The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (2 page)

As she speaks, she looks me over, just barely dissimulating her curiosity. Her voice cracks once in a while, just like Mayta's; her hands are big; and even though she smiles from time to time, her eyes are sad and watery. She complains about the rising cost of living, about the muggings—“There's not a single woman in this neighborhood who hasn't been attacked at least once”—about the robbery at the branch of the Banco de Crédito where so many poor people got shot, and about not being able to go to Venezuela too, where the streets are paved with gold.

“At the Salesian, we all thought Mayta would become a priest,” I say to her.

“That's what my sister thought, too.” She nods, blowing her nose. “Me, too. He would make the sign of the cross whenever he passed a church; he went to Communion every Sunday. A little saint. Who'd ever have said it—I mean, that he would turn out to be a communist. In those days, it didn't seem possible that a kid as religious as that would become a communist. But that's all changed; now there are lots of communist priests, right? I can remember perfectly the day he walked through that door.”

He came up to her with his schoolbooks under his arm, and then, with his fist clenched as if he were going to punch himself, he recited in one breath what he had come to announce to her, the decision that had kept him awake all night: “Godmother, we eat a lot, we don't think about the poor. Do you know what they eat? I'm telling you that, from now on, I'm only going to have some soup at lunch and some bread at night. Just like don Medaro, the blind man.”

“That little trick landed him in the hospital,” doña Josefa remembers.

The little trick went on for several months and he got thinner and thinner, without any of us in the class being able to figure out why, until Father Giovanni, full of admiration, told us when they took Mayta to Loayza Hospital. “All this time he's been fasting so he could be one with the poor, out of human and Christian solidarity,” he said softly, shocked at what Mayta's godmother had come to report to the school authorities. The news left us confused, so much so that we didn't dare make fun of him when he came back, cured by injections and tonics. “This boy will cause a stir,” Father Giovanni would say. He sure did, but not in the way you thought, Father.

“It was bad luck that he got it in his head to come that night.” Mrs. Arrisueño sighs. “If he hadn't come, he wouldn't have met Vallejos and nothing of what happened would have happened. Because Vallejos was the instigator, everybody knows it. Mayta would come, give me a hug, and leave after a little while. But that night he was the very last to go, yakking away with Vallejos over in that corner. It must be twenty-five years ago and I remember as if it were yesterday. Revolution this, revolution that. The whole blessed night.”

Revolution? Mayta turned to look at him. Had the young fellow spoken, or was it the old man in slippers?

“Yessir, tomorrow,” repeated the skinny guy, raising the glass he held in his right hand. “The socialist revolution could begin tomorrow if we wanted. I'm telling you, mister.”

Mayta yawned again and then stretched, his body tickling all over. The skinny guy went on talking about the socialist revolution with the same sauciness with which he'd told traveling-salesman jokes a moment before, the same tone he'd used to describe the last bout of “our national honor, Frontado.” Despite his weariness, Mayta began to listen. What was going on in Cuba was nothing compared to what could happen in Peru if we wanted it to. The day the Andes start shaking, the whole country will tremble. Could he be a member of APRA? A party man? A real communist at Godmother's get-together? Impossible. Mayta never remembered anyone talking politics in this house.

“And just what is going on in Cuba?” asked cousin Zoilita.

“Well, Fidel Castro swore he wouldn't cut his beard off until he brought Batista down.” The skinny guy laughed. “Haven't you seen what those guys from the 26 of July Movement are doing everywhere? They put a flag on the Statue of Liberty in New York. Batista's sinking fast, he's done for.”

“Who is Batista?” asked cousin Alicia.

“A despot,” Skinny adamantly explained. “The dictator of Cuba. What's going on there is nothing compared to what can happen here. Thanks to our geography, I mean. A real gift from God to the revolution. When the Indians rise up, Peru will be a volcano.”

“Okay, but now go and dance,” said cousin Zoilita. “People came here to dance. I'm going to put something fast on.”

