The Bad Girl: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The Château Meguru was a house of assignation operating in a labyrinthine building filled with hallways and dark stairs that led to rooms equipped with saunas, Jacuzzis, water beds, mirrors on the walls and ceilings, radios, and television sets, next to which were piles of pornographic videos with fantasies for every imaginable taste and a marked preference for sadomasochism. And in a small glass cabinet, condoms and vibrators of various sizes with features like rooster crests, tufts, and miters, as well as a rich paraphernalia of sadomasochistic toys, whips, masks, handcuffs, and chains. Like the buses, the streets, and the park, here too the cleanliness was meticulous and morbid. When I entered the room, I had the feeling I was in a laboratory or a space station. In fact, it was difficult for me to understand the enthusiasm of Salomón Toledano, who called these technological bedrooms and mini sex shops an Eden of pleasures.

  When I began to undress Kuriko, and saw and touched her soft skin, and smelled her perfume, in spite of my efforts to control myself, the anguish that had tightened my chest ever since she told me about her unconditional surrender to Fukuda overcame me. I burst into tears. She let me cry for a long time, not saying anything. Pulling myself together, I stammered some excuses, and I felt her caress my hair again.

  “We haven’t come here to be sad,” she said. “Put your arms around me and tell me you love me, foolish boy.”

  When we were both naked I saw she really had become very thin. You could see the ribs on her chest and back, and the small scar on her belly had lengthened. But her shape was as harmonious as ever, and her small breasts firm. I kissed her slowly, for a long time, everywhere on her body—the faint perfume of her skin seemed to emanate from inside—whispering words of love. I didn’t care about anything. Not even that she was bewitched by the Japanese. I was terrified that, because of the work he had her doing, she’d end up with her belly ripped open by bullets, or in an African jail. But then I would move heaven and earth to rescue her. Because, why deny it, I loved her more and more each day. And I would always love her, even if she deceived me with a thousand Fukudas, because she was the most beautiful and delicate woman in creation: my queen, my princess, my torturer, my liar, my Japanese girl, my only love. Kuriko had covered her face with her arm and said nothing, she didn’t even listen to me, totally concentrated on her pleasure.

  “What I like, good boy,” she finally ordered, spreading her legs and drawing my head to her sex.

  Kissing and sucking, relishing the fragrance that came from the depths of her womb, made me as happy as it always had. For a few eternal minutes, submerged in a silent, feverish exaltation, swallowing the sweet juices I absorbed from inside her, I forgot about Fukuda and the thousand and one adventures she had told me about. After I felt her climax I lifted myself over her, and with the same difficulty as always I penetrated her, hearing her groan and seeing her frown. I was very excited but managed to hold off inside her, lost in a frenzied vertigo until I finally ejaculated. For a long time I gripped her, holding her tight against me. I caressed her, bit her hair, her perfect ears, I kissed her and begged her pardon for not being able to hold back longer.

  “There’s a remedy so you don’t finish so quickly, so you keep your erection for a long time, for hours,” she finally said into my ear in her old, mischievous voice. “Do you know what it is? No, what would you know about these things, you’re such a saint. It’s a powder prepared from ground elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. Don’t laugh, it isn’t witchcraft, it’s true. I’ll give you a vial of it to remember me by in Paris. I’m telling you it’s worth a fortune all over Asia. This way you’ll think of Kuriko every time you go to bed with a Frenchwoman.”

  I raised my head from her neck to see her face: she looked very beautiful this way, pale, with bluish circles under her eyes and the languor she sank into after love.

  “Is that what you smuggle on your trips through Asia and Africa, aphrodisiacs prepared from elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns to swindle the gullible?” I asked, shaking with laughter.

  “It’s the best business in the world, though you may not believe it,” she said with a laugh, infected by my laughter. “The ecologists are to blame, they made the hunting of elephants, rhinoceroses, and who knows how many other animals illegal. Now those tusks and horns are worth a fortune in the countries here. I also bring in other things I don’t intend to tell you about. But that’s Fukuda’s big business. And now I have to go, good boy.”

