Madame Blavatsky and Gertrude Stein are on a Date and Rafito el Varado Has Joined Them

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At the small café table, the girls leaned inward, cups cooling, voices warming. One spoke of a friend who had reinvented herself again—new name, new doctrine, same debts. The other smiled, sharp and knowing, and countered with a story about a patron who swore devotion to art but could not sit still through a single sentence. They traded names like cards, shuffled reputations, folded rumors into napkins. There was laughter, then the soft click of porcelain, then a pause thick with implication.

Rafito listened, chin in hand, watching steam lift and vanish. He waited for an opening the way one waits for a tide. When it came, he leaned forward, eyes bright.
“But what if,” he said, “what if all this—these rebrandings, these alliances—are just ways of hiding from the terror of being here at all?”

The girls exchanged a glance. One waved him off gently. “Oh, you always do this. We’re talking about people, not abyss.”
“Yes,” the other added, “and besides, the abyss never writes back.”

Rafito smiled, unoffended. “Existential poetry does,” he said. “It writes back in fragments. It says: you are not a person with a story; you are a verb mispronounced by time.”

They blinked. One reached for sugar. “Did you hear about Clara?” she said, louder now. “She’s left her husband for a painter who only paints doors.”
“Doors are thresholds,” Rafito offered. “They’re promises that don’t guarantee passage.”
“Exactly,” the second girl said, delighted but unmoved. “He never opens them.”

They returned to their gossip with renewed focus, as if it were a craft requiring attention. Rafito tried again, softer. “We survive by narrating each other. But what happens when the story collapses?”

One of them patted his sleeve. “Then we meet for coffee,” she said. “And we talk it through.”

Rafito laughed, conceding the moment. Outside, the street went on being itself. Inside, the table held its three cups, a small island where rumor circled like birds and poetry waited, patient, for a quieter hour.