‘The boss wants to offer you a permanent position,’ said the little man.
‘But I don’t want that,’ said Mallarino. ‘I don’t want to be on anyone’s staff.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mallarino. A staff position is what every cartoonist dreams of. A guaranteed salary, maybe you don’t get it.’
‘I get it,’ said Mallarino. ‘But I don’t want it. Pay me the same, but without being on the staff. I promise I won’t draw for anyone else. And you people promise you’ll publish what I send even if it’s sometimes against your friends. Go ask your boss, and tell me.’
It was a risky move, but it worked: the three drawings appeared the next day, and so, temporarily disguised as a comic strip, calling the reader so eloquently from the centre spread, no longer the mere protest of a young man who fancied himself an artist, they became an elaborate narrative of media betrayal, a condemnation of censorship and a noisy mocking of bourgeois vulnerability, all done by one of that bourgeoisie’s most representative sons. ‘Your husband’s gone mad,’ Magdalena’s father told her. ‘Or maybe he’s turned into a communist and nobody’s noticed yet.’ She passed on the message to Mallarino raising her left eyebrow and with a slightly crooked smile, a sign of evident satisfaction that there, in the semi-darkness of their room, at the end of a day full of tensions and worries, was almost erotic. Mallarino turned on the radio, to see if he could find a repeat broadcast of the day’s episode of Kalimán, but Magdalena, who detested hearing herself, covered her ears with histrionic gestures, and he found himself forced to look for something else. Magdalena found it impossible to recognize herself in the actual broadcast: that voice that wasn’t her voice, she said, rather there was a national conspiracy to wait for her to leave the studio and then rerecord, with another, better-trained actress, everything she had recorded. Mallarino held his arm out and Magdalena leant her head on his chest, put her arms around him and let out a couple of cat-like noises that he didn’t manage to understand. After a few seconds of silence, Mallarino noticed that Magdalena’s body changed weight — her forearm and her elbow, her clean-smelling head — and knew she’d fallen asleep. He found a football match on the radio, and before falling asleep as well, lulled by his wife’s quiet snores and the monotonous commentaries from the reporters, he heard Apolinar Paniagua score twice for Millonarios and thought of something completely unrelated to those goals, but to do with the drawing in El Independiente: he thought that he couldn’t prove it, that he couldn’t have said how or why, but his place in the world had just changed irrevocably.
He was not mistaken. That was the first day of the most intense period of his life, a decade in which he went from anonymity to having a reputation and then notoriety, all at the pace of one cartoon a day. His work was the metronome that regulated his life: just as others measured time by World Cups or film premières, Mallarino associated every important event in his life with the cartoon he was working on at the time (the eyeless cheekbones of the guerrilla fighter Tirofijo, kidnapper of the Dutch Consul, would always evoke his father’s first bout of cancer; the aged and infirm Francisco Franco’s goose neck and non-existent chin, the birth of his daughter Beatriz). His routine was unassailable. He got up a little before first light, and while he made the coffee he heard the whisper of two newspapers sliding halfway under the door, the doorman’s judicious retreating footsteps, the machinery of the lift — its regretful electronic grumble — coming back to life. He read the papers standing up at the kitchen counter, with the pages spread open over the surface, so he could mark the interesting subjects with a rough charcoal circle. When he finished, with the cold light of the Andean morning timidly filling the living room, he took the radio into the bathroom and listened to the news while giving his body over to the consecutive pleasures of shitting and showering, a ritual that cleansed his intestines, yes, but especially his head: cleansed it of the muck accumulated the previous day, all the critiques trying to be intelligent that were nothing but resentful, all the opinions that should only have seemed idiotic but actually struck him as criminal, all the collisions with that strange country of brotherly hatred where mediocrity was rewarded and excellence assassinated. In the shower, with the hot water flowing over his skin and producing delicate shivers of pores closing and opening up again, sometimes he couldn’t even make out the words from the radio; but some mechanism of his imagination allowed him to guess or intuit them, and when he turned off the water and pushed open the sliding door — two or three extra movements, since the aluminium edge invariably stuck in its frame — it was as if he hadn’t missed anything. Seconds later, emerging from the steamy bathroom, the day’s image fully conceived in his head, Mallarino had only to draw it.
It was, and would go on being for a long time, the happiest moment of the day: a half-hour, or a whole one, or two, when nothing existed outside the friendly rectangle of card and the world that was being born within it, invented or cast by the lines and marks, by the to and fro of Indian ink. During those minutes Mallarino even forgot the indignation or irritation or mere anti-establishment impatience that had given rise to the drawing in the first place, and all his attention, just as happened in the middle of sex, concentrated on an attractive form — a pair of ears, an exaggerated set of teeth, a lock of hair, a deliberately ridiculous bow tie — outside of which nothing else existed. It was total abandonment, only broken when the drawing turned out to be difficult or stubborn: on those rare occasions Mallarino locked himself in the guest bathroom with a copy of Playboy in one hand and some quick relief with the other left him ready to finish his battle with the drawing, always victoriously. In the end, he stood up, took a step back and looked at the paper like a general overlooking a battle; then he signed it and only then did the drawing begin to form part of the world of real things. By some useful spell, his cartoons were free of consequences while he was doing them, as if no one was ever going to see them, as if they existed for him alone, and only when he signed them did Mallarino realize what he’d just done or said. Then he put the card in an envelope, without staring intently at it — ‘like Perseus putting the Medusa’s head in the silver bag’, Mallarino would tell a journalist years later — and the envelope in a scruffy leather briefcase that Magdalena had bought him at a flea market; he took a bus to the newspaper offices, a sort of bunker where all the inhabitants, from the cleaning women to the photographers, seemed to be the colour of concrete; he handed in the envelope and went back to his life without really knowing what to do with his hands, as if dispossessed, wondering why he was still doing what he did, what real effect his cartoon would have on the out-of-focus and remote world that began at the edge of his work table, that slim wooden precipice. Was it disenchantment he was feeling, a sense of emptiness, or had he simply lost his bearings? Was he falling into the old trap of having more ire than ink? The world around him was changing: Pedro León Valencia, legendary publisher, had stepped aside in favour of his eldest son, and Mallarino recognized that part of the pleasure of working for El Independiente had been working with a legend, being the discovery or invention of a legend. As the novelty of the early years started to wear off, the egocentric urge to open the newspaper every morning and see his name in black-and-white faded, and Mallarino was beginning to wonder if it had been worthwhile giving up his oils and canvases for this: for the adrenalin rush he no longer felt, for the imaginary reactions of imaginary readers he never got to meet, for this vague and perhaps false sensation of public importance that only caused him private trouble: relatives who greeted him less warmly, friends who no longer invited them out to dinner. For what?