The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  They jumped off ridges and landed on their feet without breaking their heads, as if they were made of rubber. They swam rushing creeks like fish, without being swept downstream or smashed against the rocks. They went through snow without suffering from the cold, and they ran and jumped at the highest altitudes without any problems. His heart rate had speeded up and the pressure of his blood on his temples was once again intolerable. Should he say something about it? Should he ask for some coca tea, anything, to relieve that anguish?

  “Tomorrow, in Ricrán, you’ll meet the ones who will do the fighting,” Vallejos said. “Get ready to climb some mountains and to see llamas and mountain grass.”

  Despite his malaise, Mayta became aware of the silence. It came from outside, it was tangible, it would be there whenever Shorty Ubilluz or Vallejos fell silent. Between a question and an answer, any time a speaker paused—that absence of motors, horns, screeching brakes, acceleration, and voices seemed to have its own sound. That silence must have covered Jauja like a night laid over the night; it was a thick presence in the room, and it rattled him. That exterior void, that lack of animal, mechanical, or human life out there on the street seemed so strange to him. He never remembered having experienced such an outrageous silence in Lima, not even in the prisons (the Sexto, the Panóptico, the Frontón) where he’d spent a few seasons. When Vallejos and Ubilluz broke it, they seemed to profane something.

  His malaise had diminished, but his anxiety remained, because he knew the loss of breath, the racing pulse, the pressure, the icy chill could come back at any moment. Shorty toasted him, and he, making an effort to smile, raised the glass to his lips. The fiery pisco shook him. How absurd, he thought. It’s only 180 miles to Lima, and it’s as if you were a foreigner in an unknown world. What kind of a country is this where, by just going from one place to another, you turn into a gringo or a Martian? He felt ashamed of knowing nothing at all about the mountains, of knowing nothing at all about the world of the peasants. He paid attention again to what Vallejos and Ubilluz were saying. They were talking about a community on the eastern slope of the mountains, the one that ran right into the jungle: Uchubamba.

  “Where is it?”

  “Not far in miles,” says Professor Ubilluz. “Close, if you look on the map. But it might as well be on the moon if you want to get there from Jauja.” Years later, during Belaúnde’s government, they put in a highway that went one fourth of the way. Before, one could only get there on foot, over the peaks, down the gorges and slopes that meet the jungle.

  Is there any way I can get there? Of course not, it’s been a battleground for a year now, at least. And, rumor has it, a huge cemetery. They say that more people have died there than in all the rest of Peru. I will not, therefore, be able to visit some key places in Mayta’s story; my investigation will be cut short. Besides, even if I could slip through the army and guerrilla lines, I wouldn’t learn much. In Jauja, everybody is sure that both Chunán and Ricrán have disappeared. Yes, yes, Professor Ubilluz has it from a good source. Chunán six months ago, more or less. It was an insurgent stronghold, and it seems they even had an antiaircraft gun. That’s why the air force wiped out Chunán with napalm—even the ants were killed.

  There was another massacre at Ricrán, maybe two months ago. We never did find out what really happened. The people from Ricrán had captured a guerrilla detachment and, some said, they had lynched them for having eaten their crops and their animals. Other people said that they turned the rebels over to the army, which shot them in the plaza, up against the church wall. Then a revenge squad came to Ricrán and did a number five on them. Did I know what a number five was? No. Count off: one, two, three, four, you—outside! Every fifth person was hacked, stoned, or stabbed right there in the same plaza. Now there is no more Ricrán. The survivors are here in Jauja in that immigrant zone that sprang up on the north side, either here or wandering in the jungle. I shouldn’t have any illusions about what was going on. The professor takes a sip and picks up the thread of our conversation.

  “Getting to Uchubamba was for tough guys, unafraid of snow or avalanches,” he says. For people without the varicose veins this old man has now. “I was strong and could take it then, and I got there once. A sight you can’t imagine, when you see the Andes turn into jungle, covered with vegetation, animals, mist. Ruins everywhere. Uchubamba, that’s the place. Don’t you remember it? Damn! Well, the members of the Uchubamba commune set all of Peru talking.”

