Mario Vargas Llosa
TRAVESURAS DE LA NIÑA MALA
375pp. Madrid: Alfaguara. £19.50.
84 204 6995 5
What was her name, her home, her life, her past?” wonders Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau on seeing Mme Arnoux for the first time. “Even the desire for physical possession gave way to a deeper yearning, an aching curiosity which knew no bounds.” Much the same feeling is stirred in the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel Travesuras de la niña mala (“The Bad Girl’s Escapades”) by the woman to whom he consecrates his life. So indefatigably unreliable and elusive will she prove, so resourceful in her self-reinventions, that Ricardo Somocurcio’s curiosity, far from being satisfied, is endlessly renewed. He will meet her again and again, over forty years, in several different cities and under a variety of names, and fall in love with her anew each and every time. She really is a bad girl, and his will be a sentimental education one wouldn’t wish on anybody, yet we can hardly imagine that Ricardo would have had it any other way. And since, for narratives as for mistresses, there are clear advantages in unpredictability, the result is a wonderfully seductive and enthralling novel.
Ricardo first meets the bad girl in 1950, when he is a quiet and bookish boy of fifteen, whose dream has always been to live in Paris. “Lily”, as she is called at this stage, is the elder and more flamboyant of two Chilean sisters newly arrived in the middle-class Lima suburb of Miraflores, where he lives. The girls make a splash in teenage social circles, dominating the scene for the whole of that year’s splendid summer – only to disappear from view when their claims to be from Chile are exposed as fiction. Who they are in fact, nobody knows – but then neither does anybody care too much once the immediate scandal has been enjoyed. Only Ricardo remembers the “Chilean sisters” as he grieves over the loss of his first love.
He has to get on with his life, however, and within a few years has realized his ambition of setting up in Paris as a translator. Revolution in Cuba has forced the hand of the radicals in his native country. Though Ricardo is apolitical, his good friend Paúl is involved, and Ricardo helps out by looking after activists passing through en route for military training in Cuba. One of these, “Comrade Arlette”, is none other than “Lily”, to whom he pours out his soul and pledges his eternal love. She denies all know-ledge of Chilean “Lily” – the conviction with which the bad girl can lie is extraordinary – but Ricardo is more than happy to let the matter go. For, as Comrade Arlette, she is prepared to submit to his sexual attentions – on her own terms and in icy passivity; it will be a feature of their relationship that the bad girl is never more remote than when they are apparently most intimate. And yet she plainly enjoys his adoration, especially the high-flown phrases (huachaferías in Peruvian Spanish) with which he swears his undying love.
She would be willing to stay with him, she says (for her the Revolution is clearly no more than a passage out of Peru), but Ricardo cannot bring himself to break his commitment to his friend. Within a few months, in fact, Paúl will be dead, having gone to Peru to join the fight, but not before telling a desolate Ricardo that the love of his life has taken up with a member of the Cuban regime.
Time passes. In the early 1960s, Ricardo is at UNESCO headquarters in Paris when he is greeted by a woman who looks as if she has stepped straight out of Vogue. “Comrade Arlette” is no more, it seems: the bad girl is now the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, whose name is none other than Arnoux. “See what you lost by your cowardice”, says the newly minted Mme Arnoux – though this epitome of elegance and glamour could hardly be less like the trainee guerrilla who shared his attic room all those months before. Utterly in thrall to this seductive woman, Ricardo resumes his relationship as an affair (at least Mme Arnoux condescends to let him make peremptorily directed love to her and ply her with his huachaferías), until the bad girl suddenly disappears from Paris with her husband’s savings. And so it goes on: she turns up next in the England of the Swinging Sixties as Mrs Richardson, the Mexican wife of a Newmarket racehorse-owner. In and out of Ricardo’s life she flits; a few years later, he finds her once again, living as “Kuriko”, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman. So well suited does she seem to the part that Ricardo finds himself wondering whether there isn’t some oriental strand to her ancestry – but it is in the nature of the bad girl that she can slip from role to role with the utmost ease. As for Ricardo, he starts to feel himself disappearing into his life as interpreter, one of a “profession of ghosts”. An interpreter, a colleague half-jokes, is a man who exists merely to transmit the thoughts and words of others, a being who “only is when he is not”. In the months and years spent without her his life hardly seems worth living; when he has her, he’s haunted by the certainty that she won’t stay.
