The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  My car moves forward slowly, and I realize that unconsciously I’ve taken my foot off the accelerator, I’m trying to postpone my second visit to Lurigancho as long as possible. Am I frightened by the thought of finally facing the character I’ve been investigating, about whom I’ve been questioning people, whom I’ve been imagining and writing about for a year? Or is my repugnance for this place stronger than my curiosity about Mayta? At the end of my first visit; I thought: It isn’t true that the convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around. Kennels, chickenhouses, and stables are more hygienic than Lurigancho.

  Between the buildings runs what is sarcastically called Jirón de la Unión, a narrow, crowded alley, dark by day and totally black at night. It’s there that the bloodiest fights between gangs and between individual killers take place, and where the pimps peddle their living goods. I remember clearly walking through this nightmare, rubbing elbows with that pitiful, almost sleepwalking fauna: half-naked blacks, half-breeds covered with tattoos, mulattoes with intricate hairdos—veritable jungles cascading down to their waists—and stupefied, bearded whites, foreigners with blue eyes and with scars, squalid Chinese, Indians huddled against the wall, and madmen talking to themselves. I know that for years Mayta has been running a kiosk where he sells things to eat and drink in Jirón de la Unión. But no matter how hard I try to remember, I just can’t seem to evoke the image of a food stand in the sultry alleyway. Was I so upset that I didn’t realize what it was? Or was the “kiosk” nothing more than a blanket on the ground where Mayta, hunkered down, offered juice, fruit, cigarettes, sodas?

  To reach building 2, I had to circle the uneven cell blocks and cross two wire fences. The warden, leaving me at the first fence, told me I was on my own now; not even the National Guard enters that sector, or anyone else carrying firearms. As soon as I passed through the fence, I was surrounded by a multitude waving their arms, all speaking at the same time. The delegation that had invited me formed a circle around me then, and that’s how we made our way: me in the center of a ring of men, and outside the ring, a mass of criminals. The convicts must have mistaken me for some official or other, because they began to spout out their case histories, rave, protest abuses, shout, and demand services. Some were coherent, but the majority were chaotic. They all seemed on edge, violent, not quite in focus mentally. As we walked, I discovered the source of the solid stench and the clouds of flies: a wall about a yard high, where all the garbage from the jail must have been accumulating for months, even years. A naked inmate was sleeping soundly, stretched out on the trash. He was one of the insane, normally assigned to the less dangerous buildings, the odd-numbered ones. I remember having said to myself after that first visit that the really strange thing was not that there were madmen in Lurigancho but that there were so few. It was incredible that all six thousand inmates hadn’t gone crazy in that abject ignominy. And what if, after all these years, Mayta had gone mad?

  He was sent back to prison twice after having served four years for the Jauja affair, the first time seven months after being amnestied. It’s extremely difficult to reconstruct his story—his police and prison history—after that, because, unlike the Jauja business, there are almost no written documents relating to the actions he was accused of participating in and no witnesses willing to talk about them. The newspaper accounts I’ve been able to find in the periodical section of the National Library are so sketchy that it’s practically impossible to figure out his role in the robberies in which he was supposed to have participated. It’s also impossible to determine whether they were political actions or just ordinary crimes. Knowing Mayta, you’d think they were probably political, but, after all, what does it mean to say “knowing Mayta”? The Mayta I’ve been researching was in his forties. The Mayta of today is over sixty. Is he the same man?

  In which cell block in Lurigancho could he have been spending these last ten years? Four, six, eight? They must all be more or less like the one I saw: low-ceilinged places with faint light (when there isn’t a blackout), cold and humid, with large windows covered with rusty bars, and a hole in the floor for sanitary purposes. To find a place to sleep amid all that excrement, vermin, and filth is a daily war. During the ceremony for the library—a painted box and a few secondhand books—I saw several drunks staggering around. When they passed around little cans so we could drink a toast, I found out that they get drunk on a chicha they make from fermented yuca. Unbelievably strong stuff, made right in the prison. Would my supposed fellow student also get drunk on that chicha when he’s feeling too high or too low?

