The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta Page 6

  He had the second attic room in a house on a dead-end street lined with two-story buildings, an area about nine by fifteen feet, overflowing with books, magazines, and newspapers scattered all over the floor. There was a bed without a headboard, with a mattress and one blanket. A few shirts and some trousers hung from nails in the wall, and behind the door there was a mirror and a little shelf with his shaving things. A dangling bulb shone a dirty light on the room, which was made even smaller by its incredible disorder. As soon as he entered, he went down on all fours to drag out from under the bed—the dust made him sneeze—the chipped basin which was probably the object he treasured most in the place.

  The rooms had no bath. In the patio, there were two common lavatories and a faucet, where all the neighbors got water for washing and cooking. During the day there were always lines, but not at night, so Mayta went down, filled his basin, and returned to his room—carefully, so he wouldn’t spill a drop—all in a few minutes. He undressed, lay down on his bed, and sank his feet in the basin. Ah, how restful. He had often fallen asleep giving himself a footbath, and would awaken sneezing and frozen to death. But he didn’t fall asleep this time. While the fresh, soothing sensation spread from his feet to his ankles and legs and the fatigue diminished, he thought that even if it had no concrete effect, it was a good thing that someone reminded him: what happened to those literati, historians, and philosophers at San Marcos should not happen to a revolutionary. A revolutionary should not forget that he lives, fights, and dies to make revolution and not to …

  “Let’s get the check,” says Moises. “Enough talk. I’ll pay. Rather, the center will pay. Stick that wallet where the sun won’t shine on it.”

  But there is no more sun. The sky has clouded over, and when we leave the Costa Verde, it looks like winter. One of those typical afternoons in Lima, wet, with a low sky that threatens and blusters, promising a storm that never comes. When he picks up his pistol at the entrance—“It’s a 7.65 Browning,” he tells me—Moises checks to see if the safety is on. He puts it in the glove compartment.

  “At least tell me what you’ve got so far,” he says as we roll along Quebrada Armendariz in his wine-colored Cadillac.

  “A forty-year-old man with flat feet, who’s spent his life in the catacombs of theoretical revolution (or should I say revolutionary intrigue?),” I sum up for him. “In APRA, an APRA dissident; in the Communist Party, a Communist Party dissident; finally, a Trotskyist. Every variant, all the contradictions of the left during the fifties. He lived underground, was jailed, and lived in permanent indigence. But …”

  “But what?”

  “But the frustration didn’t embitter him or even corrupt him. He stays honest, idealistic, despite that castrating life. Does that sound about right?”

  “Basically, yes,” affirms Moises as he slows down to let me off. “But have you ever thought how difficult it is to be corrupted in this country of ours? You have to have opportunities. Most people are honest because they have no choice, don’t you think? Did you ever wonder how Mayta would have reacted if he’d been given a chance to be corrupted?”

  “I figure he always behaved in such a way that he never put himself in the path of corruption.”

  “You don’t have much to go on yet,” concludes Moisés.

  Off in the distance, we hear shots.

  Three

  To get there from Barranco, you have to go to downtown Lima, cross the Rímac—a squalid creek this time of year—at the Ricardo Palma bridge, go along Piedra Liza and skirt the San Cristobal hills. It’s a long, risky, and at certain times of the day extremely slow route because of all the traffic. It also charts the gradual impoverishment of Lima: the prosperity of Miraflores and San Isidro progressively decays and grows ugly in Lince and La Victoria, then resurges illusively in the downtown area, with the tedious towers of banks, mutual-fund and insurance companies—among which nevertheless there proliferate promiscuous tenements and old houses that stay upright only by a miracle. But immediately after you cross the river, in the so-called Bajo el Puente sector, the city decomposes into vacant lots, where huts thrown together out of matting and rubble have sprung up, slums mixed in with garbage dumps that go on for miles. Once this marginal Lima was only poor, but now it’s a place of blood and terror as well.

