Reputations

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  III

  On Friday morning, just after eleven, Mallarino’s four-by-four snaked down towards the city along the slippery road. Rain lashed the bodywork: it was one of those Bogotá downpours that make considered conversation impossible, make drivers furrow their brows and force them to grip the steering wheel hard with both hands. The mountain rose up on their left, always menacing, always on the verge of collapsing on top of people, that mountain that seemed to pass underneath the grey ribbon of road, fall away to the right in a rough, steep slope and crash, in the distance, miraculously converted into the blurry design of the scattered city. On the horizon, that point where the western hills were no longer green, but blue, aeroplane lights dangled in the cloudy grey sky like an old woman’s earrings.

  Mallarino had slept little and badly, without ever forgetting that Samanta was there, just a few steps away, in Beatriz’s old room. Samanta Leal: the woman who was no longer a little girl, the woman who could lie and put on an act in order to gain access to his house and remember (or ask him to remember, like a beggar of memories) what happened there twenty-eight years earlier. He heard her get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom, inevitably heard the liquid sounds she made: the stream of her urine, the indiscreet flush, the water running as she washed her hands. When the first light began to shine in his window, as the gentle agitation of the hummingbirds began, Mallarino had already been awake for a while: awake and thinking about Samanta Leal, awake and feeling sorry for her, genuinely sorry, sorry for the night of total vulnerability that his guest must be enduring. Samanta was alone, alone with those new memories she’d just acquired and which altered her entire life, everything she’d believed she knew about herself until now, or at least shifted it slightly, enough to change her whole perspective. In a Holbein painting there is a skull that you can only really see from the side, not when you look straight at it: was something similar happening to Samanta Leal? Today she would wake up feeling like somebody else; right now she would be revisiting her dearest memories and re-examining them, not with affection this time, but with suspicion. Poor thing. Mallarino had given her a towel and an extra blanket, in case she felt cold. Before retreating into Beatriz’s room like someone hiding out in a cave, Samanta told Mallarino about the night of the ceremony, what had happened, and he couldn’t help thinking that she sounded as if she were talking about another person. Which, in more than one sense, was perhaps true: Samanta was now another. This woman was talking about the woman she had been just a few hours ago.

  Samanta told him about her colleagues at the Misión Gaia (an environmental foundation where she’d been working for the last two years) and the admiration that one of them had for the life and work of Javier Mallarino. She didn’t remember who had suggested they all go downtown together, to the ceremony at the Teatro Colón where Mallarino’s reputation would be enshrined for all time, but the idea sparked some enthusiasm. To witness that moment: was it not a wonderful opportunity? She accepted the invitation – more out of curiosity than anything else – and hours later found herself sitting in an unlit box, attending the beginning of what looked set to be the most boring ceremony, wondering what she’d got herself into and swearing she’d slip out the first chance she got. Then they started showing the slides; an image invaded the theatre, then another, and a third; Samanta looked at them absentmindedly, the way one looks at flames in a fireplace, and after a while she noticed that she wasn’t looking so absent-mindedly any more: that she recognized some images: that she recognized the house. She turned and said to her colleague: ‘I’ve been there.’ This surprise made her laugh, a silly laugh. The whole situation had something absurd about it, and the cheerful expression that then appeared on her colleague’s face: ‘You’ve been to Javier Mallarino’s house?’ And she assured him that she had been there, to that house, and he teased her and they laughed. But then Samanta began to recognize things: a couple of pictures, for example. The one with the three faces, for example. Now the whole thing didn’t seem so funny. ‘I’ve seen that picture before,’ she told her colleague, and the irritated people sitting behind them clicked their tongues to order silence. ‘I’ve been in that house,’ Samanta continued. But not laughing any more; it didn’t seem such a funny surprise now; the people sitting nearby kept telling her to be quiet. So Samanta didn’t say anything more about it. She stopped saying she’d been there before; she stopped saying she’d seen that picture before. She kept quiet. She wrestled as much as she could with the unformed questions that were pestering her. She began to imagine possibilities. And the next day she arrived at the house in the mountains and lied and acted and all the time she was trying to remember and to get Mallarino to remember, yes, that too: for Mallarino to remember. And all for nothing.

