The Guerrilla Fighter
The México Lindo was on the corner of Rue des Canettes and Rue Guisard, near Place Saint-Sulpice, and during my first year in Paris, when money was very tight, on many nights I'd station myself at the restaurant's back door and wait for Paúl to appear with a little package of tamales, tortillas, carnitas, or enchiladas that I would take to my garret in the H?tel du Sénat to eat before they got cold. Paúl had started out at the México Lindo as a kitchen boy, and in a short time, thanks to his culinary skills, he was promoted to chef's assistant, and by the time he left it all to dedicate himself body and soul to the revolution, he was the restaurant's regular cook.
In those early days of the 1960s, Paris was experiencing the fever of the Cuban Revolution and teeming with young people from the five continents who, like Paúl, dreamed of repeating in their own countries the exploits of Fidel Castro and his bearded ones, and prepared for that, in earnest or in jest, in café conspiracies. In addition to earning his living at the México Lindo, when I met him a few days after my arrival in Paris, Paúl was taking biology courses at the Sorbonne, which he also abandoned for the sake of the revolution.
We became friends at a little café in the Latin Quarter where a group of South Americans would meet, the kind Sebastián Salazar Bondy wrote about in Poor People of Paris, a book of short stories. When he learned of my financial difficulties, Paúl offered to give me a hand as far as food was concerned because there was more than enough at the México Lindo. If I came to the back door at about ten at night, he would offer me a "free, hot banquet," something he had already done for other compatriots in need.
He couldn't have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and he was very, very fat—a barrel with legs—and good-hearted, friendly, and talkative. He always had a big smile on his face, which inflated his plump cheeks even more. In Peru he had studied medicine for several years and served some time in prison for being one of the organizers of the famous strike at the University of San Marcos in 1952, during the dictatorship of General Manuel Odría. Before coming to Paris he spent a couple of years in Madrid, where he married a girl from Burgos. They'd just had a baby.
He lived in the Marais, which in those days, before André Malraux, General de Gaulle's minister of culture, undertook his great cleanup and restoration of old, dilapidated mansions covered by the grime of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a neighborhood of poor artisans, cabinetmakers, cobblers, tailors, Jews, and a large number of indigent students and artists. In addition to those rapid encounters at the service entrance of the México Lindo, we would also get together at midday at La Petite Source on the Carrefour de l'Odéon or on the terrace of Le Cluny, at the corner of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, to drink coffee and recount our adventures. Mine consisted exclusively of multiple efforts to find a job, something that was not at all easy since no one in Paris was impressed by my law degree from a Peruvian university or by my being fairly fluent in English and French. His had to do with preparations for the revolution that would make Peru the second Socialist Republic of Latin America. One day he suddenly asked if I'd be interested in going to Cuba on a scholarship to receive military training, and I told Paúl that even though I felt all the sympathy in the world for him, I had absolutely no interest in politics; in fact, I despised politics, and all my dreams were focused—excuse my petit bourgeois mediocrity, compadre—on getting a nice steady job that would let me spend, in the most ordinary way, the rest of my days in Paris. I also told him not to tell me anything about his conspiracies, I didn't want to live with the anxiety of accidentally revealing some information that might harm him and his associates.
"Don't worry. I trust you, Ricardo."
He did, in fact, to the extent that he ignored what I'd said. He told me everything he was doing and even the most intimate complications of their revolutionary preparations. Paúl belonged to the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR, founded by Luis de la Puente Uceda, who had repudiated the center-left American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA. The Cuban government had given MIR a hundred scholarships for young Peruvians to receive guerrilla training. These were the years of the confrontation between Beijing and Moscow, and at that moment it seemed as if Cuba was leaning toward the Maoist line, though later, for practical reasons, she eventually allied with the Soviets. The scholarship recipients, because of the strict blockade imposed on the island by the United States, had to pass through Paris on the way to their destination, and Paúl was hard-pressed to find them places to stay during their Parisian stopover.
I gave him a hand with these logistical chores, helping him reserve rooms in miserable little hotels—"for Arabs," Paúl would say—where we crowded the future guerrilla fighters by twos, and sometimes even by threes, in a small, squalid room or in the chambre de bonne of some Latin American or Frenchman disposed to adding his grain of sand to the cause of world revolution. In my garret in the H?tel du Sénat, on Rue Saint-Sulpice, I sometimes put up one of the scholarship recipients behind the back of Madame Auclair, the manager.
They constituted an extremely diverse collection of fauna. Many were students of literature, law, economics, science, and education at San Marcos, who had joined the Young Communists or other leftist organizations, and in addition to Limenians there were kids from the provinces, and even some peasants, Indians from Puno, Cuzco, and Ayacucho, bewildered by the leap from their Andean villages and communities, where they had somehow been recruited, to Paris. They looked at everything in bewilderment. From the few words I exchanged with them on the way from Orly to their hotels, they sometimes gave the impression of not being too sure what kind of scholarship they were going to enjoy and not really understanding what kind of training they would receive. Not all of them had been given their scholarships in Peru. Some had received them in Paris, chosen from the variegated mass of Peruvians—students, artists, adventurers, bohemians—who prowled the Latin Quarter. Among them, the most original was my friend Alfonso the Spiritualist, sent to France by a theosophical sect in Lima to pursue studies in parapsychology and theosophy, but Paúl's eloquence swept away the spirits and installed him in the world of the revolution. He was a pale, timid boy who barely opened his mouth, and there was something emaciated and distracted in him, a precocious kind of spirit. In our midday conversations at Le Cluny or La Petite Source, I suggested to Paúl that many of the scholarship recipients the MIR was sending to Cuba, and sometimes to North Korea or the People's Republic of China, were simply taking advantage of the chance to do a little tourism and would never climb the Andes or go down into Amazonia with rifles on their shoulders and packs on their backs.
"It's all been calculated, mon vieux," Paúl replied, sitting like a magistrate who has the laws of history on his side. "If half of them respond to us, the revolution is a sure thing."
True, the MIR was doing things a little quickly, but how could they enjoy the luxury of sleeping? History, after moving for so many years like a tortoise, had suddenly become a meteor, thanks to Cuba. It was necessary to act, learn, stumble, get up again. This wasn't the time to recruit young guerrillas by making them submit to examinations of their knowledge, to physical trials or psychological tests. The important thing was to take advantage of those one hundred scholarships before Cuba offered them to other groups—the Communist Party, the Liberation Front, the Trotskyists—who were competing to be the first to set the Peruvian revolution in motion.
Most of the scholarship recipients I picked up at Orly to take to the hotels and boardinghouses where they would spend their time in Paris were male and very young, some of them adolescents. One day I discovered there were also women among them.
"Pick them up and take them to this little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac," Paúl said. "Comrade Ana, Comrade Arlette, and Comrade Eufrasia. Be nice to them."
One rule the scholarship recipients had been carefully taught was not to disclose their real names. Even among themselves they used only their nicknames or noms de guerre. As soon as the three girls showed up, I had the impression I'd seen Comrade Arlette somewhere before.
Comrade Ana was a dark-skinned girl with lively gestures, a little older than the others, and from the things I heard her say that morning and the two or three other times I saw her, she must have been the head of a teachers' union. Comrade Eufrasia, a little Chinese girl with delicate bones, looked like a fifteen-year-old. She was exhausted because on the long flight she hadn't slept a wink and had vomited a few times because of turbulence. Comrade Arlette had an attractive shape, a slim waist, pale skin, and though she dressed, like the others, with great simplicity—coarse skirts and sweaters, percale blouses, flat shoes, and the kind of hairpins sold in markets—there was something very feminine in her manner of walking and moving and, above all, in the way she pursed her full lips as she asked about the streets the taxi was driving along. In her dark, expressive eyes, something eager was twinkling as she contemplated the tree-lined boulevards, the symmetrical buildings, the crowd of young people of both sexes carrying bags, books, and notebooks as they prowled the streets and bistrots in the area around the Sorbonne, while we approached the little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac. They were given a room with no bath and no windows, and two beds for the three of them. When I left, I repeated Paúl's instructions: they weren't to move from here until he came to see them, sometime in the afternoon, and explained the plan for their work in Paris.
I was in the doorway of the hotel, lighting a cigarette before I walked away, when somebody touched my shoulder.
"That room gives me claustrophobia," Comrade Arlette said with a smile. "And besides, a person doesn't come to Paris every day, caramba."
Then I recognized her. She had changed a great deal, of course, especially in the way she spoke, but the mischievousness I remembered so well still poured out of her, something bold, spontaneous, provocative, that was revealed in her defiant posture, her small breasts and face thrust forward, one foot set slightly back, her ass high, and a mocking glance that left her interlocutor not knowing if she was speaking seriously or joking. She was short, with small feet and hands, and her hair, black now instead of light, and tied back with a ribbon, fell to her shoulders. And she had that dark honey in her eyes.
I let her know that what we were going to do was categorically forbidden and for that reason Comrade Jean (Paúl) would be angry with us, then I took her for a walk past the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, the Odéon, the Luxembourg Gardens, and finally—far too expensive for my budget!—to have lunch at L'Acropole, a little Greek restaurant on Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. In those three hours of conversation she told me, in violation of all the rules regarding revolutionary secrecy, that she had studied letters and law at Catholic University, had been a member of the clandestine Young Communists for years, and, like other comrades, had moved to the MIR because it was a real revolutionary movement as opposed to the YC, a sclerotic and anachronistic party in the present day. She told me these things somewhat mechanically, without too much conviction. I recounted my ongoing efforts to find work so I could stay in Paris and told her that now I had all my hopes focused on an examination for Spanish translators, sponsored by UNESCO, that would be given the following day.
"Cross your fingers and knock the table three times, like this, so you'll pass," Comrade Arlette said, very seriously, as she stared at me.
To provoke her, I asked if these kinds of superstition were compatible with the scientific doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.
"To get what you want, anything goes," she replied immediately, very resolute. But then she shrugged and said with a smile, "I'll also say a rosary for you to pass, even though I'm not a believer. Will you denounce me to the party for being superstitious? I don't think so. You look like a nice guy …"
She gave a little laugh, and when she did, the same dimples she'd had as a girl formed on her cheeks. I walked her back to the hotel. If she agreed, I'd ask Comrade Jean's permission to take her to see other places in Paris before she continued her revolutionary journey. "Terrific," she replied, giving me a languid hand that she did not withdraw from mine right away. This was one very pretty, very flirtatious guerrilla fighter.
The next morning I passed the exam for translators at UNESCO with about twenty other applicants. We were given half a dozen fairly easy texts in English and French to translate. I hesitated over the phrase "art roman," which I first translated as "Roman art" but then, in the revision, I realized it referred to "Romanesque art." At midday I went with Paúl to eat sausage and fried potatoes at La Petite Source, and with no preambles asked his permission to take out Comrade Arlette while she was in Paris. He gave me a sly look and pretended to reprimand me.
