The Sky Over Lima (18 page)

But that is precisely the difficulty: Carlos never has company. The only woman who bends over his bed is the maidservant when she folds back the sheets, and he never even tries to grope her rear end.
That's not love
, thinks Carlos, but then what is? He has repeated the word so often in his early poems, and later through the mouth—the hands—of Georgina, and yet he truly understands so little about it. Lay off the Georginas, José repeats. That guff about young ladies sighing languidly in their gardens and giving their first innocent kisses is all very well—useful for inventing muses and writing marvelous letters like these—but you and I don't live inside a novel. You should come with us to the brothels and try to have a little fun for once. I promise you the women there don't lower their eyes melancholically when you kiss them; sometimes you don't even have to kiss them to get things started, if you catch my meaning.

Carlos doesn't. How could he, when his dreams never venture beyond the very real boundary of his bedroom's four walls?

But things are different now. Or at least Carlos needs them to be. So he's going to go to that meeting and do what he has to do to get to know Elizabeth a little better. Why not? Does he have some more enticing prospect? Is he engaged to someone else? No; he's a bachelor, he's twenty years old, and he never visits the brothels. He never touches the pale flesh of the dancers at the vaudeville theater, even though they ask him to. So why shouldn't he talk with whomever he wishes? All he has to do is persuade José to go with him, but José isn't the least bit interested in political meetings or invitations. He's got a prior engagement this afternoon, and anyway, what does Carlos have to lose in making a private visit to the Almada residence, of all places—they invited you, so you go, damn it, I'm not some governess who has to accompany you and hold your hand through all your maidenly obligations. But then Carlos starts talking about the Almadas' daughters, and at that José changes his tune. He guffaws at the jokes about Madeleine and discreetly arches his eyebrows at Carlos's description of Elizabeth's beauty, and after a while he places a hand on his shoulder and says, You know what, Carlota, the club and Ventura and the whorehouses of San Ginés can go to the devil for all I care—this afternoon the two of us are going to accept the young ladies' kind invitation.

◊

The Almadas' mansion is too vast to disguise its decline. Everywhere they look, there are empty corners that might once have contained Louis XV armchairs, a Swiss grandfather clock, silver-framed mirrors, Persian rugs, a Pancho Fierro watercolor—but now only their absence remains, geometric shadows marking the walls and floors. It is impossible to walk through its deserted rooms without thinking about the junk dealers and ragmen who must have haggled over prices for endless hours; the master of the house loosening his bow tie and repeatedly exclaiming “Oh!” at being forced to discuss money; the hawkers, each with a pencil behind his ear, taking measurements to demonstrate that in fact the piano won't fit, they'll have to dismantle the balustrade. But the Almadas are so hospitable and ceremonious that there's hardly time to look around. Perhaps they are hoping that their courtesy, the endlessly proffered cups of tea or chocolate, will fill in the gaps left behind by poverty. And their reverence becomes all the more wholehearted when they discover that Carlos's silent companion is none other than José Gálvez—a Gálvez!—the last name like a magnet that draws everyone's attention. Only Elizabeth seems immune to that attraction—
A pleasure to meet you
, the hand coolly extended, and then the curtsy. Her welcome to Carlos, though, is something else entirely: again that glow in her eyes that seems to prolong the look between them that began at his house. Carlos is unable to keep the hand with which he grasps hers from shaking a little.

Ten or twelve guests are assembled in the parlor. Almost all of them are relatives; indeed, most of them might as well be the same person, bowing or extending the back of the hand again and again. The only one who stands out is a nun, somebody's friend, sheathed in her wimple and holding a little basket to collect pledges for building an orphanage. Everyone peppers José with questions—Did he have the good fortune to meet his uncle José Miguel, the hero of the War of the Pacific, when he was still alive? Is it true what they say, that José writes poetry?—and there is also the occasional distracted, obligatory inquiry to Carlos. At the other end of the room, the immense Madeleine offers him a half smile that requires no translation. And it is even easier to interpret Señora Almada's efforts to position Elizabeth next to Carlos, not to mention the remarkable coincidence that it is Elizabeth herself who happens to offer him pastries and hot chocolate, her gaze lowered and her cheeks faintly blushing.

