The Sky Over Lima (20 page)

And then there are the voices of the others, of the living, of us, the family members who stayed here and have nothing to talk about but money and rents. As if my father were only that: the debts he left, which we divide up the way one would the weight of a burdensome, jet-black coffin. The words debase, they soil things; one's mouth is tarnished by talking about pesetas, partitions, inheritances. We are gradually turning into nickel and metal, growing stiff and cold as the music of a coin. I fear that the mere mention of it has also tarnished this letter.

You ask me to tell you what I have been doing and writing. And yet I do and write so little! You, by contrast, do so much, you describe so many trips and meetings with girlfriends and walks along that street they call Jirón de la Unión that I must confess to feeling a little embarrassed at the indolence with which I watch the hours pass—watch them die, because everything dies. Nothing out of the ordinary to recount, except that I am sometimes happy and sometimes miserable. Everything that happens in reality takes place inside my head, or, if you prefer, within the confines of my own soul. (By the way, you haven't said what you think of that little poem I sent you about the soul of things.) What do I do? you ask. I am afraid you will be disappointed: I do little more than walk. Now around Moguer and its environs, and previously through the cold streets of Madrid. I walk as if in a trance, and I tend to forget my hat and my cane wherever I go. I wander through the Retiro, an enormous park. You would adore it, Georgina. A little green slice of Madrid into which all of Moguer, with its diminutive houses and its river and its sad yellow fields, could easily fit. There is also a pond full of ducks and boats, and beside it a wafer seller whom I stop to observe a long while. An old man with wafers and other sweets, spinning a wheel of fortune. Sometimes the customer wins and sometimes he loses—does Lima have that sort of confection, are you familiar with such a thing?—but the peddler always smiles. Nothing seems to matter to him beyond the act of watching the wheel spin, of doling out his delights. And I would like to be a bit like him: to have the spirit of a dog or a child. Of a statue that welcomes sun and rain alike with the same smile, that does not despair or understand or suffer, that only goes to its usual corner to keep being what it is, what it can never cease to be.

And sometimes, why not admit it to you, dear Georgina—let's agree that you have allowed me that license: to call you dear, to call you friend—I imagine you are walking with me. It would be such a lovely comfort for me, a light with which to clear away such gloomy clouds. Because as I walk out there, I go within myself to craft the reply I will give you on my return. You could say that some of my letters are worked out step by step, that I write them with my feet, and sometimes without my cane or hat—if I told you how often I leave them somewhere, you wouldn't believe me. I even go walking within my own room, pacing back and forth like a captive animal that is nevertheless gentle and sad; I measure out the dimensions of my cage as I await a letter, a familiar hand, the stamps and seals of a certain far-off country. A square cell six paces on each side, bed and washbasin in the center; a total of twenty-four, and then starting over again. If I had taken all those paces in your direction—and if I could walk on the ocean, which is no small thing to imagine—where do you think I would have gotten to by now? My calculations, made with the assistance of an atlas with which I amuse myself in bed, have allowed me to estimate that I'd find myself more or less in the Sargasso Sea. That briny deep where the sea suddenly becomes unmoving land, a shipyard in which one neither comes nor goes. So lieth my soul! To tell the truth, that sea does not appear in my atlas, and I cannot say for sure whether it might be a fable or a myth, but it exists at least in our understanding, which is almost as if it existed in real life.

I would like to reach you, to reach Peru, which also exists but could just as easily not exist—or, rather, I would like for it to be you on my arm as we walked through the tranquil twilit avenues of Madrid. Perhaps you would like to walk with me, and perhaps you would also like for us to stop awhile as we treat ourselves to a wafer or two. Because I would most certainly give you one, Georgina, I would give you a hundred; something tells me that luck would smile on us for one, ten, fifty spins of that wheel. We could gorge ourselves, and laugh, and the wafer seller would laugh along with us. And if I had a photograph of you, Georgina, even if it were only one, I would know what face to affix to those walks that you and I take every morning, every night for you there in Lima. Will you share with me a portrait of the angels' smile? Will I come to know the countenance that is the inverse of my own self, that abides in the antipodes of my soul? Will you tell me, at the very least, whether you are partial to those sweet treats I offer you on our walks . . . ?

◊

“I find your cousin utterly changed of late. I think I liked her better before.”

“I think I did too,” Carlos says at last, without looking at him.

The Professor drops the latest letter onto the pile.

“Well! Fortunately, the Spanish poet doesn't share our view.”

“What do you mean?”

He points at the stack of envelopes.

“Just read the last few letters, my friend. I'd say he's starting to fall in love. I'm telling you, it's going to take a letter or two at most. Good luck for your cousin and for you, and bad luck for me! After the wedding you're not going to need me, of course. It's a shame the custom is to write letters to woo women and not to keep them.”

Carlos's face darkens.

“You think so?”

“That you don't use letters to keep a woman?”

“No, that there's going to be a wedding.”

“My dear fellow, I'd say so. When a man and a woman do what these two are doing . . . the business generally ends in a wedding. Unless your cousin surprises us again and she's the one who starts resisting the betrothal.”

“But they don't even know each other!” replies Carlos, practically shouting.

The Professor tosses back his glass of pisco and wipes the moisture from his lips with his shirt cuff.

“Well, so what? That doesn't seem to have gotten in the way before now. Also, from what I can tell, the Spanish poet is stirred up enough to come track her down. You don't agree? Look at that photograph. And that portrait of Juan Ramón. He's got the cadaverous aspect of the romantic sort of poet who blows his brains out at his lover's grave. Don't deny it. And didn't you say he'd been in three sanatoriums because of failed love affairs?”

“It was only two.”

