Reputations

III

On Friday morning, just after eleven, Mallarino’s four-by-four snaked down towards the city along the slippery road. Rain lashed the bodywork: it was one of those Bogotá downpours that make considered conversation impossible, make drivers furrow their brows and force them to grip the steering wheel hard with both hands. The mountain rose up on their left, always menacing, always on the verge of collapsing on top of people, that mountain that seemed to pass underneath the grey ribbon of road, fall away to the right in a rough, steep slope and crash, in the distance, miraculously converted into the blurry design of the scattered city. On the horizon, that point where the western hills were no longer green, but blue, aeroplane lights dangled in the cloudy grey sky like an old woman’s earrings.

Mallarino had slept little and badly, without ever forgetting that Samanta was there, just a few steps away, in Beatriz’s old room. Samanta Leal: the woman who was no longer a little girl, the woman who could lie and put on an act in order to gain access to his house and remember (or ask him to remember, like a beggar of memories) what happened there twenty-eight years earlier. He heard her get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom, inevitably heard the liquid sounds she made: the stream of her urine, the indiscreet flush, the water running as she washed her hands. When the first light began to shine in his window, as the gentle agitation of the hummingbirds began, Mallarino had already been awake for a while: awake and thinking about Samanta Leal, awake and feeling sorry for her, genuinely sorry, sorry for the night of total vulnerability that his guest must be enduring. Samanta was alone, alone with those new memories she’d just acquired and which altered her entire life, everything she’d believed she knew about herself until now, or at least shifted it slightly, enough to change her whole perspective. In a Holbein painting there is a skull that you can only really see from the side, not when you look straight at it: was something similar happening to Samanta Leal? Today she would wake up feeling like somebody else; right now she would be revisiting her dearest memories and re-examining them, not with affection this time, but with suspicion. Poor thing. Mallarino had given her a towel and an extra blanket, in case she felt cold. Before retreating into Beatriz’s room like someone hiding out in a cave, Samanta told Mallarino about the night of the ceremony, what had happened, and he couldn’t help thinking that she sounded as if she were talking about another person. Which, in more than one sense, was perhaps true: Samanta was now another. This woman was talking about the woman she had been just a few hours ago.

Samanta told him about her colleagues at the Misión Gaia (an environmental foundation where she’d been working for the last two years) and the admiration that one of them had for the life and work of Javier Mallarino. She didn’t remember who had suggested they all go downtown together, to the ceremony at the Teatro Colón where Mallarino’s reputation would be enshrined for all time, but the idea sparked some enthusiasm. To witness that moment: was it not a wonderful opportunity? She accepted the invitation — more out of curiosity than anything else — and hours later found herself sitting in an unlit box, attending the beginning of what looked set to be the most boring ceremony, wondering what she’d got herself into and swearing she’d slip out the first chance she got. Then they started showing the slides; an image invaded the theatre, then another, and a third; Samanta looked at them absentmindedly, the way one looks at flames in a fireplace, and after a while she noticed that she wasn’t looking so absent-mindedly any more: that she recognized some images: that she recognized the house. She turned and said to her colleague: ‘I’ve been there.’ This surprise made her laugh, a silly laugh. The whole situation had something absurd about it, and the cheerful expression that then appeared on her colleague’s face: ‘You’ve been to Javier Mallarino’s house?’ And she assured him that she had been there, to that house, and he teased her and they laughed. But then Samanta began to recognize things: a couple of pictures, for example. The one with the three faces, for example. Now the whole thing didn’t seem so funny. ‘I’ve seen that picture before,’ she told her colleague, and the irritated people sitting behind them clicked their tongues to order silence. ‘I’ve been in that house,’ Samanta continued. But not laughing any more; it didn’t seem such a funny surprise now; the people sitting nearby kept telling her to be quiet. So Samanta didn’t say anything more about it. She stopped saying she’d been there before; she stopped saying she’d seen that picture before. She kept quiet. She wrestled as much as she could with the unformed questions that were pestering her. She began to imagine possibilities. And the next day she arrived at the house in the mountains and lied and acted and all the time she was trying to remember and to get Mallarino to remember, yes, that too: for Mallarino to remember. And all for nothing.

‘I don’t know why it should even matter,’ said Samanta. ‘Here I am, Señor Mallarino: I am what I am, that’s not going to change. Twenty-eight years: an entire lifetime. Who does it matter to now? Maybe it’s better to just leave it all as it was. Who told me to go digging around instead of leaving well enough alone? Wasn’t it better for everything to stay as it had been? Wasn’t I just fine the way I was, without knowing what I now know? That belongs to another lifetime, a life that has never been my life. They took it away from me. They changed it. My parents changed it for me. They gave me another one: one where there was no past. A child’s past is made of plasticine, Señor Mallarino, adults can do whatever they like with it. We can, I mean, we can do whatever we like. That’s how it was with me. A year went by, and then another, and that life from before began to recede, until it stopped existing. That little girl from before, that girl that certain things happened to, went to sleep and died, Señor Mallarino. She stopped existing, like a sickly puppy. And one fine day that girl is thirty-five years old and sees a slide projection in a theatre and feels something strange, something she’s never felt. I didn’t know that could happen. Just to be sitting there and feel these strange things. With each passing minute, with each minute, feeling even stranger. They’re talking up onstage, there are speeches, but you don’t hear them. Your attention is elsewhere. You’re remembering things. You have intuitions, shall we say, uncomfortable intuitions. Half-formed memories arrive, like phantoms. What do you do with this? What do you do with phantoms? That’s what I’ve been asking myself all this time. I’ve spent half the evening remembering things and the other half wondering which of the memories were true and which were lies. I’ve begun to remember things, but now I don’t know if I’m remembering because I remember, Señor Mallarino, or if I’m remembering because you told me. Am I remembering because you put the memory in my head? It’s not easy, it’s not easy to know. The problem is that a whole lifetime has gone by, Señor Mallarino, and my question is: who can all this matter to? What happened, what didn’t happen, who does it matter to?’

Who does it matter to, thought Mallarino this morning. He waited for the coffee pot to stop bubbling and took out the glass mug; a drop fell onto the hot stovetop and the stovetop hissed like an aggressive cat. With a cup of fresh coffee in hand, Mallarino picked up the newspaper and read it standing up at the kitchen counter, his back to the frosted window, freezing to death, with his charcoal pencil in hand, until he realized he wasn’t taking anything in, that his mind was elsewhere. Elsewhere, yes, or in another time, and in any case far away from the newspaper — that vulgar flatterer of the present moment — and its announcements of parties and acts and speeches and more speeches and skies covered in balloons, big coloured balloons, all designed to celebrate the bicentennial of Colombian Independence. Who does it matter to, thought Mallarino, and then he thought: It matters to me. He poured himself more coffee; he went up to his studio; he looked at Daumier’s caricature where King Louis-Philippe’s same chubby face (his pear face, as Frenchmen of the time saw him, a king with the face of a pear) looked towards the past, the present and the future: Mallarino said to himself that his own situation didn’t seem very different at this moment. That face was like his, perhaps. But that face said to him: all is the present. What I remember, thought Mallarino, is happening now. It was too early to call Rodrigo Valencia, so Mallarino took a sheet of paper out of the fax machine — those too white, too thick sheets whose edges inflicted painful paper cuts on the unwary — and wrote a message by hand, with his careful handwriting, dating it in one corner and signing it at the end as he always did, as if it were a letter. Valencia, he thought, would find the message as soon as he arrived at the office.

Rodrigo:

I want to ask you for an urgent favour. Do you remember Adolfo Cuéllar, the congressman? Well, I need his widow’s details. Address, phone number, whatever you can find for me. I don’t know if I already said it was urgent.