  The event that sent Mayta back to prison after the Jauja affair, twenty-one years ago, took place in La Victoria, near the street that was the shame of the neighborhood—Jirón Huatica, which literally crawled with prostitutes. Three gangsters, according to La Crónica, the only newspaper to write it up, seized a garage where Teodoro Ruiz Candia had an auto-repair shop. When he came to open up at eight in the morning, he found three armed men waiting for him. They also captured Ruiz Candia’s assistant, Eliseno Carabías López. The objective of these criminals was the Banco Popular. At the rear of the garage, there was a window that opened onto a lot; the rear door of the Banco Popular opened onto the same lot. Every day at noon, a van went into the lot, to take away the day’s deposits, to bring them to the Central Bank, or to deliver money to the branch for the day’s transactions. Until noon, the thieves remained in the shop with their two prisoners. They looked out through the window and smoked. Though they wore masks, the owner and his assistant swore one of them was Mayta. They also said it was he who gave the orders.

  When they heard a car motor, they jumped out the window into the lot. Actually, no shots were fired. The thieves surprised the driver and the guard and disarmed them both, just after the bank employees had placed a sealed sack containing three million soles in the van. After forcing the driver and the guard to lie face down on the ground, one of the gangsters opened the gates of the lot that led to Avenida 28 de Julio. Then he ran back to the bank van, where his other two accomplices were waiting with the loot. They sped out. Because of nerves or careless driving, the van ran over a man sharpening knives, and then smashed against a taxi. According to La Crónica, the van turned over twice and came to rest upside down. But the thieves managed to get out and run away. Mayta was captured some hours later. The article does not say whether the money was recovered, and I haven’t been able to find out if the other two were ever caught.

  And I haven’t been able to find out if Mayta was ever sentenced for the robbery. A police report I was able to pull from the archives of the La Victoria precinct house more or less repeats the same information as the article in La Crónica (although the humidity has ruined the paper to such an extent that it’s difficult to make it out). There is no sign of a prosecutor’s report. In the files at the Ministry of Justice, where statistics on crime and data on criminals are stored, the event shows up most ambiguously in Mayta’s file. There is a date—April 16, 1963—when he must have been sent from the police station to prison, followed by the note “Attempted robbery of branch bank, people wounded and beaten, also forced detention, traffic accident, and attack on pedestrian,” and, finally, a reference to the court handling the matter. Nothing else. It’s possible that the prosecution was slow, that the judge died or lost his job, and that the whole case remained stuck where it was, or simply that the file was lost.

  How many years did Mayta spend in Lurigancho for that? I couldn’t find that out, either. I found a registry note for his entering prison, but none for his having left. That’s another thing I’d like to ask him about. In any case, I lost track of him ten years ago when he went back to jail a second time after Jauja. On that occasion, he had a proper trial and was sentenced to fifteen years for “extortion, kidnapping, and robbery leading to the loss of life.” If the dates on the file are correct, he’s been in Lurigancho for just under eleven years.

  I’ve finally arrived. I go through the usual ri
tual. The National Guards frisk me from head to toe, and I turn in all my identification papers, which will remain at the guardhouse until my visit ends. The warden has left orders that I am to be sent to his office. An aide in civilian clothes brings me here, after crossing a patio outside the wire fences. From here, you can see the entire prison. This is the best-maintained area, the least sordid in the place.

  The warden’s office is on the second floor of a cold and crumbling building made of reinforced concrete. The office itself is tiny and contains a metal desk and a couple of chairs. The walls are completely bare, and there isn’t even a pencil or piece of paper on the desk. This warden is not the one who was here five years ago, but a younger man. He knows why I’m here and orders the guards to bring the criminal I want to speak to. He will lend me his office for the interview, since it is the only place where no one will bother us. “You’ve probably seen that here in Lurigancho there isn’t an inch of space, because of overcrowding.”