"It is categorically forbidden to fuck female comrades. In Cuba and the People's Republic of China, during the revolution, screwing a comrade could mean the firing squad. Why do you want to take her out? Do you like the girl?"
"I suppose I do," I confessed, somewhat embarrassed. "But if it's going to make problems for you …"
"Then you'd control your lust?" Paúl laughed. "Don't be a hypocrite, Ricardo! Take her out, and don't let me know about it. Afterward, though, you'll tell me everything. And most important, use a condom."
That same afternoon I went to pick up Comrade Arlette at her little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac and took her to eat steak frites at La Petite Hostellerie, on Rue de la Harpe. And then to L'Escale, a small bo?te de nuit on Rue Monsieur le Prince, where in those days Carmencita, a Spanish girl dressed all in black like Juliette Gréco, accompanied herself on guitar and sang, or, I should say, recited old poems and republican songs from the Spanish Civil War. We had rum and Coca-Cola, a drink that was already being called a cuba libre. The club was small, dark, smoky, and hot, the songs epic or melancholy, not many people were there yet, and before we finished our drinks and after I told her that thanks to her magical arts and her rosary I'd done well on the UNESCO exam, I grasped her hand and, interlacing my fingers with hers, asked if she realized I'd been in love with her for ten years.
She burst into laughter.
"In love with me without knowing me? Do you mean that for ten years you've been hoping that one day a girl like me would turn up in your life?"
"We know each other very well, it's just that you don't remember," I replied, very slowly, watching her reaction. "Back then, your name was Lily and you were passing yourself off as Chilean."
I thought that surprise would make her pull back her hand or clench it convulsively in a nervous movement, but nothing like that happened. She left her hand lying quietly in mine, not agitated in the least.
"What are you saying?" she murmured. In the half-light, she leaned forward and her face came so close to mine that I could feel her breath. Her eyes scrutinized me, trying to read my mind.
"Can you still imitate the Chilean singsong so well?" I asked, as I kissed her hand. "Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. Don't you remember I asked you to go steady three times and you always turned me down flat?"
"Ricardo, Ricardito, Richard Somocurcio!" she exclaimed, amused, and now I did feel the pressure of her hand. "The skinny kid! That well-behaved snot-nose who was so proper he seemed to have taken Holy Communion the night before. Ha-ha! That was you. Oh, how funny! Even back then you had a sanctimonious look."
Still, a moment later, when I asked her how and why it had occurred to her and her sister, Lucy, to pass themselves off as Chileans when they moved to Calle Esperanza, in Miraflores, she absolutely denied knowing what I was talking about. How could I have made up a thing like that? I was thinking about somebody else. She never had been named Lily, and didn't have a sister, and never had lived in that neighborhood of rich snobs. That would be her attitude from then on: denying the story of the Chilean girls, though sometimes, for instance that night at L'Escale, when she said she recognized in me the idiotic little snot-nose from ten years back, she let something slip—an image, an allusion—that revealed she was in fact the false Chilean girl of our adolescence.
We stayed at L'Escale until three in the morning, and though she let me kiss and caress her, she didn't respond. She didn't move her lips away when I touched them with mine but made no corresponding movement, she allowed herself to be kissed but was indifferent and, of course, she never opened her mouth to let me swallow her saliva. Her body, too, seemed like an iceberg when my hands caressed her waist, her shoulders, and paused at her hard little breasts with erect nipples. She remained still, passive, resigned to this effusiveness, like a queen accepting the homage of a vassal, until, at last, noticing that my caresses were becoming bolder, she casually pushed me away.
"This is my fourth declaration of love, Chilean girl," I said at the door to the little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac. "Is the answer finally yes?"
"We'll see." And she blew me a kiss and moved away. "Never lose hope, good boy."
For the ten days that followed this encounter, Comrade Arlette and I had something that resembled a honeymoon. We saw each other every day and I went through all the cash I still had from Aunt Alberta's money orders. I took her to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, the Rodin Museum and the houses of Balzac and Victor Hugo, the Cinémathèque on Rue d'Ulm, a performance at the National Popular Theater directed by Jean Vilar (we saw Chekhov's Ce fou de Platonov, in which Vilar himself played the protagonist), and on Sunday we rode the train to Versailles, where, after visiting the palace, we took a long walk in the woods and were caught in a rainstorm and soaked to the skin. In those days anyone would have taken us for lovers because we always held hands and I used any excuse to kiss and caress her. She allowed me to do this, at times amused, at other times indifferent, always putting an end to my effusiveness with an impatient expression. "That's enough now, Ricardito." On rare occasions she would take the initiative and arrange or muss my hair with her hand or pass a slender finger along my nose or mouth as if she wanted to smooth them, a caress like that of an affectionate mistress with her poodle.
From the intimacy of those ten days I came to a conclusion: Comrade Arlette didn't give a damn about politics in general or the revolution in particular. Her membership in the Young Communists and then in the MIR was probably a lie, not to mention her studies at Catholic University. She not only never talked about political or university subjects, but when I brought the conversation around to that terrain, she didn't know what to say, was ignorant of the most elementary things, and managed to change the subject very quickly. It was evident she had obtained this guerrilla fighter's scholarship in order to get out of Peru and travel around the world, something that as a girl of very humble origins—that much was glaringly obvious—she never could have done otherwise. But I didn't have the courage to question her about any of this; I didn't want to put her on the spot and force her to tell me another lie.
On the eighth day of our chaste honeymoon she agreed, unexpectedly, to spend the night with me at the H?tel du Sénat. It was something I had asked for—had begged for—in vain, on all the previous days. This time, she took the initiative.
"I'll go with you today, if you like," she said at night as we were eating a couple of baguettes with Gruyère cheese (I didn't have the money for a restaurant) in a bistrot on Rue de Tournon. My heart raced as if I had just run a marathon.
After an awkward negotiation with the watchman at the H?tel du Sénat—"Pas de visites nocturnes à l'h?tel, monsieur!"—which left Comrade Arlette undaunted, we climbed the five flights with no elevator up to my garret. She let herself be kissed, caressed, undressed, always with that curious attitude of nonparticipation, not allowing me to lessen the invisible distance she kept from my kisses, embraces, and affection, even though she surrendered her body to me. It moved me to see her naked on the narrow bed in the corner of the room where the ceiling sloped and the light from the single bulb barely reached. She was very thin, with well-proportioned limbs and a waist so narrow I thought I could have encircled it with my hands. Under the small patch of hair on her pubis, the skin seemed lighter than on the rest of her body. Her olive skin, with Oriental reminiscences, was soft and cool. She allowed herself to be kissed from head to toe, maintaining her usual passivity, and she heard, like someone listening to the rain, Neruda's "Material nupcial," which I recited into her ear, along with my stammered words of love: this was the happiest night of my life, I had never wanted anyone the way I wanted her, I would always love her.
"Let's get under the blanket, it's very cold," she interrupted, bringing me down to mundane reality. "It's a wonder you don't freeze in here."
I was about to ask if she ought to take care of me, but I didn't, confused by her attitude of self-assurance, as if she'd had centuries of experience in these encounters and I was the novice. We made love with difficulty. She gave herself without the slightest embarrassment, but she was very narrow, and in each of my efforts to penetrate she shrank back, grimacing in pain: "Slower, slower." Finally, I did make love to her and was happy loving her. It was true my greatest joy was to be there with her, it was true that in my few and always fleeting affairs I'd never felt the combination of tenderness and desire that she inspired in me, but I doubt this was also the case for Comrade Arlette. Instead, throughout it all she gave the impression of doing what she did without really caring about it.
The next morning, when I opened my eyes, I saw her at the foot of the bed, washed and dressed and observing me with a look that revealed a profound uneasiness.
"Are you really in love with me?"
I said I was, several times, and extended my hand to take hers, but she didn't hold hers out to me.
"Do you want me to stay here and live with you, in Paris?" she asked in the tone of voice she might have used to suggest going to the movies to see one of the nouvelle vague films by Godard, Truffaut, or Louis Malle, which were at the height of their popularity.
Again I said yes, totally disconcerted. Did that mean the Chilean girl had fallen in love with me?
"It isn't for love, why lie to you?" she replied coldly. "But I don't want to go to Cuba, and I want to go back to Peru even less. I'd like to stay in Paris. You can help me get out of my commitment to the MIR. Talk to Comrade Jean, and if he releases me, I'll come and live with you." She hesitated a moment and, with a sigh, made a concession: "I might even end up falling in love with you."
On the ninth day I talked to fat Paúl during our midday meeting, this time at Le Cluny, with two croque monsieurs and two espressos in front of us. He was categorical.
"I can't release her, only the MIR leadership could do that. But even so, just proposing this would create a huge damn problem for me. Let her go to Cuba, take the course, and demonstrate she's in no physical or psychological condition for armed struggle. Then I could suggest to the leadership that she stay here as my assistant. Tell her that, and above all, tell her not to discuss this with anybody. I'm the one who'd be fucked, mon vieux."
With an aching heart I went to tell Comrade Arlette Paúl's answer. And, worst of all, I encouraged her to follow his advice. Our having to separate hurt me more than her. But we couldn't harm Paúl, and she had to avoid antagonizing the MIR because that could cause her problems in the future. The course lasted a few months. Right from the beginning she would need to demonstrate complete ineptitude for guerrilla life and even pretend to faint. In the meantime, here in Paris, I'd find work, rent a small apartment, and be waiting for her …
"I know, you'll cry, you'll miss me, you'll think about me day and night," she interrupted with an impatient gesture, her eyes hard and her voice icy. "All right, I can see there's no other way. We'll see each other in three months, Ricardito."
"Why are you saying goodbye now?"
"Didn't Comrade Jean tell you? I leave for Cuba early tomorrow, by way of Prague. Now you can begin to shed your goodbye tears."
She did, in fact, leave the next day, and I couldn't go with her to the airport because Paúl forbade it. At our next meeting, the fat man left me totally demoralized when he announced I couldn't write to Comrade Arlette or receive letters from her because, for reasons of security, the scholarship recipients had to cut off all communication during training. Once the course had ended, Paúl wasn't even sure if Comrade Arlette would pass through Paris again on her way back to Lima.
For days I was like a zombie, reproaching myself day and night for not having had the courage to tell Comrade Arlette that in spite of Paúl's prohibition she should stay with me in Paris, instead of urging her to go on with this adventure that would end only God knew how. Until, one morning, when I left my garret to have breakfast at the Café de la Marie on Place Saint-Sulpice, Madame Auclair handed me an envelope with a UNESCO imprint. I had passed the exam, and the head of the department of translators had made an appointment with me at his office. He was a gray-haired, elegant Spaniard whose family name was Charnés. He was very amiable. He laughed readily when he asked me about my "long-term plans" and I said, "To die of old age in Paris." There was no opening 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 Métro at Saint-Germain or l'Odéon to ride to the Ségur 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 Paúl'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 Paúl 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 Peruvian 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 México 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. Paúl, 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. Paúl 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 Paúl 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 Paúl, 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, Paúl 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 vieux, she isn't even that pretty."
