The Sky Over Lima Read online

  Faced with such a remarkable series of coincidences—no less than three in just one sentence—the editor has no choice but to accept the papers José is offering him. He shuffles them listlessly. Holding a poem in each hand, he fans himself with one while reading the other. He wheezes. And after a couple of minutes he declares that, all right, while the letters to and from Juan Ramón are making their way across the Atlantic, it won’t kill him to publish one of the poems, but unfortunately only one. For example, this one in his hand right here, by José Gálvez, because the one in his other hand, by Carlos Rodríguez—he says it without looking at him; in truth, he doesn’t remember which of them is José and which is Carlos—is a little less refined.

  José is exultant when they leave the office. Soon, though, perhaps feeling vaguely guilty about his friend’s rejection, he makes an effort to convert all the energy of that euphoria into indignation. He attempts to console Carlos with a long series of protests. Who does that fat fellow think he is; he wouldn’t recognize genuine talent if it smacked him on the head; the plot against them continues; they have won only the first battle in a long war; and so on. No one is going to write any letter to Juan Ramón, except maybe that fat bastard editor’s mother, and that whoreson is never going to get to publish one of the Maestro’s poems in his magazine. In his goddamn hygienic, respectable magazine. José even outlines the acceptance speech he will give if he one day wins the National Prize for Literature and Carlos still, God forbid, has not managed to publish a single poem; in it, he credits every bit of his success to him, his dear unpublished friend.

  Both of them pretend to be sad about the rejection, but Carlos fakes it a bit more convincingly. His expression is, as always, a flawless simulation. Sometimes, when he gets bored, he lingers in front of the mirror awhile, rehearsing different expressions—joy, disappointment, melancholy, hope. He does it so well that from time to time he has been surprised to find himself experiencing real sadness and yet unpersuaded by his own emotion reflected in the mirror.

  Then, in an instant, José regains the happiness he never really lost. He slings an arm familiarly around Carlos’s shoulder and offers to buy a round.

  “To Juan Ramón! We owe everything to him!” he toasts. “His letters have inspired us!”

  And when he says this, he kisses the most recent wax-sealed envelope. He kisses it as a medieval pilgrim might kiss a holy relic. And he also kisses it on precisely the spot where only a few weeks earlier there lingered the greedy snout of a rat. The same rat that, on voyage after voyage, accompanies the correspondence in the hold of the transatlantic steamer.

  Carlos lifts his glass to his lips, but by the time he has finished throwing back his drink, he is no longer thinking about the toast or about Juan Ramón—somehow he has started thinking about Georgina. This has been happening to him a lot lately. He finds himself thinking of her not as part of a game or as a pretext, but as someone who has a life of her own. Something akin to a distant cousin who lives in the countryside and whom we don’t see often, or a maiden whose beauty we have frequently heard described by others and with whom we hope to exchange a few words at the next ball. Sometimes he even wonders whether it is not Georgina herself, rather than Juan Ramón and his letters, who is inspiring so many of his poems about impossible loves and ethereal muses.

  But he says nothing, for that, too, is a secret.

  ◊

  “What about that nun?”

  “Where?”

  “Right there, right there—the one who’s walking under the archway.”

  “Oh. Secondary, obviously—who the hell wants to read about a nun?”

  “Also, she doesn’t look like she’s broken a plate in her life, so she’s more of a Saint John of the Cross character than a Zorrilla . . .”

  “What about the old woman begging for alms at the church door?”

  “She’s got a protagonistic look about her, doesn’t she? But a short piece, of course. A story. Twenty pages or so. At most.”

  “Yes, a short story. A sad one. Very French, or maybe Russian. One of those where the main character starts out a pauper and spends the rest of the narrative sinking deeper into destitution. And those soldiers making rounds?”

  “Nothing. That’s all they’re good for—making their rounds in the background. They haven’t even got a page in them.”

  They’ve played the game late into the night. Slowly the electric streetlights have come on, and behind the windowpanes in the poor neighborhoods, the flames of candles and oil lamps have begun to flicker. It smells like noodles and white rice. In that building teeming with Chinese, it always smells like noodles and white rice, and sometimes a little like opium too.

  “What about that pretty girl?”

  “What about that little boy who’s playing?”

  “What about that coachman beating his horse?”

  They keep pressing each other for a long time, even after the figures passing below them have become mere formless masses onto which any sort of character can be projected. But neither seems to have any intention of moving.

  At last, when all is swallowed in darkness, when there is nothing left to look at, one of them—it doesn’t matter which—asks:

  “What about Georgina?”

  And the other, whichever he is, doesn’t answer.

  ◊

  But after a while this, too, becomes boring. Or at least it bores them. The craze for anonymous letters fades. Nobody cares what Juan Ramón writes to Carlos and José. Back when the two were still at Most esteemed Juan R. Jiménez, the Club Unión would be packed to the rafters to hear the letter read aloud, but by the time they reach Dear friend, there are only three or four patrons who pay any attention. At this point, Gálvez doesn’t even know what trophy to request from the poet; they have it all and yet still they have nothing. Their correspondence has become as insipid as José’s and Carlos’s poems, which were never truly admired—the two friends were tolerated at salons and readings only as a way to hear the story of Juan Ramón and Georgina.

