“Are you really in love with me?”
I said I was, several times, and extended my hand to take hers, but she didn’t hold hers out to me.
“Do you want me to stay here and live with you, in Paris?” she asked in the tone of voice she might have used to suggest going to the movies to see one of the nouvelle vague films by Godard, Truffaut, or Louis Malle, which were at the height of their popularity.
Again I said yes, totally disconcerted. Did that mean the Chilean girl had fallen in love with me?
“It isn’t for love, why lie to you?” she replied coldly. “But I don’t want to go to Cuba, and I want to go back to Peru even less. I’d like to stay in Paris. You can help me get out of my commitment to the MIR. Talk to Comrade Jean, and if he releases me, I’ll come and live with you.” She hesitated a moment and, with a sigh, made a concession: “I might even end up falling in love with you.”
On the ninth day I talked to fat Paúl during our midday meeting, this time at Le Cluny, with two croque monsieurs and two espressos in front of us. He was categorical.
“I can’t release her, only the MIR leadership could do that. But even so, just proposing this would create a huge damn problem for me. Let her go to Cuba, take the course, and demonstrate she’s in no physical or psychological condition for armed struggle. Then I could suggest to the leadership that she stay here as my assistant. Tell her that, and above all, tell her not to discuss this with anybody. I’m the one who’d be fucked, mon vieux.”
With an aching heart I went to tell Comrade Arlette Paúl’s answer. And, worst of all, I encouraged her to follow his advice. Our having to separate hurt me more than her. But we couldn’t harm Paúl, and she had to avoid antagonizing the MIR because that could cause her problems in the future. The course lasted a few months. Right from the beginning she would need to demonstrate complete ineptitude for guerrilla life and even pretend to faint. In the meantime, here in Paris, I’d find work, rent a small apartment, and be waiting for her…
“I know, you’ll cry, you’ll miss me, you’ll think about me day and night,” she interrupted with an impatient gesture, her eyes hard and her voice icy. “All right, I can see there’s no other way. We’ll see each other in three months, Ricardito.”
“Why are you saying goodbye now?”
“Didn’t Comrade Jean tell you? I leave for Cuba early tomorrow, by way of Prague. Now you can begin to shed your goodbye tears.”
She did, in fact, leave the next day, and I couldn’t go with her to the airport because Paúl forbade it. At our next meeting, the fat man left me totally demoralized when he announced I couldn’t write to Comrade Arlette or receive letters from her because, for reasons of security, the scholarship recipients had to cut off all communication during training. Once the course had ended, Paúl wasn’t even sure if Comrade Arlette would pass through Paris again on her way back to Lima.
For days I was like a zombie, reproaching myself day and night for not having had the courage to tell Comrade Arlette that in spite of Paúl’s prohibition she should stay with me in Paris, instead of urging her to go on with this adventure that would end only God knew how. Until, one morning, when I left my garret to have breakfast at the Café de la Marie on Place Saint-Sulpice, Madame Auclair handed me an envelope with a UNESCO imprint. I had passed the exam, and the head of the department of translators had made an appointment with me at his office. He was a gray-haired, elegant Spaniard whose family name was Charnés. He was very amiable. He laughed readily when he asked me about my “long-term plans” and I said, “To die of old age in Paris.” There was no opening yet for a permanent position, but he could hire me as a “temp” during the general assembly and when the agency was overwhelmed with work, something that happened with some frequency. From then on I was certain that my constant dream—well, at least since I’d had the use of my reason—of living in this city for the rest of my life was beginning to become a reality.
My existence did a somersault after that day. I began to cut my hair twice a month and put on a jacket and tie every morning. I took the Métro at Saint-Germain or l’Odéon to ride to the Ségur station, the one closest to UNESCO, and I stayed there, in a small cubicle, from nine thirty to one and from two thirty to six, translating into Spanish generally ponderous documents regarding the removal of the temples of Abu Simbel on the Nile or the preservation of fragments of cuneiform writing discovered in caves in the Sahara desert, near Mali.
