The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “As far as I’m concerned, you died tonight.”

  Just then, they heard above their heads tiny sounds: light, multiple, invisible, repugnant, shapeless. For a few seconds it seemed like an earthquake. The old beams in the ceiling vibrated and it seemed as though they would fall down on the two of them. Then, in the same arbitrary way they had begun, the sounds disappeared. On other nights, they set Mayta’s nerves on edge. Today he listened to them thankfully. He felt Anatolio’s rigidity and saw his head pitched forward, listening to see if the rats were coming back: he had forgotten, he had forgotten. And Mayta thought about his neighbors sleeping three in a bed, four in a bed, eight in a bed, in those little rooms lined up in the shape of a horseshoe, indifferent to the garbage, the sounds of rats. At that moment, he envied them.

  “Rats,” he stammered. “In the attic. Dozens of them. They chase around, fight, then they calm down. They can’t get in here. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Anatolio said. And then, after a moment: “Where I live, in Callao, there are rats, too. But under the floorboards, in the drains, in … But not over my head.”

  “At first, I had nightmares,” Mayta said. He was speaking more clearly. Regaining control over his muscles, he could breathe. “I’ve set out traps, poison. Once we even got the city to fumigate. Useless. They go away for a few days and then they come back.”

  “Cats are better than poison or traps,” said Anatolio. “You should get yourself one. Anything would be better than that fucking symphony over your head.”

  As if she thought Anatolio had been talking about her, the cat in heat began to howl obscenely down the street. Mayta’s heart gave a leap: Anatolio seemed to be smiling.

  “In the RWP(T), an Action Group was formed to prepare the Jauja thing with Vallejos. You were one of its members, right? What were your activities?”

  “We had few activities, although some were quite funny.” With an ironic gesture, the senator cheapens the whole episode and turns it into mischief. “For example, we spent an afternoon grinding up charcoal and buying saltpeter and sulfur to make gunpowder. We didn’t turn out a single ounce, as far as I remember.”

  He moves his head, amused, and slowly lights another cigarette. He exhales upward and contemplates the spirals on the capitals of the column. Even the waiters have gone, and the Congress Bar seems larger. There, in the center of the hall, a burst of applause resounds. “I hope the Chamber will make the minister tell us the whole truth. We want to know if there are American Marines in Peru.” The senator reflects, forgetting me for a few seconds. “And if the Cubans are in fact ready to invade us from Bolivia.”

  “We in the Action Group began to confirm our suspicions”—he quickly returns to the subject. “We had already put Mayta under surveillance, without his noticing it. Ever since he turned up without any prior notice, with that stuff about having found a revolutionary army man. A second lieutenant who was going to start the revolution in the mountains, whom we were supposed to support. Just think back, imagine it’s 1958. Wasn’t it suspicious? But it wasn’t until later, when, despite our misgivings, he got us involved in the Jauja adventure, that he began to smell really fishy.”

  While his accusations against Mayta and Vallejos don’t upset me, the senator’s methods do: he’s as slippery as a snake, like quicksilver—impossible to catch in your bare hand. He speaks in an absolutely objective way, so that, listening to him, you’d think that Mayta’s duplicity was axiomatic. At the same time, despite all my efforts, I can’t get a single bit of incontrovertible evidence out of him, nothing beyond that web of suppositions and hypotheses he weaves all around me. “People are saying now that the Cubans are probably already over the border and that they are the ones fighting in Cuzco and Puno,” he suddenly says, loudly. “Now we’ll find out for sure.”

  I bring him back to our subject. “Do you remember any specific things that made you suspect Mayta?”

  “Any number of things,” he says instantly, as he exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Things that, taken in isolation, might not mean anything but, grouped together, become damning evidence.”

  “Are you thinking of something concrete?”

  “One day, out of the blue, he suggested we bring other political groups into the insurrection project,” says the senator. “Beginning with the CP. He’d even begun to negotiate. Do you realize what that meant?”

