Lily and Ricardo’s relationship
Where we left off, Ricardo is giving up on love again and “at the age of
forty-seven, I had verified that a man could lead a perfectly normal life
without making love.” Lily calls 4 times after the Japan episode and each time,
he hangs up as if he’s actually trying to be rid of her. When he agrees to see
her, he decides that he “would talk to her like a distant friend, and my
coldness would be the best proof that I was truly free of her” which of course
we know he is not. He concludes that she must be back because he “must be one
of the few stable things in her intense life, the faithful idiot in love who
was always there, waiting for the call that would make her feel she was still
what she no doubt was beginning not to be anymore, what she soon would not be
again: young, beautiful, loved, desirable.” But at the same time, he knows that
if he lets her come back, “it would be the same old story all over again. We’d
talk, I’d submit again to the power she always had over me, we’d have a brief
false idyll, I’d have all kinds of illusions, and when least expected she would
disappear and I’d be left battered and bewildered, licking my wounds as I had
in Tokyo. Until the next chapter!” She even admits that “I don’t enjoy anything
as much as making you suffer. Haven’t you realized that?” She continues on that
“I’ve done nothing but make problems for you.” But he says “ever since I’ve
known you, you’ve done nothing but make problems for me. It’s my destiny. And
there’s nothing you can do to fight destiny.” So he realizes that he’s never
going to break free of her and he doesn’t.
When she reveals that she’s sick from an STD and he agrees to take her
in, he gives her his bed and he sleeps on the sofa bed as though he is
reminding her that she’s not being invited in as a sexual partner but as a
friend, but of course this act doesn’t hold up for very long. He once tells her
“the time has come for me to impose my authority over you, bad girl” about
getting her medical treatment. This is the only time in the whole novel that he
has an influence over any of her actions. He tells Elena that she’s the only
one great love of his life, “the only woman I’ve loved, ever since she was a
girl. I’ve done the impossible to forget her, but the truth is it’s useless.
I’ll always love her, life wouldn’t have meaning for me if she died.” Well, I
guess getting over her was successful as a permanent fix…
When Lily has surgery and can’t have sex for a very long time, and later
when she can, he has to be very gentle, he is compliant. It kind of relates to how girls worry that if
they refuse to have sex, can’t have sex or don’t want to have sex, it will be
hard to hold onto their boyfriends/lovers because the boyfriends/lovers will
feel the need to cheat because they see sex as necessary in their lives,
Ricardo proves that’s not true. He’s content loving her without sex, just being
around her, which makes him rare as a man or lover in the eyes of a woman.
That’s probably why she stuck around over time. That’s kind of a big deal
because she says “if you were Fukuda, you’d make love to me all night and not
give a damn if I gushed blood or died.” The fact that he is compliant with the
doctor’s orders allows her to use him for stability by the end. Someone to make
her feel protected and safe but at the same time, not have to worry about fending him off sexually. At the same time, “to her, though you may not
believe it, you’re a kind of saint.” “how could she not think the imbecile who
had just gone into debt so she would be cured, so that after a while she could
move on to someone richer or more interesting than the little pissant, was a
saint.”
Acts of Love on Lily’s Part
They do have a sweet spot in their relationship from when she goes to the
clinic until his trip to London, when
she leaves one day and then comes back saying she changed her mind, and again
between when she comes back right after and a little after he gets back from
Peru. First, when he leaves her at the clinic, she clings onto him as though
she’s either terrified of going or she actually loves him but when he mentions
that she might be falling in love with him, she rejects it saying “I’ll bet
whatever you want that I never will [fall in love with you], Ricardito.” And she’s right, she never
does. She admitted to missing him when he went to visiting hours at the clinic,
something she never admitted to in the past during their years of
separation. When she returns, he’s
perfectly aware that “the illusion [of domestic tranquility] would last only as
long as her convalescence. You knew the mediocre, boring life she had with you
would weary her, and once she recovered her health and self-confidence, and
remorse or her fear of Fukuda had vanished, she would arrange to meet someone
more interesting, richer, less a creature of habit than you, and undertake a
new escapade.” When she leaves and then changes her mind, he comes home to see that
she took the only cash he kept in the house. When she comes back, he smacks her
across the face, causing the only intentional harm in their relationship and
instead of crying, she responds that he’s finally learning how to treat women,
as if it were acceptable. Then they make
love (to reward him for smacking her? What?)and she tells him she has no
intention of leaving him ever, (which she does anyway) and that she’ll never
tell him she loves him even if she does, which she maintains. When he comes
back from Peru, at first she’s happy to see him and says that “now I know that
you’re happiness for me,” which seems strange and it’s not necessarily true
considering she leaves again. When she leaves for the last time, she says it’s
because she’s not happy but Ricardo later finds out that she has run off with
her boss’s husband.
