From the other side of Jiménez Avenue, at the end of the oppressive windowless wall of the Banco de la República building, began the Parque Santander. Later, remembering this moment, Mallarino would wonder if that was when he thought of the day Ricardo Rendón died. It’s possible, he’d tell himself later, that he hadn’t been conscious of it at that moment, for his attention was on the agreeable pressure of Magdalena’s arm on his arm, on the scent of her hair, on the voice able to say, with that unpredictable sweetness, those things that pierced him to the marrow: ‘I had hoped that it wouldn’t occur to you,’ for example, or also this other one: ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’ But it had to be then, he would think, because it was just after pronouncing those words, there where you can see the sunshades of the shoeshine stands, that he stopped in the middle of the pavement and, without marvelling at the miracle, remembered once more those events he knew by heart although he’d never witnessed them.
He remembered the Chaplin film that Rendón went to see the night before, and also the profound but discreet depression overwhelming him during those days, and also the conversation with the managing editor of El Tiempo and the suggestion to go and rest in a clinic. Mallarino remembered all that, and also the blue pencil drawings that Rendón left at the newspaper office, beside the two recently published volumes of his political cartoons, and in his memory Rendón left the office after ten in the evening and went into La Gran Vía, listened to music and drank aguardiente and joked with the bartender, and arrived at his house on Eighteenth Street before midnight, sad but not drunk yet certainly tired. Mallarino remembered him planning, sleeplessly, his cartoon for the next day; also waking up and talking to his mother about what he had planned. Rendón went out, dressed as usual in full mourning, and Mallarino remembered him standing for a short time at the corner of Seventh Avenue and then going into La Gran Vía. In his memory, Rendón orders a Germania beer; he receives it on a tray; he lights a cigarette. He thinks of Clarisa, the young girl he’d fallen in love with in Medellín, so many years ago, and relives the displeasure and the girl’s parents’ protest; he thinks of Clarisa and her heroic stubbornness, her pregnancy, her forced confinement, her illness and death. He finishes his beer, takes out his pencil and draws one last picture (a diagram of straight lines calculating the path of a bullet penetrating the skull), and writes those seven words that Mallarino remembered so well: I beg not to be taken home, and then points the barrel of his Colt 25 at his temple. Mallarino remembered him doing what nobody ever saw: shooting himself. He remembered the head falling heavily to the table and the tray bouncing with a metallic jangling, the lips split by the blow and a broken tooth, the blood that begins to spill out (the blood that looks black running over the old wooden surface), and then he remembered him arriving at Dr Manuel Vicente Peña’s clinic, and remembered the doctor writing his report, choosing those words that Mallarino saw as if seeing them in black-and-white: stertorous breathing, subcutaneous haematoma, haemorrhage in mouth, right parietal lobe. The doctors perform a trepanation of the cranium to alleviate the pressure of the blood and a strong viscous spurt lands on the white floor. Mallarino remembered it and remembered the exact time of death, 6.20 in the evening. He remembered all that and heard Magdalena say: ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’
Mallarino understood that it would be futile to insist, or that the suggestion had been a mistake. He understood other things, as well, but these things were beyond immediate words, on a terrain of intuition similar to the intuition of faith. He felt tired, a sudden and treacherous tiredness, a child leaping onto his shoulders without warning. Then a movement distracted them: it was a man who approached with slow steps, leaning forward as if looking for a coin, and Mallarino remembered his features before he spoke: the nose, the ears, the moustache white and grey like pigeon shit. The man stretched out a hand and Mallarino saw the stains of shoe polish and the dry skin, and his hand closed around the man’s hand. The man’s handshake was strong and solid. Mallarino also clasped firmly.
‘You’re the cartoonist, sir,’ said the man. ‘I shone your shoes the other day and didn’t even recognize you, how very sorry I am.’
Mallarino stretched out his left arm and his watch appeared under the sleeve of his jacket. (He had thin wrists – Magdalena had always said he had womanly wrists – and when it was cold his watch strap loosened, sometimes swung right the way round, all to Magdalena’s immense amusement, who said that was exactly how women used to wear watches in the old days.) The dial moved slightly and rested against the slight prominence at the end of the ulna, the half-sphere of bone that some people touch when they’re worried. Mallarino took the face of his watch between thumb and forefinger. He thought he had time.
