The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Those meetings would drag on for hours. By the end, we’d all lose our voices,” says Moisés, digging into the rice. “For example: Should Mayta go on seeing Vallejos or be on the safe side and drop him? Things like that, you just didn’t decide in a minute. Oh, no. You had to analyze the circumstances, the causes, and the effects. We had to wring out a slew of hypotheses. The October Revolution, the relationship among socialist, capitalist, and bureaucratic-imperialist forces in the world, the development of the class struggle on all five continents, the pauperization of the neocolonial nations, monopolistic concentration…”

  He started out smiling, but now his expression is sour. He puts the fork he was just raising to his mouth back down on his plate. Just a second ago, he was eating heartily, praising the Costa Verde’s cook: “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to eat like this with what’s going on?” Suddenly he’s lost his appetite. Have the memories he’s dredged up as a favor to me depressed him?

  “Mayta and Vallejos did me a huge favor,” he murmurs, for the third time that morning. “If it hadn’t been for them, I would still be in some dinky group trying to sell fifty copies of a biweekly newsletter, knowing all the time the workers would never read it, or that, if they did read it, they would never understand it.” He wipes his mouth and gestures to the waiter to remove his plate.

  “When the Vallejos business began, I no longer believed in what we were doing,” he adds, with a funerary air. “I realized full well that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, except back to jail once in a while, into exile once in a while, and to political and personal frustration. Nevertheless… Inertia, something like that, or something I can’t define. A panic about feeling disloyal, a traitor. To the comrades, to the party, to your own self. A terror about wiping out in one shot something that, for better or for worse, represented years of struggle and sacrifice. Priests who leave the Church must feel the same thing.” He looks at me at that moment as if he had just noticed I was still there.

  “Did Mayta ever feel discouraged?”

  “I don’t know, maybe not, he was like granite.” He is thoughtful for a moment and then shrugs. “Maybe he did, but secretly. I suppose we all have those flashes of lucidity in which we see we are at the bottom of a well, without a ladder. But we would never admit it, not for a second. Yes, Mayta and Vallejos did me a big favor.”

  “You repeat it so often it seems as though you don’t believe it. Or that the favor hasn’t really been of any use to you.”

  “It really hasn’t been much use to me,” he affirms with a sad gesture.

  And when I laugh and make fun of him, telling him that he’s one of the few Peruvian intellectuals who have achieved independence, and that, in addition, he is one of the few about whom one can say that he does things and helps to do things for his colleagues, he disarms me with an ironic look. Am I talking about Action for Development? Yes, I am: it’s helped Peru and certainly contributed more to the nation than twenty years of party militancy. Yes, it also helped the people whose books it published; it got them grants and liberated them from that whorehouse of a university. But it had frustrated Moisés. Not in the same way the RWP(T) had, of course. He had always wanted—he looks at me as if wondering whether I’m worth the revelation—to be one of them. To do research, to publish. An old, very ambitious project that he knew full well he would never carry out: an economic history of Peru. General and detailed, from the pre-Inca cultures to our own times. Forgotten, like all his other academic projects! To keep the center alive meant being an administrator, a diplomat, a publicity agent, and, most of all, a bureaucrat twenty-four hours a day. No—twenty-eight, thirty. For him, the day was thirty hours long.

  “Don’t you think it’s wonderful that an ex-Trotskyist who spent his youth fulminating against the bureaucracy should end up a bureaucrat?” he asks, trying to recover his good humor.

  “There’s nothing more to be said,” protested Comrade Joaquín. “There’s nothing more to be said about the subject and that’s it.”