"I don't know why, Paúl. But the truth is she does have a tight hold on me."
With Paúl's new kind of life, Peruvian 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 café revolutionaries who vented their frustration, envy, and boredom by saying that Paúl 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, Paúl 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 Paúl 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 Paúl, 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 Lobatón. 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 Lobatón was another matter. Of the crowd of revolutionaries I met in Paris through Paúl, 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 Odría dictatorship (that was when he and Paúl 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 Peruvian 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 Paúl, 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 Lobatón 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 Paúl. 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 Paúl 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 Opéra 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," Paúl said to prepare me.
"I suppose not," I replied. "Tell me once and for all and don't fuck around, Paúl."
He had just spent a few days in Havana, and Comrade Arlette was the talk of all the young Peruvians in the MIR because, according to excited rumors, she was having a passionate love affair with Comandante Chacón, second-in-command to Osmani Cienfuegos, the younger brother of Camilo, the great hero of the Cuban Revolution who had disappeared. Comandante Osmani Cienfuegos was head of the organization that lent assistance to all revolutionary movements and related parties, and the man who coordinated rebel actions in every corner of the world. Comandante Chacón, veteran of the Sierra Maestra, was his right arm.
"Can you imagine, that tremendous piece of news was the first thing I heard." Paúl scratched his head. "That skinny thing, that absolutely ordinary girl, having an affair with one of the historic comandantes! Comandante Chacón, no less!"
"Couldn't it just be gossip, Paúl?"
He shook his head remorsefully, and patted my arm in encouragement.
"I was with them myself at a meeting in Casa de las Américas. They're living together. Comrade Arlette, even if you don't believe it, has become an influential person, sharing bed and table with the comandantes."
"It's just wonderful for the MIR," I said.
"But shit for you." Paúl gave me another little pat. "I'm damn sorry to have to give you the news, mon vieux. But it's better for you to know, isn't it? Okay, it's not the end of the world. Besides, Paris is full of damn fine women. Just look around."
After attempting a few jokes, with absolutely no success, I asked Paúl about Comrade Arlette.
"As the companion of a comandante of the revolution she doesn't need a thing, I suppose," he said evasively. "Is that what you want to know? Or if she's richer or uglier than when she was here? Just the same, I think. A little more tanned by the Caribbean sun. You know, I never thought she was anything special. I mean, don't make that face, it's not that important, my friend."
Often, in the days, weeks, and months that followed that meeting with Paúl, I tried to imagine the Chilean girl transformed into Comandante Chacón's lover, dressed as a guerrilla fighter with a pistol at her waist, a blue beret, boots, alternating with Fidel and Raúl Castro in the big parades and demonstrations of the revolution, doing voluntary work on weekends and toiling like a slave in the cane fields while her small hands with their delicate fingers struggled to hold the machete and, perhaps, with that facility of hers for phonetic metamorphosis which I already knew about, speaking with that lingering, sensual music of people from the Caribbean. The truth is, I couldn't envision her in her new role: her image trickled away as if it were liquid. Had she really fallen in love with this comandante? Or had he been the instrument for her getting out of guerrilla training and, above all, out of her commitment to the MIR to wage revolutionary war in Peru? It did me no good at all to think about Comrade Arlette, since each time I did I felt as if a new ulcer had opened in the pit of my stomach. To avoid this, and I wasn't completely successful, I dedicated myself zealously to my classes in Russian and simultaneous interpretation whenever Se?or Charnés, with whom I got on very well, had no contract for me. And I had to tell Aunt Alberta—to whom I'd confessed in a letter, in a moment of weakness, that I was in love with a girl named Arlette, and who was always asking for her photograph—that we had broken up and from now on she should put the matter out of her mind.
It must have been six or eight months following the afternoon that Paúl gave me the bad news about Comrade Arlette when, very early one morning, the fat man, whom I hadn't seen for a while, came by the hotel so we could have breakfast together. We went to Le Tournon, a bistrot on the street of the same name, at the corner of Rue de Vaugirard.
"Even though I shouldn't tell you, I've come to say goodbye," he said. "I'm leaving Paris. Yes, mon vieux, I'm going to Peru. Nobody knows about it here, so you don't know anything either. My wife and Jean-Paul are already there."
The news left me speechless. And suddenly I was filled with a terrible fear, which I tried to conceal.
"Don't worry," Paúl said to calm me, with that smile that puffed up his cheeks and made him look like a clown. "Nothing will happen to me, you'll see. And when the revolution triumphs, we'll make you ambassador to UNESCO. That's a promise!"
For a while we sipped our coffee in silence. My croissant was on the table, untouched, and Paúl, bent on making jokes, said that since something apparently was taking away my appetite, he'd make the sacrifice and take care of that crusty half-moon.
"Where I'm going the croissants must be awful," he added.
Then, unable to control myself any longer, I told him he was going to commit an unforgivable act of stupidity. He wasn't going to help the revolution, or the MIR, or his comrades. He knew it as well as I did. His weight, which left him gasping for breath after walking barely a block on Saint-Germain, would be a tremendous hindrance to the guerrillas in the Andes, and for that same reason, he'd be one of the first the soldiers would kill as soon as the uprising began.
"You're going to get yourself killed because of the stupid gossip of a few rancorous types in Paris who accuse you of being an opportunist? Think it over, Fats, you can't do something as mindless as this."
"I don't give a damn what the Peruvians in Paris say, compadre. It isn't about them, it's about me. This is a question of principle. It's my obligation to be there."
And he started to crack jokes again and assure me that, in spite of his 120 kilos, he had passed all the tests in his military training and, furthermore, had demonstrated excellent marksmanship. His decision to return to Peru had provoked arguments with Luis de la Puente and the leadership of the MIR. They all wanted him to stay in Europe as the movement's representative to friendly organizations and governments, but he, with his bulletproof obstinacy, finally got his way. Seeing there was nothing I could do, and that my best friend in Paris had practically decided to commit suicide, I asked him if his departure meant that the insurrection would break out soon.
"It's a question of a couple of months, maybe less."
They had set up three camps in the mountains, one in the department of Cuzco, another in Piura, and the third in the central region, on the eastern slope of the Cordillera, near the edge of the Junín forest. Contrary to my prophecies, he assured me that the great majority of scholarship recipients had gone to the Andes. Fewer than ten percent had deserted. With an enthusiasm that sometimes verged on euphoria, he told me the recipients' return operation had been a success. He was happy because he had directed it himself. They had gone back one by one or two by two, following complicated trajectories that made some of the kids go halfway around the world to hide their tracks. No one had been found out. In Peru, De la Puente, Lobatón, and the rest had established urban support networks, formed medical teams, installed radio stations at the camps and at scattered hiding places for supplies and explosives. Contacts with the peasant unions, especially in Cuzco, were excellent, and they expected that once the rebellion began, many members of the village communities would join the struggle. He spoke with joy and certainty, convinced of what he was saying, exalted. I couldn't hide my sorrow.
"I know you don't believe me at all, Don Incredulous," he finally murmured.
"I swear I'd like nothing better than to believe you, Paúl. And have your enthusiasm."
He nodded, observing me with his affectionate, fullmoon smile.
"And you?" he asked, grasping my arm. "What about you, mon vieux?"
"Not me, not ever," I replied. "I'll stay here, working as a translator for UNESCO, in Paris."
He hesitated for a moment, afraid that what he was going to say might hurt me. It was a question he undoubtedly had been biting his tongue over for a long time.
"Is this what you want out of life? Nothing but this? All the people who come to Paris want to be painters, writers, musicians, actors, theater directors, or get a doctorate, or make a revolution. You only want this, to live in Paris? I confess, mon vieux, I never could swallow it."
"I know you couldn't. But it's the truth, Paúl. When I was a boy, I said I wanted to be a diplomat, but that was only so they'd send me to Paris. That's what I want: to live here. Does it seem like a small thing to you?"
I pointed at the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens: heavy with green, they overflowed the fences and looked elegant beneath the overcast sky. Wasn't it the best thing that could happen to a person? To live, as Vallejo said in one of his lines, among "the leafy chestnut trees of Paris"?
"Admit that you write poetry in secret," Paúl insisted. "That it's your hidden vice. We've talked about it often, with other Peruvians. Everybody thinks you write and don't dare admit it because you're self-critical. Or timid. Every South American comes to Paris to do great things. Do you want me to believe that you're the exception to the rule?"
"I swear I am, Paúl. My only ambition is to go on living here, just as I'm doing now."
I walked with him to the Métro station at Carrefour de l'Odéon. When we embraced, I couldn't stop my eyes from filling with tears.
"Take care of yourself, Fats. Don't do anything stupid up there, please."
"Yes, yes, of course I will, Ricardo." He gave me another hug. And I saw that his eyes were wet too.
I stood there, at the entrance to the station, watching him go down the steps slowly, held back by his round, bulky body. I was absolutely certain I was seeing him for the last time.
Fat Paúl's departure left me feeling empty because he was the best friend I had during those uncertain times of my settling in Paris. Fortunately, the temp contracts at UNESCO and my classes in Russian and simultaneous interpretation kept me very busy, and at night I returned to my garret in the H?tel du Sénat and hardly had the energy to think about Comrade Arlette or fat Paúl. Without intending to, at that time I believe I began to move away unconsciously from the Peruvians in Paris, whom I had previously seen with a certain degree of frequency. I didn't look for solitude, but after I became an orphan and my aunt Alberta took me in, it hadn't been a problem for me. Thanks to UNESCO, I no longer worried about surviving; my translator's salary and occasional money orders from my aunt were enough for me to live on and to pay for my Parisian pleasures: movies, art shows, plays, and books. I was a steady customer at La Joie de Lire bookshop, on Rue Saint-Séverin, and at the bouquinistes on the quays along the Seine. I went to the National Popular Theater, the Comédie-Fran?aise, l'Odéon, and from time to time to concerts at the Salle Pleyel.
And during that time I also had the beginnings of a romance with Carmencita, the Spanish girl who, dressed in black from head to toe like Juliette Gréco, sang and accompanied herself on the guitar at L'Escale, the little bar on Rue Monsieur le Prince frequented by Spaniards and South Americans. She was Spanish but had never set foot in her country because her republican parents couldn't or wouldn't go back while Franco was alive. The ambiguity of that situation tormented her and frequently appeared in her conversation. Carmencita was tall and slim, with hair cut à la gar?on and melancholy eyes. She didn't have a great voice, but it was very melodious, and she gave marvelous performances of songs based on roundels, poems, verses, and refrains of the Golden Age, murmuring them with very effective pauses and emphasis. She had lived for a couple of years with an actor, and the break with him hurt her so much that—she told me this with the bluntness I initially found so shocking in my Spanish colleagues at UNESCO—she didn't "want to hook up with any guy right now." But she agreed to my taking her to the movies, to supper, and to the Olympia one night to hear Léo Ferré, whom we both preferred to Charles Aznavour and Georges Brassens, the other popular singers of the moment. When we said good night after the concert, at the Opéra Métro station, she said, brushing my lips, "I'm beginning to like you, my little Peruvian." Absurdly enough, whenever I went out with Carmencita I was filled with disquiet, the feeling I was being unfaithful to the lover of Comandante Chacón, an individual I imagined as sporting a huge mustache and strutting around with a pair of pistols on his hips. My relationship with the Spanish girl went no further because one night I discovered her in a corner of L'Escale melting with love in the arms of a gentleman with a neck scarf and heavy sideburns.
