Reputations

II

There are women who do not preserve, on the map of their faces, any trace of the little girls they once were, perhaps because they’ve made great efforts to leave childhood behind — its humiliations, its subtle persecutions, the experience of constant disappointment — perhaps because something’s happened in the meantime, one of those private cataclysms that don’t mould a person but raze them, like a building, and force them to reconstruct themselves from scratch. Mallarino looked at Samanta Leal and tried to catch a glimpse in her features of some shape (the curve of the frontal bone where it reaches the space between the eyebrows, the way the earlobe joins the head) or perhaps an expression he’d seen on the face of the child twenty-eight years ago. And he could not: that child had gone, as if she’d refused to go on living in that face. Although it was true, on the other hand, that he’d only seen her once and over the space of a very few hours, and perhaps his memory, which had always allowed him to recall the essential features of any face with a surgeon’s precision, was now starting to deteriorate. If that were the case, the deterioration could not be less opportune, for now Samanta Leal, from whose face a little girl had vanished, was urgently asking him to remember that little girl and her visit to this house in the mountains in July of 1982, and not just that, but she was also asking him to remember the circumstances of that long-ago visit, the names and distinguishing marks of those present that afternoon, everything Mallarino saw and heard but also (if possible) what the rest of them saw and heard. ‘Remember, please,’ Samanta Leal said to him. ‘I need you to jog your memory.’ And he thought of that curious turn of phrase, to jog a memory, as if memory were something we could take out and exercise, or nudge into action, by way of certain well-chosen materials, by the mere effort of physical work. Memory would then be one of those horrible fountains from the quarries in the hills that are sold by the roadside and that anyone could bring to life if they had talent and tools and obstinacy. Mallarino knew it wasn’t like that, and yet here he was now, trying to extract the sculpture from the stone, sitting in front of a woman awaiting an answer beside the now darkened window: the whole house leaned over the glowing city, as if spying on it; Mallarino saw the luminous stitches against the black background (the city converted into a backlit, embroidered piece of fabric) and, in the distance, floating in the night air, planes waiting their turn to land; and he thought about the men and women who at that moment were occupying those illuminated spaces and trying, like him, to remember, remember something important, remember something banal, but always to remember, that’s what we all devote ourselves to all the time, that’s where our meagre energies go. It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards, he thought again, and again he wondered where those words came from. That’s what this was about, looking back and bringing the past towards us. ‘Remember, please,’ Samanta Leal had said to him. Bit by bit, memory by memory, Mallarino was remembering.

Back then he had just moved to the house in the mountains. The move had been, more than a mere change of location, a sort of last resort, a desperate attempt to preserve, by way of the strategy of separation and distance, the well-being of his family. When had this moment started brewing? With the anonymous threat, perhaps, with the violent imbalance that had followed it? For the first time Magdalena had asked him the question that he, silently, asked himself every day: was it worth it? Was the fear and the risk and the antagonism and the threat worth it? ‘I’m not sure,’ said Magdalena. ‘I’m not sure it is worth it. You’ll know, but think of our daughter. And think of me. I don’t know if it is worth it.’ Mallarino took her words as a betrayal, a tiny betrayal, but a betrayal in any event. Had the slow and imperceptible deterioration of their relationship started then, that two-humped monster called a couple that for more than a decade had behaved so well? But it was impossible to say, thought Mallarino, impossible to spread the years of a marriage across a table like a map and draw a chalk circle around the precise moment, just as the poet Silva had asked his doctor to draw a circle on the exact location of his heart. Of course, Silva, after visiting the doctor, arrived home, took off his shirt and shot himself in the centre of the circle: that’s why he’d sought the anatomy lesson, to commit an efficient suicide. Mallarino would have wanted something else: to repair, to eliminate the harmful moment from the chain of life, the first comment that was no longer impatient but hostile, the first reply bathed in sarcasm, the first glance empty of all admiration.

Yes, that was it: the admiration had fallen from Magdalena’s eyes. He realized that his wife’s admiration had always nourished him, and finding himself suddenly without it felt too much like a public slap in the face. The revelation struck him as at once fascinating and cruel: the experience of the need, the loss of the perfect independence Mallarino had cultivated all his life, knocked him off balance more than he’d expected. ‘I won’t get into bed with anybody,’ he used to say: it was one of his catchphrases, a behavioural guide, and Mallarino had turned to it several times to justify himself. When his cartoon was an attack on some friend of the family, or an associate of his father’s (ruining a business, raising doubts about his father, presenting him to the world as a man who was incapable of earning the loyalty of his son), Mallarino received the more or less angry complaints with strained indifference, putting his art and his commitment — those are the words he used: he felt they protected him — above merely personal observances.

‘Merely personal?’ Magdalena said once. ‘Merely personal? But these people are our friends, Javier.’

‘Well, let’s change friends,’ he replied.

‘And family? Should we change families too?’

‘If it comes to that,’ said Mallarino. ‘My credibility is at stake.’ My reputation is at stake, he thought without saying. And the sacrifices had worked: his reputation was there, his good reputation and his prestige: Mallarino had earned them the hard way; he didn’t get into bed with anybody.

The sacrifices: who had used that word for the first time, and in what circumstances? It was true that they no longer went to any of the posh restaurants in the north end, for they ran the risk of bumping into the victim of a cartoon or their more or less aggressive relatives, and it was true that a sort of permanent tension had settled over Sunday lunches with the family, a general and unnameable tension like the feeling that overwhelms us when there is someone dying in the next room, but it was no less true, and this is how Mallarino felt, that the people (that abstraction, a host of vague featureless faces) respected and loved him.

‘And they need me,’ he said once. ‘They need someone to tell them what to think.’

‘Don’t be naïve,’ Magdalena told him. ‘People already know what they think. People already have their prejudices well formed. They only want someone in authority to confirm their prejudices, even if it’s the mendacious authority of newspapers. There’s your prestige, Javier: you give people the wherewithal to confirm what they already think.’ She thought for a moment, seemed to be thinking, and then added: ‘You could have been a great artist. A Botero. An Obregón. You could have been one of the current ones, a Luis Caballero, a Darío Morales. You chose to be something else. You chose to be this: someone who gets us into trouble, who obliges us to fight with everybody and who obliges everybody to fight with us.’ When had Magdalena changed so much? When had she stopped being the independent woman who had confronted a newspaper editor’s censorship? ‘I don’t want my daughter to grow up surrounded by people who have fallen out with her,’ Magdalena said. ‘I don’t want her to annoy people who’ve never even seen her.’

Perhaps that’s when Mallarino put the accusation into words: ‘Don’t bring the child into this,’ he said to her. ‘The problem is much simpler. The problem is that you no longer admire me.’ Magdalena’s only reply was a horsey snort that concentrated, in that instant, all the contempt in the world and all the invisible but obstinate deterioration of their relationship.

Mallarino would always remember the vehement urge to look for Beatriz to see if she had witnessed the scene, if she’d perceived the slight. It amazed him that his daughter, just turned seven, could share with them the spaces of the wreckage without realizing that her life was beginning to be a different one; it amazed him that her small, long-legged body could move through the rooms so confidently, that her eyes, under her arched brows inherited from her mother, scrutinized the world, the infinite world of her family, silently but intensely, in that ferocious apprenticeship, hungry for new lives, and all that without full awareness that those days — the shouts and whispers of nocturnal disputes, tense breakfasts with amplified sounds of cutlery on plates — would mark her irremediably, perhaps sowing a hard seed of mistrust in her relationship with her parents, perhaps distorting from that moment on and forever her way of loving or of being loved. Mallarino, meanwhile, went through his days feeling dead tired, and it seemed as though his body, moving through the familiar terrain of his house, was leaving bits of dry skin, like a snake, like a leper. There was in the apartment an air of nervous tension or anxiety. When Beatriz began licking her hands because they were so dry (with the sole result of the saliva drying them out even more, and the girl licking them more), Mallarino knew that it was time to move out, for his well-intentioned presence, that inertia of years as a family, was only helping to make things worse. He should go. One night, in front of the television, he told Magdalena. She was sitting on her cushion, legs crossed like a Turkish boy, her gaze fixed on the screen. The soap opera Son of Ruth was on; Magdalena had been offered a part, but she wasn’t an actress, didn’t know what to do with her face, with her hands, and turned down the offer. ‘I work in radio,’ she’d told them, ‘only in radio.’ Now she regretted it.

‘I’ll move out for a while, a short while,’ Mallarino said.

Magdalena agreed.

‘Just for a while. To see what happens.’

‘It’s better this way. Better for everyone.’

‘We have to think of Beatriz.’

‘Yes. We have to think of Beatriz.’

