The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa
Marcella was more concerned about me than I was: I had to take my blood-pressure pills, walk every day for at least half an hour, and never have more than two or three glasses of wine a day. And she always said that when she got a good commission, we would spend the money on a trip to Peru. Before she saw Cuzco and Machu Picchu, she wanted to visit the Lima neighborhood of Miraflores I talked about so much. I went along with her, though deep down I knew we never would make that trip, because I’d take care to postpone it into eternity. I didn’t intend to return to Peru. Since the death of Uncle Ataúlfo, my country had disappeared for me like mirages on sandy ground. I didn’t have relatives or friends there, and even the memories of my youth were growing dim.
I learned of Uncle Ataúlfo’s death several weeks after the fact, in a letter from Alberto Lamiel, when I had been living in Madrid for six months. Marcella brought it to me at the Barbieri, and though I knew it could happen at any moment, the news had a tremendous impact on me. I stopped working and went to walk, like a somnambulist, along the paths in the Retiro. Since my last trip to Peru, at the end of 1984, my uncle and I had written to each other every month, and in his trembling hand, which I had to decipher like a paleographer, I had followed, step by step, the economic disasters caused in Peru by Alan García’s policies: inflation, nationalizations, the rupture with credit entities, control of prices and exchange rates, falling employment and standards of living. Uncle Ataúlfo’s letters revealed the bitterness with which he awaited death. He passed in his sleep. Alberto Lamiel added that he was making arrangements to go to Boston, where, thanks to the parents of his North American wife, he had possibilities for work. He told me he had been an imbecile to believe in the promises of Alan García, for whom he voted in the 1985 elections, like so many other gullible professionals. Trusting in the president’s word that he wouldn’t touch them, Alberto had held on to the certificates in dollars where he kept all his savings. When the new leader decreed the forced conversion of foreign currency certificates into Peruvian soles, Alberto’s patrimony vanished. It was only the beginning of a chain of reverses. The best he could do was “to follow your example, Uncle Ricardo, and leave to find better horizons, because in this country it’s no longer possible to work if you’re not employed by the government.”
This was the last news I’d had of things in Peru. Then, since I saw practically no Peruvians in Madrid, I learned what was happening there only on the rare occasion when some report found its way into the Madrid newspapers, usually the birth of quintuplets, an earthquake, or a bus driving over a cliff in the Andes, with approximately thirty deaths.
I never told Uncle Ataúlfo my marriage had failed, and so in his letters, until the end, he would send regards to “my niece,” and I, in mine, sent hers to him. I don’t know why I hid it from my uncle. Perhaps because I would have to explain what had happened, and any explanation would have seemed absurd and incomprehensible to him, as it did to me.
Our separation occurred in an unexpected and brutal way, just as the bad girl’s disappearances had always happened. Though this time it wasn’t really a flight but an urbane separation, which we discussed. That was exactly why, unlike the other separations, I knew this one was definitive.
Our honeymoon after I returned to Paris from Lima, terrified she had left me because she hadn’t answered the phone for three or four days, lasted a few months. In the beginning she was as affectionate as she had been on the afternoon she greeted me with displays of love. I obtained a monthlong contract at UNESCO, and when I came home she already had returned from her office and prepared supper. One night she waited for me with the living-room light turned off and the table lit by romantic candles. Then she had to make two trips for Martine, a few days each time, to the Côte d’Azur, and she called every night. What more could I desire? I had the impression that the bad girl had reached the age of reason, that our marriage had become unbreakable. Then, at a moment my memory can’t recall specifically, her mood and behavior began to change. It was a subtle change, one she tried to hide, perhaps because she still had doubts, and I became aware of it only after the fact. It didn’t surprise me when the passionate attitude of the first few weeks slowly gave way to a more distant attitude because she always had been like that, and the unusual thing for her was to be effusive. I noticed she was distracted and became lost in thoughts that made her frown and seemed to take her beyond my reach. She would come back from these fugue states in alarm and give a start when I returned her to reality with a joke: “What troubles the fair princess with the mouth of berry red? Why is she so pensive? Can the princess be in love?” She would blush and respond with a forced little laugh.
