‘Oh, finally,’ Rodrigo Valencia said as he saw him approach. ‘Come here, Javier, come and drink a toast with us, damn it, or do you not speak to your guests, sir.’ Rodrigo Valencia never addressed anyone informally, not even his own children, but his way of speaking was so physical — made up of interjections and slaps on the back, heavy hands on shoulders, exaggerated bows — that nobody felt deprived of his closeness or trust. He hugged Javier and said: ‘This fellow is going to be the greatest, mark my words. He’s already great, but he’s going to be the greatest. Mark my words.’ The recipients of this prophecy, each with a glass of aguardiente in hand, were Elena Ronderos, Valencia’s wife, and a columnist for El Independiente, Gerardo Gómez, who had just returned from an eighteen-month exile in Mexico. Like Mallarino, he’d received an anonymous threat; but in his case, for reasons no one really understood very well, the police had considered it prudent for him to go away somewhere while things calmed down.
‘Until stuff calms down, that’s what they told me,’ said Gómez. ‘Not you? Have they never told you to go away?’
‘Never,’ said Mallarino. ‘Who knows why.’
‘Maybe because drawings aren’t as direct,’ said Gómez.
‘But more people see them,’ said Valencia.
‘But they’re not as direct,’ said Gómez. ‘And subtlety is not these people’s strong suit. Hey, Javier, what happens if they send another one?’
‘They’re not going to send any more,’ said Mallarino. ‘It’s been almost a year.’
‘But what if they do send something else? You have to think about what you’d do.’
‘They’re not going to send anything,’ said Mallarino.
‘How can you be so sure?’ said Gómez. ‘You’re not going soft on us, are you?’
‘Your father’ll go soft before this one,’ said Valencia, who was allowed to say such things. ‘Didn’t you see last Sunday’s cartoon? A depth charge, Gómez, a depth charge, and I’m not saying that because Mallarino is here. The drawing was a marvel, worthy of Goya. A bizarre thing, a sort of bat with the face of the Treasury Minister. And underneath it said: “We had to frighten people to reassure the markets.” What do you think? We’ve already received several calls from the Ministry, from the Minister’s press office. They’re furious! So, don’t give us that, Gómez, nobody’s getting soft. Don’t go thinking. .’
Gerardo Gómez interrupted him: ‘What’s that guy doing here?’
He was looking towards the front door, past the sliding door to the garden that reflected the trees and the clear sky and people’s clothes, past the big armchair where Beatriz and her friend were playing some private game, beyond the back of the leather sofa and the coffee table with its art books and empty vase and small army of abandoned glasses of aguardiente. A man had just come in; he had stopped in the middle of the living room, looking off into space, as if he were waiting for someone, but Mallarino knew he wasn’t looking off into space, but at the fireplace, or rather the wall above the fireplace, the wide white space inhabited by the single painting Mallarino’d had time to hang: one of his first nudes of Magdalena, painted at the beginning of the 1970s or even earlier, before they were married, when Magdalena’s body was still a discovery. Nobody could tell it was her, because the woman in the painting had her face hidden in the pillows, but the man was looking at her (looking at the messy sheets with their different tones of white, the naked torso and the beauty spot on the left breast, beside the relaxed nipple) as if he’d recognized her by way of mysterious arts. Mallarino, for his part, recognized him: it was Adolfo Cuéllar, a Conservative congressman he’d drawn more than once over the last few years and with a certain frequency a few months back, enough to know now by heart his large ears, the childish freckles on his face and the severe line of his slicked-over hair. His reputation had turned him into a target of several attacks from the Liberal press. Few public men carried their reputations the way Cuéllar carried his, standing on his shoulder like a parrot, no, draped around his neck the way a snake charmer carries his snake. Maybe that’s what a reputation is: the moment when a presence fabricates, for those observing, an illusory precedent. Mallarino’s last cartoon had appeared after a nurse had been beaten to death by her husband with a large hoe in a village in Valledupar. ‘It’s very regrettable,’ Cuéllar said into a journalist’s microphone. ‘But when someone hits a woman, it’s generally for a reason.’ Mallarino drew him standing in a forest of tombstones, with an oversized head where his freckles and haircut were easily distinguished, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a garden hoe in one hand; in the background, sitting on a rock in a posture denoting insurmountable tedium, was Death with his long black cloak and his scythe held in his folded arms. ‘When one is out of work,’ read the line beneath the image, ‘it’s generally for a reason.’ And now the man — ‘the man of the hoe’ as a columnist had already called him in the magazine Semana — was in Mallarino’s house. ‘What’s that guy doing here?’ Gerardo Gómez had asked. ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ said Mallarino. Or maybe he didn’t get the whole sentence out: ‘That’s what I’d like…’ he had managed to say, and at that moment he saw Rodrigo Valencia wipe his mouth with a paper napkin (above his upper lip, a trail of white specks stuck to his badly shaven skin) and clear his throat, with a touch of comic intent. ‘I invited him,’ said Valencia. ‘Mea culpa, Javier, I forgot to warn you.’
‘What do you mean you invited him?’ said Mallarino.
‘He called me on Friday, man, he called to beg me. Said he needed to speak to Señor Mallarino. That I had to get him a meeting with Señor Mallarino. He pestered me so damn much he left me no choice.’
‘Wait one second. A meeting?’
‘You’ve got to understand, man. It was like the guy was on his knees over the phone.’
‘But on a Sunday?’ said Mallarino. ‘Today? Sunday? Here in my house? Have you gone mad, Rodrigo?’
‘There was no other way to get rid of him. He’s a congressman, Javier.’
‘He’s an idiot.’
‘He’s a congressional idiot,’ said Valencia. ‘Speak to him for two seconds, that’s all I’m asking. At least the guy was civil enough to show up after lunch.’
‘Not to eat my food, you mean.’
‘Exactly, Javier,’ said Valencia. ‘Not to eat your food.’
Mallarino went inside out of courtesy (the host advancing to receive the recent arrival) and at the same time as a precaution (to prevent the recent arrival from finding himself in the place where the party was taking place and feeling, mistakenly, that he was welcome there). He greeted Cuéllar: a chubby, flaccid hand, a gaze that fixed on Mallarino’s left shoulder. His hair was shorter than it seemed from a distance: Mallarino saw the broad forehead, completely clear, a slight smudge of Brylcreem on the left temple, a fruit fly caught in a spider web, and later, seeing him turn round to sit down, he noticed a bulge at the back of his head, as if something were struggling to get out of there (something ugly, no doubt: a secret, a devious past). Everything about the little man made him feel an intense disgust: he was grateful to be taller than him, thinner, more elegant in spite of his inattention to his wardrobe. ‘Thanks for seeing me, Javier,’ the little man was saying. ‘On a Sunday, for crying out loud, and you with guests.’