Carlos wonders what has become of the novel that was once vividly rendered with each letter, as if it were being projected in the milky half-light of a moving-picture theater. A girl swinging her parasol from one shoulder to the other; a gloomy arbor in which someone is sighing or sobbing; the grille of a confessional, the grate on a window, and the wrought-iron fence around a garden with gravel paths and governesses; another cage, and in it a parakeet morosely being fed, pinch by pinch, its ration of birdseed; a missal clutched devoutly to a chest, the better to hide a bundle of letters inside it. He no longer sees any of those images that used to accompany the words. Not a trace of the real Georgina, if she ever even existed: only the faces of all the grotesque impostor georginas all around him. He sees the Panteoncito waif in the expensive dresses he gave her, costumes that were never quite able to wipe the whore off her. He sees the Polish prostitute, not a girl anymore, who no longer has her summer dress or her pink bows or her canopy bed, who doesn’t even have teeth now; all she has is the corner of a trash heap where she sells herself for a copper or a few swigs of wine, a toothless mouth that murmurs Cheistormoro to her customers, tall and short, young and old, fat and skinny—Cheistormoro, which might mean “hurry up and come” or “you’re hurting me” or maybe “I wish I were dead.” And he also sees himself lying languidly in bed, patiently kissing, with complete, pathetic earnestness, the back of his own hand. His eyes closed. And then he no longer feels a desire to reproach José or sadness for Juan Ramón or nostalgia for Georgina; instead, he feels only cavernous shame, and something like disgust. He recalls a dream he’s had many times and always forgets upon waking, a fantasy in which he sees a beautiful woman reclining on her divan, majestic as a Fortuny odalisque or a Doré engraving. Her body voluptuous, white, like something straight out of a painting, seems to become more and more real, drawing nearer, unbearably near, as if instead of eyes he had microscope lenses that someone was adjusting, or as if she, the beautiful woman, were growing so immense that soon she would swallow everything. A suddenly enormous chest, the areola of the breast covered with a purple rash, a repulsive acne, hairs growing thick as forests and wrinkles as deep as valleys, and under the skin a vertigo of secretions, viscosities, entrails, bacteria, sounds of digestion and excretion, menstruations, hot flashes, cells that replicate and die and replicate again. He always wakes from those nightmares feverish, soaked in his own sweat, shivering with fear from the weight of that awful, immense beauty.
He feels almost the same desperation now as he pushes aside the bundle of letters. He feels deep repugnance, something he cannot express in words (but the Professor says that if there are no words, then the inexpressible thing is nothing), and he understands at last, or at least he thinks he does. It is a longing for everything to be over, to declare that Georgina is dying.
That’s what he thinks: Georgina has to die.
Actually, he says it out loud.
“We have to kill her.”
And José turns to look at him and laughs. A long, exaggerated guffaw that breaks off as Carlos’s meaning dawns on him.
“Kill whom?”
Then José tries to object, to say anything at all, but Carlos rushes on. His voice does not sound like his voice; indeed, it no longer is his voice. It sounds a bit like José’s, but it’s not that either. It sounds like, and in fact is, the authoritarian voice of Román: a voice that demands deference and quiets José in an instant. It is rather amusing to hear Román say that an imaginary friend must be killed — but really it isn’t amusing at all. It is true.
Is it true?
Carlos seems quite sure of himself. As if Román had lent him not just his voice but also his confidence, that determination with which he used to play pranks or declare the rules of a game. As he talks, only the slightest gesture reveals the emotion he’s feeling: the way his fingers are fiddling with the edges of the bundle of letters. It is as if he could go forward and backward in time at will, returning to the novel to select just the scenes and examples to buttress his words. He says: Weren’t you the one who insisted that all of this was just literature? The one who quoted Aristotle and talked about verisimilitude? The one who kept saying our novel’s ending needed a bit of drama, because the best love stories always end in tragedy? That Petrarch had to have a woman die on him, and Dante a girl, and Catullus a young man, so that a great poem could be written. Isn’t that what you said, José? Well, there’s your tragedy — Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, María clenched with epilepsy, Fortunata bleeding to death, Emma Bovary swallowing arsenic. Because Georgina has consumption, don’t you see? She has two cavities in her lungs as large as fists. How else can you explain her pallor, her seclusion, and the way the housemaid would scold her when she spent evenings in the garden watching the moths burning up in the lamp — don’t you remember, José? And the cough racking the chest and the urgent admission to the Santa Águeda sanatorium — a surprising choice of disease, really. “I never said it was Santa Águeda!” José sputters. That hardly matters now, Carlos continues, the main thing is there’s only one sanatorium in La Punta, and that sanatorium is for consumptives — Juan Ramón can confirm it if he wishes. You wanted me to help you, and this is all the help I can offer: I’m just a reader of your novel, and as such I know that this story has to end with Georgina dead and Juan Ramón in mourning.
Can it really be true?
José sighs. All right, he says. Carlos may very well be correct in what he’s said, at least about part of it; José is even willing to accept that he might be correct about everything. Lately the novel has been hurtling toward a tragic end, and that could be his fault. But surely there is still something they can do; even if we aren’t the authors, let’s get on with it, damn it, who else can write an alternative ending? One where Georgina does not die but they still find a way to keep Juan Ramón from boarding that ship, to make him write a poem instead.