it’s hot in lima

stefanie golisch

I never knew know how tiring it is to travel!
I’ve never travelled. I never wanted to before. It just didn’t interest me and later, when I’d have liked to, I didn’t have the energy for it. Too late.
A pity, really a pity.
Nonsense.
In fact, I don’t mind at all that I’ve never travelled. I’ve always liked staying in Lima. For better or worse. That’s where I was. And stop. I have no doubt that I would not have been happier somewhere else, or less happy either. Or maybe I would have been? I don’t know, I’m not sure, I’ve never been sure of anything but I’m not ashamed of that. I’m old. Why should I still be ashamed? What sense would that make?
Ah, travelling is so tiring! Really tiring. I’d never have said that before. Only now do I know. I’m seventy-five years old. My birthday was in April. In the exact middle of the month. My birthday divides the month, the years, the hours, my hours, the time that remains. When I shut my eyes I hear, wherever it is, a tick-tock, it’s the heavy ticking of the cuckoo clock they brought me from Germany a long, long time ago, so long --
It’s music, for me that monotonous tick-tock is music.
Ah, I’m so tired, damn this trip! The seats are narrow and there’s always someone who wants to chat or who rustles a paper or who makes disgusting noises when he eats. It’s always like this. I know. I’m old, by now I know everything about life and I can say what I want to. Being old is a lucky thing, in German they call it the fool’s freedom, Narrenfreiheit -
They say: let him talk, he’s so old he doesn’t understand anything anymore, he’s still in the last century, just think, he won’t even drink from a plastic cup and he always wears his funny hat, green with a big feather, where in hell’s name do they wear hats like that?
Not in Lima.
Certainly not in Lima. I may be the only one who does – no, I am for sure. That’s the way I like it, and what I like even better is that no one else likes it. They laugh at me. As if I didn’t know! And I laugh at them! So there! And we’re all as happy as larks, as they say, aren’t we? without thinking, I don’t think either when senseless words and phrases come out of my mouth, speaking doesn’t make any sense, I stopped long ago, I prefer listening to music -
It’s hot in here, isn’t it? Only in Lima does it get even hotter, in my office in Calle de Cordoba 17. Vladimir Juan de la Vega is my name. A notary public by profession. That what my father decided, a long time ago, by now everything happened a long time ago. When the money was almost all gone, one day he said to me: now it’s your turn, my boy, there’s no money left for you and your sister. I finished it all, and I have to say is that I enjoyed every minute of it!
Followed by one of his loud laughs, as only he could make.
I don’t care a whit about that man and I hardly remember him at all. My sister, on the other hand, I remember her well.
Ah, my little sister.
Ada was her name. Before me there was another brother, but he died right away, or almost. His name was the same name as mine, exactly the same: Vladimir Juan.
Vladimir, because at that time my father was a Communist. Then this first Vladimir died and I was born and I lived the life not lived by my brother and the incomplete life of Vladimir Illich Lenin. It was five years before Ada was born. My Ada. She was so beautiful, good and – inconsolably – sad, my sister, whom I loved and still love and will never stop loving. It’s the most natural thing in the world to love one’s own sister, the only female with the same blood as you, the only one you can understand and who understands you down to the darkness of your guts.
I don’t understand why all brothers don’t love their sisters as they should, as is envisioned in the secret code of the saddest happiness.
I don’t understand other people’s lives, and they don’t understand mine. It’s as simple as that. We live on the same planet, but where they see one colour I see another. I was searching for happiness, mine and my sister’s, nothing more. I know that God agrees with me, that he approves of my choice. Every Sunday I light a candle in honour of the Virgin Mary, for whom the impossible became possible. And I say: thank you. And again: thank you.
Thank you because even if only for a short time my sister and I found happiness. I loved Ada and she loved me. And together we sang in our dark, untidy old house, full of strange objects my father had brought back from his journeys – the ideal place to hide. In fact, he father was almost never there. Before parting, he would absent-mindedly hand us over to an old, blind and deaf nanny, so we were free! We didn’t miss anyone, not even our mother, who had left us so long before that no one remembered her. What mattered then and still matters is her, Ada, my adored one, my music.

