The Bad Girl

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The branch manager at the Société Générate, to whom I explained the problem, said the solution was to sell the apartment. It had increased in value, and I could obtain a price that, after paying off the mortgage and the loans, would leave me with a sum that, managed prudently, would allow me to live in comfort for a long time. I talked it over with Marcella, and she also encouraged me to sell. To relieve my mind of the worry about the payments every month that kept me awake. “Don’t worry about the future, caro. I’ll have good commissions soon. If we’re left without a cent, we’ll go to my parents in Rome. We’ll live in the attic where I put on conjuring and magic shows for my friends when I was little, and where I keep all kinds of odds and ends. You’ll get on very well with my father, he’s almost your age.” What a prospect, Ricardito.

  Selling the apartment took some time. It was true, its price had tripled, but the prospective buyers brought in by real estate agents found defects, asked for discounts or certain compromises, and matters stretched out for close to three months. Finally, I came to an agreement with a functionary from the Armed Forces Ministry, an elegant gentleman who wore a monocle. Then the tiresome transactions with notaries and lawyers began, as well as the sale of the furniture. On the day we signed the contract and made the transfer of property, as I left the notary’s office at a cross street of Avenue de Suffren, a woman stopped short when she saw me and stood staring. I didn’t recognize her but greeted her with a nod.

  “I’m Martine,” she said drily, not offering her hand. “Don’t you remember me?”

  “I was distracted,” I said in apology. “Of course, I remember you very well. How are you doing, Martine?”

  “Very badly, how would I be doing?” she replied. Anger soured her face. She didn’t take her eyes off me. “But you should know I don’t let people trample on me. I know very well how to defend myself. I assure you this matter doesn’t end here.”

  She was a tall, very thin woman with gray hair. She wore a raincoat and scrutinized me as if she wanted to smash my head with the umbrella she was carrying.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Martine. Have you had problems with my wife? We separated some time ago, didn’t she tell you?”

  She fell silent and stared at me, disconcerted. Her eyes told me she thought I was a very strange beast.

  “Then, you don’t know anything?” she murmured. “Then, you live in the clouds? Who do you think that hypocrite ran off with? Don’t you know it was with my husband?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt stupid, a really strange beast. Making an effort, I mumbled, “No, I didn’t know. She only said she was leaving, and she left. I haven’t heard from her since. I’m very sorry, Martine.”

  “I gave her everything, work, friendship, my trust, and I disregarded the question of her papers, which was never very clear. I opened my house to her. And this is how she repaid me, taking my husband from me. Not because she fell in love with him but because of greed. Pure selfishness. She didn’t care about destroying an entire family.”

  I thought that if I didn’t get away Martine would slap me, as if I were responsible for her family’s misfortune. Her voice cracked with indignation.

  “I warn you this doesn’t end here,” she repeated, shaking the umbrella a few centimeters from my face. “My children won’t permit it. She only wants to wring him dry, because that’s what she is, a fortune hunter. My children have begun legal action and she’ll end up in prison. You’d be better off if you had watched over your wife a little more.”

  “I’m very sorry, I have to go, this conversation makes no sense,” I said, moving away with long strides.

  Instead of going back to pick up Marcella, who was putting into storage the household goods we hadn’t sold, I went to sit in a café in École Militaire. I tried to put my mind in order. My blood pressure must have risen because I felt flushed and dazed. I didn’t know Marline’s husband but I had met one of her children, an adult whom I had seen in passing just one time. The bad girl’s new conquest must be an old man, then, a doddering old man, I imagined. Of course she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She never had fallen in love with anybody except, perhaps, Fukuda. She had done it to escape the boredom and mediocrity of life in the little apartment in École Militaire, searching for the thing that had been her first priority ever since she was a little girl and discovered that the poor had a dog’s life but the rich lived very well: the security only money could guarantee. Once again she had deceived herself with the mirage of a rich man; after hearing Martine say, in the accent of Greek tragedy, “My children have begun legal action,” it was certain that this time too, things wouldn’t go as she wished. I harbored rancor toward her but now, imagining her with that ridiculous old man, I felt a certain compassion too.

  I found Marcella exhausted. She already had sent a small truck with what we couldn’t sell, along with some cartons of books, to storage. Sitting on the floor of the living room, I examined the walls and empty space with nostalgia. We went to a little hotel on Rue du Cherche-Midi and lived there for a number of months until we left for Spain. We had a small, bright room, with a fairly large window overlooking the nearby roofs; pigeons came to the sill to eat the kernels of corn Marcella put there for them (it was my job to clean off the droppings). The room soon filled with books, records, and especially Marcella’s drawings and maquettes. It had a long table that we shared, in theory, but in reality Marcella took up most of it. That year it was even more difficult for me to find translations, so the sale of the apartment turned out to be very advantageous. I put the remaining money into a fixed-term account, and the small monthly sum it paid required us to live very frugally. We had to cut out expensive restaurants, concerts, going to the movies more than once a week, and plays, except when Marcella obtained free tickets. But it was a relief to live without debts.

