The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa
She put her arms around my neck and kissed my mouth as I spoke. Her entire body moved to adjust to mine.
“I don’t intend to leave now or ever,” she whispered in my ear. “Don’t ask me why, because I won’t tell you even when I’m dead. I’ll never tell you I love you even if I do love you.”
At that moment I must have passed out, or fallen asleep suddenly, though after her last words, I felt all my strength drain away and everything begin to spin around me. I awoke much later, in the darkened room, feeling a warm body entangled with mine. We were lying under the sheets and blankets, and through the large skylight I saw a star twinkling. It must have stopped raining a while ago because the glass was no longer misted over. The bad girl was pressed against me, her legs entwined with mine and her mouth resting on my cheek. I could feel her heart; it was beating steadily inside me. My anger had vanished and now I was filled with remorse for having hit her and for making her suffer while I made love to her. I kissed her tenderly, trying not to wake her, and whispered soundlessly in her ear, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” She wasn’t sleeping. She held me closer and spoke to me, placing her lips on mine, while between words her tongue flickered against mine.
“You’ll never live quietly with me, I warn you. Because I don’t want you to get tired of me, to get used to me. And even if we marry to straighten out my papers, I’ll never be your wife. I always want to be your lover, your lapdog, your whore. Like tonight. Because then I’ll always keep you crazy about me.”
She said these things kissing me without pause and trying to get completely inside my body.
6
Arquímedes, Buílder of Breakwaters
“Breakwaters are the greatest mystery in engineering,” Alberto Lamiel exaggerated, spreading his arms wide. “Yes, Uncle Ricardo, science and technology have solved all the mysteries of the universe except this one. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”
Ever since Uncle Ataúlfo introduced me to his nephew, an engineer who had graduated from MIT and was considered the star of the Lamiel family, and who called me “uncle” even though I wasn’t, since I was Ataúlfo’s nephew from a different branch of the family, I had felt a certain antipathy toward the triumphant young man: he talked too much, and in an unbearably pontificating tone. But, evidently, the antipathy wasn’t reciprocal, because since our meeting his attentions toward me had increased, and he displayed an esteem as effusive as it was incomprehensible. What interest could an obscure expatriate translator, back in Peru after so many years and looking at everything with a mixture of nostalgia and stupefaction, hold for this brilliant, successful young man who was putting up buildings everywhere in the expansive Lima of the 1980s? I don’t know what it was, but Alberto spent a good deal of time with me. He took me to see the new neighborhoods—Las Casuarinas, La Planicie, Chacarilla, La Rinconada, Villa—and the vacation developments springing up like mushrooms on the southern beaches, and he showed me houses surrounded by parks, with lakes and pools, that looked like something in a Hollywood movie. Once, when he heard me say that one of the things I had envied most about my Miraflores friends when I was a boy was that many of them were members of Regatas—I’d had to sneak into the club or swim there from the neighboring beach of Pescadores—he invited me to have lunch at the old Chorrillos institution. Just as he had said, the club’s facilities were now very modern, with tennis and jai alai courts, Olympic-size warm-water pools, and two new beaches reclaimed from the ocean thanks to two long breakwaters. It was also true that the Alfresco Restaurant at Regatas prepared a dish of rice and shellfish that was marvelous served with cold beer. The view on this gray, cloudy November afternoon in a winter that refused to leave, with the ghostly cliffs of Barranco and Miraflores half hidden by the fog, stirred up many images from the depths of my memory. What he had just said about breakwaters pulled me away from the idle thoughts that preoccupied me.
“Are you serious?” I asked, my curiosity piqued. “The truth is, I don’t believe it, Alberto.”
“I didn’t believe it either, Uncle Ricardo. But I swear to you it’s so.”
