The Bad Girl (12 page)

playing a game?"

I was disconcerted and didn't know how to answer.

"All of UNESCO knows," he added, quietly, sarcastically. "I'm the

laughingstock of the agency. My wife has left me, and I don't even

know for whom. I thought it was you, Senor Somocurcio."

His voice broke before he finished pronouncing my name. His

chin quivered and his teeth seemed to be chattering. I stammered

that I was sorry, I hadn't heard anything, and stupidly repeated that

this month I had been working away from Paris, in Vienna and

Rome. And I said goodbye, but Monsieur Arnoux didn't respond.

I was so surprised and chagrined that I felt a wave of nausea in

the elevator and had to throw up in the bathroom in the corridor.

With whom had she gone away? Could she still be living in Paris

with her lover? One thought accompanied me in the days that

followed: the weekend she had given me was her goodbye. So I'd

have something special to pine for. The leavings you throw to the

dog, Ricardito. Some calamitous days followed that brief visit to

Monsieur Arnoux. For the first time in my life, I suffered from

insomnia. I was in a sweat all night, my mind blank, as I clutched

the Guerlain toothbrush that I kept like a charm in my night table,

chewing on my despair and jealousy. The next day I was a wreck, my

body shaken by chills, without energy for anything, and I didn't even

want to eat. The doctor prescribed Nembutal, which didn't put me to

sleep so much as knock me out. I awoke distraught and shaking, as

if I had a savage hangover. I kept cursing myself for how stupid I

had been when I sent her off to Cuba, putting my friendship with

Paul ahead of the love I felt for her. If I had held on to her we would

still be together, and life wouldn't be this sleeplessness, this

emptiness, this bile.

Senor Charnes helped me out of the slow emotional dissolution

in which I found myself by giving me a month's contract. I wanted

to fall on my knees and thank him. With the routine of work at

UNESCO, I was slowly emerging from the crisis I had been in since

the disappearance of the ex-Chilean girl, the ex-guerrilla fighter, the

ex-Madame Arnoux. What did she call herself now? What

personality, what name, what history had she adopted for this new

stage in her life? Her new lover must be very important, much more

important than the adviser to the director of UNESCO, who was too

modest for her ambitions now, and who was devastated by her

leaving. She had given me clear warning that last morning: "I'd only

stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful." I was

certain I wouldn't see her again this time. You had to pull yourself

together and forget the Permian girl with a thousand faces, good

boy, convince yourself she was no more than a bad dream.

But a few days after I had gone back to work at UNESCO,

Monsieur Arnoux appeared in the cubicle that was my office as I was

translating a report on bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa.

"I'm sorry I was short with you the other day," he said,

uncomfortably. "I was in a very* bad state of mind just then."

He proposed that we have supper. And though I knew this supper

would be catastrophic for my own state of mind, my curiosity to

hear about her and find out what had happened were stronger, and I

accepted.

We went to Chez Eux, a restaurant in the seventh

arrondissement, not far from my house. It was the tensest, most

difficult supper I've ever had. But fascinating too, because I learned

many things about the ex—Madame Arnoux and also discovered

how far she had gone in her search for the security she identified

with wealth.

We ordered whiskey with ice and Perrier as an aperitif, and then

red wine with a meal we barely tasted. Chez Eux had a fixed menu

consisting of exquisite food that came in deep pans, and our table

was filling up with pates, snails, salads, fish, meat, which the

amazed waiters took away almost untouched to make room for a

great variety of desserts, one bathed in bubbling chocolate, not

understanding why we slighted all those delicacies.

Robert Arnoux asked me how long I had known her. I lied and

said only since i960 or 1961, when she passed through Paris on her

way to Cuba as one of the recipients of a scholarship from the MIR

to receive guerrilla training.

"In other words, you don't know anything about her past, her

family," Monsieur Arnoux said with a nod, as if he were talking to

himself. "I always knew she lied. About her family and her

childhood, I mean. But I forgave her. They seemed like pious lies

intended to disguise a childhood and adolescence that embarrassed

her. Because she must have come from a very humble social class,

don't you agree?"

"She didn't like talking about it. She never told me anything

about her family. But yes, undoubtedly a very humble class—"

"It made me sad, I could guess at the mountain of prejudices in

Permian society, the great family names, the racism," he interrupted

me. "She said she had attended the Sophianum, the best nuns'

academy in Lima, where the daughters of high society were

educated. That her father owned a cotton plantation and she had

broken with her family out of idealism, in order to be a

revolutionary. She never cared about the revolution, I'm sure of

that! From the time I met her, she never expressed a single political

opinion. She would have done anything to get out of Cuba. Even

marry me. When we left, I suggested a trip to Peru to meet her

family. She told me more stories, of course. That because she had

been in the MIR and in Cuba, if she set foot in Peru she would be

arrested. I forgave these fantasies. I understood they were born of

her insecurity. She had been infected with the social and racial

prejudices that are so strong in South American countries. That's

why she invented the biography for me of the aristocratic girl she

had never been."

At times I had the impression that Monsieur Arnoux had

forgotten about me. Even his gaze was lost at some point in the void,

and he spoke so softly his words became an inaudible murmur. At

other times he recovered, looked at me with suspicion and hatred,

and pressed me to tell him if I'd known she had a lover. I was her

compatriot, her friend, hadn't she ever confided in me?

"She never said a word. I never suspected anything. I thought

you two got along very well, that you were happy."

