Juan Gómez Bárcena - The Sky Over Lima

Carlos doesn’t move, but his eyes are suddenly alert.

“And what did he say?”

“The first thing that came into his head. That I must remember that the first rule, the most important one, the one that trumps all others, is never to swim against love’s tide. But whose love? I asked him. He laughed, of course — what could he say? I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it…”

As for advice, the Professor hadn’t said much. He’d only laughed again and noted that Georgina sounded ill, quite gravely ill, those coughs and chills in her chest are a bad sign this time of year, she might very well be dying on them. Wouldn’t that be liberating? he’d added with a wink. And so José needs Carlos now — can you believe it, even that charlatan friend of yours has given up, has no idea how to get out of this fix, but I know you’re different, I know you’ll find a way. And as he says it he holds out the bundle of letters with a beseeching expression. Everything’s here, he adds, the latest chapters of our novel.

Our novel —that’s what he says.

Carlos hesitates a moment before finally accepting the packet of letters. He weighs it warily in his hand, finding it surprisingly light for its size. It is a mechanical gesture with no anxiety in it but no joy or curiosity or sadness either. He can’t find the right words to answer José, which, to paraphrase the Professor, means he doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know how he should feel. He has waited so often for this moment — José’s apology, Georgina’s return — and now that he’s holding that bit of fulfilled desire in his hands, he doesn’t know what to do with it. José humiliated; José pleading with him for help, to help him save their novel; José needing him for the first time in his life — but for some reason that humiliation, that plea, that need, elicit no emotion in him. His true desire, what he has been searching for so long, is something else — but what? As he grasps the packet of letters, he knows only that it seems to contain something profoundly intimate yet utterly alien. That it is the most important thing he’s done in his life and yet, at the same time, it’s nonsense, a prank, a wearisome joke that’s fallen flat. For a moment he feels the urge to take those pages and throw them one by one through the stove’s little door and into the crackling flames. Goodbye to Georgina , he thinks, and the thought is both freeing and terrifying.

But he doesn’t do it. Instead he surveys the bobbing pen strokes, José’s superb forgeries. He pauses for a moment on a passage from Georgina’s last letter. I received your latest epistles while not yet fully recuperated from an illness that kept me confined to bed for weeks. Alarmed, my family took me to Barranco, a picturesque seaside resort, and then to a sanatorium in La Punta, another summering spot, this one quite lonely and sad.

“The Santa Águeda sanatorium,” Carlos says suddenly, with unaccustomed energy.

Perhaps because it’s been so long since Carlos has spoken, José is startled by his words. Carlos’s voice sounds unusually low, as if it belonged to someone else. It takes José a moment to react.

“Santa what?”

“The sanatorium that Georgina is talking about, in La Punta,” he says without looking at him, as if he were thinking aloud. “She must be referring to Santa Águeda.”

José blinks, confused.

“Well… I don’t actually know. I just said it to say something. I wasn’t even sure there was one.”

“It’s a tuberculosis sanatorium.”

“Tuberculosis,” José repeats distractedly, perhaps thinking about something else.

◊

Carlos does not read the letters in their entirety. He reads only a few scattered phrases, which, through some mysterious happenstance, seem curiously linked. The bundle of letters must contain more than two hundred pages. Let us suppose, to offer a likely figure, that it contains exactly 249. Carlos begins reading on that page— I will take the very first ship , the poet has said — and moves from there to page 248, page 247, page 246. This is a new novel, an unfamiliar one in which the answers precede their questions, in which missives are sent futilely into the past and in which a friendship’s initial tenderness gradually calcifies into ever more ceremonious formulas— Dear friend, Most distinguished Ramón Jiménez, Most esteemed sir —until its characters decide to ignore each other entirely and never speak again. He begins at the pinnacle of a passion that dwindles the way romances never do: slowly. He knows full well what he will find in those last, first pages: a false Georgina, somewhat crude, charmingly vulgar, her mouth full of inappropriate words, rough-mannered and inelegant, who will little by little regain the characteristics of her original purity. And at first he delights in her vulgarities, in that stranger’s missteps, as if he were admonishing a young child for whims that will be corrected only a few letters later. Who would say such a thing, why on earth would he write such a stupid letter, what was José thinking when he had her put down this sentence, and this one, and that one? In his imagination, he removes those words, those idioms, those jokes, as if he were scrubbing makeup from a marble statue.

