This morning I received your letter, which I found most charming, and I am sending you my Sad Arias at once, regretting only that my verses cannot live up to all that you must have hoped they would be, Georgina…
That night in the taverns the young men celebrate their signed book and this letter written in the Maestro’s own hand. They invite their friends, other poets as destitute as they, who arrive at the pub in their horse-drawn carriages. While helping their friends out of their overcoats, José and Carlos urge them to drink, drink as much they like, Georgina Hübner is treating tonight. Then come the explanations, and the toasts, and the letter read aloud; those who believe the story and those who do not, Stop pulling our leg, Carlitos, those stilted lines could not possibly have been written by the author of Water Lilies and Violet Souls. But then they see the poet’s signature and the book that can be found only in the bookstores of Madrid and Barcelona, and they begin clapping one another on the back and laughing uproariously.
Your letter is dated March 8, but I received it only today, May 6. Please do not fault me for the delay. If you keep me apprised of your address — if ever you plan to change residences — I will send you my books as I publish them, always, of course, with the greatest of pleasure…
Their friends insist that they must answer the letter; that they must not answer the letter; that Georgina should repay the Maestro’s kindness with a photograph, or at least a few postcards of Lima; that great poets do not deserve to be mocked and Carlos and José must confess the truth straightaway; that telling the truth will achieve nothing; that they should put a stop to the joke before things end badly; that things will end badly regardless, so what does it matter. Finally it is José who proclaims, pounding the table with his fist: I say we respond, damn it. And respond they will, but that will be the next day, when the two friends return to the garret in a bleary-eyed haze, armed with the rose-scented paper they’ve purchased for the occasion.
Tonight, though, they prefer to enjoy themselves. To propose possible responses to the poet, which start out more or less sensible and then grow gradually worse under the counsel of alcohol and euphoria. To emerge into Lima’s first light lustily reciting the Sad Arias, which, with a bottle of chicha in hand, don’t seem so sad anymore. And afterward — and for this they must be forgiven, as by this point they are more drunks than they are poets — to address one another as ladies, loudly calling one another Georgina, pitching their voices higher, hiking up skirts they aren’t wearing, and feigning dizzy spells and fainting fits, until finally they squat down to urinate, all together and dying of laughter, in the Descalzos rose garden.
Thank you for your kindness. And believe me to be utterly yours, who kisses your feet.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
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Let’s suppose for a moment that we had to sketch José and Carlos in a single sentence. That we were allowed to proffer no more than, for example, thirteen words describing them — their existence summed up in the space of a telegram. In such a case, the words we chose would probably be these:
They’re rich.
They fancy themselves poets.
They want to be Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Fortunately, no one is asking us to be so brief.
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They’re rich.
Both of them are, though this is less a coincidence than it is well-nigh self-evident. In 1904, friendship between members of different social classes is a sort of fairy tale, a genre reserved for the particularly naive, like children who drowsily listen to The Prince and the Pauper before receiving a good-night kiss.
There exist, of course, circumstances in which this principle is less stringently upheld. Nearly everyone has heard tales of landowners who amuse themselves by granting generous favors to their peasants, perhaps in exchange for the pleasure they get from watching those peasants wait for long stretches in their parlors, caps clutched to their chests and eyes filled with fear that they might stain the rugs with mud. There are also rich, kindhearted widows who sweetly offer advice to their lady’s maids, who perhaps even attempt to find them decent, sensible husbands among the footmen of the other women in their ombre-playing circle. And gentlemen who dress up like laborers to tipple in picturesque taverns, exchanging comradely embraces with men whose names they will later forget.
In none of these instances can one find any signs of true friendship, only an artificial camaraderie in which the peasant — or maid, or butler — has the unhappier role. The inferiors respond to the questions, which are often elegantly softened orders, in cautious monosyllables and, humiliated, accept the alms of attention extended by their patrons. The gentlemen, on the other hand, find these little tête-à-têtes, which are convened and dissolved with the ringing of a bell, quite satisfactory and edifying. At some point the servant will leave—You may go now, Alfredo—and the gentleman will remain lounging in his armchair, the proffered glass of cognac, which the shy servant has not dared to sample, still untouched on the table, and his conscience brimming with the satisfaction of having been generous and humane.
There is, then, nothing for it but to acknowledge that both of our young men are rich. Yet there is no obligation for them to be rich in exactly the same way. The Gálvez fortune, for example, goes back centuries and is associated with an illustrious lineage of prominent national figures. And while it is true that much of the wealth accumulated by those distinguished forebears has evaporated, their descendants in 1904 still retain enough of it to enjoy a comfortable life as well as their unimpeachable reputation, which ultimately will be as valuable as the lost riches. Everyone in Lima knows that José’s grandfather José Gálvez Egúsquiza died defending the city of El Callao against Spanish troops in 1866 and that his uncle José Gálvez Moreno was a hero of the War of the Pacific. And with such letters of introduction, who could refuse to offer Master José an important post when he grows up, perhaps a diplomatic mission abroad or even a ministry of culture in Lima?
The Rodríguez family fortune, however, is embarrassingly new. Carlos’s father began to amass it only three decades ago, during the rubber fever, when he achieved some success in bleeding the jungle of its resins and its Indians. Before that, he’d been a nobody. Just a door-to-door salesman of soaps and waxes who perhaps dreamed of someday becoming one of the many gentlemen who never deigned to allow him into their homes. Then came the sugar boom, and with it a plantation of four thousand laborers, and winter and summer residences, and horse-drawn carriages, and his own serving staff, so similar to those sour-faced servants who had so often stopped him at the doorstep. There was even a botanical garden of exotic flowers and animals, along whose gravel avenues the grandee would often wander, dogged by his numerous preoccupations. Indeed, the Rodríguez family had everything but the illustrious past that not even rubber could buy: its genealogical tree was littered with little indigenous branches that had to be pruned, for that inglorious lineage is disdained in some salons, at certain splendid galas. It is why the gentlemen bow their heads ten or twelve degrees lower as they pass and the ladies offer up the backs of their hands with their noses slightly wrinkled, as if troubled by an unpleasant odor. As if the Rodríguezes still gave off a faint whiff of jungle ponds, the blood of dead headhunters, vulcanized rubber, paraffin — the paraffin that thirty years earlier Carlos’s father had sold door to door at a paltry three-quarters of a sol per ounce.