The Bad Girl: A Novel Read online

  She left the room without saying goodbye. I thought it was a passing fit of bad temper, but I didn’t hear from her the next week. I spent Wednesday and Friday waiting for her in vain, accompanied in my solitude by the belligerent Mongols. The following Wednesday, when I arrived at the Russell Hotel, the Indian concierge handed me a note. Very direct, it informed me she was leaving for Japan with “David.” She didn’t even say for how long or that she would call me as soon as she returned to England. I was filled with evil presentiments and cursed my faux pas. Knowing her, this two-sentence note could be a long and, perhaps, definitive goodbye.

  In those two years my friendship with Juan Barreto had grown closer. I spent a good number of days at his pied-à-terre in Earl’s Court, always hiding from him my meetings with the bad girl, of course. At about this time, in 1972 or ’73, the hippie movement went into rapid decline and became a bourgeois style. The psychedelic revolution turned out to be less profound and serious than its followers believed. Its music, the most creative thing it produced, was rapidly absorbed by the establishment and transformed into a part of official culture, making millionaires and multimillionaires out of old rebels and nonconformists and their representatives and recording companies, beginning with the Beatles and ending with the Rolling Stones. Instead of the liberation of the spirit, “the indefinite expansion of the human mind” promised by the guru of LSD and former Harvard professor Dr. Timothy Leary, drugs and a promiscuous, unrestrained life caused a good number of problems and some personal and familial misfortunes. Nobody lived this change of circumstances as viscerally as my friend Juan Barreto.

  He had always been very healthy but suddenly began to complain of frequent, debilitating grippes and colds, accompanied by acute attacks of neuralgia. His doctor in Cambridge advised a vacation in a warmer climate than England. He spent ten days in Ibiza and came back to London tanned and happy, full of risqué anecdotes about hot nights in Ibiza, “something I never would have imagined in a country with Spain’s reputation for prudery.”

  It was at this time that Mrs. Richardson left for Tokyo with her husband. I didn’t see Juan for about a month. I was working in Geneva and Brussels and when I called him, in London and in Newmarket, he didn’t answer the phone. During those four weeks I heard nothing from the bad girl either. When I returned to London, my neighbor in Earl’s Court, the Colombian Marina, told me Juan had been admitted to Westminster Hospital a few days earlier. They had him in the infectious diseases wing, and he was undergoing all kinds of tests. He had lost a great deal of weight. I found him unshaven, under a mountain of blankets, and in distress because “these quacks can’t manage to diagnose my disease.” At first they said he had genital herpes that had developed complications, and then that it probably was a form of sarcoma. Now they told him nothing but generalities. His eyes burned when he saw me approach his bed.

  “I feel more abandoned than a dog, brother,” he confessed. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you. I’ve discovered that even though I know a million gringos, you’re the only friend I have. A friend in a Peruvian friendship, the kind that goes down to the marrow of your bones, I mean. The truth is that friendships here are very superficial. The English don’t have time for friendship.”

  Mrs. Stubard had left her house in St. John’s Wood a few months earlier. Her health was fragile and she had retired to an old-age home in Suffolk. She came to visit Juan once, but it was too much of a trip for her, and she hadn’t returned. “The poor thing has a bad back, and getting here was a real act of heroism for her.” Juan was a different person; illness had made him lose his optimism and certainty, and filled him with fears.

