What would they say if they saw themselves strolling across that square? With what writer would they associate their own footsteps? Would they consider themselves secondary characters or protagonists? These seem like natural questions, ones they should have been asking all along. Strangely, though, they never have. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to them. Or perhaps they feel that their place is somehow there, not on foot in the street but on high, up on the rooftops of other men’s lives.
It is an odd game—a frivolous one, even—but, in the end, a fitting one for young men who see literature everywhere they look, for whom everything that happens around them happens just as they’ve read in books. Indeed, it would hardly be surprising to discover that this very scene—two men who, from their garret, dream of commanding the entire world—also came from one of those novels.
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Lima, June 26, 1904
Señor Jiménez:
Immediately after posting my letter requesting a copy of your Sad Arias, I wished I could retrieve it, destroy it utterly. Why? I shall tell you: I imagined that my behavior was rather unseemly for a young lady. Without ever having met or even seen you, I wrote to you, spoke to you. I was so audacious as to impose upon you, to ask a tedious favor of you, you who are so generous and yet owe me nothing . . .
I reproached myself for all of this again and again until I was in agony. When one is twenty years old, as I am, one thinks quickly and suffers deeply!
Yet all of my inquietudes were soothed, all my doubts evaporated, when I received your kind letter and your beautiful book.
Your mournful verses speak to the heart with the resonant cadence of Schubert’s melancholy melodies. I will long remember these stanzas, through which wafts the delicate, gentle perfume of the author’s soul.
If I told you that I liked one part of your book better than another, it would be a falsehood. Each part has its own charm, its gray tone, its tears and its shadows . . .
I must tell you that, since reading them, I have been haunted by many of your verses. I seem to recognize all around me the gardens, the trees, the longings that you describe in your poems. As if it were here, on this side of the ocean, that you endured and enjoyed such exquisite sentiments.
Do you not also, when you look upon the world, feel that it is made from the stuff of literature? Do you not seem to recognize in passersby the characters from certain novels, the creations of certain authors, the twilights of certain poems? Do you not feel sometimes that one might read life just as one turns the pages of a book . . . ?
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They want to be Juan Ramón Jiménez.
In a drawer in his desk, José hoards each letter, each stamp moistened by the poet’s precious saliva. Five handwritten poems. Two signed portraits. A book inscribed in purple ink—with the most sincere affection—to young Señorita Hübner of Lima. Luckily, Carlos has not attempted to claim any of these trophies, as José must have them all for himself. He can no longer sit down to write a poem without first touching the page upon which, even if just for a moment, the fingers of Juan Ramón once rested. The pen that scrawled Violet Souls when its author was precisely the same age that José is now. So young! This is the moment, he tells himself, stroking the watermarked paper as he might caress a woman’s skin. And then he waits, sitting at his desk. He grasps his pen firmly, waiting for something to happen. But it never does.
Carlos is amused by the worshipful way that José collects every tiny scrap of Juan Ramón’s life with philatelic patience. Yet despite his amusement, of course he does not mock. That is a privilege reserved for José alone. Though Carlos is the one who writes the letters, his objective in doing so is not to obtain those sacred objects. He is unmoved by the thought of an advance copy of the Maestro’s next book, Distant Gardens, which Juan Ramón has promised to send. Carlos pretends to be Georgina for a different reason altogether, though if anyone asked him what it was, he would not know how to answer.
That store of treasures is the envy of their circle of friends. Of course, calling them friends, even calling them a circle, may be an exaggeration. They are not friends, because before they are friends, they are poets, a profession in which good intentions are as scarce as good poems. And they aren’t really a circle, as their habit of forging alliances just so they can later destroy one another, of creating magazines and literary journals driven only by the satisfaction of rejecting the poems of their rivals, has less in common with the purity of circles than it does with the tortured, many-cornered geometry of polyhedrons. But let’s call it a circle anyway, and, with a little imagination, let’s call them friends too. It’s true that the men in that circle admire Juan Ramón, and so they also admire José and Carlos, though with a cold, pitiless passion. They feign interest in the young men’s clumsy verses as a way to draw nearer to the great poet. For a time it even becomes the fashion among their group to write to other great literary figures in the guise of imaginary characters, almost always beautiful novitiates or consumptive damsels on their deathbeds. Letters to Galdós, to Darío, to plump Pardo Bazán, to Echegaray. One even writes a moving letter to Yeats in dubious English, to which, incidentally, that cad Yeats does not deign to reply—incredible how much sensitivity it took to write “The Secret Rose” and how little of it he exhibits in failing to respond to the piteous final wish of a dying girl.
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Before he was a poet, Carlos wanted to be many other things. A dinosaur-bone hunter. A sea lion toughened by intractable Cape Horn. A missionary to the savage Shuar tribe. An elephant tamer. An imperial grenadier. A pearl diver in the Sea of Japan. At six or seven years old, he even wanted to be a Jew, an appealing profession that appeared to consist of having a very long beard and hair. What he cannot recall ever having wanted to be is a lawyer. That was the first of many desires that were his father’s alone and that little by little were inevitably imposed upon him.
