The things Lily recounted about Santiago were for me a foretaste of Parisian heaven. I listened to her with so much envy! In that city, unlike here, there were no poor people or beggars in the streets, parents allowed boys and girls to stay at parties until dawn and dance cheek to cheek, and unlike here, you never saw old people like mothers and aunts spying on young people when they danced just to scold them if they went too far. In Chile boys and girls were allowed to see adult movies and, from the time they were fifteen, smoke without hiding. Life was more fun there than in Lima because there were more movies, circuses, theaters, shows, and parties with live orchestras, and ice-skating shows and ballet companies and musicals were always coming to Santiago from the United States, and no matter what job they had, Chileans earned two or three times more than Peruvians did.
But if all this was true, why had the parents of the Chilean girls left that marvelous country and come to Peru? Because at first glance they weren’t rich but very poor. For the moment they didn’t live the way we did, the girls and boys of Barrio Alegre, in houses with butlers, cooks, maids, and gardeners, but in a little apartment in a narrow, three-story building on Calle Esperanza, near the Gambrinus restaurant. And in the Miraflores of those years, in contrast to what would happen sometime later when tall buildings began to spring up and the little houses disappeared, the only people who lived in apartments were the poor, that diminished species of human to which—ah, how sad—the Chilean girls seemed to belong.
I never saw their parents. They never took me or any neighborhood girl or boy home. They never celebrated a birthday or gave a party or invited us to have tea and play, as if they were ashamed to let us see the modesty of the place where they lived. The fact that they were poor and embarrassed by everything they didn’t have filled me with compassion, increased my love for the Chilean girl, and inspired me with altruistic plans: “When Lily and I get married, we’ll bring her whole family to live with us.”
But my Miraflores friends, especially the girls, were suspicious about Lucy and Lily never opening their doors to us. “Are they so hungry they can’t even organize a party?” they asked. “Maybe it’s not because they’re poor, maybe they’re just stingy,” said Tico Tiravante, trying to make things better and only making them worse.
The kids in the neighborhood suddenly began to speak badly of the Chilean girls because of their makeup and the clothes they wore, making fun of their scant wardrobe—we all knew by heart those skirts, blouses, and sandals that they combined in every possible way to hide the fact they had so little—and filled with righteous indignation, I’d defend them saying that this talk was just envy, green envy, poisonous envy, because at parties the Chilean girls never sat out a dance, all the boys lined up to dance with them—“They let them rub up, of course they don’t sit out a dance,” replied Laura—or because, at the get-togethers in the neighborhood, at games, at the beach, or in Parque Salazar, they were always the center of attention and all the boys crowded around them, while the rest of the girls…“They’re show-offs and brazen and with them you boys dare to tell the dirty jokes we wouldn’t let you tell us!” Teresita counterattacked. And, finally, because the Chilean girls were great-looking, modern, smart, while the Barrio Alegre girls were prudish, backward, old-fashioned, narrow-minded, and bigoted. “And proud of it!” said Ilse, mocking us.
But even though they gossiped about them, the girls from Barrio Alegre kept inviting the Chilean girls to parties and going with them in a group to the Miraflores beaches, to twelve o’clock Mass on Sundays, to matinees, and to take the obligatory stroll around Parque Salazar from dusk until the first stars came out, which twinkled in the Lima sky that summer from January to March without, I’m certain, being hidden for a single day by clouds, something that happens four-fifths of the year in this city. They did this because we boys asked them to, and because, at heart, the girls of Miraflores were as fascinated by the Chileans as the bird is by the cobra that hypnotizes it before swallowing it, as the saint is by the sinner, the angel by the devil. They envied in these foreigners from the remote land of Chile the freedom they didn’t have to go everywhere, to stay out walking or dancing until very late without asking permission for just a little while longer, and without their papa, their mama, their older sister or aunt coming to spy through the windows at a party to see with whom they were dancing and how, or to take them home because it was already midnight, a time when decent girls weren’t dancing or talking on the street with men—that’s what show-offs, cheap girls, and mixed breeds did—but were in their own houses and their own beds, dreaming of the angels. They envied the fact that the Chilean girls were so free and easy and danced so boldly, not caring if they showed their knees, and moving their shoulders, their small breasts, their bottoms, as no Miraflores girl did, and probably allowing the boys liberties the girls didn’t even dare to imagine. But, if they were so free, why didn’t either Lily or Lucy want a steady boyfriend? Why did they turn down all of us who fell for them? Lily hadn’t said no only to me; she also turned down Lalo Molfino and Lucho Claux, and Lucy had turned down Loyer, Pepe Cánepa, and the early-maturing Julio Bienvenida, the first Miraflores boy whose parents, even before he finished school, gave him a Volkswagen for his fifteenth birthday. Why didn’t the Chilean girls, who were so free, want boyfriends?
