A few* months after Paul left, Senor Charnes began to
recommend me as a translator at international conferences and
congresses in Paris or other European cities when there wasn't work
for me at UNESCO. My first contract was at the International
Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the second, in Athens, at an
international cotton congress. These trips, lasting only a few days
but well paid, allowed me to \isit places I never would have gone to
otherwise. Though this new* work cut into my time, I didn't abandon
my Russian studies or interpreting classes but attended them in a
more sporadic way.
It was on my return from one of those short business trips, this
time to Glasgow and a conference on customs tariffs in Europe, that
I found a letter at the Hotel du Senat from a first cousin of my
father's, Dr. Ataulfo Lamiel, an attorney in Lima. This uncle once
removed, whom I barely knew*, informed me that my aunt Alberta
had died of pneumonia and had made me her sole heir. It was
necessary for me to go to Lima to expedite the formalities of the
inheritance. Uncle Ataulfo offered to advance me the price of a plane
ticket against the inheritance, which, he said, would not make me a
millionaire but would help out nicely during my stay in Paris. I went
to the post office on Vaugirard to send him a telegram, saying I'd
buy the ticket myself and leave for Lima as soon as possible.
Aunt Alberta's death left me in a black mood for many days. She
had been a healthy woman, not yet seventy. Though she was as
conservative and judgmental as one could be, this spinster aunt, my
father's older sister, had always been very loving toward me, and
without her generosity and care I don't know what would have
become of me. When my parents died in a senseless car accident, hit
by a truck that fled the scene as they were traveling to Trujillo for
the wedding of a daughter of some close friends—I was ten—she
took their place. Until I finished my law studies and came to Paris, I
lived in her house, and though her anachronistic manias often
exasperated me, I loved her very much. From the time she adopted
me, she devoted herself to me body and soul. Without Aunt Alberta,
I'd be as solitary as a toadstool, and my connections to Peru would
eventually vanish.
That same afternoon I went to the offices of Air France to buy a
round-trip ticket to Lima, and then I stopped at UNESCO to explain
to Senor Charnes that I had to take a forced vacation. I was crossing
the entrance lobby when I ran into an elegant lady wearing very high
heels and wrapped in a black fur-trimmed cape, who stared at me as
if we knew* each other.
"Well, well, isn't it a small world," she said, coming close and
offering her cheek. "What are you doing here, good boy?"
"I work here, I'm a translator," I managed to stammer, totally
disconcerted by surprise, and very conscious of the lavender scent
that entered my nostrils when I kissed her. It was Comrade Arlette,
but you had to make a huge effort to recognize her in that
meticulously made-up face, those red lips, tweezed eyebrows, silky
curved lashes shading mischievous eyes that black pencil
lengthened and deepened, those hands with long nails that looked as
if they had just been manicured.
"How you've changed since I saw you last," I said, looking her up
and down. "It's about three years, isn't it?"
"Changed for the better or the worse?" she asked, totally selfassured,
placing her hands on her waist and making a model's half
turn where she stood.
"For the better," I admitted, not yet recovered from the impact
she'd had on me. "The truth is, you look wonderful. I suppose I can't
call you Lily the Chilean girl or Comrade Arlette the guerrilla fighter
anymore. What the hell's your name now?"
She laughed, showing me the gold ring on her right hand.
"Now I use my husband's name, the way they do in France:
Madame Robert Arnoux."
I found the courage to ask if we could have a cup of coffee for old
times' sake.
"Not now, my husband's expecting me," she said, mockingly.
"He's a diplomat and works here in the French delegation.
Tomorrow at eleven, at Les Deux Magots. You know the place, don't
you?"
I was awake for a long time that night, thinking about her and
about Aunt Alberta. When I finally managed to get to sleep, I had a
wild nightmare about the two of them ferociously attacking each
other, indifferent to my pleas that they resolve their dispute like
civilized people. The fight was due to my aunt Alberta accusing the
Chilean girl of stealing her new name from a character in Flaubert. I
awoke agitated, sweating, while it was still dark and a cat was
yowling.
When I arrived at Les Deux Magots, Madame Robert Arnoux was
already there, at a table on the terrace protected by a glass partition,
smoking with an ivory cigarette holder and drinking a cup of coffee.
She looked like a model out of Vogue, dressed all in yellow, with
white shoes and a flowered parasol. The change in her was truly
extraordinary.
"Are you still in love with me?" was her opening remark, to break
the ice.
"The worst thing is that I think I am," I admitted, feeling my
cheeks flush. "And if I weren't, I'd fall in love all over again today.
You've turned into a very beautiful woman, and an extremely
elegant one. I see you and don't believe what I see, bad girl."
"Now you see what you lost because you're a coward," she
replied, her honey-colored eyes glistening with mocking sparks as
she intentionally exhaled a mouthful of smoke in my face. "If you
had said yes that time I proposed staying with you, I'd be your wife
now. But you didn't want to get in trouble with your friend Comrade
Jean, and you sent me off to Cuba. You missed the opportunity of a
lifetime, Ricardito."
"Can't this be resolved? Can't I search my conscience, suffer
from heartache, and promise to reform?"
"It's too late now, good boy. What kind of match for the wife of a
French diplomat can a little pissant translator for UNESCO be?"
She didn't stop smiling as she spoke, moving her mouth with a
more refined flirtatiousness than I remembered. Contemplating her
prominent, sensual lips, lulled by the music of her voice, I had an
enormous desire to kiss her. I felt my heart beat faster.
