The Sky Over Lima (11 page)

And some days I awake at dawn filled with such sadness . . . 

Her life takes place not in a bawdyhouse but in a setting as splendid and cold as marble. A labyrinth of trellised gardens, of ornate chambers with canopies and frescoes and brocade upholstery, afternoons of making and receiving visits, of playing the piano for stern old women. Long evenings in which she sits in the dining room waiting for guests or waiting for nothing—waiting for another day to end and, at the same time, fearing that this is all she'll ever have. Sometimes she stays in the garden a long while, sitting beneath the trailing vines—Carlos can almost see her by his side—watching the bumblebees and the moths that orbit the flame of the oil lamp; like her, they are confined in a prison that cannot be seen and that, morning or night, will surely scorch their wings. Sometimes she snuffs out the lamp to free them. But other times she succumbs to cruelty and does nothing, only watches, until the maid comes running out with a shawl in her arms and strict orders for the young lady to come into the house immediately.

That setting contains few characters and only a couple of emotions. An authoritarian father who does not let her write letters that are as long as she'd like. A mother who is ailing or dead. Every once in a while, the sense that, all around her, the world has briefly turned unreal—
Do you not experience the same thing, my dear Juan Ramón?
—the suspicion that everything may be a stage set, the rehearsal for a play that has no audience or director or opening night. And above all, the six thousand miles of distance that separate her from the only human being who seems to understand her, the person who makes her feel alive again, fully alive, and whose letters slumber tucked away inside the piano.

◊

José imagines her brunette and young, almost a child. His Georgina has dark skin and indigenous features; were she wearing a vicuña wool poncho, she might even be mistaken for one of the women who come down to the city from the high Andean plateau once a month to sell their humble wares. Indeed, she bears a striking resemblance to a servant girl his family dismissed two or three years ago, though he doesn't tell Carlos that. The girl had been beautiful and happy; José always thought of her as an Inca princess in servant-girl guise, though as far as he knew the Incas had at least been able to read the knots of their khipus, and Marcela couldn't even recognize her own name in writing. But she liked poetry, or so Master José believed, and so he used to interrupt her in the middle of her duties to read her his early poems. Marcela would sit down to listen, the feather duster or broom still in her hand, and as if entranced she would repeat all those cadenced, beautiful words whose meaning she did not know. In fact, she was entirely ignorant, or so José believed, and her lack of sophistication fascinated him.

“Oh, dear Marcelita! If only we could all be like you and look at life with the blessed innocence of the songbirds and flowers! Only you, who know nothing, can be absolutely happy . . .”

The maid agreed, sincerely convinced. No doubt she was happy if Master José said so, as José was very intelligent and always right about everything. But between her twelve-hour workdays polishing the silverware and the recent news of her mother's death back in her impoverished village, she hadn't had a lot of time to think about happiness of late.

“How I envy you, dear friend! Knowledge is a cumbersome burden that I must bear everywhere upon my shoulders, like wretched Sisyphus . . . Of course you don't know who Sis-yphus is—you have that luck too! I would love to unlearn all my knowledge and become simple and unfurrowed like you!” Marcela was touched by these words. She was moved to tears imagining the unknown pains the young master suffered, and perhaps to offer him comfort she began to let herself be taken in the kitchen, under the rhododendrons in the garden, in the wine cellar, in her narrow servant's bed whenever José's mother fell asleep. Even once in Señor Gálvez's office, knocking over an inkwell in the process and ruining a number of documents whose value was docked, of course, from Marcela's wages. It was in her illiterate arms that José learned all that books and the well-mannered women who read them could not teach. Because Marcela knew how to kiss with her mouth open, and moan, and writhe when a lady would have stayed still, and her hands, those hands that seemed to have been made to take care of guests' hats, had also learned to stimulate places that a virtuous wife should know nothing about. José would remember her lessons for many years, and the words
passion
and
desire
would ever be bound in his recollection to this memory. As would the word
impossible
, because naturally the story comes to an end, a dénouement elegantly wrapped up by the Gálvez family with no consequences other than a dismissal, a small severance of fifteen
soles
, and a solemn promise from Marcela never to see their son again. And the son played at being glum for at least a couple of nights—he may even have entertained the mad notion that love between a wealthy young man and a maid was possible, a foolish delusion that we can by no means credit in 1904.

Now the maid he will never see again has been transformed into Georgina. Georgina is Marcela had Marcela not been raised an illiterate housemaid and, instead of scrubbing the floor tiles in the hallway on her knees, had spent her time reading the Symbolists and the Parnassians. It is she who attempts to slip certain insinuations into the letters to Juan Ramón with the same coquettishness with which she used to forget to latch the door to her room. But Carlos never allows that Georgina to show herself. When the two poets meet in the garret to compose a new letter and José offers one of his ideas, Carlos roundly rejects it. No, he says. Georgina would never say that. Or perhaps, almost shouting: Georgina is a young lady, not a harlot! Accustomed to always being right, to having his ideas eagerly embraced, at first José is startled by Carlos's determination, which becomes more self-assured with each letter they write. Finally he laughs heartily. He is amused by the stubbornness with which his friend defends each of Georgina's qualities.

You're acting like you're in love with her, he says.

But he doesn't stop Carlos. In the end, he cares as much about having his version of Georgina prevail as he once did about the maidservant—that is to say, very little. He is interested only in the poem, the poem that Juan Ramón still has not written. And if in order to write it the poet needs a blond muse instead of a
morena
, a frigid young lady instead of a mischievous flirt, then Carlos's ideas are quite welcome.

