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Time passes. José is nowhere to be found. He is no longer attending his classes at the university, nor is he lounging outside them smoking on the bench in the atrium. Everybody says he’s writing a novel. Carlos can’t tell whether it’s the same novel or if he’s started a different one, but in any case José seems to be quite busy. He doesn’t even go out anymore, and Ventura and his friends say he’s changed quite a bit. For a moment Carlos thinks that yes, José must be writing the love story of Juan Ramón and Georgina; indeed, he’d even say that he’s writing his own life, and also everyone else’s. The life of all of Lima. The whole world contained in its pages.

Carlos goes back to the university. Now that José’s not there, he goes as often as possible. He had almost forgotten the classrooms’ scent of wood and chalk, the height of the lectern from which all those mediocre professors give their classes. He barely even remembered his classmates’ names, much less the import of the law of habeas corpus or the particular subtleties of the Napoleonic civil code. Just a few hours of studying each day—he has so much free time now—and he learns it all, a little late but in time to take his exams. He may not write novels, or letters either, but at least he knows how to do that: pass exams. That’s what he thinks as he scribbles his answers and glances at José’s empty desk out of the corner of his eye.

His parents are happy and even tell him so. José has turned out to be a bad influence. That business with that Juan Jiménez fellow was just a silly bit of fun. They are proud that, little by little, disappointment by disappointment, Carlos is becoming a real man. Yes, he stays out all night sometimes and that’s not good, of course, but who can blame him; he’s young, it’s springtime—better that than going around cooing sweet nothings to a decent girl, the kind of girl who’s so decent that when she ends up pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. He is a good son, there’s no doubt about it. Someone who will take on the mantle of the family’s birthright when they die.

Sandoval seems quite satisfied too. He comes to visit often now, loaded with new books and projects that Carlos accepts in silence. One night he insists on taking Carlos to a political meeting in an apartment on Calle Amargura. According to the organizers, the meeting is secret—there’s even a password—but it’s a secret no one cares about, not even the police. Most of the people in attendance are Italian socialists and Spanish anarchists who claim to have been behind every assassination attempt in Europe. They confess their crimes in the same tone of voice José used to employ when claiming to have bedded the most beautiful women in Peru. Carlos only half understands them. But at one point Sandoval talks about how “all our ideologies, and even our consciousnesses, are nothing more than a reflection of material reality,” and that phrase keeps echoing in Carlos’s mind. He thinks about Georgina, though he does not know why. About their fifteen months of correspondence. About the nights when he falls asleep convinced that she is writing and breathing somewhere out there in Lima. And he wonders whether she is a false consciousness like the ones Sandoval and his friends are so animatedly discussing or if there are real ideas in the world too, as real as class warfare and annual steel production.

On some afternoons he makes his way to the garret. After idly chatting with the watchman, he climbs the stairs very slowly, gripping the banister on each step. He likes to study among the worn furniture and burlap sacks. He repeats aloud the elements of rhetorical discourse—inventio, dispositio, elocutio—and the punishment prescribed by law for the crime of impersonating another individual: three years in jail. All this in the very same place where he and José once recited Baudelaire, Yeats, Mallarmé. And during his breaks from reading, he thinks about many things. He thinks about the Professor, whom he’s been ducking for weeks, taking long detours to avoid passing through the square and running into him beneath the arches and then having to tell him—tell him what? He thinks about Ventura and his friends, who no longer haunt the club and its billiards tables. They have vanished as thoroughly as José himself, and with him those letters he is no doubt still writing and that Carlos will never read, blank chapters of the novel that once was his.

Often he thinks: I too am a character in that novel. Everything will be documented in the pages that José is writing, even Carlos’s own repeated visits to the whore he never sleeps with. He wonders if there is any explanation for certain things—a chapter, a page, even just a line to say why he feels this need to sleep next to a whore at night. He’d like to understand it himself. He’s had time to try out any number of explanations, not in front of the mirror now but in the dusty solitude of the garret. That the whore reminds him of Georgina. That she reminds him of the Polish prostitute. That he needs someone who believes in Georgina. That he feels lonely. He has even considered that perhaps his father might have been right all along and all that poetry has feminized him. Don Augusto warned him so many times as a boy, whenever he caught him with a book of poetry—Mark my words, your taste for metaphors is going to make you an invert. And now here he is, incapable of arousal even in the presence of a beautiful woman, proving his father right nearly a decade after the fact.

He dreams, too, of José’s novel. That he’s trapped within its pages, forced to do what the narrator commands him to do. It’s his worst nightmare: ending up as a pansy in José’s novel. Discovering that’s what he is only because that’s what the narrator wants.