The Sky Over Lima (23 page)

 

III

◊

After that first night, Carlos returns to the brothel every weekend. The girl is more surprised about this than anyone, as she had not expected to remain part of the novel.

Since the last chapter, she too seems to have undergone a number of changes. She is still a secondary character, it's true, but now there is something subtly protagonistic about her. She even seems a bit more beautiful than before, and so it is a little less inexplicable that he wants to see her again. Perhaps her seemingly insignificant life deserves a few lines of attention—a whole page even.

But Carlos will never read any of the words relaying her humble tale. He will never see her attic room, the bed she shares with Mimí and Cayetana. He will not watch them sleep in one another's arms or fight over the large bottle of perfume. Sometimes they laugh together, remembering a particular old man or a particular crooked cock, and he will never know anything of that laughter either. Hidden under the mattress there may be a photograph of a woman, clumsily patched and repaired, as if someone had torn it to shreds in rage and then remorsefully attempted to piece it back together. A single armoire for all of them, and in it this girl's one street gown, which reeks of mothballs because it's been so long since a customer has taken her out. Not even Carlos has. In front of the barred window, a chair to sit in, to gaze out at a world she barely remembers. And downstairs in Madame Lenotre's room, there's the account book that explains the need for the bars, noting that, in addition to the cost of food, laundry, and beauty products, not to mention the cost of two abortions and one molar extraction, the girl owes the house a total of three hundred forty-five
soles
.

One page. That's more than enough for now. After all, her rickety bed and the book of debts and the pieced-together photograph and the bars on the window will never be important enough to appear in Georgina's novel.

◊

He doesn't even touch her. At least that's what she says, and the girls are intrigued by the revelation. Customers with all manner of perverse predilections have passed through the brothel, but that particular deviancy—paying five
soles
a night in exchange for nothing—is unquestionably the most extravagant of all.

Whenever they see him sitting in the hall, shifting his hat restlessly from one hand to the other, the girls laugh. They call him Mr. Gob-Smacked. Your beau, Mr. Gob-Smacked, is here, they tell her, and she smiles or gets angry, depending on her mood. Mostly she gets angry. Anyone would say she's beginning to have feelings for him. Or maybe what she's really interested in are his generous tips. In any event, she sternly tells them to be quiet while she fixes her hair or adjusts her earrings, and then the girls laugh harder, and the madam scolds them—Shush, you ninnies, he's going to hear you—in vain:

“Is he courting you to ask for your hand in marriage?”

“Has he introduced you to his parents?”

“Remember us when you're a grand lady!”

As a customer he's very easy to satisfy. There's no need to check his thighs for syphilis sores or wash his cock in the sink. No need to fake panting or call him “master” or “stud” or shout out the ridiculous words that her customers find so arousing. All she has to do is lie beside him and talk if the gentleman wants to talk or simply be quiet if, as is sometimes the case, he prefers to spend the night smoking and staring at the ceiling. Sometimes he asks her about her life, and then she shrugs her shoulders and talks about her shared bed and the closed wardrobes, the endlessly increasing debts, the window bars. At other times it is Carlos who, taking the cigarette from his mouth, delivers some meaningless anecdote.

“I took an exam today.”

“I went to the docks yesterday. The dockworkers earn exactly the same amount that they did before, but now there's not a single one protesting.”

“This morning I ran into Ventura and he asked me if I'd heard from José and I told him I hadn't—it seems no one's heard from him in weeks.”

Afterward he stubs out the cigarette, and as he does so, he lets the sentence trail off, as if he were erasing it. In some way these confessions seem to be linked to the act of smoking those cigarettes and then putting them out, grinding them fiercely against the metal ashtray.

One night he tells her he's a poet. He looks at her solemnly when he says it, as if assessing the effect the news will produce. She doesn't respond immediately. She doesn't know much about poets except that they're very poor men, practically beggars, who always end up dying of tuberculosis. And Carlos, who is always so hale and well dressed, doesn't seem to be either of those things. A little thin, perhaps, though that probably doesn't matter. So she smiles and even nods with feigned enthusiasm when he asks her if by chance she would like to hear one of his poems. Straightaway he pulls out a sheet of paper and reads for a long time in a voice that doesn't sound like his. At first she interrupts him to ask the meaning of certain words. Then she doesn't say anything. She lets
gossamer
and
diadem
and
alabaster
echo sterilely without opening her mouth. When he finishes, Carlos asks her if she liked it and she hastens to say she did, forcing a smile. And she adds: But you are getting quite thin, sir, you should eat a little more and get your strength up—they've just reported another tuberculosis epidemic around here.

Sometimes he doesn't talk or look at the ceiling, and those are her favorite nights. The nights when he lies beside her and pretends to be thinking about trifling things but in reality is looking at her, only at her. It is a new look, one that seems to belong to that other world she can glimpse through the bars, and for a moment it makes her feel less like a whore. She senses that, in a way, he is not looking at her, not touching her—that what he seeks in her body is the shadow or memory of another woman. But still it's flattering, and she wants the feeling to last. All night if possible.

They also talk about love. In that room that smells of carmine and perfume. Lying on the bed where so many men have slumbered far away from their wives. They talk about love—or, rather, Carlos talks about it while she watches him intently. She is his audience. Five
soles
a night, and the curtain is up. He rambles tipsily about tempestuous love affairs, about insurmountable obstacles, about letters, rivalries, anonymous poems, about losses, especially those losses that cannot be remedied. He lights and stubs out cigarettes while uttering strange words. Words that, like his voice when he reads verse, do not sound like his. They sound to her as if they were taken from one of his poems or, more likely, from a serial novel. Though the girl is illiterate and has never read a novel herself, Mimí often reads them aloud to her and they clutch each other in excitement when the prince finally manages to track down the princess. So she knows what she's talking about. Like the characters in those novels, Carlos expects love to give him everything money cannot buy, and she senses that his suffering is born of that conviction. Literature, and maybe even love, has always seemed to her a treacherous luxury. She thinks of Mimí, whose passion for serial novels has also cost her dearly: ten
centavos
a week to buy the latest installment of
The Prince and the Odalisque of the Southern Seas
, which Madame Lenotre unfailingly adds to her account book in the “Owes” column.