  How right you are, thought Mayta, nothing more to be said, and besides, what was it they were discussing? A while ago—it was Comrade Medardo’s fault, because he had brought up the question of the participation of soldiers’ soviets in the Russian Revolution—they were arguing about the sailors’ rebellion in Kronstadt and how it was crushed. According to Medardo, that anti-socialist rebellion, in March of 1921, was solid evidence of the doubtful class consciousness of the troops and of the risks of relying on the revolutionary potential of soldiers. On a talking spree, Comrade Jacinto explained that, instead of speaking about their behavior in 1921, Medardo should remember what the Kronstadt sailors had done in 1905. Weren’t they the first to rise up against the tsar? And in 1917, weren’t they ahead of the majority of factories in forming a soviet? The discussion then drifted to Trotsky’s attitude toward Kronstadt. Medardo and Anatolio remembered that in his History of the Revolution he had approved, as a lesser evil, the repression of the uprising because it was objectively counterrevolutionary and aided both the White Russians and the imperialist powers. But Mayta was sure that Trotsky had rectified that thesis later and clarified it: he didn’t participate in the repression of the sailors, which had been, exclusively, the work of the Petrograd committee, headed by Zinoviev. He even went so far as to write that it was at the time of the liquidation of the rebel sailors during the Lenin government that the first manifestations of the anti-proletarian crimes of Stalinist bureaucratization had emerged. Finally, because of an unforeseen twist, the discussion ground to a halt on the question of whether the translations of Trotsky into Spanish were any good. “There’s no way we can vote on this,” Mayta stated. “Let’s see if there’s a consensus. Even though it hardly seems probable to me, I recognize that Vallejos may be under orders to infiltrate us or provoke us in some way. On the other hand, as Comrade Jacinto has said, we should not pass up the opportunity to win over a young officer. Here’s my proposal. I’ll make contact with him, I’ll sound him out, I’ll see if there is any way to attract him. Without, of course, giving him any information about the party. If I smell something suspicious, that’s it. If I don’t, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Either because they were tired or because he was persuasive, they accepted. When he saw those four heads nod in agreement, he was overjoyed: now he could go out and buy cigarettes, have a smoke.

  “In any case, if he had any crises, he certainly concealed them,” Moisés says. “That’s one thing I always envied him: how sure he was about what he was doing. Not only in the RWP(T), but before, too, when he was a Moscow man and in APRA.”

  “How do you explain all those changes? Did he just change ideologies, or were there psychological reasons?”

  “I’d say moral reasons,” Moisés corrects me. “Although to talk about morality in Mayta’s case may seem incongruous to you.”

  In his eyes, there burns a malicious light. Is he expecting a little insinuation from me so he can start gossiping?

  “It doesn’t seem incongruous to me at all,” I assure him. “I always suspected that Mayta’s political shifts were more emotional and ethical than ideological.”

  “The search for perfection, for the pure.” Moisés smiles. “He was a very good Catholic when he was a boy. He even went on a hunger strike so he could know how the poor lived. Did you know that? That’s maybe why he was that way. When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.”

  He observes me for a moment in silence while the waiter pours our coffee. Many of the Costa Verde’s customers have left, including the important man and his bodyguards with their automatic rifles. In addition to being able to hear the sound of the sea again, we can just make out, over on the left, among the Barranquito jetties, a few surfers waiting for their wave, sitting astride their boards like horsemen. “An attack from the sea would be really easy,” someone says. “There’s no beach patrol. We’ve got to tell the boss.”

 
“What is it about Mayta that interests you so much?” Moisés asks me, as he uses the tip of his tongue to check the temperature of the coffee. “Of all the revolutionaries of those years, he is the most obscure.”

  I don’t know how to go on. If I could, I would tell him, but at this moment I only know that I want to know, even invent, Mayta’s story, and as lifelike as possible. I could give him moral, social, and ideological reasons, and show him that Mayta’s story is the most important, the one that most urgently needs to be told. But it would all be a lie. I truthfully do not know why Mayta’s story intrigues and disturbs me.

  “Perhaps I know why,” Moisés says. “Because his story was the first, before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Before that event which split the left in two.”

  He may be right, it may well be because of the precursory character of the adventure. It’s also true that it inaugurated a new era in Peru, something neither Mayta nor Vallejos could guess at the time. But it’s also possible that the whole historical context has no more importance than as decor and that the obscurely suggestive element I see in it consists of the truculence, marginality, rebelliousness, delirium, and excess which all came together in that episode of which my fellow Salesian School chum was the leading character.

