REPUTATIONS
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
For Justin Webster and Assumpta Ayuso
Identical noses do not make identical men.
Rodolphe Töpffer, Essai de physiognomonie
CONTENTS
I
II
III
Author’s Note
Translator’s Note
A Note on the Author
A Note on the Translator
By the Same Author
Also available by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
I
Sitting on a bench in Parque Santander, having his shoes shined before it was time for the tribute to begin, Mallarino was suddenly sure he’d just seen a long-dead political cartoonist. He had his left foot on the wooden crate and his back pressed against the cushion, so his old hernia wouldn’t start acting up, and he’d been letting the time slip by reading the local tabloids, the cheap newsprint blackening his fingers and the huge red headlines telling him of bloody crimes, sexual secrets, aliens abducting children from barrios on the south side. Reading the tabloids was a sort of guilty pleasure: something he only allowed himself when nobody was looking. That’s what Mallarino was thinking about – the hours he’d wasted here, given over to this perversion beneath the pale sunshades – when he looked up, away from the words as one does to remember, and finding his gaze met by the tall buildings, the ever-grey sky, the trees that had always been cracking the asphalt, feeling as though he were seeing it all for the first time. And then it happened.
It was just a fraction of a second: the figure crossed Seventh Avenue in his dark suit, untidy bow tie and broad-brimmed hat, and then turned the corner beside San Francisco Church and disappeared forever. In an effort not to lose sight of him, Mallarino leaned forward and stepped off the crate just as the bootblack was about to apply the shoe polish to the leather, and left an oblong mark on his grey sock: a black eye looking up at him from below accusingly, like the man’s half-closed eyes. Mallarino, who until now had only seen the bootblack from above – the shoulders of his blue overalls speckled with fresh dandruff, the crown cleared by an encroaching baldness – found himself facing a veiny nose, small protruding ears and a moustache that was white and grey, like pigeon shit. ‘Sorry,’ said Mallarino, ‘I thought I’d seen someone.’ The man went back to his work, the well-aimed strokes of his hand applying shoe polish to the instep. ‘Hey,’ he added, ‘could I ask you a question?’
‘Go ahead, chief.’
‘Did you ever hear of Ricardo Rendón?’
Silence reached him from below: one beat, then a second.
‘Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry,’ said the man. ‘If you want we can ask my colleagues after.’
His colleagues. Two or three of them were already starting to pack up their things. They were closing up chairs, folding cloths, putting brushes with scuffed-up bristles and dented tins of shoe polish away in their wooden crates, and the air, beneath the commotion of the evening traffic, filled with the banging of metal fitting together and lids being screwed on tightly. It was ten to five in the afternoon: since when had Bogotá’s bootblacks worked fixed hours? Mallarino had drawn them on a few occasions, especially in the early days, when coming downtown and going for a stroll and having his shoes shined was a way of taking the city’s pulse, of feeling that he was a direct witness of his own material. All that had changed: Mallarino had changed; the bootblacks had changed too. He almost never came into the city any more, and had grown used to seeing the world on screens or pages, to letting life come to him instead of hunting it down in its hiding places, as if he’d gradually realized that he’d earned this and now, after so many years, it was life that should come looking for him. The bootblacks, for their part, no longer ruled their workplaces – those two square metres of public space – by virtue of a pact of honour, but rather by belonging to a union: the payment of monthly dues, the possession of a laminated identity card, which they displayed at the slightest provocation. Yes, the city was different now. But it wasn’t nostalgia that overwhelmed Mallarino as he noted the changes, but a strange desire to hold back the march of chaos, as if doing so would also hold back his own interior entropy, the slow oxidation of his organs, the erosion of his memory reflected in the city’s eroded memory: as exemplified by the fact that nobody knew who Ricardo Rendón was anymore. Ricardo Rendón: the greatest political cartoonist in Colombian history, who had just walked by in spite of having been dead for seventy-nine years, had been devoured, like so many other figures, by the insatiable hunger of oblivion. They’ll forget me too one day, thought Mallarino. As he lowered his foot off the crate and raised the other one in its place, and as he shook the paper so that a wrinkled page would return to its proper place (a dexterous flick of the wrists), Mallarino thought: Yes, they’ll forget me too. Then he thought: But not for quite a while yet. And in that moment he heard himself say: ‘What about Javier Mallarino?’
