The Sky Over Lima (19 page)

When the coach reaches Chorrillos, dusk is falling and the ficus and willow trees beside the road cast long shadows. In the silence, they can hear the clopping of the horses' hooves, the creaking of the wheels in the dust. Voices filter in through the curtains. In the estates, the parks, the gardens of the enormous summer villas, they can see swarms of white parasols and black top hats. Perhaps a wind kicks up, and José seizes the opportunity to offer Elizabeth a blanket, though the night has not yet grown cool. Elizabeth accepts. That is her way of declaring her love: allowing José to cover her legs even though the day's still warm.

The coach takes a couple of little-traveled roads. You must see the ocean, says José, the view of the cliffs at Chorrillos. I'll bet you don't have seashores like these in Philadelphia, he adds, and he's not wrong, though only because the states of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey stand between Philadelphia and the Atlantic. On some stretches it seems as if the road might dive into the sea, but always at the last moment, on the last outcropping of land, it retreats.

“It's so beautiful,” says Elizabeth, barely looking out the window.

They have stopped atop one of the cliffs. They admire the jagged profile of the cliffs, the sandy slopes and precipices that plunge into the sea. Perhaps José, gesturing toward the horizon, recites a few verses he has prepared. Elizabeth listens to them in delight, and after that she no longer sees the disk of the sun sinking into the water but rather what the poetry says the twilight really is or should mean.

“What is that?” asks the younger sister in English, pointing.

At the foot of the cliffs they can see a small cove framed by sheer rockfaces. And in the cove there is something moving: dark and yellow blotches, tumbling amid the foam of the waves. They all shield their eyes with their hands as the light of the setting sun shimmers on the water and blinds them.

“They look like wild ducks,” says Elizabeth.

“They look like fishing boats,” says José.

But then, little by little, they begin to look like something else. Like naked women swimming, splashing, cavorting in the water, for instance. But nobody says that. And when they finally realize what they are seeing, José and Carlos stare even more intently while the girls blush and cry out in unison.

“Heavens!”

The two sisters raise their hands to their mouths and turn their eyes away at the exact same moment, as if their reactions were synchronized by some hidden mechanism. Ultimately, the decency of every young woman must include a bit of studied theatricality learned through countless governesses' lessons and parish priests' sermons. Elizabeth, perhaps letting herself be carried away in her performance by an excess of inspiration, even hastily raises her fan before her eyes, but through the ribs, through the slats and flimsy paper, something of the immodest spectacle can still be glimpsed.

At that moment, José's body seems to be possessed by a sudden decisiveness. He grasps her shoulder with the determination of a romantic hero. He tells her not to be afraid, that the women are probably prostitutes from the Panteoncito brothel, who come to bathe in the sea. (Indeed they are; Gálvez knows their faces and names quite well.) That there is nothing to fear from them, that though they may be fallen women, they are perhaps secretly worthy in their poverty—are not they themselves, men and women of position, in some way responsible for the moral and physical depravity of those who have nothing? That what they are seeing is not dangerous or fearsome, only women frolicking in the water and displaying the voluptuous truth of their naked bodies. That he is there to protect her from that, from the truth.

He says all this, or something like it, murmuring very close by her ear. But whatever it is he says, it seems to have some effect, and after a moment's hesitation Elizabeth slowly lowers her fan. She swallows hard and says, quite softly, that it's all right. That if he asks it of her, she won't be afraid. That if he says so, perhaps there is no sin in contemplating the innocent beauty of a human body. And so she moves to the window and watches the women without condemnation, without fear, without guilt. It goes basically like this: Elizabeth looks at the whores; José looks at Elizabeth; Carlos looks at José; Madeleine looks at Carlos.

As that look stretches on, Elizabeth strives to seem dignified and beautiful at once. And perhaps she manages it, because José has just bent down to kiss her. She submits docilely to his kiss. Artlessly, the way the whores are taking in the last caress of the sun and the spray of the waves. Every bit of her shivers, softens with the heat of that contact; his body moves slowly over hers—the carriage creaks, wallows—and an underground, aquatic movement seems to uncoil in that embrace. As if something of the sea, of the provocative beauty of the bathers, had slipped in under the checkered blanket.

