The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “And just what is going on in Cuba?” asked cousin Zoilita.

  “Well, Fidel Castro swore he wouldn’t cut his beard off until he brought Batista down.” The skinny guy laughed. “Haven’t you seen what those guys from the 26 of July Movement are doing everywhere? They put a flag on the Statue of Liberty in New York. Batista’s sinking fast, he’s done for.”

  “Who is Batista?” asked cousin Alicia.

  “A despot,” Skinny adamantly explained. “The dictator of Cuba. What’s going on there is nothing compared to what can happen here. Thanks to our geography, I mean. A real gift from God to the revolution. When the Indians rise up, Peru will be a volcano.”

  “Okay, but now go and dance,” said cousin Zoilita. “People came here to dance. I’m going to put something fast on.”

  “Revolutions are serious business; I, for one, don’t support them,” Mayta heard the old man in slippers say in a gravelly voice. “When APRA rose up in Trujillo in 1930, there was a real bloodbath. The APRA people got into the barracks and liquidated I don’t know how many officers. Sánchez Cerro sent planes and tanks and crushed them, and they shot a thousand APRAs in the Chan Chan ruins.”

  “Were you there?” asked Skinny excitedly. Mayta thought: Revolutions and soccer matches are all the same for this guy.

  “I was in Huánuco, in my barbershop,” said the old man in slippers. “Rumors about the killing reached all the way there. The few APRAs in Huánuco were picked up and jailed. The prefect, a little army man with a bad temper who liked women a lot, did it. Colonel Badulaque.”

  After a bit, cousin Alicia also went off to dance and Skinny seemed depressed that his whole audience was the old man. Then he saw Mayta and raised his glass to him: “Hello there, buddy.”

  “How do you do,” said Mayta, raising his glass in turn.

  “My name is Vallejos,” Skinny said, shaking hands.

  “Mine’s Mayta.”

  “From talking so much, I lost my partner.” Vallejos laughed, pointing to a girl with bangs. She was dancing with Pepote (who was trying his best to get cheek-to-cheek while “Contigo a la distancia” was on)—a distant cousin of Alicia and Zoilita’s. “If he squeezes her any tighter, Alci’s gonna haul off and sock him.”

  He looked eighteen or nineteen because of his elegant figure, his smooth face, and his practically crew-cut hair, but, thought Mayta, he can’t be so young. His gestures, his tone of voice, and his self-assurance would suggest someone who’s been around. He had big white teeth that made his dark face cheerful. He was one of the few who wore a jacket and tie, and also a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. He was always smiling, and there was something direct and effusive about him. He took out a pack of Incas and offered Mayta one. Then he lit it.

  “If the APRA revolution of 1930 had been a success, things would sure be different,” he said vehemently, exhaling smoke from his nose and mouth. “There wouldn’t be so much injustice and inequality. The heads that have to roll would already be gone, and Peru would be a different place. Don’t think I’m in APRA, but let’s give Caesar his due. I’m a socialist, buddy, no matter what they say about soldiers and socialism not mixing.”

  “A soldier?” Mayta winced.

  “Second lieutenant.” Vallejos nodded. “I graduated last year in Chorrillos.”

  Jesus. Now he understood Vallejos’s haircut and his impulsive manner. Was this what they called a natural leader? Incredible that an army man would talk like that.

  “It was a historic party,” Mrs. Josefa affirms. “Because Mayta and Vallejos met, and so did my nephew Pepote and Alci. He fell in love with her and stopped being the lazy playboy he’d been. He got a job, married Alci, and they went to Venezuela, too—who wouldn’t? But it seems they’ve parted now. I hope it’s only gossip. Ah, you recognize him, right? Yes, it’s Mayta. Years and years ago.”

