The Sky Over Lima (15 page)

Carlos is silent, shuffling through a number of possible responses. Finally he says:

“You're right.”

But he can't get it out of his head. The two
soles
, just a couple of coins, grow in his mind until they fill it completely. Before him he sees the strikers, their shouts becoming louder, the animal bucking and stomping, trying with its immense body to overrun the railroad track connecting the port with the customs office. A group of soldiers, absurdly tiny, braced to stop it. Carlos feels something like admiration, not for their poverty but for the energy with which they are fighting to escape it.

He wonders what Georgina would think of them. Indeed, he wonders it aloud.

“I wonder what Georgina would think.”

“About what?”

“About all this. The strike at the docks.”

“I daresay she'd be furious at being unable to communicate with Juan Ramón.”

“Yes, but I mean their ideas. What would she think of the workers, their demands, the two
soles
. . . ?”

José makes a gesture that might mean anything. But actually it means something quite specific:
What do I care?

“I think she'd sympathize with them,” Carlos adds when it's clear that José is not going to answer.

“Maybe,” he replies at last. “You know, that wouldn't be a bad idea for a chapter. Georgina among the workers . . . Consoling them with her presence . . .” He raises his arm and points into the crowd. Slowly he lets his arm fall. “But what use would that chapter be when we can't even send it to Juan Ramón?”

Carlos is still looking at the spot where José was pointing. Among the dockworkers he can make out a few women. They are carrying leather pouches with crusts of bread for their husbands and sons, and earthenware jugs to quench the protesters' thirst. A few chant slogans, raising their voices and their fragile fists to the sky. There is also one young woman with a parasol, elegantly dressed all in white. She looks like a piece of artwork amid the workers' drab overalls. He is struck by her presence. It only accentuates the destitution around her, making it more incomprehensible, more painful, more genuine. She looks like a figure from a Sorolla painting who, wandering from one canvas to another, has ended up, whether by mistake or out of curiosity, in a humble scene from Courbet. Carlos thinks to himself:
She could be Georgina
. And for a moment it seems that she is about to turn her head—Georgina's head—but at the last second she walks back into the crowd, and she and her parasol disappear.

José slaps himself on the shins, stands up.

“So now what? Shall we go? It's obvious nothing much is going to happen here today.”

Carlos stands up too. But he doesn't head back to the carriage—he moves in the opposite direction, toward where he saw the girl disappear.

“Hey, where are you going? That's the wrong way.”

“I just want to take a look.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Let's get out of here. Can't you see these idiots are ready to riot?”

But he follows Carlos. He's not used to obeying and it takes him a while to make up his mind, but in the end he sighs and goes after him.

Carlos doesn't really know what he hopes to find. It's practically superstitious, his fantasy that the white parasol is hiding a face that can only belong to Georgina. Of course he can't share such a notion with José. He can only do what he's doing: fight his way through the crowd, elbowing and prodding the dark flesh of that animal, which seems to be rejecting them. Even though the strikers turn to look warily at the young men's gold cufflinks and impeccable suits. Even though the slogans that a few minutes ago spoke of equality and justice in rather abstract terms are increasingly filled with invective, with mentions of spilled blood and dead bosses. Even though, seen up close, some women are distributing not crusts of bread or cups of wine but paving stones and iron bars and walking sticks and metal hooks and fireplace pokers. José's voice is distorted by fear for the first time:

“Carlos, let's get out of here, damn it,” he says, grabbing his friend's arm.

Just then they hear a metallic banging rapidly approaching. A whistle. The crowd seems to respond to the noise, and José and Carlos are pulled along with it.

“Scabs! Scabs!”

It's a convoy carrying goods to the wharf, and the crowd manages to stop it by hurling stones. It all happens so quickly that there's no time to react. A few men clamber up on the locomotive and haul the engineer out of his cab. Carlos sees them drag him to the ground like a rag doll, but he doesn't feel anything; it's as if the images parading before him were happening in the pages of a book or being projected on a white sheet with a cinematograph. He is unaccustomed to violence, to the notion that ghastly things might suddenly take place before his eyes. Violence is something that's always happened somewhere else, deep in the jungle, far from the clearing where he played with Román.

“Shit,” he hears José say above the tumult.

Suddenly a few shots are fired into the air. Or maybe not into the air. In the distance, perhaps, the girl. Is that her parasol, or a soldier's white uniform? The noise of helmets falling upon the paving stones. More gunshots.

“The cavalry! The cavalry!”

Above the agitated faces, the bodies of the first horsemen come into view. There aloft, they might be at the bow of a ship that cuts through the swell of workers, who shout and scatter in all directions. He sees their sabers flash in the air. A man stabbed by a bayonet. Two dockworkers who bring down one of the horses by throwing rocks at its muzzle. José's hand gripping his arm, bruising him, trying to drag him somewhere or perhaps trying desperately not to be dragged himself. Then he sees a horseman pass by him on his left, and at that moment he feels a sudden burning, as if a bolt of lightning had struck him in the face. The sensation is a sharp pang, one that isn't preceded by any sound, that seems to have no origin or explanation. A cold bite that sears his temple and tumbles him to the ground.

As he falls he thinks he sees José turn to look at him. José hesitates a moment and then keeps running.

It's possible that things don't happen exactly like that. Maybe José does not see him fall. Perhaps he too is dragged along by the crowd and could have done nothing to help him anyway. It is possible that the person who looks at him and then runs off amid the uproar isn't even José. But whatever the case, that's how events will be etched in Carlos's memory: him falling and José abandoning him to his fate.

For a moment he thinks he's going to pass out. That's what always happens in his favorite novels. The hero falls, wounded, and the world stops with him. Everything turns black, or white, or red, according to the author's whims; reality disappears into a fog, and that fog does not clear until, hours or days later, the protagonist regains consciousness. But none of that happens.

