The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “At first, I didn’t believe it. I thought they’d chickened out,” says Mayta. “Later on, I just didn’t know. Because, months or years later, some of the people originally involved ended up in the Sexto, the Frontón. They were jailed for other reasons—union or political stuff. They all swore that they were surprised when the uprising occurred, that Ubilluz had given them a different date, that there was no desertion, no change of heart. Frankly, I just don’t know. Only Vallejos and Ubilluz knew the first date. Did Vallejos change it? He didn’t tell me. But it isn’t impossible. He was a really impulsive guy, really capable of doing something like that, even if he ran the risk of being all alone. What we used to call a willful individualist in those days.”

  Is he criticizing Vallejos? No, it’s a distanced, neutral observation. He tells me that on the first night, when Vallejos’s family came to claim his body, his father wouldn’t speak to him. He came in when they were interrogating Mayta, and Mayta stretched his hand out to him. But the father wouldn’t take it and even looked at him angrily, with tears in his eyes, as if Mayta were responsible for everything.

  “I just don’t know, it might have been like that,” he repeats. “Or there might have been a misunderstanding. That is, Vallejos was sure of support that wasn’t actually promised. At the meetings they brought me to in Ricrán between Ubilluz and the miners, they talked about revolution, and everyone seemed in agreement. But did they really offer to take a rifle and come out to the mountains on the first day? I didn’t hear them say they would. Vallejos just assumed everything, he had no doubts. It may be they just made some vague promises, moral support, they would help from a distance, with their group continuing their normal lives. Or it may be that they did commit themselves and that out of fear, or because the plan didn’t convince them, they just backed out. I couldn’t say for sure. I just don’t know.”

  He drums his fingers on the arm of the chair. There is a long silence.

  “Were you ever sorry you got mixed up in it?” I ask him. “I imagine that in jail you must have thought quite a lot over the years about what happened.”

  “Repenting is something Catholics do. I stopped being a Catholic many years ago. Revolutionaries don’t repent. They go through self-criticism, but that’s different. I went through mine, and that’s that.” He seems angry. But a few seconds later he smiles. “You don’t know how strange it is for me to talk politics, to remember political events. It’s like a ghost that comes back from the pit of time to show me the dead and make me see forgotten things.”

  Did he stop taking an interest in politics only in these last ten years? Was it during the time before in jail? Or when he was imprisoned because of Jauja? He remains silent, deep in thought, trying to clarify his memories. Could he have forgotten that, too?

  “I hadn’t thought about it until now,” he says softly, mopping his forehead. “It wasn’t a decision I made consciously. It just happened, the force of events. Remember that when I went to Jauja for the uprising I had broken with my comrades, with my party, and with my past. I was alone, politically speaking. And my new comrades were only that for a few hours. Vallejos died, Condori died, Zenón Gonzales went back to his community, the joeboys went back to school. See what I mean? It isn’t that I gave up politics. You might say that politics gave me up.”

  The way he says it makes me disbelieve him: he speaks in hushed tones, his eyes not meeting mine, as he wiggles around in his chair. He never saw his old friends from the RWP(T) again?

  “They were good to me when I was in jail, after Jauja,” he says vehemently. “They came to see me, they brought me cigarettes, they arranged it so I’d be included in the amnesty the new government put into effect. But the RWP(T) broke up a little afterward, because of what happened at La Convención, the Hugo Blanco business. When I got out of jail, the RWP(T) and the other RWP no longer existed. Other Trotskyist groups with people from Argentina sprang up. I didn’t know any of them, and I was no longer interested in politics.”

  As he says these words, he gets up to go to the bathroom. When he comes back, I see he’s washed his face as well. Sure you don’t want to go out and get something to eat? He assures me he doesn’t and repeats that he never eats at night. We sit there, each one immersed in his own thoughts, without speaking. The silence continues to be total tonight in the Malecón de Barranco. There are probably only silent lovers protected by the darkness, and not the drunks and marijuana smokers that raise such a ruckus on Friday and Saturday nights.

  I tell him that in my novel the character is an underground revolutionary, that he’s spent half his life plotting and fighting against other tiny groups as insignificant as his own, and that he flings himself into the Jauja adventure not so much because Vallejos’s plans convince him—inwardly, he may be skeptical about their chances for success—but because the lieutenant opens the way to action for him. The possibility of taking concrete action, of producing verifiable and immediate changes in everyday reality electrifies him. The minute he meets that impulsive young man, he realizes how inane his revolutionary activities have been. That’s why he embarks on the insurrection, even though he senses it is virtually suicide.

  “Do you recognize yourself in that character?” I ask him. “Or does he have nothing at all to do with you, with the reasons why you followed Vallejos?”

  He continues to look at me, thoughtful, blinking, not knowing what to say. He raises his glass and drinks the rest of the soda. His vacillation is his answer.

