If the ending of their novel is not a tragedy, then what is it?
The ending is a poem. But it is also a conversation, a reencounter in a café on Calle Belaochaga. A café that did not exist fifteen years earlier. Because Lima has changed a great deal, and José and Carlos have changed along with it. They are fatter, older, better dressed. Time has made them the same in a way, and now it is difficult to tell them apart. Indeed, it is impossible. They are sitting together in a private room in the café, shielded behind identical smiles, and it is impossible to tell which of them is asking the other about his business affairs, which one is answering that he’s muddling along as usual, just muddling along.
Or maybe it is possible to tell them apart, and the problem is that the distinction no longer matters. That José and Carlos not only look alike but in fact have become the same person.
But they do not speak or smile with ease. They address each other with the somewhat brusque air of people who do not see each other often. As if this conversation were not the product of an encounter dictated by friendship or chance but a meeting carefully arranged after a lengthy silence. That might be precisely what is happening: that they haven’t spoken in fifteen years or seen each other in nearly nine. And now they have to sum up those years in a few minutes, in a few lines. The answers are as predictable as the questions. They are both married. They both have children. The way they refer to them, the way they describe them in a few sentences, one might think they were talking about the same people. That they have married the same wife and raised the same children. This is not the case, of course; each of them has his own family, his own longings, his own secrets and sorrows, but neither is going to say that. After all, people are members of the bourgeoisie not so much because of what they say aloud but because of what they keep quiet. The vast swath of themselves that they have learned to mask behind a discreet, decorous silence.
One might say, in fact, that up until now they haven’t talked about anything. That everything worth saying, everything they want to hear from each other, has been hidden beneath a veil. And so it is for the next few minutes, as they idly inquire about the people they knew fifteen years ago. Like two old friends trying to catch up on each other’s lives. Or like a couple of mediocre writers who can’t figure out any better way to mention their novel’s secondary characters one last time. What ever happened to Sandoval? asks one of them, and the other replies that for a few years he was starting up and shutting down newspapers, calling for and calling off strikes, and is now running a doomed campaign for the legislature. But that in the end that nonsense about the eight-hour workday actually came through and has just been passed by the parliament — who would have thought it. And their professors? Most of them retired or dead. And Professor Cristóbal? Who knows. They know only that he no longer comes to the plaza to write — there are fewer and fewer people who need letters written for them, and even fewer who fall in love. Because that’s what getting older means: meeting fewer and fewer people who are in love.
And what about the other destitute poets? They’ve had some news of all them, all of it good. What’s more, they no longer have to pretend to be poor — they only have to pretend to be happy. Their fathers? Here the balance is unequaclass="underline" one is dead, the other still alive. They don’t bother asking after each other’s mothers, who never figured prominently in the novel to begin with. And finally they talk a long while about their business affairs, the companies they head, as if, in a way, the two of them were also characters. But now they’re no longer secondary. Now the plush offices, the stocks and bank drafts, the deals struck at galas and cabarets, the trips to the estate, seem to fill everything, to take center stage.
Then, all at once, the conversation collapses. Their relationship is paralyzed, nearly dead, sustainable only through endless questions and answers, sips from their coffee cups and drags on their cigarettes, cardboard smiles that make their faces ache. The coffee runs out. They must decide whether to order something else or take advantage of the empty cups to make their excuses and go their separate ways. One of them even starts to make that gesture, to say goodbye, but the other remains seated. He must do one more thing: pull out a book of poetry. Their novel cannot end until he does that: opens the book of poems and places it on the table.
“A gift,” he says, with the hint of a smile.
And that is enough. The title of the book, in a mute shout, says the rest.
Labyrinth.
Juan Ramón Jiménez.
He picks up the book cautiously, without asking any questions. And as he flips through it, the other offers irrelevant explanations. That it was published in Spain in 1913. That the Great War had prevented any copies from reaching Peru until now. That it was difficult, incredibly difficult, to find.
All of a sudden, the rapid turning of pages ceases.
It is called “Letter to Georgina Hübner in the Sky over Lima.” It is a long poem that takes up three pages, but he manages to read only the title. The rest he takes in all at once, in an instant, as effortlessly as one might contemplate a landscape. First the title and then the ending too, because the last line has a question mark that automatically draws his attention, a rhetorical question — rhetorical? — that he reads once, twice, three times.
Then he looks down at the blank space that comes after the last line. It is an empty void and yet he stares at it as if it contained something more important than the poem itself, a silence that is somehow the answer to the question he cannot get out of his head. Then he slowly pushes the book away.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” the other asks. He gives a forced smile, out of a mutual understanding that no longer exists.
No, he’s not going to read it. He understands a number of things all at the same time, and that is one of them. He will not read it, not ever. He also knows or thinks he knows that they must be very beautiful verses, perhaps the best that Juan Ramón has ever written. Worse still, he knows that the poem that does not belong to them, the poem he’s not going to read, is better than they themselves will ever be. That it is worth more than their wives and children, more than their factories, than the contract to bring Chilean nitrate to market, than their summer residences, their mistresses, their pasts and futures. He understands all that in an instant, just by looking at the last stanza.
He doesn’t know what to say. And yet something must be said — anything at all — even if it’s inappropriate, even if it will never be as beautiful as what Juan Ramón has written in his poem. For example, he could tell his friend — friend? — that over time he has almost entirely forgotten the women they seduced back then, the games they used to play to amuse themselves, the poems they wrote or read together, the voice of his dead father, but that nevertheless he remembers Georgina’s face in the minutest detail. But he cannot tell him that, because it would be, in some way, like starting the novel over again, and all he wants is to finish it once and for all. Close the book. Finally reach the last page, and then keep on living.
And for that they need only to write the ending, an answer to the question that the Maestro poses in his poem. And he decides to do that right there, in that blank space, just below the final line: Carlos Rodríguez. A slow, laborious signature that tears at the paper, as if instead of scrawling his name he were carving an epitaph. And in spite of everything, José doesn’t understand at first, and Carlos has to explain it to him again, once, twice, attempting to pass him the pen, to hand back the book: It’s our life, he says, this is the best thing we’ve ever done, the best thing we’ll ever do, so now we’re going to sign it. It seems like a joke, and when he hears it, José laughs. But it’s not a joke, it’s the ending to their novel — quite a serious matter — and when he finally understands, his expression grows sober, concentrated. He, too, takes a long time to sign his name. He, too, is careful to make it a good signature, the one he uses for checks and formal documents.