  No, the name means nothing to me. But I do remember very well the phenomenon Professor Ubilluz has evoked, as I warm the glass of pisco he’s just served me (a pisco called Devil of the Andes, a remnant of better days, when, he says, you could buy anything in the local shops, before this rationing that’s starving us to death and killing us with thirst). Although a complete surprise to official, urban, coastal Peru, about halfway through the fifties, expropriations of land began to take place in different parts of the southern and central mountains. I was in Paris, and I, along with a group of café revolutionaries, avidly followed those remote events, which were succinctly reported in Le Monde, from which we in our imagination reconstructed the exciting spectacle: armed with sticks, slings, rocks, with their elderly, their women and children, and their animals in front, they would move, at dawn or at midnight, en masse to the neighboring lands. They felt, no doubt rightly so, that they had been dispossessed from those lands by the feudal lord, or his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, or the great-grandson of the feudal lord, so they dug up the property markers and returned the land to the commune. They branded the animals with their mark, they set up their houses, and next day they began to work the land as their own.

  “Is this the beginning?” we asked ourselves, openmouthed and euphoric. “Is the volcano finally reawakening?” Perhaps that really was the beginning. In the Paris bistros, under the whispering chestnut trees, we deduced, on the basis of four lines in Le Monde, that those seizures were the work of revolutionaries, new narodniks, who had gone out to the country to persuade the Indians to carry out the agrarian reform that for years every government had promised and none had implemented. Later we found out that the takeovers were not the work of agitators sent by the Communist Party or the Trotskyist groups, that their origin was not even political. They sprang up spontaneously from the peasant masses, who, spurred on by the immemorial abuse under which they lived, by their hunger for land, and, to some degree, by the heated-up atmosphere of slogans and proclamations in favor of social justice that prevailed in Peru then—after the collapse of the Odría dictatorship—decided one day to take action. Uchubamba? Names of other communities—those that took over lands and were kicked out again, bearing their dead and wounded, or still others, which managed to keep the land—whirl around in my memory: Algolán, in Cerro de Pasco; the Valle de la Convención communities, in Cuzco. But Uchubamba, in Junín?

  “Yes, sir,” said Vallejos, exultant that he could surprise him that much. “Indians with light skin and blue eyes, more gringo than either of us.”

  “First, the Incas conquered them and made them work under the aegis of the Quipumayocs of Cuzco,” lectured Shorty Ubilluz. “Later the Spaniards took away their best lands and made them go up to work in the mines. That is, to die in the mines after a little while, with their lungs turned to sieves. The ones that were left in Uchubamba they gave over for ‘Christianizing’ to the Peláez Rioja family, who bled them dry for three centuries.”

  “But, you see, they couldn’t finish them off,” concluded Vallejos.

  They had left Ubilluz’s house to take a walk, and they were sitting on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. Over their heads, they had a marvelous silence and thousands of stars. Mayta forgot the cold and the mountain sickness. He was in a state of exaltation. He was trying to remember the great peasant uprisings: Túpac Amaru, Juan Bustamante, and Atusparia. And so, though the centuries passed, and they went on being exploited and humiliated, the communities of Uchubamba had gone on dreaming about t
he lands they had lost and had gone on asking to have them returned. First, they asked the snakes and the birds. Later, the Blessed Virgin and the saints. After that, they asked all the courts in the region, in lawsuits they always lost. But now, just a few months or weeks ago, if what he had heard was true, they had taken the decisive step. One fine day, they had simply moved onto the lands with their hogs, their dogs, their burros, and their horses, saying, “We want what is rightfully ours.” All that had happened, and you, Mayta, didn’t you know about it?

  “Not a single word,” Mayta said softly, rubbing his arms, goose-bumpy from the cold. “Not even a rumor. In Lima, we knew nothing about it.”

  He spoke while gazing at the sky, amazed at the brightness of the stars in that jet-black, sparkling dome, and by the images that what he was learning called forth in his mind. Ubilluz offered him a cigarette, and the lieutenant lit it for him.

