After a few minutes, Carlos sits down at last. It seems like he’s going to say something, but then he doesn’t. José waits patiently — at least he tries to wait, tries to be patient. He doesn’t manage it. He has decided to count to fifty before he speaks, to give Carlos fifty opportunities to speak first, but by the time he makes it to twenty, the question is already coming out of his mouth.
“Are you going to help me?”
Carlos only glances at him. He shrugs.
“You should ask Professor Cristóbal for advice. I don’t have anything to do with that anymore.”
There is no bitterness in his voice, only the neutral tone of someone expressing an incontrovertible truth. José fervently objects. Of course not, what is he talking about, hasn’t he heard a single word he’s said? He tries to apologize, to tell him they wouldn’t have made it this far without him, that there’s no getting out of this predicament without him, that the novel is his too and always has been, how could he doubt it.
“Anyway, I already talked to the Professor. Just this morning. I went to see him in the plaza and told him everything. That Georgina wasn’t anyone’s cousin, that it had all started as a joke and then got out of hand, that there was no malice in it. Brought him up to speed, basically. You know what he told me? He said he knew it from the start. The rascal! I don’t buy it, though — I know we fooled him, just like we fooled everybody else, even if he’s pretending to be clairvoyant now. And then there’s the question of those ethics he’s always going on about. Why would he have broken those famous rules of his to cultivate a romance if he knew it was a farce? I asked him that, naturally.”
Carlos doesn’t move, but his eyes are suddenly alert.
“And what did he say?”
“The first thing that came into his head. That I must remember that the first rule, the most important one, the one that trumps all others, is never to swim against love’s tide. But whose love? I asked him. He laughed, of course — what could he say? I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it…”
As for advice, the Professor hadn’t said much. He’d only laughed again and noted that Georgina sounded ill, quite gravely ill, those coughs and chills in her chest are a bad sign this time of year, she might very well be dying on them. Wouldn’t that be liberating? he’d added with a wink. And so José needs Carlos now — can you believe it, even that charlatan friend of yours has given up, has no idea how to get out of this fix, but I know you’re different, I know you’ll find a way. And as he says it he holds out the bundle of letters with a beseeching expression. Everything’s here, he adds, the latest chapters of our novel.
Our novel—that’s what he says.
Carlos hesitates a moment before finally accepting the packet of letters. He weighs it warily in his hand, finding it surprisingly light for its size. It is a mechanical gesture with no anxiety in it but no joy or curiosity or sadness either. He can’t find the right words to answer José, which, to paraphrase the Professor, means he doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know how he should feel. He has waited so often for this moment — José’s apology, Georgina’s return — and now that he’s holding that bit of fulfilled desire in his hands, he doesn’t know what to do with it. José humiliated; José pleading with him for help, to help him save their novel; José needing him for the first time in his life — but for some reason that humiliation, that plea, that need, elicit no emotion in him. His true desire, what he has been searching for so long, is something else — but what? As he grasps the packet of letters, he knows only that it seems to contain something profoundly intimate yet utterly alien. That it is the most important thing he’s done in his life and yet, at the same time, it’s nonsense, a prank, a wearisome joke that’s fallen flat. For a moment he feels the urge to take those pages and throw them one by one through the stove’s little door and into the crackling flames. Goodbye to Georgina, he thinks, and the thought is both freeing and terrifying.
But he doesn’t do it. Instead he surveys the bobbing pen strokes, José’s superb forgeries. He pauses for a moment on a passage from Georgina’s last letter. I received your latest epistles while not yet fully recuperated from an illness that kept me confined to bed for weeks. Alarmed, my family took me to Barranco, a picturesque seaside resort, and then to a sanatorium in La Punta, another summering spot, this one quite lonely and sad.
“The Santa Águeda sanatorium,” Carlos says suddenly, with unaccustomed energy.
