we told one another—a way of filling empty spaces in the
conversation—they all pretended to envy me for living in the city of
pleasure and fucking those French girls who were famous for being
wild women in bed. How surprised they would have been if I
confessed that in the years I spent in Paris, the only girl I went to
bed with was a Permian, Lily of all people, the false Chilean girl of
our childhood. What did they think of the guerrillas and their
announcement in the papers? Like Uncle Ataulfo, they didn't think
they were important. Those Castristas sent here by Cuba wouldn't
last very long. Who could believe that a Communist revolution
would triumph in Peru? If the Belaunde government couldn't stop
them, the military would come in again and impose order,
something they didn't look forward to.
That's what Dr. Ataulfo Lamiel was afraid of too. "The only thing
these idiots will achieve by playing guerrilla is to hand the military
an excuse for a coup d'etat on a silver platter. And stick us with
another eight or ten years of military dictatorship. Who even thinks
about making a revolution against a government that's not only
Chilian and democratic, but that the entire Permian oligarchy,
beginning with La Prensa and El Comercio, accuses of being
Communist because it wants agrarian reform? Peru is confusion,
nephew, you did the right thing when you went to live in the country
of Cartesian clarity."
Uncle Ataulfo was a lanky, mustachioed man in his forties who
always wore a jacket and bow tie and was married to Aunt Dolores, a
kind, pale woman who had been an invalid for close to ten years and
whom he looked after with devotion. They lived in a nice house, full
of books and records, in Olivar de San Isidro, where they invited me
to lunch and dinner. Aunt Dolores bore her illness without
bitterness and amused herself by playing the piano and watching
soap operas. When we recalled Aunt Alberta, she started to cry. They
had no children and he, in addition to his law practice, taught classes
in mercantile law at Catholic University. He had a good library and
was very interested in local politics, not hiding his sympathies for
the democratic reform movement incarnated, to his mind, in
Belaunde Terry. He was very kind to me, expediting the formalities
of the inheritance as much as he could and refusing to charge me a
cent for his services: "Don't be silly, nephew, I was very fond of
Alberta and your parents." Those were tedious days of abject
appearances before notaries and judges and carrying documents
back and forth through the labyrinthine Palace of Justice, which left
me sleepless at night and increasingly impatient to return to Paris.
In my free time I reread Flaubert's Sentimental Education because
now, for me, Madame Arnoux in the novel had not only the name
but also the face of the bad girl. Once the taxes on the inheritance
had been deducted and the debts left behind by Aunt Alberta had
been paid, Uncle Ataulfo announced that with the apartment sold
and the furniture put up for auction, I'd receive something like sixty
thousand dollars, maybe a little more. A handsome sum I never
thought I'd have. Thanks to Aunt Alberta, I could buy a small
apartment in Paris.
As soon as I was back in France, the first thing I did after
climbing up to my garret in the Hotel du Senat and even before I
unpacked was to call Madame Robert Arnoux.
She made an appointment with me for the next day and said that
if I wanted to, we could have lunch together. I picked her up at the
entrance to the Alliance Fran^aise, on Boulevard Raspail, where she
was taking an accelerated course in French, and we went to have a
curry d'agneau at La Coupole, on Boulevard Montparnasse. She was
dressed simply, slacks and sandals and a light jacket. She wore
earrings whose colors matched those in her necklace and bracelet
and a bag hanging from her shoulder, and each time she moved her
head, her hair swung gaily. I kissed her cheeks and hands, and she
greeted me with: "I thought you'd come back more tanned from the
Lima summer, Ricardito." She had really turned into an extremely
elegant woman: she combined colors and applied her makeup very
tastefully. I observed her, still stupefied by her transformation. "I
don't want you to tell me anything about Peru," she said, so
categorically I didn't ask why. Instead, I told her about my
inheritance. Would she help me find an apartment?
She approved enthusiastically.
"I love the idea, good boy. I'll help you furnish and decorate it.
I've had practice with mine. It's turning out so well, you'll see."
After a week of frantic afternoon appointments after her French
classes, which took us to agencies and apartments in the Latin
Quarter, Montparnasse, and the fourteenth arrondissement, I found
an apartment with two rooms, a bath, and a kitchen on Rue Joseph
Granier, in an art deco building from the 1930s that had geometrical
designs—rhombuses, triangles, and circles—on the facade, in the
vicinity of the Ecole Militaire in the seventh arrondissement, very
close to UNESCO. It was in good condition, and even though it faced
an interior courtyard and for the moment you had to climb four
flights of stairs to reach it—the elevator was under construction—it
had a great deal of light, since in addition to two good-sized picture
windows, a large concave skylight exposed it to the Paris sky. It cost
close to seventy thousand dollars, but I had no difficulty when I
went to the Societe Generate, the bank where I kept my account, and
asked for a mortgage. During those weeks when I was looking for
the apartment and then making it livable, cleaning, painting, and
furnishing it with a few bits and pieces purchased at La Samaritaine
and the Marche aux Puces, I saw Madame Robert Arnoux every day,
Monday through Friday—she spent Saturdays and Sundays in the
country, with her husband—from the time she left her classes until
four or five in the afternoon. She enjoyed helping me with all my
chores, practicing her French with real estate agents and concierges,
and she displayed such good humor that—as I told her—it seemed
the small apartment to which she was giving life was for the two of
us to share.
"It's what you'd like, isn't it, good boy?"
We were in a bistrot on Avenue de Tourville, near Les Invalides,
and I kissed her hands and searched for her mouth, mad with love
and desire. I nodded several times.
