The Bad Girl

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  After about six months, when I returned to Paris from one of those conferences, they handed me a letter from Mitsuko at UNESCO. Salomón had taken his life, swallowing a bottle of barbiturates in the small, rented apartment where he lived. His suicide had come as a surprise, because shortly after I left Tokyo, when Mitsuko, following my advice, found the courage to speak to him, explaining that they couldn’t go on together because she wanted to dedicate herself fully to her career, Salomón took it very well. He seemed understanding and didn’t make a scene. They had maintained a distant friendship, which was inevitable considering the hectic pace in Tokyo. They would see each other occasionally in a tearoom or restaurant and spoke frequently on the phone. Salomón let her know that once his contract with Mitsubishi had ended, he didn’t intend to renew it; he would return to Paris, “where he had a good friend.” That was why she and everyone who knew him had been disconcerted by his decision to end his life. The firm had covered all the funeral costs. Fortunately, in her letter Mitsuko made no mention at all of Kuriko. I didn’t answer or send her my condolences. I simply kept her letter in the little drawer in the night table where I kept the toy hussar the Dragoman had given me on the day he left for Tokyo, and the Guerlain toothbrush.

  5

  The Child Without a Voice

  In spite of all the years I lived there, I had made no friends among my neighbors until Simon and Elena Gravoski moved into the art deco building on Rue Joseph Granier. I had thought Monsieur Dourtois was a friend. He was a functionary at the SNCF, the French rail system, married to a retired schoolteacher, a woman with yellowish hair and a grim, expression. He lived across from me, and on the landing, or the staircase, or in the vestibule at the entrance, we would exchange nods or say good morning, and as the years passed we began to shake hands and make comments on the weather, a perennial concern of the French. Because of these fleeting conversations, I came to believe we were friends, but one night I learned we weren’t when I came home after a concert by Victoria de los Angeles at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and discovered I had forgotten my apartment key. At that hour, no locksmith was open. I made myself as comfortable as I could on the landing and waited for five in the morning, the time my very punctual neighbor left for work. I supposed that when he found me there, he would invite me into his house to wait for daylight. But at five o’clock, when Monsieur Dourtois appeared and I explained why I was there, stiff after a sleepless night, he limited himself to expressing his sorrow, looking at his watch, and saying, “You’ll have to wait another three or four hours until a locksmith opens, mon pauvre ami.”

  With his conscience now at rest, he left. Sometimes I passed other residents of the building on the stairs, and I forgot their faces immediately and their names vanished as soon as I learned them. But when the Gravoskis and Yilal, their nine-year-old adopted son, came to the building because the Dourtoises had moved to the Dordogne, it was another matter. Simon, a Belgian physicist, worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute, and Elena, a Venezuelan, was a pediatrician at the Hôpital Cochin. They were cheerful, pleasant, easygoing, curious, cultured, and from the day I met them in the middle of their move and offered to give them a hand and tell them about the neighborhood, we became friends. We would have coffee together after supper, lend each other books and magazines, and occasionally go to the La Pagode cinema, which was nearby, or take Yilal to the circus, the Louvre, or other museums in Paris.

  Simon was barely forty, though his heavy red beard and prominent belly made him look older. He dressed haphazardly, wearing a jacket whose pockets bulged with notebooks and papers and carrying a satchel full of books. He wore glasses for myopia, which he cleaned frequently with his wrinkled tie. He was the incarnation of the careless, absent-minded intellectual. Elena, on the other hand, was somewhat younger, flirtatious, smartly dressed, and I don’t recall ever seeing her in a bad mood. She was enthusiastic about everything in life: her work at the Hôpital Cochin and her young patients, about whom she told amusing anecdotes, but also the article she had just read in Le Monde or L’Express, and she would prepare to go to the movies or to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant the following Saturday as if she were attending the Oscars. She was short, slim, expressive, and she exuded congeniality from every pore. They spoke French to each other, but with me they used Spanish, which Simon knew perfectly.

