“I’m going to Lima tomorrow,” I told her. “How can I see you when I get back?”
She gave me her telephone number and address and asked if I was still living in that little room in the garret of the Hôtel du Sénat, where she had been so cold.
“It’s hard for me to leave it because I had the best experience of my life there. And that’s why, for me, that hole is a palace.”
“This experience is the one I think it is?” she asked, bringing her face, where mischief was always mixed with curiosity and coquetry, close to mine.
“The same.”
“For what you said just now, I owe you a kiss. Remind me the next time we see each other.”
But a moment later, when we said goodbye, she forgot her marital precautions and instead of her cheek she offered me her lips. They were full and sensual, and in the seconds I had them pressed against mine, I felt them move slowly, provocatively, in a supplementary caress. When I already had crossed Saint-Germain on the way to my hotel, I turned to look at her and she was still there, on the corner by Les Deux Magots, a bright, golden figure in white shoes, watching me walk away. I waved goodbye and she waved the hand holding the flowered parasol. I only had to see her to discover that in these past few years I hadn’t forgotten her for a single moment, that I loved her as much as I did the first day.
When I arrived in Lima in March 1965, shortly before my thirtieth birthday, photographs of Luis de la Puente, Guillermo Lobatón, fat Paúl, and other leaders of the MIR were in all the papers and on television—by now there was television in Peru—and everybody was talking about them. The MIR rebellion had an undeniable romantic aspect. The Miristas themselves had sent the photos to the media, announcing that in view of the iniquitous exploitative conditions that made victims of peasants and workers, and the surrender of the Belaúnde Terry government to imperialism, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left had decided to take action. The leaders of the MIR showed their faces and appeared with long hair and full-grown beards, with rifles in their hands and combat uniforms consisting of black turtleneck sweaters, khaki trousers, and boots. I noticed that Paúl was as fat as ever. In the photograph that Correo published on the front page, he was surrounded by four other leaders and was the only one smiling.
“These wild men won’t last a month,” predicted Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel in his study on Calle Boza in the center of Lima, on the morning I went to see him. “Turning Peru into another Cuba! Your poor aunt Alberta would have fainted dead away if she could see the outlaw faces of our brand-new guerrillas.”
My uncle didn’t take the announcement of armed actions very seriously, a feeling that seemed widespread. People thought it was a harebrained scheme that would end in no time. During the weeks I spent in Peru, I was crushed by a sense of oppressiveness and felt like an orphan in my own country. I lived in my aunt Alberta’s apartment on Calle Colón in Miraflores, which still was filled with her presence and where everything reminded me of her, of my years at the university, of my adolescence without parents. It moved me when I found all the letters I had written to her from Paris, arranged chronologically, in her bedside table. I saw some of my old Miraflores friends from the Barrio Alegre, and with half a dozen of them went one Saturday to eat at the Kuo Wha Chinese restaurant near the Vía Expresa to talk about old times. Except for our memories, we didn’t have much in common anymore, since their lives as young professionals and businessmen—two were working in their fathers’ companies—had nothing to do with my life in France. Three were married, one had begun to have children, and the other three had girlfriends who would soon be their brides. In the jokes we told one another—a way of filling empty spaces in the conversation—they all pretended to envy me for living in the city of pleasure and fucking those French girls who were famous for being wild women in bed. How surprised they would have been if I confessed that in the years I spent in Paris, the only girl I went to bed with was a Peruvian, Lily of all people, the false Chilean girl of our childhood. What did they think of the guerrillas and their announcement in the papers? Like Uncle Ataúlfo, they didn’t think they were important. Those Castristas sent here by Cuba wouldn’t last very long. Who could believe that a Communist revolution would triumph in Peru? If the Belaúnde government couldn’t stop them, the military would come in again and impose order, something they didn’t look forward to.
