The Bad Girl (23 page)

The Dragoman had rediscovered passion. How terrible to have

wasted so many years, so much money, so much sperm in

mercenary affairs! But perhaps not; perhaps everything he had done

until now had been an ascesis, a training of his spirit and body in

order to deserve Mitsuko.

As soon as he returned to Paris, the first thing he would do

would be to toss into the fire and watch the fusing of those

cuirassiers, hussars, plumed horsemen, sappers, artillerymen, on

whom, over the years, in an activity as onerous and absorbing as it

was useless, he had wasted his existence, turning his back on the

happiness of love. He never would collect anything again; his only

pastime would be learning by heart, in all the languages he knew,

erotic poems to whisper into Mitsuko's ear. She liked to hear them,

though she didn't understand them, after the marvelous "joys" they

had each night in a variety of settings.

Then, in prose overloaded with feverish excitement and

pornography, he went on to describe Mitsuko's amatory feats and

secret charms, among them a very subdued, inoffensive, tender, and

sensual form of the fearful vagina dentata of Greco-Roman

mythology. Tokyo was the most expensive city in the world, and

though his salary was high, it was disappearing in nocturnal trips to

the Ginza, the Tokyo district of the night, which the Dragoman and

Mitsuko, by visiting restaurants, bars, cabarets, and especially

houses of assignation, had made the jewel in their crown of

Japanese nightlife. But who cared about money when happiness was

in the balance! Because all the exquisite refinement of Japanese

culture shone not in the prints of the Meiji period, or the Noh

theater, or Kabuki, or the Bunraku puppets, as I surely believed, but

in the houses of assignation or maisons closes, called by the

Frenchified name of chaaux, the most famous of which was the

Chateau Meguru, a true paradise of carnal pleasure, given over

completely to the Japanese genius for combining the most advanced

technology with sexual wisdom and rites ennobled by tradition.

Everything was possible in the chambers of the Chateau Meguru:

excesses, fantasies, phantoms, extravagances all had a setting, and

the instrumentality to become concrete. Mitsuko and he had lived

through unforgettable experiences in the discreet reserved rooms of

the Chateau Meguru: "There we felt like gods, dear friend, and on

my honor, I do not exaggerate and am not delirious."

At last, when I was afraid the man in love wouldn't say a word

about the bad girl, the Dragoman turned his attention to my request.

He had seen her only once after receiving my letter. It was very

difficult for him to talk to her alone because, "for obvious reasons,"

he didn't want to refer to me "in front of the gentleman with whom

she lives, or at least with whom she goes out and with whom she is

usually seen," a "personage" of bad reputation and worse

appearance, someone you only had to see to feel a chill run down

your spine and to say to yourself: "I wouldn't want this individual

for an enemy."

But finally, with Mitsuko's help, he managed to speak privately

to her and give her my message. She told him that "since her petit

ami was jealous," it would be better if I didn't write to her directly so

he wouldn't make a scene (or knock her down). But, if I wanted to

write to her through the Dragoman, she would be delighted to hear

from me. Salomon Toledano added: "Do I need to tell you, dear

friend, that nothing would make me happier than being your gobetween?

Our profession is a disguised form of procuring, pimping,

or being a go-between, and so I am prepared for so noble a mission.

I shall do it, taking all the precautions in the world to keep your

letters from ever falling into the hands of that thug the girl of your

dreams is going around with. Forgive me, dear friend, but I have

guessed everything: Am I wrong, or is she the love of your life? And

by the way, congratulations: she is no Mitsuko—no one is

Mitsuko—but her exotic beauty shines with an aura of mystery in

her face that is very seductive. Be careful!" He signed it: "A hug from

the Dragoman of Chateau Meguru!"

Who was the Permian girl involved with now? A Japanese, no

doubt about that. Perhaps a gangster, one of the Yakuza bosses who

had amputated part of his little finger, the gang's countersign.

Nothing surprising about it. She undoubtedly had met him on the

trips she made to the Orient with Mr. Richardson, another gangster,

except he wore a shirt and tie and had stables in Newmarket. The

Japanese was a sinister character, judging from the Dragoman's

jokes. Was he referring only to his physical appearance when he said

there was something frightening about him? Or was it his

background? The only thing missing in the Chilean girl's resume:

lover of a boss in the Japanese mafia. A man with power and money,

of course, indispensable qualities for winning her. And a few corpses

behind him. I was eaten alive by jealousy, yet at the same time an

odd feeling had taken possession of me, a mixture of envy, curiosity,

and admiration. It was clear, the bad girl's indescribable audacity

would never cease to amaze me.

Twenty times I told myself not to be so idiotic as to write her or

try to reestablish some kind of relationship with her, because I

would be burned and spat upon, as always. But less than two days

after reading the Dragoman's letter, I wrote her a note and began to

devise a way to travel to the Land of the Rising Sun.

My letter was completely hypocritical, since I didn't want to

cause her any difficulty (I was sure that this time, in Japan, she had

sunk her feet into muddier waters than on other occasions). I was

very happy to have had news of her through my colleague, our

mutual friend, and to know things were going well for her and she

was so happy in Tokyo. I told her about my life in Paris, the work

routine that sometimes took me to other European cities, and, I

said, what a coincidence that in the not too distant future I would be

traveling to Tokyo, contracted as an interpreter at an international

conference. I hoped to see her and recall old times. Because I didn't

know what name she was using now, all I said in the salutation was

this: "Dear Permian girl." And I included a copy of my anthology of

Chekhov, with a dedication that read: "To the bad girl, with the

unchanging affection of the little pissant who translated these

stories." I mailed the letter and book to Salomon Toledano's address,

along with a few lines thanking him for his help, confessing my envy

at knowing how happy and how much in love he was, and asking

that if he heard of any conference or congress that might need good

interpreters who spoke Spanish, French, English, and Russian

(though not Japanese) to let me know, because suddenly I felt an

irresistible urge to visit Tokyo.

