deposit and took everything, everything, and ruined me.
Chapeau, un coup de maitre! She knew I couldn't denounce her
without accusing myself, without ruining my reputation and my
position. She knew if I denounced her I'd be the first one injured, for
keeping secret accounts, for evading taxes. Do you understand how
well planned it was? Can you believe she could be so cruel toward
someone who gave her only love and devotion?"
He kept returning to the same subject, with intervals in which we
drank wine in silence, each of us absorbed in his own thoughts. Was
it perverse of me to wonder what hurt him more, her leaving him or
her stealing his secret bank account in Switzerland? I felt sorry for
him, and I felt remorse, but I didn't know how to comfort him. I
limited myself to interjecting occasional brief, friendly phrases. In
reality, he didn't want to converse with me. He had invited me to
supper because he needed someone to listen to him, he needed to
say aloud, before a witness, things that had been scorching his heart
ever since the disappearance of his wife.
"Forgive me, I needed to unburden myself," he said at last when
all the other diners had left and we were alone, watched with
impatient eyes by the waiters in Chez Eux. "I thank you for your
patience. I hope this catharsis does me some good."
I said that with time, all of this would be behind him, no trouble
lasts a hundred years. And as I spoke, I felt like a total hypocrite, as
guilty as if I had planned the flight of ex—Madame Arnoux and the
plundering of his secret account.
"If you ever run into her, please tell her. She didn't need to do
that. I would have given her everything. Did she want my money? I
would have given it to her. But not like this, not like this."
We said goodbye in the doorway of the restaurant, in the
brilliance of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. It was the last time I saw
the mistreated Monsieur Robert Arnoux.
The Tupac Amaru column of the MIR, under the command of
Guillermo Lobaton, lasted some five months longer than the
column that had made its headquarters on Mesa Pelada. As it had
done with Luis de la Puente, Paul Escobar, and the Miristas who
perished in the valley of La Convention, the army gave no details
regarding how it annihilated all the members of that guerrilla band.
In the second half of 1965, helped by the Ashaninka of Gran Pajonal,
Lobaton and his companions eluded the persecution of the special
forces of the army that mobilized in helicopters and on land and
savagely punished the indigenous settlements that hid and fed the
guerrillas. Finally, the decimated column, twelve men devastated by
mosquitoes, fatigue, and disease, fell in the vicinity of the Sotziqui
River on January 7,1966. Did they die in combat or were they
captured alive and executed? Their graves were never found.
According to unverifiable rumors, Lobaton and his second-incommand
were taken up in a helicopter and thrown into the forest
so the animals would devour their corpses. For several years
Lobaton's French partner, Jacqueline, attempted without success, by
means of campaigns in Peru and other countries, to have the
government reveal the location of the graves of the rebels in that
ephemeral guerrilla war. Were there survivors? Were they living
clandestinely in the convulsed, divided Peru of Belaunde Terry's
final days? As I slowly recovered from the disappearance of the bad
girl, I followed these distant events through the letters of Uncle
Ataulfo. He seemed more and more pessimistic about the possibility
that democracy would not collapse in Peru. "The same military that
defeated the guerrillas is preparing now to defeat the legitimate
state and have another kind of uprising," he assured me.
One day in Germany, in the most unexpected way, I ran into a
survivor of Mesa Pelada: none other than Alfonso the Spiritualist,
the boy sent to Paris by a theosophical group in Lima, the one fat
Paul had
Chapeau, un coup de maitre! She knew I couldn't denounce her
without accusing myself, without ruining my reputation and my
position. She knew if I denounced her I'd be the first one injured, for
keeping secret accounts, for evading taxes. Do you understand how
well planned it was? Can you believe she could be so cruel toward
someone who gave her only love and devotion?"
He kept returning to the same subject, with intervals in which we
drank wine in silence, each of us absorbed in his own thoughts. Was
it perverse of me to wonder what hurt him more, her leaving him or
her stealing his secret bank account in Switzerland? I felt sorry for
him, and I felt remorse, but I didn't know how to comfort him. I
limited myself to interjecting occasional brief, friendly phrases. In
reality, he didn't want to converse with me. He had invited me to
supper because he needed someone to listen to him, he needed to
say aloud, before a witness, things that had been scorching his heart
ever since the disappearance of his wife.
"Forgive me, I needed to unburden myself," he said at last when
all the other diners had left and we were alone, watched with
impatient eyes by the waiters in Chez Eux. "I thank you for your
patience. I hope this catharsis does me some good."
I said that with time, all of this would be behind him, no trouble
lasts a hundred years. And as I spoke, I felt like a total hypocrite, as
guilty as if I had planned the flight of ex—Madame Arnoux and the
plundering of his secret account.
"If you ever run into her, please tell her. She didn't need to do
that. I would have given her everything. Did she want my money? I
would have given it to her. But not like this, not like this."
We said goodbye in the doorway of the restaurant, in the
brilliance of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. It was the last time I saw
the mistreated Monsieur Robert Arnoux.
The Tupac Amaru column of the MIR, under the command of
Guillermo Lobaton, lasted some five months longer than the
column that had made its headquarters on Mesa Pelada. As it had
done with Luis de la Puente, Paul Escobar, and the Miristas who
perished in the valley of La Convention, the army gave no details
regarding how it annihilated all the members of that guerrilla band.
In the second half of 1965, helped by the Ashaninka of Gran Pajonal,
Lobaton and his companions eluded the persecution of the special
forces of the army that mobilized in helicopters and on land and
savagely punished the indigenous settlements that hid and fed the
guerrillas. Finally, the decimated column, twelve men devastated by
mosquitoes, fatigue, and disease, fell in the vicinity of the Sotziqui
River on January 7,1966. Did they die in combat or were they
captured alive and executed? Their graves were never found.
According to unverifiable rumors, Lobaton and his second-incommand
were taken up in a helicopter and thrown into the forest
so the animals would devour their corpses. For several years
Lobaton's French partner, Jacqueline, attempted without success, by
means of campaigns in Peru and other countries, to have the
government reveal the location of the graves of the rebels in that
ephemeral guerrilla war. Were there survivors? Were they living
clandestinely in the convulsed, divided Peru of Belaunde Terry's
final days? As I slowly recovered from the disappearance of the bad
girl, I followed these distant events through the letters of Uncle
Ataulfo. He seemed more and more pessimistic about the possibility
that democracy would not collapse in Peru. "The same military that
defeated the guerrillas is preparing now to defeat the legitimate
state and have another kind of uprising," he assured me.
One day in Germany, in the most unexpected way, I ran into a
survivor of Mesa Pelada: none other than Alfonso the Spiritualist,
the boy sent to Paris by a theosophical group in Lima, the one fat
Paul had
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