Juan Gómez Bárcena - The Sky Over Lima

“Listen to this, Carlota!” he exclaims, waving Juan Ramón’s letter in the air. “ And suddenly, a voice / melancholy and distant, / has trembled across the water / in the silence of the air. / It is the voice of a woman / and of a piano, it is a soft / comfort for the roses / somnolent in the afternoon, / a voice that makes me / weep for nobody and for somebody / in this sad and golden / opulence of the parks. It must be Georgina! It’s so clear: there’s a voice because of the letters, which come from very far away but nevertheless speak to him… And because he doesn’t know her yet, he weeps for nobody and for somebody… Don’t you see? For nobody and for somebody! It’s quite clear!”

Carlos doesn’t say anything. He keeps looking down at the square from on high, as if there were something to decipher there. Darkness is falling. Soon there won’t be enough light for José to keep reading him the poems.

“I think I’m going to go see him again,” he says suddenly, as if setting down a burden.

“Who?”

“The Professor… if that’s all right with you.”

José looks up from his papers.

“Professor Cristóbal? What for?”

“I don’t know… It’s just a thought.”

José hesitates for a moment. Then he shrugs.

“Whatever you like. As long as I don’t have to go with you.”

He doesn’t say anything else. But a few moments later, Carlos hears him muttering other lines with the reverence of prayer:

And there are attempts at caresses, / at glances and fragrances, / and there are lost kisses that / perish upon the waves.

She always spoke in blue / she was exquisitely sweet… but / I could never even learn / if the hair on her head was blond.

I have a beloved made of snow / who does not kiss and does not sing. / She is now dead for me / and I can never forget her.

◊

For the novel to be perfect, they have to know their character down to the most minute detail. What kind of writers would they be if they did not know whether Georgina was short or tall, whether she was writing from a seaside resort or from a garret, whether she was married or unmarried or a widow or a nun? A good scrivener, says the Professor, must know his customers better than they know themselves. And that inevitably goes for novelists too. Carlos thinks he once heard that Tolstoy — or maybe it wasn’t Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky or Gogol or some other Russian — stopped writing his novel for a whole month because when he got to a particular scene, he didn’t know whether his character would accept or refuse a cup of tea.

Do they know that? Do they know whether Georgina even likes tea?

Carlos imagines her as fair, wan, maybe ill. Vaguely sad. Also quite young — she almost seems like a child. She has blue eyes and fragile hands, very white, as if they were made of snow. She is timid and sensitive as only truly beautiful women can be, and perhaps that is why her lips quiver when she rereads Juan Ramón’s letters every night, in the secret intimacy of candlelight. The hand holding the paper also trembles. It will tremble even more when she writes out her reply.

Georgina is the Polish prostitute once more.

The Polish prostitute if, six years later, she were still a virgin.

The Polish prostitute if she were neither Polish nor a prostitute; if, instead of having been born in Galicia and sold for twenty kopeks, she’d been born in a mansion in Miraflores and at her coming-out had received gifts of four hundred dollars.

The Polish prostitute if she often wept just as she had in bed with him, but with tears born not from her fear of being raped but rather from the solidarity she shows toward certain minor tragedies — a poem that moves her, the aching beauty of a sunset, the suffering of a kitten with an injured paw.

The Polish prostitute if she had learned to read and write and with those pen strokes — again the hand trembling — told Juan Ramón all the things that Carlos would have liked to hear.

Statements full of sighs:

I have thought of you so very often, my friend…! A cousin showed me your book, Violet Souls , so full of sighs and tears, and it moved me deeply. Your sweet, soft verses offered me companionship and comfort.

But why do I recount my poor melancholy things to you, on whom the whole world smiles?

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.