The Bad Girl

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I said that was fine but I’d pay for the room myself. I didn’t intend to trade my honest profession of interpreter for that of kept man.

  She burst out laughing, spontaneously this time.

  “Of course!” she exclaimed. “You’re a good little Miraflores gentleman and gentlemen don’t take money from women.”

  For the third time she ran her hand through my hair and this time I caught her hand and kissed it.

  “Did you think I’d go to bed with you in the dump that fag Juan Barreto lent you in Earl’s Court? You haven’t realized yet that I’m at the top now.”

  A minute later she was gone, after telling me not to leave the Russell Hotel for another quarter of an hour, because with David Richardson everything was possible, including his having her followed every time she came to London by one of those detectives who specialized in adultery.

  I waited fifteen minutes and then, instead of the tube, I took a long walk under a cloudy sky and intermittent showers. I went to Trafalgar Square, crossed St. James’s Park and Green Park, smelling the wet grass and watching the branches of fat oaks dripping water, went down almost all of Brompton Road, and an hour and a half later reached the half-moon of Philbeach Gardens, tired and happy. The long walk had calmed me and allowed me to think without the tumult of chaotic ideas and sensations I had experienced since my visit to Newmarket. How could seeing her again after so much time upset you so much, Ricardito? Because everything I told her was true: I was still crazy about her. It was enough for me to see her to realize that, despite my knowing that any relationship with the bad girl was doomed to failure, the only thing I really wanted in life with the passion others bring to the pursuit of fortune, glory, success, power, was having her, with all her lies, entanglements, egotism, and disappearances. A cheap, sentimental thing, no doubt, but also true that I wouldn’t do anything until Friday but curse how slowly the hours went by until I could see her again.

  On Friday, when I arrived at the Russell Hotel with my overnight bag, the receptionist, an Indian, confirmed that the room had been reserved for the day in my name. It had already been paid for. He added that “my secretary” had told them I came in from Paris with some frequency, and in that case the hotel would find a way to give me the special price they used for regular clients, “except in high season.” The room overlooked Russell Square, and though it wasn’t small it seemed so because it was crowded with objects: end tables, lamps, miniature animals, prints, and paintings of Mongol warriors with popping eyes, twisted beards, and curved scimitars who seemed to be rushing the bed with very evil intentions.

  The bad girl arrived half an hour after me, wrapped in a close-fitting leather coat, a little matching hat, and knee-high boots. In addition to her handbag she carried a portfolio filled with notebooks and textbooks for classes on modern art that, she told me later, she took three times a week at Christie’s. Before looking at me she glanced around the room and nodded briefly in approval. When, finally, she deigned to look at me, I already had her in my arms and had begun to undress her.

  “Be careful,” she instructed. “Don’t wrinkle my clothes.”

  I took them off with all the precaution in the world, studying each thing she wore as if it were a precious, unique object, kissing with devotion every centimeter of skin that came into view, breathing in the soft, lightly perfumed aura that emanated from her body. Now she had a small, almost invisible scar near her groin because her appendix had been removed, and her pubis had even less hair than before. I felt desire, emotion, tenderness as I kissed her insteps, her fragrant underarms, the suggestion of little bones in her spine, and her motionless buttocks, as delicate to the touch as velvet. I kissed her small breasts at length, mad with happiness.

  “You haven’t forgotten what I like, good boy,” she finally whispered in my ear.

  And, without waiting for my reply, she turned on her back, spreading her legs to make a place for my head as she covered her eyes with her right arm. I felt her begin to move farther and farther from me, the Russell Hotel, London, in order to concentrate totally, with an intensity I’d never seen in any other woman, on the solitary, personal, egotistical pleasure my lips had learned to give her. Licking, sucking, kissing, nibbling her small sex, I felt her grow wet and vibrate. It took her a long time to finish. But how delicious and exciting it was to feel her purring, moving, rocking, submerged in the vertigo of desire, until at last a long wail shook her body from head to toe. “Now, now,” she whispered in a choked voice. I entered her easily and embraced her with so much strength that she came out of the inertia in which the orgasm had left her. She groaned, twisting, trying to slip out from under my body, complaining, “You’re crushing me.”

