The Sky Over Lima

by Juan Gómez Bárcena

  He has no idea if this is what love looks like. Whether he is killing this girl who is screaming, writhing weakly beneath his body. He is killing her, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. His father paid four hundred dollars for it not to matter.

  It all lasts exactly as long as a nightmare does.

  And when it is over he begins to cry, and then she cries with him and, stranger still, hugs him. She’s not dead, Carlos thinks happily, faintly surprised. She isn’t dead, and she doesn’t hate him. She wraps her arms around him as if he were at once her parents, her siblings, the country she will never see again, the language she will never again hear spoken, the merchant captain who looked after her and kept his word for a whole month. She embraces him as if they were two children who have played and fought and now want to play again.

  And suddenly she starts to speak. She murmurs mysterious phrases that he hears and patiently tries to understand. They sound like questions, perhaps, and in the pauses he answers them with others. He asks her if she is thirteen. He asks her if what they’ve just done was what everyone on the other side of the door expected of them. If her father told her that becoming a woman brought with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities just before he left her at the door. And she answers, in her way, and then falls silent.

  The candles have burned out. In the darkness their bodies are still intertwined. Carlos has slowly started to caress her. His hand runs along her silky hair, her milky skin, and she softens and is soothed in the warmth of that contact. They are still crying, but quietly now, without bitterness, and the girl is repeating only a single phrase, like a litany, as if the night had become trapped in place and could not sail forward.

  Chcę iść do domu.

  When she speaks, her moist lips brush against his ear.

  Chcę iść do domu.

  And Carlos thinks of those words as he falls asleep and even afterward, minutes or hours later, when he wakes up and discovers that the Polish girl has disappeared and finds his father waiting in the hall to tell him he’s finally become a real man.

  Che is do domo.

  He tries to etch those words into his memory that day, and then for the rest of his life, as he conceives mad plans in which he and the Polish girl are together, against all odds—

  Cheis to tomo

  —but little by little those plans lose momentum, are put off, abandoned, and finally they die, because in the end she is no longer in the brothel, nobody knows where he can find her, and even if someone knew it wouldn’t make a difference, of course, because it’s one thing to rebel by reading a few poems and something else entirely to ditch it all for a girl who isn’t really a girl anymore—for a whore who probably doesn’t even cost a dollar by then, for a foreigner whose last words he has slowly resigned himself to forgetting, the indecipherable sounds becoming jumbled and blurry in his memory, as does the adolescent hope that their incantation might signify something beautiful, that Cheis torromo might mean “I forgive you,” that Cheis mortoro means “I love you,” that Cheistor moro means “I’ll never forget you either, not ever.”

  ◊

  The visit to the Professor was a waste of time. At least that’s how José sees it, and he makes sure to say so whenever he gets the chance. He never mentions Carlos’s two lost soles, just his own wasted—and invaluable—time. And what did they get in return? A few useless pieces of advice and a brief history of fashion, neither of which has improved their novel or brought them any closer to the Maestro.

  “He didn’t even say whether he thinks he’ll write the poem. He didn’t say anything! The man’s a charlatan.”

  Carlos dares only to half disagree.

  “I don’t know . . . I didn’t think it was so pointless. And I think some of his advice was good . . . in a way. That bit about imagining a woman you’ve loved . . . Or the part about the covered ladies, for example.”

  “An old man’s idle reminiscences! What about all that nonsense about the language of eyelashes? Ever so practical! Turns out the women of Lima knew Morse code. A long blink to blow a kiss . . . a long one and a short one to reject a suitor . . . How many blinks does it take to say ‘I think I’m going to throw up’?”

  Carlos laughs. He doesn’t want to, but he laughs.

