The Sky Over Lima

by Juan Gómez Bárcena

  And beneath all that must be Georgina. Except that suddenly it turns out that she’s not really there: behind that makeup there’s nothing. Though perhaps it is untrue to say it happens suddenly. It is a sudden discovery that nevertheless only much later becomes a certainty: a slow, cold surprise that lasts many minutes and dozens of pages, letters that pass through his hands one after another, faster and faster. First he goes back to page 206, more or less the moment at which the tragedy begins, and then to the strike, and then even farther back, almost to her birth, and yet there’s nothing. Georgina no longer seems like Georgina; she is like any other woman, a stranger, a ridiculous puppet. A Frankenstein fashioned out of organs and limbs pillaged from different graves, phrases from Madame Bovary, from Anna Karenina, from The Dangerous Liaisons, even certain expressions they’ve read in Galdós’s latest novel—but not a trace of the real Georgina. Did she ever exist at all? Around him, Carlos sees only lifeless wreckage. It reminds him of when the doctor and his father and even the servants began to scold him if he talked to Román, forcing him to say again and again that his little friend didn’t exist, that the silver pitcher had been hurled to the floor by Carlos alone, not some other unruly boy; that there was nothing in that chair, on that sofa, in that garden, except air. And after a while he had heard them say it so often that he began to see it too—the air, you know—he saw the air, and in it the whips, and the stretchers, and the rifles, and the fly-swarmed corpses, and so very many real children with yellow eyes and swollen bellies, as if they were pregnant with hunger. At this point, that’s all he sees: air—that is, words—and maybe that’s why he suddenly remembers Sandoval’s words, how one must bore down to the reality of circumstances, the materiality of things, because all ideology is only a false consciousness, not the product of the material conditions of existence. He thinks those words now and repeats them to himself, and suddenly Georgina becomes only what he is holding in his hands, a crinkled sheet of paper, a few carefully chosen words, a way of returning to certain themes and commonplaces, a coffee stain on a draft that they used as a coaster, the way the i’s and t’s rise up as if they were trying to escape the page—that is, to reach heaven.

  Carlos wonders what has become of the novel that was once vividly rendered with each letter, as if it were being projected in the milky half-light of a moving-picture theater. A girl swinging her parasol from one shoulder to the other; a gloomy arbor in which someone is sighing or sobbing; the grille of a confessional, the grate on a window, and the wrought-iron fence around a garden with gravel paths and governesses; another cage, and in it a parakeet morosely being fed, pinch by pinch, its ration of birdseed; a missal clutched devoutly to a chest, the better to hide a bundle of letters inside it. He no longer sees any of those images that used to accompany the words. Not a trace of the real Georgina, if she ever even existed: only the faces of all the grotesque impostor georginas all around him. He sees the Panteoncito waif in the expensive dresses he gave her, costumes that were never quite able to wipe the whore off her. He sees the Polish prostitute, not a girl anymore, who no longer has her summer dress or her pink bows or her canopy bed, who doesn’t even have teeth now; all she has is the corner of a trash heap where she sells herself for a copper or a few swigs of wine, a toothless mouth that murmurs Cheistormoro to her customers, tall and short, young and old, fat and skinny—Cheistormoro, which might mean “hurry up and come” or “you’re hurting me” or maybe “I wish I were dead.” And he also sees himself lying languidly in bed, patiently kissing, with complete, pathetic earnestness, the back of his own hand. His eyes closed. And then he no longer feels a desire to reproach José or sadness for Juan Ramón or nostalgia for Georgina; instead, he feels only cavernous shame, and something like disgust. He recalls a dream he’s had many times and always forgets upon waking, a fantasy in which he sees a beautiful woman reclining on her divan, majestic as a Fortuny odalisque or a Doré engraving. Her body voluptuous, white, like something straight out of a painting, seems to become more and more real, drawing nearer, unbearably near, as if instead of eyes he had microscope lenses that someone was adjusting, or as if she, the beautiful woman, were growing so immense that soon she would swallow everything. A suddenly enormous chest, the areola of the breast covered with a purple rash, a repulsive acne, hairs growing thick as forests and wrinkles as deep as valleys, and under the skin a vertigo of secretions, viscosities, entrails, bacteria, sounds of digestion and excretion, menstruations, hot flashes, cells that replicate and die and replicate again. He always wakes from those nightmares feverish, soaked in his own sweat, shivering with fear from the weight of that awful, immense beauty.

