The Bad Girl (28 page)

Town and in Abidjan. In every city, after work I would sweat blood at

a gym, doing abdominal exercises, running on the treadmill,

pedaling on a stationary bike, swimming or doing aerobics. And I

continued to perfect my Russian, on my own, and to translate,

slowly, for my own pleasure, the stories of Ivan Bunin, which, after

Chekhov's, were the ones I liked best. When I had three translated, I

sent them to my friend Mario Muchnik, in Spain. "With my

insistence on publishing only masterpieces, I've already bankrupted

four publishing houses," he replied. "And even though you may not

believe it, I'm persuading a suicidal entrepreneur to finance the

fifth. That's where I'll publish your Bunin and even pay you some

rights that will be enough for a few coffees. The contract will

follow." This incessant activity gradually took me out of the

emotional disorder caused by my trip to Tokyo. But it couldn't do

away with a certain inner sadness, a certain profound

disillusionment that accompanied me for a long time, like a double,

and corroded like acid any enthusiasm or interest I might begin to

feel for anything or anyone. And on many nights I had the same

filthy nightmare in which, on a background dense with shadows, I

would see the weak little figure of Fukuda, motionless on his bench,

as inexpressive as a Buddha, masturbating and ejaculating a shower

of semen that fell on the bad girl and me.

After about six months, when I returned to Paris from one of

those conferences, they handed me a letter from Mitsuko at

UNESCO. Salomon had taken his life, swallowing a bottle of

barbiturates in the small, rented apartment where he lived. His

suicide had come as a surprise, because shortly after I left Tokyo,

when Mitsuko, following my advice, found the courage to speak to

him, explaining that they couldn't go on together because she

wanted to dedicate herself fully to her career, Salomon took it very

well. He seemed understanding and didn't make a scene. They had

maintained a distant friendship, which was inevitable considering

the hectic pace in Tokyo. They would see each other occasionally in

a tearoom or restaurant and spoke frequently on the phone.

Salomon let her know that once his contract with Mitsubishi had

ended, he didn't intend to renew it; he would return to Paris, "where

he had a good friend." That was why she and everyone who knew

him had been disconcerted by his decision to end his life. The firm

had covered all the funeral costs. Fortunately, in her letter Mitsuko

made no mention at all of Kuriko. I didn't answer or send her my

condolences. I simply kept her letter in the little drawer in the night

table where I kept the toy hussar the Dragoman had given me on the

day he left for Tokyo, and the Guerlain toothbrush.

5

In spite of all the years I lived there, I had made no friends among

my neighbors until Simon and Elena Gravoski moved into the art

deco building on Rue Joseph Granier. I had thought Monsieur

Dourtois was a friend. He was a functionary at the SNCF, the French

rail system, married to a retired schoolteacher, a woman with

yellowish hair and a grim, expression. He lived across from me, and

on the landing, or the staircase, or in the vestibule at the entrance,

we would exchange nods or say good morning, and as the years

passed we began to shake hands and make comments on the

weather, a perennial concern of the French. Because of these

fleeting conversations, I came to believe we were friends, but one

night I learned we weren't when I came home after a concert by

Victoria de los Angeles at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees and

discovered I had forgotten my apartment key. At that hour, no

locksmith was open. I made myself as comfortable as I could on the

landing and waited for five in the morning, the time my very

punctual neighbor left for work. I supposed that when he found me

there, he would invite me into his house to wait for daylight. But at

five o'clock, when Monsieur Dourtois appeared and I explained why

I was there, stiff after a sleepless night, he limited himself to

expressing his sorrow, looking at his watch, and saying, "You'll have

to wait another three or four hours until a locksmith opens, mon

pauvre ami"

With his conscience now at rest, he left. Sometimes I passed

other residents of the building on the stairs, and I forgot their faces

immediately and their names vanished as soon as I learned them.

But when the Gravoskis and Yilal, their nine-year-old adopted son,

came to the building because the Dourtoises had moved to the

Dordogne, it was another matter. Simon, a Belgian physicist, worked

as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute, and Elena, a Venezuelan,

was a pediatrician at the Hopital Cochin. They were cheerful,

pleasant, easygoing, curious, cultured, and from the day I met them

in the middle of their move and offered to give them a hand and tell

them about the neighborhood, we became friends. We would have

coffee together after supper, lend each other books and magazines,

and occasionally go to the La Pagode cinema, which was nearby, or

take Yilal to the circus, the Louvre, or other museums in Paris.

Simon was barely forty, though his heavy red beard and

prominent belly made him look older. He dressed haphazardly,

wearing a jacket whose pockets bulged with notebooks and papers

and carrying a satchel full of books. He wore glasses for myopia,

which he cleaned frequently with his wrinkled tie. He was the

incarnation of the careless, absent-minded intellectual. Elena, on

the other hand, was somewhat younger, flirtatious, smartly dressed,

and I don't recall ever seeing her in a bad mood. She was

enthusiastic about everything in life: her work at the Hopital Cochin

and her young patients, about whom she told amusing anecdotes,

but also the article she had just read in Le Monde or L'Express, and

she would prepare to go to the movies or to eat at a Vietnamese

restaurant the following Saturday as if she were attending the

Oscars. She was short, slim, expressive, and she exuded congeniality

from every pore. They spoke French to each other, but with me they

used Spanish, which Simon knew perfectly.

