He did, in fact, to the extent that he ignored what I’d said. He told me everything he was doing and even the most intimate complications of their revolutionary preparations. Paúl belonged to the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR, founded by Luis de la Puente Uceda, who had repudiated the center-left American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA. The Cuban government had given MIR a hundred scholarships for young Peruvians to receive guerrilla training. These were the years of the confrontation between Beijing and Moscow, and at that moment it seemed as if Cuba was leaning toward the Maoist line, though later, for practical reasons, she eventually allied with the Soviets. The scholarship recipients, because of the strict blockade imposed on the island by the United States, had to pass through Paris on the way to their destination, and Paúl was hard-pressed to find them places to stay during their Parisian stopover.
I gave him a hand with these logistical chores, helping him reserve rooms in miserable little hotels—“for Arabs,” Paúl would say—where we crowded the future guerrilla fighters by twos, and sometimes even by threes, in a small, squalid room or in the chambre de bonne of some Latin American or Frenchman disposed to adding his grain of sand to the cause of world revolution. In my garret in the Hôtel du Sénat, on Rue Saint-Sulpice, I sometimes put up one of the scholarship recipients behind the back of Madame Auclair, the manager.
They constituted an extremely diverse collection of fauna. Many were students of literature, law, economics, science, and education at San Marcos, who had joined the Young Communists or other leftist organizations, and in addition to Limenians there were kids from the provinces, and even some peasants, Indians from Puno, Cuzco, and Ayacucho, bewildered by the leap from their Andean villages and communities, where they had somehow been recruited, to Paris. They looked at everything in bewilderment. From the few words I exchanged with them on the way from Orly to their hotels, they sometimes gave the impression of not being too sure what kind of scholarship they were going to enjoy and not really understanding what kind of training they would receive. Not all of them had been given their scholarships in Peru. Some had received them in Paris, chosen from the variegated mass of Peruvians—students, artists, adventurers, bohemians—who prowled the Latin Quarter. Among them, the most original was my friend Alfonso the Spiritualist, sent to France by a theosophical sect in Lima to pursue studies in parapsychology and theosophy, but Paúl’s eloquence swept away the spirits and installed him in the world of the revolution. He was a pale, timid boy who barely opened his mouth, and there was something emaciated and distracted in him, a precocious kind of spirit. In our midday conversations at Le Cluny or La Petite Source, I suggested to Paúl that many of the scholarship recipients the MIR was sending to Cuba, and sometimes to North Korea or the People’s Republic of China, were simply taking advantage of the chance to do a little tourism and would never climb the Andes or go down into Amazonia with rifles on their shoulders and packs on their backs.
“It’s all been calculated, mon vieux,” Paúl replied, sitting like a magistrate who has the laws of history on his side. “If half of them respond to us, the revolution is a sure thing.”
True, the MIR was doing things a little quickly, but how could they enjoy the luxury of sleeping? History, after moving for so many years like a tortoise, had suddenly become a meteor, thanks to Cuba. It was necessary to act, learn, stumble, get up again. This wasn’t the time to recruit young guerrillas by making them submit to examinations of their knowledge, to physical trials or psychological tests. The important thing was to take advantage of those one hundred scholarships before Cuba offered them to other groups—the Communist Party, the Liberation Front, the Trotskyists—who were competing to be the first to set the Peruvian revolution in motion.
Most of the scholarship recipients I picked up at Orly to take to the hotels and boardinghouses where they would spend their time in Paris were male and very young, some of them adolescents. One day I discovered there were also women among them.
“Pick them up and take them to this little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac,” Paúl said. “Comrade Ana, Comrade Arlette, and Comrade Eufrasia. Be nice to them.”
One rule the scholarship recipients had been carefully taught was not to disclose their real names. Even among themselves they used only their nicknames or noms de guerre. As soon as the three girls showed up, I had the impression I’d seen Comrade Arlette somewhere before.
