‘I think we’re going to the same place,’ she said.
There was no resentment in her voice: rather a kindness resembling something forgiven or perhaps forgotten (but Magdalena’s voice had always been capable of all kinds of sorcery). Mallarino kissed her on the cheek and remembered her perfume and something awoke in his chest. Of course, Magdalena’s radio station was nearby.
‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘If you want I’ll walk you there.’ She smiled and took his arm, or linked her arm through Mallarino’s, like she did when they were married and used to go for walks together in town, before they’d allowed life, headstrong life, to have its own way.
‘Typical of you,’ she said, ‘to arrive on foot.’
She’d noticed. Magdalena always noticed: she’d always been that way. Her liquid eyes – today, for some reason, brighter than he remembered them – saw everything, took everything in.
‘What do you expect,’ said Mallarino. ‘At our age, a person’s not going to change.’
When they got married, in a small-town church with limestone walls and cobbled steps leading into the square and where one could easily turn an ankle, Mallarino had been drawing cartoons for just under a year – two a month, with luck – for a newspaper with Conservative tendencies and family capital, one of those publications that never become leaders in the field but seem to have always existed and whose editions aren’t sold by the street vendors, but show up in the drugstores and cafés when everyone’s forgotten all about them. That minor job – Mallarino thought, with involuntary scorn – did not form part of his great projects: if he’d dropped out of his architecture course before completing the second year, if he’d refused to use his father’s contacts to get a job without a diploma in one of the important firms, it had been to pursue his true vocation, or to make the most of his virtuosity, for even his parents had to bow to the evidence of his talent on the afternoon the painter Alejandro Obregón, who at that time was working on his oil paintings of doves in a third-floor apartment at Twelfth Avenue and Seventeenth Street, visited the family home, stood in front of a life-size nude Mallarino was drying with a portable hairdryer, and exclaimed a ten-word sentence that was like a bullfighter authorizing a novice to take his place in the ring: ‘But how the hell did this kid learn to paint?’
Painting was his thing. The future (the ghosts that appeared in his head when he pronounced this word) was on canvas. So at that time the political cartoons were a short-term way of earning a living, getting by while large frames piled up in the courtyard and the house filled with the smell of turpentine, and canvases covered in female forms, all more or less disguised versions of Magdalena, changed colour according to the moods of the light coming through the windows. The newspaper paid him badly and late, and only when they actually used one of his drawings: it was not unusual for Mallarino to send five or six cartoons a week and receive them back at the end of the month with a note typed by a secretary, on embossed letterhead, in which the opinion-page editor regretted in too many words not being able to use his work this time. At the age of twenty-five, Mallarino did not yet know that this was common practice in the country’s newsrooms; Magdalena didn’t know either, but she was the one to suggest sending just one cartoon and not sending another until the first was published.
‘And if they don’t publish it?’ said Mallarino.
‘We’ll just wait till they do,’ she said.
‘But the moment passes. Cartoons are like fish: if they’re not used today, they can’t be used tomorrow.’
‘Well, that may well be the case,’ said Magdalena, concluding the subject. ‘But that’s also their problem.’
And of course, she was right. Subjected to rationing, the newspaper began to publish everything Mallarino sent, and even to increase the frequency of his appearances. For five months the situation was ideal. Then, in the month of August, the Colombian President and the Chilean President signed a joint declaration in which both countries officially expressed their respect for ideological diversity. Mallarino drew them both, the Colombian with his permanent involuntary smile and the Chilean with his thick-framed, tinted glasses. ‘Look, my dear Salvador, in Colombia it doesn’t matter if you’re Liberal or Conservative,’ read the first line of the text. And the second: ‘What matters is that you come from a good family.’ The drawing was finished in one draft, and Mallarino left it at the front desk of the newspaper, well sealed inside a cardboard envelope, inside a plastic bag from the market (it had been drizzling). But the next day, when he opened the newspaper, he found that the second line of the text had disappeared, and its absence was like a crack in the earth, a drain down which everything seeps away. ‘I want someone to explain it,’ he said that afternoon in the editorial office: he’d arrived by taxi, because his urgency warranted it, with the newspaper rolled up like a telescope and wrinkled in his sweaty fist. He didn’t want his voice to tremble; to prevent it, he tried raising it, but the result was not good.
