And now the light turned red and the traffic stopped and Mallarino could cross the street, cut through that heavy heat that forms like a cloud in front of a line of cars at a Bogotá traffic light. ‘Samanta!’ he shouted from the corner like an impatient child. But he was fifty steps from her, fifty steps from Unicorn Travel and the door that would change his life, and he could not be expected to be patient, he couldn’t be expected to wait till he’d covered that distance before declaring his presence to Samanta Leal. ‘Samanta!’ he shouted. She raised her head and turned in the direction of the shout and saw him; she lifted a timid but content hand, waved it in the air at first slowly and then enthusiastically, and something lit up in her face; and Mallarino thought that not even two days ago — the night of the ceremony, at the bar of the Teatro Colón, with a piece of plastic stuck on her little girl’s tongue — had he seen her look so lovely. And if he could go back to the night of the ceremony, the glory of the speeches and the medals and the pats on the back? If he could, would he? No he wouldn’t, thought Mallarino, and he was surprised to find himself thinking that. Again Rodrigo Valencia’s words appeared in his head, those impertinent words: What good will it do? What good is ruining a man’s life, even if the man deserves ruin? What good is this power if nothing else changed, except the ruin of that man? Forty years: everyone had been congratulating him lately, and only now had Mallarino realized that his longevity was not a virtue, but an insult: forty years, and nothing around him had changed. I beg not to be taken home: Mallarino peered at the phrase as one peers at a puddle of dark water, and thought he saw something glistening at the bottom. Again he thought of the homage; he thought of the stamp, of his own face looking out of the frame at him with its ferocious serrated edges. All that was far behind him now, very far: here, on this pavement on Seventh Avenue at this hour of the Bogotá afternoon, all that began to form part of his memory, and could be forgotten. Would Mallarino manage to? The memory has a marvellous capacity to remember the forgotten, its existence and its stalking, and thus allow us to stay alert when we don’t want to forget and forget when we choose to. Freedom, freedom from the past, that’s what Mallarino desired above all now.
There was no longer anything tying him to the past. The present was a weight and a nuisance, like the addiction to a drug. The future, however, belonged to him. It was all a question of seeing the future, of knowing how to see it clearly and divest ourselves for an instant of our propensity for deceit, the deceit of others and of ourselves, for the thousand lies we tell ourselves about what might happen to us. It is necessary to lie to ourselves, of course, because no one can stand too much clairvoyance: how many would want to know the date of their own death, for example, or foresee illness or misfortune? But now, arriving to meet Samanta, seeing her so lovely in her turquoise sweater, so solid against the blurry background of shop windows and their reflections, her mouth half open as if singing a secret song, Mallarino suddenly understood that he could do it: he understood that, even if he had no control over the unstable, volatile past, he could remember with total clarity his own future. Is that not what he did each time he drew a cartoon? He imagined a scene, imagined a character, assigned him features, wrote in his head the epigram that would be like a stinger dipped in honey, and after doing this he had to remember it to be able to draw it: none of that existed when he sat down at his drafting table, and nevertheless Mallarino was able to remember it, had to remember it to put it down on paper. Yes, thought Mallarino, the White Queen was right: it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
And then, in a lightning flash of lucidity, he remembered himself returning that very evening to his house in the mountains, climbing the stairs to his studio, sitting down in his chair, and he remembered exactly what he will do. He will glance over the cuttings pinned up on his corkboard: the Colombian President, the Latin American liberator, the German Pope. He will turn on the lamp and take a sheet of headed notepaper out of the filing cabinet and will pick up his fountain pen and write today’s date, and under the date the name Rodrigo Valencia. By means of this letter (that’s how you say it, isn’t it? So as to be formal and pretty, I like things to be well presented) I wish to notify you of my unconditional resignation (a little dramatic, I know, but that’s how it is, what can we do) from the newspaper that you, with such good fortune, have published during recent years (fewer than the number that I have spent drawing cartoons, it must be said). I take this decision after long and intense consultations with my pillow and other authorities, and hasten to emphasize that my decision, as well as unconditional, is irrevocable, definitive and all those long words. So, don’t bother wearing yourself out, brother, you’ll get nothing by insisting. He will go to the kitchen for a large plastic rubbish bag, black with an orange band, and begin chucking into it bottles of ink, blades, his pencil holder (the cut-off end of a rain stick) and with it charcoals, seven different kinds of leads, an unused spatula and a collection of nibs and brushes, well combed like the members of a school choir, and all will end up at the bottom of the bag. One by one, Mallarino will take the drawers out of his filing cabinet and empty them into the bag, and he will enjoy the sound of paper falling in cascades to the bottom, the static produced by the friction with the bag. He will pull off the skinny liberator and the haggard Pope, the recently elected President and recently killed guerrilla, and throw them in the bag. He will take two steps back, will look at the empty spaces appearing in the wake of his hand, clearings opening up in the middle of the dense jungle. He will take the slogan about the stinger and honey down off the wall and put it in the bag. He will take Daumier’s caricature down and put it in the bag.
And then he’ll do the same with all the rest.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Reputations is a work of fiction; any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. Having fulfilled this convention, which no reader should take completely seriously, I wish to thank those who gave me their time and offered me anecdotes from their lives or ideas about their trade, especially Vladimir Flórez, Vladdo, and Andrés Rábago, El Roto. Other political cartoonists lent me, unknowingly, more or less concrete information, and I’d also like to recognize my debt — more ambiguous and less direct — to Antonio Caballero, Héctor Osuna and José María Pérez González, Peridis. In order to write about the death of Ricardo Rendón, I found the book 5 en humor, by María Teresa Ronderos, very useful. I would also like to acknowledge my unpayable debt to Jorge Ruffinelli and Héctor Hoyos, of Stanford University, for the invitation and the hospitality that allowed me to finish this novel in an apartment on Oak Creek Drive, in Palo Alto, California. Finally, I’d like once more to give myself the pleasure (and put on record the infinite good fortune) of finishing a book by writing the name Mariana.