He was a good doctor. He could splint a broken leg, treat malaria, and counteract the venom of a snakebite. But he knew nothing of psychology. And even if he’d had some knowledge of it, the information would have been of limited use in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when the human mind was considered to be little more than an appendage of biology. And so he did not identify the crying fits as an anxiety disorder; those hadn’t been invented yet, and even illnesses exist less, or exist in another form, when they have not been named. The doctor also didn’t understand that tyrannical Román was the projection of a nascent inferiority complex produced by the combination of an authoritarian father and a passive mother, a mother who was insignificant, not much to speak of. A mother who mattered so little that she has not even appeared in this novel until now.
And so Carlos grows up suffering from anxiety attacks that are caused by the humid Amazonian climate. With inferiority complexes that are the product of a congenitally feeble liver.
But the prescriptions of the doctor who knows nothing of psychology fulfill their mission. At least that’s how Don Augusto sees it. Little by little, Román stops visiting the house: he is not just white and tyrannical but also pragmatic, and he would rather find new friends than sneak around to play with Carlos. The death wishes cease after Don Augusto warns the maids not to let the boy into the kitchen. The homosexuality is dealt with at thirteen in a swank brothel for rubber men with a Polish prostitute who is also a virgin, though that’s another story. And the humidity issue is resolved a year after that, when the family celebrates the completion of the mansion they’ve had built in Lima and moves there so that Carlos can start high school.
The poetry problem, however, is never solved. They send the boy off on endless walks, but he always manages to slip a volume of Hölderlin into his underwear. And when it seems that the vice has abated, one afternoon Don Augusto enters his son’s bedchamber and finds under his mattress bound proof of infinite betrayals: books of poetry by Rilke, Mallarmé, Salaverry, Bécquer — books whose absence from the shelves of his library he has never noticed because he bought them all off a bankrupt aristocrat and cannot identify a single title. That night, Don Augusto administers many doses of the medicine prescribed by the doctor. He rains down blows with his belt, which a sobbing Carlos tries fruitlessly to fend off. This blow is for French poetry, and this one for English poetry, and these two right here for Spanish poetry, the biggest betrayal of all, Spanish poetry of all things. It’s clear the boy’s a pansy, and an unpatriotic one too, but Don Augusto’s going to thrash that garbage out of his body if it takes all night. That’s what he says. Because Don Augusto already has three daughters and doesn’t want a fourth, not a simpering girl who rolls her eyes in ecstasy over poetry but a real man. There will be no more behaving like a little girl, he says, no more behaving like a sensitive little girl who can’t handle being told that the workers’ cries are caused not by mosquitoes but by the lash and that the carts that trundle off into the jungle are loaded not with sleeping Indians but with dead ones. He doesn’t want another little girl in the house. What he wants even less than a little girl, though, is a cocksucker; he tells Carlos that quite clearly as he administers his final blow: Cocks are not for sucking, they’re for goring women, understood? And Carlos understands, and he says yes, but with his voice distorted into an absurd squawk, the voice of the pansy he is and will always be, his father thinks in despair.
And during all this, the insignificant, inconsequential mother listens to the beating from her room, praying an endless rosary.
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Sometimes, when he’s not composing letters in Georgina’s name, when he’s not spending his afternoons perched on the roof of the garret, Carlos writes his own poetry. Over the years, Don Augusto has come to accept it. What choice does he have? His son, who is such a sissy in so many ways, has lamentably turned out to be quite manly in others — for instance, in his stoic ability to endure the harshest thrashings for the sake of poetry. In any case, at least he’s not the only one with this nasty mania for metaphors. The heir of the mighty Gálvez family is seized by it too — and such company can promise only great things. Don Augusto has even begun to convince himself that perhaps there’s no danger after all, as a clandestine reconnaissance of his son’s papers revealed references to a great number of women, each endowed with a lovely bare bosom. Even if his son has clothed them in so many complicated words.
The poems, to be honest, are not very good, and at times Carlos is even aware of this, but he does not care. He lost his ambition to become a great writer a long time ago. This fact, which has been noted quite casually here, is actually a great secret. He wouldn’t confess it to José for anything in the world. He knows it would disappoint him, because for his friend there is nothing more important than poetry, or, to be precise, all the glory that accompanies it. It is José who talks endlessly of magazines, of literary prizes, of garlands that must be won, of secret spells that have been cast to keep them, the country’s finest young poets, from publishing their poems. In fact, he spends much more time talking about these things than he does writing poetry. Carlos listens to him in silence. Though he is not interested in publications or prizes, he’s even less interested in contradicting José. And so he ends up agreeing with him, just the way he assented to all Román’s whims ten years earlier. Whatever you say, Román — I mean José.
What does Carlos want, then? He himself is not quite certain. It seems to him that he writes for the same reason his father accumulates tons of rubber and his mother has been praying the same uninterrupted rosary for thirty years: Because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Because he wants to be somewhere else. So every time he has to sign a document as the heir to the plantations of Don Augusto Rodríguez, every time he looks at an assignment for that degree he never wanted to pursue in the first place or hears his father and friends, over coffee, vie to see who has killed more Indians in a single day, he shuts himself in his room and writes. Or he lies on his bed and, staring at the ceiling, begins to imagine a few lines from Georgina’s next letter. For some reason the two endeavors — writing poems and being Georgina — are mysteriously linked in his head.
For some time neither of the friends is published, though José sends their poems to every newspaper and printer he knows of. But one day the editor of a small journal in Lima summons them to his office. He’s a fat, weary man with rings of sweat staining his armpits. The attention he gives them is as bloated and indolent as his appearance. Barely lifting his gaze from his papers, he informs them in a lackluster tone of the reason for their meeting. Someone has told him these two youngsters are in contact with the great Juan Ramón Jiménez. Might they be willing to suggest to the Maestro that he submit a couple of unpublished poems to this magazine — a modest publication, no need to pretend otherwise, but hygienic and quite respectable?