The Bad Girl: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The bad girl was much better. At times it was difficult for me to see her leading a life that was so normal, enjoying her work and, it seemed to me, happy in, or at least resigned to, our petit bourgeois life, working hard all week, preparing supper at night, going to the movies, the theater, an art show, or a concert, and eating out on weekends, almost always by ourselves, or with the Gravoskis when they were here, for they were still spending several months a year in Princeton. We saw Yilal only in the summer; for the rest of the year he was in school in New Jersey. His parents had decided he should be educated in the United States. There was no trace of his old problem. He spoke and grew normally, and seemed very well integrated into the world of the United States. He sent us postcards or an occasional letter, and the bad girl wrote to him every month and was always sending him presents.

  Though they say only imbeciles are happy, I confess that I felt happy. Sharing my days and nights with the bad girl filled my life. In spite of her affection toward me, compared to how icy she had been in the past, she had, in fact, succeeded in making me live in constant uneasiness, apprehensive that one day, when least expected, she would return to her old ways and disappear without saying goodbye. She always managed to let me know—or, I should say, guess—that there was more than one secret in her daily life, a dimension of her existence to which I had no access, one that could give rise at any moment to an earthquake that would topple our life together. I hadn’t gotten it into my head yet that Lily, the Chilean girl, would accept the rest of her life being what it was now: the life of a middle-class Parisian, without surprises or mystery, submerged in strict routine and devoid of adventure.

  We were never so close as in the months following what we might call our reconciliation on the night the anonymous clochard emerged from the rain and darkness on the Pont Mirabeau to save my life. “Wasn’t it God himself who grabbed your legs, good boy?” she asked mockingly. She never fully believed I was on the verge of killing myself. “When people want to commit suicide, they do it, and there’s no clochard who can stop them, Ricardito,” she said more than once. During this time she still suffered occasionally from terror attacks. Then, pale as a ghost, with gray lips, ashen skin, and dark circles under her eyes, she would not move away from me for a second. She followed me around the house like a lapdog, holding my hand, clutching at my belt or shirt, because the physical contact gave her a minimum of security without which, she stammered, “I’d fall apart.” Seeing her suffer like that made me suffer too. And, at times, the insecurity that possessed her during the crisis was so great that she couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone; overwhelmed by embarrassment, her teeth chattering, she asked me to go in with her to the toilet and hold her hand while she did what she needed to do.

  I never could get a clear idea of the nature of the fear that would suddenly invade her, undoubtedly because it had no rational explanation. Did it consist of vague images, sensations, presentiments, the foreboding that something terrible was about to crush and annihilate her? “That and much more.” When she suffered one of the attacks of fear, which generally lasted a few hours, the bold woman with so much character became as defenseless and vulnerable as a little girl. I would sit her on my lap and have her curl up against me. I felt her trembling, sighing, clinging to me with a desperation that nothing could diminish. After a while, she would fall into a deep sleep. In one or two hours she awoke, feeling fine, as if nothing had happened. All my pleas that she return to the clinic in Petit Clamart were useless. In the end, I stopped insisting because the mere mention of the subject enraged her. During those months, in spite of being so close physically, we hardly ever made love, because not even in the intimacy of bed could she achieve the minimum of tranquility, the momentary surrender that would allow her to yield to pleasure.

  Work helped her emerge from this difficult period. The crises didn’t disappear all at once, but they did become less frequent and less intense. Now she seemed much better, almost transformed into a normal woman. Well, at heart I knew she’d never be a normal woman. And I didn’t want her to be one, because what I loved in her were the indomitable and unpredictable aspects of her personality.

  In the talks we had during his convalescence, Uncle Ataúlfo never asked me questions about my wife’s past. He would send her his regards, he was delighted to have her in the family, he hoped that one day she would want to come to Lima so he could meet her, because if not, he would have no choice but to visit us in Paris. He had framed the photograph taken on the day of our marriage as we were leaving the mayor’s office, with the Panthéon as a backdrop, and kept it on an end table in the living room.

  In these conversations, generally in the afternoon after lunch and sometimes lasting for hours, we talked a great deal about Peru. He had been an enthusiastic Belaúndista all his life, but now, sorrowfully, he confessed that Belaúnde Terry’s second government had disappointed him. Except for returning the newspapers and television stations expropriated by the military dictatorship of Velasco Alvarado, he hadn’t dared to correct any of the pseudo-reforms that had impoverished and inflamed Peru even further and provoked an inflation that would give victory to APRA in the next elections. And, unlike his nephew Alberto Lamiel, my uncle had no illusions concerning Alan García. I told myself that in the country of my birth, from which I was disengaged in an increasingly irreversible way, there undoubtedly were many men and women like him, basically decent people who had dreamed all their lives of the economic, social, cultural, and political progress that would transform Peru into a modern, prosperous, democratic society with opportunities open to all, only to find themselves repeatedly frustrated, and, like Uncle Ataúlfo, had reached old age—the very brink of death—bewildered, asking themselves why we were moving backward instead of advancing and were worse off now, with more discrimination, inequality, violence, and insecurity than when they were starting out.

