Carlos fidgets on his stool.
“But what you’re saying can’t be true. There has to be something more… I mean… love is something more than words, isn’t it? It has to be. It’s something born deep within us, something that cannot be betrayed…”
He pounds his chest passionately as he speaks. But Cristóbal is unfazed.
“Deep within! Right, and a century ago, when thirteen-year-old girls were betrothed to doddering geezers without objecting in the slightest, tell me, didn’t those beauties have the same guts inside them that you do? I’ll tell you what was going on: back then people didn’t read romantic novels, and so nobody had given those girls the words to feel anything other than what they were feeling.” He stops and claps Carlos on the shoulder. “Open your eyes, my friend; love, as you understand it, was invented by literature, just as Goethe gave suicide to the Germans. We don’t write novels; novels write us.”
The Professor knocks back his drink in a single gulp. Then he looks at Carlos with curiosity, as if noticing his existence for the first time.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Christ, what else? Is there a woman in your life? A fiancée, a lover, anything of the sort? You should know that if you ever need to invent a good passionate story for her, I would be happy to do that for you. I’ve charged you in friendship.”
Carlos waves his hand weakly as if the question were somehow not pertinent.
“No, I… Actually, I don’t have anyone.”
Cristóbal rolls himself a cigarette as he listens.
“Why not? I mean, you’re quite a catch; you must have plenty of candidates. At the very least you have marriage in your future, I’d say.”
“Yes, but now’s not the time to be thinking about that. I have to focus on my studies. Also, my parents…”
He stops and looks away.
“Your parents what?”
“They’ll know how to find the woman who’s best for me,” he says at last, regaining his composure.
“Oh! I see.” Cristóbal smiles, his cigarette now between his lips. “My skills are of no use on that score in any event. But it’s good you’re taking it that way. Arranged marriages are the happiest ones — as long as you haven’t filled up your head with certain words, of course. If you wish to preserve that equanimity, promise me this: Avoid romantic novels at all cost! Those vile words will make a marriage go sour for no reason at all.”
Carlos doesn’t say anything for a while. He stares at the glass the Professor has just emptied.
“What about Georgina?” he says at last in a metallic voice that sounds so unlike his own. “So she isn’t in love either?”
Professor Cristóbal laughs so hard that his cigarette falls on the table and then rolls onto the tile floor. He is still laughing as he bends down to retrieve it.
“Oh, no! Your cousin is in love, of course she is… But that’s because, unlike you, she has read far too many novels.”
~ ~ ~
◊
Carlos is twenty years old. At that age his father was already making a living from his rubber plantations, and his mother was married and about to bring him, Carlos, into the world. And that’s nothing compared to his paternal grandfather, who at twenty was already dead — dead, with a widow and two orphaned children, but without even the twelve soles needed to pay for a coffin; that’s how he was. There aren’t men like that anymore, Don Augusto often says. Men today are cut from a different cloth; at twenty they still act like children who want to keep larking about. The day will come when men still won’t have a wife or kids or a job or a house or even the desire to have any of those things by the time they’re thirty.
He’s exaggerating, of course, though he says it with such conviction, such seriousness, that you almost believe him.
But normally Don Augusto doesn’t waste his time philosophizing. Who knows what will happen with the youth of tomorrow, and who cares? It’s still 1904—actually, they just celebrated New Year’s Day of 1905. So much time has passed, and in that time, many letters, and Don Augusto has to focus on that for now. On that and on Carlos and his twenty years of age. On making sure the boy finishes his degree, beating the ius connubium and ius praecepta into him if necessary, and then, after he descends the steps of the university, leading him straight to the church to be married. But as the degree seems to be more of a long-term objective, it might be a good idea to look for the fiancée beforehand. Get the lay of the land, as Don Augusto says, which entails sending and receiving invitations to drink hot chocolate and eat pastries with Lima’s most distinguished young ladies. Helping Carlos choose a good match, or perhaps even arranging it for him. Men today, as Don Augusto knows quite well, are like children.
There’s no need to rush, of course, as marriage will soon be something only the poor do, only nobodies who have no inheritance awaiting them and can’t travel to Europe just to kick up their heels a bit. There’s no hurry, but there’s no harm in keeping his eyes open. Cultivating friendships in prominent circles and at social gatherings, with the hope of seeing powerful influences blossom in them. Opening a path for his son that will take him from the tearooms and foyers to the boudoir of one of the Tagle-Bracho daughters, or even a Quiroga. Get the lay of the land, open a path, cultivate, harvest—these are the sort of terms used by a man for whom life has never been anything more than a jungle to attack with machetes.
The Rodríguezes have it all except a last name and a past, so the ideal prospects for Carlos are young women from families that have lost it all except their last names and their pasts. The Sáez de Ibarras, their fortune squandered in the casinos and brothels of Lima. The Lezcárragas, recently fallen on hard times thanks to an unlucky business decision in the wine trade. The Ortiz de Zárate y Toñanes family, which frankly never did have much to its name beyond dubious links to a handful of national heroes. It is houses like those that the Rodríguezes honor with their visits on the first and third Wednesdays of every month. Only in those shabby parlors, in those enormous, servantless dining rooms, in those libraries sold volume by volume to ragpickers, does the Rodríguezes’ nouveau riche odor seem to go unnoticed; there is no better cure for an overly sensitive sense of smell than becoming nouveau pauvre.
But Don Augusto is looking for more than a daughter-in-law, as Carlos is well aware. He is worried less about his son’s marriage than about the possibility of using that marriage to project a fantasy that the Rodríguezes are finally aristocrats — indeed, that they always were. Ever since Carlos’s father was a boy, he has been obsessed with that idea, his desk piled high with books on heraldry and documents showing that in the last century the family was this or that. He never found any Spanish ancestor, let alone a rich one. Only Achuars or Quechuas, and half-breeds, and quadroons, who in the baptismal records are invariably listed as “peasants” or “sons of the people”—plus one great-great-grandfather whom a jesting priest labeled a “son of the earth.” But he must persist, paging through the manuscripts until he manages to turn the past into what it is supposed to be. Don Augusto has inherited the whites’ prejudices along with their money and manners, and it is always jarring for him to look in the mirror after having loudly declared in a café that the Indians must inevitably be slaves because of the blood running through their veins.