“This is Cora, the young heiress of the Incas, granddaughter of the grandson of the granddaughter of Atahualpa himself . . .
“The one winking at you is Catalina. She’s as Russian as the czar and so affectionate she’d melt the glaciers of Siberia . . .
“That’s our dear Mimí. The lustful blood of the French runs through her veins . . .”
Each of the girls has been given something like a Homeric epithet—Cayetana of the sweet kisses; Teresita, shy by day and pure fire at night—and before he chooses, Carlos chuckles to himself just thinking about that, about Homer and The Iliad. It’s not really funny—it’s a joke for drunken intellectuals—but he laughs anyway.
◊
The one he’s chosen has a name too, but Carlos has already forgotten it. An eternity has passed since he met her in the hall—almost ten minutes—and the last swig of whiskey has scattered the madam’s words until they seem very far away. He vaguely remembers the girls, many of them quite young, waiting for him to choose and watching him with something that might have been desire or hope or boredom. Who the hell has he chosen? Antonia, the novitiate with earthly appetites? Or maybe Marieta with the unfettered imagination? Who knows, and who cares.
In the bedroom he discovers that she’s not even pretty. How could she be, when she’s not the protagonist of any novel? She has the discreet beauty of secondary characters, designed to entertain for a single chapter and then disappear without a trace. Perhaps aware of her modest role in Georgina’s novel, she doesn’t even open her mouth. She only sits on the edge of the bed, attempting to smile, waiting.
In the room, nothing happens. Though one might also say that many things happen. He takes off his coat. He tosses back his drink. He murmurs a few words—expectantly, she responds with other words, or maybe with just a smile. He feigns a sudden interest in the window latch. He consults his watch. He lights a cigarette. Then stubs it out. Nothing, to be sure, to justify the five soles he will later pay the madam. At some point, with all that nothing happening, the girl decides to take the initiative. The resulting scene is imbued with a peculiar sadness: clumsy caresses, the creaking bed, hands touching places that, no, not on your life. The bodies in a state of half undress, their movement suddenly ceasing. An apology.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You have nothing to be sorry for, sir,” she says.
There is a grandfather clock somewhere, and the sound of its weights and gears makes the silences even more profound.
“I’ve had too much to drink.”
“You should rest, then.”
“But I’m going to pay you anyway. Of course I’m going to pay you. I’ll pay you for the whole night.”
“Please don’t worry about that right now.”
Carlos shifts uneasily on the bed. He should add something, but he doesn’t know what. Or he should at least fill the silence by lighting a cigarette, but his jacket pocket is too far away. She smiles.
“Would you like to tell me what’s worrying you?”
Carlos opens his mouth and then closes it again. Antonia, or María, or Jimena counts to ten. When she finishes, she reaches out her hand to stroke his back. Slowly. It’s her way of telling him that she’s ready for the thing she’s second best at in the world: listening. She’s not all that interested in what Carlos might tell her, of course, but in a way she considers it part of her job. After all, it’s 1905 and psychologists don’t exist yet. Priests in their confessionals and whores in their brothels are the only people who help unburden men’s consciences. She uses all the experience of her profession to ask a single question:
“You’re out of sorts because you’re thinking about another woman, aren’t you?”
Carlos turns for a moment to look at the mouth that has uttered those words. Her voice is very sweet, much sweeter than a psychoanalyst’s would be. But then, when he doesn’t respond immediately, the girl apologizes. Forgive me, she says. Forgive my rudeness. You needn’t answer. But the young man is drunk and wants to answer, and after a few moments he does so, cautiously, slowly, choosing his words carefully.
He says:
“No.”
And then:
“I don’t know.”
And finally:
“I suppose so.”
He doesn’t know why he’s answered that way. He feels an enormous sorrow and yet a tiny consolation: the touch of her hand on his body. And perhaps because it’s so quiet and he feels that something more should be said, he adds: She loves someone else. A man named Juan Ramón, he says. A man named José, he corrects himself. Or maybe neither one, who knows; it’s complicated, he says at last.
But the girl doesn’t find it all that complicated. To her, all rich people’s problems look like mere variations on the same hollow, insipid problem.
A pat on the shoulder. “I understand,” she says, though she doesn’t really.
And then, since the gentleman has paid for the whole night, they blow out the oil lamp and pretend to fall asleep, but even in the dark they both keep their eyes wide open.
It is the first time a customer has rejected her, and she thinks of nothing else until daybreak. Of that and of Cayetana, the whore from Cusco. The older customers say she used to be stunningly beautiful, but today Cayetana is just a fat, sad woman to whom age has not been kind and who washes the dishes and cleans the bedrooms because nobody wants to sleep with her anymore. Only a few old men, plus Señor Hunter, who is quite young but blind and doesn’t much care what body he’s mounting. And now she wonders about the first time a customer didn’t want to sleep with Cayetana and how long it took the others to follow his lead. When did she start to get old, to make beds that other women would unmake the next day? And then the girl thinks about herself, about her twenty-five years of age, about her breasts that will gradually cease to be firm—but that can’t be the issue, impossible, because the gentleman hasn’t even seen them—about the unsightly, hairy mole on her neck that Madame Lenotre’s doctor didn’t allow her to remove; and now, finally, she imagines young, blind Señor Hunter in a few years, perhaps fewer than she thinks, Señor Hunter only a little less young but just as blind, running his trembling hands over her body and whispering in her ear, “Me too, baby, I’m all alone now too.” She shudders.