  When you come to Avenida de los Chasquis, the asphalt gives out and the potholes take over, but a car can still bounce along a few more yards, fenced-in lots on either side, and broken streetlights—the kids smash the bulbs with slingshots. Since it’s my second visit, I won’t be so dumb as to go beyond the store where I got stuck last time. My last trip involved some slapstick comedy. When I finally figured out that I was definitively stuck in the mud, I asked some boys talking on the corner to give me a push. They helped me, but before getting down to pushing, they held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me if I didn’t give them everything I had. They took my watch, my wallet, my shoes, and my shirt. They allowed me to keep my trousers. While they pushed the car, we talked. Were there many murders in the neighborhood? Quite a few. Political assassinations? Yeah, them too. Just yesterday, a decapitated body was found just down the way there, with a sign on it: “Stinking Squealer.”

  I park and walk among dumps that double as pigpens. The pigs root around in these mounds of garbage, and I have to wave both hands around to keep the flies off. On top of and in between the mounds of garbage huddle the huts, made of tin cans, bricks, cement (some), adobe, wood, and with tin roofs (some). They are all half started, never finished, always decrepit, leaning on one another, collapsing or about to collapse, swarming with people who look at me with the same indolence as the last time. Until a few months ago, political violence did not affect the slums on the outskirts of Lima as much as it affected the residential neighborhoods and the downtown area. But now most of the people assassinated or kidnapped by revolutionary commandos, the armed forces, or the counterrevolutionary death squads come from these zones.

  There are more old men than young, more women than men, and from time to time I have the impression that I’m not in Lima or even on the coast but in some village in the Andes: sandals, Indian skirts, ponchos, vests with llamas embroidered on them, dialogues in Quechua. Do they really live better in this stink and scum than in the mountain villages they have abandoned to come to Lima? Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists assure us that, as amazing as it might seem, this is the case. Their expectations for bettering themselves and for simply surviving are greater, it seems, in these fetid dumps than in the plateaus of Ancash, Puno, or Cajamarca, where drought, epidemics, barren land, and unemployment decimate the Indian towns. This is probably true. How else can you explain someone’s choosing to live in these dumps and this filth?

  “For them, it’s the lesser of two evils, a better choice,” said Mayta. “But if you think that just because there is misery in these slums they must contain revolutionary potential, you’re mistaken. These people aren’t proletarians: they’re lumpen. They have no class consciousness, because they aren’t a class. They can’t even imagine what the class struggle is.”

  “Then they’re like me.” Vallejos smiled. “What the fuck is the class struggle?”

  “The motor of history,” explained Mayta, very serious, full of his role as professor. “The struggle that results from the contrary interests of each class in society. Interests innate in the role of each class in the production of wealth. There are those who own capital, those who own property, those who own knowledge. And there are those who own nothing but their labor: the workers. And there are as well the marginal people, those people from the slums, the lumpen. Are you getting confused?”

  “Just hungry.” Vallejos yawned. “These talks always give me an appetite. Let’s forget the class struggle for today and have a nice cold beer. I’m inviting you to have lunch at my parents’ house. My sister is coming out. A big event. She’s worse off than if she were in a barracks. I’ll introduce you. And the next time we see each
other, I’ll bring the surprise I told you about.”

  They were in Mayta’s tiny room, Mayta sitting on the floor and the second lieutenant on the bed. From outside came the sounds of voices, laughter, and automobiles. Minute dust motes floated around them like weightless little animals.

  “If you go on this way, you won’t learn anything about Marxism.” Mayta gave up. “The fact is, you don’t have much of a teacher. I always complicate the things I teach.”

  “You’re better than many of the ones I had in military school.” Vallejos encouraged him with a laugh. “You know what happens to me? I’m really interested in Marxism, but all those abstractions get me. I’m much more open to practical, concrete things. By the way, should I tell you my plan for revolution before we have the beer, or later?”

