‘Travesuras de la Nina Mala’ Book Review (‘The Bad Girl’, by M.V. Llosa) (Peru, July 2019)
This book was read in stages on a recent Peruvian travel, allowing me to discover – in parallel, so to speak - in the real world this fascinating country, while following the fictional perspective of this Nobel-prize-winning Peruvian author on its people, its recent fraught history, and his fictional leading characters, and their global love story, at once full of beauty and despair.
Arequipa
(I have always felt that the best writing is partially autobiographic - no stories are as burning and inspiring as one’s own; I thus don’t share the criticism of, e.g., my favourite American novelist, recently deceased Philip Roth, who should have had the Nobel prize just as it is well deserved for Vargas Llosa. In my youth I had read lots of the works by other representatives of the Magic Realism stream of literature famous in post-WW2 Latin America, with Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mexican Carlos Fuentes my key inspiration and envy. In English, only Salman Rushdie comes close to having such imaginary powers and playfulness with words; in my (unwritten) book, that is.)
In Arequipa, his place of birth, I acquired a relatively recent novel of Vargas Llosa, something about ‘Travesuras de la nina mala’ (‘A bad girl’), written in 2006 but set on the first pages in 1950s Lima, the flower- and villa-filled district of Miraflores, to be exact, which we also constituted our first stop on this Peruvian voyage. A blond-headed Chilean girl aged 15 and named Lily dances the newly arrived mambo dance so much better and seductively, that the Peruvian teenager who is the narrator falls for her three times in one summer, enchanted first and foremost by her manner of speaking, her eating of the last syllables of expressions, her mysterious Chilean words full of promise and mystery. His stern aunt disapprovingly murmurs to herself “Bueno, no olvidemos che es chilena, el fuerte de las mujeres de este país no es la virtud!” (‘Well, let’s not forget that she is Chilean; the women of that country are not known for their virtues!’)
It is a love story that moves through time and three continents - they meet many times but can apparently neither let go of each other nor fully work out their joint lives .... more to come as I get deeper into the promising thread of the novel. (Allegedly it is a rewrite of ‘Madame Bovary’, the 1856 Gustave Flaubert novel about Europe’s first feminist, who became legendary for her voracious love life against all societal norms.)
Cusco & The Sacred Valley
[Meanwhile, ‘la nina mala’ has been growing up. Vargas Llosa fast forwards to Paris in the early 1960s, where his narrator, now a graduated Peruvian lawyer finally in the town of his dreams, making ends meet as a part-time translator at the Unesco and being suspected of secretly writing poetry (to which he has not owned up yet, but autobiographic parallels to Vargas Llosa are unmistakable), mingles with revolutionary Latino wannabees, fascinated by the Cuban revolution, and plotting to bring the same revolutionary solution to Latin America’s intractable problems of extreme inequality, ebbing and flowing of military dictatorships, and lack of sustained integrative development. His Chilean teenage love Lucy, who – having been exposed as a fraud by the petit bourgeois society of Miraflores and having left his life around 15 – reappears in Paris on a ‘revolutionary scholarship’ enroute to Cuba, as ‘guerrillera Arlette’. He declares his love a 4thtime, and recites Chilean noble literate Pablo Neruda’s love poem ‘Material Nupcial’ (Bridal Material) to her in his little Parisian mansard before finally making love to her, at the age of 25. She is cold and less romantically inclined, and begs to go beneath the sheets while he recites this complex and erotic poem to her from memory:
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/es/Neruda,_Pablo-1904/Material_nupcial/en/55013-Nuptial_Substance
After finally seeing his teenage love fulfilled, he is thrown into emotional turmoil upon seeing her disappear to Cuba for what was supposed to be a short three months, only to see her come back three years later, married, arriviste and froid, to an ageing French diplomat … and although he then becomes her lover, he never conquers her love, nor is he alone in desiring her female attributes and her heart, going from one suffering episode to another in the city of his dreams … Having finally fulfilled his life-long dream of spending an entire night with her, upon pressing her to divorce the diplomat and marry him, she brusquely tells him:
“Que ingenuo y que iluso eres. No me conoces. Yo solo me quedaría para siempre con un hombre que fuera muy, muy rico y poderoso. Tu nunca lo seras, por desgracia.”
(You are disingenuous and full of illusions. You don’t know me. I would only stay forever with a man who would be very rich and powerful. You will never be that, unfortunately.)
