The Sky Over Lima

by Juan Gómez Bárcena

  There are many other outfits, and eventually, many nights later, she has tried them all on for him. Maybe he’s looking for the dress that suits her best, the one they’ll use for their first promenade through the streets of Lima—why else would he give her such sumptuous garments?—but time passes and he proposes no such outing. The clothing remains there, stuffed into one of Madame Lenotre’s wardrobes, ready to be used at any moment. Sometimes the young man has a hankering to see her wearing one of the dresses, and then she must try it on and walk around the room, or sit on the edge of the bed, or pretend to be doing something, while he sits smoking in a corner and contemplates her through the haze. And though she does find it strange, she also accepts it easily, because it is all from that same beautiful, alien world where naked bodies are cause for embarrassment, whores are treated like ladies, and men don’t sleep with those ladies but instead read them poetry.

  She finds some of the ensembles quite amusing. An old-fashioned skirt and mantle, for instance, that look like something straight out of a dowager’s armoire, but still the young man asks her to put them on. It all seems rather absurd, him sitting there, her with the mantle over her head, just one eye left uncovered. An eye that, seen so separately from her face, could belong to a virgin or a whore or even a man. Behind the mantle she laughs to herself, because it’s laughable, but the young gentleman is solemn.

  And then there’s the night she tries on the outfit that looks like a little girl’s—a summer dress with buttons, a long blue skirt, pink shoes, even little bows for the braids she doesn’t have—and when he sees her come out from behind the screen he is gob-smacked; the girls were right to call him that, Mr. Gob-Smacked, your beau Mr. Gob-Smacked. And Mr. Gob-Smacked—who’s not really her beau—slowly approaches, as if recognizing her, and reaches out to stroke her face with his hand. The young gentleman, touching her. And then he whispers a strange phrase that seems to come from far away.

  “Che is to moro . . .”

  And at first she pays it no mind, thinking it must be another of those incomprehensible words the young gentleman likes to include in his poems. Gossamer, diadem, alabaster, and now, why not, che is to moro. But then she thinks that maybe it means something else—that maybe it’s like when the prince rescues the odalisque of the southern seas and before he kisses her he tells her he loves her more than life itself, and even though the oda-lisque does not speak his language she nevertheless understands him, because a person just knows that sort of thing. That’s what she imagines as she stands there in her little-girl dress: Carlos telling her in Persian, I love you, I will take you away with me, I won’t forget you either, not ever.

  “Chcę iść do domu,” she murmurs, trying to imitate the beautiful sounds she’s just heard as best she can.

  Carlos doesn’t react at first. He blinks and then looks into her eyes, surprised and also satisfied. Suddenly he seems very happy. He patiently repeats the phrase again, a faint smile still on his face.

  “Che is to moro.”

  “Che is do domo.”

  And then him, slower:

  “Che-is-to-moro.”

  “Che is to moro.”

  He laughs.

  “Better.”

  From now on, happiness will mean this. She’s just decided it. Being so close to the young man, and seeing him laugh, and repeating che is to moro till daybreak.

  ◊

  Somebody calls out his name. He is crossing Jirón de la Unión, and amid the hustle and bustle of passersby it takes a moment to locate him. Finally he sees someone emerge from a nearby tavern, staggering slightly and rosy-cheeked from alcohol. Professor Cristóbal.

  “Well, well. Look who we have here. If it isn’t the concerned cousin.”

  Then he says:

  “You haven’t come by in a long time. I thought you were dead, my friend.”

  “No, no, I wasn’t dead,” Carlos answers, as if Cristóbal might need clarification on that point. “I’ve just been very busy lately.”

  That is certainly the case. He’s been avoiding the main square for three months just so he won’t run into him, and as a result he has spent a great deal of time walking in complex, exhausting circles around the place. And so it is true he’s had no lack of work.

  He’s carrying a book under his arm, and Cristóbal grabs it from him.