It didn’t take long to find the house in the mountains. It was a unique opportunity, for the property was part of a disputed inheritance that would take some three years to be ruled on, meaning that Mallarino, with the help of the newspaper’s lawyers, was able to sign an unusual and un-usually favourable contract: he acquired possession of the house and began a series of necessary renovations, and until the inheritance was sorted out he would pay a fee the equivalent of a low rent; if the seller lost the ownership of the house and the deal fell through, Mallarino would get everything he paid back, including the cost of the renovations. The arrangement seemed made to measure for him: Mallarino was sure his separation from Magdalena would be short — when he tried to imagine how long it might last, on the basis of what had happened with other couples they knew, he thought in terms of months, maybe a year, two at most — and quietly hoped the pending inheritance would not work out, as if that legal situation had a secret link to the health of his marriage. At the end of June, between cartoons of a scandalously sacked Argentine football player (a big shock of dark hair and a karate suit) and one of the British Prime Minister (the toothy smile, medieval armour, the flag planted on a deserted island), Mallarino bought a bed for thirty thousand pesos and a colour TV from Sears, packed up a couple of thousand books in cardboard boxes and bubble-wrapped his desk and implements. He also took personal charge of his collection of framed fetishes: the phrase A stinger dipped in honey that a carpenter had seared into a panel of wood, his Daumier reproductions — The Legislative Belly and Past, Present, Future — the oil painting of Magdalena with Beatriz in her arms like a Bellini Virgin and the Rendón drawing, a birthday present from years ago, in which the Commissar asks the communist if he was planning to kill the President with those bombs and the communist replies: ‘Oh no, sir! We were hoping the President would be killed by remorse.’

Everything was done carefully, the way people move a table with a vase on top of it: nobody wanted to commit a blunder, nobody wanted to be responsible for damage that could not be repaired. They explained to Beatriz that from now on she’d have two houses, two bedrooms, two places to play, and she listened to them with patience but without looking at them, while popping plastic bubbles with her intensely concentrated thumb and forefinger.

‘She pretends it doesn’t matter to her, but she is suffering,’ said Magdalena.

And Mallarino: ‘But it’s better this way.’

And Magdalena: ‘Yes. It’s better this way.’

When the little girl’s school holidays began, the move was complete; Beatriz lay down for the first time in her new bed, wrinkling her last day’s uniform against the sheets and with trembling eyelids from too many farewell-party sweets, and Mallarino stayed there with his head on her pillow, breathing her breath, until he could tell she’d fallen asleep. He thought he’d get a group of friends together to celebrate the move, not because the move was worthy of celebration, but because a public, social event would normalize the situation in the child’s eyes, take away all the embarrassing aspects, convert it into something acceptable she could talk to her friends about. He made a few calls, asked his guests to make some more, told Beatriz to invite one of her classmates. The following Sunday, at lunchtime, the new house was teeming with people, and Mallarino congratulated himself for having that splendid idea. Nothing would have allowed him to anticipate what happened next.

It was a sunny day; the sunshine was strong and dry and unusual for that time of year, and the doors of the house were wide open. Above their heads a ghost of a wind was blowing, audible in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees and the groaning of long branches. Mallarino walked through the rooms on the ground floor with a sense of detachment, as if he were the visitor, not the others. He had never been the host of a party. Magdalena had organized parties: she was the one who chose the food and moved one or two pieces of furniture to make it easier for people to circulate, and she was the one who welcomed the guests and took coats and left them, with considered carelessness, on their bed, and she took charge of making introductions, of the casual remark that would start a conversation between two people who’d never set eyes on each other before, and people invariably lent themselves to those games, unaware of the power Magdalena’s voice had over them and sometimes not even knowing that her voice was the same one that had held them spellbound from some radio station in some solitary moment of the week. (He had often thought that people’s fondness for Magdalena was owing to that: they’d heard her in melancholy or lonely moments, and her voice had told them stories and had calmed them and allowed them not to think of their problems, of their latest failure, of the pretence of their success. Later they saw her and couldn’t explain why her personality was so magnetic or her way of speaking so attractive.) But today Magdalena wasn’t there. She had refused — subtly, affectionately — to come. She had thought it best, so Beatriz would start to get used to the division in her life, get used to inhabiting parallel universes where one of her two parents didn’t exist and had no reason to exist. Beatriz, for her part, seemed to accept the matter naturally: she had come to the door when her friend arrived, completely in possession of her role as woman of the house, and she herself asked her friend’s mother if Samanta could sleep over. Samanta Leal, Beatriz’s friend was called: a girl who was even shyer than she was, with deep green eyes, a small but fleshy mouth and one of those little noses that have not yet begun to reveal what they will eventually become, framed by the fringe of an old-fashioned doll. She was wearing a little grey schoolgirl’s skirt (Mallarino thought that those knees would not be so clean or so unblemished by the end of the afternoon) and burgundy patent-leather shoes over ankle socks. She didn’t look anything like her mother, who came inside briefly — she came in the way mothers came into houses: to see that everything was or seemed to be fine, to check, as far as was possible, that her daughter was not in any danger in this unfamiliar environment — and looked at the bare walls and paintings leaning against them, still wrapped in protective paper.

‘I just moved in,’ Mallarino told her (an explanation not asked for).

‘Yes, I know,’ said the woman, but didn’t clarify how she knew. She was wearing brown-leather knee-high boots and an ochre coat, and on the lapel of the coat, a silver brooch in the shape of a dragonfly. ‘So your wife’s not here,’ said the woman, and then tried to rephrase: ‘Beatriz’s mum, I mean. She’s not here?’

‘She’s coming later,’ said Mallarino. It wasn’t true: Magdalena would come to pick Beatriz up the next day. But Mallarino felt that little white lie was convenient at that moment, that it would reassure Samanta’s mother or save her some unnecessary worries.

‘To collect Beatriz?’

‘Yes, to pick her up. But not till later, the girls have time to play.’

‘Oh, that’s good. Well, Samanta’s dad will come and get her. He’ll be coming, not me. What would be a good time?’

‘Whenever he likes,’ said Mallarino. ‘But tell him to come with time to spare. If Samanta is anything like my daughter, it’s going to take a while to get her out of here.’

The woman did not react to Mallarino’s humour, and he thought: She’s one of those. This was confirmed as they said goodbye, when, after shaking his hand and beginning to walk away, the woman turned halfway round and asked, almost over her shoulder: ‘You’re the cartoonist, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right, I’m the cartoonist,’ said Mallarino.

‘Yes, that’s who you are,’ said Samanta’s mother. ‘I was trying to find out where I was bringing her.’ It seemed as though she was going to say something more, but what followed was an uncomfortable silence. A dog barked. Mallarino looked but couldn’t spot it; he saw that another guest had arrived. ‘Well then, I’ll leave her in your care,’ said the woman. ‘And thanks.’

Now Mallarino had lost sight of them. He saw them pass by now and then, and once in a while he heard and recognized Beatriz’s voice, her unmistakable delicate little tone, and now and then he sensed, with some part of his awareness, the footsteps of both girls together, the nervous, quick and distant steps, so distant from the adult world. Mallarino poured himself a whisky, took a sip that tasted of wood and felt a burning in the pit of his stomach. He went out into the tiny garden where the guests seemed to be more numerous than they actually were, and looked up and closed his eyes briefly to feel the sun on his face, and like that, with his eyes closed, counted one, two clouds, or two shadows that flew across the curtain of sky. He liked this garden: Beatriz would be able to enjoy herself here. On the stairs he had to be careful not to kick over an ashtray full of cigarette butts; further away, beside the wall, someone had dropped a piece of meat that was now sullying the place, like dog shit. Beside the rose bed was Gabriel Santoro, professor at Rosario University, who had brought his son and a woman with a foreign accent, and further away, near a pile of tiles left over from the renovations that hadn’t been taken away yet, Ignacio Escobar was talking to a newsreader and her most recent boyfriend. Monsalve, maybe, or maybe Manosalbas: Mallarino had forgotten his name. Was it possible there were fewer acquaintances than strangers at this get-together? And if that was true, what did it mean?

‘Oh, finally,’ Rodrigo Valencia said as he saw him approach. ‘Come here, Javier, come and drink a toast with us, damn it, or do you not speak to your guests, sir.’ Rodrigo Valencia never addressed anyone informally, not even his own children, but his way of speaking was so physical — made up of interjections and slaps on the back, heavy hands on shoulders, exaggerated bows — that nobody felt deprived of his closeness or trust. He hugged Javier and said: ‘This fellow is going to be the greatest, mark my words. He’s already great, but he’s going to be the greatest. Mark my words.’ The recipients of this prophecy, each with a glass of aguardiente in hand, were Elena Ronderos, Valencia’s wife, and a columnist for El Independiente, Gerardo Gómez, who had just returned from an eighteen-month exile in Mexico. Like Mallarino, he’d received an anonymous threat; but in his case, for reasons no one really understood very well, the police had considered it prudent for him to go away somewhere while things calmed down.

‘Until stuff calms down, that’s what they told me,’ said Gómez. ‘Not you? Have they never told you to go away?’

‘Never,’ said Mallarino. ‘Who knows why.’

‘Maybe because drawings aren’t as direct,’ said Gómez.

‘But more people see them,’ said Valencia.

‘But they’re not as direct,’ said Gómez. ‘And subtlety is not these people’s strong suit. Hey, Javier, what happens if they send another one?’

‘They’re not going to send any more,’ said Mallarino. ‘It’s been almost a year.’

‘But what if they do send something else? You have to think about what you’d do.’

‘They’re not going to send anything,’ said Mallarino.

‘How can you be so sure?’ said Gómez. ‘You’re not going soft on us, are you?’

