The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Ten

I visited Lurigancho for the first time five years ago. The prisoners housed in building number 2 invited me to the opening of a library, which someone decided ought to be named after me. So I accepted their invitation, in part because I was curious to find out if what people said was really true about the Lima prison.

To get there by car, you have to drive by the Plaza de Toros, cross the Zárate neighborhood, then go through some slums. The slums eventually turn into garbage dumps, where you can see the hogs from the so-called clandestine pig farms feeding. Then the asphalt runs out, replaced by potholes. Soon the cement buildings emerge in the humid morning light, partially blurred by the mist. They are as colorless as the sand flats around them. Even from a distance, you can see that the innumerable windows have no glass in them — if, in fact, they ever had glass — and that the movement in the tiny symmetrical squares are faces and eyes peering out.

What I remember vividly from that first visit is the overcrowding, those six thousand prisoners suffocating in an area meant for fifteen hundred, the indescribable filth, the atmosphere of pent-up violence on the point of exploding. Mayta was in that anonymous mass, more a horde or a pack than a human collectivity — I’m absolutely certain of it. It may be that I saw him and that we waved to each other. Could he have been in building number 2? Would he have bothered to attend the opening of the library?

The buildings stand in two rows, the odd-numbered ones in front, the even-numbered ones in back. The symmetry is broken up by the cell block for fags, which is up against the wire fence along the western wall. The even-numbered buildings are for recidivists or felons, and the odd-numbered ones house first offenders who haven’t been sentenced yet or are serving light terms. Which means that Mayta has been an inmate of an even-numbered building for years. The prisoners are housed according to their Lima neighborhoods: Agustino, Villa El Salvador, La Victoria, El Porvenir. Where would they have put Mayta?

My car moves forward slowly, and I realize that unconsciously I’ve taken my foot off the accelerator, I’m trying to postpone my second visit to Lurigancho as long as possible. Am I frightened by the thought of finally facing the character I’ve been investigating, about whom I’ve been questioning people, whom I’ve been imagining and writing about for a year? Or is my repugnance for this place stronger than my curiosity about Mayta? At the end of my first visit; I thought: It isn’t true that the convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around. Kennels, chickenhouses, and stables are more hygienic than Lurigancho.

Between the buildings runs what is sarcastically called Jirón de la Unión, a narrow, crowded alley, dark by day and totally black at night. It’s there that the bloodiest fights between gangs and between individual killers take place, and where the pimps peddle their living goods. I remember clearly walking through this nightmare, rubbing elbows with that pitiful, almost sleepwalking fauna: half-naked blacks, half-breeds covered with tattoos, mulattoes with intricate hairdos — veritable jungles cascading down to their waists — and stupefied, bearded whites, foreigners with blue eyes and with scars, squalid Chinese, Indians huddled against the wall, and madmen talking to themselves. I know that for years Mayta has been running a kiosk where he sells things to eat and drink in Jirón de la Unión. But no matter how hard I try to remember, I just can’t seem to evoke the image of a food stand in the sultry alleyway. Was I so upset that I didn’t realize what it was? Or was the “kiosk” nothing more than a blanket on the ground where Mayta, hunkered down, offered juice, fruit, cigarettes, sodas?

To reach building 2, I had to circle the uneven cell blocks and cross two wire fences. The warden, leaving me at the first fence, told me I was on my own now; not even the National Guard enters that sector, or anyone else carrying firearms. As soon as I passed through the fence, I was surrounded by a multitude waving their arms, all speaking at the same time. The delegation that had invited me formed a circle around me then, and that’s how we made our way: me in the center of a ring of men, and outside the ring, a mass of criminals. The convicts must have mistaken me for some official or other, because they began to spout out their case histories, rave, protest abuses, shout, and demand services. Some were coherent, but the majority were chaotic. They all seemed on edge, violent, not quite in focus mentally. As we walked, I discovered the source of the solid stench and the clouds of flies: a wall about a yard high, where all the garbage from the jail must have been accumulating for months, even years. A naked inmate was sleeping soundly, stretched out on the trash. He was one of the insane, normally assigned to the less dangerous buildings, the odd-numbered ones. I remember having said to myself after that first visit that the really strange thing was not that there were madmen in Lurigancho but that there were so few. It was incredible that all six thousand inmates hadn’t gone crazy in that abject ignominy. And what if, after all these years, Mayta had gone mad?

