The Bad Girl (3 page)

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 Lover, Pepe Canepa, 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 Alvarez-

Calderon, the fat little pig. A party that would define an era and

remain forever in the memories of everyone who was there. The

Alvarez-Calderon 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 binetiled

pool. Marirosa's parties always had a band and a swarm of

waiters serving pastries, canapes, 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 Ormeno

Brothers Orchestra—they might not have been Perez 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 Brena 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 Mexico 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 Paul to appear with a little

package of tamales, tortillas, carnitas, or enchiladas that I would

take to my garret in the Hotel du Senat to eat before they got cold.

Paul had started out at the Mexico 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 Paul, 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 cafe conspiracies. In

addition to earning his living at the Mexico Lindo, when I met him a

few days after my arrival in Paris, Paul was taking biology courses at

the Sorbonne, which he also abandoned for the sake of the

revolution.