“Is he courting you to ask for your hand in marriage?”
“Has he introduced you to his parents?”
“Remember us when you’re a grand lady!”
As a customer he’s very easy to satisfy. There’s no need to check his thighs for syphilis sores or wash his cock in the sink. No need to fake panting or call him “master” or “stud” or shout out the ridiculous words that her customers find so arousing. All she has to do is lie beside him and talk if the gentleman wants to talk or simply be quiet if, as is sometimes the case, he prefers to spend the night smoking and staring at the ceiling. Sometimes he asks her about her life, and then she shrugs her shoulders and talks about her shared bed and the closed wardrobes, the endlessly increasing debts, the window bars. At other times it is Carlos who, taking the cigarette from his mouth, delivers some meaningless anecdote.
“I took an exam today.”
“I went to the docks yesterday. The dockworkers earn exactly the same amount that they did before, but now there’s not a single one protesting.”
“This morning I ran into Ventura and he asked me if I’d heard from José and I told him I hadn’t—it seems no one’s heard from him in weeks.”
Afterward he stubs out the cigarette, and as he does so, he lets the sentence trail off, as if he were erasing it. In some way these confessions seem to be linked to the act of smoking those cigarettes and then putting them out, grinding them fiercely against the metal ashtray.
One night he tells her he’s a poet. He looks at her solemnly when he says it, as if assessing the effect the news will produce. She doesn’t respond immediately. She doesn’t know much about poets except that they’re very poor men, practically beggars, who always end up dying of tuberculosis. And Carlos, who is always so hale and well dressed, doesn’t seem to be either of those things. A little thin, perhaps, though that probably doesn’t matter. So she smiles and even nods with feigned enthusiasm when he asks her if by chance she would like to hear one of his poems. Straightaway he pulls out a sheet of paper and reads for a long time in a voice that doesn’t sound like his. At first she interrupts him to ask the meaning of certain words. Then she doesn’t say anything. She lets gossamer and diadem and alabaster echo sterilely without opening her mouth. When he finishes, Carlos asks her if she liked it and she hastens to say she did, forcing a smile. And she adds: But you are getting quite thin, sir, you should eat a little more and get your strength up—they’ve just reported another tuberculosis epidemic around here.
Sometimes he doesn’t talk or look at the ceiling, and those are her favorite nights. The nights when he lies beside her and pretends to be thinking about trifling things but in reality is looking at her, only at her. It is a new look, one that seems to belong to that other world she can glimpse through the bars, and for a moment it makes her feel less like a whore. She senses that, in a way, he is not looking at her, not touching her—that what he seeks in her body is the shadow or memory of another woman. But still it’s flattering, and she wants the feeling to last. All night if possible.
They also talk about love. In that room that smells of carmine and perfume. Lying on the bed where so many men have slumbered far away from their wives. They talk about love—or, rather, Carlos talks about it while she watches him intently. She is his audience. Five soles a night, and the curtain is up. He rambles tipsily about tempestuous love affairs, about insurmountable obstacles, about letters, rivalries, anonymous poems, about losses, especially those losses that cannot be remedied. He lights and stubs out cigarettes while uttering strange words. Words that, like his voice when he reads verse, do not sound like his. They sound to her as if they were taken from one of his poems or, more likely, from a serial novel. Though the girl is illiterate and has never read a novel herself, Mimí often reads them aloud to her and they clutch each other in excitement when the prince finally manages to track down the princess. So she knows what she’s talking about. Like the characters in those novels, Carlos expects love to give him everything money cannot buy, and she senses that his suffering is born of that conviction. Literature, and maybe even love, has always seemed to her a treacherous luxury. She thinks of Mimí, whose passion for serial novels has also cost her dearly: ten centavos a week to buy the latest installment of The Prince and the Odalisque of the Southern Seas, which Madame Lenotre unfailingly adds to her account book in the “Owes” column.
