The Bad Girl (44 page)

Animated by the glasses of beer, during one of Arquimedes' silences

I finally dared ask the question that had been burning my throat for

the past three hours,

"They told me you have a daughter in Paris. Is that true,

Arquimedes?"

He sat looking at me, intrigued at my knowing intimate details

about his family. And gradually the expansive expression on his face

turned sour. Before answering he brushed his nose furiously and

with a crack of his hand chased away the invisible insect.

"I don't want to know anything about that heartless girl," he

growled. "And I want to talk about her even less, caballero. I swear,

even if she repented and came to see me, I'd slam the door in her

face."

When I saw how angry he was, I apologized for my impertinence.

I had heard about his daughter from one of the engineers this

morning, and since I lived in Paris too, I became curious and

wondered if I knew her. I wouldn't have mentioned it if I thought it

would irritate him.

Without responding at all to my explanations, Arquimedes kept

eating his sandwich and sipping his beer. Since he hardly had any

teeth, it was difficult for him to chew, and he made noises with his

tongue and took a long time to swallow each mouthful.

Uncomfortable with the long silence, convinced I had committed an

error by asking about his daughter—what were you expecting to

hear, Ricardito?—I raised my hand to call over the black woman in

rollers and ask for the check. And at that moment, Arquimedes

began talking again.

"Because she's an unfeeling girl, I swear," he declared, frowning

with a very severe expression. "She didn't send money even for her

mother's funeral. An egotist is what she is. She went over there and

turned her back on us. She must think she's moved up in the world

and that gives her the right to despise us now. As if she didn't carry

the blood of her father and mother in her veins."

He was in a rage. When he spoke he grimaced, and that wrinkled

his face even more. Again I murmured that I was sorry I had

brought up the subject, it hadn't been my intention to make him

angry, we ought to talk about something else. But he wasn't

listening to me. In his staring eyes the pupils were gleaming, liquid

and incandescent.

"I lowered myself and asked her to bring me over there when I

could have ordered her to, I'm her father after all," he said, banging

the table. His lips were trembling. "I lowered myself, I humbled

myself. She didn't have to support me, nothing like that. I'd work at

anything. Like helping to build breakwaters. Don't they build

breakwaters in Paris? Well, then, I could work doing that. If I'm

good here, why not there? The only thing I asked her for was a

ticket. Not for her mother, not for her brothers. Just for me. I'd

break my back, I'd earn and save and slowly bring over the rest of

the family little by little. Was that too much to ask? It was very little,

almost nothing. And what did she do? She never answered another

letter. Not one, ever again, as if the idea of seeing me turn up there

terrified her. Is that what a daughter does? I know why I say she

became an unfeeling girl, caballero."

The black woman in rollers approached the table, swinging her

hips like a panther, but instead of the check I asked her for another

cold bottle of beer. Old Arquimedes had spoken so loudly that

people at several tables turned to look at him. When he realized this

he apologized, coughed, and lowered his voice.

"At first she did remember her family, I have to say that too.

Well, only once in a while, but something's better than nothing," he

continued more calmly. "Not when she was in Cuba; there, it seems,

because of political things, she couldn't write letters. At least, that's

what she said later, when she went to live in France and was already

married. And then yes, from time to time, for the Patriotic Festival,

or my birthday, or Christmas, she'd send a letter and a check. What a

mess trying to cash it. Taking identity papers to the bank, and the

bank charging I don't know how much in commissions. But in those

days, though it didn't happen too often, she remembered she had a

family. Until I asked her for the ticket to France. That's when she

cut it off. Never heard from her again. Not to this day. As if all her

relatives had died. She buried us, I tell you. She didn't bother to

answer even when one of her brothers wrote asking for help to put

up a marble tombstone for their mother."

I poured Arquimedes a glass of the foaming beer that the black

woman in rollers had just brought, and I poured another for myself.

Cuba, married in Paris: no doubt about it. Who else could it be? Now

I started to tremble. I felt uneasy, as if some terrible revelation

would emerge at any moment. I said, "Cheers, Arquimedes," and we

both took a long drink. From where I was sitting I could see one of

the old man's sneakers, full of holes, and a bony ankle, scabbed or

dirty, where an ant was crawling that he didn't seem to feel. Was a

coincidence like this possible? Yes, it was. I had no doubt about that

now.

"I think I met her once," I said, pretending I was talking just to

make conversation and had no personal interest. "Your daughter

was on a scholarship to Cuba for a while, wasn't she? And then she

married a French diplomat, right? A gentleman named Arnoux, if

I'm not mistaken."

"I don't know if he was a diplomat or what, she never even sent a

photograph," Arquimedes grumbled, brushing his nose. "But he was

an important Frenchy and he earned good money, that's what they

said. In a case like that, doesn't a daughter have obligations to her

family? Especially if her family is poor and suffering hardships."

He took another sip of beer and was lost in thought for a long

time. Some chicha-fueled music, off-key and monotonous, sung by

Los Shapis, replaced the salsa. At the table to the side, the

electricians were talking about Sunday's horse races and one of

them swore: "Cleopatra's a sure thing in the third." Suddenly,

remembering something, Arquimedes raised his head and stared at

me with feverish eyes.

"You knew her?"

"I think so, vaguely."

"That guy, the Frenchy, he had a lot of money, didn't he?"

"I don't know. If we're talking about the same person, he was a

functionary at UNESCO. A good position, no doubt about it. Your

daughter, the times I saw her, was always very well dressed. She was

a good-looking, elegant woman."