Very best,

Javier

The call came sooner than expected. ‘Well, if it isn’t the most brilliant star in the Colombian firmament,’ Valencia said, ‘and my number one fax correspondent. Let’s see, let’s see, tell me what on earth this is about. What have you got in mind?’ Mallarino thought Valencia was talking far too loudly; for a second he was tempted to tell him to keep his voice down, but he didn’t. He asked him to remember the afternoon of the party, twenty-eight years ago, to remember the girl, Beatriz’s little friend.

‘She needs to talk to Cuéllar’s wife,’ said Mallarino, ‘to ask her some things. Can you get me an address, a phone number? Ask someone there, your secretary, one of your researchers. Five minutes: I’m sure it wouldn’t take your people any more than five minutes.’ There was a silence. Mallarino imagined Valencia’s vacant stare landing anywhere: on a pencil, his computer keyboard, the walls where caricatures of him and of his wife that Mallarino had drawn years ago hung.

Finally, Valencia said: ‘That girl? You know the girl?’

‘Look, it’s a long story,’ said Mallarino. ‘She’s here, with me, and needs that information.’

‘Just a moment, one moment. She’s with you?’

‘Will you get it for me or not?’

‘One moment, Javier. For you, or for the girl? Who must not be a girl any more, but anyway. What is this about her being there with you? What’s her name?’

‘Will you get me the information?’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Samanta Leal. What does it matter to you? Will you get me the information?’

‘But I just don’t understand. I need more details, there’s something missing. No, I know what I’m missing: understanding. I don’t understand, that’s what’s wrong.’

‘You don’t have to understand, Rodrigo: you just have to do me a favour. And doing favours is easier than understanding. Look, it’s very simple. You’re in your office, right? There in that glass case you have instead of an office, in everyone’s sight. So follow my instructions. Raise your hand, so they see you from outside. When the first of your slaves comes in, you ask him to do this. And when you have it, send me a fax. So very simple.’

‘But what for?’ said Valencia. ‘How did that person get to your house? What is she asking you for? What’s going on, that’s what I want to know.’

‘Nothing’s going on.’

‘Of course it is. Either tell me, Javier, or I’m not helping you.’

‘Then don’t help me,’ said Mallarino. ‘And go to hell.’

‘Look, Javier, try to see it from my point of view,’ said Valencia. ‘This is not normal. Or do you think it is? Does it seem normal to you for that girl to appear just like that?’

‘She’s not a girl.’

‘For her to appear so many years later and ask you for this?’

‘She hasn’t asked me for anything,’ said Mallarino. ‘This idea is mine.’

‘How’s that?’

‘It’s to help her. She doesn’t remember.’

Mallarino then remained in the company of the silence of the phone line, that imperfect silence like darkness for blind people. In his imagination, Valencia was one of those nineteenth-century caricatures where the person appears covered in question marks and with an intense expression of confusion, and then he imagined Valencia’s head converted into a silhouette, a black line, and those three words, She doesn’t remember, banging against the line, desperate flies in a glass box. After a long few seconds, longer still because time, when one is on the phone, cannot be measured on the features of one’s interlocutor — one doesn’t notice the barely perceptible changes, the warnings, the intentions sketched across them — Valencia let out a couple of grunts, something like a clearing of the throat, like a contained belch. ‘Ah,’ he said then, ‘I see what’s going on. The girl doesn’t know.’

‘She’s not a girl,’ said Mallarino.

‘She doesn’t know, that’s the problem. She was never told.’

‘She doesn’t remember.’

‘And you want to help her.’

‘Help her to remember.’

‘Help her to find out,’ said Valencia as if he were spitting out a caramel he was choking on. ‘Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you.’

Something resembling relief: that’s what Mallarino felt. Perhaps because someone else, and not him, had said what he didn’t dare say. Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you: was it not incredible, and also fascinating, that they were talking about the past? What was not known now — now that Rodrigo Valencia mentioned it — was something that in the past had been known, about which there had been certainty at some point, and so certain had Mallarino been that he’d gone as far as to draw a cartoon about it. Was what appeared in the press not true, beyond all doubt or uncertainty? Was a page in the newspaper not the supreme proof that something had happened? Mallarino imagined the past as a watery creature with imprecise contours, a sort of deceitful, dishonest amoeba that can’t be investigated, for, looking for it again under the microscope, we find that it’s not there, and we suspect that it’s gone, and we soon realize that it has changed shape and is now impossible to recognize. Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you. In such a way that the certainties acquired at some moment in the past could in time stop being certainties: something could happen, a fortuitous or deliberate event, and suddenly all evidence is invalidated, the truth ceases to be true, the seen ceases to have been seen and the occurrence to have occurred: all lost their place in time and space; were devoured and passed on to another world, or to another dimension of our world, a dimension we didn’t know. But where was it? Where did the past go when it changed? In which folds of our world were they hiding, cowardly and ashamed, the events that had been unable to remain, to keep being true in spite of the wear and tear of time, to win their place in human history? Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you. But the problem with Samanta Leal wasn’t that she didn’t know, but that she didn’t remember: that memory, her childhood memory, had suffered certain distortions, certain — how to put it — interferences. It was a question of restoring it: for this, and for no other reason, they needed to speak with Cuéllar’s widow, ask her a couple of simple questions, get a couple of simple answers from her.

‘It’s not for me,’ said Mallarino. ‘It’s for her. I want to help her.’

‘But have you thought this through, Javier?’ asked Valencia.

‘There’s not much to think through.’

‘Have you thought about the consequences? Don’t tell me there won’t be any consequences. Don’t tell me you haven’t imagined them. Let’s see, let me see: the girl remembers nothing?’

‘She’s not a girl. And no, she doesn’t remember anything.’

‘I see. For her it’s as if nothing had happened.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Except that it did happen, Javier.’

Mallarino said nothing.

‘It did happen,’ said Valencia, ‘and we all saw it.’

What strange arrogance moved, like the undertow near the shore, beneath those apparently simple words, so vague, so everyday. The arrogance was to simulate or even to covet those certainties, as if Valencia could now not only be sure of what he himself saw, but what others saw, others who, twenty-eight years later, were absent or gone or in any case silent. The memory of others: how much he would gladly pay at this moment for a ticket to that spectacle! There, thought Mallarino, lay the origin of our dissatisfaction and our sadness: in the impossibility of sharing memory with others.

‘But that doesn’t matter,’ said Mallarino. ‘At least, that doesn’t matter to me. It’s her. The poor thing has a right to know.’

‘Oh, it’s just for her.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘Just for her, yeah,’ said Valencia. ‘What do you take me for, an idiot?’

Mallarino said nothing.

‘You think I don’t realize?’ said Valencia. ‘Well, I do realize. I see perfectly well. What might happen now if nothing happened that night. What could change for you. And I understand, believe me, I understand your worry, at least in principle.’

‘I’m not worried.’

‘I think you are. Because if nothing happened, and you did that drawing. . Of course, of course I understand. But can I tell you something? We were all there. And can I tell you something else? The last thing you want to do is to start asking questions. You’re not guilty of anything, Javier — ’

‘But who’s talking about guilt?’ Mallarino cut him off. ‘I’m not talking about guilt, nobody’s talking about guilt. I’ll tell you one more time, Rodrigo: it’s not for me. It’s for her.’

Silence. A moment later, when Valencia spoke, it was as if his voice had fallen to the floor: a stepped-on, worn-out, used-up voice.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘And so the idea is to find the widow.’

‘Yes.’

‘And speak to her, ask her.’

‘Yes.’

‘But how stupid,’ Valencia said wearily. ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Mallarino. ‘We just — ’

‘What idiots,’ said Valencia.

‘Hey, just a minute.’