  “How right you were to go to Europe, nephew,” was his refrain, which he repeated as he smoothed the graying beard he had grown. “Imagine what would have happened to you if you had stayed here to work, with all these blackouts, bombs, and kidnappings. And the lack of work for young people.”

  “I’m not so sure, uncle. Yes, it’s true, I have a profession that allows me to live in a marvelous city. But there I’ve become a person without roots, a phantom. I’ll never be French, even though I have a passport that says I am. There I’ll always be a métèque. And I’m no longer Peruvian, because I feel even more of a foreigner here than I do in Paris.”

  “Well, I suppose you know that according to a survey by the University of Lima, the primary ambition of sixty percent of young people is to go abroad, the immense majority to the United States and the rest to Europe, Japan, Australia, wherever. We can’t reproach them, can we? If their country can’t give them work, or opportunities, or security, it’s legitimate for them to want to leave. That’s why I admire Alberto so much. He could have stayed in the United States with a magnificent job but chose to come and break his heart in Peru. I hope he doesn’t regret it. He has a great deal of esteem for you, you know that, don’t you, Ricardo?”

  “Yes, uncle, and I for him. Really, he’s very amiable. Thanks to my nephew I’ve seen Lima’s other faces. The faces of the millionaires and of the shantytowns.”

  Just at that moment the phone rang and it was Alberto Lamiel, calling me.

  “Would you like to meet old Arquímedes, the breakwater builder I told you about?”

  “Man, of course I would,” I said enthusiastically.

  “They’re building a new jetty at La Punta, and the municipal engineer, Chicho Cánepa, is a friend of mine. Tomorrow morning, if that’s all right with you. I’ll pick you up at eight. That isn’t too early for you, is it?”

  “I must be very old, Uncle Ataúlfo, even though I’m only fifty,” I said when I hung up. “Because Alberto, being your nephew, is really my cousin. But he insists on calling me uncle. He must think I’m prehistoric.”

  “It is
n’t that,” Uncle Ataúlfo said with a laugh. “Since you live in Paris, you inspire his respect. Living there is a credential for him, the equivalent of having triumphed in life.”

  The next morning, punctual as a clock, Alberto came by a few minutes before eight, accompanied by Cánepa, the engineer in charge of work at the Cantolao beach and the pier at La Punta, a mature man with dark glasses and a large beer belly. He got out of Alberto’s Cherokee and gave me the front seat. The two engineers wore jeans, sport shirts, and leather jackets. I felt ridiculous in my suit, dress shirt, and tie next to those gentlemen in casual attire.

  “Old Arquímedes will make a huge impression on you,” Alberto’s friend, whom he called “Chicho,” assured me. “He’s a wonderful madman. I’ve known him twenty years, and the stories he tells still leave me openmouthed. He’s a magician, you’ll see. And a terrific storyteller.”

  “Somebody ought to tape him, I swear, Uncle Ricardo,” Alberto joined in. “His tales about breakwaters are terrific, I always try to get him to talk.”

  “I still can’t wrap my mind around what you told me, Alberto,” I said. “I keep thinking you were kidding. It seems impossible that to build an ocean jetty, you need a wizard more than you need an engineer.”

  “Well, you ought to believe it,” said Chicho Cánepa with a laugh. “Because if anybody knows that, I do, from bitter experience.”

  I told him to stop using the formal usted with me, I wasn’t that old, and from now on we’d use tú.

  We were following the beach highway, heading for Magdalena and San Miguel at the foot of the naked cliffs, and to our left was a rough sea, half hidden by fog, where some surfers rode the waves in their rubber suits even though it was still winter. Silent, indistinct, they rode the ocean, some with their arms raised to keep their balance. Chicho Cánepa recounted what happened to him with one of the jetties at Costa Verde, which we had just passed, the one that was partially built and had a mast at the tip. The municipality of Miraflores had hired him to widen the road and build two breakwaters to create a beach on the ocean. He had no difficulty with the first one, which was built in the place Arquímedes advised. Chicho wanted the second one to be a symmetrical distance from the other, between the Costa Verde and La Rosa Náutica restaurants. Arquímedes objected: it wouldn’t stand up, the sea would swallow it.

  “There was no reason for it not to stand up,” said the engineer Cánepa emphatically. “I know about these things, it’s what I studied. The waves and currents were the same as the ones pounding the first. The backward rush of the water was identical, as well as the depth of the marine base. The laborers insisted I listen to Arquímedes, but it seemed like the whim of an old drunk to justify his pay. And I built it where I wanted to. An evil hour, Ricardo, my friend! I used twice the amount of stones and mortar as in the first, and the damn thing sanded up over and over again. It caused eddies that altered the entire environment and created currents and tides that made the beach dangerous for swimmers. In less than six months the ocean pulverized the damn jetty and left it the ruin you just saw. Each time I pass there my face burns. A monument to my shame! The municipality fined me and I ended up losing money.”

  “What explanation did Arquímedes give you? Why couldn’t the breakwater be built there?”