  They’re sitting up on the roof of the garret. But they’re not in the mood for the character game today. The transatlantic steamer has just arrived and, within it, three letters from the Maestro, so similar to the previous ones that it feels like they’ve read them already. The same old formulas of friendship and courtesy, references to the invention of the cinematograph, an erudite contribution to their ongoing discussion of whether or not all things have a soul (they do, he says) and what those souls might consist of (perhaps this is what philosophers call essence?). The only new development is that accompanying these letters are the drafts of several poems. They are from Juan Ramón’s new book, to be titled Distant Gardens, which will appear next year. But of course the poems do not make a single reference to Georgina. Instead, they include an endless number of twilights and gardens—uninhabited paradises that seem to draw farther away before their eyes or were perhaps always far away, as if they could be contemplated only from the other side of a wrought-iron fence. And there’s not all that much to look at in those paradises either. Trees that glumly drop their leaves to the ground. Inconsequential rains, falling on those same trees. Boredom.

  Yet José refuses to give up. He cannot believe that Juan Ramón hasn’t written a poem to Georgina by now. There has to be one, or maybe even many—hundreds of verses hidden away somewhere. That’s what José needs to believe, anyway, as it’s been weeks since he’s written anything himself. He just sits at his desk and stares at his portrait of the Maestro. If only he could address him as a young poet in need of advice and not as a prim young lady in a skirt and bodice! He would ask him so many things. Indeed, he asks them every night, staring at the black-and-white image, at the portrait’s vacant eyes. He asks when Juan Ramón discovered he was a poet, how he was sure he had the talent for it. Whether there’s any reason for José to keep sitting there, hunched over his desk, scribbling out drafts that will never astound a critic or bring a lady to tears. Or maybe they will? At least tell me that much, Maestro: Am I already a genius, unawares? Should I persevere in my passion or accept my failure once and for all? But the Maestro does not answer, and so José does not write.

  That may be why he’s become convinced that Carlos has been right all along. That there is a particular dignity, a solemn, almost sacred dedication, in the act of creating a muse so that a great poet can craft his finest metaphors. And while he waits for those sublime pages, José busies himself reading and rereading the Maestro’s poems, finding the mark of Georgina hidden everywhere.

  “Listen to this, Carlota!” he exclaims, waving Juan Ramón’s letter in the air. “And suddenly, a voice / melancholy and distant, / has trembled across the water / in the silence of the air. / It is the voice of a woman / and of a piano, it is a soft / comfort for the roses / somnolent in the afternoon, / a voice that makes me / weep for nobody and for somebody / in this sad and golden / opulence of the parks. It must be Georgina! It’s so clear: there’s a voice because of the letters, which come from very far away but nevertheless speak to him . . . And because he doesn’t know her yet, he weeps for nobody and for somebody . . . Don’t you see? For nobody and for somebody! It’s quite clear!”

  Carlos doesn’t say anything. He keeps looking down at the square from on high, as if there were something to decipher there. Darkness is falling. Soon there won’t be enough light for José to keep reading him the poems.

  “I think I’m going to go see him again,” he says suddenly, as if setting down a burden.

  “Who?”

  “The Professor . . . if that’s all right with you.”

  José looks up from his papers.

  “Professor Cristóbal? What for?”

  “I don’t know . . . It’s just a thought.”
>
  José hesitates for a moment. Then he shrugs.

  “Whatever you like. As long as I don’t have to go with you.”

  He doesn’t say anything else. But a few moments later, Carlos hears him muttering other lines with the reverence of prayer:

  And there are attempts at caresses, / at glances and fragrances, / and there are lost kisses that / perish upon the waves.

  She always spoke in blue / she was exquisitely sweet . . . but / I could never even learn / if the hair on her head was blond.

  I have a beloved made of snow / who does not kiss and does not sing. / She is now dead for me / and I can never forget her.