Curiously, as my life changed, so did Paúl’s. He was still my best friend, but we began to see each other less and less frequently because of the obligations I had recently assumed as a bureaucrat, and because he began to travel the world, representing the MIR at congresses or meetings for peace, for the liberation of the Third World, for the struggle against nuclear armaments, against colonialism and imperialism, and a thousand other progressive causes. At times Paúl felt dazed, living in a dream—when he was back in Paris he’d call and we would have a meal or a cup of coffee two or three times a week—and he’d tell me he had just come back from Beijing, from Cairo, from Havana, from Pyongyang, from Hanoi, where he had to speak about the outlook for revolution in Latin America before fifteen hundred delegates from fifty revolutionary organizations in some thirty countries in the name of a Peruvian revolution that hadn’t even begun yet.
Often, if I hadn’t known so well the integrity that oozed from his pores, I would have believed he was exaggerating just to impress me. How was it possible that this South American in Paris, who just a few months ago had earned his living as a kitchen boy in the México Lindo, was now a figure in the revolutionary jet set, making transatlantic flights and rubbing elbows with the leaders of China, Cuba, Vietnam, Egypt, North Korea, Libya, Indonesia? But it was true. Paúl, as a result of imponderables and the strange tangle of relationships, interests, and confusions that constituted the revolution, had been transformed into an international figure. I confirmed this in 1962 when there was a minor journalistic upheaval over an attempt to assassinate the Moroccan revolutionary leader Ben Barka, nicknamed the Dynamo, who, three years later, in October 1965, was abducted and disappeared forever as he left the Brasserie Lipp, a restaurant on Saint-Germain. Paúl met me at midday at UNESCO, and we went to the cafeteria for a sandwich. He was pale and had dark circles under his eyes, an agitated voice, a kind of nervousness very unusual in him. Ben Barka had been presiding at an international congress of revolutionary forces on whose executive council Paúl also served. The two of them had been seeing a good deal of each other and traveling together during the past few weeks. The attempt on Ben Barka could only be the work of the CIA, and the MIR now felt at risk in Paris. Could I, for just a few days, while they took certain necessary steps, keep a couple of suitcases in my garret?
“I wouldn’t ask you to do something like this if I had another alternative. If you tell me you can’t, it’s not a problem, Ricardo.”
I’d do it if he told me what was in the suitcases.
“In one, papers. Pure dynamite: plans, instructions, preparations for actions in Peru. In the other, dollars.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand.”
I thought for a moment.
“If I turn the suitcases over to the CIA, will they let me keep the fifty thousand?”
“Just think, when the revolution triumphs, we could name you ambassador to UNESCO,” said Paúl, following my lead.
We joked for a while, and when night fell he brought me the two suitcases, which we put under my bed. I spent a week with my hair on end, thinking that if some thief decided to steal the money, the MIR would never believe there had been a robbery, and I’d become a target of the revolution. On the sixth day, Paúl came with three men I didn’t know to take away those troublesome lodgers.
Whenever we saw each other I asked about Comrade Arlette, and he never tried to deceive me with false news. He was very sorry but hadn’t been able to learn anything. The Cubans were extremely strict where security was concerned
, and they were keeping her whereabouts an absolute secret. The only certainty was that she hadn’t come through Paris yet, since he had a complete record of the scholarship recipients who returned to Paris.
“When she comes through, you’ll be the first to know. The girl really has a hold on you, doesn’t she? But why, mon vieux, she isn’t even that pretty.”
“I don’t know why, Paúl. But the truth is she does have a tight hold on me.”
With Paúl’s new kind of life, Peruvian circles in Paris began to speak ill of him. These were writers who didn’t write, painters who didn’t paint, musicians who didn’t play or compose, and café revolutionaries who vented their frustration, envy, and boredom by saying that Paúl had become “sensualized,” a “bureaucrat of the revolution.” What was he doing in Paris? Why wasn’t he over there with those kids he was sending to receive military training and then sneak into Peru to begin guerrilla actions in the Andes? I defended him in heated arguments. I said that in spite of his new status, Paúl continued to live with absolute modesty. Until very recently, his wife had been cleaning houses to support the family. Now the MIR, taking advantage of her Spanish passport, used her as a courier and frequently sent her to Peru to accompany returning scholarship recipients or to carry money and instructions, on trips that filled Paúl with worry. But from his confidences I knew that the life imposed on him by circumstances, which his superior insisted he continue, irritated him more and more each day. He was impatient to return to Peru, where actions would begin very soon. He wanted to help prepare them on-site. The leadership of the MIR wouldn’t authorize this, and it infuriated him. “This is what comes of knowing languages, damn it,” he’d protest, laughing in the midst of his bad temper.