‘Your father’ll go soft before this one,’ said Valencia, who was allowed to say such things. ‘Didn’t you see last Sunday’s cartoon? A depth charge, Gómez, a depth charge, and I’m not saying that because Mallarino is here. The drawing was a marvel, worthy of Goya. A bizarre thing, a sort of bat with the face of the Treasury Minister. And underneath it said: “We had to frighten people to reassure the markets.” What do you think? We’ve already received several calls from the Ministry, from the Minister’s press office. They’re furious! So, don’t give us that, Gómez, nobody’s getting soft. Don’t go thinking. .’

Gerardo Gómez interrupted him: ‘What’s that guy doing here?’

He was looking towards the front door, past the sliding door to the garden that reflected the trees and the clear sky and people’s clothes, past the big armchair where Beatriz and her friend were playing some private game, beyond the back of the leather sofa and the coffee table with its art books and empty vase and small army of abandoned glasses of aguardiente. A man had just come in; he had stopped in the middle of the living room, looking off into space, as if he were waiting for someone, but Mallarino knew he wasn’t looking off into space, but at the fireplace, or rather the wall above the fireplace, the wide white space inhabited by the single painting Mallarino’d had time to hang: one of his first nudes of Magdalena, painted at the beginning of the 1970s or even earlier, before they were married, when Magdalena’s body was still a discovery. Nobody could tell it was her, because the woman in the painting had her face hidden in the pillows, but the man was looking at her (looking at the messy sheets with their different tones of white, the naked torso and the beauty spot on the left breast, beside the relaxed nipple) as if he’d recognized her by way of mysterious arts. Mallarino, for his part, recognized him: it was Adolfo Cuéllar, a Conservative congressman he’d drawn more than once over the last few years and with a certain frequency a few months back, enough to know now by heart his large ears, the childish freckles on his face and the severe line of his slicked-over hair. His reputation had turned him into a target of several attacks from the Liberal press. Few public men carried their reputations the way Cuéllar carried his, standing on his shoulder like a parrot, no, draped around his neck the way a snake charmer carries his snake. Maybe that’s what a reputation is: the moment when a presence fabricates, for those observing, an illusory precedent. Mallarino’s last cartoon had appeared after a nurse had been beaten to death by her husband with a large hoe in a village in Valledupar. ‘It’s very regrettable,’ Cuéllar said into a journalist’s microphone. ‘But when someone hits a woman, it’s generally for a reason.’ Mallarino drew him standing in a forest of tombstones, with an oversized head where his freckles and haircut were easily distinguished, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a garden hoe in one hand; in the background, sitting on a rock in a posture denoting insurmountable tedium, was Death with his long black cloak and his scythe held in his folded arms. ‘When one is out of work,’ read the line beneath the image, ‘it’s generally for a reason.’ And now the man — ‘the man of the hoe’ as a columnist had already called him in the magazine Semana — was in Mallarino’s house. ‘What’s that guy doing here?’ Gerardo Gómez had asked. ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ said Mallarino. Or maybe he didn’t get the whole sentence out: ‘That’s what I’d like…’ he had managed to say, and at that moment he saw Rodrigo Valencia wipe his mouth with a paper napkin (above his upper lip, a trail of white specks stuck to his badly shaven skin) and clear his throat, with a touch of comic intent. ‘I invited him,’ said Valencia. ‘Mea culpa, Javier, I forgot to warn you.’

‘What do you mean you invited him?’ said Mallarino.

‘He called me on Friday, man, he called to beg me. Said he needed to speak to Señor Mallarino. That I had to get him a meeting with Señor Mallarino. He pestered me so damn much he left me no choice.’

‘Wait one second. A meeting?’

‘You’ve got to understand, man. It was like the guy was on his knees over the phone.’

‘But on a Sunday?’ said Mallarino. ‘Today? Sunday? Here in my house? Have you gone mad, Rodrigo?’

‘There was no other way to get rid of him. He’s a congressman, Javier.’

‘He’s an idiot.’

‘He’s a congressional idiot,’ said Valencia. ‘Speak to him for two seconds, that’s all I’m asking. At least the guy was civil enough to show up after lunch.’

‘Not to eat my food, you mean.’

‘Exactly, Javier,’ said Valencia. ‘Not to eat your food.’

Mallarino went inside out of courtesy (the host advancing to receive the recent arrival) and at the same time as a precaution (to prevent the recent arrival from finding himself in the place where the party was taking place and feeling, mistakenly, that he was welcome there). He greeted Cuéllar: a chubby, flaccid hand, a gaze that fixed on Mallarino’s left shoulder. His hair was shorter than it seemed from a distance: Mallarino saw the broad forehead, completely clear, a slight smudge of Brylcreem on the left temple, a fruit fly caught in a spider web, and later, seeing him turn round to sit down, he noticed a bulge at the back of his head, as if something were struggling to get out of there (something ugly, no doubt: a secret, a devious past). Everything about the little man made him feel an intense disgust: he was grateful to be taller than him, thinner, more elegant in spite of his inattention to his wardrobe. ‘Thanks for seeing me, Javier,’ the little man was saying. ‘On a Sunday, for crying out loud, and you with guests.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Mallarino. ‘But I would ask you not to call me by my first name. You and I don’t know each other.’

There was a sort of clumsiness in the man’s movements. ‘No, of course,’ he said. ‘Precisely.’ And then: ‘Can I take my jacket off?’

He did, and Mallarino found himself looking at a linen waistcoat with a blue-and-green diamond pattern straining violently over a prominent pot belly. Mallarino, in his caricatures, had never taken advantage of these recently discovered curves, and thought he would the next time. He led Cuéllar to a corner of the room, closest to the kitchen, and there, on two chairs not positioned to be used, but just to go with the telephone table, they sat down to talk. Mallarino felt around and then turned on the lamp: in this part of the house, far from the big window overlooking the garden, you could tell that evening was starting to fall. The yellow light illuminated Cuéllar’s face, and bones and skin cast new shadows as he moved. Cuéllar bent over to adjust one of his loafers (maybe it was swallowing his sock, thought Mallarino, that could be very uncomfortable) and then straightened up again. ‘Look, Señor Mallarino,’ he began, ‘I wanted to meet you, wanted us to meet, because it seems to me that you have a, how should I put this, a mistaken image. Of me, of course. A mistaken image of me.’ Mallarino listened to him while he looked for a couple of clean glasses and poured two double shots of whisky, a matter of not neglecting his duties as host even for a man unworthy of them. From the garden came the sound of a woman’s loud laugh: Mallarino looked up to see who it had been; Cuéllar, however, wiped his palms on his trousers, his fingers spread out as if he hoped Mallarino would notice the cleanliness of his nails, and kept talking. ‘I am not the person you draw in your caricatures. I’m different. You don’t know me.’

‘That’s what I just said,’ said Mallarino, ‘you and I don’t know each other.’

‘We don’t know each other,’ said Cuéllar. ‘And it seems to me that you’ve been unfair to me, forgive my saying. I’m not a bad person, you understand? I’m a good person. Ask my wife. Ask my children. I have two, two boys. Ask them and you’ll see they’ll say so, that I’m a good person. Poor little guys. I don’t show them your drawings. My wife doesn’t show them, forgive me for telling you this, sorry.’

Mallarino could barely believe it: the man had come on a supplicant mission. He called to beg me, Valencia had said. It was like the guy was on his knees over the phone. He felt invaded by a solid contempt, as palpable as a tumour. What was annoying him so much? Was it perhaps the humility with which Adolfo Cuéllar was speaking to him, head bent, casting shadows under his nose, arms resting on his knees (the pose of someone confessing to a friendly priest, a sinner before his confessor), or perhaps the respect with which he was treating Mallarino in spite of the fact that he, obviously, felt none. I’ve humiliated him, I’ve ridiculed him, and now he’s come to lick my arse. What a repugnant man. Yes, that was it, an unpredictable and thus more intense repugnance, a repugnance for which Mallarino was not prepared. He had expected complaints, protests, even diatribes; a few minutes earlier he had greeted this man with a measure of hostility just to better face up to the other’s hostility, like an employee who, caught in the wrong, arrives at the supervisor’s office gesticulating and shouting, launching little preventative attacks. Well, now it seems that Cuéllar has not come here to demand the immediate cessation of those aggressive drawings, but to humiliate himself even further before his aggressor. He is an adult, thought Mallarino, a grown man and I have humiliated him; he has a wife and kids and I have ridiculed him; but this adult man does not defend himself, this head of a family does not respond with similar blows, rather he humiliates himself even more, seeks even more ridicule. Mallarino found himself feeling a confusing emotion that went beyond contempt, something that wasn’t irritation or annoyance but seemed dangerously close to hatred, and it alarmed him to be feeling it.

‘Please, Javier,’ Cuéllar was saying, ‘please don’t draw me like that any more. I’m not like that.’ And then, correcting himself: ‘That’s what I came to ask you, Señor Mallarino,’ he said with a shaky and nervous voice (nervous like Beatriz when she licked the dry skin of her hands). ‘Thank you for listening to me, sorry for your time, I mean thank you for your time.’