  While we wait, he adds that things never work right, no matter how hard they try. Now, for example, the convicts are all riled up and are threatening a hunger strike because they think their visiting rights are being cut. It’s just not true, he assures me. It’s simply that, in order to keep tabs on the visits, the usual way drugs, alcohol, and weapons are smuggled in, he’s set visits for the women on one day and for the men the next. That way, there will be fewer people each day, and each visitor can be searched more thoroughly. If they at least could cut down on the cocaine, they would keep a lot of people from getting killed. Because of cocaine, they fight it out with knives. More than because of alcohol, money, or queers, it’s the drugs. But until now it’s been impossible to keep it out. Don’t the guards sell drugs, too? He looks at me as if to say, “Why ask what you already know?”

  “You can’t stop it. No matter what control systems we devise, they always beat them. Look, by just sneaking in a few grams of coke, just once, a guard doubles his monthly salary. Do you know how much they make? So there’s nothing surprising about it. People talk a lot about ‘the Lurigancho problem.’ This place isn’t the problem. The whole country’s the problem.”

  He says it without bitterness, as if it were a fact I should be aware of. He seems earnest and well-intentioned. I certainly don’t envy him his job. A knock at the door interrupts us.

  “I’ll leave you with the prisoner,” he says, going to the door. “Take all the time you need.”

  The person who enters the office is a skinny little guy with curly white hair and a scraggly beard, who is trembling all over. He’s wearing an overcoat that’s much too big for him. He’s got on worn-out sneakers, and his frightened eyes jump around in his head. Why is he shaking like that? Is he sick, or frightened? I can’t say a word. How can this be Mayta? He doesn’t look even slightly like the Mayta in the photos. That Mayta would be twenty years younger than this guy.

  “I wanted to talk with Alejandro Mayta,” I stammer.

  “That’s me,” he answers in a tremulous voice. His hands, his skin, even his hair seem vexed with disquiet.

  “You’re the Mayta of the Jauja business with Lieutenant Vallejos?” I hesitatingly ask.

  “No, I’m not that one,” he blurts out, realizing what’s going on. “He’s not here anymore.”

  He seems relieved, as if being brought to the warden’s office entailed some danger which has just vanished. He turns halfway around and bangs on the door until it opens and the warden appears with two men. Still shaking, the curly-headed old man explains that there’s been a mistake, that I’m looking for the other Mayta. He walks out in a hurry on his silent sneakers, shaking constantly.

  “Know which one he’s talking about, Carrillo?” the warden asks one of his assistants.

  “Sure, sure,” says a fat man, his gray hair in a crew cut and his belly slopping over his belt. “The other Mayta. Wasn’t that one mixed up in politics?”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s the one I’m looking for.”

  “You just missed him, as you might say,” he quickly explains. “He got out last month.”

  I think I’ve lost him and that I’ll never find him and that maybe it’s better that way. It could be that, instead of helping me, a meeting with the flesh-and-blood Mayta would undo everything I’ve accomplished so far. Don’t you know where he’s gone? No one has an address where he might be found? They don’t, and have no idea where he might be. I tell the warden not to bother coming with me, and as we go downstairs, I ask him if he remembers Mayta. Of course he does; he’s been here as long as the oldest convict. He came in as a simple office boy, and now he’s vice warden of the whole penitentiary. He’s seen God only knows what things!

  “A very correct, easygoing prisoner, never got into any trouble,” he says. “Ran a food kiosk in building 4. Hardworking guy. He managed to support his family while serving his sentence. He was here at least ten years the last time.”

  “His family?”

  “Wife and four kids,” he adds. “She came to see him once a week. I remember Mayta very well. Walked as if he were walking on eggs, right?”

