The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “And, ‘besides,’ what?” Blacquer encouraged me to go on.

  “Rifles,” I said in a small voice. “We have more than we need. If the Communist Party wants to defend itself when the bullets start flying, we’ll give you weapons. Free of charge, of course.”

  Blacquer was lighting his ten millionth cigarette of the morning. But his matches went out twice in a row, and when he took his first drag, he choked. “You’re sure that this time it’s for real.” I saw him stand up, smoke pouring out of his nose and mouth, poke his head into the next room, and shout, “Take him for a walk. We can’t talk with all that crying.” There was no answer, but the child instantly quieted down. Blacquer sat down again, to stare at me and calm down.

  “I still don’t know if this is a trap, Mayta,” he said, muttering. “But I do know one thing. You’ve gone crazy. Do you really think the party would ever, under any circumstances, join forces with the Trots?”

  “Not with the Trots. With the revolution,” I answered. “Yes, I do think so. That’s why I’m here.”

  “A petit-bourgeois adventure, if we want to put it precisely,” said Anatolio, and when I realized how much he was stuttering, I knew exactly what he was going to say next, that he had memorized what he was saying. “The masses have not been invited to participate and don’t figure in the plan in any way. By the same token, what guarantee is there that the people from Uchubamba will rise up if we go out there? None at all. Have any of us seen those imprisoned leaders? No. Who’s going to run this show? Us? No. A lieutenant with a Putschist, ultra-adventurist mentality. What role are we being offered? To be the caboose, the cannon fodder.” Now he did turn and he did have enough guts to look me in the eye. “My obligation is to say what I think, comrade.”

  That’s not what you thought last night, I mentally answered him. Or maybe it was that his attitude last night had been a fake, just to keep me off guard. Carefully, so I would have something to keep me busy, I straightened up the newspapers I had been sitting on and leaned them back against the wall. By then, the whole thing had become clear: there had been an earlier meeting in which the Central Committee of the RWP(T) had decided on what was now happening. Anatolio must have been there. I felt a bitter taste, a pain in my bones. It was too much of a farce. Hadn’t we talked over so many things last night in the room over on Jirón Zepita? Didn’t we review the action plan? Will you say goodbye to anyone before you go out to the mountains? Only my mother. What’ll you tell her? That I’ve won a scholarship to go to Mexico: I’ll write you once a week, Mama. Had there been in him any hesitation, doubt, contradiction—was he uncomfortable? Not a thing. He seemed enthusiastic and very sincere. We were in bed in the dark, the cot creaked, and every time the sound of the racing little feet above our heads came back, his body, pressed against mine, tensed up. That sudden vibration showed me, just for an instant, patches of Anatolio’s skin, and I anxiously waited for it to happen again. With my mouth against his, I said, suddenly, “I don’t want you to die, ever.” And a moment later: “Have you thought that you might die?” With a voice made soft and languid by desire, he answered me instantly: “Of course I’ve thought about it. And it doesn’t matter to me at all.” In pain and trembling, on the pile of Workers Voice, which once again threatened to tip over, I thought: Actually, it does matter quite a bit to you.

  “I thought it was just a pose, that he was having emotional problems, I thought that …” Blacquer stops talking because the girl at the next table has burst out laughing. “It would happen from time to time among the comrades, the same way that one fine day a soldier wakes up and thinks he’s Napoleon. I thought: This morning, he woke up and thought he was Lenin arriving at the Finland Station.”

  He’s quiet again, because of the girl’s laughter. At another table, a man shouts instructions: Fill tubs, pots, pans, barrels, and put them in every room, in every corner, even if you have to use salt water. If the Reds come in, the United States will bomb us and the fires will be even worse than the bombs. That should be our top priority, believe me—enough water available to put out the fire as soon as it starts.

  “But, despite the fact that it sounded fantastic, it was the truth,” Blacquer goes on. “It was all the truth. They had more than enough weapons. The second lieutenant had pilfered lots from an army armory, right here in Lima. He had them hidden somewhere. You knew that he gave Mayta a sub-machine gun, right? It seems it was from that lot he stole. The idea of rebelling must have been an obsession Vallejos had even when he was a cadet. He wasn’t crazy, his plan was sincere. Stupid but sincere.”