And beneath all that must be Georgina. Except that suddenly it turns out that she’s not really there: behind that makeup there’s nothing. Though perhaps it is untrue to say it happens suddenly. It is a sudden discovery that nevertheless only much later becomes a certainty: a slow, cold surprise that lasts many minutes and dozens of pages, letters that pass through his hands one after another, faster and faster. First he goes back to page 206, more or less the moment at which the tragedy begins, and then to the strike, and then even farther back, almost to her birth, and yet there’s nothing. Georgina no longer seems like Georgina; she is like any other woman, a stranger, a ridiculous puppet. A Frankenstein fashioned out of organs and limbs pillaged from different graves, phrases from Madame Bovary , from Anna Karenina , from The Dangerous Liaisons , even certain expressions they’ve read in Galdós’s latest novel — but not a trace of the real Georgina. Did she ever exist at all? Around him, Carlos sees only lifeless wreckage. It reminds him of when the doctor and his father and even the servants began to scold him if he talked to Román, forcing him to say again and again that his little friend didn’t exist, that the silver pitcher had been hurled to the floor by Carlos alone, not some other unruly boy; that there was nothing in that chair, on that sofa, in that garden, except air. And after a while he had heard them say it so often that he began to see it too — the air, you know — he saw the air, and in it the whips, and the stretchers, and the rifles, and the fly-swarmed corpses, and so very many real children with yellow eyes and swollen bellies, as if they were pregnant with hunger. At this point, that’s all he sees: air — that is, words — and maybe that’s why he suddenly remembers Sandoval’s words, how one must bore down to the reality of circumstances, the materiality of things, because all ideology is only a false consciousness, not the product of the material conditions of existence. He thinks those words now and repeats them to himself, and suddenly Georgina becomes only what he is holding in his hands, a crinkled sheet of paper, a few carefully chosen words, a way of returning to certain themes and commonplaces, a coffee stain on a draft that they used as a coaster, the way the i ’s and t ’s rise up as if they were trying to escape the page — that is, to reach heaven.

Carlos wonders what has become of the novel that was once vividly rendered with each letter, as if it were being projected in the milky half-light of a moving-picture theater. A girl swinging her parasol from one shoulder to the other; a gloomy arbor in which someone is sighing or sobbing; the grille of a confessional, the grate on a window, and the wrought-iron fence around a garden with gravel paths and governesses; another cage, and in it a parakeet morosely being fed, pinch by pinch, its ration of birdseed; a missal clutched devoutly to a chest, the better to hide a bundle of letters inside it. He no longer sees any of those images that used to accompany the words. Not a trace of the real Georgina, if she ever even existed: only the faces of all the grotesque impostor georginas all around him. He sees the Panteoncito waif in the expensive dresses he gave her, costumes that were never quite able to wipe the whore off her. He sees the Polish prostitute, not a girl anymore, who no longer has her summer dress or her pink bows or her canopy bed, who doesn’t even have teeth now; all she has is the corner of a trash heap where she sells herself for a copper or a few swigs of wine, a toothless mouth that murmurs Cheistormoro to her customers, tall and short, young and old, fat and skinny— Cheistormoro , which might mean “hurry up and come” or “you’re hurting me” or maybe “I wish I were dead.” And he also sees himself lying languidly in bed, patiently kissing, with complete, pathetic earnestness, the back of his own hand. His eyes closed. And then he no longer feels a desire to reproach José or sadness for Juan Ramón or nostalgia for Georgina; instead, he feels only cavernous shame, and something like disgust. He recalls a dream he’s had many times and always forgets upon waking, a fantasy in which he sees a beautiful woman reclining on her divan, majestic as a Fortuny odalisque or a Doré engraving. Her body voluptuous, white, like something straight out of a painting, seems to become more and more real, drawing nearer, unbearably near, as if instead of eyes he had microscope lenses that someone was adjusting, or as if she, the beautiful woman, were growing so immense that soon she would swallow everything. A suddenly enormous chest, the areola of the breast covered with a purple rash, a repulsive acne, hairs growing thick as forests and wrinkles as deep as valleys, and under the skin a vertigo of secretions, viscosities, entrails, bacteria, sounds of digestion and excretion, menstruations, hot flashes, cells that replicate and die and replicate again. He always wakes from those nightmares feverish, soaked in his own sweat, shivering with fear from the weight of that awful, immense beauty.