  In the picture, faded and yellowed around the edges, he looks forty or over. It’s a snapshot taken by some public photographer in an unrecognizable plaza in bad light. He’s standing, with a shawl over his shoulders and an expression of discomfort, as if the glare of the sun made his eyes itch or as if posing in public in front of passersby embarrassed him. In his right hand he has a satchel or a package or a briefcase, and though the picture is blurred, you can see how badly dressed he is: baggy pants, a jacket that hangs, his shirt collar too wide, and a tie with a badly tied, ridiculous little knot. Revolutionaries wore ties in those days. He’s got messy long hair; his face is rather different from the way I remember it, fuller, frowning, a taut seriousness. That’s what you see in the photo: a tired man. Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that’s much older, the fatigue of a life that has reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta’s case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, political deceptions, want, bad food, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling a victory. And nevertheless, in that exhausted and tense countenance, there glows as well, somehow, that secret, intact integrity in the face of setbacks which it always thrilled me to find in him over the years, that juvenile purity, capable of reacting with the same indignation to any injustice, in Peru or at the ends of the earth, and that honest belief that the most urgent task, the one that could not be shirked, was to change the world. An extraordinary snapshot, indeed, that caught Mayta full-length, the Mayta that Vallejos met that night.

  “I asked him to have it taken,” says doña Josefa, putting it back on the mantel. “So I could have a remembrance of him. See these photos? They’re all relatives, some really distant ones. Most are dead now. Were you two very friendly?”

  “We didn’t see each other for many years,” I tell her. “Later we ran into each other a few times, but only rarely.”

  Doña Josefa Arrisueño looks at me, and I know what she’s thinking. I would like to ease her doubts, to calm her, but it’s impossible because at this point I know as little about my plans for Mayta as she herself does.

  “What will you write about him?” she whispers, running her tongue over her thick lips. “His life?”

  “No, not his life,” I answer, trying to say something that won’t confuse her even more. “Something inspired by his life. Not a biography, but a novel. A very free history of the period, Mayta’s world, the things that happened in those years.”

  “Why him?” she asks, working herself up. “There are others who are more famous. The poet Javier Heraud, for example. Or the people in the Radical Left Movement, de la Puente, Lobatón, the ones people always talk about. Why Mayta? No one remembers him.”

  She’s right. Why? Because his case was the first in a series that would typify the period? Because he was the most absurd? Because he was the most tragic? Because his person and his story hold something ineffably moving, something that, over and beyond its political and moral implications, is like an X-ray of Peruvian misfortune?

  “In other words, you don’t believe in the revolution.” Vallejos pretended to be shocked. “In other words, you are one of those who believe that Peru will always be the same until the end of the world.”

  Mayta smiled and shook his head. “Peru will change. The revolution will come,” he explained, with infinite patience. “But it will come in its own time. It’s not as easy as you say.”

  “In fact, it is easy—I say so because I know so.” Vallejos’s face glistened with sweat, and his eyes were as fiery as his words. “It’s easy if you know the topography of the mountains, if you know how to fire a Mauser, and if the Indians rise up.”

  “If the Indians rise up.” Mayta sighed. “As easy as winning the lottery.”

  He’d never dreamed that his godmother’s birthday party could be such fun. He had thought at the outset: This guy’s a provocateur, an informer. He knows who I am and wants to loosen my tongue. But after talking with him awhile, he was sure he wasn’t any of
those things; he was a stray angel with wings who had no idea where he’d landed. Yet he felt no desire to tease him. He liked to listen to him talk about the revolution as if it were a kind of game or a set in a match, something you could bring off with a little effort and ingenuity. There was so much confidence and innocence in the boy that it made him want to go on listening to his crazy ideas all night. He wasn’t tired anymore and he was on his third glass of beer. Pepote kept dancing with Alci—the chotis “Madrid,” by Agustín Lara, sung by all the guests—but the lieutenant didn’t seem to care a bit. He had dragged a chair next to Mayta’s, and straddling it, he explained that fifty determined, well-armed men using Cáceres’s hit-and-run tactics could light the fuse of the Andes powder keg. He’s so young he could be my son, Mayta thought. And so cute he must have all the girls he wants.

  “And what do you do for a living?” Vallejos asked.

  It was a question that always made him uncomfortable, although he was ready for it. His answer—half truth, half lie—sounded falser to him than it had at other times. “I’m a journalist,” he said, wondering how Vallejos would react if he heard him say, “I do what you talk about. Revolution. What do you think of that?”

