Juan Gómez Bárcena - The Sky Over Lima

Though the girls do sleep with the customers for money, it would perhaps be unfitting to call them whores. At least, that’s what Carlos thinks when he sees them come down the stairs in their long gowns and kidskin gloves. Whores are the other ones, those sordid women he’s seen offering themselves up on street corners, the ones who crowd the prisons on the eve of presidential elections and let themselves be taken behind the nettle patches on Colchoneros for a few coins. These women, however, in the garb of elegant young ladies, look like Miraflores maidens interrupted in the middle of a gala dinner. And the madam — though it would perhaps be unfitting to call her a madam — introduces them one by one with feigned enthusiasm.

“This is Cora, the young heiress of the Incas, granddaughter of the grandson of the granddaughter of Atahualpa himself…

“The one winking at you is Catalina. She’s as Russian as the czar and so affectionate she’d melt the glaciers of Siberia…

“That’s our dear Mimí. The lustful blood of the French runs through her veins…”

Each of the girls has been given something like a Homeric epithet — Cayetana of the sweet kisses; Teresita, shy by day and pure fire at night — and before he chooses, Carlos chuckles to himself just thinking about that, about Homer and The Iliad . It’s not really funny — it’s a joke for drunken intellectuals — but he laughs anyway.

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The one he’s chosen has a name too, but Carlos has already forgotten it. An eternity has passed since he met her in the hall — almost ten minutes — and the last swig of whiskey has scattered the madam’s words until they seem very far away. He vaguely remembers the girls, many of them quite young, waiting for him to choose and watching him with something that might have been desire or hope or boredom. Who the hell has he chosen? Antonia, the novitiate with earthly appetites? Or maybe Marieta with the unfettered imagination? Who knows, and who cares.

In the bedroom he discovers that she’s not even pretty. How could she be, when she’s not the protagonist of any novel? She has the discreet beauty of secondary characters, designed to entertain for a single chapter and then disappear without a trace. Perhaps aware of her modest role in Georgina’s novel, she doesn’t even open her mouth. She only sits on the edge of the bed, attempting to smile, waiting.

In the room, nothing happens. Though one might also say that many things happen. He takes off his coat. He tosses back his drink. He murmurs a few words — expectantly, she responds with other words, or maybe with just a smile. He feigns a sudden interest in the window latch. He consults his watch. He lights a cigarette. Then stubs it out. Nothing, to be sure, to justify the five soles he will later pay the madam. At some point, with all that nothing happening, the girl decides to take the initiative. The resulting scene is imbued with a peculiar sadness: clumsy caresses, the creaking bed, hands touching places that, no, not on your life. The bodies in a state of half undress, their movement suddenly ceasing. An apology.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, sir,” she says.

There is a grandfather clock somewhere, and the sound of its weights and gears makes the silences even more profound.

“I’ve had too much to drink.”

“You should rest, then.”

“But I’m going to pay you anyway. Of course I’m going to pay you. I’ll pay you for the whole night.”

“Please don’t worry about that right now.”

Carlos shifts uneasily on the bed. He should add something, but he doesn’t know what. Or he should at least fill the silence by lighting a cigarette, but his jacket pocket is too far away. She smiles.

“Would you like to tell me what’s worrying you?”

Carlos opens his mouth and then closes it again. Antonia, or María, or Jimena counts to ten. When she finishes, she reaches out her hand to stroke his back. Slowly. It’s her way of telling him that she’s ready for the thing she’s second best at in the world: listening. She’s not all that interested in what Carlos might tell her, of course, but in a way she considers it part of her job. After all, it’s 1905 and psychologists don’t exist yet. Priests in their confessionals and whores in their brothels are the only people who help unburden men’s consciences. She uses all the experience of her profession to ask a single question:

“You’re out of sorts because you’re thinking about another woman, aren’t you?”

Carlos turns for a moment to look at the mouth that has uttered those words. Her voice is very sweet, much sweeter than a psychoanalyst’s would be. But then, when he doesn’t respond immediately, the girl apologizes. Forgive me, she says. Forgive my rudeness. You needn’t answer. But the young man is drunk and wants to answer, and after a few moments he does so, cautiously, slowly, choosing his words carefully.

He says:

“No.”

And then:

“I don’t know.”

And finally:

“I suppose so.”

He doesn’t know why he’s answered that way. He feels an enormous sorrow and yet a tiny consolation: the touch of her hand on his body. And perhaps because it’s so quiet and he feels that something more should be said, he adds: She loves someone else. A man named Juan Ramón, he says. A man named José, he corrects himself. Or maybe neither one, who knows; it’s complicated, he says at last.

But the girl doesn’t find it all that complicated. To her, all rich people’s problems look like mere variations on the same hollow, insipid problem.

A pat on the shoulder. “I understand,” she says, though she doesn’t really.

And then, since the gentleman has paid for the whole night, they blow out the oil lamp and pretend to fall asleep, but even in the dark they both keep their eyes wide open.

It is the first time a customer has rejected her, and she thinks of nothing else until daybreak. Of that and of Cayetana, the whore from Cusco. The older customers say she used to be stunningly beautiful, but today Cayetana is just a fat, sad woman to whom age has not been kind and who washes the dishes and cleans the bedrooms because nobody wants to sleep with her anymore. Only a few old men, plus Señor Hunter, who is quite young but blind and doesn’t much care what body he’s mounting. And now she wonders about the first time a customer didn’t want to sleep with Cayetana and how long it took the others to follow his lead. When did she start to get old, to make beds that other women would unmake the next day? And then the girl thinks about herself, about her twenty-five years of age, about her breasts that will gradually cease to be firm — but that can’t be the issue, impossible, because the gentleman hasn’t even seen them — about the unsightly, hairy mole on her neck that Madame Lenotre’s doctor didn’t allow her to remove; and now, finally, she imagines young, blind Señor Hunter in a few years, perhaps fewer than she thinks, Señor Hunter only a little less young but just as blind, running his trembling hands over her body and whispering in her ear, “Me too, baby, I’m all alone now too.” She shudders.

And as for what Carlos is thinking, it’s best not to say anything at all.

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Lima, June 19, 1905

My dearest friend,

You must forgive me these lines, even my handwriting… Oh, I am quite irate! As you can see, even the hand with which I grip my pen and trace these letters is quivering. Yes, I know — the etiquette manuals say that a young lady should be prudent and demure and not express any intense or excessive emotions. But I daresay there are moments when the soul cannot be gagged or thwarted. Don’t you agree? And tonight my fury is such that prim old Saturnino Calleja and his rules of decorum would certainly disapprove, but I hope that you, my dear friend, will be able to forgive me. Who else but you, the loyal confidant of my every thought, even these that go so contrary to all propriety!