  Other novelties appear. In particular: A young journalist named Sandoval who works as a typographer for the monthly newspaper Los Parias. That in itself is already a novelty—someone among their social circle who works, even though he doesn’t need to. He always shows up at the club with his hands stained with ink from the Linotype press, and he bears that mark of humility as if it were a war medal. He also has a scar on his temple, produced, he claims, by a policeman’s nightstick during a strike, and he points to it proudly every time he talks about class conflict. He’s an anarchist. Maybe not one of those terrorists who put bombs in the Barcelona opera house, but a peaceful revolutionary, an anarchist with his feet on the ground, as he puts it, who writes articles in support of the calls for strikes from the dockworkers in El Callao and the Bread Bakers’ Union in Lima.

  The people in attendance at the club, many of them members of the most elite ranks of Lima’s aristocracy, always listen respectfully to Sandoval, sometimes going so far as to applaud a little when he gets carried away talking about revolution and the collapse of capitalism. They consider him harmless, a nice fellow. They even have a vague sense that his demands might be somewhat justified, that perhaps the workers do have the right to something more than living and dying in their factories, though, truth be told, they have no idea what those workers might do instead. How would the proletariat spend their sixteen free hours a day if the eight-hour workday were implemented? In any case, the young poets at the club don’t know much about politics. They will know just as little a few years later when, one by one, they abandon poetry and step into their fathers’ places at the head of those very factories.

  To make matters worse, Sandoval is writing a novel. “I said novel, yes. Never poetry,” he declared one night, almost scornfully, when someone asked him whether he might write poems. The twentieth century would be the death of verse, he added. Who gives a damn about fripperies and bourgeois sentiment when the final battle of the class war
is being waged all around them? Only the wealthy experience that sort of emotion, those existential chasms and desponds, because when men have too much free time, when they do not employ their vital energy in demolishing the walls that divide them from their brothers, then all of that force is used to burrow into themselves, to grub away at themselves and finally concoct all those delicate, artificial emotions. Enough looking within, he continued haughtily, we must look beyond ourselves, because in plantations and factories across the globe there are humble men dying, dying in the flesh, not like those pansies who feel like they’re dying of emotions that, in reality, no one cares about at all. And you can be sure that this is only the beginning; now we write novels in order to speak about actions, but in time actions will speak for themselves. That is the real literature, I tell you: action, the force of events, not the words that explain those events. The true novel of the twentieth century will be written not in a garret but in the streets, amid the clamor of protests, assassination attempts, wars, revolutions. And of that novel, let it be known, we are already writing the opening chapters. Once more the room bursts into applause. Dozens of wealthy poets cheering first the death of capital, and then the death of poetry.

  José and Carlos don’t say anything. And if they do, nobody hears them.

  ◊

  Juan Ramón is a genius. Nobody doubts that, least of all José and Carlos. But the Maestro had his father die on him, and how could you not write sad arias if your father died, especially if you happened to have loved him; who wouldn’t have the poetic material for pastorals and violet souls and distant gardens if he’d been interned in no less than two sanatoriums and had, on top of it all, fallen fatally in love with a novitiate? The two of them, on the other hand . . .

  “The problem’s not the poems—it’s life,” says José. “To write extraordinary things, first you must live them. That’s the difference between run-of-the-mill poets and true geniuses: experience. And, honestly, what have the two of us really lived?”

  Carlos doesn’t answer for a moment, then realizes it’s not a rhetorical question. He tugs at the knot in his tie.

  “Nothing?”

  “Exactly. Nothing. We’re still in this dreadful city, always drinking from the same bottles and laughing at the same jokes. The most exciting thing we’ve done in our lives is this: writing a few little letters to collect autographs from the one man who truly knows how to live. And let’s not even talk about muses. You can’t exactly say we’ve had any passionate love affairs. We’ve slept with a few women, sure, but that’s all. And a lot of them were whores. Nobody revolutionizes Spanish poetry by writing about whores.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Even if they’re expensive whores, like the ones your father gets for you.”

  “Go to hell.”

  They’re sitting on benches in the university courtyard, watching the morning pass and the students stream in and out of the lecture halls. Carlos thinks about all the times they’ve done this very thing before: waving goodbye to their parents using their law textbooks as a pretext, then whiling away the hours sitting outside the university doors, smoking and waiting for it to get late enough to go home. In a biographical note about Juan Ramón, Carlos read, He started out studying law, but abandoned it in 1899 to devote himself entirely to painting and poetry. Him too, then! Could it be a sign? He can’t help wondering whether Juan Ramón also spent many mornings like this one, perhaps with a book of poetry in his hands, and the thought helps allay his boredom and disgust.

