‘Rodrigo says congratulations, you’ve finally made it. He says you’re nobody in this country until somebody wants to hurt you.’
* * *
On the left-hand side of the stage, hidden in the wing between backdrops, Mallarino was waiting. The organizers of the tribute had asked him not to move from the spot until he was announced, and he, obediently, amused himself looking at the velvet curtains and the grain of the wooden floorboards, but also watching the hustle and bustle of people walking without tripping over the beams, the mysterious cables, the abandoned props like the remains of old battles. The Teatro Colón was immersed in semi-darkness. The audience, that audience who’d come to see him, had their eyes fixed on the back of the stage, on the images projected on a white screen, while the voice of a professional announcer recounted the highlights of his career over rather cheesy background music. Mallarino tried to peek out without being seen. The impossible angle didn’t prevent him from recognizing himself painting in his parents’ courtyard, or speaking to President Betancur, or opening the door to some cameramen who were making a documentary in his house up in the mountains, or posing beside an old drawing on the day of his first retrospective exhibition, at the beginning of the 1990s. It was a caricature of Mikhail Gorbachev; Mallarino remembered it as if he’d drawn it yesterday; the classic bald head, and on it, instead of the by-then famous birthmark, maps of Nicaragua and Iran. Behind Gorbachev, you could see a worried and pensive Ronald Reagan asking: ‘Mikhail, are you saying I ran contraband?’ ‘No, Ronald,’ Gorbachev answers. ‘I’m saying you’re with the Iran-Contra band.’ The whole drawing had taken him just over an hour, but the easy joke had always left him dissatisfied, and now Mallarino relived that dissatisfaction and wrote new draft attempts in his head, different combinations of the same words, less obvious puns. He was busy with that when he heard himself announced, and he had to go onstage, suffer the assault of the lights, feel the explosion of applause like a gust of wind and hear its uproar like a deluge.
Mallarino raised a hand by way of greeting; his mouth moved imperceptibly. He saw his vacant seat as if it were in fog; he saw faces greeting him, attentive hands outstretched to shake his and then go back to applauding, quick like those of a bootblack brushing shoes. Out of habit — but where did it come from, when had it started — he took two pens and his note-taking pencil out of his pocket and placed them on the table in front of him, three perfectly parallel lines. The theatre was fulclass="underline" in a flash he remembered previous visits, and in his head a Les Luthiers concert got mixed up with a zarzuela that he’d enjoyed a lot even though Luisa Fernanda, no less, had hit a false note in the first song. He looked for the box he’d sat in then, fourth to the right of the presidential, and found it occupied by a group of six young people applauding on their feet. Only when the rest of the audience gradually began to sit down, making delicate little waves on the sea of the orchestra section, did he realize that the entire audience had been standing up until a moment before: they’d welcomed him to the stage with a standing ovation. In the front row was Rodrigo Valencia, hands clasped over his belly, elbows invading the seats next to him: Valencia always gave the impression that chairs were too small for him. A voice came through the speakers. Mallarino had to look around for its source, first at the table, then at the cheap wooden lectern bearing the Colombian coat of arms. Behind the lectern, the Minister — Mallarino had seen her on the news and had read her declarations: her intentions were as laudable as her ignorance was vast — began to speak.
‘Were I to be asked what ex-President Pastrana looks like,’ she said, ‘just as if I were asked what Franco or Arafat looked like, the image that forms in my head is not a photograph but a drawing by Maestro Mallarino. My idea of many people is what he has drawn, not what I have seen. It’s possible, no it’s certain that the same thing happens to many people here tonight.’ Mallarino listened to her with his gaze glued to the table, feeling people’s gazes on him like a hand, fidgeting with a non-existent ring: the ring that was once on his left ring finger and that Mallarino still felt the way amputees feel a missing limb. ‘In a sense,’ the Minister went on, ‘to be caricatured by Javier Mallarino is to have a political life. The politician who disappears from his drawings no longer exists. They go on to a better life. I’ve known many who have even told me: life after Mallarino is much better.’ The witticism was rewarded with a brief ripple of laughter. So the little lady has a sense of humour, thought Mallarino, and looked up; and in that instant, just as we will spot our own name lost in the middle of any page, Mallarino found Magdalena’s luminous face in the middle of the smiling multitude. She was smiling too, but hers was a melancholy smile, the smile of things lost. What was going on in her life? They hadn’t talked seriously for many years: they had agreed, with the solemnity of an international treaty, that mutual revelations about their private lives would only serve to complicate everything: to accelerate, like a bacteria, the decomposition of good memories, and to embitter Beatriz, whose adolescence had been a painstaking martyrdom in which she felt guilty about every one of the family’s misfortunes, and the rest of her life had been a stubborn and speedy headlong escape. For Mallarino, his daughter’s life choices — her Catholic, provincial husband, her career with Médecins Sans Frontières — were nothing but a sophisticated way to escape from her family, from that surname that always touched off embarrassing reactions, but also the painful experience of growing up as the daughter of a failed or broken couple. The only blemish on this night was the absence of Beatriz, who just that week had been obliged to make an unexpected trip to La Paz, and in a few days she’d be on a longer, more planned one to an unpronounceable village in Afghanistan, and between the two she’d drop by to see him or call so they could meet for lunch, and Mallarino knew, after that visit or that lunch, a desert of months and months without seeing her again would open before him. The Minister was suddenly talking about Greek glasses and essential strokes, using words like symbol, allegory and attribute, and Mallarino was remembering in the meantime a journalism seminar on editorial and opinion pages — with a pompous title and some grandiloquent guest speakers — where he was asked what he would change about his life and all he could think of was his relationship with Beatriz.
‘With the passage of time, over the forty years we’re here to celebrate today,’ the Minister was saying meanwhile, ‘the great Mallarino’s drawings have been getting sadder. His characters have hardened. His gaze has become more intransigent, more critical. And his cartoons, in general, have become more indispensable. I can’t imagine a life without Javier Mallarino’s daily cartoon, but nor can I imagine a country that could give itself the luxury of not having him.’ This, Mallarino admitted, had come out nicely: I wonder who writes her speeches. ‘And so today we are paying him this homage, a tiny recognition of an artist who has turned into the country’s critical conscience. Today we present him with this medal, the highest honour our nation confers, but we present him with something else too, Maestro: we have a little surprise for you.’ Behind the table, at the back of the stage, the white screen appeared again, and illuminated on it was an image: it was the caricature of himself that Mallarino had drawn forty years earlier, that ironic self-portrait that he’d used to defend himself from being censored and to begin his career at El Independiente. But there, on the screen, the image had a serrated frame, and above Mallarino’s bearded face, at the level of his glasses, there was a price. It was a stamp. ‘Maestro Mallarino,’ said the Minister, ‘allow me to present you with the first-day cover of the National Post Office’s new stamp, so that from now on letters mailed in our cities will also be a homage to your life and work.’ Mallarino saw the long hair spilling over her shoulders, the chest rising with nervous breaths, the hand that unleashed a jangle of bracelets as she handed him a black frame. From old habit, Mallarino identified the wood of the frame, the frosted glass and the foam-core board. In the centre of an enormous black space, deep as the night sky, was the stamp. The frame changed hands and the deluge of applause burst out for a second time. Mallarino noticed a slight tickle at the nape of his neck and the pit of his stomach. As he approached the lectern with the Colombian coat of arms, the flanks of which stuck out from behind like a bat’s ears, he realized he was moved.