Perhaps because it’s been so long since Carlos has spoken, José is startled by his words. Carlos’s voice sounds unusually low, as if it belonged to someone else. It takes José a moment to react.
“Santa what?”
“The sanatorium that Georgina is talking about, in La Punta,” he says without looking at him, as if he were thinking aloud. “She must be referring to Santa Águeda.”
José blinks, confused.
“Well… I don’t actually know. I just said it to say something. I wasn’t even sure there was one.”
“It’s a tuberculosis sanatorium.”
“Tuberculosis,” José repeats distractedly, perhaps thinking about something else.
~ ~ ~
◊
Carlos does not read the letters in their entirety. He reads only a few scattered phrases, which, through some mysterious happenstance, seem curiously linked. The bundle of letters must contain more than two hundred pages. Let us suppose, to offer a likely figure, that it contains exactly 249. Carlos begins reading on that page—I will take the very first ship, the poet has said — and moves from there to page 248, page 247, page 246. This is a new novel, an unfamiliar one in which the answers precede their questions, in which missives are sent futilely into the past and in which a friendship’s initial tenderness gradually calcifies into ever more ceremonious formulas—Dear friend, Most distinguished Ramón Jiménez, Most esteemed sir—until its characters decide to ignore each other entirely and never speak again. He begins at the pinnacle of a passion that dwindles the way romances never do: slowly. He knows full well what he will find in those last, first pages: a false Georgina, somewhat crude, charmingly vulgar, her mouth full of inappropriate words, rough-mannered and inelegant, who will little by little regain the characteristics of her original purity. And at first he delights in her vulgarities, in that stranger’s missteps, as if he were admonishing a young child for whims that will be corrected only a few letters later. Who would say such a thing, why on earth would he write such a stupid letter, what was José thinking when he had her put down this sentence, and this one, and that one? In his imagination, he removes those words, those idioms, those jokes, as if he were scrubbing makeup from a marble statue.
And beneath all that must be Georgina. Except that suddenly it turns out that she’s not really there: behind that makeup there’s nothing. Though perhaps it is untrue to say it happens suddenly. It is a sudden discovery that nevertheless only much later becomes a certainty: a slow, cold surprise that lasts many minutes and dozens of pages, letters that pass through his hands one after another, faster and faster. First he goes back to page 206, more or less the moment at which the tragedy begins, and then to the strike, and then even farther back, almost to her birth, and yet there’s nothing. Georgina no longer seems like Georgina; she is like any other woman, a stranger, a ridiculous puppet. A Frankenstein fashioned out of organs and limbs pillaged from different graves, phrases from Madame Bovary, from Anna Karenina, from The Dangerous Liaisons, even certain expressions they’ve read in Galdós’s latest novel — but not a trace of the real Georgina. Did she ever exist at all? Around him, Carlos sees only lifeless wreckage. It reminds him of when the doctor and his father and even the servants began to scold him if he talked to Román, forcing him to say again and again that his little friend didn’t exist, that the silver pitcher had been hurled to the floor by Carlos alone, not some other unruly boy; that there was nothing in that chair, on that sofa, in that garden, except air. And after a while he had heard them say it so often that he began to see it too — the air, you know — he saw the air, and in it the whips, and the stretchers, and the rifles, and the fly-swarmed corpses, and so very many real children with yellow eyes and swollen bellies, as if they were pregnant with hunger. At this point, that’s all he sees: air — that is, words — and maybe that’s why he suddenly remembers Sandoval’s words, how one must bore down to the reality of circumstances, the materiality of things, because all ideology is only a false consciousness, not the product of the material conditions of existence. He thinks those words now and repeats them to himself, and suddenly Georgina becomes only what he is holding in his hands, a crinkled sheet of paper, a few carefully chosen words, a way of returning to certain themes and commonplaces, a coffee stain on a draft that they used as a coaster, the way the i’s and t’s rise up as if they were trying to escape the page — that is, to reach heaven.