The bootblack took a second to realize the question was directed at him. ‘Sir?’
‘Javier Mallarino. Do you know who he is?’
‘The guy who does the cartoons for the newspaper,’ the man said. ‘But he doesn’t come around here any more. He got tired of Bogotá, that’s what I was told. He’s been living out of town for ages now, up in the mountains.’
So there’s something that was still remembered. It shouldn’t have surprised him: his move at the beginning of the 1980s, before the years of terrorism had even begun and people had fewer reasons for leaving, had been national news. Waiting for the bootblack to say something, a question or some exclamation, Mallarino stared at the bald spot on the top of his head, that devastated territory with the odd strand of hair popping up here and there, with marks revealing the hours spent out in the sun: potentially cancerous spots, the place where a life might begin to be extinguished. But the man didn’t say anything more. He hadn’t recognized him. In a few minutes Mallarino would receive the definitive consecration, the orgasm corresponding to a forty-year-long intercourse with his trade, and this had not ceased to surprise him: people didn’t recognize him. His political cartoons had turned him into what Rendón had been in the 1930s: a moral authority for half the country, public enemy number one for the other half, and for all of them a man able to cause the repeal of a law, overturn a judge’s decision, bring down a mayor or seriously threaten the stability of a ministry, and all this with no other weapons than paper and Indian ink. And nevertheless on the street he was nobody, he could go on being nobody, since cartoons, as opposed to columns these days, were never accompanied by a photo of their perpetrator: for the average reader out on the street it was as if they drew themselves, free of any authorship, like a downpour, or an accident.
The guy who does the cartoons. Yes, that was Mallarino. Cartoon-obsessed monomaniac: that’s what he’d been called once, in a letter to the editor, by a politician whose vanity he’d wounded. Now his eyes, always tired, gazed at the inhabitants of downtown Bogotá: the lottery-ticket seller resting on the stone wall, the student waiting for a bus, walking north and looking over his shoulder, the couple stopped in the middle of the pavement, man and woman, both office workers, both dressed in dark blue suits with white shirts, holding both each other’s hands but not looking at each other. All of them would react at the mention of his name – with admiration or repugnance, never with indifference – but none of them would be able to identify him. If he committed a crime, none of them could pick him out of a police line-up of usual suspects: Yes, I’m sure, it’s number five, the bearded one, the thin one, the bald one. Mallarino, for them, didn’t have particular features, and the few readers who’d met him over the years often commented with surprise: I hadn’t imagi
ned you bald, or thin, or bearded. His was the kind of baldness that didn’t call attention to itself; when he met someone he’d only seen once before, Mallarino often received the same disconcerted comments: ‘Have you always looked like that?’ Or: ‘How strange. I didn’t notice when we met.’ Maybe it was his expression, which devoured people’s attention the way a black hole devours light: his eyes with drooping lids looking out from behind his glasses with a sort of permanent sadness, or that beard that hid his face like an outlaw’s bandana. His beard used to be black; it was still full, but had gone grey: slightly more at the chin and sideburns, slightly less on the sides of his face. It didn’t matter: it kept him hidden. And Mallarino was still unrecognizable, an anonymous being on the teeming streets. That anonymity gave him a puerile pleasure (a child hiding in forbidden rooms), and had calmed Magdalena, his wife back then. ‘In this country they kill people for less,’ she used to say to him when a general or a drug baron came off badly in one of his drawings. ‘It’s better that no one knows who you are or what you look like. It’s better that you can go out and buy milk and I won’t worry if you take your time.’
