That’s when he received, in a single prodigious day, the answer to all his questions. He’d acquired the habit of walking around downtown in the afternoons, buying his daughter absurd stickers for an absurd album Magdalena insisted she fill up, or getting his shoes shined and talking politics with the bootblacks, or simply watching life with a sort of hunger that demanded he stay out on the streets instead of returning to his morning seclusion, take off his jacket and feel his arms brush up against other arms and pick up the smell of living bodies, of the food they eat and the piss they leave in corners. That afternoon was a Tuesday, which was the day of the week Mallarino would go to the Avianca building to collect his mail from his postbox (the metallic, grey and deep little box that brought him boundless pleasure, like a magician’s hat for a child) and later sit in some nearby café to read his magazines, answer his letters. He arrived at Seventh Avenue by the National Library and from there, along the eastern pavement, began to walk south, sometimes noticing the noisy, disorderly, relentless city, sometimes so distracted that the building came into view almost unexpectedly, its long straight lines penetrating the sky and struck, on a sunny afternoon, by a dense light that seemed not of this world. As he went in, his hand would already be feeling for his key ring in his pocket and separating out the postbox key, so he wouldn’t have to search for it in front of the wall of postal niches. And that’s how it had gone that time: Mallarino made his way through the corridors (through its whitish light that drew circles under everyone’s eyes) and turned to the little grey door; he stretched out his arm and his precise hand, that hand that could draw exact ninety-degree angles without any instruments, placed the tip of the key into the lock the way a medieval knight would have put the tip of his lance against his rival’s chest. But the key did not go in.
He thought at first that he’d gone to the wrong box. He leaned down towards the little door and looked at the number on the metal tag with all its digits, the same as ever, the ones Mallarino knew by heart. He hadn’t got it wrong. The revelation arrived late, like a careless guest: there was a shadow or a texture, something made him look more closely at the metallic surface, and only when he was inches away from the lock did he realize it had been blocked up with chewing gum. It was a hardened paste (it must have been there for several days) that filled the slot without overflowing the edges: a conscientious piece of work. Mallarino touched the paste with the tip of the key, probed, pushed, scratched a little, tried a carving movement with his wrist, but got nowhere: the dried gum paste remained firm. ‘Hey, what a nasty trick to play on someone,’ said a voice, and Mallarino turned his head to find a gold tooth glinting in the middle of an unshaven face. ‘No way to fix that, huh? People have no respect these days.’ And Mallarino soon found himself climbing a mottled stairway, walking till he reached a counter, handing over his ID and watching as a petite woman went through books, opened drawers and closed them again, produced a photocopy of a form from somewhere and asked if Mallarino would be paying in cash or by cheque, turned a deaf ear when Mallarino protested and said he hadn’t lost the key, that someone had put chewing gum in the lock, and the woman told him it was all the same to her and how was he paying: cash or cheque? Then there were stamps in purple ink, carbon paper and pastel-colour receipts, time wasted in a hard and hostile plastic chair and, finally, a shout ringing against the cement walls: ‘Mallarino? Javier Mallarino?’
A skinny, grief-stricken locksmith — his overalls had the smell of improperly dried clothes — went back with him to face the rebellious postbox, took a series of unnameable tools from his leather belt, and the metals gave off sparks under the neon lights, followed by the violation of the lock, or what Mallarino perceived as a violation, a violent and treacherous penetration of his private life, in spite of the fact that he’d given his authorization and consent, in spite of having been present during the whole process. He felt something like physical pain at the breaking of the lock, at the snap of the little door; he was saddened by the vulnerability of his collection of magazines looking at him imploringly from the shadowy depths: the latest Alternativa, the latest New Yorker, a back issue of Canard enchaîné a Parisian colleague had sent him. He wanted to leave and be home already, in his refuge, reading with a glass of beer, and hearing or sensing the reassuring presence of his wife and daughter. But he still had to witness the installation of the new lock and get the new keys and sign more papers and put tips in faceless hands before going back out onto Seventh Avenue carrying his leather bag slung across his chest, the back of his neck sweaty and his eyes tired from so much darkness. Later he would think it had all begun with that tiredness, or the disorientation that always overwhelmed him after contending with the senseless bureaucracy of this country, or simply the white colour of the envelope, that immaculate white, with no address or writing of any kind, no stamps, no blue-and-red stripes that revealed letters arriving from abroad. He’d begun to take the magazines out of his bag (impatient to begin leafing through them) and had his hand stuck inside, fingers moving as if through a card catalogue, head down, trying to see the covers, when he noticed the corner sticking out between the pages. He stopped in the middle of the square, looked at the front and back of the envelope, then opened it. ‘Javier Mallarino’, said the typed text of the letter, with neither date nor address. ‘With your warping of the truth you have assaulted and discredited the Armed Forces of our Republic, playing into the hands of the enemy, you are an UNPATRIOTIC LIAR and we hereby notify you that the patience of those who are LOYAL to our beloved country is wearing thin, we know where you live and where your daughter goes to school, we will not hesitate to punish with the harshest severity any further infringements against our honour.’ On the last line, over to the right with no ‘Regards’, no ‘Sincerely’, no ‘Yours faithfully’, a single word that seemed to be shouting from the page: PATRIOTS.
The first thing he did when he got home was to show Magdalena the letter, and he knew she was genuinely worried when she started making fun of the wording and grammar. Between the two of them they tried to remember the last cartoon he’d drawn on a military subject; they had to go back several weeks to a series of three drawings in which a disconsolate horse was talking to a woman who was handling some iron structures. Mallarino had drawn those scenes after Feliza Bursztyn, a Bogotá sculptor famous for working with scrap iron, had been accused of subversive activities, imprisoned in the Army’s stables, manhandled and humiliated and later forced into exile. Magdalena and Mallarino propped the originals up on the long living-room sofa and spent a good while looking at them, as if wishing they could vanish from the recent past. That night they were so frightened that they dragged a mattress into their bedroom so Beatriz, who had just turned six, could go to bed there and the family slept like that, heaped up in the insufficient space, breathing stale air all night and with their pressed-wood door securely locked. Days of paranoia would follow, looking over his shoulder on the city’s streets, returning home before dark, but later, when the memory of the threat began to fade away, what they’d remember would be the reaction of Rodrigo Valencia, who burst out laughing down the other end of the phone line when Magdalena called him at the newspaper, the day after Mallarino had received the note, to tell him what had happened. Mallarino watched Magdalena furrow her brow with the telephone stuck to her ear, and then heard her faithfully relay the message: