JUAN: I had all the women I bloody well wanted.
KATHIE: You’ve lost count. But I haven’t, Johnny darling. I know exactly how many times I’ve been unfaithful to you.
JUAN: Don’t play games like that, Kathie.
KATHIE: Eight, to be precise. There were even a few surfers amongst them, just imagine. And the odd champion, I think.
JUAN: You’re not to make jokes like that, Kathie. I won’t have it.
KATHIE: There was Bepo Torres, in the summer of ’57, on Kon Tiki beach. In Bepo’s little bungalow, next to the lighthouse. His wife had taken her mother to the States, for a facelift, remember?
(Only now does JUAN appear to start believing her.)
JUAN: Are you being serious? Are you telling the truth?
KATHIE: And then there was Ken, the Australian, the first time we went to Sydney. Nineteen fifty-eight, wasn’t it? The one you admired so much, the one who used to get right down into the tunnel of the wave. You were having an affair with that friend of his, Sheila, weren’t you? Well, I had one with him, Johnny darling.
(His consternation becomes anger, his incredulity fear.)
JUAN: Do you want me to smash your face in? Do you want me to kill you? What are you trying to do?
KATHIE: Then there was Kike Ricketts, the one who was mad about cars. In 1960, in Hawaii, there was your friend Rivarola, who used to go skin-diving. The following year, in South Africa, there was that German we met on safari, the one who took us to the ostrich farm in Wildemes. Hans, whatever his name was, remember? And then last year, there was Sapito Saldívar.
(He puts his hand over her mouth. He seems about to strangle her.)
JUAN: Are you telling me the truth, you bitch?
KATHIE: (Offering no resistance) Don’t you want to know who the other two are?
(He hesitates, releases her. He is sweaty, panting and exhausted.)
JUAN: Yes.
KATHIE: Harry Santana. And … Abel.
JUAN: (Nearly out of his mind) Abel?
KATHIE: Your brother Abel. He’s the one that hurts most, isn’t he? That makes eight. (Looks at him hard.) Who’s jealous now?
(JUAN is completely destroyed. He looks at KATHIE, stupefied.)
JUAN: Things can’t go on like this, you’ll pay for this, you’ll be sorry. And those swine are going to be even more sorry still. No, this won’t do, it just won’t do.
(He sobs. He buries his face in his hands as he weeps. KATHIE looks on indifferently.)
Why did you do this to me?
KATHIE: (Deeply depressed) To get my own back for all those pretty girls you took to bed with you under my very nose. Because I was bored, I wanted somehow to fill the emptiness in my life. And also because I was hoping to find someone worth while, someone I could fall in love with, who could add colour to my life …
JUAN: You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to blow your brains out.
KATHIE: You don’t have to do that, Johnny darling. It’s a bit extreme. One bullet in the heart will do the trick, provided you shoot straight. I probably told you all this for that very reason. I’m sick of myself too.
JUAN: And your children? What about them?
KATHIE: Yes, I’m sick of them as well. They didn’t change anything. And I’m not even interested in watching them grow up, in waiting to see what they’re going to do in life. I know perfectly well already. They’re going to turn into idiots, like you and me.
JUAN: You’ve got no feelings at all; you really are a monster.
KATHIE: I wasn’t when I married you, Johnny darling. You see, I wasn’t just a pretty girl. I was restless, and curious too. I wasn’t just rich, I also wanted to learn, to improve myself, to do things in life. Admittedly I was rather ignorant and frivolous. But I still had time to change. You put paid to that, though. Living with you made me become like you. (Turns towards SANTIAGO.) I should have met you when I was young, Mark.
(Throughout the following scene, JUAN gradually gets drunk.)
SANTIAGO: Can you imagine what I was like as a young man, Kathie?
KATHIE: As clearly as if I were seeing it now.
SANTIAGO: (In eager anticipation) What was I like, Kathie? Tell me, please.
KATHIE: You were born in the dirty, disorderly world of the suburbs, you were an orphan and you went to a state school. You eked out a living by working as a shoeshine boy, minding cars, selling lottery tickets and newspapers.
ANA: (Stroking his head sympathethically) In fact you went to the Salesian Fathers. Your parents weren’t poor, they just weren’t very well off. Yet you didn’t get a job till you were twenty.
KATHIE: You didn’t go to the Catholic University, you didn’t have the money, and besides, you were an atheist. So you went to the National one, to San Marcos. You were a brilliant student from the very first day. Always the first to arrive at the faculty and the last to leave. How many hours did you spend in the libraries, Mark?
SANTIAGO: A great many, a great many.
ANA: And how many playing pool in the bars on Azángaro Street? Did you ever get to the lectures on philosophy? Or Ancient History? Because you were a terrible lazybones, Mark Griffin.
KATHIE: How many books a week did Victor Hugo read? Two, three, sometimes one a day.
ANA: But you never really did much work; you’d neither the patience nor the perseverance. Did you understand Heidegger? Did you ever get round to translating a single line of Latin verse? Did you learn a foreign language?
KATHIE: As you were poor, you couldn’t afford the luxuries the boys from Miraflores or San Isidro had: you’d no car, you couldn’t buy yourself clothes, or become a member of the Waikiki, or go surfing, or even let your hair down on Saturdays.
ANA: And what about those beer-drinking sessions at the Patio or the Bar Palermo. Didn’t that count as letting your hair down? And those visits to Señora Nanette’s brothel on the Avenida Grau, which preyed so relentlessly on your socialist conscience?
KATHIE: But what did the gay social whirl of Miraflores, or the petty snobberies of San Isidro matter to Victor Hugo? His days and nights were devoted to deeper, higher things: assimilating the ideas of the great so as later to achieve greatness himself.
ANA: Why then did you abandon your studies? Why did you cheat in the exams? Why didn’t you do the work? Why did you miss lectures?
KATHIE: What did you care about the feats of a few surfers on the Pacific Ocean? For you, all that existed was the spirit, culture and the revolution. For you also devoted your life to stamping out social injustice, didn’t you, Karl Marx?
SANTIAGO: (Entranced) It’s true. Those Marxist study groups …
ANA: … which bored the pants off you. Did you understand Das Kapital? Did you ever read Das Kapital? Did you finish The Dialectic on Nature? And what was the name of that other book — the one with the unpronounceable title? Materialism and Empirio something or rather?
Empirioclassicism? Empiriocriticism? Empiriocretinism? Oh, how absurd.
SANTIAGO: (With a melancholy smile) And then there were the Party militants — there weren’t many of us, but we were real diehards.
KATHIE: The militants, yes, of course. Teaching the poor to read, forming charities, distributing alms, organizing bazaars, strikes, revolutions, planting bombs.