Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“We saw each other three times,” Blacquer adds. “The first two were before that meeting of the RWP(T) when they threw him out for being a traitor. I mean, for coming to see me. Me, a Stalinist.”

He smiles again, exposing his tobacco-stained teeth, and behind his thick glasses his myopic eyes look me up and down disagreeably. We are in the convalescent Café Haiti in Miraflores, which still hasn’t been put back together after the bombing: its windows still have no glass in them, the counter and the floor are both still smashed and scorched. But out here in the street you don’t see all that. All around us, people are talking about the same thing, as if everyone sitting at the twenty or so tables is having the same conversation. Could it be true that Cuban troops had crossed the Bolivian border? That for the last three days the rebels, along with the Cuban and Bolivian “volunteers” who support them, have pushed the army back? That the Junta has warned the United States that if it doesn’t intervene, the insurgents will take Arequipa in a matter of days and from there will be able to proclaim the Socialist Republic of Peru? But Blacquer and I skirt these momentous issues and chat about that insignificant, forgotten episode of a quarter century ago, the key to my novel.

“I really was one,” he adds after a while. “Like everybody else at that time. Weren’t you, after all? Weren’t you moved by the hagiography Barbusse wrote about Stalin? Didn’t you know by heart the poem Neruda wrote in his honor? Didn’t you have a poster with the drawing Picasso did of him? Didn’t you weep when he died?”

Blacquer was my first teacher of Marxism — thirty-five years ago — in a secret study group organized by the Young Communists in a house over in Pueblo Libre. At that time he was a Stalinist; I mean, a machine programmed to repeat official statements, an automaton who spoke in stereotypes. Now he is a man who has grown old, who survives by working in a print shop. Is he still a militant? Perhaps, but he’s nothing more than an outsider as far as the party is concerned: he’ll never rise in the hierarchy. The proof is the fact that he’s here with me right out in broad daylight — well, it’s a gray day with lowering, ashen clouds that themselves look like bad omens, in keeping with the rumors about the internationalization of the war in the south. No one’s hunting him down, while even the lowest-level leaders of the Communist Party — or of any party on the extreme left — are in hiding, in jail, or dead. I have only heard about his confused history, and I don’t intend to find out about it now. (If the rumors turn out to be true and the war really is growing more general, I’ll barely have time to finish my novel. If the war reaches the streets of Lima, my own front door, I doubt I’ll be able to do it.)

What I want to hear is his account of those three meetings they had twenty-five years ago on the eve of the Jauja uprising. They were opposites: the Stalinist and the Trotskyist. But I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that Blacquer, who seemed destined by fate to reach the Central Committee and perhaps to be head of the Communist Party, is today a nobody. It was something that happened to him in some Central European country — Hungary or Czechoslovakia — where he was sent to study and where he got involved in some mess or other. From the sotto voce accusations that circulated at the time — the usual: factional activity, ultra-individualism, petit-bourgeois pride, lack of discipline, sabotaging the party line — it was impossible to know what he had said or done to deserve excommunication. Had he committed the ultimate crime — criticizing the U.S.S.R.? If he did, why did he do it? All we know is that he was expelled for a few years, and lived in the infinitely sad limbo of purged communists — no one can be more an orphan than a militant expelled from the party, not even a priest who puts aside his vows — where he deteriorated in all possible ways, until, it seems, he could return, having gone through, I suppose, the obligatory rite of self-criticism. Coming back to the flock didn’t help him very much, judging by what’s become of him since. As far as I know, the party had him correcting the proofs of Unity as well as some pamphlets and leaflets. At least, that is, until the insurrection took on the dimensions it has now and the communists were declared outlaws and began to be persecuted or assassinated by the death squads. But it’s hardly likely that anyone, except through some monumental error or stupidity, is going to jail or murder the ruined and useless man Blacquer has become. His acid memories have probably ended his illusions. Every time I’ve seen him over the past few years — always in a group; this is the first time in ten or fifteen years that we’ve spoken alone — he’s impressed me as being a bitter man interested in nothing.

“They didn’t expel Mayta from the RWP(T),” I correct him. “He resigned. At that last session, to be precise. His letter of resignation appeared in Workers Voice (T) . I clipped it out.”

“They threw him out,” he firmly corrects me in turn. “I know all about that Trot meeting, just as if I’d been there myself. Mayta told me all about it the last time we met. The third time. I’d like more coffee, if you don’t mind.”

Coffee and soda is all anyone can have, now that even saltines are rationed. Actually, they’re not supposed to serve more than one cup of coffee to a customer. But no one pays much attention to that law. The people around us are very excited, all talking loudly. Even though I try not to be distracted, I find myself listening to a young man with glasses: at the Ministry of the Exterior, they estimate that “several thousand” Cubans and Bolivians have crossed the border. The girl with him opens her eyes wide: “Could Fidel Castro be with them?” “No, he’s too old for that rough stuff,” the boy says, smashing her illusions. The barefoot, ragged boys in the Diagonal attack every car like a pack of dogs, offering to wash it, guard it, scrub the white-walls. Others wander from table to table, offering to make the customers’ shoes shine like mirrors. (They say the bomb that exploded here was placed by boys like these.) There are also clusters of women who assault the passersby and the drivers (when the lights turn red) to sell them blackmarket cigarettes. With the scarcities we’re forced to put up with, the one thing we don’t lack is cigarettes. Why doesn’t the blackmarket sell preserves and crackers, something we can use to stave off the hunger we feel when we wake up and when we go to sleep?

“I’ll tell you all about it,” said Mayta, panting. He spoke calmly and methodically, and Blacquer listened politely. He told him what he wanted to tell him. Had he acted properly or not? He didn’t know and didn’t care. It was as if all the fatigue of a sleepless night had suddenly welled up in him. “See? I had a good reason for knocking at your door.”

Blacquer remained silent, looking at him, his cigarette burning down between his thin, yellowed fingers. The little room led several lives — office, dining room, foyer — and was stuffed with furniture, chairs, a few books. The greenish wallpaper was water-stained. As he was speaking, Mayta had heard the voice of a woman and the crying of a child coming from upstairs. Blacquer remained so still that Mayta would have thought he was asleep, if it weren’t that he had his myopic eyes fixed on him. This sector of Jesús María was quiet, devoid of cars.

“As a provocation directed against the party, it couldn’t be any cruder,” he said finally, his voice devoid of inflection. The ash from his cigarette fell to the floor, and Blacquer stepped on it. “I thought you Trots were a little subtler with your tricks. You needn’t have bothered to visit me, Mayta.”