He is able to feel, almost to count each of the blows he receives—twenty-seven—as the terrified mob tramples his body. He hears shouts, gunshots, horses' hooves scraping the cobblestones. Voices cry out, pleading for help. Then something like silence. The taste of blood in his mouth. And finally some words he can't understand, and the eyes of the soldier bending over him to check his pulse.

◊

The wounded are taken to the Guadalupe house of aid. The first to be treated is one Florencio Aliaga, who has a bullet lodged in his groin and is as gray as a corpse. Then the medics come back for the less seriously injured. Finally they even come to Carlos's aid, though he has only a few contusions and a laceration on his face. He is embarrassed to be transported on a stretcher, since his single wound has already stopped bleeding. But he lets himself be carried, what choice does he have, while he looks around for José. He does not find him.

“My goodness, a gentleman like yourself—what were you doing among that rabble?” the aide asks as he helps Carlos remove his eighty-
sol
suit.

“I was waiting for some letters . . .”

And he doesn't whimper once as he gets five stitches in his cheek. That's one of the most important lessons he must credit his father for having taught him: not to cry out, not ever, even when they're shredding the skin on your back with lashes.

He is afraid they will want to interrogate him, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to him. The doctors and nurses hurry from one cot to another, fold and unfold mosquito nets, push little carts loaded with scalpels and buckets of blood-tinged water. The aide also leaves him alone. Carlos struggles to his feet and then sits back down. The room is an immense nave with dozens of beds along either side, and everywhere are muffled moans and whimpers as the suture needle sews up wounds or the forceps dig around in them to pull out shrapnel. Two soldiers are posted by the door at the far end of the room, but they hold their rifles listlessly, as if they were laborers' tools. They look like peasants. Perhaps, when they return home and remove their leathers and uniforms, they really are peasants. Now, though, away from their horses, their unsheathed swords, their combat formations, they also look like little boys.

That's when he spots Sandoval. He's going from bed to bed with concern on his face, checking on his comrades, murmuring a few words of encouragement. The doctors eye him reprovingly, but no one dares say anything. He looks like a father anxious about his children's health, pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back and a solemn expression.

“Gálvez!” he says upon recognizing him. “Carlos Gálvez! What on earth are you doing here?”

Carlos—Rodríguez—hesitates a moment. No one has ever mixed up their last names before.

“Actually, I'm Rodríguez. It's José who's—”

“What goddamn difference does a last name make? Haven't you learned anything?” he asks, making a grand gesture in the air, one that blots out genealogies, privileges, the past. “Oh dear, you're injured! What have those butchers done to you?”

His voice sounds oddly tender. He draws near and examines the sutured wound. His eyes fill with pride. He takes off his hat and points to his own scar, also on the left side of his face, in almost exactly the same spot.

“Here's my own baptism gift. A souvenir of the strike of '99,” he says boastfully. “A soldier gave me this gift when I was about your age and I too was just beginning to engage in the struggle.”

“I'm not in the struggle. I just—”

“Of course, of course. You were just there by chance, right?”

Carlos begins babbling about Georgina, about letters that neither came nor went, but Sandoval interrupts him.

“Martín.”

“Pardon?”

“You don't have to call me Sandoval. You can call me Martín,” says Martín.

Then, before Carlos can start explaining again, Martín places his hand on his shoulder and adds solemnly:

“And you don't have to say anything. When our enemies bite the dust at last, we will remember sacrifices like yours. We will be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Those who were in the trenches from the beginning, and those who will have no place in the new order.”

“In 2014,” Carlos says, almost without thinking.

Martín scowls.

“Long before that! Why, today alone we have brought the eight-hour workday two or three years closer.”

He falls silent. Two beds away, a nurse is closing the eyes of the first martyr of the revolution. Martín clutches his hat to his chest.

“It's a pity it's already too late for our comrade Florencio,” he adds.

And he crosses himself, because it's still 1905 and, according to his own calculations, God will not die for another sixty-four years.

◊

A little while later, José appears. He strides confidently up to the bed and hugs Carlos. It's so wonderful to have found him! He's spent hours going from hospital to hospital in El Callao. He felt so guilty when he saw him fall; he shouldn't have left him to the mercy of those brutes, don't think he hasn't been telling himself that, but what else could he do? What would Carlos have done in his place? The same thing . . . the same thing, of course! But the worst is over. Can he walk? Then he's coming with him right now and leaving this paupers' hospital; there's a carriage waiting for him outside.

And he hugs him again, because the most important thing is that everything has turned out all right; everything is forgiven. A sergeant, accompanied by several soldiers, comes to intercept them as Carlos is getting out of bed. He says he can't let them leave, it's impossible. There are procedures and protocols that can't just be shrugged off; recent events have been quite serious, and statements must be taken from those involved. José sighs. He holds out a piece of paper that he has already prepared. The sergeant goes pallid when he sees the last name on the letterhead. He doesn't even dare to read the full document. He returns it, awestruck, and tells the soldiers that it's all been a misunderstanding, that the young men have been released and are free to go whenever they wish. With all due respect.

Carlos returns home at dusk. He's almost all better; the aide has said all he needs is a little arnica and a change of bandage once a day. But his mother does not agree: their personal doctor must be called; Carlos must be kept awake in case of internal bleeding; the criminals who tried to kill her son must be reported to the police. She looks shaken and her eyes are red. She has been weeping and praying all day, ever since the driver informed her of the young man's disappearance and they started searching for him in the jail, the morgue, the hospitals. For the first time in a long time, Carlos hears her shout, and with every shout she seems to become a little more real, filling in that years-long silence. His sisters emerge from their bedrooms and run down the stairs to kiss him, still wearing their nightgowns.