The Sky Over Lima

by Juan Gómez Bárcena

  Carlos ignores their laughter. José might not care about Georgina, but Carlos cares even less about what their circle of friends thinks. Or that they’ve all started calling him Carlota, or that they bow in greeting and pull out his chair for him when he sits down at the table. If you please, madame. Carlos has time to think only about important things. Like finally figuring out how Georgina takes her tea: Two cubes of sugar. A splash of milk. And maybe, but only if her father isn’t looking, a bit of anise liquor in her cup.

  ◊

  Lima, December 5, 1904

  My esteemed friend:

  You ask what Lima is like, this beloved city of mine, which some call the Pearl of the Pacific, or the City of Kings, or the Thrice-Crowned Villa in honor of some old anecdote I no longer recall. You ask me to write about all this, and it occurs to me that the best way to do so is to imagine that you are here with me. Or even better: To imagine that we are both high up in the bell tower of the cathedral. From there I could point out every corner of my city and all its many beauties . . .

  Or better yet: Did you not once mention that you are a painter? Imagine, then, that I am giving you instructions for painting a landscape. This beautiful view from the sky over Lima, always misty, changeable, so nurturing of inventions and fantasies . . . Suppose, if you wish, that we are painting the canvas together. And that, as with all canvases, my manner of painting it, of adding colors and textures, also creates a sort of portrait of me.

  Imagine first a network of streets and houses, so perfectly laid out that you could draw it with a T-square. Do you see it? From afar it looks like the grid of a beehive or the mesh of a lattice. But if you focus your gaze a little, its geometry unravels into life, into rooftops and awnings, elaborate rows of balconies, the arches of city hall, the Plaza Dos de Mayo, the path of the Rímac River as it plunges toward the ocean.

  All that you see there at your feet is my beloved Lima. Within its borders, as you see, there are a good number of yellow hills and fields. A lovely golden yellow that you, my distinguished friend, would have to search for in your palette, as it is not the yellow of melancholy and death that pervades your poems, but a lively yellow, like a bonfire. The color of the sun worshipped by our Incan ancestors so long ago.

  Here, everything, even the colors, means something else.

  The sea? Do not paint it so close to the city. Place it a few inches farther away on the canvas—that is, two long leagues. They may call it the Pearl of the Pacific, but the name is a deceptive one, because Lima is more a timid jewel, a gemstone that tiptoes away from the ocean without ever daring to lose sight of it, as if it both feared and craved its waters. Paint it blue, but a blue that, I suspect, is not the same blue as the Spanish seas. And in the distance place a port, and call it El Callao, and scatter a few transatlantic ships among its wharves, massive saurians cloaked in steam and rust but somehow beautiful, because they will, in the end, be the bearers of this letter.

  Farther out, somewhere on the horizon, is my home, one of the many estates in Miraflores. And perhaps it is better this way, that you cannot see it. I have said that a person’s manner of looking at a city reflects that person’s soul, but it is no less true that a house holds the spirit of the people who inhabit it. And I feel so distant from its walls! A stranger in my own bedroom, in the dining room where I while away the hours, so that even in calling it my home I am obliged to lie to you. Inside it there are only rules and reprimands, so inflexible that they might have been drawn by the same T-square used to lay out the streets. A lattice that might at times be called a cage, its bars made of bowing servants, of lectures from a father who does not find this or that to his liking, the riding frock and the gown for receiving visitors, endless dinners that always seem to feature the same plate of soup. Lessons from a young ladies’ charm manual, a work that knows so much about protocols and so little of life! It is excruciating sometimes to be a woman, to be a daughter, to be nobody!

