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couldn't harm
    Paul, and she had to avoid antagonizing the MIR because that could
    cause her problems in the future. The course lasted a few months.
    Right from the beginning she would need to demonstrate complete
    ineptitude for guerrilla life and even pretend to faint. In the
    meantime, here in Paris, I'd find work, rent a small apartment, and
    be waiting for her...
    "I know, you'll cry, you'll miss me, you'll think about me day and
    night," she interrupted with an impatient gesture, her eyes hard and
    her voice icy. "All right, I can see there's no other way. We'll see
    each other in three months, Ricardito."
    "Why are you saying goodbye now?"
    "Didn't Comrade Jean tell you? I leave for Cuba early tomorrow,
    by way of Prague. Now you can begin to shed your goodbye tears."
    She did, in fact, leave the next day, and I couldn't go with her to
    the airport because Paul forbade it. At our next meeting, the fat man
    left me totally demoralized when he announced I couldn't write to
    Comrade Arlette or receive letters from her because, for reasons of
    security, the scholarship recipients had to cut off all communication
    during training. Once the course had ended, Paul wasn't even sure if
    Comrade Arlette would pass through Paris again on her way back to
    Lima.
    For days I was like a zombie, reproaching myself day and night
    for not having had the courage to tell Comrade Arlette that in spite
    of Paul's prohibition she should stay with me in Paris, instead of
    urging her to go on with this adventure that would end only God
    knew how. Until, one morning, when I left my garret to have
    breakfast at the Cafe de la Marie on Place Saint-Sulpice, Madame
    Auclair handed me an envelope with a UNESCO imprint. I had
    passed the exam, and the head of the department of translators had
    made an appointment with me at his office. He was a gray-haired,
    elegant Spaniard whose family name was Charnes. He was very
    amiable. He laughed readily when he asked me about my "long-term
    plans" and I said, "To die of old age in Paris." There was no opening
    yet for a permanent position, but he could hire me as a "temp"
    during the general assembly and when the agency was overwhelmed
    with work, something that happened with some frequency. From
    then on I was certain that my constant dream—well, at least since
    I'd had the use of my reason—of living in this city for the rest of my
    life was beginning to become a reality.
    My existence did a somersault after that day. I began to cut my
    hair twice a month and put on a jacket and tie every morning. I took
    the Metro at Saint-Germain or l'Odeon to ride to the Segur station,
    the one closest to UNESCO, and I stayed there, in a small cubicle,
    from nine thirty to one and from two thirty to six, translating into
    Spanish generally ponderous documents regarding the removal of
    the temples of Abu Simbel on the Nile or the preservation of
    fragments of cuneiform writing discovered in caves in the Sahara
    desert, near Mali.
    Curiously, as my life changed, so did Paul's. He was still my best
    friend, but we began to see each other less and less frequently
    because of the obligations I had recently assumed as a bureaucrat,
    and because he began to travel the world, representing the MIR at
    congresses or meetings for peace, for the liberation of the Third
    World, for the struggle against nuclear armaments, against
    colonialism and imperialism, and a thousand other progressive
    causes. At times Paul felt dazed, living in a dream—when he was
    back in Paris he'd call and we would have a meal or a cup of coffee
    two or three times a week—and he'd tell me he had just come back
    from Beijing, from Cairo, from Havana, from Pyongyang, from
    Hanoi, where he had to speak about the outlook for revolution in
    Latin America before fifteen hundred delegates from fifty
    revolutionary organizations in some thirty countries in the name of
    a Permian revolution that hadn't even begun yet.
    Often, if I hadn't known so well the