When they drink, Carlos is forbidden to mention Georgina. Cristóbal doesn’t like to combine letters with alcohol—that is, work with life. Instead they talk about a great many other things, or rather Cristóbal talks about a great many other things while Carlos listens. He talks about the last covered ladies he met as a child. He talks about the scrivener’s ethic, which is as complex and strict as a priest’s but can ultimately be reduced to a single principle: never, ever swim against love’s tide. He recounts many memorable anecdotes from his professional life, such as the time a young woman asked him to compose a response to the letter he himself had written that morning.
Carlos listens patiently. Perhaps because those anecdotes are helping him write his own novel. Or perhaps because in fact, little by little, they are becoming friends. Or maybe just because the Professor is the only person with whom he feels that Georgina is alive, that in some way she actually exists.
“You know what? There was a time when I wanted to write novels and then sell them one by one, door to door.”
“And why didn’t you?” Carlos asks.
“Well, I did become a writer of a sort, don’t you think? I’ve invented quite a number of love stories . . . They say that when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, the young Germans who read it felt sorrow even more acute than the protagonist’s. They were so profoundly affected by his despair that apparently a wave of suicides washed over the nation. Think of it, the pragmatic Germans blowing their brains out because of love—well, because of Goethe, at least. But my efforts are no less worthy; because of me, a hundred people around Lima haven’t so much married a husband or a wife as they have my work . . . And so a person must take great care with words . . .”
That was another of his favorite topics: words.
“Most people believe my work is a sort of business deal, a simple exchange . . . the customers provide the emotions, and I provide the words. That’s the way they’d sum it up, at least in their heads. If only it were that easy!”
“So that’s not how it works?”
The Professor feigns horror.
“Of course not! Well, it might work that way for the illiterate. They come to me with a letter they cannot read and a piece of paper to answer it, and I am their eyes and their hands. For them, then, sure. But with the wealthy youth it’s a different story. Let’s say, for example, that you are the customer and you want me to write a love letter for you. Because while you no doubt write and read well, even very well, you don’t know what to say to your sweetheart. For instance. As you see it, the transaction is as we described it a moment ago: on one side, emotions; on the other, words. Very easy, or so it seems. But that’s not the way it is at all! Because before I give you those words, you don’t actually have anything. No, don’t look at me like that. You have nothing. You feel some things, of course, I’m not saying you don’t, but they are only the symptoms of an illness: rapid pulse, apathy, perspiration, melancholy, confusion, bouts of euphoria, dizzy spells, shortness of breath, fatigue, a sense of unreality . . . the whole lot. And you also have a natural inclination, of course, the emotions of a dog that wants to mount a bitch, that’s all. But love—where is it? It’s not there yet because nobody has given it words. Love is a discourse, my friend, it’s a serial novel, a narrative, and if it’s not written in your head or on paper or wherever, it doesn’t exist, it remains only half done; it is ever only a sensation that believes itself an emotion . . .”
“But you—”
“I write it. That’s what they come for, really, the swains and sweethearts, and that’s why they wait for hours under the punishing sun. They come so that I can write that emotion for them, show them what love should be, what they should feel. That’s what my business consists of. The important thing is not to gratify the sender—after all, I don’t even know him—so much as the customer, who comes for his romance the way a loyal reader goes for the latest installment of his serial novel. The more heartbroken the love I invent for them, the more wretched I make them on paper, the happier they leave. If you could see them, elated to feel all that nonsense! Because from that point on they will truly begin to feel it, and that’s what matters. And the same goes for the letters’ addressees, who also want someone to write them a beautiful story and are ready to fall in love with anyone who pulls it off. They look at themselves in the mirror of the other’s letter: if they like what they see, it’s a done deal. And when they get married, if they get married, it may be that one night the two of them will sit by the hearth to read the letters they sent to each other, and then they will remember—will believe—that they actually lived that tempestuous love story I created for them . . .”
Carlos fidgets on his stool.
“But what you’re saying can’t be true. There has to be something more . . . I mean . . . love is something more than words, isn’t it? It has to be. It’s something born deep within us, something that cannot be betrayed . . .”
He pounds his chest passionately as he speaks. But Cristóbal is unfazed.
“Deep within! Right, and a century ago, when thirteen-year-old girls were betrothed to doddering geezers without objecting in the slightest, tell me, didn’t those beauties have the same guts inside them that you do? I’ll tell you what was going on: back then people didn’t read romantic novels, and so nobody had given those girls the words to feel anything other than what they were feeling.” He stops and claps Carlos on the shoulder. “Open your eyes, my friend; love, as you understand it, was invented by literature, just as Goethe gave suicide to the Germans. We don’t write novels; novels write us.”
The Professor knocks back his drink in a single gulp. Then he looks at Carlos with curiosity, as if noticing his existence for the first time.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Christ, what else? Is there a woman in your life? A fiancée, a lover, anything of the sort? You should know that if you ever need to invent a good passionate story for her, I would be happy to do that for you. I’ve charged you in friendship.”