He was sent back to prison twice after having served four years for the Jauja affair, the first time seven months after being amnestied. It’s extremely difficult to reconstruct his story — his police and prison history — after that, because, unlike the Jauja business, there are almost no written documents relating to the actions he was accused of participating in and no witnesses willing to talk about them. The newspaper accounts I’ve been able to find in the periodical section of the National Library are so sketchy that it’s practically impossible to figure out his role in the robberies in which he was supposed to have participated. It’s also impossible to determine whether they were political actions or just ordinary crimes. Knowing Mayta, you’d think they were probably political, but, after all, what does it mean to say “knowing Mayta”? The Mayta I’ve been researching was in his forties. The Mayta of today is over sixty. Is he the same man?

In which cell block in Lurigancho could he have been spending these last ten years? Four, six, eight? They must all be more or less like the one I saw: low-ceilinged places with faint light (when there isn’t a blackout), cold and humid, with large windows covered with rusty bars, and a hole in the floor for sanitary purposes. To find a place to sleep amid all that excrement, vermin, and filth is a daily war. During the ceremony for the library — a painted box and a few secondhand books — I saw several drunks staggering around. When they passed around little cans so we could drink a toast, I found out that they get drunk on a chicha they make from fermented yuca. Unbelievably strong stuff, made right in the prison. Would my supposed fellow student also get drunk on that chicha when he’s feeling too high or too low?

The event that sent Mayta back to prison after the Jauja affair, twenty-one years ago, took place in La Victoria, near the street that was the shame of the neighborhood — Jirón Huatica, which literally crawled with prostitutes. Three gangsters, according to La Crónica, the only newspaper to write it up, seized a garage where Teodoro Ruiz Candia had an auto-repair shop. When he came to open up at eight in the morning, he found three armed men waiting for him. They also captured Ruiz Candia’s assistant, Eliseno Carabías López. The objective of these criminals was the Banco Popular. At the rear of the garage, there was a window that opened onto a lot; the rear door of the Banco Popular opened onto the same lot. Every day at noon, a van went into the lot, to take away the day’s deposits, to bring them to the Central Bank, or to deliver money to the branch for the day’s transactions. Until noon, the thieves remained in the shop with their two prisoners. They looked out through the window and smoked. Though they wore masks, the owner and his assistant swore one of them was Mayta. They also said it was he who gave the orders.

When they heard a car motor, they jumped out the window into the lot. Actually, no shots were fired. The thieves surprised the driver and the guard and disarmed them both, just after the bank employees had placed a sealed sack containing three million soles in the van. After forcing the driver and the guard to lie face down on the ground, one of the gangsters opened the gates of the lot that led to Avenida 28 de Julio. Then he ran back to the bank van, where his other two accomplices were waiting with the loot. They sped out. Because of nerves or careless driving, the van ran over a man sharpening knives, and then smashed against a taxi. According to La Crónica, the van turned over twice and came to rest upside down. But the thieves managed to get out and run away. Mayta was captured some hours later. The article does not say whether the money was recovered, and I haven’t been able to find out if the other two were ever caught.

And I haven’t been able to find out if Mayta was ever sentenced for the robbery. A police report I was able to pull from the archives of the La Victoria precinct house more or less repeats the same information as the article in La Crónica (although the humidity has ruined the paper to such an extent that it’s difficult to make it out). There is no sign of a prosecutor’s report. In the files at the Ministry of Justice, where statistics on crime and data on criminals are stored, the event shows up most ambiguously in Mayta’s file. There is a date — April 16, 1963—when he must have been sent from the police station to prison, followed by the note “Attempted robbery of branch bank, people wounded and beaten, also forced detention, traffic accident, and attack on pedestrian,” and, finally, a reference to the court handling the matter. Nothing else. It’s possible that the prosecution was slow, that the judge died or lost his job, and that the whole case remained stuck where it was, or simply that the file was lost.