“Revolutions are serious business; I, for one, don't support them,” Mayta heard the old man in slippers say in a gravelly voice. “When APRA rose up in Trujillo in 1930, there was a real bloodbath. The APRA people got into the barracks and liquidated I don't know how many officers. Sánchez Cerro sent planes and tanks and crushed them, and they shot a thousand APRAs in the Chan Chan ruins.”

“Were you there?” asked Skinny excitedly. Mayta thought: Revolutions and soccer matches are all the same for this guy.

“I was in Huánuco, in my barbershop,” said the old man in slippers. “Rumors about the killing reached all the way there. The few APRAs in Huánuco were picked up and jailed. The prefect, a little army man with a bad temper who liked women a lot, did it. Colonel Badulaque.”

After a bit, cousin Alicia also went off to dance and Skinny seemed depressed that his whole audience was the old man. Then he saw Mayta and raised his glass to him: “Hello there, buddy.”

“How do you do,” said Mayta, raising his glass in turn.

“My name is Vallejos,” Skinny said, shaking hands.

“Mine's Mayta.”

“From talking so much, I lost my partner.” Vallejos laughed, pointing to a girl with bangs. She was dancing with Pepote (who was trying his best to get cheek-to-cheek while “Contigo a la distancia” was on)—a distant cousin of Alicia and Zoilita's. “If he squeezes her any tighter, Alci's gonna haul off and sock him.”

He looked eighteen or nineteen because of his elegant figure, his smooth face, and his practically crew-cut hair, but, thought Mayta, he can't be so young. His gestures, his tone of voice, and his self-assurance would suggest someone who's been around. He had big white teeth that made his dark face cheerful. He was one of the few who wore a jacket and tie, and also a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. He was always smiling, and there was something direct and effusive about him. He took out a pack of Incas and offered Mayta one. Then he lit it.

“If the APRA revolution of 1930 had been a success, things would sure be different,” he said vehemently, exhaling smoke from his nose and mouth. “There wouldn't be so much injustice and inequality. The heads that have to roll would already be gone, and Peru would be a different place. Don't think I'm in APRA, but let's give Caesar his due. I'm a socialist, buddy, no matter what they say about soldiers and socialism not mixing.”

“A soldier?” Mayta winced.

“Second lieutenant.” Vallejos nodded. “I graduated last year in Chorrillos.”

Jesus. Now he understood Vallejos's haircut and his impulsive manner. Was this what they called a natural leader? Incredible that an army man would talk like that.

“It was a historic party,” Mrs. Josefa affirms. “Because Mayta and Vallejos met, and so did my nephew Pepote and Alci. He fell in love with her and stopped being the lazy playboy he'd been. He got a job, married Alci, and they went to Venezuela, too—who wouldn't? But it seems they've parted now. I hope it's only gossip. Ah, you recognize him, right? Yes, it's Mayta. Years and years ago.”

In the picture, faded and yellowed around the edges, he looks forty or over. It's a snapshot taken by some public photographer in an unrecognizable plaza in bad light. He's standing, with a shawl over his shoulders and an expression of discomfort, as if the glare of the sun made his eyes itch or as if posing in public in front of passersby embarrassed him. In his right hand he has a satchel or a package or a briefcase, and though the picture is blurred, you can see how badly dressed he is: baggy pants, a jacket that hangs, his shirt collar too wide, and a tie with a badly tied, ridiculous little knot. Revolutionaries wore ties in those days. He's got messy long hair; his face is rather different from the way I remember it, fuller, frowning, a taut seriousness. That's what you see in the photo: a tired man. Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that's much older, the fatigue of a life that has reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta's case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, political deceptions, want, bad food, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling a victory. And nevertheless, in that exhausted and tense countenance, there glows as well, somehow, that secret, intact integrity in the face of setbacks which it always thrilled me to find in him over the years, that juvenile purity, capable of reacting with the same indignation to any injustice, in Peru or at the ends of the earth, and that honest belief that the most urgent task, the one that could not be shirked, was to change the world. An extraordinary snapshot, indeed, that caught Mayta full-length, the Mayta that Vallejos met that night.

