Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

They were sitting on the sand at Agua Dulce, gazing over the deserted beach. All around them were fluttering sea gulls, and a salty, moist breeze wet their faces. What could this surprise be? The package was wrapped so carefully, as if it contained something precious. And it was really heavy.

“Of course I’d like to go to Jauja,” said Mayta. “But…”

“But you can’t pay the bus fare,” Vallejos cut in. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you a ticket.”

“We’ll see. Let’s get back to business,” Mayta insisted. “Serious business. Did you read the little book I gave you?”

“I liked it and I understood everything, except for a couple of Russian names. Know why I liked it, Mayta? Because it is more practical than theoretical. What Is to Be Done? What Is to Be Done? Lenin knew what had to be done, buddy. He was a man of action, like me. So my plan looked like kid stuff to you?”

“Well, at least you read Lenin, and at least you like him. You’re making progress.” Mayta avoided answering directly. “Want me to tell you something? You were right, your sister really impressed me. She didn’t seem like a nun. She made me remember old times. When I was a kid, I was as devout as she is, did you know that?”

“He looked older than he was,” Juanita says. “He was in his forties, wasn’t he? And since my brother looked younger than he was, they looked like father and son. It was during one of my rare visits to my family. At that time, the two of us were cloistered. Not like these snots who live half the time in the convent and half the time out on the street.”

María protests. She waves her piece of cardboard in front of her face very fast, driving the flies crazy. They’re not only all around us, buzzing our heads: they dot the walls, like nailheads. I already know what’s in this package, Mayta thought. I know what the surprise is. He felt a wave of heat in his chest and thought: He’s crazy. How old can Juanita be? Undecipherable: petite, ramrod straight; her gestures and movements released waves of energy, and her slightly bucked teeth were always biting her lower lip. Could she have been a novice in Spain and lived there for a long time? Because her accent was remotely Spanish, the accent of a Spanish woman whose j ’s and r ’s had lost their edges, the z ’s and c ’s their roundness, but whose spoken Spanish hadn’t yet taken on the Lima drawl. What are you doing here, Mayta? he thought, feeling uncomfortable. What are you doing here with a nun? He unobtrusively stretched out his hand and felt for the surprise. Yes, indeed — a gun.

“I thought the two of you were in the same order,” I say to them.

“Then you are sadly mistaken,” María replies. She smiles often, but Juanita is serious even when she makes jokes. Outside, there is a furious barking, as if a pack of dogs were fighting. “I was with the proletarian nuns, she with the aristocratic nuns. Now both of us are lumpen.”

We begin talking about Mayta and Vallejos, but without knowing it, we digress into a discussion of local crime. At the beginning, the revolutionaries were quite strong here: they solicited money in broad daylight, even held meetings. They would kill people from time to time, accusing them of being traitors. Then the freedom squads appeared, cutting off heads, mutilating, and burning real or supposed accomplices of the revolutionaries with acid. Violence has increased. Juanita believes, nevertheless, that there are still more ordinary crimes than political crimes, and that common murderers disguise their crimes as political assassinations.

“A few days ago, a guy in the neighborhood killed his wife because she was jealous of him,” María tells. “And his brothers-in-law saw him trying to cover up the crime by hanging one of those famous ‘Squealer Bitch’ signs on her.”

“Let’s go back to what brought me here,” I suggest. “The revolution that began to take shape during those years. The one Mayta and your brother were involved in. It was the first of many. It charted the process that has ended in what we are all living through now.”

“It may turn out that the great revolution of those years wasn’t any of the ones you think it was, but ours,” Juanita interrupts me. “Because — have all these murders and attacks produced anything positive? Violence only breeds violence. And things haven’t changed, have they? There is more poverty than ever, here, out in the country, out in the mountains, everywhere.”

“Did you talk about that?” I ask her. “Did Mayta talk to you about the poor, about misery?”

“We talked about religion,” Juanita says. “And don’t think I brought the subject up. It was him.”

“Yes, very Catholic, but no more — I’m free of those illusions,” Mayta murmurs, sorry he’s said it here, afraid that Vallejos’s sister will be offended. “Don’t you ever have doubts?”

“From the moment I wake up until I go to bed,” she says softly. “Whoever told you that faith and doubts don’t go together?”

“I mean”—Mayta grows bolder—“isn’t it a hoax to say that the mission of Catholic schools is to educate the elite? Is it really possible to infuse the children of the classes in power with the evangelical principles of charity and love for one’s neighbor? Have you ever thought about that?”

“I think about that and much worse things.” The nun smiled at him. “Rather, we both think. It’s true. When I took orders, we all thought that, along with power and wealth, God had given those families a mission as far as their disinherited brothers were concerned. That those girls who were the head of the social body — if we could educate them well — would take charge of making the rest of the body better, the arms and the legs. But now none of us thinks that is the way to change the world.”

And Mayta, surprised, listened to her tell about the scheme she and her schoolmates had worked up. They didn’t stop until the free school for the poor in Sophianum was closed. The little girls from paying families all had a little girl in the school, a poor girl. The better-off girls brought in sweets, clothes, and once a year visited the poor girls’ homes with presents. They would go in the family car with Mommy; or sometimes only the chauffeur dropped off the Christmas cake. Disgusting, shameful. Could you call that practicing charity? The nuns had brought the matter up so often, criticized, written, and protested so much that, finally, the free school of Sophianum was closed.

“Then we aren’t so far apart, after all, Mother.” Mayta was shocked. “I’m happy to hear you talk this way. May I quote you something a great man once said? That when humanity has fought all the revolutions necessary to end injustice, a new religion will be born.”

“Who needs a new religion when we already have the true one?” replied the nun, passing him the cookies. “Have one.”

“Trotsky,” Mayta clarified. “A revolutionary, an atheist. But he respected the problem of faith.”

“All that stuff about how the revolution liberates the people’s energy, you can understand right here.” Vallejos threw a stone at a pelican. “Did my plan seem that bad to you? Or did you say it just to bust my balls, Mayta?”

“It seemed a monstrous deformity to us.” Juanita shrugs, making a discouraged gesture. “And now I wonder if, deformity and all, it wasn’t better for those girls to have a place where they could learn to read and where they would get at least one Christmas cake a year. I don’t know, I’m not so sure anymore that we did the right thing. What were the results? At the school there were thirty-two nuns and twenty or so sisters. That’s the usual proportion in most schools. The congregations have collapsed … Was our crisis of social conscience such a good thing? Was the sacrifice of my brother a good thing?”