The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (28 page)

At the door of the station there were no guards, and Mayta signaled to Condori and Felicio Tapia: he would go in first, they should cover him. Condori looked calm, but Tapia was very pale and Mayta saw that his hands were red from holding on so tight to the rifle. He walked into the room bent over, with the safety off the sub-machine gun, shouting: “Hands up or I'll shoot!”

In the half-darkened room, Mayta surprised a man wearing underpants and an undershirt in mid-yawn, a yawn that froze, turning his face into a stupid mask. He sat there staring, and only when he saw Condori and Felicio Tapia appear behind Mayta, they too pointing rifles at him, did he raise his hands.

“Watch him,” said Mayta, and he ran to the back of the building. He passed through a narrow hall that led to an unpaved patio. Two guards, wearing trousers and boots but without shirts on, were washing their faces and hands in a basin of soapy water. One smiled at Mayta, mistaking him for a buddy.

“Get your hands up, or I'll fire!” Mayta said, not shouting this time. “Hands up, goddamn it!”

The two obeyed, and one of them moved so quickly that he knocked the basin over. The water darkened the dirt of the patio. “What's all the racket, for Christ's sake?” called out a sleepy voice. How many could there be in there? Condori was next to him, and Mayta whispered, “Take these two out,” without taking his eyes off the room where he'd heard the voice. He crossed the little patio on the run, bent forward. He passed under a climbing vine, and on the threshold of the room, he stopped short, holding back the “Hands up!” he was about to shout. It was the sleeping room. There were two rows of bunks against the walls, and on three bunks there were men, two sleeping and the third smoking, flat on his back. A transistor radio was next to him, and he was listening to country music. When he saw Mayta, he choked and jumped to his feet, staring fixedly at the sub-machine gun.

“I thought it was all a joke,” he stuttered, dropping the cigarette and placing his hands on his head.

“Wake those two up,” said Mayta, pointing to the sleeping men. “Don't make me shoot: I don't want to kill you.”

Without turning his back on Mayta or taking his eyes off the weapon, the guard edged along sideways, like a crab, until he reached the others. He shook them. “Wake up, wake up, I don't know what's going on.”

“I was expecting shots, a huge racket. I thought I'd see Mayta, Condori, and the Tapia kid bleeding, and that in the confusion the guards would shoot me, thinking I was an attacker,” says Mr. Onaka. “But there wasn't a single shot. Before I knew what was going on inside, the other taxi came with Vallejos. He'd already captured the police station over on Jirón Bolívar and locked Lieutenant Dongo and three guards in a cell. He asked the kids: Everything okay? We don't know. I begged him: Let me go, lieutenant, my wife is really sick. Don't be afraid, Mr. Onaka, we need you because none of us drives. Can you imagine anything as dumb as that? They were going to make a revolution and they didn't even know how to drive a car.”

“No problem,” said Mayta, relieved to see them again. “What about the police station?”

“A breeze,” answered Vallejos. “Well done, I congratulate all of you. And we have ten more rifles.”

“We aren't going to have enough men for so many rifles,” said Mayta.

“We'll have enough,” replied the lieutenant, as he looked over the new Mausers. “In Uchubamba there are more than enough, right, Condori?”

It seemed incredible that everything was going so well, Mayta.

“They loaded another pile of rifles in my Ford,” Mr. Onaka says, sighing. “They ordered me to drive to the telephone company, and what else could I do?”

“When I got to work, I saw two cars there, and I recognized the Chink from the store, that Onaka character, the crook,” says Mrs. Adriana Tello, a tiny, wrinkled-up old lady with a firm voice and gnarled hands. “He had such a face on that I thought he's either gotten up on the wrong side of the bed or he's a neurotic Chinaman. As soon as they saw me, some guys got out and went into the office with me. Why should I have been suspicious? In those days there weren't even robberies in Jauja, much less revolutions, so why be suspicious? Wait, we're not open yet. But it was as if they hadn't heard a word. They jumped over the counter, and one turned Asuntita Asís's—may she rest in peace—desk over. What's all this? What are you doing? What do you want? To knock out the telephone and telegraph. Good gracious! I'll be out of a job. Ha, ha, I swear that's just what I was thinking. I don't know how I can still laugh with all the things that are going on. Have you seen the impudence of these gringos who say they have come to help us? They can't even speak Spanish, and they walk around with their rifles and just go into any house they please, what nerve. As if we were their colony. There must not be any more patriots left in our Peru when we have to put up with that kind of humiliation.”