As if that were not enough to break his heart, she shortly thereafter disappears without a trace, having emptied her husband’s offshore Swiss bank account, leaving them both alone over a Parisian dinner guessing what is true and what is made-up in her many stories and narratives … meanwhile some of his close Peruvian Parisian friends, all revolucionistas, have tried to set up a Che Guevara-like guerrilla operation in the Peruvian sierra, only to end as miserably dead as the great Argentinian medical student-turned-guerrilla himself, hero of my youth, in his abortive Bolivian revolutionary exploits, in 1967, aged 39. His malaise could not be more complete.]
Lares Trail to Machu Picchu
[Back in the novel by Vargas Llosa that I carried over all these mountains, our Peruvian hapless lover throws himself into work, becoming both an interpreter at UNESCO as well as a simultaneous translator, a profession one of his colleague describes as speaking for others, as articulating a million words but not remembering one. His travels to many conferences around the world lead him to discover the ‘swinging London’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, where the hippy movement, free love, psychedelic parties full of drugs and promiscuity, plus the music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, give it an edge over his elective home town of Paris.
He reconnects with a Peruvian school friend living in Aussie’s Earls’ Court, and soon spends more time in London than anywhere else, flowing with the tides of the time. His Peruvian hippie-turned-equine painter for the horse-owning upper classes of Newmarket in Sussex has a photo in his pied-a-Terre where he identifies, four years later and having passed 40 years of age, La Niña mala!
She is now Mrs Richardson, married to a British entrepreneur and horse-lover. All the money in the world, but not happy, nor in love; and odious of the quadrupeds and the provincial life in Sussex.
Ricardito says to himself upon re-discovering her:
“Me basto verla para reconocer que, aún a sabiendas de que cualquier relación con La Niña mala estaba condenada al fracaso, lo unico que realmente deseaba yo en la vida con esa pasión con que otros persiguen la fortuna, la gloria, el éxito, el poder, era tenerla a ella, con todas sus mentiras, sus enredos, su egoísmo y sus disapariciones.”
(‘It was sufficient for me to see her to recognize that, despite knowing that any relationship with the nina mala was condemned to failure, the only thing I really desired in life with the same passion with which others pursue fortunes, glory, success, or power, was to have her, with all her lies, her entanglements, her egoism and her disappearing acts.’)
Notwithstanding that insight, our narrator, El Niño bueno, commences a two-year romantic liaison with her, meeting in Russel Hotel every week, across from where my daughter now studies at UCL. It is the happiest time in his life, until he asks her once again to own up to her emotions for him ... his second mistake after letting her leave for Cuba when she was but 25.
More to come.]
Madre de Dios (Peruvian Amazon)
[Once again, La Niña mala disappeared without trace from our narrator’s life, leaving him feeling empty, desolate, senseless. And again, not only had the woman he loved more than anything else left him with apparent disinterest and disdain, his last Peruvian friend in the European diaspora, the hippy-turned-equestrian painter that had led him back to her, contracted aids, then the new mystery disease predominantly affecting gays and bisexuals like his friend, and he died in front of his eyes. Having contacted his parents and see them collect the remains of the lost son, he departed for Paris and buried himself in more work to overcome his emptiness and despair, inter alia translating some of Chekov’s tales.
He befriended one of his translator colleagues, a man of 12 languages but few friends, who - having been deserted by his Polish fiancé in Berlin years ago, weeks before their wedding - had only believed in purchasable ‘love’, left for a contract in Tokyo and fell deeply in love with a Japanese lawyer colleague of his. In one of his letters from Tokyo, he adds a postscript: ‘greetings from the Nina mala’.
Ricardito cannot but arrange to travel there, even though he is told she lives with a loathsome elder Japanese man, whom he makes out to be a Yakuza gangster. And indeed, upon arriving and meeting Kuriko, as she is now known, she tells him that she is in thrall to this man, both as his employee smuggling allegedly aphrodisiac rhino and elephant horns from frequent travels out of Africa, and as his lover, or more appropriately his ‘puta’, as she is one of several women in his ‘service’. El Niño bueno, who feels that she is for the first time beholden to someone else and not just using the men in her life, turns jealous, and yet more desiring of her at the same time. She is more beautiful and flirtatious than ever, despite approaching her mid-40s, and she shows him Tokyo’s sights and makes love to him again.
Meanwhile it turns out that his translator friend, Salomon, is completely besotted by his Japanese love, caressing and kissing her in public to her increasing apparent discomfort. After a joint dinner of Kuriko and her Japanese man, Salomon and his girlfriend, and Ricardo, La Niña mala - having assured him that they are alone in the gangster’s sumptuous house - seduces him in a manner that he has never experienced, proactive, teasing, supremely affectionate, including blowing him as he has asked her to for two decades. Just as he climaxes, he sees the gangster out of the corner of his eye, and it dawns on him that her sexual transformation and attention is all just to serve the perverse libidinous desires of this peeping Tom.
