The Bad Girl (4 page)

We became friends at a little cafe in the Latin Quarter where a

group of South Americans would meet, the kind Sebastian Salazar

Bondy wrote about in Poor People of Paris, a book of short stories.

When he learned of my financial difficulties, Paul offered to give me

a hand as far as food was concerned because there was more than

enough at the Mexico Lindo. If I came to the back door at about ten

at night, he would offer me a "free, hot banquet," something he had

already done for other compatriots in need.

He couldn't have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five

years old, and he was very, very fat—a barrel with legs—and goodhearted,

friendly, and talkative. He always had a big smile on his

face, which inflated his plump cheeks even more. In Peru he had

studied medicine for several years and served some time in prison

for being one of the organizers of the famous strike at the University

of San Marcos in 1952, during the dictatorship of General Manuel

Odria. Before coming to Paris he spent a couple of years in Madrid,

where he married a girl from Burgos. They'd just had a baby.

He lived in the Marais, which in those days, before Andre

Malraux, General de Gaulle's minister of culture, undertook his

great cleanup and restoration of old, dilapidated mansions covered

by the grime of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a

neighborhood of poor artisans, cabinetmakers, cobblers, tailors,

Jews, and a large number of indigent students and artists. In

addition to those rapid encounters at the service entrance of the

Mexico Lindo, we would also get together at midday at La Petite

Source on the Carrefour de l'Odeon or on the terrace of Le Cluny, at

the corner of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, to drink coffee and

recount our adventures. Mine consisted exclusively of multiple

efforts to find a job, something that was not at all easy since no one

in Paris was impressed by my law degree from a Permian university

or by my being fairly fluent in English and French. His had to do

with preparations for the revolution that would make Peru the

second Socialist Republic of Latin America. One day he suddenly

asked if I'd be interested in going to Cuba on a scholarship to receive

military training, and I told Paul that even though I felt all the

sympathy in the world for him, I had absolutely no interest in

politics; in fact, I despised politics, and all my dreams were

focused—excuse my petit bourgeois mediocrity, compadre—on

getting a nice steady job that would let me spend, in the most

ordinary way, the rest of my days in Paris. I also told him not to tell

me anything about his conspiracies, I didn't want to live with the

anxiety of accidentally revealing some information that might harm

him and his associates.

"Don't worry. I trust you, Ricardo."

He did, in fact, to the extent that he ignored what I'd said. He

told me everything he was doing and even the most intimate

complications of their revolutionary preparations. Paul belonged to

the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR, founded by Luis

de la Puente Uceda, who had repudiated the center-left American

Popular Revolutionary* Alliance, or APRA. The Cuban government

had given MIR a hundred scholarships for young Peruvians to

receive guerrilla training. These were the years of the confrontation

between Beijing and Moscow, and at that moment it seemed as if

Cuba was leaning toward the Maoist line, though later, for practical

reasons, she eventually allied with the Soviets. The scholarship

recipients, because of the strict blockade imposed on the island by

the United States, had to pass through Paris on the way to their

destination, and Paul was hard-pressed to find them places to stay

during their Parisian stopover.

I gave him a hand with these logistical chores, helping him

reserve rooms in miserable little hotels—"for Arabs," Paul would

say—where we crowded the future guerrilla fighters by twos, and

sometimes even by threes, in a small, squalid room or in the

chambre de bonne of some Latin American or Frenchman disposed

to adding his grain of sand to the cause of world revolution. In my

garret in the Hotel du Senat, on Rue Saint-Sulpice, I sometimes put

up one of the scholarship recipients behind the back of Madame

Auclair, the manager.

They constituted an extremely diverse collection of fauna. Many

were students of literature, law, economics, science, and education

at San Marcos, who had joined the Young Communists or other

leftist organizations, and in addition to Limenians there were kids

from the provinces, and even some peasants, Indians from Puno,

Cuzco, and Ayacucho, bewildered by the leap from their Andean

villages and communities, where they had somehow been recruited,

to Paris. They looked at everything in bewilderment. From the few

words I exchanged with them on the way from Orly to their hotels,

they sometimes gave the impression of not being too sure what kind

of scholarship they were going to enjoy and not really understanding

what kind of training they would receive. Not all of them had been

given their scholarships in Peru. Some had received them in Paris,

chosen from the variegated mass of Peruvians—students, artists,

adventurers, bohemians—who prowled the Latin Quarter. Among

them, the most original was my friend Alfonso the Spiritualist, sent

to France by a theosophical sect in Lima to pursue studies in

parapsychology and theosophy, but Paul's eloquence swept away the

spirits and installed him in the world of the revolution. He was a

pale, timid boy who barely opened his mouth, and there was

something emaciated and distracted in him, a precocious kind of

spirit. In our midday conversations at Le Cluny or La Petite Source, I

suggested to Paul that many of the scholarship recipients the MIR

was sending to Cuba, and sometimes to North Korea or the People's

Republic of China, were simply taking advantage of the chance to do

a little tourism and would never climb the Andes or go down into

Amazonia with rifles on their shoulders and packs on their backs.

"It's all been calculated, mon vieux" Paul replied, sitting like a

magistrate who has the laws of history on his side. "If half of them

respond to us, the revolution is a sure thing."

True, the MIR was doing things a little quickly, but how could

they enjoy the luxury of sleeping? History, after moving for so many

years like a tortoise, had suddenly become a meteor, thanks to Cuba.

