Mario Llosa: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“What are you laughing at?”

“At the phrase ‘to get sensualized.’ Where did you get it?”

“I’ve probably just invented it.” Mayta smiled. “Okay. There are probably better ones. To go soft, to slip. But you understand what I mean. Small concessions that mine your morals. A little trip, a scholarship, anything that panders to your vanity. Imperialism is adept at those traps. And Stalinism, too. Workers or peasants fall easily. Intellectuals grab on to the bottle as soon as they have it in front of their mouths. Later they invent theories to justify their betrayal.”

I told him he was more or less quoting Arthur Koestler, who had said those “skillful imbeciles” were capable of preaching neutrality in the face of bubonic plague because they had acquired the diabolical art of being able to prove everything they believed and of believing everything they could prove. I was sure he would reply that quoting a known agent of the CIA like Koestler was the absolute limit, but, to my surprise, I heard him say: “Koestler? Oh, right. No one has described the psychological terrorism of Stalinism better.”

“Watch it, now. That’s the road that leads to Washington and free enterprise,” I said, to provoke him.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “That’s the road to permanent revolution and Leon Davidovich. Trotsky, to his friends.”

“And who is Trotsky?” said Vallejos.

“A revolutionary,” Mayta clarified. “He’s dead. A great thinker.”

“From Peru?” insinuated the lieutenant timidly.

“Russian,” said Mayta. “He died in Mexico.”

“Enough politics, or I’ll throw you both out,” Zoilita insisted. “Come on, cousin, you haven’t danced even once. Come on, let’s dance this waltz.”

“Dance, dance,” Alci begged for help, from Pepote’s arms.

“With whom?” said Vallejos. “I’ve lost my partner.”

“With me,” said Alicia, dragging him to the floor.

Mayta found himself in the middle of the floor, trying to follow the beat of “Lucy Smith,” the lyrics of which Zoilita hummed in a cute way. He tried to sing too, to smile, while he felt his cramped muscles and an enormous shame at having the lieutenant see how poorly he danced. The room can’t have changed much since then; except for wear and tear, this must be the same furniture as that night. It isn’t difficult to imagine the room overflowing with people, smoke, the smell of beer, the sweat on people’s faces, the music blaring, and, even, to discover them, in that corner next to the vase with wax roses, sitting one out, immersed in chatter about the only subject that mattered to Mayta — the revolution — a chat that lasted until dawn. The external scene — faces, gestures, clothing, objects — is there, quite visible. But not what happened within Mayta and the young lieutenant over the course of those hours. Did a current of sympathy flow from the first moment between the two, an affinity, the reciprocal intuition of a common denominator? There are friendships at first sight, more often perhaps than loves. Or was the relation between them from the outset exclusively political, an alliance of two men pledged to a common cause? In any case, they met here, and here began for both of them — although in the disorder of the party neither could suspect it — the most important event of their lives.

“If you do write something, don’t mention me at all,” doña Josefa Arrisueño begs me. “Or at least change my name and, above all, the address of the house. Many years have gone by, but in this country you never know. See you soon.”

“I hope we do see each other soon,” said Vallejos. “Let’s continue our talk another time. I have to thank you because, you know, I’ve learned a great deal.”

“See you, ma’am.” We shake hands, and I thank her for her patience.

I go back to Barranco on foot. As I cross Miraflores, the party fades little by little and I find myself evoking an image of that hunger strike that Mayta went on when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, so he could be on a par with the poor. Out of all that talk with his aunt-godmother, the image that remains clearest in my mind is that midday bowl of soup and that slice of bread at night: all he ate for three months.

“See you soon.” Mayta nodded. “Yes, of course, we’ll go on talking.”

The Action for Development Center is located on Avenida Pardo in Miraflores. It’s in one of the last of the old low-rise buildings to resist the advance of “urban development,” the skyscrapers that have replaced these brick-and-wood houses and the gardens that surround them. Once the old houses were graced with shade, the rustle of leaves, and the chatter of sparrows — the effect of the ficus trees, once the lords of the street and now mere pygmies, reduced by the scale of the giant buildings. The good taste of Moisés — of Doctor Moisés Barbi Leyva, as the receptionist reminds me — has filled the house with colonial furniture that fits in perfectly with the building itself, which is one of those forties copies of the architecture of our colonial era: balconies with awnings, Sevilian patios, Moorish-style arches, tiled fountains. It has a certain charm. The whole house glows, and you can see people working in the rooms that face the garden, itself well trimmed and neat. Two armed guards who frisk me to see if I’m carrying a gun patrol the entranceway. While I wait to see Moisés, I look over the center’s most recent publications, all on view in a display case illuminated by fluorescent light: studies on economy, statistics, sociology, politics, and history, all nicely printed, with a kind of prehistoric seabird colophon on the title pages.

Moisés Barbi Leyva is the backbone of the Action for Development Center. Thanks to his ability to wheel and deal, to his magnetic personality, and his prodigious appetite for work, the center is one of the most active cultural entities in the country. What is extraordinary about Moisés, beyond his cyclonic will and his bulletproof optimism, is his ability to negotiate, an anti-Hegelian science that consists in reconciling opposites, like San Martín de Porres — also from Lima — getting a dog, a mouse, and a cat all to eat from the same plate. Thanks to Moisés’s eclectic genius, the center gets subventions, grants, and loans from capitalists and communists, from the most conservative governments and foundations as well as the most revolutionary, Washington and Moscow, Bonn and Havana, Paris and Beijing. They all think the center is their institution. Naturally, they are all wrong. The Action for Development Center belongs to Moisés Barbi Leyva and will belong to no one else until he dies. And doubtless it will die with him, because there is no one in this country capable of replacing him.

In Mayta’s time, Moisés was a radical revolutionary. Now he is a progressive intellectual. His genius lies in having maintained intact his image as a man of the left, of having actually strengthened it as the center prospered — and he along with it. In the same way, he has been able to maintain excellent relations with the most violently opposed ideological adversaries; he has been able to get along with all the governments this country has had in the last twenty years, without selling out to any of them. He has a masterly sense of proportion and distance and knows how to counteract any concession that might seem excessive toward any one side with a compensatory rhetorical outburst toward the other. When I hear him at a cocktail party speak out all too forcefully against the rape of our natural resources by multinational corporations or against imperialist perversions of our Third World culture, I know that this year the U.S. contributions to the center’s programs have been larger than those of the opposition. And if, at an exhibition or concert, I hear him alarmed about Soviet intervention in Afganistan or pained at the repression of Solidarity in Poland, it’s that this time he’s received some help from the Eastern Bloc. With feints and shifts like these, he can always prove his ideological independence and that of the institution he heads.