The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa
“He lost a lot of weight,” Alfonso added. “The morning I said goodbye to him, in Illarec ch’aska, he was almost as thin as you. Sometimes we talked about you. ‘I wonder what our ambassador to UNESCO is doing?’ he’d say. ‘Do you think he decided to publish those poems he was secretly writing?’ He never lost his sense of humor. He always won the joke contests we had at night to keep from being bored. His wife and son are living in Cuba now.”
I would have liked to spend more time with Alfonso the Spiritualist, but I had to go back to the conference. We said goodbye with a hug, and I gave him my number so he could call me if he ever came through Paris.
A little while before or after this conversation, the grim prophecies of my uncle Ataúlfo came true. On October 3, 1968, the military, headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, initiated the coup that ended the democracy presided over by Belaúnde Terry, who was sent into exile, and a new military dictatorship began in Peru that would last for twelve years.
3
Painter of Horses in Swinging London
In the second half of the 1960s, London displaced Paris as the city of styles and trends that moved into Europe and then spread all over the world. Music replaced books and ideas as a center of attraction for the young, above all with the Beatles but also including Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger, other English bands and singers, and hippies and the psychedelic revolution of the flower children. As they had once gone to Paris to make the revolution, many Latin Americans immigrated to London to join the partisans of cannabis, pop music, and the promiscuous life. Carnaby Street supplanted Saint-Germain as the navel of the world. London was the birthplace of the miniskirt, long hair, the eccentric outfits commemorated by the musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, the popularization of drugs, beginning with marijuana and ending with LSD, the fascination with Hindu spiritualism and Buddhism, the practice of free love, the emergence of homosexuals from the closet, gay pride campaigns, as well as a total rejection of the bourgeois establishment, in the name not of the socialist revolution, to which the hippies were indifferent, but of a hedonistic and anarchic pacifism, tamed by a love for nature and animals and a disavowal of traditional morality. Debates regarding La Mutualité, the nouveau roman, refined singer-songwriters like Léo Ferré or Georges Brassens, and Parisian art cinemas were no longer the points of reference for young rebels, but rather Trafalgar Square and the parks where they demonstrated behind Vanessa Redgrave and Tariq Ali against the war in Vietnam, between crowded concerts by their great idols and tokes of Colombian herb, and pubs and discotheques, symbols of the new culture that like a magnet attracted millions of young people of both sexes to London. In England these were also the years of theatrical splendor, and the mounting of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade in 1964, directed by Peter Brook, best known for his revolutionary stagings of Shakespeare, was an event throughout all of Europe. I’ve never seen anything onstage since then that etched itself so deeply in my mind.
Through one of those strange conjunctions woven by fate, it turned out that in the late sixties I was spending long periods of time in England and living in the very heart of swinging London: in Earl’s Court, an extremely lively and cosmopolitan section west of Kensington which, because of the many New Zealanders and Australians, was known as Kangaroo Valley. In fact, the adventure of May 1968, when the young people of Paris filled the Latin Quarter with barricades and declared that one had to be a realist by choosing the impossible, found me in London, where, because of the strikes that paralyzed train stations and airports in France, I was stranded for a few weeks, unable to find out if anything had happened to my little apartment near the École Militaire.
When I returned to Paris, I discovered that my apartment was intact, for the revolution of May 1968 had not spilled over the perimeter of the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Contrary to what many people prophesied during those euphoric days, it did not have significant political consequences except to accelerate the fall of de Gaulle, inaugurate the brief five-year era of Pompidou, and reveal the existence of a left more modern than the French Communist Party (“la crapule stalinienne,” according to the phrase of Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of ’68). Customs became freer, but from the cultural point of view, with the disappearance of an entire illustrious generation—Mauriac, Camus, Sartre, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Malraux—there was a discreet cultural retraction during those years, when instead of creators, the maîtres à penser became the critics, first the structuralists in the style of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, and then the deconstructionists, like Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, with their arrogant, esoteric rhetoric, isolated in cabals of devotees and removed from the general public, whose cultural life, as a consequence of this development, became increasingly banal.
Those were years when I was working very hard, though, as the bad girl might have said, with only moderate achievements: the move from translator to interpreter. As I had done the first time, I filled the emptiness of her disappearance by taking on countless obligations. I resumed my classes in Russian and simultaneous interpretation, to which I devoted myself tenaciously after my hours of work at UNESCO. I spent two summers in the USSR, for two months each time, the first in Moscow and the second in Leningrad, taking special intensive Russian-language courses for interpreters in secluded university areas where we felt as if we were at a Jesuit boarding school.
Some two years after my final supper with Robert Arnoux, I had a rather subdued relationship with Cécile, a functionary at UNESCO, an attractive, pleasant woman but a nondrinker, a vegetarian, and a devout Catholic, with whom I got along perfectly well only when we made love, because in everything else we were polar opposites. At one point we contemplated the possibility of living together, but both of us became frightened—I above all—at the prospect of cohabitation when we were so different and there was not, deep down, even the shadow of true love between us. Our relationship languished from tedium, and one day we stopped seeing and calling each other.
