Juan Gómez Bárcena - The Sky Over Lima

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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.

“And what if he’s right? What if Juan Ramón wants to get married?”

José’s eyes glint. He straightens up from the billiards table before he’s even taken his shot.

“We already thought of that. Tell him, Ventura.”

Ventura has had too much to drink. He gesticulates wildly as he talks, and with every swoop of his hand a bit more whiskey sloshes out of his glass.

“All right, listen here. The novel has two possible endings. One of them is pious and the other’s a little spicy.”

“Tell him the spicy one,” José says impatiently.

“Well, in the spicy version her father forces her to marry a count or a duke — but she’s not in love, of course! He’s an ugly old man, and she has eyes only for Juan Ramón! So they have to carry on their correspondence behind the husband’s back. Keep in mind that Georgina’s a little naughty now. A furtive love! There’s even a servant who helps them and all that. All right. So years go by and—”

“No, the pious ending is definitely better,” José interrupts. “Tell him that one first.”

“Well, it’s just what you’d expect: Georgina becomes a nun. But even behind the convent walls, she finds a way to keep sending Juan Ramón little messages, forever torn between devotion to God and the temptations of the flesh.”

“Have you fellows lost your minds?” Carlos says. “Georgina has no spiritual calling, you know that. We made her that way. Together. And—”

Ventura breaks in again.

“And what of it? So we’ll make her have one. We can do that, you know!”

José gently intervenes.

“Don’t worry about that, Carlota. I know that we haven’t made her terribly devout, but it’s all worked out. Georgina is going to find God in chapter twenty-nine, with the death of her mother. Really dramatic stuff: tuberculosis!”

“But we already killed off her mother!”

They fall silent a few moments. José is still holding his glass halfway to his lips.

“Damn it, Ventura, he’s right. We hadn’t thought of that.”

“How about an aunt?”

“An aunt could work.”

“So her aunt dies, then…”

“The death of her dear aunt Rosinda! Really dramatic stuff, chapter twenty-nine!”

Carlos feels as if reality were flickering in and out, as if the sky were lurching beneath his feet.

“So are we playing pairs or not?” asks Márquez, handing him a cue stick.

“But José, don’t you see we’re destroying the novel? Everything we’ve built…”

José turns back to the game.

“You worry too much, Carlota. We’re not destroying anything. There are just some things you don’t understand. All those things you wrote were wonderful, quite lovely, very tasteful, but now we’ve got to stoke the passions a little, all right? Less prudishness. Something pulled from the pages of Wuthering Heights .”

Silence. And then a new hardness in Carlos’s voice and expression.

“I told you not to call me Carlota.”

“It’s just a joke, my good man. What do you think we should do, then? Tell him the truth?”

“No… I don’t know. I just mean that we could make sure they continue their relationship… as friends.”

“Friends, is it? Yes, I’m sure Juan Ramón would be very grateful to you. He’d say, Thank you for opening my eyes and completely screwing up the novel on top of it. That’s what he’d say.” José lays the cue stick on the table. For the first time, he’s giving him his full attention. “Listen. Imagine if at the end of María the main character didn’t feel like making the trip because when all was said and done the girl was going to die anyway. Imagine if Anna Karenina didn’t throw herself under a train or if Madame Bovary ended before Emma fell in love with Rodolphe. Would that make any sense? What sort of novels would they be then, do you think?”

“But this isn’t a novel,” Carlos replies, his voice thin. “I mean… I mean, at least that’s not all it is. It’s a novel, sure, but it’s also a man’s life.”