Uncle Ataúlfo wrote to me from time to time—he had replaced Aunt Alberta as my only correspondent in Peru—his letters filled with commentary on the political situation. Through him I learned that although the guerrilla war was very sporadic in Lima, military actions in the central and southern Andes had convulsed the country. El Comercio and La Prensa, and Apristas and Odristas now allied against the government, were accusing Belaúnde Terry of weakness in the face of the Castrista rebels, and even of secret complicity with the insurrection. The government had made the army responsible for suppressing the rebels. “This is turning ugly, nephew, and I’m afraid there may be a coup at any moment. You can hear the sound of swords crossing in the air. When don’t things go badly in our Peru!” To his affectionate letters Aunt Dolores would always add a message in her own hand.
In a totally unexpected way, I ended up getting along very well with Monsieur Robert Arnoux. He showed up one day at the Spanish office at UNESCO to suggest that, when it was time for lunch, we go to the cafeteria to have a sandwich together. For no special reason, just to chat for a while, the time needed to have a filtered Gitane, the brand we both smoked. After that, he stopped by from time to time, when his commitments allowed, and we’d have coffee and a sandwich while we discussed the political situation in France and Latin America, and cultural life in Paris, about which he was also very knowledgeable. He was a man who read and had ideas, and he complained that even though working with René Maheu was interesting, the problem was that he had time to read only on weekends and couldn’t go to the theater and concerts very frequently.
Because of him I had to rent a dinner jacket and wear formal dress for the first and undoubtedly the last time in my life in order to attend a benefit for UNESCO—a ballet, followed by dinner and dancing—at the Opéra. I had never been inside this imposing building, adorned with the frescoes Chagall had painted for the dome. Everything looked beautiful and elegant to me. But even more beautiful and elegant was the ex-Chilean girl and ex-guerrilla fighter, who, in an ethereal strapless gown of white crepe with a floral print, an upswept hairdo, and jewels at her throat, ears, and fingers, left me openmouthed with admiration. The old men who were friends of Monsieur Arnoux came up to her all night, kissed her hand, and stared at her with glittering, covetous eyes. “Quelle beauté exotique!” I heard one of those excited drones say. At last I was able to ask her to dance. Holding her tight, I murmured in her ear that I’d never even imagined she could ever be as beautiful as she was at that moment. And it tore my heart out to think that, after the dance, in her house in Passy, it would be her husband and not me who would undress her and make love to her. The beauté exotique let herself be adored with a condescending little smile and then finished me off with a cruel remark: “What cheap, sentimental things you say to me, Ricardito.” I inhaled the fragrance that floated all around her and wanted her so much I could hardly breathe.
Where did she get the money for those clothes and jewels? I was no expert in luxury items, but I realized that to wear those exclusive models and change outfits the way she did—each time I saw her she was wearing a new dress and exquisite new shoes—one needed more money than a UNESCO functionary could earn, even if he was the director’s right hand. I tried to learn the secret by asking her if, besides occasionally deceiving Monsieur Robert Arnoux with me, she wasn’t also deceiving him with some millionaire thanks to whom she could dress in clothes from the great shops and wear jewels from the Arabian Nights.
“If you were my only lover, I’d walk around like a beggar, little pissant,” she replied, and she wasn’t joking.
But she immediately offered an explanation that seemed perfect, though I was certain it was false. The clothes and jewels she wore weren’t bought but lent by the great modistes along Avenue Montaigne and the jewelers on Place Vendôme; as a way to publicize their creations, they had chic ladies in high society wear them. And so because of her social connections, she could dress and adorn herself like the most elegant women in Paris. Or did I think that on the miserable salary of a French diplomat she’d be able to compete with the grandes dames in the City of Light?
A few weeks after the dance at the Opéra, the bad girl called me at my office at UNESCO.
“Robert has to go with the director to Warsaw this weekend,” she said. “You won the lottery, good boy! I can devote all of Saturday and Sunday to you. Let’s see what you arrange for me.”
