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It doesn’t matter who tells them about the scriveners in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Whoever it is, in any case, quickly convinces them that it’s the only place for them to go for help writing their novel. And that Professor Cristóbal, an expert in lovers’ notes and epistolary courtship, is just the person they need.

If José and Carlos had seen the Professor pass by from their garret, with his shabby hat and his scribbler’s gear on his back, they would have quickly declared him a secondary character. And they would have been right, at least as far as this story is concerned. But if daily life in Lima in 1904 had its own novel, let’s say a volume of some four hundred pages, then Professor Cristóbal would certainly deserve a protagonist’s role, if only for the secrets that have passed through his hands over the course of two decades. Not even all the priests in the city, compiling all the innumerable tales they’ve heard in their confessionals, could attain a clearer picture of their parishioners’ consciences.

The lives of illustrious men begin with their birth and, in a sense, even earlier, with the feats of the ancestors who bestow upon them their last names and titles. Humble men, however, come into the world much later, once they have hands that are able to work and backs able to bear a certain amount of weight. Some—most—are never born at all. They remain invisible their whole lives, dwelling in miserable corners where History does not linger. You could say that Cristóbal was born at seventeen, when he was given a lowly position in a Lima notary office. All that preceded that moment—his childhood, his longings, the reasons for his indigent family’s extraordinary determination to provide him with proper lessons in reading and writing—is a mystery. Or, rather, it would be a mystery if anyone took an interest in finding it out. But no one does; nobody cares. And so his biography begins there, in a dingy room piled with papers where the notary ordered him to steam codicils open and keep certain bits of money apart from the rest of the accounting. Like any newborn, Cristóbal obeyed in silence, not questioning the world around him. We know as little about what passed through his head during this period as we do about what took place before his birth.

In 1879 Professor Cristóbal was called to the front to serve as an infantryman in Arauca during the disastrous war against Chile. At the time, of course, he hadn’t yet acquired his nickname. And the war against the Chileans still seemed less like a catastrophe and more like a sporting event or a hunting party, a long pilgrimage made so that the young men could wear trim uniforms with epaulets and have their cries of Long live this and Down with that ring out across the countryside. With the first shots fired came a number of bitter revelations. After a couple of days of combat, the uniforms were soiled with mire and blood, and the young men no longer seemed so young, and it was those newly fledged men, not ideas or nations, who began to die in the dusty ditches. Many of them were no doubt still virgins, which for some reason Cristóbal found saddest of all. That and the fact that his illiterate comrades, which was most of them, didn’t even have the consolation of reading their loved ones’ letters before they died. One day, upon hearing the dying wishes of a brother-in-arms, Cristóbal agreed to take dictation as the young man bade his mother farewell. On another occasion he helped his sergeant craft a marriage proposal to his wartime pen pal, and before he knew it he was earning his service pay writing the private correspondence of half the company. He was even made Captain Hornos’s personal assistant, a promotion that had a good deal to do with the six sweethearts the captain had left behind in Lima, women who required daily appeasement with promises and poetry.

The war didn’t last long. Or, rather, what began as a war and lasted a mere four years on the battlefield became a humiliating loss that would haunt Peruvians’ memory for decades. When Cristóbal—now known as Professor Cristóbal—returned to Lima, he did not want to go back to his position in the notary office. It was, it seems, a question of ethics—no more falsified wills for him, no more perjuries to assist the head notary’s accumulation of wealth—though, in fact, the matter remains somewhat muddled, as at the time the Professor was really too poor to have principles. What he did have, though, was the firm intention never to serve another master again, and so he began working under the arcades in the Plaza de Santo Domingo.

The letter writers have no superiors and no fixed schedules. In pompous moments, they call themselves public secretaries, a solemn way of saying that they don’t even have their own offices, or rather that their offices and the street are one and the same. They occupy a corner under the arches in the square, and there, each morning, they set up their ramshackle desks and wait for customers to come in search of their services. They are sometimes called evangelists because, like the evangelists of the New Testament, their work is to transcribe the words dictated to them by others. And that is all they do from morning to night, at the foot of the columns around the plaza: write letters for the unlettered. They provide a voice to the emigrant who wants to send news home—Mother, you wouldn’t believe how big Juanito’s gotten. They provide eyes to the illiterate young woman who needs to read the note someone slipped under her door. They provide elegant words to the widow or bureaucrat writing to the government to request a pension or a particular post in the provinces.

Professor Cristóbal set up his supplies in an unoccupied corner of the square, and soon that empty space belonged to him so wholly that he even nailed a hook for his hat and jacket into one of the pillars. He has a school desk, its surface marred by scratches and dents, and for twenty years he has arranged the same objects on it, always in the same order: inkwell, pen, penholder, drafting triangles, blotting paper. He also has a case that once contained a Singer sewing machine and now serves as a footstool and occasionally as a storage box where he can keep a few coins. And, finally, there’s a portrait of his dead wife, to whom he probably never wrote a single letter or poem.

He accepts only commissions for sentimental correspondence. A cardboard sign on the table states it quite clearly: PROFESSOR CRISTÓBAL: LOVE LETTERS WRITTEN ON REQUEST. But the category of love is broad enough to include the old woman who has visited him every Monday for twelve years to have him write a new petition for pardon for her imprisoned son, letters that, Cristóbal would argue, are charged with as much emotion as the most passionate romance. Dozens of customers line up in front of his desk every day, wringing their hands as they wait, or rolling their eyes, or fulfilling some other cliché of their condition, because the lovers of Lima are as unoriginal as those anywhere else in the world. It is not only the illiterate who come to him. He also helps young people who need gallant phrases with which to woo the objects of their affection. In those instances, Cristóbal is not merely an evangelist but also a poet who must imagine what the recipient of the letter is like and then compose verses to which the aspirants contribute only the wordless fever of love.

When he finishes, he places all his drafts and abortive attempts in a wicker basket, to be used later to feed the wood stove in his kitchen. He jokes about it frequently, saying that all winter long he is warmed by the love of strangers. Romance provides only an ephemeral light, one that burns quickly but leaves behind neither heat nor embers.