The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  His heart was pounding, he felt dizzy, and Professor Ubilluz, with the lake as background, just goes on talking. I stop paying attention, pursued by the nightmare images I associated with the name Jauja when I was a child. The city for people with tuberculosis! Because they had been coming here since the last century, all those Peruvians suffering from that terrifying illness, mythified by romantic literature and sadomasochism, that tuberculosis for which the dry climate of Jauja was considered extraordinarily curative. They came here from the four cardinal points of the nation, first on mules over trails, then on the steep railroad built by the engineer Meiggs. All Peruvians who began to spit blood and who could pay for the trip and who had the money to convalesce or die in the pavilions of the Olavegoya Sanatorium, which, because of that continuous invasion, grew and grew, until, at one moment, it engulfed the city.

  The name that centuries ago had aroused greed, admiration, dreams of gold doubloons and golden mountains came to mean perforated lungs, fits of coughing, bloody sputum, hemorrhage, death from consumption. Jauja, a fickle name, he thought. And pressing his hand to his chest to count the beats, he remembered that his godmother, in her house in Surquillo, in those days when he had gone on his hunger strike, had admonished him with her index finger in the air and her generous fat face: “Do you want us to send you to Jauja, you silly boy?” Alicia and Zoilita would drive him crazy every time they heard him cough: “Uh-oh, cousin, that’s how it begins, a little cough; soon we’ll see you on the road to Jauja.” What would Aunt Josefa, Zoilita, and Alicia say when they found out what he had come to Jauja to do? Later, while Vallejos was introducing him to Shorty Ubilluz, a ceremonious gentleman who made a little bow as they shook hands, and to half a dozen boys who looked more like lower-school kids from the Colegio San José and not secondary-school seniors, Mayta, his body still covered with goose bumps from the icy shower, told himself that soon, to those other images, another would have to be added: Jauja, cradle of the Peruvian revolution. Would that, too, be part of the place? Jauja of the revolution, like Jauja of gold, or Jauja for tuberculars? This was Professor Ubilluz’s house, and Mayta could see, through a dirty window, adobe buildings, tile or zinc roofs, a fragment of cobblestoned street, and the raised sidewalks because of the torrents that—as Vallejos had explained as they walked over—formed in the storms of January and February. He thought: Jauja, cradle of the socialist revolution in Peru. It was difficult to believe, it sounded so unreal, like the city of gold or the city of the consumptives. I tell him that at least outwardly there would seem to be less hunger and want in Jauja than in Lima. Am I right? Instead of answering, Professor Ubilluz, putting on a serious face, suddenly revives, on this solitary shore of the lake, the subject that has brought me to his land: “You have probably heard many stories about Vallejos, of course. And you will hear even more in the days to come.”

  “It’s always the same, when you’re trying to delve into a historical event,” I reply. “One thing you learn, when you try to reconstruct an event from eyewitness accounts, is that each version is just someone’s story, and that all stories mix truth and lies.”

  He suggests we go on to his house. A cart pulled by two burros catches up to us, and the driver agrees to take us to the city. He drops us off, half an hour later, in front of Ubilluz’s little house, nine blocks up on Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. It just about faces the jail. “Yes,” he tells me, even before I ask. “This was the lieutenant’s territory, that’s where it all started.” The jail takes up the whole block on the other side of the street and closes off Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. At that gray wall and those tile-covered eaves, the city ends. Beyond is the country: the fields, the eucalyptus trees, and the peaks. I see, just beyond, trenches, barbed wire, and soldier boys scattered here and there, doing guard duty. One of the persistent rumors last year was that the guerrillas were preparing to attack Jauja in order to declare it the capital of liberated Peru. But hasn’t the same rumor gone around about Arequipa, Puno, Cuzco, Trujillo, Cajamarca, and even Iquitos?