I spent hours thinking about what would surprise and amuse her, what odd places in Paris she didn’t know, what performances were being-offered on Saturday, what restaurant, bar, or bistrot might appeal to her because of its originality or secret, exclusive character. Finally, after shuffling through a thousand possibilities and discarding all of them, I chose for Saturday morning, if the weather was good, an excursion to the Asnières dog cemetery on a tree-filled little island in the middle of the river, and supper at Allard, on Rue de Saint-André-des-Arts, at the same table where one night I had seen Pablo Neruda eating with two spoons, one in each hand. To enhance its stature in her eyes, I’d tell Madame Arnoux it was the poet’s favorite restaurant and invent the dishes he always ordered. The idea of spending an entire night with her, making love to her, enjoying on my lips the flutter of her “sex of nocturnal eyelashes” (a line from Neruda’s poem “Material nupcial” that I had murmured in her ear the first night we were together in my garret at the Hôtel du Sénat), feeling her fall asleep in my arms, waking on Sunday morning with her warm, slim body curled up against mine, kept me, for the three or four days I had to wait until Saturday, in a state in which hope, joy, and fear that something would frustrate our plan barely allowed me to concentrate on my work. The reviewer had to correct my translations several times.
That Saturday was a glorious day. At midmorning, in the new Dauphine I had bought the previous month, I drove Madame Arnoux to the Asnières dog cemetery, which she had never seen. We spent more than an hour wandering among the graves—not only dogs but cats, rabbits, and parrots were buried there—and reading the deeply felt, poetic, cheerful, and absurd epitaphs with which owners had bid farewell to their beloved animals. She really seemed to be having a good time. She smiled and kept her hand in mine, her eyes the color of dark honey were lit by the springtime sun, and her hair was tousled by a breeze blowing along the river. She wore a light, transparent blouse that revealed the top of her breasts, a loose jacket that fluttered with her movements, and brick-red high-heeled boots. She spent some time contemplating the statue to the unknown dog at the entrance, and with a melancholy air lamented having “so complicated” a life, otherwise she would adopt a puppy. I made a mental note: that would be my gift on her birthday, if I could find out when it was.
I put my arm around her waist, pulled her to me, and said that if she decided to leave Monsieur Arnoux and marry me, I’d undertake to see that she had a normal life and could raise all the dogs she wanted.
Instead of answering, she asked, in a mocking tone, “The idea of spending the night with me makes you the happiest man in the world, Miraflores boy? I’m asking so you can tell me one of those cheap, sentimental things you love saying so much.”
“Nothing could make me happier,” I said, pressing my lips to hers. “I’ve been dreaming about it for years, guerrilla fighter.”
“How many times will you make love to me?” she continued in the same mocking tone.
“As many as I can, bad girl. Ten, if my body holds out.”
“I’ll allow you only two,” she said, biting my ear. “Once when we go to bed, and another when we wake up. And no getting up early. I need a minimum of eight hours’ sleep so I’ll never have wrinkles.”
