The Bad Girl Read Online Free Page A

the
    revolution.
    We became friends at a little cafe in the Latin Quarter where a
    group of South Americans would meet, the kind Sebastian Salazar
    Bondy wrote about in Poor People of Paris, a book of short stories.
    When he learned of my financial difficulties, Paul offered to give me
    a hand as far as food was concerned because there was more than
    enough at the Mexico Lindo. If I came to the back door at about ten
    at night, he would offer me a "free, hot banquet," something he had
    already done for other compatriots in need.
    He couldn't have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five
    years old, and he was very, very fat—a barrel with legs—and goodhearted,
    friendly, and talkative. He always had a big smile on his
    face, which inflated his plump cheeks even more. In Peru he had
    studied medicine for several years and served some time in prison
    for being one of the organizers of the famous strike at the University
    of San Marcos in 1952, during the dictatorship of General Manuel
    Odria. Before coming to Paris he spent a couple of years in Madrid,
    where he married a girl from Burgos. They'd just had a baby.
    He lived in the Marais, which in those days, before Andre
    Malraux, General de Gaulle's minister of culture, undertook his
    great cleanup and restoration of old, dilapidated mansions covered
    by the grime of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a
    neighborhood of poor artisans, cabinetmakers, cobblers, tailors,
    Jews, and a large number of indigent students and artists. In
    addition to those rapid encounters at the service entrance of the
    Mexico Lindo, we would also get together at midday at La Petite
    Source on the Carrefour de l'Odeon or on the terrace of Le Cluny, at
    the corner of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, to drink coffee and
    recount our adventures. Mine consisted exclusively of multiple
    efforts to find a job, something that was not at all easy since no one
    in Paris was impressed by my law degree from a Permian university
    or by my being fairly fluent in English and French. His had to do
    with preparations for the revolution that would make Peru the
    second Socialist Republic of Latin America. One day he suddenly
    asked if I'd be interested in going to Cuba on a scholarship to receive
    military training, and I told Paul that even though I felt all the
    sympathy in the world for him, I had absolutely no interest in
    politics; in fact, I despised politics, and all my dreams were
    focused—excuse my petit bourgeois mediocrity, compadre—on
    getting a nice steady job that would let me spend, in the most
    ordinary way, the rest of my days in Paris. I also told him not to tell
    me anything about his conspiracies, I didn't want to live with the
    anxiety of accidentally revealing some information that might harm
    him and his associates.
    "Don't worry. I trust you, Ricardo."
    He did, in fact, to the extent that he ignored what I'd said. He
    told me everything he was doing and even the most intimate
    complications of their revolutionary preparations. Paul belonged to
    the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR, founded by Luis
    de la Puente Uceda, who had repudiated the center-left American
    Popular Revolutionary* Alliance, or APRA. The Cuban government
    had given MIR a hundred scholarships for young Peruvians to
    receive guerrilla training. These were the years of the confrontation
    between Beijing and Moscow, and at that moment it seemed as if
    Cuba was leaning toward the Maoist line, though later, for practical
    reasons, she eventually allied with the Soviets. The scholarship
    recipients, because of the strict blockade imposed on the island by
    the United States, had to pass through Paris on the way to their
    destination, and Paul was hard-pressed to find them places to stay
    during their Parisian stopover.
    I gave him a hand with these logistical chores, helping him
    reserve rooms in miserable little hotels—"for Arabs," Paul would
    say—where we crowded the future guerrilla fighters by