The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “I don’t really know why, but that’s what I’ve been doing all this year,” I say to him quickly, afraid of his fear, afraid he’ll refuse to talk to me now or ever again. I try to explain: In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events. This investigation, these interviews, I didn’t do it all so I could relate what really happened in Jauja, but so I could lie and know what I’m lying about.

  I realize that, instead of calming him down, I’m confusing and alarming him. He blinks and stands there with his mouth open, mute.

  “Now I know who you are. You’re the writer.” Now he’s out of the difficulty. “Sure, I recognized you. I even read one of your novels, at least I think so, years back.”

  Just then, three sweaty boys come in from some game, judging by the equipment they’re carrying. They order ice cream and sodas. While Mayta takes care of them, I observe how he handles himself in the ice-cream parlor. He opens the freezer, fills the ice-cream dishes, opens the bottles, reaches for the glasses with an ease and familiarity that reflect a lot of practice. I try to imagine him in building 4 in Lurigancho, serving fruit juice, packages of cookies, cups of coffee, selling cigarettes to the other convicts, every morning, every afternoon, over the course of ten years. Physically, he doesn’t seem worn down; he’s a tough-looking guy, and carries his sixty-plus years with dignity. After settling the bill of the three athletes, he comes back to me, with a forced smile on his face.

  “Damn,” he says. “That’s the last thing I’d ever imagine. A novel?”

  And he moves his head incredulously from right to left and left to right.

  “Naturally, your real name never appears even once,” I assure him. “Of course I’ve changed dates, places, characters, I’ve created complications, added and taken away thousands of things. Besides, I’ve invented an apocalyptic Peru, devastated by war, terrorism, and foreign intervention. Of course, no one will recognize anything, and everyone will think it’s pure fantasy. I’ve pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends.

  “Of course,” he says, as if he were spelling it out, scrutinizing me with doubt, deciphering me bit by bit.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” I add. “Ask you a few questions, clear up a couple of points. Only what you want to tell me or feel you can tell me, naturally. I’ve got a lot of puzzles bouncing around in my head. Besides, this conversation is my final chapter. You can’t refuse me now, it would be like taking a cake out of the oven too soon—the novel would fall apart.”

  I laugh, and so does he, and we hear the three boys laughing. But they’re laughing at a joke one of them has just told. And then a woman comes in and asks for a quart, half pistachio and half chocolate. After handing her the ice cream, Mayta comes back to me.

  “Two or three years ago, some of the guys from Revolutionary Vanguard came to see me in Lurigancho,” he says. “They wanted to know all about Jauja, a written account. But I wouldn’t do it.”

  “I don’t want anything like that,” I say. “My interest isn’t political but literary, that is …”

  “Yes, I see,” he interrupts me, raising a hand. “Okay, I’ll give you one evening. No more, because I don’t have much time, and, to tell you the truth, I don’t like talking about that stuff. How about next Tuesday? It’s better for me, because on Wednesday I don’t start here until eleven, so I can stay up late the night before. All the other days, I have to leave home at six, because I have to take three buses to get here.”

  We agree that I’ll pick him up when he finishes work, after eight. Just as I’m leaving, he calls me back. “Have an ice-cream cone, on the house. So you see how good our ice cream is. Maybe you’ll become a regular customer.”

  Before I go back to Barranco, I take a little walk around the neighborhood, mentally trying to put things in their proper order. I stop for a while under the balconies of the house where that superlative beauty Flora Flores lived. She had long, chestnut-colored hair, slender legs, and violet eyes. Whenever she came to the rocky beach at Miraflores, wearing her black bathing suit, the morning would fill with light, the sun would glow hotter, the waves roll more joyously. I remember that she married a pilot and only a few months later he crashed into a peak in the Cordillera, between Lima and Tingo María. Years later, someone told me that Flora had remarried and was living in Miami. I go up to Avenida Grau. Right on this corner, there was a gang of boys with whom we—the Diego Ferré and Colón boys, from the other end of Miraflores—would have hard-fought soccer matches at the Terrazas Club. I remember how anxiously I’d wait for those matches when I was a kid, and how terribly frustrating it was when I was only on the second team. When I get back to the car, half an hour later, I’ve partially recovered from my meeting with Mayta.

