The Bad Girl (13 page)

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. Lobaton

and Maximo Velando had moved plans forward in Junin. 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 Paul, 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.

"He lost a lot of weight," Alfonso added. "The morning I said

goodbye to him, in Illarec ch'aska, he was almost as thin as you.

Sometimes we talked about you. T wonder what our ambassador to

UNESCO is doing?' he'd say. 'Do you think he decided to publish

those poems he was secretly writing?' He never lost his sense of

humor. He always won the joke contests we had at night to keep

from being bored. His wife and son are living in Cuba now."

I would have liked to spend more time with Alfonso the

Spiritualist, but I had to go back to the conference. We said goodbye

with a hug, and I gave him my number so he could call me if he ever

came through Paris.

A little while before or after this conversation, the grim

prophecies of my uncle Ataulfo came true. On October 3,1968, the

military, headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, initiated the

coup that ended the democracy presided over by Belaunde Tern*,

who was sent into exile, and a new military dictatorship began in

Peru that would last for twelve years.

3

In the second half of the 1960s, London displaced Paris as the city of

styles and trends that moved into Europe and then spread all over

the world. Music replaced books and ideas as a center of attraction

for the young, above all with the Beatles but also including Cliff

Richard, the Shadows, the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger, other

English bands and singers, and hippies and the psychedelic

revolution of the flower children. As they had once gone to Paris to

make the revolution, many Latin Americans immigrated to London

to join the partisans of cannabis, pop music, and the promiscuous

life. Carnaby Street supplanted Saint-Germain as the navel of the

world. London was the birthplace of the miniskirt, long hair, the

eccentric outfits commemorated by the musicals Hair and Jesus

Christ Superstar, the popularization of drugs, beginning with

marijuana and ending with LSD, the fascination with Hindu

spiritualism and Buddhism, the practice of free love, the emergence

of homosexuals from the closet, gay pride campaigns, as well as a

total rejection of the bourgeois establishment, in the name not of

the socialist revolution, to which the hippies were indifferent, but of

a hedonistic and anarchic pacifism, tamed by a love for nature and

animals and a disavowal of traditional morality7. Debates regarding

La Mutualite, the nouveau roman, refined singer-songwriters like

Leo Ferre or Georges Brassens, and Parisian art cinemas were no

longer the points of reference for young rebels, but rather Trafalgar

Square and the parks where they demonstrated behind Vanessa

Redgrave and Tariq Ali against the war in Vietnam, between crowded

concerts by their great idols and tokes of Colombian herb, and pubs

and discotheques, symbols of the new culture that like a magnet

attracted millions of young people of both sexes to London. In

England these were also the years of theatrical splendor, and the

mounting of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade in 1964, directed by Peter

Brook, best known for his revolutionary stagings of Shakespeare,

was an event throughout all of Europe. I've never seen anything

onstage since then that etched itself so deeply in my mind.

Through one of those strange conjunctions woven by fate, it

turned out that in the late sixties I was spending long periods of

time in England and living in the very heart of swinging London: in

Earl's Court, an extremely lively and cosmopolitan section west of

Kensington which, because of the many New Zealanders and

Australians, was known as Kangaroo Valley. In fact, the adventure of

May 1968, when the young people of Paris filled the Latin Quarter

with barricades and declared that one had to be a realist by choosing

the impossible, found me in London, where, because of the strikes

that paralyzed train stations and airports in France, I was stranded

for a few weeks, unable to find out if anything had happened to my

little apartment near the Ecole Militaire.

When I returned to Paris, I discovered that my apartment was

intact, for the revolution of May 1968 had not spilled over the

perimeter of the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

Contrary to what many people prophesied during those euphoric

days, it did not have significant political consequences except to

accelerate the fall of de Gaulle, inaugurate the brief five-year era of

Pompidou, and reveal the existence of a left more modern than the

French Communist Party ("la crapule stalinienne" according to the

phrase of Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of '68). Customs became

freer, but from the cultural point of view, with the disappearance of

an entire illustrious generation—Mauriac, Camus, Sartre, Aron,

Merleau-Ponty, Malraux—there was a discreet cultural retraction

during those years, when instead of creators, the maitres a penser

became the critics, first the structuralists in the style of Michel

Foucault and Roland Barthes, and then the deconstructionists, like

Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, with their arrogant, esoteric

rhetoric, isolated in cabals of devotees and removed from the

general public, whose cultural life, as a consequence of this

development, became increasingly banal.

