The Bad Girl

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru. He is the author of

the world-famous novels The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the

Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, In Praise of the

Stepmother, and The Feast of the Goat, and of several works of

nonfiction, including Making Waves, winner of the National Book

Critics Circle Award; The Perpetual Orgy, a study of Flaubert; and

the autobiography Fish in the Water. He lives in London, Madrid,

and Lima.

Edith Grossman, the winner of the 2006 PEN/Ralph Manheim

Medal for Translation, is the translator of many works by major

Spanish-language authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mayra

Montero, and Miguel de Cervantes, as well as Mario Vargas Llosa.

She lives in New York City. 

1

That was a fabulous summer. Perez Prado and his twelve-professor

orchestra came to liven up the Carnival dances at the Club Terrazas

of Miraflores and the Lawn Tennis of Lima; a national mambo

championship was organized in Plaza de Acho, which was a great

success in spite of the threat by Cardinal Juan Gualberto Guevara,

Archbishop of Lima, to excommunicate all the couples who took

part; and my neighborhood, the Barrio Alegre of the Miraflores

streets Diego Ferre, Juan Fanning, and Colon, competed in some

Olympic games of mini-soccer, cycling, athletics, and swimming

with the neighborhood of Calle San Martin, which, of course, we

won.

Extraordinary things happened during that summer of 1950. For

the first time Cojinoba Lanas fell for a girl—the redhead

Seminauel—and she, to the surprise of all of Miraflores, said yes.

Cojinoba forgot about his limp and from then on walked around the

streets thrusting out his chest like Charles Atlas. Tico Tiravante

broke up with Use and fell for Laurita, Victor Ojeda fell for Use and

broke up with Inge, Juan Barreto fell for Inge and broke up with

Use. There was so much sentimental restructuring in the

neighborhood that we were in a daze, people kept falling in and out

of love, and when they left the Saturday night parties the couples

weren't always the same as when they came in. "How indecent!" said

my scandalized aunt Alberta, with whom I had lived since the death

of my parents.

The waves at the Miraflores beaches broke twice, the first time in

the distance, two hundred meters from shore, and that's where

those of us who were brave went to ride them in without a board,

and they carried us a hundred meters to the spot where they died

only to re-form into huge, elegant waves and break again in a second

explosion that carried bodysurfers smoothly to the pebbles on the

beach.

During that extraordinary summer, at the parties in Miraflores,

everybody stopped dancing waltzes, corridos, blues, boleros, and

huarachas because the mambo had demolished them. The mambo,

an earthquake that had all the couples—children, adolescents, and

grown-ups—at the neighborhood parties moving, jumping, leaping,

and cutting a figure. And certainly the same thing was happening

outside Miraflores, beyond our world and our life, in Lince, Brena,

Chorrillos, or the even more exotic neighborhoods of La Victoria,

downtown Lima, Rimac, and El Porvenir, where we, the Miraflorans,

had never set foot and didn't ever plan to set foot.

And just as we had moved on from waltzes and huarachas,

sambas and polkas, to the mambo, we also moved on from skates

and scooters to bicycles, and some, Tato Monje and Tony Espejo, for

example, to motor scooters, and even one or two to cars, like Luchin,

the overgrown kid in the neighborhood, who sometimes stole his

father's Chevrolet convertible and took us for a ride along the

seawalls, from Terrazas to the stream at Armendariz, at a hundred

miles an hour.

But the most notable event of that summer was the arrival in

Miraflores, all the way from Chile, their distant country, of two

sisters whose flamboyant appearance and unmistakable way of

speaking, very fast, swallowing the last syllables of words and

ending their sentences with an aspirated exclamation that sounded

like pue, threw all of us Miraflores boys, who had just traded our

short pants for long trousers, for a loop. And me more than the rest.

The younger one seemed like the older one, and vice versa. The

older one was named Lily and was a little shorter than Lucy, who

was a year younger. Lily couldn't have been more than fourteen or

fifteen years old, and Lucy no more than thirteen or fourteen. The

adjective "flamboyant" seemed invented just for them, but though

Lucy was flamboyant it wasn't to the same degree as her sister, not

only because her hair was shorter and not as blond as Lily's, and

because she dressed more soberly, but also because she was quieter,

and when it was time to dance, though she also cut a figure and

moved her waist with a boldness no Miraflores girl dared attempt,

she seemed like a modest, inhibited, almost colorless girl compared

to that spinning top, that flame in the wind, that will-o'-the-wisp

that Lily became when the records were all stacked on the automatic

changer, the mambo exploded, and we started to dance.

