The Bad Girl (21 page)

Toledano's was so developed that in spite of his inoffensive,

innocuous air, he seemed outrageous to his colleagues. Because

when it wasn't a question of languages, he was so undefended in his

ingenuousness that he was a man-child.

We had met earlier for reasons having to do with work, but our

friendship really was born during the time in my life when I had lost

contact once again with the bad girl. Her separation from David

Richardson was catastrophic when he proved to the court hearing

the suit for divorce that Mrs. Richardson was a bigamist, for she was

also married legally in France to a functionary at the Quai d'Orsay,

whom she had never divorced. The bad girl, seeing that the battle

was lost, chose to escape England and the hated horses of

Newmarket, destination unknown. But she passed through Paris—at

least, that's what she wanted me to believe—and in March 1974 she

called to say goodbye from the new Charles de Gaulle Airport. She

told me things had gone very badly for her, her ex-husband had won

in every sense of the word, and, sick to death of courts and lawyers

who made the little money she had disappear, she was going where

no one could try her patience any further.

"If you want to stay in Paris, my house is yours," I told her in all

seriousness. "And if you want to marry again, we'll get married. I

don't give a damn if you're a bigamist or a trigamist."

"Stay in Paris so Monsieur Robert Arnoux can denounce me to

the police or do something worse? I'm not that crazy. Thanks

anyway, Ricardito. We'll see each other again, when the storm

passes."

Knowing she wouldn't tell me, I asked where she was going and

what she planned to do now with her life.

"I'll tell you the next time we see each other. Here's a kiss, and

don't cheat on me too much with the Frenchwomen."

I was sure this time too that I'd never hear from her again. As I

had the previous times, I made the firm resolution, at the age of

thirty-eight, to fall in love with someone less evasive and

complicated, a normal girl with whom I could have a relationship

free of unexpected alarms, maybe even marry and have children. But

that didn't happen, because in this life things rarely happen the way

we little pissants plan them.

I soon was in a routine of work that bored me at times but wasn't

unpleasant. I thought being an interpreter was an innocuous

profession, but one that also posed few moral problems to the

person who practiced it. And it allowed me to travel, earn a decent

amount of money, and take time off when I wanted to.

My only contact with Peru, for by now I rarely saw Peruvians in

Paris, continued to be the increasingly desperate letters from Uncle

Ataulfo. Aunt Dolores always sent me regards in her own hand, and

from time to time I would send her scores, for playing the piano was

the great diversion in her invalid's life. Uncle Ataulfo said that the

eight years of General Velasco Alvarado's military dictatorship, with

its nationalizations, agrarian reform, industrial collectivization, and

state control of the economy, had provided erroneous solutions to

the problems of social injustice, inequality, and the exploitation of

the majority by a privileged minority, and this had served only to

inflame and further impoverish everyone, frighten away

investments, eradicate savings, and increase unrest and violence.

Though populism had been reined in somewhat in the second stage

of the dictatorship, led during its last four years by General

Francisco Morales Bermudez, newspapers and television and radio

stations were still state controlled, political life nullified, and there

was no hint that democracy would be reestablished. The bitterness

distilled in Uncle Ataulfo's letters made me sorry for him and other

Peruvians of his generation who, when they reached old age, saw

their lifelong dream of Peru making progress fade instead of

materialize. Permian society was sinking deeper and deeper into

poverty, ignorance, and brutality7.1 had done the right thing by

coming to Europe, even though my life as an obscure dragoman was

somewhat solitary.

I was also losing interest in current French politics, which I once

followed passionately. In the seventies, during the governments of

Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing, I barely read the day's news. In the

daily and weekly papers I turned almost exclusively to the cultural

pages. I always went to art shows and concerts but less to the

theater, which had degenerated a good deal in comparison with the

previous decade, though I did go to the movies, sometimes twice a

week. Happily, Paris was still a paradise for cinephiles. With regard

to literature, I was no longer up-to-date because, like the theater, the

novel and essay had taken a nosedive in France. I never could read

with enthusiasm the intellectual idols of those years, Barthes,

Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and others whose verbose books dropped

from my hands, except for Michel Foucault. His history of madness

had a powerful effect on me, as did his essay on the prison system

(Surveiller etpunir), though I wasn't convinced by his theory that

the history of western Europe was one of multiple institutionalized

repressions—prisons, hospitals, gender, the police, laws—by a power

that colonized every area of liberty in order to annihilate dissent and

nonconformity. In fact, during those years I read dead authors for

the most part, especially the Russians.

I was always very busy working and doing other things, but in

the seventies, when I examined my life, trying to be objective, for

the first time it seemed sterile and my future that of a confirmed

bachelor and outsider who would never be truly integrated into his

beloved France. And I always thought of Salomon Toledano's

sudden apocalyptic observation when, one day in the interpreters'

room at UNESCO, he asked, "If we suddenly felt ourselves dying and

asked ourselves, 'What trace of our passage through this dog's life of

drudgery will we leave behind?,' the honest answer would be: 'None,

we haven't done anything except speak for other people.' Otherwise,

what does it mean to have translated millions of words and not

remember a single one of them, because not a single one deserved to

be remembered?" It wasn't strange that the Dragoman was

unpopular among people in the profession.

One day I told him I hated him because that sentence, which

came back to me from time to time, had convinced me of the total

uselessness of my existence.

