The Bad Girl (18 page)

spreading her legs to make a place for my head as she covered her

eyes with her right arm. I felt her begin to move farther and farther

from me, the Russell Hotel, London, in order to concentrate totally,

with an intensity I'd never seen in any other woman, on the solitary,

personal, egotistical pleasure my lips had learned to give her.

Licking, sucking, kissing, nibbling her small sex, I felt her grow wet

and vibrate. It took her a long time to finish. But how delicious and

exciting it was to feel her purring, moving, rocking, submerged in

the vertigo of desire, until at last a long wail shook her body from

head to toe. "Now, now," she whispered in a choked voice. I entered

her easily and embraced her with so much strength that she came

out of the inertia in which the orgasm had left her. She groaned,

twisting, trying to slip out from under my body, complaining,

"You're crushing me."

With my mouth pressed against hers, I pleaded, "For once in

your life, tell me you love me, bad girl. Even if it isn't true, say it. I

want to know how it sounds, just once."

Afterward, when we had finished making love and were talking,

lying naked on the yellow spread, menaced by the fierce Mongol

warriors, and I was caressing her breasts, her waist, and kissing the

almost invisible scar and playing with her smooth belly, pressing my

ear to her navel and listening to the deep sounds of her body, I asked

her why she hadn't made me happy, saying that small lie into my

ear. Hadn't she said it so many times to so many men?

"That's why," she replied immediately, pitiless. "I've never said 'I

love you, I adore you' and really meant it. Never. I've only said those

things as a lie. Because I've never loved anybody, Ricardito. I've lied

to all of them, always. I think the only man I've never lied to in bed

is you."

"Well, coming from you, that's a declaration of love."

Did she finally have what she had wanted for so long, now that

she was married to a rich and powerful man?

A shadow veiled her eyes, and her voice thickened.

"Yes and no. Because even though I have security now and can

buy whatever I want, I'm obliged to live in Newmarket and spend

my life talking about horses."

She said this with a bitterness that seemed to come from the

bottom of her soul. And then, suddenly, she was sincere with me in

an unexpected way, as if she could no longer keep everything inside.

She despised horses with all her heart, along with her friends and

acquaintances in Newmarket, and the owners, trainers, jockeys,

stableboys, grooms, dogs, cats, and every person who directly or

indirectly had anything to do with equines, damn monsters that

were the only topic of conversation and concern of the horrible

people who surrounded her. Not only at the races, the training

tracks, the stables, but also at dinners, receptions, weddings,

birthday parties, and casual encounters, the people in Newmarket

talked about the diseases, accidents, trial runs, victories, or defeats

of those awful quadrupeds. This life had soured her days, and even

her nights, because recently she'd been having nightmares about the

horses of Newmarket. And even though she didn't say so, it was easy

to guess that her immeasurable hatred for horses and Newmarket

had not skipped over her husband. Mr. David Richardson, moved by

his wife's suffering and depression, had given her permission a few

months ago to come to London—a city that the fauna of Newmarket

detested and where they rarely set foot—and take mini-courses on

art history at Christie's and Sotheby's, classes in flower arranging at

Out of the Bloom in Camden, and even sessions in yoga and

Transcendental Meditation at an ashram in Chelsea that distracted

her a little from the psychological devastation caused in her by

horses.

"Well, well, bad girl," I said mockingly, delighted to hear what

she was telling me. "Have you discovered that money isn't always

happiness? Can I hope, then, that one day you'll say goodbye to Mr.

Richardson and marry me? Paris is more amusing than the horsey

hell of Suffolk, as you know."

But she was in no mood for joking. The repugnance she felt for

Newmarket was even more serious than it seemed on that occasion,

a real trauma. I think that never, not once on all the many

afternoons we saw each other and made love over the next two years

in various rooms of the Russell Hotel—I had the impression she

knew them all by heart—never did the bad girl fail to vent her anger

in a rant against the horses and people of Newmarket, whose life she

thought monotonous, stupid, the emptiest in the world. Why, if she

was so unhappy with the life she led, didn't she put an end to it?

Why was she waiting to leave David Richardson, a man she clearly

had not married for love?

"I don't dare ask him for a divorce," she confessed on one of

those afternoons. "I don't know what would happen to me."

"Nothing would happen to you. You're legally married, aren't

you? Couples here get unmarried without any problem."

"I don't know," she said, going a little further with her

confidences than usual. "We were married in Gibraltar and I'm not

sure if the marriage is valid here. And I don't know how to check

that without David finding out. Good boy, you don't know the rich.

Least of all David. To marry me he worked out a divorce with his

lawyers that almost left his first wife in the street. I don't want the

same thing to happen to me. He has the best lawyers, the best

connections. And in England I'm less than nobody, a poor shit."

I never could learn how she had met him, when and in what way

her romance with David Richardson had blossomed and catapulted

her from Paris to Newmarket. It was clear she had miscalculated

when she thought that with this conquest she would also conquer

the unlimited freedom she associated with a fortune. Not only was

she not happy, but apparently she had been happier as the wife of

the French functionary she had abandoned. When, on another

afternoon, she brought up Robert Arnoux and insisted I recount in

exact detail the conversation we'd had on the night he invited me to

supper at Chez Eux, I did as she asked, omitting nothing, even

telling her how her ex-husband's eyes had filled with tears when he

told me she had fled with all his savings in their joint account in a

Swiss bank.