‘What an idiot you are. I won’t say anything about her, I don’t know what’s in her head. But you’re an idiot. And what are you going to do, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. But that’s something — ’

‘You’re going to knock on her door and she’s going to invite you in, how are you, how’s it going, and is she going to offer you a coffee? Or is the girl going to introduce herself: pleased to meet you, señora, I’d like to know what it was your husband did to me. Is that it?’

‘Go to hell, Valencia.’

‘No, that’s not it, is it? That’s not it. She’s the least of it, Javier, what matters least to you is what happened to her. You want to confirm that you didn’t make a mistake, isn’t that it? You want to be convinced. It’s idiotic, Javier, think it through, you have to see. We were all there. All of us, we were all there: are you going to cast doubt on what happened, when all of us were there? But let’s suppose it didn’t, suppose that didn’t happen. Tell me, what do you want to change? It can’t be changed now, Javier, that’s all done and finished. Cuéllar jumped from the fifth storey of a building: nothing more irreversible than that. And can I tell you something? No one’s missing him. We haven’t missed him in all these years. We’re better off without him. More than that: we’ve all forgotten him. He’s forgotten. The country forgot him. Even his party forgot him. Back then they were ashamed of him, Javier, you think anyone’s interested in his name appearing in the newspapers again? He was a despicable guy, that Cuéllar. You on the other hand are important: you’re important to the newspaper and important to the country. This country is a jungle, Javier. We count on a few people to help us get to the other side, safe and sound, without being devoured by savage beasts. And the beasts are everywhere. You look up and you realize. Everywhere, Javier. And they’re disguised, they’re where you least expect them. Let’s say you were mistaken. Let’s say we were mistaken. In any case, the guy was despicable. He’d demonstrated it a thousand times, he would have demonstrated it a thousand more. Now you’re going to turn him into a martyr, even if only for his widow? You’re going to go and confess that you did that drawing without really having seen, without being really sure. Very well. And then what? Can you imagine what the beasts could do with that? Can you imagine what will happen when the beasts realize they can cut your head off? And for something that happened so long ago, besides. Do you think they’re going to spare you? Well, they’re not. They’re going to cut off your head, the beasts of this beastly country are going to cut your head off. Everyone who hates you, who hates us, all the fanatics are going to go for the jugular. When they realize that you have doubts, that you’re not sure any more, they’re going to be all over you. No one can afford doubt these days, Javier. This is not a world for doubters. You have to look tough, because if not, you’ll get killed. You want to stand in front of them, take off your bulletproof vest and tell them to fire. And they’re going to fire, believe me. They’re going to shoot you. What good is that, Javier? Tell me, explain it to me, explain the utility of this whole ridiculous thing, because I can’t see any, I swear by my fucking mother I can’t see it. I don’t know what good this is going to do and I need you to tell me. Clearly, without any stupid metaphors, without any nonsense. Tell me, tell me in two words what good it’s going to do?’

‘None for you,’ said Mallarino. ‘But it might do her some good.’

Silence.

‘To hell with you, Javier,’ said Valencia. ‘To hell with you both.’

And he hung up.

So what he could have found out in twenty minutes he ended up finding out in two hours: Mallarino had to get out his yellowing address book that was falling apart, poor mangy little thing, and call a court reporter and some journalists at other papers — the national, news and police desks — and even a Member of Congress who owed him several favours. In a few minutes they were calling him back, each and every one of them, bending over backwards to meet Javier Mallarino’s immediate needs. His name helped, he had to admit it, but he was not the least bit concerned about abusing his reputation to achieve these modest ends, for, after all, were not these journalists and politicians the ones who had given him this reputation and the power that went with it? One thing for sure, Mallarino would have got the information much more quickly if the people he asked had been in possession of that information. But they weren’t: some of them had a hard time remembering Cuéllar; others didn’t even know he’d ever existed. Valencia was right: the man had been swallowed up by oblivion. Not surprising in this amnesiac country obsessed with the present, this narcissistic country where not even the dead are capable of burying their dead. Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Colombia: it covered them all, the good and the bad, the murderers and the heroes, like the snow in the James Joyce story, falling upon all of them alike. Right now there were people all over Colombia working hard to have certain things forgotten — small or big crimes or embezzlements or tortuous lies — and Mallarino could bet that all of them, without exception, would be successful in their endeavour. Ricardo Rendón had also been forgotten. Not even he had managed to be saved. Maybe Rodrigo Valencia had also been right about that: it was no use. What good would it do? he’d asked, and he meant something else, of course, but he’d managed to get Mallarino to retain the question and ask himself now, with some melancholy: what good would it do?

And now his four-by-four was entering the city, and the mountain road turned gradually into a suburban road and then the avenue, and the rain clouds seemed to pass them going the other way, stubbornly returning to where they’d come from: the house in the mountains. Mallarino detested this stretch where one found oneself suddenly surrounded by horrendous brick buildings, the temperature went up two or three degrees and drivers, who didn’t expect the change, began, in risky manoeuvres, to take their jackets off while driving. He had never had to take his jacket off: unlike most of the rest of the people who lived in the mountains, who left their houses all wrapped up in overcoats and scarves (and it was not unusual to see someone driving in leather gloves), Mallarino tended to dress in light clothes, no more than a shirt and corduroy blazer which changed colour when he brushed it with his hand, and preferred to leave his raincoat on the back seat of the car, ready for any eventuality. Samanta Leal, sitting beside him, had complained of the cold and ducked her head between her shoulders, like a chick, and had only recently started to relax. The sheet with the information was a tube of coiled paper; the woman’s hands gripped the tube as if she were pushing a lawnmower. Mallarino looked at them out of the corner of his eye, looked at the white knuckles and the delicate ring that was their only adornment, and then looked at Samanta’s profile, the strong angle of her jaw, the shoulders of an attentive student pressed against the back of the seat, the seat belt that crossed between her breasts like a hunter’s quiver. There, in the roll of paper, were the address and telephone number of Carmenza de Torres, who once was the wife of Adolfo Cuéllar and the mother of his sons and then his widow; Carmenza de Torres, who found herself obliged, after the death of her husband the congressman, to complete her studies in hostelry and tourism, which she’d given up at the time of her first pregnancy, and eventually ended up working at a travel agency, distinguishing herself in sales, becoming the owner’s personal assistant, marrying him and starting a new life with a new surname: a clean surname, a surname without memories. All this Mallarino found out with the help of his admirers. He also found out that the agency was called Unicorn Travel, and that the office was located across from the Parque Nacional and that Doña Carmenza went there every afternoon, from two till six, but never in the mornings (‘Every afternoon?’ Mallarino asked; ‘Yes, every afternoon,’ he was assured). Now, driving towards the ring road at forty kilometres an hour, Mallarino outlined the day’s itinerary for Samanta. He’d drop her off at her house so she could rest a little and change her clothes; he’d keep an appointment he had in the centre; they’d meet at the travel agency at three o’clock. Did that seem good to Samanta? She, staring straight ahead, nodded the way a condemned prisoner might nod.