  ◊

  For the novel to be perfect, they have to know their character down to the most minute detail. What kind of writers would they be if they did not know whether Georgina was short or tall, whether she was writing from a seaside resort or from a garret, whether she was married or unmarried or a widow or a nun? A good scrivener, says the Professor, must know his customers better than they know themselves. And that inevitably goes for novelists too. Carlos thinks he once heard that Tolstoy—or maybe it wasn’t Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky or Gogol or some other Russian—stopped writing his novel for a whole month because when he got to a particular scene, he didn’t know whether his character would accept or refuse a cup of tea.

  Do they know that? Do they know whether Georgina even likes tea?

  Carlos imagines her as fair, wan, maybe ill. Vaguely sad. Also quite young—she almost seems like a child. She has blue eyes and fragile hands, very white, as if they were made of snow. She is timid and sensitive as only truly beautiful women can be, and perhaps that is why her lips quiver when she rereads Juan Ramón’s letters every night, in the secret intimacy of candlelight. The hand holding the paper also trembles. It will tremble even more when she writes out her reply.

  Georgina is the Polish prostitute once more.

  The Polish prostitute if, six years later, she were still a virgin.

  The Polish prostitute if she were neither Polish nor a prostitute; if, instead of having been born in Galicia and sold for twenty kopeks, she’d been born in a mansion in Miraflores and at her coming-out had received gifts of four hundred dollars.

  The Polish prostitute if she often wept just as she had in bed with him, but with tears born not from her fear of being raped but rather from the solidarity she shows toward certain minor tragedies—a poem that moves her, the aching beauty of a sunset, the suffering of a kitten with an injured paw.

  The Polish prostitute if she had learned to read and write and with those pen strokes—again the hand trembling—told Juan Ramón all the things that Carlos would have liked to hear.

  Statements full of sighs:

  I have thought of you so very often, my friend . . . ! A cousin showed me your book, Violet Souls, so full of sighs and tears, and it moved me deeply. Your sweet, soft verses offered me companionship and comfort.

  But why do I recount my poor melancholy things to you, on whom the whole world smiles?

  And some days I awake at dawn filled with such sadness . . .

  Her life takes place not in a bawdyhouse but in a setting as splendid and cold as marble. A labyrinth of trellised gardens, of ornate chambers with canopies and frescoes and brocade upholstery, afternoons of making and receiving visits, of playing the piano for stern old women. Long evenings in which she sits in the dining room waiting for guests or waiting for nothing—waiting for another day to end and, at the same time, fearing that this is all she’ll ever have. Sometimes she stays in the garden a long while, sitting beneath the trailing vines—Carlos can almost see her by his side—watching the bumblebees and the moths that orbit the flame of the oil lamp; like her, they are confined in a prison that cannot be seen and that, morning or night, will surely scorch their wings. Sometimes she snuffs out the lamp to free them. But other times she succumbs to cruelty and does nothing, only watches, until the maid comes running out with a shawl in her arms and strict orders for the young lady to come into the house immediately.

  That setting contains few characters and only a couple of emotions. An authoritarian father who does not let her write letters that are as long as she’d like. A mother who is ailing or dead. Every once in a while, the sense that, all around her, the world has briefly turned unreal—Do you not experience the same thing, my dear Juan Ramón?—the suspicion that everything may be a stage set, the rehearsal for a play that has no audience or director or opening night. And above all, the six thousand miles of distance that separate her from the only human being who seems to understand her, the person who makes her feel alive again, fully alive, and whose letters slumber tucked away inside the piano.

  ◊

  José imagines her brunette and young, almost a child. His Georgina has dark skin and indigenous features; were she wearing a vicuña wool poncho, she might even be mistaken for one of the women who come down to the city from the high Andean plateau once a month to sell their humble wares. Indeed, she bears a striking resemblance to a servant girl his family dismissed two or three years ago, though he doesn’t tell Carlos that. The girl had been beautiful and happy; José always thought of her as an Inca princess in servant-girl guise, though as far as he knew the Incas had at least been able to read the knots of their khipus, and Marcela couldn’t even recognize her own name in writing. But she liked poetry, or so Master José believed, and so he used to interrupt her in the middle of her duties to read her his early poems. Marcela would sit down to listen, the feather duster or broom still in her hand, and as if entranced she would repeat all those cadenced, beautiful words whose meaning she did not know. In fact, she was entirely ignorant, or so José believed, and her lack of sophistication fascinated him.

