The Bad Girl: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-03-29T05:00:00+00:00

5

The Child Without a Voice

In spite of all the years I lived there, I had made no friends among my neighbors until Simon and Elena Gravoski moved into the art deco building on Rue Joseph Granier. I had thought Monsieur Dourtois was a friend. He was a functionary at the SNCF, the French rail system, married to a retired schoolteacher, a woman with yellowish hair and a grim, expression. He lived across from me, and on the landing, or the staircase, or in the vestibule at the entrance, we would exchange nods or say good morning, and as the years passed we began to shake hands and make comments on the weather, a perennial concern of the French. Because of these fleeting conversations, I came to believe we were friends, but one night I learned we weren’t when I came home after a concert by Victoria de los Angeles at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and discovered I had forgotten my apartment key. At that hour, no locksmith was open. I made myself as comfortable as I could on the landing and waited for five in the morning, the time my very punctual neighbor left for work. I supposed that when he found me there, he would invite me into his house to wait for daylight. But at five o’clock, when Monsieur Dourtois appeared and I explained why I was there, stiff after a sleepless night, he limited himself to expressing his sorrow, looking at his watch, and saying, “You’ll have to wait another three or four hours until a locksmith opens, mon pauvre ami.”

With his conscience now at rest, he left. Sometimes I passed other residents of the building on the stairs, and I forgot their faces immediately and their names vanished as soon as I learned them. But when the Gravoskis and Yilal, their nine-year-old adopted son, came to the building because the Dourtoises had moved to the Dordogne, it was another matter. Simon, a Belgian physicist, worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute, and Elena, a Venezuelan, was a pediatrician at the Hôpital Cochin. They were cheerful, pleasant, easygoing, curious, cultured, and from the day I met them in the middle of their move and offered to give them a hand and tell them about the neighborhood, we became friends. We would have coffee together after supper, lend each other books and magazines, and occasionally go to the La Pagode cinema, which was nearby, or take Yilal to the circus, the Louvre, or other museums in Paris.

Simon was barely forty, though his heavy red beard and prominent belly made him look older. He dressed haphazardly, wearing a jacket whose pockets bulged with notebooks and papers and carrying a satchel full of books. He wore glasses for myopia, which he cleaned frequently with his wrinkled tie. He was the incarnation of the careless, absent-minded intellectual. Elena, on the other hand, was somewhat younger, flirtatious, smartly dressed, and I don’t recall ever seeing her in a bad mood. She

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