  “I’ll only listen to your inspired plan if you pass the test,” Mayta said, following his lead. “So what the fuck is the class struggle?”

  “The big fish eats the little fish,” said Vallejos, cackling. “What else could it be, brother? To know that a landowner with a thousand acres and his Indians hate each other, you don’t have to do much studying. Well, did I get a hundred? Now, my plan is gonna knock your socks off, Mayta. Even more when you see the surprise. Will you come to lunch? I want you to meet my sister.”

  “Mother? Sister? Miss?”

  “Juanita,” she decides. “We’re better off calling each other by name. After all, we’re about the same age, right? And this is María.”

  The two women wear leather sandals, and from the bench I’m sitting on, I can see their toes: Juanita’s are still, and María’s wiggle around nervously. Juanita is dark, energetic, with thick arms and legs, and dark down on her upper lip. María is small and light-skinned, with clear eyes and an absent expression.

  “A Pasteurina or a glass of water?” Juanita asks me. “Better for us if you have a soda, because around here water is gold. Just to get it, you have to go all the way to Avenida de los Chasquis.”

  The place reminds me of a cabin out in the San Cristóbal hills where two Frenchwomen, sisters in the congregation of Father de Foucauld, lived. That was long ago. Here the walls are also whitewashed and bare, the floor covered with straw mats; the blankets make you think this could be the dwelling of a desert nomad.

  “All we need is sun,” says María. “Father Charles de Foucauld. I read his book In the Heart of the Masses. It was famous at one time.”

  “I read it, too,” says Juanita. “I don’t remember much. I never did have a good memory, even when I was young.”

  “What a shame.” Nowhere do I see a crucifix, an image of the Virgin, a religious picture, a missal. Nothing that might allude to the fact that the inhabitants are nuns. “About that lack of memory. Because I …”

  “Well, that’s something else. Of course I remember him.” Juanita chides me with a look, as she hands me the Pasteurina. Then her tone changes: “I haven’t forgotten my brother, of course.”

  “What about Mayta?” I ask her, swigging that tepid, overly sweet stuff straight from the bottle.

  “I remember him, too.” Juanita nods. “I saw him only once. At my parents’ house. I don’t remember much, because that was the next-to-the-last time I talked to my brother. The last time was two weeks later. All he did was talk about his friend Mayta. He really liked him and admired him. His influence was … Perhaps I’d better say nothing.”

  “Ah, so that’s what it’s about.” María uses a piece of cardboard to shoo the flies away from her face. Neither wears a habit, only flannel skirts and gray blouses. But in the way they wear their clothes, in the way their hair is held back in a net, in the way they talk and move, you can see they are nuns. “At least it’s about them and not about us. We were nervous, now I can say it, because publicity is bad for the things we do.”

  “And just what is it we do?” mocked Mayta, with a sarcastic laugh. “We’ve taken over the town, the police station, the jail, we’ve got all the weapons in Jauja. What now? Head for the hills like mountain goats?”

  “Not like mountain goats,” replied the second lieutenant, without getting angry. “We can go on horseback, burro, mule, by truck, or on foot. On foot is best, because there’s no better way to get around in the mountains. It’s easy to see you don’t know much about the mountains, buddy.”

  “It’s true, I really don’t know much about them,” admitted Mayta. “I’m really ashamed.”

  “Well, we can help you there. Come with me tomorrow to Jauja.” Vallejos nudged him with his elbow. “You’ll have a free place to stay, and free food. Just the weekend, man. I’ll show you the country, we can go to the Indian towns, you’ll see the real Peru. But listen, now: don’t open the surprise. You promised. Or I’ll take it back.”

  They were sitting on the sand at Agua Dulce, gazing over the deserted beach. All around them were fluttering sea gulls, and a salty, moist breeze wet their faces. What could this surprise be? The package was wrapped so carefully, as if it contained something precious. And it was really heavy.

  “Of course I’d like to go to Jauja,” said Mayta. “But…”

  “But you can’t pay the bus fare,” Vallejos cut in. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you a ticket.”

