‘Come and live with me,’ he said.
She stood up as if she’d been expecting the request (there was no surprise on her face, or was Mallarino reading it wrong). Tidy girl that she was, she pushed the chair to tuck it under the table, and the legs made an irritating metallic sound against the cement floor.
‘Let’s go,’ she replied. ‘I have to get back to the studio.’
They walked down a corridor to the main courtyard. They crossed it, passing beside the stone fountain that was distractedly spitting out a squalid little stream. Mallarino managed to catch a glimpse of Lucian Freud’s Blond Girl, which he liked so much, but he immediately looked away, in case he accidentally caught sight of the study for The Guitar Lesson. When they came out on Eleventh Street, the sky had clouded over and the shadows had disappeared from the walls, and small groups of students were gathering on the steps of the library. They went down Seventh and turned north. Magdalena had taken Mallarino’s arm. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it a good idea?’
It wasn’t easy to walk on that crowded pavement whose traffic obliged them to make themselves small, to turn side-on so another pedestrian could get past with her briefcase, or his bag of vegetables, or a child dragged by the hand and forced to walk on tiptoe. ‘I had hoped, my dear,’ said Magdalena, ‘that it wouldn’t occur to you.’
They were passing in front of the marble plaques on the Augustín Nieto building, and Mallarino noticed a guy with long white hair who was copying the inscriptions, by hand, onto the pages of a notebook, or something that looked like a notebook; the guy was visible even from the other side of the street, for there, in the midst of the perilous crowds, his was the only figure keeping still.
‘I can’t do that, Javier,’ said Magdalena. ‘I can’t now. A lot of time has passed, and I have a life without you, and it’s a life I enjoy. I enjoyed the other night too, of course, I enjoyed it a lot. But I like my life the way it is. It has taken me years to get it together and I like it the way it is. I like solitude, Javier. At this stage in life I’ve discovered that I like my solitude. Beatriz hasn’t discovered it yet, but I think I can teach her. It would be a good gift, to teach my daughter how to be alone, to enjoy her solitude. I enjoy my solitude. You can understand that, I imagine. I think you can understand, can’t you? I think it’s too late now.’ Mallarino was not surprised that she used those words, almost the same he’d used to himself a few minutes earlier. ‘It’s never really too late, of course, it depends on the person. But what you’re proposing is not for me, it’s not for us,’ said Magdalena. ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’
From the other side of Jiménez Avenue, at the end of the oppressive windowless wall of the Banco de la República building, began the Parque Santander. Later, remembering this moment, Mallarino would wonder if that was when he thought of the day Ricardo Rendón died. It’s possible, he’d tell himself later, that he hadn’t been conscious of it at that moment, for his attention was on the agreeable pressure of Magdalena’s arm on his arm, on the scent of her hair, on the voice able to say, with that unpredictable sweetness, those things that pierced him to the marrow: ‘I had hoped that it wouldn’t occur to you,’ for example, or also this other one: ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’ But it had to be then, he would think, because it was just after pronouncing those words, there where you can see the sunshades of the shoeshine stands, that he stopped in the middle of the pavement and, without marvelling at the miracle, remembered once more those events he knew by heart although he’d never witnessed them.
He remembered the Chaplin film that Rendón went to see the night before, and also the profound but discreet depression overwhelming him during those days, and also the conversation with the managing editor of El Tiempo and the suggestion to go and rest in a clinic. Mallarino remembered all that, and also the blue pencil drawings that Rendón left at the newspaper office, beside the two recently published volumes of his political cartoons, and in his memory Rendón left the office after ten in the evening and went into La Gran Vía, listened to music and drank aguardiente and joked with the bartender, and arrived at his house on Eighteenth Street before midnight, sad but not drunk yet certainly tired. Mallarino remembered him planning, sleeplessly, his cartoon for the next day; also waking up and talking to his mother about what he had planned. Rendón went out, dressed as usual in full mourning, and Mallarino remembered him standing for a short time at the corner of Seventh Avenue and then going into La Gran Vía. In his memory, Rendón orders a Germania beer; he receives it on a tray; he lights a cigarette. He thinks of Clarisa, the young girl he’d fallen in love with in Medellín, so many years ago, and relives the displeasure and the girl’s parents’ protest; he thinks of Clarisa and her heroic stubbornness, her pregnancy, her forced confinement, her illness and death. He finishes his beer, takes out his pencil and draws one last picture (a diagram of straight lines calculating the path of a bullet penetrating the skull), and writes those seven words that Mallarino remembered so welclass="underline" I beg not to be taken home, and then points the barrel of his Colt 25 at his temple. Mallarino remembered him doing what nobody ever saw: shooting himself. He remembered the head falling heavily to the table and the tray bouncing with a metallic jangling, the lips split by the blow and a broken tooth, the blood that begins to spill out (the blood that looks black running over the old wooden surface), and then he remembered him arriving at Dr Manuel Vicente Peña’s clinic, and remembered the doctor writing his report, choosing those words that Mallarino saw as if seeing them in black-and-white: stertorous breathing, subcutaneous haematoma, haemorrhage in mouth, right parietal lobe. The doctors perform a trepanation of the cranium to alleviate the pressure of the blood and a strong viscous spurt lands on the white floor. Mallarino remembered it and remembered the exact time of death, 6.20 in the evening. He remembered all that and heard Magdalena say: ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’