  The false smile bares his stained teeth. With a brusque gesture, he pushes aside a small boy who tries to shine his shoes. “They had no one to give them to, they had no one to shoulder those rifles,” he mocks.

  “How did the party react?”

  “Nobody thought it of any importance, nobody believed a single word. Not about the rifles, not about the uprising. In the summer of 1958, months before the barbudos marched into Havana, who was going to believe those things? The party reacted in a logical way. I had to sever all relations with the Trot, because he had to have some trick up his sleeve. Naturally, I did exactly that.”

  A lady tells the man who’d been talking about filling the pots of water that he’s an ignoramus. When the bombs start falling, all you can do is pray! Pots of water against bombs! What did he think, that war was like a carnival, stupid asshole? “I’m sorry you’re not a man, lady, or I’d knock your teeth down your throat,” roars the gentleman. To which the lady’s male friend gallantly adds, “I’m a man, come on and knock mine down my throat.” It looks as though they’re going to fight for real.

  “Trap, madness, whatever—we don’t want to have anything more to do with it,” quoted Blacquer. “And I don’t want you here ever again.”

  “Just what I expected. You all are what you are, and you’ll go on being just that for quite a while.”

  The two men are pulled apart, and as quickly as they got wrangled up, they calm down. The girl says, “Don’t fight among yourselves. In times like these, we have to be united.” A hunchback is looking at her legs.

  “It was a real blow for him.” Blacquer shoos away another kneeling boy trying to shine his shoes. “To come to see me, he had to overcome lots of inhibitions. No doubt about it, he actually thought the insurrection could flatten the mountains that separated us. Spineless naïveté.”

  He throws his cigarette butt away, and instantly a ragged, filthy figure jumps on it, picks it up, and anxiously takes a drag, to extract one final mouthful of smoke. Was he like that when he decided to visit Blacquer? Was I that anguished when I realized that zero hour was coming and there were only a handful of us to carry out an uprising, and we lacked even a minimal support organization in the city?

  “The coup de grâce was yet to come,” Blacquer adds. “His own party was going to expel him as a traitor.”

  That’s what Jacinto Zevallos had said, exactly that. For the veteran, the worker, the Trotskyist relic of Peru to say it, was the most upsetting thing to occur at a meeting where he had already heard so many hostile words. Even more painful was Anatolio’s turnaround. Because he both respected and cared for old Zevallos. The secretary general was speaking indignantly, and no one moved a muscle.

  “Yes, comrade, to ask help from those Creole Stalinists for this project behind our backs, and in the party’s name, is more than mere fractionization. It is betrayal. Your explanations make matters even worse. Instead of recognizing your mistake, you have simply explained your reasons. I have to request your separation from the party, Mayta.”

  What explanations did I give them? Even though none of those who were there at that session would even admit it took place, I feel the unquenchable need to believe it did, and just as Blacquer described it. What could I say to them that would justify my visit to the arch-enemy? With the aid of hindsight, it doesn’t seem so inconceivable. The Reds who may enter Lima tomorrow, or the day after, belong to a
vast Marxist spectrum, which includes Communist Party members, Trotskyists, and Maoists, all apparently fighting under one flag. The revolution was too important, serious, and difficult to be monopolized by anyone, to be the private property of a single organization, even if that organization had interpreted Peruvian reality more correctly than the others. The revolution would be possible only if all revolutionaries, setting aside their quarrels, but without giving up their individual concepts, united in a concrete action against class enemies. Badly dressed, in his forties, sweaty, overexcited, blinking, he tried to sell them that marvelous toy which had changed his life and which—he was sure—could change theirs and that of the entire left: action, purifying, redemptive, absolute action. Action would file away the rough spots, the rivalries, the byzantine differences; it would abolish the enmities born out of egoism and the cult of personality; it would sweep away the groups and factions in an unquenchable current that would carry along all revolutionaries, comrades.