That’s what Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel was afraid of too. “The only thing these idiots will achieve by playing guerrilla is to hand the military an excuse for a coup d’état on a silver platter. And stick us with another eight or ten years of military dictatorship. Who even thinks about making a revolution against a government that’s not only civilian and democratic, but that the entire Peruvian oligarchy, beginning with La Prensa and El Comercio, accuses of being Communist because it wants agrarian reform? Peru is confusion, nephew, you did the right thing when you went to live in the country of Cartesian clarity.”
Uncle Ataúlfo was a lanky, mustachioed man in his forties who always wore a jacket and bow tie and was married to Aunt Dolores, a kind, pale woman who had been an invalid for close to ten years and whom he looked after with devotion. They lived in a nice house, full of books and records, in Olivar de San Isidro, where they invited me to lunch and dinner. Aunt Dolores bore her illness without bitterness and amused herself by playing the piano and watching soap operas. When we recalled Aunt Alberta, she started to cry. They had no children and he, in addition to his law practice, taught classes in mercantile law at Catholic University. He had a good library and was very interested in local politics, not hiding his sympathies for the democratic reform movement incarnated, to his mind, in Belaúnde Terry. He was very kind to me, expediting the formalities of the inheritance as much as he could and refusing to charge me a cent for his services: “Don’t be silly, nephew, I was very fond of Alberta and your parents.” Those were tedious days of abject appearances before notaries and judges and carrying documents back and forth through the labyrinthine Palace of Justice, which left me sleepless at night and increasingly impatient to return to Paris. In my free time I reread Flaubert’s Sentimental Education because now, for me, Madame Arnoux in the novel had not only the name but also the face of the bad girl. Once the taxes on the inheritance had been deducted and the debts left behind by Aunt Alberta had been paid, Uncle Ataúlfo announced that with the apartment sold and the furniture put up for auction, I’d receive something like sixty thousand dollars, maybe a little more. A handsome sum I never thought I’d have. Thanks to Aunt Alberta, I could buy a small apartment in Paris.
As soon as I was back in France, the first thing I did after climbing up to my garret in the Hôtel du Sénat and even before I unpacked was to call Madame Robert Arnoux.
She made an appointment with me for the next day and said that if I wanted to, we could have lunch together. I picked her up at the entrance to the Alliance Française, on Boulevard Raspail, where she was taking an accelerated course in French, and we went to have a curry d’agneau at La Coupole, on Boulevard Montparnasse. She was dressed simply, slacks and sandals and a light jacket. She wore earrings whose colors matched those in her necklace and bracelet and a bag hanging from her shoulder, and each time she moved her head, her hair swung gaily. I kissed her cheeks and hands, and she greeted me with: “I thought you’d come back more tanned from the Lima summer, Ricardito.” She had really turned into an extremely elegant woman: she combined colors and applied her makeup very tastefully. I observed her, still stupefied by her transformation. “I don’t want you to tell me anything about Peru,” she said, so categorically I didn’t ask why. Instead, I told her about my inheritance. Would she help me find an apartment?
She approved enthusiastically.
“I love the idea, good boy. I’ll help you furnish and decorate it. I’ve had practice with mine. It’s turning out so well, you’ll see.”
After a week of frantic afternoon appointments after her French classes, which took us to agencies and apartments in the Latin Quart
er, Montparnasse, and the fourteenth arrondissement, I found an apartment with two rooms, a bath, and a kitchen on Rue Joseph Granier, in an art deco building from the 1930s that had geometrical designs—rhombuses, triangles, and circles—on the façade, in the vicinity of the École Militaire in the seventh arrondissement, very close to UNESCO. It was in good condition, and even though it faced an interior courtyard and for the moment you had to climb four flights of stairs to reach it—the elevator was under construction—it had a great deal of light, since in addition to two good-sized picture windows, a large concave skylight exposed it to the Paris sky. It cost close to seventy thousand dollars, but I had no difficulty when I went to the Société Générale, the bank where I kept my account, and asked for a mortgage. During those weeks when I was looking for the apartment and then making it livable, cleaning, painting, and furnishing it with a few bits and pieces purchased at La Samaritaine and the Marché aux Puces, I saw Madame Robert Arnoux every day, Monday through Friday—she spent Saturdays and Sundays in the country, with her husband—from the time she left her classes until four or five in the afternoon. She enjoyed helping me with all my chores, practicing her French with real estate agents and concierges, and she displayed such good humor that—as I told her—it seemed the small apartment to which she was giving life was for the two of us to share.
