Luchita
Seventeen, from Havana, living with Grove Soto under an arrangement she believes she is managing. She has a small son and wants to get to Paris.
To get back to Paris, and to convert the men around her into the money that would take her there.
The book
At a glance
- Seventeen
- Havana
- Pepito
- Fifty dollars a week from Grove Soto
- To return to Paris
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLuchita is seventeen years old and comes from Havana. She lives in Grove Soto's house in the capital with her small son Pepito, on an arrangement of fifty dollars a week. Bowles describes her as "unusually ingenuous for her seventeen years", and the word does the work: she is not stupid, she is young and out of her depth with men who are neither.
She once tried to improve her position by leaving Grove for an older, richer man, Señor Guzman. She thought she was managing it in great secrecy. Grove and Guzman had discussed the switch in detail before it occurred to her, and she never learns this.
She is the only person in the book with a plain, reachable ambition. She wants to go back to Paris. Bowles keeps returning her to it, in bed, in the mornings, listening to the city wake up.
How Luchita Is Portrayed
- Seventeen, and "unusually ingenuous"Bowles's own phrase for her. The narration treats her miscalculation as a serious one, made by someone too young to see the shape of the arrangement she is inside.
- The switch she thought she was makingShe reasoned that if Grove would supply fifty dollars a week and house her and Pepito, then Señor Guzman, "middle-aged and much more difficult in his demands", would at least pay her fare back to Paris.
- What she had to show for itAfter the fortnight with Guzman: "three pairs of shoes, a wristwatch, and a transistor tape recorder covered in lizard skin" — itemised by Bowles, and by Guzman, who pointed out they came to more than the seventy-five dollars a week he had vaguely mentioned.
- Havana English"Luchita had learned English in her native Havana; Spanish she spoke here only with the servants, and occasionally when she had smoked heavily."
- Paris, on waking"Luchita got into her bed. Listening to the sounds of the waking city, she thought once again about Paris."
- Her verdict on Thorny"Work? What sort of work could Thorny do? He's never worked in his life." She is contemptuous, and she is right.
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