‘There’s nothing to explain,’ said the editor-in-chief. He had a double chin and small eyes; among the disproportionate features of his face, the mouth seemed to move independently from the rest of his muscles. ‘Don’t fly off the handle, Javier, this happens all the time.’
‘To whom? Who does this happen to all the time?’
‘To everyone who draws cartoons here. Hadn’t you noticed? Everyone knows that sometimes things have to be cut. Now you’re going to tell me the editor doesn’t have that right.’
‘In a column,’ said Mallarino. It was a terrible defence, but he couldn’t think of another. ‘Not in a cartoon.’
‘In cartoons too, dear boy, don’t be naïve. Because they also appear in the newspaper and they also take up space. What am I supposed to say to the advertisers? Tell me, what do I tell them?’
Mallarino said nothing.
‘This is what I’m going to tell them,’ the editor went on, starting to walk in circles, both thumbs firmly stuck in his belt. ‘I’m going to tell them: Look, my good advertisers, gentlemen who pay me thousands of pesos a year, I have a problem. I can’t print your ads, in spite of the fact that the money you pay me is what pays the journalists’ wages. And do you know why, gentlemen? Because a cartoonist doesn’t like to have the space for his drawings trimmed by even a millimetre. That eventually we’ll have to close the newspaper down doesn’t matter, but the cartoon page cannot be touched. Geniuses are like that, my dear advertisers, be grateful you don’t have to deal with any. That’s what I’ll tell them: that geniuses are like that. Would that do it, Mallarino?’
Mallarino said nothing.
‘We’ll stop paying our journalists. Or if you like, we’ll stop paying you. Fair enough?’
Mallarino said nothing.
‘Look, go home and have a shot of aguardiente. And calm down: next time, someone will call young sir and ask his permission. So he won’t have a tantrum, for crying out loud, which is tiring for all of us.’ He pointed to the interior window of his office, a huge fresco of faces pretending not to look, a constellation of sidelong glances: ‘Look at these people. As if this were a market square, how embarrassing.’
And then Mallarino said his final words: ‘Would you give me back the original, please?’
He went out to find himself in a darkened city – the low clouds, the black suits of the passers-by and the metallic whisper of umbrellas opening all around – a downpour soaked him before he had time to get home. Hair plastered to his scalp and shoulders hunched under the weight of the rain, he didn’t seem to notice he’d turned into a high-plains scarecrow. Next time: the two words kept echoing in his head, ricocheting off the walls of his skull, when he recounted the whole episode to Magdalena. ‘Next time,’ she said, handing him a mauve towel as if handing him a declaration of war for his approval and signature. ‘Next time. Well, it seems to me like there isn’t going to be any next time.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Mallarino.
‘Just what you heard,’ sai
d Magdalena. ‘We’ll tell them to go to hell, teach them a lesson.’
Magdalena was a couple of years younger than him, but she went through life like an overseer strolling around a plantation. She possessed an intelligence as brutal as her obstinacy and was not hindered by the fact that her surname was that of the founder of a legendary legal firm – two carpeted floors of a building overlooking the Parque Nacional – although she’d always declared herself in rebellion against the surname, against her father and against everyone’s expectations: instead of enrolling in the Faculty of Law to carry on the family tradition, Magdalena had become one of the best-paid serial actresses on national radio, the voice that, from Kalimán the Incredible first and then Arandú, Jungle Prince, held the whole country spellbound at twelve noon. Those melodramas had been a natural step for her, a prolongation of the advertisements she’d read since adolescence, when publicity firms began vying for the privilege of hiring her voice. Magdalena’s voice: husky and smooth at the same time, one of those voices that paralyse the hand of someone about to turn a dial, that translate the chaos of the world and convert its obscure jargon into a diaphanous tongue. ‘A cello that speaks,’ Mallarino called her, and now that voice was saying: We’ll tell them to go to hell, and Mallarino was thinking: Yes, to hell, and he was also thinking: Teach them a lesson. The most difficult times, in Mallarino’s experience, were reduced to their simplest expression when Magdalena spoke of them, and that’s what happened that afternoon: after the conversation, after the hot shower Mallarino took to warm up after getting chilled by the rain, after the improvised sex and the well-planned meal, everything was clear.
