It was a rapid movement: she put both feet up on the dashboard and lifted up her hips and pulled her green wool tights and her soft white knickers down with a single skilful shove, sticking both thumbs under the elastic, under both elastic waistbands at once, and pushing forward, not in a straight line but tracing a curve in the air like a bowl, like a smile. The mess of wrinkled clothes bunched around her ankles, and in a brief instant Mallarino saw the calves clustered with red spots and a violet oval on one thigh, where she had a bruise. Samanta separated her knees and opened her legs and all the light in the world invaded the four-by-four and illuminated the pale sex, straight, blond, sparse pubic hairs, the insolent vulva. Samanta’s hand closed over her vulva, moved away, then closed again with straight fingers over the diaphanous skin of her lips: ‘Here,’ said Samanta, ‘I want to know what happened here. Is this what you saw, Señor Mallarino? Was this what you saw twenty-eight years ago? What do you think? Has it changed a lot?’ Mallarino looked up and saw, in a window of the brick building, the silhouette of someone who’d pulled aside the net curtains to get a better view. No it wasn’t a curious man, not a peeping Tom: it was an older woman, and Mallarino managed to see her housecoat and her expression of revulsion before she hid behind the delicate white shadows of the curtains. He tried to turn round; he was prevented by his seat belt; Mallarino unfastened it and turned round to reach for his raincoat on the back seat. He found it on the floor (it must have slipped off the seat on the way down the mountain road) and grabbed it with one hand and threw it on top of Samanta, at first with irritated gestures, and then as if covering up a little girl with a chill. ‘Here, here, here,’ she was saying, and she covered her face with her hands.
Mallarino, without knowing why, began to address her familiarly. ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘Get dressed. Everything’s going to be OK.’
She sat up and folded her knees to her chest, hugged her legs. ‘I didn’t ask for this,’ he heard her say. ‘I was perfectly fine.’ Mallarino read the shame in her voice, and the exhaustion, and the bitterness and the terrible vulnerability.
‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ he told her. He stroked her hair. He desired her, and detested himself for desiring her. He looked towards the doorman’s booth to see whether the doorman had noticed anything. On the grey tree trunk somebody had engraved, with a knife, two names and a heart. ‘PAHY’, he read, before realizing that it wasn’t an H, but two Ts crossed with the same horizontal stroke.
‘Get dressed,’ he said to Samanta. ‘Go upstairs, get a bit of sleep. I’ll see you at three.’
* * *
Magdalena thought that having lunch there, a few steps away from the Matisse and Giacometti and Klimt drawings, would be exciting for Mallarino: judging by his reputation as an anchorite, as an old-sage-hidden-in-the-mountains, he no longer frequented the neighbourhood of La Candelaria as much as he used to in the old days, much less this museum, which still today, ten years after opening, shone as if it were brand-new. Magdalena had called that morning and reserved a table on the patio in the courtyard, but now she regretted it; after the rain, the Bogotá sky had cleared as if a curtain had fallen away, and now the midday light shone brightly on the high white walls, the aluminium tables, the paper place mats, and blinded the diners. They had walked there from Fifth Avenue, while she told him about the programme she’d recorded the previous afternoon and he complained about the filthy smells: the fried-food stands reusing the same oil over and over again but also the street dogs, the homeless people’s blankets beside building entrances, and also the shit, the shit that appeared by surprise on the corners, the origin of which it was best not to imagine. That assault on his senses contrasted strongly with the memory, still recent and raw, of what had happened with Samanta Leal. He mustn’t talk about that. He had to keep it to one side: there, in another world, in an alternative world with incomprehensible rules. Coming in through the Eleventh Street entrance, up the tall step and around Botero’s dark bronze hand, Mallarino had already made the decision not to talk about what he’d seen and heard back in the house in the mountains since the last time he was with Magdalena. One day had gone by, not much more than a day: centuries and centuries had come and gone. Now the sun was shining on the white walls and dazzling them and the waiter had brought a bottle of white wine, but white wine was not white, but golden: wine is sunlight held together by water. Where had he heard that before? Maybe Magdalena would remember, she was good at things like that. Now she was pouring the wine, and enjoying doing so; her short haircut suited her strong-boned face, her cheeks straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, her nose that descended from her eyebrows in a long elegant line. Trying all the time to keep at bay the bothersome images, the interfering words, he thought of Samanta Leal. If he didn’t mention her, if he didn’t mention the last few hours or the 3 p.m. appointment, maybe this time in Magdalena’s company could turn into a necessary and urgent moment of tranquillity. Let the world stop spinning: that’s all he asked. Let it stop revolving, let everyone be quiet. Yes, let there be a little silence so he could just hear this voice that was talking to him now, that husky and still smooth voice, the voice of a cello, one of those voices that paralyse a hand about to turn a dial, that translate the chaos of the world and convert its obscure jargon into a diaphanous tongue. Interpret this world for me, Magdalena, tell me what’s happening to us and what might happen now, what could happen to me now and what could happen to Samanta Leal, tell me how to remember what hasn’t happened yet. And suddenly there was that phrase again that kept coming back to him like a fibre of meat stuck in his teeth.
‘“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,”’ recited Mallarino. ‘Who said that?’
Magdalena chewed a couple of times.
‘The White Queen says it to Alice,’ she said: her mouth half-full, her lively eyes smiling. ‘Beatriz loved that book, I don’t know how many times we read it.’
But Beatriz was not here. Beatriz was away on a trip, Beatriz was always away, Beatriz never stopped, perhaps out of fear of not being able to take off again if she did. The White Queen says it to Alice. Beatriz loved that book. Yes, he’d read it to her too once or twice, or at least a few pages, and he remembered having seen her — in a hammock, on holiday — reading it by herself when she was old enough. The image of his daughter reading always moved him, perhaps because he saw on her face the same signs of intense concentration he already knew from Magdalena’s face, the same arrangement of muscles between the eyebrows and around the lips, and he couldn’t help but wonder about the purpose of such inherited traits, what evolutionary aim could be served by daughters making the same gestures as their mothers when a tale interested them. Beatriz loved that book: Magdalena had remembered: Magdalena always remembered.