“It’s what you’d like, isn’t it, good boy?”
We were in a bistrot on Avenue de Tourville, near Les Invalides, and I kissed her hands and searched for her mouth, mad with love and desire. I nodded several times.
“The day you move we’ll have a premiere,” she promised.
She kept her promise. It was the second time we made love, on this occasion in the full light of day that came pouring in through the large skylight, where curious pigeons observed us, naked and embracing on the mattress without sheets that had recently been liberated from the plastic wrapping in which the truck from La Samaritaine had brought it. The walls smelled of fresh paint. Her body was as slim and well formed as I remembered it, with her narrow waist that I thought could be encircled by my hands, and her pubis with sparse hair, its skin whiter than her smooth belly or thighs, which darkened and shaded to a pale green luster. Her entire body gave off a delicate fragrance, accentuated in the warm nest of her depilated underarms, behind her ears, and in her small, wet sex. On her curved groin thin blue veins were visible under the skin, and it moved me to imagine her blood flowing slowly through them. As she did the last time, with total passivity she allowed herself to be caressed and listened silently, feigning an exaggerated attention or pretending she didn’t hear anything and was thinking about something else, to the intense, hurried words I said into her ear or mouth as I struggled to spread her labia.
“Make me come first,” she whispered in a tone that concealed a command. “With your mouth. Then it’ll be easier for you to enter. And don’t you come yet. I like to feel irrigated.”
She spoke with so much coldness that she didn’t seem like a girl making love but a doctor formulating a technical description, detached from pleasure. I didn’t care, I was totally happy, as I hadn’t been in a long time, perhaps not ever. “I’ll never be able to repay so much happiness, bad girl.” I spent a long time with my lips pressed against her contracted sex, feeling the pubic hairs tickling my nose, licking her tiny clitoris avidly, tenderly, until I felt her moving, becoming excited, and finishing with a quivering of her lower belly and legs.
“Come in now,” she whispered in the same imperious voice.
It wasn’t easy this time either. She was narrow, she shrank away, she resisted me, she moaned, until at last I was successful. It felt as if my sex were being broken, strangled by that throbbing interior passage. But it was a marvelous pain, a vertigo into which I sank, tremulous. I ejaculated almost immediately.
“You come very fast,” Madame Arnoux reprimanded me, pulling my hair. “You have to learn to hold off if you want to please me.”
“I’ll learn everything you want, guerrilla fighter, but be quiet now and kiss me.”
That same day, as we said goodbye, she invited me to supper to introduce me to her husband. We had drinks in their pretty apartment in Passy, decorated in the most bourgeois style one could imagine, with velvet drapes, deep carpets, antique furniture, end tables holding little porcelain figures, and, on the walls, engravings of mordant scenes by Gavarni and Daumier. We went to eat at a nearby bistrot where the specialty, according to the diplomat, was coq au vin. And for dessert, he suggested the tarte Tatin.
Monsieur Robert Arnoux was a short, bald man who had a small brush mustache that moved when he talked and eyeglasses with thick lenses, and who must have been twice the age of his wife. He treated her with great consideration, pulling out her chair and pushing it in and helping her with her raincoat. He was alert all night, pouring wine when her glass was empty and passing her the basket if she had no bread. He wasn’t very congenial, but rather arrogant and cutting, though he did actually seem cultured and spoke of Cuba and Latin America with great accuracy. His Spanish was perfect, with a slight inflection that revealed the years he had served in the Caribbean. In reality he wasn’t part of the French delegation to UNESCO but had been loaned by the Quai d’Orsay as an adviser and chief of staff to the director general, René Maheu, a colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron at the École Normale, about whom it was said that he was a circumspect genius. I had seen him a few times, always escorted by this squint-eyed little bald man who turned out to be the husband of Madame Arnoux. When I told him I worked as a temp translator for the department of Spanish, he offered to recommend me to “Charnés, an excellent person.” He asked what I thought about events in Peru, and I said I hadn’t received news from Lima for some time.