  If you wish to know my soul, you should not look at that house. Nor at the geometric avenues, rigid like the instructions of a strict tutor. I am not myself in my house. Only far from it—far, too, from the heart of that city where gentlemen in top hats and women in their street gowns promenade. In my walks, I seek a different, unknown Lima. Because to keep painting this canvas, you must know, my dear Juan Ramón, that there at the edges the strict grid becomes chaotic, twisted, full of unpredictable sinuosities and bends and leaps. I love to wander through those poor neighborhoods, down those dirt alleys where no one has to pretend to be anything. Where the people shout out with unpretentious, authentic words and you can stop to watch a sunset or a flower growing in the crevices without being bothered. My soul more closely resembles those little dead-end streets, those picturesque lots, and I return home with the hems of my skirts soiled with dust and the satisfaction of having lived something real, something beautiful . . .

  Oh dear, what strange secrets I am confessing to you, my friend!

  ◊

  The Professor has liked the last few letters. “This is something else,” he says, “now your cousin is really letting herself go, showing her face a bit.” He also praises the delicate handwriting once again, and when he does, Carlos lowers his eyes.

  “So . . . you think there’s a chance?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of making her fall in love.”

  “Making her fall in love? Who?”

  “Making him fall in love, I mean. You know, Juan Ramón. The Spanish poet.”

  “Oh! Well . . . who knows? But one thing’s for sure: the beguiling eye of this covered lady has been unveiled! No doubt about that!”

  Carlos goes to ask for his advice every week, whenever Georgina receives a letter or is getting ready to write one. I’ve never met such a solicitous cousin before, the Professor says every time he sees Carlos join the queue. He always comes alone, but Cristóbal doesn’t mention José’s absence. He seems to remember him only one morning when he insists on rewriting a particular passage of the next letter and Carlos refuses.

  “You see, she wants to write it without anybody’s help,” he insists.

  “But she’s not making you come all the way out here every week for no reason.”

  “Well . . . actually, Georgina doesn’t know I come to see you.”

  Cristóbal raises his eyebrows.

  “Oh! So she doesn’t know I exist?”

  “No.”

  “And if she doesn’t know, how do you transmit the wisdom gained from our chats?”

  “Well . . . I pretend it’s my idea, you know? I ask her, she shows me the poet’s most recent letter or one of her numerous drafts, I gently offer an opinion . . . When she listens to me, the look in her eyes . . .”

  He stops himself.

  “Go on, say it, say it. The look in your cousin’s eyes. You know, we’ve talked so much about her and I still don’t know even know what color her eyes are. I’m curious. What is this cousin of yours like? And don’t tell me she’s beautiful and shapely; that’s old news.”

  Carlos accepts the cigarette the Professor offers him. He allows himself to speak of her only as long as it takes him to get from his first puff to when the ember of the cigarette almost burns his fingers. In that interval he has time to describe her in intricate detail. Georgina’s whole life, summed up in the life of a cigarette. When Carlos drops the butt to the ground, Cristóbal bursts into laughter.

  “So she’s got blond hair and blue eyes, does she? I thought your friend said she had a darker complexion.”

  Carlos doesn’t look away. For the first time he feels a rush of genuine pride.

  “He can say whatever he likes. Who would know better than her cousin?”

  Cristóbal looks serious all of a sudden.

  “True, true. What’s more, it’s clear you love her. Unlike your friend—he doesn’t like her all that much.”

  “You think so?”

  “A blind man could see it,” says the Professor, and refuses to utter a
nother word.

  ◊

  The Professor has already warned him about the importance of making drafts. Letters are like serial novels, he said: once you’ve messed up, there’s no fixing it. That was the experience of Alexandre Dumas, who, because he did not make outlines as he should, ended up killing off a character in one episode and then resuscitating him three or four installments later. Apparently he wrote so many serial novels at the same time that he used to make miniatures of his thousands of characters and arrange them on a bookshelf according to an established code so that he could recall with a glance whether they were dead or alive. Regrettably, one day his maid decided it was time to clean those little figurines, dirty as they were, and with a single sweep of her feather duster brought a whole generation of the departed back to life.

  Such is the case with Georgina as well, or rather with her sister, who exists and does not exist at the same time, depending on which letter you consult.

