And then, one November morning, Mallarino was woken by the telephone ringing. ‘They’ve asked for his resignation,’ said Rodrigo Valencia from the other end of the line. ‘Nobody’s talking about it as a punishment, because there’s nothing to punish. But my spies have very clear opinions. You don’t have to be too savvy to realize.’
It was still very early: Mallarino cradled the receiver between his shoulder and head while his hands, tingling with sleep, felt around for his cigarettes and lighter in the methodical messiness of his bedside table. ‘Realize what?’ said Mallarino.
‘Well, Javier, you know,’ said Valencia. ‘Or rather, the less said the better. Watch the news tonight, I’m sure there’ll be something.’
And there was: that night Mallarino turned on the television a couple of minutes before seven, and listened with half an ear to the end of an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show while filing away the press clippings he hadn’t used that week. He had time to go outside and find the dogs’ plastic dishes, serve them a scoop of dog food, come back up and wash his hands before the newscast began. The first commercial break suggested that on a salary of fifteen thousand pesos he could be a banker, asked him to drink a grape-flavoured soda pop (only because a roller-skating girl was carrying one) and ordered him urgently to buy the book The World Challenge. After all that, the presenter’s talking moustache announced the news.
The images, it seems, had been filmed that very morning. There was Cuéllar, his head on a bed of microphones like the head of John the Baptist on Salomé’s platter, announcing his temporary retirement from the Congress of the Republic on the very steps of the Capitolio Nacional. ‘No, gentlemen, it is not a matter of trying to hush anything up,’ he said: replying to a question that hadn’t been broadcast. That’s how the news item began, with that irritated stress the voice makes in denial. ‘No, not at all. The reasons are personal. I’m going to take a little break, this job wears a man down, you know what I mean? My family needs me, and the family is the top priority, isn’t it? At least I’ve always said so.’ Mallarino saw the image from the edge of his bed; he tried to capture, in his sketchbook with black covers, two or three details: the nose enlarged by the cameras, the gleam of the flashes reflecting off the slicked-over hair, the high collar of his checked shirt that added a fold and a shadow under the chin. Something caught the attention: some movement, a face he knew? Mallarino leaned forward; he saw a woman keeping a restrained silence behind the swarm of journalists; despite a background shot on television not being the same as a foregrounded newspaper portrait, he recognized Cuéllar’s wife, the laboriously curled black hair, the sky-blue eye shadow, a sepia-toned silk scarf wrapped around her long neck. He didn’t know what to make of that presence, for the woman’s face was half-hidden and her expression was inscrutable, and he went back to focusing on the congressman. It was true that he looked tired: the weariness, at least, was not feigned. He could see it in his eyes, thought Mallarino, those eyes that seemed irritated by the lights, and he could also hear it in his voice: it was no longer that indiscreet and repugnant voice that had asked him for clemency that afternoon and later forgiveness, but it still had something in common with it. What was it?The image of Cuéllar — his practised indifference or confidence on the stone steps of the Capitolio — lasted a very short time, a few brief seconds, and was cut when, after the last of his indifferent and confident answers, the reporters rose up in an incomprehensible salvo of questions. The newscast went on to announce the dismantling of a conspiracy to overthrow the government in Spain, but Mallarino went on thinking about the head that was speaking among microphones and comparing it to the head that had spoken to him, drooping and humble, the afternoon of the party, and suddenly he was also thinking about the head of the woman who was observing the whole scene from behind, and then went back to thinking about the man at the party and the man on television. And then he knew, both were humiliated men. It was true that now, on television, the humiliation had been more obvious and notorious, but was actually nothing more than the exacerbated or extreme version of the previous humiliation, or rather the previous one had been the seed, and the current one, broadcast on national television at peak viewing hour, its full flowering. And now he focused on the wife again: the humiliation, all humiliation, needs a witness. It doesn’t exist without it: nobody is humiliated alone: humiliation in solitude is not humiliation. Was Cuéllar’s wife the witness at this moment? Or were the journalists? Were the real reasons he was leaving his post known or not? Did they or did they not have Mallarino’s drawing in mind? Did he, Adolfo Cuéllar? What bothered people who were caricatured most, as Mallarino had discovered over the years, was not seeing themselves with their defects, but everyone else seeing them: like when a secret comes to light, as if their bones were a well-guarded secret and Mallarino had revealed them all of a sudden. Did that happen to Cuéllar? His wife was looking at him, the journalists were looking at him, Mallarino was looking at him, millions of people all over the country were looking at him. . Cuéllar had become a visible being, too visible; Mallarino imagined himself observing the city from on high and at the same time he imagined the satisfaction the little people must feel, the men and women who were too small and insignificant to be seen by him and those like him. Perhaps Cuéllar, in these moments, would have preferred to be one of those men nobody sees, an anonymous and hidden creature. Or perhaps he was justly turning into one of them: by giving up his privileged position, going into the shadows to blend in with those who were not privileged, he was also fleeing from future humiliations. Without privileges, Adolfo Cuéllar would be safe from those, like Mallarino, who see the world through the humiliations of others; those who seek out weaknesses in others — bones, cartilages — and pounce to exploit them, the way dogs smell fear. Mallarino turned off the television. As the back of his hand passed in front of the screen, he felt the tickle of static electricity on the hairs of his fingers and on his skin.
