The Bad Girl (6 page)

yet for a permanent position, but he could hire me as a "temp"

during the general assembly and when the agency was overwhelmed

with work, something that happened with some frequency. From

then on I was certain that my constant dream—well, at least since

I'd had the use of my reason—of living in this city for the rest of my

life was beginning to become a reality.

My existence did a somersault after that day. I began to cut my

hair twice a month and put on a jacket and tie every morning. I took

the Metro at Saint-Germain or l'Odeon to ride to the Segur station,

the one closest to UNESCO, and I stayed there, in a small cubicle,

from nine thirty to one and from two thirty to six, translating into

Spanish generally ponderous documents regarding the removal of

the temples of Abu Simbel on the Nile or the preservation of

fragments of cuneiform writing discovered in caves in the Sahara

desert, near Mali.

Curiously, as my life changed, so did Paul's. He was still my best

friend, but we began to see each other less and less frequently

because of the obligations I had recently assumed as a bureaucrat,

and because he began to travel the world, representing the MIR at

congresses or meetings for peace, for the liberation of the Third

World, for the struggle against nuclear armaments, against

colonialism and imperialism, and a thousand other progressive

causes. At times Paul felt dazed, living in a dream—when he was

back in Paris he'd call and we would have a meal or a cup of coffee

two or three times a week—and he'd tell me he had just come back

from Beijing, from Cairo, from Havana, from Pyongyang, from

Hanoi, where he had to speak about the outlook for revolution in

Latin America before fifteen hundred delegates from fifty

revolutionary organizations in some thirty countries in the name of

a Permian revolution that hadn't even begun yet.

Often, if I hadn't known so well the integrity that oozed from his

pores, I would have believed he was exaggerating just to impress me.

How was it possible that this South American in Paris, who just a

few months ago had earned his living as a kitchen boy in the Mexico

Lindo, was now a figure in the revolutionary jet set, making

transatlantic flights and rubbing elbows with the leaders of China,

Cuba, Vietnam, Egypt, North Korea, Libya, Indonesia? But it was

true. Paul, as a result of imponderables and the strange tangle of

relationships, interests, and confusions that constituted the

revolution, had been transformed into an international figure. I

confirmed this in 1962 when there was a minor journalistic

upheaval over an attempt to assassinate the Moroccan revolutionary

leader Ben Barka, nicknamed the Dynamo, who, three years later, in

October 1965, was abducted and disappeared forever as he left the

Brasserie Lipp, a restaurant on Saint-Germain. Paul met me at

midday at UNESCO, and we went to the cafeteria for a sandwich. He

was pale and had dark circles under his eyes, an agitated voice, a

kind of nervousness very unusual in him. Ben Barka had been

presiding at an international congress of revolutionary forces on

whose executive council Paul also served. The two of them had been

seeing a good deal of each other and traveling together during the

past few weeks. The attempt on Ben Barka could only be the work of

the CIA, and the MIR now felt at risk in Paris. Could I, for just a few

days, while they took certain necessary steps, keep a couple of

suitcases in my garret?

"I wouldn't ask you to do something like this if I had another

alternative. If you tell me you can't, it's not a problem, Ricardo."

I'd do it if he told me what was in the suitcases.

"In one, papers. Pure dynamite: plans, instructions, preparations

for actions in Peru. In the other, dollars."

"How much?"

"Fifty thousand."

I thought for a moment.

"If I turn the suitcases over to the CIA, will they let me keep the

fifty thousand?"

"Just think, when the revolution triumphs, we could name you

ambassador to UNESCO," said Paul, following my lead.

We joked for a while, and when night fell he brought me the two

suitcases, which we put under my bed. I spent a week with my hair

on end, thinking that if some thief decided to steal the money, the

MIR would never believe there had been a robbery, and I'd become a

target of the revolution. On the sixth day, Paul came with three men

I didn't know to take away those troublesome lodgers.

Whenever we saw each other I asked about Comrade Arlette, and

he never tried to deceive me with false news. He was very sorry* but

hadn't been able to learn anything. The Cubans were extremely

strict where security was concerned, and they were keeping her

whereabouts an absolute secret. The only certainty was that she

hadn't come through Paris yet, since he had a complete record of the

scholarship recipients who returned to Paris.

"When she comes through, you'll be the first to know. The girl

really has a hold on you, doesn't she? But why, mon uieux, she isn't

even that pretty."

"I don't know why, Paul. But the truth is she does have a tight

hold on me."

With Paul's new kind of life, Permian circles in Paris began to

speak ill of him. These were writers who didn't write, painters who

didn't paint, musicians who didn't play or compose, and cafe

revolutionaries who vented their frustration, envy, and boredom by

saying that Paul had become "sensualized," a "bureaucrat of the

revolution." What was he doing in Paris? Why wasn't he over there

with those kids he was sending to receive military training and then

sneak into Peru to begin guerrilla actions in the Andes? I defended

him in heated arguments. I said that in spite of his new status, Paul

continued to live with absolute modesty. Until very recently, his wife

had been cleaning houses to support the family. Now the MIR,

taking advantage of her Spanish passport, used her as a courier and

frequently sent her to Peru to accompany returning scholarship

recipients or to carry money and instructions, on trips that filled

Paul with worry. But from his confidences I knew that the life

imposed on him by circumstances, which his superior insisted he

continue, irritated him more and more each day. He was impatient

to return to Peru, where actions would begin very soon. He wanted

to help prepare them on-site. The leadership of the MIR wouldn't

authorize this, and it infuriated him. "This is what comes of knowing

languages, damn it," he'd protest, laughing in the midst of his bad

temper.

