playing a game?"
I was disconcerted and didn't know how to answer.
"All of UNESCO knows," he added, quietly, sarcastically. "I'm the
laughingstock of the agency. My wife has left me, and I don't even
know for whom. I thought it was you, Senor Somocurcio."
His voice broke before he finished pronouncing my name. His
chin quivered and his teeth seemed to be chattering. I stammered
that I was sorry, I hadn't heard anything, and stupidly repeated that
this month I had been working away from Paris, in Vienna and
Rome. And I said goodbye, but Monsieur Arnoux didn't respond.
I was so surprised and chagrined that I felt a wave of nausea in
the elevator and had to throw up in the bathroom in the corridor.
With whom had she gone away? Could she still be living in Paris
with her lover? One thought accompanied me in the days that
followed: the weekend she had given me was her goodbye. So I'd
have something special to pine for. The leavings you throw to the
dog, Ricardito. Some calamitous days followed that brief visit to
Monsieur Arnoux. For the first time in my life, I suffered from
insomnia. I was in a sweat all night, my mind blank, as I clutched
the Guerlain toothbrush that I kept like a charm in my night table,
chewing on my despair and jealousy. The next day I was a wreck, my
body shaken by chills, without energy for anything, and I didn't even
want to eat. The doctor prescribed Nembutal, which didn't put me to
sleep so much as knock me out. I awoke distraught and shaking, as
if I had a savage hangover. I kept cursing myself for how stupid I
had been when I sent her off to Cuba, putting my friendship with
Paul ahead of the love I felt for her. If I had held on to her we would
still be together, and life wouldn't be this sleeplessness, this
emptiness, this bile.
Senor Charnes helped me out of the slow emotional dissolution
in which I found myself by giving me a month's contract. I wanted
to fall on my knees and thank him. With the routine of work at
UNESCO, I was slowly emerging from the crisis I had been in since
the disappearance of the ex-Chilean girl, the ex-guerrilla fighter, the
ex-Madame Arnoux. What did she call herself now? What
personality, what name, what history had she adopted for this new
stage in her life? Her new lover must be very important, much more
important than the adviser to the director of UNESCO, who was too
modest for her ambitions now, and who was devastated by her
leaving. She had given me clear warning that last morning: "I'd only
stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful." I was
certain I wouldn't see her again this time. You had to pull yourself
together and forget the Permian girl with a thousand faces, good
boy, convince yourself she was no more than a bad dream.
But a few days after I had gone back to work at UNESCO,
Monsieur Arnoux appeared in the cubicle that was my office as I was
translating a report on bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa.
"I'm sorry I was short with you the other day," he said,
uncomfortably. "I was in a very* bad state of mind just then."
He proposed that we have supper. And though I knew this supper
would be catastrophic for my own state of mind, my curiosity to
hear about her and find out what had happened were stronger, and I
accepted.
We went to Chez Eux, a restaurant in the seventh
arrondissement, not far from my house. It was the tensest, most
difficult supper I've ever had. But fascinating too, because I learned
many things about the ex—Madame Arnoux and also discovered
how far she had gone in her search for the security she identified
with wealth.
We ordered whiskey with ice and Perrier as an aperitif, and then
red wine with a meal we barely tasted. Chez Eux had a fixed menu
consisting of exquisite food that came in deep pans, and our table
was filling up with pates, snails, salads, fish, meat, which the
amazed waiters took away almost untouched to make room for a
great variety of desserts, one bathed in bubbling chocolate, not
understanding why we slighted all those delicacies.
Robert Arnoux asked me how long I had known her. I lied and
said only since i960 or 1961, when she passed through Paris on her
way to Cuba as one of the recipients of a scholarship from the MIR
to receive guerrilla training.
"In other words, you don't know anything about her past, her
family," Monsieur Arnoux said with a nod, as if he were talking to
himself. "I always knew she lied. About her family and her
childhood, I mean. But I forgave her. They seemed like pious lies
intended to disguise a childhood and adolescence that embarrassed
her. Because she must have come from a very humble social class,
don't you agree?"
"She didn't like talking about it. She never told me anything
about her family. But yes, undoubtedly a very humble class—"
"It made me sad, I could guess at the mountain of prejudices in
Permian society, the great family names, the racism," he interrupted
me. "She said she had attended the Sophianum, the best nuns'
academy in Lima, where the daughters of high society were
educated. That her father owned a cotton plantation and she had
broken with her family out of idealism, in order to be a
revolutionary. She never cared about the revolution, I'm sure of
that! From the time I met her, she never expressed a single political
opinion. She would have done anything to get out of Cuba. Even
marry me. When we left, I suggested a trip to Peru to meet her
family. She told me more stories, of course. That because she had
been in the MIR and in Cuba, if she set foot in Peru she would be
arrested. I forgave these fantasies. I understood they were born of
her insecurity. She had been infected with the social and racial
prejudices that are so strong in South American countries. That's
why she invented the biography for me of the aristocratic girl she
had never been."
At times I had the impression that Monsieur Arnoux had
forgotten about me. Even his gaze was lost at some point in the void,
and he spoke so softly his words became an inaudible murmur. At
other times he recovered, looked at me with suspicion and hatred,
and pressed me to tell him if I'd known she had a lover. I was her
compatriot, her friend, hadn't she ever confided in me?
"She never said a word. I never suspected anything. I thought
you two got along very well, that you were happy."
