The Bad Girl (19 page)

Christie's—she made me wait more than two hours without calling

to explain the delay. Finally she showed up, frowning, when I no

longer thought she was coming.

"Couldn't you have called?" I protested. "You've set my nerves—"

I couldn't finish because a slap, delivered with all her strength,

closed my mouth.

"You don't stand me up, little pissant." She quivered with

indignation, and her voice broke. "If you have a date with me—"

I didn't let her finish the sentence because I threw myself at her

and with all the weight of my body pushed her onto the bed. She

defended herself a little at first, but soon she stopped resisting. And

almost immediately I felt her kissing and embracing me, and

helping me take off her clothes. She'd never done anything like it

before. For the first time I felt her body embracing me, entwining

her legs with mine, her lips pressing against mine, her tongue

struggling with mine. Her hands dug into my back, my neck. I asked

her to forgive me, it would never happen again, I thanked her for

making me so happy and showing me for the first time that she

loved me too. Then I heard her sob and saw that her eyes were wet.

"My love, darling, don't cry, it's too silly." And I fondled her,

kissing away her tears. "It won't happen again, I promise. I love you,

I love you."

Afterward, when we dressed, she remained silent, her expression

rancorous, regretting her weakness. I tried to improve her mood by

joking.

"Did you stop loving me so soon?"

She looked at me angrily for a long time, and when she spoke her

voice sounded very hard.

"Make no mistake, Ricardito. Don't think I made that scene

because I'm crazy about you. No man matters very much to me, and

you're no exception. But I have my pride, and nobody stands me up

in a hotel room."

I said she was sorry I had discovered that in spite of all her

boasting, defiance, and insults, she did feel something for me. It was

the second serious error I had committed with the bad girl since the

day when, instead of keeping her in Paris, I encouraged her to go to

Cuba for guerrilla training. She looked at me very gravely, said

nothing for some time, and finally murmured, full of haughtiness

and scorn, "Is that what you think? You'll find out it isn't true, little

pissant."

She left the room without saying goodbye. I thought it was a

passing fit of bad temper, but I didn't hear from her the next week. I

spent Wednesday and Friday waiting for her in vain, accompanied in

my solitude by the belligerent Mongols. The following Wednesday,

when I arrived at the Russell Hotel, the Indian concierge handed me

a note. Very direct, it informed me she was leaving for Japan with

"David." She didn't even say for how long or that she would call me

as soon as she returned to England. I was filled with evil

presentiments and cursed my faux pas. Knowing her, this twosentence

note could be a long and, perhaps, definitive goodbye.

In those two years my friendship with Juan Barreto had grown

closer. I spent a good number of days at his pied-a-terre in Earl's

Court, always hiding from him my meetings with the bad girl, of

course. At about this time, in 1972 or '73, the hippie movement went

into rapid decline and became a bourgeois style. The psychedelic

revolution turned out to be less profound and serious than its

followers believed. Its music, the most creative thing it produced,

was rapidly absorbed by the establishment and transformed into a

part of official culture, making millionaires and multimillionaires

out of old rebels and nonconformists and their representatives and

recording companies, beginning with the Beatles and ending with

the Rolling Stones. Instead of the liberation of the spirit, "the

indefinite expansion of the human mind" promised by the guru of

LSD and former Harvard professor Dr. Timothy Leary, drugs and a

promiscuous, unrestrained life caused a good number of problems

and some personal and familial misfortunes. Nobody lived this

change of circumstances as viscerally as my friend Juan Barreto.

He had always been very healthy but suddenly began to complain

of frequent, debilitating grippes and colds, accompanied by acute

attacks of neuralgia. His doctor in Cambridge advised a vacation in a

warmer climate than England. He spent ten days in Ibiza and came

back to London tanned and happy, full of risque anecdotes about hot

nights in Ibiza, "something I never would have imagined in a

country with Spain's reputation for prudery."

It was at this time that Mrs. Richardson left for Tokyo with her

husband. I didn't see Juan for about a month. I was working in

Geneva and Brussels and when I called him, in London and in

Newmarket, he didn't answer the phone. During those four weeks I

heard nothing from the bad girl either. When I returned to London,

my neighbor in Earl's Court, the Colombian Marina, told me Juan

had been admitted to Westminster Hospital a few days earlier. They

had him in the infectious diseases wing, and he was undergoing all

kinds of tests. He had lost a great deal of weight. I found him

unshaven, under a mountain of blankets, and in distress because

"these quacks can't manage to diagnose my disease." At first they

said he had genital herpes that had developed complications, and

then that it probably was a form of sarcoma. Now they told him

nothing but generalities. His eyes burned when he saw me approach

his bed.

"I feel more abandoned than a dog, brother," he confessed. "You

don't know how happy I am to see you. I've discovered that even

though I know a million gringos, you're the only friend I have. A

friend in a Permian friendship, the kind that goes down to the

marrow of your bones, I mean. The truth is that friendships here are

very superficial. The English don't have time for friendship."

Mrs. Stubard had left her house in St. John's Wood a few months

earlier. Her health was fragile and she had retired to an old-age

home in Suffolk. She came to \isit Juan once, but it was too much of

a trip for her, and she hadn't returned. "The poor thing has a bad

back, and getting here was a real act of heroism for her." Juan was a

different person; illness had made him lose his optimism and

certainty, and filled him with fears.

