It must have been six or eight months following the afternoon that Paúl gave me the bad news about Comrade Arlette when, very early one morning, the fat man, whom I hadn’t seen for a while, came by the hôtel so we could have breakfast together. We went to Le Tournon, a bistrot on the street of the same name, at the corner of Rue de Vaugirard.
“Even though I shouldn’t tell you, I’ve come to say goodbye,” he said. “I’m leaving Paris. Yes, mon vieux, I’m going to Peru. Nobody knows about it here, so you don’t know anything either. My wife and Jean-Paul are already there.”
The news left me speechless. And suddenly I was filled with a terrible fear, which I tried to conceal.
“Don’t worry,” Paúl said to calm me, with that smile that puffed up his cheeks and made him look like a clown. “Nothing will happen to me, you’ll see. And when the revolution triumphs, we’ll make you ambassador to UNESCO. That’s a promise!”
For a while we sipped our coffee in silence. My croissant was on the table, untouched, and Paúl, bent on making jokes, said that since something apparently was taking away my appetite, he’d make the sacrifice and take care of that crusty half-moon.
“Where I’m going the croissants must be awful,” he added.
Then, unable to control myself any longer, I told him he was going to commit an unforgivable act of stupidity. He wasn’t going to help the revolution, or the MIR, or his comrades. He knew it as well as I did. His weight, which left him gasping for breath after walking barely a block on Saint-Germain, would be a tremendous hindrance to the guerrillas in the Andes, and for that same reason, he’d be one of the first the soldiers would kill as soon as the uprising began.
“You’re going to get yourself killed because of the stupid gossip of a few rancorous types in Paris who accuse you of being an opportunist? Think it over, Fats, you can’t do something as mindless as this.”
“I don’t give a damn what the Peruvians in Paris say, compadre. It isn’t about them, it’s about me. This is a question of principle. It’s my obligation to be there.”
And he started to crack jokes again and assure me that, in spite of his 120 kilos, he had passed all the tests in his military training and, furthermore, had demonstrated excellent marksmanship. His decision to return to Peru had provoked arguments with Luis de la Puente and the leadership of the MIR. They all wanted him to stay in Europe as the movement’s representative to friendly organizations and governments, but he, with his bulletproof obstinacy, finally got his way. Seeing there was nothing I could do, and that my best friend in Paris had practically decided to commit suicide, I asked him if his departure meant that the insurrection would break out soon.
“It’s a question of a couple of months, maybe less.”
They had set up three camps in the mountains, one in the department of Cuzco, another in Piura, and the third in the central region, on the eastern slope of the Cordillera, near the edge of the Junín forest. Contrary to my prophecies, he assured me that the great majority of scholarship recipients had gone to the Andes. Fewer than ten percent had deserted. With an enthusiasm that sometimes verged on euphoria, he told me the recipients’ return operation had been a success. He was happy because he had directed it himself. They had gone back one by one or two by two, following complicated trajectories that made some of the kids go halfway around the world to hide their tracks. No one had been found out. In Peru, De la Puente, Lobatón, and the rest had established urban support networks, formed medical teams, installed radio stations at the camps and at scattered hiding places for supplies and explosives. Contacts with the peasant unions, especially in Cuzco, were excellent, and they expected that once the rebellion began, many members of the village communities would join the struggle. He spoke with joy and certainty, convinced of what he was saying, exalted. I couldn’t hide my sorrow.
“I know you don’t believe me at all, Don Incredulous,” he finally murmured.
“I swear I’d like nothing better than to believe you, Paúl. And have your enthusiasm.”
He nodded, observing me with his affectionate, full-moon smile.
“And you?” he asked, grasping my arm. “What about you, mon vieux?”
“Not me, not ever,” I replied. “I’ll stay here, working as a translator for UNESCO, in Paris.”
He hesitated for a moment, afraid that what he was going to say might hurt me. It was a question he undoubtedly had been biting his tongue over for a long time.
