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The negotiations have begun, says the front page of El Comercio, the financial paper, and they go down to the port, hopeful at the news. What they do not know is that the conversations between the chamber of commerce and the strikers have failed; they had already failed, in fact, when the newspaper ink was still drying on the page. And so when they arrive they find the docks teeming with workers trying to prevent the scabs from the Britain Steamship Company from working. Tomorrow El Comercio will say that there were no more than two hundred people; the statement issued by the strikers’ commission will claim fifteen thousand. To José and Carlos, these numbers are unimportant. In any event, there are enough people to fill the port and even to block Calle de Manco Cápac, so it takes them a long time to push their way through the crowd to the edge of the dock.

In the distance they can make out the ships’ rigging, the steamships covered with patches of barnacles and rust. On one of them, who knows which, are the chapters that have not left; on another, the chapters that have not arrived. José and Carlos sit on the breakwater beside the esplanade and contemplate the ships, impotent. Last night, they heard that the Compañía Sud Americana de Vapores and the Britain Steamship Company had offered their regular crews two and a half soles to load the cargo, but the strikers’ union headed them off with a better offer, and now the city’s taverns are full of Russian and German and Turkish sailors who drink until they pass out at the workers’ expense. And so the decks are empty—there is no one aboard any of them save a handful of officers shouting at one another. Them and the rat that travels with the transatlantic mail, of course, which is startled to discover that, for the first time, the boat it calls the universe has stopped rocking and creaking to the rhythm of the waves. For the rat, at least, the strike has brought the whole world to a halt.

José flings pebbles from the breakwater into the sea. Between each one, he pauses to grumble a moment. It’s vile, an embarrassment, that a few good-for-nothings can bring an entire city to its knees and then stick around shouting and jeering. Carlos has the sensation that he is listening to his father’s voice, grown suddenly youthful but just as harsh. José also talks about Juan Ramón: “Do you know what happens when an installment of a serial novel is delayed?” he asks. Carlos does not. “Well, I’ll tell you: For the first few days the readers are restless, more curious, eager to keep reading, but as time passes they end up forgetting about it and start reading something else. That’s what’s going to happen if the letters don’t get out soon,” he continues. “The Maestro will start a new novel and won’t be interested in the old one. That’s what’s going to happen, Carlota.”

Carlos nods mechanically. For the first time he not only remembers Georgina but also contemplates, with curiosity and some surprise, the workers themselves. From the breakwater they seem to form a single body, as if they were a monstrous living thing spilling down the docks and wharves, its skin scaly with hats and faces. From time to time they shout a few slogans, and their roars, too, seem to braid together into a single voice. If José and Carlos had seen one of those lowly men from up in the garret, they would have taken him for a secondary character, but it occurs to Carlos now that as a group, they might somehow constitute a protagonist.

José hurls another stone and, with it, another complaint.

“That bastard Sandoval sank us. If his goal was to ruin our novel, he certainly succeeded.”

Carlos shakes his head, still watching the swarm of men.

“I don’t think Sandoval cares all that much about us, to be honest.”

“He does, I’m telling you, he does. I know that imbecile . . . He was dying with envy over the Georgina business. He wouldn’t care so much about these fools otherwise.”

Carlos hesitates a moment, seems about to speak, but then says nothing. José turns abruptly to look at him.

“What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“Don’t play dumb, Carlotita, I know you. At this point I know everything there is to know about your silences. What are you thinking?”

“Nothing . . . just something I heard this morning.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Do you realize they earn only two soles?”

“Who?”

“The dockworkers.”

“Okay.”

Carlos waits a few moments. Then he adds:

“Two soles a day, I mean. Not per hour.”

“And do you think that’s a little or a lot?”

“Are you joking? It takes more than a week’s wages to buy a book, for the love of God!”

José shrugs.

“I very much doubt any of them know how to read. So no books; that’s one less expense. Also, their income can’t be that low if they’re able to take this vacation right now. The bastards.”

Carlos is silent, shuffling through a number of possible responses. Finally he says:

“You’re right.”

But he can’t get it out of his head. The two soles, just a couple of coins, grow in his mind until they fill it completely. Before him he sees the strikers, their shouts becoming louder, the animal bucking and stomping, trying with its immense body to overrun the railroad track connecting the port with the customs office. A group of soldiers, absurdly tiny, braced to stop it. Carlos feels something like admiration, not for their poverty but for the energy with which they are fighting to escape it.

He wonders what Georgina would think of them. Indeed, he wonders it aloud.

“I wonder what Georgina would think.”

“About what?”

“About all this. The strike at the docks.”

“I daresay she’d be furious at being unable to communicate with Juan Ramón.”

“Yes, but I mean their ideas. What would she think of the workers, their demands, the two soles . . . ?”

José makes a gesture that might mean anything. But actually it means something quite specific: What do I care?

“I think she’d sympathize with them,” Carlos adds when it’s clear that José is not going to answer.

“Maybe,” he replies at last. “You know, that wouldn’t be a bad idea for a chapter. Georgina among the workers . . . Consoling them with her presence . . .” He raises his arm and points into the crowd. Slowly he lets his arm fall. “But what use would that chapter be when we can’t even send it to Juan Ramón?”

