The Sky Over Lima Page 20

  But the poem—where was their poem? In those first months, they still quivered with excitement as they opened each envelope. Their hopes gradually went cold as they waited for the ever-absent dedication: just another dull letter to add to the collection—thirty-two—a little postcard with the Retiro pond in the distance, sometimes a few lines inspired by another woman. Poems dedicated to Blanca Hernández-Pinzón, to Jeanne Roussie, to Francine, but none to him—that is, to her. Of course Ventura and his friends didn’t care about that. (They are not writers, after all; they do not read poetry.) They may even have grown bored with this joke that was never really a joke. They would rather smoke and drink and carouse than engage in a tedious game when it no longer mattered to them whether they won or lost, whether Georgina was demure or dissolute. Whether Juan Ramón wrote the poem or didn’t. But of course it matters, says José, what else could possibly matter if not this: writing a poem that, in one way or another, will make us immortal, serve as a reminder that we have lived, a posterity composed of lines and letters—but above all, in the end, a poem.

  What was it about Georgina Hübner that the Maestro did not like? He was tempted to ask him. To write a letter calling the poet an ingrate, an imbecile. Instead, he did just the opposite. Georgina’s missives became ever more passionate, more tender—all his ire was converted into adjectives, sentences that trailed off like sighs, intimate seductions. And also a great many adverbs and ellipses, as Carlos’s lessons had not been entirely in vain.

  Perhaps he overstepped certain bounds—José is willing to acknowledge that. He was in the grip of something like a fever, an irrepressible urge to make Juan Ramón fall in love at last. With him, with her. It was akin to the passion with which he had hounded first the Gálvezes’ chambermaid, and then dozens of lady’s companions, young women at their coming-out parties, vaudeville actresses, Sacred Heart schoolgirls, seamstresses. And he always accomplished what he set out to do—as Carlos knew all too well. Hadn’t he felt that emotion once himself? Hadn’t his desire for Juan Ramón to fall in love been strangely reminiscent of the desire to seduce a woman, to seduce all of them?

  Carlos listens without offering any expression of agreement, without meeting José’s eyes. He stares at the embers in the grate. It looks like he’s listening to a story—indeed, listening with utmost attention—but the fire is the one telling it to him. And José—the fire—sometimes breaks off, takes lengthy pauses, possibly for dramatic effect. Or possibly not; maybe José really needs those breaks to figure out what he wants to say, because the novel has started to get complicated. At least that’s what José reports. In reality, it’s just the opposite: suddenly the story he’s telling has become quite simple—certain characters disappear, the plot lines grow clearer, the love story is finally taking off—but in José’s telling of it, he uses that grim word, complication. Suddenly eight letters arrive, each of them written a day after the previous letter and then all collected together in the hold of the same ship, and those letters seem to change everything.

  In the first one, Juan Ramón talks for the first time about long-ago love affairs; he even refers to proper names, certain doleful farewells, kisses whose memory no longer causes him pain, feelings that one believes to be everlasting and, as it turns out, my lady, wither as quickly as they blossom. The second speaks of the (imprecise) boundary between love and friendship. The third, of the (finite) dimensions of the Atlantic Ocean; of how he sometimes imagines her traveling its ten thousand leagues in the same transatlantic steamer that bears her letters; imagines her, his dear friend, having her trunks carried up the gangway onto the ship; clutching her hat and holding up her skirts as she disembarks in some Spanish port. The fourth is about solitude: his need to be alone, his fear of being alone, his inability to be alone. The fifth rejects the arguments of the second: the line between love and friendship is not imprecise but rather utterly imaginary, a utopia, a boundary that is worked out between two people, that is invented and frequently adjusted, forgotten, expunged, fantasized, because in the cartography of sentiment—those are the very words he uses—there are no rivers or mountain ranges that one might use to orient oneself; an emotion can fit in the palm of one’s hand today and be as vast as a continent tomorrow. The sixth returns to the ocean: a sailor in Palos de la Frontera once told him that a man’s first voyage on the high seas expands his soul and transforms his perspective. The seventh doesn’t talk about anything—it is brief and desultory, vainly attempting to hold forth on trivial matters. And finally there’s the eighth, which in a sense ties all of the previous letters together. Six sheets of nervous handwriting and even blotches of ink that speak urgently of the possibility of a journey, of the need for a journey; in the past few weeks, he has been gripped by a wild obsession and begun planning a tour of lectures and poetry readings through the Americas and Peru, what do you think of that, Georgina—traversing the (finite) limits of the ocean to read poetry and discover the (imprecise) boundaries of love and friendship along the way, because for some time now he has been unable to think of anything but her. He is ashamed to admit it, though there is really no reason why he should be. Why should it make a man tremble simply to be sincere, to give voice to certain dreams, to explain how much he has come to feel for a woman whose face he has never even seen—why do you still refuse me that photograph, Georgina? And above all, why should he blush at telling her that on some nights he even maintains the ludicrous hope—ludicrous?—that perhaps with time, with patience, she might end up reciprocating; an emotion can fit in the palm of the hand today and be vast as a continent tomorrow; just imagine it, me in Lima, taking you by the hand and ardently telling you so many things, what do you say to that, dear Georgina, what is your answer?