“Is this what you want out of life? Nothing but this? All the people who come to Paris want to be painters, writers, musicians, actors, theater directors, or get a doctorate, or make a revolution. You only want this, to live in Paris? I confess, mon vieux, I never could swallow it.”
“I know you couldn’t. But it’s the truth, Paúl. When I was a boy, I said I wanted to be a diplomat, but that was only so they’d send me to Paris. That’s what I want: to live here. Does it seem like a small thing to you?”
I pointed at the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens: heavy with green, they overflowed the fences and looked elegant beneath the overcast sky. Wasn’t it the best thing that could happen to a person? To live, as Vallejo said in one of his lines, among “the leafy chestnut trees of Paris”?
“Admit that you write poetry in secret,” Paúl insisted. “That it’s your hidden vice. We’ve talked about it often, with other Peruvians. Everybody thinks you write and don’t dare admit it because you’re self-critical. Or timid. Every South American comes to Paris to do great things. Do you want me to believe that you’re the exception to the rule?”
“I swear I am, Paúl. My only ambition is to go on living here, just as I’m doing now.”
I walked with him to the Métro station at Carrefour de l’Odéon. When we embraced, I couldn’t stop my eyes from filling with tears.
“Take care of yourself, Fats. Don’t do anything stupid up there, please.”
“Yes, yes, of course I will, Ricardo.” He gave me another hug. And I saw that his eyes were wet too.
I stood there, at the entrance to the station, watching him go down the steps slowly, held back by his round, bulky body. I was absolutely certain I was seeing him for the last time.
Fat Paúl’s departure left me feeling empty because he was the best friend I had during those uncertain times of my settling in Paris. Fortunately, the temp contracts at UNESCO and my classes in Russian and simultaneous interpretation kept me very busy, and at night I returned to my garret in the Hôtel du Sénat and hardly had the energy to think about Comrade Arlette or fat Paúl. Without intending to, at that time I believe I began to move away unconsciously from the Peruvians in Paris, whom I had previously seen with a certain degree of frequency. I didn’t look for solitude, but after I became an orphan and my aunt Alberta took me in, it hadn’t been a problem for me. Thanks to UNESCO, I no longer worried about surviving; my translator’s salary and occasional money orders from my aunt were enough for me to live on and to pay for my Parisian pleasures: movies, art shows, plays, and books. I was a steady customer at La Joie de Lire bookshop, on Rue Saint-Séverin, and at the bouquinistes on the quays along the Seine. I went to the National Popular Theater, the Comédie-Française, l’Odéon, and from time to time to concerts at the Salle Pleyel.
And during that time I also had the beginnings of a romance with Carmencita, the Spanish girl who, dressed in black from head to toe like Juliette Gréco, sang and accompanied herself on the guitar at L’Escale, the little bar on Rue Monsieur le Prince frequented by Spaniards and South Americans. She was Spanish but had never set foot in her country because her republican parents couldn’t or wouldn’t go back while Franco was alive. The ambiguity of that situation tormented her and frequently appeared in her conversation. Carmencita was tall and slim, with hair cut à la garçon and melancholy eyes. She didn’t have a great voice, but it was very melodious, and she gave marvelous performances of songs based on roundels, poems, verses, and refrains of the Golden Age, murmuring them with very effective pauses and emp
hasis. She had lived for a couple of years with an actor, and the break with him hurt her so much that—she told me this with the bluntness I initially found so shocking in my Spanish colleagues at UNESCO—she didn’t “want to hook up with any guy right now.” But she agreed to my taking her to the movies, to supper, and to the Olympia one night to hear Léo Ferré, whom we both preferred to Charles Aznavour and Georges Brassens, the other popular singers of the moment. When we said good night after the concert, at the Opéra Métro station, she said, brushing my lips, “I’m beginning to like you, my little Peruvian.” Absurdly enough, whenever I went out with Carmencita I was filled with disquiet, the feeling I was being unfaithful to the lover of Comandante Chacón, an individual I imagined as sporting a huge mustache and strutting around with a pair of pistols on his hips. My relationship with the Spanish girl went no further because one night I discovered her in a corner of L’Escale melting with love in the arms of a gentleman with a neck scarf and heavy sideburns.