"I thought so too," he murmured, crestfallen. He ordered another
bottle of wine. And added, his eyes veiled and his voice acerbic: "She
didn't need to do what she did. It was ugly, it was dirty, it was
disloyal to behave like that with me. I gave her my name, I went out
of my way to make her happy. I endangered my career to get her out
of Cuba. That was a real via crucis. Disloyalty can't reach these
extremes. So much calculation, so much hypocrisy, it's inhuman."
Abruptly he stopped speaking. He moved his lips, not making a
sound, and his rectangular little mustache twisted and stretched. He
had gripped his empty glass and was squeezing it as if he wanted to
crush it. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears.
I didn't know what to say to him, any consolatory phrase would
have sounded false and ridiculous. Suddenly, I understood that so
much desperation was not due only to her abandoning him. There
was something else he wanted to tell me but was finding difficult.
"My life's savings," Monsieur Arnoux whispered, looking at me
accusingly, as if I were responsible for his tragedy. "Do you follow?
I'm an older man, I'm in no condition to rebuild my whole life. Do
you understand? Not only to deceive me with some gangster who
must have helped her plan the crime, but to do that too: withdraw
all the money from the account we had in Switzerland. I gave her
that proof of my trust, do you see? A joint account. In case I had an
accident, or died suddenly. So inheritance taxes wouldn't take
everything I'd saved in a lifetime of work and sacrifice. Do you
understand the disloyalty, the vileness? She went to Switzerland to
make a deposit and took everything, everything, and ruined me.
Chapeau, un coup de maitre! She knew I couldn't denounce her
without accusing myself, without ruining my reputation and my
position. She knew if I denounced her I'd be the first one injured, for
keeping secret accounts, for evading taxes. Do you understand how
well planned it was? Can you believe she could be so cruel toward
someone who gave her only love and devotion?"
He kept returning to the same subject, with intervals in which we
drank wine in silence, each of us absorbed in his own thoughts. Was
it perverse of me to wonder what hurt him more, her leaving him or
her stealing his secret bank account in Switzerland? I felt sorry for
him, and I felt remorse, but I didn't know how to comfort him. I
limited myself to interjecting occasional brief, friendly phrases. In
reality, he didn't want to converse with me. He had invited me to
supper because he needed someone to listen to him, he needed to
say aloud, before a witness, things that had been scorching his heart
ever since the disappearance of his wife.
"Forgive me, I needed to unburden myself," he said at last when
all the other diners had left and we were alone, watched with
impatient eyes by the waiters in Chez Eux. "I thank you for your
patience. I hope this catharsis does me some good."
I said that with time, all of this would be behind him, no trouble
lasts a hundred years. And as I spoke, I felt like a total hypocrite, as
guilty as if I had planned the flight of ex—Madame Arnoux and the
plundering of his secret account.
"If you ever run into her, please tell her. She didn't need to do
that. I would have given her everything. Did she want my money? I
would have given it to her. But not like this, not like this."
We said goodbye in the doorway of the restaurant, in the
brilliance of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. It was the last time I saw
the mistreated Monsieur Robert Arnoux.
The Tupac Amaru column of the MIR, under the command of
Guillermo Lobaton, lasted some five months longer than the
column that had made its headquarters on Mesa Pelada. As it had
done with Luis de la Puente, Paul Escobar, and the Miristas who
perished in the valley of La Convention, the army gave no details
regarding how it annihilated all the members of that guerrilla band.
In the second half of 1965, helped by the Ashaninka of Gran Pajonal,
Lobaton and his companions eluded the persecution of the special
forces of the army that mobilized in helicopters and on land and
savagely punished the indigenous settlements that hid and fed the
guerrillas. Finally, the decimated column, twelve men devastated by
mosquitoes, fatigue, and disease, fell in the vicinity of the Sotziqui
River on January 7,1966. Did they die in combat or were they
captured alive and executed? Their graves were never found.
According to unverifiable rumors, Lobaton and his second-incommand
were taken up in a helicopter and thrown into the forest
so the animals would devour their corpses. For several years
Lobaton's French partner, Jacqueline, attempted without success, by
means of campaigns in Peru and other countries, to have the
government reveal the location of the graves of the rebels in that
ephemeral guerrilla war. Were there survivors? Were they living
clandestinely in the convulsed, divided Peru of Belaunde Terry's
final days? As I slowly recovered from the disappearance of the bad
girl, I followed these distant events through the letters of Uncle
Ataulfo. He seemed more and more pessimistic about the possibility
that democracy would not collapse in Peru. "The same military that
defeated the guerrillas is preparing now to defeat the legitimate
state and have another kind of uprising," he assured me.
One day in Germany, in the most unexpected way, I ran into a
survivor of Mesa Pelada: none other than Alfonso the Spiritualist,
the boy sent to Paris by a theosophical group in Lima, the one fat
Paul had snatched away from spirits and the next world to turn him
into a guerrilla fighter. I was in Frankfurt, working at an
international conference on communications, and during a break I
escaped to a department store to make some purchases. At the
register, someone took my arm. I recognized him instantly. In the
four years since I'd seen him he had put on weight and let his hair
grow very long—the new style in Europe—but his dead-white face
with its reserved, rather sad expression was the same. He had been
in Germany a few months, obtained political refugee status, and was
living with a girl from Frankfurt whom he had met in Paris when
Paul was there. We went to have coffee in the department-store
cafeteria full of matrons with fat little children who were being
waited on by Turks.
Alfonso the Spiritualist had been miraculously saved from the