The Sky Over Lima (3 page)

How long have they considered themselves poets? Not even they could say for sure. Perhaps that's what they've always been, albeit unknowingly—the possibility of this pushes them to reexamine the trivial anecdotes of their childhoods with fresh eyes. Did Carlos not utter his first poem that morning when, on an outing to the countryside, he asked his governess whether the mountains had a mommy and daddy too? And the gaze with which José, having barely spoken his first words, contemplated the Tarma twilight—was that not already the gaze of a poet? In these moments of revelation, they are certain that, yes, they have indeed always been poets, and so they spend hours combing their past for those signs of brilliance that blossom early in the lives of great geniuses, then pat each other on the back when they find them and declare themselves ardent admirers of each other's poems after yet another long, pisco-soaked night. All at once they are the vibrant future of Peruvian poetry, the torch that will light the way for new literary traditions. Both of them, but especially the grandson of the illustrious José Gálvez Egúsquiza, whose light for some reason seems to shine a little more brightly.

◊

The garret is in one of the many buildings the Rodríguez family owns in Lima's San Lázaro neighborhood, aging properties they don't bother restoring and that seem on the verge of collapsing with their freight of tenants inside them. The building's other floors are rented out to thirty or so Chinese immigrants who work in the noodle factory nearby, but the garret is too dilapidated even for them. Not even those sallow men who slept on the ships' gunwales on their Pacific crossing want it, so José and Carlos are free to visit it whenever they wish.

Its windows are broken, and sunlight streams in through gaps between the planks in the walls. The floorboards are pockmarked with neglect, and somewhere a cat has miraculously survived, even though rumor has it that the Chinese eat cats and it's certainly the case that these particular Chinese are in dire need of sustenance. It is, in short, the perfect place for two young men bored with sleeping in canopy beds and admonishing the maids for failing to polish the silver wine pitchers. They are thrilled by the sensation of poverty, and they roam among the burlap sacks and heaps of dusty junk like the lucky survivors of a shipwreck.

It is there that Georgina is born. A birth marked by words and laughter, tenuously illuminated by light flickering from bottles deployed as makeshift candlesticks.

They visit the garret every afternoon. They enjoy walking through Lima's poor neighborhoods on their way to that building that might have been taken directly from the pages of a Zola novel. A humble murmuring issues from within, muffled by threadbare curtains and rice-paper screens. Two women fighting over a serving of soup. A long monologue in a strange language that could be a madman's rant or maybe a prayer. A child sobbing. They take it all in with a mix of eagerness and pleasure, searching for traces of the poetry that Baudelaire was the first to find in poverty, or perhaps they are searching through poverty in hopes of finding Baudelaire himself. Their visits distress the building's watchman, who as he opens the door for them always pleads, “Master Rodríguez, Master Gálvez, for the sake of all that is holy, please be careful.” He worries, of course, that the floorboards in the attic will give way and the young men will be injured, but more unnerving still is the vague, mysterious threat posed by the Chinese tenants.

José and Carlos laugh. They know full well that the tenants are harmless: sad-faced men and women who don't even dare to raise their eyes when they encounter them on the landings. “But they're quiet people, really,” they respond, still laughing, from the stairs. The watchman clucks his tongue. “Too quiet,” he adds before letting them go. “Too quiet . . .”

Some afternoons they clamber up from the garret to the rooftop. They loosen their cravats and take swigs from a shared bottle. Clustered below them are the houses, the humble little squares, the cathedral's spires. In the distance, the somber silhouette of the University of San Marcos, which they're skipping again. They see the denizens of Lima walking rapidly, slightly hunched, most of them oppressed by burdens that José and Carlos neither understand nor judge. The young men make an odd sight in their smudged white linen suits and their walking sticks, hanging over the abyss as if they were newly bankrupt millionaires threatening to leap into the void. But nobody sees them. In the poor neighborhoods, people walk with their eyes on the ground and look up only occasionally to ask the dear Lord to grant them some mercy, which He rarely does.

Sitting there on the rooftop, they play their favorite games. For the first, they must forget that they're in Lima garbed in fifty-
sol
suits. In one stroke they blot out the colonial bell towers, the adobe walls, the golden hills, the people—above all, those miserable people who seem so determined to spoil their fantasies. Now suddenly they are in Paris, two penniless poets without even a crust of bread between them. They have written the greatest poems of the century, but no one knows it. Incredible verses that open like exotic flowers and then gradually wilt amid the ugliness of the world. A week ago, they spent their last coin on a ream of paper. Yesterday they pawned their fountain pen and their desk. That very morning they sold the last of their books to a junkman and used the franc he gave them—ah, they used that franc to make one final wish on the Pont Neuf and then watched it plummet hopelessly into the Seine.
Plop
. They imagine that it's cold. At night, snow will again blanket Paris, and they will be forced to burn their poems one by one to survive the winter.

Their poverty softens them while the reverie lasts, which isn't long, as daydreams are arduous things that can be sustained only with immense effort. Lima is a place that is impervious to fantasies, and soon they feel the heat of their eternal summer once more, or they notice a gold cufflink gleaming at one of their wrists. Or perhaps the Rodríguez car noisily invades the unpaved streets and the chauffeur pokes his head out the driver's-side window and shouts, “Master Rodríguez! Your father wants you home for dinner!” Then their dream plunges downward like the coin they'll never toss into the Seine, and suddenly they see themselves again for what they really are: two wealthy young men looking at poverty from on high.

“What a God-awful city,” murmurs José as he prepares to go down.

