Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“Rats,” he stammered. “In the attic. Dozens of them. They chase around, fight, then they calm down. They can’t get in here. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Anatolio said. And then, after a moment: “Where I live, in Callao, there are rats, too. But under the floorboards, in the drains, in … But not over my head.”

“At first, I had nightmares,” Mayta said. He was speaking more clearly. Regaining control over his muscles, he could breathe. “I’ve set out traps, poison. Once we even got the city to fumigate. Useless. They go away for a few days and then they come back.”

“Cats are better than poison or traps,” said Anatolio. “You should get yourself one. Anything would be better than that fucking symphony over your head.”

As if she thought Anatolio had been talking about her, the cat in heat began to howl obscenely down the street. Mayta’s heart gave a leap: Anatolio seemed to be smiling.

“In the RWP(T), an Action Group was formed to prepare the Jauja thing with Vallejos. You were one of its members, right? What were your activities?”

“We had few activities, although some were quite funny.” With an ironic gesture, the senator cheapens the whole episode and turns it into mischief. “For example, we spent an afternoon grinding up charcoal and buying saltpeter and sulfur to make gunpowder. We didn’t turn out a single ounce, as far as I remember.”

He moves his head, amused, and slowly lights another cigarette. He exhales upward and contemplates the spirals on the capitals of the column. Even the waiters have gone, and the Congress Bar seems larger. There, in the center of the hall, a burst of applause resounds. “I hope the Chamber will make the minister tell us the whole truth. We want to know if there are American Marines in Peru.” The senator reflects, forgetting me for a few seconds. “And if the Cubans are in fact ready to invade us from Bolivia.”

“We in the Action Group began to confirm our suspicions”—he quickly returns to the subject. “We had already put Mayta under surveillance, without his noticing it. Ever since he turned up without any prior notice, with that stuff about having found a revolutionary army man. A second lieutenant who was going to start the revolution in the mountains, whom we were supposed to support. Just think back, imagine it’s 1958. Wasn’t it suspicious? But it wasn’t until later, when, despite our misgivings, he got us involved in the Jauja adventure, that he began to smell really fishy.”

While his accusations against Mayta and Vallejos don’t upset me, the senator’s methods do: he’s as slippery as a snake, like quicksilver — impossible to catch in your bare hand. He speaks in an absolutely objective way, so that, listening to him, you’d think that Mayta’s duplicity was axiomatic. At the same time, despite all my efforts, I can’t get a single bit of incontrovertible evidence out of him, nothing beyond that web of suppositions and hypotheses he weaves all around me. “People are saying now that the Cubans are probably already over the border and that they are the ones fighting in Cuzco and Puno,” he suddenly says, loudly. “Now we’ll find out for sure.”

I bring him back to our subject. “Do you remember any specific things that made you suspect Mayta?”

“Any number of things,” he says instantly, as he exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Things that, taken in isolation, might not mean anything but, grouped together, become damning evidence.”

“Are you thinking of something concrete?”

“One day, out of the blue, he suggested we bring other political groups into the insurrection project,” says the senator. “Beginning with the CP. He’d even begun to negotiate. Do you realize what that meant?”

“Frankly, no,” I reply. “All the left-wing parties, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, accepted years later the idea of an alliance, joint operations, even combining in a single party. Why was something suspicious then that hasn’t been thought so ever since?”

“Ever since means twenty-five years later,” he says with irony. “A quarter century ago, a Trotskyist just could not propose that we invite the Stalinists to work with us. In those days, it would have been something like the Vatican suggesting that all Catholics convert to Islam. The very suggestion was a confession. The Stalinists hated Mayta with all their heart. And he hated them, at least he appeared to. Can you imagine Trotsky calling Stalin in to work with him?” He nods in regret. “His game was obvious.”

“I never believed it,” Anatolio said. “Some of the others in the party do believe it. I always defended you, saying it was a bunch of lies.”

“If talking about it is going to make you forget it, okay, let’s talk.” Mayta spoke softly. “If not, let’s not talk about it. It’s hard for me to talk about it, Anatolio, and I’ve always been confused about it. I’ve been in the dark about it for years and years, trying to understand.”

“Do you want me to take off?” Anatolio asked. “I’ll leave right away.”

But he didn’t move a muscle. Why couldn’t Mayta stop thinking about those families in the other little rooms, piled up in the darkness, parents, children, stepchildren, sharing mattresses, blankets, the stale air and the bad smells of the night? Why did he have them before his mind’s eye now, when he normally never thought about them?

“I don’t want you to go,” he said. “I want you to forget what happened, and for us never to mention it again.”

A car, making an incredible racket, impertinent, doubtless ancient and patched up from one end to the other, crossed a nearby street, shaking the windows in their frames.

“I don’t know,” Anatolio said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to forget it and let everything go back to being what it was. What got into you, Mayta? How could you do it?”

“Well, since you really want to know, I’ll tell you,” he heard himself saying, with a firmness that surprised him. He closed his eyes, and fearing that once again his mouth would disobey him at any moment, he went on: “Ever since the Central Committee meeting, I’ve been happy. It’s as if I’d got new blood, because of this idea of going into action. I was … you know how I was, Anatolio. That was why I did it. Excitement, enthusiasm. It’s wrong, animal instincts blind our reason. I felt a desire to touch you, to caress you. I’ve felt the same way many times since I met you. But I was always able to control myself, and you never noticed. Tonight I just couldn’t contain myself. I know that you could never want to have me touch you. The most I could ever hope to get from someone like you, Anatolio, would be to let me jerk him off.”

“I’ll have to inform the party and request them to expel you.”

“And now I really do have to say goodbye,” Senator Campos suddenly says, looking at his watch, his head turning toward the Chamber. “There’s going to be a discussion of the plan to lower the draft age tofifteen. Fifteen-year-old soldier boys, can you imagine? Of course, the other side uses grade-school kids …”

He stands up, and I do likewise. I thank him for the time he’s given me, even though, as I tell him to his face, I find myself frustrated. Those harsh charges against Mayta and his interpretation of Jauja as a mere trap do not seem well-founded to me. He goes on smiling amiably.

“I don’t know if I’ve acted properly in speaking to you so frankly,” he says to me. “It’s one of my defects, I know it. But in this case, for political reasons, it would be better not to stir up the mud and spatter people with it. But, after all, you aren’t a historian but a novelist. If you had said I’m going to write an essay, a sociopolitical study, I wouldn’t have said a word. Fiction is different. You can believe what I’ve said or not, of course.”