Back then they lived near Iquitos, in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. Throughout his childhood he lived in a series of different houses, always erected near his father’s rubber camps, which moved around constantly. The camps were full of hundreds of Indians, their backs bare and covered in scabs, a few white foremen prowling among them. Sometimes you could hear the whistling of machetes chopping a path through the vegetation, mingled with the cries of men who seemed to be suffering unbearable pain in unfamiliar tongues. It’s the mosquitoes, his father said when Carlos asked about the yelling. Those savages who work for us can’t stand being bitten by mosquitoes.
It was a lonely time; his sisters were still very young, and there were no other children around to play with. Actually, the camps were full of children, but they were not children in the strictest sense of the word: they were the children of the indigenous workers, and so he could not play with them or even look at them, no matter how amusing he found their mischief or how very alone he felt. Pretend they’re invisible, his father told him. And in his efforts to do so, to see nothing where in reality there was something, he also learned to see playmates where others saw none. And so Román, his imaginary friend, was born. Since he could choose, he chose for Román to be eleven years old, like him, and also white and not Indian—white as only Germans and polar bears can be—so Carlos could play with him morning, noon, and night.
Román was a boy who inspired a great deal of respect, so much so that Carlos always addressed him with great deference and docilely acquiesced to his every whim; Román was not just white but also a bit of a tyrant. If, when lessons were over, Carlos didn’t play what Román wanted, he would go off with his own imaginary friends, children whom Carlos could not see despite his best efforts, just as he’d learned not to see those indigenous children who fashioned swords out of bamboo stalks and merrily tussled over rubber balls.
Carlos and Román did have a good deal in common, so much that they ended up becoming quite close friends. They both preferred playing in the corridors and bedrooms rather than going out into the fresh air. They were both bored during
math lessons with Don Atiliano, the private tutor, even if Román could run off to play whenever he wanted and Carlos had to sit there solving trigonometry problems. They both hated Carlos’s father’s work, that endless procession of porters bearing bundles of rubber, and sometimes even stranger things, like the cart they saw pass by one night full of a dozen Indians slumbering in a heap, clumsily hidden under palm and banana leaves.
Too much imagination. That was the camp doctor’s diagnosis. “Don’t worry, Don Augusto, your son just has too much imagination.” But Don Augusto was not reassured. “Far too much, damn it. The other day he was talking to the air like a lunatic for hours.” But the doctor insisted there was no reason to worry. For the excessive imagination, he prescribed more meat in the diet and more trigonometry lessons.
“And what about the rest of it, Doctor?”
The rest of it was a lot of things. For example, it was that for some time Carlos had been spending all day reading poetry in his father’s library, verses that, in excess, could end up turning him, as everyone knew—and here the father lowered his voice, covered his mouth with a clenched fist—into an invert. It was that sometimes he cried and hyperventilated for no reason, especially when Don Augusto discussed Carlos’s future: enrollment in high school in Lima, and a law degree, and rubber. It was that when he’d been told how one day he’d be responsible for all the family’s plantations, the boy had said in a quiet, serene voice, with the same politeness that he used to talk to Román: Then I’d rather die. It was his feminine handwriting. But the doctor wasn’t concerned about any of those things either. For the crying jags and agitated breathing, he prescribed exercise, a dry climate, and certain oils to enhance his liver function. For the poetry, he prescribed a thump on the head and more fresh air. For the homosexuality, two years of patience until the boy turned thirteen, and then whores. And for the suicide threats, he suggested ignoring them but, just in case, and just for a couple of weeks, hiding all the knives in the house.
He was a good doctor. He could splint a broken leg, treat malaria, and counteract the venom of a snakebite. But he knew nothing of psychology. And even if he’d had some knowledge of it, the information would have been of limited use in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when the human mind was considered to be little more than an appendage of biology. And so he did not identify the crying fits as an anxiety disorder; those hadn’t been invented yet, and even illnesses exist less, or exist in another form, when they have not been named. The doctor also didn’t understand that tyrannical Román was the projection of a nascent inferiority complex produced by the combination of an authoritarian father and a passive mother, a mother who was insignificant, not much to speak of. A mother who mattered so little that she has not even appeared in this novel until now.
And so Carlos grows up suffering from anxiety attacks that are caused by the humid Amazonian climate. With inferiority complexes that are the product of a congenitally feeble liver.
But the prescriptions of the doctor who knows nothing of psychology fulfill their mission. At least that’s how Don Augusto sees it. Little by little, Román stops visiting the house: he is not just white and tyrannical but also pragmatic, and he would rather find new friends than sneak around to play with Carlos. The death wishes cease after Don Augusto warns the maids not to let the boy into the kitchen. The homosexuality is dealt with at thirteen in a swank brothel for rubber men with a Polish prostitute who is also a virgin, though that’s another story. And the humidity issue is resolved a year after that, when the family celebrates the completion of the mansion they’ve had built in Lima and moves there so that Carlos can start high school.