  “I don’t plan to go back to Paris,” I said as I watched her, her back to me, walking naked on tiptoe to the bathroom. “I’ll live in Tokyo, and if I can’t kill Fukuda, I’ll settle for being your dog, just like you’re that gangster’s dog.”

  “Bowwow,” the Chilean girl barked.

  When I returned to my hotel, I found a message from Mitsuko. She wanted to see me alone on an urgent matter. Could I call her at her office early tomorrow?

  I called as soon as I got up, and with interminable Japanese courtesies, the Dragoman’s friend asked me to have coffee with her midmorning in the cafeteria at the Hotel Hilton, because she had something important to tell me. As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. It was Kuriko. She had told Fukuda that an old Peruvian friend was in Tokyo, and the Yakuza boss had invited me, along with the Dragoman and his girlfriend, to have a drink at their house tonight and then a dinner-show at the most popular musical in the Ginza. Had I heard right?

  “And then I said I’d be showing you around for the next few days. He didn’t object.”

  “How generous, how gallant,” I responded, indignant at what she had just told me. “You, asking permission of a man! I don’t recognize you, bad girl.”

  “You’ve made me blush,” she murmured in some confusion. “I thought you’d be happy to know we could see each other for as long as you’re in Tokyo.”

  “I’m jealous. Don’t you realize that? Before it didn’t matter, because your lovers or husbands didn’t matter to you, either. But this Japanese does. You never should have told me he can do whatever he wants with you. That dagger in my heart will go with me to the grave.”

  She laughed, as if I had made a joke.

  “I don’t have time now for those cheap, sentimental things, good boy. I’ll get rid of that jealousy of yours. I’ve made a wonderful plan for the day, you’ll see.”

  I asked her to pick me up at the Hilton cafeteria at noon, and I went to my appointment with Mitsuko. When I arrived she was already there, smoking. She seemed very nervous. She apologized again for her audacity in calling me, but, she said, she had no one else to turn to. “The situation has become very difficult and I don’t know what to do.” Perhaps I could advise her.

  “Are you referring to your relationship with Salomón?” I asked, suspecting what was to follow.

  “I thought our affair would be a little flirtation,” she agreed, exhaling smoke from her nose and mouth. “A pleasant, passing adventure, the kind that doesn’t involve commitment. But Salomón doesn’t understand it that way. He wants to turn this into a lifelong relationship. He insists we get married. I’ll never marry again. I went through one failed marriage and I know what it means. Besides, I have a career ahead of me. The truth is, his obstinacy is driving me crazy. I don’t know what to do to end this once and for all.”

  I wasn’t happy to have my suspicions confirmed. The Dragoman had built castles in the air and was going to suffer the greatest frustration of his life.

  “Since the two of you are such good friends and he thinks so highly of you, I thought, I mean, I hope it’s not an imposition, I thought you could help me.”

  “But how can I help you, Mitsuko?”

  “By talking to him. Explaining things to him. That I’ll never marry him. That I don’t want to and can’t continue this relationship in the way he insists on having it. The truth is he’s harassing me, crushing me. I have a great number of responsibilities at the company and this is affecting my work. It’s been very difficult for me to get where I am at Mitsubishi.”


  All the smokers in Tokyo seemed to have congregated in the impersonal cafeteria of the Hotel Hilton. Clouds of smoke and a strong odor of tobacco filled the place. You could hear English spoken at almost every table. There were as many foreigners as Japanese.

  “I’m very sorry, Mitsuko, but I won’t do it. This isn’t something third parties should interfere in, it’s between you and him. You ought to talk to him, openly, and right away. Because Salomón is head over heels in love with you. As he’s never been before with anybody else. And he’s filled with illusions. He thinks you love him too.”

  I told her some of what the Dragoman had said in his letters. How meeting her had changed the way he had thought about love ever since that distant experience of his youth in Berlin, when his Polish fiancée left him in the midst of preparations for the wedding. I could see that what I was saying didn’t move her in the least: she must have been sick of the poor Dragoman.

