The toy soldiers didn’t cause him to travel but they did amuse him very much. His apartment was filled with them, from the entrance hall to the bedroom, including the kitchen and bathroom. He specialized in the battles of Napoleon. He had them very well arranged and classified, with tiny cannon, horses, and standards, so that as you walked through his apartment you followed the military history of the First Empire until Waterloo, whose protagonists surrounded his bed on all four sides. In addition to toy soldiers, Salomón Toledano’s house was filled with dictionaries and grammars of every possible language. And, an extravagance, the small television set that rested on a shelf facing the toilet. “Television is a powerful laxative for me,” he explained.
Why did I develop so much fondness for Salomón Toledano, while all our colleagues avoided him for being unbearably tiresome? Perhaps because his solitude resembled mine, though we were different in many other ways. We told each other we never could live in our countries again, for he in Turkey and I in Peru would surely feel more foreign than we did in France, where we also felt like outsiders. And we were both very conscious that we would never be integrated into the country where we had chosen to live and which had even granted us passports (both of us had acquired French citizenship).
“It isn’t the fault of France if we’re still a couple of foreigners, dear friend. It’s our fault. It’s a vocation, a destiny. Like our profession as interpreters, another way of always being a foreigner, of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”
No doubt he was right when he said these lugubrious things. Those conversations with the Dragoman always left me somewhat demoralized, and at times they wouldn’t let me sleep. Being a phantom was not something that left me unfazed, but it didn’t seem to matter very much to him.
That was why, in 1979, when an excited Salomón Toledano announced that he had accepted an offer to travel to Tokyo and work for a year as the exclusive interpreter for Mitsubishi, I felt a certain relief. He was a good person, an interesting specimen, but something in him saddened and alarmed me because it revealed certain secret pathways in my own destiny.
I saw him off at Charles de Gaulle, and when I shook his hand next to the Japan Airlines counter I felt him slip a small metallic object between my fingers. It was a hussar of the emperor’s guard. “I have a duplicate,” he said. “It will bring you luck, dear friend.” I put it on my night table, next to my amulet, that exquisite Guerlain toothbrush.
A few months later, the military dictatorship in Peru finally ended, elections were held, and in 1980 Peruvians, as if making amends, reelected as president Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the head of state deposed by the military coup of 1968. Uncle Ataúlfo was happy and decided to celebrate by doing something extravagant: he would take a trip to Europe, where he had never set foot. He tried to persuade Aunt Dolores to accompany him, but she claimed her invalidism would keep him from enjoying the trip and turn her into a hindrance. And so Uncle Ataúlfo came alone. He arrived in time for us to celebrate my forty-fifth birthday together.
I put him up in my apartment near the École Militaire, giving him the bedroom while I slept on the sofa bed in the small living-dining room. He had aged a great deal since the last time I had seen him fifteen years earlier. He was over seventy, and the years weighed heavily on him. He had almost no hair left, and he shuffled when he walked and tired easily. He took pills for his blood pressure, and his dentures must have been uncomfortable because he was constantly moving his mouth as if trying to make them fit properly over his gums. But he was clearly delighted to be in Paris at last, an old desire of his. He was ecstatic looking at the streets, the quays along the Seine, the old stones, and he kept murmuring, “Everything’s more beautiful than in photographs.” I accompanied Uncle Ataúlfo to Notre Dame, the Louvre, Les Invalides, the Panthéon, Sacré-Coeur, galleries, museums. This city, in fact, was the most beautiful in the world, and having spent so many years here had made me forget that. I lived surrounded by so many lovely things, almost without seeing them. And so for a few days I enjoyed being a tourist in my adopted city as much as he did. We had long conversations, sitting on the terraces of bistrots, having a glass of wine as an aperitif. He was happy with the end of the military regime and the restoration of democracy in Peru but had few illusions regarding the immediate future. According to him, Peruvian society was a boiling cauldron of tensions, hatreds, prejudices, and resentments that had grown much worse in the twelve years of military government. “You wouldn’t recognize your country, nephew. There’s a latent menace in the air, a feeling that at any moment something catastrophic can explode.” His words were prophetic this time too. Soon after he returned to Peru following his trip to France and a short excursion by bus through Castile and Andalusia, Uncle Ataúlfo sent me clippings of newspaper articles from Lima accompanied by cruel photographs: in the center of the capital, unknown Maoists had hung from utility poles some poor dogs to which they had attached signs with the name Teng Hsiao-p’ing, whom they accused of betraying Mao and ending the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China. This was the beginning of the armed rebellion of Shining Path, which would last throughout the eighties and provoke an unprecedented bloodbath in Peruvian history: more than sixty thousand dead and disappeared.