When she saw Mayta and Vallejos kicking the switchboard apart, smashing the machinery with their rifle butts, and pulling out all the wires, Mrs. Adriana Tello tried to run out. But Condori and Zenón Gonzales held her while the lieutenant and Mayta finished breaking things up.

“Now we can take it easy,” said Vallejos. “With the guards locked up and the telephone line cut, we're out of immediate danger. We don't have to split up.”

“Will the people with the horses be in Quero?” Mayta was thinking aloud.

Vallejos shrugged. Could anyone be counted on?

“The peasants,” murmured Mayta, pointing at Condori and Zenón Gonzales, who, after the lieutenant signaled to them, had released the woman, who ran, terrified, out of the building. “If we get to Uchubamba, I'm sure they won't let us down.”

“We'll get there.” Vallejos smiled. “They won't let us down.”

They'd go on foot to the plaza, comrade. Vallejos ordered Gualberto Bravo and Perico Temoche to take the taxis to the corner of the Plaza de Armas and Bolognesi. That would be where they'd meet. He went to the head of those who remained and gave an order that left Mayta with goose bumps: “Forward, march!” They must have been a strange, unimaginable, disconcerting group—those four adults and five schoolboys, all armed, marching along the cobblestone streets toward the Plaza de Armas. They would attract attention, they would stop anyone on the sidewalks, they would cause people to come to windows and doors. What did the good citizens of Jauja think as they saw them pass?

“I was shaving, because in those days I'd get up sort of late,” says don Joaquín Zamudio, ex-hatmaker, ex-businessman, and now vendor of lottery tickets on the streets of Jauja. “I saw them from my room and thought they were rehearsing for the national holidays. But why so early in the year? I poked my head out the window and asked: What parade is this? The lieutenant didn't answer me and instead shouted: Long live the revolution! The others shouted: Hurrah, hurrah! What revolution is it? I asked them, thinking they were fooling around. And Corderito answered: The one we're starting, the socialist revolution. Later I found out that they went along just the way I'd seen them, marching and cheering, and robbed two banks.”

They marched into the Plaza de Armas, and Mayta saw few passersby. When people did turn to look at them, it was with indifference. A group of Indians with ponchos and packs, sitting on a bench, just followed them with their eyes. There weren't enough people for a demonstration yet. It was ridiculous to be marching, because instead of looking like revolutionaries, they looked like boy scouts. But Vallejos set the example, and the joeboys, Condori, and Gonzales followed suit, so Mayta had no choice but to get in step. He had an ambiguous feeling, exaltation and anxiety, because even though the police were locked up, and their weapons captured, and the telephone and telegraph knocked out, wasn't their little group extremely vulnerable? Could you begin a revolution just like that? He gritted his teeth. You could. You had to be able to.

“They walked through the main door, practically singing,” says don Ernesto Durán Huarcaya, ex-president of the International Bank and today an invalid dying of cancer on a cot in the Olavegoya Sanatorium. “I saw them from the window and thought that they couldn't even get in step, that they couldn't march worth a damn. Later, since they headed straight for the International Bank, I said here comes another request for money, for some carnival or parade. There was no more mystery after they got inside, because they turned their guns on us and Vallejos shouted: We've come to take the money that belongs to the people and not to the imperialists. I'm not going to put up with this, hell no, I'm going to face them down.”

“He got down on all fours under his desk,” says Adelita Campos, retired from the bank and now a seller of herb concoctions. “A real macho when it came to docking us for coming in late or pinching us when we passed too close to him. But when he saw the rifles—zoom—down he went under the desk, not even ashamed. If the president did that, what were we employees supposed to do? We were scared, of course. More of the kids than of the old guys. Because the boys were bawling like calves: Long live Peru! Long live the revolution! They were so wild they could easily start shooting. The person who had the great idea was the teller, old man Rojas. What could have become of him? I guess he's dead, probably someone killed him, because the way things have been going in Jauja, no one dies of old age anymore. Somebody kills you. And you never know who.”