  “Those things seem impossible when they fail,” he reflects. “If they succeed, they seem perfect and well planned to everyone. For example, the Cuban Revolution. How many landed with Fidel on the Granma? A handful. Maybe even fewer than we had that day in Jauja. They were lucky and we weren’t.” He meditates for a moment. “It never seemed crazy to me, much less suicidal,” he affirms. “It had been well thought out. If we had destroyed the Molinos bridge and slowed down the police, we would have crossed the Cordillera. In the jungle, they never would have found us. We would have …”

  His voice fades. His lack of conviction is so apparent that you’d say it was senseless to go on trying to make me believe something even he didn’t believe. What does my supposed exfellow student believe in now? At the Salesian School, half a century ago, he ardently believed in God. Later, when God died in his heart, he believed with the same ardor in the revolution, in Marx, in Lenin, in Trotsky. Then Jauja, or perhaps before that, those long years of insipid activism, weakened and finally killed that faith as well. What came to replace it? Nothing. That’s why he gives the impression of being an empty man, without the emotion to back up his words. When he began to rob banks and take part in kidnappings, could he believe in anything except getting money any way he could? Something inside me refuses to accept that. Above all now, as I look at him, dressed in those walking shoes and that shoddy clothing; above all, now that I’ve seen how he earns a living.

  “If you don’t want to, we don’t have to discuss it,” I point out. “But I have to say this, Mayta. It’s hard for me to understand how, after you got out of prison after Jauja, you could go around robbing banks and kidnapping people. Can we talk about that?”

  “No, not about that,” he answers immediately, with some harshness. But he contradicts himself when he adds: “I wasn’t involved. They used false evidence, they used false witnesses and made them testify against me. They condemned me because they needed a fall guy and I had a record. The real crime is that I was sent to jail.”

  Once again, his voice trails off, as if at that moment he’d been overcome by demoralization, fatigue, and the certitude that it is useless to try to dissuade me from believing something that over time has acquired an irreversible consistency. Is he telling the truth? Is it possible he wasn’t one of the thieves in La Victoria or one of the kidnappers in Pueblo Libre? I know very well that there are innocent people in the nation’s jails—perhaps as many as there are criminals outside who are supposed to be honest people—and it
is not impossible that Mayta with his record became a scapegoat for judges and cops. But I glimpse in the man seated opposite me such apathy, moral abandon, and perhaps cynicism that it is perfectly possible to imagine him an accomplice in the worst crimes.

  “The character in my novel is queer,” I tell him after a bit.

  He raises his head as if he’d been stung by a wasp. Disgust twists his face. He’s sitting in a low armchair, with a wide back, and now he does seem to be sixty or more. I see him stretch his legs and rub his hands, tense.

  “But why?” he finally asks.

  He takes me by surprise. Do I know why? But I improvise an explanation. “To accentuate his marginality, his being a man full of contradictions. Also to show the prejudices that exist with regard to this subject among those who supposedly want to liberate society from its defects. Well, I don’t really know exactly why he is.”

  His expression of displeasure grows. I see him reach out and pick up a glass of water he’s placed on some books, clutch it, and, when he notices it’s empty, put it down again in the same place.

  “I was never prejudiced about anything,” he says softly, after a silence. “But, about fags, I think I am prejudiced. After seeing them. In the Sexto, in the Frontón. In Lurigancho, it’s even worse.”

  For a while, he’s again deep in thought. His expression of disgust diminishes, without altogether disappearing. There is no note of compassion in what he says. “Tweezing their eyebrows, curling their eyelashes with burned matches, using lipstick, wearing skirts, creating hairdos, letting themselves be exploited the same way prostitutes are exploited by pimps. How can you not be sick to your stomach? It’s unbelievable that a human being can sink so low. Faggots who’d suck someone’s dick for a lousy cigarette …” He snorts, his forehead again bathed in perspiration. He adds, between his teeth: “They say Mao shot all the queers in China. Could that be?”

  He gets up to go to the bathroom again, and while I wait for him to come back, I look out the window. In the Lima sky, which is almost always cloudy, tonight you can see the stars, some tranquil and others sparkling over the black stain that is the sea. It occurs to me that Mayta, out there in Lurigancho, must have contemplated the glittering stars, completely hypnotized on nights like this, a clean, calm, and decent spectacle. A dramatic contrast to the degradation he was living in.

  When he comes back, he says he’s sorry he never left the country. It was his grand illusion every time he got out of jail: to leave, to start over from zero in another country. He tried, but it was always too hard: no money, improper papers, or both. Once, he got to the border on a bus that was going to take him to Venezuela, but they made him get off at the Ecuadorian customs office because his passport wasn’t properly stamped.

  “In any case, I haven’t given up hope of leaving,” he says, with a growl. “With such a large family, it’s more difficult. But that’s what I’d like to do. Here, I can’t get a decent job or anything. No matter where I look, I find nothing. But I still have my hopes.”

  But you have given up hope as far as Peru is concerned, I think. Totally and definitively, right, Mayta? You who believed in so much, who wanted so much to believe in a future for your unfortunate land. You threw in the towel, didn’t you? You think, or act as if you thought, that things here will never change for the better, only for the worse. More hunger, more hatred, more oppression, more ignorance, more brutality, more barbarity. Even you, like so many others, think now only about escaping before we completely collapse.

  “To Venezuela or Mexico, where they say there are lots of jobs because of oil. Even to the United States, although I don’t speak English. That’s what I’d like to do.”

