An appointment in the centre. What would Magdalena be doing right now? He suddenly felt an urgent need to see her, to be with her and hear her voice, as if by doing so he could prove in some twisted way that not all of the past was changeable and unstable. Magdalena was also the past. But Magdalena was firm. Mallarino imagined her, by some sort of automatism, in front of a double microphone, two long silvery tubes. The desk in the image was made of wood and covered in a brown cloth; on top of the cloth was a stopwatch, so Magdalena could time her monologues without consulting the digital clock on the wall. But all this was mere speculation: he wasn’t even sure that Magdalena recorded her programmes in the morning. On the avenue, the traffic was moving slowly, more slowly than normal. The four-by-four passed between unfinished rust-coloured buildings and urban trees, those sad trees with their crowns that nobody ever sees and their asphyxiated leaves on the lower branches. Samanta had given directions and proposed the best routes, drawing a map with words that Mallarino could imagine in his head, and then she had gone quiet, as if hoping that the silence would be strong enough to make Mallarino forget her presence. ‘Where should I turn off?’ he asked. Her hand moved in front of the windscreen, like the incomplete shadow of a little dove, but not a word came from her mouth; and when he turned his head, trying all the time to keep an eye on the traffic, Mallarino realized that Samanta had started to cry. They were stealthy and weary tears, like those of someone who has already cried a lot: these were remainders, leftover tears. ‘Don’t cry, Samanta,’ he said; he felt immediately, irrevocably stupid; but searching through the archives of his head he could not find any other consoling words. He didn’t have very many, either, and he didn’t often use them. And he felt immediately, irrevocably stupid.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Samanta. She smiled, wiped both eyes with the same hand, smiled again. ‘It’s just that I was fine. I didn’t need this.’
‘I know,’ said Mallarino.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Ask away.’
‘What happens now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, just that: what happens now? Or rather: what’s going to happen this afternoon? What’s going to happen after three? Am I obliged to carry on as before? I don’t know what I’m going to be told, but, do I have that obligation? And what if I decide I don’t want to, that I don’t want any of this? Right now, here, before we get to my house. What happens if I’d rather forget all this again? What if I’d rather go back to how things were before that fucking ceremony? Don’t I have that right?’
‘Is that what you want, Samanta?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have a headache.’
‘We can stop and buy something.’
‘And I want to change my clothes,’ said Samanta. ‘I can’t stand wearing dirty clothes.’
‘Well, those dirty clothes look very good on you,’ said Mallarino. He hadn’t meant it to sound like a cheap flirtatious compliment but that’s how the words came out. Not that it wasn’t true: in the morning, when Samanta came out of Beatriz’s old room with her hair wet from the shower, but wearing the same blouse and the same skirt from the day before, Mallarino had found the sight strangely erotic. He didn’t say so to Samanta, of course: women have no reason to comprehend men’s idiotic impulses, or even put up with them or tolerate them, or endure every compliment thrown at them, no matter how well intentioned. That’s all his comment had been, and nevertheless he noticed or thought he noticed a sudden tension in Samanta’s muscles, her shoulders bracing against the back of her seat, her stretched-out legs folding up. Had it bothered her? ‘I have a headache,’ she said again, but talking to herself this time. A motorcycle with its lights on veered past; behind him was a pickup truck with darkened windows, and further back, a military van with rifle barrels sticking out: the President, or some minister? Now Samanta wiped her eyes again, rubbing them carelessly, the way you’re never supposed to do (a risk of seriously scratching the corneas). On her index finger, Mallarino noticed a wet trail like that of a snail.
‘Where should I turn?’ he said.
‘Pretty soon,’ said Samanta, ‘I’ll let you know.’ And after a silence: ‘This is fucking hell. Not knowing is not hell. The hellish thing is not knowing whether I want to know. Or if I’m better off the way I was before.’ Mallarino said yes, that he felt the uncertainty too, that he also — ‘No, you don’t know,’ Samanta cut him off. Mallarino sensed some hostility. ‘You can’t know. None of you can. People like you think you know, imagine you know, and it’s not true. If you only knew how insulting that is. Believing you know. Believing you can imagine. It’s not like that.’
