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Lima, June 19, 1905

My dearest friend,

You must forgive me these lines, even my handwriting . . . Oh, I am quite irate! As you can see, even the hand with which I grip my pen and trace these letters is quivering. Yes, I know—the etiquette manuals say that a young lady should be prudent and demure and not express any intense or excessive emotions. But I daresay there are moments when the soul cannot be gagged or thwarted. Don’t you agree? And tonight my fury is such that prim old Saturnino Calleja and his rules of decorum would certainly disapprove, but I hope that you, my dear friend, will be able to forgive me. Who else but you, the loyal confidant of my every thought, even these that go so contrary to all propriety!

It is my friend Carlota who has put me in this state. Have I mentioned her to you before? Though we are joined, it’s true, by a long-established friendship, we are also divided by a great many differences! This afternoon I made the mistake of sharing the secret of these letters with her. You should have seen how she looked at me, how scandalized she was! She finds these missives we send each other quite unseemly: they are so very long, so frequent, so personal. With a stranger!—you can imagine the to-do. That I could so freely send you these letters, which go beyond mere politeness, six letters in a single envelope, and six envelopes on a single ship, and in them revealing so many private things . . . If she had her way, you and I would discuss nothing more stimulating than the weather. The rains that fall in Madrid and the summer heat that scorches the fields of my beloved Lima, or the state of your mother’s health. Or, better still, we would never have exchanged a letter at all, because what reason on earth would I have for asking you for a book, and what reason beyond that would you have for giving it to me? She stopped just short of calling me brazen! Tell me, please, that you are shaking with rage as I am. Or do you agree with her? Do you believe, as she does, that I am just a capricious, ill-mannered girl, a vulgar girl whose audacity is offensive or, at best, amusing? Oh, do not be so cruel! It would give me such pain to hear those words from your lips—or, rather, from your hand and pen.

No: I know that you share my view of it. That you too are of the belief that in a conversation between two spirits there must be neither sheriffs nor jailers, and the only protocols, those imposed by their own consciences. Even if the catechisms of propriety declare in the relevant chapter that a young lady “has the duty first to give her letters over to her parents in complete confidence” and that her replies “must express her intentions clearly, without circumlocutions to muddy them.” But oh! What if one’s intentions are precisely that—to make everything an enormous circumlocution, and for those unnecessary words to, in some way, be the language of one’s soul? Tell me, please, that you understand me. That you wish, as I do, to keep writing these letters—to speak tonight, to speak tomorrow, to speak always.

But let us forget my friend and her dogmas and address each other, please, as we once were accustomed to do. Let me tell you a few more things—so many that I wish this letter would never end . . .