The people in attendance at the club, many of them members of the most elite ranks of Lima’s aristocracy, always listen respectfully to Sandoval, sometimes going so far as to applaud a little when he gets carried away talking about revolution and the collapse of capitalism. They consider him harmless, a nice fellow. They even have a vague sense that his demands might be somewhat justified, that perhaps the workers do have the right to something more than living and dying in their factories, though, truth be told, they have no idea what those workers might do instead. How would the proletariat spend their sixteen free hours a day if the eight-hour workday were implemented? In any case, the young poets at the club don’t know much about politics. They will know just as little a few years later when, one by one, they abandon poetry and step into their fathers’ places at the head of those very factories.
To make matters worse, Sandoval is writing a novel. “I said novel, yes. Never poetry,” he declared one night, almost scornfully, when someone asked him whether he might write poems. The twentieth century would be the death of verse, he added. Who gives a damn about fripperies and bourgeois sentiment when the final battle of the class war is being waged all around them? Only the wealthy experience that sort of emotion, those existential chasms and desponds, because when men have too much free time, when they do not employ their vital energy in demolishing the walls that divide them from their brothers, then all of that force is used to burrow into themselves, to grub away at themselves and finally concoct all those delicate, artificial emotions. Enough looking within, he continued haughtily, we must look beyond ourselves, because in plantations and factories across the globe there are humble men dying, dying in the flesh, not like those pansies who feel like they’re dying of emotions that, in reality, no one cares about at all. And you can be sure that this is only the beginning; now we write novels in order to speak about actions, but in time actions will speak for themselves. That is the real literature, I tell you: action, the force of events, not the words that explain those events. The true novel of the twentieth century will be written not in a garret but in the streets, amid the clamor of protests, assassination attempts, wars, revolutions. And of that novel, let it be known, we are already writing the opening chapters. Once more the room bursts into applause. Dozens of wealthy poets cheering first the death of capital, and then the death of poetry.
José and Carlos don’t say anything. And if they do, nobody hears them.
~ ~ ~
◊
Juan Ramón is a genius. Nobody doubts that, least of all José and Carlos. But the Maestro had his father die on him, and how could you not write sad arias if your father died, especially if you happened to have loved him; who wouldn’t have the poetic material for pastorals and violet souls and distant gardens if he’d been interned in no less than two sanatoriums and had, on top of it all, fallen fatally in love with a novitiate? The two of them, on the other hand…
“The problem’s not the poems — it’s life,” says José. “To write extraordinary things, first you must live them. That’s the difference between run-of-the-mill poets and true geniuses: experience. And, honestly, what have the two of us really lived?”
Carlos doesn’t answer for a moment, then realizes it’s not a rhetorical question. He tugs at the knot in his tie.
“Nothing?”
“Exactly. Nothing. We’re still in this dreadful city, always drinking from the same bottles and laughing at the same jokes. The most exciting thing we’ve done in our lives is this: writing a few little letters to collect autographs from the one man who truly knows how to live. And let’s not even talk about muses. You can’t exactly say we’ve had any passionate love affairs. We’ve slept with a few women, sure, but that’s all. And a lot of them were whores. Nobody revolutionizes Spanish poetry by writing about whores.”
“I guess not.”
“Even if they’re expensive whores, like the ones your father gets for you.”
“Go to hell.”
They’re sitting on benches in the university courtyard, watching the morning pass and the students stream in and out of the lecture halls. Carlos thinks about all the times they’ve done this very thing before: waving goodbye to their parents using their law textbooks as a pretext, then whiling away the hours sitting outside the university doors, smoking and waiting for it to get late enough to go home. In a biographical note about Juan Ramón, Carlos read, He started out studying law, but abandoned it in 1899 to devote himself entirely to painting and poetry. Him too, then! Could it be a sign? He can’t help wondering whether Juan Ramón also spent many mornings like this one, perhaps with a book of poetry in his hands, and the thought helps allay his boredom and disgust.
“That’s what we need,” José is saying. “An unattainable muse to whom we can dedicate our finest poems. Without that, there’s nothing, you know? Only the sad little scribblings of an amateur. What would have happened to Dante if Beatrice hadn’t been a girl, or to Catullus if Lesbia hadn’t been a whore? You don’t know? Well, I’ll tell you. World literature would have gone to shit, that’s what would have happened.”
He’s found a little stick somewhere and is using it to scrawl idly in the dirt as he speaks. Parallel lines that seem to underscore his words, fill in his silences.
“Sometimes I think it is of secondary importance whether a man writes well or badly,” he continues after a pause during which his lips and the stick remain motionless. “Real poetry is produced through the beauty of great muses. You don’t need anything else — the only trouble is finding those muses in the first place. And until we find our muse, the magazines are going to keep sending back our poems, because they’ll keep being what they are: the efforts of children, school assignments. The work of cocksure schoolboys fondling themselves as they dream of the women they’ll have when they grow up.”
“We have to take a page from Juan Ramón,” Carlos murmurs, as if guessing what Gálvez wants to hear.
“Indeed; our friend writes well and always finds himself a good muse. Even a novitiate once! And before that, in the Bordeaux sanatorium, there was that story about the other one, the French one — what was her name?”
“Jeanne Roussie,” Carlos answers immediately. They are experts on Juan Ramón’s biography. They know by heart his age when his father died and the most intimate minutiae of each of his heartbreaks. They are careful not to forget a single detail, perhaps because they tend to think of all these tragedies as a sort of cursus honorum that one must follow in order to write a good book of poetry.
“That’s it, Jeanne. Anyway, that’s a tricky situation too. Falling in love with your doctor’s wife! That’s some real drama right there. But he outdid himself with the novitiate. Think of it: the battle between carnal and spiritual hungers, between divine and earthly love… Oh, he’s a true artist, that Juan Ramón. With stories like that, you’d have to be dead inside not to write good poems.”
“Well, you once kissed a novitiate, didn’t you?”
José indifferently tosses the stick away.