The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  A hot breeze had come up and the salt flats looked as if they were being bombarded with grains of sand. It was true that the second lieutenant had chosen the perfect place—who would hear the shots in this solitude? He shouldn’t think he knew all he had to know. The main thing was not loading, unloading, aiming, and firing, but cleaning the weapon and knowing how to take it apart and put it back together.

  “I told you because I had a purpose.” Vallejos returned to the subject, gesturing at the same time that they should head back to the highway, because the land breeze was going to suffocate them. “I need your help, brother. They’re boys from the Colegio San José, over in Jauja. Really young, fourth or fifth year. We got to be friends playing soccer on the little field near the jail. The joeboys.”

  They walked on the sand with their heads bent to the wind, their feet buried up to the ankles in the soft earth. Mayta quickly forgot the shooting lesson and his anger of a moment before, intrigued by what the second lieutenant was saying.

  “Don’t tell me anything that’ll make you sorry you did,” Mayta reminded him, even though he was beside himself with curiosity.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Vallejos had tied his handkerchief over his face to protect himself from the sand. “The joeboys and I went from soccer to having a few beers together, then to little parties, to the movies, and to meetings. Since we’ve been holding these meetings, I’ve tried to teach them the things you teach me. A teacher from the Colegio San José helps me out. He says he’s a socialist, too.”

  “You give classes in Marxism?” Mayta asks.

  “You bet, the only true science,” Vallejos says, gesticulating. “The antidote to all those idealist, metaphysical ideas they get pumped into their heads. Just as you yourself would have said it in your own flowery style, brother.”

  A moment before, when he was showing Mayta how to shoot, he was a dextrous athlete, a commander. And now he was a timid boy, awkwardly telling him his story. Through the rain of sand, Mayta looked at him. He imagined the women who had kissed those clean-cut features, bitten those fine lips, who had writhed under the lieutenant’s body.

  “You know you really knock me out?” he exclaimed. “I thought my classes in Marxism bored you to death.”

  “Sometimes they do—to be frank—and other times I get lost,” Vallejos admitted. “Permanent revolution, for example. It’s too many things all at the same time. So I’ve scrambled the joeboys’ brains. That’s why I’m always asking you to come to Jauja. Come on, give me a hand with them. Those boys are pure dynamite, Mayta.”

  “Of course we’re still nuns, but without the disguise.” María smiles. “We’ve got a surplus of jobs, not vows. They free us up from teaching and let us work here. The congregation helps us out as best they can.”

  Do Juanita and María have the feeling they really are helping in a positive way by living in this shack city? They must. Otherwise, the risk they run by living here under these conditions would be inexplicable. A day doesn’t go by without some priest, nun, or social worker in the slums being attacked. Setting aside whether what they do is useful or not, it’s impossible not to envy them the faith that gives them the strength to withstand this daily horror. I tell them that as I walked here I had the feeling I was crossing all the circles of hell.

  “It must be even worse there,” Juanita says, without smiling.

  “You’ve never been in this place before, young man?” María interjects.

  “No, I’ve never been in El Montón,” Juanita replied.

  “I have, often, when I was a kid, when I was such a devout Catholic,” said Mayta. She noticed that he had an abstracted—nostalgic?—expression on his face. With some boys from Catholic Action. There was a Canadian mission in the dump. Two priests and a few laymen. I remember one young, red-faced, tall priest who was a doctor. ‘Nothing I’ve learned is of any use,’ he would say. He couldn’t stand the fact that children were dying like flies, he couldn’t bear the high incidence of tuberculosis, and that at the same time the newspapers were filled with page after page on parties, banquets, the weddings of the rich. I was fifteen. I would go back to my own home and at night I could not pray. God doesn’t hear, I would think. He covers His ears so He can’t hear and His eyes so He doesn’t have to see what’s going on in El Montón. Then one day I was convinced. To fight against all that, I had to stop believing in God, Mother.”

  To Juanita, it seemed like drawing an absurd conclusion from correct premises, and she told him so. But she was moved by the fervor she saw in him.