An appointment in the centre. What would Magdalena be doing right now? He suddenly felt an urgent need to see her, to be with her and hear her voice, as if by doing so he could prove in some twisted way that not all of the past was changeable and unstable. Magdalena was also the past. But Magdalena was firm. Mallarino imagined her, by some sort of automatism, in front of a double microphone, two long silvery tubes. The desk in the image was made of wood and covered in a brown cloth; on top of the cloth was a stopwatch, so Magdalena could time her monologues without consulting the digital clock on the wall. But all this was mere speculation: he wasn’t even sure that Magdalena recorded her programmes in the morning. On the avenue, the traffic was moving slowly, more slowly than normal. The four-by-four passed between unfinished rust-coloured buildings and urban trees, those sad trees with their crowns that nobody ever sees and their asphyxiated leaves on the lower branches. Samanta had given directions and proposed the best routes, drawing a map with words that Mallarino could imagine in his head, and then she had gone quiet, as if hoping that the silence would be strong enough to make Mallarino forget her presence. ‘Where should I turn off?’ he asked. Her hand moved in front of the windscreen, like the incomplete shadow of a little dove, but not a word came from her mouth; and when he turned his head, trying all the time to keep an eye on the traffic, Mallarino realized that Samanta had started to cry. They were stealthy and weary tears, like those of someone who has already cried a lot: these were remainders, leftover tears. ‘Don’t cry, Samanta,’ he said; he felt immediately, irrevocably stupid; but searching through the archives of his head he could not find any other consoling words. He didn’t have very many, either, and he didn’t often use them. And he felt immediately, irrevocably stupid.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Samanta. She smiled, wiped both eyes with the same hand, smiled again. ‘It’s just that I was fine. I didn’t need this.’

‘I know,’ said Mallarino.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Ask away.’

‘What happens now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, just that: what happens now? Or rather: what’s going to happen this afternoon? What’s going to happen after three? Am I obliged to carry on as before? I don’t know what I’m going to be told, but, do I have that obligation? And what if I decide I don’t want to, that I don’t want any of this? Right now, here, before we get to my house. What happens if I’d rather forget all this again? What if I’d rather go back to how things were before that fucking ceremony? Don’t I have that right?’

‘Is that what you want, Samanta?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have a headache.’

‘We can stop and buy something.’

‘And I want to change my clothes,’ said Samanta. ‘I can’t stand wearing dirty clothes.’

‘Well, those dirty clothes look very good on you,’ said Mallarino. He hadn’t meant it to sound like a cheap flirtatious compliment but that’s how the words came out. Not that it wasn’t true: in the morning, when Samanta came out of Beatriz’s old room with her hair wet from the shower, but wearing the same blouse and the same skirt from the day before, Mallarino had found the sight strangely erotic. He didn’t say so to Samanta, of course: women have no reason to comprehend men’s idiotic impulses, or even put up with them or tolerate them, or endure every compliment thrown at them, no matter how well intentioned. That’s all his comment had been, and nevertheless he noticed or thought he noticed a sudden tension in Samanta’s muscles, her shoulders bracing against the back of her seat, her stretched-out legs folding up. Had it bothered her? ‘I have a headache,’ she said again, but talking to herself this time. A motorcycle with its lights on veered past; behind him was a pickup truck with darkened windows, and further back, a military van with rifle barrels sticking out: the President, or some minister? Now Samanta wiped her eyes again, rubbing them carelessly, the way you’re never supposed to do (a risk of seriously scratching the corneas). On her index finger, Mallarino noticed a wet trail like that of a snail.

‘Where should I turn?’ he said.

‘Pretty soon,’ said Samanta, ‘I’ll let you know.’ And after a silence: ‘This is fucking hell. Not knowing is not hell. The hellish thing is not knowing whether I want to know. Or if I’m better off the way I was before.’ Mallarino said yes, that he felt the uncertainty too, that he also — ‘No, you don’t know,’ Samanta cut him off. Mallarino sensed some hostility. ‘You can’t know. None of you can. People like you think you know, imagine you know, and it’s not true. If you only knew how insulting that is. Believing you know. Believing you can imagine. It’s not like that.’

‘You don’t understand, Samanta.’

‘It’s an insult. That you believe. That you imagine.’

‘That’s not what I meant to say,’ said Mallarino. ‘Don’t be like this, please.’

With a gesture that struck Mallarino as at once weak and authoritarian, Samanta pointed to a street with dark brick walls topped with broken glass: some transparent, some green, testimony to other, more innocent times when such strategies deterred thieves. ‘Turn down here. Then take the second right. But don’t miss it, or it’ll take forever to get back round.’ Samanta’s voice sounded fragile, as if it were catching somewhere. ‘That building, the only one there is,’ she said, or rather ordered, and raised her hand enough to point at a brick box with white aluminium-framed windows and net curtains behind the windows and silhouettes of women behind the net curtains: there, on a street of old Chapinero houses, Samanta’s building looked like something someone had forgotten. She pointed to a spot by the kerb where Mallarino could park: beside a tree with a thick trunk and roots growing over the pavement. A car must have just left, after the rain stopped, because a perfect dry rectangle of lighter grey was still visible on the dark grey surface.

Before they had stopped completely, with the wheezing murmur of the car’s engine still cutting off the softest syllables, Samanta said: ‘Fifteen, Señor Mallarino.’ A bicycle messenger went past, his right trouser leg tucked inside a fluorescent orange sock. ‘I was fifteen years old. My dad was away on a trip. He travelled a lot, an insurance salesman can travel a lot: Cali, Cartagena, Medellín, and, at some point, Caracas, Quito, Panama. I was at a party. My mum asked me specifically to come back early, because my dad was arriving home from a trip that night and we had to be there waiting for him. My mum’s life revolved around things like that. Having his dinner ready. His family waiting for him when he got home. I was a good girl, did what I was told. And that night, when I got home, I found my mum waiting in the kitchen. All the lights in the house were turned off, except for the one on the stove. You know the one? The little yellow light on the extractor fan, which was on even though nothing was cooking. And my mum there, sitting by the counter, eating fried pork rinds out of the bag. That’s something I’ll never forget: the crackling, pork rinds straight from the bag. She told me he hadn’t come home. At six the next morning we drove across the city, went into the airport car park. He always left his car at the airport: his trips lasted two days, never any longer. We went into the car park and we were driving around for a long time, until we found it. There was my dad’s car. I looked through the window to see what was inside. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I looked in. The windows were dirty, because it had rained. And do you know what I saw, Señor Mallarino?’ He gripped an imaginary bar; he waited for a terrifying or macabre revelation. ‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Samanta. ‘There was nothing inside. Not a key ring, not a single toll receipt, no loose change. The windows dirty and the car, inside, clean. Clean as if he were going to sell it that afternoon. I think my mum knew deep down. She didn’t seem worried: I thought that deep down she knew my dad had left. . and the weird thing is that none of this has ever been a problem for me, Señor Mallarino. What happened to my family has happened to hundreds of families, thousands. For me it’s never been a problem. But last night I began to ask myself stupid things. What did my dad’s leaving have to do with that night? Was there any link? No, what link could there be, I don’t see it. But is there one, even though I can’t see it?’ Mallarino saw her press her jaw to her chest, squeeze her eyes shut. ‘What I want to know is what happened here,’ Samanta said then. Her voice, damp and thick, had a sort of urgency in the rarefied air inside the car. ‘Here,’ said Samanta. She began to cry again, but her crying was more candid this time; it distorted her features, stole her beauty. Samanta was patting her belly and mouth, the expression on her mouth stretched. ‘What happened here,’ she was saying, ‘I want to know what happened here.’ Mallarino stared at her hands; he interrogated them, interrogated their tapping against her body; Mallarino didn’t understand. There, parked in front of her building, Samanta grimaced with impatience and her mouth suddenly released a pent-up breath.

