The Bad Girl (22 page)

had to make decisions, explore Spanish searching for nuances and

cadences that corresponded to the semantic subtleties and

tonalities—the marvelous art of allusion and elusion in Chekhov's

prose—and to the rhetorical sumptuousness of Russian literary

language. A real pleasure to which I devoted entire Saturdays and

Sundays. I sent Mario Muchnik the promised anthology almost two

years after he hired me. I'd had such a good time with it that I

almost didn't accept the check he sent as my fee. "Perhaps this will

be enough for you to buy a nice edition of some good writer,

Chekhov, for example," he said.

When, sometime later, I received copies of the anthology, I gave

one, with a dedication, to Salomon Toledano. We had a drink

together occasionally, and sometimes I went with him to shops that

sold toy soldiers, or to philatelic or antiquarian stores, which he

inspected thoroughly though he rarely bought anything. He thanked

me for the book but advised energetically against my continuing on

this "very dangerous path."

"Your livelihood is at risk," he warned. "A literary translator

aspires to be a writer; that is, he's a frustrated pencil pusher.

Somebody who'll never be resigned to disappearing into his work, as

good interpreters do. Don't renounce your status as a nonexistent

gentleman, dear friend, unless you wish to end up a clochard."

Contrary to my belief that polyglots owed their skill to a good

musical ear, Salomon Toledano didn't have the slightest interest in

music. In his apartment in Neuilly I didn't even see a phonograph.

His excellent ear was tuned specifically for languages. He told me

that in Smyrna, Turkish and Spanish—well, Ladino, which he had

shaken off completely during a summer in Salamanca—were spoken

interchangeably in his family, and that he inherited his linguistic

aptitude from his father, who could speak half a dozen languages,

which was very useful in his business. Ever since he was a boy he

had dreamed of traveling, visiting cities, and that had been the great

incentive for his learning languages, thanks to which he became

what he was now: a citizen of the world. That same nomadic

vocation made him the precocious stamp collector he had been until

his traumatic engagement in Berlin. Collecting stamps was another

way of visiting countries, of learning geography and history.

The toy soldiers didn't cause him to travel but they did amuse

him very much. His apartment was filled with them, from the

entrance hall to the bedroom, including the kitchen and bathroom.

He specialized in the battles of Napoleon. He had them very well

arranged and classified, with tiny cannon, horses, and standards, so

that as you walked through his apartment you followed the military

history of the First Empire until Waterloo, whose protagonists

surrounded his bed on all four sides. In addition to toy soldiers,

Salomon Toledano's house was filled with dictionaries and

grammars of every possible language. And, an extravagance, the

small television set that rested on a shelf facing the toilet.

"Television is a powerful laxative for me," he explained.

Why did I develop so much fondness for Salomon Toledano,

while all our colleagues avoided him for being unbearably tiresome?

Perhaps because his solitude resembled mine, though we were

different in many other ways. We told each other we never could live

in our countries again, for he in Turkey and I in Peru would surely

feel more foreign than we did in France, where we also felt like

outsiders. And we were both very conscious that we would never be

integrated into the country where we had chosen to live and which

had even granted us passports (both of us had acquired French

citizenship).

"It isn't the fault of France if we're still a couple of foreigners,

dear friend. It's our fault. It's a vocation, a destiny. Like our

profession as interpreters, another way of always being a foreigner,

of being present without being present, of existing but not existing."

No doubt he was right when he said these lugubrious things.

Those conversations with the Dragoman always left me somewhat

demoralized, and at times they wouldn't let me sleep. Being a

phantom was not something that left me unfazed, but it didn't seem

to matter very much to him.

That was why, in 1979, when an excited Salomon Toledano

announced that he had accepted an offer to travel to Tokyo and work

for a year as the exclusive interpreter for Mitsubishi, I felt a certain

relief. He was a good person, an interesting specimen, but

something in him saddened and alarmed me because it revealed

certain secret pathways in my own destiny.

I saw him off at Charles de Gaulle, and when I shook his hand

next to the Japan Airlines counter I felt him slip a small metallic

object between my fingers. It was a hussar of the emperor's guard. "I

have a duplicate," he said. "It will bring you luck, dear friend." I put

it on my night table, next to my amulet, that exquisite Guerlain

toothbrush.

A few months later, the military dictatorship in Peru finally

ended, elections were held, and in 1980 Peruvians, as if making

amends, reelected as president Fernando Belaunde Terry, the head

of state deposed by the military coup of 1968. Uncle Ataulfo was

happy and decided to celebrate by doing something extravagant: he

would take a trip to Europe, where he had never set foot. He tried to

persuade Aunt Dolores to accompany him, but she claimed her

invalidism would keep him from enjoying the trip and turn her into

a hindrance. And so Uncle Ataulfo came alone. He arrived in time

for us to celebrate my forty-fifth birthday together.