Occasionally he also mentions Georgina. Indeed, he seems to talk about her constantly, even when he doesn't say her name. The girl doesn't know much about her. She imagines her to be wan, and very somber, and most of all very boring, languidly fanning herself in her garden and drinking the same endless lemonade. Feeble too—practically moribund. She's not sure why, but she also feels a slight ache in her chest on those nights when Carlos says her name too much. It's a pang of jealousy, but she doesn't realize it. In fact, she doesn't really know what that word means,
jealousy
, since nothing has ever belonged to her and so she's never feared losing anything.

Most likely, she thinks, it's just hunger.

On some nights she is able to ask the young man questions. She feels comfortable in her role as a secondary character, offering protagonists the opportunity to think and reflect on themselves. Her questions are sometimes thoroughly gauche but asked with endearing guilelessness. After each one, she always adds: You needn't answer. But he doesn't mind. One day he even works up the confidence to tell her about the Polish prostitute. Maybe he is answering a question about his earliest sexual experience, or his adolescence, or his first love. Or maybe he's not even answering a question—he just starts talking. She listens to the story with interest, and for a moment she feels that pang again. Especially when she hears the price. Four hundred dollars! On her fingers she tries to count out how many
soles
that is, how many nights with her you'd need to pay for a single night with the Polish girl. But her hands are clumsy and she finally gives up. She concludes that it would be many, many nights. More nights than there are in a year. Maybe more than there are in a lifetime.

She'd like to know if he slept with the Polish prostitute. If he looked at that woman, that girl, the same way he looks at her now. But she doesn't dare ask him. Carlos doesn't explain any further, the story comes to a close, and in the end she decides that they did sleep together. She thinks it, and she smiles. She tells herself that the reason the young gentleman doesn't touch her is precisely that she means something to him, while the Polish girl was just your everyday harlot, a little four-hundred-dollar doll to mindlessly mount. That he stripped off her clothes on the bed or on the floor and maybe even hurt her, because in the end she meant nothing to him. That he must have learned from her, under her, beside her, moving in and out of her, everything a man needs to know about a woman. That over the course of that night, he made her weep more than she'd wept during the month-long Atlantic crossing.

And the truth is that she takes pleasure in these cruel, piteous images. The Polish girl's tears comfort her because she is jealous (hunger pangs again): her Peruvian virginity was never worth a single dollar, let alone four hundred of them, and there is a certain universal justice in that sadness, in the suffering of a pale European girl who must have felt her body becoming less and less valuable every night, one hundred dollars, twenty dollars, twenty
soles
, one
sol
, finally a nickel—just one goddamn nickel to drag her down on the floor and do the usual to her again.

◊

Time passes. José is nowhere to be found. He is no longer attending his classes at the university, nor is he lounging outside them smoking on the bench in the atrium. Everybody says he's writing a novel. Carlos can't tell whether it's the same novel or if he's started a different one, but in any case José seems to be quite busy. He doesn't even go out anymore, and Ventura and his friends say he's changed quite a bit. For a moment Carlos thinks that yes, José must be writing the love story of Juan Ramón and Georgina; indeed, he'd even say that he's writing his own life, and also everyone else's. The life of all of Lima. The whole world contained in its pages.

Carlos goes back to the university. Now that José's not there, he goes as often as possible. He had almost forgotten the classrooms' scent of wood and chalk, the height of the lectern from which all those mediocre professors give their classes. He barely even remembered his classmates' names, much less the import of the law of habeas corpus or the particular subtleties of the Napoleonic civil code. Just a few hours of studying each day—he has so much free time now—and he learns it all, a little late but in time to take his exams. He may not write novels, or letters either, but at least he knows how to do that: pass exams. That's what he thinks as he scribbles his answers and glances at José's empty desk out of the corner of his eye.

His parents are happy and even tell him so. José has turned out to be a bad influence. That business with that Juan Jiménez fellow was just a silly bit of fun. They are proud that, little by little, disappointment by disappointment, Carlos is becoming a real man. Yes, he stays out all night sometimes and that's not good, of course, but who can blame him; he's young, it's springtime—better that than going around cooing sweet nothings to a decent girl, the kind of girl who's so decent that when she ends up pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. He is a good son, there's no doubt about it. Someone who will take on the mantle of the family's birthright when they die.

Sandoval seems quite satisfied too. He comes to visit often now, loaded with new books and projects that Carlos accepts in silence. One night he insists on taking Carlos to a political meeting in an apartment on Calle Amargura. According to the organizers, the meeting is secret—there's even a password—but it's a secret no one cares about, not even the police. Most of the people in attendance are Italian socialists and Spanish anarchists who claim to have been behind every assassination attempt in Europe. They confess their crimes in the same tone of voice José used to employ when claiming to have bedded the most beautiful women in Peru. Carlos only half understands them. But at one point Sandoval talks about how “all our ideologies, and even our consciousnesses, are nothing more than a reflection of material reality,” and that phrase keeps echoing in Carlos's mind. He thinks about Georgina, though he does not know why. About their fifteen months of correspondence. About the nights when he falls asleep convinced that she is writing and breathing somewhere out there in Lima. And he wonders whether she is a false consciousness like the ones Sandoval and his friends are so animatedly discussing or if there are real ideas in the world too, as real as class warfare and annual steel production.