Mario Vargas LLosa, "Adventures of the Bad Girl"

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The first part does not take off, it proceeds by accumulation and not by development, Adventures of the bad girl by Mario Vargas Llosa, halfway between the picaresque and the love story. Only in the second part are we passionate about the events of Lily, femme fatale with an iridescent name, as her disguises (but not her character) are iridescent and of Ricardo, an anonymous Peruvian interpreter.

Ricardo is a travet, an average man, a Charles Bovary without ambitions but with a heart capable of conceiving, and guarding for life, immense love. At fifteen he falls in love with Lily, the Chilean girl, who is not a Chilean and who is not even called Lily, but Otilia - but this Ricardo will learn at his own expense only much later. He finds her at every stage of his life under different names and disguises, as a guerrilla woman Arlette, as a wife of a French diplomat first and then a horse breeder, as a sex slave of a Japanese man. Ricardo is willing to do anything to be next to Lily, he lets himself be humiliated by her, who abandons him every time have liaisons with richer men, who can not stand the simple and bourgeois life that he can offer her and seeks redemption from a past of misery. Eventually, however, it will be her who is submissive, mortified, she will be the consenting victim of the perfidious Fukuda, a Japanese tycoon who will chain her in a violent and sadistic relationship, to the point of destroying her in body and in morale. And yet, Fukuda himself will be the only man capable of conquering and subjugating her. Ricardo will lick Lily's wounds, chase her to the end of the world, dissipate his few substances to cure her, only to be abandoned again, and then recovered again in extremis, when there will be no time or space for second thoughts. On her deathbed Lily / Otilia / Kuriko will definitely return to him, the only male she trusts, the only one to whom she feels bound by true affection and esteem, the only one whom she considers "a saint". (And how to blame her?) As a small compensation, she will leave him a little house in the south of France, assigned to her by her last conquest.

Lily, however, does not inspire fear, has no perverse charm, she is repetitive and somewhat predictable in its unreliability. If anything, the most successful character is Ricardo, with his very human weakness, with his patience, with his love that does not end but rather grows with each meeting, with each abandonment. Ricardo has goodness, humility on his side, he is a man who works to live, who loves literature and foreign languages, especially Russian. He is a man whom we do not see, whom we could not even describe, probably a man who is not handsome, but strong in his constancy, his kindness, his honesty and dedication.

Many years have passed for you to have the least doubt: I love you so much that I would do anything to keep you next to me, if we were united. Do you like gangsters? I will become a robber, kidnapper, swindler, narco, whatever you want. Four years without knowing anything about you and now I can barely speak, think, how moved I am to feel so close to you.

A series of friends and acquaintances revolve around him, many of whom are destined to die soon and with stories that are told to us in parallel. In addition to the continuous presence / absence of Lily, the lion's share is the changing environment in which Ricardo moves. Chasing his love, or perhaps escaping it, Ricardo moves from country to country, from continent to continent, from Peru, country of origin - with the elegant Miraflores district in Lima, but also with the deadly terror of Sendero Luminoso - to Paris, city ​​of choice, city of soul and heart, through the swinging London of the hippies, to the murky Tokyo of the red light clubs and pleasure houses and the Madrid of the artists, where Ricardo will have a story with a younger girl, unable to make him forget his one great love. This wandering, inevitably, will transform him into a stateless person, a métèque, a man without a homeland who does not feel at home anywhere because he is no longer Peruvian but neither is he French or Spanish. Symbol of this condition is the countless number of passports of the bad girl, the bad girl of the title, the ninã mala, who, with her elusiveness, ends up embodying the protagonist's unease, his non-belonging.

Some critics reproach Vargas Llosa for having contradicted himself in this novel, for not continuing along the lines of the difficult text,  the narration with several temporal timeframes, for having opted for a perhaps trite style, but the language of the novel is as simple the words of love. Over and over again the bad girl asks Ricardo to tell her his "cheap, sentimental things", the sweet ones, The ones that seem trivial when we read them but acquire a lot of meaning if, instead, they are directed at us.

You are becoming a huachafita [sentimental woman] too, niña mala, - I kissed her on the lips. - Tell me another, another, please.