His gaze swept over the twilight universe of Parque Santander. It took just an instant to spot three people reading the paper, his paper, and he thought that all three would soon pass or had already passed their eyes over the letters of his name in print and then his signature, that clear upper-case letter that soon deteriorated into a chaos of curves and ended up disintegrating into a corner, the sad trail of a crashing plane. Everyone knew the space where his cartoon had always been: in the very centre of the first page of opinion columns, that mythic place where Colombians go to hate their public figures or find out why they love them, that great collective couch of a persistently sick country. It was the first thing anyone’s eyes saw when they reached those pages. The black square, the slender strokes, the line of text or brief dialogue beneath the frame: the scene that left his desk each day and was praised, admired, commented on, misinterpreted, repudiated in a column of the same newspaper or another, in the irate letter of an irate reader, in a debate on some morning radio show. Yes, it was a terrible power. There was a time when Mallarino desired it more than anything else in the world; he worked hard to get it; he enjoyed it and exploited it conscientiously. And now that he was sixty-five, the very political class he’d so attacked and hounded and scorned from his redoubt, mocked without consideration or respect for the ties of family or friendship (and he’d lost quite a few friends as a result, and even a few relatives), that very same political class had decided to put the gigantic Colombian machinery of sycophancy into action to create a public homage, which for the first time in history, and perhaps for the last, would celebrate a cartoonist. ‘This is not going to happen again,’ Rodrigo Valencia, publisher of the newspaper for the last three decades, said to him, when he called, diligent messenger, to tell him about the official visit he’d just received, the accolades he’d just heard, the intentions the organizers had just revealed. ‘It’s an offer that’s not going to be repeated. It would be silly to turn it down.’
‘Who said I was going to turn it down?’ asked Mallarino.
‘Nobody,’ said Valencia. ‘Well, I did. Because I know you, Javier. And so do they, truth be told. If not, why would they come here and ask me first?’
‘Oh, I see. You’re the negotiator. You’re the one who’ll convince me.’
‘More or less,’ said Valencia. His voice was guttural and deep, one of those voices that give orders naturally, or whose demands are accepted without a fuss. He knew it; he’d grown accustomed to choosing the words that best suited his voice. ‘They want to hold it in the Teatro Colón, Javier, imagine that. Don’t let the chance slip by, don’t be an idiot. Not for you, don’t get me wrong, you don’t matter to me. For the newspaper.’
Mallarino let out a snort of annoyance. ‘Well, let me think about it,’ he said.
‘For the newspaper,’ said Valencia.
‘Call me tomorrow and we’ll talk,’ said Mallarino. And then: ‘Would it be upstairs in the sala Foyer?’
‘No, Javier, this is what I’m trying to tell you. They’re going to have it on the main stage.’
‘On the main stage?’
‘That’s what I’m telling you, man. This thing’s serious.’
They confirmed it later – Teatro Colón, main stage, the thing was serious – and the place seemed only appropriate: there, under the fresco of the six muses, behind the curtain where Ruy Blas and Romeo and Othello and Juliet shared the same enchanted space, on the same stage where he’d witnessed so many beautiful artifices since he was a boy, from Marcel Marceau to Life is a Dream, he was now getting ready to play an artifice of his own creation: the favoured son, the honoured citizen, the illustrious compatriot with lapels wide enough to hold as many medals as necessary. That’s why he’d turned down the transport the Ministry had offered to put at his disposal: a bulletproof black Mercedes with darkened windows, according to the description over the phone from a tremulous-voiced secretary, which would have picked him up at his house in the mountains and dropped him off on the stone steps of the theatre, right below the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy, a young damsel arriving at the ball where she would meet her prince. No, this afternoon Mallarino had come down to the city in his old Land Rover and left it in a car park at Fifth and Nineteenth: he wanted to arrive on foot to his own apotheosis, approach like everybody else, appear suddenly at a corner and feel that his mere presence might send a tremor through the air, spark conversations, make heads turn; he wanted to announce, with this single gesture, that he hadn’t lost a speck of his old independence: he still had the clout to make any of them a target, and that wasn’t going to be changed by power or tributes or a bulletproof Mercedes with tinted windows. Now, on the bootblack’s chair, while the brush moved over his shoes (so quickly that it turned into a thick brown line, the way fans seem to no longer have blades as they spin into whirring white circles), Mallarino found himself asking a question that hadn’t been in his head before coming into town: what would Rendón have done in his place? If what had happened to Mallarino had happened to Rendón, what would he have done? Would he have received the tribute with satisfaction, or would he have accepted it with resignation or cynicism? Would he have refused it? Ah, but Rendón had refused in his own way: on 28 October 1931 he went into La Gran Vía, ordered a beer, drew a sketch and shot himself in the temple. In seventy-nine years, nobody had been able to explain why.
