Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

“ Workers Voice ,” said the secretary general. “That’s the most urgent matter.”

“Left-wing childishness, being in love with contradiction, I don’t know what to call it,” says Moisés. “The affliction of the ultra-left. To be the most revolutionary, to be further to the left than So-and-so, to be more radical than the other guy. That was Mayta’s attitude all his life. When we were in APRA Youth, snotnose punks still wet behind the ears, APRA still underground, Manuel Seoane gave us a talk about Haya de la Torre’s theory of historical space and time, how he had refuted and gone beyond Marxist dialectic. Mayta, of course, declared that we had to study Marxism so we would know just what we had refuted and gone beyond. He formed a circle, and within a few months the APRA Youth had to discipline us. And that’s how, without our knowing it, we ended up collaborating with the Communist Party. The concrete result was the Panóptico prison. Our baptism of fire.”

He laughs and I laugh. But we’re not laughing at the same thing. Moisés is laughing at the games played by the precociously politicized children he and Mayta were then, and by laughing he tries to convince me that it was all unimportant, a case of political measles, anecdotes gone with the wind. I’m laughing at two photographs I have just discovered in the office. They face each other and balance each other out in their silver frames: Moisés shaking hands with Senator Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was in Peru promoting the Alliance for Progress, and Moisés next to Premier Mao Ze-dong in Beijing, with a delegation of Latin Americans. In both, he flashes a smile of neutrality.

“The person in charge may report,” says Comrade Jacinto.

The person in charge of Workers Voice was Mayta. He shook his head to dispel both the image of Lieutenant Vallejos and the drowsiness that had been bothering him since he had awakened that morning after only three hours of sleep. He stood up and took out the three-by-five card with the outline of what he intended to say.

“That’s the truth, comrades. Workers Voice is our most urgent problem, and we have to resolve it today, right now,” he said, stifling a yawn. “In fact, there are two problems and we should take them up separately. The first, the problem of the name, has come up because the divisionists have withdrawn. The second is the usual problem, money.”

All of them knew what was going on, but Mayta spelled it out for them in great detail. Experience had shown him that being prolix in presenting an idea saved time later on in the discussion. Item one: Should they go on calling the party newspaper Workers Voice , with the T added! After all, the divisionists had brought out their own paper, which they called Workers Voice , even using the same logo, to make the working class believe that they represented the continuation of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party and that the RWP(T) was the splinter group. A sleazy move, of course. But facts have to be faced. How could there be two Revolutionary Workers’ Parties without the workers getting confused? And two Workers Voice , even if one of them had the letter T for Trotskyist all over it, would confuse them even more. By the same token, the articles for the next issue were already set, over in the Cocharcas print shop, so a decision had to be made right away. Would it be Workers Voice (T) , or should the name be changed? Mayta paused to light up a cigarette, and to see if Comrades Jacinto, Medardo, Anatolio, or Joaquín would say anything. Since they remained silent, Mayta went on, exhaling smoke. “The other matter is that we need five hundred soles to pay the printer. The business manager told me that beginning with the next issue they’ll have to charge us more, to meet the rising cost of paper. Twenty percent.”

The Cocharcas shop charged them two thousand soles to print a thousand copies, two pages each, and they sold the paper for three soles . Theoretically, if they sold out the issue, they would have had a profit of a thousand soles . In practice, the stands and paperboys charged a fifty percent commission for each copy, so that — naturally, they had no advertising — they lost fifty cents per copy. They only made a profit on the copies they sold themselves outside factories, universities, and unions. But, except for rare occasions — and those stacks of yellowed papers that demoralizingly surrounded the central committee of the RWP(T) in the garage on Jirón Zorritos were testimony to how rare they were — they had never sold out the thousand copies. Besides, many of the copies that made it to the street weren’t sold but were given away. The Workers Voice always ran at a loss, and now with the split, things had got worse.

Mayta attempted an encouraging smile. “Comrades, it isn’t the end of the world. Don’t be so downcast. Let’s try to find a solution.”

“They threw him out of the Communist Party when he was in prison, if I’m remembering right,” Moisés recalls. “Probably I’m wrong. I get confused with all those schisms and reconciliations.”

“Was he in the Communist Party for long?” I ask him. “Were you both in it?”

“We were in and not in, depending on how you look at it. We never officially joined and we didn’t have cards. But no one had a card in those days. The party was proscribed and was tiny. We collaborated as sympathizers more than as militants. In jail, Mayta, with his spirit of contradiction, began to feel heretical sympathies. We began to read Trotsky, I dragged along by him. In Frontón, he was already lecturing the prisoners about double power, permanent revolution, the stagnation of Stalinism. One day he got word that the party had expelled him, accusing him of being ultra-left, of being a divisionist, a provocateur, a Trotskyite, etc. A little later, I was exiled to Argentina. When I got back, Mayta was carrying on the fight in the RWP. But aren’t you hungry? Let’s have some lunch.”

It’s a splendid summer afternoon, with a white sun overhead that cheers up houses, people, and trees. In Moisés’s sparkling, wine-colored Cadillac, we go out into the streets of Miraflores. There are many more police patrols out than on other days, and many more army jeeps filled with helmeted soldiers. A sandbag-protected machine-gun nest manned by Marines has been set up at the entrance to the Diagonal. As we pass, I see that the officer in charge is speaking over a walkie-talkie. On a day like this, the only place to eat is at the seaside, Moisés says. The Costa Verde or the Suizo de La Herradura? The Costa Verde is closer and better defended against possible attack. On the way, we talk about the RWP in the last years of Odría’s dictatorship, 1955 and 1956, when the political prisoners were let out of jail and the exiles came home.

“Just between us, all that business with the RWP was a joke,” Moisés says. “A serious joke, of course, for the men who dedicated their lives to it and got screwed. A tragic joke for the ones who got killed. And a joke in bad taste for the ones who dried out their brains writing jerk-off pamphlets and getting caught up in sterile polemics. But, no matter how you look at it, a joke with no sense to it at all.”

Just as we feared, the Costa Verde is crowded. At the door, the restaurant’s security people frisk us, and Moisés leaves his revolver with the guards. They hand him a yellow check slip. While we wait for a table to come free, we sit under a straw awning next to the breakwater. We drink a cold beer, watch the waves break, and feel the spray on our faces.

“How many members did the RWP have in Mayta’s time?” I ask.

Moisés stares into space and takes a long drink that leaves a beer mustache on his face. He removes it with his napkin. He turns his head, and a mocking little smile floats over his face. “Never more than twenty,” he murmurs. He speaks in such a low voice that I have to lean over to hear him. “That was the most. We celebrated in a Chinese restaurant. We had twenty members. A little later, the divisions began. Pabloists and Anti-Pabloists. Do you remember Comrade Michel Pablo? The RWP and the RWP(T). Were we Pabloists or Antis? I swear I can’t even remember. It was Mayta who got us involved in those ideological subtleties. Now I remember. We were Pabloists and they were Antis. Seven of us, and thirteen of them. They got the name and we had to add a capital T to our RWP. Neither group grew after the split; that I know for sure. That’s how it went, until the Jauja business. Then the two RWPs disappeared, and another story began. Which was good for me. I was exiled in Paris, where I could write my thesis and devote myself to serious things.”