How many years did Mayta spend in Lurigancho for that? I couldn’t find that out, either. I found a registry note for his entering prison, but none for his having left. That’s another thing I’d like to ask him about. In any case, I lost track of him ten years ago when he went back to jail a second time after Jauja. On that occasion, he had a proper trial and was sentenced to fifteen years for “extortion, kidnapping, and robbery leading to the loss of life.” If the dates on the file are correct, he’s been in Lurigancho for just under eleven years.

I’ve finally arrived. I go through the usual ritual. The National Guards frisk me from head to toe, and I turn in all my identification papers, which will remain at the guardhouse until my visit ends. The warden has left orders that I am to be sent to his office. An aide in civilian clothes brings me here, after crossing a patio outside the wire fences. From here, you can see the entire prison. This is the best-maintained area, the least sordid in the place.

The warden’s office is on the second floor of a cold and crumbling building made of reinforced concrete. The office itself is tiny and contains a metal desk and a couple of chairs. The walls are completely bare, and there isn’t even a pencil or piece of paper on the desk. This warden is not the one who was here five years ago, but a younger man. He knows why I’m here and orders the guards to bring the criminal I want to speak to. He will lend me his office for the interview, since it is the only place where no one will bother us. “You’ve probably seen that here in Lurigancho there isn’t an inch of space, because of overcrowding.”

While we wait, he adds that things never work right, no matter how hard they try. Now, for example, the convicts are all riled up and are threatening a hunger strike because they think their visiting rights are being cut. It’s just not true, he assures me. It’s simply that, in order to keep tabs on the visits, the usual way drugs, alcohol, and weapons are smuggled in, he’s set visits for the women on one day and for the men the next. That way, there will be fewer people each day, and each visitor can be searched more thoroughly. If they at least could cut down on the cocaine, they would keep a lot of people from getting killed. Because of cocaine, they fight it out with knives. More than because of alcohol, money, or queers, it’s the drugs. But until now it’s been impossible to keep it out. Don’t the guards sell drugs, too? He looks at me as if to say, “Why ask what you already know?”

“You can’t stop it. No matter what control systems we devise, they always beat them. Look, by just sneaking in a few grams of coke, just once, a guard doubles his monthly salary. Do you know how much they make? So there’s nothing surprising about it. People talk a lot about ‘the Lurigancho problem.’ This place isn’t the problem. The whole country’s the problem.”

He says it without bitterness, as if it were a fact I should be aware of. He seems earnest and well-intentioned. I certainly don’t envy him his job. A knock at the door interrupts us.

“I’ll leave you with the prisoner,” he says, going to the door. “Take all the time you need.”

The person who enters the office is a skinny little guy with curly white hair and a scraggly beard, who is trembling all over. He’s wearing an overcoat that’s much too big for him. He’s got on worn-out sneakers, and his frightened eyes jump around in his head. Why is he shaking like that? Is he sick, or frightened? I can’t say a word. How can this be Mayta? He doesn’t look even slightly like the Mayta in the photos. That Mayta would be twenty years younger than this guy.

“I wanted to talk with Alejandro Mayta,” I stammer.

“That’s me,” he answers in a tremulous voice. His hands, his skin, even his hair seem vexed with disquiet.

“You’re the Mayta of the Jauja business with Lieutenant Vallejos?” I hesitatingly ask.

“No, I’m not that one,” he blurts out, realizing what’s going on. “He’s not here anymore.”

He seems relieved, as if being brought to the warden’s office entailed some danger which has just vanished. He turns halfway around and bangs on the door until it opens and the warden appears with two men. Still shaking, the curly-headed old man explains that there’s been a mistake, that I’m looking for the other Mayta. He walks out in a hurry on his silent sneakers, shaking constantly.

