“Yes, I think so. It’s just as well, good boy. I thought, after so much time, you’d forgotten me. Did your colleague Toledano tell you that? That I’m with a mafia boss?”
She burst into laughter, delighted with these credentials. But she changed the subject almost immediately and spoke to me in an affectionate way.
“I’m glad you’re coming. Even though we don’t see each other often, I always think about you. Shall I tell you why? Because you’re the only friend I have left.”
“I’m not and never will be your friend. Don’t you realize that yet? I’m your lover, your suitor, the person who, since he was a boy, has been crazy about the Chilean girl, the guerrilla fighter, the bureaucrat’s wife, the wife of the horse breeder, the gangster’s mistress. The little pissant who lives only to desire you and think about you. In Tokyo I don’t want us to remember anything. I want to hold you in my arms, kiss you, smell you, bite you, make love to you.”
She laughed again, this time more willingly.
“Do you still make love?” she asked. “Good, just as well. Nobody has said those things to me since the last time we saw each other. Will you tell me a lot of them when you come, Ricardito? Go on, tell me another, as an example.”
“On nights when there’s a full moon I go out to bay at the sky and then I see your face painted up there. Right now I’d give ten years of my life to see myself reflected at the back of your eyes, your eyes the color of dark honey—”
She was laughing, amused, but suddenly she became frightened and interrupted me.
“I have to hang up.”
I heard the receiver click. I couldn’t close my eyes again, overcome by a mixture of elation and uneasiness that kept me awake until seven in the morning, the hour when I normally got up to prepare my usual breakfast—black coffee and a slice of toast with honey—when I didn’t go out to eat at the counter of a nearby café on Avenue de Tourville.
I spent the remaining two weeks before my trip to Seoul occupied by the kinds of things, I suppose, that sweethearts full of illusions did long ago in the days preceding the wedding, when both of them would lose their virginity: buying clothes and shoes, having my hair cut (not by the low-priced barber behind UNESCO where I always went but at a deluxe barbershop on Rue Saint-Honoré), and, above all, going to boutiques and ladies’ shops to find a discreet gift the bad girl could hide in her own wardrobe and that was, at the same time, original and delicate, one that would tell her the tender, sweet things I longed to whisper in her ear. Every hour I spent looking for the gift, I told myself that I was now even more imbecilic than I had been before, and deserved to be kicked and trampled in the dirt again by the lover of the Yakuza boss. At last, after much searching, I bought one of the first things I had seen and liked, at Vuitton: a dressing case with a collection of crystal flasks for perfumes, creams, and lipsticks, and a pocket diary and mother-of-pearl pencil concealed in a false bottom. There was something vaguely adulterous about this hiding place in a cosmetics case.
The conference in Seoul was draining. It dealt with patents and tariffs, and the speakers had recourse to a very technical vocabulary, which made it twice as difficult for me. The excitement of recent days, jet lag, and the time difference between Paris and Korea kept me awake, my nerves on edge. On the day I arrived in Tokyo, early in the afternoon, I was overcome by fatigue, and in the tiny room the Dragoman had reserved for me at a small hotel in the center of the city, I collapsed with exhaustion. I slept four or five uninterrupted hours, and that night, after a long, cold shower to wake me up, I went out for supper with my friend and his Japanese love. From the first moment I sensed that Salomón Toledano was much more in love with Mitsuko than she was with him. The Dragoman looked rejuvenated and elated. He wore a bow tie I’d never seen before and a suit with a modern, youthful cut. He joked, showered attention on his friend, and on any pretext kissed her on the cheeks or mouth and put his arm around her waist, which seemed to make her uncomfortable. She was much younger than he, pleasant and rather charming, in fact: nice legs and a porcelain face in which large, vivacious eyes sparkled. She couldn’t hide an expression of displeasure each time Salomón drew her close. She spoke English very well, but her naturalness and cordiality experienced a kind of shutdown whenever my friend made these ostentatious displays of affection. He seemed not to notice. We went first to a bar on Kabuki-cho, in Shinjuku, a district filled with cabarets, erotic shops, restaurants, discotheques, massage parlors, and a dense crowd circulating among all of them. Deafening music poured out of every establishment, and there was a real aerial forest of lights, banners, and advertisements. It made me dizzy. Later we ate in a quieter place, in Nishi-Azabu, where, for the first time, I tasted Japanese food and drank the tepid, bitter sake. Throughout the evening my impression grew that the relationship between Salomón and Mitsuko was far from working as smoothly as the Dragoman had claimed in his letters. But, I told myself, this is surely because Mitsuko, sparing in her displays of affection, wasn’t yet accustomed to the expansive, Mediterranean manner in which Salomón exhibited to the world the passion she had awakened in him. She’d soon become used to it.
