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The slope of the cliff plunged into fig trees, moist earth, trenches, moss, vines, Japanese pavilions: from top to bottom, from the parish church to the beach. Suddenly, the sinister, rampant road twisted. And riding a covered sled — on one side, light; on the other, a make-believe cavern and an invisible madonna and a miracle of candles that stay lit under drips — it fell onto the platform. An old-time tenderness played pieces of Dunker Lavalle on the piano, and a violin hid its voice behind an obese, unknown Italian millionaire. An old man, down below, in the sea, sprinkled those interested in his bald spot with the water that flowed down his hands out of his round, hollow arms; and the old man was a suction pump and two parish priestly hands, forgiving and jovial. Here one might want to hang signs on the indifferent doors covered with blinds: “No Sinning in the Hallways.” “Bathers Are Asked to Refrain from Speaking English.” “Total Destruction of the Place Is Not Permitted.” “Et cetera.” Here one is possessed by a certain kind of frenetic and infantile, experienced and weary, critical and dilettantish culture. Paul Morand on a sailing boat accompanied by his earless, raceless lover on their way to Siam, as in the social pages of the newspaper. Cendrars, who comes to Peru to preach the enthusiasms of a spontaneous Bavarian explorer (lynched tourists, wheat plantations, and the man who strangles his destiny). Radiquet: carrying around on tiptoe his sweetheart who is suddenly made ugly by a heroic husband. Istrati: reeking of Dutch cheese, a ship’s hold, Eurasian misery. All the same, all indistinct, unclassifiable — secretaries of embassies, heirs to textile mills, day students at schools run by European nuns, failed university students; devout women who have come for their health, for a saintly scandal, a spiritual experience. An excessive Baedeker, a guide from who knows which avant-garde Pentapolis, inadmissible nationalism, a great big hunch. A drunken Charleston shakes a buxom lady as if she were a sack full of wood chips. A policeman rubs his anointed and cunning hands. The funicular lends a modern flourish to the cliff’s pre-republican calling. Lima, Lima, finally. And everything is nothing but your insanity and a Peruvian resort for bathing in the sea. And a native and premature desire that Europe will make of us men, women’s men, terrible Portuguese men, men like Adolphe Menjou, with a false mustache and a valet, with an international smile and a dozen London gestures, with specific danger and a thousand unexpected vices, with two Rolls-Royces and a German liver ailment. Nothing else. Bad Nauheim, Cauterers, summer in Paris. Nothing of the sort.
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She wore a parochial-school blouse and had a very polite index finger. Public-school teacher. Twenty-eight years old. Perfect health. Christian resignation to spinsterhood. A very white face. A very fragile nose. And a pair of little glasses attached to her right ear with a delicate gold chain. And, above all, Reuter Soap — a white, pedagogical smell. The skin on her nose was finer and more sensitive than that on any other part of her body, and though no one could actually prove this, it was nevertheless true. The truth! — the enthusiasm of a missionary priest, the theme of a frantic cuckold, the worst part of a good book — anything except the skin of a twenty-eight-year-old pedagogue. Right? Her nose filled her glasses full of difficulties: they became a lap dog that barked out reflections. Modern manners and the news in La Prensa made her nose wrinkle, but less, less. At seven in the morning her face blossomed — unusual, unexpected flower — a begonia plant in a green pot in her window, on her windowsill, in her house, in her house, in her house. “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo”. Then her face ended just above the long, sturdy, firm body of a guardian angel, a prudent virgin, a voluntary Miss. With an awkward rustle of sheets in her chamber — the silly, useless fluttering of a caged goose — the daily life of Miss Muler began, the antithesis of a treasurer, a woman of her house — domestic, girlish, soft, intimate, and cold like a pillow at six o’clock postmeridian. Miss Muler did everything welclass="underline" with silence, indifference, reluctance. At breakfast she held her cup between her thumb and index finger, as if she were on a date, and her whole hand turned into a vital, hard, intelligent claw And her index finger, more crooked than ever, acquired virtue, exoticism, smiles, the sadness of a Russian former duke waiting tables in Berlin. At the stroke of nine in the morning, Miss Muler instantly became a public-school teacher, basic education, a pillar of the state; she said no and made her hands into a little ball. In the afternoon, Miss Muler submitted herself to sounds, sights, and scents, and spun poetry with the wingtips of her legs and arms, ivory forever brand new as in the gums of an elephant. Nonsensical possibilities from an old maid: ubiquity, crown and scepter, a heavenly meadow, to be a bird with the head of a carnation, to die a saint, to go to Paris. Asleep, she dreamed of Napoleon riding a green horse and of Saint Rosa of Lima. She cried only when she had a