"Well, if you can no longer be my wife, there's always the
possibility of our being lovers."
"I'm a faithful spouse, the perfect wife," she assured me,
pretending to be serious. And with no transition: "What happened to
Comrade Jean? Did he go back to Peru to make the revolution?"
"Several months ago. I haven't heard anything about him or the
others. And I haven't read or heard of any guerrillas there. Those
revolutionary castles in the air probably turned into smoke. And all
the guerrillas went back home and forgot about it."
We talked for almost two hours. Naturally, she assured me the
love affair with Comandante Chacon had been nothing but the
gossip of the Peruvians in Havana; in reality, she and the
comandante had only been good friends. She refused to tell me
anything about her military training, and, as always, avoided making
any political comments or giving me details regarding her life on the
island. Her only Cuban love had been the charge d'affaires at the
French embassy, Robert Arnoux, now her husband, who had been
promoted to advisory minister. Weak with laughter and
retrospective anger, she told me about the bureaucratic obstacles
they had to overcome to marry, because it was almost unthinkable
in Cuba that a scholarship recipient would leave her training. But in
this regard it was certainly true that Comandante Chacon had been
"loving" and helped her defeat the damn bureaucracy.
"I'd wager anything you went to bed with that damn
comandante."
"Are you jealous?"
I said yes, very. And that she was so attractive I'd sell my soul to
the devil, I'd do anything if I could make love to her, or even just
kiss her. I grasped her hand and kissed it.
"Be still," she said, looking around in fake alarm. "Are you
forgetting I'm a married woman? Suppose somebody here knows
Robert and tells him about this?"
I said I knew perfectly well that her marriage to the diplomat was
a mere formality to which she had resigned herself in order to leave
Cuba and settle in Paris. Which seemed fine to me, because I too
believed one could make any sacrifice for the sake of Paris. But,
when we were alone, she shouldn't play the faithful, loving wife,
because we both knew very well it was a fairy tale. Without
becoming angry in the least, she changed the subject and said there
was a damn bureaucracy here too and she couldn't get French
nationality for two years, even though she was legally married to a
French citizen. And they had just rented a nice apartment in Passy.
She was decorating it now, and as soon as it was presentable she'd
invite me over to introduce me to my rival, who, in addition to being
congenial, was a very cultured man.
"I'm going to Lima tomorrow," I told her. "How can I see you
when I get back?"
She gave me her telephone number and address and asked if I
was still living in that little room in the garret of the Hotel du Senat,
where she had been so cold.
"It's hard for me to leave it because I had the best experience of
my life there. And that's why, for me, that hole is a palace."
"This experience is the one I think it is?" she asked, bringing her
face, where mischief was always mixed with curiosity and coquetry,
close to mine.
"The same."
"For what you said just now, I owe you a kiss. Remind me the
next time we see each other."
But a moment later, when we said goodbye, she forgot her
marital precautions and instead of her cheek she offered me her lips.
They were full and sensual, and in the seconds I had them pressed
against mine, I felt them move slowly, provocatively, in a
supplementary caress. When I already had crossed Saint-Germain
on the way to my hotel, I turned to look at her and she was still
there, on the corner by Les Deux Magots, a bright, golden figure in
white shoes, watching me walk away. I waved goodbye and she
waved the hand holding the flowered parasol. I only had to see her
to discover that in these past few years I hadn't forgotten her for a
single moment, that I loved her as much as I did the first day.
When I arrived in Lima in March 1965, shortly before my
thirtieth birthday, photographs of Luis de la Puente, Guillermo
Lobaton, fat Paul, and other leaders of the MIR were in all the
papers and on television—by now there was television in Peru—and
everybody was talking about them. The MIR rebellion had an
undeniable romantic aspect. The Miristas themselves had sent the
photos to the media, announcing that in view of the iniquitous
exploitative conditions that made victims of peasants and workers,
and the surrender of the Belaunde Terry government to imperialism,
the Movement of the Revolutionary Left had decided to take action.
The leaders of the MIR showed their faces and appeared with long
hair and full-grown beards, with rifles in their hands and combat
uniforms consisting of black turtleneck sweaters, khaki trousers,
and boots. I noticed that Paul was as fat as ever. In the photograph
that Correo published on the front page, he was surrounded by four
other leaders and was the only one smiling.
"These wild men won't last a month," predicted Dr. Ataulfo
Lamiel in his study on Calle Boza in the center of Lima, on the
morning I went to see him. "Turning Peru into another Cuba! Your
poor aunt Alberta would have fainted dead away if she could see the
outlaw faces of our brand-new guerrillas."
My uncle didn't take the announcement of armed actions very
seriously, a feeling that seemed widespread. People thought it was a
harebrained scheme that would end in no time. During the weeks I
spent in Peru, I was crushed by a sense of oppressiveness and felt
like an orphan in my own country. I lived in my aunt Alberta's
apartment on Calle Colon in Miraflores, which still was filled with
her presence and where everything reminded me of her, of my years
at the university, of my adolescence without parents. It moved me
when I found all the letters I had written to her from Paris, arranged
chronologically, in her bedside table. I saw some of my old
Miraflores friends from the Barrio Alegre, and with half a dozen of
them went one Saturday to eat at the Kuo Wha Chinese restaurant
near the Via Expresa to talk about old times. Except for our
memories, we didn't have much in common anymore, since their
lives as young professionals and businessmen—two were working in
their fathers' companies—had nothing to do with my life in France.
Three were married, one had begun to have children, and the other
three had girlfriends who would soon be their brides. In the jokes