‘Are you free?’ he asked the bootblack.
‘Of course, sir, by all means,’ said the man. ‘I’m so sorry not to have recognized you the other day. Imagine, sir: a personage like yourself.’
Just after three, after saying goodbye to Magdalena on the university esplanade with a kiss on the lips and thinking that perhaps it might be the last one, after collecting his four-by-four from the car park on Twenty-fifth Street and driving north and then down the narrow road that ran through the Parque Nacional – a short but deceptive and sinuous road where one wouldn’t want to be caught at night – after leaving the car in the sort of half-moon that constituted the very centre of the park, Mallarino walked to the stone pool of the monument to Uribe Uribe, and from the edge he tried to pick out the travel agency on the other side of the street. According to the address, the place must be very close: it should be visible to anyone looking for it from there. Mallarino’s eyes stung as they always did when he came into town from his mountain refuge; now, even though he’d left the city centre, the pollution was still in his tear ducts, and his eyes were still stinging. The afternoon was cloudy but it wouldn’t rain now; there were no shadows on the pavements, but the open air of the park was warm and soft. Those in the park were feeling it too, the kite vendors, the children guarding parked cars or running around the pool, the young couples sitting on the grass. Mallarino felt they were looking at him as he looked across to the other side of the wide avenue, looking for Cuéllar’s widow’s travel agency. He found the large white sign made of hard plastic, the word Travel in small italics, the word Unicorn in imposing capitals; he imagined the sign lit up when night had fallen, casting its light across the whole pavement. Beneath the right-hand edge, in front of the window but far from the entrance, was Samanta Leal.
She was waiting for him. Her posture had the intentional inattention of someone waiting: everyone who waits knows or thinks they might be seen at any moment, seen by the person they’re waiting to meet, and their gestures, their mannerisms, the position of their legs and straightness of their back is never the same as it would be were they not waiting. Mallarino recognized the line of her shoulders and her hair, like a sheet of copper, and he recognized the handbag, which was the same one out of which she’d pulled, the previous day, the tiny voice recorder, the dishonest recorder, the notebook and pen. She had, indeed, changed her clothes: this morning’s white blouse was now a turquoise sweater that looked thin from a distance, and the skirt and tights were now replaced by trousers that gave her hips an established look, the air of a mature woman. Mallarino walked to the lights and waited for the traffic to stop. The cars and buses and trucks travelled in both directions, faces that passed in front of Mallarino’s face like projections on a screen, faces that existed in his life for a fleeting second and then sank back into nonexistence. Some faces looked at him with blank expressions and then passed to the next face, that of some other pedestrian stopped on the busy pavement, another blank face to look at with the same blankness; others didn’t even register his presence, but looked further away or closer, at the mountains, at the buildings, at an uninhabited portion of the visible world. Sometimes people want a rest from people. There was a time when he liked to be surrounded by people. Not any more: h
e’d lost that. It was one of the many things this life of his had swallowed up. If only we knew ten per cent, one per cent, of the stories that go on in Bogotá! If only Mallarino could close his eyes and hear what those who surrounded him at that moment were thinking! But it wasn’t possible; and we all go on like this, walking on pavements, stopping at traffic lights, surrounded by people but always deaf.
There, stuck in the little crowd that was going to cross the street, he thought about what was about to happen. Maybe Rodrigo Valencia was right and all this was a mistake, a regrettable mistake, the worst Mallarino could commit in his life. Maybe his prediction was correct: if he carried on with his intentions, if he went inside the travel agency with Samanta and talked to Cuéllar’s widow or listened to Samanta, he would find a transformed world when he left: a world (a country, and in the country, a city, and in the city, a newspaper) in which Mallarino would no longer be who he was now. After this conversation, no matter what it might contain, whatever might be said, the army of his enemies would come down on him without pity. Jackals, they were all jackals, who had spent their lives waiting for such a declaration of vulnerability. Because they would find out, of course they’d find out: whatever the conversation might contain and whatever might be said. It didn’t matter what revelations came out in Cuéllar’s widow’s office, and it didn’t even matter if there were any revelations at all, if the woman sent them away amid shouts and slaps without telling them anything new, or if she refused to speak, if she wielded the terrible revenge of silence: the silence that hurt Samanta so much, that for her would be the worst affront, the most distressing humiliation. All this was, in some measure, a humiliation for Samanta; but going through anxiety and daring and the affronting memory only to run up against silence would be the worst humiliation of all.