A few months after his departure, Salomón Toledano wrote me a long letter. He was very happy with his stay in Tokyo, though the Mitsubishi people had him working so much that at night he collapsed in exhaustion on his bed. But he had brought his Japanese up-to-date, met nice people, and didn’t miss rainy Paris at all. He was going out with a lawyer in the firm who was divorced, beautiful, and didn’t have knock-knees, like so many Japanese women, but did have very shapely legs and a direct, profound gaze that “delved into his soul.” He went on to say: “Don’t worry, dear friend, faithful to my promise, I won’t fall in love with this Nipponese Jezebel. But, except for falling in love, I propose doing everything else with Mitsuko.” Beneath his signature he had written a laconic postscript: “Regards from the bad girl.” When I reached that sentence, I dropped the Dragoman’s letter and had to sit down, overcome by vertigo.
Was she in Japan? How the hell had Salomón and the mischievous Peruvian managed to meet in densely populated Tokyo? I rejected the idea that she was the lawyer with the dark gaze whom my colleague seemed taken with, though with the ex-Chilean, ex-guerrilla fighter, ex-Madame Arnoux, and ex-Mrs. Richardson nothing was impossible, even her going around now disguised as a Japanese lawyer. That reference to the “bad girl” revealed a certain degree of familiarity between her and Salomón; the Chilean girl must have told him something of our long, syncopated relationship. Had they made love? I discovered in the days that followed that the unfortunate postscript had turned my life upside down and returned me to the sickly, stupid love-passion that had consumed me for so many years, preventing me from living normally. And yet, in spite of my doubts, my jealousy, my anguished questions, knowing the bad girl was there, real and alive, in a concrete place though so far from Paris, filled my head with fantasies. Again. It was like leaving the limbo in which I had lived these past six years, ever since she called from Charles de Gaulle Airport (well, she said she was calling from there) to tell me she was escaping England.
So, Ricardo Somocurcio, are you still in love with your elusive compatriot? No doubt about it. Ever since that postscript from the Dragoman, day and night I kept seeing her dark face, insolent expression, eyes the color of dark honey, and my whole body ached with desire to hold her in my arms.
Salomón Toledano’s letter had no letterhead, and the Dragoman didn’t bother to give me his address or phone number. I made inquiries at the Paris office of Mitsubishi and they advised me to write to him at the firm’s Department of Human Resources in Tokyo, and gave me the address. That’s what I did. My letter was very indirect, telling him first about my own work; I said the emperor’s hussar had brought me luck, because in recent weeks I’d had excellent contracts, and I congratula
ted him on his new conquest. Finally I came to the point. I was agreeably surprised to learn he had met an old friend of mine. Was she living in Tokyo? I had lost track of her years ago. Could he send me her address? Her phone number? I’d like to be in touch with my compatriot again after so much time.
I sent the letter without too much hope it would reach him. But it did, and his answer was almost lost on the roads of Europe. The Dragoman’s letter landed in Paris when I was in Vienna, working at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and my concierge in École Militaire, following my instructions in the event I had a letter from Tokyo, forwarded it to Vienna. When the letter arrived in Austria I was on my way back to Paris. In short, what normally would have taken a week took close to three. When I finally held Salomón Toledano’s letter in my hands, I trembled from head to toe as if I were suffering an attack of tertian fever. And my teeth were chattering. It was a letter several pages long. I read it slowly, spelling it out, so as not to miss a syllable of what it said. From the beginning he became involved in an impassioned apology for Mitsuko, his Japanese lawyer, confessing, in some embarrassment, that his promise not to fall in love again, undertaken as a result of his “sentimental mishap in Berlin,” had been shattered after thirty years of being rigorously respected, because of the beauty, intelligence, delicacy, and sensuality of Mitsuko, a woman the Shinto gods had wanted to use to revolutionize his life ever since he had the fortunate idea of returning to this city where, for the past few months, he had been the happiest man on earth.
