The Sky Over Lima Read online

  ◊

  The subsequent letters require more drafts than the first. Something more vital than obtaining a book of poems is at stake now: if Juan Ramón doesn’t answer, the comedy is over. And for some reason, that comedy suddenly seems to its authors to be quite a serious thing. Maybe that’s why they’re hardly laughing anymore, and why Carlos has a solemn air about him when he picks up the fountain pen.

  Yet there is no reason to imagine that the correspondence might be interrupted soon. Juan Ramón always answers in the return post, sometimes even dispatching two or three letters in a single week that will later travel together, embarking on the same transatlantic voyage back to Lima. He too seems to want the joke to continue many chapters longer, even at the cost of short and somewhat ceremonious missives. The letters are frankly boring at times, yet as fundamentally Juan Ramón–esque as the Sad Arias or his Violet Souls, and that is enough to move José and Carlos to memorize them and venerate them during many a worshipful afternoon. Sometimes the quartos arrive splattered with ink stains or spelling errors, but they forgive him even that, with indulgence, with pleasure. Juan Ramón, so perfect in his poems, so intellijent—with a j—he too sometimes scratches things out with his pen, he too gets confused, mixes up g and j and s and c.

  So what do they talk about in those first letters?

  The truth is that nobody much cares. Not even them. They spend many hours writing the letters, packaging them, sending them; hours exchanging remedies for the flu or discussing the cold or the heat in Madrid or Chopin’s nocturnes or the discomforts of traveling by car. It is an unfruitful time that is best kept to a minimum. What does matter—and matters a lot—is the way those letters begin and end. The way they transition smoothly and discreetly from Señor Don Juan R. Jiménez and Señorita Georgina Hübner to Dearest friend in only fourteen letters. Not to mention the closings: Your most attentive servant, Cordially, Fondly, Affectionately, Tenderly. This shift, which takes place over the course of seven hundred forty-two lines of correspondence, equivalent to about an hour and fifty minutes of conversation in a café, might seem indecorously rapid. But as the Lima–La Coruña route is covered by just two ships a month and a ship rarely carries more than two or three of their letters, in fact the relationship develops quite slowly, very much in keeping with the period. They are rather reminiscent of those lovers who wait six months for permission to speak to each other through a window grating, and at least one full year for their first chaste kiss.

  And of course the word love has yet to be said.

  ◊

  Whenever José spots the cancellation marks of transatlantic postage amid his correspondence, he rushes off to find Carlos. They have agreed that they will always read the letters together—after all, both of them are Georgina—and Gálvez scrupulously fulfills his promise, though he does occasionally give in to temptation and peek under the flap of the envelope. They read the Maestro’s words aloud on the benches of the university or in the Club Unión billiards room, and then they go to the garret to watch the afternoon fade, deliberating over each word of their response. They often continue writing long past nightfall, and as they polish their final draft, the mosquitoes orbit the oil lamp in smaller and smaller circles until finally burning to a crisp in its flame.

  Both of them think constantly of Juan Ramón, but only Carlos pays any mind to Georgina. For José she is merely a pretext, a means by which to fill his desk drawer with holy relics from the Maestro. A dainty portrait, for example. Or one of the poet’s unpublished poems. That is José’s interest with every letter: how to get more books, more autographs, more Juan Ramón. Carlos, on the other hand, strives to give Georgina a personality and a biography. Perhaps he is beginning to suspect that his character will one day become the protagonist of her own story. So he carefully chooses the words she uses in each letter, giving them the same meticulous concentration he gives his handwriting. He’s attentive to the adverbs, the ellipses, the exclamation points. He says to José: Let me take care of this, you’re an only child and don’t understand the language of women; it’s a good thing I have three sisters and have learned to listen to them. Women sigh a lot, and whenever they sigh they use ellipses. They exaggerate a lot, and when they exaggerate they use exclamation points. They feel a lot, and that’s why their feelings all come with adverbs. José laughs, but he lets Carlos create, cross out, make over his too-manly sentences. Sometimes he teases him, of course. He calls him Carlota, tells him he’s looking particularly comely that night. Go to hell, mutters Carlota—mutters Carlos—without lifting his eyes from the paper.

  But José doesn’t go anywhere, of course. Neither of them moves. First they have to work out the answers to a great number of questions. Might Georgina be an orphan? Does she have a splash of indigenous blood or the alabaster complexion of the criolla ladies? How old is she, exactly, and what does she want from Juan Ramón? They don’t know, just as they still don’t know what they’re doing, or why it is so important that Juan Ramón keep writing back. Why don’t they just forget the whole thing and return to their obligations: studying for failed law courses and looking for flesh-and-blood women to take to the spring dance?

  But for some reason they keep writing long after it has grown dark. They don’t seem to know why, and if they do know, neither of them says.

  ◊

  They fancy themselves poets.