  He feels almost the same desperation now as he pushes aside the bundle of letters. He feels deep repugnance, something he cannot express in words (but the Professor says that if there are no words, then the inexpressible thing is nothing), and he understands at last, or at least he thinks he does. It is a longing for everything to be over, to declare that Georgina is dying.

  That’s what he thinks: Georgina has to die.

  Actually, he says it out loud.

  “We have to kill her.”

  And José turns to look at him and laughs. A long, exaggerated guffaw that breaks off as Carlos’s meaning dawns on him.

  “Kill whom?”

  Then José tries to object, to say anything at all, but Carlos rushes on. His voice does not sound like his voice; indeed, it no longer is his voice. It sounds a bit like José’s, but it’s not that either. It sounds like, and in fact is, the authoritarian voice of Román: a voice that demands deference and quiets José in an instant. It is rather amusing to hear Román say that an imaginary friend must be killed—but really it isn’t amusing at all. It is true.

  Is it true?

  Carlos seems quite sure of himself. As if Román had lent him not just his voice but also his confidence, that determination with which he used to play pranks or declare the rules of a game. As he talks, only the slightest gesture reveals the emotion he’s feeling: the way his fingers are fiddling with the edges of the bundle of letters. It is as if he could go forward and backward in time at will, returning to the novel to select just the scenes and examples to buttress his words. He says: Weren’t you the one who insisted that all of this was just literature? The one who quoted Aristotle and talked about verisimilitude? The one who kept saying our novel’s ending needed a bit of drama, because the best love stories always end in tragedy? That Petrarch had to have a woman die on him, and Dante a girl, and Catullus a young man, so that a great poem could be written. Isn’t that what you said, José? Well, there’s your tragedy—Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, María clenched with epilepsy, Fortunata bleeding to death, Emma Bovary swallowing arsenic. Because Georgina has consumption, don’t you see? She has two cavities in her lungs as large as fists. How else can you explain her pallor, her seclusion, and the way the housemaid would scold her when she spent evenings in the garden watching the moths burning up in the lamp—don’t you remember, José? And the cough racking the chest and the urgent admission to the Santa Águeda sanatorium—a surprising choice of disease, really. “I never said it was Santa Águeda!” José sputters. That hardly matters now, Carlos continues, the main thing is there’s only one sanatorium in La Punta, and that sanatorium is for consumptives—Juan Ramón can confirm it if he wishes. You wanted me to help you, and this is all the help I can offer: I’m just a reader of your novel, and as such I know that this story has to end with Georgina dead and Juan Ramón in mourning.

  Can it really be true?

  José sighs. All right, he says. Carlos may very well be correct in what he’s said, at least about part of it; José is even willing to accept that he might be correct about everything. Lately the novel has been hurtling toward a tragic end, and that could be his fault. But surely there is still something they can do; even if we aren’t the authors, let’s get on with it, damn it, who else can write an alternative ending? One where Georgina does not die but they
still find a way to keep Juan Ramón from boarding that ship, to make him write a poem instead.