That and other mysteries related to Lily and Lucy were unexpectedly clarified on March 30, 1950, the last day of that memorable summer, at the party given by Marirosa Álvarez-Calderón, the fat little pig. A party that would define an era and remain forever in the memories of everyone who was there. The Álvarez-Calderón house, at the corner of 28 de Julio and La Paz, was the prettiest in Miraflores, and perhaps in Peru, with its gardens of tall trees, yellow tipa flowers, liana vines, rose-bushes, and its blue-tiled pool. Marirosa’s parties always had a band and a swarm of waiters serving pastries, canapés, sandwiches, juice, and different kinds of nonalcoholic drinks all night, parties for which the guests prepared as if we were ascending to heaven. Everything was going wonderfully until, with the lights turned down, a crowd of girls and boys surrounded Marirosa and sang “Happy Birthday,” and she blew out the fifteen candles on the cake and we got in line to give her the required embrace.
When it was the turn of Lily and Lucy to give her a hug, Marirosa, a happy little pig whose rolls of fat overflowed her pink dress with the bow in the back, kissed them on the cheek and opened her eyes wide.
“You’re Chileans, right? I’m going to introduce you to my aunt Adriana. She’s Chilean too, she just arrived from Santiago. Come on, come on.”
She took them by the hand and led them inside the house, shouting, “Aunt Adriana, Aunt Adriana, I have a surprise for you.”
Through the glass of the long picture window, an illuminated rectangle that framed a large living room with a fireplace, walls with landscapes and oil portraits, easy chairs, sofas, carpets, and a dozen ladies and gentlemen holding glasses, I saw Marirosa burst in a few seconds later with the Chilean girls, and I also saw, pale and fleeting, the silhouette of a very tall, very well-dressed, very beautiful woman with a cigarette in a long holder, coming forward to greet her young compatriots with a condescending smile.
I went to drink some mango juice and sneak a Viceroy between the cabanas at the pool. There I ran into Juan Barreto, my friend and classmate at the Colegio Champagnat, who had also come to hide in these abandoned places to have a smoke. He asked me point-blank, “Would you care if I asked Lily, Slim?”
He knew that even though it looked as if we were going steady, we weren’t, and he also knew—like everybody else, he pointed out—that I had asked her three times and three times she had turned me down. I replied that I cared a lot, because even though Lily had turned me down this wasn’t a game she was playing—it’s the way girls were in Chile—but in fact she liked me, it was as if we were going steady, and besides, that night I’d begun to ask her again for the fourth and definitive time, and she was about to say yes when the cake with the
fifteen candles for the fat little pig interrupted us. But now, when she came out after talking to Marirosa’s aunt, I’d go on asking her and she’d say yes and after tonight she would be my absolutely genuine girlfriend.
“Well, then, I’ll have to ask Lucy,” said Juan Barreto with resignation. “The lousy thing is, compadre, the one I really like is Lily.”
I encouraged him to ask Lucy and I promised to put in a good word for him so she’d say yes. He and Lucy and Lily and I would be a sensational foursome.
