The Sky Over Lima

by Juan Gómez Bárcena

  As that look stretches on, Elizabeth strives to seem dignified and beautiful at once. And perhaps she manages it, because José has just bent down to kiss her. She submits docilely to his kiss. Artlessly, the way the whores are taking in the last caress of the sun and the spray of the waves. Every bit of her shivers, softens with the heat of that contact; his body moves slowly over hers—the carriage creaks, wallows—and an underground, aquatic movement seems to uncoil in that embrace. As if something of the sea, of the provocative beauty of the bathers, had slipped in under the checkered blanket.

  Carlos averts his eyes; it seems that he too has in him a bit of scandalized maidenhood hiding behind a raised fan. And when he looks away, his eyes meet Madeleine’s. The eyes of the homely sister, who is no longer looking at the floor, who is looking at him—the homely sister, at him—and smiling at him at that. Maybe she is expecting something. Or perhaps she too is trying to seem both dignified and beautiful at once, though surely she knows it would require a miracle to achieve the latter. In any case, it is a performance without a public, because Carlos shifts uneasily, clears his throat; he’s already stopped looking at her. He hesitates a moment. Then he strikes the roof with his cane and shouts to the coachman that it’s getting late, it’s time to go home.

  ◊

  From that point on, Georgina changes rapidly. More rapidly even than José loses interest—after only two or three dates with Elizabeth, he decides he’s had more than enough. Though those clandestine encounters leave no mark on his life, they leave one on Georgina’s. José amuses himself by incorporating Elizabeth’s attributes into his letters: her insubstantial chatter, her naive coquetry, her almost endearing credulity, her concern for the disadvantaged. Even a light touch of her natural inclination toward melodrama (“Why are you doing this to me, José? If you leave me, I am capable of anything! Anything, I tell you!”).

  But he concentrates most of his attention on including more and more references to the little mestiza housemaid, who for him has always been Georgina. And the others do more or less the same thing: fill the letters with any woman who comes to mind, especially those they know well. When somebody, let’s say a vaudeville dancer, sits on Ventura’s knee and murmurs some indelicate phrase in his ear, he softens it a bit and assigns it straightaway to Georgina. Maids, prostitutes, cabaret singers, florists: they all throw in their two cents—the modest ration of words allotted to each. A Georgina who evokes less and less the innocence of the Polish prostitute and more the eagerness with which the Gálvezes’ maid groped between the young master’s legs. Her letters are different now:

  But I must tell you that I am also impulsive and fervent, and at times I feel my chest consumed by the bonfire of an unknown passion . . . Something like a mad desire to live and be happy. A feeling of which the rest know nothing and that I can only barely mask. Except with you, my friend! You who with each letter are gradually unraveling all my secrets . . . !

  Or perhaps:

  Sometimes I think a woman is a little like a flower that blooms, hoping for something that it does not know and yet desires, desires so fiercely!

  Or even:

  I do not know, my dear Juan Ramón, whether what I am saying is right or wrong: I know only that the body sometimes feels strange and beautiful things of which the spirit knows nothing, and that disregarding such beauty might itself also constitute some category of sin . . .

  Carlos is reluctant to copy down these fancies. No, that sentence isn’t going in the letter, not a chance; Georgina’s not like that, over his dead body. But in the end he always gives in. What else can he do? His character has ceased to belong to him, and José is becoming increasingly inflexible in his decisions. Sometimes Carlos thinks of Georgina, the real one, as if she were a friend who has died, and many nights he wants to weep for his friend—his friend?—just as years ago he allowed himself to be flogged for the sake of muses who existed only in books. I’ve been telling you to think less and screw a little more, José says, emboldened by his friends’ laughter; maybe that chubby American girl, you know who I mean. You had the whole back seat there to do her the favor and you didn’t, Carlotita, you ungrateful lout. If a woman’s value were calculated by the ounce, you’d have been letting a real treasure get away.

  Ventura and the others laugh. They weren’t there, they didn’t see the fat, homely sister with her enormous mole, but even so they’re sure she really is fat and homely, and so they laugh.

  When he’s alone, Carlos rereads the drafts of the letters. And also Juan Ramón’s replies, which are growing ever longer and more affectionate and which have gradually begun to fill with intimate confidences, with little secrets. It seems the Maestro isn’t bothered by the new Georgina. Worse still, anyone would say he prefers her, a grotesque scarecrow whose words reek of absinthe and whiskey. And of opium, especially opium, because by now most of the chapters are worked out in the rear of a building on Calle del Marqués that serves as a corset shop by day and a clandestine smoking den by night. It was Ventura who first told them that no Montmartre bohemian ever wrote a line without first inhaling the dense smoke of the pipes and hookahs, and after that nobody could get the idea out of José’s head.

