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 ove
r 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.’
Reputations Page 12
