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The subsequent letters require more drafts than the first. Something more vital than obtaining a book of poems is at stake now: if Juan Ramón doesn’t answer, the comedy is over. And for some reason, that comedy suddenly seems to its authors to be quite a serious thing. Maybe that’s why they’re hardly laughing anymore, and why Carlos has a solemn air about him when he picks up the fountain pen.

Yet there is no reason to imagine that the correspondence might be interrupted soon. Juan Ramón always answers in the return post, sometimes even dispatching two or three letters in a single week that will later travel together, embarking on the same transatlantic voyage back to Lima. He too seems to want the joke to continue many chapters longer, even at the cost of short and somewhat ceremonious missives. The letters are frankly boring at times, yet as fundamentally Juan Ramón–esque as the Sad Arias or his Violet Souls, and that is enough to move José and Carlos to memorize them and venerate them during many a worshipful afternoon. Sometimes the quartos arrive splattered with ink stains or spelling errors, but they forgive him even that, with indulgence, with pleasure. Juan Ramón, so perfect in his poems, so intellijent—with a j—he too sometimes scratches things out with his pen, he too gets confused, mixes up g and j and s and c.

So what do they talk about in those first letters?

The truth is that nobody much cares. Not even them. They spend many hours writing the letters, packaging them, sending them; hours exchanging remedies for the flu or discussing the cold or the heat in Madrid or Chopin’s nocturnes or the discomforts of traveling by car. It is an unfruitful time that is best kept to a minimum. What does matter—and matters a lot—is the way those letters begin and end. The way they transition smoothly and discreetly from Señor Don Juan R. Jiménez and Señorita Georgina Hübner to Dearest friend in only fourteen letters. Not to mention the closings: Your most attentive servant, Cordially, Fondly, Affectionately, Tenderly. This shift, which takes place over the course of seven hundred forty-two lines of correspondence, equivalent to about an hour and fifty minutes of conversation in a café, might seem indecorously rapid. But as the Lima–La Coruña route is covered by just two ships a month and a ship rarely carries more than two or three of their letters, in fact the relationship develops quite slowly, very much in keeping with the period. They are rather reminiscent of those lovers who wait six months for permission to speak to each other through a window grating, and at least one full year for their first chaste kiss.

And of course the word love has yet to be said.