Mitsuko had rejuvenated him, filling him with vigor. Not even in the flower of his youth did he make love with the drive he had now. The Dragoman had rediscovered passion. How terrible to have wasted so many years, so much money, so much sperm in mercenary affairs! But perhaps not; perhaps everything he had done until now had been an ascesis, a training of his spirit and body in order to deserve Mitsuko.
As soon as he returned to Paris, the first thing he would do would be to toss into the fire and watch the fusing of those cuirassiers, hussars, plumed horsemen, sappers, artillerymen, on whom, over the years, in an activity as onerous and absorbing as it was useless, he had wasted his existence, turning his back on the happiness of love. He never would collect anything again; his only pastime would be learning by heart, in all the languages he knew, erotic poems to whisper into Mitsuko’s ear. She liked to hear them, though she didn’t understand them, after the marvelous “joys” they had each night in a variety of settings.
Then, in prose overloaded with feverish excitement and pornography, he went on to describe Mitsuko’s amatory feats and secret charms, among them a very subdued, inoffensive, tender, and sensual form of the fearful vagina dentata of Greco-Roman mythology. Tokyo was the most expensive city in the world, and though his salary was high, it was disappearing in nocturnal trips to the Ginza, the Tokyo district of the night, which the Dragoman and Mitsuko, by visiting restaurants, bars, cabarets, and especially houses of assignation, had made the jewel in their crown of Japanese nightlife. But who cared about money when happiness was in the balance! Because all the exquisite refinement of Japanese culture shone not in the prints of the Meiji period, or the Noh theater, or Kabuki, or the Bunraku puppets, as I surely believed, but in the houses of assignation or maisons closes, called by the Frenchified name of châaux, the most famous of which was the Château Meguru, a true paradise of carnal pleasure, given over completely to the Japanese genius for combining the most advanced technology with sexual wisdom and rites ennobled by tradition. Everything was possible in the chambers of the Château Meguru: excesses, fantasies, phantoms, extravagances all had a setting, and the instrumentality to become concrete. Mitsuko and he had lived through unforgettable experiences in the discreet reserved rooms of the Château Meguru: “There we felt like gods, dear friend, and on my honor, I do not exaggerate and am not delirious.”
At last, when I was afraid the man in love wouldn’t say a word about the bad girl, the Dragoman turned his attention to my request. He had seen her only once after receiving my letter. It was very difficult for him to talk to her alone because, “for obvious reasons,” he didn’t want to refer to me “in front of the gentleman with whom she lives, or at least with whom she goes out and with whom she is usually seen,” a “personage” of bad reputation and worse appearance, someone you only had to see to feel a chill run down your spine and to say to yourself: “I wouldn’t want this individual for an enemy.”
But finally, with Mitsuko’s help, he managed to speak privately to her and give her my message. She told him that “since her petit ami was jealous,” it would be better if I didn’t write to her directly so he wouldn’t make a scene (or knock her down). But, if I wanted to write to her through the Dragoman, she would be delighted to hear from me. Salomón Toledano added: “Do I need to tell you, dear friend, that nothing would make me happier than being your go-between? Our profession is a disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between, and so I am prepared for so noble a mission. I shall do it, taking all the precautions in the world to keep your letters from ever falling into the hands of that thug the girl of your dreams is going around with. Forgive me, dear friend, but I have guessed everything: Am I wrong, or is she the love of your life? And by the way, congratulations: she is no Mitsuko—no one is Mitsuko—but her exotic beauty shines with an aura of mystery in her face that is very seductive. Be careful!” He signed it: “A hug from the Dragoman of Château Meguru!”
