‘I didn’t wake up, at least, I don’t remember being woken up. And your daughter?’
‘No. She was still out cold, in another world.’
‘Has she told you?’
‘What?’
‘Has she told you that she didn’t hear anything?’
‘Well, no,’ said Mallarino. ‘I’ve never asked her. We’ve never talked about that night. The truth is I’ve never talked about that night with anybody: I’ve never had any reason to. This is the first time in twenty-eight years, I mean, and the effort is not inconsiderable. I hope you’ll keep that in mind.’
‘Tell me about the shouting.’
‘The shouts came pouring down the stairs like a landslide, Samanta. I don’t know what went through my head, but I wasn’t the only one: all of us who were in the room stopped what we were doing. Drinks were left on the table. Conversations ended mid-sentence. Those who were sitting stood up. In my memory even the music was turned off, but it’s impossible that the music would have stopped automatically at that exact moment, and nevertheless I remember it like that: the music stopped playing. Your memory does things, you know? Your memory turns off music and gives people beauty spots and changes the locations of friends’ houses. We began to walk towards the stairs, and at that moment Adolfo Cuéllar came down them. That’s how I remember it: Cuéllar came down first. I don’t know when he’d gone up, or what for. He hadn’t asked me if he could see the upper floor of the house, or asked me where the bathroom was, or anything like that. One second he was there, in the living room with us, I don’t know whether saying goodbye or looking for his coat that he’d taken off, if he’d been wearing a coat, and the next moment being chased down the stairs by Señor Leal’s shouts. “Hey,” he was shouting, “hey, come here.” The shouts came in time with his footsteps, pummelling down the stairs like a landslide, Samanta, his loud and hurried footsteps. “What happened here? What did you do to my little girl?” And what happened next I remember like this: all the guests in the corridor leading to the stairs, or a good many of us in the corridor and the rest out here, under that arch, there where the corridor begins. It was like a bottleneck, like a funnel. Cuéllar came down first. He passed me but I didn’t stop him to ask him what was going on. It didn’t seem necessary. Or maybe it didn’t even occur to me. Your dad had come down by then too and he was shouting at Cuéllar across the group of people: Valencia, Gómez, Santoro, Elena, a group that had got in between your dad and Cuéllar purely by instinct, the instinct to avoid a fight. And this is something I’m never going to forget: your dad wanted to smell Cuéllar’s hands. That’s what he was shouting: “Give me your hands! Let me smell your hands!” And he kept insulting him: “Let me smell your fingers, you son of a bitch!” I kept going towards the staircase and headed up. I needed to know what had happened. Or maybe that wasn’t it: not that I needed to know what had happened, but needed to make sure nothing had happened to Beatriz. At that moment Beatriz was much more important to me than you, what can I say. The door to my room was ajar, and I remember having thought, as I walked towards it, that it was odd, because if your dad had been here and had rushed out, wasn’t it strange that he would have stopped to adjust the door. That’s what I was thinking as I opened it. First I saw the blanket, the airline blanket, on the floor, and then I saw you, Samanta. I saw you still asleep, I mean unconscious, but lying face up, not on your side as I’d left you last time, but lying face up and with your skirt raised a little. You had your legs apart, or one leg bent, I think that was it, one leg bent. I looked away, out of discretion, you understand, but I didn’t turn my head fast enough, and I did see something. Then I went around the bed to make sure Beatriz was all right. There I was, on the other side of the bed, crouched down by my daughter’s face, when your father came in and with a quick glance held me responsible for everything. He lifted you up and carried you out. It looked perfectly normal, you with your arms around your daddy’s neck, like all little girls and all fathers. But what wasn’t normal was his left hand, which was gripping your bottom, not to support you, but as if covering you, covering up your underwear. I followed him down the stairs. The dogs had come in, I imagine they were attracted by the uproar, and had started to bark. You and your father left, and from the front door I watched you get in the car, or I watched him put you into the back seat, then get in himself and start the engine and put it in reverse. I remember it had started to rain, or to drizzle: I noticed when he turned on his headlights and I suddenly saw drops. And I stood there for a moment, watching the raindrops floating in the air, and when the car had gone out through the gate I closed the door and went back inside and realized that Adolfo Cuéllar had left too. The dogs were still barking. The fire had gone out. Someone, I don’t remember who, asked for his coat. People began to leave.’
