The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Thefts and muggings are worse than the political crimes,” Juanita repeats. “Because of unemployment and drugs. There were always thieves in the neighborhood, of course. But, before, they went out of the neighborhood, to steal from rich people. Because there’s no work, because of drugs, because of the war, there’s not a drop of neighborhood solidarity left. Now the poor rob and kill the poor.

  “It’s become a big problem,” she adds. “As soon as it gets dark, unless you have a knife—and if you do, you’re one of the killers—unless you just don’t know what you’re doing or you’re dead drunk, you just don’t walk around here, because you know you’ll get mugged. The thieves break into houses in broad daylight and the assaults often turn into murder. The people’s despair is boundless, that’s why these things happen. For instance, the poor guy the people from the next slum found trying to rape a little girl: they poured kerosene over him and burned him alive.”

  “Just yesterday, they found a cocaine laboratory here,” María says.

  What would Mayta say about all this? In those days, drugs were almost nonexistent, a toy for refined night people. Now, on the other hand … They can’t keep medicines in the clinic, I listen to them tell me. At night, they bring all the drugs home and hide them in a safe place, under some trunk. Because every night thieves break in to steal the bottles, the pills, the ampules. Not to get better—that’s what the clinic is for, and the medicines are free. They take them to get high. They think any medicine is a drug and take whatever they find. Lots of thieves turn up at the clinic the next day, suffering from diarrhea, vomiting, and worse. The neighborhood kids get high on banana skins, on floripondio leaves, on glue, on anything. What would Mayta say about all that? I can’t even guess, and besides, I can’t concentrate on Mayta’s memory, because in the context of so much misery his story shrinks to nothing and evaporates. Any unknown face is a tempting target—is it María who’s talking?

  “This is also the red-light district of the zone,” Juanita adds. Or is it that in this ignominious context it isn’t Mayta but literature that seems useless? “Really painful, don’t you think? To sell yourself to live is bad enough. But to do it here, surrounded by garbage and pigs …”

  “The explanation is that they get business here,” notes María.

  That’s a bad thought. If, like the Canadian priest in Mayta’s anecdote, I also succumb to despair, I won’t write this novel. That won’t help anyone. No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. Do they feel secure trotting around the neighborhood at night? Up till now, thank God, nothing’s happened to them. Not even with the crazy drunks who might not be able to recognize them.

  “Maybe we’re so ugly we don’t tempt anyone.” María guffaws.

  “Both doctors have been attacked,” Juanita says. “But they still keep coming.”

  I try to go on talking, but I get distracted. I try to go back to Mayta, but I just can’t, because again and again the image of the poet Ernesto Cardenal eclipses Mayta’s image. Cardenal’s image when he came to Lima—fifteen years ago?—and made such an impression on María. I haven’t told them I also went to hear him at the National Institute of Culture and at the Teatro Pardo y Aliaga, and that he made a vivid impression on me, too. I haven’t said that I’ll always be sorry I heard him, because since then I haven’t been able to read his poetry, which I had liked before. Isn’t that wrong? Does one thing have anything to do with the other? It must, in some way I can’t explain. But the relationship exists because I feel it.

  He came on stage dressed like Che Guevara, and in the question-and-answer session he responded to the demagoguery of some agitators in the audience with more demagoguery than even they wanted to hear. He did and said everything necessary to earn the approbation and applause of the most recalcitrant: there was no difference between the Kingdom of God and communist society; the Church had become a whore, but thanks to the revolution it would become pure again, as it was becoming in Cuba; the Vatican, a capitalist cave which had always defended the powerful, was now the servant of the Pentagon; the fact that there was only one party in Cuba and in the U.S.S.R. meant the elite had the task of stirring up the masses, exactly as Christ had wanted the Church to do with the people; it was immoral to speak against the forced-labor camps in the U.S.S.R.—how could anyone believe capitalist propaganda?