  It seems incredible, but that’s what the Maestro’s letter said; that’s what José tells him now.

  ◊

  He pauses again. Takes a swig from the bottle of pisco. Like the drafts of his letters, José’s words seem to be filled with erasures, with silences. Holes in which whole chapters are dismantled page by page; fragments of things he will never tell Carlos, because perhaps they do not matter. And this pause is so long that by the time he speaks again, a couple of chapters have simply vanished. And now José has ended up all alone with his own novel. It’s as if there’s been a corporate dissolution, one of those separations of estates that they studied in their labor law class. After the divvying up, Ventura and his friends have gotten the opium den, the bullring, the club, the billiards tables, and the brothels of Acequia Alta and Monserrate. José has only the letters and a predicament: how to reply to Juan Ramón. He keeps writing, and the others keep carrying on more or less the same old way in the same old places, now without poems or commitments or novelistic dénouements to consider.

  At first he weighed the two options he and Ventura had planned out: the pious ending and the spicy ending. Trot out Georgina the married woman or Georgina the nun, and the Maestro would abandon his plans to set sail. But it was too late to try to cram religious vocation into the novel, and much too late to cook up a marriage. Neither the convent nor the church was an option, then, and it was all Juan Ramón’s fault, since he’d pushed the plot along too quickly. The great works of Literature, averred Professor Schneider in one of his mandates, never succumb to the temptation of the unanticipated or sensationalist ending. Didn’t Carlos remember that counsel? Was it at all reasonable that, after a mere forty-one letters, after eighteen months without a poem, one of the protagonists would decide to make no less monumental a gesture than crossing the Atlantic? He hadn’t even seen a photograph! You ask, my dear Juan Ramón, if I am aggrieved that you requested a portrait? No! I hope you do not believe me to be so ungenerous in spirit. Only wait, it will come, but first it is only fair that you send me one of you. Would a beautiful woman ever pass up an opportunity to reveal her face? Georgina might be fat, or homely, or deformed, or pockmarked—a poxy lover is such a difficult thing to accept! Or, more likely, she might simply be ordinary,
indistinguishable from the Spanish women who pass beneath the poet’s balcony each morning. That sort of blind heroism, traveling halfway around the globe to pull back the curtain on a dream, is the kind of thing you see in serial novels and bad melodramas, you know it’s true, Carlos. And how could José have known, how could anybody have suspected that the Maestro would turn out to be such a dreadful protagonist?

  And so he had only one option: The ending that wasn’t really an ending, that was hardly more than a pause or a blank page. Georgina, fallen ill. Would Juan Ramón venture to board a ship if his beloved were far from Lima in a sanatorium and surrounded by her family? José imagined not, so he inflicted upon his Georgina a series of fevers that knocked her out for days—nay, entire weeks!—at a time. How about this: I received your latest epistles while not yet fully recuperated from an illness that kept me confined to bed for weeks, read the letter. And then a dash of drama, because her family, alarmed, had taken her to a sanatorium in Barranco, and then to another in La Punta, believing her to be on her deathbed—I must ask you to postpone that journey you’ve mentioned, please understand, though I cannot tell you not to come, the doctor insists that I should not experience any surprises or strong emotions, and the feelings you describe are too immense to be contained in a body as frail as mine; a dry cough still occasionally racks my chest.