‘That’s three thousand five hundred, chief,’ the bootblack said. ‘You’ve got pretty big feet, sir, you know.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ said Mallarino.
‘All the better for me, you’ll pardon my saying,’ said the man.
‘That’s for sure,’ said Mallarino. ‘Better for you.’
Mallarino reached into his trouser pockets, the front and then the back, before moving to his grey raincoat where his fingers found, tangled in a number of threads like fish in seaweed, a till receipt and a greenish wallet, worn with use and falling apart. ‘Here,’ he said to the bootblack with calculated generosity, ‘and keep the change.’ The man flattened out the note, took an old leather wallet out of his wooden crate and tucked it inside, without folding it, sliding it in with precision. Then he raised his tired face, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again: ‘Do you want to ask them, chief?’
‘Ask what?’
‘About the gentleman you were looking for. I can ask my colleagues, it’s no trouble.’
Mallarino didn’t say no, he waved his hand in the air as if erasing the last words, and stammered a thank-you. But he liked the man, his natural courtesy, his good manners: endangered species in this inelegant, sour-faced, coarse Bogotá, hardly the South American Athens it used to flatter itself as being. Who had said that in Bogotá even the bootblacks quoted Proust? Must have been some Englishman, Mallarino said to himself, only an Englishman would be capable of perpetrating such a pronouncement. Of course, it had be
en said some time ago: said in another city, the disappeared city, the phantom city, the city of Ricardo Rendón, the city of La Gran Vía, the entrance of which Mallarino could have seen, a few decades ago, from the spot on the pavement where he now lingered distractedly, a short step from the hostile roadway, his gaze lost between the short buses with their brightly lit windows. But the place had disappeared. Many shops and many cafés had disappeared, La Gran Vía among them. Had Rendón’s ghost emerged from that phantom door? But it wasn’t a ghost: someone dressed like Rendón, someone resembling Rendón, with the same wide-brimmed hat, with the same unruly bow tie: that was all. Maybe, thought Mallarino, it was the proximity to La Gran Vía or to its former location that had set off that vision, or maybe it was one of those false memories we all have. What a strange thing memory is, allowing us to remember what we have not experienced. Mallarino clearly remembered Rendón strolling through the centre of Bogotá, meeting León de Greiff in El Automático, arriving home, drunk and alone and sad, in the early hours . . . Fictitious memories, invented memories. There was no reason to be surprised: it was impossible, on a day like today, to pretend that Rendón had no part in his thoughts. The gentleman you were looking for. No, he wasn’t actually looking for him: rather he was on his way to replace him, to occupy his throne or inherit his sceptre or whatever imbecilic metaphor like the ones he’d read in two or three opinion columns by people as well informed as they were affected, as good at remembering as at brown-nosing. ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’: some free association had brought that phrase to mind. Where was it from, and what was it referring to? But then he stopped thinking of it, because he’d glanced again at his watch and the angle of the hands turned into a reproach: was he even going to arrive late for his own coronation?
He began to walk against the flow of the crowd along Seventh Avenue, crossing Jiménez Avenue and Rosario Square into Candelaria, dodging street vendors determined to sell everything that could be sold – buy cigarettes, buy cheap gold, buy toy cars or polished emeralds, buy umbrellas or shoelaces, buy lollipops with chewing gum centres, chewing gum without lollipops, chocolate-covered raisins – and thinking that in downtown Bogotá one always had the sensation of walking against the flow, the afternoon crowds like a strong wind across the bow. Determined to overcome the resistance, Mallarino lowered his head, raised his shoulders and stuck his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, the unfathomable depths of which never ceased to surprise him. And that’s what he was thinking about, the nooks of his raincoat he seemed not to have completely explored, when he heard the clicking of high heels behind him, or rather he realized he’d heard it when the heel-clicking ended with a hand on his shoulder, as delicate as a falling leaf, and turned round, half surprised and half curious, to find the face of Magdalena, her hair so fair the grey ones blended in, her slender eyebrows arched and her smile ironic: the whole landscape of features Mallarino had once known the way he now knew the view from his window.
Reputations Page 1