  They don’t realize it until Juan Ramón’s next delivery arrives. It is a shorter, more formal note than usual. His tone is cautious, and even the color of the ink is different. No doubt there has been some sort of mistake or misunderstanding, the letter starts, with no beating around the bush. Yes, that must be it, surely he has misunderstood something—there are so many subtleties that are lost from six thousand miles away—but for some time he has been mulling over a contradiction that has arisen. He would like to know why in her third letter Georgina talked about her sister, Teresita—do you remember, my friend?—and now, only fifteen letters later, there is no trace of Teresita, and what’s worse, in Georgina’s last letter she wrote that she was an only child. He humbly inquires what he has misunderstood—because he’s sure that’s all this is, he repeats, just a misunderstanding—and how a woman who is no doubt sincere in every facet can in one letter be an only child and in another love her sister, Teresita, so fiercely.

  The letter closes with Best wishes from your loyal servant and not the usual Anxiously awaiting news of my dear friend. In terms of formulas of politeness, it seems their relationship has been set back six or seven months.

  At first Carlos and José blame each other. “All that time spent writing and rewriting the letters, and you didn’t even realize we were handing out sisters and then snatching them back? If you took this more seriously, these things wouldn’t happen,” and so on. Then they blame the Professor. “Two soles to read some wretched letters and he doesn’t even find the errors?” Then the one to blame is Juan Ramón, though they can’t really pinpoint why; their rage is simply directed at him for the first time. In the end nobody is to blame. Everything is forgiven, but it is all infinitely sad, without any hope of consolation.

  “Well, what now? What solution does your idol Cristóbal have for us?”

  “None, because he doesn’t know about it and he’s not going to find out. What do you want me to tell him? That my cousin forgot how many sisters she has?”

  “Damn it,” says José, summing everything up quite succinctly.

  But in the end Carlos does venture to ask him, at least in a way. One morning he drags out the question as much as possible and finally reminds Cristóbal of Dumas’s serial novel and the lead figurines. He asks how Dumas solved his problem, and the Professor laughs at the question. Easy, a cinch, really: He changed the genre of his novel. He changed it from a swashbuckling novel to a supernatural one with hexes and witches and men who die and are later revived, and so the readers were satisfied. Most satisfied of all, though, was the revivified dead man, who got to stay alive until the end of the novel.

  Changing the genre. It’s not a bad idea, and Carlos hastens to implement it. His romantic novel briefly takes on tinges of tragedy—of course the real tragedy will come later, though he doesn’t know that yet—and he writes a long chapter, a five-page letter in which Georgina finally bares her soul. It has been so many years, and yet she still cannot get used to the idea that her sister is no longer with them, poor thing—as if Georgina had not spent an entire night beside her white casket, feeling that she too was drowning; as if at the funeral she had not bent over the coffin to kiss her dead sister’s purple lips. That loss had enveloped her in a persistent air of melancholy and guilt—after all, it was she who had asked Teresita to gather lilies from the riverbank. And tisanes and excursions to the seashore and six months in a sanatorium had all been useless against that constrictive pang that still strangles Georgina’s lungs.

  The coincidence makes me tremble, the poet replies in the next post, both ashamed and deeply moved. Are you aware that after my father’s death I too was sent off to sanatoriums to purge my soul of sorrows, perhaps the same ones that trouble you?

  Georgina is aware of nothing.

  ◊

  For months now Sandoval has been promising a strike that will paralyze all of Peru. The longshoremen in the ports and the railroad engineers rising up as one to tear down the foundations of capitalism together. That strike will never happen, but Sandoval keeps menacing the country with it every afternoon at the club, as if it were only a matter of days or minutes before the social revolution would finally break out. The patrons have learned to listen to his long-winded speeches with skepticism. The ritual is repeated every day with little variation, from the time he rings at the door until he loosens his tie to speak: Sandoval handing the waiter his overcoat, hat, and gloves, conspicuously displaying the ink stains and calluses on his hands, looking for a stool on which to prop one of his boots as he speaks, with the grave and somewhat ridiculous expression of a fencing student preparing to deliver a thrust with his foil. They are studied gestures intended to allow time for interested listeners to approach, but most are already tired of waiting for the strike, the revolution that never comes and that matters to no one. Sandoval, undaunted, keeps preparing harangues that can hardly be heard above the clacking of billiard balls and the clinking of plates against the marble tabletops.

