The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Good luck, don Eugenio,” he said, starting to run. He quickly crossed the thirty or forty yards that separated him from Vallejos and Perico Temoche and didn’t hear a single shot. When he reached them, they were on their knees, firing. He tried to explain what had happened to the justice of the peace, but he was gasping so furiously that he couldn’t get the words out. He tried to fire from the ground, but couldn’t. His weapon was jammed. He fired the revolver, the three final rounds, with the feeling that he was doing it for fun. The wall was very close and there was a line of rifles aimed at them: the enemy caps appeared and disappeared. He heard them shout threats that the wind brought to them quite clearly: “Give up, damn you.” “Give up, motherfuckers.” “Your accomplices have already surrendered.” “Start praying, assholes.” It occurred to him: They’ve got orders to take us alive. That’s why no one’s wounded. They were only firing to scare us. Could it be true that the first group had given up? He was calmer and tried to tell Vallejos about don Eugenio, but the lieutenant cut him off with an energetic gesture. “Run, I’ll cover you.”

  Mayta realized, from his voice and face, that this time he was really alarmed. “Quickly, this is a bad spot, they’re cutting us off. Run, run.” And he gave him a pat on the back.

  Perico Temoche began to run. Mayta got up and ran, too, hearing the shots whistle by him. But he didn’t stop. Gasping, feeling ice piercing his muscles, his bones, his very blood vessels, he kept on running, and even though he tripped and fell twice and once lost the revolver he held in his left hand, he got right up both times and went on, making a superhuman effort. Until his legs gave out and he fell to his knees. He huddled on the ground.

  “We’ve gotten ahead of them,” he heard Perico Temoche say. And an instant later: “Where’s Vallejos? Do you see him?” There was a long pause, with gasps. “Mayta, Mayta, I think those motherfuckers have got him.”

  Through the sweat that clouded his vision, he saw that down there where the lieutenant had remained to cover them—they’d run about two hundred yards—there were some greenish silhouettes moving about.

  “Let’s run, come on,” he said, panting, trying to stand up. But neither his arms nor his legs would move. Then he bellowed, “Run, Perico. I’ll cover you. Run, run.”

  “They brought Vallejos in at night, I saw him myself, didn’t all of you?” says the justice of the peace. The two old folks with us in the gazebo confirm what he says by nodding. Don Eugenio points again to the little house with the shield on it, the government office. “I saw it from there. They put us prisoners in that room with the balcony. They brought him in on a horse, wrapped in a blanket they could barely pull off him because it stuck to the blood pouring out of all his wounds. He was very dead when they brought him into Quero.”

  I listen to him ramble on about who killed Vallejos and how. It’s a story I’ve heard many times from so many people, both in Jauja and in Lima, that I know no one can tell me what I don’t already know. The former justice of the peace for Quero will not help me determine which among all the hypotheses is the correct one. That Vallejos died in the exchange of fire between the insurgents and the Civil Guards. That he was only wounded and Lieutenant Dongo finished him off, to avenge the humiliation Vallejos inflicted when he captured his police station and locked him up in his own jail. That he wasn’t wounded when they captured him, and was executed on orders from above, out there in the Huayjaco flatlands, to set an example to officers with revolutionary fancies. The justice of the peace recites all these hypotheses and—with his usual prudence—intimates that he accepts the thesis that Vallejos was executed by Lieutenant Dongo.

  Personal vengeance, the confrontation between the idealist and the conformist, the rebel and authority: these are images that correspond to the romantic appetites of our people. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that they can’t be true. The fact is that this part of the story—under what circumstances Vallejos died—will never be cleared up. We won’t even know how many times he was shot: there was no autopsy, and the death certificate doesn’t say a thing. The witnesses give the most disparate accounts: from a single shot in the back of the neck to a body turned into a sieve. All we know is that he was dead when they brought him into Quero tied to a horse, that from here they brought him to Jauja, and that his family took him back to Lima the next day. He was buried in the old cemetery in Surco. It’s not used anymore; the old headstones are in ruins, and the paths are covered with weeds. Around the lieutenant’s tomb, which gives only his name and the date of his death, there is a thick crop of wild grass.