‘And the party was over,’ said Samanta.
‘Exactly,’ said Mallarino. ‘The next day I drew the cartoon. And the day after that it was published.’
In those days, subscribing to a newspaper was to expect, every morning, the transformation of the world, sometimes as a brutal jolt to all that you knew, sometimes as a subtle access to a removed reality: the shoemaker’s shop visited by elves during the night. After his move, the first thing Mallarino did was to make sure all the paper boys had the correct address, for one could do without coffee and without breakfast, without running water and without a phone, but not without the newspaper waiting on the doorstep, damp from the recent fog, still cold with the early morning mountain chill, but ready for Mallarino to open the way a child – still in his pyjamas, sleep in the corners of his eyes – opens Christmas presents. Wasn’t it Rockefeller who had them make him his own version of the New York Times, an adulterated version with all the bad news expunged? Mallarino had never been able to understand that: for him it was the indignation or rage or hatred that kept him alive. How could anyone renounce the intense feeling of superiority one feels when hating someone? It was the emotion that made mornings make sense. That morning, Mallarino went directly to the opinion page. And there was his black-framed square, which this time he’d drawn a little thicker, and in the centre of the box, a sort of promontory that looked like it was made of earth, something like a small hill. At the base of the hill, surrounding it, there was a crowd of heads with long straight hair, all seen from the back, some adorned with a girlish ribbon. On top of the hill, on the apex of the headland, was Adolfo Cuéllar – there were Adolfo Cuéllar’s bones and cartilages – dressed in a diamond-patterned waistcoat, the lines of which were strained by the prominent belly. He had his arms open, as if wanting to embrace the world, and his freckled face looked towards the sky. Mallarino had written the caption the way Ricardo Rendón used to: putting on record the name of the character and putting a dash before his fictitious words, as if it were a novel, so that this was what was read (what millions of people were reading at that very moment) on the most read page of El Independiente:
Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar – Suffer the little girls to come unto me.
It wasn’t the first time Mallarino had drawn an ‘out-of-context cartoon’, as he called those caricatures without an obvious link to an immediate reference, a piece of news or something that was common knowledge. But it had never felt as natural as this time. The image had formed in his head the morning after the party, as soon as he had a moment of solitude in the new house and the strangeness forced him to take refuge in his work routine in order not to give in to melancholy. He was still shocked by the confrontation – because it had been a confrontation, a moment of violence – and had woken up feeling brutally fatigued, like someone who’d just had an accident. The tension in his shoulders and neck, the tension in his waist, the pain of his hernia that appeared at moments like that and shot down his left leg . . . he took a long shower and then, still in his bathrobe, began to draw. He didn’t feel indignation or rage, but rather something more abstract, like disquiet, almost like the awareness of a possibility . . . Of a power, yes, that w
as it: the awareness of an imprecise power. In twenty-five minutes, not counting the time it took to assemble his materials, the drawing was finished. Mallarino poured himself a beer, lit a cigarette and sat in the garden with the novel he was reading at the time. ‘Last night,’ he read, ‘as I reached into the chest where I store my papers, the creatures climbed up my forearm, waving their little legs, their antennae, trying to get out into the fresh air.’ The reptiles crawled over the narrator’s skin, and Mallarino thought of Cuéllar, remembered his pleading and his bones and his cartilages and his flattery, and the narrator meanwhile declared his infinite repugnance. And now that the cartoon was out there in the real universe where opinions have their effects and reputations are feeble, there was no turning back, nor did Mallarino want there to be.