  Because the strike, and with it the end of capitalism, is in fact already written. Indeed, everything has been set down in the pages of Bakunin and Kropotkin, so the future of nations holds no secret to men of understanding. In Sandoval’s language, a man of understanding means an anarchist. And that hypothetical anarchist would have only to sit and read the writing on the wall for the future of Peru, and really even the whole world, to be clear to him. Perhaps those assembled would like to hear those predictions?

  Nobody answers. Usually no more than seven or eight patrons are sitting in his corner of the room, and they pay him only sporadic attention from behind their unfurled newspapers and glasses of whiskey. Sandoval scans their faces, looking for support, a gesture of approval that might spur on the rest of his speech. Not finding one, he simply keeps talking. It is 1904, he says, and from there he spins off into prophecies based on his theory that all of history’s major milestones occur at five-year intervals. So five years later—which is to say, in 1909—the eight-hour workday will become reality. Ten years—that is, 1914—and a great war will break out among all the world’s nations. A war that will go down in history as the first in which nobody goes off to battle because the proletariat has at last understood that its enemies are not on the other side of the trenches; despite Alsace and Lorraine, the wealthy Frenchman will always, when it comes down to it, be the German capitalist’s brother; similarly, notwithstanding Tacna and Arica, the Peruvian sugar tycoon will always be the friend and compatriot of the Chilean landowner. In twenty-five years—that is, 1929—the mirage of capitalism will collapse in an explosion that will push all the millionaires out the windows. Thirty-five years—that is, 1939—and another war will break out, one in which the proletariat will go to battle because for the first time the conflict will be between social classes, not nations. Forty years—that is, 1944, give or take a year—and the communists will square off against the anarchists for the first time. (We must be honest, Sandoval confesses in a murmur, and recognize that the communists are ultimately just as dangerous as the capitalists, not
to mention much more organized.) Eighty-five years—that is, 1989—and the last foundations of communism will be toppled. Just a century from the present day—that is, 2004—and nothing of note will happen; everybody knows that reality rarely indulges in round numbers in producing its significant milestones. A century and ten years—that is, 2014—and anarchism will have managed to vanquish the last of its enemies and will hold sway in the remotest corners of the earth. The end of History.

  Carlos is not interested in politics. He’s not really even certain that he knows what terms like anarchism, means of production, and Marxism mean. But there is something in the passion with which Sandoval addresses his audience that he is instinctively drawn to. And so he sometimes pauses in his game of billiards or his conversation with José to listen to Sandoval, to learn, for example, when belief in God will finally die off (around 1969, after the final Catholic council, which will be celebrated in honor of Friedrich Nietzsche). And it is in fact while listening to Sandoval that it first occurs to him that, just as History has an end, so too should their novel, and that dénouement, which he cannot even imagine, fascinates and terrifies him all at once.

  ◊

  Anyone who saw them walking together—from high up in a garret, for instance—would think that they were friends. And perhaps they are. It all depends on whether one believes that friendship between rich men and men who have to earn their living, between protagonists and secondary characters, between young men in linen suits and old men in grease-stained felt jackets, is possible. The two of them, at least, seem to believe in this kind of friendship, and so on some days Carlos accompanies Cristóbal to the tavern to polish off his midday glass of pisco. Alcohol sparks my creativity, the Professor explains, which is why most of my customers show up after lunchtime. People who are in love notice everything, and they’ve figured out I write my best letters when I’m drunk.