Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

It was hot, and when their forearms brushed, they were moist with sweat. Anatolio was also flat on his back, and Mayta could see in the semi-darkness his bare feet next to his own. He thought that at any moment their feet would touch.

“Get me right,” he said, covering up his discomfort. “I’m not depressed about having dedicated my life to the revolution. That could never happen, Anatolio. Every time I walk down the street and I see the country I live in, I know there can be nothing more important for me. I just wonder if I’ve wasted my time, if I’ve taken the wrong road.”

“If you’re going to tell me you’ve lost your belief in Leon Davidovich and Trotskyism, I’ll kill you,” Anatolio joked. “I hope I haven’t read all that crap just for fun.”

But Mayta wasn’t in the mood for jokes. He was experiencing exaltation and at the same time anguish. His heart was beating so hard, he said to himself, that Anatolio could probably hear it. The dust piled up on the books, papers, and magazines all over the room tickled his nose. Hold in that sneeze, or you’ll die, he thought, absurdly.

“We’ve lost too much time, Anatolio. In byzantine problems — mental masturbation totally unrelated to the real world. We’re disconnected from the masses, we have no roots in the people. What kind of revolution were we going to bring about? You’re very young. But I’ve been in this thing for a long time, and the revolution isn’t an inch closer to taking place. Today, for the first time, I’ve felt we were advancing, that the revolution wasn’t a dream, but flesh and blood.”

“Calm down, brother,” Anatolio said to him, stretching out his hand and patting him on the leg. Mayta recoiled, as if instead of affectionately touching him, Anatolio had punched him. “Today, in the Central Committee meeting, when you presented your proposal for going into direct action, when you asked how long we would go on wasting time, you went right to our hearts. I never heard you speak so well, Mayta. It came right from your guts. I was thinking: Let’s go out to the mountains right now, what are we waiting for. I felt a knot in my throat, I swear.”

Mayta turned on his side, making an effort, and saw Anatolio’s profile take shape against the cloudy background of the bookshelf. Anatolio’s curly hair, his smooth forehead, his white teeth, his slightly parted lips.

“We are going to begin another life,” he whispered. “Out of the cave, into the air, out of garage and café intrigue to working with the masses and directly attacking the enemy. We are going to plunge right into the heart of the people, Anatolio.”

His face was very close to the boy’s bare shoulder. A smell, strong and elemental, of human flesh assailed his nose and made him dizzy. His bent knees grazed Anatolio’s leg. In the semi-darkness, Mayta could just barely make out Anatolio’s unmoving profile. Did he have his eyes open? His breathing made his chest move rhythmically. Slowly, he stretched out his moist and trembling right hand, and feeling around, he found Anatolio’s trousers.

“Let me jerk you off,” he whispered in an agonizing voice, feeling that his whole body was burning. “Let me, Anatolio.”

“And, last but not least, there is one other matter we haven’t gone into, but that, if we want to get to the bottom of things, we’re going to have to bring up.” Senator Campos sighs — sorry, one might say, for bringing the matter up. “You know that Mayta was a homosexual, of course.”

“In our country, people always accuse their enemies of being homosexuals. It’s hard to prove, though. Does it have anything to do with Jauja?”

“Yes, you see it must have been the way they got to him,” he adds. “That’s how they got him up against the wall and made him work for them. His Achilles’ heel. All he had to do was give in once. What could he do then but go on collaborating?”

“I learned from Moisés that he got married.”

“All queers get married.” The senator smiles. “It’s the handiest disguise there is. Aside from the fact that it was a joke, his marriage was a disaster. It only lasted a minute.”

The Senate has been called to order, or maybe it’s the deputies, because a growing noise and the sound of briefcases hitting tables comes from the hall. We hear amplified voices. The bar empties. Senator Campos says softly: “We are going to appeal directly to the minister. The Chamber is going to demand that he tell us once and for all if foreign troops have actually entered national territory.” But he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. He goes on talking without losing that scientific objectivity he uses to cover up his hatred.

“Perhaps the explanation is in all that,” he reflects, playing with his cigarette holder. “Is it possible to be sure of a homosexual? An incomplete, feminine being open to all kinds of weakness, and that includes being an informer.”

Growing excited, carried away by the theme, he forgets Mayta and Jauja and explains to me that homosexuality is intimately linked to the division of classes and to bourgeois culture. Why, if this isn’t so, are there virtually no homosexuals in socialist countries? It’s no accident, it doesn’t come about because the air of those latitudes makes people more virtuous. It’s a shame the socialist countries are fomenting subversion in Peru. Because there is a lot to imitate in those countries. The culture of idleness, that dispirited emptiness, that existential insecurity typical of the bourgeoisie that even comes to have doubts about the sex it was born with. Being queer is to lack definition — a good image.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” he heard him say. “To take advantage of me because we’re friends, because I’m in your house. Aren’t you ashamed, Mayta?”

Anatolio was sitting up, on the edge of the bed, with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, holding up his chin. A slick shine from the window fell on his back and gave his smooth skin a dark green glow in which you could see his ribs.

“Yes, I’m ashamed,” Mayta whispered. He struggled to speak. “Forget what happened.”

“I thought we were friends,” the boy said, his voice breaking, his face turned away from Mayta. He passed from rage to disdain and back to rage. “What a lousy trick, fuck! Did you think I was a queer?”

“I know you aren’t,” whispered Mayta. The heat of a moment before had given way to a cold that went right through his bones: he tried to think about Vallejos, about Jauja, about the exalting and purifying days to come. “Don’t make me feel worse than I already feel.”

“And how the fuck do you think I feel?” whined Anatolio. He moved, the little cot groaned, and Mayta thought the boy was going to stand up, slip on his shirt, and leave, slamming the door behind him. But the cot became quiet once again, and those taut shoulders were still there. “You’ve fucked it all up, Mayta. What a jerk you are. You sure picked a good moment. Today, of all days.”

“Did anything really happen?” Mayta murmured. “Don’t be such a kid. You’re talking as if we’d both died.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you died tonight.”

Just then, they heard above their heads tiny sounds: light, multiple, invisible, repugnant, shapeless. For a few seconds it seemed like an earthquake. The old beams in the ceiling vibrated and it seemed as though they would fall down on the two of them. Then, in the same arbitrary way they had begun, the sounds disappeared. On other nights, they set Mayta’s nerves on edge. Today he listened to them thankfully. He felt Anatolio’s rigidity and saw his head pitched forward, listening to see if the rats were coming back: he had forgotten, he had forgotten. And Mayta thought about his neighbors sleeping three in a bed, four in a bed, eight in a bed, in those little rooms lined up in the shape of a horseshoe, indifferent to the garbage, the sounds of rats. At that moment, he envied them.