A few months after Paúl left, Señor Charnés began to recommend me as a translator at international conferences and congresses in Paris or other European cities when there wasn’t work for me at UNESCO. My first contract was at the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the second, in Athens, at an international cotton congress. These trips, lasting only a few days but well paid, allowed me to visit places I never would have gone to otherwise. Though this new work cut into my time, I didn’t abandon my Russian studies or interpreting classes but attended them in a more sporadic way.
It was on my return from one of those short business trips, this time to Glasgow and a conference on customs tariffs in Europe, that I found a letter at the Hôtel du Sénat from a first cousin of my father’s, Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel, an attorney in Lima. This uncle once removed, whom I barely knew, informed me that my aunt Alberta had died of pneumonia and had made me her sole heir. It was necessary for me to go to Lima to expedite the formalities of the inheritance. Uncle Ataúlfo offered to advance me the price of a plane ticket against the inheritance, which, he said, would not make me a millionaire but would help out nicely during my stay in Paris. I went to the post office on Vaugirard to send him a telegram, saying I’d buy the ticket myself and leave for Lima as soon as possible.
Aunt Alberta’s death left me in a black mood for many days. She had been a healthy woman, not yet seventy. Though she was as conservative and judgmental as one could be, this spinster aunt, my father’s older sister, had always been very loving toward me, and without her generosity and care I don’t know what would have become of me. When my parents died in a senseless car accident, hit by a truck that fled the scene as they were traveling to Trujillo for the wedding of a daughter of some close friends—I was ten—she took their place. Until I finished my law studies and came to Paris, I lived in her house, and though her anachronistic manias often exasperated me, I loved her very much. From the time she adopted me, she devoted herself to me body and soul. Without Aunt Alberta, I’d be as solitary as a toadstool, and my connections to Peru would eventually vanish.
That same afternoon I went to the offices of Air France to buy a round-trip ticket to Lima, and then I stopped at UNESCO to explain to Señor Charnés that I had to take a forced vacation. I was crossing the entrance lobby when I ran into an elegant lady wearing very high heels and wrapped in a black fur-trimmed cape, who stared at me as if we knew each other.
“Well, well, isn’t it a small world,” she said, coming close and offering her cheek. “What are you doing here, good boy?”
“I work here, I’m a translator,” I managed to stammer, totally disconcerted by surprise, and very conscious of the lavender scent that entered my nostrils when I kissed her. It was Comrade Arlette, but you had to make a huge effort to recognize her in that meticulously made-up face, those red lips, tweezed eyebrows, silky curved lashes shading mischievous eyes that black pencil lengthened and deepened, those hands with long nails that looked as if they had just been manicured.
“How you’ve changed since I saw you last,” I said, looking her up and down. “It’s about three years, isn’t it?”
“Changed for the better or the worse?” she asked, totally self-assured, placing her hands on her waist and making a model’s half turn where she stood.
“For the better,” I admitted, not yet recovered from the impact she’d had on me. “The truth is, you look wonderful. I suppose I can’t call you Lily the Chilean girl or Comrade Arlette the guerrilla fighter anymore. What the hell’s your name now?”
She laughed, showing me the gold ring on her right hand.
“Now I use my husband’s name, the way they do in France: Madame Robert Arnoux.”
I found the courage to ask if we could have a cup of coffee for old times’ sake.
“Not now, my husband’s expecting me,” she said, mockingly. “He’s a diplomat and works here in the French delegation. Tomorrow at eleven, at Les Deux Magots. You know the place, don’t you?”
