The Bad Girl Read online

  One day her nephew Charles, her only close relative, came for tea. He was a horse trainer at Newmarket, quite a character, according to his aunt. And he must have been, judging by the red Jaguar he parked at the door to the house. Young and jovial, with curly blond hair and red cheeks, he was amazed there wasn’t a single bottle of good Scotch in the house and that he had to make do with a glass of the sweet muscatel Mrs. Stubard regaled him with after tea, the inevitable cucumber sandwiches, and the cheese and lemon cake. He was very cordial to Juan, though he had difficulty locating in the world the exotic country the hippie of the house came from—he confused Peru with Mexico—something he criticized himself for with a sporting spirit: “I’m going to buy a map of the world and a geography manual so I won’t stick my foot in my mouth again the way I did today.” He stayed until nightfall, telling anecdotes about the thoroughbred he was training for the races at Newmarket. And he confessed he had become a trainer because he couldn’t be a jockey, given his husky build. “Being a jockey is a terrible sacrifice, but it’s also the most beautiful profession in the world. Winning the Derby, victory at Ascot, just imagine! Better than winning first prize in the lottery.”

  Before he left he stood looking, with great satisfaction, at the charcoal sketch Juan Barreto had made of Esther. “This is a work of art,” he declared. “I laughed at him to myself, taking him for a yokel,” Juan Barreto said in self-recrimination.

  A short while later my friend received a note that, second only to his street encounter with Mrs. Stubard and Esther, definitively changed the direction of his life. Would the “artist” be interested in painting a portrait of Primrose, the mare Charles was training, the star of Mr. Patrick Chick’s stable, whose owner, happy with the rewards she brought him at the track, wanted to eternalize her in an oil painting? He was offering two hundred pounds if he liked the painting; if not, Juan could keep the canvas and receive fifty pounds for his efforts. “My ears still buzz with the vertigo I felt as I read that letter from Charles.” Juan rolled his eyes with retrospective emotion.

  Thanks to Primrose, Charles, and Mr. Chick, Juan stopped being an insolvent hippie and became a salon hippie, whose talent for immortalizing on canvas fillies, mares, breeders, and racers (“animals about which I was completely ignorant”) gradually opened to him the doors of the Newmarket owners and trainers. Mr. Chick liked the oil painting of Primrose and gave an astounded Juan Barreto the two hundred pounds he had promised. The first thing Juan did was to buy Mrs. Stubard a little flowered hat and matching umbrella.

  That had been four years ago. Juan still did not completely believe the fantastic change in his luck. He had painted at least a hundred oils of horses and made countless drawings, sketches, and studies in pencil and in charcoal, and he had so much work that the stable owners at Newmarket were obliged to wait weeks before he could take care of their requests. He bought a little house in the country halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket, and a pied-à-terre in Earl’s Court for his visits to London. Whenever he came to the city he went to visit his fairy godmother and take Esther out for a walk. When the little dog died, he and Mrs. Stubard buried her in the garden.

  I saw Juan Barreto several times in the course of that year, on all my visits to London, and I put him up for a few days in my apartment in Paris during a vacation he took to see a show dedicated to “Rembrandt’s Century” at the Grand Palais. The hippie style had just come to France, and people would turn around on the street to look at Juan’s clothes. He was an excellent person. Every time I went to London to work I let him know in advance, and he arranged to leave Newmarket and give me at least one night of pop music and London dissipation. Thanks to him I did things I’d never done, spent blanked-out nights in discotheques or at hippie parties where the smell of pot filled the air, and where brownies made with hashish were served that hurled a novice like me into hypersensitive trips, sometimes amusing and sometimes nightmarish.