  The jail and Professor Ubilluz’s house are in a neighborhood with a religious name, one that carries connotations of martyrdom and expiation: Cross of Thorns. It’s a modest place, low and dark, with a large framed photograph from which beams a gentleman of another era—string tie, straw hat, waxed mustachios, high starched collar, vest, Mephistophelian goatee—who must be the professor’s father or grandfather, to judge by the resemblance. There is a long chaise, covered with a multicolored poncho, and chairs painted in several different colors, all of them so worn they seem about to collapse. In a glass-doored bookcase, there are disorderly stacks of newspapers. Some buzzing flies circle our heads, and one of the joeboys helped pass around a plateful of sliced fresh cheese and some crusty little rolls that made Mayta’s mouth water. I’m dying of hunger and I ask Professor Ubilluz if there is someplace where I can buy some food. “At this time of day, no,” he says. “At nightfall, perhaps we’ll get some baked potatoes at a place I know. In any case, I can offer you some very good pisco.

  “They say the most absurd things about my friendship with Vallejos,” he adds. “That we met in Lima when I was in the army. That we began to conspire then and that we went on plotting here, when he came to be chief of the jail. The only truth in all that is that I did retire from the army. But when I was in, Vallejos was still at his mother’s breast…” He laughs, with a forced little giggle, and exclaims, “Pure fantasy! We met here, a few days after Vallejos came to take up his post. I also have the honor to be able to tell you that I taught him all he knew about Marxism. Because you have to understand”—he lowers his voice and looks around with apprehension, pointing out, as he does so, some empty shelves—“that I had the most complete Marxist library in Jauja.”

  A long digression distracts him from Vallejos. Despite the fact that he’s an old, sick man—he’s had a kidney removed, he’s got high blood pressure, and varicose veins that put him through the tortures of the damned—that he’s retired from all political action, the authorities, a couple of years ago, when terrorist activities were at a fever pitch in the province, burned all his books and had him incarcerated for a week. They attached electrodes to his testicles to make him confess his complicity in the guerrilla campaign. What complicity could there be when it was common knowledge that the insurgents had him on their hit list—all because of some infamous calumnies. He gets up, opens a drawer, and takes out a piece of paper, which he then shows me: “The people sentence you to death, traitor scum.” He shrugs. He was old, and life no longer mattered to him. Let them kill him, what a crock of shit. He didn’t take any precautions: he lived alone and didn’t even have a stick for self-defense.

  “So it was you who taught Vallejos Marxism.” I take advantage of his pause to interrupt him. “I thought all this time it had been Mayta.”

  “The Trotskyite?” He twists around in his chair, gesturing scornfully. “Poor Mayta! He went around in Jauja like a sleepwalker, because of the mountain sickness …”

  It was true. He had never felt anything like that pressure in his temples and that giddiness in his heart, which was suddenly punctuated by some disconcerting pauses in which it seemed to stop pumping. Mayta had the sensation of being empty, as if his bones, muscles, and veins had suddenly disappeared and a polar chill was freezing the huge void under his skin. Was he going to faint? Was he going to die? It was a sinuous, treacherous malaise: it came and went. He was at the edge of a precipice, but the threat of falling into the abyss never materialized. It seemed as though everyone in Shorty Ubilluz’s crowded little room realized what was happening to him. Some were smoking, and a grayish cloud, with flies in it, distorted the faces of the boys sitting on the floor, who from time to time interrupted Ubilluz’s monologue with questions. Mayta had lost the thread of the conversation. He was next to Vallejos on a bench, with his back resting against the bookcase, and even though he wanted to listen, he could only pay attention to his veins, his temples, and his heart.

  I
n addition to his mountain sickness, he felt ridiculous. Are you the revolutionary who’s come to test these comrades? He thought: The three-mile altitude has turned you into a faded flower with a pounding heart. He could only vaguely hear Ubilluz explaining to the boys—was he trying to impress him with his confused knowledge of Marxism?—that the way to move the revolution forward was by understanding both the social contradictions and the traits the class struggle took on in each of its phases. He thought: Cleopatra’s nose. Yes, there it was: the unforeseeable element that upsets the laws of history and turns science into poetry. How stupid he had been not to foresee the most obvious thing, that a man who goes up into the Andes can suffer mountain sickness; why hadn’t he bought some pills to counteract the effect of the difference in atmospheric pressure on his body.

