The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (26 page)

“I'm not going to ask you, because you're going to tell me they were Shorty Ubilluz's beans,” I say.

Don Ezequiel gives another one of his monstrous cackles. “Why don't you ask me who was driving it?” He raises his dirty hands, and as if punching someone, he points to the plaza. “I saw him go by, I recognized that traitor. I saw him hanging on to the steering wheel, wearing a faggoty blue cap. I saw the sacks of beans. What the fuck is going on here? What do you think was going to happen—that damned son of a bitch was screwing Vallejos, the outsider, and me.”

“Tell me just one thing more, and then I'll leave you in peace, don Ezequiel. Why didn't you go, too, that morning? Why did you stay so peacefully in your barbershop? Why didn't you at least hide?”

His fruit-like face contemplates me horribly for several seconds, in slow fury. I watch him pick his nose and tear at the skin on his neck. When he answers, he still feels the need to lie. “Why the hell should I hide when I had nothing to do with anything? What the hell for?”

“Don Ezequiel, don Ezequiel,” I chide him. “Twenty-five years have gone by, Peru's going down the drain, people are thinking only of saving themselves from a war that isn't even being fought by Peruvians, you and I might be dead in the next raid or skirmish. Who cares anymore what happened that day? Tell me the truth, help me to end my story before this homicidal chaos our country has become eats both of us up. You were supposed to cut the telephone lines and hire some taxis, using a phony barbeque over in Molinos as a pretext. Don't you remember what time you were supposed to be at the telephone company? Five minutes after they opened up. The taxis were going to wait at the corner of Alfonso Ugarte and La Mar, where Mayta's group was going to commandeer them. But you didn't hire the cabs, you didn't go to the telephone company, and when the joeboy came to ask you what was going on, you told him: ‘Nothing's going on, it's all gone to hell, run to school and forget you even know who I am.' That joeboy is Telésforo Salinas, director of physical education for this province, don Ezequiel.”

“A pack of lies! More of Ubilluz's slander!” he growls, purple with rage. “I knew nothing and I had no reason to hide or flee. Get out, go away, disappear. Stinking slanderer! Shiteating gossip!”

Hidden in the semi-darkness, with the sub-machine gun in his hands, Mayta could hear nothing. Nor could he see anything, except two streaks of light where the planks of the door met. But he had no difficulty guessing that at that very instant Vallejos was going into the barracks of the fourteen guards and was waking them up with his thundering voice: Ateeenshun! Rifle inspection! The officer in charge of the Huancayo armory had just told him he would be coming to hold an inspection early in the morning. Be careful, you've got to be fanatics about oiling both the outside and the bolts of the rifles. I don't want anybody written up for a rusty piece. Second Lieutenant Vallejos didn't want any more bad reports from the armory officer. The working weapons and the ammunition for each republican guard—ninety cartridges—would be taken to the guardroom. Fall in out in the patio! Now it would be his turn. The wheels were beginning to turn, the cogs were moving, this is action, this was it. Have the Ricrán guys gotten here yet? He looked through the cracks, waiting for the silhouettes of the guards carrying their Mausers and their bullets to the little room in front, one behind the other, and among them, Antolín Torres.

He is a retired republican guard who lives on Manco Cápac Street, halfway between the jail and don Ezequiel's store. To keep the ex-barber from taking a swing at me or from having a fit of apoplexy, I have to retreat. Sitting on a bench in Jauja's majestic plaza—disfigured now by police barriers and barbed wire on the corners where the municipal building and the sub-prefecture are—I think about Antolín Torres. I talked to him this morning. He's been a happy man ever since the Marines hired him as a guide and translator.

He used to have a little farm, but the war ruined it. He was dying of hunger until the gringos came. His job is to accompany the patrols as they reconnoiter the area around Jauja. (His Spanish is as good as his Quechua.) He knows that his work may cost him his life. Many of the people in Jauja turn their backs on him, and the façade of his house is covered with graffiti: “Traitor” and “Condemned to Death by the Revolutionary Tribunal.”