  That’s why I went to talk to Blacquer. Not to reveal any key information to him: I mentioned no names, no dates, and not a single location. And I in no way compromised the RWP(T). The first thing I told Blacquer was that I was speaking only for myself and that any future agreements would have to be made party to party. I went to see him without requesting authorization, so I could save time, comrades. Wasn’t I on my way to Jauja? I went simply to notify them that the revolution was going to begin, so they could come to the proper conclusions, if, that is, they really were the revolutionaries and Marxists they said they were. So they would be ready to take part in the struggle. Because the reactionaries would defend themselves, would fight like cornered rats, and so as not to be bitten, we all had to form a common front … Did they listen to me until I finished? Did they make me shut up? Did they throw me out of the garage on Jirón Zorritos, kicking and insulting me?

  “They let him speak several times,” Blacquer assures me. “There was a lot of tension, and a lot of personal things came to the surface. Mayta and Joaquín almost started swinging at each other. And then, instead of killing him off once and for all, they picked him up off the floor where they’d left him like a dirty rag, and they gave him an out. A Trotskyite melodrama. I suppose that last meeting of the RWP(T) is going to be quite useful to you.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But I still don’t get it. Why do Moisés, Anatolio, Pallardi, and Joaquín absolutely deny that it ever took place? Their version of what happened shows discrepancies in many areas, but they all agree on this one point: Mayta’s resignation reached them by mail, he resigned on his own when he went to Jauja, once the RWP(T) decided not to participate in the uprising. Bad collective memory?”

  “Bad collective conscience,” Blacquer says in a low voice. “Mayta couldn’t have made up that meeting. He came to tell me all about it a few hours after it happened. It was the coup de grâce, and it must still trouble them. Because, as they started piling charge after charge on him, everything started coming out, even his Achilles’ heel. Can you imagine them being that cruel?”

  “What you really mean to say is that the end of the world is coming, buddy,” a confused patron exclaims. The girl is still laughing her dumb and happy laugh, and the beggar kids leave us in peace for a moment as they start kicking a can around among the pedestrians.

  “He actually told you about that?” I’m surprised. “It was a subject he never mentioned, not even to his best friends. Why did he come to you at that particular moment? I just don’t understand.”

  “At the beginning, I didn’t get it either, but now I think I do,” says Blacquer. “He was a revolutionary, one hundred percent, don’t forget. The RWP(T) had just thrown him out. Perhaps he thought that would make us reconsider our refusal. Maybe now we would take his plan seriously.”

  “As a matter of fact, we should have expelled him a long time ago,” affirms Comrade Joaquín. He turned to look at Mayta in such a way that I thought: Why does he hate me? “I’m going to tell you what I think without pulling any punches, as a Marxist and as a revolutionary. I’m not surprised at what you have done, not about the plot, not about having secretly talked with that Stalinist policeman Blacquer. You can’t do anything straight, because you aren’t straight, you’re just not a man, Mayta.”

  “Let’s keep personal differences out of this,” the secretary general interrupted him.

  What Joaquín said took him so by surprise that Mayta couldn’t say a word. All I could do was shrink back. Why did it surprise me so much? Wasn’t it something that was always in the back of my mind, something I always feared would come up in debates, a quick low blow that would lay me out and keep me on my back for the rest of the discussion? With a cramp in every part of his body, he leaned back on the pile of newspapers. I felt a hot wave roll over me and in despair I thought: Anatolio is going to stand up and confess that we slept together last night. What was Anatolio going to say? What was he going to do?

  “It isn’t a personal difference, because it’s directly related to what’s happened,” replied Comrade Joaquín. Even with all my fear and perturbation, Mayta knew that Joaquín really did hate him. What did I ever do to him that was so serious, so wounding to him that he would take this kind of revenge? “That way of doing things of his, complicated, capricious, that idea of going to see our worst enemy, is feminine, comrades. It’s a subject that’s never been brought up here out of consideration for Mayta, the very kind of consideration he didn’t have for us. Is it possible to be a loyal revolutionary and a homosexual at the same time? That’s the real question we’ve got to decide, comrades.”

