. She read the inscription; instead of thanking him and taking her leave, she pursed her lips in a way that made Mallarino think of a freshly washed strawberry. ‘Well, what I want,’ Samanta Leal took him by surprise, ‘is an interview.’ She mumbled the name of the site, an ugly English word full of consonants; he said he knew nothing about blogs, that he didn’t like them and didn’t read them, and didn’t really trust them. If in spite of all that she was still interested, he would expect her at his house tomorrow, at three o’clock sharp, so she could get what she could in forty-five minutes and then leave him free to get back to work.

And now here was Samanta Leal. She was wearing green woollen tights, a grey skirt that didn’t reach her knees and a white blouse, as smooth as a Malevich canvas, its only adornment the change of tone where her bra began. The eyes that had been dark the previous night, beneath the soft lights of the bar, were now green, and they opened wide to scrutinize the walls with that mixture of enchantment and disappointment with which we observe the homes of those we admire. There was something impatient in her way of sitting down and crossing her legs, a certain restlessness, an uncomfortable electricity; and when she started asking random questions (How long had he lived in this house? Why had he decided to leave Bogotá?), Mallarino thought the same thing he’d thought before: that the interview was a pretext. Over time he’d learned to recognize the double intentions of those who approached him: the interview, the inscription, the brief conversation, they were just strategies suited to very different purposes: a job recommendation, the favour of leaving a particular politician alone, sex. He amused himself (but it was a dismayed amusement) by making private bets about Samanta Leal and the outcome of this visit, varying degrees of nudity or embarrassment. The young woman asked questions, and the disorder, the absence of method, was not the only feature that seemed duplicitous: in the calm of his house in the mountains the unusual music of Samanta Leal’s accent was more noticeable than it had been the night before. She looked at the walls and he looked at her looking, seeing his own house through those surprised eyes, discovering, at the same time as she discovered, Debora Arango’s toads wearing clothes, the Cuadro rojo by Santiago Cárdenas or an Ariza landscape, somewhere between Boyacá and Japan. He watched her and looked for emotion or surprise on her face, but saw none of that: Samanta Leal looked over the paintings as if seeing an absence, as if what she was really looking for was missing.

‘It was in 1982,’ said Mallarino. ‘I got tired of Bogotá, that’s all, I got tired of a lot of things. I bought this house and two dogs, two German shepherds, a male and a female, whose puppies are the ones I have now. The ones with stars on their foreheads, all identical. Of course not all of them: I kept two and sold the rest, they eat as much as twenty people and mine are as big as horses, I don’t know if you saw them.’ Samanta Leal said yes, she’d seen them and they’d scared her a little, to tell the truth. ‘No, they’re not scary,’ said Mallarino. ‘Don’t put this in the interview, but my dogs are the most cowardly creatures on earth: they’re no good at guarding anything.’

And Samanta: ‘I won’t. I promise. 1982, you said?’

And Mallarino: ‘Yes, that’s right. 1982, around the middle of the year. It’s cold, but I like the cold. The plateau begins near here, you know. A little bit higher up the mountain and there it starts.’

Samanta had taken three things out of her aquamarine handbag: a dull aluminium lighter, a pocket notebook and a pen the same colour as the handbag. She set the lighter on the table, and Mallarino realized it wasn’t a lighter but a tiny digital recorder. He made some comment about it — ‘In my day people just took notes,’ perhaps, or perhaps ‘Journalists don’t trust their own memories any more’ — and Samanta asked him how he got along with the new technologies, if he had become accustomed to using digital aids. ‘Never,’ said Mallarino. ‘I don’t like them. I don’t even make digital corrections, which is something many do. I don’t. I draw by hand, and what comes out is what goes out. Digital technologies make everything boring, predictable, monotonous. One can get bored with this trade, señorita, and you have to invent tricks so that doesn’t happen. For example, I sometimes challenge myself to draw an entire cartoon without lifting my hand off the paper, or drawing in the background, behind the main scene, a miniature reproduction of a masterpiece. People don’t stop to wonder why behind Chávez there might be a Rembrandt or a Rafael. . So, no, don’t ask me about technology. It’s not for me.’