  The idea of moving to Spain was born after an Italian modern dance company from Bari, with whom Marcella had worked previously, was invited to perform at a festival in Granada and asked her to be in charge of the lighting and sets. She traveled there with them and came back two weeks later, delighted. The performance had gone very well, she met theater people, and some possibilities had opened for her. In the months that followed she designed sets for two young companies, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona, and after each trip she returned to Paris euphoric. She said there was an extraordinary cultural vitality in Spain, and the entire country was filled with festivals and directors, actors, dancers, and musicians yearning to make Spanish society current and to do new things. There was more space there for young people than in France, where the environment was supersaturated. Besides, in Madrid you could live much more cheaply than in Paris.

  I wasn’t sorry to leave the city that, ever since I was a boy, I had associated with the idea of paradise. During the years I spent in Paris I’d had marvelous experiences, the kind that seem to justify an entire life, but all of them were connected to the bad girl, who by then, I think, I remembered without bitterness, without hatred, even with a certain tenderness, knowing very well that my sentimental misfortunes were due more to me than to her, because I had loved her in a way she never could have reciprocated, though on some few occasions she had tried: these were my most glorious memories of Paris. Now that the story was definitively over, my future life in this city would be a gradual decline exacerbated by not having work, an old age filled with austerities, and a very solitary one when cara Marcella realized she had better things to do than carry the burden of an old man whose head was weak and who could become senile—a polite way of saying imbecilic—if he had another stroke. Better for me to go and start over again somewhere else.

  Marcella found the apartment in Lavapiés, and since it was rented furnished, I gave away to charitable organizations the rest of the furniture we had in storage as well as the books in my library. I took to Madrid only a handful of favorite titles, almost all of them Russian and French, and my grammar books and dictionaries. />
  After a year and a half of living in Madrid, I had a hunch that this time Marcella was going to make the great leap. One afternoon she burst into the Café Barbieri, very excited, to tell me she had met a fabulous dancer and choreographer and they were going to work together on a fantastic project: Metamorphosis, a modern ballet inspired by one of the texts gathered by Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings: “The A Bao A Qu,” a legend collected by one of the English translators of The Thousand and One Nights. The boy was from Alicante and trained in Germany, where he had worked professionally until very recently. He had formed a group of ten dancers, five women and five men, and created the choreography for Metamorphosis. The story in question, translated and perhaps enriched by Borges, told of a marvelous little animal that lived at the top of a tower in a state of lethargy and awoke to active life only when someone climbed the stairs. Endowed with the ability to alter shape, when someone walked up or down the stairs the little animal began to move, to light up, to change form and color. Víctor Almeda, the boy from Alicante, had conceived of a performance in which the dancers, emulating that marvel while going up and down the magic stairs Marcella would design, and thanks to the lighting effects she was also responsible for, would change their personalities, movements, expressions, until the stage was transformed into a small universe where each dancer would be many, each man and woman containing countless human beings. La Sala Olimpia, an old movie house converted into a theater on Plaza de Lavapiés, where the National Center for New Trends in Stagecraft was located, had accepted Víctor Almeda’s proposal and would sponsor the performance.

  I never saw Marcella work on a set as happily as on this one, or make so many sketches and maquettes. Each day she would recount with delight the torrent of ideas flooding her head and the progress the company was making. A few times I went with her to the ramshackle Olimpia, and one afternoon we had coffee on the plaza with Víctor Almeda, a very dark boy with long hair he wore pulled back in a pony-tail, and an athletic body that revealed many hours of exercise and rehearsals. Unlike Marcella, he wasn’t exuberant or extroverted but rather reserved, though he knew very well what he wanted to do in life. And what he wanted was for Metamorphosis to be a success. He was well read and passionate about Borges. For this show he had read and looked at more than a thousand items on the subject of metamorphosis, beginning with Ovid, and the truth is that although he spoke very little, what he said was intelligent and, for me, novel: I never had listened to a choreographer and dancer talk about his vocation. That night, at home, after telling Marcella of the good impression Víctor Almeda had made on me, I asked if he was gay. She was indignant. He wasn’t. What a stupid prejudice to think all male dancers were gay. She was sure, for example, that in the professional association of interpreters and translators there was the same percentage of gays as among dancers. I apologized and assured her I didn’t have any prejudices, that my question had been asked purely out of curiosity, with no hidden agenda.