  “That’s what we need,” José is saying. “An unattainable muse to whom we can dedicate our finest poems. Without that, there’s nothing, you know? Only the sad little scribblings of an amateur. What would have happened to Dante if Beatrice hadn’t been a girl, or to Catullus if Lesbia hadn’t been a whore? You don’t know? Well, I’ll tell you. World literature would have gone to shit, that’s what would have happened.”

  He’s found a little stick somewhere and is using it to scrawl idly in the dirt as he speaks. Parallel lines that seem to underscore his words, fill in his silences.

  “Sometimes I think it is of secondary importance whether a man writes well or badly,” he continues after a pause during which his lips and the stick remain motionless. “Real poetry is produced through the beauty of great muses. You don’t need anything else—the only trouble is finding those muses in the first place. And until we find our muse, the magazines are going to keep sending back our poems, because they’ll keep being what they are: the efforts of children, school assignments. The work of cocksure schoolboys fondling themselves as they dream of the women they’ll have when they grow up.”

  “We have to take a page from Juan Ramón,” Carlos murmurs, as if guessing what Gálvez wants to hear.

  “Indeed; our friend writes well and always finds himself a good muse. Even a novitiate once! And before that, in the Bordeaux sanatorium, there was that story about the other one, the French one—what was her name?”

  “Jeanne Roussie,” Carlos answers immediately. They are experts on Juan Ramón’s biography. They know by heart his age when his father died and the most intimate minutiae of each of his heartbreaks. They are careful not to forget a single detail, perhaps because they tend to think of all these tragedies as a sort of cursus honorum that one must follow in order to write a good book of poetry.

  “That’s it, Jeanne. Anyway, that’s a tricky situation too. Falling in love with your doctor’s wife! That’s some real drama right there. But he outdid himself with the novitiate. Think of it: the battle between carnal and spiritual hungers, between divine and earthly love . . . Oh, he’s a true artist, that Juan Ramón. With stories like that, you’d have to be dead inside not to write good poems.”

  “Well, you once kissed a novitiate, didn’t you?”

  José indifferently tosses the stick away.

  “You should have seen her! She was the kind of girl who inspires nightmares, not verses. When I took off her wimple, I understood why she wanted to become a nun.”

  Carlos doesn’t respond. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s been following the progress of José’s stick in the dirt: a grid of crowded lines forming a dense lattice. Looking at it, he thinks for some reason of his father. He thinks of Georgina. He’s barely listening to José, who’s still insisting that the only thing keeping his poems from genius is the absence of the perfect woman, that divine inspiration that would elevate his verses to the very peak of the sublime. Because, sure, they’ve both had their puppy loves, he continues, but those were conventional, boring, happy stories, far removed from the mythological stature of the loves they find in books, in which, in the throes of passion, the two lovers expire. Though in their case it would be best if only the women died, because otherwise how would they go on to write their immortal verse? Someone definitely has to die, or be locked up in a monastery, or, at the very least, the families have to oppose the union, forcing the lovers to flee across the Andes with hired guns in hot pursuit. But none of that ever happens, he adds bitterly. Everything around them proceeds so easily: The family agrees to the engagement—so why bother getting engaged?—and what’s worse, the daughters agree to everything else with horrifying speed, and once they surrender themselves, how can they continue to serve as muses? What else can one do in such a suffocating environment, José asks, besides write stale literary-salon poetry, poetry for summer readings at an aunt’s house—light, insignificant verses, written to be read aloud on Sunday afternoons surrounded by lace fans, cigars, and stifled yawns.

  “So all we need is a muse,” Carlos says to himself, still looking at the drawing.

  “A muse, or whatever else we can find. I don’t know. A war, maybe. Just picture it: The flags, the parades, the speeches. The spilling of your best friend’s blood. That has to be a good reason to write a poem! Verses written on the verge of despair, knowing that at any moment a bullet might mow you down.”

  “If you don’t die first, of course.”

  “I�
��m serious; war is the best source of inspiration. Maybe Homer was a mediocre poet and was saved by hearing about the right war. Who knows. I imagine every soldier has material that could move anyone; it’s just that most of them don’t realize it. Take my uncle José Miguel. You know, the hero of the War of the Pacific. I’ve always believed he could have been a great poet. Everybody knows that he blew up a Chilean ship all by himself and that the explosion was so powerful it left him bald and nearly blind. But few know that toward the end of his life, that memory tormented him. He said that at all hours of the day and night, he could hear the screams of the Chilean sailors burning alive and begging to be rescued, for the love of God. With that on your conscience, you could either write the world’s best poem or shoot yourself in the head. And you know which way my uncle went.”

  “Well, I would have written the poem.”

  “Sure, but you and I are poets. My uncle was a soldier. I guess he did what was most appropriate for his profession.”

  Carlos smiles.

  “So as far as you’re concerned, those are our two options: finding a muse or starting another goddamn war with Chile.”

  José replies in a jocular tone.

  “It’s either that or tuberculosis, my friend! Maybe we should give that a try. They say that in your final moments, this incredible lucidity washes over you. Apparently the convulsions produce fits of creativity, and we’re losing extraordinary poems because we don’t give patients blank sheets of paper and ink as they’re dying.”