The Sky Over Lima (6 page)

“Well, you once kissed a novitiate, didn't you?”

José indifferently tosses the stick away.

“You should have seen her! She was the kind of girl who inspires nightmares, not verses. When I took off her wimple, I understood why she wanted to become a nun.”

Carlos doesn't respond. Out of the corner of his eye, he's been following the progress of José's stick in the dirt: a grid of crowded lines forming a dense lattice. Looking at it, he thinks for some reason of his father. He thinks of Georgina. He's barely listening to José, who's still insisting that the only thing keeping his poems from genius is the absence of the perfect woman, that divine inspiration that would elevate his verses to the very peak of the sublime. Because, sure, they've both had their puppy loves, he continues, but those were conventional, boring, happy stories, far removed from the mythological stature of the loves they find in books, in which, in the throes of passion, the two lovers expire. Though in their case it would be best if only the women died, because otherwise how would they go on to write their immortal verse? Someone definitely has to die, or be locked up in a monastery, or, at the very least, the families have to oppose the union, forcing the lovers to flee across the Andes with hired guns in hot pursuit. But none of that ever happens, he adds bitterly. Everything around them proceeds so easily: The family agrees to the engagement—so why bother getting engaged?—and what's worse, the daughters agree to everything else with horrifying speed, and once they surrender themselves, how can they continue to serve as muses? What else can one do in such a suffocating environment, José asks, besides write stale literary-salon poetry, poetry for summer readings at an aunt's house—light, insignificant verses, written to be read aloud on Sunday afternoons surrounded by lace fans, cigars, and stifled yawns.

“So all we need is a muse,” Carlos says to himself, still looking at the drawing.

“A muse, or whatever else we can find. I don't know. A war, maybe. Just picture it: The flags, the parades, the speeches. The spilling of your best friend's blood. That has to be a good reason to write a poem! Verses written on the verge of despair, knowing that at any moment a bullet might mow you down.”

“If you don't die first, of course.”

“I'm serious; war is the best source of inspiration. Maybe Homer was a mediocre poet and was saved by hearing about the right war. Who knows. I imagine every soldier has material that could move anyone; it's just that most of them don't realize it. Take my uncle José Miguel. You know, the hero of the War of the Pacific. I've always believed he could have been a great poet. Everybody knows that he blew up a Chilean ship all by himself and that the explosion was so powerful it left him bald and nearly blind. But few know that toward the end of his life, that memory tormented him. He said that at all hours of the day and night, he could hear the screams of the Chilean sailors burning alive and begging to be rescued, for the love of God. With that on your conscience, you could either write the world's best poem or shoot yourself in the head. And you know which way my uncle went.”

“Well, I would have written the poem.”

“Sure, but you and I are poets. My uncle was a soldier. I guess he did what was most appropriate for his profession.”

Carlos smiles.

“So as far as you're concerned, those are our two options: finding a muse or starting another goddamn war with Chile.”

José replies in a jocular tone.

“It's either that or tuberculosis, my friend! Maybe we should give that a try. They say that in your final moments, this incredible lucidity washes over you. Apparently the convulsions produce fits of creativity, and we're losing extraordinary poems because we don't give patients blank sheets of paper and ink as they're dying.”

“I don't know about you, but I think I'd rather have a muse. Or just live a long life as a bad poet.”

They both laugh.

“Maybe so.”

For a few moments neither of them says anything. The sun is now high in the sky. The birds are still singing up on the roof of the university, but the young men are hearing them only now. Soon their classmates will come out into the courtyard, shaking off the torpor of the canon law class, all mechanical and gray, like the bureaucrats they will one day become. It's time to go home.

“If only we could invent our own biographies,” says José with something like a sigh as they get up.

“At least we can invent Juan Ramón's,” replies Carlos, and he finishes the rest of the sentence in his thoughts.

