A genealogist convinced him that records of those illustrious dead could be found in the parish registers in Spain, and Don Augusto financed his trip across the globe to explore the motherland’s churches and chapels, an investigation that is still ongoing. After five years, two thousand five hundred soles—pesetas in Spain — and very few certainties, the scholar still occasionally sends letters with hopeful news. In the Santander cathedral he has found a Rodríguez who, if he is not mistaken, is Don Augusto’s grandfather’s great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather; there are some vague indications that the family may be related to the Duke of Osuna and three or four other Spanish grandees; a fifteenth-century baptism certificate could be the key that links the Rodríguezes to King Ferdinand, of Ferdinand and Isabella fame… and so on. Each new discovery justifies an outlay of a hundred or two hundred pesetas, which Don Augusto pays without hesitating.
In reality, his confidence in the genealogist is purely statistical. Don Augusto understands something of arithmetic; indeed, it could be argued that he has amassed his fortune thanks to his head for numbers — or rather, to be precise, to his ability to substitute numbers for people. When converted into figures, the genealogy issue is clearer in his head. It goes like this: He was born in 1853. Assuming twenty-five years for each generation, that means his parents (two of them) must have been born in about 1825, and his grandparents (four) in about 1800. None of them, according to the records, appear to have had noble blood. But why not keep going backward? He had 16 great-great-grandparents around 1750, 64 ancestors in 1700, and 1,024 around 1600. During the time of the conquest of Peru, there were at least 8,192 of his forebears roaming the earth. Was it really possible that they were all malodorous Incas, that none of them had come ashore from the ships of Pizarro and de Almagro? And so on: 262,144 in 1400; 4,194,304 in 1300; no fewer than 67,000,000 humans in about 1200. Had not a single one of them a coat of arms, a quartered shield to bequeath to him? It was practically redundant to confirm it; statistically speaking, they’d already been made nobles, were perhaps even the descendants of kings. Yet patience, and a smidgen of humility, prevent him from going all the way back to the first century. Something tells him that at that point he would have so many millions of ancestors, so very many, that it would have to include the world’s entire population, even Jesus Christ Himself, if it weren’t heresy to think such a thing in the first place.
For his part, Carlos prefers to know nothing of his father’s aspirations. Sometimes he even manages to convince himself that nobody is thinking about the question of his marriage with any seriousness, that his family is making and receiving all these visits for exactly the reason it seems: the pleasure of talking about the weather and ranting about the government, eating pastries, and exchanging home remedies for migraines. Counting the angels that pass, one by one, during the conversation’s many awkward silences. But to understand the truth, he has only to watch any one of the young ladies arrive, decked out as if for a wedding — her own? — and hear her mother taking every opportunity to comment on how hard-working Aurorita or Cristinilla is. And Aurora and Cristina and Jimena and Mariana look a little at him and a little at the brocade curtains, the embossed silverware, or the dazzling gold of the galleries and bedchambers, as if all of it — son, house, precious objects — were being offered as a packaged set.
And so for a while he feels a cold sweat every time a receiving day approaches. He wants to tell his father to stop looking. That he doesn’t want to find a wife, that he’s not going to go down to the parlor today, no matter that Fermín Stevens’s seven charming daughters have come to visit. But in the end he always gives in, and later, in the dead of night, he feels a pressure on his chest that keeps him from sleeping. As if his father had sat down on top of him and were staying very still, staring at him. He remembers the Professor. Could it really be true that words can cause harm? Not just the words one reads but, and especially, those one utters. Those from which, now so long ago, Georgina was once born. Because today Georgina seems much more real than the succession of women, some of them still girls, who parade through his house day in and day out, petulant and flustered.
What would he do if Georgina were one of them? Would he recognize her? Would he request her company? Would he tell his father, The Hübners are the best family for us?
Some of the girls he receives are pretty, but Carlos doesn’t even notice. He’s spent his whole life looking at cartoons and postcards of women as if they were flesh and blood, and now he is looking at the parade of flesh-and-blood women as if it were a well-worn deck of postcards and cartoons. Characters taken from a novel that has been closed and forgotten. Georgina, on the other hand… Because only when he thinks about her is the burden on his chest alleviated, as if someone had made his father get up and leave the room. As if what he senses on his body were not pressure but the lightest touch of a caress, so delicate that he has to close his eyes just to feel it. It is Georgina, coming to visit him. Or not, but what does it matter? It’s better not to open his eyes so he can keep believing it, or to open them and see her at last, because she is not like the others. She is not interested in the drapes or the etchings or the silverware. Georgina wants to look at him — only at him.
~ ~ ~
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And then the novel grinds to a halt.
They know, having gleaned it from one of the few pieces of Professor Schneider’s advice they actually managed to read, that something extraordinary must take place in the middle pages of every novel. Just before that episode, the plot must seem to falter for a moment — the beginning of the second act — passing through a low spot or valley, a brief plateau of boredom, and then that something happens. Often a character who seemed indispensable to the story dies, or maybe one who seemed like he was going to die survives. The others learn to appreciate life more, or perhaps they don’t learn anything. And that’s that.
But their novel will never emerge from that valley. It simply ends, before the peak has even been contemplated. It is brusquely interrupted, like a volume from which the last pages have been torn out: Juan Ramón has stopped answering their letters. A week passes, then two, a month — an entire month goes by and still they have no word from the Maestro. The day comes again when the ship should arrive from Europe, and nothing happens. What they do have is plenty of time to come up with explanations. The Maestro has grown bored; the Maestro has found a novel or a muse more to his liking; the Maestro has forgotten about the tiresome girl from Miraflores and their disjointed, humdrum novel. The Maestro isn’t a Maestro at all but an imbecile who needs to be taught good manners, the proper way to treat well-bred young ladies. And of course they have time to blame themselves — such mediocre writers — and others, too, obviously: Professor Cristóbal, and Don Augusto, why not, and Professor Nicanor — Mr. Scrooge — who has given them failing grades in his mercantile law course, and the watchman who doesn’t trust the Chinese, and the servant who has no doubt mixed up or misplaced the envelopes, and other characters so marginal that they haven’t even appeared in their novel.