Jealousy
When Ricardo goes to Peru, she says “we’ll see if you love me even more
or leave me for one of those mischievous Peruvian girls, good boy.” This is
like a test that she knows the outcome of. It was flipped and she was the one
going to Peru, this would be a valid concern for Ricardo to have. Also, on the
note of Peru, I thought it was devastating that all of the physical evidence of
his memories were erased and everything was worse and it left him wondering
where he belonged because he’ll never be French despite the citizenship and
he’ll never be able to be a Peruvian again. In Peru, Ricardo meets Lily’s
father who says that she is estranged and stopped caring about her family financially
even when she had money. The truth was that she had no way of receiving the
mail after all of her moves and a tie to her parents would be a potentially
compromising relationship, especially when pretending to be Japanese. He also
says she was ashamed of her family for being poor. But he alludes to the fact
that she’s always known how to survive in different worlds and adapt to new
situations in order to advance in society, so we know that this had been her
plan from the very beginning. Even from a young age, “she already had made the
rash decision to move forward and do whatever she had to do to no longer be
Otilita, daughter of the cook and the builder of breakwaters, to flee the trap,
the prison, the curse that Peru meant for her, and go far away and become rich
– that above all: rich, very rich – though to accomplish this she would have to
engage in the worst escapades, run the most awful risks, do anything at all
until she became a cold, unloving, calculating, and cruel woman.”
When Lily finds Ricardo in Madrid after months of searching for him, she
finds that he is in a relationship with a hippie artist but when she talks to
him for the first time, in a café, she doesn’t realize that they are in the
process of a breakup. She exhibits some extreme (for her) jealousy, first, by
criticizing his decision to date her because of her age (he is old enough to be
her father, in fact he is older than her father) and he tries to make her even
more jealous by lying and saying that he doesn’t think he ever loved her. When she says she wants to come back, he knows
it’s because she always turns up between lovers and assumes that her boss’s
husband threw her out and she came back to him temporarily until she finds the
next guy. He tells her “I want you to leave. Once and for all, forever and
ever, to disappear from my life.” And the only way that can happen is for her
to die. And that’s exactly what he gets. Eventually he takes her back and she
exhibits another sign of jealousy when she says “but if that foul-smelling
hippie shows up, I’ll scratch her eyes out,” as if she’s capable of hurting
anyone in her state.
The final stay at Ricardo’s apartment
In order to come back, she does a lot of lying to him. “I came looking
for you because I love you. Because I need you. Because I can’t live with
anybody except you. Though you may think it’s a little late, I know this now.”
Once he lets her at least come into his apartment, she wants him to sign
documentation that would allow him to inherit a house that her boss’s husband
had purchased for her as a gift. She then tries to force him into loving her
again even though he says he won’t but ultimately does. Then he takes her in
again, knowing they can never again have sex and knowing that she’s going to
die and not only is he going to have to deal with saying goodbye to her again
but this time permanently, he will have to deal with her cremation as he
thought he’d have to in the past. Before her death, she tells him the whole
story as if telling him will allow her to die in peace, almost as if he was a
priest. After all, she did consider him to be almost a saint. This is actually
kind of romantic and adorable, especially how she almost requests he write a
novel about their 40+ year on and off relationship.
The name “Good Boy”
Early on in the second half, after hearing Ricardo’s story, top to
bottom, Simon says “the nickname fits you like a glove. Not in the pejorative
but in the literal sense. That’s what you are, mon vieux, though you don’t like
it: a good boy.”This is true because Lily says “you’re the best thing that ever
happened to me, good boy.” In this case, he was literally the good boy that
happened to her, and from what we can tell, the only good one she ever
encountered. It was almost like Lily wanted to be mistreated on her way up the
social ladder but at the end of the day, she couldn’t trust any of her other
lovers to help her when she was most in need. It was always Ricardo she came
running back to for help. He was the one who took her in when she was in financial
ruins and homeless, had his friend help get her medical care despite having no
legal identification, pays for her psychological treatment, asks his uncle to
get her real identifying documentation and even marries her to get her French
citizenship. Even though she says she only marries for love, she’s been married
many times and loved no one. It seems like she was relatively eager to get into
all of the marriages she was in except for her marriage to Ricardo. He had to
literally get on his knees and beg her to marry him because she said she
wouldn’t if he didn’t make a huge deal out of it. it was nearly abuse how much
she made him work for it. Additionally, I thought it was interesting how she
maintains perpetual desire. “You’ll never live quietly with me, I warn you.