Mitsuko took the initiative of talking about the bad girl. She did it halfway through the meal, and in the most natural maneuver, asking if I wanted her to call my compatriot to let her know I had arrived. I asked her to do that, and gave her the phone number of my hotel. That was better than my calling her, keeping in mind that the gentleman with whom she lived was, apparently, a Japanese Othello and, perhaps, a killer.
“Is that what this man told you?” Mitsuko said with a laugh. “How silly. Mr. Fukuda is a little strange, they say he’s involved in some rather obscure business in Africa. But I’ve never heard that he’s a criminal or anything like that. It’s true he’s very jealous. At least, that’s what Kuriko says.”
“Kuriko?”
“The bad girl.”
She said “bad girl” in Spanish, and she herself celebrated her small linguistic accomplishment by applauding. In other words, now her name was Kuriko. Well then.
That night, when we said goodbye, the Dragoman managed to have a very brief private conversation with me. Pointing at Mitsuko, he asked, “What do you think?”
“Very attractive, Dragoman. You were absolutely right. She’s charming.”
“And you’re only seeing her dressed,” he said, winking and hitting his chest. “We have to have a long talk, dear friend. You’ll be amazed at the plans I have brewing. I’ll call you tomorrow. Sleep, dream, and recover.”
But the one who called, early, was the bad girl. She gave me an hour to shave, shower, and dress. When I went down she was waiting for me, sitting in one of the armchairs in the reception area. She wore a light-colored raincoat, and under that a brick-colored blouse and dark brown skirt. You could see her round, beautiful knees and slender legs. She was slimmer than I remembered and her eyes were rather tired. But no one in the world would have thought she was past forty. She looked fresh and beautiful. From a distance, she could have been taken for one of those delicate, tiny Japanese women who float silently down the street. Her face brightened when she saw me, and she stood for me to embrace her. I kissed her cheeks and she didn’t move her lips away when I brushed them with mine.
“I love you very much,” I stammered. “Thank you for still being so young and good-looking, Chilean girl.”
“Come, we’ll take the bus,” she said, grasping my arm. “I know a nice place to talk. It’s a park where all of Tokyo goes to have picnics and get drunk when the cherry blossoms come out. There you can tell me some more cheap, sentimental things.”
Holding my arm, she led me to a bus stop two or three blocks from the hotel, where we climbed onto a bus that was sparkling clean. Both the driver and the woman who took the fares had on the face masks I was surprised to see so many people wearing on the street. In many ways, Tokyo resembled a clinic. I gave her the Vuitton case I had brought for her and she accepted it without too much enthusiasm.
She examined me, half amused, half curious.
“You’ve become Japanese. In the way you dress, your gestures, your movements, even the color of your skin. How long have you been calling yourself Kuriko?”
“My friends gave me the name, I don’t know whose idea it was. I must have some Asian in me. You told me that once in Paris, don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember. Do you know, I was afraid you’d become ugly.”
“But you’ve turned gray. And you have some wrinkles, here under your lids.” She pressed my arm and her eyes filled with mischief. She lowered her voice. “Do you wish I were your geisha, good boy?”
