That’s when he received, in a single prodigious day, the answer to all his questions. He’d acquired the habit of walking around downtown in the afternoons, buying his daughter absurd stickers for an absurd album Magdalena insisted she fill up, or getting his shoes shined and talking politics with the bootblacks, or simply watching life with a sort of hunger that demanded he stay out on the streets instead of returning to his morning seclusion, take off his jacket and feel his arms brush up against other arms and pick up the smell of living bodies, of the food they eat and the piss they leave in corners. That afternoon was a Tuesday, which was the day of the week Mallarino would go to the Avianca building to collect his mail from his postbox (the metallic, grey and deep little box that brought him boundless pleasure, like a magician’s hat for a child) and later sit in some nearby café to read his magazines, answer his letters. He arrived at Seventh Avenue by the National Library and from there, along the eastern pavement, began to walk south, sometimes noticing the noisy, disorderly, relentless city, sometimes so distracted that the building came into view almost unexpectedly, its long straight lines penetrating the sky and struck, on a sunny afternoon, by a dense light that seemed not of this world. As he went in, his hand would already be feeling for his key ring in his pocket and separating out the postbox key, so he wouldn’t have to search for it in front of the wall of postal niches. And that’s how it had gone that time: Mallarino made his way through the corridors (through its whitish light that drew circles under everyone’s eyes) and turned to the little grey door; he stretched out his arm and his precise hand, that hand that could draw exact ninety-degree angles without any instruments, placed the tip of the key into the lock the way a medieval knight would have put the tip of his lance against his rival’s chest. But the key did not go in.
He thought at first that he’d gone to the wrong box. He leaned down towards the little door and looked at the number on the metal tag with all its digits, the same as ever, the ones Mallarino knew by heart. He hadn’t got it wrong. The revelation arrived late, like a careless guest: there was a shadow or a texture, something made him look more closely at the metallic surface, and only when he was inches away from the lock did he realize it had been blocked up with chewing gum. It was a hardened paste (it must have been there for several days) that filled the slot without overflowing the edges: a conscientious piece of work. Mallarino touched the paste with the tip of the key, probed, pushed, scratched a little, tried a carving movement with his wrist, but got nowhere: the dried gum paste remained firm. ‘Hey, what a nasty trick to play on someone,’ said a voice, and Mallarino turned his head to find a gold tooth glinting in the middle of an unshaven face. ‘No way to fix that, huh? People have no respect these days.’ And Mallarino soon found himself climbing a mottled stairway, walking till he reached a counter, handing over his ID and watching as a petite woman went through books, opened drawers and closed them again, produced a photocopy of a form from somewhere and asked if Mallarino would be paying in cash or by cheque, turned a deaf ear when Mallarino protested and said he hadn’t lost the key, that someone had put chewing gum in the lock, and the woman told him it was all the same to her and how was he paying: cash or cheque? Then there were stamps in purple ink, carbon paper and pastel-colour receipts, time wasted in a hard and hostile plastic chair and, finally, a shout ringing against the cement walls: ‘Mallarino? Javier Mallarino?’
A skinny, grief-stricken locksmith – his overalls had the smell of improperly dried clothes – went back with him to face the rebellious postbox, took a series of unnameable tools from his leather belt, and the metals gave off sparks under the neon lights, followed by the violation of the lock, or what Mallarino perceived as a violation, a violent and treacherous penetration of his private life, in spite of the fact that he’d given his authorization and consent, in spite of having been present during the whole process. He felt something like physical pain at the breaking of the lock, at the snap of the little door; he was saddened by the vulnerability of his collection of magazines looking at him imploringly from the shadowy depths: the latest Alternativa, the latest New Yorker, a back issue of Canard enchaîné a Parisian colleague had sent him. He wanted to leave and be home already, in his refuge, reading with a glass of beer, and hearing or sensing the reassuring presence of his wife and daughter. But he still had to witness the installation of the new lock and get the new keys and sign more papers and put tips in faceless hands before going back out onto Seventh Avenue carrying his leather bag slung across his chest, the back of his neck sweaty and his eyes tired from so much darkness. Later he would think it had all begun with that tiredness, or the disorientation that always overwhelmed him after contending with the senseless bureaucracy of this country, or simply the white colour of the envelope, that immaculate white, with no address or writing of any kind, no stamps, no blue-and-red stripes that revealed letters arriving from abroad. He’d begun to take the magazines out of his bag (impatient to begin leafing through them) and had his hand stuck inside, fingers moving as if through a card catalogue, head down, trying to see the covers, when he noticed the corner sticking out between the pages. He stopped in the middle of the square, looked at the front and back of the envelope, then opened it. ‘Javier Mallarino’, said the typed text of the letter, with neither date nor address. ‘With your warping of the truth you have assaulted and discredited the Armed Forces of our Republic, playing into the hands of the enemy, you are an UNPATRIOTIC LIAR and we hereby notify you that the patience of those who are LOYAL to our beloved country is wearing thin, we know where you live and where your daughter goes to school, we will not hesitate to punish with the harshest severity any further infringements against our honour.’ On the last line, over to the right with no ‘Regards’, no ‘Sincerely’, no ‘Yours faithfully’, a single word that seemed to be shouting from the page: PATRIOTS.
