Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

He becomes meditative, weighing the extravagant elements in the story. I let him reflect without pressing him, sure he hasn’t finished yet. The self-sacrificing Mayta transformed into a two-faced monster, weaving a really risky plot just to trap his comrades? It’s too hard to swallow, and besides, I think it would be impossible to justify in a novel unless I were to write about the unreal world of thrillers.

“Nowadays, none of that matters,” the senator adds. “Because the right failed. They wanted to liquidate the left once and for all. All they succeeded in doing was hold it up for a few years. Then came Cuba and in 1963 the Javier Heraud business. In ’65, the guerrillas from the Radical Left Movement and the National Liberation Front. Defeat after defeat for insurrectionist theses. Now they’ve got what they want. Except that…”

“Except that…” I say.

“Except that this is no longer revolution, but apocalypse. Could anyone have ever imagined that Peru would be living a permanent bloodletting like this?” He looks at me. “What’s going on now has definitively turned the page on the Mayta and Vallejos story. I’m sure there’s not a soul who remembers it. What else?”

“Vallejos,” I say to him. “Was he a provocateur, too?”

He takes a drag on his cigarette holder and breathes out a mouthful of smoke, turning his head to one side so the smoke doesn’t go into my face.

“There’s no proof about Vallejos. He may have been Mayta’s tool.” He gestures again. “Seems probable, doesn’t it? Mayta was a cunning old fox, Vallejos an unseasoned kid. But, I repeat, there’s no proof.”

He always speaks smoothly, greeting people who pass by.

“You know that Mayta spent his life changing parties,” he adds. “Always on the left. Was he just fickle, or was he clever? Even I — and I knew him well — could never tell. He was as slippery as an eel. There was no way to know him completely. In any case, he was with all of them at one time or another, all the progressive organizations. A suspicious pattern, don’t you think?”

“What about all the times he was in jail?” I ask. “The Penitentiary, the Sexto, the Frontón.”

“The way I hear it is that he never spent much time in jail,” the senator insinuates. “He was in lots of different jails, but never really in jail. All I know is that his name was on the Intelligence service books.”

He speaks with equanimity, without the slightest sign of ill will toward the man he’s accusing of lying day and night over the course of years, betraying and knifing in the back the people who believed in him, organizing an insurrection just so there’d be a pretext for a general repression of the left. He hates Mayta’s guts, no doubt about it. Everything he tells me, everything he suggests against Mayta must come from way back. He must have been thinking and rethinking it, saying and resaying it for twenty-five years. Is there any foundation of truth underneath this mountain of hatred? Is it all a game to vilify Mayta’s memory for all those who remember him? Where does this hatred come from? Is it political, personal, or both?

“It was really something Machiavellian.” He pries the butt out of the cigarette holder with a match and puts it out in the ashtray. “In the beginning, we couldn’t believe it — the refinement with which he’d set up the trap seemed impossible. A masterly operation.”

“Did it seem likely that the Intelligence services and the CIA would organize a plot like that?” I interrupt him. “Just to liquidate a seven-man organization?”

“Six, six.” Senator Campos laughs. “Don’t forget that Mayta was one of them.” But he quickly turns serious. “The target of the trap wasn’t just the RWP(T) but the whole left. A preventive operation: nip any revolutionary movements in Peru in the bud. But we ruined the surprise, there was a provocation, but it didn’t have the results they hoped it would. Insignificant as we were, it was the RWP(T) which saved the left from a bloodbath like the one going on now in Peru.”

“How did the RWP(T) make the plot fail?” I ask him. “The Jauja thing happened, didn’t it?”

“We made at least ninety percent of it fail,” he points out. “They only got ten percent of what they wanted. How many of us were jailed? How many had to hide out? They had us where they wanted us for four or five years. But they didn’t finish us off, which is what they wanted.”

“Wasn’t the price high?” I ask. “Because Mayta, Vallejos …”

His gesture silences me. “It’s risky being a provocateur and an informer,” he affirms with severity. “They failed and they paid the price, of course. Isn’t that how things work in that business? Besides, there’s other proof. Check the survivors. What’s happened to them? What did they do afterward? What are they doing now?”

It would seem that over the years Senator Campos has lost the habit of self-criticism.

“I always thought the revolution would begin with a general strike,” Anatolio said.

“A Sorelian detour, an anarchist error,” said Mayta sarcastically. “Neither Marx nor Lenin nor Trotsky ever said that a general strike would be the only method. Have you forgotten China? What was Mao’s method? Strikes, or revolutionary war? Slide back, or you’ll fall off the bed.”

Anatolio slid back from the edge.

“If the plan works, there will never be a coming together of the people and the soldiers,” he said. “It will be war to the death.”

“We have to break old patterns and discard empty formulas.” Mayta kept his ears open, because it was usually at that time of night that he would hear the sounds. Despite his anxiety, he would have preferred not to go on talking politics with Anatolio. What should they talk about, then? Anything, but not that militance that had established an abstract solidarity, an impersonal fraternity between them. He added, “It’s harder for me than for you, because I’m older.”

The two of them could barely fit on the narrow cot, which creaked if one of them made the slightest movement. They had removed their shirts and their shoes, but still had their trousers on. They had put out the light, and the glow from the streetlamp could be seen through the window. Far off, from time to time, they could hear the lewd howl of a cat in heat: it was nighttime.

“I’ll confess something to you, Anatolio,” Mayta said. On his back, resting on his right arm, he had smoked an entire pack in a few hours. Despite those pains in his chest, he still felt like smoking. His anxiety was suffocating him. He thought: Calm down, Mayta. Don’t make a fool of yourself, okay, Mayta? “This is the most important moment of my life. I’m sure it is, Anatolio.”

“It is for everybody,” said the boy, like an echo. “The most important in the life of the party. And I hope in the history of Peru.”

“It’s different for you,” Mayta said. “You’re a kid. And so’s Pallardi. You two are just beginning your lives as revolutionaries, and you’re starting out right. I’m over forty already.”

“You call that old? Don’t they say that life begins at forty?”

“No, it’s old age that begins at forty,” Mayta murmured. “I’ve been in this game for almost twenty-five years. Over the last few months, over this last year, most of all since we split up and there are only seven of us, all this time I’ve had one little idea ringing in my ear: Mayta, you’re wasting your time.”

There was silence, broken finally by the howls of the cat.

“I get depressed sometimes myself,” he heard Anatolio say. “When things don’t go right, it’s only human to paint the whole picture black. But I’m really surprised to hear you say it, Mayta. Because if there’s one thing I’ve always admired about you, it’s your optimism.”