  “It happened just as I’m telling you,” affirmed Vallejos. “They took over the Aína ranch, and the government had to send the Guardia Civil to get them out. The company that left Huancayo took a week to get to Uchubamba. They got them out, but only by resorting to shooting. Several dead and wounded, of course. But the community is still stirred up and unsettled. Now they know what they have to do.”

  “It’s not that the Uchubamba community means to fight,” Shorty Ubilluz said. “They’re fighting already; they’ve already started the revolution. What we are going to do is simply channel it.”

  The cold came and went, like vertigo. Mayta took a deep drag. “Does your information come from a good source?”

  “As good a source as myself.” Vallejos laughed. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

  “We’ve been there,” Shorty Ubilluz corrected him in his pompously proper enunciation. “We have seen and we have conversed with them. And we have left all things in readiness.”

  Mayta didn’t know what to say. Now he was sure that Vallejos was not the green, impulsive boy he thought he was at the beginning, but someone much more serious, solid, and complex, with more foresight, with his feet solidly on the ground. He had gone much further than he had said in Lima, he had more people, and his plan had more ramifications than Mayta had imagined. It was a pity Anatolio hadn’t come. So the two of them could exchange ideas, reflect—to straighten out between them that confusion of fantasy and enthusiasm which was eating him up. What a shame that all the comrades from the RWP(T) weren’t here so they could see that it was no pipe dream but a burning reality. Although it still wasn’t 10 p.m., the three seemed to be the only people in Jauja.

  “I hope you realize that I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you the Andes are ripe.” Vallejos laughed again. “Just as I told you again and again, brother—a volcano. And we’re gonna make it erupt, goddamn it!”

  “Of course, we didn’t go out to Uchubamba empty-handed.” Professor Ubilluz again lowers his voice and looks around as if that episode could still get him into trouble. “We brought three sub-machine guns and a few Mausers the lieutenant got God knows where. Also first-aid equipment. We left it all well hidden in waterproof wrappings.”

  He falls silent, to take a sip of his drink, and whispers that for what he’s telling me we could both be shot in the twinkling of an eye.

  “As you can see, it wasn’t as harebrained as everyone thought,” he adds once the echo of the metallic passage of the armored car fades in the night: we’ve heard it going by the house all afternoon at regular intervals. “It was something planned objectively, scientifically, and it would have worked if Vallejos hadn’t made the stupid mistake of moving the date forward. We worked with the patience of ants, a real spiderweb. Wasn’t the area well chosen? Aren’t the guerrillas today lords and masters of the region? The army doesn’t even dare go there. Vietnam and El Salvador are nothing, compared to this. Your health!”

  Out there, a man, a group of men, an entire detachment was a needle in a haystack. And under the mantle of glittering stars, Mayta saw it: thick, leafy, closed, hieroglyphic; and he saw himself, next to Vallejos and Ubilluz and an army of shadows, traversing it over sinuous paths. It wasn’t the Amazonian flatlands but an undulating forest, the brow of a mountainous forest, with slopes, gulches, gorges, narrow passes, defiles, ideal pitfalls where ambushes could be set up, where the enemy’s communications could be cut, where he could be dizzied, confused, driven mad, where he could be attacked when he least expected it, where he would be forced to disperse, to dilute his strength, to atomize himself in the indescribable labyrinth. His beard had grown, he was thin, in his eyes there was an unconquerable resolve, and his fingers had grown callused from squeezing the trigger, lighting fuses, and throwing dynamite. Any sign of depression he might feel would disappear as soon as he saw how new militants joined every day, how the front widened, and how there, in the cities, the workers, servants, students, and poor employees began understanding that the revolution was for them, belonged to them. He felt an anguished need to have Anatolio near, to be able to talk with him all night. He thought: With him here, I wouldn’t feel this cold.