She had never been as playful as she was that morning. And I don’t think she ever was again. I didn’t remember having seen her so natural, giving herself up to the moment without posing, without inventing a role for herself, as she breathed in the warmth of the day and let herself be penetrated and adored by the light that filtered through the tops of th
e weeping willows. She seemed much younger than she actually was, almost an adolescent and not a woman close to thirty. We had a ham sandwich with pickles and a glass of wine at a bistrot in Asnières, on the banks of the river, and then went to the Cinémathèque on Rue d’Ulm to see Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis, which I had seen but she hadn’t. When we came out she spoke about how young Jean-Louis Barrault and María Casares looked, and how they didn’t make movies like that anymore, and she confessed that she had cried at the end. I suggested we go to my apartment to rest until it was time for supper, but she refused: going home now would give me ideas. Instead, the afternoon was so nice we ought to walk for a while. We went in and out of the galleries along Rue de Seine and then sat down at an open-air café on Rue de Buci for something cold to drink. I told her I had seen André Breton around there one morning, buying fresh fish. The streets and cafés were full of people, and the Parisians had those open, pleasant expressions they wear on the rare days when the weather’s nice. I hadn’t felt this happy, optimistic, and hopeful for a long time. Then the devil raised his tail and I saw the headline in Le Monde, which the man next to me was reading: ARMY DESTROYS HEADQUARTERS OF PERUVIAN GUERRILLAS. The subtitle said: “Luis de la Puente and Other MIR Leaders Killed.” I hurried to buy the paper at the stand on the corner. The byline was Marcel Niedergang, the paper’s correspondent in South America, and there was an inset by Claude Julien explaining what the Peruvian MIR was and giving information about Luis de la Puente and the political situation in Peru. In August 1965, special forces of the Peruvian army had surrounded Mesa Pelada, a hill to the east of the city of Quillabamba, in the Cuzcan valley of La Convención, and captured the Illarec ch’aska (morning star) camp, killing a good number of guerrillas. Luis de la Puente, Paúl Escobar, and a handful of their followers had managed to escape, but the commandos, after a long pursuit, surrounded and killed them. The article indicated that military planes had bombed Mesa Pelada, using napalm. The corpses had not been returned to their families or shown to the press. According to the official communiqué, they had been buried in a secret location to prevent their graves from becoming destinations for revolutionary pilgrimages. The army showed reporters the weapons, uniforms, documents, as well as maps and radio equipment the guerrillas had stored at Mesa Pelada. In this way the Pachacútec column, one of the rebel focal points of the Peruvian revolution, had been wiped out. The army was hopeful that the Túpac Amaru column, headed by Guillermo Lobatón and also under siege, would soon fall.
“I don’t know why you’re making that face, you knew this would happen sooner or later,” Madame Arnoux said in surprise. “You yourself told me so many times that this was the only way it could turn out.”
“I said it as a kind of magic charm, so it wouldn’t happen.”
I had said it and thought it and feared it, of course, but it was different knowing it had happened and that Paúl, the good friend and companion of my early days in Paris, was now a corpse rotting in some desolate wasteland in the eastern Andes, perhaps after being executed—and no doubt tortured if the soldiers had captured him alive. I overcame my feelings and proposed to the Chilean girl that we drop the subject and not let the news ruin the gift from the gods of my having her to myself for an entire weekend. She managed that with no difficulty; for her, it seemed to me, Peru was something she had very deliberately expelled from her thoughts like a mass of bad memories (poverty, racism, discrimination, being disregarded, multiple frustrations?), and, perhaps, she had made the decision a long time ago to break forever with her native land. But in spite of my efforts, I couldn’t forget the damn news in Le Monde and concentrate on the bad girl. Throughout supper at Allard, the ghost of my friend took away my appetite and my good humor.
“It seems to me you’re in no mood to faire la fête,” she said with compassion when we were having dessert. “Do you want to leave it for another time, Ricardito?”
I insisted I didn’t and kissed her hands and swore that in spite of the awful news, spending a night with her was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. But when we reached my apartment on Joseph Granier, and she took a coquettish baby-doll, her toothbrush, and a change of clothes for the next day out of her overnight case, and we lay down on the bed—I had bought flowers for the living room and bedroom—I began to caress her and realized, to my embarrassment and humiliation, that I was in no condition to make love to her.
“This is what the French call a fiasco,” she said, laughing. “Do you know this is the first time it’s happened to me with a man?”
“How many have you been with? Let me guess. Ten? Twenty?”
“I’m terrible at math,” she said in anger. And she took her revenge with a command: “Make me come with your mouth. I have no reason to be in mourning. I hardly knew your friend Paúl, and besides, remember it was his fault I had to go to Cuba.”