  “Let’s see what you’re reading . . . Oh! Introduction to Canon Law. Excellent. For a moment I thought it might be a romantic novel. I was worried about you, but this sort of book poses no danger . . .”

  “No, it’s not a romantic novel,” Carlos answers, confirming the obvious once more.

  But that’s just what the Professor wants to talk about: romantic novels. He wants to know what happened with Carlos’s cousin. Whether she married her Spanish poet in the end. And above all, he adds with a smile, what it is he did wrong to lose his best customer. Carlos tries to smile too. You didn’t do anything wrong, he replies, you mustn’t worry about that; it’s just that my relationship with my cousin has become somewhat strained over the past few months.

  He pauses, clears his throat. He is looking for an excuse to continue on his way, but the Professor breaks in before he can find one. His brow is furrowed.

  “So you’ve had a falling-out.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And, naturally, you have no idea how things are going with the poet. Whether the relationship has continued or not.”

  “No.”

  Cristóbal has started to unwrap a cigar. He watches his own fingers intently, as if the task were a difficult one or as if he were pondering something.

  “Well. Let’s not worry about her. I’m sure she’s found someone to help her, don’t you think? Maybe that friend of yours, the one who doesn’t much like her . . .”

  Carlos doesn’t know what to say.

  “Yes, I suppose so . . . And now if you’ll excuse me, Dr. Professor, I’m late to class at the university.”

  Cristóbal cheerfully claps him on the shoulder.

  “What a shame! I thought we might chat awhile. But I don’t want to keep you, of course. You must come pay me a visit at some point. You’ve abandoned me, my friend. Come and we’ll drink pisco and talk about love, yes indeed.”

  “Most certainly, Dr. Professor. Though to be honest, these days . . .”

  “And about the covered ladies, of course. I have so much to tell you about that! Some of it would amaze you, I daresay. For instance, did I ever tell you why they tried to ban the skirt and mantle during the viceroyalty?”

  Carlos makes a timid attempt to get away, but the Professor has a firm grip on his shoulder.

  “To prevent married women from flirting?” Carlos’s tone is the same one he uses to answer when he’s called on in the classroom.

  “Yes! I remember now I told you that already. But there was another reason I forgot to mention . . .”

  “Oh,” asks Carlos. Just like that, without a question mark, without the least bit of curiosity. He only looks toward the far end of the street, wishing he could just disappear.

  “Well, the authorities also wanted to prohibit them, amazingly enough, because it seems a few fairies had started wearing them too. What do you say to that?”

  “Fairies?”

  “Sure, fairies—pansies, you know. Imagine that: nancies dressing up as coquettish young ladies so they could snag a kiss or three from strapping suitors. Droll, isn’t it?”

  Carlos’s expression freezes over, but the Professor keeps talking. He is smiling strangely, the sort of smile generally seen only on madmen and clairvoyants.

  “Men dressing up like women!” He squeezes Carlos’s shoulder even harder. “What do you make of that? It’s like something out of a book, isn’t it? Tell Georgina about it for me when you see her, which I’ve no doubt will be before too long. And, of course, give her my compliments on that exquisite handwriting of hers.”

  He lets go of Carlos’s arm, still smiling. Before moving off, he gives him
two indulgent pats on the shoulder. It is a quick, familiar gesture that Carlos recognizes instantly. The sound of a man’s hand on the shoulder of a child.

  ◊

  It’s a narrow bed; with a great deal of effort and a fair bit of discomfort, the three of them barely fit into it. Luckily, they rarely go to bed at the same time. Cayetana retires quite early, just after midnight, once it becomes clear that blind Señor Hunter and the old men won’t be coming, or maybe they have come but are interested in something else that night.

  Mimí goes to bed at about four in the morning, and by then she’s already taken care of three or four customers. She’s fast. She knows all the tricks to make men climax as quickly as possible and just the right words to say afterward, as they lie in bed, to make them remember their wives or children and want to return home. Tricks of the trade for a whore in 1905—in all likelihood, they are not too different from the tricks of the trade a century later.

