yet for a permanent position, but he could hire me as a "temp"
during the general assembly and when the agency was overwhelmed
with work, something that happened with some frequency. From
then on I was certain that my constant dream—well, at least since
I'd had the use of my reason—of living in this city for the rest of my
life was beginning to become a reality.
My existence did a somersault after that day. I began to cut my
hair twice a month and put on a jacket and tie every morning. I took
the Metro at Saint-Germain or l'Odeon to ride to the Segur station,
the one closest to UNESCO, and I stayed there, in a small cubicle,
from nine thirty to one and from two thirty to six, translating into
Spanish generally ponderous documents regarding the removal of
the temples of Abu Simbel on the Nile or the preservation of
fragments of cuneiform writing discovered in caves in the Sahara
desert, near Mali.
Curiously, as my life changed, so did Paul's. He was still my best
friend, but we began to see each other less and less frequently
because of the obligations I had recently assumed as a bureaucrat,
and because he began to travel the world, representing the MIR at
congresses or meetings for peace, for the liberation of the Third
World, for the struggle against nuclear armaments, against
colonialism and imperialism, and a thousand other progressive
causes. At times Paul felt dazed, living in a dream—when he was
back in Paris he'd call and we would have a meal or a cup of coffee
two or three times a week—and he'd tell me he had just come back
from Beijing, from Cairo, from Havana, from Pyongyang, from
Hanoi, where he had to speak about the outlook for revolution in
Latin America before fifteen hundred delegates from fifty
revolutionary organizations in some thirty countries in the name of
a Permian revolution that hadn't even begun yet.
Often, if I hadn't known so well the integrity that oozed from his
pores, I would have believed he was exaggerating just to impress me.
How was it possible that this South American in Paris, who just a
few months ago had earned his living as a kitchen boy in the Mexico
Lindo, was now a figure in the revolutionary jet set, making
transatlantic flights and rubbing elbows with the leaders of China,
Cuba, Vietnam, Egypt, North Korea, Libya, Indonesia? But it was
true. Paul, as a result of imponderables and the strange tangle of
relationships, interests, and confusions that constituted the
revolution, had been transformed into an international figure. I
confirmed this in 1962 when there was a minor journalistic
upheaval over an attempt to assassinate the Moroccan revolutionary
leader Ben Barka, nicknamed the Dynamo, who, three years later, in
October 1965, was abducted and disappeared forever as he left the
Brasserie Lipp, a restaurant on Saint-Germain. Paul met me at
midday at UNESCO, and we went to the cafeteria for a sandwich. He
was pale and had dark circles under his eyes, an agitated voice, a
kind of nervousness very unusual in him. Ben Barka had been
presiding at an international congress of revolutionary forces on
whose executive council Paul also served. The two of them had been
seeing a good deal of each other and traveling together during the
past few weeks. The attempt on Ben Barka could only be the work of
the CIA, and the MIR now felt at risk in Paris. Could I, for just a few
days, while they took certain necessary steps, keep a couple of
suitcases in my garret?
"I wouldn't ask you to do something like this if I had another
alternative. If you tell me you can't, it's not a problem, Ricardo."
I'd do it if he told me what was in the suitcases.
"In one, papers. Pure dynamite: plans, instructions, preparations
for actions in Peru. In the other, dollars."
"How much?"
"Fifty thousand."
I thought for a moment.
"If I turn the suitcases over to the CIA, will they let me keep the
fifty thousand?"
"Just think, when the revolution triumphs, we could name you
ambassador to UNESCO," said Paul, following my lead.
We joked for a while, and when night fell he brought me the two
suitcases, which we put under my bed. I spent a week with my hair
on end, thinking that if some thief decided to steal the money, the
MIR would never believe there had been a robbery, and I'd become a
target of the revolution. On the sixth day, Paul came with three men
I didn't know to take away those troublesome lodgers.
Whenever we saw each other I asked about Comrade Arlette, and
he never tried to deceive me with false news. He was very sorry* but
hadn't been able to learn anything. The Cubans were extremely
strict where security was concerned, and they were keeping her
whereabouts an absolute secret. The only certainty was that she
hadn't come through Paris yet, since he had a complete record of the
scholarship recipients who returned to Paris.
"When she comes through, you'll be the first to know. The girl
really has a hold on you, doesn't she? But why, mon uieux, she isn't
even that pretty."
"I don't know why, Paul. But the truth is she does have a tight
hold on me."
With Paul's new kind of life, Permian circles in Paris began to
speak ill of him. These were writers who didn't write, painters who
didn't paint, musicians who didn't play or compose, and cafe
revolutionaries who vented their frustration, envy, and boredom by
saying that Paul had become "sensualized," a "bureaucrat of the
revolution." What was he doing in Paris? Why wasn't he over there
with those kids he was sending to receive military training and then
sneak into Peru to begin guerrilla actions in the Andes? I defended
him in heated arguments. I said that in spite of his new status, Paul
continued to live with absolute modesty. Until very recently, his wife
had been cleaning houses to support the family. Now the MIR,
taking advantage of her Spanish passport, used her as a courier and
frequently sent her to Peru to accompany returning scholarship
recipients or to carry money and instructions, on trips that filled
Paul with worry. But from his confidences I knew that the life
imposed on him by circumstances, which his superior insisted he
continue, irritated him more and more each day. He was impatient
to return to Peru, where actions would begin very soon. He wanted
to help prepare them on-site. The leadership of the MIR wouldn't
authorize this, and it infuriated him. "This is what comes of knowing
languages, damn it," he'd protest, laughing in the midst of his bad
temper.