  “And did you see Mayta when they brought him in, don Eugenio?”

  Mayta, who never took his eyes off the guards gathered around down below, where Vallejos was, began to catch his breath, to come back to life. He was still on the ground, pointing at nothing in particular with his jammed sub-machine gun. He tried not to think about Vallejos, about what could have happened to him, but about recovering his strength, getting to his feet, and catching up to Perico Temoche. Taking deep breaths, he sat upright, and then, almost bent double, he ran, without knowing if he was being shot at, without knowing where he was going, until he finally had to stop. He threw himself on the ground with his eyes closed, waiting for the bullets to pierce his body. You are going to die, Mayta. This is what it is to be dead.

  “What should we do, what should we do?” stammered the joeboy at his side.

  “I’ll cover you,” he said, panting, trying to pick up the sub-machine gun and aim.

  “We’re surrounded,” whimpered the boy. “They’re going to kill us.”

  Through the sweat pouring down his forehead, he saw guards all around him, some prone, others hunched down. Their rifles were all pointed at them. Their lips were moving, and there were some unintelligible sounds. But he didn’t have to understand to know that they were shouting: “Give up! Drop your weapons!” Surrender? They would kill him, in any case. Or they would torture him. He pulled the trigger with all his strength, but it was still jammed. He worked the action for a few seconds, listening all the time to Perico Temoche’s whimpering.

  “Put down your guns! Put your hands on your heads!” bellowed a voice that was very near. Or you’re dead.

  “Don’t cry, don’t give them the satisfaction,” said Mayta to the joeboy. “Go ahead, Perico, throw away your rifle.”

  He threw the sub-machine far away, and, imitated by Perico Temoche, he stood up with his hands on his head.

  “Corporal Lituma!” The voice seemed to come from a bullhorn. “Frisk them. One false move, shoot them.”

  “Yes, lieutenant.”

  Uniformed figures with rifles came running from all sides. He waited, motionless, for them to come at him, convinced they would beat him, his fatigue and the coldness increasing with every second. But he only felt shoves as they searched him from head to foot. They ripped the pouch off his belt, and calling him “rustler” and “thief,” they ordered him to take the shoelaces off his sneakers. They tied his hands behind his back with a rope, and did the same to Perico Temoche. Mayta heard Corporal Lituma sermonizing the boy, asking if he wasn’t ashamed to be a “rustler” when he was just a snotnose. Rustlers? Did they think they stole cattle? He felt like laughing at the stupidity of his captors. Then he was struck in the back with a rifle butt and ordered to move. He walked, dragging his feet, which were swimming inside his loose sneakers. He was ceasing to be the machine he’d been. He began to think, doubt, remember, and ask himself questions again. He felt he was trembling. Wouldn’t it be better to be dead than to have to drink the bitter brew he had ahead of him? No, Mayta, no.

  “The delay in returning to Jauja wasn’t caused by the two casualties,” says the justice of the peace. “It was the money. Where was it? They went crazy looking for it, and it just didn’t turn up. Mayta, Zenón Gonzales, and the joeboys swore that it was on the mules, except for the soles they’d given to the widow, Teofrasia Soto de Almaraz, for her animals, and to Gertrudis Sapollacu for lunch.
The guards who captured Condori’s group swore they didn’t find a penny on the mules, only Mausers, bullets, and some pots of food. They spent a lot of time interrogating us about the whereabouts of the money. That’s why we got to Jauja at dawn.”

  We, too, are going to arrive later than we had planned. The hours flew by in the Quero gazebo, and it’s getting dark fast. The pickup’s lights are on. All I can see are dark, fleeting tree trunks and the stones and shiny pebbles we bounce over. I vaguely think about the risk of being ambushed at one of the switchbacks, about being blown up by a mine, about getting to Jauja after curfew and being locked up.

  “What could have happened to the money from the robbery?” don Eugenio wonders, unstoppable now in his evocation of those events. “Could the guards have split it up?”

