Do you not also, when you look upon the world, feel that it is made from the stuff of literature? Do you not seem to recognize in passersby the characters from certain novels, the creations of certain authors, the twilights of certain poems? Do you not feel sometimes that one might read life just as one turns the pages of a book…?
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They want to be Juan Ramón Jiménez.
In a drawer in his desk, José hoards each letter, each stamp moistened by the poet’s precious saliva. Five handwritten poems. Two signed portraits. A book inscribed in purple ink—with the most sincere affection—to young Señorita Hübner of Lima. Luckily, Carlos has not attempted to claim any of these trophies, as José must have them all for himself. He can no longer sit down to write a poem without first touching the page upon which, even if just for a moment, the fingers of Juan Ramón once rested. The pen that scrawled Violet Souls when its author was precisely the same age that José is now. So young! This is the moment, he tells himself, stroking the watermarked paper as he might caress a woman’s skin. And then he waits, sitting at his desk. He grasps his pen firmly, waiting for something to happen. But it never does.
Carlos is amused by the worshipful way that José collects every tiny scrap of Juan Ramón’s life with philatelic patience. Yet despite his amusement, of course he does not mock. That is a privilege reserved for José alone. Though Carlos is the one who writes the letters, his objective in doing so is not to obtain those sacred objects. He is unmoved by the thought of an advance copy of the Maestro’s next book, Distant Gardens, which Juan Ramón has promised to send. Carlos pretends to be Georgina for a different reason altogether, though if anyone asked him what it was, he would not know how to answer.
That store of treasures is the envy of their circle of friends. Of course, calling them friends, even calling them a circle, may be an exaggeration. They are not friends, because before they are friends, they are poets, a profession in which good intentions are as scarce as good poems. And they aren’t really a circle, as their habit of forging alliances just so they can later destroy one another, of creating magazines and literary journals driven only by the satisfaction of rejecting the poems of their rivals, has less in common with the purity of circles than it does with the tortured, many-cornered geometry of polyhedrons. But let’s call it a circle anyway, and, with a little imagination, let’s call them friends too. It’s true that the men in that circle admire Juan Ramón, and so they also admire José and Carlos, though with a cold, pitiless passion. They feign interest in the young men’s clumsy verses as a way to draw nearer to the great poet. For a time it even becomes the fashion among their group to write to other great literary figures in the guise of imaginary characters, almost always beautiful novitiates or consumptive damsels on their deathbeds. Letters to Galdós, to Darío, to plump Pardo Bazán, to Echegaray. One even writes a moving letter to Yeats in dubious English, to which, incidentally, that cad Yeats does not deign to reply — incredible how much sensitivity it took to write “The Secret Rose” and how little of it he exhibits in failing to respond to the piteous final wish of a dying girl.
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Before he was a poet, Carlos wanted to be many other things. A dinosaur-bone hunter. A sea lion toughened by intractable Cape Horn. A missionary to the savage Shuar tribe. An elephant tamer. An imperial grenadier. A pearl diver in the Sea of Japan. At six or seven years old, he even wanted to be a Jew, an appealing profession that appeared to consist of having a very long beard and hair. What he cannot recall ever having wanted to be is a lawyer. That was the first of many desires that were his father’s alone and that little by little were inevitably imposed upon him.
Back then they lived near Iquitos, in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. Throughout his childhood he lived in a series of different houses, always erected near his father’s rubber camps, which moved around constantly. The camps were full of hundreds of Indians, their backs bare and covered in scabs, a few white foremen prowling among them. Sometimes you could hear the whistling of machetes chopping a path through the vegetation, mingled with the cries of men who seemed to be suffering unbearable pain in unfamiliar tongues. It’s the mosquitoes, his father said when Carlos asked about the yelling. Those savages who work for us can’t stand being bitten by mosquitoes.
It was a lonely time; his sisters were still very young, and there were no other children around to play with. Actually, the camps were full of children, but they were not children in the strictest sense of the word: they were the children of the indigenous workers, and so he could not play with them or even look at them, no matter how amusing he found their mischief or how very alone he felt. Pretend they’re invisible, his father told him. And in his efforts to do so, to see nothing where in reality there was something, he also learned to see playmates where others saw none. And so Román, his imaginary friend, was born. Since he could choose, he chose for Román to be eleven years old, like him, and also white and not Indian — white as only Germans and polar bears can be — so Carlos could play with him morning, noon, and night.
Román was a boy who inspired a great deal of respect, so much so that Carlos always addressed him with great deference and docilely acquiesced to his every whim; Román was not just white but also a bit of a tyrant. If, when lessons were over, Carlos didn’t play what Román wanted, he would go off with his own imaginary friends, children whom Carlos could not see despite his best efforts, just as he’d learned not to see those indigenous children who fashioned swords out of bamboo stalks and merrily tussled over rubber balls.
Carlos and Román did have a good deal in common, so much that they ended up becoming quite close friends. They both preferred playing in the corridors and bedrooms rather than going out into the fresh air. They were both bored during math lessons with Don Atiliano, the private tutor, even if Román could run off to play whenever he wanted and Carlos had to sit there solving trigonometry problems. They both hated Carlos’s father’s work, that endless procession of porters bearing bundles of rubber, and sometimes even stranger things, like the cart they saw pass by one night full of a dozen Indians slumbering in a heap, clumsily hidden under palm and banana leaves.
Too much imagination. That was the camp doctor’s diagnosis. “Don’t worry, Don Augusto, your son just has too much imagination.” But Don Augusto was not reassured. “Far too much, damn it. The other day he was talking to the air like a lunatic for hours.” But the doctor insisted there was no reason to worry. For the excessive imagination, he prescribed more meat in the diet and more trigonometry lessons.
“And what about the rest of it, Doctor?”
The rest of it was a lot of things. For example, it was that for some time Carlos had been spending all day reading poetry in his father’s library, verses that, in excess, could end up turning him, as everyone knew — and here the father lowered his voice, covered his mouth with a clenched fist — into an invert. It was that sometimes he cried and hyperventilated for no reason, especially when Don Augusto discussed Carlos’s future: enrollment in high school in Lima, and a law degree, and rubber. It was that when he’d been told how one day he’d be responsible for all the family’s plantations, the boy had said in a quiet, serene voice, with the same politeness that he used to talk to Román: Then I’d rather die. It was his feminine handwriting. But the doctor wasn’t concerned about any of those things either. For the crying jags and agitated breathing, he prescribed exercise, a dry climate, and certain oils to enhance his liver function. For the poetry, he prescribed a thump on the head and more fresh air. For the homosexuality, two years of patience until the boy turned thirteen, and then whores. And for the suicide threats, he suggested ignoring them but, just in case, and just for a couple of weeks, hiding all the knives in the house.