And even if it turned out that way, the jackals would find out and launch their attack. The important thing for them, thought Mallarino, would not be what happened in the past, but the cartoonist’s current uncertainty and what that uncertainty revealed. They would also humiliate him, and that was all they’d need to humiliate him: the question would be enough, the simple question that was perhaps already forming on Samanta’s tongue, that perhaps Samanta had been practising all day, choosing the words and the intonation, even choosing the expression on her face to not look more defenceless than necessary. Choosing her clothes, thought Mallarino, yes, Samanta had surely selected her outfit thinking of the question she was going to ask the widow of a dead congressman. For her there could be a variation of results, one possibility among many or at least among two; not for him, for, no matter what happened at the Unicorn travel agency, Mallarino would encounter on his way out his enemies of forty years pointing at him, egging on a crazed mob ready to judge him summarily and burn him at the stake, the stake of changeable, capricious public opinion. Mallarino the slanderer or simply irresponsible, Mallarino destroyer of a man’s life or simply unpunished abuser of the power of the media. Now he better understood what had happened twenty-eight years ago, when he’d given himself the pleasure of humiliating Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar; he understood the fervour with which the public had received the humiliation, that fervour disguised as indignation or condemnation. He had simply set the mechanism in motion, yes, he had lit the fire and then warmed his hands at the flames . . . Now it was his turn. It didn’t matter who had right on their side. Justice and injustice didn’t matter. There was only one thing the public liked more than humiliation, and that was the humiliation of a humiliator. That afternoon Mallarino was arriving to give them that pleasure. What the dead man’s wife said would make no difference whatsoever: if he decided to go inside Unicorn Travel, Mallarino would no longer have the moral authority he had at that moment but would become a cheap rumour-monger, a sniper of other people’s reputations. Someone like that cannot be out on the loose. Someone like that is dangerous.
And now the light turned red and the traffic stopped and Mallarino could cross the street, cut through that heavy heat that forms like a cloud in front of a line of cars at a Bogotá traffic light. ‘Samanta!’ he shouted from the corner like an impatient child. But he was fifty steps from her, fifty steps from Unicorn Travel and the door that would change his life, and he could not be expected to be patient, he couldn’t be expected to wait till he’d covered that distance before declaring his presence to Samanta Leal. ‘Samanta!’ he shouted. She raised her head and turned in the direction of the shout and saw him; she lifted a timid but content hand, waved it in the air at first slowly and then enthusiastically, and something lit up in her face; and Mallarino thought that not even two days ago – the night of the ceremony, at the bar of the Teatro Colón, with a piece of plastic stuck on her little girl’s tongue – had he seen her look so lovely. And if he could go back to the night of the ceremony, the glory of the speeches and the medals and the pats on the back? If he could, would he? No he wouldn’t, thought Mallarino, and he was surprised to find himself thinking that. Again Rodrigo Valencia’s words appeared in his head, those impertinent words: What good will it do? What good is ruining a man’s life, even if the man deserves ruin? What good is this power if nothing else changed, except the ruin of that man? Forty years: everyone had been congratulating him lately, and only now had Mallarino realized that his longevity was not a virtue, but an insult: forty years, and nothing around him had changed. I beg not to be taken home: Mallarino peered at the phrase as one peers at a puddle of dark water, and thought he saw something glistening at the bottom. Again he thought of the homage; he thought of the stamp, of his own face looking out of the frame at him with its ferocious serrated edges. All that was far behind him now, very far: here, on this pavement on Seventh Avenue at this hour of the Bogotá afternoon, all that began to form part of his memory, and could be forgotten. Would Mallarino manage to? The memory has a marvellous capacity to remember the forgotten, its existence and its stalking, and thus allow us to stay alert when we don’t want to forget and forget when we choose to. Freedom, freedom from the past, that’s what Mallarino desired above all now.
