Juan Gómez Bárcena - The Sky Over Lima

“Don’t give me that nonsense! This was your idea! Didn’t you always want the credit for it? Well, here you have it, before all this assembled company: it was your idea. And it was a good idea — a good one, I tell you, the best you’ve ever had. And now you want to ditch it.”

“I didn’t say I want to ditch it. I just can’t go along with that,” he says, indicating the page.

Ventura loses his patience.

“Well, either you’re in or you’re out!”

José makes a conciliatory gesture to Carlos.

“Don’t pay him any mind. Ventura can be brusque, though he’s not entirely wrong. To a certain extent that’s the way it is, I mean. You’ve played a crucial role in”—he smiles—“well, let’s say in a stage of Georgina’s life. We’re all quite grateful. But now that life has to move on. Georgina is growing up before our very eyes, you might say. And if you don’t want to move on…”

“Of course I do! You’re the ones who…”

He trails off. He thinks about the mirror in his room, about the exercises he performs before it each morning, practicing different facial expressions. He attempts to muster a dignified expression, any one at all: skepticism, censure, indifference. But he fails. He feels like crying. Maybe he is crying — he would need to look in the mirror to be sure. He feels that they are all watching him, but he is mistaken. They are focused on the game again, engaged in a long discussion of a complicated shot.

The draft — the letter — slips from his hand and falls to the floor. Carlos doesn’t even notice. But a few seconds later José picks it up. He hands it to him again, along with a glass of whiskey filled to overflowing. He smiles.

“Come on, Carlota. Have a drink. Let’s play a game and forget about all this. You’re good with the language of women, I admit, much better than the rest of us with all that business with ellipses and exclamation points. When you copy out the letters, you can correct those sorts of details. Whatever you like. But from now on, leave the rest to us, all right? We need to make Georgina a little more passionate. A little more coy. And I think we can all agree you’re about as good at licentiousness as you are at bedding girls, Carlota.”

Even Carlos is surprised by what comes next. First he feels all his energy gather in his right hand. His right fist. A fist that’s heading toward José’s face, Carlos realizes a moment after the movement has begun. But it doesn’t make contact; the explosion of rage is a halfhearted one. Though his fist is quick, it is too slow to outrun his swift conscience, his almost instantaneous reaction of fear and cowardice. And so what begins as a punch ends up as something else, a sort of girlish slap as his hand changes course midair to swat the glass José is holding out to him to the floor and snatch the paper from José’s fingers.

What comes next is another risible gesture: he puts all the intensity of his wrath into ripping the letter into tiny pieces.

His movements are so absurd, midway between tenderness and aggression, between an accident and a deliberate act, that José is too startled to respond for a moment.

“What the hell are you doing? Now we have to write it all over again!”

“That letter can go to hell! And all of you can too!”

Every morning, Carlos tries out dozens of expressions in the mirror: surprise, piousness, adoration, indifference, approval. Especially approval. It is quite possible that he has never practiced his expression of fury, which may be why it is hard for the others to take it seriously. Or perhaps the problem is not his performance, which is perfect, as always, but what the young men think they know about him. Just as a child seems comical precisely when he manages to ape his elders’ habits perfectly, shouts and curses seem innocent, almost endearing, in Carlos’s mouth. And so after a few stunned seconds his friends react in the only way possible: by bursting into laughter.

“Oh, please do me no violence, my lady!”

“White hands do not offend, mademoiselle!”

“Go on, Carlota! Rewrite the letter and stop diddling!”

Carlos is wild with rage.

“Write it yourselves! Let’s see how you do! Let’s see you keep your lousy novel going without me.”

They continue to laugh uproariously, amused by the fury in Carlos’s eyes. Only Ventura has grown suddenly serious. He points at Carlos with his finger.

“If you don’t rewrite that letter, we’ll break your nose!”

“Leave him alone,” says José, pushing Ventura’s hand aside. He crouches down to pick up the scraps of paper. “We don’t need him anyway. With a little effort, I can mimic his prissy handwriting fairly well. See there, Carlota? My hand still shakes a bit, but damn it all, we need your harlot hand to finish the novel. So sit down already and stop being a bore.”

“You can stick the novel up your ass!”

“My ass?” José laughs even harder. “Your Indian blood has started to show! It took a while, with all that blue blood on top of it. What are you going to do now? Beat us with sticks till we bring you rubber?”

At the neighboring tables, the men reading newspapers or smoking cigars or playing billiards turn to look at them. One of the waiters gives them a severe glance from the bar. Still laughing, the destitute poets ad-lib a few more things that Carlota might do: burst into tears, pull their hair, suffer a fainting fit, write to her beloved demanding that he defend her. Or even lay off the letters and play a game, damn it — that’s Márquez’s suggestion, what he’s been saying all along, to no avail.

But Carlos only instructs the errand boy to bring his greatcoat and hat.

“That’s right, go take a walk. Come back when your head’s on straight.”

“I’m not coming back!”

He attempts to simulate confidence, but his hands are shaking, and at one point his hat falls and rolls across the floor.

“We’ll see about that, mademoiselle.”

The waiter takes advantage of the lull in the action to approach and sternly inform them that making such a ruckus is quite unseemly, that the club’s members have the right to enjoy their evening in peace, and that personal matters — he eyes the torn paper and the shattered whiskey glass as he says this — should be settled in the street. His speech is unnecessary, in any event, as Carlos has just left. The bottles behind the bar rattle as the door slams shut.

José tosses back his drink and flings a coin to the floor.

“That’s fine, absolutely fine! We’re leaving too!”

And then, looking at the door:

“He’ll come back,” he says.

But Carlos keeps his word. At least for the rest of the chapter.

◊

That night he visits every brothel in the city, his mind a blank. Around him he sees whores waiting, whores smoking, whores engaged in shouted conversations with their procurers, whores talking or laughing or crying — one of them beaten to a pulp and sprawled on a trash heap in an alleyway — whores blowing kisses, whores sighing, whores who on closer look turn out to be male, whores haggling, whores who with a whistle can be summoned to bed or to the paving stones of the alleyway; whores with rooms and without them, with madams and without them, still with teeth and already without them. Sometimes they call out to him when they see him walk by. They call him Sir or Your Excellency — even in the darkness they spot the gleam of his gold watch chain — and offer to give him the best night of his life. Carlos wards them off, waving his hat and crossing to the other side of the street.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’s drinking from a bottle of whiskey he bought somewhere along the way, and his frequent swigs from it make the uncertainty a bit more bearable. It’s a long trip, from Tajamarca to Huarapo and from there to Panteoncito, Barranquita, Acequia Alta, Monserrate. At some point he is seized by a painful thought: nowhere, not even here, will he ever be able to find Georgina. Then he keeps drinking and forgets that too. Midnight finds him in one of the bordellos on Panteoncito, drunk off his gourd and sitting on a sofa while the madam goes off to fetch the girls.