  “Frankly, no,” I reply. “All the left-wing parties, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, accepted years later the idea of an alliance, joint operations, even combining in a single party. Why was something suspicious then that hasn’t been thought so ever since?”

  “Ever since means twenty-five years later,” he says with irony. “A quarter century ago, a Trotskyist just could not propose that we invite the Stalinists to work with us. In those days, it would have been something like the Vatican suggesting that all Catholics convert to Islam. The very suggestion was a confession. The Stalinists hated Mayta with all their heart. And he hated them, at least he appeared to. Can you imagine Trotsky calling Stalin in to work with him?” He nods in regret. “His game was obvious.”

  “I never believed it,” Anatolio said. “Some of the others in the party do believe it. I always defended you, saying it was a bunch of lies.”

  “If talking about it is going to make you forget it, okay, let’s talk.” Mayta spoke softly. “If not, let’s not talk about it. It’s hard for me to talk about it, Anatolio, and I’ve always been confused about it. I’ve been in the dark about it for years and years, trying to understand.”

  “Do you want me to take off?” Anatolio asked. “I’ll leave right away.”

  But he didn’t move a muscle. Why couldn’t Mayta stop thinking about those families in the other little rooms, piled up in the darkness, parents, children, stepchildren, sharing mattresses, blankets, the stale air and the bad smells of the night? Why did he have them before his mind’s eye now, when he normally never thought about them?

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said. “I want you to forget what happened, and for us never to mention it again.”

  A car, making an incredible racket, impertinent, doubtless ancient and patched up from one end to the other, crossed a nearby street, shaking the windows in their frames.

  “I don’t know,” Anatolio said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to forget it and let everything go back to being what it was. What got into you, Mayta? How could you do it?”

  “Well, since you really want to know, I’ll tell you,” he heard himself saying, with a firmness that surprised him. He closed his eyes, and fearing that once again his mouth would disobey him at any moment, he went on: “Ever since the Central Committee meeting, I’ve been happy. It’s as if I’d got new blood, because of this idea of going into action. I was … you know how I was, Anatolio. That was why I did it. Excitement, enthusiasm. It’s wrong, animal instincts blind our reason. I felt a desire to touch you, to caress you. I’ve felt the same way many times since I met you. But I was always able to control myself, and you never noticed. Tonight I just couldn’t contain myself. I know that you could never want to have me touch you. The most I could ever hope to get from someone like you, Anatolio, would be to let me jerk him off.”

  “I’ll have to inform the party and request them to expel you.”

  “And now I really do have to say goodbye,” Senator Campos suddenly says, looking at his watch, his head turning toward the Chamber. “There’s going to be a discussion of the plan to lower the draft age tofifteen. Fifteen-year-old soldier boys, can you imagine? Of course, the other side uses grade-school kids …”

  He stands up, and I do likewise. I thank him for the time he’s given me, even though, as I tell him to his face, I find myself frustrated. Those harsh charges against Mayta and his interpretation of Jauja as a mere trap do not seem well-founded to me. He goes on smiling amiably.

  “I don’t know if I’ve acted properly in speaking to you so frankly,” he says to me. “It’s
one of my defects, I know it. But in this case, for political reasons, it would be better not to stir up the mud and spatter people with it. But, after all, you aren’t a historian but a novelist. If you had said I’m going to write an essay, a sociopolitical study, I wouldn’t have said a word. Fiction is different. You can believe what I’ve said or not, of course.”

  I inform him that all the testimonials I get, true or false, are useful to me. Did it seem to him I would discard his assertions? He’s wrong. What I use is not the truth of the testimonies but their power to suggest, their power as inventions, their color, their dramatic strength. And I certainly do have the feeling that he knows more than he’s told me.

  “And I was blabbing like a parrot,” he replies, without changing expression. “There are things I wouldn’t tell even if they were to skin me alive. My friend, let’s render unto time what is proper to time and to history what is proper to history.”

