Or that, at least, is what Magdalena wanted to say from the very moment of her arrival. Mallarino opened the door, said hello with a hug, felt a surge of desire as he touched her blue blouse: he’d always liked that blouse, the way it accentuated the curve of her breasts, and briefly fantasized about the possibility that she had chosen it on purpose. A new sincerity had established itself between them since the incident: maybe, thought Mallarino, it was the awareness of the proximity of danger, of the bad things that had grazed their lives without touching them, for Magdalena, with feminine wisdom, had overlooked Mallarino’s inattention to the abandoned drinks to concentrate on what happened afterwards, which was really serious and dangerous. She had something to tell him, Magdalena said with a vague tension in the way she moved, would he mind if she came in for a while? And there, both sitting at the dining-room table after eating with Beatriz (as they used to do, thought Mallarino without saying so, as they used to do in the world they had mislaid and would have to recover), each holding a cup of steaming tea, as they waited while the little girl showered and put her dirty clothes in the hamper and cleaned her teeth with a toothbrush with a handle the shape of a very skinny fairy, Magdalena described a scene in which the opinion page of El Independiente appeared one day on the bulletin board at the Cuéllar boys’ school, and one of them, the eldest, got into a fist fight with a classmate who made a disagreeable comment about his father. ‘Can you imagine?’ said Magdalena with something that might have been consternation but could also mean something else. ‘At the school!’ Mallarino was listening to her story, but his attention was not on it, but rather on the sudden complicity bathing them at that moment, a connection between them they hadn’t felt for a long time, or was it perhaps the rare emotion the joint protection of a child produces.
‘Has she asked anything?’ said Mallarino.
‘Nothing,’ said Magdalena, ‘she hasn’t said anything.’
‘And what about the Leal girl? Do we know anything?’
‘No, nothing. We’ll see what happens when school starts again.’ Magdalena spoke in a soft voice, in those low but fine-tuned notes that only she was able to modulate, and Mallarino desired her again; he allowed himself to cast a direct glance at her breasts, remember them fleetingly, letting his eyes show that memory; Magdalena pretended not to notice, although women always noticed those things, and didn’t fold her arms and her face showed no sign she felt uncomfortable. She said goodbye affectionately, stroking Mallarino’s arm, and he was left alone with his daughter in his new house. This was an unprecedented kind of solitude for him at that moment: he was fascinated by the novelty of the feeling, undoubtedly related to the instinctive anxiety at having sole responsibility for Beatriz and her well-being, at least for the next forty-eight hours (a vertiginous figure). This emotion brought tears to his eyes: he felt ridiculous, mocked himself. In the mist of those new impressions he thought of Cuéllar and Cuéllar’s sons, who he’d never seen, and in his mind he imagined, vivid and mobile and bright like a film, a scene of a fist fight in a school playground, and he could almost see clothes tearing against pavement, bruises on faces, dark blood and tears, and he could almost hear the sound of the blows, bones colliding with bones. But the scene soon vanished, because Beatriz, with an irresistible smile of enthusiasm, had pulled out an old deck of cards with battered corners from her little pink knapsack, and was now asking her father to play manotón in spite of the fact that he’d explained to her countless times that playing the game with just two was no fun at all.
At the end of August, when classes resumed, Beatriz brought home the news (but it wasn’t so much news as a casual mention, an offhand comment) that Samanta Leal wasn’t there any more. She didn’t mention her again. So, with dismissive ease, the girl disappeared from Beatriz’s memory and perhaps that of the whole school, and Mallarino thought that he too, finding himself in the same situation, would have done the same: created a void of silence around the child, a closed and hermetic oblivion where what happened, not existing in the memories of those around her, would soon stop existing in her own memory. Change schools, change neighbourhoods, change cities, change something, keep changing, change to leave behind, change to erase: a true pentimento, the correction to a canvas after a change of heart, an image painted over another, a brushstroke of oil paint on top of other brushstrokes. That was perhaps what had happened in the case of Samanta Leal, because oil paint cannot be erased, but can be corrected; not eliminated, but buried under new layers. It was easy to correct a child’s life: just a couple of radical decisions and a real will, a real commitment to the correction, and that was all. Samanta Leal’s parents had decided to do that, and that was to be respected; Mallarino talked about it once with Magdalena, and Magdalena agreed. As the weeks went by, and the months, Samanta Leal also began to disappear from their memories, and what should have surprised them, but didn’t surprise them, was not remembering her even when they talked about what was happening to Adolfo Cuéllar.
First there were rumours. ‘The Witches’ Post’, the gossip section of a weekly magazine, ran a story about how Cuéllar and his wife had been at the centre of a small scandal in the queue for a cinema on Sixty-third Street. Later, El Tiempo published in its ‘women’s section’ — the word Women headed the page in hollow letters, barely an outline — a half-page interview in which the congressman’s wife spoke with pleasure about charity bazaars, literacy drives, donations to food banks and also to blood banks, and Mallarino was sure he was not the only one surprised or puzzled by the omission of any mention of Adolfo Cuéllar, whose influences, direct or indirect, had made the donations and drives and bazaars possible. ‘Señora Cuéllar’, read the text, ‘preferred discreetly that we not talk about her husband. “Dirty laundry gets washed at home,” she told us.’