This is the closest thing to a friendship between classes that we can find: a wealthy man from a prominent family and an even wealthier man whose ancestors were poor. Perhaps it is unwarranted to dedicate so many words to this matter, as the novel’s own protagonists do not seem to take it very seriously. After all, they fancy themselves poets, and that belief keeps them hovering just above the ground, enjoying a detachment that is disrupted by anything to do with reality and its prosaic conventions. So why would they care that Carlos’s family has no distinguished dead and that José’s has too many? Poetry, art, their friendship — especially their friendship — transcend all of that. At least that’s what they’d say if anyone bothered to ask them. We couldn’t care less about that, they’d say, don’t you see that we’re poets? — and that answer should be sufficient.
It should be sufficient, but it is not persuasive. Because it’s clear that they do care about the implications of last name and lineage — we have already noted that it’s 1904; at this time, it could not be otherwise — though they would never admit it, and may not even realize it. But that may be why the opinions of José, nephew of the illustrious José Gálvez Moreno, always seem a little more sensible than those of his friend, and his poems fuller, and his jokes about Peruvians, Chileans, and Spaniards funnier, and his girlfriends prettier; and you might even say at times that he also seems taller, except that only recently an impartial measuring tape revealed that Carlos has nearly an inch on him. It was José who created Georgina — Carlos, smiling, delighted, thoroughly inebriated, merely agreed to the plan — and he will also be the one to choose her death if one day, God forbid, something has to happen to her. And what alternative did Carlos have, then, but to agree, even if he didn’t want to? He could only toss back another glass of pisco and toast his friend’s excellent idea; of what use are the opinions of a rubber man’s son when all of a nation’s illustrious dead are arrayed against him?
~ ~ ~
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The subsequent letters require more drafts than the first. Something more vital than obtaining a book of poems is at stake now: if Juan Ramón doesn’t answer, the comedy is over. And for some reason, that comedy suddenly seems to its authors to be quite a serious thing. Maybe that’s why they’re hardly laughing anymore, and why Carlos has a solemn air about him when he picks up the fountain pen.
Yet there is no reason to imagine that the correspondence might be interrupted soon. Juan Ramón always answers in the return post, sometimes even dispatching two or three letters in a single week that will later travel together, embarking on the same transatlantic voyage back to Lima. He too seems to want the joke to continue many chapters longer, even at the cost of short and somewhat ceremonious missives. The letters are frankly boring at times, yet as fundamentally Juan Ramón — esque as the Sad Arias or his Violet Souls, and that is enough to move José and Carlos to memorize them and venerate them during many a worshipful afternoon. Sometimes the quartos arrive splattered with ink stains or spelling errors, but they forgive him even that, with indulgence, with pleasure. Juan Ramón, so perfect in his poems, so intellijent—with a j—he too sometimes scratches things out with his pen, he too gets confused, mixes up g and j and s and c.
So what do they talk about in those first letters?
The truth is that nobody much cares. Not even them. They spend many hours writing the letters, packaging them, sending them; hours exchanging remedies for the flu or discussing the cold or the heat in Madrid or Chopin’s nocturnes or the discomforts of traveling by car. It is an unfruitful time that is best kept to a minimum. What does matter — and matters a lot — is the way those letters begin and end. The way they transition smoothly and discreetly from Señor Don Juan R. Jiménez and Señorita Georgina Hübner to Dearest friend in only fourteen letters. Not to mention the closings: Your most attentive servant, Cordially, Fondly, Affectionately, Tenderly. This shift, which takes place over the course of seven hundred forty-two lines of correspondence, equivalent to about an hour and fifty minutes of conversation in a café, might seem indecorously rapid. But as the Lima — La Coruña route is covered by just two ships a month and a ship rarely carries more than two or three of their letters, in fact the relationship develops quite slowly, very much in keeping with the period. They are rather reminiscent of those lovers who wait six months for permission to speak to each other through a window grating, and at least one full year for their first chaste kiss.
And of course the word love has yet to be said.
~ ~ ~
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Whenever José spots the cancellation marks of transatlantic postage amid his correspondence, he rushes off to find Carlos. They have agreed that they will always read the letters together — after all, both of them are Georgina — and Gálvez scrupulously fulfills his promise, though he does occasionally give in to temptation and peek under the flap of the envelope. They read the Maestro’s words aloud on the benches of the university or in the Club Unión billiards room, and then they go to the garret to watch the afternoon fade, deliberating over each word of their response. They often continue writing long past nightfall, and as they polish their final draft, the mosquitoes orbit the oil lamp in smaller and smaller circles until finally burning to a crisp in its flame.
Both of them think constantly of Juan Ramón, but only Carlos pays any mind to Georgina. For José she is merely a pretext, a means by which to fill his desk drawer with holy relics from the Maestro. A dainty portrait, for example. Or one of the poet’s unpublished poems. That is José’s interest with every letter: how to get more books, more autographs, more Juan Ramón. Carlos, on the other hand, strives to give Georgina a personality and a biography. Perhaps he is beginning to suspect that his character will one day become the protagonist of her own story. So he carefully chooses the words she uses in each letter, giving them the same meticulous concentration he gives his handwriting. He’s attentive to the adverbs, the ellipses, the exclamation points. He says to José: Let me take care of this, you’re an only child and don’t understand the language of women; it’s a good thing I have three sisters and have learned to listen to them. Women sigh a lot, and whenever they sigh they use ellipses. They exaggerate a lot, and when they exaggerate they use exclamation points. They feel a lot, and that’s why their feelings all come with adverbs. José laughs, but he lets Carlos create, cross out, make over his too-manly sentences. Sometimes he teases him, of course. He calls him Carlota, tells him he’s looking particularly comely that night. Go to hell, mutters Carlota — mutters Carlos — without lifting his eyes from the paper.
But José doesn’t go anywhere, of course. Neither of them moves. First they have to work out the answers to a great number of questions. Might Georgina be an orphan? Does she have a splash of indigenous blood or the alabaster complexion of the criolla ladies? How old is she, exactly, and what does she want from Juan Ramón? They don’t know, just as they still don’t know what they’re doing, or why it is so important that Juan Ramón keep writing back. Why don’t they just forget the whole thing and return to their obligations: studying for failed law courses and looking for flesh-and-blood women to take to the spring dance?