“You should have seen her! She was the kind of girl who inspires nightmares, not verses. When I took off her wimple, I understood why she wanted to become a nun.”
Carlos doesn’t respond. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s been following the progress of José’s stick in the dirt: a grid of crowded lines forming a dense lattice. Looking at it, he thinks for some reason of his father. He thinks of Georgina. He’s barely listening to José, who’s still insisting that the only thing keeping his poems from genius is the absence of the perfect woman, that divine inspiration that would elevate his verses to the very peak of the sublime. Because, sure, they’ve both had their puppy loves, he continues, but those were conventional, boring, happy stories, far removed from the mythological stature of the loves they find in books, in which, in the throes of passion, the two lovers expire. Though in their case it would be best if only the women died, because otherwise how would they go on to write their immortal verse? Someone definitely has to die, or be locked up in a monastery, or, at the very least, the families have to oppose the union, forcing the lovers to flee across the Andes with hired guns in hot pursuit. But none of that ever happens, he adds bitterly. Everything around them proceeds so easily: The family agrees to the engagement — so why bother getting engaged? — and what’s worse, the daughters agree to everything else with horrifying speed, and once they surrender themselves, how can they continue to serve as muses? What else can one do in such a suffocating environment, José asks, besides write stale literary-salon poetry, poetry for summer readings at an aunt’s house — light, insignificant verses, written to be read aloud on Sunday afternoons surrounded by lace fans, cigars, and stifled yawns.
“So all we need is a muse,” Carlos says to himself, still looking at the drawing.
“A muse, or whatever else we can find. I don’t know. A war, maybe. Just picture it: The flags, the parades, the speeches. The spilling of your best friend’s blood. That has to be a good reason to write a poem! Verses written on the verge of despair, knowing that at any moment a bullet might mow you down.”
“If you don’t die first, of course.”
“I’m serious; war is the best source of inspiration. Maybe Homer was a mediocre poet and was saved by hearing about the right war. Who knows. I imagine every soldier has material that could move anyone; it’s just that most of them don’t realize it. Take my uncle José Miguel. You know, the hero of the War of the Pacific. I’ve always believed he could have been a great poet. Everybody knows that he blew up a Chilean ship all by himself and that the explosion was so powerful it left him bald and nearly blind. But few know that toward the end of his life, that memory tormented him. He said that at all hours of the day and night, he could hear the screams of the Chilean sailors burning alive and begging to be rescued, for the love of God. With that on your conscience, you could either write the world’s best poem or shoot yourself in the head. And you know which way my uncle went.”
“Well, I would have written the poem.”
“Sure, but you and I are poets. My uncle was a soldier. I guess he did what was most appropriate for his profession.”
Carlos smiles.
“So as far as you’re concerned, those are our two options: finding a muse or starting another goddamn war with Chile.”
José replies in a jocular tone.
“It’s either that or tuberculosis, my friend! Maybe we should give that a try. They say that in your final moments, this incredible lucidity washes over you. Apparently the convulsions produce fits of creativity, and we’re losing extraordinary poems because we don’t give patients blank sheets of paper and ink as they’re dying.”
“I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather have a muse. Or just live a long life as a bad poet.”
They both laugh.
“Maybe so.”
For a few moments neither of them says anything. The sun is now high in the sky. The birds are still singing up on the roof of the university, but the young men are hearing them only now. Soon their classmates will come out into the courtyard, shaking off the torpor of the canon law class, all mechanical and gray, like the bureaucrats they will one day become. It’s time to go home.
“If only we could invent our own biographies,” says José with something like a sigh as they get up.
“At least we can invent Juan Ramón’s,” replies Carlos, and he finishes the rest of the sentence in his thoughts.
~ ~ ~
◊
If the idea has a single origin, it is here. And if it has a single creator, then that creator is Carlos alone, however much Gálvez tries to make it his too, gathering their friends together to declare, “Gentlemen, Carlota and I have started writing a novel.” Because the truth is that everything begins with something Carlos said, and at first all José did was shake his head in silent rejection.
The conversation could take place anywhere. Perhaps on that bench in the university courtyard, or maybe on the rooftop that always seems on the verge of collapsing, or in a tavern where they’re drunkenly passing the time till last call with bureaucratic patience. Carlos, uncharacteristically, speaks. The night before, demoralized once again by the rejection of one of his poems by yet another magazine, José has suggested that perhaps the time has come to forget about their correspondence with Juan Ramón. After all, what has their wearisome prank produced but a bunch of headaches, a few signed sheets of paper, and the nickname, however amusing it might be, of Carlota? They’re never going to become better poets like this, much less find a muse who will get them there. And so: To hell with Georgina. But Carlos doesn’t agree. For the first time, he refrains from answering with one of the expressions he’s rehearsed in his mirror and instead responds with a No that arises from deep within him. Definitively: No. His voice trembles, because he is, after all, only a rubber man’s son, made to accommodate all José’s desires, but even so he does not give in. No, he repeats stubbornly. Why not? Carlos can’t really explain. No, I said no. And that’s that.
He can’t sleep that night. Lying in bed, he mulls over what José said about muses. Just before he falls asleep, he thinks he has found the answer. An argument that, knowing his friend, will absolutely convince him. One that could change the direction of their lives. And so when they meet up again at last, he gives the speech he’s prepared for the occasion. A stammering monologue that Gálvez listens to in silence. Or at least he does for a few minutes, with a condescension that might be mistaken for respect. But at a certain point he can’t take any more and impatiently breaks in.
“No, no, no, what are you saying, Carlitos, what novel? Stop talking nonsense! We don’t write novels, remember? We leave that to Sandoval and his crowd.”
José doesn’t understand. Or maybe he doesn’t understand what his friend is doing having an idea of his own, regardless of what it is. So Carlos has to insist, despite how difficult it is for him to contradict José, despite how often he touches his hair or nervously clears his throat as he speaks. He asks José if he remembers when they said that everyone’s lives were literature, and José replies simply, “Yes.” Those afternoons up on the roof, when the world seemed to them to be full of secondary characters and only a handful of protagonists? And José answers, “Of course.” Those discussions in which they decided what writer was writing the life of each person? And José squawks, “I said yes, damn it.” Well, th-this, stutters Carlos, is exactly the same thing. The life of Juan Ramón is a novel too, and chapter by chapter, letter by letter, they have already begun to write it, though they hadn’t realized it until now. All this time, they thought they were playing a fairly tiresome prank or collecting a few souvenirs, but what they were really doing was something much more serious: writing the novel of the life of a genius.