It was a rapid movement: she put both feet up on the dashboard and lifted up her hips and pulled her green wool tights and her soft white knickers down with a single skilful shove, sticking both thumbs under the elastic, under both elastic waistbands at once, and pushing forward, not in a straight line but tracing a curve in the air like a bowl, like a smile. The mess of wrinkled clothes bunched around her ankles, and in a brief instant Mallarino saw the calves clustered with red spots and a violet oval on one thigh, where she had a bruise. Samanta separated her knees and opened her legs and all the light in the world invaded the four-by-four and illuminated the pale sex, straight, blond, sparse pubic hairs, the insolent vulva. Samanta’s hand closed over her vulva, moved away, then closed again with straight fingers over the diaphanous skin of her lips: ‘Here,’ said Samanta, ‘I want to know what happened here. Is this what you saw, Señor Mallarino? Was this what you saw twenty-eight years ago? What do you think? Has it changed a lot?’ Mallarino looked up and saw, in a window of the brick building, the silhouette of someone who’d pulled aside the net curtains to get a better view. No it wasn’t a curious man, not a peeping Tom: it was an older woman, and Mallarino managed to see her housecoat and her expression of revulsion before she hid behind the delicate white shadows of the curtains. He tried to turn round; he was prevented by his seat belt; Mallarino unfastened it and turned round to reach for his raincoat on the back seat. He found it on the floor (it must have slipped off the seat on the way down the mountain road) and grabbed it with one hand and threw it on top of Samanta, at first with irritated gestures, and then as if covering up a little girl with a chill. ‘Here, here, here,’ she was saying, and she covered her face with her hands.

Mallarino, without knowing why, began to address her familiarly. ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘Get dressed. Everything’s going to be OK.’

She sat up and folded her knees to her chest, hugged her legs. ‘I didn’t ask for this,’ he heard her say. ‘I was perfectly fine.’ Mallarino read the shame in her voice, and the exhaustion, and the bitterness and the terrible vulnerability.

‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ he told her. He stroked her hair. He desired her, and detested himself for desiring her. He looked towards the doorman’s booth to see whether the doorman had noticed anything. On the grey tree trunk somebody had engraved, with a knife, two names and a heart. ‘PAHY’, he read, before realizing that it wasn’t an H, but two Ts crossed with the same horizontal stroke.

‘Get dressed,’ he said to Samanta. ‘Go upstairs, get a bit of sleep. I’ll see you at three.’

* * *

Magdalena thought that having lunch there, a few steps away from the Matisse and Giacometti and Klimt drawings, would be exciting for Mallarino: judging by his reputation as an anchorite, as an old-sage-hidden-in-the-mountains, he no longer frequented the neighbourhood of La Candelaria as much as he used to in the old days, much less this museum, which still today, ten years after opening, shone as if it were brand-new. Magdalena had called that morning and reserved a table on the patio in the courtyard, but now she regretted it; after the rain, the Bogotá sky had cleared as if a curtain had fallen away, and now the midday light shone brightly on the high white walls, the aluminium tables, the paper place mats, and blinded the diners. They had walked there from Fifth Avenue, while she told him about the programme she’d recorded the previous afternoon and he complained about the filthy smells: the fried-food stands reusing the same oil over and over again but also the street dogs, the homeless people’s blankets beside building entrances, and also the shit, the shit that appeared by surprise on the corners, the origin of which it was best not to imagine. That assault on his senses contrasted strongly with the memory, still recent and raw, of what had happened with Samanta Leal. He mustn’t talk about that. He had to keep it to one side: there, in another world, in an alternative world with incomprehensible rules. Coming in through the Eleventh Street entrance, up the tall step and around Botero’s dark bronze hand, Mallarino had already made the decision not to talk about what he’d seen and heard back in the house in the mountains since the last time he was with Magdalena. One day had gone by, not much more than a day: centuries and centuries had come and gone. Now the sun was shining on the white walls and dazzling them and the waiter had brought a bottle of white wine, but white wine was not white, but golden: wine is sunlight held together by water. Where had he heard that before? Maybe Magdalena would remember, she was good at things like that. Now she was pouring the wine, and enjoying doing so; her short haircut suited her strong-boned face, her cheeks straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, her nose that descended from her eyebrows in a long elegant line. Trying all the time to keep at bay the bothersome images, the interfering words, he thought of Samanta Leal. If he didn’t mention her, if he didn’t mention the last few hours or the 3 p.m. appointment, maybe this time in Magdalena’s company could turn into a necessary and urgent moment of tranquillity. Let the world stop spinning: that’s all he asked. Let it stop revolving, let everyone be quiet. Yes, let there be a little silence so he could just hear this voice that was talking to him now, that husky and still smooth voice, the voice of a cello, one of those voices that paralyse a hand about to turn a dial, that translate the chaos of the world and convert its obscure jargon into a diaphanous tongue. Interpret this world for me, Magdalena, tell me what’s happening to us and what might happen now, what could happen to me now and what could happen to Samanta Leal, tell me how to remember what hasn’t happened yet. And suddenly there was that phrase again that kept coming back to him like a fibre of meat stuck in his teeth.

‘“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,”’ recited Mallarino. ‘Who said that?’

Magdalena chewed a couple of times.

‘The White Queen says it to Alice,’ she said: her mouth half-full, her lively eyes smiling. ‘Beatriz loved that book, I don’t know how many times we read it.’

But Beatriz was not here. Beatriz was away on a trip, Beatriz was always away, Beatriz never stopped, perhaps out of fear of not being able to take off again if she did. The White Queen says it to Alice. Beatriz loved that book. Yes, he’d read it to her too once or twice, or at least a few pages, and he remembered having seen her — in a hammock, on holiday — reading it by herself when she was old enough. The image of his daughter reading always moved him, perhaps because he saw on her face the same signs of intense concentration he already knew from Magdalena’s face, the same arrangement of muscles between the eyebrows and around the lips, and he couldn’t help but wonder about the purpose of such inherited traits, what evolutionary aim could be served by daughters making the same gestures as their mothers when a tale interested them. Beatriz loved that book: Magdalena had remembered: Magdalena always remembered.

‘Have you heard from her?’ Mallarino asked.

‘Yes. She wrote to me a couple of days ago. One piece of good news and one bad.’

‘Let’s see,’ said Mallarino. ‘Bad news first.’

‘They’re splitting up.’

‘That’s the good news.’

‘Don’t joke,’ said Magdalena. ‘She’s going through a tough time, poor thing. You should be thankful they don’t have kids.’

‘I’m thankful,’ said Mallarino. ‘So what’s the good news then?’

‘She’s coming to live in Colombia.’

‘But she already lives in Colombia.’

‘All right. She’s staying put in Colombia.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘She requested a transfer. I don’t know what it’s called, she didn’t really explain. She asked not to move around all the time. She asked to stay here.’

‘In Bogotá?’

‘No, no. In a place where she’s needed, Javier. Down in Meta. Or up in Cesar.’

‘She doesn’t know where?’

‘Not yet. She knows they’ll grant her the transfer, but she doesn’t know where she’ll be sent. She won’t be in Bogotá, that’s for sure. But we’ll see more of her.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because she told me. She told me we’d see her more often. She said: “We’ll see more of each other.” She said she’s been feeling lonely, that she’d been feeling lonely for months. And she would have told you the same, if you had a computer.’

