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They’re rich.

Both of them are, though this is less a coincidence than it is well-nigh self-evident. In 1904, friendship between members of different social classes is a sort of fairy tale, a genre reserved for the particularly naive, like children who drowsily listen to The Prince and the Pauper before receiving a good-night kiss.

There exist, of course, circumstances in which this principle is less stringently upheld. Nearly everyone has heard tales of landowners who amuse themselves by granting generous favors to their peasants, perhaps in exchange for the pleasure they get from watching those peasants wait for long stretches in their parlors, caps clutched to their chests and eyes filled with fear that they might stain the rugs with mud. There are also rich, kindhearted widows who sweetly offer advice to their lady’s maids, who perhaps even attempt to find them decent, sensible husbands among the footmen of the other women in their ombre-playing circle. And gentlemen who dress up like laborers to tipple in picturesque taverns, exchanging comradely embraces with men whose names they will later forget.

In none of these instances can one find any signs of true friendship, only an artificial camaraderie in which the peasant—or maid, or butler—has the unhappier role. The inferiors respond to the questions, which are often elegantly softened orders, in cautious monosyllables and, humiliated, accept the alms of attention extended by their patrons. The gentlemen, on the other hand, find these little tête-à-têtes, which are convened and dissolved with the ringing of a bell, quite satisfactory and edifying. At some point the servant will leave—You may go now, Alfredo—and the gentleman will remain lounging in his armchair, the proffered glass of cognac, which the shy servant has not dared to sample, still untouched on the table, and his conscience brimming with the satisfaction of having been generous and humane.

There is, then, nothing for it but to acknowledge that both of our young men are rich. Yet there is no obligation for them to be rich in exactly the same way. The Gálvez fortune, for example, goes back centuries and is associated with an illustrious lineage of prominent national figures. And while it is true that much of the wealth accumulated by those distinguished forebears has evaporated, their descendants in 1904 still retain enough of it to enjoy a comfortable life as well as their unimpeachable reputation, which ultimately will be as valuable as the lost riches. Everyone in Lima knows that José’s grandfather José Gálvez Egúsquiza died defending the city of El Callao against Spanish troops in 1866 and that his uncle José Gálvez Moreno was a hero of the War of the Pacific. And with such letters of introduction, who could refuse to offer Master José an important post when he grows up, perhaps a diplomatic mission abroad or even a ministry of culture in Lima?

The Rodríguez family fortune, however, is embarrassingly new. Carlos’s father began to amass it only three decades ago, during the rubber fever, when he achieved some success in bleeding the jungle of its resins and its Indians. Before that, he’d been a nobody. Just a door-to-door salesman of soaps and waxes who perhaps dreamed of someday becoming one of the many gentlemen who never deigned to allow him into their homes. Then came the sugar boom, and with it a plantation of four thousand laborers, and winter and summer residences, and horse-drawn carriages, and his own serving staff, so similar to those sour-faced servants who had so often stopped him at the doorstep. There was even a botanical garden of exotic flowers and animals, along whose gravel avenues the grandee would often wander, dogged by his numerous preoccupations. Indeed, the Rodríguez family had everything but the illustrious past that not even rubber could buy: its genealogical tree was littered with little indigenous branches that had to be pruned, for that inglorious lineage is disdained in some salons, at certain splendid galas. It is why the gentlemen bow their heads ten or twelve degrees lower as they pass and the ladies offer up the backs of their hands with their noses slightly wrinkled, as if troubled by an unpleasant odor. As if the Rodríguezes still gave off a faint whiff of jungle ponds, the blood of dead headhunters, vulcanized rubber, paraffin—the paraffin that thirty years earlier Carlos’s father had sold door to door at a paltry three-quarters of a sol per ounce.

This is the closest thing to a friendship between classes that we can find: a wealthy man from a prominent family and an even wealthier man whose ancestors were poor. Perhaps it is unwarranted to dedicate so many words to this matter, as the novel’s own protagonists do not seem to take it very seriously. After all, they fancy themselves poets, and that belief keeps them hovering just above the ground, enjoying a detachment that is disrupted by anything to do with reality and its prosaic conventions. So why would they care that Carlos’s family has no distinguished dead and that José’s has too many? Poetry, art, their friendship—especially their friendship—transcend all of that. At least that’s what they’d say if anyone bothered to ask them. We couldn’t care less about that, they’d say, don’t you see that we’re poets?—and that answer should be sufficient.

It should be sufficient, but it is not persuasive. Because it’s clear that they do care about the implications of last name and lineage—we have already noted that it’s 1904; at this time, it could not be otherwise—though they would never admit it, and may not even realize it. But that may be why the opinions of José, nephew of the illustrious José Gálvez Moreno, always seem a little more sensible than those of his friend, and his poems fuller, and his jokes about Peruvians, Chileans, and Spaniards funnier, and his girlfriends prettier; and you might even say at times that he also seems taller, except that only recently an impartial measuring tape revealed that Carlos has nearly an inch on him. It was José who created Georgina—Carlos, smiling, delighted, thoroughly inebriated, merely agreed to the plan—and he will also be the one to choose her death if one day, God forbid, something has to happen to her. And what alternative did Carlos have, then, but to agree, even if he didn’t want to? He could only toss back another glass of pisco and toast his friend’s excellent idea; of what use are the opinions of a rubber man’s son when all of a nation’s illustrious dead are arrayed against him?