The Sky Over Lima

by Juan Gómez Bárcena

  José and Carlos hesitate a moment. Never before has a humble man—a secondary character—so insolently reminded them of a debt. Normally the servants, errand boys, and even bureaucrats dare do no more than gently clear their throats. So gently that they might well be asking for forgiveness or permission. With their hats—their caps—clutched tight to their chests. Their eyes lowered. Only when you ask them outright do they name a price, almost always conveniently softened. “Just a sol, sir, if you would be so kind.” Just a sol, or a centavo, or a coin, because the name of the currency on its own seems to sear their tongues.

  “Your fee—of course,” says José icily.

  And he pays up, or rather he nudges Carlos with his elbow and Carlos pays up. Then they leave.

  But they don’t leave. As they are moving off, Carlos suddenly turns around as if he’s remembered something important.

  “Dr. Professor.”

  “Just call me Professor. What’s our little cousin done now?”

  The Professor is busy covering the desk with newspapers; sometimes the midmorning pisco leads into the lunchtime one, and then the pigeons flock to preen themselves and coo on his worktable.

  “Well, this doesn’t have to do with my cousin, Professor. It’s just . . .”

  “Oh! So it’s you! It seems Cupid has been taking potshots at your whole family!”

  “It’s not that, it’s . . . I’m just curious, Professor. That’s all. I was just wondering if you’ve had to write a lot of letters for people you’ve never met.”

  “What an odd question! Are you trying to learn all my secrets so you can steal my work out from under me?” He smiles. “Quite a few, actually. Sometimes the customers are wealthy young men reluctant to reveal themselves, and they send me messages through servants or friends . . . like your ingenuous cousin, for example. Then I have to improvise. Drawing from experience, I call it. I ask for a few basic instructions and then imagine what the lovers are like and let the pen do the rest. Once, even, a disgruntled father wanted me to write a letter pretending to be one of his daughter’s beaus. He wanted me to say that I was unworthy of her and all sorts of things . . . I didn’t accept, obviously. It’s a matter of principle, you see.”

  “But when you invent these romances—”

  “I don’t invent a thing! A person can write only about himself, even when he thinks he’s writing in someone else’s name. And so, it seems to me, my letters are always true. At the very most, the only untrue thing is the name signed to each one, don’t you think?”

  The Professor looks at his watch. Carlos looks at the Professor. José looks at Carlos out of the corner of his eye with an imploring expression. When the hell are we going to get out of here, Carlota? it seems to say. But Carlota doesn’t seem ready to leave yet.

  “And isn’t it quite difficult?”

  “What?”

  “Pretending to be somebody else.”

  “Difficult? Not in the least! It’s as easy as being yourself.”

  “Even when you’re pretending to be a woman?”

  “That’s even easier! You have to add a few I don’t knows, I believes, and it seems to mes, because women are rather unsure of themselves. And ellipses, too, as many as possible. And then there’s the matter of handwriting, which is more complicated than you’d think. But beyond that . . . do you know what the secret is? Imagine that the woman you’re pretending to be is one you once loved. And since men are all alike, you can expect that the fellow you’re writing to shares your worldview . . .”

  “And does it work?”

  The Professor laughs.

  “Does it work? Well, not always. I’m not going to lie. It’s the same as when you fall in love for real. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

  ◊

  So he has to write about love. But what does he know about that?

  It could be that Carlos is more apprehensive about this than he initially seemed and we must attribute to him a second fear: the terror that the story of Juan Ramón and Georgina will ultimately reveal nothing more than how little his own life is worth. Because in the end all good fiction is rooted in genuine emotion, as the Professor put it, which means that to write about love a novelist must look to his experiences, make use of everything he’s learned in a woman’s arms.

  And what has he learned? What does he know about flesh-and-blood women?