"Otilita always dreamed about what she didn't have, ever since

she was little," Arquimedes said suddenly, sweetening his voice and

breaking into an unexpected smile full of indulgence. "She was very

lively, at school she won prizes. And she had delusions of grandeur

from the day she was born. She was never resigned to her fate."

I couldn't control my laughter, and the old man looked at me,

disconcerted. Lily the Chilean girl, Comrade Arlette, Madame Robert

Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko, and Madame Ricardo Somocurcio

was, in reality*, named Otilia. Otilita. How funny.

"I never would have imagined her name was Otilia," I explained.

"I met her under another name, her husband's, Madame Robert

Arnoux. That's what they do in France, when a woman marries she

takes her husband's first and last names."

"People's ways are funny," remarked Arquimedes, smiling and

shrugging. "Has it been a long time since you saw her?"

"A long time, yes. I don't even know if she still lives in Paris. If

she's the same person, obviously. The Permian girl I'm telling you

about had been in Cuba and got married there, in Havana, to a

French diplomat. Then he took her to live in Paris, in the 1960s.

That's where we saw each other the last time, it must be four or five

years ago. I remember she talked a lot about Miraflores, she said she

spent her childhood in that neighborhood."

The old man nodded. In his watery eyes, nostalgia had displaced

fury. He held up the glass of beer and blew at the foam around the

edge, slowly, evening it out.

"That's her," he declared, nodding several times as he brushed

his nose. "Otilita lived in Miraflores when she was little because her

mother worked as a cook for a family who lived there. The Arenas

family."

"On Calle Esperanza?" I asked.

The old man nodded, staring at me in surprise. "You know that

too? How come you know so many things about Otilita?"

I thought, How would he react if I said: Because she's my wife?

"Well, as I said. Your daughter always remembered Miraflores

and the little house on Calle Esperanza. It's a neighborhood where I

lived as a boy too."

Behind the counter, the black woman in rollers was following the

dislocated beat of Los Shapis, moving her head from side to side.

Arquimedes took a long drink and was left with a ring of foam

around his sunken lips.

"Since she was this high, Otilita felt ashamed of us," he said,

frowning again. "She wanted to be like the whites, the rich people.

She was a smart-alecky kid, very crafty. Pretty smart, but always

taking risks. Not everybody can move to another country without a

cent, like she did. Once she won a contest, on Radio America.

Imitating Mexicans, Chileans, Argentines. I don't think she could

have been more than nine or ten years old. They gave her a pair of

skates for a prize. She conquered the family where her mother

worked as a cook. The Arenas family. She won them over, I tell you.

They treated her like a member of the family. They let her be friends

with their own daughter. They spoiled her. After that she was even

more ashamed of being the daughter of her own mother and father.

I mean, from the time she was little you could see how she'd turn

her back on her family when she was grown."

Suddenly, at this point in the conversation, I began to feel a little

sick. What was I doing here, sticking my nose into these sordid,

intimate details? What else did you want to know, Ricardito? What

for? I began to look for an excuse to say goodbye, because without

warning the Chim Pum Callao had turned into a prison cell.

Arquimedes went on talking about his family. Everything he said

made me sadder and more depressed. Apparently he had a slew of

children, by three different women, "all of them recognized." Otilita

was the oldest daughter of his first wife, now deceased. "Feeding

twelve mouths can kill you," he repeated with a resigned expression.

"It wore me out. I don't know how I still have the strength to earn

my bread, caballero." In fact, he did look exhausted and frail. Only

his eyes, lively and strong, showed a will to go on; the rest of his

body seemed defeated and fearful.

It must have been two hours at least since we came into the

Chim Pum Callao. All the tables were empty except ours. The owner

turned off the radio, suggesting it was time to close, I asked for the

check, paid it, and when we walked out, I asked Arquimedes to

accept a gift of a hundred-dollar bill.

"If you ever run into Otilita again over there in Paris, tell her to

remember her father and not be such a bad daughter, or in the next

world they might punish her." The old man extended his hand.

He stood looking at the hundred-dollar bill as if it had fallen

from the sky. He was so moved, I thought he was going to cry. He

stammered, "A hundred dollars! God bless you, caballero." I

thought, What if I told him: You're my father-in-law, Arquimedes,

can you believe it?

I waited for a while on Plaza Jose Galvez, and when a dilapidated

taxi finally appeared and I signaled it to stop, a swarm of ragged

children surrounded me, hands outstretched, asking for money. I

told the driver to take me to Calle Esperanza, in Miraflores.

On the long ride in the clattering jalopy that was belching smoke,

I regretted having instigated the conversation with Arquimedes. I

felt sad down to the marrow of my bones when I thought about what

Otilita's childhood must have been like in one of those Callao

shantytowns. Knowing it was impossible for me to approach a

reality so remote from the Miraflores life I had been lucky enough

to experience, I imagined her as a little girl, in the crowding and

grime of the hovels thrown up somehow on the banks of the

Rimac—as we drove past them, the taxi filled with flies—where

dwellings were intermingled with pyramids of garbage accumulating

there for who knows how long, and I imagined each day's want,

precariousness, insecurity, until, providential gift, the mother

obtained a job as cook for a middle-class family in a residential

neighborhood and managed to bring along her oldest daughter. I

imagined the artfulness, the flattery, the charm used by Otilita, the

girl endowed with an exceptionally well-developed instinct for

survival and adaptation, until she had won over the lady and

gentleman of the house. First they would have laughed at her, then