They had arrived at the studio. The afternoon light entered through the window that overlooked the city, that light smeared with mist, with dirty smoke, as if arriving tired from the other side of the plain. ‘The centre of cre-ation,’ said Samanta Leal, stopping in the middle of the room, right below the skylight which bathed her in its now scant light, and spinning round, sad lost caryatid, to devour with her eyes the filing cabinet, grey and metal and noisy, that kept watch over the room from one corner, and then the shelf of instruments, the hydraulic chair and work table, a large wooden board set at an exact twenty-two-degree angle that leaned like a ramp to mount a cork wall, or so the cork wall could send down, like a toboggan, newspaper clippings, sketches, to-do lists and photos of current public figures, victims or beneficiaries (mostly victims) of his caricatures. ‘Can you turn on the light?’ asked Samanta. ‘It’s hard to see.’ Obliging (but why, why so enthusiastic?), Mallarino flipped the switch; two halogen lamps came on in the ceiling and a wall covered in frames appeared out of nowhere.
‘It’s my altar,’ said Mallarino. ‘I work facing the cork walclass="underline" that’s my daily task, what I’m working on at the moment. But when things get annoying, when I start to ask myself why I got into this, or when reality gets so filthy, it doesn’t deserve to be drawn. . then I come and stand over here, in front of this wall. A couple of minutes, that’s enough. It’s like confession for a Catholic, I imagine. All these are my personal priests, the ones who hear me, who give me advice. Do you want me to explain?’
But she didn’t answer. ‘Do you want me to tell you about this wall, señorita?’ Mallarino insisted, but Samanta had stopped looking at him, stopped taking notes, and her expression was no longer diligent and attentive; she’d suddenly acquired a concentrated and at the same time empty expression, like a crazy person.
‘Ah, yes,’ he heard her say to no one, ‘here it is.’
Five little words, or four words and an interjection, nobody would have believed them capable of inaugurating such a long night. Twenty-four hours later, remembering that precise instant, he would admire the composure with which Samanta walked over to the wall to take a closer look at one of the illustrations, as if she’d discovered a new caricaturist instead of leaning over the precipice of her misfortune. Mallarino knew that he was not now going to tell her about Ricardo Rendón or discuss the stinger coated in honey, that he wouldn’t explain the James Gillray drawing of Napoleon cutting a big piece of a Europe-shaped cake, that he wouldn’t show her da Vinci’s grotesque heads nor would he mention Porta or Lavater, for whom the character of a man can be found in the structure of his face. He knew, knew with total conviction, when he saw her turn round there, in front of the image of King Louis-Philippe as Daumier had drawn him in 1834. Three distinct faces miraculously fitted within that pear-shaped head: one young and content, another pale and bitter, another sad and in shadow. The combination was grotesque, something no one would want to meet by surprise in the middle of the night. And instead of asking about the caricaturist or the caricatured one, instead of accepting explanations about the shape of the head and the triple expression on the face, Samanta began to say in a weary voice that he’d have to forgive her, that up till then she’d been lying, Señor Mallarino, and the entire visit was an act, for she was not a journalist, nor was she interested in interviewing him, nor was she an admirer of his, but she’d had to invent the whole lie, the false identity and pretend interest, to get inside this house and walk around it and look for that strange head she’d seen only once before, many years earlier, when she was a little girl and her life was made up of certainties, when she was a little girl and she had her whole life ahead of her.
II
There are women who do not preserve, on the map of their faces, any trace of the little girls they once were, perhaps because they’ve made great efforts to leave childhood behind — its humiliations, its subtle persecutions, the experience of constant disappointment — perhaps because something’s happened in the meantime, one of those private cataclysms that don’t mould a person but raze them, like a building, and force them to reconstruct themselves from scratch. Mallarino looked at Samanta Leal and tried to catch a glimpse in her features of some shape (the curve of the frontal bone where it reaches the space between the eyebrows, the way the earlobe joins the head) or perhaps an expression he’d seen on the face of the child twenty-eight years ago. And he could not: that child had gone, as if she’d refused to go on living in that face. Although it was true, on the other hand, that he’d only seen her once and over the space of a very few hours, and perhaps his memory, which had always allowed him to recall the essential features of any face with a surgeon’s precision, was now starting to deteriorate. If that were the case, the deterioration could not be less opportune, for now Samanta Leal, from whose face a little girl had vanished, was urgently asking him to remember that little girl and her visit to this house in the mountains in July of 1982, and not just that, but she was also asking him to remember the circumstances of that long-ago visit, the names and distinguishing marks of those present that afternoon, everything Mallarino saw and heard but also (if possible) what the rest of them saw and heard. ‘Remember, please,’ Samanta Leal said to him. ‘I need you to jog your memory.’ And he thought of that curious turn of phrase, to jog a memory, as if memory were something we could take out and exercise, or nudge into action, by way of certain well-chosen materials, by the mere effort of physical work. Memory would then be one of those horrible fountains from the quarries in the hills that are sold by the roadside and that anyone could bring to life if they had talent and tools and obstinacy. Mallarino knew it wasn’t like that, and yet here he was now, trying to extract the sculpture from the stone, sitting in front of a woman awaiting an answer beside the now darkened window: the whole house leaned over the glowing city, as if spying on it; Mallarino saw the luminous stitches against the black background (the city converted into a backlit, embroidered piece of fabric) and, in the distance, floating in the night air, planes waiting their turn to land; and he thought about the men and women who at that moment were occupying those illuminated spaces and trying, like him, to remember, remember something important, remember something banal, but always to remember, that’s what we all devote ourselves to all the time, that’s where our meagre energies go. It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards, he thought again, and again he wondered where those words came from. That’s what this was about, looking back and bringing the past towards us. ‘Remember, please,’ Samanta Leal had said to him. Bit by bit, memory by memory, Mallarino was remembering.
Back then he had just moved to the house in the mountains. The move had been, more than a mere change of location, a sort of last resort, a desperate attempt to preserve, by way of the strategy of separation and distance, the well-being of his family. When had this moment started brewing? With the anonymous threat, perhaps, with the violent imbalance that had followed it? For the first time Magdalena had asked him the question that he, silently, asked himself every day: was it worth it? Was the fear and the risk and the antagonism and the threat worth it? ‘I’m not sure,’ said Magdalena. ‘I’m not sure it is worth it. You’ll know, but think of our daughter. And think of me. I don’t know if it is worth it.’ Mallarino took her words as a betrayal, a tiny betrayal, but a betrayal in any event. Had the slow and imperceptible deterioration of their relationship started then, that two-humped monster called a couple that for more than a decade had behaved so well? But it was impossible to say, thought Mallarino, impossible to spread the years of a marriage across a table like a map and draw a chalk circle around the precise moment, just as the poet Silva had asked his doctor to draw a circle on the exact location of his heart. Of course, Silva, after visiting the doctor, arrived home, took off his shirt and shot himself in the centre of the circle: that’s why he’d sought the anatomy lesson, to commit an efficient suicide. Mallarino would have wanted something else: to repair, to eliminate the harmful moment from the chain of life, the first comment that was no longer impatient but hostile, the first reply bathed in sarcasm, the first glance empty of all admiration.