A few months after Paúl left, Se?or Charnés began to recommend me as a translator at international conferences and congresses in Paris or other European cities when there wasn't work for me at UNESCO. My first contract was at the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the second, in Athens, at an international cotton congress. These trips, lasting only a few days but well paid, allowed me to visit places I never would have gone to otherwise. Though this new work cut into my time, I didn't abandon my Russian studies or interpreting classes but attended them in a more sporadic way.
It was on my return from one of those short business trips, this time to Glasgow and a conference on customs tariffs in Europe, that I found a letter at the H?tel du Sénat from a first cousin of my father's, Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel, an attorney in Lima. This uncle once removed, whom I barely knew, informed me that my aunt Alberta had died of pneumonia and had made me her sole heir. It was necessary for me to go to Lima to expedite the formalities of the inheritance. Uncle Ataúlfo offered to advance me the price of a plane ticket against the inheritance, which, he said, would not make me a millionaire but would help out nicely during my stay in Paris. I went to the post office on Vaugirard to send him a telegram, saying I'd buy the ticket myself and leave for Lima as soon as possible.
Aunt Alberta's death left me in a black mood for many days. She had been a healthy woman, not yet seventy. Though she was as conservative and judgmental as one could be, this spinster aunt, my father's older sister, had always been very loving toward me, and without her generosity and care I don't know what would have become of me. When my parents died in a senseless car accident, hit by a truck that fled the scene as they were traveling to Trujillo for the wedding of a daughter of some close friends—I was ten—she took their place. Until I finished my law studies and came to Paris, I lived in her house, and though her anachronistic manias often exasperated me, I loved her very much. From the time she adopted me, she devoted herself to me body and soul. Without Aunt Alberta, I'd be as solitary as a toadstool, and my connections to Peru would eventually vanish.
That same afternoon I went to the offices of Air France to buy a round-trip ticket to Lima, and then I stopped at UNESCO to explain to Se?or Charnés that I had to take a forced vacation. I was crossing the entrance lobby when I ran into an elegant lady wearing very high heels and wrapped in a black fur-trimmed cape, who stared at me as if we knew each other.
"Well, well, isn't it a small world," she said, coming close and offering her cheek. "What are you doing here, good boy?"
"I work here, I'm a translator," I managed to stammer, totally disconcerted by surprise, and very conscious of the lavender scent that entered my nostrils when I kissed her. It was Comrade Arlette, but you had to make a huge effort to recognize her in that meticulously made-up face, those red lips, tweezed eyebrows, silky curved lashes shading mischievous eyes that black pencil lengthened and deepened, those hands with long nails that looked as if they had just been manicured.
"How you've changed since I saw you last," I said, looking her up and down. "It's about three years, isn't it?"
"Changed for the better or the worse?" she asked, totally self-assured, placing her hands on her waist and making a model's half turn where she stood.
"For the better," I admitted, not yet recovered from the impact she'd had on me. "The truth is, you look wonderful. I suppose I can't call you Lily the Chilean girl or Comrade Arlette the guerrilla fighter anymore. What the hell's your name now?"
She laughed, showing me the gold ring on her right hand.
"Now I use my husband's name, the way they do in France: Madame Robert Arnoux."
I found the courage to ask if we could have a cup of coffee for old times' sake.
"Not now, my husband's expecting me," she said, mockingly. "He's a diplomat and works here in the French delegation. Tomorrow at eleven, at Les Deux Magots. You know the place, don't you?"
I was awake for a long time that night, thinking about her and about Aunt Alberta. When I finally managed to get to sleep, I had a wild nightmare about the two of them ferociously attacking each other, indifferent to my pleas that they resolve their dispute like civilized people. The fight was due to my aunt Alberta accusing the Chilean girl of stealing her new name from a character in Flaubert. I awoke agitated, sweating, while it was still dark and a cat was yowling.
When I arrived at Les Deux Magots, Madame Robert Arnoux was already there, at a table on the terrace protected by a glass partition, smoking with an ivory cigarette holder and drinking a cup of coffee. She looked like a model out of Vogue, dressed all in yellow, with white shoes and a flowered parasol. The change in her was truly extraordinary.
"Are you still in love with me?" was her opening remark, to break the ice.
"The worst thing is that I think I am," I admitted, feeling my cheeks flush. "And if I weren't, I'd fall in love all over again today. You've turned into a very beautiful woman, and an extremely elegant one. I see you and don't believe what I see, bad girl."
"Now you see what you lost because you're a coward," she replied, her honey-colored eyes glistening with mocking sparks as she intentionally exhaled a mouthful of smoke in my face. "If you had said yes that time I proposed staying with you, I'd be your wife now. But you didn't want to get in trouble with your friend Comrade Jean, and you sent me off to Cuba. You missed the opportunity of a lifetime, Ricardito."
"Can't this be resolved? Can't I search my conscience, suffer from heartache, and promise to reform?"
"It's too late now, good boy. What kind of match for the wife of a French diplomat can a little pissant translator for UNESCO be?"
She didn't stop smiling as she spoke, moving her mouth with a more refined flirtatiousness than I remembered. Contemplating her prominent, sensual lips, lulled by the music of her voice, I had an enormous desire to kiss her. I felt my heart beat faster.
"Well, if you can no longer be my wife, there's always the possibility of our being lovers."
"I'm a faithful spouse, the perfect wife," she assured me, pretending to be serious. And with no transition: "What happened to Comrade Jean? Did he go back to Peru to make the revolution?"
"Several months ago. I haven't heard anything about him or the others. And I haven't read or heard of any guerrillas there. Those revolutionary castles in the air probably turned into smoke. And all the guerrillas went back home and forgot about it."
We talked for almost two hours. Naturally, she assured me the love affair with Comandante Chacón had been nothing but the gossip of the Peruvians in Havana; in reality, she and the comandante had only been good friends. She refused to tell me anything about her military training, and, as always, avoided making any political comments or giving me details regarding her life on the island. Her only Cuban love had been the chargé d'affaires at the French embassy, Robert Arnoux, now her husband, who had been promoted to advisory minister. Weak with laughter and retrospective anger, she told me about the bureaucratic obstacles they had to overcome to marry, because it was almost unthinkable in Cuba that a scholarship recipient would leave her training. But in this regard it was certainly true that Comandante Chacón had been "loving" and helped her defeat the damn bureaucracy.
"I'd wager anything you went to bed with that damn comandante."
"Are you jealous?"
I said yes, very. And that she was so attractive I'd sell my soul to the devil, I'd do anything if I could make love to her, or even just kiss her. I grasped her hand and kissed it.
"Be still," she said, looking around in fake alarm. "Are you forgetting I'm a married woman? Suppose somebody here knows Robert and tells him about this?"
I said I knew perfectly well that her marriage to the diplomat was a mere formality to which she had resigned herself in order to leave Cuba and settle in Paris. Which seemed fine to me, because I too believed one could make any sacrifice for the sake of Paris. But, when we were alone, she shouldn't play the faithful, loving wife, because we both knew very well it was a fairy tale. Without becoming angry in the least, she changed the subject and said there was a damn bureaucracy here too and she couldn't get French nationality for two years, even though she was legally married to a French citizen. And they had just rented a nice apartment in Passy. She was decorating it now, and as soon as it was presentable she'd invite me over to introduce me to my rival, who, in addition to being congenial, was a very cultured man.
"I'm going to Lima tomorrow," I told her. "How can I see you when I get back?"
She gave me her telephone number and address and asked if I was still living in that little room in the garret of the H?tel du Sénat, where she had been so cold.
"It's hard for me to leave it because I had the best experience of my life there. And that's why, for me, that hole is a palace."
"This experience is the one I think it is?" she asked, bringing her face, where mischief was always mixed with curiosity and coquetry, close to mine.
"The same."
"For what you said just now, I owe you a kiss. Remind me the next time we see each other."
But a moment later, when we said goodbye, she forgot her marital precautions and instead of her cheek she offered me her lips. They were full and sensual, and in the seconds I had them pressed against mine, I felt them move slowly, provocatively, in a supplementary caress. When I already had crossed Saint-Germain on the way to my hotel, I turned to look at her and she was still there, on the corner by Les Deux Magots, a bright, golden figure in white shoes, watching me walk away. I waved goodbye and she waved the hand holding the flowered parasol. I only had to see her to discover that in these past few years I hadn't forgotten her for a single moment, that I loved her as much as I did the first day.
When I arrived in Lima in March 1965, shortly before my thirtieth birthday, photographs of Luis de la Puente, Guillermo Lobatón, fat Paúl, and other leaders of the MIR were in all the papers and on television—by now there was television in Peru—and everybody was talking about them. The MIR rebellion had an undeniable romantic aspect. The Miristas themselves had sent the photos to the media, announcing that in view of the iniquitous exploitative conditions that made victims of peasants and workers, and the surrender of the Belaúnde Terry government to imperialism, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left had decided to take action. The leaders of the MIR showed their faces and appeared with long hair and full-grown beards, with rifles in their hands and combat uniforms consisting of black turtleneck sweaters, khaki trousers, and boots. I noticed that Paúl was as fat as ever. In the photograph that Correo published on the front page, he was surrounded by four other leaders and was the only one smiling.
"These wild men won't last a month," predicted Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel in his study on Calle Boza in the center of Lima, on the morning I went to see him. "Turning Peru into another Cuba! Your poor aunt Alberta would have fainted dead away if she could see the outlaw faces of our brand-new guerrillas."
My uncle didn't take the announcement of armed actions very seriously, a feeling that seemed widespread. People thought it was a harebrained scheme that would end in no time. During the weeks I spent in Peru, I was crushed by a sense of oppressiveness and felt like an orphan in my own country. I lived in my aunt Alberta's apartment on Calle Colón in Miraflores, which still was filled with her presence and where everything reminded me of her, of my years at the university, of my adolescence without parents. It moved me when I found all the letters I had written to her from Paris, arranged chronologically, in her bedside table. I saw some of my old Miraflores friends from the Barrio Alegre, and with half a dozen of them went one Saturday to eat at the Kuo Wha Chinese restaurant near the Vía Expresa to talk about old times. Except for our memories, we didn't have much in common anymore, since their lives as young professionals and businessmen—two were working in their fathers' companies—had nothing to do with my life in France. Three were married, one had begun to have children, and the other three had girlfriends who would soon be their brides. In the jokes we told one another—a way of filling empty spaces in the conversation—they all pretended to envy me for living in the city of pleasure and fucking those French girls who were famous for being wild women in bed. How surprised they would have been if I confessed that in the years I spent in Paris, the only girl I went to bed with was a Peruvian, Lily of all people, the false Chilean girl of our childhood. What did they think of the guerrillas and their announcement in the papers? Like Uncle Ataúlfo, they didn't think they were important. Those Castristas sent here by Cuba wouldn't last very long. Who could believe that a Communist revolution would triumph in Peru? If the Belaúnde government couldn't stop them, the military would come in again and impose order, something they didn't look forward to.