The ensuing emotions can only be properly appreciated from the original Spanish. When he challenges her, she hits him and shouts:
“Te creías que iba hacer esto por ti, muerto de hambre, fracasado, imbecil? Pero, quien eres tu, quien te has creido tu? Ah, te morirás si supieras cuanto te despreció, cuanto te odio, cobarde.”
(‘Did you think I was going to do this for you, starving no-good, you failure, you imbecile? Who are you, who do you think you are? Well, you would die if you knew how much I disavow you, how much I hate you, you coward.’)
One does not have to be a psychologist to be able to glimpse his emotions, but Vargas Llosa does a painfully beautiful job expressing them:
“Estuve horas con la mente in blanco, desvelado, sintiéndome una porqueria humana impregnada de estúpida inocencia, de ingenua imbecilidad.”
(‘I lay there for hours with a blank mind, sleepless, feeling like a human piece of shit, inundated with stupid naïveté, an imbecile of disingenuous proportions.’)
He hurriedly travels back to Paris, and concludes to delete her from his life, for all times. A letter reaches him from Salomon’s Japanese girlfriend, informing him that she has terminated that relationship, upon which Salomon has committed suicide ...
She has now left him three times, and three of his friends are no longer, their deaths each time coinciding with an abrupt break in this heart-breaking love addiction of his. We are on page 221 of 418 - how long can this suffering go on??
With the Peruvian journey now at its end, you will have to wait a little for the final instalments on this novel ...]
The Final Chapters (Back Home)
Back in Paris in the 1980s, Ricardito feels like he is getting old, at 47, as cutting all ties with and aspirations for la nina mala leaves him devoid of the food of life, illusions, aspirations, dreams, hope.
A few time she calls him but he throws down the receiver. He befriends the mute son of his new neighbours, an adopted child from Vietnam that evidently carries the scars of that war on his soul and body; that boy often comes over to his apartment to watch TV together. Once when Ricardo is travelling, the boy picks up a call from la nina mala, and leaves a message for him that she has yet again reached out to him.
So next time he picks up the phone to listen to her …. And of course she is back in Paris, asking to meet, and for his help. She is a mess, physically frail and ill, destitute, aged, half-broken. Telling a story about having been caught by the Lagos police smuggling, incarcerated, gang-raped, infected by near-fatal untreated medical complications.
Ricardito, well, once beholden … takes a 2nd mortgage on his apartment and a further loan, finds a private clinic outside Paris that rehabilitates her physically and psychologically. She appears changed, calm, ‘normal’, moving in with him, content with a petit bourgeois existence in Paris. Apparently.
La Nina Mala strikes up a close friendship with the mute boy, the child they never had. And encouraged by her, he finally starts speaking, in fluent Spanish and French. A little miracle.
When Ricardo meets the clinic’s lead psychiatrist for a de-briefing, after the doctor has interviewed the nina mala, inter alia under hypnotic methodology, he learns the truth … No Nigerian rape. But instead a complete and utter sexual subordination, voluntarily, and subjugation by, the Japanese yakuza gangster, who abuses her in ways not fit for public description, ‘lending’ her out to his business acolytes and bodyguards, watching her as she … all physical and mental injuries are a result of years of such abuse, all suppressed by her to find a way back into life and self-respect, according to the doctor. This novel keeps breaking your heart in more ways than one, and then some.
A few months later -- he keeps the doctor’s secret as recommended -- they appear happy, and he asks her to marry him, declaring his love for her for the umpteenth time; she stays hesitant. When he comes back from a translation job abroad a few days later, she is gone, a laconic note on his desk, life too boring, cannot handle it. – He is destroyed. And tries to jump off a bridge in Paris, only saved by a clochard at the last moment. The next day, she is back … having re-considered; and having nearly led to his suicide in the process. One would like to numb the trigger of empathy, alas.
He hits her, then they make love, and in the aftermath she gives a glimpse into her emotional framework and complexity, when she says:
‘Nunca te voy a decir que te quiero, aunque te quiera.’ [I will never tell you that I love you, even when I love you.]
‘Y aunque vamos a casarnos para arreglar mis papeles, no sera nunca tu esposa. Yo quiero ser siempre tu amante, tu perrita, tu puta. Como esta noche. Porque asi te tendre siempre loquito por me.’ [And even though we are going to get married to get my papers in order, I will never be your wife. I always want to stay your lover, your little dog, your bitch. Like tonight. Because that way you will always stay crazed for me.’]