  Hearing José’s insistence, Carlos smiles with a new expression. He has practiced it in front of the mirror many times, and at last he has the chance to use it: a look of superiority, of disdain. Of course you can do that if you like, he answers. Save her on the very last page, like in those flea-market novels that always end with an unexpected pardon from the Crown. Or the discovery of a hidden treasure. Or a mounted charge against the enemy’s rear guard, led by a general who’s never even been mentioned before. That’s called deus ex machina, is it not? Well, there you go, then: perform a deus ex machina if that’s what you want, and the hell with your novel—and the poem too. Have you forgotten about the poem? What will the Maestro write if Georgina survives? A few trifling verses that no one will even notice, guaranteed—an inconsequential lament for yet another maiden who became a nun or was forced to marry. Worse still: a poem about two scoundrels pretending to be a woman. And why should José be satisfied with that when he could have a poem that aches with real grief, a true and inconsolable wail; an elegy for a beloved who has died, snuffed out on the very eve of this long-anticipated encounter, maybe for no other reason than that such a beautiful flower simply could not last. But if he’s not convinced, he can go for it. If he’d rather have a tacky junk-shop novel, the kind that’s sold at a nickel a pound, then he knows what he has to write. Or he could just sit back and let Juan Ramón come to him; he and Georgina can get married and have paper children, for all Carlos cares.

  Here Carlos pauses; he lights a cigarette. His hands are shaking, but this time it’s not out of unease or trepidation. He feels a wild exultation, a furious euphoria that has driven him to his feet and inspired him to spit out those last words. It is a new emotion, or at least it seems new at first, but slowly he realizes that it also leaves a familiar aftertaste. He experienced something similar once before—he’s just remembered. It was eight years ago, in the Polish prostitute’s bed. Because if he’s honest with himself, he has to admit that back then he felt more than just guilt and sadness, even if it is those emotions that have prevailed in his memory for all these years. When he awoke and saw the bloodstained sheets, he also felt, he remembers now, a more primitive pleasure that he didn’t understand at the time. A sort of arousal tinged with the same frenzy his father used to exhibit when he beat their indigenous workers, and perhaps too with the pleasure that he himself had secretly enjoyed as he moved repeatedly over the young girl’s body. Her cries like a sweet anesthetic in his ear, like a thermometer measuring his valor, his strength. The knowledge that, in spite of everything, he too could inflict pain. That he could dominate and destroy another human being and then simply leave, nonchalant. And now the same exhilaration washes over him, a furious elation that would destroy everything, as if the blood on that sheet belonged not to the Polish prostitute but to tubercular Georgina—the red sputum that she will keep coughing up till she breathes her last, just because he wishes it to be so.

  José vacillates. He doesn’t speak immediately. In the glow from the stove, his face is full of oscillations, of flickering dark shadows and red light. But Carlos doesn’t need to hear what he’s about to say. He knows that his hesitation is only a mirage—that in fact the decision has already been made, just as Román always knew that his friend Carlos would end up accommodating all his desires. It cannot be otherwise. And so he takes another drag on his cigarette, and as he does, he seems to anticipate everything that will follow: His father bribing the consul, or even the Peruvian ambassador to Madrid (Tell me, you leeches, how much this poet’s heart is going to cost me); if necessary, forging a death certificate for Georgina, just as he previously invented the records of all those illustrious ancestors. Georgina’s death contained in the space of a telegram, because her final words will journey not in the hold of a ship but in a diplomatic cable. Thirteen words, to be exact, the maximum allowed in urgent messages, and he and José scrawling on sheets of paper, crumpling them up until they find the right ones. Thirteen words, perhaps something like these: Please inform poet Juan Ramón Jiménez that Señorita Georgina Hübner of Lima is dead—“That’s fourteen,” the telegraph operator will point out, and Carlos, after thinking a moment: “Then cross out the poet bit.” And the telegram, without the word poet, traveling across the ocean as Georgina dies in a tuberculosis hospital—or, better still, Georgina dying and in her delirium dreaming of a telegram that travels across the ocean; the nuns coming and going with their white wimples and surgical trays and cold compresses; electric pulses rattling down thousands of miles of undersea cable, invisible as a dream; Georgina awake, in the throes of death, and behind her eyes a telegram soaring over ocean ridges and shipwrecks, seaweed forests and mud flats, shelves and trenches briefly illuminated by a feverish lucidity; her nightmare spinning the telegraph bobbin, the inked roller, the strip of paper that is filling up with words, with silences, with dots and dashes so much like her broken breathing. The nun’s hand reaching out to close her eyelids, and the strip of paper in the hands of the telegraph operator, in the hands of the messenger boy, in the hands of the guard, of the servant, of Juan Ramón at last; once more his fingers unrolling the telegram, his hands steady at first, though soon they begin to tremble.

