He stops himself.
“Go on, say it, say it. The look in your cousin’s eyes. You know, we’ve talked so much about her and I still don’t know even know what color her eyes are. I’m curious. What is this cousin of yours like? And don’t tell me she’s beautiful and shapely; that’s old news.”
Carlos accepts the cigarette the Professor offers him. He allows himself to speak of her only as long as it takes him to get from his first puff to when the ember of the cigarette almost burns his fingers. In that interval he has time to describe her in intricate detail. Georgina’s whole life, summed up in the life of a cigarette. When Carlos drops the butt to the ground, Cristóbal bursts into laughter.
“So she’s got blond hair and blue eyes, does she? I thought your friend said she had a darker complexion.”
Carlos doesn’t look away. For the first time he feels a rush of genuine pride.
“He can say whatever he likes. Who would know better than her cousin?”
Cristóbal looks serious all of a sudden.
“True, true. What’s more, it’s clear you love her. Unlike your friend — he doesn’t like her all that much.”
“You think so?”
“A blind man could see it,” says the Professor, and refuses to utter another word.
~ ~ ~
◊
The Professor has already warned him about the importance of making drafts. Letters are like serial novels, he said: once you’ve messed up, there’s no fixing it. That was the experience of Alexandre Dumas, who, because he did not make outlines as he should, ended up killing off a character in one episode and then resuscitating him three or four installments later. Apparently he wrote so many serial novels at the same time that he used to make miniatures of his thousands of characters and arrange them on a bookshelf according to an established code so that he could recall with a glance whether they were dead or alive. Regrettably, one day his maid decided it was time to clean those little figurines, dirty as they were, and with a single sweep of her feather duster brought a whole generation of the departed back to life.
Such is the case with Georgina as well, or rather with her sister, who exists and does not exist at the same time, depending on which letter you consult.
They don’t realize it until Juan Ramón’s next delivery arrives. It is a shorter, more formal note than usual. His tone is cautious, and even the color of the ink is different. No doubt there has been some sort of mistake or misunderstanding, the letter starts, with no beating around the bush. Yes, that must be it, surely he has misunderstood something — there are so many subtleties that are lost from six thousand miles away — but for some time he has been mulling over a contradiction that has arisen. He would like to know why in her third letter Georgina talked about her sister, Teresita — do you remember, my friend? — and now, only fifteen letters later, there is no trace of Teresita, and what’s worse, in Georgina’s last letter she wrote that she was an only child. He humbly inquires what he has misunderstood — because he’s sure that’s all this is, he repeats, just a misunderstanding — and how a woman who is no doubt sincere in every facet can in one letter be an only child and in another love her sister, Teresita, so fiercely.
The letter closes with Best wishes from your loyal servant and not the usual Anxiously awaiting news of my dear friend. In terms of formulas of politeness, it seems their relationship has been set back six or seven months.
At first Carlos and José blame each other. “All that time spent writing and rewriting the letters, and you didn’t even realize we were handing out sisters and then snatching them back? If you took this more seriously, these things wouldn’t happen,” and so on. Then they blame the Professor. “Two soles to read some wretched letters and he doesn’t even find the errors?” Then the one to blame is Juan Ramón, though they can’t really pinpoint why; their rage is simply directed at him for the first time. In the end nobody is to blame. Everything is forgiven, but it is all infinitely sad, without any hope of consolation.
“Well, what now? What solution does your idol Cristóbal have for us?”
“None, because he doesn’t know about it and he’s not going to find out. What do you want me to tell him? That my cousin forgot how many sisters she has?”
“Damn it,” says José, summing everything up quite succinctly.
But in the end Carlos does venture to ask him, at least in a way. One morning he drags out the question as much as possible and finally reminds Cristóbal of Dumas’s serial novel and the lead figurines. He asks how Dumas solved his problem, and the Professor laughs at the question. Easy, a cinch, really: He changed the genre of his novel. He changed it from a swashbuckling novel to a supernatural one with hexes and witches and men who die and are later revived, and so the readers were satisfied. Most satisfied of all, though, was the revivified dead man, who got to stay alive until the end of the novel.
Changing the genre. It’s not a bad idea, and Carlos hastens to implement it. His romantic novel briefly takes on tinges of tragedy — of course the real tragedy will come later, though he doesn’t know that yet — and he writes a long chapter, a five-page letter in which Georgina finally bares her soul. It has been so many years, and yet she still cannot get used to the idea that her sister is no longer with them, poor thing — as if Georgina had not spent an entire night beside her white casket, feeling that she too was drowning; as if at the funeral she had not bent over the coffin to kiss her dead sister’s purple lips. That loss had enveloped her in a persistent air of melancholy and guilt — after all, it was she who had asked Teresita to gather lilies from the riverbank. And tisanes and excursions to the seashore and six months in a sanatorium had all been useless against that constrictive pang that still strangles Georgina’s lungs.
The coincidence makes me tremble, the poet replies in the next post, both ashamed and deeply moved. Are you aware that after my father’s death I too was sent off to sanatoriums to purge my soul of sorrows, perhaps the same ones that trouble you?
Georgina is aware of nothing.
~ ~ ~
◊
For months now Sandoval has been promising a strike that will paralyze all of Peru. The longshoremen in the ports and the railroad engineers rising up as one to tear down the foundations of capitalism together. That strike will never happen, but Sandoval keeps menacing the country with it every afternoon at the club, as if it were only a matter of days or minutes before the social revolution would finally break out. The patrons have learned to listen to his long-winded speeches with skepticism. The ritual is repeated every day with little variation, from the time he rings at the door until he loosens his tie to speak: Sandoval handing the waiter his overcoat, hat, and gloves, conspicuously displaying the ink stains and calluses on his hands, looking for a stool on which to prop one of his boots as he speaks, with the grave and somewhat ridiculous expression of a fencing student preparing to deliver a thrust with his foil. They are studied gestures intended to allow time for interested listeners to approach, but most are already tired of waiting for the strike, the revolution that never comes and that matters to no one. Sandoval, undaunted, keeps preparing harangues that can hardly be heard above the clacking of billiard balls and the clinking of plates against the marble tabletops.
Because the strike, and with it the end of capitalism, is in fact already written. Indeed, everything has been set down in the pages of Bakunin and Kropotkin, so the future of nations holds no secret to men of understanding. In Sandoval’s language, a man of understanding means an anarchist. And that hypothetical anarchist would have only to sit and read the writing on the wall for the future of Peru, and really even the whole world, to be clear to him. Perhaps those assembled would like to hear those predictions?