  And that plea should have been enough, but it was not enough, because Juan Ramón is afire and will not hear reason. Maybe the letter frightened him, or maybe he surmised it was a case of tuberculosis—though José would never be so boorish as to make his protagonist succumb to tuberculosis, of all the cheap clichés—or, worse, maybe he remembered the plot of Jorge Isaacs’s María and thought that his beloved, too, might inexorably die, that there was no time to lose. In any event he answered just yesterday, I shudder to think of it, Carlos, just a single sheet of paper with a few frantic scrawls—Why wait any longer? says the letter. I will take the very first ship, the fastest one, which will bear me swiftly to your side. You can tell me in person, the two of us sitting on the seashore or in your fragrant garden with birdsong and moonlight. Birdsong and moonlight! See, Carlos? Birdsong and moonlight, no less, as if it were the tawdry dialogue from a serial novel, an installment with the prince and the whore of the who-the-hell-knows seas, the kind of garbage that only housemaids and seamstresses enjoy. And what am I going to do now, what are we going to do? I haven’t been able to sleep all night! Who’s to say that imbecile hasn’t set sail, that he isn’t already in El Callao, sniffing around Georgina’s door, my door, right this moment? You have to help me, Carlos—you’re the only one who can come up with a happy ending for this novel.

  ◊

  The fire is dying down, and Carlos has to get up several times to feed it. It’s been so long since he’s written letters or poems that there is no scrap paper left, so he ends up digging through the rubbish piled up in the corners. He patiently pulls out dusty cloths, pieces of broken furniture, burlap sacks. Pries loose a few planks.

  José starts to get up.

  “Let me help . . .”

  “No need.”

  Carlos pokes the rags and splintered wood in through the door of the potbelly stove. José watches him silently. He seems to recognize a seriousness, a new determination in Carlos’s movements. Actually, the whole scene is eerily reminiscent of his fantasies of artists living in a Montmartre garret: clochards warming themselves by burning their poems and, when those run out, piece by piece pulling apart the walls, the ceiling, and even the floor until they are huddled in the heat of the stove under the implacable Parisian sky. But José doesn’t have time to think about that tonight. Instead, he keeps repeating the same thing: Carlos, what are you doing, sit down already, aren’t you going to say anything?

  After a few minutes, Carlos sits down at last. It seems like he’s going to say something, but then he doesn’t. José waits patiently—at least he tries to wait, tries to be patient. He doesn’t manage it. He has decided to count to fifty before he speaks, to give Carlos fifty opportunities to speak first, but by the time he makes it to twenty, the question is already coming out of his mouth.

  “Are you going to help me?”

  Carlos only glances at him. He shrugs.

  “You should ask Professor Cristóbal for advice. I don’t have anything to do with that anymore.”

  There is no bitterness in his voice, only the neutral tone of someone expressing an incontrovertible truth. José fervently objects. Of course not, what is he talking about, hasn’t he heard a single word he’s said? He tries to apologize, to tell him they wouldn’t have made it this far without him, that there’s no getting out of this predicament without him, that the novel is his too and always has been, how could he doubt it.

  “Anyway, I already talked to the Professor. Just this morning. I went to see him in the plaza and told him everything. That Georgina wasn’t anyone’s cousin, that it had all started as a joke and then got out of hand, that there was no malice in it. Brought him up to speed, basically. You know what he told me? He said he knew it from the start. The rascal! I don’t buy it, though—I know we fooled him, just like we fooled everybody else, even if he’s pretending to be clairvoyant now. And then there’s the question of those ethics he’s always going on about. Why would he have broken those famous rules of his to cultivate a romance if he knew it was a farce? I asked him that, naturally.”

  Carlos doesn’t move, but his eyes are suddenly alert.

  “And what did he say?”

  “The first thing that came into his head. That I must remember that the first rule, the most important one, the one that trumps all others, is never to swim against love’s tide. But whose love? I asked him. He laughed, of course—what could he say? I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it . . .”