  To be honest, almost nothing. It’s true that, despite his youth, he already has a bit of experience, but so far he has only ever fallen in love with fantasies. A pretty woman he saw on the street for just an instant. The willowy body of a nymph in a Gustave Doré engraving. A character in a novel. The closest he’s come to falling in love with a real person was the night he met the Polish prostitute. If that can even be called love, and if it’s even possible to call a woman a prostitute when she is still a virgin.

  It happened on the eve of his thirteenth birthday. The next day he would be a man. At least that’s what his father kept telling him as they headed off in the horse-drawn carriage toward Carlos’s birthday gift. Being a man brings with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities, he said, but also certain privileges. Carlos didn’t know if he wanted this or not, either becoming a man or enjoying the privilege his father was about to offer him. Not long ago he’d found a secret compartment in the library with a little book that was simultaneously wonderful and repugnant, full of prints of men and women intertwined, doing things that, no, not on your life. He spent the summer stealthily turning its pages, and at the end of each review his conclusion was always the same: the drawings were disgusting. Some nights he locked himself in the bathroom and studied his naked body in the mirror. He compared his scrawny figure, his hairless chest, with the images he’d seen in the book. On other occasions, in that same bathroom, the drawings briefly ceased to disgust him, but afterward they always filled him with remorse.

  At first Carlos thought they were going to downtown Iquitos, to the whorehouses where the young men of Lima made their debut. But his father had a surprise for him. After all, he was one of the richest men in the country. And money, just like manhood, brings with it certain obligations in addition to the associated privileges; for example, the sometimes painful responsibility of frittering that money away just to show that you have it. This was the peak of the rubber fever, when the cities of Brazil and Peru became cluttered with tycoons like Carlos’s father, men who suffered the anguish of not knowing how to use their fortunes. The less wealthy among them contented themselves with quenching their steeds’ thirst with French champagne. Others sent their dirty clothing by ship to be laundered in Lisbon—two months of waiting so they could protect their imported garments from the impure contact of American waters. In some clubs it was even the custom to light cigars with hundred-dollar bills and, if one didn’t smoke, to make wishes with them in public fountains. Ephemeral wishes presided over by the bust of Benjamin Franklin, which wilted and sank before the helpless gaze of passersby.

  But Don Augusto was not much interested in horses or cigars. Nor did he care that his servants washed his tuxedos in the water of the Amazon. What he really liked was women, and he was prepared to do whatever it took to ensure that Carlos shared his predilections. To make sure the boy forgot the unnatural temptations that Don Augusto believed were lurking behind every line of poetry, even those that seemed entirely innocent. And so for his son’s birthday he could give him only the best: a night in the high-end bordello favored by the rubber impresarios.

  They pulled up in front of a mansion built at the edge of the jungle, and Carlos stared at it from the carriage with a mix of fear and fascination. His father had told him that the place was full of virgins from every corner of the world, their certificates of purity filled out in four or five languages. After all, the rubber barons could allow only honorable women into their beds, prostitutes who had not yet had time to ply their trade, even though well before their first periods they’d already been evaluated, sold, and transpor
ted. Potential whores who would be sent off to regular brothels after their first night of work, after losing their virtue for an astonishing sum.

  The selection process seemed to Carlos to stretch on endlessly. He watched as Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, African, French, and Hindu women were paraded before him. There were Ottomans still wearing their veils, Englishwomen brought over so the British magnates would feel right at home, Portuguese and Spanish women with whom the mestizo men could settle old colonial scores. They were barely grown and almost beautiful, but that beauty was somehow painful. Carlos looked away. He looked at the air between them and pointed at random when his father pressed him. Every time he asked a price, a servant would pull the appropriate card from the stack on the silver tray he carried. The card included not a name or nickname, just the girl’s nationality and price. Three hundred U.S. dollars for the Japanese girls. Two hundred fifty for the Egyptians. Only two hundred for mulattas from the Antilles. But Don Augusto shook his head when he looked at the offerings. This one is just a Brazilian—we can get Brazilians anywhere, and she only costs a hundred dollars. Don’t be shy. You can choose the best one—my treat. The best, of course, meant the most expensive. And in the end that was exactly what Don Augusto gave him: a terrified girl of thirteen or fourteen, no more beautiful than the others but with a more suitable card.