Talking with Juan Barreto next to the pool and watching the couples on the dance floor as they moved to the beat of the Ormeño Brothers Orchestra—they might not have been Pérez Prado but they were very good, what trumpets, what drums—we smoked a couple of Viceroys. Why had it occurred to Marirosa to introduce her aunt to Lucy and Lily just at that moment? What were they babbling about for so long? They were ruining my plan, damn it. Because it was true, when they announced the cake with the fifteen candles I had begun my fourth—and successful this time, I was sure—declaration of love to Lily after convincing the band to play “I Like You,” the best bolero for proposing to girls.
They took forever to come back. And they came back transformed: Lucy very pale, with dark circles under her eyes, as if she’d seen a ghost and was recovering from the strong effects of the next world, and Lily in a rage, an embittered expression on her face, her eyes flashing, as if there in the house those fashionable ladies and gentlemen had given her a very hard time. Right then I asked her to dance, one of those mambos that was her specialty—“Mambo No. 5”—and I couldn’t believe it, Lily couldn’t do anything right, she lost the beat, became distracted, made mistakes, stumbled, and her little sailor’s hat slipped, making her look fairly ridiculous. She didn’t even bother to straighten it. What had happened?
I’m sure that by the time “Mambo No. 5” was over, the entire party knew because the fat little pig made it her responsibility to tell everyone. What pleasure that gossip must have felt as she told everything in detail, coloring and exaggerating the story while she opened her eyes wide, wider, with curiosity and horror and joy! What unhealthy happiness—what satisfaction and revenge—all the girls from the neighborhood must have felt, the ones who so envied the Chilean girls who came to Miraflores to revolutionize the customs of the children graduating into adolescence that summer!
I was the last to find out, when Lily and Lucy had already mysteriously disappeared, without saying goodbye to Marirosa or anybody else—“Champing at the bit with embarrassment,” my aunt Alberta would declare—and when the awesome rumor had spread all over the dance floor and cleared away the boys and girls who forgot about the band, their boyfriends and girlfriends, and making out, and went off to whisper, repeat, be alarmed, be exalted, and open wide their eyes brimming over with malice: “You know? You found out? You heard? What do you think? Can you believe it? Can you imagine? Imagine! They’re not Chileans! No, no they weren’t! Nothing but a story! They’re not Chileans, they don’t know a thing about Chile! They lied! They fooled us! They invented everything! Marirosa’s aunt found them out! What a pair of bandits, what bandits!”
They were Peruvians, that’s all they were. Poor things! Poor things! Aunt Adriana, who’d just arrived from Santiago, must have had the surprise of her life when she heard them speak with the accent that had fooled us but which she identified immediately as fake. How bad the Chilean girls must have felt when the fat little pig’s aunt, suspecting the farce, began to ask about their family in Santiago, the neighborhood where they lived in Santiago, the school they attended in Santiago, about the relatives and friends of their family in Santiago, making Lucy and Lily swallow the bitterest pill of their short lives, becoming crueler and crueler until she hounded them from the living room and they were in ruins, spiritually and physically demolished, and she could proclaim to her relatives and friends and the stupefied Marirosa: “In a pig’s eye they’re Chileans! Those girls never set foot in Santiago, and if they’re Chileans, I’m Tibetan!”
That last day of the summer of 1950—I had just turned fifteen too—was the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality.
I never knew with any certainty the complete story of the false Chileans, and neither did anyone else except the two girls, but I did hear conjectures, gossip, fantasies, and supposed revelations that, like a wake of rumors, followed the counterfeit Chileans for a long time even after they ceased to exist—in a manner of speaking—because they were never again invited to parties, or games, or teas, or neighborhood get-togethers. Malicious gossips said that even though the decent girls from Barrio Alegre and Miraflores no longer had anything to do with them and looked away if they passed them on the street, the boys, the fellows, the men did go after them, in secret, the way they went after cheap girls—and what else were Lily and Lucy but two cheap girls from some neighborhood like Breña or El Porvenir who, to conceal their origins, had passed themselves off as foreigners and slipped in among the decent people of Miraflores?—to make out with them, to do those things that only half-breeds and cheap girls let men do.