  “I’ve had my moments of anguish about my faith, too,” she said. “But, happily, I’ve never gotten to the point of demanding a reckoning from God.”

  “We don’t talk only about theory, but about practical things as well,” Vallejos went on. They were walking along the highway toward Lima, trying to flag down a truck or a bus, the sub-machine gun concealed in a bag.

  “Practical things—you mean like how to make Molotov cocktails, set dynamite charges, manufacture bombs?” mocked Mayta. “Practical things—you mean like your revolutionary plan of the other day?”

  “Everything in its proper time, brother,” Vallejos said, as always in a jovial tone. “Practical things—I mean like going to the Indian communities to see the problems of the peasants on site. And to see solutions. Because those Indians have begun to move, to occupy the lands they have been demanding for themselves for centuries.”

  “To recover them, you mean,” Mayta said softly. He fixed a curious gaze on Vallejos. He was disconcerted, as if, despite the fact that they had been seeing each other for so many weeks, he was just now discovering the real Vallejos. “Those lands belonged to them, don’t forget.”

  “Exactly, the recovery of lands is what I mean,” agreed the second lieutenant. “We go and talk with the peasants, and the boys see that those Indians, without the help of any party, are beginning to break their chains. That’s how the boys are learning the way the revolution will come to this country. Professor Ubilluz helps me out with the theory, but you’d help me much more, brother. Will you come to Jauja?”

  “Well, I have to say you’ve left me gaping,” Mayta said.

  “Shut your mouth before it gets filled with sand.” Vallejos laughed. “Look, that bus’s going to stop.”

  “So you’ve got your group and all,” repeated Mayta, rubbing his eyes, which were irritated from all the dust. “A Marxist studies circle. In Jauja! Plus you’ve made contact with peasant groups. Which means that …”

  “Which means that, while you talk about the revolution, I do it.” The lieutenant gave him a pat on the back. “Fuckin’ right. I’m a man of action. You, you’re a theoretician. We’ve got to put it all together. Theory and practice, buddy. We’ll get the people moving, and no one’ll be able to stop them. We’ll do great things. Shake hands and swear you’ll come out to Jauja. Our Peru is a great place, brother!”

  He looked like an excited, happy kid, with his impeccable uniform and his crew cut. Once again, Mayta felt happy to be with him. They took a corner table and ordered two coffees from the Chinese storekeeper. Mayta imagined they were both the same age, both boys, and that they had sealed their friendship with blood.

  “Nowadays, there are lots of priests and nuns in the Church just like that Canadian priest from El Montón,” the Mother said, not at all upset. “The Church has always known what misery is, and, whatever you say, it has always done what it could to alleviate it. But now, it’s true, it has understood that injustice is not individual but social. The Church no longer accepts the fact that the few have everything while the majority has nothing. We know that under today’s conditions purely spiritual aid is nothing but a joke … But I’m wandering from the subject.”

  “No, that is the subject,” Mayta urged her on. “Misery, the millions of hungry people in Peru. The only subject that counts. Is there a solution? What is it? Who’s got it? God? No, Mother. The revolution.”

  The afternoon has slipped by, and
when I get around to looking at my watch, I see I’ve been there for almost four hours. I would have liked to hear what Juanita heard, to hear from Mayta’s mouth how he lost his faith. Over the course of our conversation, children have appeared at the half-open door from time to time: they poke their heads in, spy on us, get bored, and go away. How many of them have been recruited by the insurgents? Did my old schoolmate ever tell me about his trips to El Montón to lend a hand to the Canadian mission? How many of them will kill or be killed? Juanita has stepped over to the nearby clinic to see if there are any problems. Did he go every afternoon, after classes at the Salesian School let out, or did he only go on Sundays?

