For a few moments neither speaks. They stare at the floor like chastened schoolboys. “So… Juan Ramón isn’t…”
“In love? How could he be? He doesn’t have anybody to fall in love with! A man can’t desire something he knows nothing about. If things were to change… who knows? Of course he talks like a bachelor. If you pushed me, I might even say he talks like someone ripe for infatuation. But as things stand now…”
Carlos’s voice trembles.
“So… what do you recommend, Professor?”
“To you two? Nothing. I might recommend something to your cousin. And my recommendation is that she talk about herself a little more. Show a tiny bit of her face so that this Juan Ramón fellow has something to remember when he thinks of her. Something that sets her apart from other women. In short, she should be a covered lady, not a mummy. Are we all set, then?”
But he doesn’t let them answer. With a deft movement, he digs in his pocket and flips open the cover of his watch.
“And with your permission, gentlemen, it is time for my midmorning glass of pisco. If it’s not too much trouble, I would ask that you pay me the two-sol fee we agreed on so that I may, in turn, pay the barkeep his.”
José and Carlos hesitate a moment. Never before has a humble man — a secondary character — so insolently reminded them of a debt. Normally the servants, errand boys, and even bureaucrats dare do no more than gently clear their throats. So gently that they might well be asking for forgiveness or permission. With their hats — their caps — clutched tight to their chests. Their eyes lowered. Only when you ask them outright do they name a price, almost always conveniently softened. “Just a sol, sir, if you would be so kind.” Just a sol, or a centavo, or a coin, because the name of the currency on its own seems to sear their tongues.
“Your fee — of course,” says José icily.
And he pays up, or rather he nudges Carlos with his elbow and Carlos pays up. Then they leave.
But they don’t leave. As they are moving off, Carlos suddenly turns around as if he’s remembered something important.
“Dr. Professor.”
“Just call me Professor. What’s our little cousin done now?”
The Professor is busy covering the desk with newspapers; sometimes the midmorning pisco leads into the lunchtime one, and then the pigeons flock to preen themselves and coo on his worktable.
“Well, this doesn’t have to do with my cousin, Professor. It’s just…”
“Oh! So it’s you! It seems Cupid has been taking potshots at your whole family!”
“It’s not that, it’s… I’m just curious, Professor. That’s all. I was just wondering if you’ve had to write a lot of letters for people you’ve never met.”
“What an odd question! Are you trying to learn all my secrets so you can steal my work out from under me?” He smiles. “Quite a few, actually. Sometimes the customers are wealthy young men reluctant to reveal themselves, and they send me messages through servants or friends… like your ingenuous cousin, for example. Then I have to improvise. Drawing from experience, I call it. I ask for a few basic instructions and then imagine what the lovers are like and let the pen do the rest. Once, even, a disgruntled father wanted me to write a letter pretending to be one of his daughter’s beaus. He wanted me to say that I was unworthy of her and all sorts of things… I didn’t accept, obviously. It’s a matter of principle, you see.”
“But when you invent these romances—”
“I don’t invent a thing! A person can write only about himself, even when he thinks he’s writing in someone else’s name. And so, it seems to me, my letters are always true. At the very most, the only untrue thing is the name signed to each one, don’t you think?”
The Professor looks at his watch. Carlos looks at the Professor. José looks at Carlos out of the corner of his eye with an imploring expression. When the hell are we going to get out of here, Carlota? it seems to say. But Carlota doesn’t seem ready to leave yet.
“And isn’t it quite difficult?”
“What?”
“Pretending to be somebody else.”
“Difficult? Not in the least! It’s as easy as being yourself.”
“Even when you’re pretending to be a woman?”
“That’s even easier! You have to add a few I don’t knows, I believes, and it seems to mes, because women are rather unsure of themselves. And ellipses, too, as many as possible. And then there’s the matter of handwriting, which is more complicated than you’d think. But beyond that… do you know what the secret is? Imagine that the woman you’re pretending to be is one you once loved. And since men are all alike, you can expect that the fellow you’re writing to shares your worldview…”
“And does it work?”
The Professor laughs.
“Does it work? Well, not always. I’m not going to lie. It’s the same as when you fall in love for real. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
~ ~ ~
◊
So he has to write about love. But what does he know about that?
It could be that Carlos is more apprehensive about this than he initially seemed and we must attribute to him a second fear: the terror that the story of Juan Ramón and Georgina will ultimately reveal nothing more than how little his own life is worth. Because in the end all good fiction is rooted in genuine emotion, as the Professor put it, which means that to write about love a novelist must look to his experiences, make use of everything he’s learned in a woman’s arms.
And what has he learned? What does he know about flesh-and-blood women?
To be honest, almost nothing. It’s true that, despite his youth, he already has a bit of experience, but so far he has only ever fallen in love with fantasies. A pretty woman he saw on the street for just an instant. The willowy body of a nymph in a Gustave Doré engraving. A character in a novel. The closest he’s come to falling in love with a real person was the night he met the Polish prostitute. If that can even be called love, and if it’s even possible to call a woman a prostitute when she is still a virgin.
It happened on the eve of his thirteenth birthday. The next day he would be a man. At least that’s what his father kept telling him as they headed off in the horse-drawn carriage toward Carlos’s birthday gift. Being a man brings with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities, he said, but also certain privileges. Carlos didn’t know if he wanted this or not, either becoming a man or enjoying the privilege his father was about to offer him. Not long ago he’d found a secret compartment in the library with a little book that was simultaneously wonderful and repugnant, full of prints of men and women intertwined, doing things that, no, not on your life. He spent the summer stealthily turning its pages, and at the end of each review his conclusion was always the same: the drawings were disgusting. Some nights he locked himself in the bathroom and studied his naked body in the mirror. He compared his scrawny figure, his hairless chest, with the images he’d seen in the book. On other occasions, in that same bathroom, the drawings briefly ceased to disgust him, but afterward they always filled him with remorse.