Carlos waves his hand weakly as if the question were somehow not pertinent.
“No, I . . . Actually, I don’t have anyone.”
Cristóbal rolls himself a cigarette as he listens.
“Why not? I mean, you’re quite a catch; you must have plenty of candidates. At the very least you have marriage in your future, I’d say.”
“Yes, but now’s not the time to be thinking about that. I have to focus on my studies. Also, my parents . . .”
He stops and looks away.
“Your parents what?”
“They’ll know how to find the woman who’s best for me,” he says at last, regaining his composure.
“Oh! I see.” Cristóbal smiles, his cigarette now between his lips. “My skills are of no use on that score in any event. But it’s good you’re taking it that way. Arranged marriages are the happiest ones—as long as you haven’t filled up your head with certain words, of course. If you wish to preserve that equanimity, promise me this: Avoid romantic novels at all cost! Those vile words will make a marriage go sour for no reason at all.”
Carlos doesn’t say anything for a while. He stares at the glass the Professor has just emptied.
“What about Georgina?” he says at last in a metallic voice that sounds so unlike his own. “So she isn’t in love either?”
Professor Cristóbal laughs so hard that his cigarette falls on the table and then rolls onto the tile floor. He is still laughing as he bends down to retrieve it.
“Oh, no! Your cousin is in love, of course she is . . . But that’s because, unlike you, she has read far too many novels.”
◊
Carlos is twenty years old. At that age his father was already making a living from his rubber plantations, and his mother was married and about to bring him, Carlos, into the world. And that’s nothing compared to his paternal grandfather, who at twenty was already dead—dead, with a widow and two orphaned children
, but without even the twelve soles needed to pay for a coffin; that’s how he was. There aren’t men like that anymore, Don Augusto often says. Men today are cut from a different cloth; at twenty they still act like children who want to keep larking about. The day will come when men still won’t have a wife or kids or a job or a house or even the desire to have any of those things by the time they’re thirty.
He’s exaggerating, of course, though he says it with such conviction, such seriousness, that you almost believe him.
But normally Don Augusto doesn’t waste his time philosophizing. Who knows what will happen with the youth of tomorrow, and who cares? It’s still 1904—actually, they just celebrated New Year’s Day of 1905. So much time has passed, and in that time, many letters, and Don Augusto has to focus on that for now. On that and on Carlos and his twenty years of age. On making sure the boy finishes his degree, beating the ius connubium and ius praecepta into him if necessary, and then, after he descends the steps of the university, leading him straight to the church to be married. But as the degree seems to be more of a long-term objective, it might be a good idea to look for the fiancée beforehand. Get the lay of the land, as Don Augusto says, which entails sending and receiving invitations to drink hot chocolate and eat pastries with Lima’s most distinguished young ladies. Helping Carlos choose a good match, or perhaps even arranging it for him. Men today, as Don Augusto knows quite well, are like children.
There’s no need to rush, of course, as marriage will soon be something only the poor do, only nobodies who have no inheritance awaiting them and can’t travel to Europe just to kick up their heels a bit. There’s no hurry, but there’s no harm in keeping his eyes open. Cultivating friendships in prominent circles and at social gatherings, with the hope of seeing powerful influences blossom in them. Opening a path for his son that will take him from the tearooms and foyers to the boudoir of one of the Tagle-Bracho daughters, or even a Quiroga. Get the lay of the land, open a path, cultivate, harvest—these are the sort of terms used by a man for whom life has never been anything more than a jungle to attack with machetes.
The Rodríguezes have it all except a last name and a past, so the ideal prospects for Carlos are young women from families that have lost it all except their last names and their pasts. The Sáez de Ibarras, their fortune squandered in the casinos and brothels of Lima. The Lezcárragas, recently fallen on hard times thanks to an unlucky business decision in the wine trade. The Ortiz de Zárate y Toñanes family, which frankly never did have much to its name beyond dubious links to a handful of national heroes. It is houses like those that the Rodríguezes honor with their visits on the first and third Wednesdays of every month. Only in those shabby parlors, in those enormous, servantless dining rooms, in those libraries sold volume by volume to ragpickers, does the Rodríguezes’ nouveau riche odor seem to go unnoticed; there is no better cure for an overly sensitive sense of smell than becoming nouveau pauvre.
But Don Augusto is looking for more than a daughter-in-law, as Carlos is well aware. He is worried less about his son’s marriage than about the possibility of using that marriage to project a fantasy that the Rodríguezes are finally aristocrats—indeed, that they always were. Ever since Carlos’s father was a boy, he has been obsessed with that idea, his desk piled high with books on heraldry and documents showing that in the last century the family was this or that. He never found any Spanish ancestor, let alone a rich one. Only Achuars or Quechuas, and half-breeds, and quadroons, who in the baptismal records are invariably listed as “peasants” or “sons of the people”—plus one great-great-grandfather whom a jesting priest labeled a “son of the earth.” But he must persist, paging through the manuscripts until he manages to turn the past into what it is supposed to be. Don Augusto has inherited the whites’ prejudices along with their money and manners, and it is always jarring for him to look in the mirror after having loudly declared in a café that the Indians must inevitably be slaves because of the blood running through their veins.
