The Sky Over Lima Read Free

closest thing to a friendship between classes that we can find: a wealthy man from a prominent family and an even wealthier man whose ancestors were poor. Perhaps it is unwarranted to dedicate so many words to this matter, as the novel’s own protagonists do not seem to take it very seriously. After all, they fancy themselves poets, and that belief keeps them hovering just above the ground, enjoying a detachment that is disrupted by anything to do with reality and its prosaic conventions. So why would they care that Carlos’s family has no distinguished dead and that José’s has too many? Poetry, art, their friendship—especially their friendship—transcend all of that. At least that’s what they’d say if anyone bothered to ask them. We couldn’t care less about that, they’d say, don’t you see that we’re poets?—and that answer should be sufficient.
    It should be sufficient, but it is not persuasive. Because it’s clear that they do care about the implications of last name and lineage—we have already noted that it’s 1904; at this time, it could not be otherwise—though they would never admit it, and may not even realize it. But that may be why the opinions of José, nephew of the illustrious José Gálvez Moreno, always seem a little more sensible than those of his friend, and his poems fuller, and his jokes about Peruvians, Chileans, and Spaniards funnier, and his girlfriends prettier; and you might even say at times that he also seems taller, except that only recently an impartial measuring tape revealed that Carlos has nearly an inch on him. It was José who created Georgina—Carlos, smiling, delighted, thoroughly inebriated, merely agreed to the plan—and he will also be the one to choose her death if one day, God forbid, something has to happen to her. And what alternative did Carlos have, then, but to agree, even if he didn’t want to? He could only toss back another glass of pisco and toast his friend’s excellent idea; of what use are the opinions of a rubber man’s son when all of a nation’s illustrious dead are arrayed against him?

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    The subsequent letters require more drafts than the first. Something more vital than obtaining a book of poems is at stake now: if Juan Ramón doesn’t answer, the comedy is over. And for some reason, that comedy suddenly seems to its authors to be quite a serious thing. Maybe that’s why they’re hardly laughing anymore, and why Carlos has a solemn air about him when he picks up the fountain pen.
    Yet there is no reason to imagine that the correspondence might be interrupted soon. Juan Ramón always answers in the return post, sometimes even dispatching two or three letters in a single week that will later travel together, embarking on the same transatlantic voyage back to Lima. He too seems to want the joke to continue many chapters longer, even at the cost of short and somewhat ceremonious missives. The letters are frankly boring at times, yet as fundamentally Juan Ramón–esque as the
Sad Arias
or his
Violet Souls
, and that is enough to move José and Carlos to memorize them and venerate them during many a worshipful afternoon. Sometimes the quartos arrive splattered with ink stains or spelling errors, but they forgive him even that, with indulgence, with pleasure. Juan Ramón, so perfect in his poems, so
intellijent
—with a
j
—he too sometimes scratches things out with his pen, he too gets confused, mixes up
g
and
j
and
s
and
c
.
    So what do they talk about in those first letters?
    The truth is that nobody much cares. Not even them. They spend many hours writing the letters, packaging them, sending them; hours exchanging remedies for the flu or discussing the cold or the heat in Madrid or Chopin’s nocturnes or the discomforts of traveling by car. It is an unfruitful time that is best kept to a minimum. What does