“Yes, that too. But above all, my wife. I’ve come to Tokyo to ask you for the umpteenth time to marry me. This time I’ll convince you, I’m warning you. And by the way, how long have you been riding buses? Can’t the Yakuza boss give you a car with a driver and bodyguard?”
“Even if he could, he wouldn’t,” she said, still holding my arm. “It would be ostentatious, what the Japanese hate most. People here disapprove of differentiating yourself from others, in any way. That’s why the rich masquerade as poor and the poor as rich.”
We got off in a park filled with people, office workers using the midday break to eat sandwiches and have a drink under the trees, surrounded by grass and pools of brightly colored fish. The bad girl took me to a teahouse in a corner of the park. There were small tables with comfortable chairs among screens that offered a certain amount of privacy. As soon as we sat down I kissed her hands, her mouth, her eyes. I had been observing her for a long time, breathing her in.
“Do I pass the test, Ricardito?”
“With outstanding grades. But you look a little tired, Japanese girl. Is it the emotion of seeing me after totally abandoning me for six years?”
“And the tension in my life as well,” she added, very seriously.
“What wicked things are you doing to make your life so tense?”
She sat looking at me, not answering, and she passed her hand over my hair in her usual affectionate gesture, half loving and half maternal.
“You have so many gray hairs,” she repeated, examining me. “I gave you some, didn’t I? Soon I’ll have to call you good old man instead of good boy.”
“Are you in love with this Fukuda? I hoped you were with him only out of self-interest. Who is he? Why does he have such a bad reputation? What does he do?”
“A lot of questions at one time, Ricardito. First tell me some of those things from soap operas. Nobody’s done that for years.”
I spoke to her very quietly, looking into her eyes and occasionally kissing the hand I held in mine.
“I haven’t lost hope, Japanese girl. Even if you think I’m an utter cretin, I’ll keep insisting until you come and live with me. In Paris, and if you don’t like Paris, wherever you want. As an interpreter I can work anywhere in the world. I swear I’ll make you happy, Japanese girl. Too many years have gone by for you to have any doubts: I love you so much I’ll do anything to keep you with me when we’re together. Do you like gangsters? I’ll become a robber, a kidnapper, a swindler, a drug trafficker, whatever you want. Six years without hearing anything from you, and now I can hardly speak, hardly think, I’m so moved to feel you close to me.”
“Not bad,” she said with a laugh as she brought her face forward and gave me a bird’s rapid peck on the lips.
She ordered tea and some cakes in a Japanese that the waitress had her repeat several times. After the order had been brought and she poured me a cup of tea, she gave a delayed response to my question.
“I don’t know if what I feel for Fukuda is love. But never in my life have I depended so much on anyone the way I depend on him. The truth is he can do whatever he wants with me.”
She didn’t say this with the joy or euphoria of someone, like the Dragoman, who had discovered a love-passion. Instead she was alarmed, surprised at something like this happening to a person like her, who had thought herself immune to those weaknesses. There was something anguished in her eyes the color of dark honey.
“Well, if he can do whatever he wants with you, that means you’ve finally fallen in love. You’re a glacial woman, and I hope this Fukuda makes you suffer the way you’ve made me suffer for so many years…”
I felt her grasp my hand and rub it.
“It isn’t love, I swear. I don’t know what it is, but it can’t be love. More a sickness, a vice. That’s what Fukuda is for me.”
The story she told me may have been true, though she surely left many things in the shadows, and dissimulated, softened, and embellished others. It was difficult for me to believe anything she said, because ever since I met her she had always told me more lies than truths. And I believe that, unlike the common run of mortals, by this time the new Kuriko found it very difficult to differentiate the world in which she lived from the one she claimed to live in. As I imagined, she had met Fukuda years earlier, on one of the trips she made to the Orient with David Richardson, who, in fact, had business dealings with the Japanese. Fukuda once told the bad girl it was a shame a worldly woman like her, with so much character, had settled for being Mrs. Richardson, because she could have had a great career in the world of business. The phrase kept sounding in her ears. When she felt her world collapsing because her ex-husband had found out about her marriage to Robert Arnoux, she called Fukuda, told him what had happened, and proposed working for him in any capacity. The Japanese sent her a ticket on a flight from London to Tokyo.
