Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“Get going and don’t stop,” Mayta ordered the driver, sticking his finger in his back. At least, no one shot that old grouch. “He’s a Spaniard,” Felicio Tapia said, laughing. “What does alight mean?”

“Everyone in Jauja says you are the most pacific man in the world, don Pedro, a person who makes no trouble for anyone. What got into you that morning that you went out and insulted the revolutionaries?”

“I don’t know what got into me.” He talks through his nose, his toothless mouth dripping saliva. He lies under the vicuña blanket in his chair in the shop where he’s passed the more than forty years since he came to Jauja: don Pedro Bautista Lozada. “I just got mad. I saw them go into the International and carry out the money in a bag. That didn’t bother me. Then I heard them give communist cheers and shoot off their rifles. They didn’t care that their stray shots could hurt someone. What was all that foolishness? So I took my shotgun, this one I have between my legs in case of unannounced guests. Then I noticed I hadn’t even loaded it.”

The dust, the junk, the disorder, and the character’s incredible age remind me of a movie I saw when I was a kid: The Prodigious Magician . Don Pedro’s face is a prune and his eyebrows are bushy and huge. He’s told me he lives alone and prepares his own food — his principles forbid him to have servants.

“Tell me something else, don Pedro. When the police from Huancayo arrived and Lieutenant Dongo began to look for guides to track down the rebels, you refused to go. Could it be you weren’t really so mad at them? Or was it that you were unfamiliar with the Jauja mountains?”

“I knew them better than anyone, good deer hunter that I was,” he drones and dribbles, wiping away the gook that pours out of his eyes. “But even though I don’t like communists, I don’t like cops either. I’m talking about then, because nowadays I don’t even know what I like anymore. I only have a few watches left and this spit that keeps slipping out because I have no teeth. I’m an anarchist and will be one until I die. If anyone walks in here with bad intentions, guerrilla or police agent, this shotgun goes off. Down with communism, goddamn it. Death to the cops.”

The taxis, one behind the other, passed through Plaza Santa Isabel, where they were to have loaded the Ricrán truck with the weapons captured at the jail, the police station, and the Civil Guard post. But no one around Mayta in the jam-packed car in which they could barely move was complaining about the change. The joeboys couldn’t stop hugging each other and cheering. Condori, reserved, looked at them without partaking of their enthusiasm. Mayta was silent. But this happiness and excitement moved him. In the other taxi, the same scene was undoubtedly taking place.

At the same time, Mayta was taking note of the driver’s edginess, watching him carefully, worried about the sloppy way he was driving. The car bounced and pitched. Mr. Onaka went into every pothole, hit every rock, and seemed intent on running over every dog, burro, horse, or person who crossed his path. Was it fear, or deliberate? Just then, only a few hunderd yards outside Jauja, the car went off the road and smashed against a pile of rocks alongside the ditch, flattening a fender and throwing the passengers into each other and against doors and windows. The five of them thought Mr. Onaka had done it on purpose. They roughed him up, insulted him, and Condori gave him a punch that split his eyebrow. Onaka whined that he hadn’t crashed on purpose. When they got out of the car, Mayta smelled eucalyptus: a cool breeze from the nearby mountains was wafting it in. Vallejos’s taxi doubled back, raising a cloud of red dust.

“That little joke cost us fifteen minutes, maybe more,” says Juan Rosas, sub-contractor, truck driver, and owner of a bean and potato farm. He happens to be in Jauja, recovering from a hernia operation at his son-in-law’s house. “We were waiting for another car to replace the Chink’s. Not even a burro came by. The worst bad luck, because there were always trucks on that road coming and going to and from Molinos, Quero, or Buena Vista. That day, nothing. Mayta told Vallejos, ‘You go on with your group — the one I was in — and see about the horses.’ Because no one thought the Ricrán people would be waiting for us. Vallejos didn’t want to go. So we stayed. Finally, a pickup came by. Fairly new, a full tank, good retreads. Not bad. We stopped it, there was an argument, the driver didn’t want to cooperate, we had to scare him. In the end, we just commandeered it. The lieutenant, Condon, and Gonzales were up front. Mayta got in the back with the plain folk — us — and all the Mausers. We were concerned about the loss of time, but as soon as we got started again, we began to sing.”

The pickup jumped along the roadbed filled with potholes, and the joeboys, their hair flying all over, their fists in the air, cheered Peru and the socialist revolution. Mayta, sitting with his back against the cab, looked at them. Then, suddenly, it occurred to him: “Why don’t we sing ‘The International,’ comrades?”

The little faces, white with dust, nodded agreement, and several said, “Yes, yes, let’s sing it.” But then he realized that none of them knew the words or had ever heard “The International.” There they were, under the diaphanous mountain sky, in their wrinkled uniforms, looking at him and looking at each other, each one waiting for the others to begin singing. He felt a wave of tenderness for the seven boys. They were years away from being men, but had already graduated into the revolution. They were risking everything in the marvelous spontaneity of their fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years, even though they lacked political experience and any ideological formation. Weren’t they worth more than the experienced revolutionaries of the RWP(T), who had stayed back in Lima, or the lettered Dr. Ubilluz and his worker-peasant legions, who had evaporated that same morning? Yes, they were. They’d chosen action. He wanted to hug them.

“I’ll teach you the words,” he said, standing up in the bouncing truck. “Let’s sing, sing along with me. ‘Arise, ye prisoners of starvation …’”

Screeching, out of key, exalted, laughing themselves sick because of their mistakes and cracked voices, raising a left fist in the air, cheering the revolution, socialism, and Peru: that’s how the mule drivers and farmers on the outskirts of Jauja saw them, and also the rare travelers trekking down toward the city through waterfalls and bushy ferns, along that rocky, humid gorge that runs from Quero to the provincial capital. They tried to sing “The International” for quite a while, but because Mayta couldn’t carry a tune, they never got it right. They ended up singing the National Anthem and the anthem of the Colegio Nacional de San José de Jauja. Then they reached the Molinos bridge. The truck didn’t stop until Mayta forced it to by banging on the roof.

“What’s the problem?” asked Vallejos, sticking his head out the half-open door.

“Weren’t we going to blow up this bridge?”

The lieutenant made a face. “How? With our hands? The dynamite’s at Ubilluz’s place.”

Mayta remembered that in every one of their discussions Vallejos had insisted on blowing up the bridge. With it destroyed, the police would have to go up to Quero on foot or on horseback, which would be one more advantage.

“Don’t worry.” Vallejos quieted him down. “We’ve done enough. Keep on singing, it makes the trip go faster.”

The pickup started to move again, and the seven joeboys began singing and joking once more. But Mayta didn’t sing along. He stood with his back against the cab, and as he watched the landscape with its huge trees go by, he listened to the sound of the waterfalls, the trill of the finches, and felt the clear air filling his lungs with oxygen. Lulled by the happiness of the adolescents, he let his imagination run wild. How would Peru be in a few years? A busy hive, whose atmosphere would reflect, on a national scale, the atmosphere of this truck, stirred by the idealism of these boys.