  “Oh, dear Marcelita! If only we could all be like you and look at life with the blessed innocence of the songbirds and flowers! Only you, who know nothing, can be absolutely happy . . .”

  The maid agreed, sincerely convinced. No doubt she was happy if Master José said so, as José was very intelligent and always right about everything. But between her twelve-hour workdays polishing the silverware and the recent news of her mother’s death back in her impoverished village, she hadn’t had a lot of time to think about happiness of late.

  “How I envy you, dear friend! Knowledge is a cumbersome burden that I must bear everywhere upon my shoulders, like wretched Sisyphus . . . Of course you don’t know who Sis-yphus is—you have that luck too! I would love to unlearn all my knowledge and become simple and unfurrowed like you!” Marcela was touched by these words. She was moved to tears imagining the unknown pains the young master suffered, and perhaps to offer him comfort she began to let herself be taken in the kitchen, under the rhododendrons in the garden, in the wine cellar, in her narrow servant’s bed whenever José’s mother fell asleep. Even once in Señor Gálvez’s office, knocking over an inkwell in the process and ruining a number of documents whose value was docked, of course, from Marcela’s wages. It was in her illiterate arms that José learned all that books and the well-mannered women who read them could not teach. Because Marcela knew how to kiss with her mouth open, and moan, and writhe when a lady would have stayed still, and her hands, those hands that seemed to have been made to take care of guests’ hats, had also learned to stimulate places that a virtuous wife should know nothing about. José would remember her lessons for many years, and the words passion and desire would ever be bound in his recollection to this memory. As would the word impossible, because naturally the story comes to an end, a dénouement elegantly wrapped up by the Gálvez family with no consequences other than a dismissal, a small severance of fifteen soles, and a solemn promise from Marcela never to see their son again. And the son played at being glum for at least a couple of nights—he may even have entertained the mad notion that love between a wealthy young man and a maid was possible, a foolish delusion that we can by no means credit in 1904.

  Now the maid he will never see again has been transformed into Georgin
a. Georgina is Marcela had Marcela not been raised an illiterate housemaid and, instead of scrubbing the floor tiles in the hallway on her knees, had spent her time reading the Symbolists and the Parnassians. It is she who attempts to slip certain insinuations into the letters to Juan Ramón with the same coquettishness with which she used to forget to latch the door to her room. But Carlos never allows that Georgina to show herself. When the two poets meet in the garret to compose a new letter and José offers one of his ideas, Carlos roundly rejects it. No, he says. Georgina would never say that. Or perhaps, almost shouting: Georgina is a young lady, not a harlot! Accustomed to always being right, to having his ideas eagerly embraced, at first José is startled by Carlos’s determination, which becomes more self-assured with each letter they write. Finally he laughs heartily. He is amused by the stubbornness with which his friend defends each of Georgina’s qualities.

  You’re acting like you’re in love with her, he says.

  But he doesn’t stop Carlos. In the end, he cares as much about having his version of Georgina prevail as he once did about the maidservant—that is to say, very little. He is interested only in the poem, the poem that Juan Ramón still has not written. And if in order to write it the poet needs a blond muse instead of a morena, a frigid young lady instead of a mischievous flirt, then Carlos’s ideas are quite welcome.

  “You should see Carlota,” he will say at the club later. “You couldn’t hire someone with such feminine handwriting. It makes you wonder. And he knows the girl better than you fellows know your own mothers and sweethearts. Anyone would think he was writing a diary, not composing letters, and that at night he puts on a shawl and goes about like one of Lima’s covered ladies.”