The Bad Girl (35 page)

Three-quarters of an hour later, the bad girl reappeared. She was

pleased by her conversation with Dr. Roullin, who seemed very

sensible and amiable, and by the visit to the clinic. The room she

would occupy was small, comfortable, very pretty, with views of the

park, and all the facilities, the dining room, the gym, the warm-water

pool, the small auditorium where they gave talks and showed

documentaries and feature films, were extremely modern. Without

further discussion, we went to administration. I signed a document

stating that I agreed to be responsible for all expenses and wrote a

check for ten thousand francs as a deposit. The bad girl handed a

French passport to the administrator, a very thin woman who wore

her hair in a bun and had an inquisitorial eye, and she asked for her

identification card instead. Elena and I looked at each other

uneasily, expecting a catastrophe.

"I don't have it yet," said the bad girl with absolute naturalness.

"I've lived abroad for many years and just came back to France. I

know I ought to get one. I'll do that right away."

The administrator wrote the data from the passport into a

notebook and returned it to her.

"You'll check in tomorrow," she said as we were leaving. "Please

get here before noon."

Taking advantage of the beautiful day, a little cold but golden and

with a perfectly clear sky, we took a long walk through the woods of

Petit Clamart, listening to the dead leaves of autumn rustling under

our feet. We had lunch in a little bistrot at the edge of the woods,

where a crackling fireplace warmed the room and reddened the faces

of the patrons. Elena had to go to work, so she left us just outside

Paris, at the first Metro station we came across. During the entire

ride to Ecole Militaire the bad girl was silent, her hand in mine. At

times I felt her shiver. In the house on Joseph Granier, as soon as

we walked in, the bad girl made me sit in the easy chair in the living

room and then she sat on my knees. Her nose and ears were

freezing, and she trembled so much she couldn't articulate a word.

Her teeth were chattering.

"The clinic will do you good," I said, caressing her neck, her

shoulders, warming her icy ears with my breath. "They'll take care of

you, fatten you up, put an end to these attacks of fear. They'll make

you pretty and you can turn back into the devil you've always been.

And, if you don't like the clinic, you'll come back here right away.

Whenever you say. It isn't a prison, but a place to rest."

She held me tight and didn't say anything, but she trembled a

long time before she grew calm. Then I prepared tea with lemon for

the two of us. We talked while she packed her bag for the clinic. I

handed her an envelope in which I had placed a thousand francs in

bills for her to take with her.

"It isn't a gift, it's a loan," I joked. "You'll pay me back when

you're rich. I'll charge you high interest."

"How much is all this going to cost you?" she asked, not looking

at me.

"Less than I thought. About a hundred thousand francs. What do

I care about a hundred thousand francs if I can see you looking

attractive again? I'm doing it out of sheer self-interest, Chilean girl."

She didn't say anything for a long time and kept packing her

suitcase, looking annoyed.

"I've become that ugly?" she said suddenly.

"Awful," I said. "Forgive me, but you've turned into a real horror

of a woman."

"That's a lie," she said, turning and throwing a sandal that landed

on my chest. "I can't be that ugly when yesterday, in bed, your cock

was hard the whole night. You had to put up with wanting to make

love to me, hypocrite."

She burst into laughter and from that moment on was in better

spirits. As soon as she finished packing, she came to sit on my lap

again so I could gently massage her back and arms. She was still

there, sound asleep, when Yilal came in around six to watch his

television program. Since the night of the surprise for his parents,

he would speak to them and to us, but only for a few moments,

because the effort tired him. And then he would go back to the slate,

which he still wore around his neck, along with a couple of pieces of

chalk in a little bag. That night we didn't hear his voice until he said

goodbye, in Spanish: "Good night, friends."

After supper, we went to the Gravoskis' for coffee, and they

promised to visit her at the clinic, and asked her to call if she needed

anything while I was in Finland. When we came back, she didn't let

me pull out the sofa bed.

"Why don't you want to sleep with me?"

I embraced her and pressed her body against mine.

"You know very well why. It's a martyrdom to have you naked

beside me, desiring you as I do, when I can't touch you."

"You're hopeless," she said, as indignant as if I'd insulted her. "If

you were Fukuda, you'd make love to me all night and not give a

damn if I gushed blood or died."

"I'm not Fukuda. Haven't you realized that yet, either?"

"Of course I have," she repeated, throwing her arms around my

neck. "That's why tonight you're going to sleep with me. Because I

don't enjoy anything as much as making you suffer. Haven't you

realized that?"

"ifeZas, yes," I said, kissing her hair. "I realized it all too well

many years ago, and the worst thing is I never learn. I even seem to

like it. We're the perfect pair: the sadist and the masochist."

We slept together, and when she tried to caress me I grasped her

hands and moved them away.

"Until you're completely healed, we're as chaste as two cherubs."

"It's true, you're a vrai con. At least hold me tight so I'm not

afraid."

The next morning we took the train at the Saint Lazare station,

and during the entire trip to Petit Clamart she was silent and

downcast. We said goodbye at the door of the clinic. She held on to

me as if we were never going to see each other again, and she wet

my face with her tears.

"At this rate, any moment now you'll wind up falling in love with

me."

"I'll bet whatever you want that I never will, Ricardito."

