“In spite of everything it was a nice weekend,” she said, brushing my lips. “Ciao, mon amour.”
When I returned home, surprised at her abrupt departure, I discovered she had left her toothbrush in the bathroom. A beautiful little brush that had the name of the manufacturer stamped on the handle: Guerlain. Forgotten? Probably not. Probably a deliberate oversight in order to leave me a memento of the sad night and happy waking.
That week I couldn’t see or talk to her, and the following week, without being able to say goodbye—she didn’t answer the phone no matter what time I called—I left for Vienna to work for two weeks at the International Atomic Energy Agency. I loved that baroque, elegant, prosperous city, but a temp’s work during those periods when international organizations have congresses, general sessions, or annual conferences—which is when they need extra translators and interpreters—is so intense it didn’t leave me time for museums, concerts, or the Opéra, except one afternoon when I made a fast visit to the Albertina. At night I was exhausted and barely had the energy to go into one of the old cafés, the Central, the Landtmann, the Hawelka, the Frauenhuber, with their belleépoque decor, to have a wiener schnitzel, the Austrian version of the breaded steak my aunt Alberta used to make, and a glass of foaming beer. I was groggy when I got into bed. I called the bad girl several times but nobody answered, or the phone was busy. I didn’t dare call Robert Amoux at UNESCO, afraid I’d arouse his suspicions. At the end of the two weeks, Señor Charnés telegraphed me proposing a ten-day contract in Rome for a seminar followed by a conference at the Food and Agriculture Organization, so that I traveled to Italy without passing through Paris. I couldn’t reach her from Rome, either. I called her as soon as I was back in France. Without success, of course. What was going on? I began to have anguished thoughts of an accident, an illness, a domestic tragedy.
My nerves were so on edge because I couldn’t communicate with Madame Arnoux that I had to read the most recent letter from Uncle Ataúlfo twice; I found it waiting for me in Paris. I couldn’t concentrate or get the Chilean girl out of my mind. Uncle Ataúlfo gave me long interpretations of the political situation in Peru. The Túpac Amaru column of the MIR, led by Lobatón, hadn’t been captured yet, though army communiqués reported constant clashes in which the guerrillas always suffered losses. According to the press, Lobatón and his people had gone deep into the forest and made alliances among the Amazonian tribes, principally the Asháninka, dispersed throughout the region bounded by the Ene, Perené, Satipo, and Anapati rivers. There were rumors that the Asháninka communities, seduced by Lobatón’s personality, identified him with a mythical hero, Itomi Pavá, the atavistic dispenser of justice who, according to legend, would come back one day to restore the power of their nation. Military planes had bombed forest villages on the suspicion they were hiding Miristas.
After more fruitless attempts to speak with Madame Arnoux, I decided to go to UNESCO and see her husband, using the pretext of inviting them to supper. I went first to say hello to Señor Charnés and my colleagues in the Spanish office. Then I went up to the sixth floor, the sanctum sanctorum, where the head offices were located. From the door I could see Monsieur Arnoux’s ravaged face and brush mustache. He gave a strange start when he saw me and seemed gruffer than ever, as if my presence displeased him. Was he ill? He seemed to have aged ten years in the few weeks I hadn’t seen him. He extended a reluctant hand without saying a word and waited for me to speak, giving me a penetrating stare with his rodent eyes.
“I’ve been working away from Paris this past month, in Vienna and Rome. I’d like to invite the two of you to have supper one night when you’re free.”
He kept looking at me, not answering. He was very pale now, his expression desolate, and he pursed his lips as if it were difficult for him to speak. My hands began to tremble. Was he going to tell me that his wife had died?
“Then you haven’t heard,” he murmured drily. “Or are you playing a game?”
I was disconcerted and didn’t know how to answer.
“All of UNESCO knows,” he added, quietly, sarcastically. “I’m the laughingstock of the agency. My wife has left me, and I don’t even know for whom. I thought it was you, Señor Somocurcio.”