  Yilal had been born in Vietnam, and that was the only thing they knew about him. They adopted him when the boy was four or five years old—they weren’t even certain of his age—through Caritas, after a Kafkaesque application procedure on the basis of which Simon, in laughing soliloquies, had founded his theory regarding the inevitable decay of humanity as a result of bureaucratic gangrene. They had named him Yilal after one of Simon’s Polish ancestors, a mythic figure who, according to my neighbor, was decapitated in prerevolutionary Russia because he had been caught in flagrante with no less a personage than the czarina. Not only had this ancestor been a royal fornicator, but he had also been a theologian of the kabbalah, a mystic, a smuggler, a counterfeiter, and a chess player. Their adopted child was mute, the result not of organic deficiencies—his vocal cords were intact—but of a trauma in his infancy, perhaps a bombing or some other terrible event in the war in Vietnam that had left him an orphan. They had seen specialists and all agreed that in time he would recover the power of speech, but for the moment it wasn’t worth inflicting more treatments on him. The therapeutic sessions were a torture for the boy and seemed to reinforce, in his wounded spirit, the desire to remain silent. He had been at a school for deaf-mutes for a few months, but they took him out because the teachers themselves advised his parents to send him to an ordinary school. Yilal wasn’t deaf. He had a fine ear and enjoyed music; he followed the rhythm with his foot and with movements of his hands or head. Elena and Simon spoke to him aloud and he responded with signs and expressive gestures, and sometimes in writing, on a slate he wore around his neck.

  He was very thin and somewhat frail, but not because he was reluctant to eat. He had an excellent appetite, and when I came to his house with a box of chocolates or a cake, his eyes would sparkle and he would devour the treats with signs of pleasure. But except for rare occasions, he was a withdrawn child who gave the impression of being submerged in a somnolence that distanced him from the reality around him. He could spend long periods of time with his lost gaze, enclosed in his private world, as if everything in his surroundings had disappeared.

  He wasn’t very affectionate but gave the impression that caresses annoyed him and he submitted to them with more resignation than happiness. Something soft and fragile emanated from him. The Gravoskis didn’t have television—at that time many Parisians of the intellectual class still believed television shouldn’t be in their houses because it was anticultural—but Yilal didn’t share those prejudices and asked his parents to buy a television set as the families of his classmates had done. I proposed that if they were determined not to have this object that impoverished sensibilities in their house, Yilal could come to my apartment sometimes to watch a soccer match or a children’s program. They agreed, and from then on, three or four times a week, after doing his homework, Yilal would cross the landing and come into my house to watch the program his parents or I had recommended to him. He seemed petrified for the hour he spent in my combined living-dining room, his eyes glued to the small screen as he watched cartoons, quiz shows, or a sports program. His gestures and expressions revealed total submission to the images. Occasionally, when the program was over, he spent some time with me and we talked. That is, he asked me questions about every imaginable thing and I responded, or read him a poem or a story from his reading book or my own library. I grew fond of him but tried not to show it too much, for Elena had warned me: “You have to treat him like a normal child. Never like a victim or an invalid, because that would do him great harm.” When I wasn’t at UNESCO and had contracts outside Paris, I left the key to my apartment with the Gravoskis so Yilal wouldn’t miss his
programs.

  When I returned from one of those working trips, this one to Brussels, Yilal showed me this message on his slate: “When you were on your trip, the bad girl called you.” The sentence was written in French, but “bad girl” was in Spanish.

  It was the fourth time she had called in the couple of years since the episode in Japan. The first was three or four months after my hurried departure from Tokyo, when I was still struggling to recover from an experience that had left a wound in my memory that still festered at times. I was checking something in the library at UNESCO, and the librarian transferred a call for me from the interpreters’ room. Before I said “Hello” I recognized her voice.

  “Are you still angry with me, good boy?”

  I hung up, feeling my hand shake.