Comrade Ana was a dark-skinned girl with lively gestures, a little older than the others, and from the things I heard her say that morning and the two or three other times I saw her, she must have been the head of a teachers’ union. Comrade Eufrasia, a little Chinese girl with delicate bones, looked like a fifteen-year-old. She was exhausted because on the long flight she hadn’t slept a wink and had vomited a few times because of turbulence. Comrade Arlette had an attractive shape, a slim waist, pale skin, and though she dressed, like the others, with great simplicity—coarse skirts and sweaters, percale blouses, flat shoes, and the kind of hairpins sold in markets—there was something very feminine in her manner of walking and moving and, above all, in the way she pursed her full lips as she asked about the streets the taxi was driving along. In her dark, expressive eyes, something eager was twinkling as she contemplated the tree-lined boulevards, the symmetrical buildings, the crowd of young people of both sexes carrying bags, books, and notebooks as they prowled the streets and bistrots in the area around the Sorbonne, while we approached the little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac. They were given a room with no bath and no windows, and two beds for the three of them. When I left, I repeated Paúl’s instructions: they weren’t to move from here until he came to see them, sometime in the afternoon, and explained the plan for their work in Paris.
I was in the doorway of the hotel, lighting a cigarette before I walked away, when somebody touched my shoulder.
“That room gives me claustrophobia,” Comrade Arlette said with a smile. “And besides, a person doesn’t come to Paris every day, caramba.”
Then I recognized her. She had changed a great deal, of course, especially in the way she spoke, but the mischievousness I remembered so well still poured out of her, something bold, spontaneous, provocative, that was revealed in her defiant posture, her small breasts and face thrust forward, one foot set slightly back, her ass high, and a mocking glance that left her interlocutor not knowing if she was speaking seriously or joking. She was short, with small feet and hands, and her hair, black now instead of light, and tied back with a ribbon, fell to her shoulders. And she had that dark honey in her eyes.
I let her know that what we were going to do was categorically forbidden and for that reason Comrade Jean (Paúl) would be angry with us, then I took her for a walk past the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, the Odéon, the Luxembourg Gardens, and finally—far too expensive for my budget!—to have lunch at L’Acropole, a little Greek restaurant on Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. In those three hours of conversation she told me, in violation of all the rules regarding revolutionary secrecy, that she had studied letters and law at Catholic University, had been a member of the clandestine Young Communists for years, and, like other comrades, had moved to the MIR because it was a real revolutionary movement as opposed to the YC, a sclerotic and anachronistic party in the present day. She told me these things somewhat mechanically, without too much conviction. I recounted my ongoing efforts to find work so I could stay in Paris and told her that now I had all my hopes focused on an examination for Spanish translators, sponsored by UNESCO, that would be given the following day.
“Cross your fingers and knock the table three times, like this, so you’ll pass,” Comrade Arlette said, very seriously, as she stared at me.
To provoke her, I asked if these kinds of superstition were compatible with the scientific doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.
“To get what you want, anything goes,” she replied immediately, very resolute. But then she shrugged and said with a smile, “I’ll also say a rosary for you to pass, even though I’m n
ot a believer. Will you denounce me to the party for being superstitious? I don’t think so. You look like a nice guy…”
She gave a little laugh, and when she did, the same dimples she’d had as a girl formed on her cheeks. I walked her back to the hotel. If she agreed, I’d ask Comrade Jean’s permission to take her to see other places in Paris before she continued her revolutionary journey. “Terrific,” she replied, giving me a languid hand that she did not withdraw from mine right away. This was one very pretty, very flirtatious guerrilla fighter.
The next morning I passed the exam for translators at UNESCO with about twenty other applicants. We were given half a dozen fairly easy texts in English and French to translate. I hesitated over the phrase “art roman,” which I first translated as “Roman art” but then, in the revision, I realized it referred to “Romanesque art.” At midday I went with Paúl to eat sausage and fried potatoes at La Petite Source, and with no preambles asked his permission to take out Comrade Arlette while she was in Paris. He gave me a sly look and pretended to reprimand me.
