“I had no idea what normal or abnormal relations were,” she says, pushing back her hair in her ritual gesture. “I couldn’t make any comparisons. In those days, you didn’t discuss those things with your girlfriends. So I thought they were normal.”
But they weren’t. They lived together and from time to time they made love. Which meant that on certain nights they hugged and kissed, finished rapidly, and went to sleep. Something superficial, routine, hygienic, something that—as she realized later—was incomplete, far short of her needs and desires. It isn’t that she didn’t like Mayta’s politeness—he always turned out the light beforehand. But she had the feeling that he was in a hurry, on edge, thinking about something else even as he caressed her. Was his mind somewhere else? Yes, as he asked himself at what moment this desire that had aroused his body by means of fantasies and memories would begin to fade, to sink, to plunge him into that well of anguish from which he would try to extricate himself by stammering stupid explanations that Adelaida, luckily, seemed to believe. His thoughts were on other nights or dawns, when his desire did not fade and even seemed to get sharper if his hands and mouth were kept busy, not with Adelaida, but with one of those little fags that, after great hesitation, he dared to seek out in Porvenir or Callao. In fact, they made love only a few times, and at first Adelaida didn’t know how to ask him not to finish so quickly. Later, when she was surer of herself, she did ask him. She begged him, implored him not to withdraw from her, exhausted, exactly when she had begun to feel a stirring, a vertigo. Most often, she didn’t even feel that, because Mayta would suddenly seem to be sorry for what he was doing. And she was such a sucker that, until that night, she had tortured herself wondering: Is it my fault? Am I frigid? Can’t I get him excited?
“May I have another glass of water?” Mayta said. “Then I’m on my way, Adelaida.”
She got up, and when she returned to the small living room, she brought, with the water, a handful of photographs. She handed them over without saying a word. The newborn child, the child a few months old in diapers, in Juan Zárate’s arms; at a birthday party, next to a cake with two candles; in short pants and in shoes, at attention, staring at the photographer. I examined them again and again, examining himself at the same time that he studied the features, the positions, the gestures, the clothes of his child, whom he had never seen and whom he would never see in the future. Would he remember these pictures tomorrow in Jauja? Would I remember them, would they go with me, would they give me courage on the march in the cold uplands, in the jungle, during attacks, while I wait in ambush? What did he feel as he looked at them? Would he feel, when he remembered them, that the struggle, the sacrifices, the murders were things he’d do for his sake? Right now, did he feel tenderness, remorse, anguish, love? No, just curiosity, and gratitude toward Adelaida for having shown him the photographs. Was this the reason that brought him to this house before he left for Jauja? Or, more than meeting his son, could it have been to find out if Adelaida was still resentful for that thing which doubtless was the agony of her existence?
“I don’t know,” says Adelaida. “If that’s why he came, he went away knowing that, despite the many years that had gone by, I hadn’t forgiven him for ruining my life.”
“But even though you knew, you stayed with him for quite a while. You even became pregnant.”
“Inertia,” she whispers. “Being pregnant gave me the strength to end the whole farce.”
She had suspected it for weeks, because her period had never been so late. The day she received the positive test results, she began to cry with excitement. Almost immediately, however, she was overcome with the thought that someday her son or daughter would know what she knew. Over the previous weeks, they had had several arguments about shock treatments.
“It wasn’t because I was afraid,” he said in a low voice as he looked at her. “It was because I didn’t want to be cured, Adelaida.”
So, in that last conversation, you two spoke about the unmentionable. Yes, and even Mayta had been much more frank than he’d been when they were living together. The procession kept picking up people from the streets it passed along, horrifying, somnambulistic men and women, children and old people stunned because they saw sons, brothers, grandchildren with their bones splintered, crushed by falling rubble, and burned in the hygienic fires. This chanting and tearful serpent squeezing through the ruinous, narrow streets of Cuzco seemed to console and reconcile the survivors. Suddenly, in the area that had been the Plaza del Rey, fighters and their supporters waving rifles and red flags tried to raise the spirit of the people and to keep them from becoming demoralized by starting a demonstration. There was an avalanche of shouts, stones, shots, and a terrified howling.
