The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (18 page)

“A fantastic accident,” Vallejos explained. “I had nothing to do with it. This was the jail they were sent to because this is where they would come before the prosecution. My sister would say that God is helping us, see?”

“Were they in with you before they were captured?”

“In a general way,” says Ubilluz. “We spoke with them during the trip we made to Uchubamba, and they helped us hide the weapons. But they only came in with us all the way in the month they were imprisoned. They really got close to their jailer. That is, the lieutenant. I think he didn't tell them the whole plan until the thing blew open.”

That part of the story, the end, makes Professor Ubilluz uncomfortable, even though so much time has passed. About that part he knows only what he's heard, and his role is both disputed and doubtful. We hear another volley, far off. “They may be shooting the accomplices of the terrorists,” he says, grunting. This is the time they usually choose to take them from their homes, in a jeep or an armored car, and bring them to the outskirts. The corpses turn up the next day on the roads. And suddenly, with no transition, he asks me, “Does it make any sense to be writing a novel with Peru in this condition and Peruvians all living on borrowed time?” Does it make any sense? I tell him it certainly does, since I'm doing it.

There's something depressing about Professor Ubilluz. Everything he says has a sad cast to it. Maybe I'm prejudiced, but I can't get rid of the notion that he's always on the defensive and that everything he tells me is aimed at some kind of self-justification. But doesn't everyone do the same thing? Why is it I have no confidence in him? The fact that he's still alive? That I've heard so much gossip and so many rumors about him? But am I not also aware of the fact that in political controversies this country was always a garbage heap, until it became the cemetery it is today? Don't I know the infinite horrors which have no basis in fact that enemies ascribe to each other? No, that isn't what seems so pitiful to me in him, but, simply, his decadence, his bitterness, the quarantine in which he lives.

“So then, in short, Mayta's part in the plan of action was nil,” I say.

“To be fair, let's say minimal,” he corrects me, shrugging his shoulders. He yawns, and his face fills with wrinkles. “With him or without him, it would have turned out the same. We let him in because we thought he was a political and union leader of some importance. We needed the support of workers and revolutionaries in the rest of the country. That was to be Mayta's function. But it turned out he didn't even represent his own group, the RWP(T). Politically speaking, he was a total orphan.”

“A total orphan.” The expression rings in my ear as I bid Professor Ubilluz goodbye and go out onto the deserted streets of Jauja, heading toward the Paca Inn, under a sky glistening with stars. The professor tells me that, if I'm afraid of such a long walk, I can sleep in his tiny living room. But I prefer to leave: I need air and solitude. I have to quell the static inside my head and put some distance between me and a person whose mere presence depresses my work. The volleys have ceased, and it's as if there were a curfew, because there's not a soul around. I walk down the middle of the street, banging my heels, making every effort to be noticed, so that if a patrol comes along, they won't think I'm trying to sneak by. The sky glows—an unusual sight for someone from Lima, where you almost never see the stars through the mist. The cold chaps my lips. I don't feel as hungry as I did in the afternoon.

A total orphan. That's what he became, by being a militant in smaller and smaller, ever more radical sects, looking for an ideological purity he never found. He was the supreme orphan when he threw himself into this extraordinary conspiracy to start a war in the heights of Junín, with a twenty-two-year-old second-lieutenant jailer and a secondary-school teacher, both of them totally disconnected from the Peruvian left. It certainly was fascinating. It kept on fascinating me for a year after I made the investigation, just as much as it fascinated me that day when I found out in Paris what had happened in Jauja … The wretched light of the widely spaced streetlights wraps around the old façades of the houses, some with enormous gateways and ironclad doors, wrought-iron bars on their windows, and shuttered balconies. Behind all that, I can imagine entrance-ways, patios with plants and trees, and a life once upon a time ordered and monotonous and now, doubtless, beside itself with fear.