Carlos is still looking at the spot where José was pointing. Among the dockworkers he can make out a few women. They are carrying leather pouches with crusts of bread for their husbands and sons, and earthenware jugs to quench the protesters’ thirst. A few chant slogans, raising their voices and their fragile fists to the sky. There is also one young woman with a parasol, elegantly dressed all in white. She looks like a piece of artwork amid the workers’ drab overalls. He is struck by her presence. It only accentuates the destitution around her, making it more incomprehensible, more painful, more genuine. She looks like a figure from a Sorolla painting who, wandering from one canvas to another, has ended up, whether by mistake or out of curiosity, in a humble scene from Courbet. Carlos thinks to himself: She could be Georgina. And for a moment it seems that she is about to turn her head—Georgina’s head—but at the last second she walks back into the crowd, and she and her parasol disappear.

José slaps himself on the shins, stands up.

“So now what? Shall we go? It’s obvious nothing much is going to happen here today.”

Carlos stands up too. But he doesn’t head back to the carriage—he moves in the opposite direction, toward where he saw the girl disappear.

“Hey, where are you going? That’s the wrong way.”

“I just want to take a look.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Let’s get out of here. Can’t you see these idiots are ready to riot?”

But he follows Carlos. He’s not used to obeying and it takes him a while to make up his mind, but in the end he sighs and goes after him.

Carlos doesn’t really know what he hopes to find. It’s practically superstitious, his fantasy that the white parasol is hiding a face that can only belong to Georgina. Of course he can’t share such a notion with José. He can only do what he’s doing: fight his way through the crowd, elbowing and prodding the dark flesh of that animal, which seems to be rejecting them. Even though the strikers turn to look warily at the young men’s gold cufflinks and impeccable suits. Even though the slogans that a few minutes ago spoke of equality and justice in rather abstract terms are increasingly filled with invective, with mentions of spilled blood and dead bosses. Even though, seen up close, some women are distributing not crusts of bread or cups of wine but paving stones and iron bars and walking sticks and metal hooks and fireplace pokers. José’s voice is distorted by fear for the first time:

“Carlos, let’s get out of here, damn it,” he says, grabbing his friend’s arm.

Just then they hear a metallic banging rapidly approaching. A whistle. The crowd seems to respond to the noise, and José and Carlos are pulled along with it.

“Scabs! Scabs!”

It’s a convoy carrying goods to the wharf, and the crowd manages to stop it by hurling stones. It all happens so quickly that there’s no time to react. A few men clamber up on the locomotive and haul the engineer out of his cab. Carlos sees them drag him to the ground like a rag doll, but he doesn’t feel anything; it’s as if the images parading before him were happening in the pages of a book or being projected on a white sheet with a cinematograph. He is unaccustomed to violence, to the notion that ghastly things might suddenly take place before his eyes. Violence is something that’s always happened somewhere else, deep in the jungle, far from the clearing where he played with Román.

“Shit,” he hears José say above the tumult.

Suddenly a few shots are fired into the air. Or maybe not into the air. In the distance, perhaps, the girl. Is that her parasol, or a soldier’s white uniform? The noise of helmets falling upon the paving stones. More gunshots.

“The cavalry! The cavalry!”

Above the agitated faces, the bodies of the first horsemen come into view. There aloft, they might be at the bow of a ship that cuts through the swell of workers, who shout and scatter in all directions. He sees their sabers flash in the air. A man stabbed by a bayonet. Two dockworkers who bring down one of the horses by throwing rocks at its muzzle. José’s hand gripping his arm, bruising him, trying to drag him somewhere or perhaps trying desperately not to be dragged himself. Then he sees a horseman pass by him on his left, and at that moment he feels a sudden burning, as if a bolt of lightning had struck him in the face. The sensation is a sharp pang, one that isn’t preceded by any sound, that seems to have no origin or explanation. A cold bite that sears his temple and tumbles him to the ground.

As he falls he thinks he sees José turn to look at him. José hesitates a moment and then keeps running.

It’s possible that things don’t happen exactly like that. Maybe José does not see him fall. Perhaps he too is dragged along by the crowd and could have done nothing to help him anyway. It is possible that the person who looks at him and then runs off amid the uproar isn’t even José. But whatever the case, that’s how events will be etched in Carlos’s memory: him falling and José abandoning him to his fate.

For a moment he thinks he’s going to pass out. That’s what always happens in his favorite novels. The hero falls, wounded, and the world stops with him. Everything turns black, or white, or red, according to the author’s whims; reality disappears into a fog, and that fog does not clear until, hours or days later, the protagonist regains consciousness. But none of that happens.

He is able to feel, almost to count each of the blows he receives—twenty-seven—as the terrified mob tramples his body. He hears shouts, gunshots, horses’ hooves scraping the cobblestones. Voices cry out, pleading for help. Then something like silence. The taste of blood in his mouth. And finally some words he can’t understand, and the eyes of the soldier bending over him to check his pulse.