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From that point on, Georgina changes rapidly. More rapidly even than José loses interest—after only two or three dates with Elizabeth, he decides he’s had more than enough. Though those clandestine encounters leave no mark on his life, they leave one on Georgina’s. José amuses himself by incorporating Elizabeth’s attributes into his letters: her insubstantial chatter, her naive coquetry, her almost endearing credulity, her concern for the disadvantaged. Even a light touch of her natural inclination toward melodrama (“Why are you doing this to me, José? If you leave me, I am capable of anything! Anything, I tell you!”).

But he concentrates most of his attention on including more and more references to the little mestiza housemaid, who for him has always been Georgina. And the others do more or less the same thing: fill the letters with any woman who comes to mind, especially those they know well. When somebody, let’s say a vaudeville dancer, sits on Ventura’s knee and murmurs some indelicate phrase in his ear, he softens it a bit and assigns it straightaway to Georgina. Maids, prostitutes, cabaret singers, florists: they all throw in their two cents—the modest ration of words allotted to each. A Georgina who evokes less and less the innocence of the Polish prostitute and more the eagerness with which the Gálvezes’ maid groped between the young master’s legs. Her letters are different now:

 

But I must tell you that I am also impulsive and fervent, and at times I feel my chest consumed by the bonfire of an unknown passion . . . Something like a mad desire to live and be happy. A feeling of which the rest know nothing and that I can only barely mask. Except with you, my friend! You who with each letter are gradually unraveling all my secrets . . . !

 

Or perhaps:

 

Sometimes I think a woman is a little like a flower that blooms, hoping for something that it does not know and yet desires, desires so fiercely!

 

Or even:

 

I do not know, my dear Juan Ramón, whether what I am saying is right or wrong: I know only that the body sometimes feels strange and beautiful things of which the spirit knows nothing, and that disregarding such beauty might itself also constitute some category of sin . . .

 

Carlos is reluctant to copy down these fancies. No, that sentence isn’t going in the letter, not a chance; Georgina’s not like that, over his dead body. But in the end he always gives in. What else can he do? His character has ceased to belong to him, and José is becoming increasingly inflexible in his decisions. Sometimes Carlos thinks of Georgina, the real one, as if she were a friend who has died, and many nights he wants to weep for his friend—his friend?—just as years ago he allowed himself to be flogged for the sake of muses who existed only in books. I’ve been telling you to think less and screw a little more, José says, emboldened by his friends’ laughter; maybe that chubby American girl, you know who I mean. You had the whole back seat there to do her the favor and you didn’t, Carlotita, you ungrateful lout. If a woman’s value were calculated by the ounce, you’d have been letting a real treasure get away.

Ventura and the others laugh. They weren’t there, they didn’t see the fat, homely sister with her enormous mole, but even so they’re sure she really is fat and homely, and so they laugh.

When he’s alone, Carlos rereads the drafts of the letters. And also Juan Ramón’s replies, which are growing ever longer and more affectionate and which have gradually begun to fill with intimate confidences, with little secrets. It seems the Maestro isn’t bothered by the new Georgina. Worse still, anyone would say he prefers her, a grotesque scarecrow whose words reek of absinthe and whiskey. And of opium, especially opium, because by now most of the chapters are worked out in the rear of a building on Calle del Marqués that serves as a corset shop by day and a clandestine smoking den by night. It was Ventura who first told them that no Montmartre bohemian ever wrote a line without first inhaling the dense smoke of the pipes and hookahs, and after that nobody could get the idea out of José’s head.

They visit the establishment two or three times a week. It’s a small, poorly ventilated place run by Chinese immigrants. The space is divided by partitions and folding screens that reveal mysterious scenes: silhouettes that laugh, that dance, that clasp one another in prolonged embraces, that slumber and go quiet for many hours at a time. Even the smoke, so dark and heavy, seems to have a silhouette. Each nook is furnished with a smoking pipe and a few reed mats and cushions where they recline to smoke until their eyes start to wander and their smiles go dull. Sometimes they talk about the letters, or women, or they recite their own poems, which sound like extended yawns. Or they don’t talk about anything; they just fall asleep, and the Chinese owners go silently from one alcove to another, covering their bodies with blankets or sheepskins, refilling the opium in the pipes, carrying bowls of some dubious potion that the poets languidly drink.

Carlos joins them against his will. Such a place, he feels, can produce only a character in tune with the setting. That is, a dull, indolent Georgina who laughs at the slightest provocation, who has a glassy look to her eyes and occasionally says inappropriate things. Foolish things that, like the smoke, take a long time to dissipate.

But it’s not just about Georgina. Carlos is also alarmed by the relaxation the drug produces in his own body. With each puff he feels as if the mask screwed to his face, the one that is always able to simulate the appropriate expression, were gradually loosening and melting. And who knows what he might be hiding under there—he, of course, has long since forgotten. And so he is afraid. Sometimes, in the depths of his prostration, it seems to him that a woman comes and sits beside him, whispers something in his ear. It is, perhaps, Georgina, but a real Georgina. She emerges from the smoke with all the purity of the very first missives, free of smudges, of incoherencies, of emendations. She kneels at the foot of the mat and touches his head for a moment. It seems to him that she smiles. And then they have long conversations that leave no words or memories, only the feverish taste of smoke, inundating his lungs like an icy, protracted vertigo, a spiral that drags and blurs the outlines of things and behind which only Georgina remains constant. Her gaze, her smile. Her kiss; Georgina’s kiss. The chill of her lips on his, her porcelain touch.

“Dlink,” she says. “Dlink is good,” she adds, inexplicably. And he drinks, drinks infinitely from that kiss, until he empties the bowl that someone is holding to his lips.