“Know which one he’s talking about, Carrillo?” the warden asks one of his assistants.

“Sure, sure,” says a fat man, his gray hair in a crew cut and his belly slopping over his belt. “The other Mayta. Wasn’t that one mixed up in politics?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s the one I’m looking for.”

“You just missed him, as you might say,” he quickly explains. “He got out last month.”

I think I’ve lost him and that I’ll never find him and that maybe it’s better that way. It could be that, instead of helping me, a meeting with the flesh-and-blood Mayta would undo everything I’ve accomplished so far. Don’t you know where he’s gone? No one has an address where he might be found? They don’t, and have no idea where he might be. I tell the warden not to bother coming with me, and as we go downstairs, I ask him if he remembers Mayta. Of course he does; he’s been here as long as the oldest convict. He came in as a simple office boy, and now he’s vice warden of the whole penitentiary. He’s seen God only knows what things!

“A very correct, easygoing prisoner, never got into any trouble,” he says. “Ran a food kiosk in building 4. Hardworking guy. He managed to support his family while serving his sentence. He was here at least ten years the last time.”

“His family?”

“Wife and four kids,” he adds. “She came to see him once a week. I remember Mayta very well. Walked as if he were walking on eggs, right?”

We’re crossing the patio, between the wire fences, heading toward the guardhouse, when the vice warden stops. “Hold it. Arispe may have his address. He inherited the food kiosk. I think they’re still partners, even now. I’ll have him brought down, maybe you’ll be lucky.”

Carrillo and I remain in the patio, standing in front of the wire fences. To kill time, I ask him about Lurigancho and he, like the warden, says that there are always problems here. “Because here we’ve got, and I really mean it, the bad ones, people who seem to have been born for the express purpose of doing indescribable things to their fellow man.” Off in the distance, breaking the symmetry of the buildings, stands the one reserved for fags. Do they still lock them up there? Yes. Not that it’s of any real use; despite the walls and the bars, the other prisoners get in and the fags get out. Business as usual. Anyway, since they’ve got their own building, there are fewer problems. Before, when they were mixed in with the others, the fights and murders they’d cause were much worse.

I remember, from my first visit, a short talk I had with one of the prison doctors about the rapes of incoming prisoners. “The most common problem is infections of the rectum, complicated by gangrene or cancer.” I ask Carrillo if there are still as many rapes. He laughs. “It’s inevitable, with people who have nothing else, don’t you think? They have to let go somehow.” Finally, the prisoner the warden had called down appears. I explain that I’m looking for Mayta, does he know where I might find him?

He’s a respectable-looking guy, dressed relatively well. He listens without asking any questions. But I see that he has doubts, and I’m sure he’s not going to tell me anything. I ask him to give Mayta my telephone number the next time he sees him.

Suddenly he decides. “He works in an ice-cream parlor,” he says. “In Miraflores.”

It’s a small ice-cream parlor which has been there for many years. It’s on Bolognesi Street, a street I know very well because when I was a kid I knew a beautiful girl who lived there. She had the improbable name of Flora Flores. I’m sure the ice-cream parlor was there then and that I went in with the beautiful Flora Flores to have a sundae. It’s an unusual place for a street where there are no stores, only the typical Miraflores houses: two stories, front lawn, the inevitable geraniums, bougainvillea, and poincianas with big red flowers. I have an attack of nerves as I turn off the Malecón onto Bolognesi. Yes, it’s exactly where I remember it, a few steps away from that gray house with balconies, where Flora’s sweet face and incandescent eyes would appear. I park a short distance from the ice-cream parlor, but I can barely get the key out of the ignition, because I’ve suddenly become jittery.

“Alejandro Mayta,” I say, stretching out my hand. “Right?”

He looks at me for a few seconds and smiles, opening a mouth not overpopulated with teeth. He blinks, trying to remember me. Finally, he gives up.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t place you,” he says. “I thought you might be Santos, but you aren’t Santos, right?”