From what Antolín has told me and from don Ezequiel's curses, I conclude that relations between the Marines and the locals are bad, awful. Even the people who oppose the insurgents resent these foreigners they can't understand, who, above all, eat well, smoke, and suffer no privations—in a town where even the formerly rich experience dearth. A sixty-year-old with a bull neck and a huge stomach, an Ayacucho man from Cangallo who has lived most of his life in Jauja, Antolín Torres speaks a wonderful Spanish spiced with Quechuanisms. “People say the communists are going to kill me. Okay, but when they come to kill me they're going to find a guy who eats well, drinks well, and smokes American cigarettes.” He's a storyteller who knows how to achieve dramatic effects with pauses and exclamations. That day, twenty-five years ago, he went on duty at eight, when he was supposed to replace Huáscar Toledo on guard duty at the front door. Huáscar wasn't in the sentry box but inside with the others, oiling his Mauser in preparation for the visit of the armory officer. Second Lieutenant Vallejos was hurrying them, and Antolín Torres suspected something.

“But why, Mr. Torres? What was so strange about an arms inspection?”

What was strange was that the lieutenant was walking around with his sub-machine gun on his shoulder. What reason could he have for being armed? And why did we have to leave our weapons in the guardroom? This is really strange, sergeant. Where does this stuff come from about separating a trooper from his rifle for an inspection? Don't think so much, Antolín, it gets in the way of promotion, is what the sergeant said. I obeyed, I cleaned my Mauser, and I left it in the guardroom along with my ninety cartridges. Then I went to fall in in the patio. But I could smell something fishy. But not what happened later. I thought it was something to do with the prisoners. There were maybe fifty in the cells. An escape attempt, I don't know what, but something.

“Now.” Mayta pushed the door open. From being so long in one position, his legs were completely cramped. His heart pounded like a drum, and he was overwhelmed by a sensation of something final, irreversible, as he walked out into the patio with his oiled sub-machine gun. He took up a position in front of the judge's office, facing the troops, and said, “Don't force me to shoot. I don't want to hurt anyone.”

Vallejos had his sub-machine gun trained on his subordinates. The bleary eyes of the fourteen guards swung back and forth from him to the lieutenant, from the lieutenant back to him, without understanding: Are we awake or dreaming? Is this really happening, or is it a nightmare?

“And then the lieutenant spoke, isn't that a fact, Mr. Torres? Remember what he said?”

“I don't want to drag you in, but I've become a rebel, a revolutionary socialist.” Antolín Torres imitates him and acts out the scene, his Adam's apple rising and falling. “If anyone wants to follow me of his own free will, let him come. I'm doing this for the sake of the poor, the suffering, and because our leaders have let us down. And you, pay sergeant, buy beer on Sunday for everyone, and take it out of my back pay.” “While the lieutenant was speaking, the other enemy, the one from Lima, had us covered with his sub-machine gun, blocking the way to the Mausers. They made fools of us. The commander punished us with two weeks' confinement to barracks.”

Mayta had heard Vallejos but hadn't paid any attention to what he was saying because of his own excitement. “Like a machine, like a soldier.” The lieutenant herded the guards to their barracks, and they obeyed docilely, still not understanding. He saw that the lieutenant, after closing the door, bolted it. Then, with rapid, precise movements, his weapon in his left hand, he ran, with a large key in his other hand, to open a cell door. Were the Uchubamba men there? They had to have seen and heard what had just happened. On the other hand, the other prisoners, the ones in cells on the other side of the patio with its cherry trees, were too far away. From his position next to the guardroom, he saw two men come out behind Vallejos. There they were, yes, the comrades he until now only knew by name. Which one was Condori and which Zenón Gonzales? Before he could find out, an argument broke out with the younger of the two, a fair-skinned little guy with long hair. Even though Mayta had been told that the peasants from the eastern region usually had light skin and hair, he was shocked: the Indian agitators who had led the seizure of the Aína hacienda looked like two little gringos. One was wearing sandals.

“Gonna chicken out now, motherfucker?” he heard Vallejos say, his face close to one of the men. “Now that things have begun, now that the fat's in the fire, you want to mouse out?”

“I'm not chickening out,” Zenón Gonzales said truculently, stepping back. “It's that…it's that…”

“It's that you're yellow, Zenón,” Vallejos shouted. “Too bad for you. Get back to your cell. I hope they send you away for a long time. Rot in the Frontón, then. I don't know why I don't just shoot you like a dog, you son of a bitch.”

