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At last it is time to tell the tale of the philanthropic rat, a tale that no one has told and no one ever will if we don’t take this opportunity to remedy the situation. It is a rat like so many others, Rattus norvegicus. It has shoved off on the Buenos Aires–La Coruña route in the same transatlantic steamer countless times before, though it knows nothing of the existence of La Coruña or Buenos Aires; indeed, it is reasonable to suppose that it believes in no world beyond the hold of its ship. The universe is three hundred feet long and sixty across, and in it the rat lives out its wee life, an endless night full of barrels and boxes and burlap sacks. Like so many workers, it has found a way to eke out a living from the transatlantic mail: it nests in the warmth of the sacks of correspondence, gnaws at the delectable sealing wax, feeds on the letters that crisscross the ocean once every four weeks. It has a special fondness for envelopes adorned with official letterheads, the typed pages that always begin with the same words: The government of Argentina regrets to inform you. And so its tiny stomach gradually fills with sorrowful news that will never be read, and in a way that is where that news deserves to be, because why should a mother have to learn that her emigrant son has been carried off by tuberculosis; why not allow her to grow old still believing that the blood of her blood has found in the Americas the fortune that so many dream of? There are some things a person is better off knowing only halfway, or knowing another way, or not knowing at all, and if José and Carlos were writing a fantasy novel, if they believed that the supernatural could insinuate itself into an otherwise realistic tale, we would say that the rat shares that view. That in some murky way it has learned to identify the tragic or needless letters, the ones that should never have been written, much less sent. But admitting such a thing would be the stuff of another genre, one in which the two young authors are not prepared to founder; as we have already noted, their novel is or aspires to be a realistic one—sometimes comedy, sometimes love story, and sometimes even tragedy, but ultimately realistic. They are interested only in the romance between Georgina Hübner and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and not in the life of a rat that reads, and judges, and feels pity for mankind. Such a thing is impossible, and, what’s worse, it would ruin their story.

Let’s agree, then, that the only reason the rat devours the letters is hunger. Let’s also agree that its predilection for sad letters arises from some fact unknown to us—maybe bad news is simply more abundant than good; maybe the rat prefers ink-soaked paper, and, as everyone knows, conveying happiness does not require so many words. It feeds on news that would cause its intended recipient pain, and today it has come to Georgina’s twenty-fifth letter to Juan Ramón. It has already pardoned one Spanish emigrant’s first message home to his family—Buenos Aires is huge, Mother, you would be amazed, larger than Santander, Torrelavega, and Laredo put together—and gnawed at the news of a homely daughter who miraculously had seemed on the verge of betrothal but who, in the end, was not. Now it stops at Georgina’s letter. It sniffs it with its greedy snout. It prepares for the first bite, its little lips drawn back over its teeth, perhaps intoxicated by the scent of the writing paper. One might say—but really it is only a manner of speaking—that it understands the envelope’s poisonous contents, that it knows that so far Georgina has been for Juan Ramón no more than a small everyday satisfaction, no more significant than a sunny afternoon or an unexpected visit from a friend, and now that clutch of letters is about to change everything. If Juan Ramón reads one more letter, there will be no fixing it; he will have fallen utterly in love with Georgina, transformed her into the muse with melancholy eyes and smoky candles who presides over his poems, and then what began as a comedy—two poets playing both at being poor and at being a woman—will end as a tragedy: a man attempting to make love to a ghost. Everything depends on whether the rat eats the letter or doesn’t, but obviously in the end it doesn’t, because if the letter were to disappear, the novel would end along with it, and it is to continue on for many pages more.

And so from this point on the book becomes a tragedy, there’s no other option—and the rat is entirely to blame. The letter will arrive and the besotted poet will want to travel to Peru to ask for Georgina’s hand, and then what will the poor poets do, those boys with scanty mustaches who only a year ago were squatting on the ground, pissing pisco? And tragedy befalls the rat, too, which will never get the chance to gnaw at the envelope. The sailor on watch comes down to look for a piece of cargo and out of the corner of his eye spots movement in the mail sack; then comes the broom brandished in the air, the desperate chase, the shouting, stomping, curses, blows, the refuge that is not reached in time, the crack of the broom against the tiny body. Once, twice, three times. And, afterward, the ascension to the heavens: the rat is carried topside by its tail and, its eyes faltering as it dies, sees that other world whose existence it never suspected—the unknown deck of the ship and above it the blue sky in the middle of nowhere, halfway between La Coruña and Buenos Aires.

This has been life, it has time to think as it is tossed overboard, and this, it perhaps thinks as it sinks under the waves, this must be death.