  The success of Metamorphosis was total and fully deserved. Víctor Almeda arranged a good deal of advance publicity, and on the night of the opening, the Olimpia was full to bursting; there were even people standing, and most of them were young. The stairs on which the five couples evolved metamorphosed just like the dancers, and, with the lights, were the real protagonists of the performance. There was no music. The rhythm was kept by the dancers themselves with their hands and feet, and by the sharp, guttural, hoarse, or sibilant sounds they made as their identities changed. The dancers took turns placing filters in front of the reflectors, which changed the intensity and color of the light and made the performers actually seem to become iridescent, to alter their skin. It was beautiful, surprising, imaginative, an hour-long performance during which the audience remained motionless, expectant, so still you could hear a pin drop. The troupe was supposed to give five performances and ended up giving ten. There were very positive articles in the press, and in all of them Marcella’s set design was praised. It was filmed for television, to be used as a segment of a program dedicated to the arts.

  I went to see the piece three times. The house was always packed and the audience as enthusiastic as it had been the day it opened. The third time, when the performance was over and I was climbing the Olimpia’s narrow, winding staircase to the dressing rooms to find Marcella, I almost ran into her in the arms of the good-looking, perspiring Víctor Almeda. They were kissing with a certain frenzy, and when they heard me approach they pulled apart in great embarrassment. I pretended not to have noticed anything strange and congratulated them, saying I had liked this performance even more than the two previous ones.

  Later, on the way home, Marcella, who had been very uncomfortable, confronted me.

  “Well, I suppose I owe you an explanation for what you saw.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, Marcella. You’re free and so am I. We live together and get along very well. But that shouldn’t infringe in any way on our freedom. Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “I only want you to know I’m very sorry,” she said. “Even though appearances say something different, I assure you absolutely nothing has happened between Víctor and me. Tonight was just something stupid, without importance. And it won’t happen again.”

  “I believe you,” I said, taking her hand because it made me sad to see how awful she felt. “Let’s forget it. And don’t look like that, please. You’re especially pretty when you smile.”

  And in fact, in the days that followed, we didn’t speak about it again, and she made a great effort to be affectionate toward me. The truth is, it didn’t disturb me very much to know that a romance had probably sprung up between Marcella and the choreographer from Alicante. I never had any great illusions about how long our relationship would last. And now I also knew that my love for her, if it was love, was a fairly superficial feeling. I didn’t feel hurt or humiliated, only curious to know when I would have to move and live alone again. And from then on I began asking myself if I would stay in Madrid or go back to Paris. Two or three weeks later, Marcella announced that Víctor Almeda had been invited to present Metamorphosis in Frankfurt, at a modern dance festival. It was an important opportunity for her to have her work better known in Germany. What did I think?

  “Magnificent,” I told her. “I’m sure Metamorphosis will be as successful there as it has been in Madrid.”

  “Of course you’ll come with me,” she said quickly. “You can translate there and…”

  But I caressed her and told her not to be silly and not to look so distressed. I wouldn’t go to Germany, we didn’t have the money for that. I’d stay in Madrid working on my translation. I had confidence in her. She ought to prepare for her trip and forget everything else, because it could be decisive for her career. She shed some tears when she embraced me and said into my ear, “I swear that stupidity won’t ever be repeated, caro.”

  “Of course, of course, bambina,” and I kissed her.

  On the day Marcella left for Frankfurt by train—I went to see her off at Atocha Station—Víctor Almeda, who was to leave two days later by plane with the rest of the company, knocked on the door of the apartment on Calle Ave María. He looked very serious, as if he were consumed by profound questions. I assumed he had come to give me some explanation of the episode at the Olimpia, and I suggested we have coffee at the Barbieri.

  In reality, he had come to tell me he and Marcella were in love and he considered it his moral obligation to let me know. Marcella didn’t want to make me suffer and for that reason sacrificed herself by staying with me even though she loved him. The sacrifice, in addition to making her miserable, was going to damage her career.

  I thanked him for his candor and asked if, by telling me all this, he hoped I would resolve the problem for them.

  “Well”—he hesitated for a moment—“in a way, yes. If you don’t take the initiative, she never will.”

  “And why would I take the initiative and break up with a girl I’m so fond of?” />
  “Out of generosity and altruism,” he said immediately, with a solemnity so theatrical it made me want to laugh. “Because you’re a gentleman. And because now you know she loves me.”

  At that moment I realized the choreographer had begun to use formal address with me. On previous occasions we always had used tú with each other. Was he trying in this way to remind me I was twenty years older than Marcella?

  “You’re not being frank with me, Víctor,” I said. “Tell me all the truth. Did you and Marcella plan this visit of yours? Did she ask you to talk to me because she didn’t have the courage?”

  I saw him shift in his chair and shake his head no. But when he opened his mouth, he said yes.

  “The two of us made the decision,” he admitted. “She doesn’t want you to suffer. She feels all kinds of remorse. But I convinced her that her first loyalty isn’t to other people but to her own feelings.”

  I was about to tell him that what I had just heard was a cheap, sentimental thing, and explain the Peruvianism, but I didn’t because I was sick of him and wanted him to go. And so I asked him to leave me alone to reflect on everything he had said. I’d make my decision soon. I wished him much success in Frankfurt and shook his hand. In reality I already had decided to leave Marcella with her dancer and return to Paris. Then, what had to happen happened.