  Just one more enigma to add to the others. In this case, at least, I have some solid clues. An abundance of lies clouds the whole story. How much could the insurgents have taken away with them from Jauja? My guess is that the bank employees inflated the amount and that the revolutionaries never knew how much they had stolen, because they never had time to count it. They carried the money in bags, which they tied to the mules. Did anybody know how much was in each bag? No one, probably. Probably, too, their captors emptied some of the money into their own pockets, so the total sum returned to the banks was barely fifteen thousand soles, much less than the amount the rebels “expropriated,” and much, much less than the amount the banks said they had stolen.

  “Perhaps that’s the saddest part of the story,” I think aloud. “That what had begun as a revolution—as crazy as it was, it was a revolution, nevertheless—should end in a dispute as to how much they had stolen and who ended up with the loot.”

  “That’s life,” philosophizes don Eugenio.

  He imagined what the Lima newspapers would say, tomorrow, the day after, or the day after that; what the comrades from the RWP and the RWP(T) would say, and what their enemies in the PC would say, when they read the exaggerated, fantastic, sensationalist, yellow-journal versions of what happened which would appear in the papers. He imagined the meeting the RWP(T) would devote to distilling revolutionary doctrine from the episode, and he could almost hear the inflections and tones of each of his old comrades, asserting that reality had confirmed the scientific, Marxist, Trotskyist analysis the party had made, and completely justified its distrust and its refusal to participate in a petit-bourgeois adventure destined to fail.

  Would anyone suggest that their distrust and refusal had contributed to the failure? The idea would never even occur to them. Would the rebellion have turned out differently if all the cadres of the RWP(T) had participated in it, and resolutely? He thought so. That would have brought the miners in, as well as Professor Ubilluz, and the Ricrán people. Things would have been planned and executed better, and right now they’d be on their way to Aína safe and sound. Were you being honest, Mayta? Did you try to think lucidly? No. It happened too fast, everything was too compressed. In tranquillity, when all of it was over, it would be necessary to analyze what had taken place from the beginning, to determine objectively if the rebellion would have had better luck if it had been conceived differently, with the participation of those who did take part as well as the RWP(T), or if a different plan would merely have delayed the defeat and made it more bloody.

  He felt sadness, but also a desire to feel Anatolio’s head against his breast, to hear that slow, rhythmic, almost musical breathing of his when he was worn out and sleeping on his body. He let out a sigh and realized his teeth were chattering. He felt a rifle butt slam into his back: “Hurry it up.” Every time Vallejos’s image came into his mind, the cold became overwhelming, so he tried to blot it all out. He didn’t want to think about him, to wonder if he was a prisoner, if he was wounded, dead, if they were beating him, torturing him, because he knew depression would leave him defenseless against what was coming. He was going to need courage, more than was necessary just to resist the rushing wind that beat at his face.

  Where had they taken Perico Temoche? Where were the others? Could any of them have managed to escape? He was walking alone between two columns of Civil Guards. They sometimes looked at him out of the corner of their eye, as if he were a rare bird, and forgetting what had just happened, they amused themselves by talking, smoking, and walking with their hands in their pockets, as if coming back from a stroll. Well, I don’t think I’ll ever be bothered by mountain sickness again, he thought. He tried to figure out where he was, because they were doubling back along the route he’d taken earlier, but now that it wasn’t raining, the landscape looked different. The colors were more sharply contrasting, and the edges of things were not as sharp. The ground was muddy and his sneakers constantly slipped off. He had to stop each time to put them back on, and every time he stopped, the guard behind him gave him a shove.

  Are you sorry, Mayta? Did you act too quickly? Did you act irresponsibly? No, no, no. On the contrary. Despite the failure, the mistakes, the foolishness, he was proud. For the first time, he had the feeling he’d done something worthwhile, he’d brought the revolution forward, even if only in a minuscule way. He wasn’t depressed about being arrested, as he had been other times; then he’d had a sense of waste. They had failed, but they had done the experiment: four intrepid men and a handful of schoolboys had occupied a city, disarmed the police, expropriated the banks, and fled to the mountains. It was possible to do, and they had proven it. In the future, the left would have to take this precedent into account: someone in this country wasn’t content with merely predicting revolution, and had tried to do it. You know what it is, he thought, as his sneaker came off. He put it back on and was struck again with a rifle butt.

