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The garret is in one of the many buildings the Rodríguez family owns in Lima’s San Lázaro neighborhood, aging properties they don’t bother restoring and that seem on the verge of collapsing with their freight of tenants inside them. The building’s other floors are rented out to thirty or so Chinese immigrants who work in the noodle factory nearby, but the garret is too dilapidated even for them. Not even those sallow men who slept on the ships’ gunwales on their Pacific crossing want it, so José and Carlos are free to visit it whenever they wish.

Its windows are broken, and sunlight streams in through gaps between the planks in the walls. The floorboards are pockmarked with neglect, and somewhere a cat has miraculously survived, even though rumor has it that the Chinese eat cats and it’s certainly the case that these particular Chinese are in dire need of sustenance. It is, in short, the perfect place for two young men bored with sleeping in canopy beds and admonishing the maids for failing to polish the silver wine pitchers. They are thrilled by the sensation of poverty, and they roam among the burlap sacks and heaps of dusty junk like the lucky survivors of a shipwreck.

It is there that Georgina is born. A birth marked by words and laughter, tenuously illuminated by light flickering from bottles deployed as makeshift candlesticks.

They visit the garret every afternoon. They enjoy walking through Lima’s poor neighborhoods on their way to that building that might have been taken directly from the pages of a Zola novel. A humble murmuring issues from within, muffled by threadbare curtains and rice-paper screens. Two women fighting over a serving of soup. A long monologue in a strange language that could be a madman’s rant or maybe a prayer. A child sobbing. They take it all in with a mix of eagerness and pleasure, searching for traces of the poetry that Baudelaire was the first to find in poverty, or perhaps they are searching through poverty in hopes of finding Baudelaire himself. Their visits distress the building’s watchman, who as he opens the door for them always pleads, “Master Rodríguez, Master Gálvez, for the sake of all that is holy, please be careful.” He worries, of course, that the floorboards in the attic will give way and the young men will be injured, but more unnerving still is the vague, mysterious threat posed by the Chinese tenants.

José and Carlos laugh. They know full well that the tenants are harmless: sad-faced men and women who don’t even dare to raise their eyes when they encounter them on the landings. “But they’re quiet people, really,” they respond, still laughing, from the stairs. The watchman clucks his tongue. “Too quiet,” he adds before letting them go. “Too quiet . . .”

Some afternoons they clamber up from the garret to the rooftop. They loosen their cravats and take swigs from a shared bottle. Clustered below them are the houses, the humble little squares, the cathedral’s spires. In the distance, the somber silhouette of the University of San Marcos, which they’re skipping again. They see the denizens of Lima walking rapidly, slightly hunched, most of them oppressed by burdens that José and Carlos neither understand nor judge. The young men make an odd sight in their smudged white linen suits and their walking sticks, hanging over the abyss as if they were newly bankrupt millionaires threatening to leap into the void. But nobody sees them. In the poor neighborhoods, people walk with their eyes on the ground and look up only occasionally to ask the dear Lord to grant them some mercy, which He rarely does.

Sitting there on the rooftop, they play their favorite games. For the first, they must forget that they’re in Lima garbed in fifty-sol suits. In one stroke they blot out the colonial bell towers, the adobe walls, the golden hills, the people—above all, those miserable people who seem so determined to spoil their fantasies. Now suddenly they are in Paris, two penniless poets without even a crust of bread between them. They have written the greatest poems of the century, but no one knows it. Incredible verses that open like exotic flowers and then gradually wilt amid the ugliness of the world. A week ago, they spent their last coin on a ream of paper. Yesterday they pawned their fountain pen and their desk. That very morning they sold the last of their books to a junkman and used the franc he gave them—ah, they used that franc to make one final wish on the Pont Neuf and then watched it plummet hopelessly into the Seine. Plop. They imagine that it’s cold. At night, snow will again blanket Paris, and they will be forced to burn their poems one by one to survive the winter.

Their poverty softens them while the reverie lasts, which isn’t long, as daydreams are arduous things that can be sustained only with immense effort. Lima is a place that is impervious to fantasies, and soon they feel the heat of their eternal summer once more, or they notice a gold cufflink gleaming at one of their wrists. Or perhaps the Rodríguez car noisily invades the unpaved streets and the chauffeur pokes his head out the driver’s-side window and shouts, “Master Rodríguez! Your father wants you home for dinner!” Then their dream plunges downward like the coin they’ll never toss into the Seine, and suddenly they see themselves again for what they really are: two wealthy young men looking at poverty from on high.

“What a God-awful city,” murmurs José as he prepares to go down.