That's what Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel was afraid of too. "The only thing these idiots will achieve by playing guerrilla is to hand the military an excuse for a coup d'état on a silver platter. And stick us with another eight or ten years of military dictatorship. Who even thinks about making a revolution against a government that's not only civilian and democratic, but that the entire Peruvian oligarchy, beginning with La Prensa and El Comercio, accuses of being Communist because it wants agrarian reform? Peru is confusion, nephew, you did the right thing when you went to live in the country of Cartesian clarity."
Uncle Ataúlfo was a lanky, mustachioed man in his forties who always wore a jacket and bow tie and was married to Aunt Dolores, a kind, pale woman who had been an invalid for close to ten years and whom he looked after with devotion. They lived in a nice house, full of books and records, in Olivar de San Isidro, where they invited me to lunch and dinner. Aunt Dolores bore her illness without bitterness and amused herself by playing the piano and watching soap operas. When we recalled Aunt Alberta, she started to cry. They had no children and he, in addition to his law practice, taught classes in mercantile law at Catholic University. He had a good library and was very interested in local politics, not hiding his sympathies for the democratic reform movement incarnated, to his mind, in Belaúnde Terry. He was very kind to me, expediting the formalities of the inheritance as much as he could and refusing to charge me a cent for his services: "Don't be silly, nephew, I was very fond of Alberta and your parents." Those were tedious days of abject appearances before notaries and judges and carrying documents back and forth through the labyrinthine Palace of Justice, which left me sleepless at night and increasingly impatient to return to Paris. In my free time I reread Flaubert's Sentimental Education because now, for me, Madame Arnoux in the novel had not only the name but also the face of the bad girl. Once the taxes on the inheritance had been deducted and the debts left behind by Aunt Alberta had been paid, Uncle Ataúlfo announced that with the apartment sold and the furniture put up for auction, I'd receive something like sixty thousand dollars, maybe a little more. A handsome sum I never thought I'd have. Thanks to Aunt Alberta, I could buy a small apartment in Paris.
As soon as I was back in France, the first thing I did after climbing up to my garret in the H?tel du Sénat and even before I unpacked was to call Madame Robert Arnoux.
She made an appointment with me for the next day and said that if I wanted to, we could have lunch together. I picked her up at the entrance to the Alliance Fran?aise, on Boulevard Raspail, where she was taking an accelerated course in French, and we went to have a curry d'agneau at La Coupole, on Boulevard Montparnasse. She was dressed simply, slacks and sandals and a light jacket. She wore earrings whose colors matched those in her necklace and bracelet and a bag hanging from her shoulder, and each time she moved her head, her hair swung gaily. I kissed her cheeks and hands, and she greeted me with: "I thought you'd come back more tanned from the Lima summer, Ricardito." She had really turned into an extremely elegant woman: she combined colors and applied her makeup very tastefully. I observed her, still stupefied by her transformation. "I don't want you to tell me anything about Peru," she said, so categorically I didn't ask why. Instead, I told her about my inheritance. Would she help me find an apartment?
She approved enthusiastically.
"I love the idea, good boy. I'll help you furnish and decorate it. I've had practice with mine. It's turning out so well, you'll see."
After a week of frantic afternoon appointments after her French classes, which took us to agencies and apartments in the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, and the fourteenth arrondissement, I found an apartment with two rooms, a bath, and a kitchen on Rue Joseph Granier, in an art deco building from the 1930s that had geometrical designs—rhombuses, triangles, and circles—on the fa?ade, in the vicinity of the école Militaire in the seventh arrondissement, very close to UNESCO. It was in good condition, and even though it faced an interior courtyard and for the moment you had to climb four flights of stairs to reach it—the elevator was under construction—it had a great deal of light, since in addition to two good-sized picture windows, a large concave skylight exposed it to the Paris sky. It cost close to seventy thousand dollars, but I had no difficulty when I went to the Société Générale, the bank where I kept my account, and asked for a mortgage. During those weeks when I was looking for the apartment and then making it livable, cleaning, painting, and furnishing it with a few bits and pieces purchased at La Samaritaine and the Marché aux Puces, I saw Madame Robert Arnoux every day, Monday through Friday—she spent Saturdays and Sundays in the country, with her husband—from the time she left her classes until four or five in the afternoon. She enjoyed helping me with all my chores, practicing her French with real estate agents and concierges, and she displayed such good humor that—as I told her—it seemed the small apartment to which she was giving life was for the two of us to share.
"It's what you'd like, isn't it, good boy?"
We were in a bistrot on Avenue de Tourville, near Les Invalides, and I kissed her hands and searched for her mouth, mad with love and desire. I nodded several times.
"The day you move we'll have a premiere," she promised.
She kept her promise. It was the second time we made love, on this occasion in the full light of day that came pouring in through the large skylight, where curious pigeons observed us, naked and embracing on the mattress without sheets that had recently been liberated from the plastic wrapping in which the truck from La Samaritaine had brought it. The walls smelled of fresh paint. Her body was as slim and well formed as I remembered it, with her narrow waist that I thought could be encircled by my hands, and her pubis with sparse hair, its skin whiter than her smooth belly or thighs, which darkened and shaded to a pale green luster. Her entire body gave off a delicate fragrance, accentuated in the warm nest of her depilated underarms, behind her ears, and in her small, wet sex. On her curved groin thin blue veins were visible under the skin, and it moved me to imagine her blood flowing slowly through them. As she did the last time, with total passivity she allowed herself to be caressed and listened silently, feigning an exaggerated attention or pretending she didn't hear anything and was thinking about something else, to the intense, hurried words I said into her ear or mouth as I struggled to spread her labia.
"Make me come first," she whispered in a tone that concealed a command. "With your mouth. Then it'll be easier for you to enter. And don't you come yet. I like to feel irrigated."
She spoke with so much coldness that she didn't seem like a girl making love but a doctor formulating a technical description, detached from pleasure. I didn't care, I was totally happy, as I hadn't been in a long time, perhaps not ever. "I'll never be able to repay so much happiness, bad girl." I spent a long time with my lips pressed against her contracted sex, feeling the pubic hairs tickling my nose, licking her tiny clitoris avidly, tenderly, until I felt her moving, becoming excited, and finishing with a quivering of her lower belly and legs.
"Come in now," she whispered in the same imperious voice.
It wasn't easy this time either. She was narrow, she shrank away, she resisted me, she moaned, until at last I was successful. It felt as if my sex were being broken, strangled by that throbbing interior passage. But it was a marvelous pain, a vertigo into which I sank, tremulous. I ejaculated almost immediately.
"You come very fast," Madame Arnoux reprimanded me, pulling my hair. "You have to learn to hold off if you want to please me."
"I'll learn everything you want, guerrilla fighter, but be quiet now and kiss me."
That same day, as we said goodbye, she invited me to supper to introduce me to her husband. We had drinks in their pretty apartment in Passy, decorated in the most bourgeois style one could imagine, with velvet drapes, deep carpets, antique furniture, end tables holding little porcelain figures, and, on the walls, engravings of mordant scenes by Gavarni and Daumier. We went to eat at a nearby bistrot where the specialty, according to the diplomat, was coq au vin. And for dessert, he suggested the tarte Tatin.
Monsieur Robert Arnoux was a short, bald man who had a small brush mustache that moved when he talked and eyeglasses with thick lenses, and who must have been twice the age of his wife. He treated her with great consideration, pulling out her chair and pushing it in and helping her with her raincoat. He was alert all night, pouring wine when her glass was empty and passing her the basket if she had no bread. He wasn't very congenial, but rather arrogant and cutting, though he did actually seem cultured and spoke of Cuba and Latin America with great accuracy. His Spanish was perfect, with a slight inflection that revealed the years he had served in the Caribbean. In reality he wasn't part of the French delegation to UNESCO but had been loaned by the Quai d'Orsay as an adviser and chief of staff to the director general, René Maheu, a colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron at the école Normale, about whom it was said that he was a circumspect genius. I had seen him a few times, always escorted by this squint-eyed little bald man who turned out to be the husband of Madame Arnoux. When I told him I worked as a temp translator for the department of Spanish, he offered to recommend me to "Charnés, an excellent person." He asked what I thought about events in Peru, and I said I hadn't received news from Lima for some time.
"Well, those guerrillas in the sierra," he said with a shrug, as if he didn't give them too much importance. "Robbing farms and assaulting the police. How absurd! Especially in Peru, one of the few Latin American countries trying to build a democracy."
So the first actions of the Mirista guerrilla war had taken place.
"You have to leave that gentleman right away and marry me," I told the Chilean girl the next time we saw each other. "Do you want me to believe you're in love with a Methuselah who not only looks like your grandfather but is very ugly too?"
"Another slander against my husband and you won't see me again," she threatened, and in one of those lightning changes that were her specialty, she laughed. "Does he really look very old next to me?"
My second honeymoon with Madame Arnoux ended shortly after that meal, because as soon as I moved to the école Militaire district, Se?or Charnés renewed my contract. Then, because of my schedule, I could see her only for short periods, an occasional midday when, during that free hour and a half between one and two thirty, instead of going up to the UNESCO cafeteria, I ate a sandwich with her in some bistrot, or a few evenings when, I don't know with what excuse, she freed herself from Monsieur Arnoux to go to the movies with me. We'd watch the film holding hands, and I would kiss her in the darkness. "Tu m'embêtes," she said, practicing her French. "Je veux voir le film, grosse bête." She made rapid progress in the language of Montaigne, began to speak it without the slightest embarrassment, and her errors in syntax and phonetics were amusing, one more charming trait in her personality. We didn't make love again until many weeks later, after a trip she took to Switzerland alone, when she returned to Paris several hours earlier than planned so she could spend some time with me in my apartment on Rue Joseph Granier.