  We walk toward the main exit. The hallways of Congress are crowded: commissions come to meet with members of Congress, women with steno pads, and supporters of various political parties, who, under the eye of men wearing armbands, stand on line to go up to the gallery above the Chamber of Deputies, where the debate on the new draft law promises to be red-hot. There are security agents everywhere: police with rifles, detectives in street clothes carrying sub-machine guns, and the personal bodyguards of the congressmen. These last are not allowed in the Chamber, so they stroll about the halls, not even bothering to hide the pistols they carry in holsters or simply stuck into their trouser tops. The police carefully frisk everyone who crosses the vestibule, obliging them to open all packages, purses, and briefcases. They are looking for explosives. But even these precautions haven’t prevented two attacks within the Congress itself over the past weeks: one of them was really serious—dynamite that exploded in the senatorial chamber, leaving two dead and three wounded. Senator Campos limps, supporting himself on a cane, and waves to all and sundry. He escorts me to the door. We pass through that space crammed with people, weapons, and political disputation that seems like a minefield. I get the feeling that all it would take would be a minor incident and the whole Congress would blow up like a powder keg.

  “How wonderful, a breath of fresh air,” the senator says, at the door. “I don’t know how many hours I’ve been here, and the air is just foul with so much smoke. Okay, I’ve contributed my widow’s mite. I smoke a lot. I’ll have to give it up one of these days. I know I can do it—I’ve already given up smoking half a dozen times.”

  He takes me by the arm, but just to whisper in my ear: “As for what we’ve discussed here, I haven’t said a word about anything. Not about Mayta, not about Jauja, nothing. No one’s going to accuse me of undermining the democratic left in these times by reviving a polemic about prehistoric events. If you were to use my name, I’d have to deny everything,” he goes on as if he were joking, although both of us know that just below his light tone there lies a warning. “The left decided to bury that episode, and that’s the only reasonable idea just now. A time will come for a full airing of the matter.”

  “I understand you perfectly, Senator. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “If you were to have me say something, I’d have to sue you for libel,” he says, winking at me and at the same time patting, as if by accident, the bulge in his jacket where his pistol is. “Now you know the truth, use it—but not my name.”

  He extends a cordial hand toward me and winks again in a roguish way: he’s got short, thin fingers. Hard to imagine them squeezing a trigger.

  “Have you ever envied the bourgeoisie?” Mayta asked.

  “Why are you asking me that?” says Anatolio, surprised.

  “Because I, who was always scornful of them, envy them something,” Mayta said. Would he laugh?

  “What’s that?”

  “Being able to take a bath every day.” Mayta was sure the boy would at least smile, but he never saw even the slightest sign of it. He was still sitting on the edge of the cot. He’d turned a bit to the side, so that now Mayta could see his long, dark, bony, serious profile, bathed in the light coming through the window. He had wide, prominent lips, and his large teeth seemed to glow.

  “Mayta.”

  “Yes, Anatolio?”

  “Do you think our relationship can go back to what it was before tonight?”

  “Yes, the same as it was before,” said Mayta. “Nothing’s really happened, Anatolio. Did anything really happen? Get it through your head, once and for all.”

  Just for a brief second, and very faintly, the pitter-pat of little feet in the attic came back, and Mayta noticed that the boy stiffened and tensed up.

  “I don’t know how you can sleep with that noise every night.”

  “I can sleep with that noise because I don’t have any choice,” Mayta replied. “But it isn’t true that you can get used to anything, as people say. I haven’t gotten used to not being able to take a bath whenever I want. Even if I can’t remember when I had an apartment with a private bath. It was probably when I lived with my aunt Josefa over in Surquillo a million years ago. Even so, it’s something I miss every day. When I come home tired and I can only wash myself like a cat down in the patio and I carry a pan of water up here to soak my feet, I think how terrific it would be to take a shower, to get under the water and feel it wash away the filth, the problems. To sleep all refreshed … What a good life the bourgeoisie have, Anatolio.”

  “There’s no public bath around here?”

  “There is one five blocks from here, where I go once or twice a week,” said Mayta. “But I don’t always have the money. A bath costs the same as a meal at the university dining hall. I can live without bathing, but not without eating. Do you have a shower at your place?”