Thanks to Paúl, during those months and years in Paris I met the principal leaders of the MIR, beginning with its head and founder, Luis de la Puente Uceda, and ending with Guillermo Lobatón. The head of the MIR was a lawyer from Trujillo, born in 1926, who had repudiated the Aprista Party. He was slim, with glasses, light skin, and light hair that he always wore slicked back like an Argentine actor. The two or three times I saw him, he was dressed very formally in a tie and a dark leather coat. He spoke quietly, like a lawyer at work, giving legalistic details and using the elaborate vocabulary of a judicial argument. I always saw him surrounded by two or three brawny types who must have been his bodyguards, men who looked at him worshipfully and never offered an opinion. In everything he said there was something so cerebral, so abstract, that it was hard for me to imagine him as a guerrilla fighter with a machine gun over his shoulder, climbing up and down steep slopes in the Andes. And yet he had been arrested several times, was exiled in Mexico, lived a clandestine life. But he gave the impression that he had been born to shine in forums, parliaments, tribunals, political negotiations, that is, in everything he and his comrades scorned as the shady double-talk of bourgeois democracy.
Guillermo Lobatón was another matter. Of the crowd of revolutionaries I met in Paris through Paúl, none seemed as intelligent, well educated, and resolute as he. He was still very young, barely in his thirties, but he already had a rich past as a man of action. In 1952 he had been the leader of the great strike at the University of San Marcos against the Odría dictatorship (that was when he and Paúl became friends), and as a result he was arrested, sent to the fronton that was used as a political prison, and tortured. This was how his studies in philosophy had been cut short at San Marcos, where, they said, he was in competition with Li Carrillo, Heidegger’s future disciple, for being the most brilliant student at the School of Letters. In 1954 he was expelled from the country by the military government, and after countless difficulties arrived in Paris, where, while he earned his living doing manual labor, he resumed his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Then the Communist Party obtained a scholarship for him in East Germany, in Leipzig, where he continued his philosophical studies at a school for the party’s cadres. While he was there he was caught off guard by the Cuban Revolution. What happened in Cuba led him to think very critically about the strategy of Latin American Communist parties and the dogmatic spirit of Stalinism. Before I met him in person, I had read a work of his that circulated around Paris in mimeographed form, in which he accused those parties of cutting themselves off from the masses because of their submission to the dictates of Moscow, forgetting, as Che Guevara had written, “that the first duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution.” In this work, where he extolled the example of Fidel Castro and his comrades as revolutionary models, he cited Trotsky. Because of this citation he was subjected to a disciplinary tribunal in Leipzig and expelled in the most infamous way from East Germany and from the Peruvian Communist Party. This was how he came to Paris, where he married a French girl, Jacqueline, who was also a revolutionary activist. In Paris he met Paúl, his old friend from San Marcos, and became affiliated with the MIR. He had received guerrilla training in Cuba and was counting the hours until he could return to Peru and move into action. During the time of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, I saw him everywhere, attending every demonstration of solidarity with Cuba and speaking at several of them, in good French and with devastating rhetoric.
He was a tall, slim boy, with light ebony skin and a smile that displayed magnificent teeth. Just as he could argue for hours, with great intellectual substance, about political subjects, he was also capable of becoming involved in impassioned dialogues on literature, art, or sports, especially soccer and the feats of his team, the Alianza Lima. There was something in his being that communicated his enthusiasm, his idealism, his generosity, and the steely sense of justice that guided his life, something I don’t believe I had seen—especially in so genuine a way—in any of the revolutionaries who passed through Paris during the sixties. That he had agreed to be an ordinary member of the MIR, where there wasn’t anyone with his talent and charisma, spoke very clearly to the purity of his revolutionary vocation. On the three or four occasions I talked to him, I was convinced, despite my skepticism, that if someone as lucid and energetic as Lobatón were at the head of the revolutionaries, Peru could be the second Cuba in Latin America.
