Everything was done carefully, the way people move a table with a vase on top of it: nobody wanted to commit a blunder, nobody wanted to be responsible for damage that could not be repaired. They explained to Beatriz that from now on she’d have two houses, two bedrooms, two places to play, and she listened to them with patience but without looking at them, while popping plastic bubbles with her intensely concentrated thumb and forefinger.
‘She pretends it doesn’t matter to her, but she is suffering,’ said Magdalena.
And Mallarino: ‘But it’s better this way.’
And Magdalena: ‘Yes. It’s better this way.’
When the little girl’s school holidays began, the move was complete; Beatriz lay down for the first time in her new bed, wrinkling her last day’s uniform against the sheets and with trembling eyelids from too many farewell-party sweets, and Mallarino stayed there with his head on her pillow, breathing her breath, until he could tell she’d fallen asleep. He thought he’d get a group of friends together to celebrate the move, not because the move was worthy of celebration, but because a public, social event would normalize the situation in the child’s eyes, take away all the embarrassing aspects, convert it into something acceptable she could talk to her friends about. He made a few calls, asked his guests to make some more, told Beatriz to invite one of her classmates. The following Sunday, at lunchtime, the new house was teeming with people, and Mallarino congratulated himself for having that splendid idea. Nothing would have allowed him to anticipate what happened next.
It was a sunny day; the sunshine was strong and dry and unusual for that time of year, and the doors of the house were wide open. Above their heads a ghost of a wind was blowing, audible in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees and the groaning of long branches. Mallarino walked through the rooms on the ground floor with a sense of detachment, as if he were the visitor, not the others. He had never been the host of a party. Magdalena had organized parties: she was the one who chose the food and moved one or two pieces of furniture to make it easier for people to circulate, and she was the one who welcomed the guests and took coats and left them, with considered carelessness, on their bed, and she took charge of making introductions, of the casual remark that would start a conversation between two people who’d never set eyes on each other before, and people invariably lent themselves to those games, unaware of the power Magdalena’s voice had over them and sometimes not even knowing that her voice was the same one that had held them spellbound from some radio station in some solitary moment of the week. (He had often thought that people’s fondness for Magdalena was owing to that: they’d heard her in melancholy or lonely moments, and her voice had told them stories and had calmed them and allowed them not to think of their problems, of their latest failure, of the pretence of their success. Later they saw her and couldn’t explain why her personality was so magnetic or her way of speaking so attractive.) But today Magdalena wasn’t there. She had refused — subtly, affectionately — to come. She had thought it best, so Beatriz would start to get used to the division in her life, get used to inhabiting parallel universes where one of her two parents didn’t exist and had no reason to exist. Beatriz, for her part, seemed to accept the matter naturally: she had come to the door when her friend arrived, completely in possession of her role as woman of the house, and she herself asked her friend’s mother if Samanta could sleep over. Samanta Leal, Beatriz’s friend was called: a girl who was even shyer than she was, with deep green eyes, a small but fleshy mouth and one of those little noses that have not yet begun to reveal what they will eventually become, framed by the fringe of an old-fashioned doll. She was wearing a little grey schoolgirl’s skirt (Mallarino thought that those knees would not be so clean or so unblemished by the end of the afternoon) and burgundy patent-leather shoes over ankle socks. She didn’t look anything like her mother, who came inside briefly — she came in the way mothers came into houses: to see that everything was or seemed to be fine, to check, as far as was possible, that her daughter was not in any danger in this unfamiliar environment — and looked at the bare walls and paintings leaning against them, still wrapped in protective paper.
‘I just moved in,’ Mallarino told her (an explanation not asked for).
‘Yes, I know,’ said the woman, but didn’t clarify how she knew. She was wearing brown-leather knee-high boots and an ochre coat, and on the lapel of the coat, a silver brooch in the shape of a dragonfly. ‘So your wife’s not here,’ said the woman, and then tried to rephrase: ‘Beatriz’s mum, I mean. She’s not here?’
‘She’s coming later,’ said Mallarino. It wasn’t true: Magdalena would come to pick Beatriz up the next day. But Mallarino felt that little white lie was convenient at that moment, that it would reassure Samanta’s mother or save her some unnecessary worries.
‘To collect Beatriz?’
‘Yes, to pick her up. But not till later, the girls have time to play.’
‘Oh, that’s good. Well, Samanta’s dad will come and get her. He’ll be coming, not me. What would be a good time?’
‘Whenever he likes,’ said Mallarino. ‘But tell him to come with time to spare. If Samanta is anything like my daughter, it’s going to take a while to get her out of here.’
The woman did not react to Mallarino’s humour, and he thought: She’s one of those. This was confirmed as they said goodbye, when, after shaking his hand and beginning to walk away, the woman turned halfway round and asked, almost over her shoulder: ‘You’re the cartoonist, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right, I’m the cartoonist,’ said Mallarino.
‘Yes, that’s who you are,’ said Samanta’s mother. ‘I was trying to find out where I was bringing her.’ It seemed as though she was going to say something more, but what followed was an uncomfortable silence. A dog barked. Mallarino looked but couldn’t spot it; he saw that another guest had arrived. ‘Well then, I’ll leave her in your care,’ said the woman. ‘And thanks.’
Now Mallarino had lost sight of them. He saw them pass by now and then, and once in a while he heard and recognized Beatriz’s voice, her unmistakable delicate little tone, and now and then he sensed, with some part of his awareness, the footsteps of both girls together, the nervous, quick and distant steps, so distant from the adult world. Mallarino poured himself a whisky, took a sip that tasted of wood and felt a burning in the pit of his stomach. He went out into the tiny garden where the guests seemed to be more numerous than they actually were, and looked up and closed his eyes briefly to feel the sun on his face, and like that, with his eyes closed, counted one, two clouds, or two shadows that flew across the curtain of sky. He liked this garden: Beatriz would be able to enjoy herself here. On the stairs he had to be careful not to kick over an ashtray full of cigarette butts; further away, beside the wall, someone had dropped a piece of meat that was now sullying the place, like dog shit. Beside the rose bed was Gabriel Santoro, professor at Rosario University, who had brought his son and a woman with a foreign accent, and further away, near a pile of tiles left over from the renovations that hadn’t been taken away yet, Ignacio Escobar was talking to a newsreader and her most recent boyfriend. Monsalve, maybe, or maybe Manosalbas: Mallarino had forgotten his name. Was it possible there were fewer acquaintances than strangers at this get-together? And if that was true, what did it mean?