  “I understand that girl,” she remarked icily. “Your friend can be, I don’t know how to say this in English, overwhelming, suffocating. Sometimes, when we’re together, I feel I’m in prison. He doesn’t give me any space to be myself, to breathe. He wants to touch me all the time. Even though I’ve explained to him that here in Japan we’re not used to that kind of demonstrativeness in public.”

  She spoke in such a way that, within a few minutes, I thought the problem was even more serious: Mitsuko felt so sickened by the Dragoman’s kissing and pawing in full view of everyone, and by who knows what kind of besiegement in private, that she had grown to detest him.

  “Then, do you think I ought to talk to him?”

  “I don’t know, Mitsuko, don’t make me give you advice about something so personal. The only thing I want is for my friend to suffer as little as possible. And I believe that if you aren’t going to continue with him, if you’ve decided to break it off, it’s better to do it right away. It’ll be worse later.”

  When she left, with more excuses and courteous phrases, I felt uncomfortable and ill at ease, I would have preferred not to have had that conversation with Mitsuko, not to have learned that my friend was going to be brutally awakened from the dream he was in and returned to harsh reality. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait very long: Kuriko appeared in the doorway of the cafeteria and I went to meet her, happy to leave that smoke-filled den. She was wearing a little hat and a raincoat of the same light checkered cloth, dark flannel trousers, a high-necked garnet-colored sweater, and sporty moccasins. Her face looked fresher and younger than it had the night before. An adolescent over forty. Just seeing her made my bad mood vanish. She offered her lips so I could kiss her, something she didn’t usually do, I was always the one who searched out her mouth.

  “Come, let’s go, I’m going to take you to the Shinto temples, the nicest ones in Tokyo. In all of them there are animals roaming free, horses, roosters, doves. They’re considered sacred, reincarnations. And tomorrow, the Zen Buddhist temples, with their gardens of sand and rocks that the monks rake and rearrange every day. They’re beautiful too.”

  It was a day of intense activity, getting on and off buses, the aerodynamic subway, sometimes taxis. I entered and left temples, pagodas, and an enormous museum that had copies of Peruvian ceramics because—as a placard indicated—the institution, respectful of the prohibitions in Peru against taking objects from the archaeological patrimony out of the country, did not exhibit original pieces. But I don’t think I paid much attention to what I was seeing, because my five senses were concentrated on Kuriko, who held my hand almost all the time and was unusually affectionate toward me. She joked, and flirted, and laughed freely, eyes shining, each time she whispered in my ear, “Now some more cheap, sentimental things, good boy,” and I did as she asked. In midafternoon we sat at an isolated table in the cafeteria of the Museum of Anthropology to have a sandwich. She took off her checkered hat and smoothed her hair. She wore it very short and displayed her entire graceful neck with its hint of a little green snake of a vein.

  “Anybody who doesn’t know you would say you’re in love with me, bad girl. I don’t think you’ve ever been this affectionate since I first met you in Miraflores, when you were Chilean.”

  “I’m probably in love with you and don’t know it yet,” she said, passing her hand over my hair and bringing her face close so I could see how ironic and insolent her eyes were. “What would you do if I told you I am, and that we can live together?”

  “I’d have a heart attack and die right here. Are you, Kuriko?”

  “I’m happy because we can see each other every day you’re in Tokyo. I was worried about that, how I’d manage to see you every day. That’s why I dared tell Fukuda. And you see how well it turned out.”

  “The magnanimous gangster gave you permission to show your compatriot the charms of Tokyo. I hate your damn Yakuza boss. I would have preferred not to meet him, never to see him. Tonight I’ll go through hell watching you with him. Can I ask you a favor? Don’t touch him, don’t kiss him in front of me.”

  Kuriko burst into laughter and covered my mouth with her hand.

  “Be quiet, fool, he’d never do those things, not with me, not with anybody. No Japanese would. There’s such a big difference here between what you do in public and in private that what seems natural to us they find shocking. He isn’t like you. Fukuda treats me like his employee. At times, like his whore. But, what’s true is true, you’ve always treated me like a princess.”

  “Now you’re the one saying cheap, sentimental things.”

  I took her face between my hands and kissed her.

