Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“So you finally made it here,” said Vallejos.

“You said it.” Mayta smiled. “Finally.”

They hugged each other. How can the Paca Inn stay open? Do tourists still come to Jauja? Of course not. What would they come to see? All festivals, even the famous Carnival, have been canceled. But the inn stays open because the functionaries who come from Lima stay there, and, at times, so do military missions. None must be here now, because there are no guards anywhere. The inn hasn’t been painted for ages and looks miserably run-down. There is no staff, no one behind the desk: just a watchman, who does everything. After I leave my bag in the small, cobwebbed room, I walk down and sit on the terrace that faces the lake, where Professor Ubilluz is waiting for me.

Did I know the famous story about Paca? He points to the glittering water, the blue sky, the fine line of peaks that surround the lake. This, hundreds of years ago, was a city of greedy folk. The beggar appeared one radiantly sunny morning when the air was clear. He went begging from house to house, and at every one, he was chased away with insults and dogs. But at one of the last houses he found a charitable widow who lived with a small child. She gave the beggar something to eat and some words of encouragement. Then the beggar began to glow and showed the charitable woman his true face — he was Jesus — and gave her this order: “Take your son and leave Paca immediately, carrying all you can. Don’t look back, no matter what you hear.” The widow obeyed and left Paca. But as she was going up the mountain she heard a loud noise, like a huge drum, and out of curiosity turned around. She managed to see the horrifying landslide of rocks and mud that buried Paca and its inhabitants and the waters that turned the town into a tranquil lake filled with ducks, trout, mallards. Neither she nor her son saw or heard anything more, because statues can’t see or hear. But the citizens of Jauja can and do see both of them, in the distance: two rocky formations staring out at the lake from a spot to which processions of pilgrims go to devote a moment to the people God punished for being greedy and insensible and who lie under those waters on which frogs croak, ducks quack, and where, formerly, tourists rowed.

“What do you think, comrade?”

Mayta could see that Vallejos was as happy and excited as he was himself. They walked to the boardinghouse where the lieutenant lived, on Tarapacá Street. How was the trip? Very good, and most of all, very moving, he’d never forget the Infiernillo Pass. Without stopping his chatter, he took note of the colonial houses, the clear air, the rosy cheeks of the Jauja girls. You were in Jauja, Mayta, but you didn’t feel very well.

“I think I’ve got mountain sickness. A really weird feeling. As if I were going to faint.”

“A bad beginning for the revolution.” Vallejos laughed, snatching Mayta’s suitcase out of his hands. Vallejos was wearing khaki trousers and shirt, boots with enormous soles, and he had a crew cut. “Some coca tea, a little snooze, and you’ll be a new man. At eight we’ll meet over at Professor Ubilluz’s place. A great guy, you’ll see.”

Vallejos had ordered a cot set up in his own room at the boardinghouse, the top floor of a house with rooms lining either side of a railed gallery. He left Mayta there, advising him to sleep awhile to get over the mountain sickness. He left, and Mayta saw a shower in the bathroom. I’m going to shower when I get up and again at bedtime every day I’m in Jauja, he thought. He would stock up on showers for when he’d have to go back to Lima. He went to bed fully clothed, only taking off his shoes before he closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep.

You didn’t know much about Jauja, Mayta. What, for example? More legend than reality, like that biblical explanation of the birth of Paca. The Indians who lived here had been part of the Huanaca civilization, one of the most vigorous conquered by the Incan Empire. Because of that, the Xauxas allied themselves with Pizarro and the Conquistadores, and took vengeance on their old masters. This region must have been immensely wealthy — who could ever guess, seeing how modest a place it is today — during colonial times, when the name Jauja was a synonym for abundance.

He knew that this little town was the first capital of Peru, designated as such by Pizarro during his Homeric trek from Cajamarca to Cuzco along one of those four Inca highways that went up and down the Andes in the same way the revolutionary columns snake their way nowadays. Those months when it could boast being the capital were its most glorious. Then, when Lima snatched the scepter from it, Jauja, like all the cities and cultures of the Andes, went into an irreversible decline and servitude, subordinate to that new center of national life set in the most unhealthy corner of the coast, from which it would go on ceaselessly expropriating all the energies of the country for its own use.

His heart was pounding, he felt dizzy, and Professor Ubilluz, with the lake as background, just goes on talking. I stop paying attention, pursued by the nightmare images I associated with the name Jauja when I was a child. The city for people with tuberculosis! Because they had been coming here since the last century, all those Peruvians suffering from that terrifying illness, mythified by romantic literature and sadomasochism, that tuberculosis for which the dry climate of Jauja was considered extraordinarily curative. They came here from the four cardinal points of the nation, first on mules over trails, then on the steep railroad built by the engineer Meiggs. All Peruvians who began to spit blood and who could pay for the trip and who had the money to convalesce or die in the pavilions of the Olavegoya Sanatorium, which, because of that continuous invasion, grew and grew, until, at one moment, it engulfed the city.

The name that centuries ago had aroused greed, admiration, dreams of gold doubloons and golden mountains came to mean perforated lungs, fits of coughing, bloody sputum, hemorrhage, death from consumption. Jauja, a fickle name, he thought. And pressing his hand to his chest to count the beats, he remembered that his godmother, in her house in Surquillo, in those days when he had gone on his hunger strike, had admonished him with her index finger in the air and her generous fat face: “Do you want us to send you to Jauja, you silly boy?” Alicia and Zoilita would drive him crazy every time they heard him cough: “Uh-oh, cousin, that’s how it begins, a little cough; soon we’ll see you on the road to Jauja.” What would Aunt Josefa, Zoilita, and Alicia say when they found out what he had come to Jauja to do? Later, while Vallejos was introducing him to Shorty Ubilluz, a ceremonious gentleman who made a little bow as they shook hands, and to half a dozen boys who looked more like lower-school kids from the Colegio San José and not secondary-school seniors, Mayta, his body still covered with goose bumps from the icy shower, told himself that soon, to those other images, another would have to be added: Jauja, cradle of the Peruvian revolution. Would that, too, be part of the place? Jauja of the revolution, like Jauja of gold, or Jauja for tuberculars? This was Professor Ubilluz’s house, and Mayta could see, through a dirty window, adobe buildings, tile or zinc roofs, a fragment of cobblestoned street, and the raised sidewalks because of the torrents that — as Vallejos had explained as they walked over — formed in the storms of January and February. He thought: Jauja, cradle of the socialist revolution in Peru. It was difficult to believe, it sounded so unreal, like the city of gold or the city of the consumptives. I tell him that at least outwardly there would seem to be less hunger and want in Jauja than in Lima. Am I right? Instead of answering, Professor Ubilluz, putting on a serious face, suddenly revives, on this solitary shore of the lake, the subject that has brought me to his land: “You have probably heard many stories about Vallejos, of course. And you will hear even more in the days to come.”