He was a tall, gringo-looking, athletic boy—he came to Regatas to play racketball and jai alai every morning at six—who wore his dark hair cut very close to the scalp, and breathed self-sufficiency and optimism. He mixed English words into his sentences. He had a fiancée in Boston, whom he was going to marry in a few months, as soon as she completed her degree in chemical engineering. He had turned down several job offers in the United States after graduating with honors from MIT in order to come back to Peru to “serve his country,” because if all the privileged Peruvians went abroad, “who’d put their shoulders to the wheel and move our country forward?” His fine patriotic sentiments made me feel guilty, but he didn’t realize it. Alberto Lamiel was the only person in his social circle who displayed so much confidence in the future of Peru. During those final months of Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s second government—the end of 1984—with runaway inflation, the terrorism of Shining Path, blackouts, kidnappings, and the prospect that APRA, with Alan García, would win next year’s elections, there was a good deal of uncertainty and pessimism in the middle class. But nothing seemed to demoralize Alberto. He carried a loaded pistol in his van in case he was attacked, and always had a smile on his face. The possibility of Alan García coming to power didn’t frighten him. He had attended a meeting of young entrepreneurs with the Aprista candidate and thought him “pretty pragmatic, not at all ideological.”
“In other words, a breakwater doesn’t turn out well or badly for technical reasons—correct or mistaken calculations, successes or defects in construction—but because of strange incantations and white or black magic,” I said, teasing him. “Is that what you, an engineer from MIT, mean to tell me? Witchcraft has come to Cambridge, Massachusetts?”
“That’s exactly right, if you want to put it that way,” he said, enjoying the joke. But he became serious again and declared, with energetic movements of his head, “A breakwater works or doesn’t work for reasons science can’t explain. The subject is so fascinating that I’m writing a brief report for the journal at my university. You’d love meeting my source. His name is Arquímedes, and it fits him to a tee. A character right out of the movies, Uncle Ricardo.”
After hearing Alberto’s stories, the breakwaters at the Regatas Unión, which we could see from the terrace of the Alfresco, took on the legendary aura of ancestral monuments, stone buttresses erected there, cutting through the sea, not only to force it to withdraw and create an arc of beach for swimmers but as reminders of an ancient lineage, constructions that were half urban, half religious, and products of both expert workmanship and knowledge that was secret, sacred, and mythic rather than practical and functional. According to my presumptive nephew, to construct a breakwater, to determine the precise spot where that assemblage of blocks of stone, superimposed or joined with mortar, should be built, the smallest technical calculation was not sufficient or even necessary. What was indispensable was the “eye” of the practitioner—a kind of wizard, shaman, diviner, like the dowser who discovers deposits of hidden water beneath the surface of the earth, or the Chinese master of feng shui who decides the direction in which a house and its furnishings should be oriented so that future inhabitants can live in peace and enjoy it or otherwise feel harassed and pushed toward discord and friction—who detects on a hunch or by divine knowledge, as old Arquímedes had been doing for half a century along the coast of Lima, where to construct a breakwater so the water accepts it and doesn’t overturn it, filling it with sand, undermining it, bending its sides, preventing it from fulfilling its duty of humbling the sea.
“The surrealists would have loved to hear something like this, nephew,” I said, pointing to the Regatas’ breakwaters, over which white gulls and black ducks were circling, along with a flock of pelicans with philosophical eyes and beaks like ladles. “The breakwater, a perfect example of the marvelous quotidian.”
“After you
Yes, I was very intrigued. Was he speaking in earnest? What Alberto told me stayed with me from that day on, leaving and returning to my mind periodically, as if I intuited that if I followed that faint track, I’d suddenly find myself at a cave filled with treasure.
I had returned to Lima for a few weeks, rather hurriedly, with the intention of saying goodbye to and burying Uncle Ataúlfo Lamiel, who had been taken as an emergency case to the American Clinic with his second heart attack, and subjected to open-heart surgery with little hope he’d survive the ordeal. But, surprisingly, he did survive, and in spite of his eighty years and four bypasses, even seemed to be recuperating well. “Your uncle has more lives than a cat,” said Dr. Castañeda, the Lima cardiologist who performed the surgery. “The truth is, I didn’t think he’d come out of this.” Uncle Ataúlfo intervened to say it was my return to Lima that had given him back his life, not any quacks. He had already been discharged from the American Clinic and was convalescing at home, cared for by a full-time nurse and by Anastasia, the maid in her nineties who had been with him all his life. Aunt Dolores had died a few years earlier. Though I tried to stay in a hotel, he insisted on my coming to his small, two-story house, not far from Olivar de San Isidro, where he had more than enough room.