And just like that, as casually as she would have lit a cigarette, she spread her legs and lay back, her arm across her eyes, in that total immobility, that deep concentration into which, forgetting about me and the world around her, she sank to wait for her pleasure. She always took a long time to become excited and finish, but that night she took even longer than usual, and two or three times my tongue cramped and for a few moments I had to stop kissing and sucking her. Each time her hand admonished me, pulling my hair or pinching my shoulder. At last I felt her move and heard the quiet little purr that seemed to move up from her belly to her mouth, and I felt her limbs contract and heard her long, satisfied sigh. “Thank you, Ricardito,” she murmured. She fell asleep almost immediately. I was awake for a long time, my throat tight with anguish. My sleep was restless, and I had nightmares I could barely recall the next day.
I awoke at about nine. The sun was no longer shining. Through the skylight I could see the overcast sky, the color of a burro’s belly, the eternal Parisian sky. She slept, her back to me. She seemed very young and fragile with her girl’s body, quiet now, hardly stirred by her light, slow breathing. No one, seeing her like this, could have imagined the difficult life she must have had since she was born. I tried to picture her childhood, being poor in the hell that Peru is for the poor, and her adolescence, perhaps even worse, the countless difficulties, defeats, sacrifices, concessions she must have suffered in Peru, in Cuba, in order to move ahead and reach the place she was now. And how hard and cold having to defend herself tooth and nail against misfortune had made her, all the beds she’d had to pass through to avoid being crushed by a life her experiences had convinced her was a battlefield. I felt immense tenderness toward her. I was sure it was my good fortune, and also my misfortune, that I would always love her. Seeing her and feeling her breathe excited me. I began to kiss her on the back, very slowly, her pert little ass, her neck and shoulders, and, turning her toward me, her breasts and mouth. She pretended to sleep but was already awake, since she arranged herself on her back to receive me. She was wet, and for the first time I could enter her without difficulty, without feeling I was making love to a virgin. I loved her, I loved her, I couldn’t live without her. I begged her to leave Monsieur Arnoux and come to me, I’d earn a lot of money, I’d pamper her, I’d satisfy her every whim, I’d…
“Well, you’ve redeemed yourself,” and she burst into laughter, “and you even held out longer than usual. I thought you’d become impotent after last night’s fiasco.”
I proposed fixing breakfast, but she wanted us to go out, she was longing for un croissant croustillant. We showered together, she let me wash and dry her and, as I sat on the bed, watch her dress, comb her hair, and put on makeup. I slipped her shoes onto her feet, first kissing her toes one by one. We walked hand in hand to a bistrot on Avenue de la Bourdonnais where, in fact, the half-moons crunched as if they had just come out of the oven.
“If instead of sending me to Cuba that time you had let me stay with you here in Paris, how long would we have lasted, Ricardito?”
“All our lives. I’d have made you so ha
ppy you never would have left me.”
She stopped joking and looked at me, very serious, and somewhat contemptuous.
“How naïve you are, what a dreamer.” She enunciated each syllable, defying me with her eyes. “You don’t know me. I’d only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you’ll never be, unfortunately.”
“And what if money wasn’t happiness, bad girl?”
“Happiness, I don’t know and I don’t care what it is, Ricardito. What I am sure about is that it isn’t the romantic, vulgar thing it is for you. Money gives you security, it protects you, it lets you enjoy life thoroughly and not worry about tomorrow. It’s the only happiness you can touch.”
She sat looking at me, wearing the cold expression that intensified sometimes in a strange way and seemed to freeze the life around her.
“You’re very nice but you have a terrible defect: lack of ambition. You’re satisfied with what you have, aren’t you? But it isn’t anything, good boy. That’s why I couldn’t be your wife. I’ll never be satisfied with what I have. I’ll always want more.”
I didn’t know how to respond, because though it hurt me, she had said something that was true. For me, happiness was having her and living in Paris. Did that mean you were unredeemably mediocre, Ricardito? Yes, probably. Before we went back to the apartment, Madame Robert Arnoux went to make a phone call. She came back with a worried face.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go, good boy. Things have become difficult.”
She offered no explanations and wouldn’t let me take her to her house or wherever she had to go. We went up for her overnight bag and I accompanied her to the taxi stand next to the École Militaire Métro station.
The Bad Girl: A Novel Page 7