A genealogist convinced him that records of those illustrious dead could be found in the parish registers in Spain, and Don Augusto financed his trip across the globe to explore the motherland’s churches and chapels, an investigation that is still ongoing. After five years, two thousand five hundred soles—pesetas in Spain—and very few certainties, the scholar still occasionally sends letters with hopeful news. In the Santander cathedral he has found a Rodríguez who, if he is not mistaken, is Don Augusto’s grandfather’s great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather; there are some vague indications that the family may be related to the Duke of Osuna and three or four other Spanish grandees; a fifteenth-century baptism certificate could be the key that links the Rodríguezes to King Ferdinand, of Ferdinand and Isabella fame . . . and so on. Each new discovery justifies an outlay of a hundred or two hundred pesetas, which Don Augusto pays without hesitating.
In reality, his confidence in the genealogist is purely statistical. Don Augusto understands something of arithmetic; indeed, it could be argued that he has amassed his fortune thanks to his head for numbers—or rather, to be precise, to his ability to substitute numbers for people. When converted into figures, the genealogy issue is clearer in his head. It goes like this: He was born in 1853. Assuming twenty-five years for each generation, that means his parents (two of them) must have been born in about 1825, and his grandparents (four) in about 1800. None of them, according to the records, appear to have had noble blood. But why not keep going backward? He had 16 great-great-grandparents around 1750, 64 ancestors in 1700, and 1,024 around 1600. During the time of the conquest of Peru, there were at least 8,192 of his forebears roaming the earth. Was it really possible that they were all malodorous Incas, that none of them had come ashore from the ships of Pizarro and de Almagro? And so on: 262,144 in 1400; 4,194,304 in 1300; no fewer than 67,000,000 humans in about 1200. Had not a single one of them a coat of arms, a quartered shield to bequeath to him? It was practically redundant to confirm it; statistically speaking, they’d already been made nobles, were perhaps even the descendants of kings. Yet patience, and a smidgen of humility, prevent him from going all the way back to the first century. Something tells him that at that point he would have so many millions of ancestors, so very many, that it would have to include the world’s entire population, even Jesus Christ Himself, if it weren’t heresy to think such a thing in the first place.
For his part, Carlos prefers to know nothing of his father’s aspirations. Sometimes he even manages to convince himself that nobody is thinking about the question of his marriage with any seriousness, that his family is making and receiving all these visits for exactly the reason it seems: the pleasure of talking about the weather and ranting about the government, eating pastries, and exchanging home remedies for migraines. Counting the angels that pass, one by one, during the conversation’s many awkward silences. But to understand the truth, he has only to watch any one of the young ladies arrive, decked out as if for a wedding—her own?—and hear her mother taking every opportunity to comment on how hard-working Aurorita or Cristinilla is. And Aurora and Cristina and Jimena and Mariana look a little at him and a little at the brocade curtains, the embossed silverware, or the dazzling gold of the galleries and bedchambers, as if all of it—son, house, precious objects—were being offered as a packaged set.
And so for a while he feels a cold sweat every time a receiving day approaches. He wants to tell his father to stop looking. That he doesn’t want to find a wife, that he’s not going to go down to the parlor today, no matter that Fermín Stevens’s seven charming daughters have come to visit. But in the end he always gives in, and later, in the dead of night, he feels a pressure on his chest that keeps him from sleeping. As if his father had sat down on top of him and were staying very still, staring at him. He remembers the Professor. Could it really be true that words can cause harm? Not just the words one reads but, and especially, those one utters. Those from which, now so long ago, Georgina was once born. Because
today Georgina seems much more real than the succession of women, some of them still girls, who parade through his house day in and day out, petulant and flustered.
What would he do if Georgina were one of them? Would he recognize her? Would he request her company? Would he tell his father, The Hübners are the best family for us?
Some of the girls he receives are pretty, but Carlos doesn’t even notice. He’s spent his whole life looking at cartoons and postcards of women as if they were flesh and blood, and now he is looking at the parade of flesh-and-blood women as if it were a well-worn deck of postcards and cartoons. Characters taken from a novel that has been closed and forgotten. Georgina, on the other hand . . . Because only when he thinks about her is the burden on his chest alleviated, as if someone had made his father get up and leave the room. As if what he senses on his body were not pressure but the lightest touch of a caress, so delicate that he has to close his eyes just to feel it. It is Georgina, coming to visit him. Or not, but what does it matter? It’s better not to open his eyes so he can keep believing it, or to open them and see her at last, because she is not like the others. She is not interested in the drapes or the etchings or the silverware. Georgina wants to look at him—only at him.
◊
And then the novel grinds to a halt.
The Sky Over Lima Page 10