Mallarino understood that it would be futile to insist, or that the suggestion had been a mistake. He understood other things, as well, but these things were beyond immediate words, on a terrain of intuition similar to the intuition of faith. He felt tired, a sudden and treacherous tiredness, a child leaping onto his shoulders without warning. Then a movement distracted them: it was a man who approached with slow steps, leaning forward as if looking for a coin, and Mallarino remembered his features before he spoke: the nose, the ears, the moustache white and grey like pigeon shit. The man stretched out a hand and Mallarino saw the stains of shoe polish and the dry skin, and his hand closed around the man’s hand. The man’s handshake was strong and solid. Mallarino also clasped firmly.
‘You’re the cartoonist, sir,’ said the man. ‘I shone your shoes the other day and didn’t even recognize you, how very sorry I am.’
Mallarino stretched out his left arm and his watch appeared under the sleeve of his jacket. (He had thin wrists — Magdalena had always said he had womanly wrists — and when it was cold his watch strap loosened, sometimes swung right the way round, all to Magdalena’s immense amusement, who said that was exactly how women used to wear watches in the old days.) The dial moved slightly and rested against the slight prominence at the end of the ulna, the half-sphere of bone that some people touch when they’re worried. Mallarino took the face of his watch between thumb and forefinger. He thought he had time.
‘Are you free?’ he asked the bootblack.
‘Of course, sir, by all means,’ said the man. ‘I’m so sorry not to have recognized you the other day. Imagine, sir: a personage like yourself.’
Just after three, after saying goodbye to Magdalena on the university esplanade with a kiss on the lips and thinking that perhaps it might be the last one, after collecting his four-by-four from the car park on Twenty-fifth Street and driving north and then down the narrow road that ran through the Parque Nacional — a short but deceptive and sinuous road where one wouldn’t want to be caught at night — after leaving the car in the sort of half-moon that constituted the very centre of the park, Mallarino walked to the stone pool of the monument to Uribe Uribe, and from the edge he tried to pick out the travel agency on the other side of the street. According to the address, the place must be very close: it should be visible to anyone looking for it from there. Mallarino’s eyes stung as they always did when he came into town from his mountain refuge; now, even though he’d left the city centre, the pollution was still in his tear ducts, and his eyes were still stinging. The afternoon was cloudy but it wouldn’t rain now; there were no shadows on the pavements, but the open air of the park was warm and soft. Those in the park were feeling it too, the kite vendors, the children guarding parked cars or running around the pool, the young couples sitting on the grass. Mallarino felt they were looking at him as he looked across to the other side of the wide avenue, looking for Cuéllar’s widow’s travel agency. He found the large white sign made of hard plastic, the word Travel in small italics, the word Unicorn in imposing capitals; he imagined the sign lit up when night had fallen, casting its light across the whole pavement. Beneath the right-hand edge, in front of the window but far from the entrance, was Samanta Leal.
She was waiting for him. Her posture had the intentional inattention of someone waiting: everyone who waits knows or thinks they might be seen at any moment, seen by the person they’re waiting to meet, and their gestures, their mannerisms, the position of their legs and straightness of their back is never the same as it would be were they not waiting. Mallarino recognized the line of her shoulders and her hair, like a sheet of copper, and he recognized the handbag, which was the same one out of which she’d pulled, the previous day, the tiny voice recorder, the dishonest recorder, the notebook and pen. She had, indeed, changed her clothes: this morning’s white blouse was now a turquoise sweater that looked thin from a distance, and the skirt and tights were now replaced by trousers that gave her hips an established look, the air of a mature woman. Mallarino walked to the lights and waited for the traffic to stop. The cars and buses and trucks travelled in both directions, faces that passed in front of Mallarino’s face like projections on a screen, faces that existed in his life for a fleeting second and then sank back into nonexistence. Some faces looked at him with blank expressions and then passed to the next face, that of some other pedestrian stopped on the busy pavement, another blank face to look at with the same blankness; others didn’t even register his presence, but looked further away or closer, at the mountains, at the buildings, at an uninhabited portion of the visible world. Sometimes people want a rest from people. There was a time when he liked to be surrounded by people. Not any more: he’d lost that. It was one of the many things this life of his had swallowed up. If only we knew ten per cent, one per cent, of the stories that go on in Bogotá! If only Mallarino could close his eyes and hear what those who surrounded him at that moment were thinking! But it wasn’t possible; and we all go on like this, walking on pavements, stopping at traffic lights, surrounded by people but always deaf.
There, stuck in the little crowd that was going to cross the street, he thought about what was about to happen. Maybe Rodrigo Valencia was right and all this was a mistake, a regrettable mistake, the worst Mallarino could commit in his life. Maybe his prediction was correct: if he carried on with his intentions, if he went inside the travel agency with Samanta and talked to Cuéllar’s widow or listened to Samanta, he would find a transformed world when he left: a world (a country, and in the country, a city, and in the city, a newspaper) in which Mallarino would no longer be who he was now. After this conversation, no matter what it might contain, whatever might be said, the army of his enemies would come down on him without pity. Jackals, they were all jackals, who had spent their lives waiting for such a declaration of vulnerability. Because they would find out, of course they’d find out: whatever the conversation might contain and whatever might be said. It didn’t matter what revelations came out in Cuéllar’s widow’s office, and it didn’t even matter if there were any revelations at all, if the woman sent them away amid shouts and slaps without telling them anything new, or if she refused to speak, if she wielded the terrible revenge of silence: the silence that hurt Samanta so much, that for her would be the worst affront, the most distressing humiliation. All this was, in some measure, a humiliation for Samanta; but going through anxiety and daring and the affronting memory only to run up against silence would be the worst humiliation of all.
And even if it turned out that way, the jackals would find out and launch their attack. The important thing for them, thought Mallarino, would not be what happened in the past, but the cartoonist’s current uncertainty and what that uncertainty revealed. They would also humiliate him, and that was all they’d need to humiliate him: the question would be enough, the simple question that was perhaps already forming on Samanta’s tongue, that perhaps Samanta had been practising all day, choosing the words and the intonation, even choosing the expression on her face to not look more defenceless than necessary. Choosing her clothes, thought Mallarino, yes, Samanta had surely selected her outfit thinking of the question she was going to ask the widow of a dead congressman. For her there could be a variation of results, one possibility among many or at least among two; not for him, for, no matter what happened at the Unicorn travel agency, Mallarino would encounter on his way out his enemies of forty years pointing at him, egging on a crazed mob ready to judge him summarily and burn him at the stake, the stake of changeable, capricious public opinion. Mallarino the slanderer or simply irresponsible, Mallarino destroyer of a man’s life or simply unpunished abuser of the power of the media. Now he better understood what had happened twenty-eight years ago, when he’d given himself the pleasure of humiliating Congressman Adolfo Cuéllar; he understood the fervour with which the public had received the humiliation, that fervour disguised as indignation or condemnation. He had simply set the mechanism in motion, yes, he had lit the fire and then warmed his hands at the flames. . Now it was his turn. It didn’t matter who had right on their side. Justice and injustice didn’t matter. There was only one thing the public liked more than humiliation, and that was the humiliation of a humiliator. That afternoon Mallarino was arriving to give them that pleasure. What the dead man’s wife said would make no difference whatsoever: if he decided to go inside Unicorn Travel, Mallarino would no longer have the moral authority he had at that moment but would become a cheap rumour-monger, a sniper of other people’s reputations. Someone like that cannot be out on the loose. Someone like that is dangerous.