Uncle Ataúlfo had aged a great deal and was now a frail little man who shuffled his feet and was as thin as a broomstick. But he preserved the unrestrained cordiality he’d always had, and he was still alert and curious, reading three or four newspapers a day with the help of a philatelist’s magnifying glass and listening to the news every night so he would know how the world we live in was getting on. Unlike Alberto, Uncle Ataúlfo had somber forebodings about the immediate future. He thought that Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement would be with us for some time, and he mistrusted the triumph of APRA in the next elections predicted by the polls. “It will be the coup de grâce for poor Peru, nephew,” he complained.
I had returned to Lima after almost twenty years. I felt like a complete stranger in a city where there was almost no trace left of my memories. My aunt Alberta’s house had disappeared, and in its place stood an ugly, four-story building. The same thing had happened all over Miraflores, where only a handful of the small houses with gardens from my childhood resisted modernization. The entire neighborhood had been depersonalized with a profusion of buildings of various heights and the multiplication of businesses and aerial forests of neon signs competing with one another in vulgarity and bad taste. Thanks to Alberto Lamiel, the engineer, I had seen the neighborhoods out of Arabian Nights where the rich and well-to-do had moved. They were surrounded by the immense districts, now euphemistically called “new towns,” the refuge of millions of peasants who came down from the mountains, fleeing hunger and violence—armed actions and terrorism were concentrated principally in the region of the central sierra—and barely getting by in hovels made of straw mats, sticks, tin, rags, whatever they could find, in settlements that for the most part had no water, light, sewers, streets, or transportation. This coexistence of wealth and poverty in Lima made the rich seem richer and the poor seem poorer. On many afternoons, when I didn’t go out with my old friends from Barrio Alegre or my new nephew, Alberto Lamiel, I would stay and talk with Uncle Ataúlfo, and this topic returned obsessively to our conversation. It seemed to me that the economic differences between the very small minority of Peruvians who lived well and enjoyed the advantages of education, work, and entertainment, and those who barely survived in poor or wretched conditions, had been exacerbated in the past two decades. According to him, this was a false impression, due to the perspective I had brought from Europe, where the existence of an enormous middle class diluted and wiped away those contrasts between extremes. But in Peru, where the middle class was very small, huge contrasts had always existed. Uncle Ataúlfo was dismayed by the violence that was crushing Peruvian society. “I always suspected this might happen. And now it’s here, it has happened. It’s just as well poor Dolores didn’t live to see it.” The kidnappings, the terrorists’ bombs, the destruction of bridges, highways, electrical powerhouses, the atmosphere of insecurity and vandalism, he lamented, would set back by many years the country’s ascent toward modernity, in which Uncle Ataúlfo had never stopped believing. Until now. “I won’t see the ascent now, nephew. I hope you do.”
I never could give him a convincing explanation of why the bad girl refused to come to Lima with me, because I didn’t have one. He accepted with concealed skepticism the story that she couldn’t leave her job because it was precisely the time of year when the company had to handle an overwhelming demand from conventions, conferences, weddings, banquets, and all kinds of celebrations, which prevented her taking a couple of weeks’ vacation. In Paris I didn’t believe her either when she used this excuse for not coming with me, and I told her so. The bad girl then confessed it wasn’t true, that in reality she didn’t want to go to Lima. “And why is that, may I ask?” I said, trying to tempt her. “Don’t you miss Peruvian food? Well, I propose a couple of weeks with all the delicacies of our national cuisine, ceviche of corvina, prawn stew, rice with duck, cracked ribs, potatoes and eggs with chilies and olives, kid stew, and anything else you might want.” There was no way to convince her, she wouldn’t accept my enticements, serious or humorous. She wouldn’t go to Peru, not now, not ever. She wouldn’t set foot there even for a couple of hours. And when I wanted to cancel the trip so she wouldn’t be left alone, she insisted I go, claiming the Gravoskis would be in Paris then, and she could turn to them if she needed help at any time.
