◊

 

 

After that first night, Carlos returns to the brothel every weekend. The girl is more surprised about this than anyone, as she had not expected to remain part of the novel.

Since the last chapter, she too seems to have undergone a number of changes. She is still a secondary character, it’s true, but now there is something subtly protagonistic about her. She even seems a bit more beautiful than before, and so it is a little less inexplicable that he wants to see her again. Perhaps her seemingly insignificant life deserves a few lines of attention—a whole page even.

But Carlos will never read any of the words relaying her humble tale. He will never see her attic room, the bed she shares with Mimí and Cayetana. He will not watch them sleep in one another’s arms or fight over the large bottle of perfume. Sometimes they laugh together, remembering a particular old man or a particular crooked cock, and he will never know anything of that laughter either. Hidden under the mattress there may be a photograph of a woman, clumsily patched and repaired, as if someone had torn it to shreds in rage and then remorsefully attempted to piece it back together. A single armoire for all of them, and in it this girl’s one street gown, which reeks of mothballs because it’s been so long since a customer has taken her out. Not even Carlos has. In front of the barred window, a chair to sit in, to gaze out at a world she barely remembers. And downstairs in Madame Lenotre’s room, there’s the account book that explains the need for the bars, noting that, in addition to the cost of food, laundry, and beauty products, not to mention the cost of two abortions and one molar extraction, the girl owes the house a total of three hundred forty-five soles.

One page. That’s more than enough for now. After all, her rickety bed and the book of debts and the pieced-together photograph and the bars on the window will never be important enough to appear in Georgina’s novel.