“It is categorically forbidden to fuck female comrades. In Cuba and the People’s Republic of China, during the revolution, screwing a comrade could mean the firing squad. Why do you want to take her out? Do you like the girl?”
“I suppose I do,” I confessed, somewhat embarrassed. “But if it’s going to make problems for you…”
“Then you’d control your lust?” Paúl laughed. “Don’t be a hypocrite, Ricardo! Take her out, and don’t let me know about it. Afterward, though, you’ll tell me everything. And most important, use a condom.”
That same afternoon I went to pick up Comrade Arlette at her little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac and took her to eat steak frites at La Petite Hostellerie, on Rue de la Harpe. And then to L’Escale, a small boîte de nuit on Rue Monsieur le Prince, where in those days Carmencita, a Spanish girl dressed all in black like Juliette Gréco, accompanied herself on guitar and sang, or, I should say, recited old poems and republican songs from the Spanish Civil War. We had rum and Coca-Cola, a drink that was already being called a cuba libre. The club was small, dark, smoky, and hot, the songs epic or melancholy, not many people were there yet, and before we finished our drinks and after I told her that thanks to her magical arts and her rosary I’d done well on the UNESCO exam, I grasped her hand and, interlacing my fingers with hers, asked if she realized I’d been in love with her for ten years.
She burst into laughter.
“In love with me without knowing me? Do you mean that for ten years you’ve been hoping that one day a girl like me would turn up in your life?”
“We know each other very well, it’s just that you don’t remember,” I replied, very slowly, watching her reaction. “Back then, your name was Lily and you were passing yourself off as Chilean.”
I thought that surprise would make her pull back her hand or clench it convulsively in a nervous movement, but nothing like that happened. She left her hand lying quietly in mine, not agitated in the least.
“What are you saying?” she murmured. In the half-light, she leaned forward and her face came so close to mine that I could feel her breath. Her eyes scrutinized me, trying to read my mind.
“Can you still imitate the Chilean singsong so well?” I asked, as I kissed her hand. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Don’t you remember I asked you to go steady three times and you always turned me down flat?”
“Ricardo, Ricardito, Richard Somocurcio!” she exclaimed, amused, and now I did feel the pressure of her hand. “The skinny kid! That well-behaved snot-nose who was so proper he seemed to have taken Holy Communion the night before. Ha-ha! That was you. Oh, how funny! Even back then you had a sanctimonious look.”
Still, a moment later, when I asked her how and why it had occurred to her and her sister, Lucy, to pass themselves off as Chileans when they moved to Calle Esperanza, in Miraflores, she absolutely denied knowing what I was talking about. How could I have made up a thing like that? I was thinking about somebody else. She never had been named Lily, and didn’t have a sister, and never had lived in that neighborhood of rich snobs. That would be her attitude from then on: denying the story of the Chilean girls, though sometimes, for instance that night at L’Escale, when she said she recognized in me the idiotic little snot-nose from ten years back, she let something slip—an image, an allusion—that revealed she was in fact the false Chilean girl of our adolescence.
We stayed at L’Escale until three in the morning, and though she let me kiss and caress her, she didn’t respond. She didn’t move her lips away when I touched them with mine but made no corresponding movement, she allowed herself to be kissed but was indifferent and, of course, she never opened her mouth to let me swallow her saliva. Her body, too, seemed like an iceberg when my hands caressed her waist, her shoulders, and paused at her hard little breasts with erect nipples. She remained still, passive, resigned to this effusiveness, like a queen accepting the homage of a vassal, until, at last, noticing that my caresses were becoming bolder, she casually pushed me away.
“This is my fourth declaration of love, Chilean girl,” I said at the door to the little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac. “Is the answer finally yes?”
“We’ll see.” And she blew me a kiss and moved away. “Never lose hope, good boy.”