  Again, his voice catches in his throat, worn out by his lack of conviction. I, too, lose something at that moment: my interest in this conversation. I know I’m not going to get from my false fellow student anything more than what I’ve already got: the depressing confirmation that he is a man destroyed by suffering and resentment, who has even lost his memories. Someone in essence quite different from the Mayta of my novel, that obstinate optimist, that man of faith who loves life despite the horror and misery in it. I feel uncomfortable, as if I’m abusing him by keeping him here—it’s almost midnight—in a predictable conversation that has no substance. This digging away at memories must be anguishing for him, this going back and forth from my study to the bathroom, a perturbation of his daily routine, which I imagine to be monotonous, animal-like.

  “I’m keeping you up too late,” I say.

  “Well, I do go to bed early,” he says, relieved, thanking me with a smile that puts an end to our talk. “Even though I don’t sleep much—I only need four or five hours. When I was a kid, on the other hand, I was a real sleeper.”

  We get up and go out. On the street, he asks me where he can catch a downtown bus. When I tell him I’m going to drive him home, he stammers that it would be enough just to bring him closer. He can get a bus in Rímac.

  There’s almost no traffic on the Vía Expresa. A light drizzle blurs the windshield. Until we get to Avenida Javier Prado, we talk only about the news—the drought down south, the floods up north, the problems on the border. When we get to the bridge, he sighs, visibly annoyed, that he’s got to get out for a minute. I stop, he gets out and urinates by the car, shielding himself with the door. When he gets back in, he mutters that at night, because of the humidity, his kidney problem is worse. Has he been to a doctor? Is he being treated? First, he had to make arrangements with the insurance. Now that he has it, he’ll have to go to the Hospital del Empleado to be examined, although it seems he’s got a chronic condition that can’t be cured.

  We’re quiet until we get to Plaza Grau. There, suddenly—I just passed someone selling skin cream—as if it were someone else speaking, I hear him say, “There were two robberies, it’s true. Before the one in La Victoria, the one they locked me up for. What I told you is the truth: I had nothing to do with the kidnapping in Pueblo Libre, either. I wasn’t even in Lima when it happened. I was in Pacasmayo, working in a sugarmill.”

  He is silent. I don’t press him, I don’t ask him anything. I drive very slowly, hoping he’ll decide to go on, afraid he won’t. The emotion in his voice surprises me, as does his confidential tone. The streets downtown are dark and deserted. The only noise is the car motor.

  “It was when I got out of jail, after Jauja, after those four years inside,” he says, looking straight ahead. “Do you remember what was going on in the Valle de La Convención, out there in Cuzco? Hugo Blanco had organized the peasants in unions and had led them in a few land seizures. Something important, very different from what all the left had been doing. They had to have support, so what happened to us in Jauja wouldn’t happen to them.”

  I stop at a red light, on Avenida Abancay, and he stops, too. It’s as if the person next to me were different from the one who was just in my study, and different from the Mayta in my story. A third, wounded, lacerated Mayta, whose memory is intact.

  “So we tried to give them support, with money.” He is whispering. “We planned two expropriations. At that time, it was the best way to lend a hand.”

  I don’t ask him who his accomplices were: his old comrades from the RWP(T) or those from the RWP, revolutionaries he met in jail, or others. At that time—the early sixties—the idea of direct action was in the air, and there were countless young men who, if they weren’t already taking action, spoke night and day about doing it. It couldn’t have been difficult for Mayta to link up with them, charm them, lead them in an action sanctified with the all-absolving name of expropriation. What happened in Jauja must have earned him some prestige among radical groups. I don’t bother to ask if he was the brain behind those robberies.

  “The plan worked perfectly in both cases,” he adds. “There were no arrests, no casualties. We carried them out on two consecutive days, in different parts of Lima. We expropriated”—a brief hesitation before coming up with the proper vague formula�
��“several million.”

  He falls silent once again. I see that he’s concentrating, looking for the right words to say what must be the most difficult thing of all. We are at the Plaza de Acho, a mass of shadows blurred by the fog. Which way? Yes, I’m going to take you all the way home. He points the way to Zárate. It’s a bitter paradox that, now that he’s free, he lives in the Lurigancho area. The street here is a combination of holes, puddles, and garbage. The car shakes and bounces.

  “Since the cops knew all there was to know about me, we agreed that I wouldn’t bring the money out to Cuzco. That’s where we were supposed to hand it over to Hugo Blanco’s people. As a simple precaution, we decided that afterward I would stay away from the others. The comrades left in two groups. I helped them to leave myself. One group in a heavy truck, the other in a rented car.”

  He is silent again for a moment, and coughs. Then, in a dry voice, with a touch of irony, he quickly adds: “That’s when the cops grabbed me. Not for the expropriations. For the robbery in La Victoria. In which I hadn’t been involved, about which I knew nothing. Now there’s a coincidence, I thought. Nice coincidence. Terrific. It has its positive side. It distracts them, it’s going to screw them up. They won’t connect me at all with the expropriations. But no, it wasn’t a mere coincidence …”