‘Forty years,’ he said, leaning down towards the microphone that suddenly looked like a fly’s compound eye. ‘Forty years and more than ten thousand cartoons. And let me confess something to you alclass="underline" I still don’t understand anything. Or perhaps things haven’t changed so much. In these forty years, it occurs to me now, there are at least two things that haven’t changed: first, what worries us; second, what makes us laugh. That’s still the same, it’s still the same as it was forty years ago, and I’m very much afraid that it’ll still be the same forty years from now. Good cartoons have a special relationship with time, with our time. Good caricatures seek and find the constant in a person: something that never changes, that stays the same and allows us to recognize someone we haven’t seen in a thousand years. Even if a thousand years go by, Tony Blair will still have big ears and Julio César Turbay will still wear a bow tie. They’re characteristics a person is grateful for. When a new politician has one of those characteristics, one immediately thinks: Please let him do something, let him do something so I can use it, so that feature won’t be lost to the world’s memory. One thinks: Please, don’t let him be honest, don’t let him be prudent, don’t let him be a good politician, because then I won’t be able to use him so frequently.’ A whisper of laughter could be heard, thin like the sound before a scandal. ‘Of course, there are politicians without distinctive features: absent faces. They’re the most difficult, because they have to be invented, and so I do them a favour: they have no personality, and I give them one. They should be grateful. I don’t know why, but they almost never are.’ Sudden guffaws bubbled up around the theatre. Mallarino waited until the auditorium returned to respectful silence again. ‘No, they almost never are. But one has to get the idea out of one’s head that it might matter. Great caricaturists don’t expect applause from anyone, and that’s not what they draw for: they draw to annoy, to embarrass, to be insulted. I have been insulted, I’ve been threatened, I’ve been declared persona non grata, I’ve been denied entry to restaurants, I’ve been excommunicated. And the only thing I always say, my only response to the complaints and aggression, is this: political cartoons might exaggerate reality, but they can’t invent it. They can distort, but never lie.’ Mallarino paused theatrically, awaited applause and the applause arrived. He raised his eyes, looked up at the gods and remembered having sat up there, at eighteen, the first time he brought a date to the Colón (a production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera), and then he looked back at the orchestra, searching for Magdalena, wanting to see the admiration on her face that he’d seen from time to time, that unconditional admiration that had once been his nourishment and objective. His gaze fluttered around in space like a moth.
‘Don’t ever die, Mallarino!’ shouted a woman’s voice from somewhere in the front rows, possibly to his left, and Mallarino came out of his reverie. The voice that shouted was a mature voice, perhaps worn by cigarettes, perhaps by a lifetime of shouting out in theatres, and her peremptory tone was immediately celebrated by the audience with loud laughter. ‘Never!’ shouted someone at the back. Mallarino feared for a second that the tribute was going to turn into a political rally.
‘Ricardo Rendón, my master,’ he hurried to say, ‘once compared the caricature to a stinger, but dipped in honey. I have that phrase mounted above my desk, more or less the way a sailor has a compass. A stinger dipped in honey. The identity of the caricaturist depends on the measures he uses of the two ingredients, but both ingredients always have to be there. There are no political cartoons that don’t sting, and none without honey. There’s no caricature if there’s no subversion, because every memorable image of a politician is by nature subversive: it throws the solemn man off balance and reveals the impostor. But there’s no cartoon either if it doesn’t bring a smile, even if it’s a bitter smile, to the reader’s face. .’ Mallarino was saying this when his marooned gaze found Magdalena’s eyes, with those slender eyebrows that only arched like that, the way they were arched now, when Magdalena was really paying attention: she was one of those women who could not feign interest, not even flirtatiously. A sudden urgency invaded him, a brutal desire to get down off the stage and be with her, to hear that voice that wasn’t of this world, to speak in whispers with the past.
Mallarino furrowed his brow (again the buffoon, he thought, again playing a part) and leaned in close to the microphone. ‘I would like to finish off,’ he said, ‘by remembering a certainty we often forget: life is the best caricaturist. Life turns us into caricatures of ourselves. You have, we all have, the obligation to make the best caricature possible, to camouflage what we don’t like and exalt what we like best. You’ll understand that I’m not just talking about physical attributes, but of the mysterious traces life leaves on our features, the moral landscape, if you will, that’s the only thing to call it, that moral landscape that gets drawn on our face as life goes by, as we go along making mistakes or getting things right, as we wound others or strive not to, as we lie or deceive or persist, sometimes at the cost of great sacrifices, in the ever difficult task of telling the truth. Many thanks.’
The newspapers on the following day contained a litany of hackneyed praise. APOTHEOSIS IN THE COLÓN, was El Tiempo’s headline in the culture section and El Espectador kept the matter on the front page: JAVIER MALLARINO GOES DOWN IN HISTORY, it read, the words floating over a grainy black-and-white photo with sharp contrasts, taken from a low angle by a good student of Orson Welles. That’s what Mallarino said: ‘A good student of Orson Welles.’ Magdalena, whose face was emerging unhurriedly from sleep, the delicate muscles moving and settling in her forehead and her cheeks and her grin, all filling up with expression as a clay mask takes shape as it dries, looked at the image of Mallarino speaking behind the lectern with his arms open wide, and gave her opinion that if the photographer was thinking of Citizen Kane, the subject was thinking of Titanic. Leaning back on a disorderly pile of pillows, Mallarino could only wonder how they had ended up here, in his house in the mountains, waking up together and naked in the same bed as they hadn’t done for several lifetimes, and each keeping a careful silence: not the habitual, daily silence, but the apprehensive silence people keep in order not to break — with clumsiness, with an inopportune question, with a sarcastic comment — the fragile equilibrium of reunions. Was this a reunion? The word was heavy on the tongue, like a flavour stuck there from the last meaclass="underline" no, they mustn’t talk about what had happened, mustn’t commit that beginner’s error. They talked about other things: her work at the university radio station, the musical programme she’d been producing and presenting for the last few years, so agreeable because she never had to fight with any living people, with their vanities and pretensions. Magdalena recorded her programme in a small studio with ochre walls, and in that fictitious solitude (because on the other side of the glass was the sound technician, and behind the technician, the noise of the world) she read the text that she herself, often with the help of those who knew more, had written. The stories of the songs, that’s what Magdalena’s programme was about: telling people who Jude and Michelle were, what misfortunes lay behind L’Aigle noir, what marital breakdown was referred to in Graceland. All this she told him now with her mouth hidden under the white duvet, protecting herself from the morning cold. It was cold, the house in the mountains: it would have been a scientific inaccuracy to say it was on the highland plateau, but it was close; if you went out for a walk, tall trees gradually disappeared and it wasn’t impossible to run into some frailejón plants. Mallarino also liked the idea of living up at those altitudes, and frequently used it to impress the gullible, even if it was an exaggeration: my house in the Bogotá highlands. He lifted the duvet to take a peek at Magdalena’s body, and she slapped it down making a tiny feather fly through the air.