Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“And, ‘besides,’ what?” Blacquer encouraged me to go on.

“Rifles,” I said in a small voice. “We have more than we need. If the Communist Party wants to defend itself when the bullets start flying, we’ll give you weapons. Free of charge, of course.”

Blacquer was lighting his ten millionth cigarette of the morning. But his matches went out twice in a row, and when he took his first drag, he choked. “You’re sure that this time it’s for real.” I saw him stand up, smoke pouring out of his nose and mouth, poke his head into the next room, and shout, “Take him for a walk. We can’t talk with all that crying.” There was no answer, but the child instantly quieted down. Blacquer sat down again, to stare at me and calm down.

“I still don’t know if this is a trap, Mayta,” he said, muttering. “But I do know one thing. You’ve gone crazy. Do you really think the party would ever, under any circumstances, join forces with the Trots?”

“Not with the Trots. With the revolution,” I answered. “Yes, I do think so. That’s why I’m here.”

“A petit-bourgeois adventure, if we want to put it precisely,” said Anatolio, and when I realized how much he was stuttering, I knew exactly what he was going to say next, that he had memorized what he was saying. “The masses have not been invited to participate and don’t figure in the plan in any way. By the same token, what guarantee is there that the people from Uchubamba will rise up if we go out there? None at all. Have any of us seen those imprisoned leaders? No. Who’s going to run this show? Us? No. A lieutenant with a Putschist, ultra-adventurist mentality. What role are we being offered? To be the caboose, the cannon fodder.” Now he did turn and he did have enough guts to look me in the eye. “My obligation is to say what I think, comrade.”

That’s not what you thought last night, I mentally answered him. Or maybe it was that his attitude last night had been a fake, just to keep me off guard. Carefully, so I would have something to keep me busy, I straightened up the newspapers I had been sitting on and leaned them back against the wall. By then, the whole thing had become clear: there had been an earlier meeting in which the Central Committee of the RWP(T) had decided on what was now happening. Anatolio must have been there. I felt a bitter taste, a pain in my bones. It was too much of a farce. Hadn’t we talked over so many things last night in the room over on Jirón Zepita? Didn’t we review the action plan? Will you say goodbye to anyone before you go out to the mountains? Only my mother. What’ll you tell her? That I’ve won a scholarship to go to Mexico: I’ll write you once a week, Mama. Had there been in him any hesitation, doubt, contradiction — was he uncomfortable? Not a thing. He seemed enthusiastic and very sincere. We were in bed in the dark, the cot creaked, and every time the sound of the racing little feet above our heads came back, his body, pressed against mine, tensed up. That sudden vibration showed me, just for an instant, patches of Anatolio’s skin, and I anxiously waited for it to happen again. With my mouth against his, I said, suddenly, “I don’t want you to die, ever.” And a moment later: “Have you thought that you might die?” With a voice made soft and languid by desire, he answered me instantly: “Of course I’ve thought about it. And it doesn’t matter to me at all.” In pain and trembling, on the pile of Workers Voice , which once again threatened to tip over, I thought: Actually, it does matter quite a bit to you.

“I thought it was just a pose, that he was having emotional problems, I thought that …” Blacquer stops talking because the girl at the next table has burst out laughing. “It would happen from time to time among the comrades, the same way that one fine day a soldier wakes up and thinks he’s Napoleon. I thought: This morning, he woke up and thought he was Lenin arriving at the Finland Station.”

He’s quiet again, because of the girl’s laughter. At another table, a man shouts instructions: Fill tubs, pots, pans, barrels, and put them in every room, in every corner, even if you have to use salt water. If the Reds come in, the United States will bomb us and the fires will be even worse than the bombs. That should be our top priority, believe me — enough water available to put out the fire as soon as it starts.

“But, despite the fact that it sounded fantastic, it was the truth,” Blacquer goes on. “It was all the truth. They had more than enough weapons. The second lieutenant had pilfered lots from an army armory, right here in Lima. He had them hidden somewhere. You knew that he gave Mayta a sub-machine gun, right? It seems it was from that lot he stole. The idea of rebelling must have been an obsession Vallejos had even when he was a cadet. He wasn’t crazy, his plan was sincere. Stupid but sincere.”

The false smile bares his stained teeth. With a brusque gesture, he pushes aside a small boy who tries to shine his shoes. “They had no one to give them to, they had no one to shoulder those rifles,” he mocks.

“How did the party react?”

“Nobody thought it of any importance, nobody believed a single word. Not about the rifles, not about the uprising. In the summer of 1958, months before the barbudos marched into Havana, who was going to believe those things? The party reacted in a logical way. I had to sever all relations with the Trot, because he had to have some trick up his sleeve. Naturally, I did exactly that.”

A lady tells the man who’d been talking about filling the pots of water that he’s an ignoramus. When the bombs start falling, all you can do is pray! Pots of water against bombs! What did he think, that war was like a carnival, stupid asshole? “I’m sorry you’re not a man, lady, or I’d knock your teeth down your throat,” roars the gentleman. To which the lady’s male friend gallantly adds, “I’m a man, come on and knock mine down my throat.” It looks as though they’re going to fight for real.

“Trap, madness, whatever — we don’t want to have anything more to do with it,” quoted Blacquer. “And I don’t want you here ever again.”

“Just what I expected. You all are what you are, and you’ll go on being just that for quite a while.”

The two men are pulled apart, and as quickly as they got wrangled up, they calm down. The girl says, “Don’t fight among yourselves. In times like these, we have to be united.” A hunchback is looking at her legs.

“It was a real blow for him.” Blacquer shoos away another kneeling boy trying to shine his shoes. “To come to see me, he had to overcome lots of inhibitions. No doubt about it, he actually thought the insurrection could flatten the mountains that separated us. Spineless naïveté.”

He throws his cigarette butt away, and instantly a ragged, filthy figure jumps on it, picks it up, and anxiously takes a drag, to extract one final mouthful of smoke. Was he like that when he decided to visit Blacquer? Was I that anguished when I realized that zero hour was coming and there were only a handful of us to carry out an uprising, and we lacked even a minimal support organization in the city?

“The coup de grâce was yet to come,” Blacquer adds. “His own party was going to expel him as a traitor.”

That’s what Jacinto Zevallos had said, exactly that. For the veteran, the worker, the Trotskyist relic of Peru to say it, was the most upsetting thing to occur at a meeting where he had already heard so many hostile words. Even more painful was Anatolio’s turnaround. Because he both respected and cared for old Zevallos. The secretary general was speaking indignantly, and no one moved a muscle.

“Yes, comrade, to ask help from those Creole Stalinists for this project behind our backs, and in the party’s name, is more than mere fractionization. It is betrayal. Your explanations make matters even worse. Instead of recognizing your mistake, you have simply explained your reasons. I have to request your separation from the party, Mayta.”