Yilal had been born in Vietnam, and that was the only thing they

knew about him. They adopted him when the boy was four or five

years old—they weren't even certain of his age—through Caritas,

after a Kafkaesque application procedure on the basis of which

Simon, in laughing soliloquies, had founded his theory regarding the

inevitable decay of humanity as a result of bureaucratic gangrene.

They had named him Yilal after one of Simon's Polish ancestors, a

mythic figure who, according to my neighbor, was decapitated in

prerevolutionary Russia because he had been caught in flagrante

with no less a personage than the czarina. Not only had this ancestor

been a royal fornicator, but he had also been a theologian of the

kabbalah, a mystic, a smuggler, a counterfeiter, and a chess player.

Their adopted child was mute, the result not of organic

deficiencies—his vocal cords were intact—but of a trauma in his

infancy, perhaps a bombing or some other terrible event in the war

in Vietnam that had left him an orphan. They had seen specialists

and all agreed that in time he would recover the power of speech,

but for the moment it wasn't worth inflicting more treatments on

him. The therapeutic sessions were a torture for the boy and seemed

to reinforce, in his wounded spirit, the desire to remain silent. He

had been at a school for deaf-mutes for a few months, but they took

him out because the teachers themselves advised his parents to send

him to an ordinary school. Yilal wasn't deaf. He had a fine ear and

enjoyed music; he followed the rhythm with his foot and with

movements of his hands or head. Elena and Simon spoke to him

aloud and he responded with signs and expressive gestures, and

sometimes in writing, on a slate he wore around his neck.

He was very thin and somewhat frail, but not because he was

reluctant to eat. He had an excellent appetite, and when I came to

his house with a box of chocolates or a cake, his eyes would sparkle

and he would devour the treats with signs of pleasure. But except for

rare occasions, he was a withdrawn child who gave the impression of

being submerged in a somnolence that distanced him from the

reality around him. He could spend long periods of time with his

lost gaze, enclosed in his private world, as if everything in his

surroundings had disappeared.

He wasn't very affectionate but gave the impression that caresses

annoyed him and he submitted to them with more resignation than

happiness. Something soft and fragile emanated from him. The

Gravoskis didn't have television—at that time many Parisians of the

intellectual class still believed television shouldn't be in their

houses because it was anticultural—but Yilal didn't share those

prejudices and asked his parents to buy a television set as the

families of his classmates had done. I proposed that if they were

determined not to have this object that impoverished sensibilities in

their house, Yilal could come to my apartment sometimes to watch a

soccer match or a children's program. They agreed, and from then

on, three or four times a week, after doing his homework, Yilal

would cross the landing and come into my house to watch the

program his parents or I had recommended to him. He seemed

petrified for the hour he spent in my combined living-dining room,

his eyes glued to the small screen as he watched cartoons, quiz

shows, or a sports program. His gestures and expressions revealed

total submission to the images. Occasionally, when the program was

over, he spent some time with me and we talked. That is, he asked

me questions about every imaginable thing and I responded, or read

him a poem or a story from his reading book or my own library. I

grew fond of him but tried not to show it too much, for Elena had

warned me: "You have to treat him like a normal child. Never like a

victim or an invalid, because that would do him great harm." When I

wasn't at UNESCO and had contracts outside Paris, I left the key to

my apartment with the Gravoskis so Yilal wouldn't miss his

programs.

When I returned from one of those working trips, this one to

Brussels, Yilal showed me this message on his slate: "When you

were on your trip, the bad girl called you." The sentence was written

in French, but "bad girl" was in Spanish.

It was the fourth time she had called in the couple of years since

the episode in Japan. The first was three or four months after my

hurried departure from Tokyo, when I was still struggling to recover

from an experience that had left a wound in my memory that still

festered at times. I was checking something in the library* at

UNESCO, and the librarian transferred a call for me from the

interpreters' room. Before I said "Hello" I recognized her voice.

"Are you still angry with me, good boy?"

I hung up, feeling my hand shake.

"Bad news?" the librarian asked, a Georgian woman who spoke

Russian with me. "How pale you are."

I had to go into a UNESCO bathroom and throw up. For the rest

of the day I was agitated by the call. But I had made a decision not to

see the bad girl again or talk to her, and I was going to stick to it. It

was the only way I would be cured of the dead weight that had

conditioned my life ever since the day I helped my friend Paul and

went to pick up three aspiring guerrilla fighters at Orly Airport. I

managed to forget her only partially. Devoted to my work, to the

obligations it imposed on me—among which perfecting my Russian

always headed the list—I sometimes spent weeks without thinking

about her. But suddenly something would bring her to mind, and it

was as if a hermit crab had taken up residence in my intestines and

begun to devour my enthusiasm and energy. I would fall into a

depression, and there was no way to get out of my head the image of

Kuriko overwhelming me with caresses that had a fire she had never

shown before, only to please her Japanese lover, who watched us,

masturbating, from the shadows.

Her second call surprised me at the Hotel Sacher, in Vienna,

during the only affair I had in those two years, with a colleague at a

conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency. My lack of

sexual appetite had been absolute since the episode in Tokyo, to the

point where I wondered if I hadn't been left impotent. I had almost

become accustomed to living without sex when, on the same day we

met, Astrid, a Danish interpreter, proposed with disarming

naturalness, "If you like, we can see each other tonight." She was a

tall redhead, athletic, uncomplicated, with eyes so light they seemed

liquid. We went to have some Tafelspitz and beer at the Cafe Central

in the Palais Ferstel, Herrengasse, with its columns from a Turkish