“I asked him to have it taken,” says doña Josefa, putting it back on the mantel. “So I could have a remembrance of him. See these photos? They're all relatives, some really distant ones. Most are dead now. Were you two very friendly?”

“We didn't see each other for many years,” I tell her. “Later we ran into each other a few times, but only rarely.”

Doña Josefa Arrisueño looks at me, and I know what she's thinking. I would like to ease her doubts, to calm her, but it's impossible because at this point I know as little about my plans for Mayta as she herself does.

“What will you write about him?” she whispers, running her tongue over her thick lips. “His life?”

“No, not his life,” I answer, trying to say something that won't confuse her even more. “Something inspired by his life. Not a biography, but a novel. A very free history of the period, Mayta's world, the things that happened in those years.”

“Why him?” she asks, working herself up. “There are others who are more famous. The poet Javier Heraud, for example. Or the people in the Radical Left Movement, de la Puente, Lobatón, the ones people always talk about. Why Mayta? No one remembers him.”

She's right. Why? Because his case was the first in a series that would typify the period? Because he was the most absurd? Because he was the most tragic? Because his person and his story hold something ineffably moving, something that, over and beyond its political and moral implications, is like an X-ray of Peruvian misfortune?

“In other words, you don't believe in the revolution.” Vallejos pretended to be shocked. “In other words, you are one of those who believe that Peru will always be the same until the end of the world.”

Mayta smiled and shook his head. “Peru will change. The revolution will come,” he explained, with infinite patience. “But it will come in its own time. It's not as easy as you say.”

“In fact, it
is
easy—I say so because I know so.” Vallejos's face glistened with sweat, and his eyes were as fiery as his words. “It's easy if you know the topography of the mountains, if you know how to fire a Mauser, and if the Indians rise up.”

“If the Indians rise up.” Mayta sighed. “As easy as winning the lottery.”

He'd never dreamed that his godmother's birthday party could be such fun. He had thought at the outset: This guy's a provocateur, an informer. He knows who I am and wants to loosen my tongue. But after talking with him awhile, he was sure he wasn't any of those things; he was a stray angel with wings who had no idea where he'd landed. Yet he felt no desire to tease him. He liked to listen to him talk about the revolution as if it were a kind of game or a set in a match, something you could bring off with a little effort and ingenuity. There was so much confidence and innocence in the boy that it made him want to go on listening to his crazy ideas all night. He wasn't tired anymore and he was on his third glass of beer. Pepote kept dancing with Alci—the
chotis
“Madrid,” by Agustín Lara, sung by all the guests—but the lieutenant didn't seem to care a bit. He had dragged a chair next to Mayta's, and straddling it, he explained that fifty determined, well-armed men using Cáceres's hit-and-run tactics could light the fuse of the Andes powder keg. He's so young he could be my son, Mayta thought. And so cute he must have all the girls he wants.

“And what do you do for a living?” Vallejos asked.

It was a question that always made him uncomfortable, although he was ready for it. His answer—half truth, half lie—sounded falser to him than it had at other times. “I'm a journalist,” he said, wondering how Vallejos would react if he heard him say, “I do what you talk about. Revolution. What do you think of that?”

“For which paper?”

“For France-Presse. I do translations.”

“So you speak frog.” Vallejos made a face. “Where'd you learn it?”

“By himself, with a dictionary, and a grammar someone won in a raffle,” doña Josefa tells me. “You may not believe me, but I saw him with my own eyes. He would lock himself up in his room and repeat words for hours and hours. The parish priest in Surquillo would lend him magazines. He would say to me, ‘I already understand a little, godmother. I'm picking it up.' Finally, he did understand it, because he would spend days reading books in French, believe me.”

“Of course I believe you,” I tell her. “I'm not surprised he learned by himself. When he got some idea in his head, he saw it through. I've known few people as tenacious as Mayta.”