◊

If the idea has a single origin, it is here. And if it has a single creator, then that creator is Carlos alone, however much Gálvez tries to make it his too, gathering their friends together to declare, “Gentlemen, Carlota and I have started writing a novel.” Because the truth is that everything begins with something Carlos said, and at first all José did was shake his head in silent rejection.

The conversation could take place anywhere. Perhaps on that bench in the university courtyard, or maybe on the rooftop that always seems on the verge of collapsing, or in a tavern where they're drunkenly passing the time till last call with bureaucratic patience. Carlos, uncharacteristically, speaks. The night before, demoralized once again by the rejection of one of his poems by yet another magazine, José has suggested that perhaps the time has come to forget about their correspondence with Juan Ramón. After all, what has their wearisome prank produced but a bunch of headaches, a few signed sheets of paper, and the nickname, however amusing it might be, of Carlota? They're never going to become better poets like this, much less find a muse who will get them there. And so: To hell with Georgina. But Carlos doesn't agree. For the first time, he refrains from answering with one of the expressions he's rehearsed in his mirror and instead responds with a
No
that arises from deep within him. Definitively: No. His voice trembles, because he is, after all, only a rubber man's son, made to accommodate all José's desires, but even so he does not give in. No, he repeats stubbornly. Why not? Carlos can't really explain. No, I said no. And that's that.

He can't sleep that night. Lying in bed, he mulls over what José said about muses. Just before he falls asleep, he thinks he has found the answer. An argument that, knowing his friend, will absolutely convince him. One that could change the direction of their lives. And so when they meet up again at last, he gives the speech he's prepared for the occasion. A stammering monologue that Gálvez listens to in silence. Or at least he does for a few minutes, with a condescension that might be mistaken for respect. But at a certain point he can't take any more and impatiently breaks in.

“No, no, no, what are you saying, Carlitos, what novel? Stop talking nonsense! We don't write novels, remember? We leave that to Sandoval and his crowd.”

José doesn't understand. Or maybe he doesn't understand what his friend is doing having an idea of his own, regardless of what it is. So Carlos has to insist, despite how difficult it is for him to contradict José, despite how often he touches his hair or nervously clears his throat as he speaks. He asks José if he remembers when they said that everyone's lives were literature, and José replies simply, “Yes.” Those afternoons up on the roof, when the world seemed to them to be full of secondary characters and only a handful of protagonists? And José answers, “Of course.” Those discussions in which they decided what writer was writing the life of each person? And José squawks, “I said yes, damn it.” Well, th-this, stutters Carlos, is exactly the same thing. The life of Juan Ramón is a novel too, and chapter by chapter, letter by letter, they have already begun to write it, though they hadn't realized it until now. All this time, they thought they were playing a fairly tiresome prank or collecting a few souvenirs, but what they were really doing was something much more serious: writing the novel of the life of a genius.

José opens his mouth. Then closes it. And Carlos goes on, stammering less and less. Because while it may be that they don't have their own muse and so will never manage to produce a perfect poem, he adds, in the end, what does that matter? Perhaps providence has reserved for them, Carlos Rodríguez and José Gálvez Barrenechea, a far nobler fate: out of nothing, creating the beauty celebrated by another poet. And who knows, continues Carlos, who can no longer stop himself, maybe that's another sort of perfect poem, the only one that is truly transcendent, molding the clay of words and saying to them: Rise, and go forth. The two of them would resemble God the Father and Creator of all things, were it not a sin to say so, or even think it. They are giving life to the muse with whom Juan Ramón must fall in love, and that story, that tempestuous romance, that fragment of life caught midway between reality and fiction, will be their novel. And if one day the Maestro builds a poem upon the embers of that love, even just one, they will know in their hearts that they've done the most difficult thing of all: that they couldn't be more responsible for the beauty of that poem if they'd written it themselves.

Carlos stops. To bolster his thesis that everything is literature, that the entire world is a text constructed of words alone, he would like to cite Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. But he cannot, because Derrida and Lacan and Foucault have not yet been born. Actually, Lacan has: he is three years old and currently playing with a jigsaw puzzle—it's morning in Paris—perhaps constructing future memories of what he will one day call the mirror stage. So Carlos has nothing else to add.