“If I didn’t know it was against your principles, I’d ask you to have an abortion,” said Mayta, as if he had prepared the statement. “There are plenty of good reasons. The life I lead, that we lead. Is it possible to bring up a child in the midst of that kind of life? What I do requires total dedication. I just can’t hang that around my neck. Anyway, if it isn’t against your principles. If it is, we’ll just have to do our best.”
She didn’t cry and they didn’t even argue. “I don’t know, let me see, I’ll think about it.” And at that moment she knew what she had to do, clearly and absolutely.
“So you lied to me.” Adelaida smiled, with a little air of triumph. “When you told me that you were ashamed of yourself, that it made you feel like garbage, that it was the disgrace of your life. I’m happy to see that you finally admit it.”
“It made and still makes me ashamed sometimes,” said Mayta. My cheeks were burning, and my tongue felt coated, but I wasn’t sorry to be talking about these things. “It’s still the disgrace of my life.”
“So then, why didn’t you want to get better,” Adelaida repeated.
“I want to be what I am,” I muttered, “I’m a revolutionary and I have flat feet. I’m also a queer. I don’t want to stop being one. It’s difficult to explain it to you. In this society, there are rules and prejudices; whatever seems abnormal seems a crime or a sickness. All because society is rotten, full of stupid ideas. That’s why we need a revolution, see?”
“And at the same time he told me himself that in the U.S.S.R. he would have been thrown into an insane asylum, and in China he would have been shot, because that’s how they deal with queers,” Adelaida tells me. “Is that why you want to start a revolution?”
Amid the dust of the collapsing buildings, the smoke from the fires, the prayers of the believers, the howls of the wounded, the despair of the unharmed, the sound of rifle shots echoed only a few seconds. Suddenly there came again the sound of screaming engines. Even before the people who had been throwing stones at each other, punching each other, and cursing each other could understand what was happening, bombs and machine-gun fire rained down on Cuzco.
“That’s why I want to start another revolution,” Mayta said, as he passed his tongue over his dry lips. He was dying of thirst but didn’t dare ask for a third glass of water. “No half measures, but the true, the integral revolution. A revolution that will wipe out all injustice, a revolution that will guarantee that no one will have any reason to be afraid of being what he is.”
“And you’re going to bring about that revolution with your pals from the RWP?” Adelaida laughed.
“I’m going to have to bring it about all by myself.” Mayta smiled at her. “I’m not in the RWP anymore. I resigned last night.”
She woke up the next day, and the idea was in her head, perfected by a night’s sleep. She caressed it, she turned it over, she spun it around as she got dressed, waited for the bus, and rattled toward the Banco de Crédito in Lince, and while she checked the balance in an account in her Lilliputian office. At eleven, she asked permission to go to the post office. Juan Zárate was still there, behind the four-paned windows. She managed to let him see her, and when he greeted her, she answered with a Technicolor smile. Juan Zárate, of cours
e, took off his glasses, straightened his tie, and dashed out to shake her hand. The breakdown is total. The broken-up streets are strewn with more dead, more houses collapse, and those still standing are looted. Few of those who moan, weep, steal, die, or search for their dead seem to hear the orders given on every corner by the rebel patrols: “The order is to abandon the city, comrades. Abandon the city, abandon the city.”
“I’m still shocked that I had the nerve,” says Adelaida, looking at her honeymoon photo.
So that, during that last conversation, in this little living room, Mayta spoke to the woman who had been his wife about intimate, ideal things: the true, the integral revolution, the one that would abolish all injustices without inflicting new ones. So that, despite the last-minute reverses and setbacks, he felt, as Blacquer assured me, euphoric and even lyrical.
“If only our revolution would light the way for the others. Yes, Adelaida. I hope our Peru sets the example for the rest of the world.”