  The clinic is open from eight to nine, run by two volunteer doctors who take turns; in the afternoons, a male and a female nurse come to give vaccinations and first aid. Did Mayta help the redheaded, desperate, angry priest bury the babies wiped out by hunger and infection, did his eyes fill with tears, did his heart pound in his breast, did his childish, believer’s imagination soar to heaven to ask why: Why do you permit this to happen, Lord? Next to the clinic, in a shack made from boards, is the office of Communal Action. Along with the clinic, that office is the reason why Juanita and María are in the slum. Did the Canadian mission where Mayta did volunteer work look like this one? Did a lawyer go to that one to give free legal counsel to the neighborhood, was there also a technical adviser to advise them on establishing businesses? Mayta would go there, would plunge into all that misery, his faith would begin to falter, and at the Salesian he wouldn’t say a word about it. With me, he went on talking about serials and how terrific it would be to see a picture based on The Count of Monte Cristo.

  Juanita and María tell me they worked for a few years in the bottling plant at San Juan de Lurigancho, but that since the plant closed they have devoted themselves exclusively to Communal Action. Their respective orders send them enough to live on. Why did he confide just like that in a person he was meeting for the first time? Because she was a nun, because she inspired affection, because the nun was the sister of his new friend, or because he suddenly felt a wave of melancholy, remembering the ardent faith he’d felt as a Salesian student?

  “When the terrorism started, we were really frightened,” María says. “We thought they’d blow the place up and destroy everything. But so much time has passed that we don’t even remember anymore. We’ve been lucky. Even though there’s been some violence around here, they haven’t touched us yet.”

  “Is your family very Catholic?” asked Mayta. “Didn’t you have problems with …?”

  “They’re Catholics, but more out of routine than conviction.” The nun smiled. “Like most people. Sure I had problems. They were really astonished when I told them I wanted to be a nun. For my mother, it was the end of the world. For my father, it was as if I had been buried alive. But they’ve gotten used to it.”

  “One son in the army and one daughter in the convent,” said Mayta. “It was the usual pattern in aristocratic families in colonial times.”

  “Come on out,” called Vallejos from the table. “Talk with the rest of the family, too, and don’t monopolize my sister—we never get to see her.”

  Both teach morning classes in the little school they’ve set up in Communal Action. On Sundays, when the priest comes to say Mass, the place turns into a chapel. He hasn’t come often of late: someone blew up his church and he’s had problems with his nerves ever since.

  “It doesn’t look as if it was the freedom squads that did it, but some neighborhood kids who wanted to play a little trick on him, knowing he’s so chickenhearted,” María says. “The poor man has never said a single word about politics, and his only weakness is chocolate. But after the blast, and with his nerves, he’s lost more than twenty pounds.”

  “Does it seem to you that I speak of him with some anger and resentment?” Juanita makes a curious face, and I see she is not asking just for the sake of asking. It’s something that must have been bothering her now for a long time.

  “No, I didn’t sense anything like that,” I say to her. “What I’ve noticed is that you try to avoid mentioning Mayta by name. You always beat around the bush instead of saying ‘Mayta.’ Is it because of the Jauja thing, because you’re sure he pushed Vallejos into it?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Juanita denies it. “It’s possible that my brother is also to blame. But even though I don’t want to, I realize that I still resent him a little. Not because of Jauja. But because he made him doubt. That last time we were together, I asked him, ‘Are you going to become an atheist like your friend Mayta? Are you going that way, too?’ He didn’t give me the answer I was looking for. He just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘I probably will, sister, because the revolution is the most important thing.’”

  “Father Ernesto Cardenal also said the revolution was the most important thing,” María recalls. She adds that—she doesn’t know why—the redheaded priest Mayta talked about reminded her of the visits to Peru of, first, Ivan Ilyich, and then Ernesto Cardenal.

  “Yes, it’s true, what would Mayta have said that afternoon when we talked, if he had known that we would be hearing things like that from within the Church,” Juanita says. “Even though I thought I was up on everything, I was shocked when Ivan Ilyich came. Could it be a priest saying those things? Had our revolution gotten to that point? It certainly wasn’t a silent revolution any longer.”