  “Yeah,” said Anatolio. “The problem is, there isn’t always water.”

  “You lucky dog.” Mayta yawned. “See, in some ways you’re a little bit bourgeois yourself.”

  Again, Anatolio did not smile. They were silent and still, each one in his place. Although it was dark, Mayta noted the signs of dawn on the other side of the tiny window—a couple of car horns, indistinct voices, movement. Could it be five, or perhaps six? They had stayed up the whole night. He felt weak, as if he had made some great effort or had gotten over a serious illness.

  “Let’s sleep awhile,” he said, turning over on his back. He covered his eyes with his forearm and slid over as far as he could to make room. “It must be very late. Tomorrow, I mean today, we’ll have to kick ass.”

  Anatolio said nothing, but after a bit, Mayta felt him move, heard the bed creak, and glimpsed him stretch out, also on his back, next to him, but careful not to touch him.

  “Mayta.”

  “Yes, Anatolio?”

  The boy said nothing, even though Mayta waited quite a while. He felt him breathing anxiously. Then Mayta’s unruly body began to heat up again.

  “Go to sleep,” he repeated. “And tomorrow all we think about is Jauja, Anatolio.”

  “You can give me a hand job if you want,” Mayta heard him whisper timidly. And, in an even lower, frightened voice: “But nothing more than that, Mayta.”

  Senator Anatolio Campos goes his way, and I remain at the head of the main staircase of the Congress, facing the river of people, mini-buses, cars, buses, the hustle and bustle of Plaza Bolívar. Until I lose sight of it along Avenida Abancay, I watch a decrepit city bus, gray and leaning over to the right, whose exhaust pipe, flush with the top of the roof, spouts a column of black smoke. Clinging to its doors, a cancerous growth of people miraculously hangs on, just grazing the cars, the light posts, and the pedestrians. Everyone’s on his way home. On every corner, there’s a compact mass waiting for the buses and mini-buses. When the vehicle stops, there is a melee of pushing, shouting, shoving, insults. They are all humble, sweaty people, men and women for whom this street fighting, all to clamber onto those stinking hulks—on which, when they finally get on, they travel a half
hour or forty-five minutes, standing, crowded together, angry—is an everyday routine. And these Peruvians, despite their poorly made, slightly absurd clothes, their sleazy skirts, their greasy ties, are members of a minority blessed by fortune. No matter how modest and monotonous their lives may be, they have jobs as office girls or minor officials, they have their little salaries, their social security, their retirement guaranteed. Highly privileged people, compared with those barefoot cholitos over there: I’m watching them pull a cart filled with empty bottles, cutting through the traffic, spitting. I also see that family in rags—a woman of indeterminate age, four kids covered with scales of grime—who from the stairs of the Museum of the Inquisition stretch their hands out toward me automatically, as soon as they see I’m close: “Some spare change, boss.” “Anything you can give, mister.”

  Suddenly, instead of continuing toward Plaza San Martín, I decide to go into the Museum of the Inquisition. I haven’t been here for a long time, maybe since the last time I saw my schoolmate Mayta. As I go through the museum, I can’t get his face out of my mind, as if that image of a prematurely aged, tired man that I saw in the photo in his godmother’s house were evoked in some irresistible way by the place I’m visiting. What’s the connection? What secret thread links this all-powerful institution, which for three centuries kept guard over Catholic orthodoxy in Peru and the rest of South America, and the obscure revolutionary militant who twenty-five years ago, for a brief moment, flashed like a bolt of lightning.

  What was the Palace of the Inquisition is in ruins, but the eighteenth-century mahogany ceiling panels are in good condition, as a lecturing schoolteacher explains to a group of kids. Beautiful ceiling: the Inquisitors were men of taste. Almost all the Sevilian tiles the Dominicans imported to dress up the place have disappeared. Even the brick floors were brought from Spain; now you can’t see them for the soot. I pause for a minute at the stone shield that proudly overlooked the archway of this palace, the shield with its cross, sword, and laurel. Now it sits on a broken-down sawhorse.