Mallarino listened to him and thought: He’s weak. He’s weak and that’s why I hate him. He’s weak and I’m strong now, and I hate him for making the fact so obvious, for allowing me to abuse my strength, for giving me away, yes, for exposing this power that maybe I don’t deserve. Seen from this seat, the sliding door to the garden had turned into a big illuminated rectangle, and Mallarino saw, against the bright backdrop, the silhouettes that now began to enter. ‘The day’s cooled down now,’ he heard someone say. The house filled with lively conversations, open or more discreet laughter; someone asked where the record player was, and someone else, Gómez or Valencia, began to sing without waiting for musical accompaniment. I saw you arrive, he sang, and felt the presence of an unknown being: it was a song Magdalena liked, but there was no way Valencia or Gómez knew that or knew that those lines were forcing Mallarino to remember his absent wife, the profound emptiness that was opening in his life without her, and to regret everything, to regret it intensely: I saw you arrive and felt what I’d never ever felt before. Adolfo Cuéllar was just apologizing again: for taking his time, for invading his house on a Sunday. He was talking about a father’s image for his children, and how his sons would grow up with Mallarino’s image of him. ‘Do it for them,’ Cuéllar was saying, ‘as a father yourself, please,’ he asked or begged, and Mallarino saw his ears, his nose, the bones of his forehead and his temples, and thought of the strange disdain those bones and cartilages produced in him, and said to himself that even if Adolfo Cuéllar didn’t strike him as a repugnant little character, he would keep drawing him non-stop, and his bones and cartilages were to blame. His bones are to blame, thought Mallarino, it’s always all the fault of bones and cartilages. And then he thought: Bones are the only things that matter; in them, in the shape of the skull and the angle of the nose, in the width of the forehead and the strength or trepidation of a jaw and the dimples on a chin, their delicate or brusque slopes, their more or less intense shadows, there lies the reputation and the image: give me a bone and I shall move the world. Politicians don’t know it, they haven’t realized yet, or maybe they have, but it’s not something they can fix: we are born with these bones, it’s very difficult to change them, and so we’ll go through life with the same vulnerabilities, or always forcing ourselves to compensate for them: didn’t someone say that a successful man is simply someone who has found the way to conceal a complex? In the living room, standing next to a crouching body who was manipulating old newspapers to light, for the first time, a fire in the fireplace of the new house, Rodrigo Valencia — it was him, it was Valencia, now Mallarino had recognized him — was singing at the top of his voice the lines of the song about a love that wasn’t fire and wasn’t flame, and those other lines, that Magdalena loved so much, about the distances that separate cities and cities that destroy customs, and with each line Mallarino had the impression that Adolfo Cuéllar, who now took a sip of his drink and made a grotesque grimace as he swallowed, fell lower and lower in humiliation and shamelessness. A burst of flames reddened the room. Cuéllar was incredible: how could he inflict such pains on himself, or did it not pain him to kneel before someone who’d wounded him? Mallarino was on the verge of asking him roughly when there was a sound of breaking glass, and before Mallarino had time to discover where it had come from Elena Ronderos appeared, taking long strides and moving her hands as if wiping a clumsy phrase off a blackboard.

‘Hey, Javier, come quick,’ she said. ‘Something’s wrong with the girls.’

And that’s how the adults discovered that Beatriz and her little friend had spent the last hour running around the house, visiting every surface where there were half-finished drinks, every table in the living room and every step on the stairs and every shelf where some guest might have set down the last sip of aguardiente or whisky or rum, and now they were so drunk they were pinned out like butterflies on the floor of Beatriz’s room and couldn’t even open their eyes or answer any of the questions they were asked. They had broken one of the framed pictures, which were propped up against the wall, waiting to be assigned a place, and there was the frame and three or four long triangles of glass. Mallarino thought he’d clean them up right away, but first he picked up his daughter; someone, he doesn’t know who, picked up Samanta Leal, and a few seconds later both girls were on the bed in the master bedroom, one beside the other like two pens on a sheet of drawing paper, perfectly unconscious and motionless. A woman whose name Mallarino didn’t remember brought a wet cloth from the kitchen; she put it on the girls’ foreheads, alternately, and on Beatriz’s and Samanta’s pale skin, on their foreheads, emptied of colour, was a fleeting patch, red and damp. Mallarino, meanwhile, had called a paediatrician, and moments later he was striding into the room and sitting down on the bed with efficient movements and putting down on the bedside table, or rather on top of his notebook, transforming it into a coaster, a glass of water with sugar and a teaspoon that glistened when he turned on the reading lamp. ‘A little bit every twenty minutes and everything will be fine,’ he said. ‘A little spoonful, just one, and everything will be fine.’

‘We got drunk?’ said Samanta Leal. ‘I got drunk?’

‘You two drank all the dregs in the house,’ said Mallarino. ‘And it wasn’t funny either. You could have put yourselves in a coma.’

‘I don’t remember at all. I don’t remember your daughter. Were we very good friends?’

‘Not as far as I know. Beatriz changed best friends every week. That’s what it’s like when you’re seven, I guess.’

‘I guess,’ said Samanta Leal. ‘And who looked after us, you?’

‘Every twenty minutes I looked in on you,’ said Mallarino, ‘and gave you each a teaspoonful of sugar water. That’s what the doctor had told me to do. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to get you to swallow it.’

‘I don’t remember, I don’t remember at all.’

‘Of course not. You were both out of it, Samanta, completely out. At one point I even put a mirror under your nostrils, to make sure you hadn’t died on me. A father’s paranoia.’

‘Nobody dies of that.’

‘No, of course not, but what did I know. Or rather, a father imagines anything, that anything might be possible. And you looked like you’d fainted.’

‘Well, we must have.’

‘We couldn’t hear you breathing. You didn’t even snore the way drunks do. You didn’t move either. It was as if you were sedated. I put a blanket over you both, one of those blankets people used to steal from aeroplanes, and the blanket didn’t even move: each time I came back it was exactly as I’d left it, I think I could have painted the folds and they would have stayed exactly the same for as long as it took. As I said, you were both out cold. Naturally.’

‘Naturally?’

‘I mean, that much booze in a seven-year-old body, and not just any drinks, but aguardiente and rum. You might as well have just been gulping down a coma. No, but we really were very worried. And you don’t remember a thing.’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘I see that.’

‘Not a thing,’ said Samanta.

‘Not about what happened afterwards either?’ Silence. ‘The scandal, all that? You don’t remember that either?’ Silence. ‘I see,’ said Mallarino. ‘So that’s what this. .’

‘Yes,’ said Samanta. ‘It’s about that.’

‘I see.’ Silence. ‘But you must remember something.’

Samanta closed her eyes. ‘I remember my dad lifting me up,’ she said. ‘Or maybe not, maybe I only think I remember my dad lifting me up, because I remember my dad putting me in the car, in the back seat of the car. And if he carried me to the car, he must have had to lift me up, right? My dad carried me to the car, didn’t he?’

‘I think so.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I don’t remember too clearly,’ said Mallarino. ‘You have to understand, I was very upset. Everybody was very upset at that moment.’

‘Because of the drinks,’ said Samanta. It wasn’t a question; it wasn’t even an affirmation. It was something else.

‘No, no,’ said Mallarino. ‘You know that’s not why. The upset over the drinks had passed by then, you two were sleeping and taken care of, I was going in every twenty minutes with my spoonful of sugar water. That was under control.’

‘So then?’

‘You know,’ said Mallarino.

‘No,’ said Samanta, ‘that’s just it. I don’t know.’ Silence. ‘And what I want is to know. I want you to tell me.’ Silence. ‘Let’s see, let’s see. You were taking care of us.’

‘Yes.’

‘You came by with spoonfuls of sugar water.’

‘Yes.’

‘Every twenty minutes.’

‘Yes. That’s what the doctor ordered.’

‘And between one spoonful and the next?’

‘I went to see to my guests, of course. I was still the host.’

‘They were all still there?’

‘Most of them, at least. I don’t remember anyone having left.’

‘Were they all there when my father arrived?’

‘I think so. As I said, most of them. I had just given you two a spoonful, but I don’t remember if it was the third or fourth. There was a fire lit in the fireplace, I remember that, and I had to keep it burning. I went out to the garden, brought in wood, looked for old newspapers to burn, and the fire kept burning. People had taken over the bar, I mean they knew where to find booze and were helping themselves. But now and then someone asked me for something: ice, a fresh glass, soda, cigarettes. I remember that, the smell of cigarette smoke. Or I think I remember that, but maybe it’s just because I had stopped smoking. Anyway, what I can tell you is that I didn’t sit down for a second. Between the fireplace, the things people asked me for and friends who put their arms over my shoulders to sing a ranchera, I didn’t sit down for a second. I don’t even remember having answered the door when your father arrived. Introducing him, yes: I remember introducing him, making him come into the living room where everybody was and introducing him, look, Samanta’s dad, yes, Samanta, Beatriz’s little friend. And everybody stiffening, obviously: he had to be told something, but nobody wanted to be the one to tell him. That’s when I realized I’d screwed up. I should have explained the whole thing as soon as I opened the door. But I don’t know if I answered the door, Samanta, maybe the door was open and he just walked in. That changes everything, don’t you think? When you answer the door to a stranger, it’s easier for something to occur to you, to explain something important to someone you don’t know. But if the stranger finds himself suddenly inside, you might forget, no? Some tiny distraction, any little thing. . It doesn’t matter, it’s not an excuse. I should have explained everything as soon as I shook his hand. But I didn’t, and it was a mistake.’