Carlos averts his eyes; it seems that he too has in him a bit of scandalized maidenhood hiding behind a raised fan. And when he looks away, his eyes meet Madeleine's. The eyes of the homely sister, who is no longer looking at the floor, who is looking at him—the homely sister, at him—and smiling at him at that. Maybe she is expecting something. Or perhaps she too is trying to seem both dignified and beautiful at once, though surely she knows it would require a miracle to achieve the latter. In any case, it is a performance without a public, because Carlos shifts uneasily, clears his throat; he's already stopped looking at her. He hesitates a moment. Then he strikes the roof with his cane and shouts to the coachman that it's getting late, it's time to go home.

◊

From that point on, Georgina changes rapidly. More rapidly even than José loses interest—after only two or three dates with Elizabeth, he decides he's had more than enough. Though those clandestine encounters leave no mark on his life, they leave one on Georgina's. José amuses himself by incorporating Elizabeth's attributes into his letters: her insubstantial chatter, her naive coquetry, her almost endearing credulity, her concern for the disadvantaged. Even a light touch of her natural inclination toward melodrama (“Why are you doing this to me, José? If you leave me, I am capable of anything! Anything, I tell you!”).

But he concentrates most of his attention on including more and more references to the little mestiza housemaid, who for him has always been Georgina. And the others do more or less the same thing: fill the letters with any woman who comes to mind, especially those they know well. When somebody, let's say a vaudeville dancer, sits on Ventura's knee and murmurs some indelicate phrase in his ear, he softens it a bit and assigns it straightaway to Georgina. Maids, prostitutes, cabaret singers, florists: they all throw in their two cents—the modest ration of words allotted to each. A Georgina who evokes less and less the innocence of the Polish prostitute and more the eagerness with which the Gálvezes' maid groped between the young master's legs. Her letters are different now:

But I must tell you that I am also impulsive and fervent, and at times I feel my chest consumed by the bonfire of an unknown passion . . . Something like a mad desire to live and be happy. A feeling of which the rest know nothing and that I can only barely mask. Except with you, my friend! You who with each letter are gradually unraveling all my secrets . . . !

Or perhaps:

Sometimes I think a woman is a little like a flower that blooms, hoping for something that it does not know and yet desires, desires so fiercely!

Or even:

I do not know, my dear Juan Ramón, whether what I am saying is right or wrong: I know only that the body sometimes feels strange and beautiful things of which the spirit knows nothing, and that disregarding such beauty might itself also constitute some category of sin
. . .

Carlos is reluctant to copy down these fancies. No, that sentence isn't going in the letter, not a chance; Georgina's not like that, over his dead body. But in the end he always gives in. What else can he do? His character has ceased to belong to him, and José is becoming increasingly inflexible in his decisions. Sometimes Carlos thinks of Georgina, the real one, as if she were a friend who has died, and many nights he wants to weep for his friend—his friend?—just as years ago he allowed himself to be flogged for the sake of muses who existed only in books. I've been telling you to think less and screw a little more, José says, emboldened by his friends' laughter; maybe that chubby American girl, you know who I mean. You had the whole back seat there to do her the favor and you didn't, Carlotita, you ungrateful lout. If a woman's value were calculated by the ounce, you'd have been letting a real treasure get away.

Ventura and the others laugh. They weren't there, they didn't see the fat, homely sister with her enormous mole, but even so they're sure she really is fat and homely, and so they laugh.