Thanks to Paul, during those months and years in Paris I met the
principal leaders of the MIR, beginning with its head and founder,
Luis de la Puente Uceda, and ending with Guillermo Lobaton. The
head of the MIR was a lawyer from Trujillo, born in 1926, who had
repudiated the Aprista Party. He was slim, with glasses, light skin,
and light hair that he always wore slicked back like an Argentine
actor. The two or three times I saw him, he was dressed very
formally in a tie and a dark leather coat. He spoke quietly, like a
lawyer at work, giving legalistic details and using the elaborate
vocabulary of a judicial argument. I always saw him surrounded by
two or three brawny types who must have been his bodyguards, men
who looked at him worshipfully and never offered an opinion. In
everything he said there was something so cerebral, so abstract, that
it was hard for me to imagine him as a guerrilla fighter with a
machine gun over his shoulder, climbing up and down steep slopes
in the Andes. And yet he had been arrested several times, was exiled
in Mexico, lived a clandestine life. But he gave the impression that
he had been born to shine in forums, parliaments, tribunals,
political negotiations, that is, in everything he and his comrades
scorned as the shady double-talk of bourgeois democracy.
Guillermo Lobaton was another matter. Of the crowd of
revolutionaries I met in Paris through Paul, none seemed as
intelligent, well educated, and resolute as he. He was still very
young, barely in his thirties, but he already had a rich past as a man
of action. In 1952 he had been the leader of the great strike at the
University of San Marcos against the Odria dictatorship (that was
when he and Paul became friends), and as a result he was arrested,
sent to the fronton that was used as a political prison, and tortured.
This was how his studies in philosophy had been cut short at San
Marcos, where, they said, he was in competition with Li Carrillo,
Heidegger's future disciple, for being the most brilliant student at
the School of Letters. In 1954 he was expelled from the country* by
the military government, and after countless difficulties arrived in
Paris, where, while he earned his living doing manual labor, he
resumed his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Then the
Communist Party obtained a scholarship for him in East Germany,
in Leipzig, where he continued his philosophical studies at a school
for the party's cadres. While he was there he was caught off guard by
the Cuban Revolution. What happened in Cuba led him to think very
critically about the strategy of Latin American Communist parties
and the dogmatic spirit of Stalinism. Before I met him in person, I
had read a work of his that circulated around Paris in mimeographed
form, in which he accused those parties of cutting themselves off
from the masses because of their submission to the dictates of
Moscow, forgetting, as Che Guevara had written, "that the first duty*
of a revolutionary is to make the revolution." In this work, where he
extolled the example of Fidel Castro and his comrades as
revolutionary models, he cited Trotsky. Because of this citation he
was subjected to a disciplinary tribunal in Leipzig and expelled in
the most infamous way from East Germany and from the Permian
Communist Party. This was how he came to Paris, where he married
a French girl, Jacqueline, who was also a revolutionary activist. In
Paris he met Paul, his old friend from San Marcos, and became
affiliated with the MIR. He had received guerrilla training in Cuba
and was counting the hours until he could return to Peru and move
into action. During the time of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of
Pigs, I saw him everywhere, attending every demonstration of
solidarity with Cuba and speaking at several of them, in good French
and with devastating rhetoric.
He was a tall, slim boy, with light ebony skin and a smile that
displayed magnificent teeth. Just as he could argue for hours, with
great intellectual substance, about political subjects, he was also
capable of becoming involved in impassioned dialogues on
literature, art, or sports, especially soccer and the feats of his team,
the Alianza Lima. There was something in his being that
communicated his enthusiasm, his idealism, his generosity, and the
steely sense of justice that guided his life, something I don't believe
I had seen—especially in so genuine a way—in any of the
revolutionaries who passed through Paris during the sixties. That he
had agreed to be an ordinary member of the MIR, where there
wasn't anyone with his talent and charisma, spoke very clearly to the
purity of his revolutionary vocation. On the three or four occasions I
talked to him, I was convinced, despite my skepticism, that if
someone as lucid and energetic as Lobaton were at the head of the
revolutionaries, Peru could be the second Cuba in Latin America.
It was at least six months after she left that I had news of Comrade
Arlette, through Paul. Since my contract as a temp left me with a
good amount of free time, I began to study Russian, thinking that if
I could also translate from that language—one of the four official
languages of the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies at the
time—my work as a translator would be more secure. I was also
taking a course in simultaneous interpretation. The work of
interpreters was more intense and difficult than that of translators,
but for this reason they were more in demand. One day, as I left my
Russian class at the Berlitz School on Boulevard des Capucines, I
found fat Paul waiting for me at the entrance to the building.
"News about the girl, finally," he said by way of greeting, wearing
a long face. "I'm sorry*, but it isn't good, mon vieux"
I invited him to one of the bistrots near the Opera for a drink to
help me digest the bad news. We sat outside, on the terrace. It was a
warm spring twilight, with early stars, and all of Paris seemed to
have poured out onto the street to enjoy the good weather. We
ordered two beers.
"I suppose that after so much time you're not still in love with
her," Paul said to prepare me.
"I suppose not," I replied. "Tell me once and for all and don't fuck
around, Paul."
He had just spent a few days in Havana, and Comrade Arlette
was the talk of all the young Peruvians in the MIR because,