  And the final act of pure theater: waving his hands, he announced to the world that the recent cyclone that hit Lake Nicaragua was the result of some ballistic experiments carried out by the United States … I still have a vivid impression of his insincerity and his histrionics. Ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid meeting the writers I like, so that the same thing that happened with the poet Cardenal doesn’t happen with them. Every time I try to read him, something like acid flows out of the book and ruins it—the memory of the man who wrote it.

  We’ve reached the car. The door on the driver’s side has been broken open. Since there was nothing to take, the thief, to get even, has slit the seat, and the stain indicates that he’s urinated on it. I tell Juanita and María that he’s done me a favor, because now I’ll have to change the seat covers, which were worn out, anyway. But they, sincerely sorry for me, and angry, pity me.

  Four

  “Sooner or later, the story will have to be written,” says the senator, moving around in his seat until he finds a comfortable position for his bad leg. “The true story, not the myth. But the time isn’t right just yet.”

  I had asked that our conversation take place somewhere quiet, but he insisted that I come to the Congress Bar. Just as I feared, someone’s always interrupting us: colleagues and reporters come up to us, say hello to him, gossip, ask him questions. Ever since the attack that left him lame, he is one of the most popular members of Congress. We are talking intermittently, with long pauses. I explain once again that I’m not trying to write the “true story” of Alejandro Mayta. I only want to garner as much information, as many opinions about him as I can, so that later I can add a large dose of fancy to all that data, so I can create something that will be an unrecognizable version of what actually happened. His bulging, distrustful little eyes scrutinize me unsympathetically.

  “As far as what’s happening today is concerned, no one should do anything that might hinder the great process of unification that is taking place among the democratic left-wing organizations, the only thing that can save Peru in today’s circumstances,” he says softly. “Mayta’s story, even if twenty-five years have gone by, may still make some old wounds bleed.”

  He’s a thin man who speaks easily. He dresses elegantly and has lots of gray mixed into his thick curly hair. From time to time, his bad leg seems to give him some pain, because he rubs it hard. He writes well, for a politician. That skill opened to him the higher spheres of General Velasco’s military government, to which he was an adviser. He invented a good number of the high-sounding phrases that conferred a progressive aura on the dictatorship, and he was the editor of one of the confiscated newspapers. He wrote speeches for General Velasco (you could tell which ones, because certain sociojuridical expressions got tangled in the general’s teeth). He and his small group represented the regime’s radical wing. Now, Senator Campos is a moderate personality, attacked by the extreme right, the Maoist and Trotskyist ultra-left. The guerrillas have condemned him to death, and so have the liberty squads. These death squads—a sign of the absurd times we live in—declare that he is the secret leader of the subversives. A few months ago, a bomb destroyed his car, wounding his chauffeur and maiming his left leg, which he can no longer bend. Who threw the bomb? No one knows.

  “But, after all,” he exclaims suddenly, just when I think there’s no way to make him speak and I’m about to leave, “if you’ve learned so many things already, you’d better know the main thing: Mayta collaborated with Army Intelligence and probably with the CIA.”

  “That’s not true,” protested Mayta.

  “It is,” countered Anat
olio. “Lenin and Trotsky always condemned terrorism.”

  “Direct action is not terrorism,” said Mayta, “but pure and simple revolutionary insurrection. If Lenin and Trotsky condemned that, then I don’t know what they did all their lives. Figure it out, Anatolio. We’re forgetting the most important thing. Our job is the revolution, the first task of any Marxist. Isn’t it incredible that a second lieutenant has to remind us of it?”

  “Will you accept at least that Lenin and Trotsky condemned terrorism?” Anatolio made a tactical retreat.

  “So long as we take careful note of the differences, I do, too,” Mayta agreed. “Blind terrorism, cut off from the masses, estranges the people from the revolutionary vanguard. We are going to be something else: the spark that lights the fuse, the snowball that turns into an avalanche.”

  “You’re waxing poetic today.” Anatolio burst out laughing, with a laugh that seemed too loud for the small room.

