~ ~ ~
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The visit to the Professor was a waste of time. At least that’s how José sees it, and he makes sure to say so whenever he gets the chance. He never mentions Carlos’s two lost soles, just his own wasted — and invaluable — time. And what did they get in return? A few useless pieces of advice and a brief history of fashion, neither of which has improved their novel or brought them any closer to the Maestro.
“He didn’t even say whether he thinks he’ll write the poem. He didn’t say anything! The man’s a charlatan.”
Carlos dares only to half disagree.
“I don’t know… I didn’t think it was so pointless. And I think some of his advice was good… in a way. That bit about imagining a woman you’ve loved… Or the part about the covered ladies, for example.”
“An old man’s idle reminiscences! What about all that nonsense about the language of eyelashes? Ever so practical! Turns out the women of Lima knew Morse code. A long blink to blow a kiss… a long one and a short one to reject a suitor… How many blinks does it take to say ‘I think I’m going to throw up’?”
Carlos laughs. He doesn’t want to, but he laughs.
They’re sitting up on the roof of the garret. But they’re not in the mood for the character game today. The transatlantic steamer has just arrived and, within it, three letters from the Maestro, so similar to the previous ones that it feels like they’ve read them already. The same old formulas of friendship and courtesy, references to the invention of the cinematograph, an erudite contribution to their ongoing discussion of whether or not all things have a soul (they do, he says) and what those souls might consist of (perhaps this is what philosophers call essence?). The only new development is that accompanying these letters are the drafts of several poems. They are from Juan Ramón’s new book, to be titled Distant Gardens, which will appear next year. But of course the poems do not make a single reference to Georgina. Instead, they include an endless number of twilights and gardens — uninhabited paradises that seem to draw farther away before their eyes or were perhaps always far away, as if they could be contemplated only from the other side of a wrought-iron fence. And there’s not all that much to look at in those paradises either. Trees that glumly drop their leaves to the ground. Inconsequential rains, falling on those same trees. Boredom.
Yet José refuses to give up. He cannot believe that Juan Ramón hasn’t written a poem to Georgina by now. There has to be one, or maybe even many — hundreds of verses hidden away somewhere. That’s what José needs to believe, anyway, as it’s been weeks since he’s written anything himself. He just sits at his desk and stares at his portrait of the Maestro. If only he could address him as a young poet in need of advice and not as a prim young lady in a skirt and bodice! He would ask him so many things. Indeed, he asks them every night, staring at the black-and-white image, at the portrait’s vacant eyes. He asks when Juan Ramón discovered he was a poet, how he was sure he had the talent for it. Whether there’s any reason for José to keep sitting there, hunched over his desk, scribbling out drafts that will never astound a critic or bring a lady to tears. Or maybe they will? At least tell me that much, Maestro: Am I already a genius, unawares? Should I persevere in my passion or accept my failure once and for all? But the Maestro does not answer, and so José does not write.
That may be why he’s become convinced that Carlos has been right all along. That there is a particular dignity, a solemn, almost sacred dedication, in the act of creating a muse so that a great poet can craft his finest metaphors. And while he waits for those sublime pages, José busies himself reading and rereading the Maestro’s poems, finding the mark of Georgina hidden everywhere.
“Listen to this, Carlota!” he exclaims, waving Juan Ramón’s letter in the air. “And suddenly, a voice / melancholy and distant, / has trembled across the water / in the silence of the air. / It is the voice of a woman / and of a piano, it is a soft / comfort for the roses / somnolent in the afternoon, / a voice that makes me / weep for nobody and for somebody / in this sad and golden / opulence of the parks. It must be Georgina! It’s so clear: there’s a voice because of the letters, which come from very far away but nevertheless speak to him… And because he doesn’t know her yet, he weeps for nobody and for somebody… Don’t you see? For nobody and for somebody! It’s quite clear!”
Carlos doesn’t say anything. He keeps looking down at the square from on high, as if there were something to decipher there. Darkness is falling. Soon there won’t be enough light for José to keep reading him the poems.
“I think I’m going to go see him again,” he says suddenly, as if setting down a burden.
“Who?”
“The Professor… if that’s all right with you.”
José looks up from his papers.
“Professor Cristóbal? What for?”
“I don’t know… It’s just a thought.”
José hesitates for a moment. Then he shrugs.
“Whatever you like. As long as I don’t have to go with you.”
He doesn’t say anything else. But a few moments later, Carlos hears him muttering other lines with the reverence of prayer:
And there are attempts at caresses, / at glances and fragrances, / and there are lost kisses that / perish upon the waves.
She always spoke in blue / she was exquisitely sweet… but / I could never even learn / if the hair on her head was blond.
I have a beloved made of snow / who does not kiss and does not sing. / She is now dead for me / and I can never forget her.
~ ~ ~
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For the novel to be perfect, they have to know their character down to the most minute detail. What kind of writers would they be if they did not know whether Georgina was short or tall, whether she was writing from a seaside resort or from a garret, whether she was married or unmarried or a widow or a nun? A good scrivener, says the Professor, must know his customers better than they know themselves. And that inevitably goes for novelists too. Carlos thinks he once heard that Tolstoy — or maybe it wasn’t Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky or Gogol or some other Russian — stopped writing his novel for a whole month because when he got to a particular scene, he didn’t know whether his character would accept or refuse a cup of tea.
Do they know that? Do they know whether Georgina even likes tea?
Carlos imagines her as fair, wan, maybe ill. Vaguely sad. Also quite young — she almost seems like a child. She has blue eyes and fragile hands, very white, as if they were made of snow. She is timid and sensitive as only truly beautiful women can be, and perhaps that is why her lips quiver when she rereads Juan Ramón’s letters every night, in the secret intimacy of candlelight. The hand holding the paper also trembles. It will tremble even more when she writes out her reply.
Georgina is the Polish prostitute once more.
The Polish prostitute if, six years later, she were still a virgin.