“When you called me from the airport in Paris to say goodbye, were you going to join him?”
She nodded. “Yes, but in fact I called from the airport in London.”
On the very night she arrived in Japan, Fukuda made her his mistress. But he didn’t have her live with him for another couple of years. Until then she lived alone, in a boardinghouse, in a minuscule room with a bathroom and a wall kitchen, “tinier than the room my Filipina maid had in Newmarket.” If she hadn’t traveled so much, “running errands for Fukuda,” she would have gone mad with claustrophobia and loneliness. She was Fukuda’s mistress, but one among several. The Japanese never hid the fact that he slept with other women. He brought her sometimes to spend the night with him, but then weeks could go by without his inviting her to his house. During those periods, their relationship was strictly that of employee and employer. What were Mr. Fukuda’s “errands”? Smuggling drugs, diamonds, paintings, weapons, money? Often not even she knew. She carried what he prepared for her, in suitcases, packages, bags, or briefcases, and so far—she knocked the wooden table—she had always gotten past customs, borders, and police without too much difficulty. Traveling this way through Asia and Africa, she discovered what panicked fear meant. At the same time, she never had lived with so much intensity and the kind of energy that on each trip made her feel that life was a marvelous adventure. “How different living this way is from that limbo, that slow death surrounded by horses in Newmarket!” After two years of working for him, Fukuda, satisfied with her services, rewarded her with a promotion: “You deserve to live under my roof.”
“You’re going to end up knifed, murdered, locked up for years and years in some horrible jail,” I said. “Have you lost your mind? If you’re telling me the truth, what you’re doing is stupid. When you’re caught smuggling drugs or something worse, do you think this gangster is going to worry about you?”
“I know he won’t, he told me so himself,” she interrupted. “At least he’s very frank with me, you see. ‘If they ever catch you, you’re on your own. I don’t know you and I’ve never known you. You’re on your own.’”
“You see how much he loves you.”
“He doesn’t love me. Not me, not anybody. He’s like me that way. But he has more character and he’s stronger than I am.”
We had been there more than an hour, and it was growing dark. I didn’t know what to say. I felt demoralized. It was the first time she seemed to have given herself totally, body and s
oul, to a man. Now it was crystal clear: the bad girl would never be yours, little pissant.
“What an unhappy expression on your face,” she said with a smile. “Does what I told you make you sad? You’re the only person I could have told it to. Besides, I needed to tell somebody. But maybe I’ve done a bad thing. Will you forgive me if I give you a kiss?”
“It makes me sad that for the first time in your life, you really love somebody and it’s not me.”
“No, no, it’s not love,” she repeated, shaking her head. “It’s more complicated, more like a sickness, I already told you that. He makes me feel alive, useful, active. But not happy. It’s a kind of possession. Don’t laugh, don’t joke, sometimes I feel possessed by Fukuda.”
“If you’re so afraid of him, I imagine you won’t dare make love to me. And I came to Tokyo expressly to ask you to take me to the Château Meguru.”
She had been very serious telling me about her life with Fukuda, but now, opening her eyes wide, she burst into laughter.
“And how the hell do you know about the Château Meguru when you’ve only just come to Tokyo?”
“From my friend, the interpreter. Salomón calls himself ‘the Dragoman of the Château Meguru.’” I grasped her hand and kissed it. “Would you dare, bad girl?”
She looked at her watch and was thoughtful for a few moments, calculating. Suddenly, decisively, she asked the waitress to call us a taxi.
“I don’t have much time,” she said. “But for some reason it makes me feel bad to see you with that face of a beaten dog. Let’s go, though I’m taking a huge risk doing this.”