In that first visit to Jauja, nevertheless, the total orphan must have felt exultation and happiness such as he never felt before. He was going to act, the revolt was becoming tangible: faces, places, dialogues, concrete action. As if suddenly his whole life as a militant, a conspirator, a persecuted individual, a political prisoner was justified and at the same time catapulted into a higher reality. Besides, it all coincided with the attainment of something which until a week ago had seemed a wild dream. Hadn't he dreamed? No, it was as true and concrete as the imminent revolt: he had had in his arms the boy he had desired for so many years. He had made him experience pleasure and he had experienced pleasure himself. He had heard him whimper under his caresses. He felt a burning in his testicles, the prelude to an erection, and he thought: Have you gone crazy? Here? Right in the station? Here, in front of Vallejos? He thought: It's happiness. You have never felt like this before, comrade.

Nothing's open, and I remember from a previous visit, years ago, before all this, the eternal shops of Jauja at dusk, illuminated with kerosene lamps: the tailor shops, the candlemaker's shop, the barbershops, the jewelers, the bakeries, the hat stores. And also that hanging from the balconies you could sometimes see rows of rabbits drying in the sun. Suddenly I'm hungry again, and my mouth waters. I think about Mayta. Excited, happy, he got ready to return to Lima, certain that his comrades in the RWP(T) would approve the plan of action without reservations. He thought: I'll see Anatolio, we'll spend the night talking, I'll tell him everything, we'll laugh, he'll help me to get the others excited. And later … There is a placid silence, the kind you find in books by the Spanish writer Azorín, broken from time to time by the cry of a night bird, invisible under the eaves of a house.

Now I'm leaving the town. This is where it took place, this is where they did it, in these little streets, so tranquil, so timeless then, in that plaza of such beautiful proportions, which twenty-five years ago had a weeping willow and a border of cypresses. Here in this land where it would be difficult to imagine that things could be worse, that hunger, murder, and the danger of disintegration would reach the extremes of today. Here, before returning to Lima, when they said goodbye in the station, the total orphan indicated to the impulsive second lieutenant that in order to give a greater impetus to the start of the rebellion he should consider a few armed acts of propaganda.

“And just what is that?” Vallejos asked.

The train was in the station and people were shoving their way on. They talked near the stairs, taking advantage of the last minutes.

“Translated into Catholic language, it means to preach by example,” said Mayta. “Actions that educate the masses, that take hold in their imagination, that give them ideas, show them their own power. One armed act of propaganda is worth hundreds of issues of the
Workers Voice
.”

They were speaking in low tones, but there was no danger of their being heard, because of the pandemonium all around them.

“And you want more armed acts of propaganda than taking over the Jauja jail and seizing the weapons? More than seizing the police station and the Civil Guard post?”

“Yes, I want more than that,” said Mayta.

Capturing those places was a belligerent, military act, which would seem like a traditional military coup because a lieutenant was doing it. It wasn't sufficiently explicit from the ideological point of view. He would have to take maximum advantage of those first hours. Newspapers and radios would be reporting nonstop. Everything they did in those first hours would reverberate and remain engraved in the memory of the people. So he would have to take full advantage and carry out acts that would have a symbolic charge to them, whose message would be both about revolution and about the class struggle, which would reach the militants, students, intellectuals, workers, and peasants.

“You know something?” said Vallejos. “I think you're right.”

“The important thing is how much time we have.”

“A few hours. With the telephone and telegraph lines cut and the radio out of commission, the only way to sound the alarm is for someone to go to Huancayo. While they go and come back and mobilize the police—let's say, five hours.”

“More than enough for some didactic action,” said Mayta. “Action that will show the masses that our movement is against bourgeois power, imperialism, and capitalism.”

“Now you're making a speech.” Vallejos laughed, hugging him. “Get on, get on. And now that you're going back, don't forget the surprise I gave you. You're going to need it.”

“The plan was perfect,” Professor Ubilluz said several times during our chat. What went wrong then, Professor? “That it was changed, rushed, turned upside down.” Who did all that? “I couldn't tell you, exactly. Vallejos, naturally. But perhaps influenced by the Trotskyite. I'll wonder about that until I die.” A doubt, he says, that has eaten away at his life, that is still eating away at it, even more than the infamous calumnies against him, even more than being on the insurgents' blaklist. I have gone halfway back to the inn without running into a patrol, armored car, man, or beast: only invisible chirps. The stars and the moon render visible the quiet, bluish countryside, the fields, the eucalyptus trees, the mountains, the small houses along the road sealed up with mud and rocks, just like those in the city. The waters of the lake, in a night like this, should be worth seeing. When I get to the inn, I'll go out to look at them. The walk has restored my enthusiasm for my book. I'll go out on the terrace and the dock, no stray or intended shots will interrupt me. And I shall think, remember, and imagine until, just before dawn, I give form to this episode in the real life of Alejandro Mayta. A whistle blew and the train began to move.