‘Why was it a mistake?’

‘Because it put him on the defensive. Don’t take this the wrong way, Samanta, but as soon as I saw him I realized that your dad wasn’t the most assured guy in the world. Or isn’t. He’s still alive, I imagine.’

‘I was fifteen when he left. I know at first he was living in Brazil, then I haven’t heard anything since. What do you mean by assured?’

‘I mean you could see a sort of bashfulness from a mile away, I don’t know how to explain it, something that made him pull back. You could see that he would rather not have come to pick you up, that he would have preferred it if your mother had come. I introduced him to everybody in the living room and it seemed hard for him to shake hands, and it was very strange, a guy that size so reticent. He’s a big guy, your dad, a well-built guy, and there in the living room, with all of us, he seemed sort of shrunken. Your dad seemed like one of those big guys who would rather not draw attention to themselves when they arrive, and seem to have their heads ducked down between their shoulders, as if they were bending down to go through a low door. Although maybe it’s always like that, you know? Maybe that’s always the way it is with someone who just arrives at a party where everybody’s had a bit to drink. You look small even if you’re six feet tall and have swimmer’s shoulders, or at least that’s how I remember your dad. I also remember long sideburns and a strong jawline, I may be mistaken. You have a strong jawline, Samanta, but not like your dad’s. In any case, I had finished taking him round, introducing him to all those people who were staring at him, and then I explained what had happened. The look on his face changed, of course. Where was Samanta, he began asking me, where was his daughter. “She’s upstairs, in my room,” I told him. “She’s fine, don’t worry, she’s asleep and she’s fine, both of them are fine, my daughter too.” That was to remind him that there were two little girls with the same problem, not just one, and if I was here, relatively calm, he could be here too, relatively calm. “And where are the stairs?” he asked me. I pointed towards the hallway, just as I pointed it out to you a few hours ago, and said, “Give me a second, I’ll come with you.” But he didn’t give me a second. I don’t remember him running, or even walking quickly, as one does in an emergency. No, no: he simply turned on his heel, without saying anything to me, a little offended, I think, or indignant, and went towards the staircase without another word. He didn’t have to say anything for me to know what he was thinking. What kind of place is this, that’s what he was thinking, how did my daughter end up here. There are people who don’t know how to deal with the unexpected, and your dad was like that, you could see that too from a mile away. He walked towards the stairs and I saw him go through the doorway, there, on the left, just as we did before. And then I didn’t see him any more. I didn’t follow him, Samanta, and now I’m very sorry that I didn’t. But it bothered me, what can I say: his impoliteness, his rough edges bothered me. I thought: OK then, to hell with him, he’s on his own. Let him go upstairs, look around, try the wrong door, let him find her, see that everything’s fine, throw her over his shoulder and get out of here. To hell with him. That’s what I thought. And then the shouting started.’

‘Coming from upstairs.’

‘It began upstairs,’ said Mallarino, ‘and then came down the staircase, rolling down the stairs like a ball, no, like a stone, like one of those landslides you get on mountain roads. One time, when Beatriz was a baby, I ran into a landslide near La Nariz del Diablo. Have you seen the Devil’s Nose, Samanta? It’s on the way to the tropical lowlands, a huge piece of rock, truly gigantic, that juts out of the mountain and hangs over the road like a bridge. People say that the devil stands there, on top of that stone nose, to make cars crash. The drivers get scared or distracted and lose control and drive over the edge of the cliff, which is extremely high at that point, a cut through the mountain and a fall into the abyss. Down there at the bottom of the ravine are the cars of the victims, and if they don’t die when they hit the bottom they die for lack of help, because no one can get down that far, and if they shout, no one can hear them. . My wife and I were going to spend Easter week in Melgar, I think it was. Beatriz’s first holiday. She was in the back, or rather they were both in the back, Magdalena with Beatriz in her arms. And we ran into the landslide. They’d closed the road a little way before the Nariz and the traffic was stopped and we saw the Nariz, and Magdalena started talking about the devil. “What if we see him?” she said. “What if we see the devil standing right there?” We didn’t see him, Samanta, we didn’t see the devil, but we heard a noise and then everything started to tremble, the car began to tremble and the landslide came down the mountain. A stampede of big rocks that seemed to be heading straight for us, to have us in their sights, and for four or five seconds one thinks well, that’s it, here and no further, because if one of those rocks landed on top of us, no car’s bodywork would hold up. It all passed twenty metres ahead of us, but just thinking that Magdalena and Beatriz were back there. . Anyway, a landslide is a shocking spectacle that would frighten anybody. So, like that landslide, the shouts came crashing down from upstairs. It still strikes me as incredible that neither of you woke up.’

‘I didn’t wake up, at least, I don’t remember being woken up. And your daughter?’

‘No. She was still out cold, in another world.’

‘Has she told you?’

‘What?’

‘Has she told you that she didn’t hear anything?’

‘Well, no,’ said Mallarino. ‘I’ve never asked her. We’ve never talked about that night. The truth is I’ve never talked about that night with anybody: I’ve never had any reason to. This is the first time in twenty-eight years, I mean, and the effort is not inconsiderable. I hope you’ll keep that in mind.’

‘Tell me about the shouting.’

‘The shouts came pouring down the stairs like a landslide, Samanta. I don’t know what went through my head, but I wasn’t the only one: all of us who were in the room stopped what we were doing. Drinks were left on the table. Conversations ended mid-sentence. Those who were sitting stood up. In my memory even the music was turned off, but it’s impossible that the music would have stopped automatically at that exact moment, and nevertheless I remember it like that: the music stopped playing. Your memory does things, you know? Your memory turns off music and gives people beauty spots and changes the locations of friends’ houses. We began to walk towards the stairs, and at that moment Adolfo Cuéllar came down them. That’s how I remember it: Cuéllar came down first. I don’t know when he’d gone up, or what for. He hadn’t asked me if he could see the upper floor of the house, or asked me where the bathroom was, or anything like that. One second he was there, in the living room with us, I don’t know whether saying goodbye or looking for his coat that he’d taken off, if he’d been wearing a coat, and the next moment being chased down the stairs by Señor Leal’s shouts. “Hey,” he was shouting, “hey, come here.” The shouts came in time with his footsteps, pummelling down the stairs like a landslide, Samanta, his loud and hurried footsteps. “What happened here? What did you do to my little girl?” And what happened next I remember like this: all the guests in the corridor leading to the stairs, or a good many of us in the corridor and the rest out here, under that arch, there where the corridor begins. It was like a bottleneck, like a funnel. Cuéllar came down first. He passed me but I didn’t stop him to ask him what was going on. It didn’t seem necessary. Or maybe it didn’t even occur to me. Your dad had come down by then too and he was shouting at Cuéllar across the group of people: Valencia, Gómez, Santoro, Elena, a group that had got in between your dad and Cuéllar purely by instinct, the instinct to avoid a fight. And this is something I’m never going to forget: your dad wanted to smell Cuéllar’s hands. That’s what he was shouting: “Give me your hands! Let me smell your hands!” And he kept insulting him: “Let me smell your fingers, you son of a bitch!” I kept going towards the staircase and headed up. I needed to know what had happened. Or maybe that wasn’t it: not that I needed to know what had happened, but needed to make sure nothing had happened to Beatriz. At that moment Beatriz was much more important to me than you, what can I say. The door to my room was ajar, and I remember having thought, as I walked towards it, that it was odd, because if your dad had been here and had rushed out, wasn’t it strange that he would have stopped to adjust the door. That’s what I was thinking as I opened it. First I saw the blanket, the airline blanket, on the floor, and then I saw you, Samanta. I saw you still asleep, I mean unconscious, but lying face up, not on your side as I’d left you last time, but lying face up and with your skirt raised a little. You had your legs apart, or one leg bent, I think that was it, one leg bent. I looked away, out of discretion, you understand, but I didn’t turn my head fast enough, and I did see something. Then I went around the bed to make sure Beatriz was all right. There I was, on the other side of the bed, crouched down by my daughter’s face, when your father came in and with a quick glance held me responsible for everything. He lifted you up and carried you out. It looked perfectly normal, you with your arms around your daddy’s neck, like all little girls and all fathers. But what wasn’t normal was his left hand, which was gripping your bottom, not to support you, but as if covering you, covering up your underwear. I followed him down the stairs. The dogs had come in, I imagine they were attracted by the uproar, and had started to bark. You and your father left, and from the front door I watched you get in the car, or I watched him put you into the back seat, then get in himself and start the engine and put it in reverse. I remember it had started to rain, or to drizzle: I noticed when he turned on his headlights and I suddenly saw drops. And I stood there for a moment, watching the raindrops floating in the air, and when the car had gone out through the gate I closed the door and went back inside and realized that Adolfo Cuéllar had left too. The dogs were still barking. The fire had gone out. Someone, I don’t remember who, asked for his coat. People began to leave.’

‘And the party was over,’ said Samanta.

‘Exactly,’ said Mallarino. ‘The next day I drew the cartoon. And the day after that it was published.’