  “A progressive military man? Are you sure there is such a thing?” mocks Comrade Medardo. “The APRA people have spent their lives looking for one, so he could make their revolution for them and open the doors of the Palace to them. They’ve grown old without finding him. Do you want the same thing to happen to us?”

  “It’s not going to happen.” Mayta smiles. “Because we aren’t going to stage a barracks coup but bring about the revolution. Don’t worry, comrade.”

  “Well, I for one am worrying,” said Comrade Jacinto. “But about something more terrestrial. Did Comrade Carlos pay the rent? I don’t want the old lady down here again.”

  The meeting was over, and since they never left all at once, Anatolio and Joaquín had gone first. Mayta and Jacinto waited a few minutes before leaving. Mayta smiled as he remembered that night. The old lady had walked in unexpectedly right in the middle of a hot discussion of the agrarian reform that Paz Estenssoro’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement had instituted in Bolivia. Her entrance had left all of them stupefied, as if the person who opened the door were an informer and not that fragile little figure with white hair and a bent back, leaning on a metal cane.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Blomberg,” Comrade Carlos reacted. “What a surprise.”

  “Why didn’t you knock?” protested Comrade Jacinto.

  “I don’t have to knock on the door to my own garage, do I?” retorted the offended Mrs. Blomberg. “We agreed that you would pay the rent on the first. What happened?”

  “We’re a bit behind because of the bank strike,” said Comrade Carlos, stepping forward, trying to block Mrs. Blomberg’s view of the poster with the bearded men and of the stacks of Workers Voice. “Here’s the check, see?”

  Mrs. Blomberg calmed down when she saw Comrade Carlos take an envelope out of his pocket. She looked over the check carefully, nodded, and said goodbye, muttering all the while that in the future they should pay on time because at her age she wasn’t in any shape to go around collecting rents from house to house. They had a fit of laughing, forgot the discussion, and began to dream up scenarios. Could Mrs. Blomberg have seen Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky? Could she be on her way to the police station? Would the garage be raided that night? They had told her they were renting the garage as the headquarters for a chess club, and about the only thing the old lady wouldn’t see in her quick visit was a chessboard or a pawn. But the police never came, so Mrs. Blomberg must have noticed nothing suspicious.

  “Unless this lieutenant of yours who wants to start a revolution is an outcome of that visit,” said Medardo. “Instead of raiding us, infiltrating us.”

  “After all these months?” Mayta demurred, afraid to reopen a discussion that would keep him from his cigarette. “We’ll know soon enough. Ten minutes have gone by. Shall we go?”

  “We’ll have to find out why Pallardi and Carlos didn’t come,” said Jacinto.

  “Carlos was the only one of the seven who led a normal life,” Moisés says. “A contractor, he owned a brickworks. He paid the garage rent, the printer, and he paid for the handbills. We all chipped in, but our contributions were nothing. His wife wished we’d drop dead.”

  “And Mayta? At France-Presse he couldn’t have earned much.”

  “And he spent half his salary or more on the party,” Moisés adds. “His wife hated us, too, of course.”

  “Mayta had a wife?”

  “Mayta was married as legally as can be.” Moisés laughs. “But not for long. To a woman named Adelaida—she worked in a bank. A real cutie. Something we never understood. You didn’t know Mayta was married?”

  I knew nothing about it. They left together and locked the garage door. At the corner store they stopped off so Mayta could buy a pack of Incas. He offered them to Jacinto and Medardo and lit up his own so hastily he actually burned his fingers. Heading toward Avenida Alfonso Ugarte, he took several deep drags, half closing his eyes, enjoying to the fullest the pleasure of inhaling and exhaling those diminutive clouds of smoke that faded into the night.

  “I know why I can’t stop thinking about the lieutenant’s face,” he thought aloud.

  “That soldier boy’s made us lose a lot of time,” complained Medardo. “Three hours, for a second lieutenant!”

  Mayta went on as if he hadn’t heard a word: “It’s either because he’s ignorant or because he’s inexperienced, or who knows why—he was talking about the revolution the way we never talked.”

  “Don’t use dem big words wit’ me, sir, ah’s jus a worker, not uh intelleftual,” mocked Jacinto.

