Ventura and the others laugh. They weren’t there, they didn’t see the fat, homely sister with her enormous mole, but even so they’re sure she really is fat and homely, and so they laugh.
When he’s alone, Carlos rereads the drafts of the letters. And also Juan Ramón’s replies, which are growing ever longer and more affectionate and which have gradually begun to fill with intimate confidences, with little secrets. It seems the Maestro isn’t bothered by the new Georgina. Worse still, anyone would say he prefers her, a grotesque scarecrow whose words reek of absinthe and whiskey. And of opium, especially opium, because by now most of the chapters are worked out in the rear of a building on Calle del Marqués that serves as a corset shop by day and a clandestine smoking den by night. It was Ventura who first told them that no Montmartre bohemian ever wrote a line without first inhaling the dense smoke of the pipes and hookahs, and after that nobody could get the idea out of José’s head.
They visit the establishment two or three times a week. It’s a small, poorly ventilated place run by Chinese immigrants. The space is divided by partitions and folding screens that reveal mysterious scenes: silhouettes that laugh, that dance, that clasp one another in prolonged embraces, that slumber and go quiet for many hours at a time. Even the smoke, so dark and heavy, seems to have a silhouette. Each nook is furnished with a smoking pipe and a few reed mats and cushions where they recline to smoke until their eyes start to wander and their smiles go dull. Sometimes they talk about the letters, or women, or they recite their own poems, which sound like extended yawns. Or they don’t talk about anything; they just fall asleep, and the Chinese owners go silently from one alcove to another, covering their bodies with blankets or sheepskins, refilling the opium in the pipes, carrying bowls of some dubious potion that the poets languidly drink.
Carlos joins them against his will. Such a place, he feels, can produce only a character in tune with the setting. That is, a dull, indolent Georgina who laughs at the slightest provocation, who has a glassy look to her eyes and occasionally says inappropriate things. Foolish things that, like the smoke, take a long time to dissipate.
But it’s not just about Georgina. Carlos is also alarmed by the relaxation the drug produces in his own body. With each puff he feels as if the mask screwed to his face, the one that is always able to simulate the appropriate expression, were gradually loosening and melting. And who knows what he might be hiding under there — he, of course, has long since forgotten. And so he is afraid. Sometimes, in the depths of his prostration, it seems to him that a woman comes and sits beside him, whispers something in his ear. It is, perhaps, Georgina, but a real Georgina. She emerges from the smoke with all the purity of the very first missives, free of smudges, of incoherencies, of emendations. She kneels at the foot of the mat and touches his head for a moment. It seems to him that she smiles. And then they have long conversations that leave no words or memories, only the feverish taste of smoke, inundating his lungs like an icy, protracted vertigo, a spiral that drags and blurs the outlines of things and behind which only Georgina remains constant. Her gaze, her smile. Her kiss; Georgina’s kiss. The chill of her lips on his, her porcelain touch.
“Dlink,” she says. “Dlink is good,” she adds, inexplicably. And he drinks, drinks infinitely from that kiss, until he empties the bowl that someone is holding to his lips.
~ ~ ~
◊
Moguer, May 8, 1905
My dear friend:
Will you allow me to call you “dear,” to call you “friend”? It has been four weeks since I’ve had news of you. Your charming letters must be waiting for me in the mailbox of my residence in Madrid; and, knowing that, it is all the more puzzling that I am still here, a full month spent in my boyhood home in Moguer, surrounded by relatives and relics of another era. Of excruciatingly sad lights and aromas with which I cannot even make poetry, with which I can no longer do anything.
You spoke in your last letter of your own sorrows that also bear your loved ones’ visages and are set in your own home. A home that I imagine resembles the sort you see in engravings, with whitewashed walls and palm trees, with straight windowsills and severe façades and a well with a pulley. All stone and rigor, just like your upbringing with your father, who no doubt loves you but who, perhaps, through loving you too much, poor thing, makes you miserable. You spoke of the bowels of that piano where you hide your secrets, these humble letters of mine among them. Of your tiny, fragile chest, which seems to grow even smaller when your father approaches. How could I not understand you, I who between these walls feel the presence of my own father’s ghost? His dead eyes that now see everything, against which keys and drawers are now useless. His threadbare words reviving old accusations: abandoning my law studies, and the mad notion of becoming a painter, and then the even madder notion of becoming a poet — that’s what my father would say. That’s what he says now in a voice growing louder and more certain, in my ears, all the time. Here, in what was his house, he sounds ever more powerful.
And then there are the voices of the others, of the living, of us, the family members who stayed here and have nothing to talk about but money and rents. As if my father were only that: the debts he left, which we divide up the way one would the weight of a burdensome, jet-black coffin. The words debase, they soil things; one’s mouth is tarnished by talking about pesetas, partitions, inheritances. We are gradually turning into nickel and metal, growing stiff and cold as the music of a coin. I fear that the mere mention of it has also tarnished this letter.
You ask me to tell you what I have been doing and writing. And yet I do and write so little! You, by contrast, do so much, you describe so many trips and meetings with girlfriends and walks along that street they call Jirón de la Unión that I must confess to feeling a little embarrassed at the indolence with which I watch the hours pass — watch them die, because everything dies. Nothing out of the ordinary to recount, except that I am sometimes happy and sometimes miserable. Everything that happens in reality takes place inside my head, or, if you prefer, within the confines of my own soul. (By the way, you haven’t said what you think of that little poem I sent you about the soul of things.) What do I do? you ask. I am afraid you will be disappointed: I do little more than walk. Now around Moguer and its environs, and previously through the cold streets of Madrid. I walk as if in a trance, and I tend to forget my hat and my cane wherever I go. I wander through the Retiro, an enormous park. You would adore it, Georgina. A little green slice of Madrid into which all of Moguer, with its diminutive houses and its river and its sad yellow fields, could easily fit. There is also a pond full of ducks and boats, and beside it a wafer seller whom I stop to observe a long while. An old man with wafers and other sweets, spinning a wheel of fortune. Sometimes the customer wins and sometimes he loses — does Lima have that sort of confection, are you familiar with such a thing? — but the peddler always smiles. Nothing seems to matter to him beyond the act of watching the wheel spin, of doling out his delights. And I would like to be a bit like him: to have the spirit of a dog or a child. Of a statue that welcomes sun and rain alike with the same smile, that does not despair or understand or suffer, that only goes to its usual corner to keep being what it is, what it can never cease to be.