Reputations

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Sitting on a bench in Parque Santander, having his shoes shined before it was time for the tribute to begin, Mallarino was suddenly sure he’d just seen a long-dead political cartoonist. He had his left foot on the wooden crate and his back pressed against the cushion, so his old hernia wouldn’t start acting up, and he’d been letting the time slip by reading the local tabloids, the cheap newsprint blackening his fingers and the huge red headlines telling him of bloody crimes, sexual secrets, aliens abducting children from barrios on the south side. Reading the tabloids was a sort of guilty pleasure: something he only allowed himself when nobody was looking. That’s what Mallarino was thinking about — the hours he’d wasted here, given over to this perversion beneath the pale sunshades — when he looked up, away from the words as one does to remember, and finding his gaze met by the tall buildings, the ever-grey sky, the trees that had always been cracking the asphalt, feeling as though he were seeing it all for the first time. And then it happened.

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