And as for what Carlos is thinking, it’s best not to say anything at all.
◊
Lima, June 19, 1905
My dearest friend,
You must forgive me these lines, even my handwriting . . . Oh, I am quite irate! As you can see, even the hand with which I grip my pen and trace these letters is quivering. Yes, I know—the etiquette manuals say that a young lady should be prudent and demure and not express any intense or excessive emotions. But I daresay there are moments when the soul cannot be gagged or thwarted. Don’t you agree? And tonight my fury is such that prim old Saturnino Calleja and his rules of decorum would certainly disapprove, but I hope that you, my dear friend, will be able to forgive me. Who else but you, the loyal confidant of my every thought, even these that go so contrary to all propriety!
It is my friend Carlota who has put me in this state. Have I mentioned her to you before? Though we are joined, it’s true, by a long-established friendship, we are also divided by a great many differences! This afternoon I made the mistake of sharing the secret of these letters with her. You should have seen how she looked at me, how scandalized she was! She finds these missives we send each other quite unseemly: they are so very long, so frequent, so personal. With a stranger!—you can imagine the to-do. That I could so freely send you these letters, which go beyond mere politeness, six letters in a single envelope, and six envelopes on a single ship, and in them revealing so many private things . . . If she had her way, you and I would discuss nothing more stimulating than the weather. The rains that fall in Madrid and the summer heat that scorches the fields of my beloved Lima, or the state of your mother’s health. Or, better still, we would never have exchanged a letter at all, becaus
e what reason on earth would I have for asking you for a book, and what reason beyond that would you have for giving it to me? She stopped just short of calling me brazen! Tell me, please, that you are shaking with rage as I am. Or do you agree with her? Do you believe, as she does, that I am just a capricious, ill-mannered girl, a vulgar girl whose audacity is offensive or, at best, amusing? Oh, do not be so cruel! It would give me such pain to hear those words from your lips—or, rather, from your hand and pen.
No: I know that you share my view of it. That you too are of the belief that in a conversation between two spirits there must be neither sheriffs nor jailers, and the only protocols, those imposed by their own consciences. Even if the catechisms of propriety declare in the relevant chapter that a young lady “has the duty first to give her letters over to her parents in complete confidence” and that her replies “must express her intentions clearly, without circumlocutions to muddy them.” But oh! What if one’s intentions are precisely that—to make everything an enormous circumlocution, and for those unnecessary words to, in some way, be the language of one’s soul? Tell me, please, that you understand me. That you wish, as I do, to keep writing these letters—to speak tonight, to speak tomorrow, to speak always.
But let us forget my friend and her dogmas and address each other, please, as we once were accustomed to do. Let me tell you a few more things—so many that I wish this letter would never end . . .
◊
At last it is time to tell the tale of the philanthropic rat, a tale that no one has told and no one ever will if we don’t take this opportunity to remedy the situation. It is a rat like so many others, Rattus norvegicus. It has shoved off on the Buenos Aires–La Coruña route in the same transatlantic steamer countless times before, though it knows nothing of the existence of La Coruña or Buenos Aires; indeed, it is reasonable to suppose that it believes in no world beyond the hold of its ship. The universe is three hundred feet long and sixty across, and in it the rat lives out its wee life, an endless night full of barrels and boxes and burlap sacks. Like so many workers, it has found a way to eke out a living from the transatlantic mail: it nests in the warmth of the sacks of correspondence, gnaws at the delectable sealing wax, feeds on the letters that crisscross the ocean once every four weeks. It has a special fondness for envelopes adorned with official letterheads, the typed pages that always begin with the same words: The government of Argentina regrets to inform you. And so its tiny stomach gradually fills with sorrowful news that will never be read, and in a way that is where that news deserves to be, because why should a mother have to learn that her emigrant son has been carried off by tuberculosis; why not allow her to grow old still believing that the blood of her blood has found in the Americas the fortune that so many dream of? There are some things a person is better off knowing only halfway, or knowing another way, or not knowing at all, and if José and Carlos were writing a fantasy novel, if they believed that the supernatural could insinuate itself into an otherwise realistic tale, we would say that the rat shares that view. That in some murky way it has learned to identify the tragic or needless letters, the ones that should never have been written, much less sent. But admitting such a thing would be the stuff of another genre, one in which the two young authors are not prepared to founder; as we have already noted, their novel is or aspires to be a realistic one—sometimes comedy, sometimes love story, and sometimes even tragedy, but ultimately realistic. They are interested only in the romance between Georgina Hübner and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and not in the life of a rat that reads, and judges, and feels pity for mankind. Such a thing is impossible, and, what’s worse, it would ruin their story.
