The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (30 page)

The peasants, owners of their own lands by then; the workers, owners of their own factories by then; government officials, conscious that now they were serving the community and not imperialists, millionaires, political bosses, or local parties, would feel the same. With discrimination and exploitation abolished, the foundations of equality established through the abolition of inherited wealth, the replacement of the elitist army with a popular militia, the nationalization of private schools, and the expropriation of all companies, banks, businesses, and urban property, millions of Peruvians would feel that now indeed they were progressing, the poorest first. The hardest-working, most talented, and most revolutionary would get the important jobs, instead of the richest or the best connected.

And every day the chasms that separated the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, the whites from the Indians, blacks, and Asiatics, the coastal people from the mountain and jungle people, the Spanish speakers from the Quechua speakers, would be bridged just a bit more. Everyone, except the tiny group that would flee to the United States or die defending their privileges, would take part in the great production effort to develop the country, end illiteracy, and do away with the stranglehold of central authority. The fog of religion would fade with the systematic rise of science. The worker and peasant councils, in their factories, on their collective farms, and in government ministries, would prevent the outsized growth and consequent ossification of a bureaucracy that would freeze the revolution and use it for its own benefit.

What would he do in that new society, if he was still alive? He wouldn't accept any important place in government, in the armed forces, or in the diplomatic service. Maybe a political post, a minor one, perhaps in the country, on a collective farm in the Andes, or on some colonization project in the Amazon region. Social, moral, and sexual prejudices would give way little by little, and it wouldn't matter to anyone, in that crucible of work and faith that Peru would be in the future, that he would be living with Anatolio. By then, they would have gotten back together, and it would be more or less obvious that, alone, free of stares, with all due discretion, they could love each other and enjoy each other. He secretly touched his fly with the hand grip of his weapon. Beautiful, isn't it, Mayta? Very. But how far off it seemed …

The community of Quero is one of the most ancient in Junín province. Today, the people of Quero—just as they did twenty-five years ago and probably just as they did centuries ago—grow potatoes, beans, and coca. They pasture their cattle on mountains which can be reached from Jauja by following a steep trail. If the rains don't turn the road into a swamp, the trip takes a couple of hours. The potholes make the pickup seem like a bucking bronco, but the countryside more than makes up for the rough ride: a deep pass, bound at each end by twin mountains, paralleled by a foamy, rushing river whose name changes—first it's called Molinos, and then, nearer to the town, Quero. Luxuriant cinchonas, their leaves made even greener by the morning dew, line the route toward the little town that stretches out along the pass. We go in at about eleven.

In Jauja, I heard contradictory versions of what took place in Quero. The town itself is in a war zone and in recent years has been the scene of innumerable attacks, executions, and large-scale operations by both the rebels and counterinsurgency forces. According to some, Quero was under rebel control and its plaza was fortified. Others said the army had an artillery company stationed there, as well as a training camp complete with U.S. advisers. One person was sure I'd never be allowed to enter Quero, because the army uses it as a concentration camp and torture center. “That's where they bring prisoners from all over the Mantaro Valley to make them talk. They use the most up-to-date methods. When they've finished with the prisoners, they take them up in helicopters and drop them out over the jungle to terrorize the Reds, who are supposedly watching from below.”

Tales. In Quero, there's not a sign of either insurgents or soldiers. I'm not surprised that reality contradicts these rumors. Information in this country has ceased to be objective and has become pure fantasy—in newspapers, radio, television, and ordinary conversation. “To report” among us now means either to interpret reality according to our desires or fears, or to say simply what is convenient. It's an attempt to make up for our ignorance of what's going on—which in our heart of hearts we understand is irremediable and definitive. Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

The real Quero, where I'm walking around now, bears no resemblance to its image in the fictions I've heard. You see not a trace of war or combatants (of either side) anywhere. Why is the town deserted? I supposed that all eligible men would have been conscripted either by the army or by the guerrillas, but, as a matter of fact, you don't see old men or boys either. They must be working in the fields or inside their houses. Probably they get scared whenever an outsider walks into town. As I stroll through the little church, built in 1946, with its stone tower and tile roof, and wander around the gazebo in the center of the plaza, surrounded by cypress and eucalyptus trees, I get the feeling it's a ghost town. Could it have had the same image that morning when the revolutionaries rolled in?

“The sun was shining brightly, and the plaza was full of people, because it was the time for communal labor,” don Eugenio Fernández Cristóbal assures me, as he points his cane at the sky filled with ashen clouds. “I was here in the square. They came right around that corner over there. About this time of day, more or less.”