  But she doesn’t go to bed until daybreak. At least not on the nights that Carlos comes calling. She climbs the stairs to the attic with her shoes in her hand and wipes off her lipstick in front of the broken moon of the mirror. By then, the sun’s first weak rays are bending in through the rafters, and she starts to get undressed without lighting the oil lamp. Cayetana half opens her eyes and glances silently at the girl’s youthful body, the naked heat of her pale skin in the blue dawn. Then she tries to fall back asleep. Sometimes she can’t.

  The bed has seemed narrower of late, and the contact with the other girls’ skin more uncomfortable. Mimí and Cayetana take up the whole mattress, and she has to fight a little to carve out a space. Every night is the same thing. She didn’t mind in the past, but now, for some reason, she does. Even the attic seems smaller. And then there are the bars, which she’s never thought about before. She feels as if she can’t breathe, like a bird gasping in the hollow of a closed fist. It annoys her that Mimí snores and Cayetana gets up early to make coffee for the girls. It most especially annoys her that Cayetana dreams so often and so badly, and tosses, and kicks, and sometimes cries out. Afterward she says she was dreaming about the blind man again.

  Because she has a hard time falling asleep, she often finds herself pushed to one side of the bed as Mimí and Cayetana fight to stretch out their arms, and she tries to think about happier things. She thinks, for example, about the Holy Week celebrations, when the policemen come to seal up the door of the brothel—“You whores are an affront to Christ every day, but especially so the week He was crucified”—and then she and the rest of the girls get to spend seven days doing whatever they like. She thinks about the days when no customers come at all and they play bingo into the wee hours, and Mimí has to help her fill up her cards. About the sweltering afternoons when Madame Lenotre agrees to take them to a cove in Barranco, two long miles of beach where the wealthy bathe in the sea—they may even come across a man they know, accompanied by his wife and children—and they all leap into the ocean naked, laughing and splashing. She thinks about things like that, images full of sun and afternoon naps and dried beans filling the bingo cards, and if she’s lucky she falls asleep.

  But on other nights she can’t help it: the happy memories quickly fade away, to be replaced by thoughts of Madame Lenotre’s account book. Behind her closed eyelids she can almost feel the pages of the book turning, marred with sums and debts she does not understand. She wonders how long it will take her to pay them all before she can be free, and she tells herself maybe one or two years longer. It’s a lucky thing she doesn’t know how to read, much less do sums. If she knew basic addition and subtraction, she would discover that her debt has grown to three hundred sixty-two soles, and that paying off such a figure would take exactly seven years and one hundred forty-eight days, assuming she satisfied three customers a night. And that’s not counting the food or clothing or the annual visit from the doctor to look for—and inevitably find—symptoms of syphilis.

  Nine years and two months if she doesn’t work Holy Week and other religious holidays.

  Thirteen years and seven months if she continues to eat and drink.

  Seventeen and a half years if she gets it into her head to use spermicide.

  Twenty-one if she decides to fall ill a couple of times.

  Thirty-nine if she bathes every morning.

  Forty-five if she’s pregnant even just once.

  One hundred fourteen if Mimí finally manages to teach her to read and she too makes a habit of buying the latest installment of The Prince and the Odalisque of the Southern Seas every week.

  But luckily she doesn’t know how to count. So she can keep smiling and serenely close her eyes, unaware that every day she lives and breathes means yet another coin owed to the house. Some nights she is so happy, despite the narrow bed and the window bars, that she even ends up thinking about that which cannot be contemplated. She remembers the silver knob on Carlos’s walking stick and wonders whether it would be worth enough to pay her debts, should the young gentleman wish to spend the money on her. She dreams about what she would do if she were free, and finally, before drifting off—though she’s a little embarrassed to admit it—she closes her eyes again, and instead of the account book she sees the young man in a turban. How amusing, Master Carlos in a turban instead of a hat, carrying a saber instead of a walking stick, crossing the fathomless southern seas and then battling his way into the palace harem. Doing everything to reach her and take her away with him. Far from the evil sultan; far from Madame Lenotre.