  Not a poet, he thought. A man with a dream, a man who’s been rejuvenated. And with an optimism he hadn’t felt for years. It was as if the mounds of books and newspapers piled around him were burning with a mild, all-encompassing fire that, instead of burning him, kept his body and his soul in a kind of incandescence. Was this happiness? The discussion of the Central Committee of the RWP(T) had been impassioned, the most emotional that he could recall in many years. Right after the meeting, he had gone to the Plazuela del Teatro Segura, to France-Presse. He translated for around four hours, and despite all that mindless work, he felt fresh and lucid. His report on the second lieutenant had been approved, as had his proposal to take Vallejos’s plan into consideration. Work program, action plan—what jargon, he thought. The agreement was, in fact, transcendent: to carry out the revolution now, once and for all. As he expounded, Mayta spoke with such conviction that he moved his comrades: he saw it in their faces and in the fact that they listened to him without interrupting even once. Yes, it could be done, as long as a revolutionary organization like the RWP(T) directed it—not a well-intentioned boy lacking ideological solidity. He half closed his eyes, and the image materialized, clear and sharp: a small, well-armed, well-equipped vanguard, with urban support and clear ideas about their strategic goals. Their accomplishments would be the focal point from which the revolution would radiate outward toward the rest of the nation—the flint and steel that would spark the revolutionary blaze. Hadn’t the objective conditions existed since time immemorial in Peru, a country with such glaring class contradictions? That initial nucleus, by means of daring attacks of armed propaganda, would set about creating the subjective conditions that would induce the workers and peasants to join the action. The figure of Anatolio, standing at the corner of the bed where Mayta was sitting, brought him back to the present.

  “Well, I’m going down to see if there’s still a line.” He’d already gone down twice, and both times he’d found someone waiting at the outhouse door. Mayta saw him come out bent over, holding his stomach. What a good thing it was that Anatolio had come over tonight, what a good thing that today, when finally something important was happening, today when something new was happening, he had someone with whom to share the torrent of ideas in his head. The party has taken a decisive step, he thought. He was stretched out on his bed, resting on his right arm as if on a pillow. The Central Committee of the RWP(T), after approving the idea of his working with Vallejos, had named an Action Group—Comrade Jacinto, Comrade Anatolio, and Mayta himself—to prepare a schedule of activities. It was decided that Mayta would go to Jauja immediately, to see on the spot what Vallejos’s outfit looked like and what kind of contacts he had made with the Indian communities in Mantaro Valley. Then the other two members of the Action Group would also go up to the mountains, to coordinate the work. The RWP(T) meeting broke up with everyone in a state of euphoria, and Mayta remained exalted even as he translated releases for France-Presse. He was still euphoric when he reached his room on Jirón Zepita. Just where the dead-end street began, he saw a youthful figure waiting for him, teeth glistening in the semi-darkness.

  “I was so shaken up by all that that I came by to see if we could talk awhile,” said Anatolio. “Are you very tired?”

  “Just the opposite. Let’s go on up.” Mayta patted him on the back. “I’m all excited, too—it’s just what our little pal Vallejos says, pure dynamite.”

  There were rumors, insinuations, gossip, even a handbill that went around San Marcos University—all accusing him. Of being an infiltrator? Of being an informer? Then there appeared two articles containing disturbing facts about Mayta’s activities.

  “An informer?” I interrupt him. “But all of you …”

  Senator Campos raises his hand and stops me dead. “We were Trotskyists, just as Mayta was, and those attacks came from the Stalinists, so at first we paid no attention,” he explains, shrugging. “They always called those of us in the RWP half-breed squealers. Trotskyists and Stalinists always fought like cats and dogs. The basic idea was always ‘Your worst enemy is the guy most like you; get rid of him even if you have to sell your soul.’”

  He falls silent, because once again a reporter has come up to ask if what they’ve said in another newspaper is true; namely, that because he’s been frightened by the threats on his life, the senator is preparing to flee the country, under the pretext that he is going to have his leg operated on again. The senator laughs. “A pack of lies. Unless I’m bumped off, the Peruvian people will have me around for quite some time.” The reporter leaves, happily writing down that last remark. We ask for another coffee. “I know, I know, we over here in the Congress abuse our privileges by drinking coffee several times a day, while, for people on the outside, coffee’s become a luxury item. But don’t worry, it won’t go on this way. The guy with the coffee concession had a reserve stock, but it’s giving out.” He goes on for a while, discoursing about the havoc the war has wrought: rationing, insecurity, the psychosis the people are living through these days, with the rumors about the presence of foreign troops in national territory.

