The Bad Girl (49 page)

remember me?"

"I was distracted," I said in apology. "Of course, I remember you

very* well. How* are you doing, Martine?"

"Very badly, how would I be doing?" she replied. Anger soured

her face. She didn't take her eyes off me. "But you should know I

don't let people trample on me. I know* very* well how to defend

myself. I assure you this matter doesn't end here."

She was a tall, very thin woman with gray hair. She wore a

raincoat and scrutinized me as if she wanted to smash my head with

the umbrella she was carrying.

"I don't know* what you're talking about, Martine. Have you had

problems with my wife? We separated some time ago, didn't she tell

you?"

She fell silent and stared at me, disconcerted. Her eyes told me

she thought I was a very strange beast.

"Then, you don't know anything?" she murmured. "Then, you

live in the clouds? Who do you think that hypocrite ran off with?

Don't you know* it was with my husband?"

I didn't know what to say. I felt stupid, a really strange beast.

Making an effort, I mumbled, "No, I didn't know. She only said she

was leaving, and she left. I haven't heard from her since. I'm very

sorry, Martine."

"I gave her everything, work, friendship, my trust, and I

disregarded the question of her papers, which was never very clear. I

opened my house to her. And this is how* she repaid me, taking my

husband from me. Not because she fell in love with him but because

of greed. Pure selfishness. She didn't care about destroying an entire

family."

I thought that if I didn't get away Martine would slap me, as if I

were responsible for her family's misfortune. Her voice cracked with

indignation.

"I warn you this doesn't end here," she repeated, shaking the

umbrella a few* centimeters from my face. "My children won't permit

it. She only wants to wring him dry, because that's what she is, a

fortune hunter. My children have begun legal action and she'll end

up in prison. You'd be better off if you had watched over your wife a

little more."

"I'm very sorry, I have to go, this conversation makes no sense," I

said, moving away with long strides.

Instead of going back to pick up Marcella, who was putting into

storage the household goods we hadn't sold, I went to sit in a cafe in

Ecole Militaire. I tried to put my mind in order. My blood pressure

must have risen because I felt flushed and dazed. I didn't know*

Marline's husband but I had met one of her children, an adult whom

I had seen in passing just one time. The bad girl's new conquest

must be an old man, then, a doddering old man, I imagined. Of

course she hadn't fallen in love with him. She never had fallen in

love with anybody except, perhaps, Fukuda. She had done it to

escape the boredom and mediocrity of life in the little apartment in

Ecole Militaire, searching for the thing that had been her first

priority ever since she was a little girl and discovered that the poor

had a dog's life but the rich lived very well: the security only money

could guarantee. Once again she had deceived herself with the

mirage of a rich man; after hearing Martine say, in the accent of

Greek tragedy, "My children have begun legal action," it was certain

that this time too, things wouldn't go as she wished. I harbored

rancor toward her but now, imagining her with that ridiculous old

man, I felt a certain compassion too.

I found Marcella exhausted. She already had sent a small truck

with what we couldn't sell, along with some cartons of books, to

storage. Sitting on the floor of the living room, I examined the walls

and empty space with nostalgia. We went to a little hotel on Rue du

Cherche-Midi and lived there for a number of months until we left

for Spain. We had a small, bright room, with a fairly large window

overlooking the nearby roofs; pigeons came to the sill to eat the

kernels of corn Marcella put there for them (it was my job to clean

off the droppings). The room soon filled with books, records, and

especially Marcella's drawings and maquettes. It had a long table

that we shared, in theory, but in reality Marcella took up most of it.

That year it was even more difficult for me to find translations, so

the sale of the apartment turned out to be very advantageous. I put

the remaining money into a fixed-term account, and the small

monthly sum it paid required us to live very frugally. We had to cut

out expensive restaurants, concerts, going to the movies more than

once a week, and plays, except when Marcella obtained free tickets.

But it was a relief to live without debts.

The idea of moving to Spain was born after an Italian modern

dance company from Bari, with whom Marcella had worked

previously, was invited to perform at a festival in Granada and asked

her to be in charge of the lighting and sets. She traveled there with

them and came back two weeks later, delighted. The performance

had gone very well, she met theater people, and some possibilities

had opened for her. In the months that followed she designed sets

for two young companies, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona,

and after each trip she returned to Paris euphoric. She said there

was an extraordinary cultural vitality in Spain, and the entire

country was filled with festivals and directors, actors, dancers, and

musicians yearning to make Spanish society current and to do new

things. There was more space there for young people than in France,

where the environment was supersaturated. Besides, in Madrid you

could live much more cheaply than in Paris.

I wasn't sorry to leave the city that, ever since I was a boy, I had

associated with the idea of paradise. During the years I spent in

Paris I'd had marvelous experiences, the kind that seem to justify an

entire life, but all of them were connected to the bad girl, who by

then, I think, I remembered without bitterness, without hatred, even

with a certain tenderness, knowing very well that my sentimental

misfortunes were due more to me than to her, because I had loved

her in a way she never could have reciprocated, though on some few

occasions she had tried: these were my most glorious memories of

Paris. Now that the story was definitively over, my future life in this

city would be a gradual decline exacerbated by not having work, an

old age filled with austerities, and a very solitary one when cara

Marcella realized she had better things to do than carry the burden

of an old man whose head was weak and who could become

senile—a polite way of saying imbecilic—if he had another stroke.