"Like a good Frenchman, the only thing that hurt him was the

money," she said, not at all impressed. "His savings! A few measly

francs that weren't enough for me to live on for a year. He used me

to sneak money out of France. Not only his but his friends' money

too. I could have been arrested if I had been caught. Besides, he was

a miser, the worst thing anybody can be in this life."

"Since you're so cold and perverse, why don't you kill David

Richardson, bad girl? You'll avoid the risks of a divorce and inherit

his fortune."

"Because I wouldn't know how to do it without getting caught,"

she replied, not smiling. "Do you want to do it? I'd give you ten

percent of the inheritance. It's an awful lot of money."

We wTere playing, but wThen I heard her say those outrageous

things to me so openly, I couldn't help shuddering. She wras no

longer the vulnerable girl who had gone through a thousand

difficulties and come out of them thanks to uncommon boldness

and determination; now she was a grown woman, convinced that life

wTas a jungle where only the wTorst triumphed, and ready to do

anything not to be conquered and to keep moving higher. Even

sending her husband to the next world in order to inherit his money,

if she could do it with an absolute guarantee of impunity? "Of

course," she said with that fierce, mocking look. "Do I scare you,

good boy?"

She enjoyed herself only wThen David Richardson took her on his

business trips to Asia. According to what she said, something fairly

vague, her husband was a broker, the middleman for various

commodities that Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan

exported to Europe, wThich is w7hy he made frequent trips to meet

with the suppliers. She didn't always go with him; wThen she did, she

felt emancipated. Seoul, Bangkok, Tokyo wTere the compensations

that allowed her to endure Newmarket. While he had his dinners

and business meetings, she was a tourist, visiting temples and

museums and buying clothes or decorative objects for her house.

For example, she had a marvelous collection of Japanese kimonos

and a great variety of the articulated marionettes used in Balinese

theater. Sometime when her husband was traveling, would she let

me come to Newmarket and see her house? No, never. I should

never show up there again, even if Juan Barreto invited me. Except,

of course, if I decided to take her homicidal proposition seriously.

Those two years when I spent long periods of time in swinging

London sleeping at Juan Barreto's pied-a-terre in Earl's Court and

seeing the bad girl once or twice a week were the happiest I'd ever

had. I earned less money as an interpreter because, for the sake of

London, I turned down many contracts in Paris and other European

cities, including Moscow, where international conferences and

congresses became more frequent at the end of the sixties and the

beginning of the seventies, but I did accept fairly low-paying jobs

whose only attraction was that they took me to England. But not for

anything in the world would I have traded the joy of arriving at the

Russell Hotel, where I came to know all the staff by name, and

waiting, in a trance, for Mrs. Richardson. She surprised me each

time with a new dress, lingerie, perfume, or shoes. One afternoon, as

I'd asked her to do, she brought several kimonos from her collection

in a bag and put on a show for me, walking and moving around the

room with her feet very close together and wearing the stereotyped

smile of a geisha. I always had noticed an Asian trace in her small

body and the slightly greenish tinge of her skin, the inheritance of

some ancestor she knew nothing about, and that afternoon it

seemed more obvious than ever.

We made love, we talked while we were naked and I toyed with

her hair and body, and on occasion, if time allowed, we took a walk

in a park. If it was raining we went to the movies and watched the

picture holding hands. Or we'd have tea with the scones she liked at

Fortnum and Mason, and once we had the famous, elaborate tea

served at the Hotel Ritz, but we never went back because as we were

leaving she spotted a couple from Newmarket at one of the tables. I

saw her turn pale. In those two years I became convinced that, in my

case at least, it wasn't true that love diminished or disappeared with

use. Mine grew each day. I studied carefully the galleries, museums,

art cinemas, expositions, recommended itineraries—the oldest pubs

in the city, the antiques fairs, the settings for Dickens's novels—so I

could suggest walks that would amuse her, and each time I also

surprised her with some little gift from Paris that would impress her

for its originality, if not its price. At times, when she was happy with

the gift, she would say, "You deserve a kiss," and place her lips on

mine for a second. Resting there quietly, they let themselves be

kissed but didn't respond.

Did she come to love me a little in those two years? She never

said so, of course, that would have been a demonstration of

weakness for which she never could have forgiven herself—or me.

But I think she became accustomed to my devotion, to feeling

flattered by the love I poured over her with both hands, more than

she ever would have confessed, even to herself. She liked my giving

her pleasure with my mouth and then, as soon as she'd had an

orgasm, penetrating and "irrigating" her. And my telling her all the

possible forms and thousand ways I loved her. "What cheap,

sentimental things are you going to tell me today?" was sometimes

her greeting.

"That the most exciting thing in you, after this tiny clitoris of

yours, is your Adam's apple. When it goes up, but principally when it

dances down your throat."

If I managed to make her laugh I felt fulfilled, the way I had

when I was a boy after the daily good deed the brothers at the

Colegio Champagnat in Miraflores recommended we do in order to

sanctify the day. One afternoon we had a curious incident, with

some consequences. I was working at a congress organized by

British Petroleum, in a conference hall at Uxbridge on the outskirts

of London, and I couldn't leave to meet her—I had asked permission

to be away in the afternoon—because the colleague who was

supposed to replace me fell ill. I called her at the Russell Hotel,

giving her all kinds of excuses. Without saying a word she hung up

on me. I called again and she wasn't in the room.

The following Friday—generally we saw each other on

Wednesdays and Fridays, the days of her supposed art classes at