Occasionally he also mentions Georgina. Indeed, he seems to talk about her constantly, even when he doesn’t say her name. The girl doesn’t know much about her. She imagines her to be wan, and very somber, and most of all very boring, languidly fanning herself in her garden and drinking the same endless lemonade. Feeble too—practically moribund. She’s not sure why, but she also feels a slight ache in her chest on those nights when Carlos says her name too much. It’s a pang of jealousy, but she doesn’t realize it. In fact, she doesn’t really know what that word means, jealousy, since nothing has ever belonged to her and so she’s never feared losing anything.
Most likely, she thinks, it’s just hunger.
On some nights she is able to ask the young man questions. She feels comfortable in her role as a secondary character, offering protagonists the opportunity to think and reflect on themselves. Her questions are sometimes thoroughly gauche but asked with endearing guilelessness. After each one, she always adds: You needn’t answer. But he doesn’t mind. One day he even works up the confidence to tell her about the Polish prostitute. Maybe he is answering a question about his earliest sexual experience, or his adolescence, or his first love. Or maybe he’s not even answering a question—he just starts talking. She listens to the story with interest, and for a moment she feels that pang again. Especially when she hears the price. Four hundred dollars! On her fingers she tries to count out how many soles that is, how many nights with her you’d need to pay for a single night with the Polish girl. But her hands are clumsy and she finally gives up. She concludes that it would be many, many nights. More nights than there are in a year. Maybe more than there are in a lifetime.
She’d like to know if he slept with the Polish prostitute. If he looked at that woman, that girl, the same way he looks at her now. But she doesn’t dare ask him. Carlos doesn’t explain any further, the story comes to a close, and in the end she decides that they did sleep together. She thinks it, and she smiles. She tells herself that the reason the young gentleman doesn’t touch her is precisely that she means something to him, while the Polish girl was just your everyday harlot, a little four-hundred-dollar doll to mindlessly mount. That he stripped off her clothes on the bed or on the floor and maybe even hurt her, because in the end she meant nothing to him. That he must have learned from her, under her, beside her, moving in and out of her, everything a man needs to know about a woman. That over the course of that night, he made her weep more than she’d wept during the month-long Atlantic crossing.
And the truth is that she takes pleasure in these cruel, piteous images. The Polish girl’s tears comfort her because she is jealous (hunger pangs again): her Peruvian virginity was never worth a single dollar, let alone four hundred of them, and there is a certain universal justice in that sadness, in the suffering of a pale European girl who must have felt her body becoming less and less valuable every night, one hundred dollars, twenty dollars, twenty soles, one sol, finally a nickel—just one goddamn nickel to drag her down on the floor and do the usual to her again.
◊
Time passes. José is nowhere to be found. He is no longer attending his classes at the university, nor is he lounging outside them smoking on the bench in the atrium. Everybody says he’s writing a novel. Carlos can’t tell whether it’s the same novel or if he’s started a different one, but in any case José seems to be quite busy. He doesn’t even go out anymore, and Ventura and his friends say he’s changed quite a bit. For a moment Carlos thinks that yes, José must be writing the love story of Juan Ramón and Georgina; indeed, he’d even say that he’s writing his own life, a
nd also everyone else’s. The life of all of Lima. The whole world contained in its pages.
Carlos goes back to the university. Now that José’s not there, he goes as often as possible. He had almost forgotten the classrooms’ scent of wood and chalk, the height of the lectern from which all those mediocre professors give their classes. He barely even remembered his classmates’ names, much less the import of the law of habeas corpus or the particular subtleties of the Napoleonic civil code. Just a few hours of studying each day—he has so much free time now—and he learns it all, a little late but in time to take his exams. He may not write novels, or letters either, but at least he knows how to do that: pass exams. That’s what he thinks as he scribbles his answers and glances at José’s empty desk out of the corner of his eye.