Magdalena took the plates and cutlery and coloured sisal place mats into the kitchen while Mallarino brought a piece of paper, a quill pen and a bottle of ink to the table, still warm from the heat of the serving dishes. In twenty minutes, while she put away the leftovers and covered the containers with a meticulous sheet of tinfoil, he quickly drew a self-portrait and put it in the envelope with the drawing of the presidents. He amused himself caricaturing himself for the first time: the premature baldness, the bushy black beard he’d inherited from his father and the thick angular glasses, two little boxes of black acetate that did not manage to hide his wary eyes, his studiedly helpless gaze. Where his mouth would be, a gag straight out of the movies; beneath the drawing, the caption. The oligarchy doesn’t like to be talked about, ran the first line. And then: They wouldn’t want us noticing that they’re still right there. In the envelope there was another document: a handwritten letter to Pedro León Valencia. He was the editor-in-chief of El Independiente, the oldest Liberal newspaper in the country, and a man of strong convictions. ‘I’d like to offer you a package,’ wrote Mallarino in his own diploma writer’s calligraphy, but with words dictated by Magdalena. ‘I’m sending one original cartoon, one censored cartoon and one cartoon on censorship. If you can publish them all together, the package is yours; if not, return it and I’ll look for another paper.’ Magdalena insisted on delivering the envelope, so Mallarino wouldn’t appear needy (she never lost sight of these strategies of life in society), and that very evening both the telephones in their house began to ring in a hysterical chorus. It was the editor of the opinion page, a man Mallarino knew and had never liked: he was one of those professional victims incapable of delivering good news without disguising his envy. And Mallarino knew he was phoning to give him good news: he could sense it in the hostility of his tone, in his words with syllables cut off as if with a machete; Mallarino was surprised his rancour didn’t make the receiver splutter.
‘The boss wants to offer you a permanent position,’ said the little man.
‘But I don’t want that,’ said Mallarino. ‘I don’t want to be on anyone’s staff.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mallarino. A staff position is what every cartoonist dreams of. A guaranteed salary, maybe you don’t get it.’
‘I get it,’ said Mallarino. ‘But I don’t want it. Pay me the same, but without being on the staff. I promise I won’t draw for anyone else. And you people promise you’ll publish what I send even if it’s sometimes against your friends. Go ask your boss, and tell me.’
It was a risky move, but it worked: the three drawings appeared the next day, and so, temporarily disguised as a comic strip, calling the reader so eloquently from the centre spread, no longer the mere protest of a young man who fancied himself an artist, they became an elaborate narrative of media betrayal, a condemnation of censorship and a noisy mocking of bourgeois vulnerability, all done by one of that bourgeoisie’s most representative sons. ‘Your husband’s gone mad,’ Magdalena’s father told her. ‘Or maybe he’s turned into a communist and nobody’s noticed yet.’ She passed on the message to Mallarino raising her left eyebrow and with a slightly crooked smile, a sign of evident satisfaction that there, in the semi-darkness of their room, at the end of a day full of tensions and worries, was almost erotic. Mallarino turned on the radio, to see if he could find a repeat broadcast of the day’s episode of Kalimán, but Magdalena, who detested hearing herself, covered her ears with histrionic gestures, and he found himself forced to look for something else. Magdalena found it impossible to recognize herself in the actual broadcast: that voice that wasn’t her voice, she said, rather there was a national conspiracy to wait for her to leave the studio and then rerecord, with another, better-trained actress, everything she had recorded. Mallarino held his arm out and Magdalena leant her head on his chest, put her arms around him and let out a couple of cat-like noises that he didn’t manage to understand. After a few seconds of silence, Mallarino noticed that Magdalena’s body changed weight – her forearm and her elbow, her clean-smelling head – and knew she’d fallen asleep. He found a football match on the radio, and before falling asleep as well, lulled by his wife’s quiet snores and the monotonous commentaries from the reporters, he heard Apolinar Paniagua score twice for Millonarios and thought of something completely unrelated to those goals, but to do with the drawing in El Independiente: he thought that he couldn’t prove it, that he couldn’t have said how or why, but his place in the world had just changed irrevocably.