  “I’m dying and they don’t know from what,” he said in a cavernous voice the second or third time I went to see him. “I don’t think they’re hiding it from me so as not to frighten me, English doctors always tell you the truth no matter how awful it is. The fact is they don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  The tests showed nothing conclusive, and the doctors suddenly began to talk about an elusive, unidentified virus that attacked the immune system, making Juan susceptible to all kinds of infections. He was exceedingly weak, with sunken eyes, bluish skin, protruding bones. He kept passing his hands over his face as if to prove he was still there. I was with him during all the hours visitors were authorized. I saw him being consumed more and more each day as he sank into despair. One day he asked me to find him a Catholic priest because he wanted to confess. It wasn’t easy. The priest at the Brompton Oratory with whom I spoke said it was impossible for him to visit hospitals. But he gave me the phone number of a Dominican convent that offered this service. I had to go in person to arrange the matter. A red-faced, good-natured Irish priest came to see Juan, and my friend had a long conversation with him. The Dominican came back two or three times to see him. Those dialogues calmed him for a few days. And as a result he made a transcendental decision: he would write to his family, with whom he’d had no contact for more than ten years.

  He was too weak to write, and so he dictated a long, deeply felt letter to me in which he told his parents about his career as a painter in Newmarket, with humorous details. He said that though he often wanted to write and make peace with them, he always had been held back by a stupid streak of pride, which he regretted. Because he loved and missed them very much. In a postscript he added something that would make them happy, he was sure: after being estranged from the Church for many years, God had allowed him to return to the faith he had been brought up in, which now brought peace to his life. He didn’t say a word about his illness.

  Without telling Juan, I requested an appointment with the head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Westminster Hospital. Dr. Rotkof was an older, fairly dry man with a graying beard and tuberous nose, who before answering my questions wanted to know my relationship to the patient.

  “We’re friends, Doctor. He has no family here in England. I’d like to be able to write to his parents in Peru and tell them the truth about Juan’s condition.”

  “I can’t tell you very much, except that it’s extremely serious,” he said abruptly, with no preambles. “He can die at any moment. His organism lacks defenses and a cold could kill him.”

  It was a new disease, and a fair number of cases had been detected in the United States and the United Kingdom. It attacked with special virulence homosexual communities, people addicted to heroin and all intravenous drugs, and hemophiliacs. Except for the fact that sperm and blood were the principal means of transmitting the “syndrome”—nobody was talking about AIDS yet—very little was known about its origin and nature. It devastated the immune system and exposed the patient to every sort of disease. A constant was the kind of lesion on the legs and abdomen that was tormenting my friend. Stunned by what I’d just heard, I asked Dr. Rotkof to advise me what to do. Should I tell Juan? He shrugged and pouted. That depended entirely on me. Maybe yes, maybe no. Though perhaps yes, if my friend had to make any arrangements with regard to his passing.

  I was so affected by my conversation with Dr. Rotkof that I didn’t have the courage to return to Juan’s room, certain he would see everything in my face. I felt terribly sorry for him. What I wouldn’t have given to see Mrs. Richardson that afternoon and feel her, if only for a few hours, at my side. Juan Barreto had told me a profound truth: though I also knew hundreds of people here in Europe, the only friend I had “in the Peruvian style” was about to die. And the woman I loved was on the other side of the world with her husband, and true to form, had given no sign of life for more than a month. She had carried out her threat, showing the insolent little pissant that she absolutely was not in love and could dispose of him like a useless trinket. For days I had been tormented by the suspicion that she would disappear again without leaving a trace. Is this why you dreamed about escaping from Peru and living in Europe since the time you were a boy, Ricardo Somocurcio? During those days in London I felt as lonely and sad as a stray dog.

  Without sayi
ng anything to Juan, I wrote a letter to his parents, explaining that he was in very delicate condition, the victim of an unknown disease, and telling them what Dr. Rotkof had told me: he could meet a fatal end at any moment. I said that though I lived in Paris, I would stay in London as long as necessary to be with Juan. I gave them the phone number and address of the pied-à-terre in Earl’s Court and asked for their instructions.

  They called as soon as they received my letter, which arrived at the same time as the one Juan had dictated to me. His father was devastated by the news, but, at the same time, happy to have recovered his prodigal son. They made arrangements to come to London. They asked me to reserve a room at a modest hotel, since they didn’t have much money at their disposal. I reassured them; they would stay at Juan’s pied-à-terre, where they could cook, making their stay in London less expensive. We agreed that I would prepare Juan for their imminent arrival.