Everything in the life of Madame Arnoux remained extremely mysterious, as it had been in the lives of Lily the Chilean girl and Arlette the guerrilla fighter. If what she told me was true, she now led an intense social life of receptions, dinners, and cocktail parties, where she rubbed elbows with le tout Paris; for example, yesterday she had met Maurice Couve de Murville, General de Gaulle's minister of foreign relations, and last week she had seen Jean Cocteau at a private screening of To Die in Madrid, a documentary by Frédéric Rossif, on the arm of his lover, the actor Jean Marais, who, by the way, was extremely handsome, and tomorrow she was going to a tea given by friends for Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah of Iran, who was on a private visit to Paris. Mere delusions of grandeur and snobbery, or had her husband in fact introduced her to a world of luminaries and frivolity that she found dazzling? And she was constantly making, or she told me she was making, trips to Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, for just two or three days, and for reasons that were never clear: expositions, gala events, parties, concerts. Since her explanations seemed so obviously fantastic to me, I chose not to ask more questions about her trips, pretending to believe absolutely the reasons she occasionally deigned to give me for those glittering excursions.
One afternoon in the middle of 1965, at UNESCO, a colleague at the office, an old Spanish republican who years ago had written "a definitive novel on the Civil War that corrected Hemingway's errors," entitled For Whom the Bells Don't Toll, handed me the copy of Le Monde he was leafing through. The guerrillas of the Túpac Amaru column of the MIR, led by Lobatón and operating in the provinces of La Concepción and Satipo, in the department of Junín, had plundered the powder magazine of a mine, blown up a bridge across the Moraniyoc River, occupied the Runatullo ranch, and distributed the provisions to the peasants. And a couple of weeks later, it ambushed a detachment of the Civil Guard in the narrow Yahuarina pass. Nine guards, among them the major in command of the patrol, died in the fighting. In Lima, there had been bombing attacks on the Hotel Crillón and the Club Nacional. The Belaúnde government had decreed a state of siege throughout the central sierra. I felt my heart shrink. That day, and the days that followed, I was uneasy, the face of fat Paúl etched in my mind.
Uncle Ataúlfo wrote to me from time to time—he had replaced Aunt Alberta as my only correspondent in Peru—his letters filled with commentary on the political situation. Through him I learned that although the guerrilla war was very sporadic in Lima, military actions in the central and southern Andes had convulsed the country. El Comercio and La Prensa, and Apristas and Odristas now allied against the government, were accusing Belaúnde Terry of weakness in the face of the Castrista rebels, and even of secret complicity with the insurrection. The government had made the army responsible for suppressing the rebels. "This is turning ugly, nephew, and I'm afraid there may be a coup at any moment. You can hear the sound of swords crossing in the air. When don't things go badly in our Peru!" To his affectionate letters Aunt Dolores would always add a message in her own hand.
In a totally unexpected way, I ended up getting along very well with Monsieur Robert Arnoux. He showed up one day at the Spanish office at UNESCO to suggest that, when it was time for lunch, we go to the cafeteria to have a sandwich together. For no special reason, just to chat for a while, the time needed to have a filtered Gitane, the brand we both smoked. After that, he stopped by from time to time, when his commitments allowed, and we'd have coffee and a sandwich while we discussed the political situation in France and Latin America, and cultural life in Paris, about which he was also very knowledgeable. He was a man who read and had ideas, and he complained that even though working with René Maheu was interesting, the problem was that he had time to read only on weekends and couldn't go to the theater and concerts very frequently.
Because of him I had to rent a dinner jacket and wear formal dress for the first and undoubtedly the last time in my life in order to attend a benefit for UNESCO—a ballet, followed by dinner and dancing—at the Opéra. I had never been inside this imposing building, adorned with the frescoes Chagall had painted for the dome. Everything looked beautiful and elegant to me. But even more beautiful and elegant was the ex–Chilean girl and ex–guerrilla fighter, who, in an ethereal strapless gown of white crepe with a floral print, an upswept hairdo, and jewels at her throat, ears, and fingers, left me open-mouthed with admiration. The old men who were friends of Monsieur Arnoux came up to her all night, kissed her hand, and stared at her with glittering, covetous eyes. "Quelle beauté exotique!" I heard one of those excited drones say. At last I was able to ask her to dance. Holding her tight, I murmured in her ear that I'd never even imagined she could ever be as beautiful as she was at that moment. And it tore my heart out to think that, after the dance, in her house in Passy, it would be her husband and not me who would undress her and make love to her. The beauté exotique let herself be adored with a condescending little smile and then finished me off with a cruel remark: "What cheap, sentimental things you say to me, Ricardito." I inhaled the fragrance that floated all around her and wanted her so much I could hardly breathe.
Where did she get the money for those clothes and jewels? I was no expert in luxury items, but I realized that to wear those exclusive models and change outfits the way she did—each time I saw her she was wearing a new dress and exquisite new shoes—one needed more money than a UNESCO functionary could earn, even if he was the director's right hand. I tried to learn the secret by asking her if, besides occasionally deceiving Monsieur Robert Arnoux with me, she wasn't also deceiving him with some millionaire thanks to whom she could dress in clothes from the great shops and wear jewels from the Arabian Nights.
"If you were my only lover, I'd walk around like a beggar, little pissant," she replied, and she wasn't joking.
But she immediately offered an explanation that seemed perfect, though I was certain it was false. The clothes and jewels she wore weren't bought but lent by the great modistes along Avenue Montaigne and the jewelers on Place Vend?me; as a way to publicize their creations, they had chic ladies in high society wear them. And so because of her social connections, she could dress and adorn herself like the most elegant women in Paris. Or did I think that on the miserable salary of a French diplomat she'd be able to compete with the grandes dames in the City of Light?
A few weeks after the dance at the Opéra, the bad girl called me at my office at UNESCO.
"Robert has to go with the director to Warsaw this weekend," she said. "You won the lottery, good boy! I can devote all of Saturday and Sunday to you. Let's see what you arrange for me."
I spent hours thinking about what would surprise and amuse her, what odd places in Paris she didn't know, what performances were being offered on Saturday, what restaurant, bar, or bistrot might appeal to her because of its originality or secret, exclusive character. Finally, after shuffling through a thousand possibilities and discarding all of them, I chose for Saturday morning, if the weather was good, an excursion to the Asnières dog cemetery on a tree-filled little island in the middle of the river, and supper at Allard, on Rue de Saint-André-des-Arts, at the same table where one night I had seen Pablo Neruda eating with two spoons, one in each hand. To enhance its stature in her eyes, I'd tell Madame Arnoux it was the poet's favorite restaurant and invent the dishes he always ordered. The idea of spending an entire night with her, making love to her, enjoying on my lips the flutter of her "sex of nocturnal eyelashes" (a line from Neruda's poem "Material nupcial" that I had murmured in her ear the first night we were together in my garret at the H?tel du Sénat), feeling her fall asleep in my arms, waking on Sunday morning with her warm, slim body curled up against mine, kept me, for the three or four days I had to wait until Saturday, in a state in which hope, joy, and fear that something would frustrate our plan barely allowed me to concentrate on my work. The reviewer had to correct my translations several times.
That Saturday was a glorious day. At midmorning, in the new Dauphine I had bought the previous month, I drove Madame Arnoux to the Asnières dog cemetery, which she had never seen. We spent more than an hour wandering among the graves—not only dogs but cats, rabbits, and parrots were buried there—and reading the deeply felt, poetic, cheerful, and absurd epitaphs with which owners had bid farewell to their beloved animals. She really seemed to be having a good time. She smiled and kept her hand in mine, her eyes the color of dark honey were lit by the springtime sun, and her hair was tousled by a breeze blowing along the river. She wore a light, transparent blouse that revealed the top of her breasts, a loose jacket that fluttered with her movements, and brick-red high-heeled boots. She spent some time contemplating the statue to the unknown dog at the entrance, and with a melancholy air lamented having "so complicated" a life, otherwise she would adopt a puppy. I made a mental note: that would be my gift on her birthday, if I could find out when it was.
I put my arm around her waist, pulled her to me, and said that if she decided to leave Monsieur Arnoux and marry me, I'd undertake to see that she had a normal life and could raise all the dogs she wanted.
Instead of answering, she asked, in a mocking tone, "The idea of spending the night with me makes you the happiest man in the world, Miraflores boy? I'm asking so you can tell me one of those cheap, sentimental things you love saying so much."
"Nothing could make me happier," I said, pressing my lips to hers. "I've been dreaming about it for years, guerrilla fighter."
"How many times will you make love to me?" she continued in the same mocking tone.
"As many as I can, bad girl. Ten, if my body holds out."
"I'll allow you only two," she said, biting my ear. "Once when we go to bed, and another when we wake up. And no getting up early. I need a minimum of eight hours' sleep so I'll never have wrinkles."
She had never been as playful as she was that morning. And I don't think she ever was again. I didn't remember having seen her so natural, giving herself up to the moment without posing, without inventing a role for herself, as she breathed in the warmth of the day and let herself be penetrated and adored by the light that filtered through the tops of the weeping willows. She seemed much younger than she actually was, almost an adolescent and not a woman close to thirty. We had a ham sandwich with pickles and a glass of wine at a bistrot in Asnières, on the banks of the river, and then went to the Cinémathèque on Rue d'Ulm to see Marcel Carné's Les enfants du paradis, which I had seen but she hadn't. When we came out she spoke about how young Jean-Louis Barrault and María Casares looked, and how they didn't make movies like that anymore, and she confessed that she had cried at the end. I suggested we go to my apartment to rest until it was time for supper, but she refused: going home now would give me ideas. Instead, the afternoon was so nice we ought to walk for a while. We went in and out of the galleries along Rue de Seine and then sat down at an open-air café on Rue de Buci for something cold to drink. I told her I had seen André Breton around there one morning, buying fresh fish. The streets and cafés were full of people, and the Parisians had those open, pleasant expressions they wear on the rare days when the weather's nice. I hadn't felt this happy, optimistic, and hopeful for a long time. Then the devil raised his tail and I saw the headline in Le Monde, which the man next to me was reading: ARMY DESTROYS HEADQUARTERS OF PERUVIAN GUERRILLAS. The subtitle said: "Luis de la Puente and Other MIR Leaders Killed." I hurried to buy the paper at the stand on the corner. The byline was Marcel Niedergang, the paper's correspondent in South America, and there was an inset by Claude Julien explaining what the Peruvian MIR was and giving information about Luis de la Puente and the political situation in Peru. In August 1965, special forces of the Peruvian army had surrounded Mesa Pelada, a hill to the east of the city of Quillabamba, in the Cuzcan valley of La Convención, and captured the Illarec ch'aska (morning star) camp, killing a good number of guerrillas. Luis de la Puente, Paúl Escobar, and a handful of their followers had managed to escape, but the commandos, after a long pursuit, surrounded and killed them. The article indicated that military planes had bombed Mesa Pelada, using napalm. The corpses had not been returned to their families or shown to the press. According to the official communiqué, they had been buried in a secret location to prevent their graves from becoming destinations for revolutionary pilgrimages. The army showed reporters the weapons, uniforms, documents, as well as maps and radio equipment the guerrillas had stored at Mesa Pelada. In this way the Pachacútec column, one of the rebel focal points of the Peruvian revolution, had been wiped out. The army was hopeful that the Túpac Amaru column, headed by Guillermo Lobatón and also under siege, would soon fall.
