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Lima, June 26, 1904

Señor Jiménez:

Immediately after posting my letter requesting a copy of your Sad Arias, I wished I could retrieve it, destroy it utterly. Why? I shall tell you: I imagined that my behavior was rather unseemly for a young lady. Without ever having met or even seen you, I wrote to you, spoke to you. I was so audacious as to impose upon you, to ask a tedious favor of you, you who are so generous and yet owe me nothing . . .

I reproached myself for all of this again and again until I was in agony. When one is twenty years old, as I am, one thinks quickly and suffers deeply!

Yet all of my inquietudes were soothed, all my doubts evaporated, when I received your kind letter and your beautiful book.

Your mournful verses speak to the heart with the resonant cadence of Schubert’s melancholy melodies. I will long remember these stanzas, through which wafts the delicate, gentle perfume of the author’s soul.

If I told you that I liked one part of your book better than another, it would be a falsehood. Each part has its own charm, its gray tone, its tears and its shadows . . .

I must tell you that, since reading them, I have been haunted by many of your verses. I seem to recognize all around me the gardens, the trees, the longings that you describe in your poems. As if it were here, on this side of the ocean, that you endured and enjoyed such exquisite sentiments.

Do you not also, when you look upon the world, feel that it is made from the stuff of literature? Do you not seem to recognize in passersby the characters from certain novels, the creations of certain authors, the twilights of certain poems? Do you not feel sometimes that one might read life just as one turns the pages of a book . . . ?