“When I saw them come up to my window, I opened the box on the left side,” says old man Rojas, ex-teller at the International Bank, in the squalid quarters where he's waiting to die in the Jauja old-folks home. “That's where I had the morning deposits and the small bills we used to make change, nothing much. I raised my hands and prayed: ‘Holy Mother, let them believe this one.' They did. They went right to the open box and took what they saw: fifty thousand
soles
, or thereabouts. Now that's nothing, but then it was quite a tidy sum, but nothing compared to what there was in the box on the right—almost a million
soles
that hadn't yet been put in the vault. They were amateurs, not like the ones that came later. Shh, now, sir, don't repeat what I've told you.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that's all.” The teller trembled. “It's early, only a few people have come in.”

“This money isn't for us but for the revolution,” Mayta interrupted him. He spoke into the incredulous faces of the employees. “For the people, for those who have sweated. This isn't stealing, it's expropriation. You have no reason to be frightened. The enemies of the people are the bankers, the oligarchs, and the imperialists. All of you are being exploited by them.”

“Yes, of course,” the teller said, quaking. “What you say is true, sir.”

When they got out into the plaza, the boys went on cheering. Mayta, carrying the moneybag, went up to Vallejos: Let's go to the Regional, there aren't enough people here for a meeting. He saw very few people, and although they looked at the insurgents with curiosity, they wouldn't come too close.

“But we've got to move quickly,” agreed Vallejos, “before they bolt the door on us.”

He started running, and the others followed him, lining up in the same order in which they'd been marching. A few seconds of running eliminated Mayta's ability to think. Shortness of breath, pressure in his temples: the malaise came back, even though they weren't running that quickly, but almost, as it were, warming up before a game. When, two blocks later, they stopped at the doors of the Regional Bank, Mayta was seeing stars and his mouth was hanging open. You can't faint now, Mayta. He entered with the group, but in a dream. Leaning on the counter, seeing the shock on the face of the woman in front of him, he heard Vallejos explain: “This is a revolutionary action, we've come to recover the money stolen from the people.” Someone protested. The lieutenant shoved a man and punched him.

He had to help, move, but he didn't do a thing, because he knew that if he stepped away from the counter, he'd fall down. Propped on his elbows, he pointed his weapon at the group of employees—some shouting, some seemingly about to defend the man who had protested—and saw Condori and Zenón Gonzales grab the man from the big desk, the one Vallejos had hit. The lieutenant pointed his sub-machine gun at him with a menacing gesture. The man finally gave in and opened the safe next to his desk. When Condori had finished putting the money into the bag, Mayta began to feel better. You should have come a week earlier to acclimatize yourself to the altitude, you just don't know how to do things.

“Are you okay?” Vallejos asked him on the way out.

“A touch of mountain sickness from running. Let's hold the meeting with whatever people are here. We've got to do it.”

One of the boys euphorically shouted: “Long live the revolution!”

“Hurrah!” bellowed the other joeboys. One of them pointed his Mauser at the sky and fired. The first shot of the day. The other four followed. They invaded the plaza, cheering the revolution, firing shots in the air, and telling people to gather around.

“Everyone's told you there was no meeting, because nobody wanted to hear what they had to say. They called to the people walking on the square, standing in doorways, anyone—but no one would come,” says Anthero Huillmo, ex-street photographer, now blind and selling novenas, religious pictures, and rosaries from eight in the morning until eight at night at the cathedral door. “They even tried to stop the truck drivers: ‘Stop!' ‘Get out!' ‘Come on!' But the drivers had their doubts and just stepped on the gas. But there was a meeting. I was there, I saw it and heard it. That was before God saw fit to send that tear-gas grenade that burned my face. Now I can't see, but then I could and did. Actually, it was a meeting held exclusively for me.”