José opens his mouth. Then closes it. And Carlos goes on, stammering less and less. Because while it may be that they don’t have their own muse and so will never manage to produce a perfect poem, he adds, in the end, what does that matter? Perhaps providence has reserved for them, Carlos Rodríguez and José Gálvez Barrenechea, a far nobler fate: out of nothing, creating the beauty celebrated by another poet. And who knows, continues Carlos, who can no longer stop himself, maybe that’s another sort of perfect poem, the only one that is truly transcendent, molding the clay of words and saying to them: Rise, and go forth. The two of them would resemble God the Father and Creator of all things, were it not a sin to say so, or even think it. They are giving life to the muse with whom Juan Ramón must fall in love, and that story, that tempestuous romance, that fragment of life caught midway between reality and fiction, will be their novel. And if one day the Maestro builds a poem upon the embers of that love, even just one, they will know in their hearts that they’ve done the most difficult thing of alclass="underline" that they couldn’t be more responsible for the beauty of that poem if they’d written it themselves.
Carlos stops. To bolster his thesis that everything is literature, that the entire world is a text constructed of words alone, he would like to cite Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. But he cannot, because Derrida and Lacan and Foucault have not yet been born. Actually, Lacan has: he is three years old and currently playing with a jigsaw puzzle — it’s morning in Paris — perhaps constructing future memories of what he will one day call the mirror stage. So Carlos has nothing else to add.
José doesn’t either. Instead he stares, as if his friend had only just now begun to exist.
He agrees with a slow nod.
He smiles the same smile with which he celebrated Georgina’s birth.
II. A Love Story
~ ~ ~
◊
Their novel does not yet have a title or a defined plot. All they know are the names of the two protagonists and the settings they inhabit: a real Lima and a Madrid vaguely imagined from the other side of the Atlantic.
It starts out as a comedy. Or at least it seems that way. The opening pages are full of rich men pretending to be poor and men pretending to be women and squatting down to urinate in empty avenues. There are mistakes and laughter and gluttonous rats that nest in mail sacks; there are bottles of pisco and chicha. A great poet is tricked as if he were a child, and two children pretend to be great poets. There is envy, too, but the kind that is ultimately healthy, bracing, not bitter, as well as a trend among Lima’s wealthy youth to write to their favorite authors pretending to be infatuated young ladies.
Perhaps in keeping with this jovial spirit, the letters between Georgina and Juan Ramón are also breezy and light, like notes passed between schoolchildren. For José and Carlos, the authors of the comedy, it is a happy period, partly because they enjoy the writing and partly because they feel like protagonists in their own novel. Telling them otherwise, informing them that Georgina is the sole protagonist, would likely be a fruitless endeavor. They are young, full of ambition and dreams; they are still unable to imagine that there might be a story in the world in which they are not the main characters.
Then comes the revelation. They discover they’ve been mistaken all along. It is not a comedy. It never has been, even if the drunken revels and the hoaxes and the little blind girls writing to Yeats made them believe otherwise. It is a love story, perfectly in keeping with so many other beautiful books before it, and only they can write it. An epistolary novel on a par with Goethe’s Werther and Richardson’s Pamela—maybe even better than those, as theirs will be the first book in history to be inhabited by flesh-and-blood characters. Each letter sent or received constitutes a chapter of the novel. Juan Ramón, Georgina, the friends and relatives to which the two of them refer — they are all characters brought to life in these pages. The poem that the Maestro will one day write to his beloved is the perfect dénouement. And Carlos and José are the authors, of course, clever novelists who shut themselves away in the garret to deliberate over the details of the plot. They say, for example: “The heroine becomes somewhat overwrought in the fifth chapter; we should bring down the tension a bit in the seventh.” Or perhaps: “Would you take another look at the latest chapter? I’ve noticed a plausibility problem in the first paragraph.”
It’s true, it still feels like a game. In a way, though, it’s the most serious thing they’ve ever done.
Of course, between letters, many things happen. After all, a ship takes no less than thirty days to cross the Atlantic. Everything is slow in 1904, from the length of a mourning period to the time needed to pose for a photograph. And so during the long spells of waiting, José and Carlos’s life continues: their mornings playing hooky, their afternoons lounging in the garret, and their nights carousing at the club; their evenings attending plays and concerts; their afternoons sunbathing and swimming in the sea at Chorrillos; their Saturdays placing bets at the cockfighting ring in Huanquilla or at the Santa Beatriz racetrack or at the billiards tables; their Sundays enduring Mass and watching the hours tick by on the sitting-room clock; their ends of semesters forging grade reports; their spring afternoons strolling up and down Jirón de la Unión; their first and third Wednesdays of every month making and receiving visits, drinking hot chocolate and eating cookies, bowing and listening to piano recitals, discussing the weather or the advantages of train travel with prim young ladies who may one day be their wives. All of that is what they used to call life, but now it seems like only a slow and sticky dream, exasperating in the way it passes drop by suffocating drop. As if the whole world has gone mad and only their letters can keep it going. Real life now consists of waiting for the transatlantic steamship to dock in El Callao and unload its supply of letters from the Maestro. Sitting in the club talking about their flesh-and-blood novel and watching the other patrons gradually lose interest in Sandoval’s dockworkers’ strike, which never quite takes off. Writing the next letter.
To improve their efforts, they consult a book entitled Advice for a Young Novelist, a seven-hundred-page tome that is rather short on advice and long on commandments and whose target audience seems to be not a young writer but an elderly scholar. The author, one Johannes Schneider, repeatedly employs the words dissection, exhumation, analysis, and autopsy. One could not ask for greater honesty, as indeed the book undertakes with Prussian rigor the task of dismembering World Literature, until everything extraordinary and beautiful in that genre is writhing under its scalpel. The boys take turns reading it aloud, but they always end up dozing off, unable to make it past the one hundred and fourteenth guideline. One inspired night, they decide to light the wood stove in the garret with its pages, timidly at first, but when they see it blaze up they can no longer hold back. Laughing wildly, they burn the seven hundred guidelines, page by page, in a celebration reminiscent of a pagan ritual, of a liberation from the old and the advent of the unknown: a new literature that will have no pages with which to warm oneself, only events and endeavors that will make their mark on the flesh and memory of men. They contemplate this as the flames waver and tremble, and their laughter gradually dies out with them; somewhere the cat scampers and howls, and downstairs the Chinese tenants eat or dream or sing old songs about the Yellow River, or simply continue the business of living without thinking about anything, attempting to remain unaware that they are already starting to forget the faces of their mothers and wives.