  With my mouth pressed against hers, I pleaded, “For once in your life, tell me you love me, bad girl. Even if it isn’t true, say it. I want to know how it sounds, just once.”

  Afterward, when we had finished making love and were talking, lying naked on the yellow spread, menaced by the fierce Mongol warriors, and I was caressing her breasts, her waist, and kissing the almost invisible scar and playing with her smooth belly, pressing my ear to her navel and listening to the deep sounds of her body, I asked her why she hadn’t made me happy, saying that small lie into my ear. Hadn’t she said it so many times to so many men?

  “That’s why,” she replied immediately, pitiless. “I’ve never said ‘I love you, I adore you’ and really meant it. Never. I’ve only said those things as a lie. Because I’ve never loved anybody, Ricardito. I’ve lied to all of them, always. I think the only man I’ve never lied to in bed is you.”

  “Well, coming from you, that’s a declaration of love.”

  Did she finally have what she had wanted for so long, now that she was married to a rich and powerful man?

  A shadow veiled her eyes, and her voice thickened.

  “Yes and no. Because even though I have security now and can buy whatever I want, I’m obliged to live in Newmarket and spend my life talking about horses.”

  She said this with a bitterness that seemed to come from the bottom of her soul. And then, suddenly, she was sincere with me in an unexpected way, as if she could no longer keep everything inside. She despised horses with all her heart, along with her friends and acquaintances in Newmarket, and the owners, trainers, jockeys, stableboys, grooms, dogs, cats, and every person who directly or indirectly had anything to do with equines, damn monsters that were the only topic of conversation and concern of the horrible people who surrounded her. Not only at the races, the training tracks, the stables, but also at dinners, receptions, weddings, birthday parties, and casual encounters, the people in Newmarket talked about the diseases, accidents, trial runs, victories, or defeats of those awful quadrupeds. This life had soured her days, and even her nights, because recently she’d been having nightmares about the horses of Newmarket. And even though she didn’t say so, it was easy to guess that her immeasurable hatred for horses and Newmarket had not skipped over her husband. Mr. David Richardson, moved by his wife’s suffering and depression, had given her permission a few months ago to come to London—a city that the fauna of Newmarket detested and where they rarely set foot—and take mini-courses on art history at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, classes in flower arranging at Out of the Bloom in Camden, and even sessions in yoga and Transcendental Meditation at an ashram in Chelsea that distracted her a little from the psychological devastation caused in her by horses.

  “Well, well, bad girl,” I said mockingly, delighted to hear what she was telling me. “Have you discovered that money isn’t always happiness? Can I hope, then, that one day you’ll say goodbye to Mr. Richardson and marry me? Paris is more amusing than the horsey hell of Suffolk, as you know.”

  But she was in no mood for joking. The repugnance she felt for Newmarket was even more serious than it seemed on that occasion, a real trauma. I think that never, not once on all the many afternoons we saw each other and made love over the next two years in various rooms of the
Russell Hotel—I had the impression she knew them all by heart—never did the bad girl fail to vent her anger in a rant against the horses and people of Newmarket, whose life she thought monotonous, stupid, the emptiest in the world. Why, if she was so unhappy with the life she led, didn’t she put an end to it? Why was she waiting to leave David Richardson, a man she clearly had not married for love?

  “I don’t dare ask him for a divorce,” she confessed on one of those afternoons. “I don’t know what would happen to me.”

  “Nothing would happen to you. You’re legally married, aren’t you? Couples here get unmarried without any problem.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, going a little further with her confidences than usual. “We were married in Gibraltar and I’m not sure if the marriage is valid here. And I don’t know how to check that without David finding out. Good boy, you don’t know the rich. Least of all David. To marry me he worked out a divorce with his lawyers that almost left his first wife in the street. I don’t want the same thing to happen to me. He has the best lawyers, the best connections. And in England I’m less than nobody, a poor shit.”