The poetry problem, however, is never solved. They send the boy off on endless walks, but he always manages to slip a volume of Hölderlin into his underwear. And when it seems that the vice has abated, one afternoon Don Augusto enters his son’s bedchamber and finds under his mattress bound proof of infinite betrayals: books of poetry by Rilke, Mallarmé, Salaverry, Bécquer—books whose absence from the shelves of his library he has never noticed because he bought them all off a bankrupt aristocrat and cannot identify a single title. That night, Don Augusto administers many doses of the medicine prescribed by the doctor. He rains down blows with his belt, which a sobbing Carlos tries fruitlessly to fend off. This blow is for French poetry, and this one for English poetry, and these two right here for Spanish poetry, the biggest betrayal of all, Spanish poetry of all things. It’s clear the boy’s a pansy, and an unpatriotic one too, but Don Augusto’s going to thrash that garbage out of his body if it takes all night. That’s what he says. Because Don Augusto already has three daughters and doesn’t want a fourth, not a simpering girl who rolls her eyes in ecstasy over poetry but a real man. There will be no more behaving like a little girl, he says, no more behaving like a sensitive little girl who can’t handle being told that the workers’ cries are caused not by mosquitoes but by the lash and that the carts that trundle off into the jungle are loaded not with sleeping Indians but with dead ones. He doesn’t want another little girl in the house. What he wants even less than a little girl, though, is a cocksucker; he tells Carlos that quite clearly as he administers his final blow: Cocks are not for sucking, they’re for goring women, understood? And Carlos understands, and he says yes, but with his voice distorted into an absurd squawk, the voice of the pansy he is and will always be, his father thinks in despair.
And during all this, the insignificant, inconsequential mother listens to the beating from her room, praying an endless rosary.
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Sometimes, when he’s not composing letters in Georgina’s name, when he’s not spending his afternoons perched on the roof of the garret, Carlos writes his own poetry. Over the years, Don Augusto has come to accept it. What choice does he have? His son, who is such a sissy in so many ways, has lamentably turned out to be quite manly in others—for instance, in his stoic ability to endure the harshest thrashings for the sake of poetry. In any case, at least he’s not the only one with this nasty mania for metaphors. The heir of the mighty Gálvez family is seized by it too—and such company can promise only great things. Don Augusto has even begun to convince himself that perhaps there’s no danger after all, as a clandestine reconnaissance of his son’s papers revealed references to a great number of women, each endowed with a lovely bare bosom. Even if his son has clothed them in so many complicated words.
The poems, to be honest, are not very good, and at times Carlos is even aware of this, but he does not care. He lost his ambition to become a great writer a long time ago. This fact, which has been noted quite casually here, is actually a great secret. He wouldn’t confess it to José for anything in the world. He knows it would disappoint him, because for his friend there is nothing more important than poetry, or, to be precise, all the glory that accompanies it. It is José who talks endlessly of magazines, of literary prizes, of garlands that must be won, of secret spells that have been cast to keep them, the country’s finest young poets, from publishing their poems. In fact, he spends much more time talking about these things than he does writing poetry. Carlos listens to him in silence. Though he is not interested in publications or prizes, he’s even less interested in contradicting José. And so he ends up agreeing with him, just the way he assented to all Román’s whims ten years earlier. Whatever you say, Román—I mean José.
What does Carlos want, then? He himself is not quite certain. It seems to him that he writes for the same reason his father accumulates tons of rubber and his mother has been praying the same uninterrupted rosary for thirty years: Because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Because he wants to be somewhere else. So every time he has to sign a document as the heir to the plantations of Don Augusto Rodríguez, every time he looks at an assignment for that degree he never wanted to pursue in the first place or hears his father and friends, over coffee, vie to see who has killed more Indians in a single day, he shuts himself in his room and writes. Or he lies on his bed and,
staring at the ceiling, begins to imagine a few lines from Georgina’s next letter. For some reason the two endeavors—writing poems and being Georgina—are mysteriously linked in his head.
For some time neither of the friends is published, though José sends their poems to every newspaper and printer he knows of. But one day the editor of a small journal in Lima summons them to his office. He’s a fat, weary man with rings of sweat staining his armpits. The attention he gives them is as bloated and indolent as his appearance. Barely lifting his gaze from his papers, he informs them in a lackluster tone of the reason for their meeting. Someone has told him these two youngsters are in contact with the great Juan Ramón Jiménez. Might they be willing to suggest to the Maestro that he submit a couple of unpublished poems to this magazine—a modest publication, no need to pretend otherwise, but hygienic and quite respectable?
They hesitate a moment before responding. Carlos is trying to picture a magazine at its toilette. And José seems to be in a trance, gazing at the sheen of sweat on the man’s face, the massive belly pressed against the tabletop. Someone so stout and sweaty should be barred from being a poet, he thinks, and certainly from being the editor of a magazine on which so many poets depend. In the end it is José who replies. They will mention it to Juan Ramón, of course; he’s a close friend and will almost certainly say yes. In the meantime, however, perhaps they might come to an agreement, because as it happens the two of them are poets too, what a coincidence, and also coincidentally, they still have a few poems that have not yet been promised to other publications. (To be honest, they have more than a few of those—indeed, they have nothing else—but of course they choose not to clarify that point.) And coincidence strikes again, because, by chance, they happen to have some drafts of their poems with them.
The Sky Over Lima Page 3