  They met in the lecture halls of the University of San Marcos at that critical age when students begin to cultivate ideas of their own along with their first sparse facial hair. For both young men, one of those first interests—the reluctant mustaches would come much later—was poetry. Up until that point, all their life decisions had been made by their families, from their enrollment in law school to their tedious piano lessons. Both wore suits purchased through catalogs in Europe, they recited the same formulaic pleasantries, and at social gatherings they had learned to offer similar opinions on the Chilean war, the indecent nature of certain modern dances, and the disastrous consequences of Spanish colonialism. Carlos was to become a lawyer to see to his father’s affairs, and José—well, all José had to do was get the degree, and his family’s contacts would do the rest. Their love of poetry, on the other hand, had not been imposed on them by anyone, nor did it serve any practical purpose. It was the first passion that belonged entirely to them. Mere words, perhaps, but words that spoke to them of somewhere else, a world beyond their comfortable prison of folding screens and parasols, of Cuban cigars in the guest parlor and dinners served at eight thirty on the dot.

  Though they’re not poets, at least not yet, they have learned to behave as if they were, which is almost as good. They frequent the salons of Madame Linard on Tuesdays and those of the Club Unión on Thursdays; they rummage in their armoires and dig out scarves and hats and ancient topcoats so they can dress up as Baudelaire at night; they grow increasingly thin—alarmingly so, according to their mothers. In a pub on Jirón de la Unión, they draw up a solemn manifesto with three other students in which they swear never to return to their law studies as long as they all shall live, under pain of mediocrity. Sometimes they even write: appallingly bad poetry, verses that sound like an atrocious translation of Rilke or, worse still, an even more atrocious translation of Bécquer. No matter. Writing well is a detail that will no doubt come later, with the aid of Baudelaire’s wardrobe, Rimbaud’s absinthe, or Mallarmé’s handlebar mustache. And with each line of poetry they write, the convictions they have inherited from their fathers become a bit more tattered; they begin to think that Chile might have been in the right during the Chilean war, that perhaps what is truly indecent is to keep dancing their grandparents’ dances well into the twentieth century, and that Spanish colonialism—well, actually, in the case of Spanish colonialism, they have to admit that they continue to share their fathers’ views, much as it pains them.

  How long have they considered themselves poets? Not even they could say for sure. Perhaps that’s what they’ve always been, albei
t unknowingly—the possibility of this pushes them to reexamine the trivial anecdotes of their childhoods with fresh eyes. Did Carlos not utter his first poem that morning when, on an outing to the countryside, he asked his governess whether the mountains had a mommy and daddy too? And the gaze with which José, having barely spoken his first words, contemplated the Tarma twilight—was that not already the gaze of a poet? In these moments of revelation, they are certain that, yes, they have indeed always been poets, and so they spend hours combing their past for those signs of brilliance that blossom early in the lives of great geniuses, then pat each other on the back when they find them and declare themselves ardent admirers of each other’s poems after yet another long, pisco-soaked night. All at once they are the vibrant future of Peruvian poetry, the torch that will light the way for new literary traditions. Both of them, but especially the grandson of the illustrious José Gálvez Egúsquiza, whose light for some reason seems to shine a little more brightly.

  ◊

  The garret is in one of the many buildings the Rodríguez family owns in Lima’s San Lázaro neighborhood, aging properties they don’t bother restoring and that seem on the verge of collapsing with their freight of tenants inside them. The building’s other floors are rented out to thirty or so Chinese immigrants who work in the noodle factory nearby, but the garret is too dilapidated even for them. Not even those sallow men who slept on the ships’ gunwales on their Pacific crossing want it, so José and Carlos are free to visit it whenever they wish.

  Its windows are broken, and sunlight streams in through gaps between the planks in the walls. The floorboards are pockmarked with neglect, and somewhere a cat has miraculously survived, even though rumor has it that the Chinese eat cats and it’s certainly the case that these particular Chinese are in dire need of sustenance. It is, in short, the perfect place for two young men bored with sleeping in canopy beds and admonishing the maids for failing to polish the silver wine pitchers. They are thrilled by the sensation of poverty, and they roam among the burlap sacks and heaps of dusty junk like the lucky survivors of a shipwreck.

  It is there that Georgina is born. A birth marked by words and laughter, tenuously illuminated by light flickering from bottles deployed as makeshift candlesticks.

  They visit the garret every afternoon. They enjoy walking through Lima’s poor neighborhoods on their way to that building that might have been taken directly from the pages of a Zola novel. A humble murmuring issues from within, muffled by threadbare curtains and rice-paper screens. Two women fighting over a serving of soup. A long monologue in a strange language that could be a madman’s rant or maybe a prayer. A child sobbing. They take it all in with a mix of eagerness and pleasure, searching for traces of the poetry that Baudelaire was the first to find in poverty, or perhaps they are searching through poverty in hopes of finding Baudelaire himself. Their visits distress the building’s watchman, who as he opens the door for them always pleads, “Master Rodríguez, Master Gálvez, for the sake of all that is holy, please be careful.” He worries, of course, that the floorboards in the attic will give way and the young men will be injured, but more unnerving still is the vague, mysterious threat posed by the Chinese tenants.

  José and Carlos laugh. They know full well that the tenants are harmless: sad-faced men and women who don’t even dare to raise their eyes when they encounter them on the landings. “But they’re quiet people, really,” they respond, still laughing, from the stairs. The watchman clucks his tongue. “Too quiet,” he adds before letting them go. “Too quiet . . .”

