The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (3 page)

“He could have been a lawyer, a professional man,” laments doña Josefa. “Did you know he got into San Marcos on the first try? And high up on the list. He was still a boy, sixteen or seventeen at the most. He could have had a degree when he was twenty-four or twenty-five. What a waste, my God! And for what? For politics, that's what. Pure waste!”

“He didn't stay at the university long, isn't that right?”

“Within a few months, or a year at the most, he was thrown in jail,” doña Josefa says. “That's when the calamities began. He didn't come back here, he lived by himself. From then on, it went from bad to worse. Where's your godson? Hiding out. Where's Mayta these days? In jail. Have they let him out? Yes, but they're looking for him again. If I were to tell you the number of times the police came here to turn the place upside down, to treat me disrespectfully, to scare me out of my wits, you'd think I was exaggerating. If I tell you fifty times, I'm shortening the list. Instead of winning cases with the mind God gave him. Is that any kind of life?”

“Yes, it is,” I gently contradict her. “A hard life, if you like, but also intense and coherent. Preferable to many others, ma'am. I can't imagine Mayta growing old in some office, doing the same thing day after day.”

“Well, you may be right,” doña Josefa agrees—more from good manners than out of conviction. “From the time he was a child, you could see he wouldn't have a life like everyone else's. Has anyone ever seen a snotnose kid stop eating one day because there are people in the world going hungry? I didn't believe it, right? He had his soup and left the rest. And at night he had his bread. Zoilita, Alicia, and I would tease him: ‘You gorge yourself when no one can see you, you trickster.' But it turned out that wasn't so. That's all he ate. And if he was like that as a kid, why wouldn't he be the way he was when he grew up?”

“Did you see
And God Created Woman
, with Brigitte Bardot?” asked Vallejos, changing the subject. “I saw it yesterday. Long legs, so long they come right out of the screen. I'd like to go to Paris someday and see Brigitte Bardot in the flesh.”

“Shut up and dance.” Alci had just gotten loose from Pepote and was tugging Vallejos out of his chair. “I'm not going to spend the whole night dancing with this lug. It's like dancing with a leech. Come on, a mambo.”

“A mambo!” the lieutenant intoned. “Terrific! A mambo!”

A minute later, he was spinning like a top. He was a good dancer: he moved his hands, he knew trick steps, he sang. He inspired the others, who began to form wheels, conga lines, change partners. Soon the room was a whirl that left you dizzy. Mayta got up and pushed his chair against the wall to give the dancers more space. Would he ever dance like Vallejos? Never. Compared with Mayta, even Pepote was an ace. Smiling, Mayta remembered how he always felt like a Neanderthal whenever he had to dance with Adelaida, even the easiest dances. It wasn't his body that was awkward; it was that timidity, modesty, visceral inhibition that came from being so close to a woman that turned him into a bear. That's why he had decided not to dance unless forced into it, as when cousin Alicia or cousin Zoila made him, which could happen any moment. Did Leon Davidovitch know how to dance? Sure he did. Didn't Natalia Sedova say that, revolution aside, he was the most normal of men? An affectionate father, a loving husband, a good gardener; he loved to feed rabbits. The most normal thing in normal men is that they like to dance. To them, dancing did not seem, as it did to him, something ridiculous, a frivolity, a waste of time, a forgetting of important things. You are not a normal man, remember that, he thought. When the mambo was over, there was applause. They had opened the windows facing the street to let fresh air into the room, and Mayta could see the couples with their faces pressed against the window frames, the lieutenant with his masculine eyes bulging, gazing hungrily at the women. His godmother made an announcement: there was chicken soup, and she needed help to serve it. Alci ran to the kitchen. Vallejos came and sat down next to Mayta again, sweating. He offered him a cigarette.

“In reality, I am here and not here.” He winked jokingly. “Because I should be in Jauja. I live there. I'm in charge of the jail. I shouldn't leave, but I get out whenever I can. Ever been to Jauja?”

“I've been to other places in the mountains,” said Mayta, “but never to Jauja.”