  Why does he say homosexual and not fag? I thought absurdly. Isn’t fag the right word? Recovering, he raised his hand, signaling to Comrade Jacinto that he wanted to speak.

  “Are you sure that it was Mayta himself who told them he’d gone to see you?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Blacquer nods. “He thought he had done the right thing. He wanted to have a motion approved. That once the three who had to go went up to Jauja, the ones who stayed in Lima would again try to set up an agreement with us. It was his biggest mistake. For the Trots, who couldn’t figure out how they were going to get out of the Jauja operation—which they never believed in, and which they thought Mayta had dragged them into—this was the perfect pretext. They could get rid of Jauja and Mayta all in one shot. Which meant splitting up even more. That’s always been the Trots’ favorite sport: purges, divisions, fractions, and expulsions.”

  He laughs, showing his nicotine-stained teeth.

  “Personal differences have nothing to do with it, and neither do sexual or family differences,” I answered, without taking my eyes off the back of Anatolio’s head, as he sat on one of the little milking stools, his eyes fixed on the floor. “And that’s why I’m not going to pay attention to that provocation. Because there’s only one way to respond to what you said, Joaquín.”

  “It’s against the rules to get personal. Threats are also against the rules.” The secretary general raised his voice.

  “Well, are you homosexual or not, Mayta?” he heard Comrade Joaquín say right to his face. I saw that his fists were clenched, that he was ready to defend himself or to attack. “At least be frank about your vice.”

  “Private conversations are not allowed,” insisted the secretary general. “And if you want to fight, go outside.”

  “You’re right, comrade,” said Mayta, looking at Jacinto Zevallos. “No conversations and no fights, nothing to distract us from our business. This argument isn’t about sex. We’ll take it up another time, if Comrade Joaquín thinks it’s so important. Let’s go back to our agenda. And I hope I won’t be interrupted, at least.”

  I’d recovered my self-control, and they actually did let me speak. But even as he spoke, he knew inside that it wasn’t going to be much use. They’d already decided, that’s right, behind my back, to wash their hands of the insurrection, and no amount of talk was going to change their minds. As he spoke, he never revealed his pessimis
m. I forcefully repeated all the reasons I’d already given them, which circumstance gave them, reasons that even now, despite reverses and objections, still seem irrefutable to me as I heard them spoken aloud.

  Didn’t the objective conditions exist? Weren’t the victims of latifundism, bossism, and capitalist and imperialist exploitation a revolutionary potential? If that is the case, then the revolutionary vanguard would create the subjective conditions by means of armed acts of propaganda, striking at the enemy in pedagogic operations that would mobilize the masses and gradually incorporate them into the action. Weren’t there lots of examples? Indochina, Algeria, Cuba—there they were, the proof that a determined vanguard could start the revolution. It was false to say that Jauja was a petit-bourgeois adventure. It was a well-planned action and it had its own small but sufficient infrastructure. It would be successful if all of us would do our jobs. It was also false to say that the RWP(T) was being dragged along in the operation: it would have ideological control over the revolution, Vallejos would only have military control. We would have to take a more liberal, more generous, more Marxist, and more Trotskyist point of view, comrades. We cannot afford sectarian squabbles. Here in Lima, you’re right, support is weak. That’s why we have to be open to support from other left groups, because the fight is going to be long, difficult, and …

  “There is a motion on the floor asking for Mayta’s expulsion, and that’s what we have to discuss,” remembered Comrade Pallardi.

  “Didn’t I make myself clear when I said we shouldn’t see each other ever again?” said Blacquer, closing the door of his house.

  “It’s a long story,” replied Mayta. “I can’t compromise you anymore. Because I came to speak to you, I’ve been expelled from the RWP(T).”

  “And because I spoke to him, my party expelled me,” Blacquer says in his bleak voice. “Ten years later.”

  “Your problems with the party came about because of those conversations?”