The Bad Girl Read Online Free

immediately as
    fake. How bad the Chilean girls must have felt when the fat little
    pig's aunt, suspecting the farce, began to ask about their family in
    Santiago, the neighborhood where they lived in Santiago, the school
    they attended in Santiago, about the relatives and friends of their
    family in Santiago, making Lucy and Lily swallow the bitterest pill of
    their short lives, becoming crueler and crueler until she hounded
    them from the living room and they were in ruins, spiritually and
    physically demolished, and she could proclaim to her relatives and
    friends and the stupefied Marirosa: "In a pig's eye they're Chileans!
    Those girls never set foot in Santiago, and if they're Chileans, I'm
    Tibetan!"
    That last day of the summer of 1950—I had just turned fifteen
    too—was the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates
    castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality.
    I never knew with any certainty the complete story of the false
    Chileans, and neither did anyone else except the two girls, but I did
    hear conjectures, gossip, fantasies, and supposed revelations that,
    like a wake of rumors, followed the counterfeit Chileans for a long
    time even after they ceased to exist—in a manner of
    speaking—because they were never again invited to parties, or
    games, or teas, or neighborhood get-togethers. Malicious gossips
    said that even though the decent girls from Barrio Alegre and
    Miraflores no longer had anything to do with them and looked away
    if they passed them on the street, the boys, the fellows, the men did
    go after them, in secret, the way they went after cheap girls—and
    what else were Lily and Lucy but two cheap girls from some
    neighborhood like Brena or El Porvenir who, to conceal their
    origins, had passed themselves off as foreigners and slipped in
    among the decent people of Miraflores?—to make out with them, to
    do those things that only half-breeds and cheap girls let men do.
    Later on, I imagine, they began to forget about Lily and Lucy,
    because other people, other matters eventually replaced that
    adventure of the last summer of our childhood. But I didn't. I didn't
    forget them, especially not Lily. And even though so many years
    have gone by, and Miraflores has changed so much, as have our
    customs, and barriers and prejudices have been obscured that once
    had been flaunted with insolence and now are disguised, I keep her
    in my memory, and evoke her again at times, and hear the
    mischievous laugh and see the mocking glance of her eyes the color
    of dark honey, and watch her swaying like a reed to the rhythms of
    the mambo. And still think that, in spite of my having lived for so
    many summers, that one was the most fabulous of all.

2
The Guerrilla Fighter
    The Mexico Lindo was on the corner of Rue des Canettes and Rue
    Guisard, near Place Saint-Sulpice, and during my first year in Paris,
    when money was very tight, on many nights I'd station myself at the
    restaurant's back door and wait for Paul to appear with a little
    package of tamales, tortillas, carnitas, or enchiladas that I would
    take to my garret in the Hotel du Senat to eat before they got cold.
    Paul had started out at the Mexico Lindo as a kitchen boy, and in a
    short time, thanks to his culinary skills, he was promoted to chef s
    assistant, and by the time he left it all to dedicate himself body and
    soul to the revolution, he was the restaurant's regular cook.
    In those early days of the 1960s, Paris was experiencing the fever
    of the Cuban Revolution and teeming with young people from the
    five continents who, like Paul, dreamed of repeating in their own
    countries the exploits of Fidel Castro and his bearded ones, and
    prepared for that, in earnest or in jest, in cafe conspiracies. In
    addition to earning his living at the Mexico Lindo, when I met him a
    few days after my arrival in Paris, Paul was taking biology courses at
    the Sorbonne, which he also abandoned for the sake of