  “For which paper?”

  “For France-Presse. I do translations.”

  “So you speak frog.” Vallejos made a face. “Where’d you learn it?”

  “By himself, with a dictionary, and a grammar someone won in a raffle,” doña Josefa tells me. “You may not believe me, but I saw him with my own eyes. He would lock himself up in his room and repeat words for hours and hours. The parish priest in Surquillo would lend him magazines. He would say to me, ‘I already understand a little, godmother. I’m picking it up.’ Finally, he did understand it, because he would spend days reading books in French, believe me.”

  “Of course I believe you,” I tell her. “I’m not surprised he learned by himself. When he got some idea in his head, he saw it through. I’ve known few people as tenacious as Mayta.”

  “He could have been a lawyer, a professional man,” laments doña Josefa. “Did you know he got into San Marcos on the first try? And high up on the list. He was still a boy, sixteen or seventeen at the most. He could have had a degree when he was twenty-four or twenty-five. What a waste, my God! And for what? For politics, that’s what. Pure waste!”

  “He didn’t stay at the university long, isn’t that right?”

  “Within a few months, or a year at the most, he was thrown in jail,” doña Josefa says. “That’s when the calamities began. He didn’t come back here, he lived by himself. From then on, it went from bad to worse. Where’s your godson? Hiding out. Where’s Mayta these days? In jail. Have they let him out? Yes, but they’re looking for him again. If I were to tell you the number of times the police came here to turn the place upside down, to treat me disrespectfully, to scare me out of my wits, you’d think I was exaggerating. If I tell you fifty times, I’m shortening the list. Instead of winning cases with the mind God gave him. Is that any kind of life?”

  “Yes, it is,” I gently contradict her. “A hard life, if you like, but also intense and coherent. Preferable to many others, ma’am. I can’t imagine Mayta growing old in some office, doing the same thing day after day.”

  “Well, you may be right,” doña Josefa agrees—more from good manners than out of conviction. “From the time he was a child, you could see he wouldn’t have a life like everyone else’s. Has anyone ever seen a snotnose kid stop eating one day because there are people in the world going hungry? I didn’t believe it, right? He had his soup and left the rest. And at night he had his bread. Zoilita, Alicia, and I would tease him: ‘You gorge yourself when no one can see you, you trickster.’ But it turned out that wasn’t so. That’s all he ate. And if he was like that as a kid, why wouldn’t he be the way he was when he grew up?”

  “Did you see And God Created Woman, with Brigitte Bardot?” asked Vallejos, changing the subject. “I saw it yesterday. Long legs, so long they come right out of the screen. I’d like to go to Paris someday and see Brigitte Bardot in the flesh.”

  “Shut up and dance.” Alci had just gotten loose from Pepote and was tugging Vallejos out of his chair. “I’m not going to spend the whole night dancing with this lug. It’s like dancing with a leech. Come on, a mambo.”

  “A mambo!” the lieutenant intoned. “Terrific! A mambo!”

  A minute later, he was spinning like a top. He was a good dancer: he moved his hands, he knew trick steps, he sang. He inspired the others, who began to form wheels, conga lines, change partners. Soon the room was a whirl that left you dizzy. Mayta got up and pushed his chair against the wall to give the dancers more space. Would he ever dance like Vallejos? Never. Compared with Mayta, even Pepote was an ace. Smiling, Mayta remembered how he always felt like a Neanderthal whenever he had to dance with Adelaida, even the easiest dances. It wasn’t his body that was awkward; it was that timidity, modesty, visceral inhibition that came from being so close to a woman that turned him into a bear. That’s why he had decided not to dance unless forced into it, as when cousin Alicia or cousin Zoila made him, which could happen any moment. Did Leon Davidovitch know how to dance? Sure he did. Didn’t Natalia Sedova say that, revolution aside, he was the most normal of men? An affectionate father, a loving husband, a good gardener; he loved to feed rabbits. The most normal thing in normal men is that they like to dance. To them, dancing did not seem, as it did to him, something ridiculous, a frivolity, a waste of time, a forgetting of important things. You are not a normal man, remember that, he thought. When the mambo was over, there was applause. They had opened the windows facing the street to let fresh air into the room, and Mayta could see the couples with their faces pressed against the window frames, the lieutenant with his masculine eyes bulging, gazing hungrily at the women. His godmother made an announcement: there was chicken soup, and she needed help to serve it. Alci ran to the kitchen. Vallejos came and sat down next to Mayta again, sweating. He offered him a cigarette.