Ah, how much time has passed since my sister’s death left me like a piece of trembling meat, alone in that house where we’d been so happy. I still ask myself how she could have gone without saying a word? You took my soul, sister, even if certain modern philosophers say we were wrong and that it doesn’t exist. But I know it does, or rather that it did. Then my sister ate it, and now it’s inside her, I’ve been inside her for over fifty years, inside my sister, who has always joyfully welcomed her brother’s soul and body inside her. That was how it was meant to be and in a certain sense still is. Nothing has changed and nothing ever will.
Only after Ada’s death did I start listening to music. Because she had a lovely voice and loved to sing. Because when I listened to it I felt less lonely, and at times I can still hear her voice. I didn’t want to leave home. I didn’t want to go to school and, later, to university. I didn’t want a profession, a life, a wife. I didn’t want to betray her, I wanted to remain eternally faithful to our stupendous dreaming.
But my father insisted. He wanted me to become a notary public, like him, and I didn’t have the strength to resist his will, which had the force of a lion’s. In the end I became a notary like him. I’ve spent most of my life in an office, behind a desk, wearing a well-ironed white shirt and taking care of things that meant absolutely nothing for me.

Holy indifference! In a certain sense it was better not to have to think about my Ada during the day. I’d probably be dead if I hadn’t been forced to go to the office every morning, where I was treated with respect and called ‘sir’ or ‘notary’ and where every problem was simple and could be solved. It was all right like that, until five p.m. it was all right. Then my real life began. I’ve never betrayed my sister. I’ve always been faithful to her.

It’s hot in Lima, it’s always hot, it’s hot in this plane! I can’t catch my breath, I need something to drink so I call the hostess. No, not water, I need something stronger, getting drunk may be one of the most sublime pleasures in the world, miss, it’s good for an old man like me, who doesn’t know where he’s going and why.
That’s not true.
Of course I know.
Do you want me to tell you, miss? You are so young and lovely, a bit too thin, a bit too blond and your smile is a bit too wide. You’ve no idea what’s waiting for you! Your appalling ignorance worries me, and so my heartfelt wish for you is that soon life, in its infinite generosity, will grant you real, true grief. I’d like to see you a little less blond, smiling a little less when you bring all these drinks to the common passengers on this flight, these useless coloured drinks, because the one thing that is worth drinking is red wine. Have you got a lover, my dear? Is he handsome? It’s right that you have a handsome lover to make love with in romantic places. Calm, I’m the one who’s telling you. Vladimir Juan de la Vega, a tired old man who is travelling for the first time in his life. Lima-Dresden, one way, I said firmly at the desk of a travel agency not far from my house. A week later I picked up the ticked, I paid cash and now here I am above the clouds, on a flight to Dresden.

I imagine that Dresden is a very clean town.
They say the Germans are very orderly. And that they never mistake even the smallest detail and are always punctual. Fortunate country! When I think of Lima I feel suffocated by the heat, and when I think of my sister lying in peace in that monumental cemetery, I don’t know.
I pay her a visit every Saturday afternoon. I take her a bouquet of flowers that vary with the seasons, and in autumn I light candles and placate her impatience with the same words, always. Soon, soon, I whisper to the white tomb, soon I’ll be with you, meanwhile take care of my soul, Ada, my adored one, you’ll see that we’ll be together again soon -
More than once in my lifetime I’ve been tempted to write a poem, but I’ve never yielded to that ridiculous temptation. I’ve been strong, a real man, I resisted beauty and in its place I’ve done the greyest job in the world. That’s how I earned my living. I spent my days in the office, but the evening I lived at home with her, listening to music. The great music of Europe, the only thing in the world that can console our tormented souls, which according to certain fashionable philosophers do not exist. What would I have done all these years without Mozart’s requiem, Bach’s cello suite and – Wagner’s Death of Isolde? How could I have survived?

