‘My pleasure,’ said Mallarino. ‘But I would ask you not to call me by my first name. You and I don’t know each other.’
There was a sort of clumsiness in the man’s movements. ‘No, of course,’ he said. ‘Precisely.’ And then: ‘Can I take my jacket off?’
He did, and Mallarino found himself looking at a linen waistcoat with a blue-and-green diamond pattern straining violently over a prominent pot belly. Mallarino, in his caricatures, had never taken advantage of these recently discovered curves, and thought he would the next time. He led Cuéllar to a corner of the room, closest to the kitchen, and there, on two chairs not positioned to be used, but just to go with the telephone table, they sat down to talk. Mallarino felt around and then turned on the lamp: in this part of the house, far from the big window overlooking the garden, you could tell that evening was starting to fall. The yellow light illuminated Cuéllar’s face, and bones and skin cast new shadows as he moved. Cuéllar bent over to adjust one of his loafers (maybe it was swallowing his sock, thought Mallarino, that could be very uncomfortable) and then straightened up again. ‘Look, Señor Mallarino,’ he began, ‘I wanted to meet you, wanted us to meet, because it seems to me that you have a, how should I put this, a mistaken image. Of me, of course. A mistaken image of me.’ Mallarino listened to him while he looked for a couple of clean glasses and poured two double shots of whisky, a matter of not neglecting his duties as host even for a man unworthy of them. From the garden came the sound of a woman’s loud laugh: Mallarino looked up to see who it had been; Cuéllar, however, wiped his palms on his trousers, his fingers spread out as if he hoped Mallarino would notice the cleanliness of his nails, and kept talking. ‘I am not the person you draw in your caricatures. I’m different. You don’t know me.’
‘That’s what I just said,’ said Mallarino, ‘you and I don’t know each other.’
‘We don’t know each other,’ said Cuéllar. ‘And it seems to me that you’ve been unfair to me, forgive my saying. I’m not a bad person, you understand? I’m a good person. Ask my wife. Ask my children. I have two, two boys. Ask them and you’ll see they’ll say so, that I’m a good person. Poor little guys. I don’t show them your drawings. My wife doesn’t show them, forgive me for telling you this, sorry.’
Mallarino could barely believe it: the man had come on a supplicant mission. He called to beg me, Valencia had said. It was like the guy was on his knees over the phone. He felt invaded by a solid contempt, as palpable as a tumour. What was annoying him so much? Was it perhaps the humility with which Adolfo Cuéllar was speaking to him, head bent, casting shadows under his nose, arms resting on his knees (the pose of someone confessing to a friendly priest, a sinner before his confessor), or perhaps the respect with which he was treating Mallarino in spite of the fact that he, obviously, felt none. I’ve humiliated him, I’ve ridiculed him, and now he’s come to lick my arse. What a repugnant man. Yes, that was it, an unpredictable and thus more intense repugnance, a repugnance for which Mallarino was not prepared. He had expected complaints, protests, even diatribes; a few minutes earlier he had greeted this man with a measure of hostility just to better face up to the other’s hostility, like an employee who, caught in the wrong, arrives at the supervisor’s office gesticulating and shouting, launching little preventative attacks. Well, now it seems that Cuéllar has not come here to demand the immediate cessation of those aggressive drawings, but to humiliate himself even further before his aggressor. He is an adult, thought Mallarino, a grown man and I have humiliated him; he has a wife and kids and I have ridiculed him; but this adult man does not defend himself, this head of a family does not respond with similar blows, rather he humiliates himself even more, seeks even more ridicule. Mallarino found himself feeling a confusing emotion that went beyond contempt, something that wasn’t irritation or annoyance but seemed dangerously close to hatred, and it alarmed him to be feeling it.
‘Please, Javier,’ Cuéllar was saying, ‘please don’t draw me like that any more. I’m not like that.’ And then, correcting himself: ‘That’s what I came to ask you, Señor Mallarino,’ he said with a shaky and nervous voice (nervous like Beatriz when she licked the dry skin of her hands). ‘Thank you for listening to me, sorry for your time, I mean thank you for your time.’
Mallarino listened to him and thought: He’s weak. He’s weak and that’s why I hate him. He’s weak and I’m strong now, and I hate him for making the fact so obvious, for allowing me to abuse my strength, for giving me away, yes, for exposing this power that maybe I don’t deserve. Seen from this seat, the sliding door to the garden had turned into a big illuminated rectangle, and Mallarino saw, against the bright backdrop, the silhouettes that now began to enter. ‘The day’s cooled down now,’ he heard someone say. The house filled with lively conversations, open or more discreet laughter; someone asked where the record player was, and someone else, Gómez or Valencia, began to sing without waiting for musical accompaniment. I saw you arrive, he sang, and felt the presence of an unknown being: it was a song Magdalena liked, but there was no way Valencia or Gómez knew that or knew that those lines were forcing Mallarino to remember his absent wife, the profound emptiness that was opening in his life without her, and to regret everything, to regret it intensely: I saw you arrive and felt what I’d never ever felt before. Adolfo Cuéllar was just apologizing again: for taking his time, for invading his house on a Sunday. He was talking about a father’s image for his children, and how his sons would grow up with Mallarino’s image of him. ‘Do it for them,’ Cuéllar was saying, ‘as a father yourself, please,’ he asked or begged, and Mallarino saw his ears, his nose, the bones of his forehead and his temples, and thought of the strange disdain those bones and cartilages produced in him, and said to himself that even if Adolfo Cuéllar didn’t strike him as a repugnant little character, he would keep drawing him non-stop, and his bones and cartilages were to blame. His bones are to blame, thought Mallarino, it’s always all the fault of bones and cartilages. And then he thought: Bones are the only things that matter; in them, in the shape of the skull and the angle of the nose, in the width of the forehead and the strength or trepidation of a jaw and the dimples on a chin, their delicate or brusque slopes, their more or less intense shadows, there lies the reputation and the image: give me a bone and I shall move the world. Politicians don’t know it, they haven’t realized yet, or maybe they have, but it’s not something they can fix: we are born with these bones, it’s very difficult to change them, and so we’ll go through life with the same vulnerabilities, or always forcing ourselves to compensate for them: didn’t someone say that a successful man is simply someone who has found the way to conceal a complex? In the living room, standing next to a crouching body who was manipulating old newspapers to light, for the first time, a fire in the fireplace of the new house, Rodrigo Valencia — it was him, it was Valencia, now Mallarino had recognized him — was singing at the top of his voice the lines of the song about a love that wasn’t fire and wasn’t flame, and those other lines, that Magdalena loved so much, about the distances that separate cities and cities that destroy customs, and with each line Mallarino had the impression that Adolfo Cuéllar, who now took a sip of his drink and made a grotesque grimace as he swallowed, fell lower and lower in humiliation and shamelessness. A burst of flames reddened the room. Cuéllar was incredible: how could he inflict such pains on himself, or did it not pain him to kneel before someone who’d wounded him? Mallarino was on the verge of asking him roughly when there was a sound of breaking glass, and before Mallarino had time to discover where it had come from Elena Ronderos appeared, taking long strides and moving her hands as if wiping a clumsy phrase off a blackboard.