The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (20 page)

“As a matter of fact, we should have expelled him a long time ago,” affirms Comrade Joaquín. He turned to look at Mayta in such a way that I thought: Why does he hate me? “I'm going to tell you what I think without pulling any punches, as a Marxist and as a revolutionary. I'm not surprised at what you have done, not about the plot, not about having secretly talked with that Stalinist policeman Blacquer. You can't do anything straight, because you aren't straight, you're just not a man, Mayta.”

“Let's keep personal differences out of this,” the secretary general interrupted him.

What Joaquín said took him so by surprise that Mayta couldn't say a word. All I could do was shrink back. Why did it surprise me so much? Wasn't it something that was always in the back of my mind, something I always feared would come up in debates, a quick low blow that would lay me out and keep me on my back for the rest of the discussion? With a cramp in every part of his body, he leaned back on the pile of newspapers. I felt a hot wave roll over me and in despair I thought: Anatolio is going to stand up and confess that we slept together last night. What was Anatolio going to say? What was he going to do?

“It isn't a personal difference, because it's directly related to what's happened,” replied Comrade Joaquín. Even with all my fear and perturbation, Mayta knew that Joaquín really did hate him. What did I ever do to him that was so serious, so wounding to him that he would take this kind of revenge? “That way of doing things of his, complicated, capricious, that idea of going to see our worst enemy, is feminine, comrades. It's a subject that's never been brought up here out of consideration for Mayta, the very kind of consideration he didn't have for us. Is it possible to be a loyal revolutionary and a homosexual at the same time? That's the real question we've got to decide, comrades.”

Why does he say homosexual and not fag? I thought absurdly. Isn't fag the right word? Recovering, he raised his hand, signaling to Comrade Jacinto that he wanted to speak.

“Are you sure that it was Mayta himself who told them he'd gone to see you?”

“Yes, I'm sure.” Blacquer nods. “He thought he had done the right thing. He wanted to have a motion approved. That once the three who had to go went up to Jauja, the ones who stayed in Lima would again try to set up an agreement with us. It was his biggest mistake. For the Trots, who couldn't figure out how they were going to get out of the Jauja operation—which they never believed in, and which they thought Mayta had dragged them into—this was the perfect pretext. They could get rid of Jauja and Mayta all in one shot. Which meant splitting up even more. That's always been the Trots' favorite sport: purges, divisions, fractions, and expulsions.”

He laughs, showing his nicotine-stained teeth.

“Personal differences have nothing to do with it, and neither do sexual or family differences,” I answered, without taking my eyes off the back of Anatolio's head, as he sat on one of the little milking stools, his eyes fixed on the floor. “And that's why I'm not going to pay attention to that provocation. Because there's only one way to respond to what you said, Joaquín.”

“It's against the rules to get personal. Threats are also against the rules.” The secretary general raised his voice.

“Well, are you homosexual or not, Mayta?” he heard Comrade Joaquín say right to his face. I saw that his fists were clenched, that he was ready to defend himself or to attack. “At least be frank about your vice.”

“Private conversations are not allowed,” insisted the secretary general. “And if you want to fight, go outside.”

“You're right, comrade,” said Mayta, looking at Jacinto Zevallos. “No conversations and no fights, nothing to distract us from our business. This argument isn't about sex. We'll take it up another time, if Comrade Joaquín thinks it's so important. Let's go back to our agenda. And I hope I won't be interrupted, at least.”

I'd recovered my self-control, and they actually did let me speak. But even as he spoke, he knew inside that it wasn't going to be much use. They'd already decided, that's right, behind my back, to wash their hands of the insurrection, and no amount of talk was going to change their minds. As he spoke, he never revealed his pessimism. I forcefully repeated all the reasons I'd already given them, which circumstance gave them, reasons that even now, despite reverses and objections, still seem irrefutable to me as I heard them spoken aloud.