“It’s better to be frank, and that’s just how I’m going to talk to you—frankly.” Adelaida couldn’t believe her own self-confidence and daring. Even as she was saying these things, she was able to smile, strike a pose, and shake her hair in such a way that the head of the Lince post office looked at her in ecstasy. “You were wild about marrying me, isn’t that right, Juan?”
“You said it, Adelaidita.” Juan Zárate bent forward over the little table in the Petit Thouars coffee shop where they were having a soda. “Crazy about you, and even more than crazy.”
“Look me in the eye, Juan, and answer me truthfully. Do you still like me as much as you did years ago?”
“More than ever.” The head of the Lince post office swallowed hard. “You’re even prettier now than then, Adelaidita.”
“Well then, if you like, you may marry me.” Her voice hadn’t failed her, and it doesn’t fail her now. “I don’t want to cheat you, Juan. I’m not in love with you. But I’ll try to love you, to comply with your wishes, I’ll respect you, and I’ll do whatever I can to be a good wife.”
Juan Zárate stared at her, blinking. The soda in his hand began to tremble.
“Are you speaking seriously, Adelaidita?” he managed finally to blurt out.
“I certainly am.” And even now she didn’t hesitate. “I ask only one thing from you. That you give your name to the child I’m expecting.”
“Give me another glass of water,” said Mayta. “I just can’t stop drinking, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’ve been making speeches,” she said, getting up. She went on, from the kitchen: “You haven’t changed a bit. You’re even worse. Now you want to start a revolution not just for the poor but also for the queers. I swear you make me laugh, Mayta.”
A revolution for the queers, too, I thought. Yes, for the poor queers, too. He wasn’t the slightest bit angry about Adelaida’s burst of laughter. Amid the smoke and pestilence, you could make out the columns of people fleeing from the destroyed city, tripping over the broken pavement, covering their mouths and noses. The dead, the badly wounded, the very old, and the very young remained among the ruins. And looters, who, defying asphyxiation, fire, and sporadic bombing, broke into the houses still standing, looking for money and food.
“And he accepted,” I conclude. “Don Juan Zárate must have really loved you, ma’am.”
“We had a church wedding while we waited for my divorce from Mayta to go through.” Adelaida sighs, looking at the Cañete photograph. “It was two years before the divorce was official. Then we had a civil ceremony.”
How did Mayta take this story? Without any surprise, certainly with relief. He had gone through the charade of telling her how very concerned he was that she should marry that way, with no feelings at all.
“Wasn’t that what you did with me? But with one difference. You tricked me, and I told Juan everything.”
“But your calculations were wrong,” said Mayta. He had just finished the glass of water and was feeling bloated. “Don’t you remember that I warned you? Right from the beginning, I warned you that …”
“No more speeches, please,” Adelaida interrupted him.
She is silent, tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair, and I can see by the look on her face that she has estimated that the hour is up. But I look at my watch and there are fifteen minutes left. Just then, we hear shots: one isolated report, then two more, than a burst of fire. Adelaida and I jump to the window and look out. The guards have disappeared, no doubt crouching behind the barbed wire and sandbags. But on the left, seemingly unconcerned, a patrol of airmen advances toward Rospigliosi Castle. It’s true that the shots sounded quite far away. Executions in the slums? Has the fighting on the outskirts of Lima begun?
“And did it really work out as you wished?” I take up the conversation again. She looks away from the window, at me. The expression of alarm on her face when she heard the shots has been replaced by the sour expression which seems to be habitual in her. “The business about the boy.”
“It worked out until he discovered that Juan wasn’t his father,” she says. She remains there, with her lips parted, trembling, and her eyes, which stare fixedly at me, begin to shine.
“Well, that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, we don’t have to talk about your son.” I excuse myself. “Let’s get back to Mayta.”
“I’m not going to make another speech,” he said, to calm her. He drank the last drop of water. What if being so thirsty is a sign of fever, Mayta? “I’m going to be frank with you, Adelaida. I wanted to find out about my son before I leave the country, but I wanted to find out how you were doing, too. I’m no better off for having found out. I hoped I’d find you happy, at peace. But all I see is resentment, toward me and everybody else.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I resent you less than I resent myself. Because I made all my own trouble.”
