Juan Gómez Bárcena - The Sky Over Lima

“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.

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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!