handkerchief. She would say, “Bon Dieu,” and lackadaisically let out a rippling laugh. She did not understand Eguren, but she recognized him when she saw him. She would mumble, “Out of the question”. her eyes far away. And, “My pleasure.” And, “Jesus, Jesus. ” She would place half her finger perpendicular over the page of the book she was reading. Et cetera. Miss Muler dreamed about him one night, three days after having met him. His turn came before Ramón’s; a colonel who fought in the War of the Pacific — a patriotic dream from a nationalistic textbook. Ramón had finally penetrated Miss Muler’s subconscious; and one night my favorite friend became a priest; he hailed from Palestine on Mister Kakison’s back. Lima turned into a tangled heap of towers; the ringing of bells fell like stones in a labyrinth of dirt clods; an Italian angel sang in Latin; a Boy Scout trumpet called only to men of good will; the Jordan River escaped while laughing at the sky through the squinting eye of Viceroy Superunda’s congenial bridge; Ramón, wearing the habit of the Order of Mercy and with the moon of Barranco in his hands, appeased the elements and coughed horribly. Miss Muler fell in love with Ramón. Ramón did not fall in love with Miss Muler. Miss Muler was twenty-eight years old; Ramón, eighteen. But, in spite of it all, Ramón did not fall in love with Miss Muler. From a million points of view, in a tango as long as a movie reel, the phonograph filmed the resort town in slow motion — yellowed and desolate like a Mexican village in a cowboyish comic book with Tom Mix. And, behind it all, the sea, useless and absurd like a bandstand the morning after the afternoon of a gymkhana. And a triangle of common pigeons carried off Miss Muler’s pen strokes in their beaks, romantically.
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A German wearing thick-soled shoes and smelling of leather and disinfectant rented a room full of spiderwebs in Ramón’s house. There was another one, freshly wallpapered and also to let, but the one with spiderwebs had a large window facing the neighbor’s garden that looked out on elder trees and a plaster of Paris Eros with a terrible parrot perched on its head. A swallow that was hunting fleas between the floorboards when Herr Oswald Teller, with rapt attention, looked over the room for the first time with the round magnifying glass on his forehead convinced him to rent it without delay, fearing that some Herr Hemmer or another Herr Dabermann would find out that a room with swallows and a garden with plaster love and sea breezes was for rent. The morning after that afternoon, Ramón’s sleep-filled and unbespectacled eyes saw descend from the cart the portrait of Bismarck, the violin, the gaiters, the rucksack, the seven languages, the microscope, the crucifix, the mug for Herr Oswald Teller’s beer, for he was changing his place of residence mit Kind und Kegel, with all his belongings. Finally Herr Oswald Teller himself, fat and wet like the morning, descended from the cart. He walked along beside it, his tiny legs getting tangled in the tail bristles of the mule that pulled the flatbed cart. Martinita: an enormous old mule, fussy as an in-law. And Herr Oswald Teller spoke to the cart driver about mornings in Hanover, the full moon, the industrialization of America, the Battle of the Marne. and his rr’s rose from his belly, and his glances flowed from his brain, and his memories skated around on bluish snow. And Herr Oswald Teller abruptly stopped talking when Martinita abruptly stopped pulling. Joaquín, as sullen and hermetic as a Javanese idol, chewed with his black jaws and imagined the sea, remote and perpendicular, in the sea of fog between his mule’s ears. The fog of the sea smelled of shellfish, and the sea hung in the fog. Over the sidewalk fell a dark, dense, delicate, brief rain of German illustrated magazines — Fliegende Blatter, Garten, and Laube — magazines with covers displaying horrible cosmic nudes and fierce euphoria over architectural Wagnerian painting. Then everything was in Herr Oswald Teller’s room. Herr Oswald Teller found a spot for everything. The cry of a milkmaid fell unexpectedly into the middle of the room, and a few minutes later, so did the church bells ringing six times at six o’clock in the morning. Herr Oswald Teller stuffed the six bells of six in the morning into the pocket of his hunting jacket, and he grabbed the cry of the milkmaid with the brush he used to brush his bald spot. (One day, Herr Oswald Teller told Ramón that when he brushed his hair he felt happy, smelling the stables and imagining he was in Hanover; and the milkmaid’s cry was still a reflection of country light — blue and peaceful — on the brush.) In the afternoons, in the long pre-nights to Lima’s winter, Herr Oswald Teller, from his mildewy room, flooded the house with music and homesickness and geniality. Liquefied Mozart poured down the staircase and formed puddles in the hollows like a torrent of rain that had soaked through the roof. Ramón fumed. Classical concert. Brrr. Old music, intransigent, imposed on the admiration of a twenty-year-old, by dint of warnings, horrible grandmotherly warnings full of good sense. And Ramón drifted away in his armchair and stiffened, and listened, and in the end grew dizzy with a magic flute in his eardrums.