Those were years when I was working very hard, though, as the

bad girl might have said, with only moderate achievements: the

move from translator to interpreter. As I had done the first time, I

filled the emptiness of her disappearance by taking on countless

obligations. I resumed my classes in Russian and simultaneous

interpretation, to which I devoted myself tenaciously after my hours

of work at UNESCO. I spent two summers in the USSR, for two

months each time, the first in Moscow and the second in Leningrad,

taking special intensive Russian-language courses for interpreters in

secluded university areas where we felt as if we were at a Jesuit

boarding school.

Some two years after my final supper with Robert Arnoux, I had

a rather subdued relationship with Cecile, a functionary at UNESCO,

an attractive, pleasant woman but a nondrinker, a vegetarian, and a

devout Catholic, with whom I got along perfectly well only when we

made love, because in everything else we were polar opposites. At

one point we contemplated the possibility of living together, but

both of us became frightened—I above all—at the prospect of

cohabitation when we were so different and there was not, deep

down, even the shadow of true love between us. Our relationship

languished from tedium, and one day we stopped seeing and calling

each other.

It was difficult for me to obtain my first contracts as an

interpreter in spite of excelling at all the exams and having the

corresponding diplomas. But this was a tighter network than that of

translators, and the professional associations, real mafias, admitted

new members by the eyedropper. I achieved membership only when

I could add Russian to English and French as the languages I

translated into Spanish. My interpreting contracts kept me traveling

a great deal in Europe, and frequently to London, especially for

economic conferences and seminars. One day in 1970, at the

Permian consulate on Sloane Street, where I had gone to renew my

passport, I ran into Juan Barreto, a childhood friend and classmate

at the Colegio Champagnat in Miraflores, who was also renewing his

passport.

He had become a hippie, not the tattered kind but an elegant one.

He wore his silky, graying hair hanging loose down to his shoulders

and had a rather sparse beard that created a carefully tended muzzle

around his mouth. I remembered him as chubby and short, but now

he was taller than me by a few centimeters and was as slim as a

model. He wore cherry-colored velvet trousers and sandals that

seemed to be made of parchment, not leather, a printed silk Oriental

tunic, a blaze of color framed by his loose, open jacket that reminded

me of the ones worn by Turkoman shepherds in a documentary on

Mesopotamia I had seen at the Palais de Chaillot in the series

Connaissance du monde, which I attended every month.

We went for coffee in the vicinity of the consulate, and our

conversation was so agreeable I invited him to have lunch at a pub

in Kensington Gardens. We spent more than two hours together, he

speaking and I listening and interjecting monosyllables.

His story was novelesque. I recalled that in his last years at

school, Juan began to work at Radio El Sol as a commentator and

soccer announcer, and his Marist friends predicted a great future for

him as a sports journalist. "But that was really a child's game," he

told me. "My true vocation was always painting." He attended the

School of Fine Arts in Lima and took part in a group show at the

Institute of Contemporary Art on Jiron Ocona. Then his father sent

him to take a course in design and color at St. Martin School of Arts

in London. As soon as he arrived in England, he decided the city was

his ("Brother, it seemed to be waiting for me") and he would never

leave it. When he told his father he wasn't returning to Peru, his

father cut off his allowance. Then he began a poverty-stricken

existence as a street artist, making portraits of tourists in Leicester

Square or in the doorways of Harrods, and drawing with chalk on

the sidewalks of Parliament, Big Ben, or the Tower of London and

then passing the hat among the onlookers. He slept at the YMCA

and in miserable bed-and-breakfasts and, like other dropouts, on

winter nights he took refuge in religious shelters for human rejects

and stood in long lines at churches and charitable institutions where

they gave out bowls of hot soup twice a day. He often spent the night

outdoors, in parks or inside cartons in the vestibules of stores. "I

was desperate, but never once in all that time did I feel fucked-up

enough to ask my father for a ticket back to Peru."

In spite of their insolvency, he and other vagabond hippies

managed to travel to Kathmandu, where he discovered that in

spiritual Nepal it was more difficult to survive without money than

in materialistic Europe. The solidarity of his migratory companions

was decisive in keeping him from dying of hunger or disease,

because in India he contracted a Maltese fever that brought him to

within an inch of departing this world. The girl and two boys

traveling with him took turns watching over him as he convalesced

in a filthy hospital in Madras where the rats wandered among the

patients lying on the floor on straw mats.

"I'd become totally accustomed to the life of a tramp, to my

home being on the street, when my luck changed."

He was making charcoal portraits for a couple of pounds each at