  The most surprising thing for me—and the most pleasant, why deny it?—was how easy it was at those parties to caress and make love to any girl. Only then did I discover how much I had absorbed the moral framework that my aunt Alberta taught me, which, in a sense, still regulated my life in Paris. In the world’s imagination, French girls were known for being free, without prejudices, and not too finicky when it was time to go to bed with a man, but in fact, the ones who carried that freedom to an unprecedented extreme were the girls and boys of the London hippie revolution who, at least in Juan Barreto’s circle of acquaintances, would go to bed with the stranger they had just danced with and come back after a while as if nothing had happened and go on with the party and taste the same dish again.

  “The life you’ve lived in Paris is the life of a UNESCO bureaucrat, Ricardo,” Juan said mockingly, “a Miraflores puritan. I assure you that in many places in Paris the same freedom exists as here.”

  This was certainly true. My life in Paris—my life in general—had been fairly sober, even during the times I had no contract, when instead of kicking up my heels, I would dedicate myself to perfecting Russian with a private teacher because, though I could interpret it, I didn’t feel as confident with the language of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as I did with English and French. I had taken a liking to it and read more in Russian than in any other language. Those occasional weekends in England, taking part in nights of pop music, pot, and sex in swinging London, marked a modulation in what had been before (and would go on being afterward) a very austere life. But on those London weekends, which I gave to myself as a present after finishing a contract, and thanks to the painter of horse portraits, I did things that made it hard for me to recognize myself: dancing barefoot, with disheveled hair, smoking pot or chewing peyote seeds, and almost always, as the finishing touch to those agitated nights, making love, often in the most unlikely places, under tables, in tiny bathrooms, in closets, in gardens, with some girl, at times very young, with whom I barely exchanged a word and whose name I wouldn’t remember afterward.

  Juan insisted, after our first meeting, that whenever I came to London I stay at his pied-à-terre in Earl’s Court. He was almost never there because he spent most of his time in Newmarket, transferring real equines to canvas. I’d be doing him a favor if I aired out his apartment from time to time. If we were in London at the same time, that wouldn’t be a problem either because he could sleep at Mrs. Stubard’s—he still had his room there—and, as a last resort, he could set up a folding cot in the bedroom of his pied-à-terre. He was so insistent that finally I agreed. Since he wouldn’t allow me to pay even a penny in rent, I tried to make it up to him by always bringing from Paris a bottle of good Bordeaux, some Camembert or Brie, and tins of pate de foie gras, which made his eyes sparkle. Juan was now a hippie on no special diet, one who didn’t believe in vegetarianism.

  I liked Earl’s Court very much and fell in love with its fauna. The district breathed youth, music, lives lived without caution or calculation, great doses of ingenuousness, the desire to live for the day, removed from conventional morality and values, a search for pleasure that rejected the old bourgeois myths of happiness—money, power, family, position, social success—and found it in simple, passive forms of existence: music, artificial paradises, promiscuity, and an absolute lack of interest in the other problems that were shaking society. With their tranquil, peaceable hedonism, the hippies harmed no one, and they didn’t proselytize, didn’t want to convince or recruit people they had broken with in order to live their alternative lives: they wanted to be left in peace, absorbed in their frugal egotism and their psychedelic dream.

  I knew I’d never be one of them because, though I thought of myself as a person fairly free of prejudices, I would never feel comfortable letting my hair grow down to my shoulders, or dressing in capes, necklaces, and iridescent shirts, or engaging in group sexual encounters. But I felt a great fondness for and even a melancholy envy of those boys and girls, given over without the slightest apprehension to the confused idealism that guided the
ir conduct, never imagining the risks all of that was obliging them to take.