And so they marry, on false papers that he organizes from Peru, since she is a bigamist, twice married and never divorced. On a trip back to Lima, Ricardo meets an old man, who complains about an ungrateful daughter that has lied and deceived her parents, left for Europe decades ago, and has never been in touch no supported them financially.
And it becomes clear that having lived in her youth on the disadvantaged side of the very unequal Peruvian society, Otilita (her true name) was always embarrassed at being poor, disadvantaged, without access to good education, social mobility, respectability, the good life. Her apparently pathological obsession to flee that heritage and poverty at last throws an explanatory light on her self-destructive man-jumping spree over the last three decades. The narrator tells neither the father about his daughter, nor upon the return to Paris the daughter about the discussion with her father. -- The reader starts to understand, and, importantly, to forgive.
Well, soon afterwards, she disappears again, for good. He suffers a mental breakdown this time, and a minor brain injury, affecting his memory and linguistic capabilities, as a result of which he contracts less work and needs to sell his Paris apartment, the one objective in his life, lest it is repossessed by the bank. We are in the early 1990s by now, he is a spent man in many ways. He moves to post-Franco Madrid and makes end meets with irregular and poorly paid translator work, a young Italian actress at his side, a relationship of convenience for both, a comfort without passion, a way to put her behind him.
At the same time, he knows that he is as much to blame as her for the suffering he has had to endure:
‘Sabia muy bien que mis infortunios sentimentales debia mas a mi que a ella, por haberla querido de una manera que ella nunca hubiera podido quererme a mi.’ [I knew very well that my emotional misfortunes were more attributable to me than to her, since I had loved her in a way that she would never have been able to reciprocate.]
Vargas Llosa describes the new freedom in Madrid in the early 1990s, post-France, with a heavy veil lifted from a whole country and society after the 2nd longest dictatorship in Europe, from 1937-1975 (only Portugal’s lasted even longer). And in the interview with Vargas Llosa closing out the book, he reflects that these stations of the book, Paris in the 1960s, London in the 1970s/80s, Tokyo, and Madrid in the 1990s, do reflect parallels to his own biographic experiences.
Closing Time
One last time, the nina mala reappears in Ricardito’s life. Admitting that he has been the only man who ever loved her truly.
‘Me equivocaba. Ahora se que tu eres para mi la felicidad.’ [I was wrong. Now I know that you were happiness for me.]
But now nothing is left of her, ‘era una vieja’. Cancer has led to a dual mastectomy, and removal of her uterus. The brutal symbolism of many of her marks of femininity and fertility having been removed is not lost on the reader. She wants Ricardo to bury her in dignity.
He is unsparing in his comments upon her forced re-entry into his life:
‘Eres la persona mas perversa que he conocido, nina mala. Un monstruo de egoismo y de insensibilidad capaz de apunalar con la mayor frialdad a las personas que mejor se portan contigo.’ [You are the most perverse person in the world that I have known, nina mala. A monster of egoism and insensibility, capable of putting in cold blood daggers into the people that have treated you best.]
‘A mi me han hecho las peores maldades que puede hacer una mujer a un hombre. Me has hecho creer que me querias, mientrasque, con toda la tranquilidad del mundo, seducias a otros caballeros. Porque tenian mas dinero, y me largabas sin el mejor cargo de cociencia. No lo has hecho una sino dos, tres veces. Dejandome destrozado, aturdito, sin animos de nada.’ [I have been made to suffer the worst abuses that a woman can inflict on a man. You have led me to believe that you loved me, whereas, with all the calmness of the world, you seduced other men. Because they had more money, and you left me without the tiniest pang of bad conscience. Not once, but twice, thrice. Leaving me destroyed, dazed, with no life left in me.]
But also:
‘Y, aunque me has hecho maldades, me has dado tambien una felicidad maravillosa.’ [And yet, while you have treated me badly, you have also given me a marvelous happiness.’
True to form, he takes her back, now all platonic and caretaking, a few weeks of peace and togetherness in Madrid – the Italian actress having just eloped with a young Spanish theatre director, with Ricardo’s half-hearted blessing – it is not easy giving up a woman to a younger man.
They spend her last 37 days on earth together and she behaves like the ‘esposa modelo’, the model spouse, just as she promised upon her last return.
She bequeaths a small rural house in the south of France to him, left to her by her last male conquest, and closes her life saying that she hopes she has at least given him the material for a good novel to write …
*****
