The Sky Over Lima (27 page)

But he doesn't do it. Instead he surveys the bobbing pen strokes, José's superb forgeries. He pauses for a moment on a passage from Georgina's last letter.
I received your latest epistles while not yet fully recuperated from an illness that kept me confined to bed for weeks. Alarmed, my family took me to Barranco, a picturesque seaside resort, and then to a sanatorium in La Punta, another summering spot, this one quite lonely and sad.

“The Santa Águeda sanatorium,” Carlos says suddenly, with unaccustomed energy.

Perhaps because it's been so long since Carlos has spoken, José is startled by his words. Carlos's voice sounds unusually low, as if it belonged to someone else. It takes José a moment to react.

“Santa what?”

“The sanatorium that Georgina is talking about, in La Punta,” he says without looking at him, as if he were thinking aloud. “She must be referring to Santa Águeda.”

José blinks, confused.

“Well . . . I don't actually know. I just said it to say something. I wasn't even sure there was one.”

“It's a tuberculosis sanatorium.”

“Tuberculosis,” José repeats distractedly, perhaps thinking about something else.

◊

Carlos does not read the letters in their entirety. He reads only a few scattered phrases, which, through some mysterious happenstance, seem curiously linked. The bundle of letters must contain more than two hundred pages. Let us suppose, to offer a likely figure, that it contains exactly 249. Carlos begins reading on that page—
I will take the very first ship
, the poet has said—and moves from there to page 248, page 247, page 246. This is a new novel, an unfamiliar one in which the answers precede their questions, in which missives are sent futilely into the past and in which a friendship's initial tenderness gradually calcifies into ever more ceremonious formulas—
Dear friend, Most distinguished Ramón Jiménez, Most esteemed sir
—until its characters decide to ignore each other entirely and never speak again. He begins at the pinnacle of a passion that dwindles the way romances never do: slowly. He knows full well what he will find in those last, first pages: a false Georgina, somewhat crude, charmingly vulgar, her mouth full of inappropriate words, rough-mannered and inelegant, who will little by little regain the characteristics of her original purity. And at first he delights in her vulgarities, in that stranger's missteps, as if he were admonishing a young child for whims that will be corrected only a few letters later. Who would say such a thing, why on earth would he write such a stupid letter, what was José thinking when he had her put down this sentence, and this one, and that one? In his imagination, he removes those words, those idioms, those jokes, as if he were scrubbing makeup from a marble statue.

And beneath all that must be Georgina. Except that suddenly it turns out that she's not really there: behind that makeup there's nothing. Though perhaps it is untrue to say it happens suddenly. It is a sudden discovery that nevertheless only much later becomes a certainty: a slow, cold surprise that lasts many minutes and dozens of pages, letters that pass through his hands one after another, faster and faster. First he goes back to page 206, more or less the moment at which the tragedy begins, and then to the strike, and then even farther back, almost to her birth, and yet there's nothing. Georgina no longer seems like Georgina; she is like any other woman, a stranger, a ridiculous puppet. A Frankenstein fashioned out of organs and limbs pillaged from different graves, phrases from
Madame Bovary
, from
Anna Karenina
, from
The Dangerous Liaisons
, even certain expressions they've read in Galdós's latest novel—but not a trace of the real Georgina. Did she ever exist at all? Around him, Carlos sees only lifeless wreckage. It reminds him of when the doctor and his father and even the servants began to scold him if he talked to Román, forcing him to say again and again that his little friend didn't exist, that the silver pitcher had been hurled to the floor by Carlos alone, not some other unruly boy; that there was nothing in that chair, on that sofa, in that garden, except air. And after a while he had heard them say it so often that he began to see it too—the air, you know—he saw the air, and in it the whips, and the stretchers, and the rifles, and the fly-swarmed corpses, and so very many real children with yellow eyes and swollen bellies, as if they were pregnant with hunger. At this point, that's all he sees: air—that is, words—and maybe that's why he suddenly remembers Sandoval's words, how one must bore down to the reality of circumstances, the materiality of things, because all ideology is only a false consciousness, not the product of the material conditions of existence. He thinks those words now and repeats them to himself, and suddenly Georgina becomes only what he is holding in his hands, a crinkled sheet of paper, a few carefully chosen words, a way of returning to certain themes and commonplaces, a coffee stain on a draft that they used as a coaster, the way the
i
's and
t
's rise up as if they were trying to escape the page—that is, to reach heaven.

