Read Online The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online Page B

an orphan in my own country. I lived in my aunt Alberta's
    apartment on Calle Colon in Miraflores, which still was filled with
    her presence and where everything reminded me of her, of my years
    at the university, of my adolescence without parents. It moved me
    when I found all the letters I had written to her from Paris, arranged
    chronologically, in her bedside table. I saw some of my old
    Miraflores friends from the Barrio Alegre, and with half a dozen of
    them went one Saturday to eat at the Kuo Wha Chinese restaurant
    near the Via Expresa to talk about old times. Except for our
    memories, we didn't have much in common anymore, since their
    lives as young professionals and businessmen—two were working in
    their fathers' companies—had nothing to do with my life in France.
    Three were married, one had begun to have children, and the other
    three had girlfriends who would soon be their brides. In the jokes
    we told one another—a way of filling empty spaces in the
    conversation—they all pretended to envy me for living in the city of
    pleasure and fucking those French girls who were famous for being
    wild women in bed. How surprised they would have been if I
    confessed that in the years I spent in Paris, the only girl I went to
    bed with was a Permian, Lily of all people, the false Chilean girl of
    our childhood. What did they think of the guerrillas and their
    announcement in the papers? Like Uncle Ataulfo, they didn't think
    they were important. Those Castristas sent here by Cuba wouldn't
    last very long. Who could believe that a Communist revolution
    would triumph in Peru? If the Belaunde government couldn't stop
    them, the military would come in again and impose order,
    something they didn't look forward to.
    That's what Dr. Ataulfo Lamiel was afraid of too. "The only thing
    these idiots will achieve by playing guerrilla is to hand the military
    an excuse for a coup d'etat on a silver platter. And stick us with
    another eight or ten years of military dictatorship. Who even thinks
    about making a revolution against a government that's not only
    Chilian and democratic, but that the entire Permian oligarchy,
    beginning with La Prensa and El Comercio, accuses of being
    Communist because it wants agrarian reform? Peru is confusion,
    nephew, you did the right thing when you went to live in the country
    of Cartesian clarity."
    Uncle Ataulfo was a lanky, mustachioed man in his forties who
    always wore a jacket and bow tie and was married to Aunt Dolores, a
    kind, pale woman who had been an invalid for close to ten years and
    whom he looked after with devotion. They lived in a nice house, full
    of books and records, in Olivar de San Isidro, where they invited me
    to lunch and dinner. Aunt Dolores bore her illness without
    bitterness and amused herself by playing the piano and watching
    soap operas. When we recalled Aunt Alberta, she started to cry. They
    had no children and he, in addition to his law practice, taught classes
    in mercantile law at Catholic University. He had a good library and
    was very interested in local politics, not hiding his sympathies for
    the democratic reform movement incarnated, to his mind, in
    Belaunde Terry. He was very kind to me, expediting the formalities
    of the inheritance as much as he could and refusing to charge me a
    cent for his services: "Don't be silly, nephew, I was very fond of
    Alberta and your parents." Those were tedious days of abject
    appearances before notaries and judges and carrying documents
    back and forth through the labyrinthine Palace of Justice, which left
    me sleepless at night and increasingly impatient to return to Paris.
    In my free time I reread Flaubert's Sentimental Education because
    now, for me, Madame Arnoux in the novel had not only the name
    but also the face of the bad girl. Once the taxes on the inheritance
    had been deducted and the debts left behind by Aunt Alberta had
    been paid, Uncle Ataulfo announced that with the apartment sold
    and the furniture