  Vallejos asked him, “Do you feel okay?” “Sure, fine.” He thought: I’ve come to Jauja so this hick professor who doesn’t know shit can give me a class on Marxism. Now Shorty Ubilluz was pointing to him, welcoming him: the comrade from Lima that Vallejos had spoken to them about, someone with enormous revolutionary and union experience. He invited Mayta to speak and told the boys to ask him questions. Mayta smiled at the half-dozen beardless faces that had turned to gaze at him with curiosity and a certain admiration. He opened his mouth.

  “He was the real guilty party, if we’re looking for guilty parties,” Professor Ubilluz repeats, with his vinegary expression. “He made fools of us. We thought he was the link with the Lima revolutionaries, with the unions, with the party, which consisted of hundreds of comrades. In reality, he represented no one and was no one. A Trotskyite, to top things off. His very presence sealed off any possibility that the Communist Party might support us. We were very naïve, it’s true. I knew about Marxism, but I had no idea of the strength of the party, and much less about the divisions among the left-wing groups. And Vallejos, of course, knew even less than I. So you thought that Mayta the Trotskyite indoctrinated the lieutenant? Not a chance. They barely had time to see each other, only when Vallejos could get to Lima. It was in this room right here that the lieutenant learned about dialectics and materialism.”

  Professor Ubilluz comes from an old Jauja family in which there have been sub-prefects, mayors, and lots of lawyers. (Law is the great profession in the mountains, and Jauja beats most places even there in numbers of lawyers per citizen.) They must have been well-off because, he tells me, many of his relatives have managed to go abroad: Mexico, Buenos Aires, Miami. Not him. He’s going to stay here until the end, threats or no threats, and he’ll sink with whatever’s left when it’s over. Not only because he doesn’t have the means to leave, but because of his contrary nature, that rebelliousness that caused him, unlike his cousins, uncles, and brothers, who were busy with farms, small businesses, or legal practices, to devote himself to teaching and to become the first Marxist in the city. He’s paid for it, he adds: jailed countless times, beaten up, insulted. And even worse, the ingratitude of the left, which has now grown and is about to take power, but which forgets the people who opened the way and laid down the foundation.

  “The real lessons in philosophy and history, the ones I couldn’t give in the Colegio San José, I gave in this little room,” he exclaims proudly. “My house was a people’s university.”

  He falls silent because we hear a metallic sound and military voices. I get up to peek through the curtains. The armored car is passing by, the same one I saw at the station. Next to it, under the command of an officer, that’s a platoon of soldiers. They disappear around the corner of the jail.

  “Wasn’t it Mayta who planned everything, then?” I abruptly ask him. “Wasn’t it he who orchestrated all the details of the uprising?”

  The surprise reflected in his half-reddened face, which is full of white spots from his whiskers, seems genuine. As if he had heard incorrectly and knew nothing about what I was saying.

  “Trotskyite Mayta the intellectual author of the uprising?” He carefully pronounces the words, with that overly precise mountain diction, which barely allows the syllables out of his mouth. “What an idea! When he got here, everything had already been arranged by Vallejos and me. He had nothing to do with it until the very end. I’m going to say something else. He was only informed of the details at the last minute.”

  “Because you didn’t trust him?” I interrupt.

  “Just as a precaution,” says Professor Ubilluz. “Well, if you prefer the word ‘trust,’ then yes, because we didn’t trust him. Not that we thought he was a squealer, but that he might be afraid. Vallejos and I decided to keep him in ignorance, as soon as we figured out that he had no one behind him, that he was on his own. Would it have been surprising that at the critical moment the poor guy would turn tail and run? He wasn’t one of us, and he couldn’t really take the altitude. He had no knowledge of weapons. Vallejos taught him how to shoot on a beach near Lima. A hell of a revolutionary to dig up! They say he was even a fag.”