It was necessary to act, learn, stumble, get up again. This wasn't the

time to recruit young guerrillas by making them submit to

examinations of their knowledge, to physical trials or psychological

tests. The important thing was to take advantage of those one

hundred scholarships before Cuba offered them to other

groups—the Communist Party, the Liberation Front, the

Trotskyists—who were competing to be the first to set the Permian

revolution in motion.

Most of the scholarship recipients I picked up at Orly to take to

the hotels and boardinghouses where they would spend their time in

Paris were male and very young, some of them adolescents. One day

I discovered there were also women among them.

"Pick them up and take them to this little hotel on Rue Gay

Lussac," Paul said. "Comrade Ana, Comrade Arlette, and Comrade

Eufrasia. Be nice to them."

One rule the scholarship recipients had been carefully taught

was not to disclose their real names. Even among themselves they

used only their nicknames or noms de guerre. As soon as the three

girls showed up, I had the impression I'd seen Comrade Arlette

somewhere before.

Comrade Ana was a dark-skinned girl with lively gestures, a little

older than the others, and from the things I heard her say that

morning and the two or three other times I saw her, she must have

been the head of a teachers' union. Comrade Eufrasia, a little

Chinese girl with delicate bones, looked like a fifteen-year-old. She

was exhausted because on the long flight she hadn't slept a wink and

had vomited a few times because of turbulence. Comrade Arlette

had an attractive shape, a slim waist, pale skin, and though she

dressed, like the others, with great simplicity—coarse skirts and

sweaters, percale blouses, flat shoes, and the kind of hairpins sold in

markets—there was something very feminine in her manner of

walking and moving and, above all, in the way she pursed her full

lips as she asked about the streets the taxi was driving along. In her

dark, expressive eyes, something eager was twinkling as she

contemplated the tree-lined boulevards, the symmetrical buildings,

the crowd of young people of both sexes carrying bags, books, and

notebooks as they prowled the streets and bistrots in the area

around the Sorbonne, while we approached the little hotel on Rue

Gay Lussac. They were given a room with no bath and no windows,

and two beds for the three of them. When I left, I repeated Paul's

instructions: they weren't to move from here until he came to see

them, sometime in the afternoon, and explained the plan for their

work in Paris.

I was in the doorway of the hotel, lighting a cigarette before I

walked away, when somebody touched my shoulder.

"That room gives me claustrophobia," Comrade Arlette said with

a smile. "And besides, a person doesn't come to Paris every day,

caramba."

Then I recognized her. She had changed a great deal, of course,

especially in the way she spoke, but the mischievousness I

remembered so well still poured out of her, something bold,

spontaneous, provocative, that was revealed in her defiant posture,

her small breasts and face thrust forward, one foot set slightly back,

her ass high, and a mocking glance that left her interlocutor not

knowing if she was speaking seriously or joking. She was short, with

small feet and hands, and her hair, black now instead of light, and

tied back with a ribbon, fell to her shoulders. And she had that dark

honey in her eyes.

I let her know that what we were going to do was categorically

forbidden and for that reason Comrade Jean (Paul) would be angry

with us, then I took her for a walk past the Pantheon, the Sorbonne,

the Odeon, the Luxembourg Gardens, and finally—far too expensive

for my budget!—to have lunch at L'Acropole, a little Greek

restaurant on Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie. In those three hours of

conversation she told me, in violation of all the rules regarding

revolutionary secrecy, that she had studied letters and law at

Catholic University, had been a member of the clandestine Young

Communists for years, and, like other comrades, had moved to the

MIR because it was a real revolutionary movement as opposed to

the YC, a sclerotic and anachronistic party in the present day. She

told me these things somewhat mechanically, without too much

conviction. I recounted my ongoing efforts to find work so I could

stay in Paris and told her that now I had all my hopes focused on an

examination for Spanish translators, sponsored by UNESCO, that

would be given the following day.

"Cross your fingers and knock the table three times, like this, so

you'll pass," Comrade Arlette said, very seriously, as she stared at

me.

To provoke her, I asked if these kinds of superstition were

compatible with the scientific doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.

"To get what you want, anything goes," she replied immediately,

very resolute. But then she shrugged and said with a smile, "I'll also

say a rosary for you to pass, even though I'm not a believer. Will you

denounce me to the party for being superstitious? I don't think so.

You look like a nice guy..."

She gave a little laugh, and when she did, the same dimples she'd

had as a girl formed on her cheeks. I walked her back to the hotel. If

she agreed, I'd ask Comrade Jean's permission to take her to see

other places in Paris before she continued her revolutionary

journey. "Terrific," she replied, giving me a languid hand that she did

not withdraw from mine right away. This was one very pretty, very

flirtatious guerrilla fighter.

The next morning I passed the exam for translators at UNESCO

with about twenty other applicants. We were given half a dozen

fairly easy texts in English and French to translate. I hesitated over

the phrase "art roman" which I first translated as "Roman art" but

then, in the revision, I realized it referred to "Romanesque art." At

midday I went with Paul to eat sausage and fried potatoes at La

Petite Source, and with no preambles asked his permission to take

out Comrade Arlette while she was in Paris. He gave me a sly look

and pretended to reprimand me.

"It is categorically forbidden to fuck female comrades. In Cuba

and the People's Republic of China, during the revolution, screwing

a comrade could mean the firing squad. Why do you want to take

her out? Do you like the girl?"

"I suppose I do," I confessed, somewhat embarrassed. "But if it's