  Poland. Four hundred dollars.

  While their order was being prepared, Don Augusto gripped Carlos’s shoulder. It’s going to be four hundred dollars, he said, so you’d better tell me if she bleeds or not. Pay close attention; you never know with these whores. Some of them start working early, offering comfort to the sailors on the Atlantic crossing—they’re not even worth the clothes on their backs.

  Carlos shuddered. At the mention of blood, all he could think of was how on the first day his father had taken him hunting, he hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on any of the animals they’d found for him. All day long, monkeys and wild boars ambled nonchalantly before him, granted a stay of execution by his cowardice. In the end, Don Augusto had furiously snatched his rifle from him and shot them down one by one, piercing their flesh with astounding precision.

  The memory lasted only a moment. Someone had just opened the door to the private room, and when he looked up, the girl was already waiting for him.

  ◊

  Carlos knows the polite way to interact with dignified old women, housekeepers, mothers, sisters, chambermaids, and the pious nuns of the Order of Saint Clare, but he knows nothing about how to interact with whores who are really little girls more than they are whores. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t move at first. He hangs back, pressing against the door—We’ll let you two get to know each other better, his father said before shutting it—while the Polish girl sits on the edge of the bed and waits. She doesn’t seem to know what comes next any better than he does. She knows how to deal with Galician peasants, twelve siblings sleeping in a single bed, parents who will sell you for twenty kopeks, the rough crewmen of the Carpathia, but she knows nothing about customers who are really little boys more than they are customers. And maybe that’s why she is more frightened than she has ever been before, even more than when that drunken sailor tried to drag her to his cabin one dark Atlantic night on the crossing.

  Carlos speaks only Spanish, and the Polish girl speaks only Polish. For the first fifteen minutes, though, neither of them says a word. They just look around the room—the velvet drapes, the bars on the windows, the canopy bed she’s clinging to—as if the other person weren’t there. Then Carlos attempts to muster a few words of greeting. He says, Good evening, and the Polish girl doesn’t respond. My name is Carlos, what’s yours? And silence. Tomorrow’s my thirteenth birthday. He keeps trying out longer and longer sentences, slowly drawing nearer and sitting down beside her.

  He doesn’t want to look into her eyes, but eventually he can’t control his curiosity any longer and gives in. He expects to find in those eyes some trace of rage or pain, the mark of premature old age left by suffering, but instead he finds something else: the startled blue gaze of a girl faintly distressed by a broken porcelain figurine or a lost doll. It is then that he realizes that he’ll never do anything with her. That his birthday gift will be to disobey his father for once in his life. He wants to tell the girl that. He does tell her. He says: Don’t be afraid, because we’re not going to do it. We’ll sleep beside each other tonight, but we won’t even touch. Tomorrow I’ll still be a virgin and you’ll still cost four hundred dollars.

  She looks at him, unconvinced. She doesn’t trust him, of course, because she can’t understand the meaning of his words. Or perhaps because, in not understanding them, she is able to identify something deeper that lurks beneath them, between them, despite them—a terrible message Carlos himself knows nothing about.