It was the famous singer Irmgard Schmidt, a great lady and divine soprano, who got me to accept the fact that my Ada had died at the age of fifteen because of a neglected case of diphtheria. We are in Lima, that is, in the jungle. In Dresden Ada would surely have been saved, and we would be together still and now we would be flying to Germany together.
Oh, Ada – almost as old as I am, with rheumatism in her legs and drooping breasts! But I swear, if she were alive we would still be in love, always, because we were made for one another. We were desired and welcomed into this world of horrors. Happy before the tragedy. But in Lima even tragedies are a gift. People thank the Lord for the most horrendous of fates. The enthusiasm of the drowning man. A sea of candles that make no difference between happiness and tragedy. "Amor fati".
All my life I’ve detested Lima, with all my heart.

It’s always hot in Lima.
Thank you for warmth, too, Lord high in your heaven, thank you for taking away my soul, you are right, I know it is a thousand times better off in my beloved sister’s bosom, my soul which is in truth, or so they say, only an invention -

My first record was a gift, a kind and careless gesture. My father’s friends thought I needed to take my mind off things, and in fact they were right. As I didn’t own a record player, the very next day I bought one. Since then there has not been a single day when I don’t pass all my free time listening. Music has saved my life.
I had never heard of Tristan and Isolde. Not of a singer named Irmgard Schmidt. It took me a long time to learn to pronounce her name well. Now I know. I even studied German, it’s hard but in the end I succeeded. Naturally, I did it for her. So that on the day when I finally decided to set out to hear her sing I could pay her compliments in her native tongue.

Now I’m on my way
. She’s singing tomorrow night at the Semperoper. From what they say it’s a beautiful theatre. They’re doing Tristan. Naturally. I’ll hear it, and afterwards I’ll pay her my sincerest compliments. I’ll take her a big bouquet of white roses and I’ll say in the rough accent of us latinos: Sie waren wunderbar, Madame. Because she will be wunderbar. She will have to be, because tomorrow her greatest admirer, the notary Vladimir Juan de la Vega, will be in the audience, come all the way from Lima to hear his sister sing -

From the time we were small we always slept in the same bed, Ada and I. My father had bought it in Africa. It was black, and it had a band of weird masks around it that talked during the night. They really did. Without moving their lips, the masks told us complicated stories, always a new one. You had to pay attention, otherwise you lost the thread and couldn’t understand anything. And Ada and I never lost a word. We learned everything we had to know about life from those masks and when we’d understood everything, when we were ready for our sublime sin, suddenly the masks stopped talking. It was very wise, our bed was. We grew up beautiful one for the other in its dark womb, and when at last the moment arrived, we became lovers. And when we made love the masks sang, you sang for me and I sang for you, and our nights had no end.
They had no end until you left me and I started to wear well-ironed white shirts and busy myself with the most useless things in the world. After Ada’s death the masks stopped talking and singing, and since I couldn’t bear that sudden silence, one day I smashed our bed and took it down into the street. Someone must have picked up the pieces because the next morning they were gone. I hope the bed sings again now, our bed. It was black. Like my sister’s hair. I slept on the floor for a long time, then I bought a bed of light wood, an anonymous bed, narrow, chaste, solid, the bed of a man destined to eternal solitude.
I’ve made love in other beds, without looking into the face of the woman under me. I’ve made Lima’s most beautiful whores cry. They were crying for you, Ada, because you are dead and they are alive and every one of them, at least in the instant of delight, would have given her life so you could come back from the dead. But neither their easy crying nor my hard tears brought you back. I wanted to be made of stone when they carried you away, and I had really turned to stone. Only later did the blood of life come back to me, hunger, thirst, desire. Stronger and fiercer than ever, the night animal returned to me, a seven-headed monster without one single soul. Because you, Ada, took away my soul.
And it was for you, Ada, that the women of Lima cried, street women, the lowest of the low, covered with pimples and scars, the ones who die young, dirty, thrown into a common grave without a single flower. They cried for you and grew beautiful, the sister you never knew, a pity, Ada, because they were like you, because my love breathed your soul into their wombs -