Because I don’t want you to get tired of me, to get used to me. And even if we
marry to straighten out my papers, I’ll never be your wife. I always want to be
your lover, your lapdog, your whore. Like tonight. Because then I’ll always
keep you crazy about me.” And it works and she sticks to every part of that
statement.
Lily’s physical appearance
The first time Lily reappears in the second half of the book, Ricardo is
pretty disgusted with the way she looks and is kind of brutally honest about
it. He describes her as “she had become a skeleton of a woman” which is
indicative of how she is as a person, not just physically, nevertheless, this
is a very strong description that you wouldn’t normally use if you didn’t have
emotions tied to that person. This is from when she’s homeless and he describes
her with “hair [that] was disheveled, and on her very thing fingers the nails
seemed badly cut, unfiled, as if she bit them. The bones of her forehead, cheeks,
and chin were prominent, stretching her very pale skin and accentuating its
greenish cast. Her eyes had lost their light, and there was something fearful
in them that recalled certain timid animals. She didn’t have on a single
adornment or any trace of makeup.” She looks like this because she is homeless
and broke. It’s also why, at the end of the meeting, she wouldn’t give Ricardo
her address or phone number, because she didn’t have an address or a phone. She
later goes to get her things to move into his apartment without him despite
being very weak because she’s embarrassed to let him see the dirty hole she’d
been living in. This whole circumstance is proof that “’by doing these things,
[she] lives more intensely.’ Well, whoever plays with fire sooner or later gets
burned” and her burn was the physical damage she endured that ultimately killed
her. The reason for her reappearance on this occasion is to ask him to be the
one to bury her, which he presumably eventually does. I guess this is
understandable considering she has no other ties, but this seems like a strange
request to ask him to cremate her when she dies because she’s basically asking
him to absorb all of the sadness of her loss. It’s touching in a way but at the
same time he thinks that she asked him of all people because “she had never
loved me but did feel confidence in me, the affection awakened by a loyal
servant.” Which is true, he basically is her servant by bailing her out of
things, paying for her health care, getting her papers in order, nursing her
back to health, providing a place to live and die but it still kind of sucks
that the last memory he’s going to have of her is of watching her die painfully
from cancer.
Skipping back because I got
ahead of myself, After obtaining more details about her current predicament
(the rape), he wants her to get medical treatment so that “you’ll be attractive
again, and we’ll see if you can get me to fall in love with you again.” This
seems to be a strange thing to pay attention to when the real issue is her
survival, not her attractiveness and the real aim is to get her well so she can
live, not so that he’ll fall in love with her again. It almost seemed a little
bit arrogant on his part, like he thinks she wants to get well to please him
and make him love her when the goal is really for her to get well enough to go
back to cheating on him. When they drop her off at the clinic, he tells her
“they’ll take care of you, fatten you up, put an end to these attacks of fear.
They’ll make you pretty and you can turn back into the devil you’ve always
been.” So he’s basically admitting that he thinks she’s ugly right now. That’s
nice. She actually confronts him about that: “I’ve become that ugly?” and he
says “Awful. Forgive me, but you’ve turned into a real horror of a woman.” If
someone I was dating ever said that to me, I’d never see them again. Even if he
was joking, that’s so not okay to say, especially to someone who is as
psychologically damaged as she is. That’s like playing with fire in and of
itself.
The very last time she comes back, ultimately to die, she asks that “if
you think I’ve become very skinny, very ugly, and very old, please don’t tell
me.”
References to Money
There were a couple low blows here and there about finances. My personal
favorite was “he’s the exact opposite of you. That’s why Fukuda is rich and
powerful and you are and always will be a little pissant.” Which is definitely
what you call somebody after asking them to take care of your cremation. He
says he’s going to pay for her treatment and she thanks him by saying “you’re
not rich, you’re a poor little puissant… if you weren’t, I wouldn’t have gone
to Cuba, or London, or Japan. I would have stayed with you after that time when
you showed me around Paris and took me to those horrible restaurants for
beggars. I’ve always left you for rich men who turned out to be trash. And this
is how I’ve ended up, a ruin. Are you happy that I acknowledge it? do you like
to hear it? Are you doing this to show me how superior you are to all of them,
and what I lost in you?” Can’t she just say thank you? The last time Lily
leaves, she promises Ricardo, “I won’t ask for any of what I’m entitled to as
your wife. Not a cent.” And for once she’s telling the truth.
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