The first thing he did when he got home was to show Magdalena the letter, and he knew she was genuinely worried when she started making fun of the wording and grammar. Between the two of them they tried to remember the last cartoon he’d drawn on a military subject; they had to go back several weeks to a series of three drawings in which a disconsolate horse was talking to a woman who was handling some iron structures. Mallarino had drawn those scenes after Feliza Bursztyn, a Bogotá sculptor famous for working with scrap iron, had been accused of subversive activities, imprisoned in the Army’s stables, manhandled and humiliated and later forced into exile. Magdalena and Mallarino propped the originals up on the long living-room sofa and spent a good while looking at them, as if wishing they could vanish from the recent past. That night they were so frightened that they dragged a mattress into their bedroom so Beatriz, who had just turned six, could go to bed there and the family slept like that, heaped up in the insufficient space, breathing stale air all night and with their pressed-wood door securely locked. Days of paranoia would follow, looking over his shoulder on the city’s streets, returning home before dark, but later, when the memory of the threat began to fade away, what they’d remember would be the reaction of Rodrigo Valencia, who burst out laughing down the other end of the phone line when Magdalena called him at the newspaper, the day after Mallarino had received the note, to tell him what had happened. Mallarino watched Magdalena furrow her brow with the telephone stuck to her ear, and then heard her faithfully relay the message:
‘Rodrigo says congratulations, you’ve finally made it. He says you’re nobody in this country until somebody wants to hurt you.’
* * *
On the left-hand side of the stage, hidden in the wing between backdrops, Mallarino was waiting. The organizers of the tribute had asked him not to move from the spot until he was announced, and he, obediently, amused himself looking at the velvet curtains and the grain of the wooden floorboards, but also watching the hustle and bustle of people walking without tripping over the beams, the mysterious cables, the abandoned props like the remains of old battles. The Teatro Colón was immersed in semi-darkne
ss. The audience, that audience who’d come to see him, had their eyes fixed on the back of the stage, on the images projected on a white screen, while the voice of a professional announcer recounted the highlights of his career over rather cheesy background music. Mallarino tried to peek out without being seen. The impossible angle didn’t prevent him from recognizing himself painting in his parents’ courtyard, or speaking to President Betancur, or opening the door to some cameramen who were making a documentary in his house up in the mountains, or posing beside an old drawing on the day of his first retrospective exhibition, at the beginning of the 1990s. It was a caricature of Mikhail Gorbachev; Mallarino remembered it as if he’d drawn it yesterday; the classic bald head, and on it, instead of the by-then famous birthmark, maps of Nicaragua and Iran. Behind Gorbachev, you could see a worried and pensive Ronald Reagan asking: ‘Mikhail, are you saying I ran contraband?’ ‘No, Ronald,’ Gorbachev answers. ‘I’m saying you’re with the Iran-Contra band.’ The whole drawing had taken him just over an hour, but the easy joke had always left him dissatisfied, and now Mallarino relived that dissatisfaction and wrote new draft attempts in his head, different combinations of the same words, less obvious puns. He was busy with that when he heard himself announced, and he had to go onstage, suffer the assault of the lights, feel the explosion of applause like a gust of wind and hear its uproar like a deluge.
Mallarino raised a hand by way of greeting; his mouth moved imperceptibly. He saw his vacant seat as if it were in fog; he saw faces greeting him, attentive hands outstretched to shake his and then go back to applauding, quick like those of a bootblack brushing shoes. Out of habit – but where did it come from, when had it started – he took two pens and his note-taking pencil out of his pocket and placed them on the table in front of him, three perfectly parallel lines. The theatre was full: in a flash he remembered previous visits, and in his head a Les Luthiers concert got mixed up with a zarzuela that he’d enjoyed a lot even though Luisa Fernanda, no less, had hit a false note in the first song. He looked for the box he’d sat in then, fourth to the right of the presidential, and found it occupied by a group of six young people applauding on their feet. Only when the rest of the audience gradually began to sit down, making delicate little waves on the sea of the orchestra section, did he realize that the entire audience had been standing up until a moment before: they’d welcomed him to the stage with a standing ovation. In the front row was Rodrigo Valencia, hands clasped over his belly, elbows invading the seats next to him: Valencia always gave the impression that chairs were too small for him. A voice came through the speakers. Mallarino had to look around for its source, first at the table, then at the cheap wooden lectern bearing the Colombian coat of arms. Behind the lectern, the Minister – Mallarino had seen her on the news and had read her declarations: her intentions were as laudable as her ignorance was vast – began to speak.
