Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“If you don’t want to, we don’t have to discuss it,” I point out. “But I have to say this, Mayta. It’s hard for me to understand how, after you got out of prison after Jauja, you could go around robbing banks and kidnapping people. Can we talk about that?”

“No, not about that,” he answers immediately, with some harshness. But he contradicts himself when he adds: “I wasn’t involved. They used false evidence, they used false witnesses and made them testify against me. They condemned me because they needed a fall guy and I had a record. The real crime is that I was sent to jail.”

Once again, his voice trails off, as if at that moment he’d been overcome by demoralization, fatigue, and the certitude that it is useless to try to dissuade me from believing something that over time has acquired an irreversible consistency. Is he telling the truth? Is it possible he wasn’t one of the thieves in La Victoria or one of the kidnappers in Pueblo Libre? I know very well that there are innocent people in the nation’s jails — perhaps as many as there are criminals outside who are supposed to be honest people — and it is not impossible that Mayta with his record became a scapegoat for judges and cops. But I glimpse in the man seated opposite me such apathy, moral abandon, and perhaps cynicism that it is perfectly possible to imagine him an accomplice in the worst crimes.

“The character in my novel is queer,” I tell him after a bit.

He raises his head as if he’d been stung by a wasp. Disgust twists his face. He’s sitting in a low armchair, with a wide back, and now he does seem to be sixty or more. I see him stretch his legs and rub his hands, tense.

“But why?” he finally asks.

He takes me by surprise. Do I know why? But I improvise an explanation. “To accentuate his marginality, his being a man full of contradictions. Also to show the prejudices that exist with regard to this subject among those who supposedly want to liberate society from its defects. Well, I don’t really know exactly why he is.”

His expression of displeasure grows. I see him reach out and pick up a glass of water he’s placed on some books, clutch it, and, when he notices it’s empty, put it down again in the same place.

“I was never prejudiced about anything,” he says softly, after a silence. “But, about fags, I think I am prejudiced. After seeing them. In the Sexto, in the Frontón. In Lurigancho, it’s even worse.”

For a while, he’s again deep in thought. His expression of disgust diminishes, without altogether disappearing. There is no note of compassion in what he says. “Tweezing their eyebrows, curling their eyelashes with burned matches, using lipstick, wearing skirts, creating hairdos, letting themselves be exploited the same way prostitutes are exploited by pimps. How can you not be sick to your stomach? It’s unbelievable that a human being can sink so low. Faggots who’d suck someone’s dick for a lousy cigarette …” He snorts, his forehead again bathed in perspiration. He adds, between his teeth: “They say Mao shot all the queers in China. Could that be?”

He gets up to go to the bathroom again, and while I wait for him to come back, I look out the window. In the Lima sky, which is almost always cloudy, tonight you can see the stars, some tranquil and others sparkling over the black stain that is the sea. It occurs to me that Mayta, out there in Lurigancho, must have contemplated the glittering stars, completely hypnotized on nights like this, a clean, calm, and decent spectacle. A dramatic contrast to the degradation he was living in.

When he comes back, he says he’s sorry he never left the country. It was his grand illusion every time he got out of jail: to leave, to start over from zero in another country. He tried, but it was always too hard: no money, improper papers, or both. Once, he got to the border on a bus that was going to take him to Venezuela, but they made him get off at the Ecuadorian customs office because his passport wasn’t properly stamped.

“In any case, I haven’t given up hope of leaving,” he says, with a growl. “With such a large family, it’s more difficult. But that’s what I’d like to do. Here, I can’t get a decent job or anything. No matter where I look, I find nothing. But I still have my hopes.”

But you have given up hope as far as Peru is concerned, I think. Totally and definitively, right, Mayta? You who believed in so much, who wanted so much to believe in a future for your unfortunate land. You threw in the towel, didn’t you? You think, or act as if you thought, that things here will never change for the better, only for the worse. More hunger, more hatred, more oppression, more ignorance, more brutality, more barbarity. Even you, like so many others, think now only about escaping before we completely collapse.

“To Venezuela or Mexico, where they say there are lots of jobs because of oil. Even to the United States, although I don’t speak English. That’s what I’d like to do.”

Again, his voice catches in his throat, worn out by his lack of conviction. I, too, lose something at that moment: my interest in this conversation. I know I’m not going to get from my false fellow student anything more than what I’ve already got: the depressing confirmation that he is a man destroyed by suffering and resentment, who has even lost his memories. Someone in essence quite different from the Mayta of my novel, that obstinate optimist, that man of faith who loves life despite the horror and misery in it. I feel uncomfortable, as if I’m abusing him by keeping him here — it’s almost midnight — in a predictable conversation that has no substance. This digging away at memories must be anguishing for him, this going back and forth from my study to the bathroom, a perturbation of his daily routine, which I imagine to be monotonous, animal-like.

“I’m keeping you up too late,” I say.

“Well, I do go to bed early,” he says, relieved, thanking me with a smile that puts an end to our talk. “Even though I don’t sleep much — I only need four or five hours. When I was a kid, on the other hand, I was a real sleeper.”

We get up and go out. On the street, he asks me where he can catch a downtown bus. When I tell him I’m going to drive him home, he stammers that it would be enough just to bring him closer. He can get a bus in Rímac.

There’s almost no traffic on the Vía Expresa. A light drizzle blurs the windshield. Until we get to Avenida Javier Prado, we talk only about the news — the drought down south, the floods up north, the problems on the border. When we get to the bridge, he sighs, visibly annoyed, that he’s got to get out for a minute. I stop, he gets out and urinates by the car, shielding himself with the door. When he gets back in, he mutters that at night, because of the humidity, his kidney problem is worse. Has he been to a doctor? Is he being treated? First, he had to make arrangements with the insurance. Now that he has it, he’ll have to go to the Hospital del Empleado to be examined, although it seems he’s got a chronic condition that can’t be cured.

We’re quiet until we get to Plaza Grau. There, suddenly — I just passed someone selling skin cream — as if it were someone else speaking, I hear him say, “There were two robberies, it’s true. Before the one in La Victoria, the one they locked me up for. What I told you is the truth: I had nothing to do with the kidnapping in Pueblo Libre, either. I wasn’t even in Lima when it happened. I was in Pacasmayo, working in a sugarmill.”

He is silent. I don’t press him, I don’t ask him anything. I drive very slowly, hoping he’ll decide to go on, afraid he won’t. The emotion in his voice surprises me, as does his confidential tone. The streets downtown are dark and deserted. The only noise is the car motor.