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I say, leaning on the counter. “You’re going to be surprised,” I warn him. “Just now, I’ve come from Lurigancho. The guy who told me how to find you was your partner in building 4—Arispe.”

I study him carefully, to see how he reacts. He seems neither surprised nor upset. He looks at me with curiosity, the hint of a smile still on his dark face. He’s wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I see hands that are rough, the rough hands of a porter or a day laborer. What I notice most is his absurd haircut. Someone has really chopped him up: his head looks like a mop, laughable. He makes me remember my first year in Paris, when I was really poor, and a friend of mine and I would get our hair cut at a school for barbers, near the Bastille. The students, just kids, would cut our hair for free, but they would leave us looking like my invented classmate. He looks at me, squinting up his dark, tired eyes — crow’s-feet at each end — with distrust growing in them.

“I’ve been investigating you for a year now, talking with the people who knew you,” I say. “Imagining you, even dreaming about you. Because I’ve written a novel that in a remote way deals with the Jauja business.”

He looks at me without saying a word, quite surprised now, not understanding, not sure he’s heard correctly, but very jumpy.

“But …” he stammers. “Why would you even bother, how can it be …”

“I don’t really know why, but that’s what I’ve been doing all this year,” I say to him quickly, afraid of his fear, afraid he’ll refuse to talk to me now or ever again. I try to explain: In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events. This investigation, these interviews, I didn’t do it all so I could relate what really happened in Jauja, but so I could lie and know what I’m lying about.

I realize that, instead of calming him down, I’m confusing and alarming him. He blinks and stands there with his mouth open, mute.

“Now I know who you are. You’re the writer.” Now he’s out of the difficulty. “Sure, I recognized you. I even read one of your novels, at least I think so, years back.”

Just then, three sweaty boys come in from some game, judging by the equipment they’re carrying. They order ice cream and sodas. While Mayta takes care of them, I observe how he handles himself in the ice-cream parlor. He opens the freezer, fills the ice-cream dishes, opens the bottles, reaches for the glasses with an ease and familiarity that reflect a lot of practice. I try to imagine him in building 4 in Lurigancho, serving fruit juice, packages of cookies, cups of coffee, selling cigarettes to the other convicts, every morning, every afternoon, over the course of ten years. Physically, he doesn’t seem worn down; he’s a tough-looking guy, and carries his sixty-plus years with dignity. After settling the bill of the three athletes, he comes back to me, with a forced smile on his face.

“Damn,” he says. “That’s the last thing I’d ever imagine. A novel?”

And he moves his head incredulously from right to left and left to right.

“Naturally, your real name never appears even once,” I assure him. “Of course I’ve changed dates, places, characters, I’ve created complications, added and taken away thousands of things. Besides, I’ve invented an apocalyptic Peru, devastated by war, terrorism, and foreign intervention. Of course, no one will recognize anything, and everyone will think it’s pure fantasy. I’ve pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends.

“Of course,” he says, as if he were spelling it out, scrutinizing me with doubt, deciphering me bit by bit.

“I’d like to talk with you,” I add. “Ask you a few questions, clear up a couple of points. Only what you want to tell me or feel you can tell me, naturally. I’ve got a lot of puzzles bouncing around in my head. Besides, this conversation is my final chapter. You can’t refuse me now, it would be like taking a cake out of the oven too soon — the novel would fall apart.”

I laugh, and so does he, and we hear the three boys laughing. But they’re laughing at a joke one of them has just told. And then a woman comes in and asks for a quart, half pistachio and half chocolate. After handing her the ice cream, Mayta comes back to me.

“Two or three years ago, some of the guys from Revolutionary Vanguard came to see me in Lurigancho,” he says. “They wanted to know all about Jauja, a written account. But I wouldn’t do it.”