I left for Helsinki that same afternoon, and for the two weeks I

was working there I didn't stop speaking Russian, every day,

morning and afternoon. This was a tripartite conference, with

delegates from Europe, the United States, and Russia, to design a

policy of aid and cooperation from the Western powers to what

remained of the ruins of the Soviet Union. There were commissions

dealing with the economy, institutions, social policy, culture, and

sports, and on all of them, the Russian delegates expressed

themselves with a freedom and spontaneity inconceivable just a

short time ago in those monotonous robots, the apparatchiks sent to

international conferences by the governments of Brezhnev and even

Gorbachev. It was evident things were changing there. I wanted to

go back to Moscow and to the rebaptized Saint Petersburg, where I

hadn't been for many years.

We interpreters had a great deal of work and almost no time to

walk around. It was my second trip to Helsinki. The first had been in

spring, when it was possible to walk the streets, and go out to the

countryside and see the forests of fir trees dotted with lakes, and

pretty villages with wooden houses in a country where everything

was beautiful: the architecture, the landscape, the inhabitants, and,

above all, the old people. Now, however, with the snow and a

temperature of twenty degrees below zero, during my free hours I

preferred to stay in the hotel reading or practicing the mysterious

rituals of the sauna, which had a delicious anesthetic effect on me.

After ten days in Helsinki I received a letter from the bad girl.

She was settled into the clinic in Petit Clamart, to which she had

adjusted with no difficulty. She wasn't on a diet, she was overfed,

but since she had to do a good deal of exercise in the gym—and was

also swimming, helped by an instructor because she never had

learned to swim, only to float and paddle in the water like a

puppy—her appetite was good. She'd already had two sessions with

Dr. Roullin, who was quite intelligent, and they got on very well. She

hadn't had occasion to talk to the other patients; she only exchanged

greetings with some of them at meals. The only patient with whom

she had talked two or three times was a German girl who was

anorexic, very shy and timid, but a nice person. All she remembered

of the hypnosis session with Dr. Zilacxy was that when she woke up,

she felt very calm and rested. She also said she missed me, and that

I shouldn't do "a lot of dirty* things in those Finnish saunas, which,

as everyone knows, are great centers of sexual degeneracy."

In two weeks, when I returned to Paris, Senor Charnes's agency

had another five-day contract for me almost immediately, in

Alexandria. I was in France barely a day, so I couldn't visit the bad

girl. But we spoke on the phone, at dusk. I found her in good spirits,

happy above all with Dr. Roullin, who, she said, was doing her "an

enormous amount of good," and amused at the group therapy led by

Dr. Zilacxy, "something like the confessions of priests, but in a

group, and with sermons by the doctor." What did she want me to

bring her from Egypt? "A camel." She added, seriously: "I know

what: one of those dancing outfits with your belly exposed that Arab

dancers wear." Was she planning to please me, when she left the

clinic, with a performance of belly dancing just for me? "When I get

out, I'm going to do some things you don't even know exist, little

saint." When I said I missed her a great deal, she replied, "Me too, I

think." She was getting better, no doubt about it.

That night I had supper at the Gravoskis' and gave Yilal a dozen

toy soldiers I had bought in a store in Helsinki. Elena and Simon

were beside themselves with joy. Though the boy sometimes sank

back into mutism and wouldn't give up his slate, each day he spoke a

little more, not only with them but also at school, where his

classmates, who had called him "the Mute" before, now called him

"the Chatterbox." It was a question of patience; he'd soon be totally

normal. The Gravoskis had gone to visit the bad girl a couple of

times and found her perfectly adjusted to the clinic. Elena spoke

once on the phone with Dr. Zilacxy, and he read her a few lines in

which Dr. Roullin made a very positive report on the patient's

progress. She had gained weight and had more and more control of

her nerves every day.

The next afternoon I left for Cairo, where, after five tedious

hours of flying, I had to take another plane on an Egyptian airline to

Alexandria. I was exhausted when I arrived. As soon as I was in my

little room in a miserable hotel called the Nile—it was my fault, I

chose the cheapest one offered to the interpreters—I didn't feel like

unpacking and fell asleep for almost eight hours, something that

happened to me very* rarely.

The next day, which I had free, I walked around the ancient city

founded by Alexander, visited its museum of Roman antiquities and

the ruins of its amphitheater, and took a long walk on the beautiful

avenue by the coast, with its cafes, restaurants, hotels, shops for

tourists, and talkative, cosmopolitan crowd. Sitting on one of the

terraces that made me think of the poet Kavafis—his house in the

vanished, now Arabified Greek district could not be visited; a sign in

English indicated it was being renovated by the Greek consulate—I

wrote a long letter to the patient, telling her how glad I was to know

she was happy at the clinic in Petit Clamart and offering, if she

behaved herself and left the clinic totally cured, to take her for a

week to some beach in the south of Spain so she could get a tan.

Would she like to have a honeymoon with this little pissant?

I spent the afternoon reviewing all the documentation on the

conference, which began the next day. It had to do with the

economic cooperation and development of all the countries in the

Mediterranean basin: France, Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Cyprus,

Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Syria. Israel had been

excluded. They were five exhausting days, with no time for anything,

immersed in confused and tedious papers and debates which, in

spite of producing mountains of printed paper, seemed to serve no

practical purpose. On the last day, one of the Arabic interpreters at

the conference, a native of Alexandria, helped me find what the bad

girl had asked for: an Arab dancer's outfit, full of veils and sequins. I

imagined her wearing it, swaying like a palm tree on the desert sand,

under the moon, to the rhythm of flageolets, flutes, finger cymbals,

timbrels, mandolins, cymbals, and other Arabic musical

instruments, and I wanted her.

The day after I arrived in Paris, even before I talked with the

Gravoskis, I went to visit her at the clinic in Petit Clamart. It was a