  “The explanations he gives aren’t explanations,” said Chicho. “They’re simpleminded, like: ‘The sea won’t accept it there, it doesn’t fit there, it’s going to move there, and if it moves, the water will knock it over.’ Nonsense like that, meaningless things. Witchcraft, as you say, or whatever it is. But after what happened to me at Costa Verde, I keep my mouth shut and do what the old man says. As far as breakwaters are concerned, engineering isn’t worth anything: he knows more.”

  The truth was I felt impatient to meet this marvel of flesh and blood. Alberto hoped we would find him watching the ocean. Then Arquímedes became a spectacle: sitting on the beach, his legs crossed like a Buddha, immobile, frozen, he could spend hours scrutinizing the water, in a state of metaphysical communication with the hidden forces of the tides and the gods of the marine depths, questioning them, listening to them, or praying to them in silence. Until, at last, he seemed to come back to life. Muttering something he would rise to his feet and with an energetic gesture proclaim: “Yes, you can,” or “No, you can’t”—in which case you had to go and find another place favorable to the breakwater.

  And then suddenly, when we reached the little square of San Miguel, wet with misty rain, not suspecting the turmoil that would be unleashed deep inside me, it occurred to the engineer Chicho Cánepa to say, “He’s a marvelous, fanciful old man. He’s always telling the wildest stories, because he also has delusions of grandeur. At one point he fabricated a story about having a daughter in Paris who was going to bring him over there to live with her, in the City of Light!”

  It was as if the morning had suddenly turned dark. I felt the acid sometimes produced by an old duodenal ulcer, a sputtering of lights in my head, I don’t exactly know what I felt but there were a number of things, and then I knew why, ever since Alberto Lamiel decided at the Regatas Unión to tell me the story of Arquímedes and the breakwaters of Lima, I’d had an uneasy feeling, the strange itch that precedes the unexpected, the premonition of a cataclysm or a miracle, as if the story contained something that deeply concerned me. I barely could control my desire to shower Chicho Cánepa with questions about what he had just said.

  As soon as we got out of the van on the Figueredo de Punta seawall, facing the beach at Cantolao, I knew who Arquímedes was without their needing to point him out to me. He wasn’t sitting still. He was walking with his hands in his pockets along the shore where gentle waves came to die on the little beach of black stones and pebbles that I hadn’t seen since my adolescence. He was an ashen, wretched, emaciated cholo, a mestizo with thin, disheveled hair, someone who had surely passed long ago into the time when old age begins, the consolatory season when chronological distances disappear and a man can be seventy, eighty, even ninety years old without anyone noticing the difference. He wore a threadbare blue shirt with hardly a button left on it, which the wind of the cold, gray morning inflated like a sail, revealing the old man’s hairless, bony chest as, slightly bent and stumbling over the stones on the beach, he went back and forth, striding like a heron and threatening to fall down at each step.

  “That’s him, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Who else would it be?” said Chicho Cánepa. And cupping his hands, he shouted: “Arquímedes! Arquímedes! Come here, somebody wants to meet you. Just think, he came all the way from Europe to see your face.”

  The old man stopped and his head gave a jerk. He looked at us, disconcerted. Then he nodded and came toward us, balancing on the black and lead-colored stones on the beach. When he was closer, I could see him more clearly. His cheeks were sunken, as if he had lost all his teeth, and his chin was divided by a cleft that could very well have been a scar. The liveliest and most powerful part of his person was his eyes, small, watery, but intense and belligerent, which looked without blinking, with insolent fixity. He must have been very old, given the wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes, the ones that gave his neck the appearance of a rooster’s crest, and the gnarled hand with black nails he held out to greet us.

  “You’re so famous, Arquímedes, that even if you don’t believe it, my uncle Ricardo has come from France to meet the great builder of breakwaters in Lima,” Alberto said, slapping him on the back. “He wants you to explain to him how and why you know where to build a breakwater and where not to.”

  “You can’t explain it,” the old man said, shaking my hand and spraying saliva when he talked. “You feel it in your gut. Happy to meet you, caballero. Are you a Frenchy?”

  “No, I’m Peruvian. But I’ve lived there for many years.”

  He had a faint, high-pitched voice and barely said the end of his words, as if he lacked the breath to pronounce all the letters. Almost without a pause, as soon a
s he greeted me he turned to Chicho Cánepa.

  “I’m sorry, but I think you won’t be able to build here, engineer.”

  “What do you mean, ‘think’?” The engineer was furious and raised his voice. “Are you sure or not?”

  “I’m not sure,” the old man admitted, uncomfortable, wrinkling his face even more. He paused, and taking a quick look at the ocean, he added, “I mean, I don’t even know if I’m sure. Don’t get angry with me, but something’s telling me no.”

  “Don’t fuck around, Arquímedes,” the engineer Cánepa protested, waving his arms. “You have to give me a definitive answer. Or I won’t pay you, damn it.”

  “It’s just that sometimes the ocean’s a crafty female, one of those who say ‘Yes, but no,’ and ‘No, but yes.’” The old man laughed, opening wide his large mouth where barely two or three teeth were visible. And then I realized his breath was saturated with the sharp, acrid smell of some very strong cane liquor, or pisco.