It was difficult for me to obtain my first contracts as an interpreter in spite of excelling at all the exams and having the corresponding diplomas. But this was a tighter network than that of translators, and the professional associations, real mafias, admitted new members by the eyedropper. I achieved membership only when I could add Russian to English and French as the languages I translated into Spanish. My interpreting contracts kept me traveling a great deal in Europe, and frequently to London, especially for economic conferences and seminars. One day in 1970, at the Peruvian consulate on Sloane Street, where I had gone to renew my passport, I ran into Juan Barreto, a childhood friend and classmate at the Colegio Champagnat in Miraflores, who was also renewing his passport.
He had become a hippie, not the tattered kind but an elegant one. He wore his silky, graying hair hanging loose down to his shoulders and had a rather sparse beard that created a carefully tended muzzle around his mouth. I remembered him as chubby and short, but now he was taller than me by a few centimeters and was as slim as a model. He wore cherry-colored velvet trousers and sandals that seemed to be made of parchment, not leather, a printed silk Oriental tunic, a blaze of color framed by his loose, open jacket that reminded me of the ones worn by Turkoman shepherds in a documentary on Mesopotamia I had seen at the Palais de Chaillot in the series Connaissance du monde, which I attended every month.
We went for coffee in the vicinity of the consulate, and our conversation was so agreeable I invited him to have lunch at a pub in Kensington Gardens. We spent more than two hours together, he speaking and I listening and interjecting monosyllables.
His story was novelesque. I recalled that in his last years at school, Juan began to work at Radio El Sol as a commentator and soccer announcer, and his Marist friends predicted a great future for him as a sports journalist. “But that was really a child’s game,” he told me. “My true vocation was always painting.” He attended the School of Fine Arts in Lima and took part in a group show at the
In spite of their insolvency, he and other vagabond hippies managed to travel to Kathmandu, where he discovered that in spiritual Nepal it was more difficult to survive without money than in materialistic Europe. The solidarity of his migratory companions was decisive in keeping him from dying of hunger or disease, because in India he contracted a Maltese fever that brought him to within an inch of departing this world. The girl and two boys traveling with him took turns watching over him as he convalesced in a filthy hospital in Madras where the rats wandered among the patients lying on the floor on straw mats.
“I’d become totally accustomed to the life of a tramp, to my home being on the street, when my luck changed.”
He was making charcoal portraits for a couple of pounds each at the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum on Brompton Road, when a lady carrying a parasol and wearing net gloves unexpectedly asked him to draw the portrait of the dog she was walking, a female King Charles spaniel, with white and coffee-colored spots, that was brushed, washed, and combed with the airs of a lady. The dog’s name was Esther. The lady was delighted with the double drawing Juan made, “full face and in profile.” When she went to pay him, she discovered she didn’t have any money, either because her wallet had been stolen or because she had left it at home. “It doesn’t matter,” said Juan. “It’s been an honor to work for so distinguished a model.” The lady, confused and grateful, left. But after taking a few steps, she returned and handed Juan a card. “If you’re ever in the area, knock on the door so you can greet your new friend.” She pointed at the dog.
Mrs. Stubard, a retired nurse and childless widow, became a fairy godmother whose magic wand took Juan Barreto off the London streets and gradually cleaned him up (“One of the consequences of being a tramp is that you never bathe, and you don’t even smell as dirty as you really are”), fed him, dressed him, and finally catapulted him into the most English of English environments: the world of owners, riders, trainers, and enthusiasts at the Newmarket Riding Club, where the most famous racehorses in Great Britain, and perhaps the world, are born, grow up, die, and are buried.
Mrs. Stubard lived alone with little Esther in a redbrick house, with a small garden that she tended herself and kept beautiful, in a quiet, prosperous section of St. John’s Wood. She had inherited it from her husband, a pediatrician who had spent his entire life in the wards and consulting rooms of Charing Cross Hospital caring for other people’s children though he never could have one of his own. Juan Barreto knocked on the widow’s door one afternoon when he was hungrier, lonelier, and more anguished than usual. She recognized him immediately.
“I’ve come to see how my friend Esther is getting along. And, if it’s not too much trouble, to ask you for a piece of bread.”
“Come in, artist,” she said with a smile. “Would you mind shaking off those disgusting sandals you’re wearing? And take the opportunity to wash your feet at the faucet in the garden.”
“Mrs. Stubard was an angel come down from heaven,” said Juan Barreto. “She had framed my charcoal drawing of the dog and kept it on an end table in the living room. It looked very nice.” She also had Juan wash his hands with soap and water (“From the beginning she adopted the air of a bossy mother that she still uses with me”) and fixed him a couple of tomato, cheese, and cucumber sandwiches and a cup of tea. They talked for a long time, and she urged Juan to tell her his life from A to Z. She was alert and avid to know everything about the world, and she insisted that Juan describe in detail what the hippies were like, where they came from, and what kinds of lives they led.