One afternoon, when I returned from Señor Charnés’s old office—he had retired to spend his old age in the south of Spain—where for the third or fourth time I was told they had no work for me at the moment, I opened the door to the apartment on Rue Joseph Granier and saw her sitting in the living room with the suitcase she always took on her trips, wearing her brown tailored suit, and I understood something serious was going on. She was ashen.
“What is it?”
She sighed, gathering her strength—she had blue circles under her eyes, which were shining—and without beating around the bush, she came out with the sentence she undoubtedly had prepared well in advance.
“I didn’t want to go without talking to you, so you don’t think I’m running away.” She said it in one breath, in the icy voice she generally used for sentimental statements. “For the sake of what you love most, I beg you not to make a scene or threaten to kill yourself. Both of us are too old for that kind of thing. Forgive me for speaking so harshly, but I think it’s for the best.”
I dropped into the armchair, facing her. I felt infinitely weary. I had the feeling that I was hearing a record that kept repeating, each time with more distortion, the same musical phrase. She always was very pale, but now her expression was irritated, as if having to sit there giving me explanations filled her with resentment toward me.
“It must be obvious that I’ve tried to adapt to this kind of life, to please you, to repay you for helping me when I was sick.” Her coldness now seemed to be boiling with rage. “I can’t stand it anymore. This isn’t the life for me. If I stay with you out of compassion, I’ll end up hating you. I don’t want to hate you. Try to understand, if you can.”
She stopped speaking, waiting for me to say something, but I felt so tired I didn’t have the energy or desire to tell her anything.
“I’m suffocating here,” she added, looking around her. “These two little rooms are a prison and I can’t bear them anymore. I know my limit. This routine, this mediocrity, is killing me. I don’t want the rest of my life to be like this. You don’t care, you’re happy, better for you. But I’m not like you, I don’t know how to be resigned. I’ve tried, you’ve seen that I’ve tried. I can’t. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with you out of compassion. Forgive me for speaking so frankly. It’s better if you know and accept the truth, Ricardo.”
“Who is he?” I asked when she fell silent again. “May I at least know who it is you’re leaving with?”
“Are you going to make a jealous scene?” was her indignant response. And she reminded me, sarcastically: “I’m a free woman, Ricardito. Our marriage was only to obtain papers for me. So don’t demand an accounting from me about anything.”
She was challenging me, as enraged as a fighting cock. Now a feeling of being ridiculous was added to my exhaustion. She was right: we were too old for these scenes.
“I see you’ve decided everything and there’s not much to say,” I interrupted, getting to my feet. “I’m going to take a walk so you can pack your bags in peace.”
“They’re packed,” she replied in the same exasperated tone.
I was sorry she hadn’t gone the way she had other times, leaving me a few scrawled lines. As I walked to the door, I heard her say behind me in a thin voice, trying to be placating, “By the way, I won?
“You’re very kind,” I thought, closing the apartment door very slowly. “But the only thing you could get from me would be debts and the mortgage on this apartment, which, at the rate we’re going, will be foreclosed soon.” When I was outside, it began to rain. I hadn’t brought an umbrella, so I took refuge in the café on the corner, where I sat a long time, sipping a cup of tea that grew cold until it was tasteless. The truth was there was something in her impossible not to admire, for the reasons that lead us to appreciate well-made works even when they’re perverse. She had made a conquest, and done it with calculation, so she could again achieve the social and economic status that would give her greater security and take her out of the two confining little rooms on Rue Joseph Granier. And now, without blinking, she had made her move, tossing me into the trash. Who could her lover be this time? Someone she had met through her work with Martine, at one of those congresses, conferences, celebrations they organized. A good job of seduction, no doubt. She looked very good, but after all, she was over fifty. Chapeau! An old man, no doubt, whom she might kill with pleasure to get his inheritance, like the heroine in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse? When it cleared, I took a walk around École Militaire, killing time.