The culminating novel of Vargas Llosa’s early career, Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), still amazes in its technical adventurousness and its vast, synoptic scope. “To become a true novelist”, reads the epigraph from Balzac, “a man must have explored every sphere of social life, given that the novel is the private history of nations.” Conversation in the Cathedral triumphantly passes that test, as do later more obviously ambitious works such as The Feast of the Goat (2000): by those standards this new novel may seem slight. But Balzac was not the only novelist in nineteenth-century France, a fact well known to Mario Vargas Llosa who, like Ricardo here, grew up in Miraflores dreaming of Paris and the literary life. The spirit of Flaubert informs every page of his new novel – the explicit allusions to L’Education sentimentale may be light-hearted, but the debt to its author goes deep. Oddly, the story of Frédéric Moreau’s self-defeating devotion to his unattainable mistress struck the young Émile Zola as being “the only truly historical novel that I know”. And here and there in Las Travesuras de la niña mala, amid the momentous non-events of Ricardo’s stalled, even pointless, life, we catch glimpses of an ironic commentary on his homeland’s Sisyphean struggle towards political and economic progress. Flaubert was famously withering in his assessment of his age’s radicals (“My compatriots make me vomit!”), but he felt they were guilty of something far worse than empty posturing. “Ah we intellectuals!”, he wrote to George Sand in 1870.
“Mankind is far from our ideal! And our immense error, our fatal error, is to imagine it is like us, and to want to treat it accordingly!” For Vargas Llosa too, the Left may be ridiculous in its self-indulgent and self-deceiving idealism, but it is pernicious in its refusal to acknowledge the reality of the individual, an imaginative as well as a moral failure. Peru’s poor become an abstraction in their political analysis, “the people” an empty phrase in their rhetoric. As damning, in his eyes, is his sense that there is nothing rebellious about these revolutionaries; that they are slavish followers of a collective cause. Speaking at a symposium in 2001, Vargas Llosa remarked on how excited he had been to read in a memoir by the young Lima novelist, Ivan Thay, about a boyhood decision to support, not one of Lima’s two rival football teams but the Argentinean Boca Juniors. An inconsequential choice, and yet for Vargas Llosa an assertion of the individual will, and perhaps the purer for that.
In The Perpetual Orgy (1975), Vargas Llosa describes his own long love affair with Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. On first meeting her, he confesses, “I knew that from that moment on, till my dying day, she would be for me, as for Léon Dupuis in the first days of their affair, ‘the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every play, the vague she of every volume of verse’”. What makes her so compelling is her rebellion against the humdrum condition to which her destiny has condemned her, her determination to snatch at a more highly coloured, glamorous life. The bad girl resembles Mme Bovary in this: in her case too we find a reminder that, as Flaubert’s lawyer Antoine-Marie-Jules Senard put it at the author’s prosecution over Madame Bovary, with masterful reductiveness, “dangers lie ahead for a girl who receives an education superior to that of her class”. Ricardo may know little else for sure about the object of his devotions, but he is in no doubt of the “thousand scrapes, compromises, sacrifices, concessions” she must have made in scrabbling her way out of “that inferno which Peru is for the poor”, or of how hard and cold she must have made herself to hold her own on the battlefield of her life. Her fight has been as valiant as it has been amoral.
The other great virtue of Flaubert in Vargas Llosa’s eyes is that this most rigorous of artists, this most meticulous of stylists, was so open in his engagement with vulgarity. Madame Bovary’s yearnings may seem absurd to us, yet her resolve to realize them remains inspiring, her failure tragic. “It pleases me”, writes Vargas Llosa, “that Madame Bovary can also be read as a collection of clichés – that it is peopled with stock characters.” Not since Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) has he himself served up so exhilaratingly hackneyed a set of types, from the Bond-villain Fukuda to the nice old English lady, Mrs Stubard. We are offered Earl’s Court in the Summer of Love and the cosmopolitan colour of Madrid’s raffish Lavapiés quarter. We see sunsets over the Pacific and over Notre-Dame, a vision of time-transcending beauty. There are magnificent scenes in the foyer of the opera, in elegant apartments and in sumptuous drawing-rooms, and of course there is any number of soap-style confrontations. Vargas Llosa’s taste for such vulgarities has always been evident, as has been the transparent sincerity of his sensibility: this is no slumming aesthete or patronizing wit. He is being neither perverse nor condescending when he writes, in The Perpetual Orgy, “the melodramatic element moves me because melodrama is closer to the real than drama”. Overblown language and exaggerated gestures express a Bovaryesque rebellion against quotidian realities, though Vargas Llosa would resist any temptation to intellectualize them. Despising the sensibilities of kitsch and camp for the knowing detachment they presuppose, he insists on a straightforwardly emotional response to the most imbecilic extravagances of popular stories and song.
Sentimentality can be heroic, then, as pretentious huachaferías can be poetry; but only when their opposites are – at least implicitly – present too. It would be wrong to suggest that Travesuras de la niña mala is “really” more serious than it seems: it is a joyous romp, albeit one haunted by despair. And by unanswered questions. Has Ricardo been lucky enough to live his dream, or has he seen his life sucked dry? Have the bad girl’s epic impostures won her the prize she sought? Which – if any – of these arresting women is the essential bad girl? How, for that matter, would we ever truly know? However far we get, we sense that we are never going to have the answers, but this novel compels our curiosity, keeping us guessing to the very end.
