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After leaving Nancy, I hurried to Javier’s pensión on the Avenida 28 de Julio, but there were no lights on in the house and I didn’t dare wake up the owner, a woman with a terrible temper. I felt very frustrated, because I needed to tell my best friend about my great plan and get his advice. I didn’t sleep well and had nightmares all that night. I had breakfast at dawn with my grandfather, who always got up at daybreak, and hurried to Javier’s pensión again. I met him just as he was leaving, and we walked to the Avenida Larco to take the jitney to Lima. The night before, for the first time in his life, he’d listened to an entire chapter of one of Pedro Camacho’s serials, along with the owner of his pensión and the other boarders, and he was impressed.

“Your pal Camacho is capable of anything, I must say. Do you know what happened in the one last night—the one about an old boardinghouse in Lima run by a poor family that’s come down from the sierra? Everyone was sitting around the lunch table talking and all of a sudden an earthquake hit. It was all so realistic—the doors and windows shaking, the screams—that we all leapt to our feet and Señora Gracia ran out into the garden…”

I imagined Puddler, that genius, snoring to imitate the earth’s deep rumble, reproducing the dance of Lima’s houses and buildings by shaking baby’s rattles or rubbing glass marbles together in front of the microphone, and cracking nuts with his feet or knocking stones together to produce the sounds of roofs and walls cracking and stairways coming crashing down, as Josefina, Luciano, and the other actors panicked, prayed, screamed with pain, and begged for help under Pedro Camacho’s watchful eye.

“But the earthquake isn’t the half of it,” Javier interrupted me as I was telling him of Puddler’s extraordinary feats. “To top everything off, the entire boardinghouse fell in and everyone inside was crushed to death. Not a single one got out alive—can you believe it? A guy who’s capable of killing off every last one of his characters in a story by having them die in an earthquake is worthy of respect.”

We’d arrived at the jitney stop and I couldn’t keep my secret a minute longer. I summed up in a few words what had happened the evening before and the great decision I’d come to.

He pretended not to be at all taken aback by my news. “Well, well, you, too, are capable of anything,” he said, shaking his head pityingly. And then, a moment later: “Are you sure you want to get married?”

“I’ve never been this sure of anything in my life,” I swore to him.

And by then that was quite true. The evening before, when I’d asked Aunt Julia to marry me, it had seemed like something I hadn’t really thought about, a mere phrase, almost a joke, but now, after talking with Nancy, I felt very sure of myself. It seemed to me that I was telling him of an irrevocable decision that I had long pondered.

“The one thing I’m sure of is that all these mad things you’re up to are going to land me in jail,” Javier commented resignedly, once we were in the jitney. And then, a few blocks later, as we reached the Avenida Javier Prado: “You don’t have much time. If your aunt and uncle have asked Julita to leave, she can’t stay with them very much longer. And you’ll have to pull the whole thing off before the bogeyman gets here, because with your father on the scene, you’re going to have a hard time of it.”

We sat there for a while not saying anything as the jitney went down the Avenida Arequipa, stopping on the corners to let passengers out and pick up others. As we were passing the Colegio Raimondi, Javier spoke up again, his mind totally occupied with the problem now: “You’re going to need money. How are you going to manage that?”

“I’ll ask for an advance at the radio station. Sell all the old things I have—clothes, books. And pawn my typewriter, my watch, anything else I can put in hock for cash. And start looking like crazy for extra work.”

“I’ve got some things I can pawn, too—my radio, my pens, my good watch,” Javier said.