He was not mistaken. That was the first day of the most intense period of his life, a decade in which he went from anonymity to having a reputation and then notoriety, all at the pace of one cartoon a day. His work was the metronome that regulated his life: just as others measured time by World Cups or film premières, Mallarino associated every important event in his life with the cartoon he was working on at the time (the eyeless cheekbones of the guerrilla fighter Tirofijo, kidnapper of the Dutch Consul, would always evoke his father’s first bout of cancer; the aged and infirm Francisco Franco’s goose neck and non-existent chin, the birth of his daughter Beatriz). His routine was unassailable. He got up a little before first light, and while he made the coffee he heard the whisper of two newspapers sliding halfway under the door, the doorman’s judicious retreating footsteps, the machinery of the lift – its regretful electronic grumble – coming back to life. He read the papers standing up at the kitchen counter, with the pages spread open over the surface, so he could mark the interesting subjects with a rough charcoal circle. When he finished, with the cold light of the Andean morning timidly filling the living room, he took the radio into the bathroom and listened to the news while giving his body over to the consecutive pleasures of shitting and showering, a ritual that cleansed his intestines, yes, but especially his head: cleansed it of the muck accumulated the previous day, all the critiques trying to be intelligent that were nothing but resentful, all the opinions that should only have seemed idiotic but actually struck him as criminal, all the collisions with that strange country of brotherly hatred where mediocrity was rewarded and excellence assassinated. In the shower, with the hot water flowing over his skin and producing delicate shivers of pores closing and opening up again, sometimes he couldn’t even make out the words from the radio; but some mechanism of his imagination allowed him to guess or intuit them, an
d when he turned off the water and pushed open the sliding door – two or three extra movements, since the aluminium edge invariably stuck in its frame – it was as if he hadn’t missed anything. Seconds later, emerging from the steamy bathroom, the day’s image fully conceived in his head, Mallarino had only to draw it.
It was, and would go on being for a long time, the happiest moment of the day: a half-hour, or a whole one, or two, when nothing existed outside the friendly rectangle of card and the world that was being born within it, invented or cast by the lines and marks, by the to and fro of Indian ink. During those minutes Mallarino even forgot the indignation or irritation or mere anti-establishment impatience that had given rise to the drawing in the first place, and all his attention, just as happened in the middle of sex, concentrated on an attractive form – a pair of ears, an exaggerated set of teeth, a lock of hair, a deliberately ridiculous bow tie – outside of which nothing else existed. It was total abandonment, only broken when the drawing turned out to be difficult or stubborn: on those rare occasions Mallarino locked himself in the guest bathroom with a copy of Playboy in one hand and some quick relief with the other left him ready to finish his battle with the drawing, always victoriously. In the end, he stood up, took a step back and looked at the paper like a general overlooking a battle; then he signed it and only then did the drawing begin to form part of the world of real things. By some useful spell, his cartoons were free of consequences while he was doing them, as if no one was ever going to see them, as if they existed for him alone, and only when he signed them did Mallarino realize what he’d just done or said. Then he put the card in an envelope, without staring intently at it – ‘like Perseus putting the Medusa’s head in the silver bag’, Mallarino would tell a journalist years later – and the envelope in a scruffy leather briefcase that Magdalena had bought him at a flea market; he took a bus to the newspaper offices, a sort of bunker where all the inhabitants, from the cleaning women to the photographers, seemed to be the colour of concrete; he handed in the envelope and went back to his life without really knowing what to do with his hands, as if dispossessed, wondering why he was still doing what he did, what real effect his cartoon would have on the out-of-focus and remote world that began at the edge of his work table, that slim wooden precipice. Was it disenchantment he was feeling, a sense of emptiness, or had he simply lost his bearings? Was he falling into the old trap of having more ire than ink? The world around him was changing: Pedro León Valencia, legendary publisher, had stepped aside in favour of his eldest son, and Mallarino recognized that part of the pleasure of working for El Independiente had been working with a legend, being the discovery or invention of a legend. As the novelty of the early years started to wear off, the egocentric urge to open the newspaper every morning and see his name in black-and-white faded, and Mallarino was beginning to wonder if it had been worthwhile giving up his oils and canvases for this: for the adrenalin rush he no longer felt, for the imaginary reactions of imaginary readers he never got to meet, for this vague and perhaps false sensation of public importance that only caused him private trouble: relatives who greeted him less warmly, friends who no longer invited them out to dinner. For what?
Reputations Page 2