Rodrigo Valencia was in the habit of phoning him on days a special cartoon came out, because, even though he had seen and commented on the drawing the previous day, he thought it was not excessive to offer the cartoonist moral support when his work went out into the world. But this morning it wasn’t Valencia who phoned first, but Gerardo Gómez. ‘Oh man, that takes spunk,’ said Gómez. ‘And there I was asking if you’d gone soft on us. As if!’ Valencia, who phoned next, thought it was a harsh but necessary declaration (or maybe he said denunciation): there were certain things that had to be said and only a caricature could say them correctly. ‘If you don’t say it, nobody says it,’ he added. ‘OK, go get some rest. Here at the office we’re ready for whatever’s coming.’ They didn’t have long to wait for the calls of complaint: from Cuéllar’s secretary, from a woman with a screechy voice, from a lawyer who claimed to be representing him and was determined to instigate the appropriate legal actions. ‘But don’t worry, Javier, nothing’s going to happen,’ said Valencia. ‘Suing over a cartoon is like admitting the charges. Besides, you’re you, let’s not kid ourselves, and this newspaper is this newspaper.’ There was a letter to the editor: ‘We protest in the most emphatic way . . . This unjust attack on the image of one of our most distinguished public servants . . . We, who have ardently defended our fatherland, denounce the partisan use of the national means of communication . . .’ It was signed ‘Friends of Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar’; for Mallarino, the fact that the letter was, in practice, anonymous, just as bombastic and falsely elegant as the anonymous threats, differing only in its lack of capital letters and spelling mistakes, confirmed, in an imprecise, inexplicable and maybe superstitious way, the validity of the drawing and what the drawing suggested. What the drawing suggested: neither declared nor denounced, thought Mallarino; it was like a whisper at a meeting, a sidelong glance, a private finger-pointing. Cartoons had rare chemical properties: Mallarino gradually noticed that the defence, any defence Cuéllar or anyone else might make for him, sunk him further into disrepute, as if the true disgrace was mentioning the cartoon. What was the mysterious mechanism that turned a journalistic attack into a kind of quicksand where simply making a fuss was enough to make one sink further and irremediably? Mallarino realized that, by not tying his attack to a concrete and verifiable piece of news, by allowing himself to be rather gratuitous, he made defence impossible or ridiculous: it’s impossible to answer something unsaid, unless you do so precisely by saying it. As if that were not enough, the gratuitous attack enjoyed a longer life. By the following Friday, when Magdalena brought Beatriz over to spend the weekend with her father, the cartoon should have fallen into oblivion, dragged away or obliterated by current events which never let up (the new President and his imminent inauguration, maybe, or maybe the earthquake that had killed so many people in a small, nearby country), or at least having passed down the list of that capricious and voluble monster, the newspaper reader’s priorities. But that was not the case: it had not fallen into oblivion; it had not slipped down the list of priorities: it had taken on a life of its own and was wandering the city, loose and hazardous, ricocheting around corners.
Or that, at least, is what Magdalena wanted to say from the very moment of her arrival. Mallarino opened the door, said hello with a hug, felt a surge of desire as he touched her blue blouse: he’d always liked that blouse, the way it accentuated the curve of her breasts, and briefly fantasized about the possibility that she had chosen it on purpose. A new sincerity had established itself between them since the incident: maybe, thought Mallarino, it was the awareness of the proximity of danger, of the bad things that had grazed their lives without touching them, for Magdalena, with feminine wisdom, had overlooked Mallarino’s inattention to the abandoned drinks to concentrate on what happened afterwards, which was really serious and dangerous. She had something to tell him, Magdalena said with a vague tension in the way she moved, would he mind if she came in for a while? And there, both sitting at the dining-room table after eating with Beatriz (as they used to do, thought Mallarino without saying so, as they used to do in the world they had mislaid and would have to recover), each holding a cup of steaming tea, as they waited while the little girl showered and put her dirty clothes in the hamper and cleaned her teeth with a toothbrush with a handle the shape of a very skinny fairy, Magdalena described a scene in which the opinion page of El Independiente appeared one day on the bulletin board at the Cuéllar boys’ school, and one of them, the eldest, got into a fist fight with a classmate who made a disagreeable comment about his father. ‘Can you imagine?’ said Magdalena with something that might have been consternation but could also mean something else. ‘At the school!’ Mallarino was listening to her story, but his attention was not on it, but rather on the sudden complicity bathing them at that moment, a connection between them they hadn’t felt for a long time, or was it perhaps the rare emotion the joint protection of a child produces.