His voice broke before he finished pronouncing my name. His chin quivered and his teeth seemed to be chattering. I stammered that I was sorry, I hadn’t heard anything, and stupidly repeated that this month I had been working away from Paris, in Vienna and Rome. And I said goodbye, but Monsieur Arnoux didn’t respond.
I was so surprised and chagrined that I felt a wave of nausea in the elevator and had to throw up in the bathroom in the corridor. With whom had she gone away? Could she still be living in Paris with her lover? One thought accompanied me in the days that followed: the weekend she had given me was her goodbye. So I’d have something special to pine for. The leavings you throw to the dog, Ricardito. Some calamitous days followed that brief visit to Monsieur Arnoux. For the first time in my life, I suffered from insomnia. I was in a sweat all night, my mind blank, as I clutched the Guerlain toothbrush that I kept like a charm in my night table, chewing on my despair and jealousy. The next day I was a wreck, my body shaken by chills, without energy for anything, and I didn’t even want to eat. The doctor prescribed Nembutal, which didn’t put me to sleep so much as knock me out. I awoke distraught and shaking, as if I had a savage hangover. I kept cursing myself for how stupid I had been when I sent her off to Cuba, putting my friendship with Paúl ahead of the love I felt for her. If I had held on to her we would still be together, and life wouldn’t be this sleeplessness, this emptiness, this bile.
Señor Charnés helped me out of the slow emotional dissolution in which I found myself by giving me a month’s contract. I wanted to fall on my knees and thank him. With the routine of work at UNESCO, I was slowly emerging from the crisis I had been in since the disappearance of the ex-Chilean girl, the ex-guerrilla fighter, the ex-Madame Amoux. What did she call herself now? What personality, what name, what history had she adopted for this new stage in her life? Her new lover must be very important, much more important than the adviser to the director of UNESCO, who was too modest for her ambitions now, and who was devastated by her leaving. She had given me clear warning that last morning: “I’d only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful.” I was certain I wouldn’t see her again this time. You had to pull yourself together and forget the Peruvian girl with a thousand faces, good boy, convince yourself she was no more than a bad dream.
But a few days after I had gone back to work at UNESCO, Monsieur Arnoux appeared in the cubicle that was my office as I was translating a report on bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa.
“I’m sorry I was short with you the other day,” he said, uncomfortably. “I was in a very bad state of mind just then.”
He proposed that we have supper. And though I knew this supper would be catastrophic for my own state of mind, my curiosity to hear about her and find out what had happened were stronger, and I accepted.
We went to Chez Eux, a restaurant in the seventh arrondissement, not far from my house. It was the tensest, most difficult supper I’ve ever had. But fascinating too, because I learned many things about the ex—Madame Arnoux and also discovered how far she had gone in her search for the security she identified with wealth.
We ordered whiskey with ice and Perrier as an aperitif, and then red wine with a meal we barely tasted. Chez Eux had a fixed menu consisting of exquisite food that came in deep pans, and our table was filling up with pâtés, snails, salads, fish, meat, which the amazed waiters took away almost untouched to make room for a great variety of desserts, one bathed in bubbling chocolate, not understanding why we slighted all those delicacies.
Robert Arnoux asked me how long I had known her. I lied and said only since 1960 or 1961, when she passed through Paris on her way to Cuba as one of the recipients of a scholarship from the MIR to receive guerrilla training.
“In
other words, you don’t know anything about her past, her family,” Monsieur Arnoux said with a nod, as if he were talking to himself. “I always knew she lied. About her family and her childhood, I mean. But I forgave her. They seemed like pious lies intended to disguise a childhood and adolescence that embarrassed her. Because she must have come from a very humble social class, don’t you agree?”
“She didn’t like talking about it. She never told me anything about her family. But yes, undoubtedly a very humble class—”
“It made me sad, I could guess at the mountain of prejudices in Peruvian society, the great family names, the racism,” he interrupted me. “She said she had attended the Sophianum, the best nuns’ academy in Lima, where the daughters of high society were educated. That her father owned a cotton plantation and she had broken with her family out of idealism, in order to be a revolutionary. She never cared about the revolution, I’m sure of that! From the time I met her, she never expressed a single political opinion. She would have done anything to get out of Cuba. Even marry me. When we left, I suggested a trip to Peru to meet her family. She told me more stories, of course. That because she had been in the MIR and in Cuba, if she set foot in Peru she would be arrested. I forgave these fantasies. I understood they were born of her insecurity. She had been infected with the social and racial prejudices that are so strong in South American countries. That’s why she invented the biography for me of the aristocratic girl she had never been.”
