‘Have you heard from her?’ Mallarino asked.
‘Yes. She wrote to me a couple of days ago. One piece of good news and one bad.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Mallarino. ‘Bad news first.’
‘They’re splitting up.’
‘That’s the good news.’
‘Don’t joke,’ said Magdalena. ‘She’s going through a tough time, poor thing. You should be thankful they don’t have kids.’
‘I’m thankful,’ said Mallarino. ‘So what’s the good news then?’
‘She’s coming to live in Colombia.’
‘But she already lives in Colombia.’
‘All right. She’s staying put in Colombia.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘She requested a transfer. I don’t know what it’s called, she didn’t really explain. She asked not to move around all the time. She asked to stay here.’
‘In Bogotá?’
‘No, no. In a place where she’s needed, Javier. Down in Meta. Or up in Cesar.’
‘She doesn’t know where?’
‘Not yet. She knows they’ll grant her the transfer, but she doesn’t know where she’ll be sent. She won’t be in Bogotá, that’s for sure. But we’ll see more of her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because she told me. She told me we’d see her more often. She said: “We’ll see more of each other.” She said she’s been feeling lonely, that she’d been feeling lonely for months. And she would have told you the same, if you had a computer.’
But Mallarino realized it wasn’t a serious reproach: it was a game, a friendly wink, a dig in the ribs. Her infallible instinct told Magdalena that this was not a moment for serious reproaches. What had she noticed? How had she noticed? Oh, but that was Magdalena: a sublime reader of reality, and especially that circumscribed and impoverished reality, that melancholy and daunted reality that was Mallarino. ‘Well, we’ll keep her company,’ he said. ‘She’s not going to be lonely here.’ Beatriz’s husband was the youngest son of a family of conservative, Catholic Popayán landowners, who had a reputation, as far as Mallarino knew, of being on the wrong side since the beginning of the years of political violence. ‘I know more or less what that family’s like,’ Mallarino had said to her once, ‘and I don’t much like you going out with him.’ ‘Well, his family knows exactly who you are,’ answered Beatriz. ‘And they don’t like him going out with me at all.’ And now, a few years after that conversation and many after her own parents’ separation, Beatriz was splitting up with her husband. Juan Felipe Velasco, was his name: a blond guy with a cleft chin who crossed himself every time he was about to drive somewhere. Beatriz had learned to cross herself with him, and would have taught their children to cross themselves if they’d had any; but they hadn’t had any, and that was lucky; and now they were splitting up, they too were worn down by the diverse strategies life has to wear lovers down, too many trips or too much togetherness, the accumulated weight of lies or stupidity or lack of tact or mistakes, the things said at the wrong time and with immoderate or inappropriate words or those which, perhaps not finding appropriate or moderate words, were never said, or worn down too by a bad memory, yes, by the inability to remember what’s essential and live within it (to remember what once made the other happy: how many lovers had succumbed to that negligent forgetting), and by the inability, as well, to get ahead of all that wearing down and deterioration, get ahead of the lies, the stupidity, the lack of tact, the mistakes, the things that shouldn’t be said and the silences that should be avoided: to see all that, see it all coming from way off, see it coming and step aside and feel it blow past like a meteorite grazing the planet. See it coming, thought Mallarino, and step aside. For an indigenous tribe in Paraguay, or maybe it was Bolivia, the past is what is in front of us, because we can see it and know it, but the future is what is behind: what we do not see and cannot know. The meteorite always comes from behind, we don’t see it, we can’t see it. You need to see it, see it coming and step aside. You need to face the future. It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
He looked around, beyond Magdalena’s luminous face, and to his left, beyond the glass wall that separated the patio from the interior, and to his right, across the courtyard, towards the museum entrance. Two, three, four couples: how many would be splitting up right now? How many would be splitting up even without knowing it, heading slowly for disintegration? In the courtyard, a little boy in shorts was running after a minuscule bouncing ball. The ball was rolling towards the storm drains; the boy shouted, calling for help. And Samanta Leal? He hadn’t asked her if she was married, if she had children, someone with whom to share the suffering or at least disperse it. She was the same age as Beatriz, the same thirty-five years they’d both had in which to achieve so many things. That’s what Mallarino was thinking when someone from one of the nearby tables, a man who’d been eating on the other side of the glass, looked him in the eyes and stood up (his hands folding the napkin) and began to walk towards the open door. He waited until he was beside the table before speaking; when he did, Mallarino found the contrast between his size — and the size of the hand he extended in greeting — and his obsequious manner startling. ‘You are Javier Mallarino,’ he said, halfway between a statement and an enquiry.
Magdalena looked up. Her fork remained suspended in the air. Mallarino nodded. He shook the outstretched hand.
‘Thank you for your work,’ the man said. ‘I admire you, sir. I, uh, admire you very much.’
‘How the world has changed,’ said Magdalena when the man had gone back to his chair on the other side of the glass. The scene had visibly amused her: she spoke with irony, but also with flagrant satisfaction at the corner of her mouth, turned up in her ironic smile. ‘This is something I’ve never witnessed. Since when do such things happen to you?’
‘Since today,’ said Mallarino. ‘Or since yesterday. But I didn’t come into town yesterday.’
‘Can it be that people still read newspapers?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You could have done your Titanic pose,’ said Magdalena. ‘Given your fans a treat.’
Mallarino smiled down at his plate. ‘Don’t take the piss.’
He shifted in his chair, turning to one side and pressing his back against the cool aluminium, as if trying to get a better view of the place. Magdalena asked him if his hernia was bothering him, if he wanted them to get the bill and walk around for a while, and only then did he realize that yes, his hernia was bothering him (a dull ache in his tailbone, his left leg already uncomfortable). Magdalena knew. How pleasant that was, and how surprising to notice the persistence of the past, the stubborn presence between them of the years of their marriage. They knew each other well, but it wasn’t just that: it was, undoubtedly, having met so young, having started living together and gone through the first disappointments and then the long march of learning (and now they’d learned, but it was too late to apply the lessons). All that was still present, another guest at the table, and that’s what they owed the comfort to, the relaxed way Magdalena set her cutlery down together on the empty plate and, just as he’d done earlier, leaned back silently in her chair. Why had her second marriage failed? Nine years after leaving Mallarino, Magdalena had married an easy-going commercial lawyer, and anybody would have thought — second chances are easier to make the most of — that the relationship was definitive. It was not: Mallarino found out vaguely about it from the rumour mill and, once, from the ‘Pink Telephone’ section of El Tiempo that also carried a rumour about Pablo Escobar’s possible surrender. (In one of his cartoons of the time, Mallarino drew Escobar alongside the victims of his most recent terrorist attack. On one side of the box appears the priest Rafael García Herreros, wearing his cassock, and saying: ‘Don’t worry, my son. I know you’re basically a good man.’) Magdalena’s marriage ended in eighteen months; Mallarino never tried to find out why. Now he could. Did he want to? Now he could. A heavy cloud darkened the patio; Mallarino felt a chilly breeze and the pores of his skin closing up all of a sudden. Magdalena clenched her fists above her chest and raised her shoulders, and Mallarino had the unmistakable feeling, as concrete as a tug in the vertebrae, that it was getting late. That’s what he said to himself: I’m running out of time, or rather those words lit up his mind. He immediately realized, with some amazement, that he was not thinking about the hours of the day.