  They visit the establishment two or three times a week. It’s a small, poorly ventilated place run by Chinese immigrants. The space is divided by partitions and folding screens that reveal mysterious scenes: silhouettes that laugh, that dance, that clasp one another in prolonged embraces, that slumber and go quiet for many hours at a time. Even the smoke, so dark and heavy, seems to have a silhouette. Each nook is furnished with a smoking pipe and a few reed mats and cushions where they recline to smoke until their eyes start to wander and their smiles go dull. Sometimes they talk about the letters, or women, or they recite their own poems, which sound like extended yawns. Or they don’t talk about anything; they just fall asleep, and the Chinese owners go silently from one alcove to another, covering their bodies with blankets or sheepskins, refilling the opium in the pipes, carrying bowls of some dubious potion that the poets languidly drink.

  Carlos joins them against his will. Such a place, he feels, can produce only a character in tune with the setting. That is, a dull, indolent Georgina who laughs at the slightest provocation, who has a glassy look to her eyes and occasionally says inappropriate things. Foolish things that, like the smoke, take a long time to dissipate.

  But it’s not just about Georgina. Carlos is also alarmed by the relaxation the drug produces in his own body. With each puff he feels as if the mask screwed to his face, the one that is always able to simulate the appropriate expression, were gradually loosening and melting. And who knows what he might be hiding under there—he, of course, has long since forgotten. And so he is afraid. Sometimes, in the depths of his prostration, it seems to him that a woman comes and sits beside him, whispers something in his ear. It is, perhaps, Georgina, but a real Georgina. She emerges from the smoke with all the purity of the very first missives, free of smudges, of incoherencies, of emendations. She kneels at the foot of the mat and touches his head for a moment. It seems to him that she smiles. And then they have long conversations that leave no words or memories, only the feverish taste of smoke, inundating his lungs like an icy, protracted vertigo, a spiral that drags and blurs the outlines of things and behind which only Georgina remains constant. Her gaze, her smile. Her kiss; Georgina’s kiss. The chill of her lips on his, her porcelain touch.

  “Dlink,” she says. “Dlink is good,” she adds, inexplicably. And he drinks, drinks infinitely from that kiss, until he empties the bowl that someone is holding to his lips.

  ◊

  Moguer, May 8, 1905

  My dear friend:

  Will you allow me to call you “dear,” to call you “friend”? It has been four weeks since I’ve had news of you. Your charming letters must be waiting for me in the mailbox of my residence in Madrid; and, knowing that, it is all the more puzzling that I am still here, a full month spent in my boyhood home in Mogue
r, surrounded by relatives and relics of another era. Of excruciatingly sad lights and aromas with which I cannot even make poetry, with which I can no longer do anything.

  You spoke in your last letter of your own sorrows that also bear your loved ones’ visages and are set in your own home. A home that I imagine resembles the sort you see in engravings, with whitewashed walls and palm trees, with straight windowsills and severe façades and a well with a pulley. All stone and rigor, just like your upbringing with your father, who no doubt loves you but who, perhaps, through loving you too much, poor thing, makes you miserable. You spoke of the bowels of that piano where you hide your secrets, these humble letters of mine among them. Of your tiny, fragile chest, which seems to grow even smaller when your father approaches. How could I not understand you, I who between these walls feel the presence of my own father’s ghost? His dead eyes that now see everything, against which keys and drawers are now useless. His threadbare words reviving old accusations: abandoning my law studies, and the mad notion of becoming a painter, and then the even madder notion of becoming a poet—that’s what my father would say. That’s what he says now in a voice growing louder and more certain, in my ears, all the time. Here, in what was his house, he sounds ever more powerful.

  And then there are the voices of the others, of the living, of us, the family members who stayed here and have nothing to talk about but money and rents. As if my father were only that: the debts he left, which we divide up the way one would the weight of a burdensome, jet-black coffin. The words debase, they soil things; one’s mouth is tarnished by talking about pesetas, partitions, inheritances. We are gradually turning into nickel and metal, growing stiff and cold as the music of a coin. I fear that the mere mention of it has also tarnished this letter.

  You ask me to tell you what I have been doing and writing. And yet I do and write so little! You, by contrast, do so much, you describe so many trips and meetings with girlfriends and walks along that street they call Jirón de la Unión that I must confess to feeling a little embarrassed at the indolence with which I watch the hours pass—watch them die, because everything dies. Nothing out of the ordinary to recount, except that I am sometimes happy and sometimes miserable. Everything that happens in reality takes place inside my head, or, if you prefer, within the confines of my own soul. (By the way, you haven’t said what you think of that little poem I sent you about the soul of things.) What do I do? you ask. I am afraid you will be disappointed: I do little more than walk. Now around Moguer and its environs, and previously through the cold streets of Madrid. I walk as if in a trance, and I tend to forget my hat and my cane wherever I go. I wander through the Retiro, an enormous park. You would adore it, Georgina. A little green slice of Madrid into which all of Moguer, with its diminutive houses and its river and its sad yellow fields, could easily fit. There is also a pond full of ducks and boats, and beside it a wafer seller whom I stop to observe a long while. An old man with wafers and other sweets, spinning a wheel of fortune. Sometimes the customer wins and sometimes he loses—does Lima have that sort of confection, are you familiar with such a thing?—but the peddler always smiles. Nothing seems to matter to him beyond the act of watching the wheel spin, of doling out his delights. And I would like to be a bit like him: to have the spirit of a dog or a child. Of a statue that welcomes sun and rain alike with the same smile, that does not despair or understand or suffer, that only goes to its usual corner to keep being what it is, what it can never cease to be.