  She is wearing a buttoned summer top, a long blue skirt, pink shoes. They have arranged her hair into two thick blond braids that snake down to her bust, which won’t offer much to look at for another couple of years. Out of the corner of his eye, Carlos can see, under the flounces and gauzy swaths of muslin, her tiny chest rapidly swelling and sinking like a frightened bird’s. He wants to tell her again not to be afraid, that she can trust him, but at that moment he stops. He sees her small hand slowly reach out and then clumsily touch his body in a trembling, hesitating movement. The gesture has something of a received instruction about it, of an order mechanically obeyed, as if she were administering an unpleasant-tasting medicine or completing paperwork. In his memory, the touch of those white fingers recalls something else. Perhaps the sensation of going back to the jungle. The exotic birds and monkeys he was unable to shoot, his father’s disappointment, the ride home. And associated with that memory are so many others: the little volumes of poetry hidden under his mattress, his mother’s sighs, the indecent drawings with their edges ragged from endless handling, his father’s words just before he had him climb into the coach. Being a man brings with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities. His father with a hand on his shoulder and smiling at him for the first time in a long time. His father waiting for him in the hall, maybe reading a newspaper, maybe flirting with one of the girls; her sitting on his knees and him explaining to her patiently, still smiling, that he’s a married man, that he’s here only for his son, that he’s so proud because his son is finally going to become a man.

  And then he looks at her. At the girl who quivers and obeys. She has as little desire to be there as he has and yet there she is, uncomplaining. It isn’t her birthday and she won’t be earning four hundred dollars, but all the same she is participating in this long chain of overseers, mademoiselles, sailors, and human traffickers. A puppet who first moves her hand and later will open her legs, just because Señor Rodríguez has pulled the right strings.

  He feels a cold sweat. An electric jolt runs down his back, partly because of those thoughts and partly because, almost without his willing it, his hand has begun to slide down her hip. The hand no longer seems to belong to his body. The girl bites her lip. Her tense little body remains motionless, and she stifles a yelp. Carlos closes his eyes. We’ll sleep beside each other tonight, but we won’t even touch, he says. Tomorrow I’ll still be a virgin and you’ll still cost four hundred dollars, he repeats, but still she doesn’t believe his words. Gradually he, too, has stopped believing them, because suddenly, behind his closed eyelids, he is imagining the girl leaving the room with her braids still intact, the madam laughing at the gift of four hundred dollars, his father icily shaking his head—he’s realized; he always knew—and then the lashes on his back with the leather strap and his mother’s prayers and the doctor prescribing spoonfuls of castor oil and summers in the mountains.

  But none of that will occur—the hand moving up her torso while she can only tremble; that hand, his hand, touching one of her breasts for the first time. It will not occur, because his father always gets what he wants and this time will be no different. If being a man means he has to c
rush the Polish girl’s body under the weight of his own, he’ll do it, he’ll press himself against her, that girl who looks like she still plays with dolls, holds afternoon tea parties, and practices embroidery. And it shouldn’t arouse him, but it does, and he shouldn’t start kissing her or undressing her, but he already has. The girl begins to breathe more heavily, trying not to urinate out of pure terror, and closes her eyes too because she finally believes him, because wordlessly she has understood his movements better than he has, understood the intentions of this terrible boy who is pushing on top of her, still wearing his trousers.

  He knows hardly anything about women’s bodies. He has a vague idea of the subject that becomes suddenly quite clear and painful, like the revelation experienced by a traveler who thought he knew the desert merely from studying it on a map.

  And so he feels himself burning against her body, which now feels as cold and remote as a sacrificial stone. He smells new odors that are somehow familiar. A salty taste he seems to recall from somewhere, as if it came to him in a long dream. As he tears at the bodice and yanks up her skirt, he thinks of the elderly housemaid, Gertrudis, and how patiently she dressed and undressed his sisters. When he feels the pure whiteness of the girl’s skin, which tastes like the sacramental host; when he hears the incomprehensible plaints of the suffering girl, praying, perhaps dying, in Polish, he thinks of his mother. When he lets all of the weight of his body sink into her, he doesn’t think about anything.

  Then, later, everything he has been doing suddenly pains him. He feels like crying. But the dampness on his cheeks is nothing compared to that other, more awful dampness, hot like a wound, underground like a disease, that he feels surrounding his sex. He hears the girl scream and then sees blood, a small smear of blood where his father told him it would be. Blood glistening on the jungle foliage. Red and black spattering the white sheets. He feels as if the rest of his body were the blade of a knife that only today, this very night, has been unsheathed.