Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“What is it about Mayta that interests you so much?” Moisés asks me, as he uses the tip of his tongue to check the temperature of the coffee. “Of all the revolutionaries of those years, he is the most obscure.”

I don’t know how to go on. If I could, I would tell him, but at this moment I only know that I want to know, even invent, Mayta’s story, and as lifelike as possible. I could give him moral, social, and ideological reasons, and show him that Mayta’s story is the most important, the one that most urgently needs to be told. But it would all be a lie. I truthfully do not know why Mayta’s story intrigues and disturbs me.

“Perhaps I know why,” Moisés says. “Because his story was the first, before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Before that event which split the left in two.”

He may be right, it may well be because of the precursory character of the adventure. It’s also true that it inaugurated a new era in Peru, something neither Mayta nor Vallejos could guess at the time. But it’s also possible that the whole historical context has no more importance than as decor and that the obscurely suggestive element I see in it consists of the truculence, marginality, rebelliousness, delirium, and excess which all came together in that episode of which my fellow Salesian School chum was the leading character.

“A progressive military man? Are you sure there is such a thing?” mocks Comrade Medardo. “The APRA people have spent their lives looking for one, so he could make their revolution for them and open the doors of the Palace to them. They’ve grown old without finding him. Do you want the same thing to happen to us?”

“It’s not going to happen.” Mayta smiles. “Because we aren’t going to stage a barracks coup but bring about the revolution. Don’t worry, comrade.”

“Well, I for one am worrying,” said Comrade Jacinto. “But about something more terrestrial. Did Comrade Carlos pay the rent? I don’t want the old lady down here again.”

The meeting was over, and since they never left all at once, Anatolio and Joaquín had gone first. Mayta and Jacinto waited a few minutes before leaving. Mayta smiled as he remembered that night. The old lady had walked in unexpectedly right in the middle of a hot discussion of the agrarian reform that Paz Estenssoro’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement had instituted in Bolivia. Her entrance had left all of them stupefied, as if the person who opened the door were an informer and not that fragile little figure with white hair and a bent back, leaning on a metal cane.

“Good evening, Mrs. Blomberg,” Comrade Carlos reacted. “What a surprise.”

“Why didn’t you knock?” protested Comrade Jacinto.

“I don’t have to knock on the door to my own garage, do I?” retorted the offended Mrs. Blomberg. “We agreed that you would pay the rent on the first. What happened?”

“We’re a bit behind because of the bank strike,” said Comrade Carlos, stepping forward, trying to block Mrs. Blomberg’s view of the poster with the bearded men and of the stacks of Workers Voice . “Here’s the check, see?”

Mrs. Blomberg calmed down when she saw Comrade Carlos take an envelope out of his pocket. She looked over the check carefully, nodded, and said goodbye, muttering all the while that in the future they should pay on time because at her age she wasn’t in any shape to go around collecting rents from house to house. They had a fit of laughing, forgot the discussion, and began to dream up scenarios. Could Mrs. Blomberg have seen Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky? Could she be on her way to the police station? Would the garage be raided that night? They had told her they were renting the garage as the headquarters for a chess club, and about the only thing the old lady wouldn’t see in her quick visit was a chessboard or a pawn. But the police never came, so Mrs. Blomberg must have noticed nothing suspicious.

“Unless this lieutenant of yours who wants to start a revolution is an outcome of that visit,” said Medardo. “Instead of raiding us, infiltrating us.”

“After all these months?” Mayta demurred, afraid to reopen a discussion that would keep him from his cigarette. “We’ll know soon enough. Ten minutes have gone by. Shall we go?”

“We’ll have to find out why Pallardi and Carlos didn’t come,” said Jacinto.

“Carlos was the only one of the seven who led a normal life,” Moisés says. “A contractor, he owned a brickworks. He paid the garage rent, the printer, and he paid for the handbills. We all chipped in, but our contributions were nothing. His wife wished we’d drop dead.”

“And Mayta? At France-Presse he couldn’t have earned much.”

“And he spent half his salary or more on the party,” Moisés adds. “His wife hated us, too, of course.”

“Mayta had a wife?”

“Mayta was married as legally as can be.” Moisés laughs. “But not for long. To a woman named Adelaida — she worked in a bank. A real cutie. Something we never understood. You didn’t know Mayta was married?”

I knew nothing about it. They left together and locked the garage door. At the corner store they stopped off so Mayta could buy a pack of Incas. He offered them to Jacinto and Medardo and lit up his own so hastily he actually burned his fingers. Heading toward Avenida Alfonso Ugarte, he took several deep drags, half closing his eyes, enjoying to the fullest the pleasure of inhaling and exhaling those diminutive clouds of smoke that faded into the night.

“I know why I can’t stop thinking about the lieutenant’s face,” he thought aloud.

“That soldier boy’s made us lose a lot of time,” complained Medardo. “Three hours, for a second lieutenant!”

Mayta went on as if he hadn’t heard a word: “It’s either because he’s ignorant or because he’s inexperienced, or who knows why — he was talking about the revolution the way we never talked.”

“Don’t use dem big words wit’ me, sir, ah’s jus a worker, not uh intelleftual,” mocked Jacinto.

It was a joke he made so often that Mayta had begun to wonder if in fact Comrade Jacinto didn’t envy the intelleftuals he said he respected so little. At that moment, the three of them had to hug the wall to keep from being run over by a crowded bus that came sliding over the sidewalk.

“He talked with humor, joyfully,” added Mayta. “As if he were talking about something healthy and beautiful. We’ve lost that kind of enthusiasm.”

“You mean we’ve gotten old,” joked Jacinto. “Maybe you have, but I’m still growing.”

But Mayta wasn’t in the mood for jokes and went on speaking anxiously, hastily: “We’re too wound up in theory, too serious, too politicizing. I don’t know… Listening to that kid spout off about the socialist revolution made me envy him. Being involved in the struggle for so long hardens you, sure, but it’s bad to lose your illusions. It’s bad that the methods we use make us forget our goals, comrades.”

Did they understand what he wanted to tell them? He felt he was getting upset and changed the subject. When he left them on Alfonso Ugarte to go to his room on Zepita Street, the idea kept buzzing in his head. In front of the Loyaza Hospital, as he waited for a break in the river of cars, trucks, and buses that choked the four lanes, he suddenly understood an association that had been flitting, ghostlike, through his mind since the previous night. That’s what it was: the university. That disillusioning year, those courses on history, literature, and philosophy he’d signed up for at San Marcos University. He had quickly concluded that the professors had lost their love of teaching somewhere along the line, if in fact they had ever had any love for the great works and great ideas they were supposed to teach. To judge by what they were teaching and the kind of papers they expected from their students, it would seem that some kind of inversion had taken place in their dull, mediocre wits. The Spanish literature professor seemed convinced that it was more important to read what Leo Spitzer had written about García Lorca than to read Lorca himself, or to read Amado Alonso’s book on Neruda’s poetry than to read Neruda. And the history professor deemed the sources of Peruvian history more important than Peruvian history. For the philosophy professor, form was more important than ideas and their impact on action … Culture for them had dried up, had become a vain science, sterile erudition separated from life. He had told himself then that this was what was to be expected from bourgeois culture, from bourgeois idealism — leaving life behind. He had withdrawn from the university in disgust: real culture was just the opposite of what they were teaching.