  ◊

  It happens one summer night.

  For this scene, the one of repentance and forgiveness, Carlos had frankly expected different circumstances. It would take place in his parents’ mansion. Outside, it would be pouring rain, and beneath the sheets of water José would bang the door knocker and wait. The butler would take one look at his muddy shoes and usher him in through the service entrance. Then a servant would inform Carlos. But he would not come down immediately. In his fantasy there was some reason for the delay, one unrelated to pride or cruelty. The pretext changed from day to day as he reimagined the scene. The other ingredients would remain unchanged: the night, the rain, the muddy shoes, the maid’s scornful expression. He could see himself descending the stairs so clearly that he was even able to identify the suit he was wearing and the title of the book he was holding in his right hand. And as he reached the bottom—after making him wait a very long time—he saw José standing in the parlor, soaked to the bone. José looking at him imploringly, then starting to speak.

  What would he say?

  That part never quite came together. Even in his dreams it was impossible to imagine José asking for forgiveness.

  ◊

  Reality turns out to be somewhat less generous. It is nighttime, yes, but he is not in his parents’ mansion. Instead, he is reading in the garret, so there is no maid, no service entrance. It isn’t raining either, of course. In fact, it is quite a pleasant night for a stroll. Furthermore, José doesn’t have to wait outside at all. The watchman opens the door for him straightaway, and he climbs the stairs on his own, as he has so many times before, and knocks on the garret door.

  Only José himself is just as Carlos has imagined him. He stammers and seems unsure of how to go about this encounter. Maybe he thinks the grandson of José Gálvez Egúsquiza should not have to apologize for anything. Perhaps he even has the poor taste to remember the Rodríguezes’ past and compare it with his own illustrious pedigree, and so finds this humiliating scene all the more grotesque. In his hand he is carrying the bundle of letters, his reason for being there, despite all the blood the Gálvez family has spilled for the good of the nation.

  His voice trembling, he makes a few false starts.

  He says:

  “You were right. What we did was vile and deplorable.”

  And then:

  “Something terrible has happened, and I need your help; Georgina and I need you . . .”

  And then:

  “I
’ve missed you . . .”

  There is no rain, no maid, no parents’ mansion. Strictly speaking, there’s not even a real apology. But Carlos doesn’t need all that. He doesn’t even need José to finish his speech, those halting sentences mutilated by shame. He goes to José and puts his arms around him; he calls him brother and tells him he’s missed him too. Missed both of them.

  ◊

  It’s not cold, but they light the stove anyway, perhaps unable to imagine listening to a good story anywhere but beside a warm fire. And the story is, in fact, a good one, but also rather a long one, and confusing too. Or maybe it’s just that José doesn’t know how to tell it, doesn’t entirely understand it and so gets lost in the details, mixing up the order of the letters and confusing what comes before and after. As he talks, he is aglow with the light of the flames, which cast flickering shadows over his face and his words.

  At first it was all very easy. So he says. And there is reason to believe him: when he talks about that period, those first weeks after Carlos’s desertion, his speech seems freer, less mechanical. The letters they wrote then were humorous, or else so terribly serious that they made him and Ventura laugh. And so they laughed a lot and sometimes wrote a little, in the opium den, at the billiards table, in the Club Unión, in the stands at the bullring, in the brothels of Monserrate. They were overflowing with ideas, some of them contradictory and fearless, others absolutely ludicrous, but sooner or later they ended up putting them all down on paper. And it seemed that Juan Ramón enjoyed that wild Georgina, José insists, because his replies became longer, and in a way also contradictory, and fearless, and ludicrous.