The Bad Girl (14 page)

the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum on Brompton Road,

when a lady carrying a parasol and wearing net gloves unexpectedly

asked him to draw the portrait of the dog she was walking, a female

King Charles spaniel, with white and coffee-colored spots, that was

brushed, washed, and combed with the airs of a lady. The dog's

name was Esther. The lady was delighted with the double drawing

Juan made, "full face and in profile." When she went to pay him, she

discovered she didn't have any money, either because her wallet had

been stolen or because she had left it at home. "It doesn't matter,"

said Juan. "It's been an honor to work for so distinguished a model."

The lady, confused and grateful, left. But after taking a few steps,

she returned and handed Juan a card. "If you're ever in the area,

knock on the door so you can greet your new friend." She pointed at

the dog.

Mrs. Stubard, a retired nurse and childless widow, became a fairy

godmother whose magic wand took Juan Barreto off the London

streets and gradually cleaned him up ("One of the consequences of

being a tramp is that you never bathe, and you don't even smell as

dirty as you really are"), fed him, dressed him, and finally catapulted

him into the most English of English environments: the world of

owners, riders, trainers, and enthusiasts at the Newmarket Riding

Club, where the most famous racehorses in Great Britain, and

perhaps the world, are born, grow up, die, and are buried.

Mrs. Stubard lived alone with little Esther in a redbrick house,

with a small garden that she tended herself and kept beautiful, in a

quiet, prosperous section of St. John's Wood. She had inherited it

from her husband, a pediatrician who had spent his entire life in the

wards and consulting rooms of Charing Cross Hospital caring for

other people's children though he never could have one of his own.

Juan Barreto knocked on the widow's door one afternoon when he

was hungrier, lonelier, and more anguished than usual. She

recognized him immediately.

"I've come to see how my friend Esther is getting along. And, if

it's not too much trouble, to ask you for a piece of bread."

"Come in, artist," she said with a smile. "Would you mind

shaking off those disgusting sandals you're wearing? And take the

opportunity to wash your feet at the faucet in the garden."

"Mrs. Stubard was an angel come down from heaven," said Juan

Barreto. "She had framed my charcoal drawing of the dog and kept it

on an end table in the living room. It looked very nice." She also had

Juan wash his hands with soap and water ("From the beginning she

adopted the air of a bossy mother that she still uses with me") and

fixed him a couple of tomato, cheese, and cucumber sandwiches and

a cup of tea. They talked for a long time, and she urged Juan to tell

her his life from A to Z. She was alert and avid to know everything

about the world, and she insisted that Juan describe in detail what

the hippies were like, where they came from, and what kinds of lives

they led.

"You won't believe it, but I was fascinated by the old lady. I went

to see her not only so she could feed me but because I had a great

time talking to her. She had a seventy-year-old body but a fifteenyear-

old spirit. And this'll kill you, I turned her into a hippie."

Juan stopped by the little house in St. John's Wood once a week,

bathed and combed Esther, helped Mrs. Stubard prune and water

the garden, and sometimes went shopping with her at the nearby

Sainsbury market. The bourgeois residents of St. John's Wood must

have been surprised to see the mismatched pair. Juan helped her

cook—he taught her Permian recipes for stuffed potato, shredded

chicken and chili, ceviche—and washed the dishes for her, and then

they had after-dinner conversations during which Juan played music

by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones for her, and recounted a

thousand and one adventures and anecdotes about the hippies, male

and female, he had met on his wanderings around London, India,

and Nepal. Mrs. Stubard's curiosity was not satisfied with Juan's

explanations of how cannabis sharpened one's lucidity and

sensitivity, principally for music. At last, overcoming her

prejudices—she was a practicing Methodist—she gave Juan some

money so she could try marijuana. "She was so restless, I swear she

would have tried a cap of LSD if I had encouraged her to." Their

marijuana session was carried out against the musical background

of the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine, the Beatles picture Mrs.

Stubard and Juan had gone arm in arm to see at a theater in

Picadilly Circus. My friend was afraid his protector and friend would

have a bad trip and, in fact, eventually she complained of a headache

and fell asleep faceup on the living-room carpet after two hours of

extraordinary excitement when she chattered like a parrot, bursting

into laughter and doing ballet steps before the stupefied eyes of

Juan and Esther.

Their relationship turned into something more than friendship, a

fraternal companionship of accomplices in spite of the differences in

age, language, and background. "I felt as if she were my mother, my

sister, my buddy, my guardian angel."

As if Juan's testimony regarding the hippie subculture were not

enough for her, one day Mrs. Stubard suggested he invite two or

three of his friends for tea. He had all kinds of doubts. He feared the

consequences of that effort to mix water and oil, but finally he

arranged for the meeting. He chose three of the more presentable of

his hippie friends and told them if they gave Mrs. Stubard a hard

time, or stole anything from her house, he'd break his pacifist vows

and strangle them. The two girls and the boy—Rene, Jody, and

Aspern—sold incense and bags woven according to supposed

Afghani patterns on the streets of Earl's Court. They behaved fairly

well and made short work of the strawberry shortcake and almond

pastries Mrs. Stubard had prepared for them, but when they lit a

stick of incense, explaining to the lady of the house that this would

purify the atmosphere spiritually and that the karma of each person

present would improve, it turned out that Mrs. Stubard was allergic

to the purifying smoke: she suffered an attack of loud, unstoppable

sneezes that reddened her eyes and nose and set off Esther's

barking. When this incident had been overcome, the get-together

proceeded fairly well until Rene, Jody, and Aspern told Mrs. Stubard

they formed a love triangle and that the three of them making love

was their homage to the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the

Holy Spirit—and an even more determined way of putting into

practice the slogan "Make love not war," approved at the last

demonstration in Trafalgar Square against the war in Vietnam by no

less a personage than the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand

Russell. Within the Methodist morality she had been taught, a

three-way love was something Mrs. Stubard had not imagined even

in her most salacious nightmare. "The poor woman's jaw dropped

and she spent the rest of the afternoon staring in a catatonic stupor

at the trio I had brought to her house. Later, she confessed with a

melancholy air that, having been brought up as English girls of her

generation were brought up, she had been deprived of many curious

things in life. And she told me she never had seen her husband

naked, because from the first day to the last they made love in the

dark."

