The Bad Girl (15 page)

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-a-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-a-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 their

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-a-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 facades 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-a-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 Ataulfo 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-a-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-a-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 superblooking

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