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Lulú wore a robe like a cabbage leaf, cool and stiff. The colors on her spinster-doll face were too bright. She obviously needed to be allowed to age, to fade. One had the urge to hang her out in the sun by her braid. Lulú was the terror of the parochial lay-sisters — she sowed the benches of the temple with thumbtacks, poured holy water on the faithful, made the sexton fall in love with her, upset the chorus, tripped over everyone’s feet, and extinguished all the candles. And she was good: a pure little soul who sought only to cheer God up with her mischief. Lulú was a saint in her own way. And among the flock of stubborn and stuffy saints in the ecclesiastical mode, Lulú’s wild and human saintliness stood out like a bramble over a cauliflower patch.
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The esplanade atop the sea cliff of Barranco, the last stretch on the way to Chorrillos, zigzagging, seascape in relief, carved with a knife, a sailor’s toy, so different from the esplanade of Chorrillos: too much light, an excessive horizon, obese sky undergoing the sea’s cure. The esplanade of Chorrillos: superpanorama with a fourth dimension: solitude. And the whole sea changes along with the esplanade — this one, a transatlantic cruise; that one, route to Asia; the other, first love. And the sea is one of Salgari’s rivers or Loti’s shores, or Verne’s fantastic ships, and the sea is never glaucous but rather has pale, colorless zones, lined with the tracks of ducks, full of minute coasts and feeble backgrounds. The sea is a soul we once had, that we cannot find, that we barely remember as our own, a soul that is always different along every esplanade. And the sea is never the cold and vigorous one that squeezed us, with estival lust, throughout our childhood and our vacations. The esplanade is full of German shepherds and English nursemaids, a domestic sea, family stories, the great-grandfather was captain of a frigate, or a freebooter in the sea of the Antilles, a bearded millionaire. An esplanade lined with ancient gardens of fragile roses and dirty and dwarfed palm trees; a fox terrier barks at the sun; the solitude of the shacks appears at the windows to contemplate noontime; an unemployed worker, and light — the light of the sea, humid and warm. An esplanade with patches of dry grass, tension before a first date with a girl we didn’t really love; above this esplanade is a varied sky that collides with the one over the sea. An esplanade with only one hour of quietude: six o’clock in the afternoon, the two twin skies, one with no chance for continuity, both with the same gulls and melancholies.
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Ample, hard, firm end-of-February sun. There is no shadow possible at this immutable, exact, artificial midday. Night will never arrive. It is two o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun is still halfway across the sky, stuck in a stubborn and foolish affinity for the earth. The plaster along the streets gleams — the white, the yellow, the light green, the sky blue, the pearly gray — the perfect, prudent colors of the houses of Barranco. There is the scent only of heat, only heat — a solid scent of fully dilated air. Brass and tiles clang in the windows. Flagless poles with dangling ropes that form knots on top of the cornices. The one o’clock bell dissolves its dregs of sound in the spongy air, and over Barranco descends a flutter of schoolchildren: the light and feathery whiteness of the moment flies off to sea. The end of the lunch hour that is the solitude of the streets and a silvery hot and cold silence, and the shimmering of causeways paved with round, auriferous stones, with stones from riverbeds, thirsty and gasping. With its squeaking and banging a cart carries off the fever of all the streets it has traveled through: nightmares, beings, banana groves, bitterness, deaf systoles and diastoles. The sultry air isochronally strikes the eardrums of the window glass — tense, painful membranes. And in the wake of the cart, the streets remain pale, convalescent, without ailments and without health. And the cart continues past the walls to burn up the evil of the streets in the blaze of the distant sunset. A memory of banana groves. Each sound collides with the hard air, and there is a bang. Three in the afternoon. And a trolley car sings its heart out with the guitar of the road to Miraflores — gray, convivial, sad, two metal strings, and around its neck, the green belt of the boulevard that churns the sea air. Streetcar, sambo casanova.
~ ~ ~
She shouted at me that she loved me with her entire face, fresh and covered more than ever with lint from her towel; naked, cold, and juicy in yellow overalls like the inside of oranges; she almost fell into my arms — an adverse wind stopped her; I told her she was as terrifying and inoffensive as a sea lion; she did not believe me; her gluteal, livid knees trembled; I reproached her for her impertinence, her immodesty, her bad faith, her seventeen years, her bare feet that could get hurt; she warned me that she bit like a tramboyo when caught, and she showed me her fishbowl teeth; she could also scratch, like a hunted otter — she slowly unsheathed her not-at-all-corneous nails: misty, opaque; she allowed me not to get frightened; we went down to the big beach, I think on a rope, like cats on coasting steamboats; we returned to the gazebo in the water; she measured the craziness in my eyes with her own; with a frown she tightened the straps of her nakedness over her pale shoulders; she was trying to say to me, as if to a naughty child, “Settle down, or there’ll be no treats.,” but she was afraid of making me cry. My thorax — that of a studious boy — distracted her from my words; she forgave me; she became natural; the cold x-rayed her thighs and bound her arms together; she looked out beyond the round pier; suddenly — tracing a stupendous, incomprehensible parabola — she threw herself into the bather’s semi-sea, head first behind her inverted wig that hung like the tentacles of an octopus on a grappling iron in the market. I had to wait for her on the beach, under the terrace — the semidarkness of a marine cavern — amid wholesalers — hairy, vertical, shivering cetaceans — and the stench of seafood — green vapors; she emerged from her drenching dressed in water; she no longer loved me; the two of us, under the platform; I thought of a caustic and pretty jellyfish, but no.; I grabbed her hand that was as slippery as a fish; I dragged her along toward the light and the desert in a painful race over round pebbles; my heels grew numb; our entwined hands crashed into a useless rail standing upright with a stupid rock balanced on its tip, and we separated; she wanted to be a rail that could not be dragged along the beach, just like that; a mercurial lizard carried away one of her sad glances; she wanted to forgive me with all her heart and I would not allow it; her garment of moisture fell; she hit the beach with her knees and said no.