My efforts to find a job that would take me to Japan failed. Not

knowing Japanese excluded me from many local conferences, and

for the moment there were no meetings in Tokyo of any UN agency

where only the official languages of the United Nations were

required. Going on my own, as a tourist, would cost an arm and a

leg. Would I vaporize in just a few days most of the funds I had been

able to save in recent years? I decided to do it. But as soon as I made

the decision and was ready to go to a travel agency, I received a

phone call from my old boss at UNESCO, Senor Charnes. He had

retired but was working on his own as the head of a private agency

for translators and interpreters with which I was always in contact.

He had a conference for me in Seoul, for five days. That meant I now

had my round-trip fare. It would be cheaper to get to Tokyo from

Korea. From that moment on, my life was caught up in a whirlwind:

arranging visas, finding guidebooks for Korea and Japan, and

constantly repeating to myself that I was taking a totally stupid step

since the most likely thing was that I wouldn't even be able to see

her in Tokyo. The bad girl probably had moved somewhere else or

would avoid me so the Yakuza boss wouldn't slit her open from head

to toe and throw her body to the dogs, as the villain had done in a

Japanese film I had just seen.

During those feverish days, the phone woke me in the middle of

the night.

"Are you still in love with me?"

The same voice, the same mocking, amused tone as before, and,

at bottom, that trace of the Lima accent she never had lost

completely.

"I must be, bad girl," I replied, wide awake now. "Otherwise, ever

since I found out you're in Tokyo, why would I keep knocking on

doors for a contract that would take me there, even if only for a day?

I finally have one, for Seoul. I'll leave in a couple of weeks. From

there I'll go to Tokyo to see you. Even if that Yakuza boss you're

with, according to what my spies tell me, shoots me dead. Are these

symptoms of my being in love?"

"Yes, I think so. It's just as well, good boy. I thought, after so

much time, you'd forgotten me. Did your colleague Toledano tell

you that? That I'm with a mafia boss?"

She burst into laughter, delighted with these credentials. But she

changed the subject almost immediately and spoke to me in an

affectionate way.

"I'm glad you're coming. Even though we don't see each other

often, I always think about you. Shall I tell you why? Because you're

the only friend I have left."

"I'm not and never will be your friend. Don't you realize that yet?

I'm your lover, your suitor, the person who, since he was a boy, has

been crazy about the Chilean girl, the guerrilla fighter, the

bureaucrat's wife, the wife of the horse breeder, the gangster's

mistress. The little pissant who lives only to desire you and think

about you. In Tokyo I don't want us to remember anything. I want to

hold you in my arms, kiss you, smell you, bite you, make love to

you."

She laughed again, this time more willingly.

"Do you still make love?" she asked. "Good, just as well. Nobody

has said those things to me since the last time we saw each other.

Will you tell me a lot of them when you come, Ricardito? Go on, tell

me another, as an example."

"On nights when there's a full moon I go out to bay at the sky

and then I see your face painted up there. Right now I'd give ten

years of my life to see myself reflected at the back of your eyes, your

eyes the color of dark honey—"

She was laughing, amused, but suddenly she became frightened

and interrupted me.

"I have to hang up."

I heard the receiver click. I couldn't close my eyes again,

overcome by a mixture of elation and uneasiness that kept me

awake until seven in the morning, the hour when I normally got up

to prepare my usual breakfast—black coffee and a slice of toast with

honey—when I didn't go out to eat at the counter of a nearby cafe on

Avenue de Tourville.

I spent the remaining two weeks before my trip to Seoul

occupied by the kinds of things, I suppose, that sweethearts full of

illusions did long ago in the days preceding the wedding, when both

of them would lose their virginity: buying clothes and shoes, having

my hair cut (not by the low-priced barber behind UNESCO where I

always went but at a deluxe barbershop on Rue Saint-Honore), and,

above all, going to boutiques and ladies' shops to find a discreet gift

the bad girl could hide in her own wardrobe and that was, at the

same time, original and delicate, one that would tell her the tender,

sweet things I longed to whisper in her ear. Every hour I spent

looking for the gift, I told myself that I was now even more imbecilic

than I had been before, and deserved to be kicked and trampled in

the dirt again by the lover of the Yakuza boss. At last, after much

searching, I bought one of the first things I had seen and liked, at

Vuitton: a dressing case with a collection of crystal flasks for

perfumes, creams, and lipsticks, and a pocket diary and mother-ofpearl

pencil concealed in a false bottom. There was something

vaguely adulterous about this hiding place in a cosmetics case.

The conference in Seoul was draining. It dealt with patents and

tariffs, and the speakers had recourse to a very technical vocabulary,

which made it twice as difficult for me. The excitement of recent

days, jet lag, and the time difference between Paris and Korea kept

me awake, my nerves on edge. On the day I arrived in Tokyo, early in

the afternoon, I was overcome by fatigue, and in the tiny room the

Dragoman had reserved for me at a small hotel in the center of the

city, I collapsed with exhaustion. I slept four or five uninterrupted

hours, and that night, after a long, cold shower to wake me up, I

went out for supper with my friend and his Japanese love. From the

first moment I sensed that Salomon Toledano was much more in

love with Mitsuko than she was with him. The Dragoman looked