“Wait up, hold it, let's talk calmly without fighting,” said Condori, stepping between them. He was the one wearing sandals, and Mayta was happy to see someone who might be his own age. “Don't go off the deep end, Vallejos. Let me talk to Zenón for a minute.”

In three strides, the lieutenant was at Mayta's side.

“What a faggot,” he said, no longer furious as he was a moment before, but disillusioned. “Last night, he agreed. Now come the doubts—maybe it would be better to stay here, and later on we'll see. That's what you call fear, not doubt.”

What doubts moved the young leader from Uchubamba to provoke this incident? Did he think, when the rebellion was about to begin, that perhaps there were too few of them? Did he doubt that he and Condori could drag the rest of the community into the uprising? Did he have an inkling of the defeat? Or, simply, did he hesitate when he thought that he would have to kill people and that someone might kill him?

Condori and Gonzales whispered together. Mayta heard the odd word and sometimes saw them gesture. Once, Condori grabbed his comrade by the arm. He must have had some power over him, because Gonzales, even though complaining, remained respectful. A moment later, they came over.

“Okay, Vallejos,” said Condori. “Everything's okay now. No problem.”

“Okay, Zenón.” Vallejos squeezed his hand. “I'm sorry I got mad. No hard feelings?”

The young man nodded. As he squeezed his hand, Vallejos said again, “No hard feelings. We're doing this for Peru, Zenón.” Judging by his face, Gonzales seemed more resigned than convinced.

Vallejos turned to Mayta. “Have the weapons loaded into the taxis. I'm going to talk to the prisoners.”

He went off toward the cherry trees, and Mayta ran to the main entrance. Through the small window in the door, he looked out on the street. Instead of taxis, Ubilluz, and the miners from La Droya, he saw a small group of joeboys headed by the cadet commander, Cordero Espinoza.

“What are you doing here?” he asked them. “Why aren't you at your posts?”

“We aren't at our posts because everyone's gone,” says Cordero Espinoza, with a yawn that warms his smile. “We got tired of waiting. We couldn't be messengers for people who weren't there. I was assigned the police station. I got there good and early, and no one else showed up. After a while, Hernando Huasasquiche came to tell me that Professor Ubilluz wasn't at home or anywhere around here. And that he'd seen him driving his truck on the main road. A little later, we found out that the Ricrán people had just disappeared, the La Oroya men had either never come or had gone back. We got really scared! We got together in the plaza. We were all worried, just standing around waiting to go to school. We'd been fooled, the whole thing was some kind of phony story. Right then, Felicio Tapia turned up. He told us that the guy from Lima had gone to the jail after being stood up by the Ricrán men. So we went to the jail to see what was happening. Vallejos and Mayta had locked up the guards, captured the rifles, and freed Condori and Gonzales. Can you imagine anything as ridiculous as that?”

Dr. Cordero Espinoza is certainly right. What else could you say but that it was ridiculous? They take over the jail, they've got fourteen rifles and twelve hundred cartridges. But there aren't any revolutionaries, because not one of the thirty or forty conspirators turned up. Was that what Mayta thought when he peered through the window and found only seven boys in uniform?

“Nobody came? None? Not a single one?”

“Well, we're here,” said the kid with the half-shaved head, and despite his confusion, Mayta remembered what Ubilluz had said about him when they were introduced: Cordero Espinoza, commander of his class, number one, a brain. “But it looks like the others have taken off.”

Shock, rage, an intimation of the catastrophe closing in on them? Or, rather, the tacit confirmation of something as yet undefined, which he'd feared since earlier, when the Ricrán men weren't in the plaza, or maybe earlier still, when his Lima comrades from the RWP(T) decided to withdraw their support, or when he'd understood that his attempt at Blacquer's to get the Communist Party involved in the uprising was useless? Was it since one of those moments that he'd been waiting, without even admitting it to himself, for this coup de grâce? The revolution wouldn't even begin? But it has begun, Mayta, don't you realize it, it has begun.

“That's why we're here, that's why we've come,” exclaimed Cordero Espinoza. “Don't you think we can replace those guys?”