The Bad Girl (40 page)

completely inside my body.

6

"Breakwaters are the greatest mystery in engineering," Alberto

Lamiel exaggerated, spreading his arms wide. "Yes, Uncle Ricardo,

science and technology have solved all the mysteries of the universe

except this one. Didn't anybody ever tell you that?"

Ever since Uncle Ataulfo introduced me to his nephew, an

engineer who had graduated from MIT and was considered the star

of the Lamiel family, and who called me "uncle" even though I

wasn't, since I was Ataulfo's nephew from a different branch of the

family, I had felt a certain antipathy toward the triumphant young

man: he talked too much, and in an unbearably pontificating tone.

But, evidently, the antipathy wasn't reciprocal, because since our

meeting his attentions toward me had increased, and he displayed

an esteem as effusive as it was incomprehensible. What interest

could an obscure expatriate translator, back in Peru after so many

years and looking at everything with a mixture of nostalgia and

stupefaction, hold for this brilliant, successful young man who was

putting up buildings everywhere in the expansive Lima of the

1980s? I don't know what it was, but Alberto spent a good deal of

time with me. He took me to see the new neighborhoods—Las

Casuarinas, La Planicie, Chacarilla, La Rinconada, Villa—and the

vacation developments springing up like mushrooms on the

southern beaches, and he showed me houses surrounded by parks,

with lakes and pools, that looked like something in a Hollywood

movie. Once, when he heard me say that one of the things I had

envied most about my Miraflores friends when I was a boy was that

many of them were members of Regatas—I'd had to sneak into the

club or swim there from the neighboring beach of Pescadores—he

invited me to have lunch at the old Chorrillos institution. Just as he

had said, the club's facilities were now very modern, with tennis and

jai alai courts, Olympic-size warm-water pools, and two new beaches

reclaimed from the ocean thanks to two long breakwaters. It was

also true that the Alfresco Restaurant at Regatas prepared a dish of

rice and shellfish that was marvelous served with cold beer. The

view on this gray, cloudy November afternoon in a winter that

refused to leave, with the ghostly cliffs of Barranco and Miraflores

half hidden by the fog, stirred up many images from the depths of

my memory. What he had just said about breakwaters pulled me

away from the idle thoughts that preoccupied me.

"Are you serious?" I asked, my curiosity piqued. "The truth is, I

don't believe it, Alberto."

"I didn't believe it either, Uncle Ricardo. But I swear to you it's

so."

He was a tall, gringo-looking, athletic boy—he came to Regatas to

play racketball and jai alai every morning at six—who wore his dark

hair cut very close to the scalp, and breathed self-sufficiency and

optimism. He mixed English words into his sentences. He had a

fiancee in Boston, whom he was going to marry in a few months, as

soon as she completed her degree in chemical engineering. He had

turned down several job offers in the United States after graduating

with honors from MIT in order to come back to Peru to "serve his

country," because if all the privileged Peruvians went abroad, "who'd

put their shoulders to the wheel and move our country forward?"

His fine patriotic sentiments made me feel guilty, but he didn't

realize it. Alberto Lamiel was the only person in his social circle who

displayed so much confidence in the future of Peru. During those

final months of Fernando Belaunde Terry's second government—the

end of 1984—with runaway inflation, the terrorism of Shining Path,

blackouts, kidnappings, and the prospect that APRA, with Alan

Garcia, would win next year's elections, there was a good deal of

uncertainty and pessimism in the middle class. But nothing seemed

to demoralize Alberto. He carried a loaded pistol in his van in case

he was attacked, and always had a smile on his face. The possibility

of Alan Garcia coming to power didn't frighten him. He had attended

a meeting of young entrepreneurs with the Aprista candidate and

thought him "pretty pragmatic, not at all ideological."

"In other words, a breakwater doesn't turn out well or badly for

technical reasons—correct or mistaken calculations, successes or

defects in construction—but because of strange incantations and

white or black magic," I said, teasing him. "Is that what you, an

engineer from MIT, mean to tell me? Witchcraft has come to

Cambridge, Massachusetts?"

"That's exactly right, if you want to put it that way," he said,

enjoying the joke. But he became serious again and declared, with

energetic movements of his head, "A breakwater works or doesn't

work for reasons science can't explain. The subject is so fascinating

that I'm writing a brief report for the journal at my university. You'd

love meeting my source. His name is Arquimedes, and it fits him to

a tee. A character right out of the movies, Uncle Ricardo."

After hearing Alberto's stories, the breakwaters at the Regatas

Union, which we could see from the terrace of the Alfresco, took on

the legendary aura of ancestral monuments, stone buttresses

erected there, cutting through the sea, not only to force it to

withdraw and create an arc of beach for swimmers but as reminders

of an ancient lineage, constructions that were half urban, half

religious, and products of both expert workmanship and knowledge

that was secret, sacred, and mythic rather than practical and

functional. According to my presumptive nephew, to construct a

breakwater, to determine the precise spot where that assemblage of

blocks of stone, superimposed or joined with mortar, should be

built, the smallest technical calculation was not sufficient or even

necessary. What was indispensable was the "eye" of the

practitioner—a kind of wizard, shaman, diviner, like the dowser who

discovers deposits of hidden water beneath the surface of the earth,

or the Chinese master of feng shui who decides the direction in

which a house and its furnishings should be oriented so that future

inhabitants can live in peace and enjoy it or otherwise feel harassed

and pushed toward discord and friction—who detects on a hunch or

by divine knowledge, as old Arquimedes had been doing for half a

century along the coast of Lima, where to construct a breakwater so

the water accepts it and doesn't overturn it, filling it with sand,

undermining it, bending its sides, preventing it from fulfilling its

duty of humbling the sea.