  In those years, though not for much longer, the employees of banks, insurance companies, and financial firms in the City wore the traditional attire of striped trousers, black jacket, bowler hat, and the inescapable black umbrella under the arm. But on the backstreets of Earl’s Court, with their two- or three-story houses and little gardens front and back, you could see people dressed as if they were going to a masquerade ball, even in rags and often barefoot, but always with a keen esthetic sense and sly, humorous details, seeking out what was showy, exotic, distinctive. I was astounded by my neighbor Marina, a Colombian who had come to London to study dance. She had a hamster that would constantly escape into Juan’s pied-à-terre and scare me half to death, since it usually climbed into bed and curled up in the sheets. Marina, though she lived in poverty and must have had very little clothing, rarely dressed the same way twice: one day she appeared in huge clown’s overalls and a derby on her head, and the next day in a miniskirt that left practically no secret of her body to the imagination of passersby. One day I ran into her in the Earl’s Court station mounted on stilts, her face disfigured by a Union Jack painted from ear to ear.

  Many hippies, perhaps the majority, came from the middle or upper class, and their rebellion was familial, directed against the well-regulated lives of their parents and what they considered the hypocrisy of puritanical customs and social façades behind which they hid their egotism, insular spirit, and lack of imagination. Their pacifism, naturism, vegetarianism, their eager search for a spiritual life that would give transcendence to their rejection of a materialist world corroded by class, social, and sexual prejudices, a world they wanted nothing to do with—this was sympathetic. But all of it was anarchic, thoughtless, without a center or direction, even without ideas, because the hippies—at least the ones I knew and observed up close—though they claimed to identify with the poetry of the beatniks (Allen Ginsberg gave a reading of his poems in Trafalgar Square in which he sang and performed Indian dances, and thousands of young people attended), in fact read very little or nothing at all. Their philosophy wasn’t based on thought and reason but on sentiment, on feeling.

  One morning I was in Juan’s pied-à-terre, dedicated to the prosaic task of ironing some shirts and undershorts I had just washed in the Earl’s Court Laundromat, when someone rang the doorbell. I opened and saw half a dozen boys with shaved heads, commando boots, short trousers, leather jackets with a military cut, some wearing crosses and combat medals on their chests. They asked about the Swag and Tails pub, which was just around the corner. They were the first skinheads I had seen. After that, these gangs would appear in the neighborhood from time to time, sometimes armed with clubs, and the benign hippies who spread their blankets on the sidewalks to sell handcrafted trinkets had to run, some with their babies in their arms, because the skinheads professed an obstinate hatred for them. It wasn’t only hatred for the way they lived but also class hatred, because these hoodlums, playing at being SS, came from working-class and marginal areas and embodied their own kind of rebellion. They became the shock troops of a tiny party, the racist National Front, which demanded the expulsion of blacks from England. Their idol was Enoch Powell, a conservative parliamentarian who, in a speech that caused an uproar, had prophesied in an apocalyptic manner that “rivers of blood would run in Great Britain” if there wasn’t a halt to immigration. The appearance of the skinheads had created a certain tension, and there were some acts of violence in the district, but they were isolated. As far as I was concerned, I really enjoyed all those short stays in Earl’s Court. Even Uncle Ataúlfo noticed it. We wrote to each other with some frequency; I recounted my London discoveries, and he complained about the economic disasters that the dictatorship of General Velasco Alvarado was beginning to cause in Peru. In one of his letters, he said, “I see you’re having a very good time in London and that the city makes you happy.”

  The neighborhood had filled with small cafes, vegetarian restaurants, and houses where all the varieties of Indian tea were offered, staffed by hippie girls and boys who prepared the perfumed infusions in front of the patron. The hippies’ scorn for the industrial world had led them to revive handicrafts of every kind and to mythologize manual labor: they WOVE bags and made sandals, earrings, necklaces, tunics, headscarves, and pendants. I loved to go to the teahouses and read, as I did in the bistrots of Paris, but how different the atmosphere was, especially in a garage with four tables where the waitress was Annette, a French girl with long hair held back in a braid and very pretty feet; I had long conversations with her about the differences between asanas and pranayama yoga, about which she seemed to know everything and I nothing.