It was at least six months after she left that I had news of Comrade Arlette, through Paúl. Since my contract as a temp left me with a good amount of free time, I began to study Russian, thinking that if I could also translate from that language—one of the four official languages of the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies at the time—my work as a translator would be more secure. I was also taking a course in simultaneous interpretation. The work of interpreters was more intense and difficult than that of translators, but for this reason they were more in demand. One day, as I left my Russian class at the Berlitz School on Boulevard des Capucines, I found fat Paúl waiting for me at the entrance to the building.
“News about the girl, finally,” he said by way of greeting, wearing a long face. “I’m sorry, but it isn’t good, mon vieux.”
I invited him to one of the bistrots near the Opéra for a drink to help me digest the bad news. We sat outside, on the terrace. It was a warm spring twilight, with early stars, and all of Paris seemed to have poured out onto the street to enjoy the good weather. We ordered two beers.
“I suppose that after so much time you’re not still in love with her,” Paúl said to prepare me.
“I suppose not,” I replied. “Tell me once and for all and don’t fuck around, Paúl.”
He had just spent a few days in Havana, and Comrade Arlette was the talk of all the young Peruvians in the MIR because, according to excited rumors, she was having a passionate love affair with Comandante Chacón, second-in-command to Osmani Cienfuegos, the younger brother of Camilo, the great hero of the Cuban Revolution who had disappeared. Comandante Osmani Cienfuegos was head of the organization that lent assistance to all revolutionary movements and related parties, and the man who coordinated rebel actions in every corner of the world. Comandante Chacón, veteran of the Sierra Maestra, was his right arm.
br /> “Can you imagine, that tremendous piece of news was the first thing I heard.” Paúl scratched his head. “That skinny thing, that absolutely ordinary girl, having an affair with one of the historic comandantes! Comandante Chacón, no less!”
“Couldn’t it just be gossip, Paúl?”
He shook his head remorsefully, and patted my arm in encouragement.
“I was with them myself at a meeting in Casa de las Américas. They’re living together. Comrade Arlette, even if you don’t believe it, has become an influential person, sharing bed and table with the comandantes.”
“It’s just wonderful for the MIR,” I said.
“But shit for you.” Paúl gave me another little pat. “I’m damn sorry to have to give you the news, mon vieux. But it’s better for you to know, isn’t it? Okay, it’s not the end of the world. Besides, Paris is full of damn fine women. Just look around.”
After attempting a few jokes, with absolutely no success, I asked Paúl about Comrade Arlette.
“As the companion of a comandante of the revolution she doesn’t need a thing, I suppose,” he said evasively. “Is that what you want to know? Or if she’s richer or uglier than when she was here? Just the same, I think. A little more tanned by the Caribbean sun. You know, I never thought she was anything special. I mean, don’t make that face, it’s not that important, my friend.”
Often, in the days, weeks, and months that followed that meeting with Paúl, I tried to imagine the Chilean girl transformed into Comandante Chacón’s lover, dressed as a guerrilla fighter with a pistol at her waist, a blue beret, boots, alternating with Fidel and Raúl Castro in the big parades and demonstrations of the revolution, doing voluntary work on weekends and toiling like a slave in the cane fields while her small hands with their delicate fingers struggled to hold the machete and, perhaps, with that facility of hers for phonetic metamorphosis which I already knew about, speaking with that lingering, sensual music of people from the Caribbean. The truth is, I couldn’t envision her in her new role: her image trickled away as if it were liquid. Had she really fallen in love with this comandante? Or had he been the instrument for her getting out of guerrilla training and, above all, out of her commitment to the MIR to wage revolutionary war in Peru? It did me no good at all to think about Comrade Arlette, since each time I did I felt as if a new ulcer had opened in the pit of my stomach. To avoid this, and I wasn’t completely successful, I dedicated myself zealously to my classes in Russian and simultaneous interpretation whenever Señor Charnés, with whom I got on very well, had no contract for me. And I had to tell Aunt Alberta—to whom I’d confessed in a letter, in a moment of weakness, that I was in love with a girl named Arlette, and who was always asking for her photograph—that we had broken up and from now on she should put the matter out of her mind.