  ◊

  Somebody is pounding on the door. It is six in the morning, and the noise is so loud, it sounds like whoever it is is trying to tear the house down. The gendarmes again, thinks Madame Lenotre as she hurries downstairs, attempting to fasten her shawl. It’s been four years since the incident, but impossible to forget—a squad of armed men rapping sharply on the door to arrest one of her customers, a tiny man, almost a dwarf. They took him into custody right then and there, his cock still erect and a look on his face like he’d never broken a dish in his life. Seeing him so defenseless, so small, so childlike in the hands of all those men, some of the girls wept. Finally someone explained that he’d escaped from the penitentiary, and that on previous nights he’d attacked four women at other brothels, slitting their throats and hacking them to pieces. The girl who’d been with him was dumbstruck when she found out, and the other girls peppered her with questions about him. They wanted to know what he was like, how to distinguish a normal customer from a deviant, a madman. Her eyes still wide and her tongue stiff and clumsy, she answered that he was just a man. No gentler or rougher, no chattier or quieter than any of the other customers she saw, some two dozen a week.

  But tonight there are no fugitive prisoners in the house; there aren’t even any customers. The last one left at least a couple of hours ago, and Lenotre told the girls they could go to bed, that nobody else was likely to come. So there are no men, and no girls awake to see them, and when she opens the street door it turns out there aren’t any gendarmes either. Just young Master Carlos, thoroughly soused, clinging to the knocker to keep from falling down. It’s hard to believe this polite, formal boy has caused such a ruckus. And yet there he is, his chin held high and his gaze defiant. There’s a new determination in his voice and expression, a profound gravity that comes not just from drunkenness but from something else, someone else. Yes. That’s exactly what Lenotre finds herself thinking for a moment: Young Master Rodríguez has become another man. And this stranger needs to see the girl—he’s yelling it at the top of his lungs. He knows that it’s six in the morning and the house is closed, but he must see her immediately; he is very sorry, it must be at once. His money is as good as anyone else’s, and as he says this he pulls wads of bills out of his pocket like fruit rinds. Empty casings that first spill into Lenotre’s bony hand and then fall across the rug.

  The girl is sound asleep, and everything that happens after that seems to her like the continuation of a dream. Lenotre claps loudly at her bedside, shouting that the young gentleman is here. What young gentleman? Well, who else, the young gentleman is the young gentleman, Mr. Gob-Smacked, the one with the hymen, the son of the rubber magnate. He’s out of his mind, he s
ays he must see you at once and he’s brought a pile of cash—put on one of those dresses he likes so much and do whatever he wants. She jumps to her feet in a flash; she almost leaps across Cayetana’s body. She runs to look at herself in the cracked moon of the mirror. Why would the young gentleman be in such a hurry? His desperation, his urgency can mean only one thing. Only one? As she hastily applies makeup and gets dressed, she makes a deal with God: if he is waiting for her in the private rooms on the ground floor and not on the second, then it means he’s come to say to her what she so longs to hear. It’s a fair deal; not having a crucifix, she seals it with a kiss on her fist. As she descends the staircase, everything around her seems unreal: the carpeted stairs, the still-life paintings on the walls, the sickly light that is beginning to sift in through the windows, giving the house a dreamlike atmosphere. No, it’s not a dream—it is a passage from one of those novels Mimí is always reading to her. And she is the protagonist, of course; she looks like a young lady and everything, with her white dress and her matching hat and gloves. His favorite outfit. She has opened the parasol, too, and is carrying it against her shoulder. She’s not superstitious about that, at least; how could she be, when lately only good things have been happening to her, even when she opens umbrellas that aren’t really umbrellas indoors.