In those days, subscribing to a newspaper was to expect, every morning, the transformation of the world, sometimes as a brutal jolt to all that you knew, sometimes as a subtle access to a removed reality: the shoemaker’s shop visited by elves during the night. After his move, the first thing Mallarino did was to make sure all the paper boys had the correct address, for one could do without coffee and without breakfast, without running water and without a phone, but not without the newspaper waiting on the doorstep, damp from the recent fog, still cold with the early morning mountain chill, but ready for Mallarino to open the way a child — still in his pyjamas, sleep in the corners of his eyes — opens Christmas presents. Wasn’t it Rockefeller who had them make him his own version of the New York Times, an adulterated version with all the bad news expunged? Mallarino had never been able to understand that: for him it was the indignation or rage or hatred that kept him alive. How could anyone renounce the intense feeling of superiority one feels when hating someone? It was the emotion that made mornings make sense. That morning, Mallarino went directly to the opinion page. And there was his black-framed square, which this time he’d drawn a little thicker, and in the centre of the box, a sort of promontory that looked like it was made of earth, something like a small hill. At the base of the hill, surrounding it, there was a crowd of heads with long straight hair, all seen from the back, some adorned with a girlish ribbon. On top of the hill, on the apex of the headland, was Adolfo Cuéllar — there were Adolfo Cuéllar’s bones and cartilages — dressed in a diamond-patterned waistcoat, the lines of which were strained by the prominent belly. He had his arms open, as if wanting to embrace the world, and his freckled face looked towards the sky. Mallarino had written the caption the way Ricardo Rendón used to: putting on record the name of the character and putting a dash before his fictitious words, as if it were a novel, so that this was what was read (what millions of people were reading at that very moment) on the most read page of El Independiente:

Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar — Suffer the little girls to come unto me.

It wasn’t the first time Mallarino had drawn an ‘out-of-context cartoon’, as he called those caricatures without an obvious link to an immediate reference, a piece of news or something that was common knowledge. But it had never felt as natural as this time. The image had formed in his head the morning after the party, as soon as he had a moment of solitude in the new house and the strangeness forced him to take refuge in his work routine in order not to give in to melancholy. He was still shocked by the confrontation — because it had been a confrontation, a moment of violence — and had woken up feeling brutally fatigued, like someone who’d just had an accident. The tension in his shoulders and neck, the tension in his waist, the pain of his hernia that appeared at moments like that and shot down his left leg. . he took a long shower and then, still in his bathrobe, began to draw. He didn’t feel indignation or rage, but rather something more abstract, like disquiet, almost like the awareness of a possibility. . Of a power, yes, that was it: the awareness of an imprecise power. In twenty-five minutes, not counting the time it took to assemble his materials, the drawing was finished. Mallarino poured himself a beer, lit a cigarette and sat in the garden with the novel he was reading at the time. ‘Last night,’ he read, ‘as I reached into the chest where I store my papers, the creatures climbed up my forearm, waving their little legs, their antennae, trying to get out into the fresh air.’ The reptiles crawled over the narrator’s skin, and Mallarino thought of Cuéllar, remembered his pleading and his bones and his cartilages and his flattery, and the narrator meanwhile declared his infinite repugnance. And now that the cartoon was out there in the real universe where opinions have their effects and reputations are feeble, there was no turning back, nor did Mallarino want there to be.

Rodrigo Valencia was in the habit of phoning him on days a special cartoon came out, because, even though he had seen and commented on the drawing the previous day, he thought it was not excessive to offer the cartoonist moral support when his work went out into the world. But this morning it wasn’t Valencia who phoned first, but Gerardo Gómez. ‘Oh man, that takes spunk,’ said Gómez. ‘And there I was asking if you’d gone soft on us. As if!’ Valencia, who phoned next, thought it was a harsh but necessary declaration (or maybe he said denunciation): there were certain things that had to be said and only a caricature could say them correctly. ‘If you don’t say it, nobody says it,’ he added. ‘OK, go get some rest. Here at the office we’re ready for whatever’s coming.’ They didn’t have long to wait for the calls of complaint: from Cuéllar’s secretary, from a woman with a screechy voice, from a lawyer who claimed to be representing him and was determined to instigate the appropriate legal actions. ‘But don’t worry, Javier, nothing’s going to happen,’ said Valencia. ‘Suing over a cartoon is like admitting the charges. Besides, you’re you, let’s not kid ourselves, and this newspaper is this newspaper.’ There was a letter to the editor: ‘We protest in the most emphatic way. . This unjust attack on the image of one of our most distinguished public servants. . We, who have ardently defended our fatherland, denounce the partisan use of the national means of communication. .’ It was signed ‘Friends of Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar’; for Mallarino, the fact that the letter was, in practice, anonymous, just as bombastic and falsely elegant as the anonymous threats, differing only in its lack of capital letters and spelling mistakes, confirmed, in an imprecise, inexplicable and maybe superstitious way, the validity of the drawing and what the drawing suggested. What the drawing suggested: neither declared nor denounced, thought Mallarino; it was like a whisper at a meeting, a sidelong glance, a private finger-pointing. Cartoons had rare chemical properties: Mallarino gradually noticed that the defence, any defence Cuéllar or anyone else might make for him, sunk him further into disrepute, as if the true disgrace was mentioning the cartoon. What was the mysterious mechanism that turned a journalistic attack into a kind of quicksand where simply making a fuss was enough to make one sink further and irremediably? Mallarino realized that, by not tying his attack to a concrete and verifiable piece of news, by allowing himself to be rather gratuitous, he made defence impossible or ridiculous: it’s impossible to answer something unsaid, unless you do so precisely by saying it. As if that were not enough, the gratuitous attack enjoyed a longer life. By the following Friday, when Magdalena brought Beatriz over to spend the weekend with her father, the cartoon should have fallen into oblivion, dragged away or obliterated by current events which never let up (the new President and his imminent inauguration, maybe, or maybe the earthquake that had killed so many people in a small, nearby country), or at least having passed down the list of that capricious and voluble monster, the newspaper reader’s priorities. But that was not the case: it had not fallen into oblivion; it had not slipped down the list of priorities: it had taken on a life of its own and was wandering the city, loose and hazardous, ricocheting around corners.

Or that, at least, is what Magdalena wanted to say from the very moment of her arrival. Mallarino opened the door, said hello with a hug, felt a surge of desire as he touched her blue blouse: he’d always liked that blouse, the way it accentuated the curve of her breasts, and briefly fantasized about the possibility that she had chosen it on purpose. A new sincerity had established itself between them since the incident: maybe, thought Mallarino, it was the awareness of the proximity of danger, of the bad things that had grazed their lives without touching them, for Magdalena, with feminine wisdom, had overlooked Mallarino’s inattention to the abandoned drinks to concentrate on what happened afterwards, which was really serious and dangerous. She had something to tell him, Magdalena said with a vague tension in the way she moved, would he mind if she came in for a while? And there, both sitting at the dining-room table after eating with Beatriz (as they used to do, thought Mallarino without saying so, as they used to do in the world they had mislaid and would have to recover), each holding a cup of steaming tea, as they waited while the little girl showered and put her dirty clothes in the hamper and cleaned her teeth with a toothbrush with a handle the shape of a very skinny fairy, Magdalena described a scene in which the opinion page of El Independiente appeared one day on the bulletin board at the Cuéllar boys’ school, and one of them, the eldest, got into a fist fight with a classmate who made a disagreeable comment about his father. ‘Can you imagine?’ said Magdalena with something that might have been consternation but could also mean something else. ‘At the school!’ Mallarino was listening to her story, but his attention was not on it, but rather on the sudden complicity bathing them at that moment, a connection between them they hadn’t felt for a long time, or was it perhaps the rare emotion the joint protection of a child produces.

‘Has she asked anything?’ said Mallarino.

‘Nothing,’ said Magdalena, ‘she hasn’t said anything.’

‘And what about the Leal girl? Do we know anything?’

‘No, nothing. We’ll see what happens when school starts again.’ Magdalena spoke in a soft voice, in those low but fine-tuned notes that only she was able to modulate, and Mallarino desired her again; he allowed himself to cast a direct glance at her breasts, remember them fleetingly, letting his eyes show that memory; Magdalena pretended not to notice, although women always noticed those things, and didn’t fold her arms and her face showed no sign she felt uncomfortable. She said goodbye affectionately, stroking Mallarino’s arm, and he was left alone with his daughter in his new house. This was an unprecedented kind of solitude for him at that moment: he was fascinated by the novelty of the feeling, undoubtedly related to the instinctive anxiety at having sole responsibility for Beatriz and her well-being, at least for the next forty-eight hours (a vertiginous figure). This emotion brought tears to his eyes: he felt ridiculous, mocked himself. In the mist of those new impressions he thought of Cuéllar and Cuéllar’s sons, who he’d never seen, and in his mind he imagined, vivid and mobile and bright like a film, a scene of a fist fight in a school playground, and he could almost see clothes tearing against pavement, bruises on faces, dark blood and tears, and he could almost hear the sound of the blows, bones colliding with bones. But the scene soon vanished, because Beatriz, with an irresistible smile of enthusiasm, had pulled out an old deck of cards with battered corners from her little pink knapsack, and was now asking her father to play manotón in spite of the fact that he’d explained to her countless times that playing the game with just two was no fun at all.