  And sometimes, why not admit it to you, dear Georgina—let’s agree that you have allowed me that license: to call you dear, to call you friend—I imagine you are walking with me. It would be such a lovely comfort for me, a light with which to clear away such gloomy clouds. Because as I walk out there, I go within myself to craft the reply I will give you on my return. You could say that some of my letters are worked out step by step, that I write them with my feet, and sometimes without my cane or hat—if I told you how often I leave them somewhere, you wouldn’t believe me. I even go walking within my own room, pacing back and forth like a captive animal that is nevertheless gentle and sad; I measure out the dimensions of my cage as I await a letter, a familiar hand, the stamps and seals of a certain far-off country. A square cell six paces on each side, bed and washbasin in the center; a total of twenty-four, and then starting over again. If I had taken all those paces in your direction—and if I could walk on the ocean, which is no small thing to imagine—where do you think I would have gotten to by now? My calculations, made with the assistance of an atlas with which I amuse myself in bed, have allowed me to estimate that I’d find myself more or less in the Sargasso Sea. That briny deep where the sea suddenly becomes unmoving land, a shipyard in which one neither comes nor goes. So lieth my soul! To tell the truth, that sea does not appear in my atlas, and I cannot say for sure whether it might be a fable or a myth, but it exists at least in our understanding, which is almost as if it existed in real life.

  I would like to reach you, to reach Peru, which also exists but could just as easily not exist—or, rather, I would like for it to be you on my arm as we walked through the tranquil twilit avenues of Madrid. Perhaps you would like to walk with me, and perhaps you would also like for us to stop awhile as we treat ourselves to a wafer or two. Because I would most certainly give you one, Georgina, I would give you a hundred; something tells me that luck would smile on us for one, ten, fifty spins of that wheel. We could gorge ourselves, and laugh, and the wafer seller would laugh along with us. And if I had a photograph of you, Georgina, even if it were only one, I would know what face to affix to those walks that you and I take every morning, every night for you there in Lima. Will you share with me a portrait of the angels’ smile? Will I come to know the countenance that is the inverse of my own self, that abides in the antipodes of my soul? Will you tell me, at the very least, whether you are partial to those sweet treats I offer you on our walks . . . ?

  ◊

  “I find your cousin utterly changed of late. I think I liked her better before.”

  “I think I did too,” Carlos says at last, without looking at him.

  The Professor drops the latest letter onto the pile.

  “Well! Fortunately, the Spanish poet doesn’t share our view.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He points at the stack of envelopes.

  “Just read the last few letters, my friend. I’d say he’s starting to fall in love. I’m telling you, it’s going to take a letter or two at most. Good luck for your cousin and for you, and bad luck for me! After the wedding you’re not going to need me, of course. It’s a shame the custom is to write letters to woo women and not to keep them.”

  Carlos’s face darkens.

  “You think so?”

  “That you don’t use letters to keep a woman?”

  “No, that there’s going to be a wedding.”

  “My dear fellow, I’d say so. When a man and a woman do what these two are doing . . . the business generally ends in a wedding. Unless your cousin surprises us again and she’s the one who starts resisting the betrothal.”

  “But they don’t even know each other!” replies Carlos, practically shouting.

  The Professor tosses back his glass of pisco and wipes the moisture from his lips with his shirt cuff.

  “Well, so what? That doesn’t seem to have gotten in the way before now. Also, from what I can tell, the Spanish poet is stirred up enough to come track her down. You don’t agree? Look at that photograph. And that portrait of Juan Ramón. He’s got the cadaverous aspect of the romantic sort of poet who blows his brains out at his lover’s grave. Don’t deny it. And didn’t you say he’d been in three sanatoriums because of failed love affairs?”

  “It was only two.”

  “Same difference! Listen to me, I’ve got twenty-three years of experience with this sort of thing. It’s all in here, believe me. Suggests a passionate sort with little regard for consequences. And your cousin must be delighted, s
o there’s no reason to fret, am I right?”

  Carlos doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look up. He stares at his hands as if he didn’t recognize them.

  “Come now, why so glum? You don’t seem too pleased for your cousin. And didn’t we agree that the most important rule was never to swim against love’s tide? Let’s drink to them, then, and not discuss it any further. As you see, I’m even violating my policy of never combining drink and work, and I’m only doing it for them—that is, for you.”

  He snaps his fingers.

  “Jorge! Bring two more glasses for my friend and me. We’ve got a lot to celebrate.”

  “What’s the happy news?” asks the waiter from the kitchen.

  “Some friends of ours are getting married.”

  “That calls for some whiskey, at least! No, no, I insist—it’s on the house.”

  He takes the bottle and fills two glasses to the brim.

  “To the happy couple!” exclaims the Professor.

  Carlos hesitates a few moments longer. He stares at Cristóbal’s raised glass. Finally he raises his own.

  “To the happy couple,” he replies.

  ◊