Then the guests and their hosts sit down around the table. The famous political meeting has begun, though Carlos does not realize it for a few minutes. The discourse is simplified to suit the most naive, the gathered company speaking abstractly of children going hungry and women dying in childbirth in the hospices. Elizabeth ventures a remark from time to time. She chooses her words carefully, glancing furtively at her father and Carlos, seeking approval. Hers are cozy notions to which no one in attendance could object: hunger should be combated with food, poverty with alms, and the deaths of childbearing mothers with additional orphanages. Well-intentioned words, to which the others listen with their eyes fastened on the dessert tray and their lips smeared with chocolate. Though one might think those at the table evinced a certain sympathy for the proletariat, that would not be entirely accurate. The guests' compassion is inspired not by the life of the dockworker or the butcher they encounter on the street but by an ideal worker they've never met because he does not, in fact, exist.

“A real snoozer of a meeting you've dragged me to, Carlota,” José mutters to him in an aside. “We sound like a Christian charity club. Lucky for us, at least the view is nice,” he adds, nodding toward Elizabeth.

“Don't point.”

“Well, what do you say? Protagonist or secondary character?”

“Lower your voice.”

“I say she's a secondary character. Do you like her? I think she was flirting with you. We're not going to fight over a secondary character, are we?”

“Would you just shut up?”

After a while, Señor Almada breaks in to offer Carlos the floor. This man, he says, witnessed firsthand the events at the El Callao docks. And so they clamor for him to stand up and tell them all about it.

Carlos gets slowly to his feet. He lifts the napkin he has folded over his knees and uses it to wipe the sweat from his hands. He doesn't know what to say. Now that everyone's listening to him, now that his disquisition on the dockworkers' poverty is awaited with curiosity and sympathy, he no longer has any interest in giving it. He studies Elizabeth's reaction out of the corner of his eye; he feels the searing weight of her gaze right on his lacerated cheek. For the first time he realizes that she never looks at his eyes or mouth. It is that stitched-up flesh that she is always observing, seeming to study it with interest and desire and even a bit of pride, just as a girl might examine the medals her beloved earned in battle.

At last he begins to speak. He sketches the scene of the crowd packed into the port, the train brought to a halt with hurled rocks, the mounted soldiers charging. The account should electrify his listeners, but for some reason it does not; the words emerge as flat and lifeless as a canvas. He has lost the ardor of his first speech. Now it is not Sandoval or Marx or Kropotkin himself who seems to speak through him; now only Carlos speaks through Carlos's mouth. If anyone bothered to transcribe his words, they would find them to be as full of hesitations, adverbs, and ellipses as Georgina's letters. But nobody bothers to transcribe them, of course. At most they listen to him distractedly, uninterested in his dull discourse. Even Elizabeth's gaze seems to have cooled a little. Only Madeleine, who has not understood a word, maintains the same imperturbable smile.