  The incident that caused him to be sent back to Lurigancho, the reason he spent the past ten years there, is well documented in newspapers and judicial archives. It occurred in Magdalena Vieja, not far from the Anthropological Museum, at sunrise one January day in 1973. The president of the Pueblo Libre branch of the Banco de Crédito was watering his patio—he did it every morning before getting dressed—when the doorbell rang. He thought it was the milkman, coming by earlier than usual. At the door there were four men, their faces covered with ski masks and their pistols pointing straight at him. They went with him to his wife’s room. They tied her up in her own bed. Then—they seemed to know the place well—they went into his only daughter’s bedroom. (She was nineteen years old, studying to become a travel agent.) They waited until the girl got dressed and told the gentleman that, if he wanted to see her again, he should pack fifty million soles into an attaché case and bring it to Los Garifos Park, near the National Stadium. They disappeared with the girl in a taxi they’d stolen the night before.

  Mr. Fuentes reported everything to the police and, following their instructions, carried an attaché case stuffed with paper to the Los Garifos Park. There were plainclothesmen stationed all around it. No one approached him, and Mr. Fuentes received no communication for three days. Just when he and his wife were getting desperate, there was a second telephone call: the kidnappers knew that he had called the police. They would, however, give him one last chance. He was to bring the money to a corner of Avenida Aviación. Mr. Fuentes explained that he couldn’t get fifty million soles, that the bank would never give him that kind of money, but he would give them his life savings, some five million. The kidnappers insisted: fifty million or they’d kill her.

  Mr. Fuentes helped himself to some money, signed notes, and succeeded in getting together nine million, which he brought that night to the place the kidnappers had indicated—this time, without telling the police. A car skidded to a halt, and the person on the passenger side grabbed the attaché case, without saying a word. The girl turned up some hours later at her parents’ home. She had taken a taxi at Avenida Colonial, where her captors had left her. They’d held her for three days, blindfolded and partially chloroformed. She was so distraught that she had to be taken to the Hospital del Empleado. A few days later, she walked out of the room she was sharing with a woman just operated on for appendicitis, and, without saying a word, jumped out of a window.

  The newspapers sensationalized the girl’s suicide and fanned public opinion. A few days later, the police announced that they had captured the head of the group—Mayta—and that his accomplices would be captured momentarily. According to the police, Mayta admitted his guilt and gave all the details. His accomplices and the money vanished. At the trial, Mayta denied he had ever taken part in the kidnapping, denied he had even known about it, and insisted that he was tortured into making a false confession.

  The trial lasted several months, and at the outset it got a lot of attention in the papers. But that quickly faded. Mayta was sentenced to fifteen years: the court found him guilty of kidnapping, criminal extortion, and complicity in a homicide. He swore he was innocent. That on the day of the kidnapping he was in Pa
casmayo looking into a possible job, as he said again and again, but he could provide no witnesses, no proof. The testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Fuentes was especially damning. Both were sure that Mayta’s voice and physical appearance were those of one of the men in ski masks. Mayta’s lawyer, an obscure shyster whose performance during the entire trial was awkward and halting, appealed. The Supreme Court upheld the original sentence two years later. The fact that Mayta was set free after serving two-thirds of his time certainly corroborates what Mr. Carrillo told me at Lurigancho: that his behavior during those years was exemplary.

  On Tuesday, at 8 p.m., when I drive over to pick him up at the ice-cream parlor, Mayta is waiting for me, carrying an airline bag, which probably contains the clothing he wears at work. He’s just washed his face and combed that wild hair of his; a few drops of water run down his neck. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt, a faded, much darned checked jacket, wrinkled khaki trousers, and heavy shoes, the kind used for hiking. Is he hungry? Shall we go to a restaurant? He says he never eats at night and that it would be better if we were just to look for a quiet place. A few minutes later, we’re in my study, face to face, drinking soda. He doesn’t want beer or anything alcoholic. He tells me he gave up smoking and drinking years ago.

