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The fire is dying down, and Carlos has to get up several times to feed it. It’s been so long since he’s written letters or poems that there is no scrap paper left, so he ends up digging through the rubbish piled up in the corners. He patiently pulls out dusty cloths, pieces of broken furniture, burlap sacks. Pries loose a few planks.

José starts to get up.

“Let me help . . .”

“No need.”

Carlos pokes the rags and splintered wood in through the door of the potbelly stove. José watches him silently. He seems to recognize a seriousness, a new determination in Carlos’s movements. Actually, the whole scene is eerily reminiscent of his fantasies of artists living in a Montmartre garret: clochards warming themselves by burning their poems and, when those run out, piece by piece pulling apart the walls, the ceiling, and even the floor until they are huddled in the heat of the stove under the implacable Parisian sky. But José doesn’t have time to think about that tonight. Instead, he keeps repeating the same thing: Carlos, what are you doing, sit down already, aren’t you going to say anything?

After a few minutes, Carlos sits down at last. It seems like he’s going to say something, but then he doesn’t. José waits patiently—at least he tries to wait, tries to be patient. He doesn’t manage it. He has decided to count to fifty before he speaks, to give Carlos fifty opportunities to speak first, but by the time he makes it to twenty, the question is already coming out of his mouth.

“Are you going to help me?”

Carlos only glances at him. He shrugs.

“You should ask Professor Cristóbal for advice. I don’t have anything to do with that anymore.”

There is no bitterness in his voice, only the neutral tone of someone expressing an incontrovertible truth. José fervently objects. Of course not, what is he talking about, hasn’t he heard a single word he’s said? He tries to apologize, to tell him they wouldn’t have made it this far without him, that there’s no getting out of this predicament without him, that the novel is his too and always has been, how could he doubt it.

“Anyway, I already talked to the Professor. Just this morning. I went to see him in the plaza and told him everything. That Georgina wasn’t anyone’s cousin, that it had all started as a joke and then got out of hand, that there was no malice in it. Brought him up to speed, basically. You know what he told me? He said he knew it from the start. The rascal! I don’t buy it, though—I know we fooled him, just like we fooled everybody else, even if he’s pretending to be clairvoyant now. And then there’s the question of those ethics he’s always going on about. Why would he have broken those famous rules of his to cultivate a romance if he knew it was a farce? I asked him that, naturally.”

Carlos doesn’t move, but his eyes are suddenly alert.

“And what did he say?”

“The first thing that came into his head. That I must remember that the first rule, the most important one, the one that trumps all others, is never to swim against love’s tide. But whose love? I asked him. He laughed, of course—what could he say? I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it . . .”

As for advice, the Professor hadn’t said much. He’d only laughed again and noted that Georgina sounded ill, quite gravely ill, those coughs and chills in her chest are a bad sign this time of year, she might very well be dying on them. Wouldn’t that be liberating? he’d added with a wink. And so José needs Carlos now—can you believe it, even that charlatan friend of yours has given up, has no idea how to get out of this fix, but I know you’re different, I know you’ll find a way. And as he says it he holds out the bundle of letters with a beseeching expression. Everything’s here, he adds, the latest chapters of our novel.

Our novel—that’s what he says.

Carlos hesitates a moment before finally accepting the packet of letters. He weighs it warily in his hand, finding it surprisingly light for its size. It is a mechanical gesture with no anxiety in it but no joy or curiosity or sadness either. He can’t find the right words to answer José, which, to paraphrase the Professor, means he doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know how he should feel. He has waited so often for this moment—José’s apology, Georgina’s return—and now that he’s holding that bit of fulfilled desire in his hands, he doesn’t know what to do with it. José humiliated; José pleading with him for help, to help him save their novel; José needing him for the first time in his life—but for some reason that humiliation, that plea, that need, elicit no emotion in him. His true desire, what he has been searching for so long, is something else—but what? As he grasps the packet of letters, he knows only that it seems to contain something profoundly intimate yet utterly alien. That it is the most important thing he’s done in his life and yet, at the same time, it’s nonsense, a prank, a wearisome joke that’s fallen flat. For a moment he feels the urge to take those pages and throw them one by one through the stove’s little door and into the crackling flames. Goodbye to Georgina, he thinks, and the thought is both freeing and terrifying.

But he doesn’t do it. Instead he surveys the bobbing pen strokes, José’s superb forgeries. He pauses for a moment on a passage from Georgina’s last letter. I received your latest epistles while not yet fully recuperated from an illness that kept me confined to bed for weeks. Alarmed, my family took me to Barranco, a picturesque seaside resort, and then to a sanatorium in La Punta, another summering spot, this one quite lonely and sad.

“The Santa Águeda sanatorium,” Carlos says suddenly, with unaccustomed energy.

Perhaps because it’s been so long since Carlos has spoken, José is startled by his words. Carlos’s voice sounds unusually low, as if it belonged to someone else. It takes José a moment to react.

“Santa what?”

“The sanatorium that Georgina is talking about, in La Punta,” he says without looking at him, as if he were thinking aloud. “She must be referring to Santa Águeda.”

José blinks, confused.

“Well . . . I don’t actually know. I just said it to say something. I wasn’t even sure there was one.”

“It’s a tuberculosis sanatorium.”

“Tuberculosis,” José repeats distractedly, perhaps thinking about something else.