And sometimes, why not admit it to you, dear Georgina — let’s agree that you have allowed me that license: to call you dear, to call you friend — I imagine you are walking with me. It would be such a lovely comfort for me, a light with which to clear away such gloomy clouds. Because as I walk out there, I go within myself to craft the reply I will give you on my return. You could say that some of my letters are worked out step by step, that I write them with my feet, and sometimes without my cane or hat — if I told you how often I leave them somewhere, you wouldn’t believe me. I even go walking within my own room, pacing back and forth like a captive animal that is nevertheless gentle and sad; I measure out the dimensions of my cage as I await a letter, a familiar hand, the stamps and seals of a certain far-off country. A square cell six paces on each side, bed and washbasin in the center; a total of twenty-four, and then starting over again. If I had taken all those paces in your direction — and if I could walk on the ocean, which is no small thing to imagine — where do you think I would have gotten to by now? My calculations, made with the assistance of an atlas with which I amuse myself in bed, have allowed me to estimate that I’d find myself more or less in the Sargasso Sea. That briny deep where the sea suddenly becomes unmoving land, a shipyard in which one neither comes nor goes. So lieth my soul! To tell the truth, that sea does not appear in my atlas, and I cannot say for sure whether it might be a fable or a myth, but it exists at least in our understanding, which is almost as if it existed in real life.
I would like to reach you, to reach Peru, which also exists but could just as easily not exist — or, rather, I would like for it to be you on my arm as we walked through the tranquil twilit avenues of Madrid. Perhaps you would like to walk with me, and perhaps you would also like for us to stop awhile as we treat ourselves to a wafer or two. Because I would most certainly give you one, Georgina, I would give you a hundred; something tells me that luck would smile on us for one, ten, fifty spins of that wheel. We could gorge ourselves, and laugh, and the wafer seller would laugh along with us. And if I had a photograph of you, Georgina, even if it were only one, I would know what face to affix to those walks that you and I take every morning, every night for you there in Lima. Will you share with me a portrait of the angels’ smile? Will I come to know the countenance that is the inverse of my own self, that abides in the antipodes of my soul? Will you tell me, at the very least, whether you are partial to those sweet treats I offer you on our walks…?
~ ~ ~
◊
“I find your cousin utterly changed of late. I think I liked her better before.”
“I think I did too,” Carlos says at last, without looking at him.
The Professor drops the latest letter onto the pile.
“Well! Fortunately, the Spanish poet doesn’t share our view.”
“What do you mean?”
He points at the stack of envelopes.
“Just read the last few letters, my friend. I’d say he’s starting to fall in love. I’m telling you, it’s going to take a letter or two at most. Good luck for your cousin and for you, and bad luck for me! After the wedding you’re not going to need me, of course. It’s a shame the custom is to write letters to woo women and not to keep them.”
Carlos’s face darkens.
“You think so?”
“That you don’t use letters to keep a woman?”
“No, that there’s going to be a wedding.”
“My dear fellow, I’d say so. When a man and a woman do what these two are doing… the business generally ends in a wedding. Unless your cousin surprises us again and she’s the one who starts resisting the betrothal.”
“But they don’t even know each other!” replies Carlos, practically shouting.
The Professor tosses back his glass of pisco and wipes the moisture from his lips with his shirt cuff.
“Well, so what? That doesn’t seem to have gotten in the way before now. Also, from what I can tell, the Spanish poet is stirred up enough to come track her down. You don’t agree? Look at that photograph. And that portrait of Juan Ramón. He’s got the cadaverous aspect of the romantic sort of poet who blows his brains out at his lover’s grave. Don’t deny it. And didn’t you say he’d been in three sanatoriums because of failed love affairs?”
“It was only two.”
“Same difference! Listen to me, I’ve got twenty-three years of experience with this sort of thing. It’s all in here, believe me. Suggests a passionate sort with little regard for consequences. And your cousin must be delighted, so there’s no reason to fret, am I right?”
Carlos doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look up. He stares at his hands as if he didn’t recognize them.
“Come now, why so glum? You don’t seem too pleased for your cousin. And didn’t we agree that the most important rule was never to swim against love’s tide? Let’s drink to them, then, and not discuss it any further. As you see, I’m even violating my policy of never combining drink and work, and I’m only doing it for them — that is, for you.”
He snaps his fingers.
“Jorge! Bring two more glasses for my friend and me. We’ve got a lot to celebrate.”
“What’s the happy news?” asks the waiter from the kitchen.
“Some friends of ours are getting married.”
“That calls for some whiskey, at least! No, no, I insist — it’s on the house.”
He takes the bottle and fills two glasses to the brim.
“To the happy couple!” exclaims the Professor.
Carlos hesitates a few moments longer. He stares at Cristóbal’s raised glass. Finally he raises his own.
“To the happy couple,” he replies.
~ ~ ~
◊
He is dreaming. The dream will soon turn into a nightmare, but he doesn’t know that yet. At the moment he’s trying to figure out what he and Román are doing in the middle of the jungle. He wants to ask him where he’s been all this time, but really there’s no need, because they’re ten years old again, and they have mustaches and their Roman law texts under their arms. And Román’s face still bears the same sullen expression, the same haughty aloofness.
They push through the foliage for hours, creating openings in the bush that seem to lead nowhere, until at last they come across his father. He’s sitting in the armchair in his study. He has something in his hand. Or rather he doesn’t have anything, not even hands; at first they see only his face, an enormous face twisted into a scowl. They have broken a window with a rubber ball, it’s Román’s fault, or maybe Carlos’s — it doesn’t matter, the window is broken and the repair has cost two soles. He tells them, “You’ve cost me two soles, you troublemakers.” And another fourteen soles when, intentionally or unintentionally — it was never entirely clear — they bathed and dried the household mastiffs on the Persian rug in the parlor. And then there was the music box they broke while playing with it and later buried in the courtyard — it cost thirty dollars because of the gems and mother-of-pearl inlay, though it cost the servant accused of stealing it even more dearly. And now Don Augusto is rebuking them for all of that. He is holding something in his hand again. But they don’t look at it yet; they look at his mouth opening and closing, detailing their disobediences. “Two soles for the window,” he says. “Fourteen for the soiled rug,” he says. “Thirty dollars for the music box,” he says. “Four hundred dollars for the virtue of that foreign whore.” And then, raising the pulsing bundle he has in his hand, blood dripping between his fingers, he adds, “And now tell me, you leeches, tell me how much this poet’s heart is going to cost me.”