  I wake don Eugenio, who fell asleep halfway back, and I let him off at his place on the outskirts of Jauja, thanking him for his company and his memories. I go straight to the Paca Inn. The kitchen is still open and I could get something to eat, but all I want is a beer. I drink it on the small terrace above the lake. The water sparkles, and the reeds on the shore are lit by the moon, which shines round and white in a sky spattered with stars. In Paca at night, all kinds of noises can be heard: the whistling wind, toads croaking, nightbirds singing. But not tonight. Tonight, even the animals are silent. The only other guests at the inn are two traveling salesmen, in the beer business, whom I hear talking on the other side of the windows, in the dining room.

  This is the end of the main part of the story, its core of drama. It didn’t last twelve hours, beginning at dawn with the seizure of the jail and ending before nightfall with the deaths of Vallejos and Condori and the capture of the others. They brought them to the Jauja jail, where they held them for a week, and then they sent them to the Huancayo jail, where they remained for a month. There they discretely began to free the joeboys, following the decision of the juvenile court, which placed them in the custody of their families, under a kind of house arrest. The justice of the peace for Quero went back to work, “free of dust and dirt,” after three weeks. Mayta and Zenón Gonzales were taken to Lima, locked up in the Sexto, then in the Frontón, and later returned to the Sexto. Both were amnestied—there never was a trial—years later, when a new president took office. Zenón Gonzales still runs the Uchubamba commune, which has owned the Aína hacienda since the agrarian reform of 1971, and belongs to the Popular Action Party, of which he is the local boss.

  During the first days, the newspapers were filled with these events and devoted front pages, headlines, editorials, and articles to what, because of Mayta’s past record, they deemed an attempted communist insurrection. An unrecognizable photo of him behind bars in some jail or other appeared in La Prensa. But, after a week, people stopped talking about it. Later, when there were outbreaks of guerrilla fighting in the mountains and the jungle in 1963, 1964, 1965, and 1966—all inspired by the Cuban Revolution—no newspaper remembered that the forerunner of those attempts to raise up the people in armed struggle to establish socialism in Peru had been that
minor episode, rendered ghostlike by the years, which had taken place in Jauja province. Today no one remembers who took part in it.

  As I fall asleep, I hear a rhythmic noise. No, it isn’t the night birds. It’s the wind, which slaps the waters of Lake Paca against the terrace of the inn. That soft music and the beautiful, starry night sky of Jauja suggest a peaceful land and happy, tranquil people. They lie, because all fictions are lies.

  Ten

  I visited Lurigancho for the first time five years ago. The prisoners housed in building number 2 invited me to the opening of a library, which someone decided ought to be named after me. So I accepted their invitation, in part because I was curious to find out if what people said was really true about the Lima prison.

  To get there by car, you have to drive by the Plaza de Toros, cross the Zárate neighborhood, then go through some slums. The slums eventually turn into garbage dumps, where you can see the hogs from the so-called clandestine pig farms feeding. Then the asphalt runs out, replaced by potholes. Soon the cement buildings emerge in the humid morning light, partially blurred by the mist. They are as colorless as the sand flats around them. Even from a distance, you can see that the innumerable windows have no glass in them—if, in fact, they ever had glass—and that the movement in the tiny symmetrical squares are faces and eyes peering out.

  What I remember vividly from that first visit is the overcrowding, those six thousand prisoners suffocating in an area meant for fifteen hundred, the indescribable filth, the atmosphere of pent-up violence on the point of exploding. Mayta was in that anonymous mass, more a horde or a pack than a human collectivity—I’m absolutely certain of it. It may be that I saw him and that we waved to each other. Could he have been in building number 2? Would he have bothered to attend the opening of the library?

  The buildings stand in two rows, the odd-numbered ones in front, the even-numbered ones in back. The symmetry is broken up by the cell block for fags, which is up against the wire fence along the western wall. The even-numbered buildings are for recidivists or felons, and the odd-numbered ones house first offenders who haven’t been sentenced yet or are serving light terms. Which means that Mayta has been an inmate of an even-numbered building for years. The prisoners are housed according to their Lima neighborhoods: Agustino, Villa El Salvador, La Victoria, El Porvenir. Where would they have put Mayta?