Reputations

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘To collect Beatriz?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘But more people see them,’ said Valencia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Wait one second. A meeting?’

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

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

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

  ‘He’s an idiot.’

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

  ‘Not to eat my food, you mean.’

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

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

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

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

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