‘Has she asked anything?’ said Mallarino.
‘Nothing,’ said Magdalena, ‘she hasn’t said anything.’
‘And what about the Leal girl? Do we know anything?’
‘No, nothing. We’ll see what happens when school starts again.’ Magdalena spoke in a soft voice, in those low but fine-tuned notes that only she was able to modulate, and Mallarino desired her again; he allowed himself to cast a direct glance at her breasts, remember them fleetingly, letting his eyes show that memory; Magdalena pretended not to notice, although women always noticed those things, and didn’t fold her arms and her face showed no sign she felt uncomfortable. She said goodbye affectionately, stroking Mallarino’s arm, and he was left alone with his daughter in his new house. This was an unprecedented kind of solitude for him at that moment: he was fascinated by the novelty of the feeling, undoubtedly related to the instinctive anxiety at having sole responsibility for Beatriz and her well-being, at least for the next forty-eight hours (a vertiginous figure). This emotion brought tears to his eyes: he felt ridiculous, mocked himself. In the mist of those new impressions he thought of Cuéllar and Cuéllar’s sons, who he’d never seen, and in his mind he imagined, vivid and mobile and bright like a film, a scene of a fist fight in a school playground, and he could almost see clothes tearing against pavement, bruises on faces, dark blood and tears, and he could almost hear the sound of the blows, bones colliding with bones. But the scene soon vanished, because Beatriz, with an irresistible smile of enthusiasm, had pulled out an old deck of cards with battered corners from her little pink knapsack, and was now asking her father to play manotón in spite of the fact that he’d explained to her countless times that playing the game with just two was no fun at all.
At the end of August, when classes resumed, Beatriz brought home the news (but it wasn’t so much news as a casual mention, an offhand comment) that Samanta Leal wasn’t there any more. She didn’t mention her again. So, with dismissive ease, the girl disappeared from Beatriz’s memory and perhaps that of the whole school, and Mallarino thought that he too, finding himself in the same situation, would have done the same: created a void of silence around the child, a closed and hermetic oblivion where what happened, not existing in the memories of those around her, would soon stop exi
sting in her own memory. Change schools, change neighbourhoods, change cities, change something, keep changing, change to leave behind, change to erase: a true pentimento, the correction to a canvas after a change of heart, an image painted over another, a brushstroke of oil paint on top of other brushstrokes. That was perhaps what had happened in the case of Samanta Leal, because oil paint cannot be erased, but can be corrected; not eliminated, but buried under new layers. It was easy to correct a child’s life: just a couple of radical decisions and a real will, a real commitment to the correction, and that was all. Samanta Leal’s parents had decided to do that, and that was to be respected; Mallarino talked about it once with Magdalena, and Magdalena agreed. As the weeks went by, and the months, Samanta Leal also began to disappear from their memories, and what should have surprised them, but didn’t surprise them, was not remembering her even when they talked about what was happening to Adolfo Cuéllar.
First there were rumours. ‘The Witches’ Post’, the gossip section of a weekly magazine, ran a story about how Cuéllar and his wife had been at the centre of a small scandal in the queue for a cinema on Sixty-third Street. Later, El Tiempo published in its ‘women’s section’ – the word Women headed the page in hollow letters, barely an outline – a half-page interview in which the congressman’s wife spoke with pleasure about charity bazaars, literacy drives, donations to food banks and also to blood banks, and Mallarino was sure he was not the only one surprised or puzzled by the omission of any mention of Adolfo Cuéllar, whose influences, direct or indirect, had made the donations and drives and bazaars possible. ‘Señora Cuéllar’, read the text, ‘preferred discreetly that we not talk about her husband. “Dirty laundry gets washed at home,” she told us.’
Reputations Page 8