  We’re crossing the patio, between the wire fences, heading toward the guardhouse, when the vice warden stops. “Hold it. Arispe may have his address. He inherited the food kiosk. I think they’re still partners, even now. I’ll have him brought down, maybe you’ll be lucky.”

  Carrillo and I remain in the patio, standing in front of the wire fences. To kill time, I ask him about Lurigancho and he, like the warden, says that there are always problems here. “Because here we’ve got, and I really mean it, the bad ones, people who seem to have been born for the express purpose of doing indescribable things to their fellow man.” Off in the distance, breaking the symmetry of the buildings, stands the one reserved for fags. Do they still lock them up there? Yes. Not that it’s of any real use; despite the walls and the bars, the other prisoners get in and the fags get out. Business as usual. Anyway, since they’ve got their own building, there are fewer problems. Before, when they were mixed in with the others, the fights and murders they’d cause were much worse.

  I remember, from my first visit, a short talk I had with one of the prison doctors about the rapes of incoming prisoners. “The most common problem is infections of the rectum, complicated by gangrene or cancer.” I ask Carrillo if there are still as many rapes. He laughs. “It’s inevitable, with people who have nothing else, don’t you think? They have to let go somehow.” Finally, the prisoner the warden had called down appears. I explain that I’m looking for Mayta, does he know where I might find him?

  He’s a respectable-looking guy, dressed relatively well. He listens without asking any questions. But I see that he has doubts, and I’m sure he’s not going to tell me anything. I ask him to give Mayta my telephone number the next time he sees him.

  Suddenly he decides. “He works in an ice-cream parlor,” he says. “In Miraflores.”

  It’s a small ice-cream parlor which has been there for many years. It’s on Bolognesi Street, a street I know very well because when I was a kid I knew a beautiful girl who lived there. She had the improbable name of Flora Flores. I’m sure the ice-cream parlor was there then and that I went in with the beautiful Flora Flores to have a sundae. It’s an unusual place for a street where there are no stores, only the typical Miraflores houses: two stories, front lawn, the inevitable geraniums, bougainvillea, and poincianas with big red flowers. I have an attack of nerves as I turn off the Malecón onto Bolognesi. Yes, it’s exactly where I remember it, a few steps away from that gray house with balconies, where Flora’s sweet face and incandescent eyes would appear. I park a short distance from the ice-cream parlor, but I can barely get the key out of the ignition, because I’ve suddenly become jittery.

  “Alejandro Mayta,” I say, stretching out my hand. “Right?”

  He looks at me for a few seconds and smiles, opening a mouth not overpopulated with teeth. He blinks, trying to remember me. Finally, he gives up.

  �
�I’m sorry, but I can’t place you,” he says. “I thought you might be Santos, but you aren’t Santos, right?”

  “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I say, leaning on the counter. “You’re going to be surprised,” I warn him. “Just now, I’ve come from Lurigancho. The guy who told me how to find you was your partner in building 4—Arispe.”

  I study him carefully, to see how he reacts. He seems neither surprised nor upset. He looks at me with curiosity, the hint of a smile still on his dark face. He’s wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I see hands that are rough, the rough hands of a porter or a day laborer. What I notice most is his absurd haircut. Someone has really chopped him up: his head looks like a mop, laughable. He makes me remember my first year in Paris, when I was really poor, and a friend of mine and I would get our hair cut at a school for barbers, near the Bastille. The students, just kids, would cut our hair for free, but they would leave us looking like my invented classmate. He looks at me, squinting up his dark, tired eyes—crow’s-feet at each end—with distrust growing in them.

  “I’ve been investigating you for a year now, talking with the people who knew you,” I say. “Imagining you, even dreaming about you. Because I’ve written a novel that in a remote way deals with the Jauja business.”

  He looks at me without saying a word, quite surprised now, not understanding, not sure he’s heard correctly, but very jumpy.

  “But …” he stammers. “Why would you even bother, how can it be …”