“The first capital of Peru!” Vallejos played the fool. “Jauja! Jauja! What a shame you've never been there. All Peruvians should visit Jauja!”

Mayta then heard him launch, with no preamble, into a discourse about Indian life. The real Peru was in the mountains and not along the coast, among the Indians and condors and the peaks of the Andes, not here in Lima, a foreign, lazy, anti-Peruvian city, because from the time the Spaniards had founded it, it had looked toward Europe and the United States and turned its back on Peru. These were things Mayta had heard and read often, but they sounded different coming from the lieutenant's mouth. The novelty was in the clean and smiling way he said them, blowing out gray smoke rings at the same time. There was something spontaneous and lively in his manner of speaking that made whatever he was saying sound even better. Why did this boy arouse in him that nostalgia, that sensation of something altogether extinct. Because he's sound, thought Mayta. He's not perverted. Politics hasn't killed his joy in living. He's probably never taken part in politics of any kind. That's why he's irresponsible, that's why he says whatever comes into his head. There seemed to be no guile, no hidden intentions, no prefabricated rhetoric in the lieutenant. He was still in that adolescence in which politics consists exclusively of feelings, moral indignation, rebellion, idealism, dreams, generosity, disinterestedness, mysticism. Yes, those things do still exist, Mayta. There they were, incarnate—who the fuck would have thought it—in a little army officer. Listen to what he says. The injustice of it all was monstrous, any millionaire had more money than a million poor people, the dogs of the rich ate better than the Indians in the mountains, that iniquity had to be stopped, the people had to be mobilized, the haciendas had to be taken over, the barracks seized, the troops, who came from the people, made to revolt, unleash strikes, remake society from top to bottom, do justice. What envy. There he was, young, slim, handsome, smiling, talkative, with his invisible wings, believing that the revolution was a question of honesty, bravery, disinterestedness, daring. He didn't suspect and would perhaps never know that the revolution was a long act of patience, an infinite routine, a terribly sordid thing, a thousand and one wants, a thousand and one vile deeds, a thousand and one … But here comes the chicken soup, and Mayta's mouth watered when he smelled the aroma of the steaming bowl Alci put into his hands.

“How much work, and also what an expense every birthday,” doña Josefa remembers. “I was in debt for a long time after. People broke glasses, vases. The house the next morning looked like a battleground or as if there had been an earthquake. But I took the trouble every year because it was a tradition in the neighborhood. Many relatives and friends saw each other only that one day a year: I did it for them as well, so as not to deprive them. Here, in Surquillo, my birthday parties were like national holidays or Christmas. Everything's changed, now there's no room in life for parties. The last time was the year that Alicita and her husband went to Venezuela. Now on my birthday I watch TV and then go to bed.”

She looks sadly around the room devoid of people, as if putting back into those chairs, corners, and windows all the relatives and friends who would come to sing “Happy Birthday” to her, to applaud her good cooking, and she sighs. Now she looks seventy years old. Did she know if any relative had Mayta's notebooks and his articles? Her distrust rekindles.

“What relatives?” she murmurs, making a face. “The only relative Mayta ever had was me, and he never even brought a box of matches here, because whenever the police were looking for him this was the first place they came to. Besides, I never knew he was a writer or anything like that.”

Yes, he wrote, and once in a while I read the articles that would come out in those little newspapers—handbills, really—in which he collaborated, and which he printed himself, and which are not to be found anywhere, not even in the National Library, or in any private library. But it's natural that doña Josefa never knew about
Workers Voice
, or any of the other little papers. Neither did the vast majority of the people in this country, especially those for whom they were written and printed. By the same token, doña Josefa was right: he wasn't a writer, or anything like that. Even though it would have pained him, he was a real intellectual. I still remember the hard tone in which he referred to intellectuals, in that last conversation we had in Plaza San Martín. They weren't good for much, according to him.

“At least the ones from this country.” He was specific. “They get too sensualized too soon, they have no solid convictions. Their morality is worth approximately the price of a plane ticket to a youth congress, a peace congress, etc. That's why the ones who don't sell themselves for a Yankee scholarship, or to the Congress for the Freedom of Culture, let themselves be bribed by Stalinism and become party members.”