‘And for sending them?’

‘What about sending them?’

‘Don’t you use a computer?’

‘I don’t have a computer. I don’t use the internet, I don’t have email. Didn’t you know? I’m famous for that: absurdly famous, if you want my opinion. I don’t know what’s so strange about this. I have six or seven magazine subscriptions in three languages: tons of paper that I never finish reading. With that and the television I have enough to keep me informed. I have cable, it’s true, I have more news channels than I need, and I can even press pause to see someone’s face better.’

‘But then how do you send them? How do you send the cartoons?’

‘At first I used to take them in personally, of course. Then I started to use a fax machine, I used it for years. I still use it to communicate with people. That machine is my personal mail: if you want to write to me, you can do so by fax, and I’ll answer you by fax. It’s quite simple. But I used to use it to send in my cartoons. It didn’t work. It broke up my lines, you know? Worried friends used to call: “Are you ill? Is something wrong? Your lines aren’t steady.” That’s when they started to pick them up.’

‘Who?’

‘The newspaper sends a courier. They’ve always had a courier driving around the city picking up and dropping off papers, it’s called La Chiva. And when they come to collect my drawing, they call it La Chiva de Mallarino.’

‘But you live far away,’ said Samanta. ‘They’d have to cross the entire city. They come as far as this?’

‘They’re very kind,’ said Mallarino.

‘They spoil you,’ said Samanta.

‘I suppose so,’ said Mallarino.

‘It must be that you’re important,’ said Samanta with a smile.

‘Must be.’

‘And how does it feel?’

‘How does what feel?’

‘Being important. Being a country’s conscience.’

‘Look,’ said Mallarino, ‘we live in confusing times. Our leaders aren’t leading anything, much less telling us what’s going on. That’s where I come in. I tell people what’s going on. The important thing in our society is not what goes on, but who tells us what’s going on. Are we going to allow ourselves to be told only by politicians? That would be suicide, national suicide. No, we can’t rely on them, we can’t be satisfied with their version. We need to look for another version, from other people with other interests: from humanists. That’s what I am: a humanist. I’m not a graphic jokester. I’m not a cartoon sketcher. I am a satirical illustrator. It has its risks as well, of course. The risk of turning into a social analgesic: the things I draw become more comprehensible, more easily assimilated. It hurts us less to confront them. I don’t want my drawings to do that, of course I don’t. But I’m not sure it can be avoided.’

Samanta took down the dictation diligently. Mallarino watched her copying it down in her notebook and reading over what she’d written with her big eyes even beneath the roof of her serious brow. ‘Could we go to your studio?’ she asked, and Mallarino nodded. He pointed towards a darkened corridor and, at the end of the corridor, some steps of polished wood; he let her go ahead of him, in part out of chivalry, in part to observe the shape of her body through her skirt as she started up the steps. Mallarino had given many interviews lately, but this time, for some reason, was different: this time he wanted to talk. He felt loquacious, communicative, open and prepared to reveal himself. Perhaps it was the recent impression of his night with Magdalena, or perhaps the notion that his life, from this morning on, was a different life, but suddenly he’d started telling anecdotes, to do what he never did: talk about himself. He spoke of the day when a mayor changed his mind after a drawing was finished, and Mallarino resolved the matter by drawing another speech bubble with three short words: Or maybe not. He spoke of the businessman who once called him to ask him to stop drawing him the way he used to look, now that he’d bought new glasses and had his protruding teeth fixed, but Mallarino kept drawing him the same way: wasn’t it unfair? ‘One time nothing occurred to me,’ said Mallarino. ‘It’s unusual, but it happens. I drew myself with a cup of coffee, with a blank piece of paper and a thought bubble with the light bulb of ideas completely dark. I sent the editor a note saying look, nothing has occurred to me. I have to submit the cartoon and not a single idea has occurred to me. I’m sorry. You decide whether to publish it or not. The cartoon was published. The next day I began to receive congratulatory calls. Everybody was congratulating me. It turns out the day before there was a massive power cut in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Medellín. The cartoon was interpreted as criticizing the indolence of the administration, etc. I never told them the truth.’

