Then they pay the bill and walk together three or four blocks to the corner where their paths diverge. Maybe they chat about something else before saying goodbye. They may try to lighten the dramatic tone of their parting, the solemnity of their names interwoven on the page of the book of poems. They will spend the rest of their lives doing that: pretending that the ending has not yet arrived, that a great many things are still to come, that what succeeds that poem and that novel still matters. But they will do all that on their own, once more on their own. Because when the last chapter is over, they will never see each other again. That, then, is their ending: a poem, two signatures, a farewell.
~ ~ ~
◊
They part on the very corner in San Lázaro where their garret once stood. Like all coincidences, this one is meaningless, but on his way home Carlos amuses himself by coming up with different explanations.
It is a new brick building with freshly painted bars on the windows and electrical wires running up the walls. He stops and looks at a particular spot on its façade. A place where, in fact, there is nothing to see, somewhere between the third and fourth floors. His memory has to painstakingly rebuild the rest: a crumbling attic, a roof with splintering rafters, a window. Two young men looking down from on high. And it seems to him that if his nearsighted eyes were twenty years old again, he would be able to see their hats and bow ties, all from another era, and, of course, their ridiculous mustaches; and that if it weren’t for the automobiles and the honking horns, he could even make out what the two men are saying to each other.
“And what about that fellow?”
“Which one?”
“The fat one… the one looking up at us. The one stopped in the middle of the street, carrying a book under his arm.”
“Oh! Well… he looks like a portly millionaire out of a Dickens novel, don’t you think?”
“To me he looks more like a bored middle-class man from one of Echegaray’s plays.”
“Or a greedy landlord out of Dostoyevsky, with the addresses of all the tenants he’s going to evict written in that little book.”
A silence.
“Not at all! Take a good look. Now that I observe him more closely, I think he’s really just a secondary character…”
And down there on the sidewalk, the millionaire, the landlord, the secondary character, looks back at them and smiles.
Letter to Georgina Hübner in the Sky over Lima by Juan Ramón Jiménez
The Peruvian consul tells me: “Georgina Hübner is dead…”
… Dead! Why? How? On what day?
What golden rays, departing from my life one eventide,
would have burnished the splendor of your hands,
so sweetly crossed upon your quiet breast
like two lavender lilies of love and sentiment?
… Now your back has felt the white casket,
your thighs are now forever shut,
and in the tender green of your new-dug grave
the sinking sun will set the hummingbirds aflame…
La Punta is much colder and lonelier now
than when you saw it, fleeing from the tomb,
those far-off afternoons when your phantom told me:
“So often have I thought of you, my dearest friend!”
And I of you, Georgina? I cannot say what you were like—
fair? demure? melancholy? I know only that my sorrow
is a woman, just like you, who is seated,
weeping, sobbing, beside my soul!
I know that my sorrow writes in that graceful hand
that soared across the sea from distant lands
to call me “friend”… or something more… perhaps… a part
of all that throbbed in your twenty-year-old heart!
You wrote: “Yesterday my cousin brought your book to me.”
Remember? Myself, gone pale: “A cousin? Who is he?”
I longed to enter your life, to offer you my hand,
noble as a flame, Georgina… In every ship
that sailed, my wild heart went out in search of you…
I thought I’d finally found you, pensive, in La Punta,
with a book in your hand, just as you’d told me,
dreaming among the flowers, casting a spell on my life!
Now the vessel I will take one evening, searching for you,
will never leave this port, nor cleave the seas,
it will travel into infinity, its prow pointing ever upward,
seeking, as an angel would, its celestial isle…
Oh, Georgina, Georgina! By heaven! My books
will wait for you above, and surely you’ll have read
a few verses aloud to God… You will tread the western skies
in which my fervent fancies are snuffed out…
and learn that all of this is meaningless—
that, save love, the rest is only words…
Love! Oh, love! Did you feel in the nights
the distant thrall of my ardent cries,
as I, in the stars, in the shadows, in the breezes,
wailing toward the south, called out to you: Georgina?
Did, perhaps, a gentle zephyr bearing
the ineffable perfume of my formless longing
pass by your ear? Did you hear something of me,
my dreams of your country estate, of kisses in the garden?
Oh, how the best of our lives is shattered!
We live… for what? To watch the days
with their funereal hue, no sky in the still waters…
to clutch our foreheads in our hands!
to weep, to long for what is ever distant,
and never to step across the threshold of dreams.
Oh, Georgina, Georgina! to think that you perished
one evening, one night… and I all unknowing!
The Peruvian consul tells me: “Georgina Hübner is dead…”
You are dead. You are, soulless, in Lima,
opening white roses beneath the earth.
And if our arms are destined never to intertwine,
then what heedless child, born of hatred and pain,