Don Eugenio was justice of the peace in Quero at that time. Now he's retired. What's extraordinary is that after all those events in which he was absolutely and totally involved—at least since Vallejos, Mayta, Condori, Zenón Gonzales, and their following of seven children arrived here—he went back to his judicial functions and lived several years more in Quero, finally retiring. Now he lives on the outskirts of Jauja. Despite all the apocalyptic tales about the region, I didn't have to ask him twice to go with me to Quero. “I always liked adventure,” he tells me. And I didn't have to ask him twice to tell what he remembered about that day, the most important in his long life. He answers my questions quickly and with absolute certitude, even with regard to insignificant details. He never doubts, never contradicts himself, and leaves no loose threads that might call his memory into question. Not an easy game for an octogenarian who, besides, I have no doubt, hides some things from me and lies about many others. What exactly was his part in the adventure? No one knows for sure. Does he know himself, or does the version he's cooked up convince him as well?

“I took no notice, because it wasn't odd for pickups carrying people from Jauja to come to Quero. They parked right over there, next to Tadeo Canchis's house. They asked where they could eat. They were very hungry.”

“And you didn't notice that they were all armed, don Eugenio? That, besides the weapon each one had, there were rifles in the truck?”

“I asked them if they were going hunting,” don Eugenio says. “Because this is not a good season for deer hunting, lieutenant.”

“We're just going to do a little target practice, doctor,” he says Vallejos told him. Up on the pampa.

“Wasn't it perfectly normal for some boys from the Colegio San José to come here for training?” don Eugenio asks himself. “Weren't they taking military training courses? Wasn't the lieutenant a soldier? The explanation seemed more than satisfactory to me.”

“I'll tell you something. Until we got here, I hadn't given up hope.”

“That the Ricrán guys would be waiting for us with horses?” Vallejos smiled.

“And Shorty Ubilluz, too, with the miners,” confessed Mayta. “I still had my hopes.”

He looked over Quero's small, green plaza a couple of times, as if trying to make the missing men appear by an act of will. His brow was furrowed and his mouth trembled. A bit farther on, Condori and Zenón Gonzales were talking with some people from the community. The joeboys stayed by the truck, keeping an eye on the Mausers.

“A real knife in the back,” he added, in a barely audible voice.

“Unless some accident held them up on the highway,” said the justice of the peace, standing next to him.

“There was no accident. They aren't here because they didn't want to be here,” said Mayta. “What else could you expect? Why waste time feeling sorry about what they've done. They didn't come and that's that, what's the big deal?”

“That's the spirit.” Vallejos clapped him on the back. “Better on our own than in bad company, damn it.”

Mayta made an effort. He'd have to shake off this depression. Let's get to work, get the horses and mules, buy supplies, get going. Only one idea should be in your head, Mayta: Cross the mountains and get to Uchubamba. There, out of danger, they would be able to recruit men and calmly go over their strategy. On the road, while he was standing in the pickup, his mountain sickness had disappeared. But now, in Quero, as he began to move around, he felt the pressure in his temples again, the same accelerated heart rate, the same dizziness, the same vertigo. He tried to cover it up as he walked through Quero, Vallejos on one side, the justice of the peace on the other, trying to find people who would rent them pack animals. Condori and Zenón Gonzales, who knew people in the village, went to get something to eat and to buy supplies. Cash, of course.

They should have held a meeting here to explain the insurrection to the peasants. But, without even talking it over with Vallejos, he rejected the idea. After this morning's failure he didn't want to remind the lieutenant of it. Why was he so depressed? He just couldn't shake it off. The euphoria he'd felt on the road had kept him from thinking over the day's events. But now he reviewed their situation again and again: four adults and seven adolescents hell-bent on putting plans into action that fell apart with each step they took. This is defeatism, Mayta, the road to failure. Like a machine, remember. He smiled and tried to show he understood what the justice of the peace and the lady who owned the house where they had stopped were saying in Quechua. You should have learned Quechua instead of French.

“They screwed themselves by staying here so long.” Don Eugenio takes one last drag from the minuscule butt of his cigarette. How long did they stay? At least two hours. They got here around ten and left after twelve.

He really should say, “We left.” Didn't he go with them? But don Eugenio, eighty years of age and all, commits not the slightest lapse that might even suggest that he was an accomplice of the rebels. We are in the gazebo in the center of the plaza, besieged by an impertinent rain the gray, hunchback clouds pour over the town. An intense, rapid cloudburst, followed by the most beautiful rainbow. When the sky clears, there always remains a light, imperceptible drizzle, the kind we get all the time in Lima, which makes the grass in the Quero plaza glisten.