They had arrived at the studio. The afternoon light entered through the window that overlooked the city, that light smeared with mist, with dirty smoke, as if arriving tired from the other side of the plain. ‘The centre of cre-ation,’ said Samanta Leal, stopping in the middle of the room, right below the skylight which bathed her in its now scant light, and spinning round, sad lost caryatid, to devour with her eyes the filing cabinet, grey and metal and noisy, that kept watch over the room from one corner, and then the shelf of instruments, the hydraulic chair and work table, a large wooden board set at an exact twenty-two-degree angle that leaned like a ramp to mount a cork wall, or so the cork wall could send down, like a toboggan, newspaper clippings, sketches, to-do lists and photos of current public figures, victims or beneficiaries (mostly victims) of his caricatures. ‘Can you turn on the light?’ asked Samanta. ‘It’s hard to see.’ Obliging (but why, why so enthusiastic?), Mallarino flipped the switch; two halogen lamps came on in the ceiling and a wall covered in frames appeared out of nowhere.

‘It’s my altar,’ said Mallarino. ‘I work facing the cork wall: that’s my daily task, what I’m working on at the moment. But when things get annoying, when I start to ask myself why I got into this, or when reality gets so filthy, it doesn’t deserve to be drawn. . then I come and stand over here, in front of this wall. A couple of minutes, that’s enough. It’s like confession for a Catholic, I imagine. All these are my personal priests, the ones who hear me, who give me advice. Do you want me to explain?’

But she didn’t answer. ‘Do you want me to tell you about this wall, señorita?’ Mallarino insisted, but Samanta had stopped looking at him, stopped taking notes, and her expression was no longer diligent and attentive; she’d suddenly acquired a concentrated and at the same time empty expression, like a crazy person.

‘Ah, yes,’ he heard her say to no one, ‘here it is.’

Five little words, or four words and an interjection, nobody would have believed them capable of inaugurating such a long night. Twenty-four hours later, remembering that precise instant, he would admire the composure with which Samanta walked over to the wall to take a closer look at one of the illustrations, as if she’d discovered a new caricaturist instead of leaning over the precipice of her misfortune. Mallarino knew that he was not now going to tell her about Ricardo Rendón or discuss the stinger coated in honey, that he wouldn’t explain the James Gillray drawing of Napoleon cutting a big piece of a Europe-shaped cake, that he wouldn’t show her da Vinci’s grotesque heads nor would he mention Porta or Lavater, for whom the character of a man can be found in the structure of his face. He knew, knew with total conviction, when he saw her turn round there, in front of the image of King Louis-Philippe as Daumier had drawn him in 1834. Three distinct faces miraculously fitted within that pear-shaped head: one young and content, another pale and bitter, another sad and in shadow. The combination was grotesque, something no one would want to meet by surprise in the middle of the night. And instead of asking about the caricaturist or the caricatured one, instead of accepting explanations about the shape of the head and the triple expression on the face, Samanta began to say in a weary voice that he’d have to forgive her, that up till then she’d been lying, Señor Mallarino, and the entire visit was an act, for she was not a journalist, nor was she interested in interviewing him, nor was she an admirer of his, but she’d had to invent the whole lie, the false identity and pretend interest, to get inside this house and walk around it and look for that strange head she’d seen only once before, many years earlier, when she was a little girl and her life was made up of certainties, when she was a little girl and she had her whole life ahead of her.