The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “I don’t have anything to hide, so I’ll tell you the way it was. The guy in charge of everything wasn’t Vallejos or the outsider but Ubilluz.” Don Ezequiel scratches the bumpy wattles on his throat with his black fingernails, and snorts. “He was responsible for what happened and what didn’t happen that morning. You’re wasting your time shooting the shit with anyone else. He’s the guy you want. That fuckup is the only one who knows just exactly what the fuck happened.”

  A radio turned up full blast and broadcasting in English drowns out his voice. It’s a station set up for the American Marines and pilots, who are using the Colegio San José as a headquarters.

  “There goes the radio station of the motherfucking gringos!” barks don Ezequiel, covering his ears.

  I tell him how surprised I am not to have seen Marines on the streets, that all the patrols around are Peruvian soldiers and national guardsmen.

  “The gringos must be sleeping it off or resting after screwing so much,” he bellows, enraged. “They’ve corrupted Jauja totally, even the nuns are prostitutes now. How could it be otherwise when they’ve got dollars and we’re dying of hunger? They say they even bring their water in by plane. It isn’t true that their money helps local commerce. Not a single one has ever come in here to buy anything. They only spend money on cocaine, you bet; they pay anything for cocaine. It’s a lie that they’ve come here to fight the communists. They’ve come to snort cocaine and screw Jauja girls. They even brought blacks with them, how the hell do you like that?”

  Even though I’m paying attention to don Ezequiel’s tantrum, I don’t forget about what Mayta was doing that early morning twenty-five years ago, in that Jauja free of revolutionaries and Marines, as he walked down the morning street Alfonso Ugarte, carrying his weapon in his suitcase. Was he worried that the truck was late? He must have been. Even though they knew that someone was bound to be late, this first problem—even before the plan went into effect—must have troubled him. As to the plan itself, I think I’ve figured it out fairly well, despite all the lies and fantasies surrounding it, up until the moment when, about eleven in the morning, the revolutionaries were to leave Jauja and head for the bridge at Molinos.

  From that point on, I get lost, because of the contradictions in the various accounts I’ve heard. I’m increasingly sure that only a small nucleus—perhaps only Vallejos and Ubilluz, maybe just those two and Mayta, perhaps only the lieutenant—knew everything they’d planned. The decision to keep the others ignorant of the entire plan hampered them terribly. What could Mayta have been thinking about on the last block of Alfonso Ugarte, when he saw on his left the adobe walls and the tile-covered eaves of the jail? That, to the right, behind the curtains in Ubilluz’s house, Shorty and the comrades from La Oroya, Casapalca, and Morocha, ensconced there since the night before or at least for some hours now, were perhaps watching him pass. Should he warn them that the truck hadn’t come? No, he should just follow orders. Besides, just from seeing him there alone, they would understand that the truck was held up. If it arrived in the next half hour, the Ricrán men would get into the fray. And if it didn’t, they would meet with them in Quero, where the latecomers were supposed to go.

  He reached the stone façade of the jail, and as the lieutenant had said, there was no guard. The rusty door opened and Vallejos appeared. Signaling him to be quiet, he took Mayta by the arm and brought him in, after checking to see if anyone was following him. With a gesture, he told him to go into the warden’s office. Then he disappeared. Mayta observed the entranceway with its columns, the door of the room in front, which had the word Guardroom on it, and the little patio with cherry trees, which had long, thin leaves and clusters of fruit. In the room where he stood, there was the national emblem, a blackboard, a desk, a chair, and a small window. Through the dirty glass, he could just make out the street. He stood there with the suitcase in his hands, not knowing what to do.

  Then Vallejos came back. “Just wanted to see if anyone noticed you come in,” he said in a low voice. “Didn’t the truck come?”

  “Seems not. I sent Feliciano to wait for it and to tell my group to be here at six-thirty. Will we need the Ricrán people?”

  “No problem,” said Vallejos. “Hide in here and wait. Don’t make a sound.”