  Some afternoons they clamber up from the garret to the rooftop. They loosen their cravats and take swigs from a shared bottle. Clustered below them are the houses, the humble little squares, the cathedral’s spires. In the distance, the somber silhouette of the University of San Marcos, which they’re skipping again. They see the denizens of Lima walking rapidly, slightly hunched, most of them oppressed by burdens that José and Carlos neither understand nor judge. The young men make an odd sight in their smudged white linen suits and their walking sticks, hanging over the abyss as if they were newly bankrupt millionaires threatening to leap into the void. But nobody sees them. In the poor neighborhoods, people walk with their eyes on the ground and look up only occasionally to ask the dear Lord to grant them some mercy, which He rarely does.

  Sitting there on the rooftop, they play their favorite games. For the first, they must forget that they’re in Lima garbed in fifty-sol suits. In one stroke they blot out the colonial bell towers, the adobe walls, the golden hills, the people—above all, those miserable people who seem so determined to spoil their fantasies. Now suddenly they are in Paris, two penniless poets without even a crust of bread between them. They have written the greatest poems of the century, but no one knows it. Incredible verses that open like exotic flowers and then gradually wilt amid the ugliness of the world. A week ago, they spent their last coin on a ream of paper. Yesterday they pawned their fountain pen and their desk. That very morning they sold the last of their books to a junkman and used the franc he gave them—ah, they used that franc to make one final wish on the Pont Neuf and then watched it plummet hopelessly into the Seine. Plop. They imagine that it’s cold. At night, snow will again blanket Paris, and they will be forced to burn their poems one by one to survive the winter.

  Their poverty softens them while the reverie lasts, which isn’t long, as daydreams are arduous things that can be sustained only with immense effort. Lima is a place that is impervious to fantasies, and soon they feel the heat of their eternal summer once more, or they notice a gold cufflink gleaming at one of their wrists. Or perhaps the Rodríguez car noisily invades the unpaved streets and the chauffeur pokes his head out the driver’s-side window and shouts, “Master Rodríguez! Your father wants you home for dinner!” Then their dream plunges downward like the coin they’ll never toss into the Seine, and suddenly they see themselves again for what they really are: two wealthy young men looking at poverty from on high.

  “What a God-awful city,” murmurs José as he prepares to go down.

  ◊

  But their favorite pastime is the character game. It began by chance during a lecture on mercantile law, when José observed that the professor looked just like Ebenezer Scrooge, right down to his spectacles. They both tittered so loudly that Professor Nicanor—Mr. Scrooge—interrupted his lecture and escorted them to the classroom door, whose threshold they seldom darkened anyway. Out in the courtyard, fortified with alcohol, they continued playing. The Roman law professor was Ana Ozores’s cuckolded husband from Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta. The ancient and practically mummified rector was Ivan Ilyich before Ivan’s death—or perhaps, José added snidely, Ivan Ilyich after his death. The widow of the impresario Francisco Stevens, an extraordinarily fat woman, was an aging Madame Bovary. “But Emma commits suicide when she’s still young,” Carlos objected. “Exactly,” Gálvez countered. “She’s a Madame Bovary who doesn’t commit suicide. One who has the objectionable taste to outlive her beauty and become fat and farcical.”

  Soon enough everyone’s a character: friends, relatives, literary rivals, strangers. Even animals: though they’ve never seen the cat that ekes out a living in the garret—they occasionally hear it yowling somewhere amid the detritus, perhaps reveling in the knowledge of being among kindred spirits—they are unanimous in their conviction that it belongs in a Poe story.

  From up on the rooftop, they decide with unhurried capriciousness which of the people swarming at their feet are the work of Balzac, or Cervantes, or Victor Hugo. Up there it is easy to feel like a poet, to contemplate the square and the adjoining streets as if they were a vast postcard with characters from all the world’s literature wandering about. For example, the first fantasies of the schoolgirls who line up at the entrance to the convent school are written by Bécquer. The lives of the wealthy citizens striding across the square are narrated by Galdós—what dull lives they lead, poor things, just like Benito the Garbanzo Eater himself.
If you are one of the whores on Calle del Panteoncito, your endless misfortunes are narrated by Zola or, should you become a nun, by Saint John of the Cross. The drunks who stumble out of the taverns, of course, are figments from the nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe. Madmen? Dostoyevsky. Adventurers? Melville. Lovers? If things turn out well, Tolstoy, and if they go sour, Goethe. Beggars? That’s an easy one, because poverty is everywhere alike—the lives of Lima’s mendicants are written by Dickens, but without fog; by Gogol, but without vodka; by Twain, but without hope.

  An implacable arbitrariness also divides the characters into protagonists and secondary figures, and their deliberations on whether or not a particular beautiful woman or a certain picturesque beggar is the main character of a story can go on for quite some time. The matter is not to be taken lightly, as protagonists are, in fact, a rare breed; you have to stumble across them, track them patiently amid the mob of figures entering and leaving that page of the book of their lives.