But Mallarino realized it wasn’t a serious reproach: it was a game, a friendly wink, a dig in the ribs. Her infallible instinct told Magdalena that this was not a moment for serious reproaches. What had she noticed? How had she noticed? Oh, but that was Magdalena: a sublime reader of reality, and especially that circumscribed and impoverished reality, that melancholy and daunted reality that was Mallarino. ‘Well, we’ll keep her company,’ he said. ‘She’s not going to be lonely here.’ Beatriz’s husband was the youngest son of a family of conservative, Catholic Popayán landowners, who had a reputation, as far as Mallarino knew, of being on the wrong side since the beginning of the years of political violence. ‘I know more or less what that family’s like,’ Mallarino had said to her once, ‘and I don’t much like you going out with him.’ ‘Well, his family knows exactly who you are,’ answered Beatriz. ‘And they don’t like him going out with me at all.’ And now, a few years after that conversation and many after her own parents’ separation, Beatriz was splitting up with her husband. Juan Felipe Velasco, was his name: a blond guy with a cleft chin who crossed himself every time he was about to drive somewhere. Beatriz had learned to cross herself with him, and would have taught their children to cross themselves if they’d had any; but they hadn’t had any, and that was lucky; and now they were splitting up, they too were worn down by the diverse strategies life has to wear lovers down, too many trips or too much togetherness, the accumulated weight of lies or stupidity or lack of tact or mistakes, the things said at the wrong time and with immoderate or inappropriate words or those which, perhaps not finding appropriate or moderate words, were never said, or worn down too by a bad memory, yes, by the inability to remember what’s essential and live within it (to remember what once made the other happy: how many lovers had succumbed to that negligent forgetting), and by the inability, as well, to get ahead of all that wearing down and deterioration, get ahead of the lies, the stupidity, the lack of tact, the mistakes, the things that shouldn’t be said and the silences that should be avoided: to see all that, see it all coming from way off, see it coming and step aside and feel it blow past like a meteorite grazing the planet. See it coming, thought Mallarino, and step aside. For an indigenous tribe in Paraguay, or maybe it was Bolivia, the past is what is in front of us, because we can see it and know it, but the future is what is behind: what we do not see and cannot know. The meteorite always comes from behind, we don’t see it, we can’t see it. You need to see it, see it coming and step aside. You need to face the future. It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

He looked around, beyond Magdalena’s luminous face, and to his left, beyond the glass wall that separated the patio from the interior, and to his right, across the courtyard, towards the museum entrance. Two, three, four couples: how many would be splitting up right now? How many would be splitting up even without knowing it, heading slowly for disintegration? In the courtyard, a little boy in shorts was running after a minuscule bouncing ball. The ball was rolling towards the storm drains; the boy shouted, calling for help. And Samanta Leal? He hadn’t asked her if she was married, if she had children, someone with whom to share the suffering or at least disperse it. She was the same age as Beatriz, the same thirty-five years they’d both had in which to achieve so many things. That’s what Mallarino was thinking when someone from one of the nearby tables, a man who’d been eating on the other side of the glass, looked him in the eyes and stood up (his hands folding the napkin) and began to walk towards the open door. He waited until he was beside the table before speaking; when he did, Mallarino found the contrast between his size — and the size of the hand he extended in greeting — and his obsequious manner startling. ‘You are Javier Mallarino,’ he said, halfway between a statement and an enquiry.

Magdalena looked up. Her fork remained suspended in the air. Mallarino nodded. He shook the outstretched hand.

‘Thank you for your work,’ the man said. ‘I admire you, sir. I, uh, admire you very much.’

‘How the world has changed,’ said Magdalena when the man had gone back to his chair on the other side of the glass. The scene had visibly amused her: she spoke with irony, but also with flagrant satisfaction at the corner of her mouth, turned up in her ironic smile. ‘This is something I’ve never witnessed. Since when do such things happen to you?’

‘Since today,’ said Mallarino. ‘Or since yesterday. But I didn’t come into town yesterday.’

‘Can it be that people still read newspapers?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You could have done your Titanic pose,’ said Magdalena. ‘Given your fans a treat.’

Mallarino smiled down at his plate. ‘Don’t take the piss.’

He shifted in his chair, turning to one side and pressing his back against the cool aluminium, as if trying to get a better view of the place. Magdalena asked him if his hernia was bothering him, if he wanted them to get the bill and walk around for a while, and only then did he realize that yes, his hernia was bothering him (a dull ache in his tailbone, his left leg already uncomfortable). Magdalena knew. How pleasant that was, and how surprising to notice the persistence of the past, the stubborn presence between them of the years of their marriage. They knew each other well, but it wasn’t just that: it was, undoubtedly, having met so young, having started living together and gone through the first disappointments and then the long march of learning (and now they’d learned, but it was too late to apply the lessons). All that was still present, another guest at the table, and that’s what they owed the comfort to, the relaxed way Magdalena set her cutlery down together on the empty plate and, just as he’d done earlier, leaned back silently in her chair. Why had her second marriage failed? Nine years after leaving Mallarino, Magdalena had married an easy-going commercial lawyer, and anybody would have thought — second chances are easier to make the most of — that the relationship was definitive. It was not: Mallarino found out vaguely about it from the rumour mill and, once, from the ‘Pink Telephone’ section of El Tiempo that also carried a rumour about Pablo Escobar’s possible surrender. (In one of his cartoons of the time, Mallarino drew Escobar alongside the victims of his most recent terrorist attack. On one side of the box appears the priest Rafael García Herreros, wearing his cassock, and saying: ‘Don’t worry, my son. I know you’re basically a good man.’) Magdalena’s marriage ended in eighteen months; Mallarino never tried to find out why. Now he could. Did he want to? Now he could. A heavy cloud darkened the patio; Mallarino felt a chilly breeze and the pores of his skin closing up all of a sudden. Magdalena clenched her fists above her chest and raised her shoulders, and Mallarino had the unmistakable feeling, as concrete as a tug in the vertebrae, that it was getting late. That’s what he said to himself: I’m running out of time, or rather those words lit up his mind. He immediately realized, with some amazement, that he was not thinking about the hours of the day.

‘Come and live with me,’ he said.

She stood up as if she’d been expecting the request (there was no surprise on her face, or was Mallarino reading it wrong). Tidy girl that she was, she pushed the chair to tuck it under the table, and the legs made an irritating metallic sound against the cement floor.

‘Let’s go,’ she replied. ‘I have to get back to the studio.’

They walked down a corridor to the main courtyard. They crossed it, passing beside the stone fountain that was distractedly spitting out a squalid little stream. Mallarino managed to catch a glimpse of Lucian Freud’s Blond Girl, which he liked so much, but he immediately looked away, in case he accidentally caught sight of the study for The Guitar Lesson. When they came out on Eleventh Street, the sky had clouded over and the shadows had disappeared from the walls, and small groups of students were gathering on the steps of the library. They went down Seventh and turned north. Magdalena had taken Mallarino’s arm. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it a good idea?’

It wasn’t easy to walk on that crowded pavement whose traffic obliged them to make themselves small, to turn side-on so another pedestrian could get past with her briefcase, or his bag of vegetables, or a child dragged by the hand and forced to walk on tiptoe. ‘I had hoped, my dear,’ said Magdalena, ‘that it wouldn’t occur to you.’

They were passing in front of the marble plaques on the Augustín Nieto building, and Mallarino noticed a guy with long white hair who was copying the inscriptions, by hand, onto the pages of a notebook, or something that looked like a notebook; the guy was visible even from the other side of the street, for there, in the midst of the perilous crowds, his was the only figure keeping still.

‘I can’t do that, Javier,’ said Magdalena. ‘I can’t now. A lot of time has passed, and I have a life without you, and it’s a life I enjoy. I enjoyed the other night too, of course, I enjoyed it a lot. But I like my life the way it is. It has taken me years to get it together and I like it the way it is. I like solitude, Javier. At this stage in life I’ve discovered that I like my solitude. Beatriz hasn’t discovered it yet, but I think I can teach her. It would be a good gift, to teach my daughter how to be alone, to enjoy her solitude. I enjoy my solitude. You can understand that, I imagine. I think you can understand, can’t you? I think it’s too late now.’ Mallarino was not surprised that she used those words, almost the same he’d used to himself a few minutes earlier. ‘It’s never really too late, of course, it depends on the person. But what you’re proposing is not for me, it’s not for us,’ said Magdalena. ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’

From the other side of Jiménez Avenue, at the end of the oppressive windowless wall of the Banco de la República building, began the Parque Santander. Later, remembering this moment, Mallarino would wonder if that was when he thought of the day Ricardo Rendón died. It’s possible, he’d tell himself later, that he hadn’t been conscious of it at that moment, for his attention was on the agreeable pressure of Magdalena’s arm on his arm, on the scent of her hair, on the voice able to say, with that unpredictable sweetness, those things that pierced him to the marrow: ‘I had hoped that it wouldn’t occur to you,’ for example, or also this other one: ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’ But it had to be then, he would think, because it was just after pronouncing those words, there where you can see the sunshades of the shoeshine stands, that he stopped in the middle of the pavement and, without marvelling at the miracle, remembered once more those events he knew by heart although he’d never witnessed them.