Who was the Peruvian girl involved with now? A Japanese, no doubt about that. Perhaps a gangster, one of the Yakuza bosses who had amputated part of his little finger, the gang’s countersign. Nothing surprising about it. She undoubtedly had met him on the trips she made to the Orient with Mr. Richardson, another gangster, except he wore a shirt and tie and had stables in Newmarket. The Japanese was a sinister character, judging from the Dragoman’s jokes. Was he referring only to his physical appearance when he said there was something frightening about him? Or was it his background? The only thing missing in the Chilean girl’s résumé: lover of a boss in the Japanese mafia. A man with power and money, of course, indispensable qualities for winning her. And a few corpses behind him. I was eaten alive by jealousy, yet at the same time an odd feeling had taken possession of me, a mixture of envy, curiosity, and admiration. It was clear, the bad girl’s indescribable audacity would never cease to amaze me.
Twenty times I told myself not to be so idiotic as to write her or try to reestablish some kind of relationship with her, because I would be burned and spat upon, as always. But less than two days after reading the Dragoman’s letter, I wrote her a note and began to devise a way to travel to the Land of the Rising Sun.
My letter was completely hypocritical, since I didn’t want to cause her any difficulty (I was sure that this time, in Japan, she had sunk her feet into muddier waters than on other occasions). I was very happy to have had news of her through my colleague, our mutual friend, and to know things were going well for her and she was so happy in Tokyo. I told her about my life in Paris, the work routine that sometimes took me to other European cities, and, I said, what a coincidence that in the not too distant future I would be traveling to Tokyo, contracted as an interpreter at an international conference. I hoped to see her and recall old times. Because I didn’t know what name she was using now, all I said in the salutation was this: “Dear Peruvian girl.” And I included a copy of my anthology of Chekhov, with a dedication that read: “To the bad girl, with the unchanging affection of the little pissant who translated these stories.” I mailed the letter and book to Salomón Toledano’s address, along with a few lines thanking him for his help, confessing my envy at knowing how happy and how much in love he was, and asking that if he heard of any conference or congress that might need good interpreters who spoke Spanish, French, English, and Russian (though not Japanese) to let me know, because suddenly I felt an irresistible urge to visit Tokyo.
My efforts to find a job that would take me to Japan failed. Not kn
owing Japanese excluded me from many local conferences, and for the moment there were no meetings in Tokyo of any UN agency where only the official languages of the United Nations were required. Going on my own, as a tourist, would cost an arm and a leg. Would I vaporize in just a few days most of the funds I had been able to save in recent years? I decided to do it. But as soon as I made the decision and was ready to go to a travel agency, I received a phone call from my old boss at UNESCO, Señor Charnés. He had retired but was working on his own as the head of a private agency for translators and interpreters with which I was always in contact. He had a conference for me in Seoul, for five days. That meant I now had my round-trip fare. It would be cheaper to get to Tokyo from Korea. From that moment on, my life was caught up in a whirlwind: arranging visas, finding guidebooks for Korea and Japan, and constantly repeating to myself that I was taking a totally stupid step since the most likely thing was that I wouldn’t even be able to see her in Tokyo. The bad girl probably had moved somewhere else or would avoid me so the Yakuza boss wouldn’t slit her open from head to toe and throw her body to the dogs, as the villain had done in a Japanese film I had just seen.
During those feverish days, the phone woke me in the middle of the night.
“Are you still in love with me?”
The same voice, the same mocking, amused tone as before, and, at bottom, that trace of the Lima accent she never had lost completely.
“I must be, bad girl,” I replied, wide awake now. “Otherwise, ever since I found out you’re in Tokyo, why would I keep knocking on doors for a contract that would take me there, even if only for a day? I finally have one, for Seoul. I’ll leave in a couple of weeks. From there I’ll go to Tokyo to see you. Even if that Yakuza boss you’re with, according to what my spies tell me, shoots me dead. Are these symptoms of my being in love?”