Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

She tries to smile, as if excusing herself for having involved me in her confusion.

“It’s logical, it’s a piece of cake, it’s money in the bank.” Vallejos was getting excited. “If the Indians work for a boss who exploits them, they work unwillingly and produce very little. When they work for themselves, they will produce more, and that will benefit all of society. Need cigarettes, brother?”

“As long as a parasitic class doesn’t come into existence to expropriate and use for its own advantage the efforts of the proletariat and the peasants,” Mayta explained to him. “As long as a bureaucratic class doesn’t accumulate enough power to create a new unjust social structure. And to avoid that, Leon Davidovich conceived the permanent revolution. God, I even bore myself with these lectures.”

“I’d like to go to a soccer match, how about you?” Vallejos sighed. “I got out of Jauja to see the classic Alianza-U match and I don’t want to miss it. Come on, I’m inviting you.”

“What’s your answer to that question?” I say to her when I see she’s stopped talking. “Did the silent revolution of those years help the Church or hurt it?”

“It helped us, the ones who lost our false illusions, but it didn’t help the faith. As to the other nuns, I can’t say,” María says. And, turning to Juanita: “What was Mayta like?”

“He always spoke softly, courteously, and he dressed very modestly,” Juanita recalls. “He tried to shock me with his anti-religious attitudes. But I rather think I shocked him. He had no idea what was going on in the convents, seminaries, the parishes. He knew nothing about our revolution … He opened his eyes wide and said, ‘We’re not so far apart, after all.’ The years have proven him correct, don’t you think?”

And she tells me that Father Miguel, a priest in the neighborhood who mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, is, it seems, the famous Comrade Leoncio who led the bloody attack on the Palace of Government a month ago.

“I doubt it,” María protests. “Father Miguel was a loudmouth. Fiery as far as words go, but nothing but a blowhard. I’m sure the police or the freedom squads killed him.”

Yes, that’s what it was. Not a revolver or an automatic pistol, but a short, light sub-machine gun that looked factory-fresh: black, oily, and shiny. Mayta stared at it hypnotized. Making an effort, he took his eyes off the weapon, which trembled in his hands, and looked around, all the time with the feeling that from among the books and papers scattered around his room the informers were crawling out, pointing a finger at him, laughing their heads off: “We’ve got you now, Mayta.” “You’ve had it now, Mayta,” “Right in the act, Mayta.” This kid’s foolish, a nut, he thought. A … But he felt no ill will toward the lieutenant. Instead, the benevolence inspired by a prank played by a favorite child, and the desire to see him again as soon as possible. To box his ears, he thought. To tell him …

“When I’m with you, I feel funny somehow. I don’t know whether to tell you or not. I hope you don’t get mad. May I speak frankly?”

The stadium was half empty, and they had arrived very early. The preliminary match hadn’t even begun.

“Of course,” said Vallejos, exhaling smoke from his mouth and nose. “I can guess. Are you going to tell me my revolutionary plan is half-assed? Or are you going to get on me again about the surprise?”

“How long have we been seeing each other?” asks Mayta. “Two months?”

“We’re really tight, though, right?” Vallejos says as he applauds a kick made by a small, extremely agile wing. “What were you going to say?”

“That sometimes I think we’re wasting our time.”

Vallejos forgot the match. “You mean, about lending me books and teaching me Marxism?”

“Not because you don’t understand what I teach you,” Mayta clarified. “You’re smart enough to understand dialectical materialism, or anything else.”

“That’s good,” said Vallejos, returning to the match. “I thought you were wasting your time because I’m a jerk.”

“No, you’re no jerk.” Mayta smiled at the lieutenant’s profile. “The fact is, when I’m talking to you, knowing what you’re thinking, knowing you yourself, I think that theory, instead of helping you, can actually get in your way.”

“Darn! Almost a goal. Nice shot.” Vallejos got up to clap.

“In that sense, understand?” Mayta went on.

“I don’t understand a thing,” Vallejos said. “Now I am a jerk. Are you trying to tell me to forget my plan, that I was wrong to give you the sub-machine gun? What do you mean, brother? Goal! All right!”

“In theory, revolutionary spontaneity is bad,” Mayta said. “If there is no doctrine, no scientific knowledge, the impulse is wasted in anarchic gestures. But you have an instinctive resistance to getting tangled up in theory. Maybe you’re right. Perhaps, thanks to that instinct, what happened to us won’t happen to you …”

“Us?” asked Vallejos, turning to look at him.

“From worrying so much about being well prepared in doctrinal terms, we forgot the practical, and …”

He fell silent because there was a huge uproar in the stands: firecrackers were going off, and a rain of confetti came down on the field. You’d made a mistake, Mayta.

“You haven’t answered me,” Vallejos insisted, without looking at him, contemplating his cigarette. Was he an informer? “You said us , and I asked who us is. You didn’t answer, buddy.”

“Revolutionary Peruvians, Marxist Peruvians,” Mayta spelled it out, scrutinizing him. Was he an agent ordered to find out about them, to provoke them? “We know a lot about Leninism and Trotskyism, but we don’t know how to reach the masses. That’s what I meant.”

“I asked him if he at least believed in God, if his political ideas were compatible with the Christian faith,” Juanita says.

“I shouldn’t have asked you that, brother,” Vallejos begged pardon, contrite, the two of them immersed in the flood of people emptying out of the stadium. “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to tell me anything.”

“What can I tell you that you don’t already know?” Mayta said. “I’m happy we came, even if the match was no good. It’s been ages since …”

“I want to tell you just one thing,” Vallejos declared, taking him by the arm. “I understand that you have your doubts about me.”

“You’re nuts,” said Mayta. “Why should I have doubts about you?”

“Because I’m a soldier, and because you don’t know me all that well,” said Vallejos. “I can understand that you’d hide certain things from me. I don’t want to know anything about your political life, Mayta. I play fair and square with my friends, and I think of you as a friend. If I pull a fast one on you, you’ve got a way to even the score — the surprise …”

“The revolution and the Catholic religion are incompatible,” asserts Mayta softly. “Don’t fool yourself, Mother.”

“You’re the one who’s fouled up. You’re also way behind the times,” Juanita jokes. “Do you think I’m put out when I hear religion called the opiate of the people? It may have been, probably was, in any case. But that’s all finished. Everything is changing. We’re going to bring about the revolution, too. Don’t laugh.”

Had the era of progressive priests and nuns already begun then in Peru? Juanita says yes, but I have my doubts. Anyway, it was in such an early stage of development, as yet so inarticulate, that Mayta couldn’t have had any idea of it. Would he have been pleased? The ex-child who had gone on a hunger strike to be like the poor, would he have been happy that Monsignor Bambarén, bishop of the slums, wore his famous ring with the pontifical coat of arms on one side and the hammer and sickle on the other? Would he have been happy that Father Gustavo Gutiérrez conceived liberation theology by explaining that bringing about the socialist revolution was the obligation of every Catholic? That Monsignor Méndez Arceo advised the Mexican faithful to go to Cuba as they used to go to Lourdes? Yes, no doubt about it. Maybe he would have gone on being a Catholic, as have so many these days. Did he give one the feeling that he was dogmatic, a man of rigid ideas?