There was no longer anything tying him to the past. The present was a weight and a nuisance, like the addiction to a drug. The future, however, belonged to him. It was all a question of seeing the future, of knowing how to see it clearly and divest ourselves for an instant of our propensity for deceit, the deceit of others and of ourselves, for the thousand lies we tell ourselves about what might happen to us. It is necessary to lie to ourselves, of course, because no one can stand too much clairvoyance: how many would want to know the date of their own death, for example, or foresee illness or misfortune? But now, arriving to meet Samanta, seeing her so lovely in her turquoise sweater, so solid against the blurry background of shop windows and their reflections, her mouth half open as if singing a secret song, Mallarino suddenly understood that he could do it: he understood that, even if he had no control over the unstable, volatile past, he could remember with total clarity his own future. Is that not what he did each time he drew a cartoon? He imagined a scene, imagined a character, assigned him features, wrote in his head the epigram that would be like a stinger dipped in honey, and after doing this he had to remember it to be able to draw it: none of that existed when he sat down at his drafting table, and nevertheless Mallarino was able to remember it, had to remember it to put it down on paper. Yes, thought Mallarino, the White Queen was right: it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
And then, in a lightning flash of lucidity, he remembered himself returning that very evening to his house in the mountains, climbing the stairs to his studio, sitting down in his chair, and he remembered exactly what he will do. He will glance over the cuttings pinned up on his corkboard: the Colombian President, the Latin American liberator, the German Pope. He will turn on the lamp and take a sheet of headed notepaper out of the filing cabinet and will pick up his fountain pen and write today’s date, and under the date the name Rodrigo Valencia. By means of this letter (that’s how you say it, i
sn’t it? So as to be formal and pretty, I like things to be well presented) I wish to notify you of my unconditional resignation (a little dramatic, I know, but that’s how it is, what can we do) from the newspaper that you, with such good fortune, have published during recent years (fewer than the number that I have spent drawing cartoons, it must be said). I take this decision after long and intense consultations with my pillow and other authorities, and hasten to emphasize that my decision, as well as unconditional, is irrevocable, definitive and all those long words. So, don’t bother wearing yourself out, brother, you’ll get nothing by insisting. He will go to the kitchen for a large plastic rubbish bag, black with an orange band, and begin chucking into it bottles of ink, blades, his pencil holder (the cut-off end of a rain stick) and with it charcoals, seven different kinds of leads, an unused spatula and a collection of nibs and brushes, well combed like the members of a school choir, and all will end up at the bottom of the bag. One by one, Mallarino will take the drawers out of his filing cabinet and empty them into the bag, and he will enjoy the sound of paper falling in cascades to the bottom, the static produced by the friction with the bag. He will pull off the skinny liberator and the haggard Pope, the recently elected President and recently killed guerrilla, and throw them in the bag. He will take two steps back, will look at the empty spaces appearing in the wake of his hand, clearings opening up in the middle of the dense jungle. He will take the slogan about the stinger and honey down off the wall and put it in the bag. He will take Daumier’s caricature down and put it in the bag.
And then he’ll do the same with all the rest.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Reputations is a work of fiction; any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. Having fulfilled this convention, which no reader should take completely seriously, I wish to thank those who gave me their time and offered me anecdotes from their lives or ideas about their trade, especially Vladimir Flórez, Vladdo, and Andrés Rábago, El Roto. Other political cartoonists lent me, unknowingly, more or less concrete information, and I’d also like to recognize my debt – more ambiguous and less direct – to Antonio Caballero, Héctor Osuna and José María Pérez González, Peridis. In order to write about the death of Ricardo Rendón, I found the book 5 en humor, by María Teresa Ronderos, very useful. I would also like to acknowledge my unpayable debt to Jorge Ruffinelli and Héctor Hoyos, of Stanford University, for the invitation and the hospitality that allowed me to finish this novel in an apartment on Oak Creek Drive, in Palo Alto, California. Finally, I’d like once more to give myself the pleasure (and put on record the infinite good fortune) of finishing a book by writing the name Mariana.
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