“You should see Carlota,” he will say at the club later. “You couldn't hire someone with such feminine handwriting. It makes you wonder. And he knows the girl better than you fellows know your own mothers and sweethearts. Anyone would think he was writing a diary, not composing letters, and that at night he puts on a shawl and goes about like one of Lima's covered ladies.”

Carlos ignores their laughter. José might not care about Georgina, but Carlos cares even less about what their circle of friends thinks. Or that they've all started calling him Carlota, or that they bow in greeting and pull out his chair for him when he sits down at the table. If you please, madame. Carlos has time to think only about important things. Like finally figuring out how Georgina takes her tea: Two cubes of sugar. A splash of milk. And maybe, but only if her father isn't looking, a bit of anise liquor in her cup.

◊

Lima, December 5, 1904

My esteemed friend:

You ask what Lima is like, this beloved city of mine, which some call the Pearl of the Pacific, or the City of Kings, or the Thrice-Crowned Villa in honor of some old anecdote I no longer recall. You ask me to write about all this, and it occurs to me that the best way to do so is to imagine that you are here with me. Or even better: To imagine that we are both high up in the bell tower of the cathedral. From there I could point out every corner of my city and all its many beauties . . .

Or better yet: Did you not once mention that you are a painter? Imagine, then, that I am giving you instructions for painting a landscape. This beautiful view from the sky over Lima, always misty, changeable, so nurturing of inventions and fantasies . . . Suppose, if you wish, that we are painting the canvas together. And that, as with all canvases, my manner of painting it, of adding colors and textures, also creates a sort of portrait of me.

Imagine first a network of streets and houses, so perfectly laid out that you could draw it with a T-square. Do you see it? From afar it looks like the grid of a beehive or the mesh of a lattice. But if you focus your gaze a little, its geometry unravels into life, into rooftops and awnings, elaborate rows of balconies, the arches of city hall, the Plaza Dos de Mayo, the path of the Rímac River as it plunges toward the ocean.

All that you see there at your feet is my beloved Lima. Within its borders, as you see, there are a good number of yellow hills and fields. A lovely golden yellow that you, my distinguished friend, would have to search for in your palette, as it is not the yellow of melancholy and death that pervades your poems, but a lively yellow, like a bonfire. The color of the sun worshipped by our Incan ancestors so long ago.

Here, everything, even the colors, means something else.

The sea? Do not paint it so close to the city. Place it a few inches farther away on the canvas—that is, two long leagues. They may call it the Pearl of the Pacific, but the name is a deceptive one, because Lima is more a timid jewel, a gemstone that tiptoes away from the ocean without ever daring to lose sight of it, as if it both feared and craved its waters. Paint it blue, but a blue that, I suspect, is not the same blue as the Spanish seas. And in the distance place a port, and call it El Callao, and scatter a few transatlantic ships among its wharves, massive saurians cloaked in steam and rust but somehow beautiful, because they will, in the end, be the bearers of this letter.

Farther out, somewhere on the horizon, is my home, one of the many estates in Miraflores. And perhaps it is better this way, that you cannot see it. I have said that a person's manner of looking at a city reflects that person's soul, but it is no less true that a house holds the spirit of the people who inhabit it. And I feel so distant from its walls! A stranger in my own bedroom, in the dining room where I while away the hours, so that even in calling it my home I am obliged to lie to you. Inside it there are only rules and reprimands, so inflexible that they might have been drawn by the same T-square used to lay out the streets. A lattice that might at times be called a cage, its bars made of bowing servants, of lectures from a father who does not find this or that to his liking, the riding frock and the gown for receiving visitors, endless dinners that always seem to feature the same plate of soup. Lessons from a young ladies' charm manual, a work that knows so much about protocols and so little of life! It is excruciating sometimes to be a woman, to be a daughter, to be nobody!

If you wish to know my soul, you should not look at that house. Nor at the geometric avenues, rigid like the instructions of a strict tutor. I am not myself in my house. Only far from it—far, too, from the heart of that city where gentlemen in top hats and women in their street gowns promenade. In my walks, I seek a different, unknown Lima. Because to keep painting this canvas, you must know, my dear Juan Ramón, that there at the edges the strict grid becomes chaotic, twisted, full of unpredictable sinuosities and bends and leaps. I love to wander through those poor neighborhoods, down those dirt alleys where no one has to pretend to be anything. Where the people shout out with unpretentious, authentic words and you can stop to watch a sunset or a flower growing in the crevices without being bothered. My soul more closely resembles those little dead-end streets, those picturesque lots, and I return home with the hems of my skirts soiled with dust and the satisfaction of having lived something real, something beautiful . . .

Oh dear, what strange secrets I am confessing to you, my friend!

◊

The Professor has liked the last few letters. “This is something else,” he says, “now your cousin is really letting herself go, showing her face a bit.” He also praises the delicate handwriting once again, and when he does, Carlos lowers his eyes.

“So . . . you think there's a chance?”

“Of what?”

“Of making her fall in love.”

“Making her fall in love? Who?”

“Making him fall in love, I mean. You know, Juan Ramón. The Spanish poet.”

“Oh! Well . . . who knows? But one thing's for sure: the beguiling eye of this covered lady has been unveiled! No doubt about that!”

Carlos goes to ask for his advice every week, whenever Georgina receives a letter or is getting ready to write one. I've never met such a solicitous cousin before, the Professor says every time he sees Carlos join the queue. He always comes alone, but Cristóbal doesn't mention José's absence. He seems to remember him only one morning when he insists on rewriting a particular passage of the next letter and Carlos refuses.

“You see, she wants to write it without anybody's help,” he insists.

“But she's not making you come all the way out here every week for no reason.”

“Well . . . actually, Georgina doesn't know I come to see you.”

Cristóbal raises his eyebrows.