“Well, those guerrillas in the sierra,” he said with a shrug, as if he didn’t give them too much importance. “Robbing farms and assaulting the police. How absurd! Especially in Peru, one of the few Latin American countries trying to build a democracy.”
So the first actions of the Mirista guerrilla war had taken place.
“You have to leave that gentleman right away and marry me,” I told the Chilean girl the next time we saw each other. “Do you want me to believe you’re in love with a Methuselah who not only looks like your grandfather but is very ugly too?”
“Another slander against my husband and you won’t see me again,” she threatened, and in one of those lightning changes that were her specialty, she laughed. “Does he really look very old next to me?”
My second honeymoon with Madame Arnoux ended shortly after that meal, because as soon as I moved to the École Militaire district, Señor Charnés renewed my contract. Then, because of my schedule, I could see her only for short periods, an occasional midday when, during that free hour and a half between one and two thirty, instead of going up to the UNESCO cafeteria, I ate a sandwich with her in some bistrot, or a few evenings when, I don’t know with what excuse, she freed herself from Monsieur Arnoux to go to the movies with me. We’d watch the film holding hands, and I would kiss her in the darkness. “Tu m’embêtes,” she said, practicing her French. “Je veux voir le film, grosse bête.” She made rapid progress in the language of Montaigne, began to speak it without the slightest embarrassment, and her errors in syntax and phonetics were amusing, one more charming trait in her personality. We didn’t make love again until many weeks later, after a trip she took to Switzerland alone, when she returned to Paris several hours earlier than planned so she could spend some time with me in my apartment on Rue Joseph Granier.
Everything in the life of Madame Arnoux remained extremely mysterious, as it had been in the lives of Lily the Chilean girl and Arlette the guerrilla fighter. If what she told me was true, she now led an intense social life of receptions, dinners, and cocktail parties, where she rubbed elbows with le tout Paris; for example, yesterday she had met Maurice Couve de Murville, General de Gaulle’s minister of foreign relations, and last week she had seen Jean Coct
eau at a private screening of To Die in Madrid, a documentary by Frédéric Rossif, on the arm of his lover, the actor Jean Marais, who, by the way, was extremely handsome, and tomorrow she was going to a tea given by friends for Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah of Iran, who was on a private visit to Paris. Mere delusions of grandeur and snobbery, or had her husband in fact introduced her to a world of luminaries and frivolity that she found dazzling? And she was constantly making, or she told me she was making, trips to Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, for just two or three days, and for reasons that were never clear: expositions, gala events, parties, concerts. Since her explanations seemed so obviously fantastic to me, I chose not to ask more questions about her trips, pretending to believe absolutely the reasons she occasionally deigned to give me for those glittering excursions.
One afternoon in the middle of 1965, at UNESCO, a colleague at the office, an old Spanish republican who years ago had written “a definitive novel on the Civil War that corrected Hemingway’s errors,” entitled For Whom the Bells Don’t Toll, handed me the copy of Le Monde he was leafing through. The guerrillas of the Túpac Amaru column of the MIR, led by Lobatón and operating in the provinces of La Concepción and Satipo, in the department of Junín, had plundered the powder magazine of a mine, blown up a bridge across the Moraniyoc River, occupied the Runatullo ranch, and distributed the provisions to the peasants. And a couple of weeks later, it ambushed a detachment of the Civil Guard in the narrow Yahuarina pass. Nine guards, among them the major in command of the patrol, died in the fighting. In Lima, there had been bombing attacks on the Hotel Crillón and the Club Nacional. The Belaúnde government had decreed a state of siege throughout the central sierra. I felt my heart shrink. That day, and the days that followed, I was uneasy, the face of fat Paúl etched in my mind.
The Bad Girl: A Novel Page 6