His parents are happy and even tell him so. José has turned out to be a bad influence. That business with that Juan Jiménez fellow was just a silly bit of fun. They are proud that, little by little, disappointment by disappointment, Carlos is becoming a real man. Yes, he stays out all night sometimes and that’s not good, of course, but who can blame him; he’s young, it’s springtime—better that than going around cooing sweet nothings to a decent girl, the kind of girl who’s so decent that when she ends up pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. He is a good son, there’s no doubt about it. Someone who will take on the mantle of the family’s birthright when they die.
Sandoval seems quite satisfied too. He comes to visit often now, loaded with new books and projects that Carlos accepts in silence. One night he insists on taking Carlos to a political meeting in an apartment on Calle Amargura. According to the organizers, the meeting is secret—there’s even a password—but it’s a secret no one cares about, not even the police. Most of the people in attendance are Italian socialists and Spanish anarchists who claim to have been behind every assassination attempt in Europe. They confess their crimes in the same tone of voice José used to employ when claiming to have bedded the most beautiful women in Peru. Carlos only half understands them. But at one point Sandoval talks about how “all our ideologies, and even our consciousnesses, are nothing more than a reflection of material reality,” and that phrase keeps echoing in Carlos’s mind. He thinks about Georgina, though he does not know why. About their fifteen months of correspondence. About the nights when he falls asleep convinced that she is writing and breathing somewhere out there in Lima. And he wonders whether she is a false consciousness like the ones Sandoval and his friends are so animatedly discussing or if there are real ideas in the world too, as real as class warfare and annual steel production.
On some afternoons he makes his way to the garret. After idly chatting with the watchman, he climbs the stairs very slowly, gripping the banister on each step. He likes to study among the worn furniture and burlap sacks. He repeats aloud the elements of rhetorical discourse—inventio, dispositio, elocutio—and the punishment prescribed by law for the crime of impersonating another individual: three years in jail. All this in the very same place where he and José once recited Baudelaire, Yeats, Mallarmé. And during his breaks from reading, he thinks about many things. He thinks about the Professor, whom he’s been ducking for weeks, taking long detours to avoid passing through the square and running into him beneath the arches and then having to tell him—tell him what? He thinks about Ventura and his friends, who no longer haunt the club and its billiards tables. They have vanished as thoroughly as José himself, and with him those letters he is no doubt still writing and that Carlos will never read, blank chapters of the novel that once was his.
Often he thinks: I too am a character in that novel. Everything will be documented in the pages that José is writing, even Carlos’s own repeated visits to the whore he never sleeps with. He wonders if there is any explanation for certain things—a chapter, a page, even just a line to say why he feels this need to sleep next to a whore at night. He’d like to understand it himself. He’s had time to try out any number of explanations, not in front of the mirror now but in the dusty solitude of the garret. That the whore reminds him of Georgina. That she reminds him of the Polish prostitute. That he needs someone who believes in Georgina. That he feels lonely. He has even considered that perhaps his father might have been right all along and all that poetry has feminized him. Don Augusto warned him so many times as a boy, whenever he caught him with a book of poetry—Mark my words, your taste for metaphors is going to make you an invert. And now here he is, incapable of arousal even in the presence of a beautiful woman, proving his father right nearly a decade after the fact.
He dreams, too, of José’s novel. That he’s trapped within its pages, forced to do what the narrator commands him to do. It’s his worst nightmare: ending up as a pansy in José’s novel. Discovering that’s what he is only because that’s what the narrator wants.
◊
The gentleman’s gifts, always as extravagant as they are beautiful. At the moment, for example, he is loaded down with cardboard boxes and tubes that he wants her to open. Look inside and tell me if you like them, see if they’re your size. She hates ripping the wrapping paper and cutting the ribbons, but at last she does and goes through the packages in wonder, pulling out petticoats and hats, bodices and skirts, satin veils and shoes and nightgowns. Gauzes so fine that she feels like she’s holding air, like someone’s sewn stitches through nothing. He says it’s his mother’s and sisters’ castoff clothing, and she pretends to believe him, even though the garments smell new and it’s clear no one’s had the chance to wear out the hems of the dresses. His mother’s and sisters’ clothing, sure, if he says so, but at the bottom of the last box she finds a receipt with a figure so enormous, so astronomical, that she cannot even comprehend it.