José doesn't either. Instead he stares, as if his friend had only just now begun to exist.

He agrees with a slow nod.

He smiles the same smile with which he celebrated Georgina's birth.

 

II

◊

Their novel does not yet have a title or a defined plot. All they know are the names of the two protagonists and the settings they inhabit: a real Lima and a Madrid vaguely imagined from the other side of the Atlantic.

It starts out as a comedy. Or at least it seems that way. The opening pages are full of rich men pretending to be poor and men pretending to be women and squatting down to urinate in empty avenues. There are mistakes and laughter and gluttonous rats that nest in mail sacks; there are bottles of pisco and chicha. A great poet is tricked as if he were a child, and two children pretend to be great poets. There is envy, too, but the kind that is ultimately healthy, bracing, not bitter, as well as a trend among Lima's wealthy youth to write to their favorite authors pretending to be infatuated young ladies.

Perhaps in keeping with this jovial spirit, the letters between Georgina and Juan Ramón are also breezy and light, like notes passed between schoolchildren. For José and Carlos, the authors of the comedy, it is a happy period, partly because they enjoy the writing and partly because they feel like protagonists in their own novel. Telling them otherwise, informing them that Georgina is the sole protagonist, would likely be a fruitless endeavor. They are young, full of ambition and dreams; they are still unable to imagine that there might be a story in the world in which they are not the main characters.

Then comes the revelation. They discover they've been mistaken all along. It is not a comedy. It never has been, even if the drunken revels and the hoaxes and the little blind girls writing to Yeats made them believe otherwise. It is a love story, perfectly in keeping with so many other beautiful books before it, and only they can write it. An epistolary novel on a par with Goethe's
Werther
and Richardson's
Pamela
—maybe even better than those, as theirs will be the first book in history to be inhabited by flesh-and-blood characters. Each letter sent or received constitutes a chapter of the novel. Juan Ramón, Georgina, the friends and relatives to which the two of them refer—they are all characters brought to life in these pages. The poem that the Maestro will one day write to his beloved is the perfect dénouement. And Carlos and José are the authors, of course, clever novelists who shut themselves away in the garret to deliberate over the details of the plot. They say, for example: “The heroine becomes somewhat overwrought in the fifth chapter; we should bring down the tension a bit in the seventh.” Or perhaps: “Would you take another look at the latest chapter? I've noticed a plausibility problem in the first paragraph.”

It's true, it still feels like a game. In a way, though, it's the most serious thing they've ever done.

Of course, between letters, many things happen. After all, a ship takes no less than thirty days to cross the Atlantic. Everything is slow in 1904, from the length of a mourning period to the time needed to pose for a photograph. And so during the long spells of waiting, José and Carlos's life continues: their mornings playing hooky, their afternoons lounging in the garret, and their nights carousing at the club; their evenings attending plays and concerts; their afternoons sunbathing and swimming in the sea at Chorrillos; their Saturdays placing bets at the cockfighting ring in Huanquilla or at the Santa Beatriz racetrack or at the billiards tables; their Sundays enduring Mass and watching the hours tick by on the sitting-room clock; their ends of semesters forging grade reports; their spring afternoons strolling up and down Jirón de la Unión; their first and third Wednesdays of every month making and receiving visits, drinking hot chocolate and eating cookies, bowing and listening to piano recitals, discussing the weather or the advantages of train travel with prim young ladies who may one day be their wives. All of that is what they used to call life, but now it seems like only a slow and sticky dream, exasperating in the way it passes drop by suffocating drop. As if the whole world has gone mad and only their letters can keep it going. Real life now consists of waiting for the transatlantic steamship to dock in El Callao and unload its supply of letters from the Maestro. Sitting in the club talking about their flesh-and-blood novel and watching the other patrons gradually lose interest in Sandoval's dockworkers' strike, which never quite takes off. Writing the next letter.