The Bad Girl

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I reached Rue Joseph Granier soaked from head to toe and dying of the cold. I took a hot shower, put on dry clothes, and prepared a ham and cheese sandwich that I ate with fruit yogurt. With the case of toy soldiers under my arm, I knocked on the Gravoskis’ door. Yilal was already in bed, and they had just finished eating a supper of spaghetti with basil. They offered me some, but all I accepted was a cup of coffee. While Simon examined the toy soldiers and joked that with gifts like these I wanted to turn Yilal into a militarist, Elena noticed something strange in my reticence.

  “Something’s happened, Ricardo,” she said, scrutinizing my eyes. “Did the bad girl call you?”

  Simon looked up from the toy soldiers and stared at me.

  “I’ve just spent an hour with her in a bistrot. She’s living in Paris. She’s a wreck and has no money, she’s dressed like a beggar. She says the Japanese dumped her after the police in Lagos arrested her on one of those trips she made to Africa to help him in his trafficking. And raped her. And infected her with crabs and chancre. And then, in some foul hospital, they almost finished the job. It may be true. It may be false. I don’t know. She says Fukuda dropped her because he was afraid Interpol had her on file and the blacks had infected her with AIDS. The truth or an invention? I have no way of knowing.”

  “The saga becomes more interesting every day,” Simon exclaimed in stupefaction. “True or not, it’s a terrific story.”

  He and Elena looked at each other and looked at me, and I knew very well what they were thinking. I agreed.

  “She remembers very clearly the call she made to my house. A thin, high-pitched voice answered, in French, and she thought it belonged to an Asian woman. He had her repeat ‘bad girl’ several times in Spanish. She can’t have invented that.”

  I saw Elena become agitated. She was blinking very rapidly.

  “I always thought it was true,” murmured Simon. His voice was excited and he became flushed, as if he were suffocating from the heat. He kept scratching at his red beard. “I turned it around and around and reached the conclusion it had to be true. How could Yilal invent anything like ‘bad girl’? How happy you’ve made us with this news, mon vieux.”

  Elena agreed, holding my arm. She was smiling and crying at the same time.

  “I always knew it too, knew that Yilal had talked to her,” she said, sounding out each word. “But please, we mustn’t do anything. Or say anything to the boy. It will all come on its own. If we try to force him, things may get worse. He has to do it, break that barrier by his own effort. He will, at the right time, he’ll do it soon, you’ll see.”

  “This is the moment to bring out the cognac,” said Simon, winking at me. “You see, mon vieux, I took precautions. Now we’re prepared for the surprises you give us periodically. An excellent Napoleon, you’ll see!”

  We each had a cognac, almost without speaking, deep in our own thoughts. The drink did me good, for the walk in the rain had chilled me. When I said good night, Elena walked out to the landing with me.

  “I don’t know, it just occurred to me,” she said. “Maybe your friend needs a medical exam. Ask her. If she wants, I can arrange it at the Hôpital Cochin, with my copains. At no charge to her, I mean. I imagine she has no insurance or anything like that.”

  I thanked her. I’d ask the next time we spoke.

  “If it’s true, it must have been awful for the poor woman,” she murmured. “A thing like that leaves dreadful scars in one’s mind.”

  The next day, I hurried home from UNESCO so I would see Yilal. He was watching a cartoon on television, and beside him were the six horsemen of the Russian Imperial Guard lined up in a row. He showed me his slate: “Thank you for the nice gift, Uncle Ricardo.” He shook my hand, smiling. I began to read Le Monde while he, his attention hypnotized, was involved in his program. Afterward, instead of reading to him, I told him about Salomón Toledano. I talked about his collection of toy soldiers that I had seen invading every inch of his house, and his incredible ability to learn languages. He had been the best interpreter in the world. When he asked on his slate if I could take him to Salomón’s house to see his Napoleonic battles, and I said he had died very far from Paris, in Japan, Yilal became sad. I showed him the hussar I kept on my night table, the one Salomón had given me the day he left for Tokyo. A little while later, Elena came to take him home.

  In order not to think too much about the bad girl, I went to a movie in the Latin Quarter. In the dark, warm theater filled with students, on Rue Champollion, as I distractedly followed the adventures in Stagecoach, John Ford’s classic Western, the deteriorated, wretched image of the Chilean girl appeared and reappeared in my head. That day, and all the rest of the week, her figure was always on my mind, along with the question to which I never found a reply: Had she told me the truth? Was the story about Lagos and Fukuda true? I was tormented by the conviction that I would never know with any certainty.