From now on, happiness will mean this. She’s decided it must be so. When she hears the word happiness—not that it’s heard with any frequency in the brothel—she will remember placing the dresses on their hangers. Seeing her fingers peeking through the sheer muslin. Finding, and not understanding, that astonishing number.
“Do you like them?” asks the gentleman, without a hint of joy in his voice, with something more like aching hope.
“They’re—they’re for me?”
“For you, if you like them.”
It’s not the sort of clothing a whore wears. That’s the first thing she thinks. It’s the sort of clothing worn by the young ladies she sees through the bars, passing by in their carriages. A fleeting sight that lasts just long enough for her to begin to envy them and then watch them disappear, unsure what to do with their memory.
“How could I not like them?”
“Why don’t you try them on?”
Yes, why not? She starts undressing immediately, pulling off her skirt, her garter, her petticoats, flinging her shoes and bodice aside. The garments sail through the air in a blind frenzy born of pure happiness. She does it so quickly that she’s already half naked when Carlos manages to tear his eyes away and suggests that it might be better if she undressed behind the screen.
He stammers as he says it, still not looking at her, and for the first time she recalls the screen that stands behind the door, a faded parchment-like material printed with flowers, which no customer has required until now. But no one else has given her clothing and shoes, or read her poetry at dawn, so why shouldn’t Carlos be the one to request it? The screen—why not. She covers herself as best she can with whatever clothing she hasn’t yet removed and slips behind the screen, blushing and silent.
As she finishes getting undressed, she ponders Carlos’s discomfort and comes up with a number of possible explanations before finally deciding that she doesn’t understand it at all. She is not ashamed of her body and never has been; showing it to her customers has always seemed completely natural to her, as commonplace as a naked babe. But as much as Carlos has looked at her as a customer would, he also watches her as a preacher might, or a policeman sealing off the whorehouse door, or a haughty old woman crossing herself when she sees her on the street
. She pauses a moment to study herself, now completely naked behind the shelter of the screen, and in the candlelight her body appears inoffensive. But suddenly an unfamiliar sensation comes over her. A whiff of modesty, as if it were no longer she who was looking at her—as if Carlos had lent her his eyes and through them she felt an unfamiliar curiosity about the roundness of those breasts and the curve of that hip. The sensation provokes fear, but also desire and guilt and arousal and hope. She closes her eyes. Then, with a sudden brusque movement, she starts to get dressed.
The first box contains a floor-length white gown with a bonnet, gloves, and garters to match. When she emerges from behind the screen, she has been transformed into a figure from a Sorolla painting who has wandered out of her canvas and into a Toulouse-Lautrec brothel. Naturally, she has no idea who Sorolla and Lautrec are, but she does know this: when Carlos sees her, it’s as if he were looking at the static image of a painting. He recognizes fear in her eyes, but also desire and guilt and arousal and hope. She smiles nervously, her hands clasped behind her back—Does she look like a young lady now? Can the whorehouse still be discerned in her face?—but Carlos doesn’t smile in return. He just hands her a parasol, also white, and asks her to open it. She hesitates a moment.
“Isn’t it bad luck?”
“That’s umbrellas.”
Indeed, a parasol is not an umbrella, though they’re similar. A parasol is used not to shield from rain but to provide shade from the sun—and why on earth does the young man want her to open it here, in the light of the oil lamp?—but she takes it and minces primly from the bed to the wardrobe and from the wardrobe to the window. Taking small steps like a woman with a tiny dog. What would her mother say if she could see her now, looking like a real lady? And what would Carlos say, if instead of staring at her with his mouth agape he ventured to say something? But no matter. She feels joy wash over her because he is still looking at her, because he’s never looked at her so intently as he is right now.
The Sky Over Lima Page 18