  Juan’s pied-à-terre was tiny, happy, and inviting. It was on the ground floor of a two-story house, divided and subdivided into small apartments, and it consisted of a single bedroom, a small bathroom, and a kitchenette built into a wall. The room was spacious, with two large windows that assured good ventilation and an excellent view of Philbeach Gardens, a small street in the shape of a half-moon, and the interior garden, which lack of care had turned into an overgrown thicket. At one time there was a Sioux tent in that garden where a hippie couple lived with two crawling babies. She would come to the pied-à-terre to heat her children’s bottles, and she showed me a way of breathing that entailed holding the air and passing it through the entire body, which, she said very seriously, dissolved all the warlike tendencies’ in human nature.

  In addition to the bed, the room had a large table full of strange objects bought by Juan Barreto on Portobello Road and, on the walls, a multitude of prints, some images of Peru—the inevitable Machu Picchu in a preferred spot—and photographs of Juan with different people in a variety of places. And a tall case where he kept books and magazines. There were also some books on a shelf, but what abounded in the place were records: he had an excellent collection of rock-and-roll and pop music, both English and American, arranged around a first-rate radio and record player.

  One day when I was examining Juan’s photographs for the third or fourth time—the most amusing was one taken in the equine paradise of Newmarket, in which my friend appeared on a superb-looking thoroughbred crowned with a horseshoe of acanthus flowers, its reins held by a jockey and a splendid gentleman, undoubtedly the owner, both laughing at the poor rider who seemed very uncertain on this Pegasus—one of the pictures attracted my attention. Taken at a party of three or four very well-dressed couples, smiling and looking at the camera and holding glasses in their hands. What? Merely a resemblance. I looked again and rejected the idea. That day I went back to Paris. For the next two months, when I didn’t return to London, the suspicion haunted me until it became a fixed idea. Could it be that the ex—Chilean girl, the ex—guerrilla fighter, the ex-Madame Arnoux was now in Newmarket? I asked myself this very often, caressing the little Guerlain toothbrush she left in my apartment on the last day I saw her and which I always kept with me, like an amulet. Too improbable, too coincidental, too everything. But I couldn’t get the suspicion—the hope—out of my head. And I began to count the days until a new contract would return me to the pied-à-terre in Earl’s Court.

  “Do you know her?” Juan asked in surprise when I finally showed him the photograph and asked him about it. “She’s Mrs. Richardson, the wife of that flamboyant man you see there, he’s something of a glutton. She’s Mexican, I think. She speaks a very funny English, you’d die laughing if you heard her. Are you sure you know her?”

  “No, it isn’t the person I thought it was.”

  But I was absolutely certain it was. What he said about her “very funny English” and her “Mexican” background convinced me. It had to be her. And though in the four years that had passed since she disappeared from Paris, I had often told myself it was much better this way because that little Peruvian adventurer had already caused enough disarray in my life, when I was sure she had reappeared in a new incarnation of her mutabl
e identity only fifty miles from London, I felt an irresistible, restless need to go to Newmarket and see her again. Juan was sleeping at Mrs. Stubard’s and I spent a good number of nights wide awake, in a state of anxiety that made my heart pound as if I were suffering an attack of tachycardia. Could she possibly have gone there? What adventures, entanglements, audacities had catapulted her into an enclave of the most exclusive society in the world? I didn’t dare ask Juan Barreto more questions about Mrs. Richardson. I was afraid that if he confirmed the identity of our compatriot, she’d find herself embroiled in an extremely difficult situation. If she was passing herself off as Mexican in Newmarket, it had to be for some dark and troubled reason. I devised a secretive strategy. Indirectly, without mentioning in any way the lady in the photograph, I would try to have Juan take me to that Eden of horse racing. During a long night of palpitations and sleeplessness, not to mention a violent erection, at one point I even had an attack of jealousy of my friend. I imagined that the equine portrait painter not only did oil paintings in Newmarket but also entertained the bored wives of stable owners in his idle moments and, perhaps, that among his conquests was Mrs. Richardson.