And then it happens. Someone asks Carlos what he was doing in El Callao on the very day and at the very hour of the largest strike of the century so far, and for a moment he doesn't know how to respond. He seeks out José's gaze, as if asking for help. And suddenly José is standing with a smile and begging permission to speak. Those present must forgive him, he says in a confident tone, but the truth is that it was all his fault; his dear friend Carlos has been covering for him for far too long, but the time has come to confess the truth. It was entirely because of him that they were at the port that day, as he has so often chided himself since—how could he not feel regret after what happened? But he has always felt such profound concern for the disadvantaged, those who go hungry, those who are deprived of the bread that God would knead for all of His creatures. And on that fateful day, he wanted—so selfishly!—to go find out whether the shipping-company magnates had come to an agreement with the protesters. He is sometimes possessed by these sorts of whims—sponsoring a student who has not been offered a scholarship or giving a fifty-
sol
cloak to a blind man so he doesn't feel the chill. His friend Carlos attempted to talk him out of it, of course, because Carlos is sensible and prudent and always tries to make him see reason. He might warn him, for example, that the poor student spends his tuition money on women and wine, or remind him that fifty
soles
aren't to be squandered on a destitute blind man who is probably faking anyway and has perfectly functional eyes behind his dark glasses. Though José does not share Carlos's ideas, he knows that they come from his friend's prudence and good judgment, virtues that he admires so much. Well, then: Carlos gave him the same sort of advice that day, to no avail, and he should have listened to him, because as it turned out, no agreement had been reached, and instead they encountered guns and swords. And it was his poor friend Carlos who'd borne the brunt of it, sensible, prudent Carlos who'd lain wounded on the ground, and José had wept during the charge and refused to leave his side—another foolish bit of stubbornness, really, they could have killed him, though they didn't—the soldiers rushing past with their swords held high and him weeping over his injured friend, the injured people, the whole world injured by injustice and poverty and oppression.

José keeps talking a few minutes longer. He describes the way his hand clutched Carlos's as the doctor sewed up the wound; the fearlessness with which he blocked the sergeant who attempted to detain his friend—Under no circumstances, sir, if you wish to arrest this man, you will have to arrest me first. But Carlos has stopped listening. He is conscious only of the evolving expressions on the guests' faces: the smiles, the looks of surprise, of admiration, of suspense. The way even the nun's waxen cheeks seem to flush with an insurgent glow. But especially the face of Elizabeth, who is no longer looking at him, who now is conscious only of José's gestures, José's eyes, José's mouth opening and closing, saying what she so longs to hear. Seeing the intensity of her gaze, Carlos attempts to smile. He smiles until the mask of his mouth begins to ache.

◊

When José and Carlos take their leave, the two sisters accompany them out to the street. It seems they've become accustomed to taking a walk every afternoon right before dinner. And it also turns out the four of them are going in the same direction, what a remarkable coincidence, so José immediately offers the young ladies their coach. He and Carlos can return home on foot, so they won't be in the sisters' way. And the young ladies accept the chivalrous offer, of course, but they would not dream of depriving the young men of their conveyance. “There's more than enough room!” Elizabeth notes earnestly, her eyes fixed on José. Might not the four of them travel together? The lady's voice stresses the word
together
, but certainly not the
four
. José lightly bows his head and responds that, in that case, they will share the coach with pleasure. Also, it's such a lovely afternoon . . . Mightn't the ladies want to join them on their outing? Although, he hastens to add, including Carlos with his gaze, perhaps the two of them should not request such an abuse of time and trust; surely the young ladies have already had the opportunity to visit Lima and get to know its every detail, and so there is nothing they could offer to amuse them.

“None of that, now! We've hardly left the house since we arrived!” Elizabeth lies, perhaps forgetting that not five minutes ago she declared them enthusiastic takers of long walks.

“Pardon me?” adds the younger sister in English, with utmost sincerity.

And so it is arranged: a journey to Miraflores and the beach at Chorrillos and the Barranco cliffs, and then back to Lima at dinnertime.

Carlos barely participates in the operation. He climbs into the carriage and sits next to Madeleine, careful that their knees don't touch. He doesn't speak; he stares at the knob of his cane, smiles politely when obligated, and occasionally gives a brief instruction to the coachman through the little window.

José, though, points out at the landscape and offers commentary ranging from the humorous to the picturesque. When the inspiration strikes, he even tries out a few philosophical musings that have little to do with what he is seeing and very much to do with the particular texts he has studied for the occasion. As she listens, Elizabeth laughs or expresses surprise or feigns deep reflection, as appropriate. From time to time she translates the observations for her sister, who seems rather less entertained or astonished or meditative. In any event, the conversation has ceased to revolve around the workers and their hardships. Nor do the two of them remember Carlos, who presses against the cushions in the carriage and fiddles with his watch chain. Only the homely daughter occasionally turns to look at him and smile.