The Polish prostitute if she were neither Polish nor a prostitute; if, instead of having been born in Galicia and sold for twenty kopeks, she’d been born in a mansion in Miraflores and at her coming-out had received gifts of four hundred dollars.
The Polish prostitute if she often wept just as she had in bed with him, but with tears born not from her fear of being raped but rather from the solidarity she shows toward certain minor tragedies — a poem that moves her, the aching beauty of a sunset, the suffering of a kitten with an injured paw.
The Polish prostitute if she had learned to read and write and with those pen strokes — again the hand trembling — told Juan Ramón all the things that Carlos would have liked to hear.
Statements full of sighs:
I have thought of you so very often, my friend…! A cousin showed me your book, Violet Souls, so full of sighs and tears, and it moved me deeply. Your sweet, soft verses offered me companionship and comfort.
But why do I recount my poor melancholy things to you, on whom the whole world smiles?
And some days I awake at dawn filled with such sadness…
Her life takes place not in a bawdyhouse but in a setting as splendid and cold as marble. A labyrinth of trellised gardens, of ornate chambers with canopies and frescoes and brocade upholstery, afternoons of making and receiving visits, of playing the piano for stern old women. Long evenings in which she sits in the dining room waiting for guests or waiting for nothing — waiting for another day to end and, at the same time, fearing that this is all she’ll ever have. Sometimes she stays in the garden a long while, sitting beneath the trailing vines — Carlos can almost see her by his side — watching the bumblebees and the moths that orbit the flame of the oil lamp; like her, they are confined in a prison that cannot be seen and that, morning or night, will surely scorch their wings. Sometimes she snuffs out the lamp to free them. But other times she succumbs to cruelty and does nothing, only watches, until the maid comes running out with a shawl in her arms and strict orders for the young lady to come into the house immediately.
That setting contains few characters and only a couple of emotions. An authoritarian father who does not let her write letters that are as long as she’d like. A mother who is ailing or dead. Every once in a while, the sense that, all around her, the world has briefly turned unreal—Do you not experience the same thing, my dear Juan Ramón? — the suspicion that everything may be a stage set, the rehearsal for a play that has no audience or director or opening night. And above all, the six thousand miles of distance that separate her from the only human being who seems to understand her, the person who makes her feel alive again, fully alive, and whose letters slumber tucked away inside the piano.
~ ~ ~
◊
José imagines her brunette and young, almost a child. His Georgina has dark skin and indigenous features; were she wearing a vicuña wool poncho, she might even be mistaken for one of the women who come down to the city from the high Andean plateau once a month to sell their humble wares. Indeed, she bears a striking resemblance to a servant girl his family dismissed two or three years ago, though he doesn’t tell Carlos that. The girl had been beautiful and happy; José always thought of her as an Inca princess in servant-girl guise, though as far as he knew the Incas had at least been able to read the knots of their khipus, and Marcela couldn’t even recognize her own name in writing. But she liked poetry, or so Master José believed, and so he used to interrupt her in the middle of her duties to read her his early poems. Marcela would sit down to listen, the feather duster or broom still in her hand, and as if entranced she would repeat all those cadenced, beautiful words whose meaning she did not know. In fact, she was entirely ignorant, or so José believed, and her lack of sophistication fascinated him.
“Oh, dear Marcelita! If only we could all be like you and look at life with the blessed innocence of the songbirds and flowers! Only you, who know nothing, can be absolutely happy…”
The maid agreed, sincerely convinced. No doubt she was happy if Master José said so, as José was very intelligent and always right about everything. But between her twelve-hour workdays polishing the silverware and the recent news of her mother’s death back in her impoverished village, she hadn’t had a lot of time to think about happiness of late.
“How I envy you, dear friend! Knowledge is a cumbersome burden that I must bear everywhere upon my shoulders, like wretched Sisyphus… Of course you don’t know who Sis-yphus is — you have that luck too! I would love to unlearn all my knowledge and become simple and unfurrowed like you!” Marcela was touched by these words. She was moved to tears imagining the unknown pains the young master suffered, and perhaps to offer him comfort she began to let herself be taken in the kitchen, under the rhododendrons in the garden, in the wine cellar, in her narrow servant’s bed whenever José’s mother fell asleep. Even once in Señor Gálvez’s office, knocking over an inkwell in the process and ruining a number of documents whose value was docked, of course, from Marcela’s wages. It was in her illiterate arms that José learned all that books and the well-mannered women who read them could not teach. Because Marcela knew how to kiss with her mouth open, and moan, and writhe when a lady would have stayed still, and her hands, those hands that seemed to have been made to take care of guests’ hats, had also learned to stimulate places that a virtuous wife should know nothing about. José would remember her lessons for many years, and the words passion and desire would ever be bound in his recollection to this memory. As would the word impossible, because naturally the story comes to an end, a dénouement elegantly wrapped up by the Gálvez family with no consequences other than a dismissal, a small severance of fifteen soles, and a solemn promise from Marcela never to see their son again. And the son played at being glum for at least a couple of nights — he may even have entertained the mad notion that love between a wealthy young man and a maid was possible, a foolish delusion that we can by no means credit in 1904.
Now the maid he will never see again has been transformed into Georgina. Georgina is Marcela had Marcela not been raised an illiterate housemaid and, instead of scrubbing the floor tiles in the hallway on her knees, had spent her time reading the Symbolists and the Parnassians. It is she who attempts to slip certain insinuations into the letters to Juan Ramón with the same coquettishness with which she used to forget to latch the door to her room. But Carlos never allows that Georgina to show herself. When the two poets meet in the garret to compose a new letter and José offers one of his ideas, Carlos roundly rejects it. No, he says. Georgina would never say that. Or perhaps, almost shouting: Georgina is a young lady, not a harlot! Accustomed to always being right, to having his ideas eagerly embraced, at first José is startled by Carlos’s determination, which becomes more self-assured with each letter they write. Finally he laughs heartily. He is amused by the stubbornness with which his friend defends each of Georgina’s qualities.
You’re acting like you’re in love with her, he says.
But he doesn’t stop Carlos. In the end, he cares as much about having his version of Georgina prevail as he once did about the maidservant — that is to say, very little. He is interested only in the poem, the poem that Juan Ramón still has not written. And if in order to write it the poet needs a blond muse instead of a morena, a frigid young lady instead of a mischievous flirt, then Carlos’s ideas are quite welcome.