He remembered the Chaplin film that Rendón went to see the night before, and also the profound but discreet depression overwhelming him during those days, and also the conversation with the managing editor of El Tiempo and the suggestion to go and rest in a clinic. Mallarino remembered all that, and also the blue pencil drawings that Rendón left at the newspaper office, beside the two recently published volumes of his political cartoons, and in his memory Rendón left the office after ten in the evening and went into La Gran Vía, listened to music and drank aguardiente and joked with the bartender, and arrived at his house on Eighteenth Street before midnight, sad but not drunk yet certainly tired. Mallarino remembered him planning, sleeplessly, his cartoon for the next day; also waking up and talking to his mother about what he had planned. Rendón went out, dressed as usual in full mourning, and Mallarino remembered him standing for a short time at the corner of Seventh Avenue and then going into La Gran Vía. In his memory, Rendón orders a Germania beer; he receives it on a tray; he lights a cigarette. He thinks of Clarisa, the young girl he’d fallen in love with in Medellín, so many years ago, and relives the displeasure and the girl’s parents’ protest; he thinks of Clarisa and her heroic stubbornness, her pregnancy, her forced confinement, her illness and death. He finishes his beer, takes out his pencil and draws one last picture (a diagram of straight lines calculating the path of a bullet penetrating the skull), and writes those seven words that Mallarino remembered so well: I beg not to be taken home, and then points the barrel of his Colt 25 at his temple. Mallarino remembered him doing what nobody ever saw: shooting himself. He remembered the head falling heavily to the table and the tray bouncing with a metallic jangling, the lips split by the blow and a broken tooth, the blood that begins to spill out (the blood that looks black running over the old wooden surface), and then he remembered him arriving at Dr Manuel Vicente Peña’s clinic, and remembered the doctor writing his report, choosing those words that Mallarino saw as if seeing them in black-and-white: stertorous breathing, subcutaneous haematoma, haemorrhage in mouth, right parietal lobe. The doctors perform a trepanation of the cranium to alleviate the pressure of the blood and a strong viscous spurt lands on the white floor. Mallarino remembered it and remembered the exact time of death, 6.20 in the evening. He remembered all that and heard Magdalena say: ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’

Mallarino understood that it would be futile to insist, or that the suggestion had been a mistake. He understood other things, as well, but these things were beyond immediate words, on a terrain of intuition similar to the intuition of faith. He felt tired, a sudden and treacherous tiredness, a child leaping onto his shoulders without warning. Then a movement distracted them: it was a man who approached with slow steps, leaning forward as if looking for a coin, and Mallarino remembered his features before he spoke: the nose, the ears, the moustache white and grey like pigeon shit. The man stretched out a hand and Mallarino saw the stains of shoe polish and the dry skin, and his hand closed around the man’s hand. The man’s handshake was strong and solid. Mallarino also clasped firmly.

‘You’re the cartoonist, sir,’ said the man. ‘I shone your shoes the other day and didn’t even recognize you, how very sorry I am.’

Mallarino stretched out his left arm and his watch appeared under the sleeve of his jacket. (He had thin wrists — Magdalena had always said he had womanly wrists — and when it was cold his watch strap loosened, sometimes swung right the way round, all to Magdalena’s immense amusement, who said that was exactly how women used to wear watches in the old days.) The dial moved slightly and rested against the slight prominence at the end of the ulna, the half-sphere of bone that some people touch when they’re worried. Mallarino took the face of his watch between thumb and forefinger. He thought he had time.

‘Are you free?’ he asked the bootblack.

‘Of course, sir, by all means,’ said the man. ‘I’m so sorry not to have recognized you the other day. Imagine, sir: a personage like yourself.’

Just after three, after saying goodbye to Magdalena on the university esplanade with a kiss on the lips and thinking that perhaps it might be the last one, after collecting his four-by-four from the car park on Twenty-fifth Street and driving north and then down the narrow road that ran through the Parque Nacional — a short but deceptive and sinuous road where one wouldn’t want to be caught at night — after leaving the car in the sort of half-moon that constituted the very centre of the park, Mallarino walked to the stone pool of the monument to Uribe Uribe, and from the edge he tried to pick out the travel agency on the other side of the street. According to the address, the place must be very close: it should be visible to anyone looking for it from there. Mallarino’s eyes stung as they always did when he came into town from his mountain refuge; now, even though he’d left the city centre, the pollution was still in his tear ducts, and his eyes were still stinging. The afternoon was cloudy but it wouldn’t rain now; there were no shadows on the pavements, but the open air of the park was warm and soft. Those in the park were feeling it too, the kite vendors, the children guarding parked cars or running around the pool, the young couples sitting on the grass. Mallarino felt they were looking at him as he looked across to the other side of the wide avenue, looking for Cuéllar’s widow’s travel agency. He found the large white sign made of hard plastic, the word Travel in small italics, the word Unicorn in imposing capitals; he imagined the sign lit up when night had fallen, casting its light across the whole pavement. Beneath the right-hand edge, in front of the window but far from the entrance, was Samanta Leal.

She was waiting for him. Her posture had the intentional inattention of someone waiting: everyone who waits knows or thinks they might be seen at any moment, seen by the person they’re waiting to meet, and their gestures, their mannerisms, the position of their legs and straightness of their back is never the same as it would be were they not waiting. Mallarino recognized the line of her shoulders and her hair, like a sheet of copper, and he recognized the handbag, which was the same one out of which she’d pulled, the previous day, the tiny voice recorder, the dishonest recorder, the notebook and pen. She had, indeed, changed her clothes: this morning’s white blouse was now a turquoise sweater that looked thin from a distance, and the skirt and tights were now replaced by trousers that gave her hips an established look, the air of a mature woman. Mallarino walked to the lights and waited for the traffic to stop. The cars and buses and trucks travelled in both directions, faces that passed in front of Mallarino’s face like projections on a screen, faces that existed in his life for a fleeting second and then sank back into nonexistence. Some faces looked at him with blank expressions and then passed to the next face, that of some other pedestrian stopped on the busy pavement, another blank face to look at with the same blankness; others didn’t even register his presence, but looked further away or closer, at the mountains, at the buildings, at an uninhabited portion of the visible world. Sometimes people want a rest from people. There was a time when he liked to be surrounded by people. Not any more: he’d lost that. It was one of the many things this life of his had swallowed up. If only we knew ten per cent, one per cent, of the stories that go on in Bogotá! If only Mallarino could close his eyes and hear what those who surrounded him at that moment were thinking! But it wasn’t possible; and we all go on like this, walking on pavements, stopping at traffic lights, surrounded by people but always deaf.