“I don’t want anything like that,” I say. “My interest isn’t political but literary, that is …”

“Yes, I see,” he interrupts me, raising a hand. “Okay, I’ll give you one evening. No more, because I don’t have much time, and, to tell you the truth, I don’t like talking about that stuff. How about next Tuesday? It’s better for me, because on Wednesday I don’t start here until eleven, so I can stay up late the night before. All the other days, I have to leave home at six, because I have to take three buses to get here.”

We agree that I’ll pick him up when he finishes work, after eight. Just as I’m leaving, he calls me back. “Have an ice-cream cone, on the house. So you see how good our ice cream is. Maybe you’ll become a regular customer.”

Before I go back to Barranco, I take a little walk around the neighborhood, mentally trying to put things in their proper order. I stop for a while under the balconies of the house where that superlative beauty Flora Flores lived. She had long, chestnut-colored hair, slender legs, and violet eyes. Whenever she came to the rocky beach at Miraflores, wearing her black bathing suit, the morning would fill with light, the sun would glow hotter, the waves roll more joyously. I remember that she married a pilot and only a few months later he crashed into a peak in the Cordillera, between Lima and Tingo María. Years later, someone told me that Flora had remarried and was living in Miami. I go up to Avenida Grau. Right on this corner, there was a gang of boys with whom we — the Diego Ferré and Colón boys, from the other end of Miraflores — would have hard-fought soccer matches at the Terrazas Club. I remember how anxiously I’d wait for those matches when I was a kid, and how terribly frustrating it was when I was only on the second team. When I get back to the car, half an hour later, I’ve partially recovered from my meeting with Mayta.

The incident that caused him to be sent back to Lurigancho, the reason he spent the past ten years there, is well documented in newspapers and judicial archives. It occurred in Magdalena Vieja, not far from the Anthropological Museum, at sunrise one January day in 1973. The president of the Pueblo Libre branch of the Banco de Crédito was watering his patio — he did it every morning before getting dressed — when the doorbell rang. He thought it was the milkman, coming by earlier than usual. At the door there were four men, their faces covered with ski masks and their pistols pointing straight at him. They went with him to his wife’s room. They tied her up in her own bed. Then — they seemed to know the place well — they went into his only daughter’s bedroom. (She was nineteen years old, studying to become a travel agent.) They waited until the girl got dressed and told the gentleman that, if he wanted to see her again, he should pack fifty million soles into an attaché case and bring it to Los Garifos Park, near the National Stadium. They disappeared with the girl in a taxi they’d stolen the night before.

Mr. Fuentes reported everything to the police and, following their instructions, carried an attaché case stuffed with paper to the Los Garifos Park. There were plainclothesmen stationed all around it. No one approached him, and Mr. Fuentes received no communication for three days. Just when he and his wife were getting desperate, there was a second telephone call: the kidnappers knew that he had called the police. They would, however, give him one last chance. He was to bring the money to a corner of Avenida Aviación. Mr. Fuentes explained that he couldn’t get fifty million soles, that the bank would never give him that kind of money, but he would give them his life savings, some five million. The kidnappers insisted: fifty million or they’d kill her.

Mr. Fuentes helped himself to some money, signed notes, and succeeded in getting together nine million, which he brought that night to the place the kidnappers had indicated — this time, without telling the police. A car skidded to a halt, and the person on the passenger side grabbed the attaché case, without saying a word. The girl turned up some hours later at her parents’ home. She had taken a taxi at Avenida Colonial, where her captors had left her. They’d held her for three days, blindfolded and partially chloroformed. She was so distraught that she had to be taken to the Hospital del Empleado. A few days later, she walked out of the room she was sharing with a woman just operated on for appendicitis, and, without saying a word, jumped out of a window.

The newspapers sensationalized the girl’s suicide and fanned public opinion. A few days later, the police announced that they had captured the head of the group — Mayta — and that his accomplices would be captured momentarily. According to the police, Mayta admitted his guilt and gave all the details. His accomplices and the money vanished. At the trial, Mayta denied he had ever taken part in the kidnapping, denied he had even known about it, and insisted that he was tortured into making a false confession.