I got back about eleven and she had gone, leaving the keys in the living room. She took all her clothes in the two suitcases we had, and tossed into garbage bags what was old or what she had too much of: slippers, slips, a housecoat, stockings and blouses, and many jars of creams and makeup. She hadn’t touched the francs we kept in a small strongbox in a closet in the living room.
Maybe someone she met at the gym on Avenue Montaigne? It was an expensive place, prosperous old men went there to reduce their bellies, men who could guarantee her a more amusing and comfortable life. I knew the worst thing I could do was to keep shuffling through these kinds of hypotheses, and for the sake of my mental health I had to forget about her right away. Because this time the separation was definitive, the end of the love story. Could this farce more than thirty years old be called a love story, Ricardito?
I succeeded in not thinking too much about her in the days, weeks, and months that followed, when, feeling like a bag of soulless bones, skin, and muscles, I spent the whole day looking for work. It was urgent because I needed to confront my debts and daily expenses, and because I knew the best way to get through this period was to give myself over wholeheartedly to an obligation.
For a few months I had only badly paid translations. Finally, one day they called me to be a replacement at an international conference on authors’ rights sponsored by UNESCO. For a few days I’d had constant attacks of neuralgia, which I attributed to low spirits and lack of sleep. I fought them with analgesics prescribed by the pharmacist on the corner. My replacing the UNESCO interpreter was a disaster. The attacks of neuralgia kept me from doing my work well, and after two days I had to give up and explain to the head interpreter what was happening to me. The doctor at Social Welfare diagnosed a case of otitis and sent me to a specialist. I had to wait hours at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière and come back several times before I could enter the consulting room of Dr. Pennau, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. He confirmed I had a slight ear infection and cured me in a week. But when the attacks of neuralgia and dizziness didn’t stop, I went to a new internist at the same hospital. After examining me, he had me take all kinds of tests, including an MRI. I have an ugly memory of the thirty or forty minutes I spent inside that metal tube, buried alive, as motionless as a mummy, my ears tormented by waves of stupefying noises.
The MRI established that I had suffered a slight stroke. That was the real reason for the neuralgia and dizziness. Nothing very serious; the danger had passed. From now on I had to take care of myself, exercise, have a balanced diet, control my blood pressure, drink very little alcohol, lead a quiet life. “A retired person’s life,” the doctor prescribed. My work might be reduced, and I could expect a diminution in concentration and memory.
Fortunately for me, the Gravoskis came to spend a month in Paris, this time with Yilal. He had grown a great deal and was a complete gringo in the way he spoke and dressed. When I told him the bad girl and I had separated, he put on a sorrowful face, “That’s why she hasn’t answered my letters for so long,” he whispered.
The company of these friends was very opportune. Talking to them, joking, going out for supper and to the movies, brought back some of my joy in life. One night, when we were having a beer on the terrace of a bistrot on Boulevard Raspail, Elena suddenly said, “That madwoman was about to kill you, Ricardo. And I liked her so much even with all her madness. But this I won’t forgive. I forbid you to be friends with her again.”
“Never again,” I promised. “I’ve learned my lesson. Besides, since I’m a human wreck now, there’s no danger she’ll come back into my life.”
“So you think the sorrows of love cause cerebral hemorrhages?” said Simon. “Romanticism once again?”
“In this case yes, you heartless Belgian,” Elena replied. “Ricardo isn’t like you. He’s a romantic, a sensitive man. She could have killed him with her last little pleasantry. I’ll never forgive her, I swear. And I hope that you, Ricardo, won’t be enough of a shithead to follow after like a dog when she calls you to get her out of some new entanglement.”
“It’s clear you love me more than the bad girl does, my friend.” I kissed her hand. “As for the rest, ‘shithead’ is a word that suits me perfectly.”
“We all agree about that,” Simon declared.
“What’s a shithead?” asked the little gringo.