  “Bad news?” the librarian asked, a Georgian woman who spoke Russian with me. “How pale you are.”

  I had to go into a UNESCO bathroom and throw up. For the rest of the day I was agitated by the call. But I had made a decision not to see the bad girl again or talk to her, and I was going to stick to it. It was the only way I would be cured of the dead weight that had conditioned my life ever since the day I helped my friend Paúl and went to pick up three aspiring guerrilla fighters at Orly Airport. I managed to forget her only partially. Devoted to my work, to the obligations it imposed on me—among which perfecting my Russian always headed the list—I sometimes spent weeks without thinking about her. But suddenly something would bring her to mind, and it was as if a hermit crab had taken up residence in my intestines and begun to devour my enthusiasm and energy. I would fall into a depression, and there was no way to get out of my head the image of Kuriko overwhelming me with caresses that had a fire she had never shown before, only to please her Japanese lover, who watched us, masturbating, from the shadows.

  Her second call surprised me at the Hotel Sacher, in Vienna, during the only affair I had in those two years, with a colleague at a conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency. My lack of sexual appetite had been absolute since the episode in Tokyo, to the point where I wondered if I hadn’t been left impotent. I had almost become accustomed to living without sex when, on the same day we met, Astrid, a Danish interpreter, proposed with disarming naturalness, “If you like, we can see each other tonight.” She was a tall redhead, athletic, uncomplicated, with eyes so light they seemed liquid. We went to have some Tafelspitz and beer at the Café Central in the Palais Ferstel, Herrengasse, with its columns from a Turkish mosque, domed ceiling, and red marble tables, and then, without need for prior arrangements, we went to bed in the luxurious Hotel Sacher, where the two of us were staying, since the hotel offered significant discounts to conference participants. She was still attractive, though age had begun to leave a few traces on her extremely white body. She made love and the smile didn’t leave her face, not even when she had an orgasm. I enjoyed it and she enjoyed it too, but it seemed to me that this healthful way of making love had more to do with gymnastics than with what the late Salomón Toledano called, in one of his letters, “the disturbing and lascivious pleasure of the gonads.” The second and last time we went to bed, the telephone on my night table rang when we had finished our acrobatics and Astrid was telling me about the accomplishments of one of her daughters in Copenhagen, who had made the move from ballet dancer to circus acrobat. I picked up the receiver, said “Hello,” and heard the affectionate, kittenish voice.

  “Are you going to hang up on me again, little pissant?”

  I held the receiver for a few seconds while I mentally cursed UNESCO for giving her my phone number in Vienna, but I hung up when, after a pause, she began to say: “Well, at least this time…”

  “Stories of past love?” guessed Astrid. “Shall I go to the bathroom so you can talk freely?”

  No, no, it was a story over and done with. Since that night I hadn’t had another sexual relationship, and the truth was, it didn’t concern me in the least. At the age of forty-seven, I had verified that a man could lead a perfectly normal life without making love. Because my life was fairly normal, though empty. I worked a great deal and did my job to fill the time and earn a salary, but not because I was interested—that happened only rarely—and even my studies of Russian and the almost eternal translation of Ivan Bunin’s stories, which I did over and over again, turned out to be a mechanical chore that seldom became pleasurable again. Even films, concerts, books, records were ways to kill time more than activities that excited me as they once had. Another reason for my still feeling rancorous toward Kuriko. Because of her, the illusions that make existence something more than the sum of its routines had been extinguished for me. At times I felt like an old man.

  Perhaps because of this state of mind, the arrival of Elena, Simon, and Yilal Gravoski in the building on Rue Joseph Granier was providential. My neighbors’ friendship infused a little humanity and emotion into my dull, flat life. The third call from the bad girl came to my house in Paris, at least a year after the call to Vienna.

  It was early, four or five in the morning, and the loud rings of the phone pulled me out of sleep and filled me with alarm. It rang so many times that finally I opened my eyes and fumbled for the receiver.