  She called me a week later, at home, again very early in the morning. After asking how she was—“Fine, I’m fine now, I told you that”—I proposed having supper that night. She agreed, and we arranged to meet at the old Procope, on Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, at eight. I arrived before she did and waited for her at a table beside the window that overlooked the Rohan passage. She arrived right after me. Better dressed than the last time, but still shabby: under the ugly, asexual jacket she wore a dark blue dress, without a collar or sleeves, and her medium-heeled shoes were cracked but recently polished. It was very strange to see her without rings, bracelets, earrings, or makeup. At least she had filed her nails. How could she have gotten so thin? It looked as if she would shatter with a single misstep.

  She ordered consommé and grilled fish and barely sipped at the wine during the meal. She chewed very slowly and reluctantly and had difficulty swallowing. Did she really feel all right?

  “My stomach has shrunk and I can hardly tolerate food,” she explained. “After two or three bites I feel full. But this fish is delicious.”

  In the end I drank the bottle of Côtes du Rhône by myself. When the waiter brought coffee for me and verbena tea for her, I said, holding her hand, “I beg you, by what you love most, swear that everything you told me the other day in La Rhumerie is true.”

  “You’ll never believe anything I tell you again, I know that.” She had an air of fatigue, of weariness, and didn’t seem to care in the least if I believed her or not. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. I told you so you would let me see you from time to time. Because even if you don’t believe this either, talking to you does me good.”

  I felt like kissing her hand but controlled myself. I told her Elena’s proposal. She sat looking at me, disconcerted.

  “But, she knows about me, about us?”

  I nodded. Elena and Simon knew everything. In an outburst I had told them “our” entire story. They were very good friends, she had nothing to fear from them. They wouldn’t denounce her to the police as a trafficker in aphrodisiacs.

  “I don’t know why I confided in them. Perhaps because, like everybody, occasionally I need to share with someone the things that distress me or make me happy. Do you accept Elena’s proposal?”

  She didn’t seem very enthusiastic. She looked at me uneasily, as if fearing a trap. That light, the color of dark honey, had disappeared from her eyes. Along with the mischief, the mockery.

  “Let me think about it,” she said at last. “We’ll see how I feel. I’m feeling fine, now. The only thing I need is quiet, and rest.”

  “It’s not true that you’re fine,” I insisted. “You’re a ghost. You’re so thin a simple grippe could send you to the grave. And I don’t feel like attending to that sinister little chore of incinerating you, and so forth. Don’t you want to be attractive again?”

  She burst into laughter.

  “Ah, so now you think I’m ugly. Thanks for your honesty.” She pressed the hand I was still holding hers with, and for a second her eyes came alive. “But you’re still in lov
e with me, aren’t you, Ricardito?”

  “No, not anymore. And I’ll never be in love with you again. But I don’t want you to die.”

  “It must be true you don’t love me anymore if you haven’t said a single cheap, sentimental thing to me this time,” she acknowledged, making a half-comic face. “What do I have to do to conquer you again?”

  She laughed with the flirtatiousness of the old days, and her eyes filled with mischievous light, but suddenly, with no transition, I felt the pressure of her hand on mine weaken. Her eyes went blank, she turned livid and opened her mouth, as if she needed air. If I hadn’t been beside her, holding her, she would have fallen to the floor. I rubbed her temples with a dampened napkin, had her drink some water. She recovered a little but was still very pale, almost white. And now there was an animal panic in her eyes.

  “I’m going to die,” she stammered, digging her nails into my arm.

  “You’re not going to die. I’ve allowed you every despicable thing in the world since we were children, but not dying. I forbid it.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “It was time you said something nice to me.” Her voice was barely audible. “I needed it, even if you don’t believe that, either.”

  When, after a while, I tried to have her stand, her legs were trembling and she dropped, exhausted, onto the chair. I had a waiter at Le Procope bring a taxi from the stand on the corner of Saint-Germain to the door of the restaurant, and then help me walk her to the street. The two of us carried her, lifting her at the waist. When she heard me tell the driver to take us to the nearest hospital—“The Hôtel-Dieu on the Cité, all right?”—she grabbed me in despair. “No, no, not to a hospital, under no circumstances, no.” I found myself obliged to rectify that and ask the driver to take us instead to Rue Joseph Granier. On the way to my house—I had her leaning on my shoulder—she lost consciousness again for a few seconds. Her body went slack and slipped in the seat. When I straightened her, I could feel all the bones in her back. At the door to the art deco building, I called Simon and Elena on the intercom and asked them to come down and help me.

  The three of us got her up to my apartment and laid her on my bed. My friends asked nothing but looked at the bad girl with avid curiosity, as if she had risen from the dead. Elena lent her a nightgown and took her temperature and blood pressure. She had no fever, but her pressure was very low. When she was fully conscious again, Elena had her sip a cup of very hot tea, with two pills that, she said, were a simple restorative. When she said goodbye, she assured me she didn’t see any imminent danger, but if, in the course of the night, the bad girl felt ill, I should wake her. Elena herself would call the Hôpital Cochin and have them send an ambulance. In view of her fainting spells, a complete medical examination was indispensable. She would arrange everything, but it would take a couple of days at least.

