Mario Llosa: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“It was when I got out of jail, after Jauja, after those four years inside,” he says, looking straight ahead. “Do you remember what was going on in the Valle de La Convención, out there in Cuzco? Hugo Blanco had organized the peasants in unions and had led them in a few land seizures. Something important, very different from what all the left had been doing. They had to have support, so what happened to us in Jauja wouldn’t happen to them.”

I stop at a red light, on Avenida Abancay, and he stops, too. It’s as if the person next to me were different from the one who was just in my study, and different from the Mayta in my story. A third, wounded, lacerated Mayta, whose memory is intact.

“So we tried to give them support, with money.” He is whispering. “We planned two expropriations. At that time, it was the best way to lend a hand.”

I don’t ask him who his accomplices were: his old comrades from the RWP(T) or those from the RWP, revolutionaries he met in jail, or others. At that time — the early sixties — the idea of direct action was in the air, and there were countless young men who, if they weren’t already taking action, spoke night and day about doing it. It couldn’t have been difficult for Mayta to link up with them, charm them, lead them in an action sanctified with the all-absolving name of expropriation. What happened in Jauja must have earned him some prestige among radical groups. I don’t bother to ask if he was the brain behind those robberies.

“The plan worked perfectly in both cases,” he adds. “There were no arrests, no casualties. We carried them out on two consecutive days, in different parts of Lima. We expropriated”—a brief hesitation before coming up with the proper vague formula—“several million.”

He falls silent once again. I see that he’s concentrating, looking for the right words to say what must be the most difficult thing of all. We are at the Plaza de Acho, a mass of shadows blurred by the fog. Which way? Yes, I’m going to take you all the way home. He points the way to Zárate. It’s a bitter paradox that, now that he’s free, he lives in the Lurigancho area. The street here is a combination of holes, puddles, and garbage. The car shakes and bounces.

“Since the cops knew all there was to know about me, we agreed that I wouldn’t bring the money out to Cuzco. That’s where we were supposed to hand it over to Hugo Blanco’s people. As a simple precaution, we decided that afterward I would stay away from the others. The comrades left in two groups. I helped them to leave myself. One group in a heavy truck, the other in a rented car.”

He is silent again for a moment, and coughs. Then, in a dry voice, with a touch of irony, he quickly adds: “That’s when the cops grabbed me. Not for the expropriations. For the robbery in La Victoria. In which I hadn’t been involved, about which I knew nothing. Now there’s a coincidence, I thought. Nice coincidence. Terrific. It has its positive side. It distracts them, it’s going to screw them up. They won’t connect me at all with the expropriations. But no, it wasn’t a mere coincidence …”

Suddenly I know what he’s going to tell me, I’ve guessed exactly what the climax of his story is going to be.

“I didn’t understand completely until years later. Maybe because I didn’t want to understand.” He yawns, his face red, and chews on something. “One day in Lurigancho, I even saw a mimeographed handbill printed by some damn little group or other that accused me of being a common thief. They said I had robbed I don’t know how much money from the bank in La Victoria. I paid no attention, I thought it was one of the usual low blows you get in political life. When I got out of Lurigancho, absolved for the La Victoria caper, eighteen months had gone by. I began to look for the comrades who’d taken part in the expropriations. Why, in all that time, hadn’t they sent me a single message, why hadn’t they contacted me? Finally, I found one of them. And we talked.”

He smiles, half opening his mouth and showing his remaining teeth. The drizzle has stopped and in the headlights I can see dirt, stones, garbage, the outline of poor houses.

“Did he tell you that the money never got into Hugo Blanco’s hands?” I ask.

“He swore he’d been against it, that he tried to convince the others not to pull a dirty deal like that,” Mayta says. “He told me dozens of lies and blamed it all on the others. He had asked them to consult me about what they were going to do. According to him, the others didn’t want to. ‘Mayta’s a fanatic,’ he says they said. ‘He wouldn’t understand, he’s too upright to do something like that.’ Out of all the lies he told me, I managed to pick out some truths.”

He sighs and asks me to stop. While I watch him, next to the door, unbutton and button his fly, I ask myself: If the Mayta who was my model could be called a fanatic, what about this one? Yes, no doubt about it, they both are. Although, perhaps, not in the same way.

“It’s true. I wouldn’t have understood,” he says softly, when he’s sitting alongside me again. “It’s true. I would have said: The revolution’s money will burn your hands. Don’t you realize that if you keep it, you stop being revolutionaries and become thieves?”

He sighs again, deeply. I’m driving very slowly down a dark street on the sides of which we see whole families sleeping, covered with newspapers. Squalid dogs come out to bark at us, their eyes glowing in the headlights.

“I wouldn’t have let them, of course,” he repeats. “That’s why they turned me in, that’s why they implicated me in the La Victoria robbery. They knew that, before allowing such a thing, I would have shot them. They killed two birds with one stone when they squealed on me. They got rid of me, and the police found a fall guy. They knew I wouldn’t turn in comrades I thought were bringing the money from our expropriations out to Hugo Blanco. When I realized during the questioning what they were accusing me of, I said, ‘Perfect, they don’t suspect a thing.’ And for a while I was fooling them. I thought it was a good alibi.”

He laughs, slowly, with his face still serious. He falls silent, and I realize that he won’t say anything more. He doesn’t have to. If it’s true, now I know what destroyed him, now I know why he’s the ghost I have beside me. It wasn’t the Jauja failure, not all those years in jail, not even paying for crimes committed by others. It was finding out that the expropriations were, in fact, robberies. Finding out that, according to his own philosophy, he had acted “objectively” like a common thief. Or had he, rather, played the naïve fool with less seasoned comrades who’d been in fewer prisons than he? Was that what disillusioned him with the revolution, what made him this faded copy of what he once was?

“For a while, I thought of hunting them down one by one and settling accounts,” he says.

“Like The Count of Monte Cristo ,” I interrupt. “Did you ever read it?”

But Mayta isn’t listening to me.

“Later I even lost my anger and hatred,” he goes on. “If you like, we can say that I forgave them. Because, as far as I could tell, they had it as bad or even worse than I did. Except one, who got to be a congressman.”

He laughs, a small acid laugh.

It’s not true that you’ve forgiven them, I think. You haven’t even forgiven yourself for what happened. Should I ask him for names, dates, try to squeeze out something more? But the confession he’s made is unique, a moment of weakness he may later regret. I think what it must have been like, behind the wire fences and concrete walls at Lurigancho, knowing you were the butt of the joke. But what if all this is nothing but exaggeration and lies? Couldn’t it be a premeditated charade to get himself forgiven for a record that shames him? I look at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s yawning and shaking as if he were cold. Just where the turnoff to Lurigancho is, he tells me to keep going straight. The asphalt pavement runs out. This fork is a dirt road that runs into open country.