The Bad Girl, Part I

The Bad Girl

By: Mario Vargas Llosa

The Bad Girl is the ultimate tale of unrequited love, but I wish the perspective alternated between Ricardo’s and Lily’s. Lily appears as though she has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She’s a liar and a cheat as well as a money hungry gold digger. Although Ricardo finds her enchanting, his dear friend Paul points out that, “She isn’t even that pretty.” However, there has to be more to her character than just malicious cruelty.

The Chilean girl is facing a few desire problems of her own. She recycles husbands like plastic water bottles. Is she looking for wealth and power? She has been with men who offer both, yet found herself unfulfilled and unhappy with them. Lily has a mentality similar to Emma Bovary, where she is constantly searching for the next best thing. No one truly knows the Chilean girl because she hides so many aspect of her life with lies. In all honesty, I don’t think Lily even knows Lily; somewhere along the line, she lost track of where the truth ends and the lies begin. Perhaps this absence of identity is the reason she is never satisfied when she gets what she wants. How can you know what you want if you don’t know who you are?

I thought the use of the Cuban Revolution as a backdrop for the novel created an interesting political dimension.  The rebels were heavily reliant on guerilla warfare, something with which Lily is certainly familiar. For months, Ricardo hears nothing of or from Lily when, suddenly she will descend on his life like a swarm of locusts. She wreaks havoc on his psyche for a few days, and then disappears just as quickly as she came.

The relationship between the bad girl and the good boy reminds me of the Zizek reading we did earlier this semester in which Zizek stressed the masochistic nature of courtly love. They resemble the Lady and the Knight, where, “the knight’s relationship to the Lady is thus the relationship of the subject-bondsman, the vassal, to his feudal Master-Sovereign who subjects him to senseless, outrageous, impossible, arbitrary, capricious ordeals.” (Zizek, p. 90) Lily has undoubtedly subjected Ricardo to impossible and capricious ordeal and has been doing so since their childhood in Peru.

In line with Zizek’s prediction, Ricardo has elevated Lily to the point where she fits the role of his ideal woman. However, in doing so he loses sight of the substance of her personality We hear about her slender waist and olive skin, but he never praises anything but her physical attributes. Her actions indicate that she is greedy, emotionless, and sociopathic, but Ricardo turns a blind eye.  He chooses to see her as this small, poor, vulnerable woman instead of a black widow who eats her lovers alive. Both Juan and Salomon warn Ricardo of love, but it’s too late; he’s already become a slave to the Chilean girl.