  I never could learn how she had met him, when and in what way her romance with David Richardson had blossomed and catapulted her from Paris to Newmarket. It was clear she had miscalculated when she thought that with this conquest she would also conquer the unlimited freedom she associated with a fortune. Not only was she not happy, but apparently she had been happier as the wife of the French functionary she had abandoned. When, on another afternoon, she brought up Robert Arnoux and insisted I recount in exact detail the conversation we’d had on the night he invited me to supper at Chez Eux, I did as she asked, omitting nothing, even telling her how her ex-husband’s eyes had filled with tears when he told me she had fled with all his savings in their joint account in a Swiss bank.

  “Like a good Frenchman, the only thing that hurt him was the money,” she said, not at all impressed. “His savings! A few measly francs that weren’t enough for me to live on for a year. He used me to sneak money out of France. Not only his but his friends’ money too. I could have been arrested if I had been caught. Besides, he was a miser, the worst thing anybody can be in this life.”

  “Since you’re so cold and perverse, why don’t you kill David Richardson, bad girl? You’ll avoid the risks of a divorce and inherit his fortune.”

  “Because I wouldn’t know how to do it without getting caught,” she replied, not smiling. “Do you want to do it? I’d give you ten percent of the inheritance. It’s an awful lot of money.”

  We were playing, but when I heard her say those outrageous things to me so openly, I couldn’t help shuddering. She was no longer the vulnerable girl who had gone through a thousand difficulties and come out of them thanks to uncommon boldness and determination; now she was a grown woman, convinced that life was a jungle where only the worst triumphed, and ready to do anything not to be conquered and to keep moving higher. Even sending her husband to the next world in order to inherit his money, if she could do it with an absolute guarantee of impunity? “Of course,” she said with that fierce, mocking look. “Do I scare you, good boy?”

  She enjoyed herself only when David Richardson took her on his business trips to Asia. According to what she said, something fairly vague, her husband was a broker, the middleman for various commodities that Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan exported to Europe, which is why he made frequent trips to meet with the suppliers. She didn’t always go with him; when she did, she felt emancipated. Seoul, Bangkok, Tokyo were the compensations that allowed her to endure Newmarket. While he had his dinners and business meetings, she was a tourist, visiting temples and museums and buying clothes or decorative objects for her house. For example, she had a marvelous collection of Japanese kimonos and a great variety of the articulated marionettes used in Balinese theater. Sometime when her husband was traveling, would she let me come to Newmarket and see her house? No, never. I should never show up there again, even if Juan Barreto invited me. Except, of course, if I decided to take her homicidal proposition seriously.

  Those two years when I spent long periods of time in swinging London sleeping at Juan Barreto’s pied-à-terre in Earl’s Court and seeing the bad girl once or twice a week were the happiest I’d ever had. I earned less money as an interpreter because, for the sake of London, I turned down many contracts in Paris and other European cities, including Moscow, where international conferences and congresses became more frequent at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, but I did accept fairly low-paying jobs whose only attraction was that they took me to England. But not for anything in the world would I have traded the joy of arriving at the Russell Hotel, where I came to know all the staff by name, and waiting, in a trance, for Mrs. Richardson. She surprised me each time with a new dress, lingerie, perfume, or shoes. One afternoon, as I’d asked her to do, she brought several kimonos from her collection in a bag and put on a show for me, walking and moving around the room with her feet very close together and wearing the stereotyped smile of a geisha. I always had noticed an Asian trace in her small body and the slightly greenish tinge of her skin, the inheritance of some ancestor she knew nothing about, and that afternoon it seemed more obvious than ever.