Carlos wonders what has become of the novel that was once vividly rendered with each letter, as if it were being projected in the milky half-light of a moving-picture theater. A girl swinging her parasol from one shoulder to the other; a gloomy arbor in which someone is sighing or sobbing; the grille of a confessional, the grate on a window, and the wrought-iron fence around a garden with gravel paths and governesses; another cage, and in it a parakeet morosely being fed, pinch by pinch, its ration of birdseed; a missal clutched devoutly to a chest, the better to hide a bundle of letters inside it. He no longer sees any of those images that used to accompany the words. Not a trace of the real Georgina, if she ever even existed: only the faces of all the grotesque impostor georginas all around him. He sees the Panteoncito waif in the expensive dresses he gave her, costumes that were never quite able to wipe the whore off her. He sees the Polish prostitute, not a girl anymore, who no longer has her summer dress or her pink bows or her canopy bed, who doesn't even have teeth now; all she has is the corner of a trash heap where she sells herself for a copper or a few swigs of wine, a toothless mouth that murmurs
Cheistormoro
to her customers, tall and short, young and old, fat and skinny—
Cheistormoro
, which might mean “hurry up and come” or “you're hurting me” or maybe “I wish I were dead.” And he also sees himself lying languidly in bed, patiently kissing, with complete, pathetic earnestness, the back of his own hand. His eyes closed. And then he no longer feels a desire to reproach José or sadness for Juan Ramón or nostalgia for Georgina; instead, he feels only cavernous shame, and something like disgust. He recalls a dream he's had many times and always forgets upon waking, a fantasy in which he sees a beautiful woman reclining on her divan, majestic as a Fortuny odalisque or a Doré engraving. Her body voluptuous, white, like something straight out of a painting, seems to become more and more real, drawing nearer, unbearably near, as if instead of eyes he had microscope lenses that someone was adjusting, or as if she, the beautiful woman, were growing so immense that soon she would swallow everything. A suddenly enormous chest, the areola of the breast covered with a purple rash, a repulsive acne, hairs growing thick as forests and wrinkles as deep as valleys, and under the skin a vertigo of secretions, viscosities, entrails, bacteria, sounds of digestion and excretion, menstruations, hot flashes, cells that replicate and die and replicate again. He always wakes from those nightmares feverish, soaked in his own sweat, shivering with fear from the weight of that awful, immense beauty.

He feels almost the same desperation now as he pushes aside the bundle of letters. He feels deep repugnance, something he cannot express in words (but the Professor says that if there are no words, then the inexpressible thing is nothing), and he understands at last, or at least he thinks he does. It is a longing for everything to be over, to declare that Georgina is dying.

That's what he thinks:
Georgina has to die.

Actually, he says it out loud.

“We have to kill her.”

And José turns to look at him and laughs. A long, exaggerated guffaw that breaks off as Carlos's meaning dawns on him.

“Kill whom?”

Then José tries to object, to say anything at all, but Carlos rushes on. His voice does not sound like his voice; indeed, it no longer is his voice. It sounds a bit like José's, but it's not that either. It sounds like, and in fact is, the authoritarian voice of Román: a voice that demands deference and quiets José in an instant. It is rather amusing to hear Román say that an imaginary friend must be killed—but really it isn't amusing at all. It is true.

Is it true?