Little by little, the people who still live there emerge. They appear from out of the houses like unreal figures—Indian women lost under multiple skirts, babies wearing hats, ancient peasants wearing sandals. They come over to say hello to don Eugenio, to embrace him. Some leave after exchanging a few words with him; others remain with us. They listen to him recall that episode of times past, at times nodding slightly; at other times, they interpolate brief comments. But when I try to find out how things are now, they all lapse into an unbreachable silence. Or they lie: they haven't seen soldiers or guerrillas, and know nothing about the war. As I supposed, there is not a single man or woman of fighting age among them. With his vest buttoned up tight, his wool cap pulled down to his eyes, and with the shoulders of his shiny old jacket too wide for his body, the old justice of the peace of Quero looks like a character out of a book, a gnome who's lost his way among these Andean peaks. His voice has a metallic quality, as if he were speaking from inside a tunnel.

“Why did they stay so long in Quero?” he asks himself, his thumbs stuck in the buttonholes of his vest. He observes the sky as if the answer were in the clouds. Because they had a hard time getting the pack animals. These people here can't rent out the animals they need for work just like that. No one wanted to rent, even though they were willing to pay top dollar. Finally they convinced the widow, doña Teofrasia Soto de Almaraz. By the way, what became of doña Teofrasia? There's a murmur, some remarks in Quechua, and one of the women crosses herself. Ah, she died. In the bombing? So the guerrillas had been here after all. Damn. Had they gone already? Did many die? Why did they put doña Teofrasia's son on trial?

Thanks to don Eugenio's marginal comments in Spanish during his conversation in Quechua with the townspeople, I begin sorting out the episode that obliquely reintroduces the present into Mayta's story. The guerrillas were in Quero and had “meted out justice” to several people, doña Teofrasia's son among them. But they had already gone their way, when a plane flew over the town, strafing the place. Among the victims was doña Teofrasia, who, when she heard the plane, had gone out to see what it looked like. She died in the doorway of the church.

“What a sad way to go,” comments don Eugenio. She lived right down this street. Hunchbacked and a bit of a witch, according to local gossip. Well, it was she who accepted their offer after letting them plead with her. But her animals were out in the pasture, and it took her more than an hour to round them up. At the same time, they were held up by the food. I told you already, they were hungry, and they ordered lunch over at Gertrudis Sapollacu's place—she had a little inn and rented rooms.

“So they were sure of themselves.”

“The police almost caught them with bowls of chicken soup in front of them,” don Eugenio agrees.

The chronology is clear enough. Everyone agrees. An hour after things had calmed down, the busload of Civil Guards from Huancayo, commanded by a lieutenant named Silva and a corporal named Lituma, arrived at Jauja. They stopped briefly in the city to get a guide and to pick up Lieutenant Dongo and the guards under his command. The chase began immediately.

“And how is it you went with them, sir,” I ask him point-blank, just to see if I can rattle him.

The lieutenant tried to get him to stay in Quero. Mayta listed the reasons why he should come with them. They needed someone to act as bridge between the city and the country, especially now, after all that had happened. They had to set up auxiliary networks, recruit people, get information. He was the right man for the job. All the arguing was useless. Vallejos's orders and Mayta's entreaties were obliterated by the resolve of the diminutive lawyer. No, gentlemen, I'm no fool, I'm not going to wait around here for the police so I can pay the piper. He was going with them whether they liked it or not. The polite exchange of ideas turned into an altercation. The voices of Vallejos and the justice of the peace grew louder, and in the somber room reeking of grease and garlic, Mayta noticed that Condori, Zenón Gonzales, and the joeboys had stopped eating to listen. It was unwise to let the argument turn bitter. They had enough problems already, and there were too few of them for internal squabbles.

“It's not worthwhile arguing like this, comrades. If the doctor insists on coming, let him come.”

He was afraid the lieutenant would contradict him, but Vallejos chose instead to eat his lunch. The justice did the same, and in a few minutes the air was clear. Vallejos had posted cadet commander Cordero Espinoza out on a hill to keep an eye on the road as they ate. The stop in Quero was growing longer, and as he nibbled smoked pieces of chicken, Mayta told himself it was foolish to be taking so long.

“We really should be getting out of here.”

Vallejos agreed, glancing at his watch, but he continued eating unhurriedly. Mayta knew inwardly that he was right. Yes, what a bother it was to stand up, to stretch your legs, limber up your muscles, run out to the hills, and walk—for how many hours? What if he fainted from mountain sickness? They'd put him on a mule, like a sack. It was ridiculous to be bothered by this illness. He felt as if mountain sickness were a luxury unacceptable in a revolutionary. But the physical discomfort was very real: shivers, headaches, a generalized lassitude. And, worst of all, that pounding in his chest.