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That night he visits every brothel in the city, his mind a blank. Around him he sees whores waiting, whores smoking, whores engaged in shouted conversations with their procurers, whores talking or laughing or crying—one of them beaten to a pulp and sprawled on a trash heap in an alleyway—whores blowing kisses, whores sighing, whores who on closer look turn out to be male, whores haggling, whores who with a whistle can be summoned to bed or to the paving stones of the alleyway; whores with rooms and without them, with madams and without them, still with teeth and already without them. Sometimes they call out to him when they see him walk by. They call him Sir or Your Excellency—even in the darkness they spot the gleam of his gold watch chain—and offer to give him the best night of his life. Carlos wards them off, waving his hat and crossing to the other side of the street.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’s drinking from a bottle of whiskey he bought somewhere along the way, and his frequent swigs from it make the uncertainty a bit more bearable. It’s a long trip, from Tajamarca to Huarapo and from there to Panteoncito, Barranquita, Acequia Alta, Monserrate. At some point he is seized by a painful thought: nowhere, not even here, will he ever be able to find Georgina. Then he keeps drinking and forgets that too. Midnight finds him in one of the bordellos on Panteoncito, drunk off his gourd and sitting on a sofa while the madam goes off to fetch the girls.

Though the girls do sleep with the customers for money, it would perhaps be unfitting to call them whores. At least, that’s what Carlos thinks when he sees them come down the stairs in their long gowns and kidskin gloves. Whores are the other ones, those sordid women he’s seen offering themselves up on street corners, the ones who crowd the prisons on the eve of presidential elections and let themselves be taken behind the nettle patches on Colchoneros for a few coins. These women, however, in the garb of elegant young ladies, look like Miraflores maidens interrupted in the middle of a gala dinner. And the madam—though it would perhaps be unfitting to call her a madam—introduces them one by one with feigned enthusiasm.

“This is Cora, the young heiress of the Incas, granddaughter of the grandson of the granddaughter of Atahualpa himself . . .

“The one winking at you is Catalina. She’s as Russian as the czar and so affectionate she’d melt the glaciers of Siberia . . .

“That’s our dear Mimí. The lustful blood of the French runs through her veins . . .”

Each of the girls has been given something like a Homeric epithet—Cayetana of the sweet kisses; Teresita, shy by day and pure fire at night—and before he chooses, Carlos chuckles to himself just thinking about that, about Homer and The Iliad. It’s not really funny—it’s a joke for drunken intellectuals—but he laughs anyway.