‘Poor bastard,’ Mallarino said to the black screen, the chest of drawers, the closed blinds. ‘He should have just stayed home.’
The second Sunday of December, just before the end-of-the-year festivities got under way in the agitated and warm city, Mallarino invited Magdalena to the first bullfight of the season. A young Colombian torero was going to graduate to full standing; his sponsors would be two Spanish bullfighters, and one of them, Antoñete, always put on a good performance at the Santamaría Bullring; Mallarino thought that all this could provide him with the perfect pretext to spend an afternoon with his wife, just the two of them on their own, and discover if the impression he’d had lately was illusory. He’d been feeling it for days now, each time he met with Magdalena to hand over or return Beatriz like clandestine merchandise: it was something impossible to pinpoint, a sigh that seemed involuntary during a goodbye kiss on the cheek, a straightening up when Mallarino, with a hand on her waist, directed her through a door he was holding open. One night, after the birthday celebration of a mutual friend they were obliged to attend together, they’d found themselves furiously desiring each other, and there was a tacit agreement between them to close their eyes and forget about everything, even what was about to happen, like someone placing a bet thinking that tomorrow he’ll see what to do if he loses. It was a drunken fuck, a clumsy, cursing, colliding coupling in the darkness on a sofa with upholstery that left marks on their skin, and it was neither repeated nor even mentioned, except to say that if they weren’t more careful things were going to get very complicated. But now, in the front row of the half-filled shady section, Mallarino thought that maybe it might not be impossible: that time had passed now, and with time, many things. The sunny section was full to bursting, he saw coloured scarves, he saw heads wearing dark glasses, he saw the trees behind the flags and the brick tower blocks behind the trees, and Magdalena was at his side, and Beatriz was waiting for them at her grandparents’ house. He liked, he’d always liked, the imminence of unpredictable danger, the threat that he felt each time the wooden doors spat forth one of those bulls with their four-hundred-and-fifty-kilo charge, and he was glad he was there, with Magdalena, knowing that she too liked some of it: she liked the music, the din of the paso dobles in the imperfect acoustics; she liked the heat of the early afternoon and the coolness of the end. Everything was good, thought Mallarino, and then the Colombian torero flourished a set of veronica passes and finished off the bull with know-how beyond his years. Mallarino was looking at Magdalena, the way the sun reflected from the other side of the ring illuminated her face, when a banderillero was slightly gored and the whole bullring let out a howl and both Magdalena’s hands flew to her mouth, her long fingers to her full lips, and Mallarino saw the liquid shine of her gaze and thought that maybe it might not be impossible, that time had passed, and with time, many things. Antoñete presented the Colombian torero with his sword and other accoutrements. Everyone applauded. The Colombian torero did an amusing bow; when he put his feet together he raised a little cloud of dust. It’s fine to live and to die, thought Mallarino. He was fine, Magdalena was fine, everything was fine.