  As for advice, the Professor hadn’t said much. He’d only laughed again and noted that Georgina sounded ill, quite gravely ill, those coughs and chills in her chest are a bad sign this time of year, she might very well be dying on them. Wouldn’t that be liberating? he’d added with a wink. And so José needs Carlos now—can you believe it, even that charlatan friend of yours has given up, has no idea how to get out of this fix, but I know you’re different, I know you’ll find a way. And as he says it he holds out the bundle of letters with a beseeching expression. Everything’s here, he adds, the latest chapters of our novel.

  Our novel—that’s what he says.

  Carlos hesitates a moment before finally accepting the packet of letters. He weighs it warily in his hand, finding it surprisingly light for its size. It is a mechanical gesture with no anxiety in it but no joy or curiosity or sadness either. He can’t find the right words to answer José, which, to paraphrase the Professor, means he doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know how he should feel. He has waited so often for this moment—José’s apology, Georgina’s return—and now that he’s holding that bit of fulfilled desire in his hands, he doesn’t know what to do with it. José humiliated; José pleading with him for help, to help him save their novel; José needing him for the first time in his life—but for some reason that humiliation, that plea, that need, elicit no emotion in him. His true desire, what he has been searching for so long, is something else—but what? As he grasps the packet of letters, he knows only that it seems to contain something profoundly intimate yet utterly alien. That it is the most important thing he’s done in his life and yet, at the same time, it’s nonsense, a prank, a wearisome joke that’s fallen flat. For a moment he feels the urge to take those pages and throw them one by one through the stove’s little door and into the crackling flames. Goodbye to Georgina, he thinks, and the thought is both freeing and terrifying.

  But he doesn’t do it. Instead he surveys the bobbing pen strokes, José’s superb forgeries. He pauses for a moment on a passage from Georgina’s last letter. I received your latest epistles while not yet fully recuperated from an illness that kept me confined to bed for weeks. Alarmed, my family took me to Barranco, a pictur
esque seaside resort, and then to a sanatorium in La Punta, another summering spot, this one quite lonely and sad.

  “The Santa Águeda sanatorium,” Carlos says suddenly, with unaccustomed energy.

  Perhaps because it’s been so long since Carlos has spoken, José is startled by his words. Carlos’s voice sounds unusually low, as if it belonged to someone else. It takes José a moment to react.

  “Santa what?”

  “The sanatorium that Georgina is talking about, in La Punta,” he says without looking at him, as if he were thinking aloud. “She must be referring to Santa Águeda.”

  José blinks, confused.

  “Well . . . I don’t actually know. I just said it to say something. I wasn’t even sure there was one.”

  “It’s a tuberculosis sanatorium.”

  “Tuberculosis,” José repeats distractedly, perhaps thinking about something else.

  ◊

  Carlos does not read the letters in their entirety. He reads only a few scattered phrases, which, through some mysterious happenstance, seem curiously linked. The bundle of letters must contain more than two hundred pages. Let us suppose, to offer a likely figure, that it contains exactly 249. Carlos begins reading on that page—I will take the very first ship, the poet has said—and moves from there to page 248, page 247, page 246. This is a new novel, an unfamiliar one in which the answers precede their questions, in which missives are sent futilely into the past and in which a friendship’s initial tenderness gradually calcifies into ever more ceremonious formulas—Dear friend, Most distinguished Ramón Jiménez, Most esteemed sir—until its characters decide to ignore each other entirely and never speak again. He begins at the pinnacle of a passion that dwindles the way romances never do: slowly. He knows full well what he will find in those last, first pages: a false Georgina, somewhat crude, charmingly vulgar, her mouth full of inappropriate words, rough-mannered and inelegant, who will little by little regain the characteristics of her original purity. And at first he delights in her vulgarities, in that stranger’s missteps, as if he were admonishing a young child for whims that will be corrected only a few letters later. Who would say such a thing, why on earth would he write such a stupid letter, what was José thinking when he had her put down this sentence, and this one, and that one? In his imagination, he removes those words, those idioms, those jokes, as if he were scrubbing makeup from a marble statue.