“It was the most terrifying encounter I ever had in my life,” says Blacquer. “I stood there blinking, not really believing he was actually standing there. Was it really Mayta? ‘Yes, it's me,' said Mayta quickly. ‘Can I come in? It's urgent.'”

“Can you imagine me letting a Trot in?” Blacquer smiles, remembering the shiver that ran down his spine that morning when he found himself face to face with that apparition. “I don't think you and I have anything to say to each other, Mayta.”

“It's important, it's urgent, it goes way beyond our differences.” He spoke vehemently, and seemed not to have slept or washed. You could see he was really excited. “If you're afraid you'll be compromised if you let me in, we can go anywhere you like.”

“We saw each other three times,” Blacquer adds. “The first two were before that meeting of the RWP(T) when they threw him out for being a traitor. I mean, for coming to see me. Me, a Stalinist.”

He smiles again, exposing his tobacco-stained teeth, and behind his thick glasses his myopic eyes look me up and down disagreeably. We are in the convalescent Café Haiti in Miraflores, which still hasn't been put back together after the bombing: its windows still have no glass in them, the counter and the floor are both still smashed and scorched. But out here in the street you don't see all that. All around us, people are talking about the same thing, as if everyone sitting at the twenty or so tables is having the same conversation. Could it be true that Cuban troops had crossed the Bolivian border? That for the last three days the rebels, along with the Cuban and Bolivian “volunteers” who support them, have pushed the army back? That the Junta has warned the United States that if it doesn't intervene, the insurgents will take Arequipa in a matter of days and from there will be able to proclaim the Socialist Republic of Peru? But Blacquer and I skirt these momentous issues and chat about that insignificant, forgotten episode of a quarter century ago, the key to my novel.

“I really was one,” he adds after a while. “Like everybody else at that time. Weren't you, after all? Weren't you moved by the hagiography Barbusse wrote about Stalin? Didn't you know by heart the poem Neruda wrote in his honor? Didn't you have a poster with the drawing Picasso did of him? Didn't you weep when he died?”

Blacquer was my first teacher of Marxism—thirty-five years ago—in a secret study group organized by the Young Communists in a house over in Pueblo Libre. At that time he was a Stalinist; I mean, a machine programmed to repeat official statements, an automaton who spoke in stereotypes. Now he is a man who has grown old, who survives by working in a print shop. Is he still a militant? Perhaps, but he's nothing more than an outsider as far as the party is concerned: he'll never rise in the hierarchy. The proof is the fact that he's here with me right out in broad daylight—well, it's a gray day with lowering, ashen clouds that themselves look like bad omens, in keeping with the rumors about the internationalization of the war in the south. No one's hunting him down, while even the lowest-level leaders of the Communist Party—or of any party on the extreme left—are in hiding, in jail, or dead. I have only heard about his confused history, and I don't intend to find out about it now. (If the rumors turn out to be true and the war really is growing more general, I'll barely have time to finish my novel. If the war reaches the streets of Lima, my own front door, I doubt I'll be able to do it.)

What I want to hear is his account of those three meetings they had twenty-five years ago on the eve of the Jauja uprising. They were opposites: the Stalinist and the Trotskyist. But I've always been intrigued by the fact that Blacquer, who seemed destined by fate to reach the Central Committee and perhaps to be head of the Communist Party, is today a nobody. It was something that happened to him in some Central European country—Hungary or Czechoslovakia—where he was sent to study and where he got involved in some mess or other. From the sotto voce accusations that circulated at the time—the usual: factional activity, ultra-individualism, petit-bourgeois pride, lack of discipline, sabotaging the party line—it was impossible to know what he had said or done to deserve excommunication. Had he committed the ultimate crime—criticizing the U.S.S.R.? If he did, why did he do it? All we know is that he was expelled for a few years, and lived in the infinitely sad limbo of purged communists—no one can be more an orphan than a militant expelled from the party, not even a priest who puts aside his vows—where he deteriorated in all possible ways, until, it seems, he could return, having gone through, I suppose, the obligatory rite of self-criticism. Coming back to the flock didn't help him very much, judging by what's become of him since. As far as I know, the party had him correcting the proofs of
Unity
as well as some pamphlets and leaflets. At least, that is, until the insurrection took on the dimensions it has now and the communists were declared outlaws and began to be persecuted or assassinated by the death squads. But it's hardly likely that anyone, except through some monumental error or stupidity, is going to jail or murder the ruined and useless man Blacquer has become. His acid memories have probably ended his illusions. Every time I've seen him over the past few years—always in a group; this is the first time in ten or fifteen years that we've spoken alone—he's impressed me as being a bitter man interested in nothing.