From visiting her once a week, Juan passed on to two, then three

visits, and finally he moved in with Mrs. Stubard, who fixed up the

small room that had been her late husband's, since in his final years

they'd had separate bedrooms. Contrary to what Juan had feared,

their cohabitation was perfect. She never tried to interfere in any

way in Juan's life, or ask why he slept elsewhere on certain nights or

came home when the residents of St. John's Wood were leaving for

work. She gave him a key to the house. "The only thing she worried

about was my taking a bath a couple of times a week," Juan said

with a laugh. "Because you may not believe it, but after almost three

years as a street hippie, I had lost the habit of showering. In Mrs.

Stubard's house, I gradually rediscovered the Miraflores perversion

of a daily shower."

In addition to helping her in the garden and kitchen, and taking

Esther for walks and putting the trash can out on the street, Juan

had long, intimate conversations with Mrs. Stubard, always with a

cup of tea in their hands and a platter of gingersnaps in front of

them. He told her about Peru and she talked of an England that,

from the perspective of swinging London, seemed prehistoric: boys

and girls who stayed in harsh boarding schools until they were

sixteen and where, except for the disreputable districts of Soho, St.

Pancras, and the East End, life ended at nine o'clock at night. The

only diversion Mrs. Stubard and her husband allowed themselves

was to go occasionally to hear a concert or an opera at Covent

Garden. During summer vacation they spent a week in Bristol, in the

house of her brother and sister-in-law, and another week in the

Scottish Highlands, which her husband loved. Mrs. Stubard had

never been out of Great Britain. But she was interested in the world:

she read The Times carefully, beginning with the obituaries, and

listened to BBC newscasts on the radio at one in the afternoon and

at eight in the evening. It never had occurred to her to buy a

television set, and she went to the movies only rarely. But she had a

phonograph and listened to the symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven,

and Benjamin Britten.

One day her nephew Charles, her only close relative, came for

tea. He was a horse trainer at Newmarket, quite a character,

according to his aunt. And he must have been, judging by the red

Jaguar he parked at the door to the house. Young and jovial, with

curly blond hair and red cheeks, he was amazed there wasn't a single

bottle of good Scotch in the house and that he had to make do with a

glass of the sweet muscatel Mrs. Stubard regaled him with after tea,

the inevitable cucumber sandwiches, and the cheese and lemon

cake. He was very cordial to Juan, though he had difficulty7 locating

in the world the exotic country the hippie of the house came

from—he confused Peru with Mexico—something he criticized

himself for with a sporting spirit: "I'm going to buy a map of the

world and a geography manual so I won't stick my foot in my mouth

again the way I did today." He stayed until nightfall, telling

anecdotes about the thoroughbred he was training for the races at

Newmarket. And he confessed he had become a trainer because he

couldn't be a jockey, given his husky build. "Being a jockey is a

terrible sacrifice, but it's also the most beautiful profession in the

world. Winning the Derby, victory at Ascot, just imagine! Better than

winning first prize in the lottery."

Before he left he stood looking, with great satisfaction, at the

charcoal sketch Juan Barreto had made of Esther. "This is a work of

art," he declared. "I laughed at him to myself, taking him for a

yokel," Juan Barreto said in self-recrimination.

A short while later my friend received a note that, second only to

his street encounter with Mrs. Stubard and Esther, definitively

changed the direction of his life. Would the "artist" be interested in

painting a portrait of Primrose, the mare Charles was training, the

star of Mr. Patrick Chick's stable, whose owner, happy with the

rewards she brought him at the track, wanted to eternalize her in an

oil painting? He was offering two hundred pounds if he liked the

painting; if not, Juan could keep the canvas and receive fifty pounds

for his efforts. "My ears still buzz with the vertigo I felt as I read that

letter from Charles." Juan rolled his eyes with retrospective

emotion.

Thanks to Primrose, Charles, and Mr. Chick, Juan stopped being

an insolvent hippie and became a salon hippie, whose talent for

immortalizing on canvas fillies, mares, breeders, and racers

("animals about which I was completely ignorant") gradually opened

to him the doors of the Newmarket owners and trainers. Mr. Chick

liked the oil painting of Primrose and gave an astounded Juan

Barreto the two hundred pounds he had promised. The first thing

Juan did was to buy Mrs. Stubard a little flowered hat and matching

umbrella.

That had been four years ago. Juan still did not completely

believe the fantastic change in his luck. He had painted at least a

hundred oils of horses and made countless drawings, sketches, and

studies in pencil and in charcoal, and he had so much work that the

stable owners at Newmarket were obliged to wait weeks before he

could take care of their requests. He bought a little house in the

country halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket, and a pied-aterre

in Earl's Court for his visits to London. Whenever he came to