"I thought so too," he murmured, crestfallen. He ordered another

bottle of wine. And added, his eyes veiled and his voice acerbic: "She

didn't need to do what she did. It was ugly, it was dirty, it was

disloyal to behave like that with me. I gave her my name, I went out

of my way to make her happy. I endangered my career to get her out

of Cuba. That was a real via crucis. Disloyalty can't reach these

extremes. So much calculation, so much hypocrisy, it's inhuman."

Abruptly he stopped speaking. He moved his lips, not making a

sound, and his rectangular little mustache twisted and stretched. He

had gripped his empty glass and was squeezing it as if he wanted to

crush it. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears.

I didn't know what to say to him, any consolatory phrase would

have sounded false and ridiculous. Suddenly, I understood that so

much desperation was not due only to her abandoning him. There

was something else he wanted to tell me but was finding difficult.

"My life's savings," Monsieur Arnoux whispered, looking at me

accusingly, as if I were responsible for his tragedy. "Do you follow?

I'm an older man, I'm in no condition to rebuild my whole life. Do

you understand? Not only to deceive me with some gangster who

must have helped her plan the crime, but to do that too: withdraw

all the money from the account we had in Switzerland. I gave her

that proof of my trust, do you see? A joint account. In case I had an

accident, or died suddenly. So inheritance taxes wouldn't take

everything I'd saved in a lifetime of work and sacrifice. Do you

understand the disloyalty, the vileness? She went to Switzerland to

make a deposit and took everything, everything, and ruined me.

Chapeau, un coup de maitre! She knew I couldn't denounce her

without accusing myself, without ruining my reputation and my

position. She knew if I denounced her I'd be the first one injured, for

keeping secret accounts, for evading taxes. Do you understand how

well planned it was? Can you believe she could be so cruel toward

someone who gave her only love and devotion?"

He kept returning to the same subject, with intervals in which we

drank wine in silence, each of us absorbed in his own thoughts. Was

it perverse of me to wonder what hurt him more, her leaving him or

her stealing his secret bank account in Switzerland? I felt sorry for

him, and I felt remorse, but I didn't know how to comfort him. I

limited myself to interjecting occasional brief, friendly phrases. In

reality, he didn't want to converse with me. He had invited me to

supper because he needed someone to listen to him, he needed to

say aloud, before a witness, things that had been scorching his heart

ever since the disappearance of his wife.

"Forgive me, I needed to unburden myself," he said at last when

all the other diners had left and we were alone, watched with

impatient eyes by the waiters in Chez Eux. "I thank you for your

patience. I hope this catharsis does me some good."

I said that with time, all of this would be behind him, no trouble

lasts a hundred years. And as I spoke, I felt like a total hypocrite, as

guilty as if I had planned the flight of ex—Madame Arnoux and the

plundering of his secret account.

"If you ever run into her, please tell her. She didn't need to do

that. I would have given her everything. Did she want my money? I

would have given it to her. But not like this, not like this."

We said goodbye in the doorway of the restaurant, in the

brilliance of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. It was the last time I saw

the mistreated Monsieur Robert Arnoux.

The Tupac Amaru column of the MIR, under the command of

Guillermo Lobaton, lasted some five months longer than the

column that had made its headquarters on Mesa Pelada. As it had

done with Luis de la Puente, Paul Escobar, and the Miristas who

perished in the valley of La Convention, the army gave no details

regarding how it annihilated all the members of that guerrilla band.

In the second half of 1965, helped by the Ashaninka of Gran Pajonal,

Lobaton and his companions eluded the persecution of the special

forces of the army that mobilized in helicopters and on land and

savagely punished the indigenous settlements that hid and fed the

guerrillas. Finally, the decimated column, twelve men devastated by

mosquitoes, fatigue, and disease, fell in the vicinity of the Sotziqui

River on January 7,1966. Did they die in combat or were they

captured alive and executed? Their graves were never found.

According to unverifiable rumors, Lobaton and his second-incommand

were taken up in a helicopter and thrown into the forest

so the animals would devour their corpses. For several years

Lobaton's French partner, Jacqueline, attempted without success, by

means of campaigns in Peru and other countries, to have the

government reveal the location of the graves of the rebels in that

ephemeral guerrilla war. Were there survivors? Were they living

clandestinely in the convulsed, divided Peru of Belaunde Terry's

final days? As I slowly recovered from the disappearance of the bad

girl, I followed these distant events through the letters of Uncle

Ataulfo. He seemed more and more pessimistic about the possibility

that democracy would not collapse in Peru. "The same military that

defeated the guerrillas is preparing now to defeat the legitimate

state and have another kind of uprising," he assured me.

One day in Germany, in the most unexpected way, I ran into a

survivor of Mesa Pelada: none other than Alfonso the Spiritualist,

the boy sent to Paris by a theosophical group in Lima, the one fat

Paul had snatched away from spirits and the next world to turn him

into a guerrilla fighter. I was in Frankfurt, working at an

international conference on communications, and during a break I

escaped to a department store to make some purchases. At the

register, someone took my arm. I recognized him instantly. In the

four years since I'd seen him he had put on weight and let his hair

grow very long—the new style in Europe—but his dead-white face

with its reserved, rather sad expression was the same. He had been

in Germany a few months, obtained political refugee status, and was

living with a girl from Frankfurt whom he had met in Paris when

Paul was there. We went to have coffee in the department-store

cafeteria full of matrons with fat little children who were being

waited on by Turks.

Alfonso the Spiritualist had been miraculously saved from the