Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“But, you see, they couldn’t finish them off,” concluded Vallejos.

They had left Ubilluz’s house to take a walk, and they were sitting on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. Over their heads, they had a marvelous silence and thousands of stars. Mayta forgot the cold and the mountain sickness. He was in a state of exaltation. He was trying to remember the great peasant uprisings: Túpac Amaru, Juan Bustamante, and Atusparia. And so, though the centuries passed, and they went on being exploited and humiliated, the communities of Uchubamba had gone on dreaming about the lands they had lost and had gone on asking to have them returned. First, they asked the snakes and the birds. Later, the Blessed Virgin and the saints. After that, they asked all the courts in the region, in lawsuits they always lost. But now, just a few months or weeks ago, if what he had heard was true, they had taken the decisive step. One fine day, they had simply moved onto the lands with their hogs, their dogs, their burros, and their horses, saying, “We want what is rightfully ours.” All that had happened, and you, Mayta, didn’t you know about it?

“Not a single word,” Mayta said softly, rubbing his arms, goose-bumpy from the cold. “Not even a rumor. In Lima, we knew nothing about it.”

He spoke while gazing at the sky, amazed at the brightness of the stars in that jet-black, sparkling dome, and by the images that what he was learning called forth in his mind. Ubilluz offered him a cigarette, and the lieutenant lit it for him.

“It happened just as I’m telling you,” affirmed Vallejos. “They took over the Aína ranch, and the government had to send the Guardia Civil to get them out. The company that left Huancayo took a week to get to Uchubamba. They got them out, but only by resorting to shooting. Several dead and wounded, of course. But the community is still stirred up and unsettled. Now they know what they have to do.”

“It’s not that the Uchubamba community means to fight,” Shorty Ubilluz said. “They’re fighting already; they’ve already started the revolution. What we are going to do is simply channel it.”

The cold came and went, like vertigo. Mayta took a deep drag. “Does your information come from a good source?”

“As good a source as myself.” Vallejos laughed. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

“ We’ve been there,” Shorty Ubilluz corrected him in his pompously proper enunciation. “We have seen and we have conversed with them. And we have left all things in readiness.”

Mayta didn’t know what to say. Now he was sure that Vallejos was not the green, impulsive boy he thought he was at the beginning, but someone much more serious, solid, and complex, with more foresight, with his feet solidly on the ground. He had gone much further than he had said in Lima, he had more people, and his plan had more ramifications than Mayta had imagined. It was a pity Anatolio hadn’t come. So the two of them could exchange ideas, reflect — to straighten out between them that confusion of fantasy and enthusiasm which was eating him up. What a shame that all the comrades from the RWP(T) weren’t here so they could see that it was no pipe dream but a burning reality. Although it still wasn’t 10 p.m., the three seemed to be the only people in Jauja.

“I hope you realize that I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you the Andes are ripe.” Vallejos laughed again. “Just as I told you again and again, brother — a volcano. And we’re gonna make it erupt, goddamn it!”

“Of course, we didn’t go out to Uchubamba empty-handed.” Professor Ubilluz again lowers his voice and looks around as if that episode could still get him into trouble. “We brought three sub-machine guns and a few Mausers the lieutenant got God knows where. Also first-aid equipment. We left it all well hidden in waterproof wrappings.”

He falls silent, to take a sip of his drink, and whispers that for what he’s telling me we could both be shot in the twinkling of an eye.

“As you can see, it wasn’t as harebrained as everyone thought,” he adds once the echo of the metallic passage of the armored car fades in the night: we’ve heard it going by the house all afternoon at regular intervals. “It was something planned objectively, scientifically, and it would have worked if Vallejos hadn’t made the stupid mistake of moving the date forward. We worked with the patience of ants, a real spiderweb. Wasn’t the area well chosen? Aren’t the guerrillas today lords and masters of the region? The army doesn’t even dare go there. Vietnam and El Salvador are nothing, compared to this. Your health!”

Out there, a man, a group of men, an entire detachment was a needle in a haystack. And under the mantle of glittering stars, Mayta saw it: thick, leafy, closed, hieroglyphic; and he saw himself, next to Vallejos and Ubilluz and an army of shadows, traversing it over sinuous paths. It wasn’t the Amazonian flatlands but an undulating forest, the brow of a mountainous forest, with slopes, gulches, gorges, narrow passes, defiles, ideal pitfalls where ambushes could be set up, where the enemy’s communications could be cut, where he could be dizzied, confused, driven mad, where he could be attacked when he least expected it, where he would be forced to disperse, to dilute his strength, to atomize himself in the indescribable labyrinth. His beard had grown, he was thin, in his eyes there was an unconquerable resolve, and his fingers had grown callused from squeezing the trigger, lighting fuses, and throwing dynamite. Any sign of depression he might feel would disappear as soon as he saw how new militants joined every day, how the front widened, and how there, in the cities, the workers, servants, students, and poor employees began understanding that the revolution was for them, belonged to them. He felt an anguished need to have Anatolio near, to be able to talk with him all night. He thought: With him here, I wouldn’t feel this cold.

“Would you mind if we spoke a bit more about Mayta, Professor? Going back to that trip you all made in March of’58. He’d met you and the joeboys; he knew that you had contact with the Uchubamba communities and that it was there that Vallejos thought he would launch the guerrilla war. Did he do anything more, did he learn anything more on that first trip?”

He looks at me with his beady, disenchanted eyes as he raises his glass of pisco . He smacks his lips, satisfied. How can he make that little drink last so long? He must sip a drop at a time. “When this bottle’s empty, I know I’ll never have another drop until I die,” he says softly. “Because things will get worse and worse.” Since I stopped drinking a long time ago, the pisco goes to my head. My thinking’s out of kilter; I’m dizzy, just as Mayta must have been with his mountain sickness.

“The poor guy got the surprise of his life,” he says, in the contemptuous tone he uses when he talks about Mayta. Is it just resentment of Mayta, or is it something more general and abstract, a provincial’s resentment of everything and everyone from Lima, the capital, the coast? “He came here with all the experience of a revolutionary who’s already been to jail, sure he was going to take over, and he found that everything had already been taken care of, and well taken care of.”

He sighs, with an expression of grief over the pisco that’s running out, over his lost youth, over that guy from the coast he and Vallejos had taught a lesson to, over the hunger everyone’s experiencing, and the uncertainty everyone’s living through. In the short time we’ve been talking, I’ve come to realize that he’s a man full of contradictions, difficult to understand. Sometimes he gets excited and justifies his revolutionary past. Other times, he blurts out remarks such as, “At any moment, the guerrillas will come in here, pass sentence on me, and hang a ‘Stinking Traitor’ sign around my neck. Or a death squad will charge in, cut the balls off my corpse, and stick them in my mouth. That’s what they do around here — in Lima, too?” Sometimes he gets angry at me: “How can you go on writing novels in this nightmare?” Will he ever go back to what matters most to me? Yes: there he goes.