  It was a joke he made so often that Mayta had begun to wonder if in fact Comrade Jacinto didn’t envy the intelleftuals he said he respected so little. At that moment, the three of them had to hug the wall to keep from being run over by a crowded bus that came sliding over the sidewalk.

  “He talked with humor, joyfully,” added Mayta. “As if he were talking about something healthy and beautiful. We’ve lost that kind of enthusiasm.”

  “You mean we’ve gotten old,” joked Jacinto. “Maybe you have, but I’m still growing.”

  But Mayta wasn’t in the mood for jokes and went on speaking anxiously, hastily: “We’re too wound up in theory, too serious, too politicizing. I don’t know… Listening to that kid spout off about the socialist revolution made me envy him. Being involved in the struggle for so long hardens you, sure, but it’s bad to lose your illusions. It’s bad that the methods we use make us forget our goals, comrades.”

  Did they understand what he wanted to tell them? He felt he was getting upset and changed the subject. When he left them on Alfonso Ugarte to go to his room on Zepita Street, the idea kept buzzing in his head. In front of the Loyaza Hospital, as he waited for a break in the river of cars, trucks, and buses that choked the four lanes, he suddenly understood an association that had been flitting, ghostlike, through his mind since the previous night. That’s what it was: the university. That disillusioning year, those courses on history, literature, and philosophy he’d signed up for at San Marcos University. He had quickly concluded that the professors had lost their love of teaching somewhere along the line, if in fact they had ever had any love for the great works and great ideas they were supposed to teach. To judge by what they were teaching and the kind of papers they expected from their students, it would seem that some kind of inversion had taken place in their dull, mediocre wits. The Spanish literature professor seemed convinced that it was more important to read what Leo Spitzer had written about García Lorca than to read Lorca himself, or to read Amado Alonso’s book on Neruda’s poetry than to read Neruda. And the history professor deemed the sources of Peruvian history more important than Peruvian history. For the philosophy professor, form was more important th
an ideas and their impact on action … Culture for them had dried up, had become a vain science, sterile erudition separated from life. He had told himself then that this was what was to be expected from bourgeois culture, from bourgeois idealism—leaving life behind. He had withdrawn from the university in disgust: real culture was just the opposite of what they were teaching.

  But had he, Jacinto, Medardo, the comrades of the RWP(T), and those in the other RWP become just as academic? Had they forgotten the true hierarchy of things—that there was a difference between essentials and extraneous matters? Had their revolutionary work become as esoteric and pedantic as literature, history, and philosophy had for the professors at San Marcos? Listening to Vallejos was like being awakened from a dream: “Don’t forget the essentials, Mayta. Don’t get tangled up in superfluous things, comrade.” He knew nothing, had read nothing, was a virgin—all of that—but in one sense he had an advantage over all of them: the revolution for him was action, something tangible, heaven on earth, the reign of justice, equality, fraternity. He could guess what images the revolution took on in Vallejos’s mind: peasants breaking the chains the bosses had shackled them with, workers who went from being servants to being masters of machines and shops, a society in which surplus value no longer fattens up a minority but reverts back to the workers … and he felt a shiver run down his spine.

  Wasn’t he at the corner of Cañete and Zepita? He woke from his reverie and rubbed his arms. Damn! How absent-minded can you get? The corner of Canete and Zepita was one he always avoided, because of the bad taste it left in his mouth whenever he went near it. Right there, in front of the newsstand, the gray-green car had stopped with a screech that still whined in his ears. Before he could figure out what was happening, four thugs got out and he saw four pistols pointed at him. He was frisked, pushed around, and shoved into the car. He had been in police stations and various jails before, but that was the worst and the longest time, the first in which he had been worked over. He thought he would go mad and considered suicide. Ever since, he had avoided that corner, out of a kind of superstition he would have been ashamed to admit. He turned onto Zepita and slowly walked the two blocks to his house. His weariness as usual concentrated in his feet. Damned flat feet. I’m a fakir, he thought. Walking on thousands of tiny needles … He thought: The revolution is a party for that brand-new lieutenant.