At times I had the impression that Monsieur Arnoux had forgotten about me. Even his gaze was lost at some point in the void, and he spoke so softly his words became an inaudible murmur. At other times he recovered, looked at me with suspicion and hatred, and pressed me to tell him if I’d known she had a lover. I was her compatriot, her friend, hadn’t she ever confided in me?
“She never said a word. I never suspected anything. I thought you two got along very well, that you were happy.”
“I thought so too,” he murmured, crestfallen. He ordered another bottle of wine. And added, his eyes veiled and his voice acerbic: “She didn’t need to do what she did. It was ugly, it was dirty, it was disloyal to behave like that with me. I gave her my name, I went out of my way to make her happy. I endangered my career to get her out of Cuba. That was a real via crucis. Disloyalty can’t reach these extremes. So much calculation, so much hypocrisy, it’s inhuman.”
Abruptly he stopped speaking. He moved his lips, not making a sound, and his rectangular little mustache twisted and stretched. He had gripped his empty glass and was squeezing it as if he wanted to crush it. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears.
I didn’t know what to say to him, any consolatory phrase would have sounded false and ridiculous. Suddenly, I understood that so much desperation was not due only to her abandoning him. There was something else he wanted to tell me but was finding difficult.
“My life’s savings,” Monsieur Arnoux whispered, looking at me accusingly, as if I were responsible for his tragedy. “Do you follow? I’m an older man, I’m in no condition to rebuild my whole life. Do you understand? Not only to deceive me with some gangster who must have helped her plan the crime, but to do that too: withdraw all the money from the account we had in Switzerland. I gave her that proof of my trust, do you see? A joint account. In case I had an accident, or died suddenly. So inheritance taxes wouldn’t take everything I’d saved in a lifetime of work and sacrifice. Do you understand the disloyalty, the vileness? She went to Switzerland to make a deposit and took everything, everything, and ruined me. Chapeau, un coup de maître! She knew I couldn’t denounce her without accusing myself, without ruining my reputation and my position. She knew if I denounced her I’d be the first one injured, for keeping secret accounts, for evading taxes. Do you understand how well planned it was? Can you believe she could be so cruel toward someone who gave her only love and devotion?”
He kept returning to the same subject, with intervals in which we drank wine in silence, each of us absorbed in his own thoughts. Was it perverse of me to wonder what hurt him more, her leaving him or her stealing his secret bank account in Switzerland? I felt sorry for him, and I felt remorse, but I didn’t know how to comfort him. I limited myself to interjecting occasional brief, friendly phrases. In reality, he didn’t want to converse with me. He had invited me to supper because he needed someone to listen to him, he needed to say aloud, before a witness, things that had been scorching his heart ever since the disappearance of his wife.
“Forgive me, I needed to unburden myself,” he said at last when all the other diners had left and we were alone, watched with impatient eyes by the waiters in Chez Eux. “I thank you for your patience. I hope this catharsis does me some good.”
I said that with time, all of this would be behind him, no trouble lasts a hundred years. And as I spoke, I felt like a total hypocrite, as guilty as if I had planned the flight of ex—Madame Arnoux and the plundering of his secret account.
“If you ever run into her, please tell her. She didn’t need to do that. I would have given her everything. Did she want my money? I would have given it to her. But not like this, not like this.”
We said goodbye in the doorway of the restaurant, in the brilliance of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. It was the last time I saw the mistreated Monsieur Robert Arnoux.
