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So he has to write about love. But what does he know about that?

It could be that Carlos is more apprehensive about this than he initially seemed and we must attribute to him a second fear: the terror that the story of Juan Ramón and Georgina will ultimately reveal nothing more than how little his own life is worth. Because in the end all good fiction is rooted in genuine emotion, as the Professor put it, which means that to write about love a novelist must look to his experiences, make use of everything he’s learned in a woman’s arms.

And what has he learned? What does he know about flesh-and-blood women?

To be honest, almost nothing. It’s true that, despite his youth, he already has a bit of experience, but so far he has only ever fallen in love with fantasies. A pretty woman he saw on the street for just an instant. The willowy body of a nymph in a Gustave Doré engraving. A character in a novel. The closest he’s come to falling in love with a real person was the night he met the Polish prostitute. If that can even be called love, and if it’s even possible to call a woman a prostitute when she is still a virgin.

It happened on the eve of his thirteenth birthday. The next day he would be a man. At least that’s what his father kept telling him as they headed off in the horse-drawn carriage toward Carlos’s birthday gift. Being a man brings with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities, he said, but also certain privileges. Carlos didn’t know if he wanted this or not, either becoming a man or enjoying the privilege his father was about to offer him. Not long ago he’d found a secret compartment in the library with a little book that was simultaneously wonderful and repugnant, full of prints of men and women intertwined, doing things that, no, not on your life. He spent the summer stealthily turning its pages, and at the end of each review his conclusion was always the same: the drawings were disgusting. Some nights he locked himself in the bathroom and studied his naked body in the mirror. He compared his scrawny figure, his hairless chest, with the images he’d seen in the book. On other occasions, in that same bathroom, the drawings briefly ceased to disgust him, but afterward they always filled him with remorse.

At first Carlos thought they were going to downtown Iquitos, to the whorehouses where the young men of Lima made their debut. But his father had a surprise for him. After all, he was one of the richest men in the country. And money, just like manhood, brings with it certain obligations in addition to the associated privileges; for example, the sometimes painful responsibility of frittering that money away just to show that you have it. This was the peak of the rubber fever, when the cities of Brazil and Peru became cluttered with tycoons like Carlos’s father, men who suffered the anguish of not knowing how to use their fortunes. The less wealthy among them contented themselves with quenching their steeds’ thirst with French champagne. Others sent their dirty clothing by ship to be laundered in Lisbon—two months of waiting so they could protect their imported garments from the impure contact of American waters. In some clubs it was even the custom to light cigars with hundred-dollar bills and, if one didn’t smoke, to make wishes with them in public fountains. Ephemeral wishes presided over by the bust of Benjamin Franklin, which wilted and sank before the helpless gaze of passersby.

But Don Augusto was not much interested in horses or cigars. Nor did he care that his servants washed his tuxedos in the water of the Amazon. What he really liked was women, and he was prepared to do whatever it took to ensure that Carlos shared his predilections. To make sure the boy forgot the unnatural temptations that Don Augusto believed were lurking behind every line of poetry, even those that seemed entirely innocent. And so for his son’s birthday he could give him only the best: a night in the high-end bordello favored by the rubber impresarios.

They pulled up in front of a mansion built at the edge of the jungle, and Carlos stared at it from the carriage with a mix of fear and fascination. His father had told him that the place was full of virgins from every corner of the world, their certificates of purity filled out in four or five languages. After all, the rubber barons could allow only honorable women into their beds, prostitutes who had not yet had time to ply their trade, even though well before their first periods they’d already been evaluated, sold, and transported. Potential whores who would be sent off to regular brothels after their first night of work, after losing their virtue for an astonishing sum.

The selection process seemed to Carlos to stretch on endlessly. He watched as Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, African, French, and Hindu women were paraded before him. There were Ottomans still wearing their veils, Englishwomen brought over so the British magnates would feel right at home, Portuguese and Spanish women with whom the mestizo men could settle old colonial scores. They were barely grown and almost beautiful, but that beauty was somehow painful. Carlos looked away. He looked at the air between them and pointed at random when his father pressed him. Every time he asked a price, a servant would pull the appropriate card from the stack on the silver tray he carried. The card included not a name or nickname, just the girl’s nationality and price. Three hundred U.S. dollars for the Japanese girls. Two hundred fifty for the Egyptians. Only two hundred for mulattas from the Antilles. But Don Augusto shook his head when he looked at the offerings. This one is just a Brazilian—we can get Brazilians anywhere, and she only costs a hundred dollars. Don’t be shy. You can choose the best one—my treat. The best, of course, meant the most expensive. And in the end that was exactly what Don Augusto gave him: a terrified girl of thirteen or fourteen, no more beautiful than the others but with a more suitable card.

Poland. Four hundred dollars.

While their order was being prepared, Don Augusto gripped Carlos’s shoulder. It’s going to be four hundred dollars, he said, so you’d better tell me if she bleeds or not. Pay close attention; you never know with these whores. Some of them start working early, offering comfort to the sailors on the Atlantic crossing—they’re not even worth the clothes on their backs.

Carlos shuddered. At the mention of blood, all he could think of was how on the first day his father had taken him hunting, he hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on any of the animals they’d found for him. All day long, monkeys and wild boars ambled nonchalantly before him, granted a stay of execution by his cowardice. In the end, Don Augusto had furiously snatched his rifle from him and shot them down one by one, piercing their flesh with astounding precision.

The memory lasted only a moment. Someone had just opened the door to the private room, and when he looked up, the girl was already waiting for him.