“They didn't expel Mayta from the RWP(T),” I correct him. “He resigned. At that last session, to be precise. His letter of resignation appeared in
Workers Voice (T)
. I clipped it out.”

“They threw him out,” he firmly corrects me in turn. “I know all about that Trot meeting, just as if I'd been there myself. Mayta told me all about it the last time we met. The third time. I'd like more coffee, if you don't mind.”

Coffee and soda is all anyone can have, now that even saltines are rationed. Actually, they're not supposed to serve more than one cup of coffee to a customer. But no one pays much attention to that law. The people around us are very excited, all talking loudly. Even though I try not to be distracted, I find myself listening to a young man with glasses: at the Ministry of the Exterior, they estimate that “several thousand” Cubans and Bolivians have crossed the border. The girl with him opens her eyes wide: “Could Fidel Castro be with them?” “No, he's too old for that rough stuff,” the boy says, smashing her illusions. The barefoot, ragged boys in the Diagonal attack every car like a pack of dogs, offering to wash it, guard it, scrub the white-walls. Others wander from table to table, offering to make the customers' shoes shine like mirrors. (They say the bomb that exploded here was placed by boys like these.) There are also clusters of women who assault the passersby and the drivers (when the lights turn red) to sell them blackmarket cigarettes. With the scarcities we're forced to put up with, the one thing we don't lack is cigarettes. Why doesn't the blackmarket sell preserves and crackers, something we can use to stave off the hunger we feel when we wake up and when we go to sleep?

“I'll tell you all about it,” said Mayta, panting. He spoke calmly and methodically, and Blacquer listened politely. He told him what he wanted to tell him. Had he acted properly or not? He didn't know and didn't care. It was as if all the fatigue of a sleepless night had suddenly welled up in him. “See? I had a good reason for knocking at your door.”

Blacquer remained silent, looking at him, his cigarette burning down between his thin, yellowed fingers. The little room led several lives—office, dining room, foyer—and was stuffed with furniture, chairs, a few books. The greenish wallpaper was water-stained. As he was speaking, Mayta had heard the voice of a woman and the crying of a child coming from upstairs. Blacquer remained so still that Mayta would have thought he was asleep, if it weren't that he had his myopic eyes fixed on him. This sector of Jesús María was quiet, devoid of cars.

“As a provocation directed against the party, it couldn't be any cruder,” he said finally, his voice devoid of inflection. The ash from his cigarette fell to the floor, and Blacquer stepped on it. “I thought you Trots were a little subtler with your tricks. You needn't have bothered to visit me, Mayta.”

He wasn't surprised: Blacquer had said, more or less, what he was supposed to say. Mayta admitted to himself that he was right: a militant should be suspicious, and Blacquer was a good militant. This he knew from the time they were in jail together. Before he answered, Mayta lit a cigarette and yawned. Upstairs, the child began to cry again. The woman quieted him down, in low tones.

“Just remember, I'm not here to ask your party for anything. I just wanted to inform you. This goes beyond our differences and concerns all revolutionaries.”

“Even the Stalinists who betrayed the October Revolution?” asked Blacquer quietly.

“Even the Stalinists who betrayed the October Revolution.” Mayta nodded. His tone changed. “I thought about taking this step all night before actually doing it. I'm as suspicious of you as you are of me. Don't you realize that? Do you think I don't know what I'm risking? I'm putting a powerful weapon in your hands and in the hands of your party. Nevertheless, here I am. Don't talk about provocations even you don't believe in. Just think a little.”