  “The fact is that our Soviet comrades knew everything,” he suddenly adds to what he had been saying to me. “The word had to be passed to them from above. Moscow, the KGB. That’s how they probably found out about Mayta’s duplicity.”

  He puts a cigarette in his holder, lights it, takes a drag, and rubs his leg. His face has turned sad, as if he was wondering if he hadn’t told me too much. He and my old schoolmate fought the same fight, shared the same political dreams, the same underground life, the same persecution. How can he just tell me in that indifferent way that Mayta was a lousy stool pigeon?

  “You know that Mayta was in and out of jail quite often.” He drops ashes in the empty coffee cup. “That must have been where they blackmailed him into working for them. Some people harden in jail; others get soft.”

  He looks at me, measuring the effect of his words. He seems calm, sure of himself, with that amiable expression he never loses, even in the most heated arguments. Why does he hate his old comrade?

  “Those things are always difficult to prove.”

  There, in some moment of the past, an unrecognizable Mayta, wrapped in greasy scarves, passes notebooks written in invisible ink that contain names, plans, and places to an army officer obviously uncomfortable in civilian clothes and a distrustful foreigner who just can’t get his Spanish prepositions right.

  “Impossible to prove, rather,” he clarifies. “And yet, on one occasion, we did find some things out for sure.” He takes a deep breath and lets me have it: “During the time of General Velasco, we found out that the CIA practically ran our Intelligence service. Many names were revealed. Mayta’s was one of them. And when we took a good look at things, remembering back, we saw a few events in a different light. His behavior was suspicious from the time he met Vallejos.”

  “That’s a sizable accusation,” I tell him. “A spy for the army and a CIA agent at the same time …”

  “Spy, agent—those are big words,”
he modifies. “Informer, instrument, perhaps victim. Have you spoken with anyone else who knew Mayta then?”

  “Moisés Barbi Leyva. How is it he knew nothing about all this? Moisés was involved in all the planning for the Jauja thing, he even saw Mayta the day before …”

  “Moisés is a guy who knows a lot of things.” Senator Campos smiles.

  Is he going to tell me now that Moisés is a CIA agent? No, he could never make an accusation like that against the director of a center that has already published two of his sociopolitical tomes—one of them with an introduction by Barbi Leyva himself.

  “Moisés is a prudent man, full of interests to defend,” he blurts out, in a mildly acid tone. “His philosophy nowadays is what’s done is done. It’s the only way to live, if you want to avoid problems. Unfortunately, I’m not like him. I’ve never hesitated to speak up. That’s why I ended up with a game leg—I always say what I think. Someday I’ll get killed for it. What I can do, of course, is look my family in the eye without feeling shame.”

  He turns aside for a moment, as if upset at allowing himself to be drawn into such an autobiographical outpouring.

  “What does Moisés think of the Mayta of those days?” he asks me, keeping his eyes fixed on the toes of his shoes.

  “He thinks Mayta was a rather naïve idealist,” I tell him. “A headstrong man full of conflicts, but a revolutionary through and through.”

  He continues to meditate, shrouded in cigarette smoke. “I told you: it’s better not to take the lid off that pot. There are some stinks in there that would make lots of people choke.” He pauses a moment, smiles, and unloads: “It was Moisés who read the charge that Mayta was an infiltrator the night we expelled him from the RWP(T).”

  He’s left me speechless. In the small garage, now turned into a courtroom, an adolescent, thundering Moisés ends his deposition by waving a handful of irrefutable evidence. Squealer! Informer! Pale, slumped over underneath the poster bearing the effigies of the ideologues, my schoolmate utters not a syllable. The door opened and Anatolio entered.