‘Don’t start,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to get going.’
It was all strange: it was strange, in the first place, that Magdalena recognized how strange it all was, that she understood in the same way or seemed to understand, and the weight of her body in this bed was also strange, different from other bodies and curiously her own, and the familiarity was strange, the insolent familiarity they felt in spite of so many years of not being together, and, in particular, Mallarino’s capacity to anticipate Magdalena’s movements was very strange.
‘I’ve got a terrible day ahead of me,’ she said, ‘but let’s see each other tomorrow, shall we? I’ll take you out to lunch in town, so you don’t get out of the habit.’
‘Not in town,’ said Mallarino. ‘It makes our eyes water, us mountain folk.’
‘What a weakling,’ said Magdalena. ‘A little pollution never hurt anybody.’ And then: ‘Will you come and pick me up at the station?’ And then: ‘Let’s say one o’clock.’
Mallarino said OK, they’d have lunch in town tomorrow, that he’d pick her up at one at the station, that a little pollution never hurt anybody, and at the same time he was making private predictions: now she’ll roll over on her side, turning her back on him, looking nowhere, and now she’ll get out of bed in a single agile movement, slipping out without even pausing to sit on the edge and stretch, and now she’ll walk towards the bathroom without looking back, or rather allowing herself to be looked at, sure that Mallarino would be looking at her the way he was looking at her, comparing her body to the one he’d known years before and seeing the stretch marks on her hips and shadows on her buttocks and being jealous of them, because the shadows and stretch marks weren’t shadows and stretch marks, but messengers of all that had happened in his absence: all that Mallarino had missed. The night before had been like making love with a memory, with the memory of a woman, and not with the woman who was present, the way we keep feeling, after stepping barefoot on a stone, the shape of the stone in the arch of our foot. That’s what Magdalena was: a sharp reminder. He saw her close the bathroom door and knew (an uncomfortable knowledge as well as so satisfactory) that he wouldn’t see her come out again for a good quarter of an hour. And finding himself there, in front of a picture window looking out into the cloud forest, surrounded by papers filled with news of his triumph and waiting for his regained wife to come back to him, Mallarino felt a rare calm. He wondered if this was what happy people felt, and he was sure that it was a few hours later, after Magdalena had said goodbye with a kiss on the lips and he had been working on the next cartoon, when the dogs barked and the doorbell buzzed and Mallarino found himself with the young journalist from the previous evening, who had asked him for an interview for some blog he’d never heard of, and showing her into the living room and offering her something to drink he noticed, not without surprise, that he had not the slightest intention of seducing her.
Her name was Samanta Leal. During the cocktail party the previous evening in the bar of the Teatro Colón to toast Mallarino and his award, she had approached, one of dozens, to ask him to autograph a copy of his most recent book. She brought it over still sealed in the unpleasant plastic Colombian books come in, and which seems designed to discourage the reader and humiliate the author who, like Mallarino, tries to open it to write an inscription. Mallarino, his fingers wet from the condensation on his whisky glass, failed spectacularly at the task; when the interested party took the book in both hands and held it to her mouth and bit a corner of the plastic, Mallarino noticed the long fingers without any rings and then the parted lips and then the teeth that bit and then the whole mouth, which got into trouble with the bitten-off corner of plastic and tried to spit it out politely with comical movements of a very pink tongue (Mallarino thought: A little girl’s tongue). It must have been the emotion of the moment, but it all seemed so sensual to him, so concrete, that he focused especially on the young woman’s name as he wrote it. ‘For Samanta Leal,’ he said, pronouncing both the Ls carefully, as if to retain them, as if they were going to escape. ‘What do you want me to put?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘put whatever you want.’ And he wrote: ‘For Samanta Leal, whatever you want.’ None of what would happen with Magdalena had begun yet — she had congratulated him affectionately, but then she’d sat down on a red velvet chair and was laughing her head off with a writer from the coast — and Mallarino felt free to fantasize about an attractive thirtysomething and to act on those fantasies. She read the inscription; instead of thanking him and taking her leave, she pursed her lips in a way that made Mallarino think of a freshly washed strawberry. ‘Well, what I want,’ Samanta Leal took him by surprise, ‘is an interview.’ She mumbled the name of the site, an ugly English word full of consonants; he said he knew nothing about blogs, that he didn’t like them and didn’t read them, and didn’t really trust them. If in spite of all that she was still interested, he would expect her at his house tomorrow, at three o’clock sharp, so she could get what she could in forty-five minutes and then leave him free to get back to work.
And now here was Samanta Leal. She was wearing green woollen tights, a grey skirt that didn’t reach her knees and a white blouse, as smooth as a Malevich canvas, its only adornment the change of tone where her bra began. The eyes that had been dark the previous night, beneath the soft lights of the bar, were now green, and they opened wide to scrutinize the walls with that mixture of enchantment and disappointment with which we observe the homes of those we admire. There was something impatient in her way of sitting down and crossing her legs, a certain restlessness, an uncomfortable electricity; and when she started asking random questions (How long had he lived in this house? Why had he decided to leave Bogotá?), Mallarino thought the same thing he’d thought before: that the interview was a pretext. Over time he’d learned to recognize the double intentions of those who approached him: the interview, the inscription, the brief conversation, they were just strategies suited to very different purposes: a job recommendation, the favour of leaving a particular politician alone, sex. He amused himself (but it was a dismayed amusement) by making private bets about Samanta Leal and the outcome of this visit, varying degrees of nudity or embarrassment. The young woman asked questions, and the disorder, the absence of method, was not the only feature that seemed duplicitous: in the calm of his house in the mountains the unusual music of Samanta Leal’s accent was more noticeable than it had been the night before. She looked at the walls and he looked at her looking, seeing his own house through those surprised eyes, discovering, at the same time as she discovered, Debora Arango’s toads wearing clothes, the Cuadro rojo by Santiago Cárdenas or an Ariza landscape, somewhere between Boyacá and Japan. He watched her and looked for emotion or surprise on her face, but saw none of that: Samanta Leal looked over the paintings as if seeing an absence, as if what she was really looking for was missing.