  “We’ll see. Let’s get back to business,” Mayta insisted. “Serious business. Did you read the little book I gave you?”

  “I liked it and I understood everything, except for a couple of Russian names. Know why I liked it, Mayta? Because it is more practical than theoretical. What Is to Be Done? What Is to Be Done? Lenin knew what had to be done, buddy. He was a man of action, like me. So my plan looked like kid stuff to you?”

  “Well, at least you read Lenin, and at least you like him. You’re making progress.” Mayta avoided answering directly. “Want me to tell you something? You were right, your sister really impressed me. She didn’t seem like a nun. She made me remember old times. When I was a kid, I was as devout as she is, did you know that?”

  “He looked older than he was,” Juanita says. “He was in his forties, wasn’t he? And since my brother looked younger than he was, they looked like father and son. It was during one of my rare visits to my family. At that time, the two of us were cloistered. Not like these snots who live half the time in the convent and half the time out on the street.”

  María protests. She waves her piece of cardboard in front of her face very fast, driving the flies crazy. They’re not only all around us, buzzing our heads: they dot the walls, like nailheads. I already know what’s in this package, Mayta thought. I know what the surprise is. He felt a wave of heat in his chest and thought: He’s crazy. How old can Juanita be? Undecipherable: petite, ramrod straight; her gestures and movements released waves of energy, and her slightly bucked teeth were always biting her lower lip. Could she have been a novice in Spain and lived there for a long time? Because her accent was remotely Spanish, the accent of a Spanish woman whose j’s and r’s had lost their edges, the z’s and c’s their roundness, but whose spoken Spanish hadn’t yet taken on the Lima drawl. What are you doing here, Mayta? he thought, feeling uncomfortable. What are you doing here with a nun? He unobtrusively stretched out his hand and felt for the surprise. Yes, indeed—a gun.

  “I thought the two of you were in the same order,” I say to them.

  “Then you are sadly mistaken,” María replies. She smiles often, but Juanita is serious even when she makes jokes. Outside, there is a furious barking, as if a pack of dogs were fighting. “I was with the proletarian nuns, she with the aristocratic nuns. Now both of us are lumpen.”

  We begin talking about Mayta and Vallejos, but without knowing it, we digress into a discussion of local crime. At the beginning, the revolutionaries were quite strong here: they solicited money in broad daylight, even held meetings. They would kill people from time to time, accusing them of being traitors. Then the freedom squads appeared, cutting off heads, mutilating, and burning real or supposed accomplices of the revolutionaries with acid. Violence has increas
ed. Juanita believes, nevertheless, that there are still more ordinary crimes than political crimes, and that common murderers disguise their crimes as political assassinations.

  “A few days ago, a guy in the neighborhood killed his wife because she was jealous of him,” María tells. “And his brothers-in-law saw him trying to cover up the crime by hanging one of those famous ‘Squealer Bitch’ signs on her.”

  “Let’s go back to what brought me here,” I suggest. “The revolution that began to take shape during those years. The one Mayta and your brother were involved in. It was the first of many. It charted the process that has ended in what we are all living through now.”

  “It may turn out that the great revolution of those years wasn’t any of the ones you think it was, but ours,” Juanita interrupts me. “Because—have all these murders and attacks produced anything positive? Violence only breeds violence. And things haven’t changed, have they? There is more poverty than ever, here, out in the country, out in the mountains, everywhere.”

  “Did you talk about that?” I ask her. “Did Mayta talk to you about the poor, about misery?”

  “We talked about religion,” Juanita says. “And don’t think I brought the subject up. It was him.”

  “Yes, very Catholic, but no more—I’m free of those illusions,” Mayta murmurs, sorry he’s said it here, afraid that Vallejos’s sister will be offended. “Don’t you ever have doubts?”

  “From the moment I wake up until I go to bed,” she says softly. “Whoever told you that faith and doubts don’t go together?”