  “Don’t hang up.” Pleading and anger mixed in her voice. “I need to talk to you, Ricardo.”

  I hung up and, of course, couldn’t close my eyes for the rest of the night. I was distraught, feeling ill, until I saw the streaks of a mouse-colored dawn in the Paris sky through the skylight in my bedroom. Why was she calling me periodically? Because I must be one of the few stable things in her intense life, the faithful idiot in love who was always there, waiting for the call that would make her feel she was still what she no doubt was beginning not to be anymore, what she soon would not be again: young, beautiful, loved, desirable. Or, perhaps, she needed something from me? It wasn’t impossible. A gap had suddenly appeared in her life that the little pissant could fill. And with that icy character of hers, she wouldn’t hesitate to look for me, certain there was no pain, no humiliation that she, with her infinite power over my feelings, couldn’t erase after two minutes of conversation. Knowing her, it was certain she’d be obstinate; she’d go on insisting, every few months, or years. No, this time you’re wrong. I won’t talk to you again on the phone, Peruvian girl.

  Now she had called for the fourth time. From where? I asked Elena Gravoski but, to my surprise, she said she hadn’t answered that call or any other during my trip to Brussels.

  “Then it was Simon. Hasn’t he said anything to you?”

  “He doesn’t even set foot in your apartment. He comes home from the institute when Yilal is eating supper.”

  But then, was it Yilal who spoke to the bad girl?

  Elena turned pale.

  “Don’t ask him,” she said, lowering her voice. She was as white as a sheet. “Don’t make the slightest allusion to the message he gave you.”

  Was it possible Yilal had spoken to Kuriko? Was it possible the boy broke his silence when his parents weren’t nearby and couldn’t see or hear him?

  “Let’s not think about that, let’s not talk about that,” Elena repeated, making an effort to compose her voice and appear natural. “What has to happen, will happen. In its own time. If we try to force it, we’ll make everything worse. I’ve always known it would happen, that it will happen. Let’s change the subject, Ricardo. What’s this about the bad girl? Who is she? Tell me about her.”

  We were drinking coffee in her house, after supper, and talking quietly so as not to disturb Simon, who was in the next room, his study, revising a report he had to present the following day at a seminar. Yilal had gone to bed a while ago.

  “An old story,” I replied. “I’ve never told anybody about it. But look, I think I’ll tell you, Elena. So you’ll forget what happened with Yilal.”

  And I did tell her. From start to finish, from the distant days of my childhood, when the arrival of Lucy and Lily, the false Chileans, disturbed the tranquil streets o
f Miraflores, to the night of passionate love in Tokyo—the most beautiful night of love in my life—abruptly cut off by the sight, in the shadows of the room, of Mr. Fukuda watching us from behind his dark glasses, his hands moving inside his fly. I don’t know how long I talked. I don’t know exactly when Simon appeared and sat down next to Elena and began to listen to me, as silent and attentive as she was. I don’t know when I began to cry, and, embarrassed by this emotional outburst, fell silent. It took me a while to regain my composure. As I stammered excuses, I saw Simon stand and then come back with glasses and a bottle of wine.

  “It’s the only thing I have, wine, a very cheap Beaujolais,” he said in apology, patting me on the shoulder. “I imagine in cases like this a nobler drink would be more appropriate.”

  “Whiskey, vodka, rum, cognac, of course!” said Elena. “This house is a disaster. We never have what we ought to have. We’re terrible hosts, Ricardo.”

  “I’ve messed up your report for tomorrow with my little performance, Simon.”

  “Something much more interesting than my report,” he declared. “Aside from that, the nickname fits you like a glove. Not in the pejorative but in the literal sense. That’s what you are, mon vieux, though you don’t like it: a good boy.”

  “Do you know, it’s a marvelous love story?” exclaimed Elena, looking at me in surprise. “Because that’s what it is, basically. A marvelous love story. This melancholy Belgian has never loved me like that. I envy her, chico.”