Now that I am in Peru and so in love with Cusco, it was time to read some Peruvian literature. And who better to start with than the Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa? His last novel, The Bad Girl, was one of five recommended by The Guardian. Soon after I began reading it, Gabriel Garcia Marquez died and there were the inevitable comparisons. When I read the first chapter of The Bad Girl, I thought Llosa was no Marquez. I was a bit disappointed. But chapter by chapter my respect grew for Llosa's clear and simple style. I enjoyed it very much even though I thought it ended too abruptly. The moral of the story, for me: nothing justifies perpetual bad behavior, no matter how beautiful and desireable you may be. But love makes you stupid, somethimes for the better, but often for the worse. In the end we ourselves are to blame, not any bad girl or boy.

Excerpts

... tomorrow she was going to a tea given by friends for Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah of Iran, who was on a private visit to Paris.

***

“And what if money wasn’t happiness, bad girl?”

“Happiness, I don’t know and I don’t care what it is, Ricardito. What I am sure about is that it isn’t the romantic, vulgar thing it is for you. Money gives you security, it protects you, it lets you enjoy life thoroughly and not worry about tomorrow. It’s the only happiness you can touch.”

***

Many hippies, perhaps the majority, came from the middle or upper class, and their rebellion was familial, directed against the well-regulated lives of their parents and what they considered the hypocrisy of puritanical customs and social façades behind which they hid their egotism, insular spirit, and lack of imagination. Their pacifism, naturism, vegetarianism, their eager search for a spiritual life that would give transcendence to their rejection of a materialist world corroded by class, social, and sexual prejudices, a world they wanted nothing to do with—this was sympathetic. But all of it was anarchic, thoughtless, without a center or direction, even without ideas, because the hippies—at least the ones I knew and observed up close—though they claimed to identify with the poetry of the beatniks (Allen Ginsberg gave a reading of his poems in Trafalgar Square in which he sang and performed Indian dances, and thousands of young people attended), in fact read very little or nothing at all. Their philosophy wasn’t based on thought and reason but on sentiment, on feeling.

***

“... The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life, which is the love that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you live with greater tranquility and enjoy things more.”

***

It was enough for me to see her to realize that, despite my knowing that any relationship with the bad girl was doomed to failure, the only thing I really wanted in life with the passion others bring to the pursuit of fortune, glory, success, power, was having her, with all her lies, entanglements, egotism, and disappearances.

***

“I’ve never said ‘I love you, I adore you’ and really meant it. Never. I’ve only said those things as a lie. Because I’ve never loved anybody, Ricardito. I’ve lied to all of them, always. I think the only man I’ve never lied to in bed is you.”

“Well, coming from you, that’s a declaration of love.”

***

She looked like an escapee from a painting by Botero.

***

Because of her, the illusions that make existence something more than the sum of its routines had been extinguished for me.

***

“You’ll never live quietly with me, I warn you. Because I don’t want you to get tired of me, to get used to me. And even if we marry to straighten out my papers, I’ll never be your wife. I always want to be your lover, your lapdog, your whore. Like tonight. Because then I’ll always keep you crazy about me.”

***

Though they say only imbeciles are happy, I confess that I felt happy.

***

I told myself that in [Peru] the country of my birth, from which I was disengaged in an increasingly irreversible way, there undoubtedly were many men and women like him, basically decent people who had dreamed all their lives of the economic, social, cultural, and political progress that would transform Peru into a modern, prosperous, democratic society with opportunities open to all, only to find themselves repeatedly frustrated, and, like Uncle Ataúlfo, had reached old age—the very brink of death—bewildered, asking themselves why we were moving backward instead of advancing and were worse off now, with more discrimination, inequality, violence, and insecurity than when they were starting out.

***

... perhaps, right here, when she was still very young, she already had made the rash decision to move forward and do whatever she had to do to no longer be Otilita, daughter of the cook and the builder of breakwaters, to flee forever the trap, the prison, the curse that Peru meant for her, and go far away and become rich—that above all: rich, very rich—though to accomplish this she would have to engage in the worst escapades, run the most awful risks, do anything at all until she became a cold, unloving, calculating, and cruel woman.

***

... for the sake of my mental health I had to forget about her right away. Because this time the separation was definitive, the end of the love story. Could this farce more than thirty years old be called a love story, Ricardito?

***

I had loved her in a way she never could have reciprocated, though on some few occasions she had tried: these were my most glorious memories...