Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

They jumped off ridges and landed on their feet without breaking their heads, as if they were made of rubber. They swam rushing creeks like fish, without being swept downstream or smashed against the rocks. They went through snow without suffering from the cold, and they ran and jumped at the highest altitudes without any problems. His heart rate had speeded up and the pressure of his blood on his temples was once again intolerable. Should he say something about it? Should he ask for some coca tea, anything, to relieve that anguish?

“Tomorrow, in Ricrán, you’ll meet the ones who will do the fighting,” Vallejos said. “Get ready to climb some mountains and to see llamas and mountain grass.”

Despite his malaise, Mayta became aware of the silence. It came from outside, it was tangible, it would be there whenever Shorty Ubilluz or Vallejos fell silent. Between a question and an answer, any time a speaker paused — that absence of motors, horns, screeching brakes, acceleration, and voices seemed to have its own sound. That silence must have covered Jauja like a night laid over the night; it was a thick presence in the room, and it rattled him. That exterior void, that lack of animal, mechanical, or human life out there on the street seemed so strange to him. He never remembered having experienced such an outrageous silence in Lima, not even in the prisons (the Sexto, the Panóptico, the Frontón) where he’d spent a few seasons. When Vallejos and Ubilluz broke it, they seemed to profane something.

His malaise had diminished, but his anxiety remained, because he knew the loss of breath, the racing pulse, the pressure, the icy chill could come back at any moment. Shorty toasted him, and he, making an effort to smile, raised the glass to his lips. The fiery pisco shook him. How absurd, he thought. It’s only 180 miles to Lima, and it’s as if you were a foreigner in an unknown world. What kind of a country is this where, by just going from one place to another, you turn into a gringo or a Martian? He felt ashamed of knowing nothing at all about the mountains, of knowing nothing at all about the world of the peasants. He paid attention again to what Vallejos and Ubilluz were saying. They were talking about a community on the eastern slope of the mountains, the one that ran right into the jungle: Uchubamba.

“Where is it?”

“Not far in miles,” says Professor Ubilluz. “Close, if you look on the map. But it might as well be on the moon if you want to get there from Jauja.” Years later, during Belaúnde’s government, they put in a highway that went one fourth of the way. Before, one could only get there on foot, over the peaks, down the gorges and slopes that meet the jungle.

Is there any way I can get there? Of course not, it’s been a battleground for a year now, at least. And, rumor has it, a huge cemetery. They say that more people have died there than in all the rest of Peru. I will not, therefore, be able to visit some key places in Mayta’s story; my investigation will be cut short. Besides, even if I could slip through the army and guerrilla lines, I wouldn’t learn much. In Jauja, everybody is sure that both Chunán and Ricrán have disappeared. Yes, yes, Professor Ubilluz has it from a good source. Chunán six months ago, more or less. It was an insurgent stronghold, and it seems they even had an antiaircraft gun. That’s why the air force wiped out Chunán with napalm — even the ants were killed.

There was another massacre at Ricrán, maybe two months ago. We never did find out what really happened. The people from Ricrán had captured a guerrilla detachment and, some said, they had lynched them for having eaten their crops and their animals. Other people said that they turned the rebels over to the army, which shot them in the plaza, up against the church wall. Then a revenge squad came to Ricrán and did a number five on them. Did I know what a number five was? No. Count off: one, two, three, four, you — outside! Every fifth person was hacked, stoned, or stabbed right there in the same plaza. Now there is no more Ricrán. The survivors are here in Jauja in that immigrant zone that sprang up on the north side, either here or wandering in the jungle. I shouldn’t have any illusions about what was going on. The professor takes a sip and picks up the thread of our conversation.

“Getting to Uchubamba was for tough guys, unafraid of snow or avalanches,” he says. For people without the varicose veins this old man has now. “I was strong and could take it then, and I got there once. A sight you can’t imagine, when you see the Andes turn into jungle, covered with vegetation, animals, mist. Ruins everywhere. Uchubamba, that’s the place. Don’t you remember it? Damn! Well, the members of the Uchubamba commune set all of Peru talking.”

No, the name means nothing to me. But I do remember very well the phenomenon Professor Ubilluz has evoked, as I warm the glass of pisco he’s just served me (a pisco called Devil of the Andes, a remnant of better days, when, he says, you could buy anything in the local shops, before this rationing that’s starving us to death and killing us with thirst). Although a complete surprise to official, urban, coastal Peru, about halfway through the fifties, expropriations of land began to take place in different parts of the southern and central mountains. I was in Paris, and I, along with a group of café revolutionaries, avidly followed those remote events, which were succinctly reported in Le Monde , from which we in our imagination reconstructed the exciting spectacle: armed with sticks, slings, rocks, with their elderly, their women and children, and their animals in front, they would move, at dawn or at midnight, en masse to the neighboring lands. They felt, no doubt rightly so, that they had been dispossessed from those lands by the feudal lord, or his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, or the great-grandson of the feudal lord, so they dug up the property markers and returned the land to the commune. They branded the animals with their mark, they set up their houses, and next day they began to work the land as their own.

“Is this the beginning?” we asked ourselves, openmouthed and euphoric. “Is the volcano finally reawakening?” Perhaps that really was the beginning. In the Paris bistros, under the whispering chestnut trees, we deduced, on the basis of four lines in Le Monde , that those seizures were the work of revolutionaries, new narodniks, who had gone out to the country to persuade the Indians to carry out the agrarian reform that for years every government had promised and none had implemented. Later we found out that the takeovers were not the work of agitators sent by the Communist Party or the Trotskyist groups, that their origin was not even political. They sprang up spontaneously from the peasant masses, who, spurred on by the immemorial abuse under which they lived, by their hunger for land, and, to some degree, by the heated-up atmosphere of slogans and proclamations in favor of social justice that prevailed in Peru then — after the collapse of the Odría dictatorship — decided one day to take action. Uchubamba? Names of other communities — those that took over lands and were kicked out again, bearing their dead and wounded, or still others, which managed to keep the land — whirl around in my memory: Algolán, in Cerro de Pasco; the Valle de la Convención communities, in Cuzco. But Uchubamba, in Junín?

“Yes, sir,” said Vallejos, exultant that he could surprise him that much. “Indians with light skin and blue eyes, more gringo than either of us.”

“First, the Incas conquered them and made them work under the aegis of the Quipumayocs of Cuzco,” lectured Shorty Ubilluz. “Later the Spaniards took away their best lands and made them go up to work in the mines. That is, to die in the mines after a little while, with their lungs turned to sieves. The ones that were left in Uchubamba they gave over for ‘Christianizing’ to the Peláez Rioja family, who bled them dry for three centuries.”