  Two weeks later the engineer Clímaco Barreto and his wife, Eufrasia, were installed in Earl’s Court and I had moved to a bed-and-breakfast in Bayswater. The arrival of his parents had an immensely positive effect on Juan. He recovered his hope and humor, and seemed to improve. He even managed to keep down some of the food the nurse brought him morning and evening, though before that everything he put in his mouth nauseated him. The Barretos were fairly young—he had worked all his life at the Paramonga ranch, until the government of General Velasco Alvarado expropriated it, and then he resigned and found a job as a professor of mathematics at one of the new universities springing up in Lima like mushrooms—or else they were very well preserved, since they barely looked in their fifties. He was tall and had the athletic look of someone who has spent his life in the countryside, and she was a small, energetic woman whose manner of speaking, the soft tone and abundance of diminutives, the music of my old Miraflores neighborhood, made me nostalgic. As I listened to her, I felt. I had left Peru a long time ago to live the European adventure. But spending time with them also confirmed that it would be impossible for me to go back and speak and think the way Juan’s parents spoke and thought. Their comments on what they saw in Earl’s Court, for example, revealed very graphically how much I had changed over the years. It wasn’t an encouraging revelation. I undoubtedly had stopped being a Peruvian in many senses. What was I, then? I hadn’t become a European either, not in France and certainly not in England. So what were you, Ricardito? Maybe what Mrs. Richardson called me in her fits of temper: a little pissant, nothing but an interpreter, somebody, as my colleague Salomón Toledano liked to define us, who is only when he isn’t, a hominid who exists when he stops being what he is so that what other people think and say can pass through him more easily.

  With Juan Barreto’s parents in London, I could go back to Paris and work. I accepted the contracts I was offered, even if they were for only one or two days, because, as a result of the time I had spent in England with Juan, my income had taken a nosedive.

  Even though Mrs. Richardson had forbidden me to do so, I began calling her house in Newmarket to find out when the couple would return from their trip to Japan. The person who answered, a Filipina maid, didn’t know. Each time I pretended to be a different person, but I suspected that the Filipina recognized my voice and was slamming the phone in my face: “They aren’t back yet.”

  Until one day, when I despaired of ever seeing her again, Mrs. Richardson herself answered the phone. She recognized me instantly because there was a long silence. “Can you talk?” I asked. She replied in a cutting voice, full of contained fury, “No. Are you in Paris? I’ll call you at UNESCO or at home as soon as I can.” And she banged down the phone, emphasizing her annoyance. She called me that same night at my apartment near the École Militaire.

  “Because I stood you up one time, you hit me and made that commotion,” I complained in an affectionate voice. “What must I have done not to hear anything from you for three months?”

  “Don’t ever call Newmarket again,” she reprimanded me with a displeasure that raged in her words. “This isn’t a joke. I’m having a very serious problem with my husband. We shouldn’t see each other or talk for a while. Please. I beg you. If it’s true you love me, do this for me. We’ll see each other when this is all over, I promise. But don’t ever call me again. I’m in trouble and I have to take care of myself.”

  “Wait, wait, don’t hang up. At least tell me how Juan Barreto is.”

  “He died. His parents took his remains back to Lima. They came to Newmarket to put his cottage up for sale. Another thing, Ricardo. Avoid coming to London for a while, if you don’t mind. Because if you come, without meaning to you can create a very serious problem for me. I can’t say anything else for now.”

  And she hung up without saying goodbye. I was left empty and distraught. I felt so angry, so demoralized, so contemptuous of myself that I resolved—once again!—to uproot Mrs. Richardson from my memory and my heart, to use the kind of cheap sentimental phrase that made her laugh. It was stupid to go on loving someone so insensitive, someone who was sick of me, who played with me as if I were an idiot, who never showed me the slightest consideration. This time you must absolutely free yourself from that Peruvian, Ricardo Somocurcio!

