They hesitate a moment before responding. Carlos is trying to picture a magazine at its toilette. And José seems to be in a trance, gazing at the sheen of sweat on the man’s face, the massive belly pressed against the tabletop. Someone so stout and sweaty should be barred from being a poet, he thinks, and certainly from being the editor of a magazine on which so many poets depend. In the end it is José who replies. They will mention it to Juan Ramón, of course; he’s a close friend and will almost certainly say yes. In the meantime, however, perhaps they might come to an agreement, because as it happens the two of them are poets too, what a coincidence, and also coincidentally, they still have a few poems that have not yet been promised to other publications. (To be honest, they have more than a few of those — indeed, they have nothing else — but of course they choose not to clarify that point.) And coincidence strikes again, because, by chance, they happen to have some drafts of their poems with them.
Faced with such a remarkable series of coincidences — no less than three in just one sentence — the editor has no choice but to accept the papers José is offering him. He shuffles them listlessly. Holding a poem in each hand, he fans himself with one while reading the other. He wheezes. And after a couple of minutes he declares that, all right, while the letters to and from Juan Ramón are making their way across the Atlantic, it won’t kill him to publish one of the poems, but unfortunately only one. For example, this one in his hand right here, by José Gálvez, because the one in his other hand, by Carlos Rodríguez — he says it without looking at him; in truth, he doesn’t remember which of them is José and which is Carlos — is a little less refined.
José is exultant when they leave the office. Soon, though, perhaps feeling vaguely guilty about his friend’s rejection, he makes an effort to convert all the energy of that euphoria into indignation. He attempts to console Carlos with a long series of protests. Who does that fat fellow think he is; he wouldn’t recognize genuine talent if it smacked him on the head; the plot against them continues; they have won only the first battle in a long war; and so on. No one is going to write any letter to Juan Ramón, except maybe that fat bastard editor’s mother, and that whoreson is never going to get to publish one of the Maestro’s poems in his magazine. In his goddamn hygienic, respectable magazine. José even outlines the acceptance speech he will give if he one day wins the National Prize for Literature and Carlos still, God forbid, has not managed to publish a single poem; in it, he credits every bit of his success to him, his dear unpublished friend.
Both of them pretend to be sad about the rejection, but Carlos fakes it a bit more convincingly. His expression is, as always, a flawless simulation. Sometimes, when he gets bored, he lingers in front of the mirror awhile, rehearsing different expressions — joy, disappointment, melancholy, hope. He does it so well that from time to time he has been surprised to find himself experiencing real sadness and yet unpersuaded by his own emotion reflected in the mirror.
Then, in an instant, José regains the happiness he never really lost. He slings an arm familiarly around Carlos’s shoulder and offers to buy a round.
“To Juan Ramón! We owe everything to him!” he toasts. “His letters have inspired us!”
And when he says this, he kisses the most recent wax-sealed envelope. He kisses it as a medieval pilgrim might kiss a holy relic. And he also kisses it on precisely the spot where only a few weeks earlier there lingered the greedy snout of a rat. The same rat that, on voyage after voyage, accompanies the correspondence in the hold of the transatlantic steamer.
Carlos lifts his glass to his lips, but by the time he has finished throwing back his drink, he is no longer thinking about the toast or about Juan Ramón — somehow he has started thinking about Georgina. This has been happening to him a lot lately. He finds himself thinking of her not as part of a game or as a pretext, but as someone who has a life of her own. Something akin to a distant cousin who lives in the countryside and whom we don’t see often, or a maiden whose beauty we have frequently heard described by others and with whom we hope to exchange a few words at the next ball. Sometimes he even wonders whether it is not Georgina herself, rather than Juan Ramón and his letters, who is inspiring so many of his poems about impossible loves and ethereal muses.
But he says nothing, for that, too, is a secret.
~ ~ ~
◊
“What about that nun?”
“Where?”
“Right there, right there — the one who’s walking under the archway.”
“Oh. Secondary, obviously — who the hell wants to read about a nun?”
“Also, she doesn’t look like she’s broken a plate in her life, so she’s more of a Saint John of the Cross character than a Zorrilla…”
“What about the old woman begging for alms at the church door?”
“She’s got a protagonistic look about her, doesn’t she? But a short piece, of course. A story. Twenty pages or so. At most.”
“Yes, a short story. A sad one. Very French, or maybe Russian. One of those where the main character starts out a pauper and spends the rest of the narrative sinking deeper into destitution. And those soldiers making rounds?”
“Nothing. That’s all they’re good for — making their rounds in the background. They haven’t even got a page in them.”
They’ve played the game late into the night. Slowly the electric streetlights have come on, and behind the windowpanes in the poor neighborhoods, the flames of candles and oil lamps have begun to flicker. It smells like noodles and white rice. In that building teeming with Chinese, it always smells like noodles and white rice, and sometimes a little like opium too.
“What about that pretty girl?”
“What about that little boy who’s playing?”
“What about that coachman beating his horse?”
They keep pressing each other for a long time, even after the figures passing below them have become mere formless masses onto which any sort of character can be projected. But neither seems to have any intention of moving.
At last, when all is swallowed in darkness, when there is nothing left to look at, one of them — it doesn’t matter which — asks:
“What about Georgina?”
And the other, whichever he is, doesn’t answer.
~ ~ ~
◊
But after a while this, too, becomes boring. Or at least it bores them. The craze for anonymous letters fades. Nobody cares what Juan Ramón writes to Carlos and José. Back when the two were still at Most esteemed Juan R. Jiménez, the Club Unión would be packed to the rafters to hear the letter read aloud, but by the time they reach Dear friend, there are only three or four patrons who pay any attention. At this point, Gálvez doesn’t even know what trophy to request from the poet; they have it all and yet still they have nothing. Their correspondence has become as insipid as José’s and Carlos’s poems, which were never truly admired — the two friends were tolerated at salons and readings only as a way to hear the story of Juan Ramón and Georgina.
Other novelties appear. In particular: A young journalist named Sandoval who works as a typographer for the monthly newspaper Los Parias. That in itself is already a novelty — someone among their social circle who works, even though he doesn’t need to. He always shows up at the club with his hands stained with ink from the Linotype press, and he bears that mark of humility as if it were a war medal. He also has a scar on his temple, produced, he claims, by a policeman’s nightstick during a strike, and he points to it proudly every time he talks about class conflict. He’s an anarchist. Maybe not one of those terrorists who put bombs in the Barcelona opera house, but a peaceful revolutionary, an anarchist with his feet on the ground, as he puts it, who writes articles in support of the calls for strikes from the dockworkers in El Callao and the Bread Bakers’ Union in Lima.