On the urging of the Gravoskis I went to see a neurosurgeon at a private clinic in Passy. My friends insisted that, no matter how small it had been, a cerebral hemorrhage could have consequences and I ought to know what to expect. Without too much hope, I had asked my bank for another loan so I could face the interest payments on the mortgage and the two earlier loans, and to my surprise, they gave it to me. I put myself in the hands of Dr. Pierre Joudret, a charming man and, as far as I could judge, a competent professional. He subjected me again to all kinds of tests and prescribed a treatment to control my blood pressure and maintain good circulation. This was when I met Marcella one afternoon in his office.
That night, in Nanterre, after the performance of The Bourgeois Gentleman, when we went to have a glass of wine at a bistrot, the Italian designer seemed very amiable, and the passion and conviction with which she spoke about her work were fascinating. She told me about her life, the arguments and reconciliations with her parents, the stage sets she had designed for small theaters in Spain and Italy. The set in Nanterre was one of the first she had done in France. At a certain moment, among a thousand other things, she assured me that the best theatrical sets she had seen in Paris were not on stages but in the display windows of stores. Would I like to see them with her and lose the skeptical face I had as I listened to her?
We said goodbye at the Métro station with kisses on the cheeks and agreed to see each other the following Saturday. I enjoyed the excursion very much, not only because of the windows she took me to see but because of her explanations and interpretations. She showed me, for example, that the sandy ground and palm trees under white light at La Samaritaine would be marvelous for Beckett’s Oh les beaux, jours!, the canopy of flaming reds at an Arab restaurant in Montparnasse as the backdrop for Orpheus in Hell, and the window of a popular shoemaker’s shop near the Church of Saint Paul in Le Marais for Geppetto’s house in a dramatic adaptation of Pinocchio. Everything she said was ingenious, unexpected, and her enthusiasm and joy kept me amused and happy. During supper at La Petite Périgourdine, a restaurant on Rue des Écoles, I said I liked her, and I kissed her. She confessed that ever since the day we spoke in the waiting room at the clinic in Passy she had known “something happened between us.” She told me she had lived for two years with an actor and they recently broke up, though they were still good friends.
We went to the little apartment on Joseph Granier and made love. She had a slim body, with small, delicate breasts, and she was tender, ardent, and uncomplicated. She examined my books and reprimanded me for having only poetry, novels, some essays, but not a single book on the theater. She would take care of helping me fill that void. “You’ve come right into my life, caro,” she added. She had a broad smile that seemed to come not only from her eyes and mouth but also from her forehead, nose, and ears.
Marcella had to go back to Italy a few days later for a possible job in Milan, and I accompanied her to the station because she traveled by train (she was afraid of planes). We spoke several times on the phone, and when she returned to Paris she came to my house instead of going to the little hotel in the Latin Quarter where she had been living. She brought a bag with a few pairs of trousers, some blouses, sweaters, and wrinkled jackets, and a trunk that held books, magazines, figurines, and maquettes of her stage sets.
Marcella’s entrance into my life was so rapid that I almost didn’t have time to reflect, to ask myself if I wasn’t being reckless. Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to wait a little, get to know each other better, see if the relationship would work? After all, she was a kid and I could be her father. But the relationship did work, thanks to her way of being so adaptable, so simple in her tastes, so disposed to putting a good face on any setback. I couldn’t have said I loved her, in any case not the way I had loved the bad girl, but I felt so good with her, and so grateful she was with me and even loved me. She rejuvenated me and helped me bury my memories.
From time to time Marcella came up with assignments for stage sets in neighborhood theaters subsidized by town councils. Then she would dedicate herself to her work with so much frenzy that she forgot about my existence. I had more and more difficulty obtaining translations. I had given up interpreting, I didn’t feel capable of doing the work with my former certainty. Perhaps because word had gotten around the profession about my health problems, I was entrusted with fewer and fewer texts to translate. And those I did get—late, rarely, or never—took me a long time, because after an hour or an hour and a half of work, the dizziness and headaches returned. In the first few months of living with Marcella, my income was reduced to almost nothing, and I found myself very worried again about the mortgage and interest payments on the loans.