"I'm dying and they don't know from what," he said in a

cavernous voice the second or third time I went to see him. "I don't

think they're hiding it from me so as not to frighten me, English

doctors always tell you the truth no matter how awful it is. The fact

is they don't know what's happening to me."

The tests showed nothing conclusive, and the doctors suddenly

began to talk about an elusive, unidentified \irus that attacked the

immune system, making Juan susceptible to all kinds of infections.

He was exceedingly weak, with sunken eyes, bluish skin, protruding

bones. He kept passing his hands over his face as if to prove he was

still there. I was with him during all the hours \isitors were

authorized. I saw him being consumed more and more each day as

he sank into despair. One day he asked me to find him a Catholic

priest because he wanted to confess. It wasn't easy. The priest at the

Brompton Oratory with whom I spoke said it was impossible for him

to \isit hospitals. But he gave me the phone number of a Dominican

convent that offered this service. I had to go in person to arrange the

matter. A red-faced, good-natured Irish priest came to see Juan, and

my friend had a long conversation with him. The Dominican came

back two or three times to see him. Those dialogues calmed him for

a few days. And as a result he made a transcendental decision: he

would write to his family, with whom he'd had no contact for more

than ten years.

He was too weak to write, and so he dictated a long, deeply felt

letter to me in which he told his parents about his career as a painter

in Newmarket, with humorous details. He said that though he often

wanted to write and make peace with them, he always had been held

back by a stupid streak of pride, which he regretted. Because he

loved and missed them very much. In a postscript he added

something that would make them happy, he was sure: after being

estranged from the Church for many years, God had allowed him to

return to the faith he had been brought up in, which now brought

peace to his life. He didn't say a word about his illness.

Without telling Juan, I requested an appointment with the head

of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Westminster Hospital.

Dr. Rotkof was an older, fairly dry man with a graying beard and

tuberous nose, who before answering my questions wanted to know

my relationship to the patient.

"We're friends, Doctor. He has no family here in England. I'd like

to be able to write to his parents in Peru and tell them the truth

about Juan's condition."

"I can't tell you very much, except that it's extremely serious," he

said abruptly, with no preambles. "He can die at any moment. His

organism lacks defenses and a cold could kill him."

It was a new disease, and a fair number of cases had been

detected in the United States and the United Kingdom. It attacked

with special virulence homosexual communities, people addicted to

heroin and all intravenous drugs, and hemophiliacs. Except for the

fact that sperm and blood were the principal means of transmitting

the "syndrome"—nobody was talking about AIDS yet—very little was

known about its origin and nature. It devastated the immune system

and exposed the patient to every sort of disease. A constant was the

kind of lesion on the legs and abdomen that was tormenting my

friend. Stunned by what I'd just heard, I asked Dr. Rotkof to advise

me what to do. Should I tell Juan? He shrugged and pouted. That

depended entirely on me. Maybe yes, maybe no. Though perhaps

yes, if my friend had to make any arrangements with regard to his

passing.

I was so affected by my conversation with Dr. Rotkof that I didn't

have the courage to return to Juan's room, certain he would see

everything in my face. I felt terribly sorry for him. What I wouldn't

have given to see Mrs. Richardson that afternoon and feel her, if

only for a few hours, at my side. Juan Barreto had told me a

profound truth: though I also knew hundreds of people here in

Europe, the only friend I had "in the Permian style" was about to

die. And the woman I loved was on the other side of the world with

her husband, and true to form, had given no sign of life for more

than a month. She had carried out her threat, showing the insolent

little pissant that she absolutely was not in love and could dispose of

him like a useless trinket. For days I had been tormented by the

suspicion that she would disappear again without leaving a trace. Is

this why you dreamed about escaping from Peru and living in

Europe since the time you were a boy, Ricardo Somocurcio? During

those days in London I felt as lonely and sad as a stray dog.

Without saying anything to Juan, I wrote a letter to his parents,

explaining that he was in very delicate condition, the \ictim of an

unknown disease, and telling them what Dr. Rotkof had told me: he

could meet a fatal end at any moment. I said that though I lived in

Paris, I would stay in London as long as necessary to be with Juan. I

gave them the phone number and address of the pied-a-terre in

Earl's Court and asked for their instructions.

They called as soon as they received my letter, which arrived at

the same time as the one Juan had dictated to me. His father was

devastated by the news, but, at the same time, happy to have

recovered his prodigal son. They made arrangements to come to

London. They asked me to reserve a room at a modest hotel, since

they didn't have much money at their disposal. I reassured them;

they would stay at Juan's pied-a-terre, where they could cook,

making their stay in London less expensive. We agreed that I would

prepare Juan for their imminent arrival.

Two weeks later the engineer Climaco Barreto and his wife,

Eufrasia, were installed in Earl's Court and I had moved to a bedand-

breakfast in Bayswater. The arrival of his parents had an

immensely positive effect on Juan. He recovered his hope and

humor, and seemed to improve. He even managed to keep down

some of the food the nurse brought him morning and evening,

though before that everything he put in his mouth nauseated him.

The Barretos were fairly young—he had worked all his life at the

Paramonga ranch, until the government of General Velasco Alvarado

expropriated it, and then he resigned and found a job as a professor

of mathematics at one of the new universities springing up in Lima

like mushrooms—or else they were very well preserved, since they

barely looked in their fifties. He was tall and had the athletic look of

someone who has spent his life in the countryside, and she was a