Carlos seems quite sure of himself. As if Román had lent him not just his voice but also his confidence, that determination with which he used to play pranks or declare the rules of a game. As he talks, only the slightest gesture reveals the emotion he's feeling: the way his fingers are fiddling with the edges of the bundle of letters. It is as if he could go forward and backward in time at will, returning to the novel to select just the scenes and examples to buttress his words. He says: Weren't you the one who insisted that all of this was just literature? The one who quoted Aristotle and talked about verisimilitude? The one who kept saying our novel's ending needed a bit of drama, because the best love stories always end in tragedy? That Petrarch had to have a woman die on him, and Dante a girl, and Catullus a young man, so that a great poem could be written. Isn't that what you said, José? Well, there's your tragedy—Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, María clenched with epilepsy, Fortunata bleeding to death, Emma Bovary swallowing arsenic. Because Georgina has consumption, don't you see? She has two cavities in her lungs as large as fists. How else can you explain her pallor, her seclusion, and the way the housemaid would scold her when she spent evenings in the garden watching the moths burning up in the lamp—don't you remember, José? And the cough racking the chest and the urgent admission to the Santa Águeda sanatorium—a surprising choice of disease, really. “I never said it was Santa Águeda!” José sputters. That hardly matters now, Carlos continues, the main thing is there's only one sanatorium in La Punta, and that sanatorium is for consumptives—Juan Ramón can confirm it if he wishes. You wanted me to help you, and this is all the help I can offer: I'm just a reader of your novel, and as such I know that this story has to end with Georgina dead and Juan Ramón in mourning.

Can it really be true?

José sighs. All right, he says. Carlos may very well be correct in what he's said, at least about part of it; José is even willing to accept that he might be correct about everything. Lately the novel has been hurtling toward a tragic end, and that could be his fault. But surely there is still something they can do; even if we aren't the authors, let's get on with it, damn it, who else can write an alternative ending? One where Georgina does not die but they still find a way to keep Juan Ramón from boarding that ship, to make him write a poem instead.

Hearing José's insistence, Carlos smiles with a new expression. He has practiced it in front of the mirror many times, and at last he has the chance to use it: a look of superiority, of disdain. Of course you can do that if you like, he answers. Save her on the very last page, like in those flea-market novels that always end with an unexpected pardon from the Crown. Or the discovery of a hidden treasure. Or a mounted charge against the enemy's rear guard, led by a general who's never even been mentioned before. That's called deus ex machina, is it not? Well, there you go, then: perform a deus ex machina if that's what you want, and the hell with your novel—and the poem too. Have you forgotten about the poem? What will the Maestro write if Georgina survives? A few trifling verses that no one will even notice, guaranteed—an inconsequential lament for yet another maiden who became a nun or was forced to marry. Worse still: a poem about two scoundrels pretending to be a woman. And why should José be satisfied with that when he could have a poem that aches with real grief, a true and inconsolable wail; an elegy for a beloved who has died, snuffed out on the very eve of this long-anticipated encounter, maybe for no other reason than that such a beautiful flower simply could not last. But if he's not convinced, he can go for it. If he'd rather have a tacky junk-shop novel, the kind that's sold at a nickel a pound, then he knows what he has to write. Or he could just sit back and let Juan Ramón come to him; he and Georgina can get married and have paper children, for all Carlos cares.

Here Carlos pauses; he lights a cigarette. His hands are shaking, but this time it's not out of unease or trepidation. He feels a wild exultation, a furious euphoria that has driven him to his feet and inspired him to spit out those last words. It is a new emotion, or at least it seems new at first, but slowly he realizes that it also leaves a familiar aftertaste. He experienced something similar once before—he's just remembered. It was eight years ago, in the Polish prostitute's bed. Because if he's honest with himself, he has to admit that back then he felt more than just guilt and sadness, even if it is those emotions that have prevailed in his memory for all these years. When he awoke and saw the bloodstained sheets, he also felt, he remembers now, a more primitive pleasure that he didn't understand at the time. A sort of arousal tinged with the same frenzy his father used to exhibit when he beat their indigenous workers, and perhaps too with the pleasure that he himself had secretly enjoyed as he moved repeatedly over the young girl's body. Her cries like a sweet anesthetic in his ear, like a thermometer measuring his valor, his strength. The knowledge that, in spite of everything, he too could inflict pain. That he could dominate and destroy another human being and then simply leave, nonchalant. And now the same exhilaration washes over him, a furious elation that would destroy everything, as if the blood on that sheet belonged not to the Polish prostitute but to tubercular Georgina—the red sputum that she will keep coughing up till she breathes her last, just because he wishes it to be so.