Reputations

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘And for sending them?’

  ‘What about sending them?’

  ‘Don’t you use a computer?’

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

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

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