“Same difference! Listen to me, I've got twenty-three years of experience with this sort of thing. It's all in here, believe me. Suggests a passionate sort with little regard for consequences. And your cousin must be delighted, so there's no reason to fret, am I right?”

Carlos doesn't answer. He doesn't even look up. He stares at his hands as if he didn't recognize them.

“Come now, why so glum? You don't seem too pleased for your cousin. And didn't we agree that the most important rule was never to swim against love's tide? Let's drink to them, then, and not discuss it any further. As you see, I'm even violating my policy of never combining drink and work, and I'm only doing it for them—that is, for you.”

He snaps his fingers.

“Jorge! Bring two more glasses for my friend and me. We've got a lot to celebrate.”

“What's the happy news?” asks the waiter from the kitchen.

“Some friends of ours are getting married.”

“That calls for some whiskey, at least! No, no, I insist—it's on the house.”

He takes the bottle and fills two glasses to the brim.

“To the happy couple!” exclaims the Professor.

Carlos hesitates a few moments longer. He stares at Cristóbal's raised glass. Finally he raises his own.

“To the happy couple,” he replies.

◊

He is dreaming. The dream will soon turn into a nightmare, but he doesn't know that yet. At the moment he's trying to figure out what he and Román are doing in the middle of the jungle. He wants to ask him where he's been all this time, but really there's no need, because they're ten years old again, and they have mustaches and their Roman law texts under their arms. And Román's face still bears the same sullen expression, the same haughty aloofness.

They push through the foliage for hours, creating openings in the bush that seem to lead nowhere, until at last they come across his father. He's sitting in the armchair in his study. He has something in his hand. Or rather he doesn't have anything, not even hands; at first they see only his face, an enormous face twisted into a scowl. They have broken a window with a rubber ball, it's Román's fault, or maybe Carlos's—it doesn't matter, the window is broken and the repair has cost two
soles
. He tells them, “You've cost me two
soles
, you troublemakers.” And another fourteen
soles
when, intentionally or unintentionally—it was never entirely clear—they bathed and dried the household mastiffs on the Persian rug in the parlor. And then there was the music box they broke while playing with it and later buried in the courtyard—it cost thirty dollars because of the gems and mother-of-pearl inlay, though it cost the servant accused of stealing it even more dearly. And now Don Augusto is rebuking them for all of that. He is holding something in his hand again. But they don't look at it yet; they look at his mouth opening and closing, detailing their disobediences. “Two
soles
for the window,” he says. “Fourteen for the soiled rug,” he says. “Thirty dollars for the music box,” he says. “Four hundred dollars for the virtue of that foreign whore.” And then, raising the pulsing bundle he has in his hand, blood dripping between his fingers, he adds, “And now tell me, you leeches, tell me how much this poet's heart is going to cost me.”

◊

He spends the afternoon running an errand, and when he finally arrives at the club he finds that they've already finished writing the letter.

“You were taking forever,” José offers as an excuse.

Márquez and Ventura are with him, ensconced in a seemingly endless game of billiards. Carlos wants somebody, anybody, to ask why he was delayed. But nobody looks up from the table. Only Márquez seems happy to see him: We've got an even number now, he says, we can start playing in pairs.

“Where is the draft?”

José curses a missed carom shot and pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket without looking at it.

“It's not a draft.”

“What?”

“It's not a draft. It's the final version.”

“Final?” Carlos grabs the paper.

“All you have to do is copy it out.”

It takes Carlos a moment to understand what José is saying. He drops into one of the armchairs, still holding the paper, while the others continue to call out shots—Orange five in the left pocket—and argue over whether or not to go after a particular one. The first thing he notices is the handwriting. Somebody, probably José, has attempted to reproduce Carlos's handwriting as a diligent schoolchild might, with some success. There remains only a trace of virility at the corners of the capital letters, and a slight tremor in the strokes. He reads the forged letters with increasing worry. Once. Twice.

“What is this?” he asks at last.

“The draft,” says Ventura, clarifying the obvious.

“I said it's not a draft,” José insists. “It's the final version. It just needs to be copied out.”

And Márquez:

“So are you going to play a game or what?”

Carlos can't stop staring at the paper. A waiter approaches to ask what the gentleman would like to drink, and the gentleman barely notices. Everything around him seems to have stopped except the hubbub in the billiards room, where the noise of cues and clacking balls is endless. The woman who wrote that letter is not, cannot be Georgina. Her voice is marred by moments of stridency, awkwardness, vulgarity; the covered lady has suddenly stripped naked and started talking of love and passion as easily as she used to discuss Chopin's nocturnes. It is as if Gálvez's indigenous maidservant has gradually taken over and left nothing of Georgina's former discretion and modesty. She no longer resembles the Polish girl. Instead, she resembles the Almadas' daughter; once again she is sitting in the carriage with José, under the blankets. The two of them giggle, and he can only watch them in silence, listen to them kiss in the darkness. A knot in his throat.

“I can't copy this.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's too . . .”

It takes him a moment to find a word.

“Too what?”

“Too . . . bold.”

Ventura guffaws.

“Bold! A fine word! You mean Señorita Georgina's gone saucy on us.”

Carlos doesn't turn to look at him. He keeps watching José's eyes, which are fixed on the cue ball.

“Georgina isn't like that. You know it.”

José shrugs his shoulders.

“Characters change.”

Carlos swallows hard.

“I was just talking with the Professor about that.”

“Let me guess. He doesn't think it's a good idea for Georgina to change.”

“He says he thinks Georgina has been off lately. That at this rate the romance will end in a wedding, and then we won't be able to—”

“The Professor can suck my cock,” Ventura breaks in.

They burst into laughter. José does too, though his is a calm laugh, barely showing his teeth; it is the smile of someone with power, sketched out from a distance. Only Carlos remains earnest.