"We dragomans are merely useless, dear friend," he consoled me.

"But we don't harm anyone with our work. In every other profession

great damage can be done to the species. Think about lawyers and

doctors, for example, not to mention architects and politicians."

We were having a beer in a bistrot on Avenue de Suffren after a

day of work at UNESCO, which was holding its annual conference.

In an attack of confidentiality, I had just told him, without specific

details or names, that for many years I had been in love with a

woman who came and went in my life like a will-o'-the-wisp,

lighting it up with happiness for short periods of time and then

leaving it dry, sterile, immune to any other enthusiasm or love.

"Falling in love is a mistake," was Salomon Toledano's judgment,

echoing my vanished friend Juan Barreto, who shared that

philosophy but without my colleague's verbal mannerisms. "Grab

the woman by her hair and drag her to bed. Make her see all the

stars in the firmament as quick as a wink. That's the correct theory.

I cannot practice it, helas, on account of my weak physique. Once I

tried to play macho with a wild woman and she wrecked my face

with a single slap. Which is why, despite my thesis, I treat ladies,

above all prostitutes, as if they were queens."

"I don't believe you've never been in love, Dragoman."

He acknowledged falling in love once in his life, when he was a

university student in Berlin. With a Polish girl, so Catholic that

every time they made love she cried with remorse. The Dragoman

proposed. The girl accepted. It was a tremendous effort for them to

obtain their families' blessings. They managed it after a complicated

negotiation in which they decided on a double wedding, one Jewish,

the other Catholic. In the midst of preparations for the wedding,

without warning the bride ran off with an American officer who had

concluded his service in Berlin. The Dragoman, maddened by

despair, engaged in a strange inquisition: he burned his magnificent

collection of stamps. And decided he would never fall in love again.

In the future, love for him would be purely mercenary. He kept his

word. After that episode, he frequented only prostitutes. And instead

of stamps, now he collected toy soldiers.

A few days later, thinking he was doing me a favor, he involved

me in a weekend trip with two Russian courtesans who, according to

him, would not only allow me to practice my Russian but would

introduce me to the "emanations and bruises of Slavic love." We

went for supper to Le Grand Samovar, a restaurant in Batignolles,

and then to a narrow, dark, suffocatingly smoky boite de nuit near

Place de Clichy, where we met the nymphs. We drank a good deal of

vodka, so that my memories blurred almost from the time we

walked into the cave called Les Cosaques, and the only thing I

remember clearly was that of the two Russians, fate, or I should say

the Dragoman, gave me Natasha, the fatter and more heavily madeup

of the two Rubenesque women in their forties. My companion

was stuffed into a brilliant pink dress with net trim, and when she

laughed or moved, her tits shook like belligerent balloons. She

looked like an escapee from a painting by Botero. Until my memory

vanished into an alcoholic mist, my friend talked like a parrot in a

Russian larded with obscenities, which the two courtesans

celebrated with loud laughter.

The next morning I awoke with an aching head and sore bones: I

had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed where the supposed

Natasha was snoring, fully dressed and wearing her shoes. By day

she was even fatter than at night. She slept placidly until noon, and

when she awoke she looked in astonishment at the room, the bed

she was occupying, and me, who wished her good afternoon. She

immediately demanded three thousand francs, about six hundred

dollars at the time, which is what she charged for a full night. I had

nothing like that much money and an unpleasant discussion ensued

in which I finally convinced her to take all the cash I had with me,

which came to half that amount, and some little porcelain figures

that adorned the room. She left, shouting curses, and I spent a long

time under the shower, swearing never again to engage in this kind

of dragomanic adventure.

When I told Salomon Toledano about my nocturnal fiasco, he

said that by contrast he and his friend had made love until they

passed out in a display of strength worthy of pages in The Guinness

Book of World Records. He never dared propose to me another

nocturnal excursion with exotic ladies.

What distracted me and occupied many of my hours in those

final years of the seventies were the stories of Chekhov in particular

and Russian literature in general. I never had considered doing

literary translations because I knew they were very* badly paid in

every language, and surely worse in Spanish than in others. But in

1976 or 1977, through a mutual friend, I met a Spanish publisher,

Mario Muchnik, at UNESCO, and we became friends. When he

learned I knew Russian and was very fond of reading, he encouraged

me to prepare a small anthology of Chekhov's stories, which I had

raved to him about, assuring him that Chekhov was as good a

storywriter as he was a dramatist, though the mediocre translations

of his stories meant he was not valued very highly as a narrator.

Muchnik was an interesting case. Born in Argentina, he studied

sciences and began a career as a researcher and academic but soon

abandoned it to devote himself to publishing, his secret passion. He

was a publisher by vocation, for he loved books and published only

good literature, which, he said, guaranteed him all the failure in the

world, financially speaking, but the greatest personal satisfaction.

He spoke of the books he brought out with an enthusiasm so

contagious that, after thinking about it for a while, I accepted his

offer to translate an anthology of Chekhov's stories, for which I

requested unlimited time. "You have it," he said, "and besides, even

though you earn a pittance, you'll have more fun than a pig in mud."

It took a very long time, but I did, in fact, enjoy myself, reading

all of Chekhov, choosing his most beautiful stories, and bringing

them over into Spanish. It was more delicate than translating the

speeches and papers to which I was accustomed in my work. I felt

less ghostlike as a literary translator than I did as an interpreter. I