The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa Read Free Book Online

her as a courier and
    frequently sent her to Peru to accompany returning scholarship
    recipients or to carry money and instructions, on trips that filled
    Paul with worry. But from his confidences I knew that the life
    imposed on him by circumstances, which his superior insisted he
    continue, irritated him more and more each day. He was impatient
    to return to Peru, where actions would begin very soon. He wanted
    to help prepare them on-site. The leadership of the MIR wouldn't
    authorize this, and it infuriated him. "This is what comes of knowing
    languages, damn it," he'd protest, laughing in the midst of his bad
    temper.
    Thanks to Paul, during those months and years in Paris I met the
    principal leaders of the MIR, beginning with its head and founder,
    Luis de la Puente Uceda, and ending with Guillermo Lobaton. The
    head of the MIR was a lawyer from Trujillo, born in 1926, who had
    repudiated the Aprista Party. He was slim, with glasses, light skin,
    and light hair that he always wore slicked back like an Argentine
    actor. The two or three times I saw him, he was dressed very
    formally in a tie and a dark leather coat. He spoke quietly, like a
    lawyer at work, giving legalistic details and using the elaborate
    vocabulary of a judicial argument. I always saw him surrounded by
    two or three brawny types who must have been his bodyguards, men
    who looked at him worshipfully and never offered an opinion. In
    everything he said there was something so cerebral, so abstract, that
    it was hard for me to imagine him as a guerrilla fighter with a
    machine gun over his shoulder, climbing up and down steep slopes
    in the Andes. And yet he had been arrested several times, was exiled
    in Mexico, lived a clandestine life. But he gave the impression that
    he had been born to shine in forums, parliaments, tribunals,
    political negotiations, that is, in everything he and his comrades
    scorned as the shady double-talk of bourgeois democracy.
    Guillermo Lobaton was another matter. Of the crowd of
    revolutionaries I met in Paris through Paul, none seemed as
    intelligent, well educated, and resolute as he. He was still very
    young, barely in his thirties, but he already had a rich past as a man
    of action. In 1952 he had been the leader of the great strike at the
    University of San Marcos against the Odria dictatorship (that was
    when he and Paul became friends), and as a result he was arrested,
    sent to the fronton that was used as a political prison, and tortured.
    This was how his studies in philosophy had been cut short at San
    Marcos, where, they said, he was in competition with Li Carrillo,
    Heidegger's future disciple, for being the most brilliant student at
    the School of Letters. In 1954 he was expelled from the country* by
    the military government, and after countless difficulties arrived in
    Paris, where, while he earned his living doing manual labor, he
    resumed his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Then the
    Communist Party obtained a scholarship for him in East Germany,
    in Leipzig, where he continued his philosophical studies at a school
    for the party's cadres. While he was there he was caught off guard by
    the Cuban Revolution. What happened in Cuba led him to think very
    critically about the strategy of Latin American Communist parties
    and the dogmatic spirit of Stalinism. Before I met him in person, I
    had read a work of his that circulated around Paris in mimeographed
    form, in which he accused those parties of cutting themselves off
    from the masses because of their submission to the dictates of
    Moscow, forgetting, as Che Guevara had written, "that the first duty*
    of a revolutionary is to make the revolution." In this work, where he
    extolled the example of Fidel Castro and his comrades as
    revolutionary models, he cited Trotsky. Because of this citation he
    was subjected to a disciplinary tribunal in Leipzig and expelled in
    the most infamous way from East Germany and from the Permian
    Communist Party. This was how he