"I don't know why you're making that face, you knew this would happen sooner or later," Madame Arnoux said in surprise. "You yourself told me so many times that this was the only way it could turn out."
"I said it as a kind of magic charm, so it wouldn't happen."
I had said it and thought it and feared it, of course, but it was different knowing it had happened and that Paúl, the good friend and companion of my early days in Paris, was now a corpse rotting in some desolate wasteland in the eastern Andes, perhaps after being executed—and no doubt tortured if the soldiers had captured him alive. I overcame my feelings and proposed to the Chilean girl that we drop the subject and not let the news ruin the gift from the gods of my having her to myself for an entire weekend. She managed that with no difficulty; for her, it seemed to me, Peru was something she had very deliberately expelled from her thoughts like a mass of bad memories (poverty, racism, discrimination, being disregarded, multiple frustrations?), and, perhaps, she had made the decision a long time ago to break forever with her native land. But in spite of my efforts, I couldn't forget the damn news in Le Monde and concentrate on the bad girl. Throughout supper at Allard, the ghost of my friend took away my appetite and my good humor.
"It seems to me you're in no mood to faire la fête," she said with compassion when we were having dessert. "Do you want to leave it for another time, Ricardito?"
I insisted I didn't and kissed her hands and swore that in spite of the awful news, spending a night with her was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. But when we reached my apartment on Joseph Granier, and she took a coquettish baby-doll, her toothbrush, and a change of clothes for the next day out of her overnight case, and we lay down on the bed—I had bought flowers for the living room and bedroom—I began to caress her and realized, to my embarrassment and humiliation, that I was in no condition to make love to her.
"This is what the French call a fiasco," she said, laughing. "Do you know this is the first time it's happened to me with a man?"
"How many have you been with? Let me guess. Ten? Twenty?"
"I'm terrible at math," she said in anger. And she took her revenge with a command: "Make me come with your mouth. I have no reason to be in mourning. I hardly knew your friend Paúl, and besides, remember it was his fault I had to go to Cuba."
And just like that, as casually as she would have lit a cigarette, she spread her legs and lay back, her arm across her eyes, in that total immobility, that deep concentration into which, forgetting about me and the world around her, she sank to wait for her pleasure. She always took a long time to become excited and finish, but that night she took even longer than usual, and two or three times my tongue cramped and for a few moments I had to stop kissing and sucking her. Each time her hand admonished me, pulling my hair or pinching my shoulder. At last I felt her move and heard the quiet little purr that seemed to move up from her belly to her mouth, and I felt her limbs contract and heard her long, satisfied sigh. "Thank you, Ricardito," she murmured. She fell asleep almost immediately. I was awake for a long time, my throat tight with anguish. My sleep was restless, and I had nightmares I could barely recall the next day.
I awoke at about nine. The sun was no longer shining. Through the skylight I could see the overcast sky, the color of a burro's belly, the eternal Parisian sky. She slept, her back to me. She seemed very young and fragile with her girl's body, quiet now, hardly stirred by her light, slow breathing. No one, seeing her like this, could have imagined the difficult life she must have had since she was born. I tried to picture her childhood, being poor in the hell that Peru is for the poor, and her adolescence, perhaps even worse, the countless difficulties, defeats, sacrifices, concessions she must have suffered in Peru, in Cuba, in order to move ahead and reach the place she was now. And how hard and cold having to defend herself tooth and nail against misfortune had made her, all the beds she'd had to pass through to avoid being crushed by a life her experiences had convinced her was a battlefield. I felt immense tenderness toward her. I was sure it was my good fortune, and also my misfortune, that I would always love her. Seeing her and feeling her breathe excited me. I began to kiss her on the back, very slowly, her pert little ass, her neck and shoulders, and, turning her toward me, her breasts and mouth. She pretended to sleep but was already awake, since she arranged herself on her back to receive me. She was wet, and for the first time I could enter her without difficulty, without feeling I was making love to a virgin. I loved her, I loved her, I couldn't live without her. I begged her to leave Monsieur Arnoux and come to me, I'd earn a lot of money, I'd pamper her, I'd satisfy her every whim, I'd …
"Well, you've redeemed yourself," and she burst into laughter, "and you even held out longer than usual. I thought you'd become impotent after last night's fiasco."
I proposed fixing breakfast, but she wanted us to go out, she was longing for un croissant croustillant. We showered together, she let me wash and dry her and, as I sat on the bed, watch her dress, comb her hair, and put on makeup. I slipped her shoes onto her feet, first kissing her toes one by one. We walked hand in hand to a bistrot on Avenue de la Bourdonnais where, in fact, the half-moons crunched as if they had just come out of the oven.
"If instead of sending me to Cuba that time you had let me stay with you here in Paris, how long would we have lasted, Ricardito?"
"All our lives. I'd have made you so happy you never would have left me."
She stopped joking and looked at me, very serious, and somewhat contemptuous.
"How na?ve you are, what a dreamer." She enunciated each syllable, defying me with her eyes. "You don't know me. I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you'll never be, unfortunately."
"And what if money wasn't happiness, bad girl?"
"Happiness, I don't know and I don't care what it is, Ricardito. What I am sure about is that it isn't the romantic, vulgar thing it is for you. Money gives you security, it protects you, it lets you enjoy life thoroughly and not worry about tomorrow. It's the only happiness you can touch."
She sat looking at me, wearing the cold expression that intensified sometimes in a strange way and seemed to freeze the life around her.
"You're very nice but you have a terrible defect: lack of ambition. You're satisfied with what you have, aren't you? But it isn't anything, good boy. That's why I couldn't be your wife. I'll never be satisfied with what I have. I'll always want more."
I didn't know how to respond, because though it hurt me, she had said something that was true. For me, happiness was having her and living in Paris. Did that mean you were unredeemably mediocre, Ricardito? Yes, probably. Before we went back to the apartment, Madame Robert Arnoux went to make a phone call. She came back with a worried face.
"I'm sorry, but I have to go, good boy. Things have become difficult."
She offered no explanations and wouldn't let me take her to her house or wherever she had to go. We went up for her overnight bag and I accompanied her to the taxi stand next to the école Militaire Métro station.
"In spite of everything it was a nice weekend," she said, brushing my lips. "Ciao, mon amour."
When I returned home, surprised at her abrupt departure, I discovered she had left her toothbrush in the bathroom. A beautiful little brush that had the name of the manufacturer stamped on the handle: Guerlain. Forgotten? Probably not. Probably a deliberate oversight in order to leave me a memento of the sad night and happy waking.
That week I couldn't see or talk to her, and the following week, without being able to say goodbye—she didn't answer the phone no matter what time I called—I left for Vienna to work for two weeks at the International Atomic Energy Agency. I loved that baroque, elegant, prosperous city, but a temp's work during those periods when international organizations have congresses, general sessions, or annual conferences—which is when they need extra translators and interpreters—is so intense it didn't leave me time for museums, concerts, or the opera, except one afternoon when I made a fast visit to the Albertina. At night I was exhausted and barely had the energy to go into one of the old cafés, the Central, the Landtmann, the Hawelka, the Frauenhuber, with their belle époque decor, to have a wiener schnitzel, the Austrian version of the breaded steak my aunt Alberta used to make, and a glass of foaming beer. I was groggy when I got into bed. I called the bad girl several times but nobody answered, or the phone was busy. I didn't dare call Robert Arnoux at UNESCO, afraid I'd arouse his suspicions. At the end of the two weeks, Se?or Charnés telegraphed me proposing a ten-day contract in Rome for a seminar followed by a conference at the Food and Agriculture Organization, so that I traveled to Italy without passing through Paris. I couldn't reach her from Rome, either. I called her as soon as I was back in France. Without success, of course. What was going on? I began to have anguished thoughts of an accident, an illness, a domestic tragedy.
My nerves were so on edge because I couldn't communicate with Madame Arnoux that I had to read the most recent letter from Uncle Ataúlfo twice; I found it waiting for me in Paris. I couldn't concentrate or get the Chilean girl out of my mind. Uncle Ataúlfo gave me long interpretations of the political situation in Peru. The Túpac Amaru column of the MIR, led by Lobatón, hadn't been captured yet, though army communiqués reported constant clashes in which the guerrillas always suffered losses. According to the press, Lobatón and his people had gone deep into the forest and made alliances among the Amazonian tribes, principally the Asháninka, dispersed throughout the region bounded by the Ene, Perené, Satipo, and Anapati rivers. There were rumors that the Asháninka communities, seduced by Lobatón's personality, identified him with a mythical hero, Itomi Pavá, the atavistic dispenser of justice who, according to legend, would come back one day to restore the power of their nation. Military planes had bombed forest villages on the suspicion they were hiding Miristas.
After more fruitless attempts to speak with Madame Arnoux, I decided to go to UNESCO and see her husband, using the pretext of inviting them to supper. I went first to say hello to Se?or Charnés and my colleagues in the Spanish office. Then I went up to the sixth floor, the sanctum sanctorum, where the head offices were located. From the door I could see Monsieur Arnoux's ravaged face and brush mustache. He gave a strange start when he saw me and seemed gruffer than ever, as if my presence displeased him. Was he ill? He seemed to have aged ten years in the few weeks I hadn't seen him. He extended a reluctant hand without saying a word and waited for me to speak, giving me a penetrating stare with his rodent eyes.
"I've been working away from Paris this past month, in Vienna and Rome. I'd like to invite the two of you to have supper one night when you're free."
He kept looking at me, not answering. He was very pale now, his expression desolate, and he pursed his lips as if it were difficult for him to speak. My hands began to tremble. Was he going to tell me that his wife had died?
"Then you haven't heard," he murmured drily. "Or are you playing a game?"
I was disconcerted and didn't know how to answer.
"All of UNESCO knows," he added, quietly, sarcastically. "I'm the laughingstock of the agency. My wife has left me, and I don't even know for whom. I thought it was you, Se?or Somocurcio."
His voice broke before he finished pronouncing my name. His chin quivered and his teeth seemed to be chattering. I stammered that I was sorry, I hadn't heard anything, and stupidly repeated that this month I had been working away from Paris, in Vienna and Rome. And I said goodbye, but Monsieur Arnoux didn't respond.
I was so surprised and chagrined that I felt a wave of nausea in the elevator and had to throw up in the bathroom in the corridor. With whom had she gone away? Could she still be living in Paris with her lover? One thought accompanied me in the days that followed: the weekend she had given me was her goodbye. So I'd have something special to pine for. The leavings you throw to the dog, Ricardito. Some calamitous days followed that brief visit to Monsieur Arnoux. For the first time in my life, I suffered from insomnia. I was in a sweat all night, my mind blank, as I clutched the Guerlain toothbrush that I kept like a charm in my night table, chewing on my despair and jealousy. The next day I was a wreck, my body shaken by chills, without energy for anything, and I didn't even want to eat. The doctor prescribed Nembutal, which didn't put me to sleep so much as knock me out. I awoke distraught and shaking, as if I had a savage hangover. I kept cursing myself for how stupid I had been when I sent her off to Cuba, putting my friendship with Paúl ahead of the love I felt for her. If I had held on to her we would still be together, and life wouldn't be this sleeplessness, this emptiness, this bile.