Thanks to Paul, during those months and years in Paris I met the

principal leaders of the MIR, beginning with its head and founder,

Luis de la Puente Uceda, and ending with Guillermo Lobaton. The

head of the MIR was a lawyer from Trujillo, born in 1926, who had

repudiated the Aprista Party. He was slim, with glasses, light skin,

and light hair that he always wore slicked back like an Argentine

actor. The two or three times I saw him, he was dressed very

formally in a tie and a dark leather coat. He spoke quietly, like a

lawyer at work, giving legalistic details and using the elaborate

vocabulary of a judicial argument. I always saw him surrounded by

two or three brawny types who must have been his bodyguards, men

who looked at him worshipfully and never offered an opinion. In

everything he said there was something so cerebral, so abstract, that

it was hard for me to imagine him as a guerrilla fighter with a

machine gun over his shoulder, climbing up and down steep slopes

in the Andes. And yet he had been arrested several times, was exiled

in Mexico, lived a clandestine life. But he gave the impression that

he had been born to shine in forums, parliaments, tribunals,

political negotiations, that is, in everything he and his comrades

scorned as the shady double-talk of bourgeois democracy.

Guillermo Lobaton was another matter. Of the crowd of

revolutionaries I met in Paris through Paul, none seemed as

intelligent, well educated, and resolute as he. He was still very

young, barely in his thirties, but he already had a rich past as a man

of action. In 1952 he had been the leader of the great strike at the

University of San Marcos against the Odria dictatorship (that was

when he and Paul became friends), and as a result he was arrested,

sent to the fronton that was used as a political prison, and tortured.

This was how his studies in philosophy had been cut short at San

Marcos, where, they said, he was in competition with Li Carrillo,

Heidegger's future disciple, for being the most brilliant student at

the School of Letters. In 1954 he was expelled from the country* by

the military government, and after countless difficulties arrived in

Paris, where, while he earned his living doing manual labor, he

resumed his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Then the

Communist Party obtained a scholarship for him in East Germany,

in Leipzig, where he continued his philosophical studies at a school

for the party's cadres. While he was there he was caught off guard by

the Cuban Revolution. What happened in Cuba led him to think very

critically about the strategy of Latin American Communist parties

and the dogmatic spirit of Stalinism. Before I met him in person, I

had read a work of his that circulated around Paris in mimeographed

form, in which he accused those parties of cutting themselves off

from the masses because of their submission to the dictates of

Moscow, forgetting, as Che Guevara had written, "that the first duty*

of a revolutionary is to make the revolution." In this work, where he

extolled the example of Fidel Castro and his comrades as

revolutionary models, he cited Trotsky. Because of this citation he

was subjected to a disciplinary tribunal in Leipzig and expelled in

the most infamous way from East Germany and from the Permian

Communist Party. This was how he came to Paris, where he married

a French girl, Jacqueline, who was also a revolutionary activist. In

Paris he met Paul, his old friend from San Marcos, and became

affiliated with the MIR. He had received guerrilla training in Cuba

and was counting the hours until he could return to Peru and move

into action. During the time of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of

Pigs, I saw him everywhere, attending every demonstration of

solidarity with Cuba and speaking at several of them, in good French

and with devastating rhetoric.

He was a tall, slim boy, with light ebony skin and a smile that

displayed magnificent teeth. Just as he could argue for hours, with

great intellectual substance, about political subjects, he was also

capable of becoming involved in impassioned dialogues on

literature, art, or sports, especially soccer and the feats of his team,

the Alianza Lima. There was something in his being that

communicated his enthusiasm, his idealism, his generosity, and the

steely sense of justice that guided his life, something I don't believe

I had seen—especially in so genuine a way—in any of the

revolutionaries who passed through Paris during the sixties. That he

had agreed to be an ordinary member of the MIR, where there

wasn't anyone with his talent and charisma, spoke very clearly to the

purity of his revolutionary vocation. On the three or four occasions I

talked to him, I was convinced, despite my skepticism, that if

someone as lucid and energetic as Lobaton were at the head of the

revolutionaries, Peru could be the second Cuba in Latin America.

It was at least six months after she left that I had news of Comrade

Arlette, through Paul. Since my contract as a temp left me with a

good amount of free time, I began to study Russian, thinking that if

I could also translate from that language—one of the four official

languages of the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies at the

time—my work as a translator would be more secure. I was also

taking a course in simultaneous interpretation. The work of

interpreters was more intense and difficult than that of translators,

but for this reason they were more in demand. One day, as I left my

Russian class at the Berlitz School on Boulevard des Capucines, I

found fat Paul waiting for me at the entrance to the building.

"News about the girl, finally," he said by way of greeting, wearing

a long face. "I'm sorry*, but it isn't good, mon vieux"

I invited him to one of the bistrots near the Opera for a drink to

help me digest the bad news. We sat outside, on the terrace. It was a

warm spring twilight, with early stars, and all of Paris seemed to

have poured out onto the street to enjoy the good weather. We

ordered two beers.

"I suppose that after so much time you're not still in love with

her," Paul said to prepare me.

"I suppose not," I replied. "Tell me once and for all and don't fuck

around, Paul."

He had just spent a few days in Havana, and Comrade Arlette

was the talk of all the young Peruvians in the MIR because,