Let’s agree, then, that the only reason the rat devours the letters is hunger. Let’s also agree that its predilection for sad letters arises from some fact unknown to us—maybe bad news is simply more abundant than good; maybe the rat prefers ink-soaked paper, and, as everyone knows, conveying happiness does not require so many words. It feeds on news that would cause its intended recipient pain, and today it has come to Georgina’s twenty-fifth letter to Juan Ramón. It has already pardoned one Spanish emigrant’s first message home to his family—Buenos Aires is huge, Mother, you would be amazed, larger than Santander, Torrelavega, and Laredo put together—and gnawed at the news of a homely daughter who miraculously had seemed on the verge of betrothal but who, in the end, was not. Now it stops at Georgina’s letter. It sniffs it with its greedy snout. It prepares for the first bite, its little lips drawn back over its teeth, perhaps intoxicated by the scent of the writing paper. One might say—but really it is only a manner of speaking—that it understands the envelope’s poisonous contents, that it knows that so far Georgina has been for Juan Ramón no more than a small everyday satisfaction, no more significant than a sunny afternoon or an unexpected visit from a friend, and now that clutch of letters is about to change everything. If Juan Ramón reads one more letter, there will be no fixing it; he will have fallen utterly in love with Georgina, transformed her into the muse with melancholy eyes and smoky candles who presides over his poems, and then what began as a comedy—two poets playing both at being poor and at being a woman—will end as a tragedy: a man attempting to make love to a ghost. Everything depends on whether the rat eats the letter or doesn’t, but obviously in the end it doesn’t, because if the letter were to disappear, the novel would end along with it, and it is to continue on for many pages more.
And so from this point on the book becomes a tragedy, there’s no other option—and the rat is entirely to blame. The letter will arrive and the besotted poet will want to travel to Peru to ask for Georgina’s hand, and then what will the poor poets do, those boys with scanty mustaches who only a year ago were squatting on the ground, pissing pisco? And tragedy befalls the rat, too, which will never get the chance to gnaw at the envelope. The sailor on watch comes down to look for a piece of cargo and out of the corner of his eye spots movement in the mail sack; then comes the broom brandished in the air, the desperate chase, the shouting, stomping, curses, blows, the refuge that is not reached in time, the crack of the broom against the tiny body. Once, twice, three times. And, afterward, the ascension to the heavens: the rat is carried topside by its tail and, its eyes faltering as it dies, sees that other world whose existence it never suspected—the unknown deck of the ship and above it the blue sky in the middle of nowhere, halfway between La Coruña and Buenos Aires.
This has been life, it has time to think as it is tossed overboard, and this, it perhaps thinks as it sinks under the waves, this must be death.
III
A Tragedy
◊
After that first night, Carlos returns to the brothel every weekend. The girl is more surprised about this than anyone, as she had not expected to remain part of the novel.
Since the last chapter, she too seems to have undergone a number of changes. She is still a secondary character, it’s true, but now there is something subtly protagonistic about her. She even seems a bit more beautiful than before, and so it is a little less inexplicable that he wants to see her again. Perhaps her seemingly insignificant life deserves a few lines of attention—a whole page even.
But Carlos will never read any of the words relaying her humble tale. He will never see her attic room, the bed she shares with Mimí and Cayetana. He will not watch them sleep in one another’s arms or fight over the large bottle of perfume. Sometimes they laugh together, remembering a particular old man or a particular crooked cock, and he will never know anything of that laughter either. Hidden under the mattress there may be a photograph of a woman, clumsily patched and repaired, as if someone had torn it to shreds in rage and then remorsefully attempted to piece it back together. A single armoire for all of them, and in it this girl’s one street gown, which reeks of mothballs because it’s been so long since a customer has taken her out. Not even Carlos has. In front of the barred window, a chair to sit in, to gaze out at a world she barely remembers. And downstairs in Madame Lenotre’s room,
there’s the account book that explains the need for the bars, noting that, in addition to the cost of food, laundry, and beauty products, not to mention the cost of two abortions and one molar extraction, the girl owes the house a total of three hundred forty-five soles.
One page. That’s more than enough for now. After all, her rickety bed and the book of debts and the pieced-together photograph and the bars on the window will never be important enough to appear in Georgina’s novel.
◊
He doesn’t even touch her. At least that’s what she says, and the girls are intrigued by the revelation. Customers with all manner of perverse predilections have passed through the brothel, but that particular deviancy—paying five soles a night in exchange for nothing—is unquestionably the most extravagant of all.
Whenever they see him sitting in the hall, shifting his hat restlessly from one hand to the other, the girls laugh. They call him Mr. Gob-Smacked. Your beau, Mr. Gob-Smacked, is here, they tell her, and she smiles or gets angry, depending on her mood. Mostly she gets angry. Anyone would say she’s beginning to have feelings for him. Or maybe what she’s really interested in are his generous tips. In any event, she sternly tells them to be quiet while she fixes her hair or adjusts her earrings, and then the girls laugh harder, and the madam scolds them—Shush, you ninnies, he’s going to hear you—in vain:
The Sky Over Lima Page 17