  “In reality, I am here and not here.” He winked jokingly. “Because I should be in Jauja. I live there. I’m in charge of the jail. I shouldn’t leave, but I get out whenever I can. Ever been to Jauja?”

  “I’ve been to other places in the mountains,” said Mayta, “but never to Jauja.”

  “The first capital of Peru!” Vallejos played the fool. “Jauja! Jauja! What a shame you’ve never been there. All Peruvians should visit Jauja!”

  Mayta then heard him launch, with no preamble, into a discourse about Indian life. The real Peru was in the mountains and not along the coast, among the Indians and condors and the peaks of the Andes, not here in Lima, a foreign, lazy, anti-Peruvian city, because from the time the Spaniards had founded it, it had looked toward Europe and the United States and turned its back on Peru. These were things Mayta had heard and read often, but they sounded different coming from the lieutenant’s mouth. The novelty was in the clean and smiling way he said them, blowing out gray smoke rings at the same time. There was something spontaneous and lively in his manner of speaking that made whatever he was saying sound even better. Why did this boy arouse in him that nostalgia, that sensation of something altogether extinct. Because he’s sound, thought Mayta. He’s not perverted. Politics hasn’t killed his joy in living. He’s probably never taken part in politics of any kind. That’s why he’s irresponsible, that’s why he says whatever comes into his head. There seemed to be no guile, no hidden intentions, no prefabricated rhetoric in the lieutenant. He was still in that adolescence in which politics consists exclusively of feelings, moral indignation, rebellion, idealism, dreams, generosity, disinterestedness, mysticism. Yes, those things do still exist, Mayta. There they were, incarnate—who the fuck would have thought it—in a little army officer. Listen to what he says. The injustice of it all was monstrous, any millionaire had more money than a million poor people, the dogs of the rich ate better than the Indians in the mountains, that iniquity had to be stopped, the
people had to be mobilized, the haciendas had to be taken over, the barracks seized, the troops, who came from the people, made to revolt, unleash strikes, remake society from top to bottom, do justice. What envy. There he was, young, slim, handsome, smiling, talkative, with his invisible wings, believing that the revolution was a question of honesty, bravery, disinterestedness, daring. He didn’t suspect and would perhaps never know that the revolution was a long act of patience, an infinite routine, a terribly sordid thing, a thousand and one wants, a thousand and one vile deeds, a thousand and one … But here comes the chicken soup, and Mayta’s mouth watered when he smelled the aroma of the steaming bowl Alci put into his hands.

  “How much work, and also what an expense every birthday,” doña Josefa remembers. “I was in debt for a long time after. People broke glasses, vases. The house the next morning looked like a battleground or as if there had been an earthquake. But I took the trouble every year because it was a tradition in the neighborhood. Many relatives and friends saw each other only that one day a year: I did it for them as well, so as not to deprive them. Here, in Surquillo, my birthday parties were like national holidays or Christmas. Everything’s changed, now there’s no room in life for parties. The last time was the year that Alicita and her husband went to Venezuela. Now on my birthday I watch TV and then go to bed.”

  She looks sadly around the room devoid of people, as if putting back into those chairs, corners, and windows all the relatives and friends who would come to sing “Happy Birthday” to her, to applaud her good cooking, and she sighs. Now she looks seventy years old. Did she know if any relative had Mayta’s notebooks and his articles? Her distrust rekindles.

  “What relatives?” she murmurs, making a face. “The only relative Mayta ever had was me, and he never even brought a box of matches here, because whenever the police were looking for him this was the first place they came to. Besides, I never knew he was a writer or anything like that.”