For the ten days that followed this encounter, Comrade Arlette and I had something that resembled a honeymoon. We saw each other every day and I went through all the cash I still had from Aunt Alberta’s money orders. I took her to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, the Rodin Museum and the houses of Balzac and Victor Hugo, the Cinémathèque on Rue d’Ulm, a performance at the National Popular Theater directed by Jean Vilar (we saw Chekhov’s Ce fou de Platonov, in which Vilar himself played the protagonist), and on Sunday we rode the train to Versailles, where, after visiting the palace, we took a long walk in the woods and were caught in a rainstorm and soaked to the skin. In those days anyone would have taken us for lovers because we always held hands and I used any excuse to kiss and caress her. She allowed me to do this, at times amused, at other times indifferent, always putting an end to my effusiveness with an impatient expression. “That’s enough now, Ricardito.” On rare occasions she would take the initiative and arrange or muss my hair with her hand or pass a slender finger along my nose or mouth as if she wanted to smooth them, a caress like that of an affectionate mistress with her poodle.
From the intimacy of those ten days I came to a conclusion: Comrade Arlette didn’t give a damn about politics in general or the revolution in particular. Her membership in the Young Communists and then in the MIR was probably a lie, not to mention her studies at Catholic University. She not only never talked about political or university subjects, but when I brought the conversation around to that terrain, she didn’t know what to say, was ignorant of the most elementary things, and managed to change the subject very quickly. It was evident she had obtained this guerrilla fighter’s scholarship in order to get out of Peru and travel around the world, something that as a girl of very humble origins—that much was glaringly obvious—she never could have done otherwise. But I didn’t have the courage to question her about any of this; I didn’t want to put her on the spot and force her to tell me another lie.
On the eighth day of our chaste honeymoon she agreed, unexpectedly, to spend the night with me at the Hôtel du Sénat. It was something I had asked for—had begged for—in vain, on all the previous days. This time, she took the initiative.
“I’ll go with you today, if you like,” she said at night as we were eating a couple of baguettes with Gruyère cheese (I didn’t have the money for a restaurant) in a bistrot on Rue de Tournon. My heart raced as if I had just run a marathon.
After an awkward negotiation with the watchman at the Hôtel du Sénat—“Pas de visites nocturnes à l’hôtel, monsieur!”—which left Comrade Arlette undaunted, we climbed the five flights with no elevator up to my garret. She let herself be kissed, caressed, und
ressed, always with that curious attitude of nonparticipation, not allowing me to lessen the invisible distance she kept from my kisses, embraces, and affection, even though she surrendered her body to me. It moved me to see her naked on the narrow bed in the corner of the room where the ceiling sloped and the light from the single bulb barely reached. She was very thin, with well-proportioned limbs and a waist so narrow I thought I could have encircled it with my hands. Under the small patch of hair on her pubis, the skin seemed lighter than on the rest of her body. Her olive skin, with Oriental reminiscences, was soft and cool. She allowed herself to be kissed from head to toe, maintaining her usual passivity, and she heard, like someone listening to the rain, Neruda’s “Material nupcial,” which I recited into her ear, along with my stammered words of love: this was the happiest night of my life, I had never wanted anyone the way I wanted her, I would always love her.
“Let’s get under the blanket, it’s very cold,” she interrupted, bringing me down to mundane reality. “It’s a wonder you don’t freeze in here.”
I was about to ask if she ought to take care of me, but I didn’t, confused by her attitude of self-assurance, as if she’d had centuries of experience in these encounters and I was the novice. We made love with difficulty. She gave herself without the slightest embarrassment, but she was very narrow, and in each of my efforts to penetrate she shrank back, grimacing in pain: “Slower, slower.” Finally, I did make love to her and was happy loving her. It was true my greatest joy was to be there with her, it was true that in my few and always fleeting affairs I’d never felt the combination of tenderness and desire that she inspired in me, but I doubt this was also the case for Comrade Arlette. Instead, throughout it all she gave the impression of doing what she did without really caring about it.
The next morning, when I opened my eyes, I saw her at the foot of the bed, washed and dressed and observing me with a look that revealed a profound uneasiness.