  When I returned to the bedroom, I found her with eyes open wide.

  “You must be cursing the hour you picked up the phone,” she said. “I’ve done nothing but make problems for you.”

  “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve done nothing but make problems for me. It’s my destiny. And there’s nothing you can do to fight destiny. Look, here it is in case you need it. It’s yours. But you have to return it to me.”

  And I took the Guerlain toothbrush out of the night table. She examined it, amused.

  “Do you mean you still have it? It’s your second gallantry of the evening. What luxury. Where are you going to sleep, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “The sofa in the living room is a sofa bed, so don’t get your hopes up. There’s no chance at all that I’ll sleep with you.”

  She laughed again. But that small effort fatigued her, and curling up under the sheets, she closed her eyes. I covered her with the blankets and put my bathrobe at her feet. I went to brush my teeth, put on my pajamas, and pull out the sofa bed in the living room. When I returned to the bedroom, she was asleep, breathing normally. The light from the street that filtered through the skylight illuminated her face: still very pale, with its pointed nose and, through her hair, glimpses of her beautiful ears. Her mouth was half open, the sides of her nose palpitating, and her expression was languid, totally abandoned. When I brushed her hair with my lips I felt her breath on my face. I went to lie down. I fell asleep almost immediately but awoke a couple of times in the night, and both times I tiptoed in to see her. She was asleep, breathing evenly. The skin on her face was drawn tight and her bones stood out. As she breathed, her chest lightly moved the blankets up and down. I imagined her small heart, thought of it beating wearily.

  The next morning, I was preparing breakfast when I heard her get up. I was brewing coffee when she appeared in the kitchen, wrapped in my robe. It was enormous on her, and she looked like a clown. Her bare feet were like a little girl’s.

  “I slept almost eight hours,” she said in astonishment. “That hasn’t happened for ages. Last night I fainted, didn’t I?”

  “Nothing but an act so I’d bring you home. And, as you can see, I did. And you even got into my bed. You know all the tricks from soup to nuts, bad girl.”

  “I ruined your night, didn’t I, Ricardito?”

  “And you’ll ruin my day too. Because you’re going to stay here, in bed, while Elena arranges things at the Hôpital Cochin so they can give you a complete checkup. No arguments allowed. The time has come for me to impose my authority over you, bad girl.”

  “Wow, what progress. You talk as if you were my lover.”

  But this time I didn’t make her smile. She looked at me, her face contorted, her eyes gloomy. She looked very comical this way, with her hair disheveled and the robe dragging on the floor. I approached and embraced her. She was trembling and felt very fragile. I thought that if I tightened the embrace a little she would break, like a baby bird.

  “You’re not going to die,” I whispered in her ear, just kissing her hair. “They’ll do the exam, and if something’s wrong, they’ll treat it. And you’ll be attractive again, and we’ll see if you can get me to fall in love with you again. And now come, let’s have breakfast, I don’t want to get to UNESCO late.”

  As we were having coffee and toast, Elena stopped in on her way to work. She took the bad girl’s temperature again, and her blood pressure, and found her better than the night before. But she told her to stay in bed all day and eat light things. She would try to arrange everything at the hospital so she could be admitted tomorrow. Elena asked what she needed, and the bad girl requested a hairbrush.

  Before I left, I showed her the food in the refrigerator and the cupboard, more than enough for her to fix some chicken or buttered noodles in the afternoon. I’d take care of supper when I got back. If she felt sick, she had to call me immediately at UNESCO. She nodded without saying anything, looking at everything with a lost expression, as if she hadn’t really understood what was happening to her.

  I called early in the afternoon. She felt well. A bubble bath in my tub had made her happy, because for at least six months she had taken only showers in public bathhouses, always in a rush. In the evening, when I returned, I found her and Yilal absorbed in a Laurel and Hardy movie that sounded absurd dubbed into French. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves and celebrated the clowning of the fat man and the thin man. She had put on a pair of my pajamas, and on top of that the bathrobe in which she seemed lost. Her hair was combed, and her face was fresh and smiling.

  On his slate, Yilal asked, pointing at the bad girl: “Are you going to marry her, Uncle Ricardo?”

  “Not a chance,” I told him, putting on a horrified face. “That’s what she’d like. She’s been trying to seduce me for years. But I don’t pay attention to her.”

  “Pay attention,” Yilal replied, writing quickly on his slate. “She’s nice and she’ll be a good wife.”

  “What have you done to buy off this child, guerrilla fighter?”

  “I told him things about Japan and Africa. He’s very good in geogr
aphy. He knows the capitals better than I do.”