  ‘I don’t know why it should even matter,’ said Samanta. ‘Here I am, Señor Mallarino: I am what I am, that’s not going to change. Twenty-eight years: an entire lifetime. Who does it matter to now? Maybe it’s better to just leave it all as it was. Who told me to go digging around instead of leaving well enough alone? Wasn’t it better for everything to stay as it had been? Wasn’t I just fine the way I was, without knowing what I now know? That belongs to another lifetime, a life that has never been my life. They took it away from me. They changed it. My parents changed it for me. They gave me another one: one where there was no past. A child’s past is made of plasticine, Señor Mallarino, adults can do whatever they like with it. We can, I mean, we can do whatever we like. That’s how it was with me. A year went by, and then another, and that life from before began to recede, until it stopped existing. That little girl from before, that girl that certain things happened to, went to sleep and died, Señor Mallarino. She stopped existing, like a sickly puppy. And one fine day that girl is thirty-five years old and sees a slide projection in a theatre and feels something strange, something she’s never felt. I didn’t know that could happen. Just to be sitting there and feel these strange things. With each passing minute, with each minute, feeling even stranger. They’re talking up onstage, there are speeches, but you don’t hear them. Your attention is elsewhere. You’re remembering things. You have intuitions, shall we say, uncomfortable intuitions. Half-formed memories arrive, like phantoms. What do you do with this? What do you do with phantoms? That’s what I’ve been asking myself all this time. I’ve spent half the evening remembering things and the other half wondering which of the memories were true and which were lies. I’ve begun to remember things, but now I don’t know if I’m remembering because I remember, Señor Mallarino, or if I’m remembering because you told me. Am I remembering because you put the memory in my head? It’s not easy, it’s not easy to know. The problem is that a whole lifetime has gone by, Señor Mallarino, and my question is: who can all this matter to? What happened, what didn’t happen, who does it matter to?’

  Who does it matter to, thought Mallarino this morning. He waited for the coffee pot to stop bubbling and took out the glass mug; a drop fell onto the hot stovetop and the stovetop hissed like an aggressive cat. With a cup of fresh coffee in hand, Mallarino picked up the newspaper and read it standing up at the kitchen counter, his back to the frosted window, freezing to death, with his charcoal pencil in hand, until he realized he wasn’t taking anything in, that his mind was elsewhere. Elsewhere, yes, or in another time, and in any case far away from the newspaper – that vulgar flatterer of the present moment – and its announcements of parties and acts and speeches and more speeches and skies covered in balloons, big coloured balloons, all designed to celebrate the bicentennial of Colombian Independence. Who does it matter to, thought Mallarino, and then he thought: It matters to me. He poured himself more coffee; he went up to his studio; he looked at Daumier’s caricature where King Louis-Philippe’s same chubby face (his pear face, as Frenchmen of the time saw him, a king with the face of a pear) looked towards the past, the present and the future: Mallarino said to himself that his own situation didn’t seem very different at this moment. That face was
like his, perhaps. But that face said to him: all is the present. What I remember, thought Mallarino, is happening now. It was too early to call Rodrigo Valencia, so Mallarino took a sheet of paper out of the fax machine – those too white, too thick sheets whose edges inflicted painful paper cuts on the unwary – and wrote a message by hand, with his careful handwriting, dating it in one corner and signing it at the end as he always did, as if it were a letter. Valencia, he thought, would find the message as soon as he arrived at the office.

  Rodrigo:

  I want to ask you for an urgent favour. Do you remember Adolfo Cuéllar, the congressman? Well, I need his widow’s details. Address, phone number, whatever you can find for me. I don’t know if I already said it was urgent.

  Very best,

  Javier

  The call came sooner than expected. ‘Well, if it isn’t the most brilliant star in the Colombian firmament,’ Valencia said, ‘and my number one fax correspondent. Let’s see, let’s see, tell me what on earth this is about. What have you got in mind?’ Mallarino thought Valencia was talking far too loudly; for a second he was tempted to tell him to keep his voice down, but he didn’t. He asked him to remember the afternoon of the party, twenty-eight years ago, to remember the girl, Beatriz’s little friend.

  ‘She needs to talk to Cuéllar’s wife,’ said Mallarino, ‘to ask her some things. Can you get me an address, a phone number? Ask someone there, your secretary, one of your researchers. Five minutes: I’m sure it wouldn’t take your people any more than five minutes.’ There was a silence. Mallarino imagined Valencia’s vacant stare landing anywhere: on a pencil, his computer keyboard, the walls where caricatures of him and of his wife that Mallarino had drawn years ago hung.

  Finally, Valencia said: ‘That girl? You know the girl?’

  ‘Look, it’s a long story,’ said Mallarino. ‘She’s here, with me, and needs that information.’

  ‘Just a moment, one moment. She’s with you?’

  ‘Will you get it for me or not?’

  ‘One moment, Javier. For you, or for the girl? Who must not be a girl any more, but anyway. What is this about her being there with you? What’s her name?’

  ‘Will you get me the information?’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Samanta Leal. What does it matter to you? Will you get me the information?’

  ‘But I just don’t understand. I need more details, there’s something missing. No, I know what I’m missing: understanding. I don’t understand, that’s what’s wrong.’

  ‘You don’t have to understand, Rodrigo: you just have to do me a favour. And doing favours is easier than understanding. Look, it’s very simple. You’re in your office, right? There in that glass case you have instead of an office, in everyone’s sight. So follow my instructions. Raise your hand, so they see you from outside. When the first of your slaves comes in, you ask him to do this. And when you have it, send me a fax. So very simple.’

  ‘But what for?’ said Valencia. ‘How did that person get to your house? What is she asking you for? What’s going on, that’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Nothing’s going on.’