He pointed out that Vallejos, surprised at what he had said and at the tone in which he had said it, looked him up and down, with his spoon suspended midway between his mouth and the bowl. He had upset him and, in a way, put him on his guard. A bad job, Mayta, a very bad job. Why did he let his temper and impatience get the better of him when the subject was intellectuals? What was Leon Davidovich, after all? He was an intellectual, and a genial one, and Vladimir Ilyich as well. But both of them had been, above and beyond everything else, revolutionaries. Didn't you blow off steam against the intellectuals out of spite, because in Peru they were all reactionaries or Stalinists, and not a single one a Trotskyist?

“All I mean is, you can't count much on intellectuals for the revolution.” Mayta tried to smooth things over, raising his voice so he could be heard over the
huaracha
“La Negra Tomasa.” “Not at first, in any case. First come the workers, then the peasants. The intellectuals bring up the rear.”

“What about Fidel Castro and the 26 of July people in the mountains of Cuba, aren't they intellectuals?” countered Vallejos.

“Maybe they are,” admitted Mayta. “But that revolution is still green. And it isn't a socialist revolution but a petit-bourgeois revolution. Two very different things.”

The lieutenant stared at him, intrigued. “At least you think about those things,” he said, recovering his aplomb and his smile between spoonfuls of soup. “At least you don't get bored talking about the revolution.”

“No, it doesn't bore me.” Mayta smiled at him. “On the contrary.”

My fellow student Mayta—he never became “sensualized.” Of all the impressions I have of him from those fleeting encounters we had over the course of the years, the strongest is of the frugality that emanated from his person, from his appearance, from his gestures. Even in his way of sitting in a café, of looking over the menu, of telling the waiter his choice, even in his way of accepting a cigarette, there was something ascetic. That was what gave authority, a respectable aura, to his political theories, no matter how wild they may have seemed to me, no matter how lacking in disciples he was. The last time I saw him, weeks before the party where he met Vallejos, he was over forty and had spent at least twenty years in the struggle. No matter how much anyone might dig into his life, not even his worst enemies could accuse him of profiting, even once, from politics. On the contrary, the most consistent aspect of his career was always to have taken, with a kind of infallible intuition, all the necessary steps so that things would turn out for the worst, so that he would be entangled in problems and complications. “What he is is an amateur suicide,” a friend we had in common once said to me. “An amateur, not a real suicide,” he repeated. “Someone who likes to kill himself bit by bit.” The idea set off sparks in my head, because it was so unexpected, so picturesque, like that phrase I'm sure I heard him use that time, in his diatribe against intellectuals.

“What are you laughing at?”

“At the phrase ‘to get sensualized.' Where did you get it?”

“I've probably just invented it.” Mayta smiled. “Okay. There are probably better ones. To go soft, to slip. But you understand what I mean. Small concessions that mine your morals. A little trip, a scholarship, anything that panders to your vanity. Imperialism is adept at those traps. And Stalinism, too. Workers or peasants fall easily. Intellectuals grab on to the bottle as soon as they have it in front of their mouths. Later they invent theories to justify their betrayal.”

I told him he was more or less quoting Arthur Koestler, who had said those “skillful imbeciles” were capable of preaching neutrality in the face of bubonic plague because they had acquired the diabolical art of being able to prove everything they believed and of believing everything they could prove. I was sure he would reply that quoting a known agent of the CIA like Koestler was the absolute limit, but, to my surprise, I heard him say: “Koestler? Oh, right. No one has described the psychological terrorism of Stalinism better.”

“Watch it, now. That's the road that leads to Washington and free enterprise,” I said, to provoke him.

“You're wrong,” he said. “That's the road to permanent revolution and Leon Davidovich. Trotsky, to his friends.”

“And who is Trotsky?” said Vallejos.

“A revolutionary,” Mayta clarified. “He's dead. A great thinker.”

“From Peru?” insinuated the lieutenant timidly.