“You won’t believe it, but I was fascinated by the old lady. I went to see her not only so she could feed me but because I had a great time talking to her. She had a seventy-year-old body but a fifteen-year-old spirit. And this’ll kill you, I turned her into a hippie.”
Juan stopped by the little house in St. John’s Wood once a week, bathed and combed Esther, helped Mrs. Stubard prune and water the garden, and sometimes went shopping with her at the nearby Sainsbury market. The bourgeois residents of St. John’s Wood must have been surprised to see the mismatched pair. Juan helped her cook—he taught her Peruvian recipes for stuffed potato, shredded chicken and chili, ceviche—and washed the dishes for her, and then they had after-dinner conversations during which Juan played music by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones for her, and recounted a thousand and one adventures and anecdotes about the hippies, male and female, he had met on his wanderings around London, India, and Nepal. Mrs. Stubard’s curiosity was not satisfied with Juan’s explanations of how cannabis sharpened one’s lucidity and sensitivity, principally for music. At last, overcoming her prejudices—she was a practicing Methodist—she gave Juan some money so she could try marijuana. “She was so restless, I swear she would have tried a cap of LSD if I had encouraged her to.” Their marijuana session was carried out against the musical background of the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine, the Beatles picture Mrs. Stubard and Juan had gone arm in arm to see at a theater in Picadilly Circus. My friend was afraid his protector and friend would have a bad trip and, in fact, eventually she complained of a headache and fell asleep faceup on the living-room carpet after two hours of extraordinary excitement when she chattered like a parrot, bursting into laughter and doing ballet steps before the stupefied eyes of Juan and Esther.
Their relationship turned into something more than friendship, a fraternal companionship of accomplices in spite of the differences in age, language, and background. “I felt as if she were my mother, my sister, my buddy, my guardian angel.”
As if Juan’s testimony regarding the hippie subculture were not enough for her, one day Mrs. Stubard suggested he invite two or three of his friends for tea. He had all kinds of doubts. He feared the consequences of that effort to mix water and oil, but finally he arranged for the meeting. He chose three of the more presentable of his hippie friends and told them if they gave Mrs. Stubard a hard time, or stole anything from her house, he’d break his pacifist vows and strangle them. The two girls and the boy—René, Jody, and Aspern—sold incense and bags woven according to supposed Afghani patterns on the streets of Earl’s Court. They behaved fairly well and made short work of the strawberry shortcake and almond pastries Mrs. Stubard had prepared for them, but when they lit a stick of incense, explaining to the lady of the house that this would purify the atmosphere spiritually and that the karma of each person present would improve, it turned out that Mrs. Stubard was allergic to the purifying smoke: she suffered an attack of loud, unstoppable sneezes that reddened her eyes and nose and set off Esther’s barking. When this incident had been overcome, the get-together proceeded fairly well until René, Jody, and Aspern told Mrs. Stubard they formed a love triangle and that the three of them making love was their homage to the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and an even more determined way of putting into practice the slogan “Make love not war,” approved at the last demonstration in Trafalgar Square against
From visiting her once a week, Juan passed on to two, then three visits, and finally he moved in with Mrs. Stubard, who fixed up the small room that had been her late husband’s, since in his final years they’d had separate bedrooms. Contrary to what Juan had feared, their cohabitation was perfect. She never tried to interfere in any way in Juan’s life, or ask why he slept elsewhere on certain nights or came home when the residents of St. John’s Wood were leaving for work. She gave him a key to the house. “The only thing she worried about was my taking a bath a couple of times a week,” Juan said with a laugh. “Because you may not believe it, but after almost three years as a street hippie, I had lost the habit of showering. In Mrs. Stubard’s house, I gradually rediscovered the Miraflores perversion of a daily shower.”
In addition to helping her in the garden and kitchen, and taking Esther for walks and putting the trash can out on the street, Juan had long, intimate conversations with Mrs. Stubard, always with a cup of tea in their hands and a platter of gingersnaps in front of them. He told her about Peru and she talked of an England that, from the perspective of swinging London, seemed prehistoric: boys and girls who stayed in harsh boarding schools until they were sixteen and where, except for the disreputable districts of Soho, St. Pancras, and the East End, life ended at nine o’clock at night. The only diversion Mrs. Stubard and her husband allowed themselves was to go occasionally to hear a concert or an opera at Covent Garden. During summer vacation they spent a week in Bristol, in the house of her brother and sister-in-law, and another week in the Scottish Highlands, which her husband loved. Mrs. Stubard had never been out of Great Britain. But she was interested in the world: she read The Times carefully, beginning with the obituaries, and listened to BBC newscasts on the radio at one in the afternoon and at eight in the evening. It never had occurred to her to buy a television set, and she went to the movies only rarely. But she had a phonograph and listened to the symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Benjamin Britten.