I put him up in my apartment near the Ecole Militaire, giving

him the bedroom while I slept on the sofa bed in the small livingdining

room. He had aged a great deal since the last time I had seen

him fifteen years earlier. He was over seventy, and the years

weighed heavily on him. He had almost no hair left, and he shuffled

when he walked and tired easily. He took pills for his blood

pressure, and his dentures must have been uncomfortable because

he was constantly moving his mouth as if trying to make them fit

properly over his gums. But he was clearly delighted to be in Paris at

last, an old desire of his. He was ecstatic looking at the streets, the

quays along the Seine, the old stones, and he kept murmuring,

"Everything's more beautiful than in photographs." I accompanied

Uncle Ataulfo to Notre Dame, the Louvre, Les Invalides, the

Pantheon, Sacre-Coeur, galleries, museums. This city, in fact, was

the most beautiful in the world, and having spent so many years

here had made me forget that. I lived surrounded by so many lovely

things, almost without seeing them. And so for a few days I enjoyed

being a tourist in my adopted city as much as he did. We had long

conversations, sitting on the terraces of bistrots, having a glass of

wine as an aperitif. He was happy with the end of the military

regime and the restoration of democracy in Peru but had few

illusions regarding the immediate future. According to him,

Permian society was a boiling cauldron of tensions, hatreds,

prejudices, and resentments that had grown much worse in the

twelve years of military government. "You wouldn't recognize your

country, nephew. There's a latent menace in the air, a feeling that at

any moment something catastrophic can explode." His words were

prophetic this time too. Soon after he returned to Peru following his

trip to France and a short excursion by bus through Castile and

Andalusia, Uncle Ataulfo sent me clippings of newspaper articles

from Lima accompanied by cruel photographs: in the center of the

capital, unknown Maoists had hung from utility poles some poor

dogs to which they had attached signs with the name Teng Hsiaop'ing,

whom they accused of betraying Mao and ending the Cultural

Revolution in the People's Republic of China. This was the

beginning of the armed rebellion of Shining Path, which would last

throughout the eighties and provoke an unprecedented bloodbath in

Permian history: more than sixty thousand dead and disappeared.

A few months after his departure, Salomon Toledano wrote me a

long letter. He was very happy with his stay in Tokyo, though the

Mitsubishi people had him working so much that at night he

collapsed in exhaustion on his bed. But he had brought his Japanese

up-to-date, met nice people, and didn't miss rainy Paris at all. He

was going out with a lawyer in the firm who was divorced, beautiful,

and didn't have knock-knees, like so many Japanese women, but did

have very shapely legs and a direct, profound gaze that "delved into

his soul." He went on to say: "Don't worry, dear friend, faithful to

my promise, I won't fall in love with this Nipponese Jezebel. But,

except for falling in love, I propose doing everything else with

Mitsuko." Beneath his signature he had written a laconic postscript:

"Regards from the bad girl." When I reached that sentence, I

dropped the Dragoman's letter and had to sit down, overcome by

vertigo.

Was she in Japan? How* the hell had Salomon and the

mischievous Permian managed to meet in densely populated

Tokyo? I rejected the idea that she w*as the lawyer with the dark gaze

whom my colleague seemed taken with, though with the ex-Chilean,

ex-guerrilla fighter, ex-Madame Arnoux, and ex-Mrs. Richardson

nothing was impossible, even her going around now disguised as a

Japanese lawyer. That reference to the "bad girl" revealed a certain

degree of familiarity between her and Salomon; the Chilean girl

must have told him something of our long, syncopated relationship.

Had they made love? I discovered in the days that followed that the

unfortunate postscript had turned my life upside down and returned

me to the sickly, stupid love-passion that had consumed me for so

many years, preventing me from living normally. And yet, in spite of

my doubts, my jealousy, my anguished questions, knowing the bad

girl was there, real and alive, in a concrete place though so far from

Paris, filled my head with fantasies. Again. It was like leaving the

limbo in which I had lived these past six years, ever since she called

from Charles de Gaulle Airport (well, she said she was calling from

there) to tell me she was escaping England.

So, Ricardo Somocurcio, are you still in love with your elusive

compatriot? No doubt about it. Ever since that postscript from the

Dragoman, day and night I kept seeing her dark face, insolent

expression, eyes the color of dark honey, and my whole body ached

with desire to hold her in my arms.

Salomon Toledano's letter had no letterhead, and the Dragoman

didn't bother to give me his address or phone number. I made

inquiries at the Paris office of Mitsubishi and they advised me to

write to him at the firm's Department of Human Resources in

Tokyo, and gave me the address. That's what I did. My letter was

very indirect, telling him first about my own work; I said the

emperor's hussar had brought me luck, because in recent weeks I'd

had excellent contracts, and I congratulated him on his new

conquest. Finally I came to the point. I was agreeably surprised to

learn he had met an old friend of mine. Was she living in Tokyo? I

had lost track of her years ago. Could he send me her address? Her

phone number? I'd like to be in touch with my compatriot again

after so much time.

I sent the letter without too much hope it would reach him. But

it did, and his answer was almost lost on the roads of Europe. The

Dragoman's letter landed in Paris when I was in Vienna, working at

the International Atomic Energy Agency, and my concierge in Ecole

Militaire, following my instructions in the event I had a letter from

Tokyo, forwarded it to Vienna. When the letter arrived in Austria I

was on my way back to Paris. In short, what normally would have

taken a week took close to three. When I finally held Salomon

Toledano's letter in my hands, I trembled from head to toe as if I

were suffering an attack of tertian fever. And my teeth were

chattering. It was a letter several pages long. I read it slowly, spelling

it out, so as not to miss a syllable of what it said. From the beginning

he became involved in an impassioned apology for Mitsuko, his

Japanese lawyer, confessing, in some embarrassment, that his

promise not to fall in love again, undertaken as a result of his

"sentimental mishap in Berlin," had been shattered after thirty years

of being rigorously respected, because of the beauty, intelligence,

delicacy, and sensuality of Mitsuko, a woman the Shinto gods had

wanted to use to revolutionize his life ever since he had the

fortunate idea of returning to this city where, for the past few

months, he had been the happiest man on earth.

Mitsuko had rejuvenated him, filling him with vigor. Not even in

the flower of his youth did he make love with the drive he had now.