◊

 

 

It’s not cold, but they light the stove anyway, perhaps unable to imagine listening to a good story anywhere but beside a warm fire. And the story is, in fact, a good one, but also rather a long one, and confusing too. Or maybe it’s just that José doesn’t know how to tell it, doesn’t entirely understand it and so gets lost in the details, mixing up the order of the letters and confusing what comes before and after. As he talks, he is aglow with the light of the flames, which cast flickering shadows over his face and his words.

At first it was all very easy. So he says. And there is reason to believe him: when he talks about that period, those first weeks after Carlos’s desertion, his speech seems freer, less mechanical. The letters they wrote then were humorous, or else so terribly serious that they made him and Ventura laugh. And so they laughed a lot and sometimes wrote a little, in the opium den, at the billiards table, in the Club Unión, in the stands at the bullring, in the brothels of Monserrate. They were overflowing with ideas, some of them contradictory and fearless, others absolutely ludicrous, but sooner or later they ended up putting them all down on paper. And it seemed that Juan Ramón enjoyed that wild Georgina, José insists, because his replies became longer, and in a way also contradictory, and fearless, and ludicrous.

But the poem—where was their poem? In those first months, they still quivered with excitement as they opened each envelope. Their hopes gradually went cold as they waited for the ever-absent dedication: just another dull letter to add to the collection—thirty-two—a little postcard with the Retiro pond in the distance, sometimes a few lines inspired by another woman. Poems dedicated to Blanca Hernández-Pinzón, to Jeanne Roussie, to Francine, but none to him—that is, to her. Of course Ventura and his friends didn’t care about that. (They are not writers, after all; they do not read poetry.) They may even have grown bored with this joke that was never really a joke. They would rather smoke and drink and carouse than engage in a tedious game when it no longer mattered to them whether they won or lost, whether Georgina was demure or dissolute. Whether Juan Ramón wrote the poem or didn’t. But of course it matters, says José, what else could possibly matter if not this: writing a poem that, in one way or another, will make us immortal, serve as a reminder that we have lived, a posterity composed of lines and letters—but above all, in the end, a poem.

What was it about Georgina Hübner that the Maestro did not like? He was tempted to ask him. To write a letter calling the poet an ingrate, an imbecile. Instead, he did just the opposite. Georgina’s missives became ever more passionate, more tender—all his ire was converted into adjectives, sentences that trailed off like sighs, intimate seductions. And also a great many adverbs and ellipses, as Carlos’s lessons had not been entirely in vain.

Perhaps he overstepped certain bounds—José is willing to acknowledge that. He was in the grip of something like a fever, an irrepressible urge to make Juan Ramón fall in love at last. With him, with her. It was akin to the passion with which he had hounded first the Gálvezes’ chambermaid, and then dozens of lady’s companions, young women at their coming-out parties, vaudeville actresses, Sacred Heart schoolgirls, seamstresses. And he always accomplished what he set out to do—as Carlos knew all too well. Hadn’t he felt that emotion once himself? Hadn’t his desire for Juan Ramón to fall in love been strangely reminiscent of the desire to seduce a woman, to seduce all of them?

Carlos listens without offering any expression of agreement, without meeting José’s eyes. He stares at the embers in the grate. It looks like he’s listening to a story—indeed, listening with utmost attention—but the fire is the one telling it to him. And José—the fire—sometimes breaks off, takes lengthy pauses, possibly for dramatic effect. Or possibly not; maybe José really needs those breaks to figure out what he wants to say, because the novel has started to get complicated. At least that’s what José reports. In reality, it’s just the opposite: suddenly the story he’s telling has become quite simple—certain characters disappear, the plot lines grow clearer, the love story is finally taking off—but in José’s telling of it, he uses that grim word, complication. Suddenly eight letters arrive, each of them written a day after the previous letter and then all collected together in the hold of the same ship, and those letters seem to change everything.

In the first one, Juan Ramón talks for the first time about long-ago love affairs; he even refers to proper names, certain doleful farewells, kisses whose memory no longer causes him pain, feelings that one believes to be everlasting and, as it turns out, my lady, wither as quickly as they blossom. The second speaks of the (imprecise) boundary between love and friendship. The third, of the (finite) dimensions of the Atlantic Ocean; of how he sometimes imagines her traveling its ten thousand leagues in the same transatlantic steamer that bears her letters; imagines her, his dear friend, having her trunks carried up the gangway onto the ship; clutching her hat and holding up her skirts as she disembarks in some Spanish port. The fourth is about solitude: his need to be alone, his fear of being alone, his inability to be alone. The fifth rejects the arguments of the second: the line between love and friendship is not imprecise but rather utterly imaginary, a utopia, a boundary that is worked out between two people, that is invented and frequently adjusted, forgotten, expunged, fantasized, because in the cartography of sentiment—those are the very words he uses—there are no rivers or mountain ranges that one might use to orient oneself; an emotion can fit in the palm of one’s hand today and be as vast as a continent tomorrow. The sixth returns to the ocean: a sailor in Palos de la Frontera once told him that a man’s first voyage on the high seas expands his soul and transforms his perspective. The seventh doesn’t talk about anything—it is brief and desultory, vainly attempting to hold forth on trivial matters. And finally there’s the eighth, which in a sense ties all of the previous letters together. Six sheets of nervous handwriting and even blotches of ink that speak urgently of the possibility of a journey, of the need for a journey; in the past few weeks, he has been gripped by a wild obsession and begun planning a tour of lectures and poetry readings through the Americas and Peru, what do you think of that, Georgina—traversing the (finite) limits of the ocean to read poetry and discover the (imprecise) boundaries of love and friendship along the way, because for some time now he has been unable to think of anything but her. He is ashamed to admit it, though there is really no reason why he should be. Why should it make a man tremble simply to be sincere, to give voice to certain dreams, to explain how much he has come to feel for a woman whose face he has never even seen—why do you still refuse me that photograph, Georgina? And above all, why should he blush at telling her that on some nights he even maintains the ludicrous hope—ludicrous?—that perhaps with time, with patience, she might end up reciprocating; an emotion can fit in the palm of the hand today and be vast as a continent tomorrow; just imagine it, me in Lima, taking you by the hand and ardently telling you so many things, what do you say to that, dear Georgina, what is your answer?

It seems incredible, but that’s what the Maestro’s letter said; that’s what José tells him now.