“You should see Carlota,” he will say at the club later. “You couldn’t hire someone with such feminine handwriting. It makes you wonder. And he knows the girl better than you fellows know your own mothers and sweethearts. Anyone would think he was writing a diary, not composing letters, and that at night he puts on a shawl and goes about like one of Lima’s covered ladies.”
Carlos ignores their laughter. José might not care about Georgina, but Carlos cares even less about what their circle of friends thinks. Or that they’ve all started calling him Carlota, or that they bow in greeting and pull out his chair for him when he sits down at the table. If you please, madame. Carlos has time to think only about important things. Like finally figuring out how Georgina takes her tea: Two cubes of sugar. A splash of milk. And maybe, but only if her father isn’t looking, a bit of anise liquor in her cup.
~ ~ ~
◊
Lima, December 5, 1904
My esteemed friend:
You ask what Lima is like, this beloved city of mine, which some call the Pearl of the Pacific, or the City of Kings, or the Thrice-Crowned Villa in honor of some old anecdote I no longer recall. You ask me to write about all this, and it occurs to me that the best way to do so is to imagine that you are here with me. Or even better: To imagine that we are both high up in the bell tower of the cathedral. From there I could point out every corner of my city and all its many beauties…
Or better yet: Did you not once mention that you are a painter? Imagine, then, that I am giving you instructions for painting a landscape. This beautiful view from the sky over Lima, always misty, changeable, so nurturing of inventions and fantasies… Suppose, if you wish, that we are painting the canvas together. And that, as with all canvases, my manner of painting it, of adding colors and textures, also creates a sort of portrait of me.
Imagine first a network of streets and houses, so perfectly laid out that you could draw it with a T-square. Do you see it? From afar it looks like the grid of a beehive or the mesh of a lattice. But if you focus your gaze a little, its geometry unravels into life, into rooftops and awnings, elaborate rows of balconies, the arches of city hall, the Plaza Dos de Mayo, the path of the Rímac River as it plunges toward the ocean.
All that you see there at your feet is my beloved Lima. Within its borders, as you see, there are a good number of yellow hills and fields. A lovely golden yellow that you, my distinguished friend, would have to search for in your palette, as it is not the yellow of melancholy and death that pervades your poems, but a lively yellow, like a bonfire. The color of the sun worshipped by our Incan ancestors so long ago.
Here, everything, even the colors, means something else.
The sea? Do not paint it so close to the city. Place it a few inches farther away on the canvas — that is, two long leagues. They may call it the Pearl of the Pacific, but the name is a deceptive one, because Lima is more a timid jewel, a gemstone that tiptoes away from the ocean without ever daring to lose sight of it, as if it both feared and craved its waters. Paint it blue, but a blue that, I suspect, is not the same blue as the Spanish seas. And in the distance place a port, and call it El Callao, and scatter a few transatlantic ships among its wharves, massive saurians cloaked in steam and rust but somehow beautiful, because they will, in the end, be the bearers of this letter.
Farther out, somewhere on the horizon, is my home, one of the many estates in Miraflores. And perhaps it is better this way, that you cannot see it. I have said that a person’s manner of looking at a city reflects that person’s soul, but it is no less true that a house holds the spirit of the people who inhabit it. And I feel so distant from its walls! A stranger in my own bedroom, in the dining room where I while away the hours, so that even in calling it my home I am obliged to lie to you. Inside it there are only rules and reprimands, so inflexible that they might have been drawn by the same T-square used to lay out the streets. A lattice that might at times be called a cage, its bars made of bowing servants, of lectures from a father who does not find this or that to his liking, the riding frock and the gown for receiving visitors, endless dinners that always seem to feature the same plate of soup. Lessons from a young ladies’ charm manual, a work that knows so much about protocols and so little of life! It is excruciating sometimes to be a woman, to be a daughter, to be nobody!
If you wish to know my soul, you should not look at that house. Nor at the geometric avenues, rigid like the instructions of a strict tutor. I am not myself in my house. Only far from it — far, too, from the heart of that city where gentlemen in top hats and women in their street gowns promenade. In my walks, I seek a different, unknown Lima. Because to keep painting this canvas, you must know, my dear Juan Ramón, that there at the edges the strict grid becomes chaotic, twisted, full of unpredictable sinuosities and bends and leaps. I love to wander through those poor neighborhoods, down those dirt alleys where no one has to pretend to be anything. Where the people shout out with unpretentious, authentic words and you can stop to watch a sunset or a flower growing in the crevices without being bothered. My soul more closely resembles those little dead-end streets, those picturesque lots, and I return home with the hems of my skirts soiled with dust and the satisfaction of having lived something real, something beautiful…
Oh dear, what strange secrets I am confessing to you, my friend!
~ ~ ~
◊
The Professor has liked the last few letters. “This is something else,” he says, “now your cousin is really letting herself go, showing her face a bit.” He also praises the delicate handwriting once again, and when he does, Carlos lowers his eyes.
“So… you think there’s a chance?”
“Of what?”
“Of making her fall in love.”
“Making her fall in love? Who?”
“Making him fall in love, I mean. You know, Juan Ramón. The Spanish poet.”
“Oh! Well… who knows? But one thing’s for sure: the beguiling eye of this covered lady has been unveiled! No doubt about that!”
Carlos goes to ask for his advice every week, whenever Georgina receives a letter or is getting ready to write one. I’ve never met such a solicitous cousin before, the Professor says every time he sees Carlos join the queue. He always comes alone, but Cristóbal doesn’t mention José’s absence. He seems to remember him only one morning when he insists on rewriting a particular passage of the next letter and Carlos refuses.
“You see, she wants to write it without anybody’s help,” he insists.
“But she’s not making you come all the way out here every week for no reason.”
“Well… actually, Georgina doesn’t know I come to see you.”
Cristóbal raises his eyebrows.
“Oh! So she doesn’t know I exist?”
“No.”
“And if she doesn’t know, how do you transmit the wisdom gained from our chats?”
“Well… I pretend it’s my idea, you know? I ask her, she shows me the poet’s most recent letter or one of her numerous drafts, I gently offer an opinion… When she listens to me, the look in her eyes…”