José flings pebbles from the breakwater into the sea. Between each one, he pauses to grumble a moment. It’s vile, an embarrassment, that a few good-for-nothings can bring an entire city to its knees and then stick around shouting and jeering. Carlos has the sensation that he is listening to his father’s voice, grown suddenly youthful but just as harsh. José also talks about Juan Ramón: “Do you know what happens when an installment of a serial novel is delayed?” he asks. Carlos does not. “Well, I’ll tell you: For the first few days the readers are restless, more curious, eager to keep reading, but as time passes they end up forgetting about it and start reading something else. That’s what’s going to happen if the letters don’t get out soon,” he continues. “The Maestro will start a new novel and won’t be interested in the old one. That’s what’s going to happen, Carlota.”
Carlos nods mechanically. For the first time he not only remembers Georgina but also contemplates, with curiosity and some surprise, the workers themselves. From the breakwater they seem to form a single body, as if they were a monstrous living thing spilling down the docks and wharves, its skin scaly with hats and faces. From time to time they shout a few slogans, and their roars, too, seem to braid together into a single voice. If José and Carlos had seen one of those lowly men from up in the garret, they would have taken him for a secondary character, but it occurs to Carlos now that as a group, they might somehow constitute a protagonist.
José hurls another stone and, with it, another complaint.
“That bastard Sandoval sank us. If his goal was to ruin our novel, he certainly succeeded.”
Carlos shakes his head, still watching the swarm of men.
“I don’t think Sandoval cares all that much about us, to be honest.”
“He does, I’m telling you, he does. I know that imbecile… He was dying with envy over the Georgina business. He wouldn’t care so much about these fools otherwise.”
Carlos hesitates a moment, seems about to speak, but then says nothing. José turns abruptly to look at him.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“Don’t play dumb, Carlotita, I know you. At this point I know everything there is to know about your silences. What are you thinking?”
“Nothing… just something I heard this morning.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Do you realize they earn only two soles?”
“Who?”
“The dockworkers.”
“Okay.”
Carlos waits a few moments. Then he adds:
“Two soles a day, I mean. Not per hour.”
“And do you think that’s a little or a lot?”
“Are you joking? It takes more than a week’s wages to buy a book, for the love of God!”
José shrugs.
“I very much doubt any of them know how to read. So no books; that’s one less expense. Also, their income can’t be that low if they’re able to take this vacation right now. The bastards.”
Carlos is silent, shuffling through a number of possible responses. Finally he says:
“You’re right.”
But he can’t get it out of his head. The two soles, just a couple of coins, grow in his mind until they fill it completely. Before him he sees the strikers, their shouts becoming louder, the animal bucking and stomping, trying with its immense body to overrun the railroad track connecting the port with the customs office. A group of soldiers, absurdly tiny, braced to stop it. Carlos feels something like admiration, not for their poverty but for the energy with which they are fighting to escape it.
He wonders what Georgina would think of them. Indeed, he wonders it aloud.
“I wonder what Georgina would think.”
“About what?”
“About all this. The strike at the docks.”
“I daresay she’d be furious at being unable to communicate with Juan Ramón.”
“Yes, but I mean their ideas. What would she think of the workers, their demands, the two soles…?”
José makes a gesture that might mean anything. But actually it means something quite specific: What do I care?
“I think she’d sympathize with them,” Carlos adds when it’s clear that José is not going to answer.
“Maybe,” he replies at last. “You know, that wouldn’t be a bad idea for a chapter. Georgina among the workers… Consoling them with her presence…” He raises his arm and points into the crowd. Slowly he lets his arm fall. “But what use would that chapter be when we can’t even send it to Juan Ramón?”
Carlos is still looking at the spot where José was pointing. Among the dockworkers he can make out a few women. They are carrying leather pouches with crusts of bread for their husbands and sons, and earthenware jugs to quench the protesters’ thirst. A few chant slogans, raising their voices and their fragile fists to the sky. There is also one young woman with a parasol, elegantly dressed all in white. She looks like a piece of artwork amid the workers’ drab overalls. He is struck by her presence. It only accentuates the destitution around her, making it more incomprehensible, more painful, more genuine. She looks like a figure from a Sorolla painting who, wandering from one canvas to another, has ended up, whether by mistake or out of curiosity, in a humble scene from Courbet. Carlos thinks to himself: She could be Georgina. And for a moment it seems that she is about to turn her head — Georgina’s head — but at the last second she walks back into the crowd, and she and her parasol disappear.
José slaps himself on the shins, stands up.
“So now what? Shall we go? It’s obvious nothing much is going to happen here today.”
Carlos stands up too. But he doesn’t head back to the carriage — he moves in the opposite direction, toward where he saw the girl disappear.
“Hey, where are you going? That’s the wrong way.”
“I just want to take a look.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Let’s get out of here. Can’t you see these idiots are ready to riot?”
But he follows Carlos. He’s not used to obeying and it takes him a while to make up his mind, but in the end he sighs and goes after him.
Carlos doesn’t really know what he hopes to find. It’s practically superstitious, his fantasy that the white parasol is hiding a face that can only belong to Georgina. Of course he can’t share such a notion with José. He can only do what he’s doing: fight his way through the crowd, elbowing and prodding the dark flesh of that animal, which seems to be rejecting them. Even though the strikers turn to look warily at the young men’s gold cufflinks and impeccable suits. Even though the slogans that a few minutes ago spoke of equality and justice in rather abstract terms are increasingly filled with invective, with mentions of spilled blood and dead bosses. Even though, seen up close, some women are distributing not crusts of bread or cups of wine but paving stones and iron bars and walking sticks and metal hooks and fireplace pokers. José’s voice is distorted by fear for the first time: