The Bad Girl (16 page)

ex—guerrilla fighter, the ex-Madame Arnoux was now in

Newmarket? I asked myself this very often, caressing the little

Guerlain toothbrush she left in my apartment on the last day I saw

her and which I always kept with me, like an amulet. Too

improbable, too coincidental, too everything. But I couldn't get the

suspicion—the hope—out of my head. And I began to count the days

until a new contract would return me to the pied-a-terre in Earl's

Court.

"Do you know her?" Juan asked in surprise when I finally

showed him the photograph and asked him about it. "She's Mrs.

Richardson, the wife of that flamboyant man you see there, he's

something of a glutton. She's Mexican, I think. She speaks a very

funny English, you'd die laughing if you heard her. Are you sure you

know her?"

"No, it isn't the person I thought it was."

But I was absolutely certain it was. What he said about her "very

funny English" and her "Mexican" background convinced me. It had

to be her. And though in the four years that had passed since she

disappeared from Paris, I had often told myself it was much better

this way because that little Permian adventurer had already caused

enough disarray in my life, when I was sure she had reappeared in a

new incarnation of her mutable identity only fifty miles from

London, I felt an irresistible, restless need to go to Newmarket and

see her again. Juan was sleeping at Mrs. Stubard's and I spent a

good number of nights wide awake, in a state of anxiety that made

my heart pound as if I were suffering an attack of tachycardia. Could

she possibly have gone there? What adventures, entanglements,

audacities had catapulted her into an enclave of the most exclusive

society in the world? I didn't dare ask Juan Barreto more questions

about Mrs. Richardson. I was afraid that if he confirmed the identity*

of our compatriot, she'd find herself embroiled in an extremely

difficult situation. If she was passing herself off as Mexican in

Newmarket, it had to be for some dark and troubled reason. I

devised a secretive strategy. Indirectly, without mentioning in any

way the lady in the photograph, I would try to have Juan take me to

that Eden of horse racing. During a long night of palpitations and

sleeplessness, not to mention a violent erection, at one point I even

had an attack of jealousy of my friend. I imagined that the equine

portrait painter not only did oil paintings in Newmarket but also

entertained the bored wives of stable owners in his idle moments

and, perhaps, that among his conquests was Mrs. Richardson.

Why didn't Juan have a steady partner, like so many other

hippies? At the parties he took me to he almost always disappeared

with a girl, sometimes with two. But one night I was amazed to see

him caress and kiss on the mouth with a good deal of passion a

redheaded boy, as slim as a reed, whom he crushed in his arms with

amorous frenzy.

"I hope you weren't shocked by what you saw," he said to me

later, somewhat peevishly.

I said that at the age of thirty-five nothing in the world shocked

me, least of all whether human beings made love from the front or

the back.

"I do it both ways and that makes me happy, my friend," he

confessed, proudly. "I think I like girls better than boys, but in any

case I wouldn't fall in love with one or the other. The secret to

happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex

from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life,

which is the love that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you

live with greater tranquility* and enjoy things more."

A philosophy the bad girl would have subscribed to down to the

crossed t's and dotted i's, since she no doubt had always practiced it.

I believe this was the only time we spoke—I should say, that he

spoke—about intimate matters. He led a totally free and

promiscuous life, but at the same time he preserved that widespread

urge among Peruvians to avoid confidences in sexual matters and

always to touch on the subject in a veiled, indirect way. Our

conversations dealt principally with far-off Peru, where the news we

received was increasingly disastrous regarding the sweeping

nationalizations of farms and businesses by the military dictatorship

of General Velasco Alvarado, which, according to my uncle Ataulfo's

letters, were more and more demoralizing and would drive us back

to the Stone Age. On this occasion Juan also confessed that though

in London he pursued every opportunity to satisfy his appetites ("So

I've seen," I joked), in Newmarket he behaved like a chaste

gentleman even though there was no lack of possibilities for

amusement. But he didn't want some bedroom complication to

compromise the work that had provided him with the security and

income he never thought he'd attain. "I'm thirty-five, too, and as

you've seen, here in Earl's Court that counts as old age." It was true:

the physical and mental youth of the inhabitants of this London

neighborhood sometimes made me feel prehistoric.

It cost me a good amount of time and a delicate tangle of

insinuations and apparently innocent questions to keep pushing

Juan Barreto to take me to Newmarket, the celebrated town in

Suffolk that since the middle of the eighteenth century had

incarnated the English passion for thoroughbreds. I asked him

endless questions. What were the people like there, the houses

where they lived, the rituals and traditions that surrounded them,

the relations among owners, jockeys, and trainers. And what

happened at the auctions at Tattersalls, where extraordinary sums

were paid for star horses, and how was it possible to auction a horse

by parts, as if it could be disassembled. In response to what he told

me, I did everything but applaud—"Man, that's interesting"—and put

on an enthusiastic face: "How lucky you are, old friend, to know a

world like that from the inside."