At the end of August, when classes resumed, Beatriz brought home the news (but it wasn’t so much news as a casual mention, an offhand comment) that Samanta Leal wasn’t there any more. She didn’t mention her again. So, with dismissive ease, the girl disappeared from Beatriz’s memory and perhaps that of the whole school, and Mallarino thought that he too, finding himself in the same situation, would have done the same: created a void of silence around the child, a closed and hermetic oblivion where what happened, not existing in the memories of those around her, would soon stop existing in her own memory. Change schools, change neighbourhoods, change cities, change something, keep changing, change to leave behind, change to erase: a true pentimento, the correction to a canvas after a change of heart, an image painted over another, a brushstroke of oil paint on top of other brushstrokes. That was perhaps what had happened in the case of Samanta Leal, because oil paint cannot be erased, but can be corrected; not eliminated, but buried under new layers. It was easy to correct a child’s life: just a couple of radical decisions and a real will, a real commitment to the correction, and that was all. Samanta Leal’s parents had decided to do that, and that was to be respected; Mallarino talked about it once with Magdalena, and Magdalena agreed. As the weeks went by, and the months, Samanta Leal also began to disappear from their memories, and what should have surprised them, but didn’t surprise them, was not remembering her even when they talked about what was happening to Adolfo Cuéllar.

First there were rumours. ‘The Witches’ Post’, the gossip section of a weekly magazine, ran a story about how Cuéllar and his wife had been at the centre of a small scandal in the queue for a cinema on Sixty-third Street. Later, El Tiempo published in its ‘women’s section’ — the word Women headed the page in hollow letters, barely an outline — a half-page interview in which the congressman’s wife spoke with pleasure about charity bazaars, literacy drives, donations to food banks and also to blood banks, and Mallarino was sure he was not the only one surprised or puzzled by the omission of any mention of Adolfo Cuéllar, whose influences, direct or indirect, had made the donations and drives and bazaars possible. ‘Señora Cuéllar’, read the text, ‘preferred discreetly that we not talk about her husband. “Dirty laundry gets washed at home,” she told us.’

And then, one November morning, Mallarino was woken by the telephone ringing. ‘They’ve asked for his resignation,’ said Rodrigo Valencia from the other end of the line. ‘Nobody’s talking about it as a punishment, because there’s nothing to punish. But my spies have very clear opinions. You don’t have to be too savvy to realize.’

It was still very early: Mallarino cradled the receiver between his shoulder and head while his hands, tingling with sleep, felt around for his cigarettes and lighter in the methodical messiness of his bedside table. ‘Realize what?’ said Mallarino.

‘Well, Javier, you know,’ said Valencia. ‘Or rather, the less said the better. Watch the news tonight, I’m sure there’ll be something.’

And there was: that night Mallarino turned on the television a couple of minutes before seven, and listened with half an ear to the end of an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show while filing away the press clippings he hadn’t used that week. He had time to go outside and find the dogs’ plastic dishes, serve them a scoop of dog food, come back up and wash his hands before the newscast began. The first commercial break suggested that on a salary of fifteen thousand pesos he could be a banker, asked him to drink a grape-flavoured soda pop (only because a roller-skating girl was carrying one) and ordered him urgently to buy the book The World Challenge. After all that, the presenter’s talking moustache announced the news.

The images, it seems, had been filmed that very morning. There was Cuéllar, his head on a bed of microphones like the head of John the Baptist on Salomé’s platter, announcing his temporary retirement from the Congress of the Republic on the very steps of the Capitolio Nacional. ‘No, gentlemen, it is not a matter of trying to hush anything up,’ he said: replying to a question that hadn’t been broadcast. That’s how the news item began, with that irritated stress the voice makes in denial. ‘No, not at all. The reasons are personal. I’m going to take a little break, this job wears a man down, you know what I mean? My family needs me, and the family is the top priority, isn’t it? At least I’ve always said so.’ Mallarino saw the image from the edge of his bed; he tried to capture, in his sketchbook with black covers, two or three details: the nose enlarged by the cameras, the gleam of the flashes reflecting off the slicked-over hair, the high collar of his checked shirt that added a fold and a shadow under the chin. Something caught the attention: some movement, a face he knew? Mallarino leaned forward; he saw a woman keeping a restrained silence behind the swarm of journalists; despite a background shot on television not being the same as a foregrounded newspaper portrait, he recognized Cuéllar’s wife, the laboriously curled black hair, the sky-blue eye shadow, a sepia-toned silk scarf wrapped around her long neck. He didn’t know what to make of that presence, for the woman’s face was half-hidden and her expression was inscrutable, and he went back to focusing on the congressman. It was true that he looked tired: the weariness, at least, was not feigned. He could see it in his eyes, thought Mallarino, those eyes that seemed irritated by the lights, and he could also hear it in his voice: it was no longer that indiscreet and repugnant voice that had asked him for clemency that afternoon and later forgiveness, but it still had something in common with it. What was it?The image of Cuéllar — his practised indifference or confidence on the stone steps of the Capitolio — lasted a very short time, a few brief seconds, and was cut when, after the last of his indifferent and confident answers, the reporters rose up in an incomprehensible salvo of questions. The newscast went on to announce the dismantling of a conspiracy to overthrow the government in Spain, but Mallarino went on thinking about the head that was speaking among microphones and comparing it to the head that had spoken to him, drooping and humble, the afternoon of the party, and suddenly he was also thinking about the head of the woman who was observing the whole scene from behind, and then went back to thinking about the man at the party and the man on television. And then he knew, both were humiliated men. It was true that now, on television, the humiliation had been more obvious and notorious, but was actually nothing more than the exacerbated or extreme version of the previous humiliation, or rather the previous one had been the seed, and the current one, broadcast on national television at peak viewing hour, its full flowering. And now he focused on the wife again: the humiliation, all humiliation, needs a witness. It doesn’t exist without it: nobody is humiliated alone: humiliation in solitude is not humiliation. Was Cuéllar’s wife the witness at this moment? Or were the journalists? Were the real reasons he was leaving his post known or not? Did they or did they not have Mallarino’s drawing in mind? Did he, Adolfo Cuéllar? What bothered people who were caricatured most, as Mallarino had discovered over the years, was not seeing themselves with their defects, but everyone else seeing them: like when a secret comes to light, as if their bones were a well-guarded secret and Mallarino had revealed them all of a sudden. Did that happen to Cuéllar? His wife was looking at him, the journalists were looking at him, Mallarino was looking at him, millions of people all over the country were looking at him. . Cuéllar had become a visible being, too visible; Mallarino imagined himself observing the city from on high and at the same time he imagined the satisfaction the little people must feel, the men and women who were too small and insignificant to be seen by him and those like him. Perhaps Cuéllar, in these moments, would have preferred to be one of those men nobody sees, an anonymous and hidden creature. Or perhaps he was justly turning into one of them: by giving up his privileged position, going into the shadows to blend in with those who were not privileged, he was also fleeing from future humiliations. Without privileges, Adolfo Cuéllar would be safe from those, like Mallarino, who see the world through the humiliations of others; those who seek out weaknesses in others — bones, cartilages — and pounce to exploit them, the way dogs smell fear. Mallarino turned off the television. As the back of his hand passed in front of the screen, he felt the tickle of static electricity on the hairs of his fingers and on his skin.

‘Poor bastard,’ Mallarino said to the black screen, the chest of drawers, the closed blinds. ‘He should have just stayed home.’

The second Sunday of December, just before the end-of-the-year festivities got under way in the agitated and warm city, Mallarino invited Magdalena to the first bullfight of the season. A young Colombian torero was going to graduate to full standing; his sponsors would be two Spanish bullfighters, and one of them, Antoñete, always put on a good performance at the Santamaría Bullring; Mallarino thought that all this could provide him with the perfect pretext to spend an afternoon with his wife, just the two of them on their own, and discover if the impression he’d had lately was illusory. He’d been feeling it for days now, each time he met with Magdalena to hand over or return Beatriz like clandestine merchandise: it was something impossible to pinpoint, a sigh that seemed involuntary during a goodbye kiss on the cheek, a straightening up when Mallarino, with a hand on her waist, directed her through a door he was holding open. One night, after the birthday celebration of a mutual friend they were obliged to attend together, they’d found themselves furiously desiring each other, and there was a tacit agreement between them to close their eyes and forget about everything, even what was about to happen, like someone placing a bet thinking that tomorrow he’ll see what to do if he loses. It was a drunken fuck, a clumsy, cursing, colliding coupling in the darkness on a sofa with upholstery that left marks on their skin, and it was neither repeated nor even mentioned, except to say that if they weren’t more careful things were going to get very complicated. But now, in the front row of the half-filled shady section, Mallarino thought that maybe it might not be impossible: that time had passed now, and with time, many things. The sunny section was full to bursting, he saw coloured scarves, he saw heads wearing dark glasses, he saw the trees behind the flags and the brick tower blocks behind the trees, and Magdalena was at his side, and Beatriz was waiting for them at her grandparents’ house. He liked, he’d always liked, the imminence of unpredictable danger, the threat that he felt each time the wooden doors spat forth one of those bulls with their four-hundred-and-fifty-kilo charge, and he was glad he was there, with Magdalena, knowing that she too liked some of it: she liked the music, the din of the paso dobles in the imperfect acoustics; she liked the heat of the early afternoon and the coolness of the end. Everything was good, thought Mallarino, and then the Colombian torero flourished a set of veronica passes and finished off the bull with know-how beyond his years. Mallarino was looking at Magdalena, the way the sun reflected from the other side of the ring illuminated her face, when a banderillero was slightly gored and the whole bullring let out a howl and both Magdalena’s hands flew to her mouth, her long fingers to her full lips, and Mallarino saw the liquid shine of her gaze and thought that maybe it might not be impossible, that time had passed, and with time, many things. Antoñete presented the Colombian torero with his sword and other accoutrements. Everyone applauded. The Colombian torero did an amusing bow; when he put his feet together he raised a little cloud of dust. It’s fine to live and to die, thought Mallarino. He was fine, Magdalena was fine, everything was fine.