Lily danced with a delicious rhythm and a good deal of grace,

smiling and softly singing the words to the song, raising her arms,

showing her knees, and moving her waist and shoulders so that her

entire body, to which her skirts and blouses clung so perversely and

with so many curves, seemed to shake, vibrate, and take part in the

dance from the ends of her hair down to her feet. Whoever danced

the mambo with her always had a hard time, because how could

anyone go on and not be ensnared by the demonic whirlwind of

those madly leaping legs and feet? Impossible! You were left behind

from the beginning, very conscious of the fact that the eyes of all the

couples were focused on Lily's mambistic feats. "What a girl!" said

my aunt Alberta indignantly. "She dances like Tongolele, like a

rumbera in a Mexican movie. Well, let's not forget she's Chilean,"

she'd say in response to herself, "and virtue isn't the strong point of

women in that country."

I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way

to fall in love—it was also called heating up to a hundred

degrees—and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times.

The first, in the upper balcony of the Ricardo Palma, the movie

theater in Parque Central in Miraflores, during the Sunday matinee,

and she told me no, she was still very young to have a boyfriend. The

second time, at the skating rink that opened that summer at the foot

of Parque Salazar, and she told me no, she had to think about it,

because though she liked me a little, her parents had asked her not

to have a boyfriend until she finished the fourth year and she was

still in the third. And the last time, a few days before the trouble, in

the Cream Rica on Avenida Larco, while we were having a vanilla

milk shake, and of course, again she said no, why would she say yes

if we seemed to be going steady just the way we were? Weren't we

always together at Marta's when we played truth or dare? Didn't we

sit together on the Miraflores beach? Didn't she dance with me

more than anybody else at parties? Then why would she give me a

formal yes if all of Miraflores already thought we were going steady?

With her model's looks, her dark mischievous eyes, and her small

mouth with full lips, Lily was the incarnation of coquettishness.

"I like everything about you," I would tell her. "But what I like

best is the way you talk." It was funny and original because of its

intonation and musicality, so different from that of Permian girls,

and also because of certain expressions, words, and sayings that left

the boys in the neighborhood in the dark, trying to guess what they

meant and if they contained a hidden joke. Lily spent her time

saying things with double meanings, asking riddles, or telling jokes

so risque they made the girls in the neighborhood blush. "Those

Chilean girls are terrible" my aunt Alberta declared, taking off and

putting on her eyeglasses with the air of a high-school teacher

concerned that those two strangers would cause the disintegration

of Miraflores morality.

In the early years of the 1950s there were still no tall buildings in

Miraflores, a neighborhood of one-story houses—two at the

most—and gardens with their inevitable geraniums, poincianas,

laurels, bougainvilleas, and lawns and verandas along which

honeysuckle or ivy climbed, with rocking chairs where neighbors

waited for nightfall, gossiping or inhaling the scent of the jasmine.

In some parks there were ceibo trees thorny with red and pink

flowers, and the straight, clean sidewalks were lined with frangipani,

jacaranda, and mulberry trees, a note of color along with the flowers

in the gardens and the little yellow D'Onofrio ice-cream trucks—the

drivers dressed in their uniforms of white smocks and little black

caps—that drove up and down the streets day and night, announcing

their presence with a Klaxon whose slow ululation had the effect on

me of a primitive horn, a prehistoric reminiscence. You could still

hear birds singing in that Miraflores, where families cut a pine

branch when their girls reached marriageable age, because if they

didn't, the poor things would become old maids like my aunt

Alberta.

Lily never said yes, but the fact is that except for that formality,

in everything else we seemed to be going steady. We'd hold hands at

matinees in the Ricardo Palma, the Leuro, the Montecarlo, and the

Colina, and though it couldn't be said that in the darkness of the

balcony we were making out like other, older couples—making out

was a formula that included everything from anodyne kisses to the

tongue-sucking and wicked touching that had to be confessed to the

priest on first Fridays as mortal sins—Lily let me kiss her on the

cheek, the edge of her ears, the corner of her mouth, and sometimes,

for just a second, she'd touch her lips to mine and move them away

with a melodramatic expression: "No, no, absolutely not that, Slim."

My friends from the neighborhood made fun of me: "You're like a

calf, Slim, you're turning blue, Slim, that crush is melting you, Slim."

They never called me by my real name—Ricardo Somocurcio—but