I was awake for a long time that night, thinking about her and about Aunt Alberta. When I finally managed to get to sleep, I had a wild nightmare about the two of them ferociously attacking each other, indifferent to my pleas that they resolve their dispute like civilized people. The fight was due to my aunt Alberta accusing the Chilean girl of stealing her new name from a character in Flaubert. I awoke agitated, sweating, while it was still dark and a cat was yowling.
When I arrived at Les Deux Magots, Madame Robert Arnoux was already there, at a table on the terrace protected by a glass partition, smoking with an ivory cigarette holder and drinking a cup of coffee. She looked like a model out of Vogue, dressed all in yellow, with white shoes and a flowered parasol. The change in her was truly extraordinary.
“Are you still in love with me?” was her opening remark, to break the ice.
“The worst thing is that I think I am,” I admitted, feeling my cheeks flush. “And if I weren’t, I’d fall in love all over again today. You’ve turned into a very beautiful woman, and an extremely elegant one. I see you and don’t believe what I see, bad girl.”
“Now you see what you lost because you’re a coward,” she replied, her honey-colored eyes glistening with mocking sparks as she intentionally exhaled a mouthful of smoke in my face. “If you had said yes that time I proposed staying with you, I’d be your wife now. But you didn’t want to get in trouble with your friend Comrade Jean, and you sent me off to Cuba. You missed the opportunity of a lifetime, Ricardito.”
“Can’t this be resolved? Can’t I search my conscience, suffer from heartache, and promise to reform?”
“It’s too late now, good boy. What kind of match for the wife of a French diplomat can a little pissant translator for UNESCO be?”
She didn’t stop smiling as she spoke, moving her mouth with a more refined flirtatiousness than I remembered. Contemplating her prominent, sensual lips, lulled by the music of her voice, I had an enormous desire to kiss her. I felt my heart beat faster.
“Well, if you can no longer be my wife, there’s always the possibility of our being lovers.”
“I’m a faithful spouse, the perfect wife,” she assured me, pretending to be serious. And with no transition: “What happened to Comrade Jean? Did he go back to Peru to make the revolution?”
“Several months ago. I haven’t heard anything about him or the others. And I haven’t read or heard of any guerrillas there. Those revolutionary castles in the air probably turned into smoke. And all the guerrillas went back home and forgot about it.”
We talked for almost two hours. Naturally, she assured me the love affair with Comandante Chacón had been nothing but the gossip of the Peruvians in Havana; in reality, she and the comandante had only been good friends. She refused to tell me anything about her military training, and, as always, avoided making any political comments or giving me details regarding her life on the island. Her only Cuban love had been the chargé d’affaires at the French embassy, Robert Arnoux, now her husband, who had been promot
ed to advisory minister. Weak with laughter and retrospective anger, she told me about the bureaucratic obstacles they had to overcome to marry, because it was almost unthinkable in Cuba that a scholarship recipient would leave her training. But in this regard it was certainly true that Comandante Chacón had been “loving” and helped her defeat the damn bureaucracy.
“I’d wager anything you went to bed with that damn comandante.”
“Are you jealous?”
I said yes, very. And that she was so attractive I’d sell my soul to the devil, I’d do anything if I could make love to her, or even just kiss her. I grasped her hand and kissed it.
“Be still,” she said, looking around in fake alarm. “Are you forgetting I’m a married woman? Suppose somebody here knows Robert and tells him about this?”
I said I knew perfectly well that her marriage to the diplomat was a mere formality to which she had resigned herself in order to leave Cuba and settle in Paris. Which seemed fine to me, because I too believed one could make any sacrifice for the sake of Paris. But, when we were alone, she shouldn’t play the faithful, loving wife, because we both knew very well it was a fairy tale. Without becoming angry in the least, she changed the subject and said there was a damn bureaucracy here too and she couldn’t get French nationality for two years, even though she was legally married to a French citizen. And they had just rented a nice apartment in Passy. She was decorating it now, and as soon as it was presentable she’d invite me over to introduce me to my rival, who, in addition to being congenial, was a very cultured man.
The Bad Girl: A Novel Page 5