  We made love, we talked while we were naked and I toyed with her hair and body, and on occasion, if time allowed, we took a walk in a park. If it was raining we went to the movies and watched the picture holding hands. Or we’d have tea with the scones she liked at Fortnum and Mason, and once we had the famous, elaborate tea served at the Hotel Ritz, but we never went back because as we were leaving she spotted a couple from Newmarket at one of the tables. I saw her turn pale. In those two years I became convinced that, in my case at least, it wasn’t true that love diminished or disappeared with use. Mine grew each day. I studied carefully the galleries, museums, art cinemas, expositions, recommended itineraries—the oldest pubs in the city, the antiques fairs, the settings for Dickens’s novels—so I could suggest walks that would amuse her, and each time I also surprised her with some little gift from Paris that would impress her for its originality, if not its price. At times, when she was happy with the gift, she would say, “You deserve a kiss,” and place her lips on mine for a second. Resting there quietly, they let themselves be kissed but didn’t respond.

  Did she come to love me a little in those two years? She never said so, of course, that would have been a demonstration of weakness for which she never could have forgiven herself—or me. But I think she became accustomed to my devotion, to feeling flattered by the love I poured over her with both hands, more than she ever would have confessed, even to herself. She liked my giving her pleasure with my mouth and then, as soon as she’d had an orgasm, penetrating and “irrigating” her. And my telling her all the possible forms and thousand ways I loved her. “What cheap, sentimental things are you going to tell me today?” was sometimes her greeting.

  “That the most exciting thing in you, after this tiny clitoris of yours, is your Adam’s apple. When it goes up, but principally when it dances down your throat.”

  If I managed to make her laugh I felt fulfilled, the way I had when I was a boy after the daily good deed the brothers at the Colegio Champagnat in Miraflores recommended we do in order to sanctify the day. One afternoon we had a curious incident, with some consequences. I was working at a congress organized by British Petroleum, in a conference hall at Uxbridge on the outskirts of London, and I couldn’t leave to meet her—I had asked permission to be away in the afternoon—because the colleague who was supposed to replace me fell ill. I called her at the Russell Hotel, giving her all kinds of excuses. Without saying a word she hung up on me. I called again and she wasn’t in the room.

  The following Friday—generally we saw each other on Wednesdays and Fridays, the days of her supposed art classes at Christie’s—she made me wait more than two hours without calling to explain the delay. Finally she showed up, frowning, when I no l
onger thought she was coming.

  “Couldn’t you have called?” I protested. “You’ve set my nerves—”

  I couldn’t finish because a slap, delivered with all her strength, closed my mouth.

  “You don’t stand me up, little pissant.” She quivered with indignation, and her voice broke. “If you have a date with me—”

  I didn’t let her finish the sentence because I threw myself at her and with all the weight of my body pushed her onto the bed. She defended herself a little at first, but soon she stopped resisting. And almost immediately I felt her kissing and embracing me, and helping me take off her clothes. She’d never done anything like it before. For the first time I felt her body embracing me, entwining her legs with mine, her lips pressing against mine, her tongue struggling with mine. Her hands dug into my back, my neck. I asked her to forgive me, it would never happen again, I thanked her for making me so happy and showing me for the first time that she loved me too. Then I heard her sob and saw that her eyes were wet.

  “My love, darling, don’t cry, it’s too silly.” And I fondled her, kissing away her tears. “It won’t happen again, I promise. I love you, I love you.”

  Afterward, when we dressed, she remained silent, her expression rancorous, regretting her weakness. I tried to improve her mood by joking.

  “Did you stop loving me so soon?”

  She looked at me angrily for a long time, and when she spoke her voice sounded very hard.

  “Make no mistake, Ricardito. Don’t think I made that scene because I’m crazy about you. No man matters very much to me, and you’re no exception. But I have my pride, and nobody stands me up in a hotel room.”

  I said she was sorry I had discovered that in spite of all her boasting, defiance, and insults, she did feel something for me. It was the second serious error I had committed with the bad girl since the day when, instead of keeping her in Paris, I encouraged her to go to Cuba for guerrilla training. She looked at me very gravely, said nothing for some time, and finally murmured, full of haughtiness and scorn, “Is that what you think? You’ll find out it isn’t true, little pissant.”