  He laughs, with his usual forced giggle. I’m just about to say that, unlike him, who wasn’t where he was supposed to be—and I hope he explains why—Mayta, despite his mountain sickness and his representing no one else, was alongside Vallejos when—to use Ubilluz’s own expression—“the potatoes fell in the fire.” I’m just about to tell him that lots of other people have said about him exactly what he’s saying about Mayta: that he was really the one to blame, that he was the deserter. But of course I say nothing at all. I’m not here to contradict anyone. My job is to listen, observe, compare stories, mix it all together and weave a fantasy. Again, we hear the metallic sound of the armored car and the trotting soldiers.

  When one of the boys said, “It’s time to go,” Mayta felt relieved. He was feeling better, after having gone through some moments of agony. He answered the questions posed by Ubilluz, Vallejos, the joeboys, and at the same time he was keenly aware of the malaise that was crushing his head and chest and seemed to be churning his blood. Had he answered well? At least he seemed sure of himself, even if nothing was further from the truth, and in allaying the fears of the boys, he had tried not to lie even as he avoided telling truths that might dampen their enthusiasm.

  It wasn’t easy. Would the Lima working class support them once the revolutionary action began? Yes, but not right away. At the beginning, the workers would be indecisive, confused because of the misinformation the newspapers and radio would spread and because of the lies those in power and the bourgeois parties would tell. They would be paralyzed by brutality and repression. But that very repression would quickly open their eyes, revealing just which group was defending their interests, and which was, in addition to exploiting them, deceiving them. The revolutionary action would push the class struggle to heights of violence.

  Mayta was moved by the boys’ wide-open eyes and their attentive immobility. They believe everything you tell them. Now, while the joeboys were saying goodbye to him, ceremoniously shaking his hand, he asked himself just what in fact the attitude of the Lima proletariat would be when the action began. Hostility? Scorn for that vanguard fighting for them out in the mountains? The fact was that APRA controlled the unions, that they were allied with the Prado government, and opposed to anything that smacked of socialism. It might be different with a few unions, like Civil Construction, in which the Communist Party had some influence. No, probably not. Those guys would accuse us of being provocateurs, of playing along with the government, of serving them on a silver platter the pretext for outlawing the party and deporting and jailing the progressives. He could imagine the headlines in Unity, the comments in the handbills they would distribute, and the articles that would appear in the Workers Voice published by the rival RWP. Yes, that would all hold true for the first phase. But, he was sure, if the uprising were to last, develop, undermine bourgeois power here and there, oblige it to discard its liberal mask and show its bloodied face, the working class would shake off its lethargy, all the reformist deceptions, all its corrupt leaders, all those illusions of be
ing able to coexist with the sellouts, and would join the struggle.

  “Well, the chicks have gone to roost.” Shorty Ubilluz went to the pile of books, pamphlets, newspapers, cobwebs in his studio and dug out a jug and some glasses. “Now let’s have a drink.”

  “How did the boys seem to you?” Vallejos asked him.

  “Very enthusiastic, but still wet behind the ears,” Mayta said. “Some of them can’t be more than fifteen, right? Are you sure you can depend on them?”

  “You have no faith in our young people.” Vallejos laughed. “Sure we can depend on them.”

  “Remember González Prada.” Shorty Ubilluz began to quote, sliding around the bookcases like a gnome and getting back into his chair. “The old fogies to the grave, and the young to work.”

  “And every man to his assigned job.” Vallejos smacked his fist into his palm, and Mayta thought: I hear him and I have no doubts. It seems that everything will bend to his will, he’s a born leader, a central committee all by himself. “Nobody’s going to make these boys shoot anyone. They’re going to be messengers.”

  “The messenger boys of the revolution,” Shorty Ubilluz baptized them. “I’ve known them since they learned how to crawl. They’re the best of the joeboys.”

  “They’ll be in charge of communications,” Vallejos explained, waving his arms back and forth. “They’ll maintain contact between the guerrillas and the city; they’ll carry dispatches, supplies, medicine, matériel. And because they’re kids, they won’t be noticed. They know these mountains like the back of their hands. We’ve taken long hikes, and I’ve trained them in forced marches. They’re terrific.”