  “Would you mind if we spoke a bit more about Mayta, Professor? Going back to that trip you all made in March of’58. He’d met you and the joeboys; he knew that you had contact with the Uchubamba communities and that it was there that Vallejos thought he would launch the guerrilla war. Did he do anything more, did he learn anything more on that first trip?”

  He looks at me with his beady, disenchanted eyes as he raises his glass of pisco. He smacks his lips, satisfied. How can he make that little drink last so long? He must sip a drop at a time. “When this bottle’s empty, I know I’ll never have another drop until I die,” he says softly. “Because things will get worse and worse.” Since I stopped drinking a long time ago, the pisco goes to my head. My thinking’s out of kilter; I’m dizzy, just as Mayta must have been with his mountain sickness.

  “The poor guy got the surprise of his life,” he says, in the contemptuous tone he uses when he talks about Mayta. Is it just resentment of Mayta, or is it something more general and abstract, a provincial’s resentment of everything and everyone from Lima, the capital, the coast? “He came here with all the experience of a revolutionary who’s already been to jail, sure he was going to take over, and he found that everything had already been taken care of, and well taken care of.”

  He sighs, with an expression of grief over the pisco that’s running out, over his lost youth, over that guy from the coast he and Vallejos had taught a lesson to, over the hunger everyone’s experiencing, and the uncertainty everyone’s living through. In the short time we’ve been talking, I’ve come to realize that he’s a man full of contradictions, difficult to understand. Sometimes he gets excited and justifies his revolutionary past. Other times, he blurts out remarks such as, “At any moment, the guerrillas will come in here, pass sentence on me, and hang a ‘Stinking Traitor’ sign around my neck. Or a death squad will charge in, cut the balls off my corpse, and stick them in my mouth. That’s what they do around here—in Lima, too?” Sometimes he gets angry at me: “How can you go on writing novels in this nightmare?” Will he ever go back to what matters most to me? Yes: there he goes.

  “Of course I can tell you what he did, said, saw, and heard on that first trip. He stuck to me like a leech. We organized a couple of meetings for him, first with the joeboys and later with comrades who had seen fighting. Miners from La Oroya, from Casapalca, from Morococha. Men from Jauja who had gone to work in the mines of the great imperialist octopus of the time, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. They would come back for holidays and occasionally for weekends.”

  “Were they also committed to the project?”

  Vallejos and Ubilluz said they were, but Mayta wouldn’t have sworn to it. There were five of them. They had talked the following morning, also in Shorty’s house, almost two hours straight. He thought the meeting was terrific and that communication with all of them was easy—above all, with the Parrot, the best-read and mos
t politicized of the bunch—but at no time did any of them say they would give up their jobs and leave their homes to fight. At the same time, Mayta wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t do so. They’re sensible, he thought. They were workers and knew what they were risking. They were seeing him for the first time. Wasn’t it logical they would be cautious? They seemed to be old friends of Ubilluz. At least one of them, the one with a mouth full of gold teeth, the Parrot, had been a militant in APRA. Now he said he was a socialist. When they talked about the gringos in Cerro de Pasco, they were decidedly anti-imperialist. When they talked about salaries, accidents, the diseases they contracted in the tunnels, they were absolutely revolutionary. But every time Mayta tried to get them to say exactly how they would participate in the uprising, their answers were vague. When they went from the general to the specific, their resolve seemed to weaken.

  “We also went to Ricrán,” adds Professor Ubilluz, dropping out his pearls one by one. “I brought him myself, in a truck that belonged to one of my nephews, because Vallejos had to stay at the jail that day. Ricrán, which has now disappeared. Do you know how many villages like Ricrán have been destroyed in this war? A judge was telling me the other day that, according to a colonel on the General Staff, the secret statistics of the armed forces list half a million dead, since all this started. Yes, I brought him to Ricrán. Four hours of bouncing around, climbing up to a valley about twenty-five hundred feet above sea level. Poor Trotskyite! His nose began to bleed, and his handkerchief was soaked. He just wasn’t cut out for high altitudes. The gorges scared the hell out of him. He got dizzy just looking, I swear.”