  Mayta was reassured by the calm and sureness of the lieutenant. He was wearing fatigues, boots, and a black turtleneck sweater instead of his commando shirt. He went into the warden’s inner office, which seemed to him a kind of large closet with white walls. That cabinet must have been a weapons locker, they must put rifles in those niches over there. When he closed the door, he found himself in semi-darkness. He had to struggle to open the suitcase, because the lock jammed. He took out the sub-machine gun and put the ammunition clips in his pockets. As suddenly as it came alive, the radio fell silent. What had happened to the truck from Ricrán?

  “It had arrived very early at Santa Isabel, where it was supposed to go.” Don Ezequiel bursts into laughter, and it’s as if poison were pouring out of his eyes, mouth, and ears. “And when the thing at the jail began, it had already left. But not heading for Quero, where it was supposed to go, but for Lima. And not carrying communists or stolen weapons. No, sir. What was it carrying? Beans! As fucking crazy as it sounds. The revolution’s truck, just when the revolution was starting, went off to Lima with a shipment of beans. Why don’t you ask me whose beans they were?”

  “I’m not going to ask you, because you’re going to tell me they were Shorty Ubilluz’s beans,” I say.

  Don Ezequiel gives another one of his monstrous cackles. “Why don’t you ask me who was driving it?” He raises his dirty hands, and as if punching someone, he points to the plaza. “I saw him go by, I recognized that traitor. I saw him hanging on to the steering wheel, wearing a faggoty blue cap. I saw the sacks of beans. What the fuck is going on here? What do you think was going to happen—that damned son of a bitch was screwing Vallejos, the outsider, and me.”

  “Tell me just one thing more, and then I’ll leave you in peace, don Ezequiel. Why didn’t you go, too, that morning? Why did you stay so peacefully in your barbershop? Why didn’t you at least hide?”

  His fruit-like face contemplates me horribly for several seconds, in slow fury. I watch him pick his nose and tear at the skin on his neck. When he answers, he still feels the need to lie. “Why the hell should I hide when I had nothing to do with anything? What the hell for?”

  “Don Ezequiel, don Ezequiel,” I chide him. “Twenty-five years have gone by, Peru’s going down the drain, people are thinking only of saving themselves from a war that isn’t even being fought by Peruvians, you and I might be dead in the next raid or skirmish. Who cares anymore what happened that day? Tell me the truth, help me to end my story before this homicidal chaos our country has become eats both of us up. You were supposed to cut the telephone lines and hire some taxis, using a phony barbeque over in Molinos as a pretext. Don’t you remember what time you were supposed to be at the telephone company? Five minutes after they opened up. The taxis were going to wait at the corner of Alfonso Ugarte and La Mar, where Mayta’s group was going to commandeer them. But you didn’t hire the cabs, you didn’t go to the telephone company, and when the joeboy came to ask you what was going on, you told him: ‘Nothing’s going on, it’s all gone to hell, run to school and forget you even know who I am.’ That joeboy is Telésforo Salinas, director of physical education for this province, don Ezequiel.”

  “A pack of lies! More of Ubilluz’s slander!” he growls, purple with rage. “I knew nothing and I had no reason to hide or flee. Get out, go away, disappear. Stinking slanderer! Shiteating gossip!”

  Hidden in the semi-darkness, with the sub-machine gun in his hands, Mayta could hear nothing. Nor could he see anything, except two streaks of light where the planks of the door met. But he had no difficulty guessing that at that very instant Vallejos was going into the barracks of the fourteen guards and was waking them up with his thundering voice: Ate
eenshun! Rifle inspection! The officer in charge of the Huancayo armory had just told him he would be coming to hold an inspection early in the morning. Be careful, you’ve got to be fanatics about oiling both the outside and the bolts of the rifles. I don’t want anybody written up for a rusty piece. Second Lieutenant Vallejos didn’t want any more bad reports from the armory officer. The working weapons and the ammunition for each republican guard—ninety cartridges—would be taken to the guardroom. Fall in out in the patio! Now it would be his turn. The wheels were beginning to turn, the cogs were moving, this is action, this was it. Have the Ricrán guys gotten here yet? He looked through the cracks, waiting for the silhouettes of the guards carrying their Mausers and their bullets to the little room in front, one behind the other, and among them, Antolín Torres.