  “But Ivan Ilyich wasn’t anything,” interposes María, her blue eyes filled with mischief. “You had to hear Ernesto Cardenal to get the good stuff. Where we were teaching, some of us asked special permission to go to the National Institute of Culture and the Teatro Pardo y Aliaga to see him.”

  “Now he’s a government minister in his country, a real political figure, right?” asked Juanita.

  “Yes, I’ll go to Jauja with you,” Mayta promised him in a low voice. “But, for God’s sake, let’s be discreet. Above all, after what you’ve told me. What you’re doing with those boys is subversion, comrade. You’re risking your career, and lots of other things.”

  “Look who’s talking. And who fills my head with subversive propaganda every time we meet?”

  They started laughing, and the Chinese man who was bringing them their coffee asked what the joke was. “A traveling-salesman joke,” said the lieutenant.

  “The next time you come to Lima, we’ll fix a date for me to go to Jauja,” Mayta promised him. “But give me your word you won’t say a thing to your group about my visit.”

  “Secrets, secrets, you’ve got a mania for secrets,” Vallejos protested. “Yeah, I know: security is vital. But you can’t always be so finicky, brother. Shall I tell you about secrets? Pepote, that creep from your aunt’s party, took Alci from me. I went to see her and I found her with him. Holding hands. ‘Let me introduce my boyfriend,’ she said. They set me up as their audience.”

  It didn’t seem to bother him, since he laughed as he told the story. No, he wouldn’t say a thing to the joeboys or to Ubilluz, it would be a surprise. Now he had to take off. They parted with a heartfelt handshake, and Mayta watched him leave the store, ramrod-straight and solid in his uniform, walking toward Avenida España. As he watched him disappear, he thought that this was the third time they were meeting in the same place. Was it smart? The police station was just down the way, and it wouldn’t be odd to see informers having coffee there. So he had formed—on his own, taking his chances—a Marxist circle. Who would have guessed? He half closed his eyes and saw, at an altitude of about nine thousand feet, their adolescent, mountain-Indian faces, their rosy cheeks, their stringy hair, their wide mountaineer’s chests. He saw them chasing a ball, sweating, excited. The second lieutenant running with them, as if he were one of them, but he was taller, more agile, stronger, more skillful, kicking, charging, and with every jump, kick, or charge, his muscles would harden. After the game, he saw them crowded into a whitewashed adobe room—through the windows, you could see white clouds skimming over purple
peaks. They would be listening attentively to the lieutenant, who would be showing them Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, saying, “Boys, this is pure dynamite.” He didn’t laugh. He felt not the slightest desire to make fun of him, to say to himself what he had been saying about Vallejos to his comrades in the RWP(T): “He’s very young, but he’s made of good stuff.” “He’s good, but he’s got to grow up.” He felt, at this moment, considerable admiration for Vallejos, a bit of envy for his youth and enthusiasm, and something more, something intimate and warm. At the next meeting of the Central Committee of the RWP(T), he would request a discussion because the Jauja business was now taking on a new character. He was about to get up from his corner table—Vallejos had paid the check before he left—when he discovered the bulge in his trousers. His face and body burned. He realized he was trembling with desire.

  “We’ll walk you,” Juanita says.

  We talk for a while at their door, in the dusk that will soon be night. I tell them not to bother, that I’ve left the car about three-quarters of a mile away, why should they walk all that way?

  “It’s not to be nice,” María says. “We don’t want you to get mugged again.”

  “I haven’t got anything for them to steal,” I tell them. “Just the car key and this notebook. The notes don’t mean anything—whatever hasn’t found its way into my memory doesn’t get into the novel.”

  But there’s no way to dissuade them and they go out with me into the stench and heat of the dump. I walk between them and I call them my bodyguards as we make our way through the crazy terrain consisting of shacks, caves, stands, pigsties, children tumbling down the garbage hills, unexpected dogs. The people all seem to be at their doors or walking through the heat, and you hear conversations, jokes, curses. Once in a while, I trip on a hole or on a stone, no matter how carefully I walk, but María and Juanita walk easily, as if they know every obstacle in the road by heart.