There, stuck in the little crowd that was going to cross the street, he thought about what was about to happen. Maybe Rodrigo Valencia was right and all this was a mistake, a regrettable mistake, the worst Mallarino could commit in his life. Maybe his prediction was correct: if he carried on with his intentions, if he went inside the travel agency with Samanta and talked to Cuéllar’s widow or listened to Samanta, he would find a transformed world when he left: a world (a country, and in the country, a city, and in the city, a newspaper) in which Mallarino would no longer be who he was now. After this conversation, no matter what it might contain, whatever might be said, the army of his enemies would come down on him without pity. Jackals, they were all jackals, who had spent their lives waiting for such a declaration of vulnerability. Because they would find out, of course they’d find out: whatever the conversation might contain and whatever might be said. It didn’t matter what revelations came out in Cuéllar’s widow’s office, and it didn’t even matter if there were any revelations at all, if the woman sent them away amid shouts and slaps without telling them anything new, or if she refused to speak, if she wielded the terrible revenge of silence: the silence that hurt Samanta so much, that for her would be the worst affront, the most distressing humiliation. All this was, in some measure, a humiliation for Samanta; but going through anxiety and daring and the affronting memory only to run up against silence would be the worst humiliation of all.

And even if it turned out that way, the jackals would find out and launch their attack. The important thing for them, thought Mallarino, would not be what happened in the past, but the cartoonist’s current uncertainty and what that uncertainty revealed. They would also humiliate him, and that was all they’d need to humiliate him: the question would be enough, the simple question that was perhaps already forming on Samanta’s tongue, that perhaps Samanta had been practising all day, choosing the words and the intonation, even choosing the expression on her face to not look more defenceless than necessary. Choosing her clothes, thought Mallarino, yes, Samanta had surely selected her outfit thinking of the question she was going to ask the widow of a dead congressman. For her there could be a variation of results, one possibility among many or at least among two; not for him, for, no matter what happened at the Unicorn travel agency, Mallarino would encounter on his way out his enemies of forty years pointing at him, egging on a crazed mob ready to judge him summarily and burn him at the stake, the stake of changeable, capricious public opinion. Mallarino the slanderer or simply irresponsible, Mallarino destroyer of a man’s life or simply unpunished abuser of the power of the media. Now he better understood what had happened twenty-eight years ago, when he’d given himself the pleasure of humiliating Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar; he understood the fervour with which the public had received the humiliation, that fervour disguised as indignation or condemnation. He had simply set the mechanism in motion, yes, he had lit the fire and then warmed his hands at the flames. . Now it was his turn. It didn’t matter who had right on their side. Justice and injustice didn’t matter. There was only one thing the public liked more than humiliation, and that was the humiliation of a humiliator. That afternoon Mallarino was arriving to give them that pleasure. What the dead man’s wife said would make no difference whatsoever: if he decided to go inside Unicorn Travel, Mallarino would no longer have the moral authority he had at that moment but would become a cheap rumour-monger, a sniper of other people’s reputations. Someone like that cannot be out on the loose. Someone like that is dangerous.

And now the light turned red and the traffic stopped and Mallarino could cross the street, cut through that heavy heat that forms like a cloud in front of a line of cars at a Bogotá traffic light. ‘Samanta!’ he shouted from the corner like an impatient child. But he was fifty steps from her, fifty steps from Unicorn Travel and the door that would change his life, and he could not be expected to be patient, he couldn’t be expected to wait till he’d covered that distance before declaring his presence to Samanta Leal. ‘Samanta!’ he shouted. She raised her head and turned in the direction of the shout and saw him; she lifted a timid but content hand, waved it in the air at first slowly and then enthusiastically, and something lit up in her face; and Mallarino thought that not even two days ago — the night of the ceremony, at the bar of the Teatro Colón, with a piece of plastic stuck on her little girl’s tongue — had he seen her look so lovely. And if he could go back to the night of the ceremony, the glory of the speeches and the medals and the pats on the back? If he could, would he? No he wouldn’t, thought Mallarino, and he was surprised to find himself thinking that. Again Rodrigo Valencia’s words appeared in his head, those impertinent words: What good will it do? What good is ruining a man’s life, even if the man deserves ruin? What good is this power if nothing else changed, except the ruin of that man? Forty years: everyone had been congratulating him lately, and only now had Mallarino realized that his longevity was not a virtue, but an insult: forty years, and nothing around him had changed. I beg not to be taken home: Mallarino peered at the phrase as one peers at a puddle of dark water, and thought he saw something glistening at the bottom. Again he thought of the homage; he thought of the stamp, of his own face looking out of the frame at him with its ferocious serrated edges. All that was far behind him now, very far: here, on this pavement on Seventh Avenue at this hour of the Bogotá afternoon, all that began to form part of his memory, and could be forgotten. Would Mallarino manage to? The memory has a marvellous capacity to remember the forgotten, its existence and its stalking, and thus allow us to stay alert when we don’t want to forget and forget when we choose to. Freedom, freedom from the past, that’s what Mallarino desired above all now.

There was no longer anything tying him to the past. The present was a weight and a nuisance, like the addiction to a drug. The future, however, belonged to him. It was all a question of seeing the future, of knowing how to see it clearly and divest ourselves for an instant of our propensity for deceit, the deceit of others and of ourselves, for the thousand lies we tell ourselves about what might happen to us. It is necessary to lie to ourselves, of course, because no one can stand too much clairvoyance: how many would want to know the date of their own death, for example, or foresee illness or misfortune? But now, arriving to meet Samanta, seeing her so lovely in her turquoise sweater, so solid against the blurry background of shop windows and their reflections, her mouth half open as if singing a secret song, Mallarino suddenly understood that he could do it: he understood that, even if he had no control over the unstable, volatile past, he could remember with total clarity his own future. Is that not what he did each time he drew a cartoon? He imagined a scene, imagined a character, assigned him features, wrote in his head the epigram that would be like a stinger dipped in honey, and after doing this he had to remember it to be able to draw it: none of that existed when he sat down at his drafting table, and nevertheless Mallarino was able to remember it, had to remember it to put it down on paper. Yes, thought Mallarino, the White Queen was right: it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

And then, in a lightning flash of lucidity, he remembered himself returning that very evening to his house in the mountains, climbing the stairs to his studio, sitting down in his chair, and he remembered exactly what he will do. He will glance over the cuttings pinned up on his corkboard: the Colombian President, the Latin American liberator, the German Pope. He will turn on the lamp and take a sheet of headed notepaper out of the filing cabinet and will pick up his fountain pen and write today’s date, and under the date the name Rodrigo Valencia. By means of this letter (that’s how you say it, isn’t it? So as to be formal and pretty, I like things to be well presented) I wish to notify you of my unconditional resignation (a little dramatic, I know, but that’s how it is, what can we do) from the newspaper that you, with such good fortune, have published during recent years (fewer than the number that I have spent drawing cartoons, it must be said). I take this decision after long and intense consultations with my pillow and other authorities, and hasten to emphasize that my decision, as well as unconditional, is irrevocable, definitive and all those long words. So, don’t bother wearing yourself out, brother, you’ll get nothing by insisting. He will go to the kitchen for a large plastic rubbish bag, black with an orange band, and begin chucking into it bottles of ink, blades, his pencil holder (the cut-off end of a rain stick) and with it charcoals, seven different kinds of leads, an unused spatula and a collection of nibs and brushes, well combed like the members of a school choir, and all will end up at the bottom of the bag. One by one, Mallarino will take the drawers out of his filing cabinet and empty them into the bag, and he will enjoy the sound of paper falling in cascades to the bottom, the static produced by the friction with the bag. He will pull off the skinny liberator and the haggard Pope, the recently elected President and recently killed guerrilla, and throw them in the bag. He will take two steps back, will look at the empty spaces appearing in the wake of his hand, clearings opening up in the middle of the dense jungle. He will take the slogan about the stinger and honey down off the wall and put it in the bag. He will take Daumier’s caricature down and put it in the bag.

And then he’ll do the same with all the rest.