Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“The delay in returning to Jauja wasn’t caused by the two casualties,” says the justice of the peace. “It was the money. Where was it? They went crazy looking for it, and it just didn’t turn up. Mayta, Zenón Gonzales, and the joeboys swore that it was on the mules, except for the soles they’d given to the widow, Teofrasia Soto de Almaraz, for her animals, and to Gertrudis Sapollacu for lunch. The guards who captured Condori’s group swore they didn’t find a penny on the mules, only Mausers, bullets, and some pots of food. They spent a lot of time interrogating us about the whereabouts of the money. That’s why we got to Jauja at dawn.”

We, too, are going to arrive later than we had planned. The hours flew by in the Quero gazebo, and it’s getting dark fast. The pickup’s lights are on. All I can see are dark, fleeting tree trunks and the stones and shiny pebbles we bounce over. I vaguely think about the risk of being ambushed at one of the switchbacks, about being blown up by a mine, about getting to Jauja after curfew and being locked up.

“What could have happened to the money from the robbery?” don Eugenio wonders, unstoppable now in his evocation of those events. “Could the guards have split it up?”

Just one more enigma to add to the others. In this case, at least, I have some solid clues. An abundance of lies clouds the whole story. How much could the insurgents have taken away with them from Jauja? My guess is that the bank employees inflated the amount and that the revolutionaries never knew how much they had stolen, because they never had time to count it. They carried the money in bags, which they tied to the mules. Did anybody know how much was in each bag? No one, probably. Probably, too, their captors emptied some of the money into their own pockets, so the total sum returned to the banks was barely fifteen thousand soles , much less than the amount the rebels “expropriated,” and much, much less than the amount the banks said they had stolen.

“Perhaps that’s the saddest part of the story,” I think aloud. “That what had begun as a revolution — as crazy as it was, it was a revolution, nevertheless — should end in a dispute as to how much they had stolen and who ended up with the loot.”

“That’s life,” philosophizes don Eugenio.

He imagined what the Lima newspapers would say, tomorrow, the day after, or the day after that; what the comrades from the RWP and the RWP(T) would say, and what their enemies in the PC would say, when they read the exaggerated, fantastic, sensationalist, yellow-journal versions of what happened which would appear in the papers. He imagined the meeting the RWP(T) would devote to distilling revolutionary doctrine from the episode, and he could almost hear the inflections and tones of each of his old comrades, asserting that reality had confirmed the scientific, Marxist, Trotskyist analysis the party had made, and completely justified its distrust and its refusal to participate in a petit-bourgeois adventure destined to fail.

Would anyone suggest that their distrust and refusal had contributed to the failure? The idea would never even occur to them. Would the rebellion have turned out differently if all the cadres of the RWP(T) had participated in it, and resolutely? He thought so. That would have brought the miners in, as well as Professor Ubilluz, and the Ricrán people. Things would have been planned and executed better, and right now they’d be on their way to Aína safe and sound. Were you being honest, Mayta? Did you try to think lucidly? No. It happened too fast, everything was too compressed. In tranquillity, when all of it was over, it would be necessary to analyze what had taken place from the beginning, to determine objectively if the rebellion would have had better luck if it had been conceived differently, with the participation of those who did take part as well as the RWP(T), or if a different plan would merely have delayed the defeat and made it more bloody.

He felt sadness, but also a desire to feel Anatolio’s head against his breast, to hear that slow, rhythmic, almost musical breathing of his when he was worn out and sleeping on his body. He let out a sigh and realized his teeth were chattering. He felt a rifle butt slam into his back: “Hurry it up.” Every time Vallejos’s image came into his mind, the cold became overwhelming, so he tried to blot it all out. He didn’t want to think about him, to wonder if he was a prisoner, if he was wounded, dead, if they were beating him, torturing him, because he knew depression would leave him defenseless against what was coming. He was going to need courage, more than was necessary just to resist the rushing wind that beat at his face.

Where had they taken Perico Temoche? Where were the others? Could any of them have managed to escape? He was walking alone between two columns of Civil Guards. They sometimes looked at him out of the corner of their eye, as if he were a rare bird, and forgetting what had just happened, they amused themselves by talking, smoking, and walking with their hands in their pockets, as if coming back from a stroll. Well, I don’t think I’ll ever be bothered by mountain sickness again, he thought. He tried to figure out where he was, because they were doubling back along the route he’d taken earlier, but now that it wasn’t raining, the landscape looked different. The colors were more sharply contrasting, and the edges of things were not as sharp. The ground was muddy and his sneakers constantly slipped off. He had to stop each time to put them back on, and every time he stopped, the guard behind him gave him a shove.

Are you sorry, Mayta? Did you act too quickly? Did you act irresponsibly? No, no, no. On the contrary. Despite the failure, the mistakes, the foolishness, he was proud. For the first time, he had the feeling he’d done something worthwhile, he’d brought the revolution forward, even if only in a minuscule way. He wasn’t depressed about being arrested, as he had been other times; then he’d had a sense of waste. They had failed, but they had done the experiment: four intrepid men and a handful of schoolboys had occupied a city, disarmed the police, expropriated the banks, and fled to the mountains. It was possible to do, and they had proven it. In the future, the left would have to take this precedent into account: someone in this country wasn’t content with merely predicting revolution, and had tried to do it. You know what it is, he thought, as his sneaker came off. He put it back on and was struck again with a rifle butt.

I wake don Eugenio, who fell asleep halfway back, and I let him off at his place on the outskirts of Jauja, thanking him for his company and his memories. I go straight to the Paca Inn. The kitchen is still open and I could get something to eat, but all I want is a beer. I drink it on the small terrace above the lake. The water sparkles, and the reeds on the shore are lit by the moon, which shines round and white in a sky spattered with stars. In Paca at night, all kinds of noises can be heard: the whistling wind, toads croaking, nightbirds singing. But not tonight. Tonight, even the animals are silent. The only other guests at the inn are two traveling salesmen, in the beer business, whom I hear talking on the other side of the windows, in the dining room.

This is the end of the main part of the story, its core of drama. It didn’t last twelve hours, beginning at dawn with the seizure of the jail and ending before nightfall with the deaths of Vallejos and Condori and the capture of the others. They brought them to the Jauja jail, where they held them for a week, and then they sent them to the Huancayo jail, where they remained for a month. There they discretely began to free the joeboys, following the decision of the juvenile court, which placed them in the custody of their families, under a kind of house arrest. The justice of the peace for Quero went back to work, “free of dust and dirt,” after three weeks. Mayta and Zenón Gonzales were taken to Lima, locked up in the Sexto, then in the Frontón, and later returned to the Sexto. Both were amnestied — there never was a trial — years later, when a new president took office. Zenón Gonzales still runs the Uchubamba commune, which has owned the Aína hacienda since the agrarian reform of 1971, and belongs to the Popular Action Party, of which he is the local boss.