But that is precisely the difficulty: Carlos never has company. The only woman who bends over his bed is the maidservant when she folds back the sheets, and he never even tries to grope her rear end. That’s not love, thinks Carlos, but then what is? He has repeated the word so often in his early poems, and later through the mouth — the hands — of Georgina, and yet he truly understands so little about it. Lay off the Georginas, José repeats. That guff about young ladies sighing languidly in their gardens and giving their first innocent kisses is all very well — useful for inventing muses and writing marvelous letters like these — but you and I don’t live inside a novel. You should come with us to the brothels and try to have a little fun for once. I promise you the women there don’t lower their eyes melancholically when you kiss them; sometimes you don’t even have to kiss them to get things started, if you catch my meaning.
Carlos doesn’t. How could he, when his dreams never venture beyond the very real boundary of his bedroom’s four walls?
But things are different now. Or at least Carlos needs them to be. So he’s going to go to that meeting and do what he has to do to get to know Elizabeth a little better. Why not? Does he have some more enticing prospect? Is he engaged to someone else? No; he’s a bachelor, he’s twenty years old, and he never visits the brothels. He never touches the pale flesh of the dancers at the vaudeville theater, even though they ask him to. So why shouldn’t he talk with whomever he wishes? All he has to do is persuade José to go with him, but José isn’t the least bit interested in political meetings or invitations. He’s got a prior engagement this afternoon, and anyway, what does Carlos have to lose in making a private visit to the Almada residence, of all places — they invited you, so you go, damn it, I’m not some governess who has to accompany you and hold your hand through all your maidenly obligations. But then Carlos starts talking about the Almadas’ daughters, and at that José changes his tune. He guffaws at the jokes about Madeleine and discreetly arches his eyebrows at Carlos’s description of Elizabeth’s beauty, and after a while he places a hand on his shoulder and says, You know what, Carlota, the club and Ventura and the whorehouses of San Ginés can go to the devil for all I care — this afternoon the two of us are going to accept the young ladies’ kind invitation.
~ ~ ~
◊
The Almadas’ mansion is too vast to disguise its decline. Everywhere they look, there are empty corners that might once have contained Louis XV armchairs, a Swiss grandfather clock, silver-framed mirrors, Persian rugs, a Pancho Fierro watercolor — but now only their absence remains, geometric shadows marking the walls and floors. It is impossible to walk through its deserted rooms without thinking about the junk dealers and ragmen who must have haggled over prices for endless hours; the master of the house loosening his bow tie and repeatedly exclaiming “Oh!” at being forced to discuss money; the hawkers, each with a pencil behind his ear, taking measurements to demonstrate that in fact the piano won’t fit, they’ll have to dismantle the balustrade. But the Almadas are so hospitable and ceremonious that there’s hardly time to look around. Perhaps they are hoping that their courtesy, the endlessly proffered cups of tea or chocolate, will fill in the gaps left behind by poverty. And their reverence becomes all the more wholehearted when they discover that Carlos’s silent companion is none other than José Gálvez — a Gálvez! — the last name like a magnet that draws everyone’s attention. Only Elizabeth seems immune to that attraction—A pleasure to meet you, the hand coolly extended, and then the curtsy. Her welcome to Carlos, though, is something else entirely: again that glow in her eyes that seems to prolong the look between them that began at his house. Carlos is unable to keep the hand with which he grasps hers from shaking a little.
Ten or twelve guests are assembled in the parlor. Almost all of them are relatives; indeed, most of them might as well be the same person, bowing or extending the back of the hand again and again. The only one who stands out is a nun, somebody’s friend, sheathed in her wimple and holding a little basket to collect pledges for building an orphanage. Everyone peppers José with questions — Did he have the good fortune to meet his uncle José Miguel, the hero of the War of the Pacific, when he was still alive? Is it true what they say, that José writes poetry? — and there is also the occasional distracted, obligatory inquiry to Carlos. At the other end of the room, the immense Madeleine offers him a half smile that requires no translation. And it is even easier to interpret Señora Almada’s efforts to position Elizabeth next to Carlos, not to mention the remarkable coincidence that it is Elizabeth herself who happens to offer him pastries and hot chocolate, her gaze lowered and her cheeks faintly blushing.
Then the guests and their hosts sit down around the table. The famous political meeting has begun, though Carlos does not realize it for a few minutes. The discourse is simplified to suit the most naive, the gathered company speaking abstractly of children going hungry and women dying in childbirth in the hospices. Elizabeth ventures a remark from time to time. She chooses her words carefully, glancing furtively at her father and Carlos, seeking approval. Hers are cozy notions to which no one in attendance could object: hunger should be combated with food, poverty with alms, and the deaths of childbearing mothers with additional orphanages. Well-intentioned words, to which the others listen with their eyes fastened on the dessert tray and their lips smeared with chocolate. Though one might think those at the table evinced a certain sympathy for the proletariat, that would not be entirely accurate. The guests’ compassion is inspired not by the life of the dockworker or the butcher they encounter on the street but by an ideal worker they’ve never met because he does not, in fact, exist.
“A real snoozer of a meeting you’ve dragged me to, Carlota,” José mutters to him in an aside. “We sound like a Christian charity club. Lucky for us, at least the view is nice,” he adds, nodding toward Elizabeth.
“Don’t point.”
“Well, what do you say? Protagonist or secondary character?”
“Lower your voice.”
“I say she’s a secondary character. Do you like her? I think she was flirting with you. We’re not going to fight over a secondary character, are we?”
“Would you just shut up?”
After a while, Señor Almada breaks in to offer Carlos the floor. This man, he says, witnessed firsthand the events at the El Callao docks. And so they clamor for him to stand up and tell them all about it.
Carlos gets slowly to his feet. He lifts the napkin he has folded over his knees and uses it to wipe the sweat from his hands. He doesn’t know what to say. Now that everyone’s listening to him, now that his disquisition on the dockworkers’ poverty is awaited with curiosity and sympathy, he no longer has any interest in giving it. He studies Elizabeth’s reaction out of the corner of his eye; he feels the searing weight of her gaze right on his lacerated cheek. For the first time he realizes that she never looks at his eyes or mouth. It is that stitched-up flesh that she is always observing, seeming to study it with interest and desire and even a bit of pride, just as a girl might examine the medals her beloved earned in battle.