◊

But their favorite pastime is the character game. It began by chance during a lecture on mercantile law, when José observed that the professor looked just like Ebenezer Scrooge, right down to his spectacles. They both tittered so loudly that Professor Nicanor—Mr. Scrooge—interrupted his lecture and escorted them to the classroom door, whose threshold they seldom darkened anyway. Out in the courtyard, fortified with alcohol, they continued playing. The Roman law professor was Ana Ozores's cuckolded husband from Leopoldo Alas's
La Regenta
. The ancient and practically mummified rector was Ivan Ilyich before Ivan's death—or perhaps, José added snidely, Ivan Ilyich
after
his death. The widow of the impresario Francisco Stevens, an extraordinarily fat woman, was an aging Madame Bovary. “But Emma commits suicide when she's still young,” Carlos objected. “Exactly,” Gálvez countered. “She's a Madame Bovary who doesn't commit suicide. One who has the objectionable taste to outlive her beauty and become fat and farcical.”

Soon enough everyone's a character: friends, relatives, literary rivals, strangers. Even animals: though they've never seen the cat that ekes out a living in the garret—they occasionally hear it yowling somewhere amid the detritus, perhaps reveling in the knowledge of being among kindred spirits—they are unanimous in their conviction that it belongs in a Poe story.

From up on the rooftop, they decide with unhurried capriciousness which of the people swarming at their feet are the work of Balzac, or Cervantes, or Victor Hugo. Up there it is easy to feel like a poet, to contemplate the square and the adjoining streets as if they were a vast postcard with characters from all the world's literature wandering about. For example, the first fantasies of the schoolgirls who line up at the entrance to the convent school are written by Bécquer. The lives of the wealthy citizens striding across the square are narrated by Galdós—what dull lives they lead, poor things, just like Benito the Garbanzo Eater himself. If you are one of the whores on Calle del Panteoncito, your endless misfortunes are narrated by Zola or, should you become a nun, by Saint John of the Cross. The drunks who stumble out of the taverns, of course, are figments from the nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe. Madmen? Dostoyevsky. Adventurers? Melville. Lovers? If things turn out well, Tolstoy, and if they go sour, Goethe. Beggars? That's an easy one, because poverty is everywhere alike—the lives of Lima's mendicants are written by Dickens, but without fog; by Gogol, but without vodka; by Twain, but without hope.

An implacable arbitrariness also divides the characters into protagonists and secondary figures, and their deliberations on whether or not a particular beautiful woman or a certain picturesque beggar is the main character of a story can go on for quite some time. The matter is not to be taken lightly, as protagonists are, in fact, a rare breed; you have to stumble across them, track them patiently amid the mob of figures entering and leaving that page of the book of their lives.

What would they say if they saw themselves strolling across that square? With what writer would they associate their own footsteps? Would they consider themselves secondary characters or protagonists? These seem like natural questions, ones they should have been asking all along. Strangely, though, they never have. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to them. Or perhaps they feel that their place is somehow there, not on foot in the street but on high, up on the rooftops of other men's lives.

It is an odd game—a frivolous one, even—but, in the end, a fitting one for young men who see literature everywhere they look, for whom everything that happens around them happens just as they've read in books. Indeed, it would hardly be surprising to discover that this very scene—two men who, from their garret, dream of commanding the entire world—also came from one of those novels.

◊

Lima, June 26, 1904

Señor Jiménez:

Immediately after posting my letter requesting a copy of your
Sad Arias
, I wished I could retrieve it, destroy it utterly. Why? I shall tell you: I imagined that my behavior was rather unseemly for a young lady. Without ever having met or even seen you, I wrote to you, spoke to you. I was so audacious as to impose upon you, to ask a tedious favor of you, you who are so generous and yet owe me nothing . . .

I reproached myself for all of this again and again until I was in agony. When one is twenty years old, as I am, one thinks quickly and suffers deeply!

Yet all of my inquietudes were soothed, all my doubts evaporated, when I received your kind letter and your beautiful book.

Your mournful verses speak to the heart with the resonant cadence of Schubert's melancholy melodies. I will long remember these stanzas, through which wafts the delicate, gentle perfume of the author's soul.

If I told you that I liked one part of your book better than another, it would be a falsehood. Each part has its own charm, its gray tone, its tears and its shadows . . .

I must tell you that, since reading them, I have been haunted by many of your verses. I seem to recognize all around me the gardens, the trees, the longings that you describe in your poems. As if it were here, on this side of the ocean, that you endured and enjoyed such exquisite sentiments.

Do you not also, when you look upon the world, feel that it is made from the stuff of literature? Do you not seem to recognize in passersby the characters from certain novels, the creations of certain authors, the twilights of certain poems? Do you not feel sometimes that one might read life just as one turns the pages of a book . . . ?

◊

They want to be Juan Ramón Jiménez.

In a drawer in his desk, José hoards each letter, each stamp moistened by the poet's precious saliva. Five handwritten poems. Two signed portraits. A book inscribed in purple ink—
with the most sincere affection
—to young Señorita Hübner of Lima. Luckily, Carlos has not attempted to claim any of these trophies, as José must have them all for himself. He can no longer sit down to write a poem without first touching the page upon which, even if just for a moment, the fingers of Juan Ramón once rested. The pen that scrawled
Violet Souls
when its author was precisely the same age that José is now. So young! This is the moment, he tells himself, stroking the watermarked paper as he might caress a woman's skin. And then he waits, sitting at his desk. He grasps his pen firmly, waiting for something to happen. But it never does.

Carlos is amused by the worshipful way that José collects every tiny scrap of Juan Ramón's life with philatelic patience. Yet despite his amusement, of course he does not mock. That is a privilege reserved for José alone. Though Carlos is the one who writes the letters, his objective in doing so is not to obtain those sacred objects. He is unmoved by the thought of an advance copy of the Maestro's next book,
Distant Gardens
, which Juan Ramón has promised to send. Carlos pretends to be Georgina for a different reason altogether, though if anyone asked him what it was, he would not know how to answer.