  ‘Of course it is. Either tell me, Javier, or I’m not helping you.’

  ‘Then don’t help me,’ said Mallarino. ‘And go to hell.’

  ‘Look, Javier, try to see it from my point of view,’ said Valencia. ‘This is not normal. Or do you think it is? Does it seem normal to you for that girl to appear just like that?’

  ‘She’s not a girl.’

  ‘For her to appear so many years later and ask you for this?’

  ‘She hasn’t asked me for anything,’ said Mallarino. ‘This idea is mine.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s to help her. She doesn’t remember.’

  Mallarino then remained in the company of the silence of the phone line, that imperfect silence like darkness for blind people. In his imagination, Valencia was one of those nineteenth-century caricatures where the person appears covered in question marks and with an intense expression of confusion, and then he imagined Valencia’s head converted into a silhouette, a black line, and those three words, She doesn’t remember, banging against the line, desperate flies in a glass box. After a long few seconds, longer still because time, when one is on the phone, cannot be measured on the features of one’s interlocutor – one doesn’t notice the barely perceptible changes, the warnings, the intentions sketched across them – Valencia let out a couple of grunts, something like a clearing of the throat, like a contained belch. ‘Ah,’ he said then, ‘I see what’s going on. The girl doesn’t know.’

  ‘She’s not a girl,’ said Mallarino.

  ‘She doesn’t know, that’s the problem. She was never told.’

  ‘She doesn’t remember.’

  ‘And you want to help her.’

  ‘Help her to remember.’

  ‘Help her to find out,’ said Valencia as if he were spitting out a caramel he was choking on. ‘Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you.’

  Something resembling relief: that’s what Mallarino felt. Perhaps because someone else, and not him, had said what he didn’t dare say. Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you: was it not incredible, and also fascinating, that they were talking about the past? What was not known now – now that Rodrigo Valencia mentioned it – was something that in the past had been known, about which there had been certainty at some point, and so certain had Mallarino been that he’d gone as far as to draw a cartoon about it. Was what appeared in the press not true, beyond all doubt or uncertainty? Was a page in the newspaper not the supreme proof that something had happened? Mallarino imagined the past as a watery creature with imprecise contours, a sort of deceitful, dishonest amoeba that can’t be investigated, for, looking for it again under the microscope, we find that it’s not there, and we suspect that it’s gone, and we soon realize that it has changed shape and is now impossible to recognize. Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you. In such a way that the certainties acquired at some moment in the past could in time stop being certainties: something could happen, a fortuitous or deliberate event, and suddenly all evidence is invalidated, the truth ceases to be true, the seen ceases to have been seen and the occurrence to have occurred: all lost their place in time and space; were devoured and passed on to another world, or to another dimension of our world, a dimension we didn’t know. But where was it? Where did the past go when it changed? In which folds of our world were they hiding, cowardly and ashamed, the events that had been unable to remain, to keep being true in spite of the wear and tear of time, to win their place in human history? Because if she doesn’t know, then neither do you. But the problem with Samanta Leal wasn’t that she didn’t know, but that she didn’t remember: that memory, her childhood memory, had suffered certain distortions, certain – how to put it – interferences. It was a question of restoring it: for this, and for no other reason, they needed to speak with Cuéllar’s widow, ask her a couple of simple questions, get a couple of simple answers from her.

  ‘It’s not for me,’ said Mallarino. ‘It’s for her. I want to help her.’

  ‘But have you thought this through, Javier?’ asked Valencia.

  ‘There’s not much to think through.’

  ‘Have you thought about the consequences? Don’t tell me there won’t be any consequences. Don’t tell me you haven’t imagined them. Let’s see, let me see: the girl remembers nothing?’

  ‘She’s not a girl. And no, she doesn’t remember anything.’

  ‘I see. For her it’s as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Except that it did happen, Javier.’

  Mallarino said nothing.

  ‘It did happen,’ said Valencia, ‘and we all saw it.’

  What strange arrogance moved, like the undertow near the shore, beneath those apparently simple words, so vague, so everyday. The arrogance was to simulate or even to covet those certain
ties, as if Valencia could now not only be sure of what he himself saw, but what others saw, others who, twenty-eight years later, were absent or gone or in any case silent. The memory of others: how much he would gladly pay at this moment for a ticket to that spectacle! There, thought Mallarino, lay the origin of our dissatisfaction and our sadness: in the impossibility of sharing memory with others.

  ‘But that doesn’t matter,’ said Mallarino. ‘At least, that doesn’t matter to me. It’s her. The poor thing has a right to know.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just for her.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

  ‘Just for her, yeah,’ said Valencia. ‘What do you take me for, an idiot?’

  Mallarino said nothing.

  ‘You think I don’t realize?’ said Valencia. ‘Well, I do realize. I see perfectly well. What might happen now if nothing happened that night. What could change for you. And I understand, believe me, I understand your worry, at least in principle.’