‘You don’t understand, Samanta.’
‘It’s an insult. That you believe. That you imagine.’
‘That’s not what I meant to say,’ said Mallarino. ‘Don’t be like this, please.’
With a gesture that struck Mallarino as at once weak and authoritarian, Samanta pointed to a street with dark brick walls topped with broken glass: some transparent, some green, testimony to other, more innocent times when such strategies deterred thieves. ‘Turn down here. Then take the second right. But don’t miss it, or it’ll take forever to get back round.’ Samanta’s voice sounded fragile, as if it were catching somewhere. ‘That building, the only one there is,’ she said, or rather ordered, and raised her hand enough to point at a brick box with white aluminium-framed windows and net curtains behind the windows and silhouettes of women behind the net curtains: there, on a street of old Chapinero houses, Samanta’s building looked like something someone had forgotten. She pointed to a spot by the kerb where Mallarino could park: beside a tree with a thick trunk and roots growing over the pavement. A car must have just left, after the rain stopped, because a perfect dry rectangle of lighter grey was still visible on the dark grey surface.
Before they had stopped completely, with the wheezing murmur of the car’s engine still cutting off the softest syllables, Samanta said: ‘Fifteen, Señor Mallarino.’ A bicycle messenger went past, his right trouser leg tucked inside a fluorescent orange sock. ‘I was fifteen years old. My dad was away on a trip. He travelled a lot, an insurance salesman can travel a lot: Cali, Cartagena, Medellín, and, at some point, Caracas, Quito, Panama. I was at a party. My mum asked me specifically to come back early, because my dad was arriving home from a trip that night and we had to be there waiting for him. My mum’s life revolved around things like that. Having his dinner ready. His family waiting for him when he got home. I was a good girl, did what I was told. And that night, when I got home, I found my mum waiting in the kitchen. All the lights in the house were turned off, except for the one on the stove. You know the one? The little yellow light on the extractor fan, which was on even though nothing was cooking. And my mum there, sitting by the counter, eating fried pork rinds out of the bag. That’s something I’ll never forget: the crackling, pork rinds straight from the bag. She told me he hadn’t come home. At six the next morning we drove across the city, went into the airport car park. He always left his car at the airport: his trips lasted two days, never any longer. We went into the car park and we were driving around for a long time, until we found it. There was my dad’s car. I looked through the window to see what was inside. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I looked in. The windows were dirty, because it had rained. And do you know what I saw, Señor Mallarino?’ He gripped an imaginary bar; he waited for a terrifying or macabre revelation. ‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Samanta. ‘There was nothing inside. Not a key ring, not a single toll receipt, no loose change. The windows dirty and the car, inside, clean. Clean as if he were going to sell it that afternoon. I think my mum knew deep down. She didn’t seem worried: I thought that deep down she knew my dad had left. . and the weird thing is that none of this has ever been a problem for me, Señor Mallarino. What happened to my family has happened to hundreds of families, thousands. For me it’s never been a problem. But last night I began to ask myself stupid things. What did my dad’s leaving have to do with that night? Was there any link? No, what link could there be, I don’t see it. But is there one, even though I can’t see it?’ Mallarino saw her press her jaw to her chest, squeeze her eyes shut. ‘What I want to know is what happened here,’ Samanta said then. Her voice, damp and thick, had a sort of urgency in the rarefied air inside the car. ‘Here,’ said Samanta. She began to cry again, but her crying was more candid this time; it distorted her features, stole her beauty. Samanta was patting her belly and mouth, the expression on her mouth stretched. ‘What happened here,’ she was saying, ‘I want to know what happened here.’ Mallarino stared at her hands; he interrogated them, interrogated their tapping against her body; Mallarino didn’t understand. There, parked in front of her building, Samanta grimaced with impatience and her mouth suddenly released a pent-up breath.