Now she reads it again as if she were another fourteen-year-old girl reading the words she has written. The other girl can’t believe that, at her same age, someone wrote such beautiful lines and cries over the diary which has become a book with Georgina’s picture on the cover. The whole world is crying. She has died. Hidden among piles of paper, they have found the exercise book with the red covers, the confession of so many thwarted ideals. It doesn’t seem possible that someone like her should die at the dawn of so much promise, she who could have soared so high. Georgina blows her nose, she’s such a fool. She crosses out the last ‘I feel’ and writes ‘I wish.’ ‘I wish to soar very, very high.’
Amazing. She rereads the last sentence, she is truly impressed. For the past two hours she has been trying to get started on what is for her one of the most terrifying jobs in the world: sorting out her papers. She is eighteen and says that sorting out your drawers is like cleaning out your soul. Her soul is full of astounding junk, tatters of stories, but she only needs to rescue whatever is concerned with the relentless destiny she has chosen for herself. She hates being sentimental; she knows that the chosen ones are cold and strong; she has read a lot. The exercise book with the red covers is a real find. She has opened it on the first page and has felt that God is speaking in her ear. The wish to soar very high, amazing; only those who’ve been predestined can write a sentence like that at the age of fourteen. For an instant she can imagine the exercise book, under a glass cover, in the Museum of the Theatre Arts. She turns the pages but nothing. Here, on the very first page, the diary ends. A few lines of verse copied out, the drawing of a large heart with her name and another name pierced by an arrow, some notes taken in class, and no more. How unsettled one was at fourteen, she thinks with adult insight. She smiles. She has remembered the absurd idea she had that day when she thought of starting the diary. Heroic and premature deaths! At eighteen, she has understood that true heroics lie in the act of living. She rolls up the exercise book and throws it into the garbage. It is like a signal. With unaccustomed energy, she spills out the contents of drawers, throws papers away and tears faded photos of once fashionable stars off the wall. She sighs with relief: now everything is in order. Now she can, at last, do what she has been promising herself she will do all afternoon. She takes a huge poster with the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and fixes it to the wall with four thumbtacks. The two women stare at each other. Now Georgina knows what she wants.
‘You want me,’ he says. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
They are leaning against the riverside wall, waiting for the sun to come up. Georgina sighs with resignation and somewhat loudly, because she’s just realized that Manuel has not understood a single word of what she has been saying. Very carefully she begins to smooth out a green and golden candy wrapper. ‘No,’ she says. Yes, of course she wants him, she loves him, but it’s something else. Theatre, of course. Something else.
‘Why something else?’ Manuel asks, but a ship’s foghorn is heard in the distance.
Georgina has finished smoothing out the wrapper and now rolls it around her index finger. He looks at her hands.
‘What will you do?’ he asks.
Her face brightens.
‘Well,’ she replies, ‘it’s all a bit complicated, I don’t know. I could just tell you that I’m going to be a great actress, but it’s something more, I don’t know how to explain it.’
‘No,’ he shakes his head. ‘With the candy wrapper. I mean what are you going to do with the candy wrapper?’
‘Ah,’ she stares at her finger. ‘A little cup. Daddy always used to make one for me. You twist the paper here, then you take out your finger and there: see?’
Manuel pushes the hair away from her face.
‘Georgina,’ he says. ‘Why something else?’
She lifts her eyebrows with a look of surprise. ‘Theatre, I mean. Why does it have to be something else?’
She laughs and points a finger at him.
‘He’s jealous,’ she says in a singsong. ‘Manuel is jealous.’ She looks at him in the face and becomes serious. ‘Not at all, you fool. It is the same thing. Love, theatre and… I don’t know how to explain, it’s as if I were fated. I mean, as if with everything I do, I’m supposed to rise higher and higher… Who knows? To be in decline must be something terrible. Haven’t you ever thought about that? I’m always thinking about these things, it’s awful.’
Manuel whistles admiringly.
‘It’s true,’ says Georgina. ‘The problem is that you don’t take me seriously, but that’s how it is. What’s more, long before I turn into one of those old actresses who go on living God-knows-why—’ She stops and looks at him with determination. ‘I’ll kill myself,’ she says.
Manuel puts his palms together and mimics a jump into the river.
‘Splash,’ he says.
No, no, Georgina shakes her head desperately. Not in the river, what a philistine, he doesn’t understand a thing. She’s talking to him about a luminous ascent towards the loftiest heights, she means putting an end to all, cleanly, at the very top, and he comes out with something as unaesthetic as drowning oneself. Virginia Woolf, of course, but does he imagine her a few moments before the end, thrashing about and swallowing water and probably retching? And then what? A bloated half-rotten corpse drying out on a slab in the morgue. Lovely posthumous image. No, never, nothing like that. A beautiful death, Georgina means. Like her life.
He has watched her as she speaks. Lightly, he touches the tip of her nose.
‘Do me a favour,’ he says. ‘Don’t ever kill yourself.’
They can’t bear persistence, she thinks from high above a pedestal.
‘But yes, you fool. Don’t you realize?’ she says. ‘They must remember me beautiful. Beautiful for ever and ever.’
As soon as the words are out, she has the disagreeable impression of having said too much. She glares at Manuel and then covers her face with her hands.
‘No, not now, what an idiot you are,’ she says. ‘At six in the morning anyone looks awful,’ as she uncovers her face and places her hands on her hips, aggressively. ‘Anyway, I’m twenty, right? I still have my whole life to get what I want.’
‘Get what?’ he asks.
‘Everything.’
Manuel arches his eyebrows. He sits on the wall. Georgina stands as if waiting for something, and then finally she sits down as well. They sit with their legs dangling towards the river, the sun is about to rise and all is well.
‘See, that’s what I was telling you,’ Georgina says. ‘We come into the world with these things, who knows why. Strange, isn’t it? Imagine: I was only fourteen and already I wrote it down on the very first page of my diary.’
Manuel slaps his forehead with a wide open palm.
‘No!’ he says. ‘Don’t tell me that you also keep a diary!’
Georgina is about to explain something to him. She shrugs.
‘Of course,’ she says.
‘Of course?’ he laughs. ‘Women are out of this world. Okay, tell me.’
‘Tell you what? What have women to do with this?’
‘What you write in your diary, all that stuff. Let’s see if I can finally get to understand you.’