  The beginning of the chat is rather sad. I ask him about the Salesian School. He did study there, correct? Yes. He hasn’t seen any of his schoolmates for ages, and knows only the slightest bit about a few of them, professional men, businessmen, or politicians—the ones whose names appear in the papers. And nothing about the priests, although, he tells me, just a few days ago he ran into Father Luis on the street. The one who taught the youngest students. A little old man, almost blind, bent over, dragging his feet, propelling himself along with a broomstick. He told Mayta that he was in the habit of taking his little strolls on Avenida Brazil, and that he had recognized him, but Mayta smiles; of course he had no idea to whom he was speaking. He must be a hundred years old.

  When I show him the material I’ve gathered about him and the Jauja adventure—articles clipped out of newspapers, photocopies of reports, photographs, maps with routes traced on them, cards on the participants and on witnesses, notebooks with data and interviews—I see him sniff, look through it, and handle it, an expression of stupor and embarrassment on his face. Several times, he gets up to go to the bathroom. He has a problem with his kidneys, he explains, and constantly feels like urinating, although most of the time it’s a false alarm and there are only a few drops.

  “On the bus, at home, at the ice-cream parlor, it’s a real pain. It’s a two-hour commute, I told you already. I just can’t make it all the way, no matter how much I pee before I get on. Sometimes there’s nothing I can do except wet my pants like a baby.”

  “Were the years in Lurigancho tough?” I stupidly ask.

  Disconcerted, he stares at me. There is total silence outside on the Malecón de Barranco. You can’t even hear the surf.

  “Well, you don’t live like a prince,” he answers after a bit, shamefaced. “It’s hard, especially at the beginning. But you can get used to anything, don’t you think?”

  Finally, something that jibes with the Mayta of the witness accounts: that modesty, that reticence when it comes to speaking about his personal problems or revealing his inner feelings. What he never did get used to was the National Guard, he soon admits. He hadn’t known what hate was until he discovered the feeling they inspired in the prisoners. Hatred mixed with absolute and total terror, of course. Because when they come through the wire fences to stop a riot or break up a strike, they always do it by shooting and beating, no matter who gets it, the righteous and the sinners.

  “It was at the end of last year, wasn’t it?” I say. “When there was that massacre.”

  “December 31,” he says, nodding. “A hundred or so came in to celebrate New Year’s Eve. They wanted to have some fun, to bring in the New Year with a bang, as they said. They were all stinking drunk.”

  It was around 10 p.m. They emptied their rifles from the doors and windows of the cell blocks. They stole all the money, liquor, marijuana, and coke they could find in the prison, and until dawn they went on having fun, shooting, beating the prisoners with their rifle butts, making them hop around like frogs, making them run the gauntlet, or just kicking in their teeth.

  “The official figures list thirty-five dead,” he says. “Actually, they killed at least twice that many, even more. The newspapers said later that they’d thwarted an escape attempt.”

  He makes a gesture of fatigue and his voice becomes a murmur. The convicts piled up on top of each other, like a rugby scrum, mountains of bodies, for self-protection. But that isn’t his worst prison memory. The worst was probably the first months, when he was brought from Lurigancho to the Palacio de Justicia for prosecution, in one of those crowded paddy wagons with metal walls. The prisoners had to ride hunched down, with their heads touching the floor. If they raised their heads even slightly to try to sneak a look out the window, they were savagely beaten. The same thing on the return trip: to get back on the wagon from the lockup, they had to run the gauntlet, a double line of National Guards. They had to decide whether to protect their heads or their testicles, because all along the route they were hit with billy clubs, kicked, and spit on. He remains pensive—he’s just returned from the bathroom—and he adds, without looking at me: “When I read that one of them’s been killed, I feel really happy.”

  He says it with a quick and profound resentment that disappears a second later when I ask him about the other Mayta, that curly-headed, skinny guy who shook in that odd way.

  “He’s just a sneak thief whose brain has melted away from cocaine,” he says. “He won’t last long.”

  His voice and his expression sweeten when he talks about the food kiosk he ran with Arispe in building 4. “We created a genuine revolution,” he assures me with pride. “We won the respect of the whole place. We boiled the water for making fruit juice, for coffee, for everything. We washed the knives, forks, and spoons, the glasses, and the plates before and after they were used. Hygiene, above all. A revolution, you bet. We organized a system of rebate coupons. You might not believe me, but they only tried to rob us once. I took a gash right here on my leg, but they didn’t get a thing. We even set up a kind of bank, because a lot of cons gave us their money for safekeeping.”