Far off, there are more shots. From the surrounding valleys, ridges, peaks, and plateaus, Cuzco is a cloud of smoke filled with groans.
“Juan didn’t tell him. I did,” she whispers, in a hesitant voice. “Juan will never forgive me. He always loved Johnny as if he were his own son.”
And she tells me the old story that must gnaw at her day and night, a story that combines religion, jealousy, and grudge. From the beginning, Johnny favored his false father over his mother, was more attached to him than to her, perhaps because in some obscure way he sensed that it was Adelaida’s fault that there was a huge lie in his life.
“Do you mean that your husband takes him to Mass every Sunday?” Mayta said, thinking aloud. My memory brought back to me a whirlwind of prayers, chants, communions, and childhood confessions, the collection of colorful holy pictures I stored in my notebook as if they were precious objects. “Well, at least in that, he has something in common with me. When I was his age, I went to Mass every day.”
“Juan is a very devout Catholic,” said Adelaida. “Catholic, Apostolic, Roman, a pious old lady, he says jokingly. But it’s the absolute truth. And he wants Johnny to be that way, of course.”
“Of course.” Mayta nodded. But he was free-associating, thinking about the boys from the San José school in Jaula who had listened so attentively, almost hypnotized, to what he told them about Marxism and revolution. He saw them: they were printing the communiqués their leaders sent them, on mimeograph machines hidden under tarpaulins and boxes; they were distributing handbills outside factories, schools, markets, movie houses. He saw them multiplying like the loaves of bread in the Bible, every day recruiting scores of boys as poor and selfdenying as themselves, coming and going along dangerous paths, along snowdrifts in the mountains, slipping through obstacles and army patrols, sliding at night over the roofs of public buildings and the tops of peaks to leave red flags with the hammer and sickle. And I saw them arrive, sweaty, joyful, and formidable at remote encampments with the medicine, information, clothing, and food the guerrillas would need. His son was one of the
m. They were very young, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old. Thanks to them, the guerrillas would surely be victorious.
The assault on heaven, I thought. We shall bring heaven down from heaven, establish it on earth; heaven and earth were becoming one in this twilight hour. The ashen clouds in the sky met the ashen clouds from the fires. And those little black spots that flew, innumerable, from all four points on the compass toward Cuzco—they weren’t ashes but vultures. Spurred on by hunger, braving smoke and flames, they dove on toward their desirable prey. From the heights, the survivors, parents, wounded, the fighters, the internationalists, all of them, with a minimum of fantasy, could hear the anxious tearing, the febrile pecking, the abject beating of wings, and smell the horrifying stench.
“And so …?” I urge her to continue. Now we hear shots all the time, always far off, but neither of us looks out on the street again.
“And so the subject was never brought up in front of Johnny,” she goes on. I listen to her and I try to get interested in her story, but I still see and smell the carnage.
It was a taboo subject, down at the very roots of their relationship, undermining it like slow acid. Juan Zárate loved the boy, but he had never forgiven her that agreement, the price she made him pay to marry her. The story took an unexpected turn the day Johnny—he’d finished secondary school and entered pharmacy school—discovered his father had a lover. Don Juan Zárate had a lover? Yes, and she had her own little house. The very idea would have made Adelaida roar with laughter—jealousy was out of the question: that old coot, dragging his feet, practically blind, with a lover. She was dying of laughter. A woman is jealous when she is in love, and she had never loved Juan Zárate. She had stoically put up with him. She was just annoyed that, with the pittance he earned, he supported two households …
“But my son, on the other hand, was devastated. It drove him crazy,” she adds, in a hypnotic state. “He became embittered, shriveled up. That his father could have a sweetheart seemed like the end of the world to him. Was it because he’s been raised so piously? In a child, I would have understood a reaction like that. But how can you figure it in a young man twenty years old?”
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta Page 21