  He is a retired republican guard who lives on Manco Cápac Street, halfway between the jail and don Ezequiel’s store. To keep the ex-barber from taking a swing at me or from having a fit of apoplexy, I have to retreat. Sitting on a bench in Jauja’s majestic plaza—disfigured now by police barriers and barbed wire on the corners where the municipal building and the sub-prefecture are—I think about Antolín Torres. I talked to him this morning. He’s been a happy man ever since the Marines hired him as a guide and translator.

  He used to have a little farm, but the war ruined it. He was dying of hunger until the gringos came. His job is to accompany the patrols as they reconnoiter the area around Jauja. (His Spanish is as good as his Quechua.) He knows that his work may cost him his life. Many of the people in Jauja turn their backs on him, and the façade of his house is covered with graffiti: “Traitor” and “Condemned to Death by the Revolutionary Tribunal.”

  From what Antolín has told me and from don Ezequiel’s curses, I conclude that relations between the Marines and the locals are bad, awful. Even the people who oppose the insurgents resent these foreigners they can’t understand, who, above all, eat well, smoke, and suffer no privations—in a town where even the formerly rich experience dearth. A sixty-year-old with a bull neck and a huge stomach, an Ayacucho man from Cangallo who has lived most of his life in Jauja, Antolín Torres speaks a wonderful Spanish spiced with Quechuanisms. “People say the communists are going to kill me. Okay, but when they come to kill me they’re going to find a guy who eats well, drinks well, and smokes American cigarettes.” He’s a storyteller who knows how to achieve dramatic effects with pauses and exclamations. That day, twenty-five years ago, he went on duty at eight, when he was supposed to replace Huáscar Toledo on guard duty at the front door. Huáscar wasn’t in the sentry box but inside with the others, oiling his Mauser in preparation for the visit of the armory officer. Second Lieutenant Vallejos was hurrying them, and Antolín Torres suspected something.

  “But why, Mr. Torres? What was so strange about an arms inspection?”

  What was strange was that the lieutenant was walking around with his sub-machine gun on his shoulder. What reason could he have for being armed? And why did we have to leave our weapons in the guardroom? This is really strange, sergeant. Where does this stuff come from about separating a trooper from his rifle for an inspection? Don’t think so much, Antolín, it gets in the way of promotion, is what the sergeant said. I obeyed, I cleaned my Mauser, and I left it in the guardroom along with my ninety cartridges. Then I went to fall in in the patio. But I could smell something fishy. But not what happened later. I thought it was something to do with the prisoners. There were maybe fifty in the cells. An escape attempt, I don’t know what, but something.

  “Now.” Mayta pushed the door open. From being so long in one position, his legs were completely cramped. His heart pounded like a drum, and he was overwhelmed by a sensation of something final, irreversible, as he walked out into the patio with his oiled sub-machine gun. He took up a position in front of the judge’s office, facing the troops, and said, “Don’t force me to shoot. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  Vallejos had his sub-machine gun trained on his subordinates. The bleary eyes of the fourteen guards swung back and forth from him to the lieutenant, from the lieutenant back to him, without understanding: Are we awake or dreaming? Is this really happening, or is it a nightmare?

  “And then the lieutenant spoke, isn’t that a fact, Mr. Torres? Remember what he said?”

  “I don’t want to drag you in, but I’ve become a rebel, a revolutionary socialist.” Antolín Torres imitates him and acts out the scene, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. “If anyone wants to follow me of his own free will, let him come. I’m doing this for the sake of the poor, the suffering, and because our leaders have let us down. And you, pay sergeant, buy beer on Sunday for everyone, and take it out of my back pay.” “While the lieutenant was speaking, the other enemy, the one from Lima, had us covered with his sub-machine gun, blocking the way to the Mausers. They made fools of us. The commander punished us with two weeks’ confinement to barracks.”