Better for me to go and start over again somewhere else.

Marcella found the apartment in Lavapies, and since it was

rented furnished, I gave away to charitable organizations the rest of

the furniture we had in storage as well as the books in my library. I

took to Madrid only a handful of favorite titles, almost all of them

Russian and French, and my grammar books and dictionaries.

After a year and a half of living in Madrid, I had a hunch that this

time Marcella was going to make the great leap. One afternoon she

burst into the Cafe Barbieri, very excited, to tell me she had met a

fabulous dancer and choreographer and they were going to work

together on a fantastic project: Metamorphosis, a modern ballet

inspired by one of the texts gathered by Borges in his Book of

Imaginary Beings: "The A Bao A Qu," a legend collected by one of

the English translators of The Thousand and One Nights. The boy

was from Alicante and trained in Germany, where he had worked

professionally until very recently. He had formed a group of ten

dancers, five women and five men, and created the choreography for

Metamorphosis. The story in question, translated and perhaps

enriched by Borges, told of a marvelous little animal that lived at the

top of a tower in a state of lethargy and awoke to active life only

when someone climbed the stairs. Endowed with the ability* to alter

shape, when someone walked up or down the stairs the little animal

began to move, to light up, to change form and color. Victor Almeda,

the boy from Alicante, had conceived of a performance in which the

dancers, emulating that marvel while going up and down the magic

stairs Marcella would design, and thanks to the lighting effects she

was also responsible for, would change their personalities,

movements, expressions, until the stage was transformed into a

small universe where each dancer would be many, each man and

woman containing countless human beings. La Sala Olimpia, an old

movie house converted into a theater on Plaza de Lavapies, where

the National Center for New Trends in Stagecraft was located, had

accepted Victor Almeda's proposal and would sponsor the

performance.

I never saw Marcella work on a set as happily as on this one, or

make so many sketches and maquettes. Each day she would recount

with delight the torrent of ideas flooding her head and the progress

the company was making. A few times I went with her to the

ramshackle Olimpia, and one afternoon we had coffee on the plaza

with Victor Almeda, a very dark boy with long hair he wore pulled

back in a pony-tail, and an athletic body that revealed many hours of

exercise and rehearsals. Unlike Marcella, he wasn't exuberant or

extroverted but rather reserved, though he knew very well what he

wanted to do in life. And what he wanted was for Metamorphosis to

be a success. He was well read and passionate about Borges. For this

show he had read and looked at more than a thousand items on the

subject of metamorphosis, beginning with Ovid, and the truth is that

although he spoke very* little, what he said was intelligent and, for

me, novel: I never had listened to a choreographer and dancer talk

about his vocation. That night, at home, after telling Marcella of the

good impression Victor Almeda had made on me, I asked if he was

gay. She was indignant. He wasn't. What a stupid prejudice to think

all male dancers were gay. She was sure, for example, that in the

professional association of interpreters and translators there was

the same percentage of gays as among dancers. I apologized and

assured her I didn't have any prejudices, that my question had been

asked purely out of curiosity, with no hidden agenda.

The success of Metamorphosis was total and fully deserved.

Victor Almeda arranged a good deal of advance publicity, and on the

night of the opening, the Olimpia was full to bursting; there were

even people standing, and most of them were young. The stairs on

which the five couples evolved metamorphosed just like the dancers,

and, with the lights, were the real protagonists of the performance.

There was no music. The rhythm was kept by the dancers

themselves with their hands and feet, and by the sharp, guttural,

hoarse, or sibilant sounds they made as their identities changed. The

dancers took turns placing filters in front of the reflectors, which

changed the intensity and color of the light and made the

performers actually seem to become iridescent, to alter their skin. It

was beautiful, surprising, imaginative, an hour-long performance

during which the audience remained motionless, expectant, so still

you could hear a pin drop. The troupe was supposed to give five

performances and ended up giving ten. There were very positive

articles in the press, and in all of them Marcella's set design was

praised. It was filmed for television, to be used as a segment of a

program dedicated to the arts.

I went to see the piece three times. The house was always packed

and the audience as enthusiastic as it had been the day it opened.

The third time, when the performance was over and I was climbing

the Olimpia's narrow, winding staircase to the dressing rooms to

find Marcella, I almost ran into her in the arms of the good-looking,

perspiring Victor Almeda. They were kissing with a certain frenzy,

and when they heard me approach they pulled apart in great

embarrassment. I pretended not to have noticed anything strange

and congratulated them, saying I had liked this performance even

more than the two previous ones.

Later, on the way home, Marcella, who had been very

uncomfortable, confronted me.

"Well, I suppose I owe you an explanation for what you saw."

"You don't owe me anything, Marcella. You're free and so am I.

We live together and get along very well. But that shouldn't infringe

in any way on our freedom. Let's not talk about it anymore."

"I only want you to know I'm very sorry," she said. "Even though

appearances say something different, I assure you absolutely

nothing has happened between Victor and me. Tonight was just

something stupid, without importance. And it won't happen again."

"I believe you/' I said, taking her hand because it made me sad to

see how awful she felt. "Let's forget it. And don't look like that,

please. You're especially pretty when you smile."

And in fact, in the days that followed, we didn't speak about it