  Several weeks later I received a few lines from Juan Barreto’s parents in Lima. They thanked me for helping them and apologized for not having written or called me, as I had asked them to do. But Juan’s death, which was so sudden, had left them stunned, half crazed, unable to do anything. The formalities involved in repatriating his remains were horrible, and if it hadn’t been for the people at the Peruvian embassy, they would never have been able to take him home and bury him in Peru as he wished. At least they had succeeded in doing that for their adored son, whose loss had left them inconsolable. In any case, in the midst of their sorrow, it was a comfort to know Juan had died like a saint, reconciled with God and religion, in a true angelic state. That’s what the Dominican priest who administered the last rites had told them.

  Juan Barreto’s death affected me deeply. Again I was left without a close friend, for in a way he had replaced fat Paúl. Since Paúl had disappeared in the guerrilla war, I hadn’t known anyone in Europe whom I esteemed as much and to whom I felt as close as the Peruvian hippie who became a painter of horses in Newmarket. London, England—they wouldn’t be the same without him. Another reason not to go back there for a good long while.

  I tried to put my decision into practice with the usual recipe: loading myself down with work. I accepted every contract and spent weeks and months traveling from one European city to another, working as an interpreter at conferences and congresses on all imaginable topics. I had acquired the skill of the good interpreter, which consists in knowing the equivalents of words without necessarily understanding their contents (according to Salomón Toledano, understanding them was a hindrance), and I continued to perfect Russian, the language I loved, until I acquired a sureness and naturalness in it equivalent to my skills in French and English.

  Even though I’d had a residency permit in France for years, I began to take the steps necessary to obtain French nationality, since with a French passport greater possibilities for work would open to me. A Peruvian passport aroused suspicion in some organizations when it was time to hire an interpreter, for they had difficulty situating Peru in the world and determining its status in the community of nations. Further, beginning in the 1970s, an attitude of rejection and hostility toward immigrants from poor countries became widespread throughout western Europe.

  One Sunday in May, as I was shaving and getting ready to take advantage of the spring day and stroll along the quays of the Seine to the Latin Quarter, where I intended to have couscous for lunch in one of the Arab restaurants on Rue Saint-Séverin, the phone rang. Without saying “Hello” or “Good morning,” the bad girl shouted at me, “Did you tell David I was married in France to Robert Arnoux?”

  I was about to hang up. Four or five months had gone by since our last conversation. But I controlled my ang
er.

  “I should have but it didn’t occur to me, Señora Bigamist. You can’t know how sorry I am that I didn’t. They arrested you, didn’t they?”

  “Answer me and don’t play the fool,” her voice insisted, giving off sparks. “I’m in no mood for jokes now. Was it you? You once threatened to tell him, don’t think I’ve forgotten that.”

  “No, it wasn’t me. What’s going on? What kind of trouble are you in now, you savage?”

  There was a pause. I heard her anxious breathing. When she spoke again, she seemed weak, tearful.

  “We were getting a divorce and things were going well. But suddenly, in these past few days, I don’t know how, my marriage to Robert came up. David has the best lawyers. Mine is a nobody and now he says that if they prove I’m married in France, my marriage to David in Gibraltar will automatically be nullified and I can find myself in big trouble. David won’t give me a cent, and if he reaches an agreement with Robert, they can bring criminal charges against me, demand compensation for damages, and I don’t know what else. I might even go to jail. And they’ll throw me out of the country. Are you sure it wasn’t you who told? Good, I’m glad, you didn’t seem like the kind of person who does those things.”

  There was another long pause, and she sighed, as if choking back a sob. As she talked she seemed sincere, speaking without a hint of self-pity.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said. “The truth is, your last call hurt me so much I decided not to see you, or talk to you, or look for you, or think about your existence ever again.”

  “Aren’t you in love with me anymore?” she said with a laugh.