This is one of the things I understand least in this story, the strangest episode. Wasn't it absurd to reveal details about an uprising to a political enemy, to whom—this was the icing on the cake—he was not even going to propose a pact, a joint action, from whom he was not going to ask a thing? What sense was there in all that? “Early this morning, over that radio over there, they said that red flags have been flying since last night over Puno, and that before tomorrow they will be flying over Arequipa and Cuzco,” someone says. “Fabrications,” someone else counters.

“When he came to see me, I also thought it didn't make any sense,” agrees Blacquer. “First, I thought it was a trap. Or that Mayta had gotten involved in something, was sorry he ever did it, and was now trying to weasel out by creating complications and difficulties … Later on, after what happened, it was all clear.”

“The only clear thing in all this is a knife in our backs,” roared Comrade Pallardi. “To ask for help from the Stalinists for this adventure isn't merely indiscipline. It's purely and simply betrayal.”

“I'll explain it to you all over again, if I have to,” Mayta interrupted him, without getting upset. He was sitting on a pile of back numbers of
Workers Voice
and was leaning on the poster with Trotsky's face on it. Within a few seconds, an electric tension had galvanized the garage on Jirón Zorritos. “But before I do, comrade, clear something up for me. When you say adventure, are you referring to the revolution?”

Blacquer slowly savors his watery coffee and runs the tip of his tongue over his cracked lips. He narrows his eyes and remains silent, seeming to reflect on the dialogue taking place at a nearby table: “If this news is right, tomorrow or the day after, the war will be right here in Lima.” “Do you really think so, Pacho? A war would really be somethin', doncha think?” The afternoon passes and the automobile traffic intensifies. The Diagonal is bumper-to-bumper. The beggar kids and the women selling cigarettes have also become more numerous. “I'm happy the Cubans and Bolivians have crossed the border,” exclaims an irritable guy. “Now the Marines in Ecuador have no reason to stay out. It may well be that they're already in Piura or Chiclayo. I hope they kill the people they have to kill and that they put an end to all this once and for all, goddamn it.” I barely hear him, because, in fact, at this very moment his bloody speculation has less life to it than those two meetings in that Lima of fewer cars, fewer beggars, and fewer blackmarket dealers, where the things that are happening now would seem impossible: Mayta going to share his plot with his Stalinist enemy, Mayta fighting it out with his comrades in the final session of the Central Committee of the RWP(T).

“Coming to see me was the only sensible thing he did in that entire crazy business he got involved in,” adds Blacquer. He's taken off his glasses to clean them, and he looks blind. “If the guerrilla war really took off, they would have needed urban support. Networks that would send them medicine and information, that could hide and nurse the wounded and recruit new fighters. Networks that would broadcast the actions of the advance guard. Who was going to create those networks? The twenty-odd Peruvian Trots?”

“Actually, there are only seven of us,” I correct him.

Had Blacquer understood him? He was still as a statue again. Leaning his head forward, realizing that he was sweating, trying to find the words that fatigue and worry were stealing from him, hearing from time to time, in that invisible upper floor, the child and the woman, I explained it to him again. No one was asking the militants of the Communist Party to go out to the mountains—he had taken the precaution not to mention to him Vallejos, Jauja, or any date whatsoever—or that they give up any of their theories, ideas, prejudices, dogmas, anything. Only that they be informed and alert. Soon they would be in a situation where they'd have only two alternatives: put their convictions into practice or renounce them. Soon they would have to show the masses they really wanted to topple the exploitive system and replace it with a revolutionary worker-peasant regime. Or they would show that all they had been saying was just rhetoric: they could vegetate in the shadow of the powerful ally that had adopted them and wait for the revolution to fall on Peru someday like a gift from heaven.

“When you attack us, then you seem like your old self,” said Blacquer. “What are you asking for? Make your point.”

“All I'm asking is that you be ready, nothing more.” I thought: Will I lose my voice? I had never been so exhausted. I had to make a huge effort to articulate every syllable. Overhead, the child began to wail again. “Because, when we act, there is going to be a massive counterstrike. And of course you all won't be exempt from the repression.”