After the fifth bull, the crowd whistling as it was dragged away, leaving a trail of blood that seemed to coagulate in the sand in front of the audience’s eyes, Mallarino looked up and thought someone was waving at him from a flat on one of the top floors of the Torres del Parque. Someone was moving their arms, but he was far away and his face was a blurry oval, and Mallarino decided he was waving at someone else. As he looked down, however, he saw another pair of arms, waving more exaggeratedly: it was Rodrigo Valencia, who was taking off his cap as if his signals would be more comprehensible if he had it in his hand. Mallarino understood they’d see him afterwards. ‘Oh, look,’ said Magdalena. ‘I wonder what he’s doing here.’ The Valencia family had season tickets to the bullfights every year, as Magdalena knew very well; her sarcasm, however, did not seem to refer to that. What new notes were there in her voice? Something like resentment, but doubtful and lukewarm, lacking conviction, the lilt of a spoiled little girl prowled through the air as if they weren’t in a public place but in the privacy of her room.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mallarino. ‘Don’t you want us to see Valencia?’

‘He’s going to invite us somewhere. I don’t want to do anything this evening, I wanted. . I don’t want to do anything.’

‘Well, I’ll say no. I’ll just say no to whatever he proposes. Nothing easier.’

Magdalena shrugged at the same time as the sixth bull burst cheerfully out, stirring up the sand with the drum roll of his hoofs. The Colombian torero was handling his cape well, but Magdalena’s mood had darkened. Her hands busied themselves with the belt of her coat and took refuge in her deep pockets; from behind them came the smell of tobacco, and Mallarino had a sudden urge to smoke as well. Now the whole bullring had started whistling at the picadors: the old man next to them whistled, sprinkling the shoulders in front of him with saliva, and Magdalena whistled at them, and received disapproving looks from a lady with dyed hair. Later, when the Colombian torero missed with his sword and disenchantment flew around the bullring like slander, Magdalena seemed to be with him again, here, regretting the loss of the ears, shouting silly patriotic cheers while a small group of enthusiasts lifted the young man onto their shoulders.

‘How little it takes,’ Mallarino said to her, when they were inching their way out, brushing up against arms and elbows like cows in a corral. ‘To get carried on people’s shoulders, I mean. It’s as if people do it for their own pleasure.’

‘Maybe they do do it for their own pleasure, silly,’ said Magdalena.

They were just about at Seventh Avenue when Mallarino heard some hurried steps behind them and then felt a tapping of fingers on his shoulder, on the shoulder pad of his jacket. ‘And where are you two going?’ said Rodrigo Valencia. ‘Answer: Nowhere. You’re coming with me.’ Tedium clouded Magdalena’s face.

‘Where?’ asked Mallarino. ‘You know post-bullfight chitchat bores me.’

‘We’re not going to recap the corrida, Javier.’

‘Lots of people talking nonsense. Lots of people who don’t go to see but to be seen.’

‘It’s nothing to do with the corrida,’ said Valencia, suddenly serious. ‘I have to tell you something.’

And that’s how Mallarino found out: almost by accident, in an almost private moment, in the company of the woman who was almost his wife. Valencia led him and Magdalena to a restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel Tequendama, a cold, unpleasant place with lights that were too red from the door of which you could see the grey cement mouth of the tunnel that led down to the underground parking (and this, who knows why, made Mallarino intensely uneasy). At a dark table, beside the window where the name of the restaurant shone in curved neon tubes, a small group of people waited for them: Mallarino recognized two reporters from the judicial section and greeted the rest from afar, unenthusiastically, perhaps because he already knew that enthusiasm was not welcome at this meeting. ‘Tell Mallarino what you told me,’ said Valencia, the words cast out into the air without being addressed to any of them specifically, cast out so the most interested would pick them up. The one most interested was a young woman — too big now to be wearing the braces she had on her teeth — who began to talk about Adolfo Cuéllar as if she’d known him her whole life. She spoke of his marital problems over the last few months, well known to all, and the fact, known only to a few, that he’d recently separated from his wife, or rather his wife had asked him to leave. She spoke of Cuéllar’s health, which was not impeccable, and of the diabetes that was forcing him to have constant check-ups for the next three years. She spoke of Cuéllar’s phone call that morning, demanding an appointment with such insistence that, in spite of it being a holiday and the exceptional circumstances, the doctor had to see him. She also spoke of the routine check-up that took place in the examining room — she spoke of Cuéllar in stockinged feet on the scales, Cuéllar lying down barefoot while the doctor checked his pulse beside his Achilles tendon, Cuéllar without his shirt on taking deep breaths and coughing — and she spoke of the conversation that followed the check-up right there, with the patient sitting on the examining table: shirtless and shoeless. She also spoke of the things that, according to the doctor, Cuéllar had mentioned, several anecdotes concerning his wife and sons and most of all the same recurring complaint: the irreparable loss of his reputation. She spoke of the moment the doctor had left the examining room and sat down behind his desk to find stamps and headed notepaper and write up and sign a prescription for antidepressants, and then she spoke of what the doctor said he heard: the unmistakable sound of a window opening and, seconds later, the screeching of cars braking suddenly and the reactions of pedestrians, which must have been very noisy, because otherwise they would not have reached so high from the pavement of Thirteenth Avenue. And now, after telling all that, the girl with braces looked at her colleagues, and Mallarino understood, in the same magnificent moment, that Valencia had not brought him there just to hear the tale of Adolfo Cuéllar’s suicide, but also to respond to the reporters’ questions, or to one single declaration followed by one single question, in this improvised and almost clandestine press conference. This time too it was the little girl with braces who took charge. ‘Maestro Mallarino,’ she said (and Mallarino saw the alert spiral notebooks and pens erect over them like phalluses), ‘we are all in agreement, as public opinion is as well, that Congressman Cuéllar’s fall from grace began with your caricature. My question, our question, is: do you feel in any way responsible for his death?’

Public opinion, thought Mallarino. Fall from grace. Where did those formulaic phrases come from? Who had invented them? Who had been the first to use them?

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘No caricature is capable of such a thing.’

On the way back to Beatriz’s grandparents’ house, the silence in the car was dense, rich, concentrated. Bogotá, on a Sunday evening, is a vast, desolate city; if it’s Christmas time and the streets are festooned with lights, there is something melancholy about it, like a party that’s gone wrong. Or that was Mallarino’s impression, not knowing why he felt Magdalena’s gaze weighing on him like a judgement. If at some moment, a thousand years ago, it had been possible that the day might have ended with some sort of reconciliation (and perhaps that was why they’d left Beatriz with her grandparents: to allow them an hour or two extra and the sex that might happen in that time), that possibility seemed distant now, seemed more confused with every green light they passed as they drove north up Seventh Avenue. They had to arrive in front of the building where Magdalena had grown up, they had to turn off the car and stay in the dark, illuminated only by the pale streetlights, for Magdalena to tell him how terrified she was at having seen what she’d seen.

‘What did you see?’ asked Mallarino. ‘I don’t know what you’re referring to.’

‘Of course you do, Javier, of course you know, you know perfectly well,’ she said. ‘You absolutely realized, maybe you realized before I did. It took me a couple of seconds, I confess. I didn’t realize from one moment to the next, no, but gradually. It wasn’t easy, I have to admit that too, it wasn’t easy to realize. But I did realize, Javier, I realized something was not right in the air, there, in that horrible restaurant that seemed full of smoke even though nobody was smoking and I was trying to think for a moment what it might be. Until I knew. It was the look in people’s eyes, the look in the eyes of those reporters and even Rodrigo Valencia: the look of admiration. They were looking at you with admiration. The guy killed himself this morning and they were interviewing you, they had to ask you that question: but they asked it with admiration. Or with astonishment, or awe, choose the word you like best. But that’s what there was in the air, that sort of fear you inspire, yes, a reverential fear. And then came the worst: when I realized that you were proud. You were proud of that question they were asking you, Javier, and who knows, maybe you were proud of something else. Here, while we’re talking, with our daughter asleep a few steps away, you are proud. You’re proud and I can’t understand it. You’re proud and I don’t know who you are any more. I don’t know who you are, but I do know one thing: that I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want Beatriz to be with you. I want you far away from her and far from me. I want you far, far, far away.’