"The surrealists would have loved to hear something like this,

nephew," I said, pointing to the Regatas' breakwaters, over which

white gulls and black ducks were circling, along with a flock of

pelicans with philosophical eyes and beaks like ladles. "The

breakwater, a perfect example of the marvelous quotidian."

"After you explain to me who the surrealists are, Uncle Ricardo,"

said the engineer, calling the waiter and indicating to me in a

peremptory way that he would pay the bill. "I can see, even though

you play the skeptic, that my story about breakwaters has knocked

you out."

Yes, I was very intrigued. Was he speaking in earnest? What

Alberto told me stayed with me from that day on, leaving and

returning to my mind periodically, as if I intuited that if I followed

that faint track, I'd suddenly find myself at a cave filled with

treasure.

I had returned to Lima for a few weeks, rather hurriedly, with the

intention of saying goodbye to and burying Uncle Ataulfo Lamiel,

who had been taken as an emergency case to the American Clinic

with his second heart attack, and subjected to open-heart surgery

with little hope he'd survive the ordeal. But, surprisingly, he did

survive, and in spite of his eighty years and four bypasses, even

seemed to be recuperating well. "Your uncle has more lives than a

cat," said Dr. Castaneda, the Lima cardiologist who performed the

surgery. "The truth is, I didn't think he'd come out of this." Uncle

Ataulfo intervened to say it was my return to Lima that had given

him back his life, not any quacks. He had already been discharged

from the American Clinic and was convalescing at home, cared for

by a full-time nurse and by Anastasia, the maid in her nineties who

had been with him all his life. Aunt Dolores had died a few years

earlier. Though I tried to stay in a hotel, he insisted on my coming to

his small, two-story* house, not far from Olivar de San Isidro, where

he had more than enough room.

Uncle Ataulfo had aged a great deal and was now a frail little man

who shuffled his feet and was as thin as a broomstick. But he

preserved the unrestrained cordiality he'd always had, and he was

still alert and curious, reading three or four newspapers a day with

the help of a philatelist's magnifying glass and listening to the news

every night so he would know how the world we live in was getting

on. Unlike Alberto, Uncle Ataulfo had somber forebodings about the

immediate future. He thought that Shining Path and the Tupac

Amaru Revolutionary Movement would be with us for some time,

and he mistrusted the triumph of APRA in the next elections

predicted by the polls. "It will be the coup de grace for poor Peru,

nephew," he complained.

I had returned to Lima after almost twenty years. I felt like a

complete stranger in a city where there was almost no trace left of

my memories. My aunt Alberta's house had disappeared, and in its

place stood an ugly, four-story building. The same thing had

happened all over Miraflores, where only a handful of the small

houses with gardens from my childhood resisted modernization.

The entire neighborhood had been depersonalized with a profusion

of buildings of various heights and the multiplication of businesses

and aerial forests of neon signs competing with one another in

vulgarity and bad taste. Thanks to Alberto Lamiel, the engineer, I

had seen the neighborhoods out of Arabian Nights where the rich

and well-to-do had moved. They were surrounded by the immense

districts, now euphemistically called "new towns," the refuge of

millions of peasants who came down from the mountains, fleeing

hunger and violence—armed actions and terrorism were

concentrated principally in the region of the central sierra—and

barely getting by in hovels made of straw mats, sticks, tin, rags,

whatever they could find, in settlements that for the most part had

no water, light, sewers, streets, or transportation. This coexistence of

wealth and poverty in Lima made the rich seem richer and the poor

seem poorer. On many afternoons, when I didn't go out with my old

friends from Barrio Alegre or my new nephew, Alberto Lamiel, I

would stay and talk with Uncle Ataulfo, and this topic returned

obsessively to our conversation. It seemed to me that the economic

differences between the very small minority of Peruvians who lived

well and enjoyed the advantages of education, work, and

entertainment, and those who barely survived in poor or wretched

conditions, had been exacerbated in the past two decades. According

to him, this was a false impression, due to the perspective I had

brought from Europe, where the existence of an enormous middle

class diluted and wiped away those contrasts between extremes. But

in Peru, where the middle class was very small, huge contrasts had

always existed. Uncle Ataulfo was dismayed by the violence that was

crushing Permian society. "I always suspected this might happen.

And now it's here, it has happened. It's just as well poor Dolores

didn't live to see it." The kidnappings, the terrorists' bombs, the

destruction of bridges, highways, electrical powerhouses, the

atmosphere of insecurity and vandalism, he lamented, would set

back by many years the country's ascent toward modernity, in which

Uncle Ataulfo had never stopped believing. Until now. "I won't see

the ascent now, nephew. I hope you do."

I never could give him a convincing explanation of why the bad

girl refused to come to Lima with me, because I didn't have one. He

accepted with concealed skepticism the story that she couldn't leave

her job because it was precisely the time of year when the company

had to handle an overwhelming demand from conventions,

conferences, weddings, banquets, and all kinds of celebrations,

which prevented her taking a couple of weeks' vacation. In Paris I

didn't believe her either when she used this excuse for not coming

with me, and I told her so. The bad girl then confessed it wasn't true,

that in reality she didn't want to go to Lima. "And why is that, may I

ask?" I said, trying to tempt her. "Don't you miss Permian food?

Well, I propose a couple of weeks with all the delicacies of our

national cuisine, ceviche of corvina, prawn stew, rice with duck,

cracked ribs, potatoes and eggs with chilies and olives, kid stew, and