‘Were I to be asked what ex-President Pastrana looks like,’ she said, ‘just as if I were asked what Franco or Arafat looked like, the image that forms in my head is not a photograph but a drawing by Maestro Mallarino. My idea of many people is what he has drawn, not what I have seen. It’s possible, no it’s certain that the same thing happens to many people here tonight.’ Mallarino listened to her with his gaze glued to the table, feeling people’s gazes on him like a hand, fidgeting with a non-existent ring: the ring that was once on his left ring finger and that Mallarino still felt the way amputees feel a missing limb. ‘In a sense,’ the Minister went on, ‘to be caricatured by Javier Mallarino is to have a political life. The politician who disappears from his drawings no longer exists. They go on to a better life. I’ve known many who have even told me: life after Mallarino is much better.’ The witticism was rewarded with a brief ripple of laughter. So the little lady has a sense of humour, thought Mallarino, and looked up; and in that instant, just as we will spot our own name lost in the middle of any page, Mallarino found Magdalena’s luminous face in the middle of the smiling multitude. She was smiling too, but hers was a melancholy smile, the smile of things lost. What was going on in her life? They hadn’t talked seriously for many years: they had agreed, with the solemnity of an international treaty, that mutual revelations about their private lives would only serve to complicate everything: to accelerate, like a bacteria, the decomposition of good memories, and to embitter Beatriz, whose adolescence had been a painstaking martyrdom in which she felt guilty about every one of the family’s misfortunes, and the rest of her life had been a stubborn and speedy headlong escape. For Mallarino, his daughter’s life choices – her Catholic, provincial husband, her career with Médecins Sans Frontières – were nothing but a sophisticated way to escape from her family, from that surname that always touched off embarrassing reactions, but also the painful experience of growing up as the daughter of a failed or broken couple. The only blemish on this night was the absence of Beatriz, who just that week had been obliged to make an unexpected trip to La Paz, and in a few days she’d be on a longer, more planned one to an unpronounceable village in Afghanistan, and between the two she’d drop by to see him or call so they could meet for lunch, and Mallarino knew, after that visit or that lunch, a desert of months and months without seeing her again would open before him. The Minister was suddenly talking about Greek glasses and essential strokes, using words like symbol, allegory and attribute, and Mallarino was remembering in the meantime a journalism seminar on editorial and opinion pages – with a pompous title and some grandiloquent guest speakers – where he was asked what he would change about his life and all he could think of was his relationship with Beatriz.
‘With the passage of time, over the forty years we’re here to celebrate today,’ the Minister was saying meanwhile, ‘the great Mallarino’s drawings have been getting sadder. His characters have hardened. His gaze has become more intransigent, more critical. And his cartoons, in general, have become more indispensable. I can’t imagine a life without Javier Mallarino’s daily cartoon, but nor can I imagine a country that could give itself the luxury of not having him.’ This, Mallarino admitted, had come out nicely: I wonder who writes her speeches. ‘And so today we are paying him this homage, a tiny recognition of an artist who has turned into the country’s critical conscience. Today we present him with this medal, the highest honour our nation confers, but we present him with something else too, Maestro: we have a little surprise for you.’ Behind the table, at the back of the stage, the white screen appeared again, and illuminated on it was an image: it was the caricature of himself that Mallarino had drawn forty years earlier, that ironic self-portrait that he’d used to defend himself from being censored and to begin his career at El Independiente. But there, on the screen, the image had a serrated frame, and above Mallarino’s bearded face, at the level of his glasses, there was a price. It was a stamp. ‘Maestro Mallarino,’ said the Minister, ‘allow me to present you with the first-day cover of the National Post Office’s new stamp, so that from now on letters mailed in our cities will also be a homage to your life and work.’ Mallarino saw the long hair spilling over her shoulders, the chest rising with nervous breaths, the hand that unleashed a jangle of bracelets as she handed him a black frame. From old habit, Mallarino identified the wood of the frame, the frosted glass and the foam-core board. In the centre of an enormous black space, deep as the night sky, was the stamp. The frame changed hands and the deluge of applause burst out for a second time. Mallarino noticed a slight tickle at the nape of his neck and the pit of his stomach. As he approached the lectern with the Colombian coat of arms, the flanks of which stuck out from behind like a bat’s ears, he realized he was moved.
Reputations Page 3