When he's alone, Carlos rereads the drafts of the letters. And also Juan Ramón's replies, which are growing ever longer and more affectionate and which have gradually begun to fill with intimate confidences, with little secrets. It seems the Maestro isn't bothered by the new Georgina. Worse still, anyone would say he prefers her, a grotesque scarecrow whose words reek of absinthe and whiskey. And of opium, especially opium, because by now most of the chapters are worked out in the rear of a building on Calle del Marqués that serves as a corset shop by day and a clandestine smoking den by night. It was Ventura who first told them that no Montmartre bohemian ever wrote a line without first inhaling the dense smoke of the pipes and hookahs, and after that nobody could get the idea out of José's head.

They visit the establishment two or three times a week. It's a small, poorly ventilated place run by Chinese immigrants. The space is divided by partitions and folding screens that reveal mysterious scenes: silhouettes that laugh, that dance, that clasp one another in prolonged embraces, that slumber and go quiet for many hours at a time. Even the smoke, so dark and heavy, seems to have a silhouette. Each nook is furnished with a smoking pipe and a few reed mats and cushions where they recline to smoke until their eyes start to wander and their smiles go dull. Sometimes they talk about the letters, or women, or they recite their own poems, which sound like extended yawns. Or they don't talk about anything; they just fall asleep, and the Chinese owners go silently from one alcove to another, covering their bodies with blankets or sheepskins, refilling the opium in the pipes, carrying bowls of some dubious potion that the poets languidly drink.

Carlos joins them against his will. Such a place, he feels, can produce only a character in tune with the setting. That is, a dull, indolent Georgina who laughs at the slightest provocation, who has a glassy look to her eyes and occasionally says inappropriate things. Foolish things that, like the smoke, take a long time to dissipate.

But it's not just about Georgina. Carlos is also alarmed by the relaxation the drug produces in his own body. With each puff he feels as if the mask screwed to his face, the one that is always able to simulate the appropriate expression, were gradually loosening and melting. And who knows what he might be hiding under there—he, of course, has long since forgotten. And so he is afraid. Sometimes, in the depths of his prostration, it seems to him that a woman comes and sits beside him, whispers something in his ear. It is, perhaps, Georgina, but a real Georgina. She emerges from the smoke with all the purity of the very first missives, free of smudges, of incoherencies, of emendations. She kneels at the foot of the mat and touches his head for a moment. It seems to him that she smiles. And then they have long conversations that leave no words or memories, only the feverish taste of smoke, inundating his lungs like an icy, protracted vertigo, a spiral that drags and blurs the outlines of things and behind which only Georgina remains constant. Her gaze, her smile. Her kiss; Georgina's kiss. The chill of her lips on his, her porcelain touch.

“Dlink,” she says. “Dlink is good,” she adds, inexplicably. And he drinks, drinks infinitely from that kiss, until he empties the bowl that someone is holding to his lips.

◊

Moguer, May 8, 1905

My dear friend:

Will you allow me to call you “dear,” to call you “friend”? It has been four weeks since I've had news of you. Your charming letters must be waiting for me in the mailbox of my residence in Madrid; and, knowing that, it is all the more puzzling that I am still here, a full month spent in my boyhood home in Moguer, surrounded by relatives and relics of another era. Of excruciatingly sad lights and aromas with which I cannot even make poetry, with which I can no longer do anything.

You spoke in your last letter of your own sorrows that also bear your loved ones' visages and are set in your own home. A home that I imagine resembles the sort you see in engravings, with whitewashed walls and palm trees, with straight windowsills and severe façades and a well with a pulley. All stone and rigor, just like your upbringing with your father, who no doubt loves you but who, perhaps, through loving you too much, poor thing, makes you miserable. You spoke of the bowels of that piano where you hide your secrets, these humble letters of mine among them. Of your tiny, fragile chest, which seems to grow even smaller when your father approaches. How could I not understand you, I who between these walls feel the presence of my own father's ghost? His dead eyes that now see everything, against which keys and drawers are now useless. His threadbare words reviving old accusations: abandoning my law studies, and the mad notion of becoming a painter, and then the even madder notion of becoming a poet—that's what my father would say. That's what he says now in a voice growing louder and more certain, in my ears, all the time. Here, in what was his house, he sounds ever more powerful.