  “And you shouldn’t have told me that this Japanese treats you like his whore,” I whispered in her ear. “Don’t you see it’s like skinning me alive?”

  “I didn’t tell you. Let’s forget it, wipe it away.”

  Fukuda lived in a district far from the center of Tokyo, a residential area where very modern buildings of six or eight stories alternated with traditional houses that had tile roofs and tiny gardens and seemed about to be flattened by their tall neighbors. He had an apartment on the sixth floor of a building with a uniformed doorman who accompanied me to the elevator. This opened into the interior of the house, and after a small, bare reception room, there was a spacious dining room that had a large picture window through which you could see an infinite blanket of twinkling lights under a starless sky. The living room was soberly furnished, with blue ceramic plates on the walls, Polynesian sculptures on shelves, and carved ivory objects on a long, low table. Mitsuko and Salomón were already there, holding glasses of champagne. The bad girl was wearing a long, mustard-colored dress that left her shoulders bare, and a gold chain around her neck. She was made-up for a party and her hair was gathered in two knots. The hairstyle, which I hadn’t seen her wear before, accentuated her Oriental appearance. She could be taken for Japanese, now more than ever. She kissed me on the cheek and said to Mr. Fukuda in Spanish, “This is Ricardo Somocurcio, the friend I told you about.”

  Mr. Fukuda made the well-known Japanese bow of greeting. And in fairly comprehensible Spanish, his greeting as he extended his hand was this: “The Yakuza boss welcomes you.”

  The witticism left me totally disconcerted, not only because I wasn’t expecting it—I didn’t imagine that Kuriko could have told him what I’d said about him—but because Mr. Fukuda joked (was he joking?) without smiling, with the same inexpressive, neutral, parchment-like face he maintained all night. A face that looked like a mask. When I stammered, “Ah, you speak Spanish,” he shook his head and from then on spoke only a very hesitant, awkward English on the few occasions he did speak. He handed me a glass of champagne and indicated a seat next to Kuriko.

  He was a short man, even smaller than Salomón Toledano, almost skeletal, so that compared to the svelte, slim bad girl, he seemed delicate. I had formed so different an idea of him that I had the impression he was an impostor. He wore round, dark glasses with wire frames that he didn’t remove all night, which increased the di
scomfort he produced in me because I couldn’t tell if his eyes—I imagined them as cold and belligerent—were observing me or not. He had gray hair plastered against his skull, perhaps pomaded, and combed back in the style of Argentine tango singers of the 1950s. He wore a dark suit and tie, which gave him a certain funereal air, and he could remain motionless and silent for a long time, his small hands resting on his knees, as if he were petrified. But perhaps his most pronounced physical trait was a lipless mouth that barely moved when he spoke, like a ventriloquist’s. I felt so tense and uncomfortable that, uncharacteristically—I never could drink much because alcohol went to my head very quickly—that night I drank to excess. When Mr. Fukuda stood to indicate it was time for us to leave, I’d had three glasses of champagne and my head was beginning to spin. And, somewhat removed from the conversation being held almost exclusively by the Dragoman as he spoke of the regional variants in Japanese he had begun to distinguish, I asked myself in stupefaction: “What does this insignificant old man have that makes the bad girl talk about him the way she does?” What did he say to her, what did he do to her, to make her say he’s her vice, her sickness, that she’s possessed by him, that he can do what he wants with her? Since I didn’t find the answer, I felt more jealousy, more fury, more contempt for myself, and I cursed myself for having done something as stupid as coming to Japan. And yet, a second later, looking at her out of the corner of my eye, I told myself that only once before, at the dance at the Opéra in Paris, had she looked as desirable as she did tonight.

  Two taxis were waiting at the entrance to the building. I went alone with Kuriko, because that was indicated with a single gesture of command by Mr. Fukuda, who climbed into the other cab with the Dragoman and Mitsuko. As soon as we drove away, I felt the bad girl grasp my hand and move it to her legs so I would touch her.

  “Isn’t he supposed to be jealous?” I said, pointing at the other taxi ahead of us. “Why does he let you ride alone with me?”