Didn't the objective conditions exist? Weren't the victims of latifundism, bossism, and capitalist and imperialist exploitation a revolutionary potential? If that is the case, then the revolutionary vanguard would create the subjective conditions by means of armed acts of propaganda, striking at the enemy in pedagogic operations that would mobilize the masses and gradually incorporate them into the action. Weren't there lots of examples? Indochina, Algeria, Cuba—there they were, the proof that a determined vanguard could start the revolution. It was false to say that Jauja was a petit-bourgeois adventure. It was a well-planned action and it had its own small but sufficient infrastructure. It would be successful if all of us would do our jobs. It was also false to say that the RWP(T) was being dragged along in the operation: it would have ideological control over the revolution, Vallejos would only have military control. We would have to take a more liberal, more generous, more Marxist, and more Trotskyist point of view, comrades. We cannot afford sectarian squabbles. Here in Lima, you're right, support is weak. That's why we have to be open to support from other left groups, because the fight is going to be long, difficult, and …

“There is a motion on the floor asking for Mayta's expulsion, and that's what we have to discuss,” remembered Comrade Pallardi.

“Didn't I make myself clear when I said we shouldn't see each other ever again?” said Blacquer, closing the door of his house.

“It's a long story,” replied Mayta. “I can't compromise you anymore. Because I came to speak to you, I've been expelled from the RWP(T).”

“And because I spoke to him, my party expelled me,” Blacquer says in his bleak voice. “Ten years later.”

“Your problems with the party came about because of those conversations?”

We've left the Haiti and we're walking along Miraflores Park, toward the corner of Larco, where Blacquer will take a bus. A thick mass of people stroll among and trip over the vendors who have their trinkets spread out all over the ground. The excitement the news of the invasion has caused is general. Our chat is spattered with the words Cubans, Bolivians, bombings, Marines, war, Reds.

“No, that's not true,” Blacquer clarifies. “My problems began when I started questioning the party line. But I was castigated for reasons that outwardly had nothing to do with my questions. Among the many charges brought against me was that I had supposedly flirted with Trotskyism. They said that I'd proposed to the party a plan of action that involved the Trots. The same old story: discredit the critic, so that anything he says is garbage. In that kind of game, nobody's better than we are.”

“So you were also a kind of victim of the Jauja thing,” I say to him.

“In a way.” He looks at me again, with his old, parchment-colored face humanized by a half smile. “Other proofs of my collusion with the Trots existed, but they didn't know about them. I inherited Mayta's books when he went out to the mountains.”

“I don't have anyone else to give them to,” I said jokingly. “I am bereft of comrades. Better you than the informers. If you look at it that way, you needn't have any scruples. Take my books and learn something.”

“There was a huge amount of Trotskyite shit, which I read in secret, the way we read Vargas Vila in secondary school.” Blacquer laughs. “In secret, right. I even ripped out the pages where Mayta had written down his initials, so there'd be no criminal evidence.”

He laughs again. There is a small crowd of people all craning their necks, trying to hear a news bulletin from a portable radio some passerby holds over his head. We just catch the end of a communiqué: the Junta for National Restoration announces to the community of nations the invasion of the fatherland by Cuban-Bolivian-Soviet forces. The invasion began at dawn, and the enemy has violated our sacred Peruvian soil at three places on the border, in the province of Puno. At 8 p.m., the committee will address the nation on the radio and television to report on this outrageous affront, which has electrified all Peruvians and made them into a single fist in defense of … So it was true, they had invaded. It must also be true, then, that the Marines will be moving in from their Ecuadorian bases, if they haven't already. We start walking again, among people either stunned or frightened by the news.

“It doesn't matter who wins, because I lose anyway,” Blacquer suddenly says, more bored than alarmed. “If the Marines win, I lose because I must be on their list as an old agent of international communism. If the rebels win, I lose because I'm a revisionist, a socialist-imperialist, and an ex-traitor to the cause. I'm not going to follow the advice that guy in the Haití was giving. I'm not going to fill pots and pans with water. For me, the fires may be the solution.”