"The day you move we'll have a premiere," she promised.
She kept her promise. It was the second time we made love, on
this occasion in the full light of day that came pouring in through
the large skylight, where curious pigeons observed us, naked and
embracing on the mattress without sheets that had recently been
liberated from the plastic wrapping in which the truck from La
Samaritaine had brought it. The walls smelled of fresh paint. Her
body was as slim and well formed as I remembered it, with her
narrow waist that I thought could be encircled by my hands, and her
pubis with sparse hair, its skin whiter than her smooth belly or
thighs, which darkened and shaded to a pale green luster. Her entire
body gave off a delicate fragrance, accentuated in the warm nest of
her depilated underarms, behind her ears, and in her small, wet sex.
On her curved groin thin blue veins were visible under the skin, and
it moved me to imagine her blood flowing slowly through them. As
she did the last time, with total passivity she allowed herself to be
caressed and listened silently, feigning an exaggerated attention or
pretending she didn't hear anything and was thinking about
something else, to the intense, hurried words I said into her ear or
mouth as I struggled to spread her labia.
"Make me come first," she whispered in a tone that concealed a
command. "With your mouth. Then it'll be easier for you to enter.
And don't you come yet. I like to feel irrigated."
She spoke with so much coldness that she didn't seem like a girl
making love but a doctor formulating a technical description,
detached from pleasure. I didn't care, I was totally happy, as I hadn't
been in a long time, perhaps not ever. "I'll never be able to repay so
much happiness, bad girl." I spent a long time with my lips pressed
against her contracted sex, feeling the pubic hairs tickling my nose,
licking her tiny clitoris avidly, tenderly, until I felt her moving,
becoming excited, and finishing with a quivering of her lower belly
and legs.
"Come in now," she whispered in the same imperious voice.
It wasn't easy this time either. She was narrow, she shrank away,
she resisted me, she moaned, until at last I was successful. It felt as
if my sex were being broken, strangled by that throbbing interior
passage. But it was a marvelous pain, a vertigo into which I sank,
tremulous. I ejaculated almost immediately.
"You come very fast," Madame Arnoux reprimanded me, pulling
my hair. "You have to learn to hold off if you want to please me."
"I'll learn everything you want, guerrilla fighter, but be quiet now
and kiss me."
That same day, as we said goodbye, she invited me to supper to
introduce me to her husband. We had drinks in their pretty
apartment in Passy, decorated in the most bourgeois style one could
imagine, with velvet drapes, deep carpets, antique furniture, end
tables holding little porcelain figures, and, on the walls, engravings
of mordant scenes by Gavarni and Daumier. We went to eat at a
nearby bistrot where the specialty, according to the diplomat, was
coq au vin. And for dessert, he suggested the tarte Tatin.
Monsieur Robert Arnoux was a short, bald man who had a small
brush mustache that moved when he talked and eyeglasses with
thick lenses, and who must have been twice the age of his wife. He
treated her with great consideration, pulling out her chair and
pushing it in and helping her with her raincoat. He was alert all
night, pouring wine when her glass was empty and passing her the
basket if she had no bread. He wasn't very congenial, but rather
arrogant and cutting, though he did actually seem cultured and
spoke of Cuba and Latin America with great accuracy. His Spanish
was perfect, with a slight inflection that revealed the years he had
served in the Caribbean. In reality he wasn't part of the French
delegation to UNESCO but had been loaned by the Quai d'Orsay as
an adviser and chief of staff to the director general, Rene Maheu, a
colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron at the Ecole
Normale, about whom it was said that he was a circumspect genius.
I had seen him a few times, always escorted by this squint-eyed little
bald man who turned out to be the husband of Madame Arnoux.
When I told him I worked as a temp translator for the department of
Spanish, he offered to recommend me to "Charnes, an excellent
person." He asked what I thought about events in Peru, and I said I
hadn't received news from Lima for some time.
"Well, those guerrillas in the sierra," he said with a shrug, as if he
didn't give them too much importance. "Robbing farms and
assaulting the police. How absurd! Especially in Peru, one of the few
Latin American countries trying to build a democracy."
So the first actions of the Mirista guerrilla war had taken place.
"You have to leave that gentleman right away and marry me," I
told the Chilean girl the next time we saw each other. "Do you want
me to believe you're in love with a Methuselah who not only looks
like your grandfather but is very ugly too?"
"Another slander against my husband and you won't see me
again," she threatened, and in one of those lightning changes that
were her specialty, she laughed. "Does he really look very* old next to
me?"
My second honeymoon with Madame Arnoux ended shortly after
that meal, because as soon as I moved to the Ecole Militaire district,
Senor Charnes renewed my contract. Then, because of my schedule,
I could see her only for short periods, an occasional midday when,
during that free hour and a half between one and two thirty, instead
of going up to the UNESCO cafeteria, I ate a sandwich with her in
some bistrot, or a few evenings when, I don't know with what
excuse, she freed herself from Monsieur Arnoux to go to the movies
with me. We'd watch the film holding hands, and I would kiss her in
the darkness. "Tu m'embetes," she said, practicing her French. "Je
veux voir le film, grosse bete." She made rapid progress in the
language of Montaigne, began to speak it without the slightest
embarrassment, and her errors in syntax and phonetics were
amusing, one more charming trait in her personality*. We didn't
make love again until many weeks later, after a trip she took to
Switzerland alone, when she returned to Paris several hours earlier
than planned so she could spend some time with me in my
apartment on Rue Joseph Granier.