  Mayta had heard Vallejos but hadn’t paid any attention to what he was saying because of his own excitement. “Like a machine, like a soldier.” The lieutenant herded the guards to their barracks, and they obeyed docilely, still not understanding. He saw that the lieutenant, after closing the door, bolted it. Then, with rapid, precise movements, his weapon in his left hand, he ran, with a large key in his other hand, to open a cell door. Were the Uchubamba men there? They had to have seen and heard what had just happened. On the other hand, the other prisoners, the ones in cells on the other side of the patio with its cherry trees, were too far away. From his position next to the guardroom, he saw two men come out behind Vallejos. There they were, yes, the comrades he until now only knew by name. Which one was Condori and which Zenón Gonzales? Before he could find out, an argument broke out with the younger of the two, a fair-skinned little guy with long hair. Even though Mayta had been told that the peasants from the eastern region usually had light skin and hair, he was shocked: the Indian agitators who had led the seizure of the Aína hacienda looked like two little gringos. One was wearing sandals.

  “Gonna chicken out now, motherfucker?” he heard Vallejos say, his face close to one of the men. “Now that things have begun, now that the fat’s in the fire, you want to mouse out?”

  “I’m not chickening out,” Zenón Gonzales said truculently, stepping back. “It’s that…it’s that…”

  “It’s that you’re yellow, Zenón,” Vallejos shouted. “Too bad for you. Get back to your cell. I hope they send you away for a long time. Rot in the Frontón, then. I don’t know why I don’t just shoot you like a dog, you son of a bitch.”

  “Wait up, hold it, let’s talk calmly without fighting,” said Condori, stepping between them. He was the one wearing sandals, and Mayta was happy to see someone who might be his own age. “Don’t go off the deep end, Vallejos. Let me talk to Zenón for a minute.”

  In three strides, the lieutenant was at Mayta’s side.

  “What a faggot,” he said, no longer furious as he was a moment before, but disillusioned. “Last night, he agreed. Now come the doubts—maybe it would be better to stay here, and later on we’ll see. That’s what you call fear, not doubt.”

  What doubts moved the young leader from Uchubamba to provoke this incident? Did he think, when the rebellion was about to begin, that perhaps there were too few of them? Did he doubt that he and Condori could drag the rest of the community into the uprising? Did he have an inkling of the defeat? Or, simply, did he hesitate when he thought that he would have to kill people and that someone might kill him?

  Condori and Gonzales whispered together. Mayta heard the odd word and sometimes saw them gesture. Once, Condori grabbed his comrade by the arm. He must have had some power over him, because Gonzales, even though complaining, remained respectful. A moment later, they came over.

  “Okay, Vallejos,” said Condori. “Everything’s okay now. No problem.”

  “Okay, Zenón.” Vallejos squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry I got mad. No hard feelings?”

  The
young man nodded. As he squeezed his hand, Vallejos said again, “No hard feelings. We’re doing this for Peru, Zenón.” Judging by his face, Gonzales seemed more resigned than convinced.

  Vallejos turned to Mayta. “Have the weapons loaded into the taxis. I’m going to talk to the prisoners.”

  He went off toward the cherry trees, and Mayta ran to the main entrance. Through the small window in the door, he looked out on the street. Instead of taxis, Ubilluz, and the miners from La Droya, he saw a small group of joeboys headed by the cadet commander, Cordero Espinoza.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked them. “Why aren’t you at your posts?”

  “We aren’t at our posts because everyone’s gone,” says Cordero Espinoza, with a yawn that warms his smile. “We got tired of waiting. We couldn’t be messengers for people who weren’t there. I was assigned the police station. I got there good and early, and no one else showed up. After a while, Hernando Huasasquiche came to tell me that Professor Ubilluz wasn’t at home or anywhere around here. And that he’d seen him driving his truck on the main road. A little later, we found out that the Ricrán people had just disappeared, the La Oroya men had either never come or had gone back. We got really scared! We got together in the plaza. We were all worried, just standing around waiting to go to school. We’d been fooled, the whole thing was some kind of phony story. Right then, Felicio Tapia turned up. He told us that the guy from Lima had gone to the jail after being stood up by the Ricrán men. So we went to the jail to see what was happening. Vallejos and Mayta had locked up the guards, captured the rifles, and freed Condori and Gonzales. Can you imagine anything as ridiculous as that?”

  Dr. Cordero Espinoza is certainly right. What else could you say but that it was ridiculous? They take over the jail, they’ve got fourteen rifles and twelve hundred cartridges. But there aren’t any revolutionaries, because not one of the thirty or forty conspirators turned up. Was that what Mayta thought when he peered through the window and found only seven boys in uniform?