  It’s clear that for some reason he’s really reluctant to speak of the thing that interests me the most: Jauja. Every time I try to bring it up, he starts to talk about it, and then, very quickly, inevitably, he switches to some current topic. For example, his family. He tells me he got married in the time he was free between his last two terms in Lurigancho, but that he actually met his wife in jail, the time before. She would come to visit her brother, and he introduced her to Mayta. They wrote each other, and when he was released, they got married. They have four children, three boys and a girl. It was really hard on his wife when he was imprisoned again. During the first years, she had to practically kill herself to feed the kids, until finally he could help her, thanks to the kiosk. During those first years, his wife knitted, and peddled her work from door to door. He also tried to sell her knitting—there was some demand for sweaters—in Lurigancho.

  As I listen, I study him. My first impression—that he is well-conserved, healthy, and strong—is false. His health can’t be good. Not only because of that problem with his kidneys that makes him go to the bathroom every other minute. He perspires a great deal; at times he chokes up, as if he were overcome by waves of vertigo. He dries his forehead with his handkerchief and sometimes, in the middle of a spasm, he can’t speak. Does he feel ill? Should we stop the interview? No, he’s fine, let’s keep going.

  “It seems to me that you don’t want to talk about Vallejos and Jauja,” I say, point-blank. “Does it bother you because it was such a failure? Because of how it affected the rest of your life?”

  He shakes his head.

  “It bothers me because I
realize that you know more about it than I do.” He smiles. “Yes, no joke. I’ve forgotten lots of things, and I’m mixed up about lots of others. I’d really like to help you out and tell you about it. But the problem is that I don’t know all that happened or even how it happened. It’s a long time ago, don’t forget.”

  Is he just talking, is it a pose? No. His memories are hesitant, sometimes erroneous. I have to correct him every few minutes. I’m shocked, because this whole year I’ve been obsessed with the subject, and I naïvely supposed the major actor in it would be too, and that his memory would still go on scratching away at what happened in those few hours a quarter century ago. Why should it be that way? All that, for Mayta, was one episode in a life in which, before and after, there were many other episodes, as important, or even more so. It’s only normal that these other events would replace or blur Jauja.

  “There is one thing, above all others, that I just can’t understand,” I say to him. “Was there a betrayal? Why did the people who were involved just disappear? Did Professor Ubilluz countermand the orders? Why did he do it? Fear? Because he didn’t believe in the project? Or was it Vallejos, as Ubilluz declares, who moved the date of the uprising forward?”

  Mayta reflects for a few seconds in silence. He shrugs his shoulders. “That part never was clear and never will be,” he says in a low voice. “That day, it looked like betrayal to me. Later it got even more complicated. Because I hadn’t known beforehand the date they’d set for the revolt. Only Vallejos and Ubilluz knew it, for security reasons. Ubilluz has always said that the date they’d agreed on was four days later, and that Vallejos moved it forward when he found out he was going to be transferred, because of an incident he’d been involved in with the APRA people two days earlier.”

  That there was such an incident is true; it’s documented in a small Jauja newspaper. There was an APRA demonstration in the Plaza de Armas in honor of Haya de la Torre, who made a speech in the atrium of the cathedral. Vallejos, in civilian clothes, Shorty Ubilluz, and a small group of friends stationed themselves at one corner of the plaza, and when the entourage passed by, they pelted them with rotten eggs. The APRISTA toughs scattered them. Vallejos, Ubilluz, and the others tried to fight back, and then they took refuge in Ezequiel’s barbershop. That’s all we know for sure. Ubilluz and other people in Jauja assert that Vallejos was recognized by the APRA people and that they noisily protested the participation of the head of the prison, an officer on active duty, in action directed against an authorized political meeting. Vallejos was told that because he took part in the demonstration he was going to be transferred. They say he received an urgent message from his immediate superior in Huancayo. That’s what probably pushed him into moving the rebellion up four days, without telling the others about it. Ubilluz swears he only found out what happened when the lieutenant was dead and the other rebels were in jail.