Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“It’s always the same, when you’re trying to delve into a historical event,” I reply. “One thing you learn, when you try to reconstruct an event from eyewitness accounts, is that each version is just someone’s story, and that all stories mix truth and lies.”

He suggests we go on to his house. A cart pulled by two burros catches up to us, and the driver agrees to take us to the city. He drops us off, half an hour later, in front of Ubilluz’s little house, nine blocks up on Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. It just about faces the jail. “Yes,” he tells me, even before I ask. “This was the lieutenant’s territory, that’s where it all started.” The jail takes up the whole block on the other side of the street and closes off Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. At that gray wall and those tile-covered eaves, the city ends. Beyond is the country: the fields, the eucalyptus trees, and the peaks. I see, just beyond, trenches, barbed wire, and soldier boys scattered here and there, doing guard duty. One of the persistent rumors last year was that the guerrillas were preparing to attack Jauja in order to declare it the capital of liberated Peru. But hasn’t the same rumor gone around about Arequipa, Puno, Cuzco, Trujillo, Cajamarca, and even Iquitos?

The jail and Professor Ubilluz’s house are in a neighborhood with a religious name, one that carries connotations of martyrdom and expiation: Cross of Thorns. It’s a modest place, low and dark, with a large framed photograph from which beams a gentleman of another era — string tie, straw hat, waxed mustachios, high starched collar, vest, Mephistophelian goatee — who must be the professor’s father or grandfather, to judge by the resemblance. There is a long chaise, covered with a multicolored poncho, and chairs painted in several different colors, all of them so worn they seem about to collapse. In a glass-doored bookcase, there are disorderly stacks of newspapers. Some buzzing flies circle our heads, and one of the joeboys helped pass around a plateful of sliced fresh cheese and some crusty little rolls that made Mayta’s mouth water. I’m dying of hunger and I ask Professor Ubilluz if there is someplace where I can buy some food. “At this time of day, no,” he says. “At nightfall, perhaps we’ll get some baked potatoes at a place I know. In any case, I can offer you some very good pisco .

“They say the most absurd things about my friendship with Vallejos,” he adds. “That we met in Lima when I was in the army. That we began to conspire then and that we went on plotting here, when he came to be chief of the jail. The only truth in all that is that I did retire from the army. But when I was in, Vallejos was still at his mother’s breast…” He laughs, with a forced little giggle, and exclaims, “Pure fantasy! We met here, a few days after Vallejos came to take up his post. I also have the honor to be able to tell you that I taught him all he knew about Marxism. Because you have to understand”—he lowers his voice and looks around with apprehension, pointing out, as he does so, some empty shelves—“that I had the most complete Marxist library in Jauja.”

A long digression distracts him from Vallejos. Despite the fact that he’s an old, sick man — he’s had a kidney removed, he’s got high blood pressure, and varicose veins that put him through the tortures of the damned — that he’s retired from all political action, the authorities, a couple of years ago, when terrorist activities were at a fever pitch in the province, burned all his books and had him incarcerated for a week. They attached electrodes to his testicles to make him confess his complicity in the guerrilla campaign. What complicity could there be when it was common knowledge that the insurgents had him on their hit list — all because of some infamous calumnies. He gets up, opens a drawer, and takes out a piece of paper, which he then shows me: “The people sentence you to death, traitor scum.” He shrugs. He was old, and life no longer mattered to him. Let them kill him, what a crock of shit. He didn’t take any precautions: he lived alone and didn’t even have a stick for self-defense.

“So it was you who taught Vallejos Marxism.” I take advantage of his pause to interrupt him. “I thought all this time it had been Mayta.”

“The Trotskyite?” He twists around in his chair, gesturing scornfully. “Poor Mayta! He went around in Jauja like a sleepwalker, because of the mountain sickness …”

It was true. He had never felt anything like that pressure in his temples and that giddiness in his heart, which was suddenly punctuated by some disconcerting pauses in which it seemed to stop pumping. Mayta had the sensation of being empty, as if his bones, muscles, and veins had suddenly disappeared and a polar chill was freezing the huge void under his skin. Was he going to faint? Was he going to die? It was a sinuous, treacherous malaise: it came and went. He was at the edge of a precipice, but the threat of falling into the abyss never materialized. It seemed as though everyone in Shorty Ubilluz’s crowded little room realized what was happening to him. Some were smoking, and a grayish cloud, with flies in it, distorted the faces of the boys sitting on the floor, who from time to time interrupted Ubilluz’s monologue with questions. Mayta had lost the thread of the conversation. He was next to Vallejos on a bench, with his back resting against the bookcase, and even though he wanted to listen, he could only pay attention to his veins, his temples, and his heart.

In addition to his mountain sickness, he felt ridiculous. Are you the revolutionary who’s come to test these comrades? He thought: The three-mile altitude has turned you into a faded flower with a pounding heart. He could only vaguely hear Ubilluz explaining to the boys — was he trying to impress him with his confused knowledge of Marxism? — that the way to move the revolution forward was by understanding both the social contradictions and the traits the class struggle took on in each of its phases. He thought: Cleopatra’s nose. Yes, there it was: the unforeseeable element that upsets the laws of history and turns science into poetry. How stupid he had been not to foresee the most obvious thing, that a man who goes up into the Andes can suffer mountain sickness; why hadn’t he bought some pills to counteract the effect of the difference in atmospheric pressure on his body.

Vallejos asked him, “Do you feel okay?” “Sure, fine.” He thought: I’ve come to Jauja so this hick professor who doesn’t know shit can give me a class on Marxism. Now Shorty Ubilluz was pointing to him, welcoming him: the comrade from Lima that Vallejos had spoken to them about, someone with enormous revolutionary and union experience. He invited Mayta to speak and told the boys to ask him questions. Mayta smiled at the half-dozen beardless faces that had turned to gaze at him with curiosity and a certain admiration. He opened his mouth.

“He was the real guilty party, if we’re looking for guilty parties,” Professor Ubilluz repeats, with his vinegary expression. “He made fools of us. We thought he was the link with the Lima revolutionaries, with the unions, with the party, which consisted of hundreds of comrades. In reality, he represented no one and was no one. A Trotskyite, to top things off. His very presence sealed off any possibility that the Communist Party might support us. We were very naïve, it’s true. I knew about Marxism, but I had no idea of the strength of the party, and much less about the divisions among the left-wing groups. And Vallejos, of course, knew even less than I. So you thought that Mayta the Trotskyite indoctrinated the lieutenant? Not a chance. They barely had time to see each other, only when Vallejos could get to Lima. It was in this room right here that the lieutenant learned about dialectics and materialism.”