At last it produced results. After an end-of-season horse auction,

an Italian breeder married to an Englishwoman, Signor Ariosti, was

giving a dinner in his house to which he had invited Juan. My friend

asked if he could bring along a compatriot, and the host said he'd be

delighted. I recall that for the seventeen days I had to wait until the

moment arrived, I was in a daze and suffered sudden cold sweats, an

adolescent's excitement as I imagined seeing the Permian girl, and a

few sleepless nights during which I did nothing but reproach myself:

I was a hopeless imbecile to still be in love with a madwoman, an

adventurer, an unscrupulous female with whom no man, I least of

all, could maintain a stable relationship without eventually being

stepped on. But in the intervals between these masochistic

soliloquies, others came into play, full of joy and hope: Had she

changed very much? Did she still have the bold manner that

attracted me so much, or had life in the stratified English world of

horses domesticated and nullified it? The day we took the train to

Newmarket—we had to change lines at the Cambridge station—I was

assailed by the notion that all of this was a figment of my

imagination and Mrs. Richardson was in fact nothing more or less

than some ordinary woman of Mexican background. What if you've

been chasing an illusion all this time, Ricardito.

Juan Barreto's house in the country, a few miles from

Newmarket, was a one-story wooden structure surrounded by

willows and hydrangeas that looked more like an artist's studio than

a residence. Crowded with jars of paint, easels, canvases mounted on

stretchers, sketchbooks, and books about art, there were also a good

number of records strewn on the floor around a wonderful sound

system. Juan had a Mini Minor that he never brought to London,

and that afternoon he gave me a ride in his small vehicle around

Newmarket, a mysterious, scattered city with practically no center.

He took me to see the blue-blood Jockey Club and the National

Horseracing Museum. The real city wasn't the handful of houses

around Newmarket High Street where there was a church, a few

shops, some Laundromats, and a couple of restaurants, but the

beautiful residences dispersed over the flat countryside and

surrounded by the stables, outbuildings, and training tracks that

Juan pointed out to me, naming their owners and recounting

anecdotes about them. I barely heard him. All my attention was

focused on the people we passed in the hope that the female form I

was searching for would suddenly appear among them.

She didn't appear, not on that drive, and not in the small Indian

restaurant where Juan took me that night for tandoori curry, and

not the next day, either, during the long, interminable auction of

mares and fillies and racehorses and studhorses held at Tattersalls

under a huge canvas tent. I was stupendously bored. It surprised me

to see the number of Arabs, some in jellabas, who raised the bids at

each sale and sometimes paid astronomical sums that I never

suspected could be paid for a quadruped. None of the many people

Juan introduced me to during the auction, or the rest periods when

attendees drank champagne from paper cups and ate carrots,

cucumbers, and sardines from paper plates, mentioned the name I

was waiting for: Mr. David Richardson.

But that night, as soon as I entered the sumptuous mansion of

Signor Ariosti, I suddenly felt my throat go dry and my finger- and

toenails begin to ache. There she was, less than ten meters away,

sitting on the arm of a sofa, holding a tall glass in her hand. Before I

could say a word or get close enough to her face to kiss her cheek,

she extended an indifferent hand and greeted me in English as if I

were a perfect stranger: "How do you do?" And without giving me

time to reply, she turned her back and resumed her conversation

with the people around her. Soon I heard her recounting, with

absolute confidence and in an approximate but very expressive

English, how, when she was a girl, her father would take her to

Mexico City every week to a concert or the opera. In this way he

instilled in her an early passion for classical music.

She hadn't changed very much in these four years. She had the

same slim, graceful appearance, with a narrow waist, slender

shapely legs, and ankles as fine and delicate as wrists. She seemed

more sure of herself and more confident than before, and she moved

her head at the end of each sentence with studied nonchalance. She

had lightened her hair a little and wore it longer than in Paris, with

waves I didn't recall; her makeup was simpler and more natural

than the heavy application Madame Arnoux was in the habit of

using. She wore a skirt that was fashionably short and showed her

knees, and a low-cut blouse that bared her smooth, silky shoulders

and emphasized her throat, an elegant column encircled by a thin

silver chain from which hung a precious stone, perhaps a sapphire,

that with her movements swayed roguishly over the opening where

arrogant breasts peeked out. I saw the wedding band on the ring

finger of her left hand, in the Protestant manner. Had she converted

to Anglicanism too? Mr. Richardson, to whom Juan introduced me

in the next room, was an exuberant man in his sixties wearing an

electric-yellow shirt and a handkerchief of the same color that

spilled out over his smart blue suit. Drunk and euphoric, he was

telling jokes about his travels in Japan, which greatly amused the

circle of guests around him as he filled their glasses from a bottle of

Dom Perignon that appeared and reappeared in his hands as if by

magic. Juan explained that he was a very rich man who spent part of

the year in Asia on business, but that the guiding star of his life was

the aristocratic passion par excellence: horses.

The hundred or so people, who filled the rooms and the veranda

that opened onto a vast garden with a lighted tiled swimming pool,

corresponded more or less to what Juan Barreto had described: a

very English world that had been joined by some foreign horse

people, like the owner of the house, Signor Ariosti, or my exotic

compatriot disguised as a Mexican, Mrs. Richardson. Everyone had

consumed a fair amount of drink, and they all seemed to know one

another very well and communicate in a coded language whose

recurrent theme was horse racing. Once, when I had managed to sit

in the group around Mrs. Richardson, I learned that several of them,

including the bad girl and her husband, had recently flown to Dubai

in a private plane as the guests of an Arab sheikh for the opening of

a racetrack. They had been treated like royalty. As for Muslims not

drinking alcohol, they said, it might be true for poor Muslims, but

the others, the horse people of Dubai, for instance, drank and served

their guests the most exquisite French wine and champagne.

In spite of my efforts, in the course of the long night I couldn't

exchange a single word with Mrs. Richardson. Each time I