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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.

“You should have seen her! She was the kind of girl who inspires nightmares, not verses. When I took off her wimple, I understood why she wanted to become a nun.”

Carlos doesn’t respond. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s been following the progress of José’s stick in the dirt: a grid of crowded lines forming a dense lattice. Looking at it, he thinks for some reason of his father. He thinks of Georgina. He’s barely listening to José, who’s still insisting that the only thing keeping his poems from genius is the absence of the perfect woman, that divine inspiration that would elevate his verses to the very peak of the sublime. Because, sure, they’ve both had their puppy loves, he continues, but those were conventional, boring, happy stories, far removed from the mythological stature of the loves they find in books, in which, in the throes of passion, the two lovers expire. Though in their case it would be best if only the women died, because otherwise how would they go on to write their immortal verse? Someone definitely has to die, or be locked up in a monastery, or, at the very least, the families have to oppose the union, forcing the lovers to flee across the Andes with hired guns in hot pursuit. But none of that ever happens, he adds bitterly. Everything around them proceeds so easily: The family agrees to the engagement—so why bother getting engaged?—and what’s worse, the daughters agree to everything else with horrifying speed, and once they surrender themselves, how can they continue to serve as muses? What else can one do in such a suffocating environment, José asks, besides write stale literary-salon poetry, poetry for summer readings at an aunt’s house—light, insignificant verses, written to be read aloud on Sunday afternoons surrounded by lace fans, cigars, and stifled yawns.

“So all we need is a muse,” Carlos says to himself, still looking at the drawing.

“A muse, or whatever else we can find. I don’t know. A war, maybe. Just picture it: The flags, the parades, the speeches. The spilling of your best friend’s blood. That has to be a good reason to write a poem! Verses written on the verge of despair, knowing that at any moment a bullet might mow you down.”

“If you don’t die first, of course.”

“I’m serious; war is the best source of inspiration. Maybe Homer was a mediocre poet and was saved by hearing about the right war. Who knows. I imagine every soldier has material that could move anyone; it’s just that most of them don’t realize it. Take my uncle José Miguel. You know, the hero of the War of the Pacific. I’ve always believed he could have been a great poet. Everybody knows that he blew up a Chilean ship all by himself and that the explosion was so powerful it left him bald and nearly blind. But few know that toward the end of his life, that memory tormented him. He said that at all hours of the day and night, he could hear the screams of the Chilean sailors burning alive and begging to be rescued, for the love of God. With that on your conscience, you could either write the world’s best poem or shoot yourself in the head. And you know which way my uncle went.”

“Well, I would have written the poem.”

“Sure, but you and I are poets. My uncle was a soldier. I guess he did what was most appropriate for his profession.”

Carlos smiles.

“So as far as you’re concerned, those are our two options: finding a muse or starting another goddamn war with Chile.”

José replies in a jocular tone.

“It’s either that or tuberculosis, my friend! Maybe we should give that a try. They say that in your final moments, this incredible lucidity washes over you. Apparently the convulsions produce fits of creativity, and we’re losing extraordinary poems because we don’t give patients blank sheets of paper and ink as they’re dying.”

“I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather have a muse. Or just live a long life as a bad poet.”

They both laugh.

“Maybe so.”

For a few moments neither of them says anything. The sun is now high in the sky. The birds are still singing up on the roof of the university, but the young men are hearing them only now. Soon their classmates will come out into the courtyard, shaking off the torpor of the canon law class, all mechanical and gray, like the bureaucrats they will one day become. It’s time to go home.

“If only we could invent our own biographies,” says José with something like a sigh as they get up.

“At least we can invent Juan Ramón’s,” replies Carlos, and he finishes the rest of the sentence in his thoughts.