Hearing José’s insistence, Carlos smiles with a new expression. He has practiced it in front of the mirror many times, and at last he has the chance to use it: a look of superiority, of disdain. Of course you can do that if you like, he answers. Save her on the very last page, like in those flea-market novels that always end with an unexpected pardon from the Crown. Or the discovery of a hidden treasure. Or a mounted charge against the enemy’s rear guard, led by a general who’s never even been mentioned before. That’s called deus ex machina, is it not? Well, there you go, then: perform a deus ex machina if that’s what you want, and the hell with your novel — and the poem too. Have you forgotten about the poem? What will the Maestro write if Georgina survives? A few trifling verses that no one will even notice, guaranteed — an inconsequential lament for yet another maiden who became a nun or was forced to marry. Worse stilclass="underline" a poem about two scoundrels pretending to be a woman. And why should José be satisfied with that when he could have a poem that aches with real grief, a true and inconsolable wail; an elegy for a beloved who has died, snuffed out on the very eve of this long-anticipated encounter, maybe for no other reason than that such a beautiful flower simply could not last. But if he’s not convinced, he can go for it. If he’d rather have a tacky junk-shop novel, the kind that’s sold at a nickel a pound, then he knows what he has to write. Or he could just sit back and let Juan Ramón come to him; he and Georgina can get married and have paper children, for all Carlos cares.
Here Carlos pauses; he lights a cigarette. His hands are shaking, but this time it’s not out of unease or trepidation. He feels a wild exultation, a furious euphoria that has driven him to his feet and inspired him to spit out those last words. It is a new emotion, or at least it seems new at first, but slowly he realizes that it also leaves a familiar aftertaste. He experienced something similar once before — he’s just remembered. It was eight years ago, in the Polish prostitute’s bed. Because if he’s honest with himself, he has to admit that back then he felt more than just guilt and sadness, even if it is those emotions that have prevailed in his memory for all these years. When he awoke and saw the bloodstained sheets, he also felt, he remembers now, a more primitive pleasure that he didn’t understand at the time. A sort of arousal tinged with the same frenzy his father used to exhibit when he beat their indigenous workers, and perhaps too with the pleasure that he himself had secretly enjoyed as he moved repeatedly over the young girl’s body. Her cries like a sweet anesthetic in his ear, like a thermometer measuring his valor, his strength. The knowledge that, in spite of everything, he too could inflict pain. That he could dominate and destroy another human being and then simply leave, nonchalant. And now the same exhilaration washes over him, a furious elation that would destroy everything, as if the blood on that sheet belonged not to the Polish prostitute but to tubercular Georgina — the red sputum that she will keep coughing up till she breathes her last, just because he wishes it to be so.
José vacillates. He doesn’t speak immediately. In the glow from the stove, his face is full of oscillations, of flickering dark shadows and red light. But Carlos doesn’t need to hear what he’s about to say. He knows that his hesitation is only a mirage — that in fact the decision has already been made, just as Román always knew that his friend Carlos would end up accommodating all his desires. It cannot be otherwise. And so he takes another drag on his cigarette, and as he does, he seems to anticipate everything that will follow: His father bribing the consul, or even the Peruvian ambassador to Madrid (Tell me, you leeches, how much this poet’s heart is going to cost me); if necessary, forging a death certificate for Georgina, just as he previously invented the records of all those illustrious ancestors. Georgina’s death contained in the space of a telegram, because her final words will journey not in the hold of a ship but in a diplomatic cable. Thirteen words, to be exact, the maximum allowed in urgent messages, and he and José scrawling on sheets of paper, crumpling them up until they find the right ones. Thirteen words, perhaps something like these: Please inform poet Juan Ramón Jiménez that Señorita Georgina Hübner of Lima is dead—“That’s fourteen,” the telegraph operator will point out, and Carlos, after thinking a moment: “Then cross out the poet bit.” And the telegram, without the word poet, traveling across the ocean as Georgina dies in a tuberculosis hospital — or, better still, Georgina dying and in her delirium dreaming of a telegram that travels across the ocean; the nuns coming and going with their white wimples and surgical trays and cold compresses; electric pulses rattling down thousands of miles of undersea cable, invisible as a dream; Georgina awake, in the throes of death, and behind her eyes a telegram soaring over ocean ridges and shipwrecks, seaweed forests and mud flats, shelves and trenches briefly illuminated by a feverish lucidity; her nightmare spinning the telegraph bobbin, the inked roller, the strip of paper that is filling up with words, with silences, with dots and dashes so much like her broken breathing. The nun’s hand reaching out to close her eyelids, and the strip of paper in the hands of the telegraph operator, in the hands of the messenger boy, in the hands of the guard, of the servant, of Juan Ramón at last; once more his fingers unrolling the telegram, his hands steady at first, though soon they begin to tremble.
~ ~ ~
◊
Somebody is pounding on the door. It is six in the morning, and the noise is so loud, it sounds like whoever it is is trying to tear the house down. The gendarmes again, thinks Madame Lenotre as she hurries downstairs, attempting to fasten her shawl. It’s been four years since the incident, but impossible to forget — a squad of armed men rapping sharply on the door to arrest one of her customers, a tiny man, almost a dwarf. They took him into custody right then and there, his cock still erect and a look on his face like he’d never broken a dish in his life. Seeing him so defenseless, so small, so childlike in the hands of all those men, some of the girls wept. Finally someone explained that he’d escaped from the penitentiary, and that on previous nights he’d attacked four women at other brothels, slitting their throats and hacking them to pieces. The girl who’d been with him was dumbstruck when she found out, and the other girls peppered her with questions about him. They wanted to know what he was like, how to distinguish a normal customer from a deviant, a madman. Her eyes still wide and her tongue stiff and clumsy, she answered that he was just a man. No gentler or rougher, no chattier or quieter than any of the other customers she saw, some two dozen a week.
But tonight there are no fugitive prisoners in the house; there aren’t even any customers. The last one left at least a couple of hours ago, and Lenotre told the girls they could go to bed, that nobody else was likely to come. So there are no men, and no girls awake to see them, and when she opens the street door it turns out there aren’t any gendarmes either. Just young Master Carlos, thoroughly soused, clinging to the knocker to keep from falling down. It’s hard to believe this polite, formal boy has caused such a ruckus. And yet there he is, his chin held high and his gaze defiant. There’s a new determination in his voice and expression, a profound gravity that comes not just from drunkenness but from something else, someone else. Yes. That’s exactly what Lenotre finds herself thinking for a moment: Young Master Rodríguez has become another man. And this stranger needs to see the girl — he’s yelling it at the top of his lungs. He knows that it’s six in the morning and the house is closed, but he must see her immediately; he is very sorry, it must be at once. His money is as good as anyone else’s, and as he says this he pulls wads of bills out of his pocket like fruit rinds. Empty casings that first spill into Lenotre’s bony hand and then fall across the rug.