The Túpac Amaru column of the MIR, under the command of Guillermo Lobatón, lasted some five months longer than the column that had made its headquarters on Mesa Pelada. As it had done with Luis de la Puente, Paúl Escobar, and the Miristas who perished in the valley of La Convención, the army gave no details regarding how it annihilated all the members of that guerrilla band. In the second half of 1965, helped by the Asháninka of Gran Pajonal, Lobatón and his companions eluded the persecution of the special forces of the army that mobilized in helicopters and on land and savagely punished the indigenous settlements that hid and fed the guerrillas. Finally, the decimated column, twelve men devastated by mosquitoes, fatigue, and disease, fell in the vicinity of the Sotziqui River on January 7, 1966. Did they die in combat or were they captured alive and executed? Their graves were never found. According to unverifiable rumors, Lobatón and his second-in-command were taken up in a helicopter and thrown into the forest so the animals would devour their corpses. For several years Lobatón’s French partner, Jacqueline, attempted without success, by means of campaigns in Peru and other countries, to have the government reveal the location of the graves of the rebels in that ephemeral guerrilla war. Were there survivors? Were they living clandestinely in the convulsed, divided Peru of Belaúnde Terry’s final days? As I slowly recovered from the disappearance of the bad girl, I followed these distant events through the letters of Uncle Ataúlfo. He seemed more and more pessimistic about the possibility that democracy would not collapse in Peru. “The same military that defeated the guerrillas is preparing now to defeat the legitimate state and have another kind of uprising,” he assured me.
One day in Germany, in the most unexpected way, I ran into a survivor of Mesa Pelada: none other than Alfonso the Spiritualist, the boy sent to Paris by a theosophical group in Lima, the one fat Paúl had snatched away from spirits and the next world to turn him into a guerrilla fighter. I was in Frankfurt, working at an international conference on communications, and during a break I escaped to a department store to make some purchases. At the register, someone took my arm. I recognized him instantly. In the four years since I’d seen him he had put on weight and let his hair grow very long—the new style in Europe—but his dead-white face with its reserved, rather sad expression was the same. He had been in Germany a few months, obtained political refugee status, and was living with a girl from Frankfurt whom he had met in Paris when Paúl was there. We went to have coffee in the department-store cafeteria full of matrons with fat little children who were being waited on by Turks.
Alfonso the Spiritualist had been miraculously saved from the army commando attack that leveled Mesa Pelada. Luis de la Puente had sent
him to Quillabamba a few days earlier: communications with urban support bases were not working well, and in the field they hadn’t heard anything about a group of five trained boys whose arrival had been expected weeks before.
“The support base in Cuzco had been infiltrated,” he told me, speaking with the same calm I remembered. “Several people were captured, and somebody talked under torture. That’s how they got to Mesa Pelada. The truth was, we hadn’t begun operations. Lobatón and Máximo Velando had moved plans forward in Junín. And after the ambush in Yahuarina, when they killed so many police, they threw the army at us. Those of us in Cuzco hadn’t begun to move yet. De la Puente’s idea wasn’t to stay in the field but to keep moving. ‘The guerrilla focus is perpetual movement,’ that’s what Che taught. But they didn’t give us time and we were caught in the security zone.”
The Spiritualist spoke with a curious distance from what he was saying, as if it had occurred centuries earlier. He didn’t know by what conjunction of circumstances he had escaped the dragnets that demolished the MIR’s support bases in Quillabamba and Cuzco. He hid in the house of a Cuzcan family, whom he had known long ago through his theosophical sect. They treated him very well even though they were afraid. After a couple of months, they got him out of the city and to Puno, hiding in a freight truck. From there it was easy to reach Bolivia, where, after a long series of procedures and formalities, he arranged for East Germany to admit him as a political refugee.
“Tell me about fat Paúl, up there in Mesa Pelada.”
Apparently he had adapted well to the life and to the altitude of 3,800 meters. His spirits never flagged, though at times, on marches exploring the territory around the camp, his body played some bad tricks on him. Above all when he had to climb up mountains or down precipices in torrential rains. One time he fell on a slope that was a quagmire and rolled twenty, thirty meters. His companions thought he had cracked open his skull, but he got up as good as new, covered in mud from head to toe.