Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“We’ll walk you,” Juanita says.

We talk for a while at their door, in the dusk that will soon be night. I tell them not to bother, that I’ve left the car about three-quarters of a mile away, why should they walk all that way?

“It’s not to be nice,” María says. “We don’t want you to get mugged again.”

“I haven’t got anything for them to steal,” I tell them. “Just the car key and this notebook. The notes don’t mean anything — whatever hasn’t found its way into my memory doesn’t get into the novel.”

But there’s no way to dissuade them and they go out with me into the stench and heat of the dump. I walk between them and I call them my bodyguards as we make our way through the crazy terrain consisting of shacks, caves, stands, pigsties, children tumbling down the garbage hills, unexpected dogs. The people all seem to be at their doors or walking through the heat, and you hear conversations, jokes, curses. Once in a while, I trip on a hole or on a stone, no matter how carefully I walk, but María and Juanita walk easily, as if they know every obstacle in the road by heart.

“Thefts and muggings are worse than the political crimes,” Juanita repeats. “Because of unemployment and drugs. There were always thieves in the neighborhood, of course. But, before, they went out of the neighborhood, to steal from rich people. Because there’s no work, because of drugs, because of the war, there’s not a drop of neighborhood solidarity left. Now the poor rob and kill the poor.

“It’s become a big problem,” she adds. “As soon as it gets dark, unless you have a knife — and if you do, you’re one of the killers — unless you just don’t know what you’re doing or you’re dead drunk, you just don’t walk around here, because you know you’ll get mugged. The thieves break into houses in broad daylight and the assaults often turn into murder. The people’s despair is boundless, that’s why these things happen. For instance, the poor guy the people from the next slum found trying to rape a little girl: they poured kerosene over him and burned him alive.”

“Just yesterday, they found a cocaine laboratory here,” María says.

What would Mayta say about all this? In those days, drugs were almost nonexistent, a toy for refined night people. Now, on the other hand … They can’t keep medicines in the clinic, I listen to them tell me. At night, they bring all the drugs home and hide them in a safe place, under some trunk. Because every night thieves break in to steal the bottles, the pills, the ampules. Not to get better — that’s what the clinic is for, and the medicines are free. They take them to get high. They think any medicine is a drug and take whatever they find. Lots of thieves turn up at the clinic the next day, suffering from diarrhea, vomiting, and worse. The neighborhood kids get high on banana skins, on floripondio leaves, on glue, on anything. What would Mayta say about all that? I can’t even guess, and besides, I can’t concentrate on Mayta’s memory, because in the context of so much misery his story shrinks to nothing and evaporates. Any unknown face is a tempting target — is it María who’s talking?

“This is also the red-light district of the zone,” Juanita adds. Or is it that in this ignominious context it isn’t Mayta but literature that seems useless? “Really painful, don’t you think? To sell yourself to live is bad enough. But to do it here, surrounded by garbage and pigs …”

“The explanation is that they get business here,” notes María.

That’s a bad thought. If, like the Canadian priest in Mayta’s anecdote, I also succumb to despair, I won’t write this novel. That won’t help anyone. No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. Do they feel secure trotting around the neighborhood at night? Up till now, thank God, nothing’s happened to them. Not even with the crazy drunks who might not be able to recognize them.

“Maybe we’re so ugly we don’t tempt anyone.” María guffaws.

“Both doctors have been attacked,” Juanita says. “But they still keep coming.”

I try to go on talking, but I get distracted. I try to go back to Mayta, but I just can’t, because again and again the image of the poet Ernesto Cardenal eclipses Mayta’s image. Cardenal’s image when he came to Lima — fifteen years ago? — and made such an impression on María. I haven’t told them I also went to hear him at the National Institute of Culture and at the Teatro Pardo y Aliaga, and that he made a vivid impression on me, too. I haven’t said that I’ll always be sorry I heard him, because since then I haven’t been able to read his poetry, which I had liked before. Isn’t that wrong? Does one thing have anything to do with the other? It must, in some way I can’t explain. But the relationship exists because I feel it.

He came on stage dressed like Che Guevara, and in the question-and-answer session he responded to the demagoguery of some agitators in the audience with more demagoguery than even they wanted to hear. He did and said everything necessary to earn the approbation and applause of the most recalcitrant: there was no difference between the Kingdom of God and communist society; the Church had become a whore, but thanks to the revolution it would become pure again, as it was becoming in Cuba; the Vatican, a capitalist cave which had always defended the powerful, was now the servant of the Pentagon; the fact that there was only one party in Cuba and in the U.S.S.R. meant the elite had the task of stirring up the masses, exactly as Christ had wanted the Church to do with the people; it was immoral to speak against the forced-labor camps in the U.S.S.R. — how could anyone believe capitalist propaganda?

And the final act of pure theater: waving his hands, he announced to the world that the recent cyclone that hit Lake Nicaragua was the result of some ballistic experiments carried out by the United States … I still have a vivid impression of his insincerity and his histrionics. Ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid meeting the writers I like, so that the same thing that happened with the poet Cardenal doesn’t happen with them. Every time I try to read him, something like acid flows out of the book and ruins it — the memory of the man who wrote it.

We’ve reached the car. The door on the driver’s side has been broken open. Since there was nothing to take, the thief, to get even, has slit the seat, and the stain indicates that he’s urinated on it. I tell Juanita and María that he’s done me a favor, because now I’ll have to change the seat covers, which were worn out, anyway. But they, sincerely sorry for me, and angry, pity me.

“Sooner or later, the story will have to be written,” says the senator, moving around in his seat until he finds a comfortable position for his bad leg. “The true story, not the myth. But the time isn’t right just yet.”

I had asked that our conversation take place somewhere quiet, but he insisted that I come to the Congress Bar. Just as I feared, someone’s always interrupting us: colleagues and reporters come up to us, say hello to him, gossip, ask him questions. Ever since the attack that left him lame, he is one of the most popular members of Congress. We are talking intermittently, with long pauses. I explain once again that I’m not trying to write the “true story” of Alejandro Mayta. I only want to garner as much information, as many opinions about him as I can, so that later I can add a large dose of fancy to all that data, so I can create something that will be an unrecognizable version of what actually happened. His bulging, distrustful little eyes scrutinize me unsympathetically.