After the fifth bull, the crowd whistling as it was dragged away, leaving a trail of blood that seemed to coagulate in the sand in front of the audience’s eyes, Mallarino looked up and thought someone was waving at him from a flat on one of the top floors of the Torres del Parque. Someone was moving their arms, but he was far away and his face was a blurry oval, and Mallarino decided he was waving at someone else. As he looked down, however, he saw another pair of arms, waving more exaggeratedly: it was Rodrigo Valencia, who was taking off his cap as if his signals would be more comprehensible if he had it in his hand. Mallarino understood they’d see him afterwards. ‘Oh, look,’ said Magdalena. ‘I wonder what he’s doing here.’ The Valencia family had season tickets to the bullfights every year, as Magdalena knew very well; her sarcasm, however, did not seem to refer to that. What new notes were there in her voice? Something like resentment, but doubtful and lukewarm, lacking conviction, the lilt of a spoiled little girl prowled through the air as if they weren’t in a public place but in the privacy of her room.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mallarino. ‘Don’t you want us to see Valencia?’
‘He’s going to invite us somewhere. I don’t want to do anything this evening, I wanted. . I don’t want to do anything.’
‘Well, I’ll say no. I’ll just say no to whatever he proposes. Nothing easier.’
Magdalena shrugged at the same time as the sixth bull burst cheerfully out, stirring up the sand with the drum roll of his hoofs. The Colombian torero was handling his cape well, but Magdalena’s mood had darkened. Her hands busied themselves with the belt of her coat and took refuge in her deep pockets; from behind them came the smell of tobacco, and Mallarino had a sudden urge to smoke as well. Now the whole bullring had started whistling at the picadors: the old man next to them whistled, sprinkling the shoulders in front of him with saliva, and Magdalena whistled at them, and received disapproving looks from a lady with dyed hair. Later, when the Colombian torero missed with his sword and disenchantment flew around the bullring like slander, Magdalena seemed to be with him again, here, regretting the loss of the ears, shouting silly patriotic cheers while a small group of enthusiasts lifted the young man onto their shoulders.
‘How little it takes,’ Mallarino said to her, when they were inching their way out, brushing up against arms and elbows like cows in a corral. ‘To get carried on people’s shoulders, I mean. It’s as if people do it for their own pleasure.’
‘Maybe they do do it for their own pleasure, silly,’ said Magdalena.
They were just about at Seventh Avenue when Mallarino heard some hurried steps behind them and then felt a tapping of fingers on his shoulder, on the shoulder pad of his jacket. ‘And where are you two going?’ said Rodrigo Valencia. ‘Answer: Nowhere. You’re coming with me.’ Tedium clouded Magdalena’s face.
‘Where?’ asked Mallarino. ‘You know post-bullfight chitchat bores me.’
‘We’re not going to recap the corrida, Javier.’
‘Lots of people talking nonsense. Lots of people who don’t go to see but to be seen.’
‘It’s nothing to do with the corrida,’ said Valencia, suddenly serious. ‘I have to tell you something.’
And that’s how Mallarino found out: almost by accident, in an almost private moment, in the company of the woman who was almost his wife. Valencia led him and Magdalena to a restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel Tequendama, a cold, unpleasant place with lights that were too red from the door of which you could see the grey cement mouth of the tunnel that led down to the underground parking (and this, who knows why, made Mallarino intensely uneasy). At a dark table, beside the window where the name of the restaurant shone in curved neon tubes, a small group of people waited for them: Mallarino recognized two reporters from the judicial section and greeted the rest from afar, unenthusiastically, perhaps because he already knew that enthusiasm was not welcome at this meeting. ‘Tell Mallarino what you told me,’ said Valencia, the words cast out into the air without being addressed to any of them specifically, cast out so the most interested would pick them up. The one most interested was a young woman — too big now to be wearing the braces she had on her teeth — who began to talk about Adolfo Cuéllar as if she’d known him her whole life. She spoke of his marital problems over the last few months, well known to all, and the fact, known only to a few, that he’d recently separated from his wife, or rather his wife had asked him to leave. She spoke of Cuéllar’s health, which was not impeccable, and of the diabetes that was forcing him to have constant check-ups for the next three years. She spoke of Cuéllar’s phone call that morning, demanding an appointment with such insistence that, in spite of it being a holiday and the exceptional circumstances, the doctor had to see him. She also spoke of the routine check-up that took place in the examining room — she spoke of Cuéllar in stockinged feet on the scales, Cuéllar lying down barefoot while the doctor checked his pulse beside his Achilles tendon, Cuéllar without his shirt on taking deep breaths and coughing — and she spoke of the conversation that followed the check-up right there, with the patient sitting on the examining table: shirtless and shoeless. She also spoke of the things that, according to the doctor, Cuéllar had mentioned, several anecdotes concerning his wife and sons and most of all the same recurring complaint: the irreparable loss of his reputation. She spoke of the moment the doctor had left the examining room and sat down behind his desk to find stamps and headed notepaper and write up and sign a prescription for antidepressants, and then she spoke of what the doctor said he heard: the unmistakable sound of a window opening and, seconds later, the screeching of cars braking suddenly and the reactions of pedestrians, which must have been very noisy, because otherwise they would not have reached so high from the pavement of Thirteenth Avenue. And now, after telling all that, the girl with braces looked at her colleagues, and Mallarino understood, in the same magnificent moment, that Valencia had not brought him there just to hear the tale of Adolfo Cuéllar’s suicide, but also to respond to the reporters’ questions, or to one single declaration followed by one single question, in this improvised and almost clandestine press conference. This time too it was the little girl with braces who took charge. ‘Maestro Mallarino,’ she said (and Mallarino saw the alert spiral notebooks and pens erect over them like phalluses), ‘we are all in agreement, as public opinion is as well, that Congressman Cuéllar’s fall from grace began with your caricature. My question, our question, is: do you feel in any way responsible for his death?’