The Bad Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

from then on: denying the story of the Chilean girls, though
    sometimes, for instance that night at L'Escale, when she said she
    recognized in me the idiotic little snot-nose from ten years back, she
    let something slip—an image, an allusion—that revealed she was in
    fact the false Chilean girl of our adolescence.
    We stayed at L'Escale until three in the morning, and though she
    let me kiss and caress her, she didn't respond. She didn't move her
    lips away when I touched them with mine but made no
    corresponding movement, she allowed herself to be kissed but was
    indifferent and, of course, she never opened her mouth to let me
    swallow her saliva. Her body, too, seemed like an iceberg when my
    hands caressed her waist, her shoulders, and paused at her hard
    little breasts with erect nipples. She remained still, passive, resigned
    to this effusiveness, like a queen accepting the homage of a vassal,
    until, at last, noticing that my caresses were becoming bolder, she
    casually pushed me away.
    "This is my fourth declaration of love, Chilean girl," I said at the
    door to the little hotel on Rue Gay Lussac. "Is the answer finally
    yes?"
    "We'll see." And she blew me a kiss and moved away. "Never lose
    hope, good boy."
    For the ten days that followed this encounter, Comrade Arlette
    and I had something that resembled a honeymoon. We saw each
    other every day and I went through all the cash I still had from Aunt
    Alberta's money orders. I took her to the Louvre and the Jeu de
    Paume, the Rodin Museum and the houses of Balzac and Victor
    Hugo, the Cinematheque on Rue d'Ulm, a performance at the
    National Popular Theater directed by Jean Vilar (we saw Chekhov's
    Cefou de Platonov, in which Vilar himself played the protagonist),
    and on Sunday we rode the train to Versailles, where, after visiting
    the palace, we took a long walk in the woods and were caught in a
    rainstorm and soaked to the skin. In those days anyone would have
    taken us for lovers because we always held hands and I used any
    excuse to kiss and caress her. She allowed me to do this, at times
    amused, at other times indifferent, always putting an end to my
    effusiveness with an impatient expression. "That's enough now,
    Ricardito." On rare occasions she would take the initiative and
    arrange or muss my hair with her hand or pass a slender finger
    along my nose or mouth as if she wanted to smooth them, a caress
    like that of an affectionate mistress with her poodle.
    From the intimacy of those ten days I came to a conclusion:
    Comrade Arlette didn't give a damn about politics in general or the
    revolution in particular. Her membership in the Young Communists
    and then in the MIR was probably a lie, not to mention her studies
    at Catholic University. She not only never talked about political or
    university subjects, but when I brought the conversation around to
    that terrain, she didn't know what to say, was ignorant of the most
    elementary things, and managed to change the subject very quickly.
    It was evident she had obtained this guerrilla fighter's scholarship in
    order to get out of Peru and travel around the world, something that
    as a girl of very humble origins—that much was glaringly
    obvious—she never could have done otherwise. But I didn't have the
    courage to question her about any of this; I didn't want to put her on
    the spot and force her to tell me another lie.
    On the eighth day of our chaste honeymoon she agreed,
    unexpectedly, to spend the night with me at the Hotel du Senat. It
    was something I had asked for—had begged for—in vain, on all the
    previous days. This time, she took the initiative.
    "I'll go with you today, if you like," she said at night as we were
    eating a couple of baguettes with Gruyere cheese (I didn't have the
    money for a restaurant) in a bistrot on Rue de Tournon. My heart
    raced as if I had just run a marathon.
    After an awkward negotiation with the watchman at the Hotel du
    Senat—"Pas de visites nocturnes a