At the bus stop, in front of the Tiendecita Blanca, there is such a crowd that he'll have to wait a long time before he can get on a bus. In the years he spent in the limbo of the expelled, he tells me, he understood the Mayta of that day. I hear him, but I'm distanced from him, thinking. That the events in Jauja contributed years later, even indirectly, to Blacquer's fall to the status of nonperson in which he's lived is yet another proof of how mysterious and unforeseeable the ramifications of events are, that unbelievably complex web of causes and effects, reverberations and accidents that make up human history. It seems, in any case, that he doesn't resent Mayta's impulsive visits. It even seems that at a distance he respects Mayta.

“Nobody's abstaining, you can count the hands,” said Jacinto Zevallos. “Unanimity, Mayta. You are no longer a member of the RWP(T). You have expelled yourself.”

There was a sepulchral silence, and no one moved. Should he just leave? Should he say anything? Should he walk out, leaving the doors open or just tell them to go fuck themselves?

“Ten minutes ago, we both knew we were enemies to the death,” shouted Blacquer furiously as he paced in front of Mayta's chair. “And now you act as if we'd been comrades all our lives. It's grotesque!”

“Don't anybody leave,” said Comrade Medardo softly. “I have a request for a reconsideration, comrades.”

“We are in different trenches, but we are both revolutionaries,” said Mayta. “And we resemble each other in something else: for you and for me, personal matters always take a back seat to politics. So stop bitching and let's talk.”

A reconsideration? All eyes were fixed on Comrade Medardo. There was so much smoke that from the corner where he was sitting, next to the pile of
Workers Voice
, Mayta saw their faces as if in a cloud.

“Was he desperate, crushed, did he feel his world was collapsing?”

“He was confident, calm, even optimistic, or at least that's how he appeared.” Blacquer moves his head in negation. “He wanted to show me that being expelled didn't affect him in the slightest. It might well have been true. Did you ever meet one of these guys who discovers sex or religion in old age? They get anxious, fiery, indefatigable. That's how he was. He had discovered action and he seemed like a kid with a new toy. He looked ridiculous, like an old man trying to do the latest dance steps. At the same time, it was hard not to envy him a little.”

“We've been enemies for ideological reasons, and for the very same reasons we can be friends now.” Mayta smiled at him. “Being friends or enemies, as far as we're concerned, is purely a matter of tactics.”

“Are you going to go through the rite of self-criticism and request membership in the party?” Blacquer ended up, laughing.

The veteran revolutionary in decline who one fine day discovers action and throws himself into it without thinking, impatient, hopeful that the fighting and the marching are going to recompense him for years of impotence—that's the Mayta of those days, the one I perceive best among all the other Maytas. Were friendship and love things he understood only in political terms? No: he talked that way only to win Blacquer over. If he had been able to control his sentiments and instincts, he wouldn't have led the double life he led, he wouldn't have had to deal with the intrinsic split between being, by day, a clandestine militant totally given over to the task of changing the world, and, by night, a pervert on the prowl for faggots. There's no doubt that he could pull out all the stops when he had to—we see the proof of it in that last attempt to attain the impossible, the support of his arch-enemies for an uncertain revolt. Two, three buses pass and Blacquer still can't get on. We decide to walk down Larco; maybe on Benavides it'll be easier.

“If news of this gets out, the only people who will gain by it will be the reactionaries. It's also a black eye for the party,” Comrade Medardo explained delicately. “Our enemies will be rubbing their hands with glee, even the ones from the other RWP. There they go, they'll say, tearing themselves to bits in one more internal struggle. Don't interrupt me, Joaquín, I'm not asking for an act of Christian forgiveness or anything like that. Yes, I'll explain what kind of reconsideration I'm talking about.”

The atmosphere of the garage on Jirón Zorritos had thickened. The smoke was so dense that Mayta's eyes were burning. He saw that they were listening to Moisés with relief burgeoning on their faces, as if, surprised at having defeated him so easily, they were thankful that someone was giving them an out whereby they could leave with a clear conscience.