The Bad Girl Read Online Free Page B

twos, and
    sometimes even by threes, in a small, squalid room or in the
    chambre de bonne of some Latin American or Frenchman disposed
    to adding his grain of sand to the cause of world revolution. In my
    garret in the Hotel du Senat, on Rue Saint-Sulpice, I sometimes put
    up one of the scholarship recipients behind the back of Madame
    Auclair, the manager.
    They constituted an extremely diverse collection of fauna. Many
    were students of literature, law, economics, science, and education
    at San Marcos, who had joined the Young Communists or other
    leftist organizations, and in addition to Limenians there were kids
    from the provinces, and even some peasants, Indians from Puno,
    Cuzco, and Ayacucho, bewildered by the leap from their Andean
    villages and communities, where they had somehow been recruited,
    to Paris. They looked at everything in bewilderment. From the few
    words I exchanged with them on the way from Orly to their hotels,
    they sometimes gave the impression of not being too sure what kind
    of scholarship they were going to enjoy and not really understanding
    what kind of training they would receive. Not all of them had been
    given their scholarships in Peru. Some had received them in Paris,
    chosen from the variegated mass of Peruvians—students, artists,
    adventurers, bohemians—who prowled the Latin Quarter. Among
    them, the most original was my friend Alfonso the Spiritualist, sent
    to France by a theosophical sect in Lima to pursue studies in
    parapsychology and theosophy, but Paul's eloquence swept away the
    spirits and installed him in the world of the revolution. He was a
    pale, timid boy who barely opened his mouth, and there was
    something emaciated and distracted in him, a precocious kind of
    spirit. In our midday conversations at Le Cluny or La Petite Source, I
    suggested to Paul that many of the scholarship recipients the MIR
    was sending to Cuba, and sometimes to North Korea or the People's
    Republic of China, were simply taking advantage of the chance to do
    a little tourism and would never climb the Andes or go down into
    Amazonia with rifles on their shoulders and packs on their backs.
    "It's all been calculated, mon vieux" Paul replied, sitting like a
    magistrate who has the laws of history on his side. "If half of them
    respond to us, the revolution is a sure thing."
    True, the MIR was doing things a little quickly, but how could
    they enjoy the luxury of sleeping? History, after moving for so many
    years like a tortoise, had suddenly become a meteor, thanks to Cuba.
    It was necessary to act, learn, stumble, get up again. This wasn't the
    time to recruit young guerrillas by making them submit to
    examinations of their knowledge, to physical trials or psychological
    tests. The important thing was to take advantage of those one
    hundred scholarships before Cuba offered them to other
    groups—the Communist Party, the Liberation Front, the
    Trotskyists—who were competing to be the first to set the Permian
    revolution in motion.
    Most of the scholarship recipients I picked up at Orly to take to
    the hotels and boardinghouses where they would spend their time in
    Paris were male and very young, some of them adolescents. One day
    I discovered there were also women among them.
    "Pick them up and take them to this little hotel on Rue Gay
    Lussac," Paul said. "Comrade Ana, Comrade Arlette, and Comrade
    Eufrasia. Be nice to them."
    One rule the scholarship recipients had been carefully taught
    was not to disclose their real names. Even among themselves they
    used only their nicknames or noms de guerre. As soon as the three
    girls showed up, I had the impression I'd seen Comrade Arlette
    somewhere before.
    Comrade Ana was a dark-skinned girl with lively gestures, a little
    older than the others, and from the things I heard her say that
    morning and the two or three other times I saw her, she must have
    been the head of a teachers' union. Comrade Eufrasia, a little
    Chinese girl with delicate bones,