Wobbling on the unsteady platform of public opinion
To some people, Javier Mallarino is a hero; for others, he is “public enemy number one.” A political cartoonist in Colombia, the man has the power to “cause the repeal of a law, overturn a judge’s decision, bring down a mayor, or seriously threaten the stability of a ministry, and all this with no other weapons than paper and India ink.”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez explores the arena of public opinion — fickle and unsteady territory — in his sharp, compact novella “Reputations.”
Vásquez studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne and lived in Europe for much of the past two decades, but in recent years he has returned to live in his native Colombia. He’ll be in Houston in November for a reading, part of Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
In “Reputations,” Mallarino has made a career of cartoons that are both witty and sharp, like “a stinger dipped in honey.” He has built a sterling reputation over four decades, jabbing at powerful figures in his cartoons on the newspaper editorial page.
“Everyone knew the space where his cartoon had always been: in the very center of the first page of opinion columns, that mythic place where Colombians go to hate their public figures or figure out why they love them, that great collective couch of a persistently sick country.”
Mallarino’s world is the Colombian upper-middle class; he has been anti-establishment for so many decades, he has been embraced by the establishment. His outspoken cartoons have inspired death threats but, as his publisher said, “you’re nobody in this country until somebody wants to hurt you.”
And at 65, he is given a national achievement award for his long career. The national post office even unveils a stamp created in his honor.
“Caricatures might exaggerate reality, but they can’t invent it,” he tells the vast theater full of wellwishers. “They can distort, but never lie.”
At the reception afterward, a young woman approaches Mal- larino, claiming to be a blogger and asking him for an interview. He agrees, telling her to come to his house the next afternoon.
That’s when the cartoonist’s life takes a turn. The woman, Samanta Leal, is not a writer; she lied to gain access to his house. When she tells him why she’s really there, Mallarino realizes that he met her when she was a young girl. She’s been in this house before. And the story of what happened that day — a story neither of them fully knows — is crucial to both of them.
It’s difficult to offer more details without giving away the heart of the story. For some time, the book becomes a mystery, a hunt for the truth, and that shouldn’t be spoiled. Mallarino, for his part, ends up wondering whether a politician he skewered nearly 30 years ago — a man he despised, who may have been guilty of terrible things — was treated unfairly. The question has the potential to undermine the black-and-white, ink-and-paper career Mallarino has made. He’d destroyed that man’s reputation with his cartoon, and he’d built up his own. Was he right? It upsets Mallarino’s world to think that his reputation is built on such quicksand, that he might lose his “moral authority” and become “a cheap rumormonger, a sniper of other people’s reputations.” He sees how easily his public stature could be turned against him imagining the enemies he’s made over 40 years — all the people he’s prodded with his pen — “egging on a crazed mob ready to judge him summarily and burn him at the stake, the stake of capricious, changeable public opinion.” The prose in “Reputations,” translated by Anne McLean, is spare, simple and lovely. It is constructed like a good short story, with no extraneous scenes or unnecessary action. Vásquez has written a page-turner, a story that’s intriguing enough to follow through its short unfolding. It’s also a rumination on the power of public opinion that keeps churning long after the final page.