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He doesn’t even touch her. At least that’s what she says, and the girls are intrigued by the revelation. Customers with all manner of perverse predilections have passed through the brothel, but that particular deviancy—paying five soles a night in exchange for nothing—is unquestionably the most extravagant of all.

Whenever they see him sitting in the hall, shifting his hat restlessly from one hand to the other, the girls laugh. They call him Mr. Gob-Smacked. Your beau, Mr. Gob-Smacked, is here, they tell her, and she smiles or gets angry, depending on her mood. Mostly she gets angry. Anyone would say she’s beginning to have feelings for him. Or maybe what she’s really interested in are his generous tips. In any event, she sternly tells them to be quiet while she fixes her hair or adjusts her earrings, and then the girls laugh harder, and the madam scolds them—Shush, you ninnies, he’s going to hear you—in vain:

“Is he courting you to ask for your hand in marriage?”

“Has he introduced you to his parents?”

“Remember us when you’re a grand lady!”

As a customer he’s very easy to satisfy. There’s no need to check his thighs for syphilis sores or wash his cock in the sink. No need to fake panting or call him “master” or “stud” or shout out the ridiculous words that her customers find so arousing. All she has to do is lie beside him and talk if the gentleman wants to talk or simply be quiet if, as is sometimes the case, he prefers to spend the night smoking and staring at the ceiling. Sometimes he asks her about her life, and then she shrugs her shoulders and talks about her shared bed and the closed wardrobes, the endlessly increasing debts, the window bars. At other times it is Carlos who, taking the cigarette from his mouth, delivers some meaningless anecdote.

“I took an exam today.”

“I went to the docks yesterday. The dockworkers earn exactly the same amount that they did before, but now there’s not a single one protesting.”

“This morning I ran into Ventura and he asked me if I’d heard from José and I told him I hadn’t—it seems no one’s heard from him in weeks.”

Afterward he stubs out the cigarette, and as he does so, he lets the sentence trail off, as if he were erasing it. In some way these confessions seem to be linked to the act of smoking those cigarettes and then putting them out, grinding them fiercely against the metal ashtray.

One night he tells her he’s a poet. He looks at her solemnly when he says it, as if assessing the effect the news will produce. She doesn’t respond immediately. She doesn’t know much about poets except that they’re very poor men, practically beggars, who always end up dying of tuberculosis. And Carlos, who is always so hale and well dressed, doesn’t seem to be either of those things. A little thin, perhaps, though that probably doesn’t matter. So she smiles and even nods with feigned enthusiasm when he asks her if by chance she would like to hear one of his poems. Straightaway he pulls out a sheet of paper and reads for a long time in a voice that doesn’t sound like his. At first she interrupts him to ask the meaning of certain words. Then she doesn’t say anything. She lets gossamer and diadem and alabaster echo sterilely without opening her mouth. When he finishes, Carlos asks her if she liked it and she hastens to say she did, forcing a smile. And she adds: But you are getting quite thin, sir, you should eat a little more and get your strength up—they’ve just reported another tuberculosis epidemic around here.

Sometimes he doesn’t talk or look at the ceiling, and those are her favorite nights. The nights when he lies beside her and pretends to be thinking about trifling things but in reality is looking at her, only at her. It is a new look, one that seems to belong to that other world she can glimpse through the bars, and for a moment it makes her feel less like a whore. She senses that, in a way, he is not looking at her, not touching her—that what he seeks in her body is the shadow or memory of another woman. But still it’s flattering, and she wants the feeling to last. All night if possible.

They also talk about love. In that room that smells of carmine and perfume. Lying on the bed where so many men have slumbered far away from their wives. They talk about love—or, rather, Carlos talks about it while she watches him intently. She is his audience. Five soles a night, and the curtain is up. He rambles tipsily about tempestuous love affairs, about insurmountable obstacles, about letters, rivalries, anonymous poems, about losses, especially those losses that cannot be remedied. He lights and stubs out cigarettes while uttering strange words. Words that, like his voice when he reads verse, do not sound like his. They sound to her as if they were taken from one of his poems or, more likely, from a serial novel. Though the girl is illiterate and has never read a novel herself, Mimí often reads them aloud to her and they clutch each other in excitement when the prince finally manages to track down the princess. So she knows what she’s talking about. Like the characters in those novels, Carlos expects love to give him everything money cannot buy, and she senses that his suffering is born of that conviction. Literature, and maybe even love, has always seemed to her a treacherous luxury. She thinks of Mimí, whose passion for serial novels has also cost her dearly: ten centavos a week to buy the latest installment of The Prince and the Odalisque of the Southern Seas, which Madame Lenotre unfailingly adds to her account book in the “Owes” column.

Occasionally he also mentions Georgina. Indeed, he seems to talk about her constantly, even when he doesn’t say her name. The girl doesn’t know much about her. She imagines her to be wan, and very somber, and most of all very boring, languidly fanning herself in her garden and drinking the same endless lemonade. Feeble too—practically moribund. She’s not sure why, but she also feels a slight ache in her chest on those nights when Carlos says her name too much. It’s a pang of jealousy, but she doesn’t realize it. In fact, she doesn’t really know what that word means, jealousy, since nothing has ever belonged to her and so she’s never feared losing anything.

Most likely, she thinks, it’s just hunger.

On some nights she is able to ask the young man questions. She feels comfortable in her role as a secondary character, offering protagonists the opportunity to think and reflect on themselves. Her questions are sometimes thoroughly gauche but asked with endearing guilelessness. After each one, she always adds: You needn’t answer. But he doesn’t mind. One day he even works up the confidence to tell her about the Polish prostitute. Maybe he is answering a question about his earliest sexual experience, or his adolescence, or his first love. Or maybe he’s not even answering a question—he just starts talking. She listens to the story with interest, and for a moment she feels that pang again. Especially when she hears the price. Four hundred dollars! On her fingers she tries to count out how many soles that is, how many nights with her you’d need to pay for a single night with the Polish girl. But her hands are clumsy and she finally gives up. She concludes that it would be many, many nights. More nights than there are in a year. Maybe more than there are in a lifetime.

She’d like to know if he slept with the Polish prostitute. If he looked at that woman, that girl, the same way he looks at her now. But she doesn’t dare ask him. Carlos doesn’t explain any further, the story comes to a close, and in the end she decides that they did sleep together. She thinks it, and she smiles. She tells herself that the reason the young gentleman doesn’t touch her is precisely that she means something to him, while the Polish girl was just your everyday harlot, a little four-hundred-dollar doll to mindlessly mount. That he stripped off her clothes on the bed or on the floor and maybe even hurt her, because in the end she meant nothing to him. That he must have learned from her, under her, beside her, moving in and out of her, everything a man needs to know about a woman. That over the course of that night, he made her weep more than she’d wept during the month-long Atlantic crossing.

And the truth is that she takes pleasure in these cruel, piteous images. The Polish girl’s tears comfort her because she is jealous (hunger pangs again): her Peruvian virginity was never worth a single dollar, let alone four hundred of them, and there is a certain universal justice in that sadness, in the suffering of a pale European girl who must have felt her body becoming less and less valuable every night, one hundred dollars, twenty dollars, twenty soles, one sol, finally a nickel—just one goddamn nickel to drag her down on the floor and do the usual to her again.