Later on, I imagine, they began to forget about Lily and Lucy, because other people, other matters eventually replaced that adventure of the last summer of our childhood. But I didn’t. I didn’t forget them, especially not Lily. And even though so many years have gone by, and Miraflores has changed so much, as have our customs, and barriers and prejudices have been obscured that once had been flaunted with insolence and now are disguised, I keep her in my memory, and evoke her again at times, and hear the mischievous laugh and see the mocking glance of her eyes the color of dark honey, and watch her swaying like a reed to the rhythms of the mambo. And still think that, in spite of my having lived for so many summers, that one was the most fabulous of all.
2
The Guerrilla Fighter
The México Lindo was on the corner of Rue des Canettes and Rue Guisard, near Place Saint-Sulpice, and during my first year in Paris, when money was very tight, on many nights I’d station myself at the restaurant’s back door and wait for Paúl to appear with a little package of tamales, tortillas, carnitas, or enchiladas that I would take to my garret in the Hôtel du Sénat to eat before they got cold. Paúl had started out at the México Lindo as a kitchen boy, and in a short time, thanks to his culinary skills, he was promoted to chef’s assistant, and by the time he left it all to dedicate himself body and soul to the revolution, he was the restaurant’s regular cook.
In those early days of the 1960s, Paris was experiencing the fever of the Cuban Revolution and teeming with young people from the five continents who, like Paúl, dreamed of repeating in their own countries the exploits of Fidel Castro and his bearded ones, and prepared for that, in earnest or in jest, in café conspiracies. In addition to earning his living at the México Lindo, when I met him a few days after my arrival in Paris, Paúl was taking biology courses at the Sorbonne, which he also abandoned for the sake of the revolution.
We became friends at a little café in the Latin Quarter where a group of South Americans would meet, the kind Sebastián Salazar Bondy wrote about in Poor People of Paris, a book of short stories. When he learned of my financial difficulties, Paúl offered to give me a hand as far as food was concerned because there was more than enough at the México Lindo. If I came to the back door at about ten at night, he would offer me a “free, hot banquet,” something he had already done for other compatriots in need.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and he was very, very fat—a barrel with legs—and good-hearted, friendly, and talkative. He always had a big smile on his face, which inflated his plump cheeks even more. In Peru he had studied medicine for several years and served some time in prison for being one of the organizers of the famous strike at the University of San Marcos in 1952, during the dictatorship of General Manuel Odría. Before coming to Paris he spent a couple of years in Madrid, wh
ere he married a girl from Burgos. They’d just had a baby.
He lived in the Marais, which in those days, before André Malraux, General de Gaulle’s minister of culture, undertook his great cleanup and restoration of old, dilapidated mansions covered by the grime of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a neighborhood of poor artisans, cabinetmakers, cobblers, tailors, Jews, and a large number of indigent students and artists. In addition to those rapid encounters at the service entrance of the México Lindo, we would also get together at midday at La Petite Source on the Carrefour de l’Odéon or on the terrace of Le Cluny, at the corner of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, to drink coffee and recount our adventures. Mine consisted exclusively of multiple efforts to find a job, something that was not at all easy since no one in Paris was impressed by my law degree from a Peruvian university or by my being fairly fluent in English and French. His had to do with preparations for the revolution that would make Peru the second Socialist Republic of Latin America. One day he suddenly asked if I’d be interested in going to Cuba on a scholarship to receive military training, and I told Paúl that even though I felt all the sympathy in the world for him, I had absolutely no interest in politics; in fact, I despised politics, and all my dreams were focused—excuse my petit bourgeois mediocrity, compadre—on getting a nice steady job that would let me spend, in the most ordinary way, the rest of my days in Paris. I also told him not to tell me anything about his conspiracies, I didn’t want to live with the anxiety of accidentally revealing some information that might harm him and his associates.
The Bad Girl: A Novel Page 2