Se?or Charnés helped me out of the slow emotional dissolution in which I found myself by giving me a month's contract. I wanted to fall on my knees and thank him. With the routine of work at UNESCO, I was slowly emerging from the crisis I had been in since the disappearance of the ex-Chilean girl, the ex-guerrilla fighter, the ex-Madame Arnoux. What did she call herself now? What personality, what name, what history had she adopted for this new stage in her life? Her new lover must be very important, much more important than the adviser to the director of UNESCO, who was too modest for her ambitions now, and who was devastated by her leaving. She had given me clear warning that last morning: "I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful." I was certain I wouldn't see her again this time. You had to pull yourself together and forget the Peruvian girl with a thousand faces, good boy, convince yourself she was no more than a bad dream.
But a few days after I had gone back to work at UNESCO, Monsieur Arnoux appeared in the cubicle that was my office as I was translating a report on bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa.
"I'm sorry I was short with you the other day," he said, uncomfortably. "I was in a very bad state of mind just then."
He proposed that we have supper. And though I knew this supper would be catastrophic for my own state of mind, my curiosity to hear about her and find out what had happened were stronger, and I accepted.
We went to Chez Eux, a restaurant in the seventh arrondissement, not far from my house. It was the tensest, most difficult supper I've ever had. But fascinating too, because I learned many things about the ex-Madame Arnoux and also discovered how far she had gone in her search for the security she identified with wealth.
We ordered whiskey with ice and Perrier as an aperitif, and then red wine with a meal we barely tasted. Chez Eux had a fixed menu consisting of exquisite food that came in deep pans, and our table was filling up with patés, snails, salads, fish, meat, which the amazed waiters took away almost untouched to make room for a great variety of desserts, one bathed in bubbling chocolate, not understanding why we slighted all those delicacies.
Robert Arnoux asked me how long I had known her. I lied and said only since 1960 or 1961, when she passed through Paris on her way to Cuba as one of the recipients of a scholarship from the MIR to receive guerrilla training.
"In other words, you don't know anything about her past, her family," Monsieur Arnoux said with a nod, as if he were talking to himself. "I always knew she lied. About her family and her childhood, I mean. But I forgave her. They seemed like pious lies intended to disguise a childhood and adolescence that embarrassed her. Because she must have come from a very humble social class, don't you agree?"
"She didn't like talking about it. She never told me anything about her family. But yes, undoubtedly a very humble class—"
"It made me sad, I could guess at the mountain of prejudices in Peruvian society, the great family names, the racism," he interrupted me. "She said she had attended the Sophianum, the best nuns' academy in Lima, where the daughters of high society were educated. That her father owned a cotton plantation and she had broken with her family out of idealism, in order to be a revolutionary. She never cared about the revolution, I'm sure of that! From the time I met her, she never expressed a single political opinion. She would have done anything to get out of Cuba. Even marry me. When we left, I suggested a trip to Peru to meet her family. She told me more stories, of course. That because she had been in the MIR and in Cuba, if she set foot in Peru she would be arrested. I forgave these fantasies. I understood they were born of her insecurity. She had been infected with the social and racial prejudices that are so strong in South American countries. That's why she invented the biography for me of the aristocratic girl she had never been."
At times I had the impression that Monsieur Arnoux had forgotten about me. Even his gaze was lost at some point in the void, and he spoke so softly his words became an inaudible murmur. At other times he recovered, looked at me with suspicion and hatred, and pressed me to tell him if I'd known she had a lover. I was her compatriot, her friend, hadn't she ever confided in me?
"She never said a word. I never suspected anything. I thought you two got along very well, that you were happy."
"I thought so too," he murmured, crestfallen. He ordered another bottle of wine. And added, his eyes veiled and his voice acerbic: "She didn't need to do what she did. It was ugly, it was dirty, it was disloyal to behave like that with me. I gave her my name, I went out of my way to make her happy. I endangered my career to get her out of Cuba. That was a real via crucis. Disloyalty can't reach these extremes. So much calculation, so much hypocrisy, it's inhuman."
Abruptly he stopped speaking. He moved his lips, not making a sound, and his rectangular little mustache twisted and stretched. He had gripped his empty glass and was squeezing it as if he wanted to crush it. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears.
I didn't know what to say to him, any consolatory phrase would have sounded false and ridiculous. Suddenly, I understood that so much desperation was not due only to her abandoning him. There was something else he wanted to tell me but was finding difficult.
"My life's savings," Monsieur Arnoux whispered, looking at me accusingly, as if I were responsible for his tragedy. "Do you follow? I'm an older man, I'm in no condition to rebuild my whole life. Do you understand? Not only to deceive me with some gangster who must have helped her plan the crime, but to do that too: withdraw all the money from the account we had in Switzerland. I gave her that proof of my trust, do you see? A joint account. In case I had an accident, or died suddenly. So inheritance taxes wouldn't take everything I'd saved in a lifetime of work and sacrifice. Do you understand the disloyalty, the vileness? She went to Switzerland to make a deposit and took everything, everything, and ruined me. Chapeau, un coup de ma?tre! She knew I couldn't denounce her without accusing myself, without ruining my reputation and my position. She knew if I denounced her I'd be the first one injured, for keeping secret accounts, for evading taxes. Do you understand how well planned it was? Can you believe she could be so cruel toward someone who gave her only love and devotion?"
He kept returning to the same subject, with intervals in which we drank wine in silence, each of us absorbed in his own thoughts. Was it perverse of me to wonder what hurt him more, her leaving him or her stealing his secret bank account in Switzerland? I felt sorry for him, and I felt remorse, but I didn't know how to comfort him. I limited myself to interjecting occasional brief, friendly phrases. In reality, he didn't want to converse with me. He had invited me to supper because he needed someone to listen to him, he needed to say aloud, before a witness, things that had been scorching his heart ever since the disappearance of his wife.
"Forgive me, I needed to unburden myself," he said at last when all the other diners had left and we were alone, watched with impatient eyes by the waiters in Chez Eux. "I thank you for your patience. I hope this catharsis does me some good."
I said that with time, all of this would be behind him, no trouble lasts a hundred years. And as I spoke, I felt like a total hypocrite, as guilty as if I had planned the flight of ex–Madame Arnoux and the plundering of his secret account.
"If you ever run into her, please tell her. She didn't need to do that. I would have given her everything. Did she want my money? I would have given it to her. But not like this, not like this."
We said goodbye in the doorway of the restaurant, in the brilliance of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. It was the last time I saw the mistreated Monsieur Robert Arnoux.
*
The Túpac Amaru column of the MIR, under the command of Guillermo Lobatón, lasted some five months longer than the column that had made its headquarters on Mesa Pelada. As it had done with Luis de la Puente, Paúl Escobar, and the Miristas who perished in the valley of La Convención, the army gave no details regarding how it annihilated all the members of that guerrilla band. In the second half of 1965, helped by the Asháninka of Gran Pajonal, Lobatón and his companions eluded the persecution of the special forces of the army that mobilized in helicopters and on land and savagely punished the indigenous settlements that hid and fed the guerrillas. Finally, the decimated column, twelve men devastated by mosquitoes, fatigue, and disease, fell in the vicinity of the Sotziqui River on January 7, 1966. Did they die in combat or were they captured alive and executed? Their graves were never found. According to unverifiable rumors, Lobatón and his second-in-command were taken up in a helicopter and thrown into the forest so the animals would devour their corpses. For several years Lobatón's French partner, Jacqueline, attempted without success, by means of campaigns in Peru and other countries, to have the government reveal the location of the graves of the rebels in that ephemeral guerrilla war. Were there survivors? Were they living clandestinely in the convulsed, divided Peru of Belaúnde Terry's final days? As I slowly recovered from the disappearance of the bad girl, I followed these distant events through the letters of Uncle Ataúlfo. He seemed more and more pessimistic about the possibility that democracy would not collapse in Peru. "The same military that defeated the guerrillas is preparing now to defeat the legitimate state and have another kind of uprising," he assured me.
One day in Germany, in the most unexpected way, I ran into a survivor of Mesa Pelada: none other than Alfonso the Spiritualist, the boy sent to Paris by a theosophical group in Lima, the one fat Paúl had snatched away from spirits and the next world to turn him into a guerrilla fighter. I was in Frankfurt, working at an international conference on communications, and during a break I escaped to a department store to make some purchases. At the register, someone took my arm. I recognized him instantly. In the four years since I'd seen him he had put on weight and let his hair grow very long—the new style in Europe—but his dead-white face with its reserved, rather sad expression was the same. He had been in Germany a few months, obtained political refugee status, and was living with a girl from Frankfurt whom he had met in Paris when Paúl was there. We went to have coffee in the department-store cafeteria full of matrons with fat little children who were being waited on by Turks.
Alfonso the Spiritualist had been miraculously saved from the army commando attack that leveled Mesa Pelada. Luis de la Puente had sent him to Quillabamba a few days earlier: communications with urban support bases were not working well, and in the field they hadn't heard anything about a group of five trained boys whose arrival had been expected weeks before.
"The support base in Cuzco had been infiltrated," he told me, speaking with the same calm I remembered. "Several people were captured, and somebody talked under torture. That's how they got to Mesa Pelada. The truth was, we hadn't begun operations. Lobatón and Máximo Velando had moved plans forward in Junín. And after the ambush in Yahuarina, when they killed so many police, they threw the army at us. Those of us in Cuzco hadn't begun to move yet. De la Puente's idea wasn't to stay in the field but to keep moving. 'The guerrilla focus is perpetual movement,' that's what Che taught. But they didn't give us time and we were caught in the security zone."
The Spiritualist spoke with a curious distance from what he was saying, as if it had occurred centuries earlier. He didn't know by what conjunction of circumstances he had escaped the dragnets that demolished the MIR's support bases in Quillabamba and Cuzco. He hid in the house of a Cuzcan family, whom he had known long ago through his theosophical sect. They treated him very well even though they were afraid. After a couple of months, they got him out of the city and to Puno, hiding in a freight truck. From there it was easy to reach Bolivia, where, after a long series of procedures and formalities, he arranged for East Germany to admit him as a political refugee.
"Tell me about fat Paúl, up there in Mesa Pelada."
Apparently he had adapted well to the life and to the altitude of 3,800 meters. His spirits never flagged, though at times, on marches exploring the territory around the camp, his body played some bad tricks on him. Above all when he had to climb up mountains or down precipices in torrential rains. One time he fell on a slope that was a quagmire and rolled twenty, thirty meters. His companions thought he had cracked open his skull, but he got up as good as new, covered in mud from head to toe.
"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.