Finding that job had been the best remedy for her state of mind. It also helped her, I think, when after overcoming a thousand complications, we married and she became, according to what she sometimes told me at moments of intimacy, “a woman who, when she was almost forty-eight years old, had her papers in order for the first time in her life.” I thought that for the restless, freewheeling person she always had been, working in a company that organized “social events” would soon bore her, and she would be an employee so incompetent they would fire her. This didn’t happen. On the contrary, in a short time she earned the confidence of the woman who hired her. And she took very seriously being busy, doing things, taking on obligations, even if it was asking prices at hotels and restaurants, making comparisons and negotiating discounts, finding out what the businesses, associations, and families really wanted—what kinds of landscapes, hotels, menus, shows, orchestras—for their meetings, banquets, anniversaries. She worked not only at the office but at home as well. In the afternoons and evenings I heard her, glued to the telephone, discussing the details of contracts with infinite patience, or reporting to Martine, her employer, on the arrangements made that day. Sometimes she had to travel to the provinces—generally to Provence, the Côte d’Azur, or Biarritz—either with Martine or as her representative. Then she would call every night and tell me, with a wealth of detail, what she had done that day. It had been good for her to be occupied, acquire responsibilities, and earn money. Once again she dressed flirtatiously, went to hairdressers, masseuses, manicurists, pedicurists, and constantly surprised me with a change in makeup, hairdo, or outfit. “Do you do this to be fashionable or to keep your husband forever in love?” “I do it above all because clients love to see me looking attractive and elegant. Are you jealous?” Yes, I was. I still was head over heels in love with her, and I think she was with me too, because except for small, passing crises, since the night I almost threw myself into the Seine I had noticed details in our relationship that would have been unthinkable before. “This two-week separation will be a test,” she said on the night I left. “We’ll see if you love me even more or leave me for one of those mischievous Peruvian girls, good
Our marriage had been a true bureaucratic adventure. Though it calmed her to know she now had her situation normalized at last, I suspected that if one day, for whatever reason, the French authorities began to dig through her papers, they would discover that our marriage was invalid because it had so many defects in form and substance. But I didn’t tell her that, least of all now, when the French government had just granted her citizenship two years after our marriage, not suspecting that the new Madame Ricardo Somocurcio had already been made a naturalized French citizen through an earlier marriage under the name of Madame Robert Arnoux.
In order for us to marry, we had to create false papers for her, using a name different from the one she had when she married Robert Arnoux. We wouldn’t have managed without the help of Uncle Ataúlfo. When I described the problem for him, in very broad strokes, without giving him any explanations except the indispensable ones and avoiding the scandalous details of the bad girl’s life, he responded immediately, saying he didn’t need to know anything else. Underdevelopment has rapid, though somewhat complicated, solutions for cases like this. And no sooner said than done: in a few weeks he sent me birth and baptismal certificates, issued by the municipality and parish of Huaura, in the name of Lucy Solórzano Cajahuaringa, and with them, following his instructions, we appeared before the Peruvian consul in Brussels, who was a friend of his. Uncle Ataúlfo had told him earlier, in a letter, that Lucy Solórzano, the fiancée of his nephew Ricardo Somocurcio, had lost all her papers, including her passport, and needed a new one. The consul, a human relic wearing a waistcoat, watch chain, and monocle, received us with cool, prudent good breeding. He didn’t ask a single question, by which I understood that Uncle Ataúlfo had told him more things than he appeared to know. He was courteous, impersonal, and respectful of all the forms. He communicated with the Ministry of Foreign Relations, and through the ministry with the government and police, and sent copies of my fiancée’s birth and baptismal certificates, requesting authorization to issue a new document. At the end of two months the bad girl had a new passport and a new identity, with which we could obtain, in Belgium, a tourist visa for France, endorsed by me, a nationalized French citizen residing in Paris. We immediately began the application process at the mayor’s office in the fifth arrondissement, on Place du Panthéon. There we finally were married on an autumn afternoon in October 1982, accompanied only by the Gravoskis, who acted as witnesses. There was no wedding banquet or any kind of celebration, because that same afternoon I left for Rome with a two-week contract at the Food and Agriculture Organization.