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Moguer, May 8, 1905

My dear friend:

Will you allow me to call you “dear,” to call you “friend”? It has been four weeks since I’ve had news of you. Your charming letters must be waiting for me in the mailbox of my residence in Madrid; and, knowing that, it is all the more puzzling that I am still here, a full month spent in my boyhood home in Moguer, surrounded by relatives and relics of another era. Of excruciatingly sad lights and aromas with which I cannot even make poetry, with which I can no longer do anything.

You spoke in your last letter of your own sorrows that also bear your loved ones’ visages and are set in your own home. A home that I imagine resembles the sort you see in engravings, with whitewashed walls and palm trees, with straight windowsills and severe façades and a well with a pulley. All stone and rigor, just like your upbringing with your father, who no doubt loves you but who, perhaps, through loving you too much, poor thing, makes you miserable. You spoke of the bowels of that piano where you hide your secrets, these humble letters of mine among them. Of your tiny, fragile chest, which seems to grow even smaller when your father approaches. How could I not understand you, I who between these walls feel the presence of my own father’s ghost? His dead eyes that now see everything, against which keys and drawers are now useless. His threadbare words reviving old accusations: abandoning my law studies, and the mad notion of becoming a painter, and then the even madder notion of becoming a poet—that’s what my father would say. That’s what he says now in a voice growing louder and more certain, in my ears, all the time. Here, in what was his house, he sounds ever more powerful.

And then there are the voices of the others, of the living, of us, the family members who stayed here and have nothing to talk about but money and rents. As if my father were only that: the debts he left, which we divide up the way one would the weight of a burdensome, jet-black coffin. The words debase, they soil things; one’s mouth is tarnished by talking about pesetas, partitions, inheritances. We are gradually turning into nickel and metal, growing stiff and cold as the music of a coin. I fear that the mere mention of it has also tarnished this letter.

You ask me to tell you what I have been doing and writing. And yet I do and write so little! You, by contrast, do so much, you describe so many trips and meetings with girlfriends and walks along that street they call Jirón de la Unión that I must confess to feeling a little embarrassed at the indolence with which I watch the hours pass—watch them die, because everything dies. Nothing out of the ordinary to recount, except that I am sometimes happy and sometimes miserable. Everything that happens in reality takes place inside my head, or, if you prefer, within the confines of my own soul. (By the way, you haven’t said what you think of that little poem I sent you about the soul of things.) What do I do? you ask. I am afraid you will be disappointed: I do little more than walk. Now around Moguer and its environs, and previously through the cold streets of Madrid. I walk as if in a trance, and I tend to forget my hat and my cane wherever I go. I wander through the Retiro, an enormous park. You would adore it, Georgina. A little green slice of Madrid into which all of Moguer, with its diminutive houses and its river and its sad yellow fields, could easily fit. There is also a pond full of ducks and boats, and beside it a wafer seller whom I stop to observe a long while. An old man with wafers and other sweets, spinning a wheel of fortune. Sometimes the customer wins and sometimes he loses—does Lima have that sort of confection, are you familiar with such a thing?—but the peddler always smiles. Nothing seems to matter to him beyond the act of watching the wheel spin, of doling out his delights. And I would like to be a bit like him: to have the spirit of a dog or a child. Of a statue that welcomes sun and rain alike with the same smile, that does not despair or understand or suffer, that only goes to its usual corner to keep being what it is, what it can never cease to be.

And sometimes, why not admit it to you, dear Georgina—let’s agree that you have allowed me that license: to call you dear, to call you friend—I imagine you are walking with me. It would be such a lovely comfort for me, a light with which to clear away such gloomy clouds. Because as I walk out there, I go within myself to craft the reply I will give you on my return. You could say that some of my letters are worked out step by step, that I write them with my feet, and sometimes without my cane or hat—if I told you how often I leave them somewhere, you wouldn’t believe me. I even go walking within my own room, pacing back and forth like a captive animal that is nevertheless gentle and sad; I measure out the dimensions of my cage as I await a letter, a familiar hand, the stamps and seals of a certain far-off country. A square cell six paces on each side, bed and washbasin in the center; a total of twenty-four, and then starting over again. If I had taken all those paces in your direction—and if I could walk on the ocean, which is no small thing to imagine—where do you think I would have gotten to by now? My calculations, made with the assistance of an atlas with which I amuse myself in bed, have allowed me to estimate that I’d find myself more or less in the Sargasso Sea. That briny deep where the sea suddenly becomes unmoving land, a shipyard in which one neither comes nor goes. So lieth my soul! To tell the truth, that sea does not appear in my atlas, and I cannot say for sure whether it might be a fable or a myth, but it exists at least in our understanding, which is almost as if it existed in real life.

I would like to reach you, to reach Peru, which also exists but could just as easily not exist—or, rather, I would like for it to be you on my arm as we walked through the tranquil twilit avenues of Madrid. Perhaps you would like to walk with me, and perhaps you would also like for us to stop awhile as we treat ourselves to a wafer or two. Because I would most certainly give you one, Georgina, I would give you a hundred; something tells me that luck would smile on us for one, ten, fifty spins of that wheel. We could gorge ourselves, and laugh, and the wafer seller would laugh along with us. And if I had a photograph of you, Georgina, even if it were only one, I would know what face to affix to those walks that you and I take every morning, every night for you there in Lima. Will you share with me a portrait of the angels’ smile? Will I come to know the countenance that is the inverse of my own self, that abides in the antipodes of my soul? Will you tell me, at the very least, whether you are partial to those sweet treats I offer you on our walks . . . ?