The trial lasted several months, and at the outset it got a lot of attention in the papers. But that quickly faded. Mayta was sentenced to fifteen years: the court found him guilty of kidnapping, criminal extortion, and complicity in a homicide. He swore he was innocent. That on the day of the kidnapping he was in Pacasmayo looking into a possible job, as he said again and again, but he could provide no witnesses, no proof. The testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Fuentes was especially damning. Both were sure that Mayta’s voice and physical appearance were those of one of the men in ski masks. Mayta’s lawyer, an obscure shyster whose performance during the entire trial was awkward and halting, appealed. The Supreme Court upheld the original sentence two years later. The fact that Mayta was set free after serving two-thirds of his time certainly corroborates what Mr. Carrillo told me at Lurigancho: that his behavior during those years was exemplary.

On Tuesday, at 8 p.m., when I drive over to pick him up at the ice-cream parlor, Mayta is waiting for me, carrying an airline bag, which probably contains the clothing he wears at work. He’s just washed his face and combed that wild hair of his; a few drops of water run down his neck. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt, a faded, much darned checked jacket, wrinkled khaki trousers, and heavy shoes, the kind used for hiking. Is he hungry? Shall we go to a restaurant? He says he never eats at night and that it would be better if we were just to look for a quiet place. A few minutes later, we’re in my study, face to face, drinking soda. He doesn’t want beer or anything alcoholic. He tells me he gave up smoking and drinking years ago.

The beginning of the chat is rather sad. I ask him about the Salesian School. He did study there, correct? Yes. He hasn’t seen any of his schoolmates for ages, and knows only the slightest bit about a few of them, professional men, businessmen, or politicians — the ones whose names appear in the papers. And nothing about the priests, although, he tells me, just a few days ago he ran into Father Luis on the street. The one who taught the youngest students. A little old man, almost blind, bent over, dragging his feet, propelling himself along with a broomstick. He told Mayta that he was in the habit of taking his little strolls on Avenida Brazil, and that he had recognized him, but Mayta smiles; of course he had no idea to whom he was speaking. He must be a hundred years old.

When I show him the material I’ve gathered about him and the Jauja adventure — articles clipped out of newspapers, photocopies of reports, photographs, maps with routes traced on them, cards on the participants and on witnesses, notebooks with data and interviews — I see him sniff, look through it, and handle it, an expression of stupor and embarrassment on his face. Several times, he gets up to go to the bathroom. He has a problem with his kidneys, he explains, and constantly feels like urinating, although most of the time it’s a false alarm and there are only a few drops.

“On the bus, at home, at the ice-cream parlor, it’s a real pain. It’s a two-hour commute, I told you already. I just can’t make it all the way, no matter how much I pee before I get on. Sometimes there’s nothing I can do except wet my pants like a baby.”

“Were the years in Lurigancho tough?” I stupidly ask.

Disconcerted, he stares at me. There is total silence outside on the Malecón de Barranco. You can’t even hear the surf.

“Well, you don’t live like a prince,” he answers after a bit, shamefaced. “It’s hard, especially at the beginning. But you can get used to anything, don’t you think?”

Finally, something that jibes with the Mayta of the witness accounts: that modesty, that reticence when it comes to speaking about his personal problems or revealing his inner feelings. What he never did get used to was the National Guard, he soon admits. He hadn’t known what hate was until he discovered the feeling they inspired in the prisoners. Hatred mixed with absolute and total terror, of course. Because when they come through the wire fences to stop a riot or break up a strike, they always do it by shooting and beating, no matter who gets it, the righteous and the sinners.

“It was at the end of last year, wasn’t it?” I say. “When there was that massacre.”

“December 31,” he says, nodding. “A hundred or so came in to celebrate New Year’s Eve. They wanted to have some fun, to bring in the New Year with a bang, as they said. They were all stinking drunk.”

It was around 10 p.m. They emptied their rifles from the doors and windows of the cell blocks. They stole all the money, liquor, marijuana, and coke they could find in the prison, and until dawn they went on having fun, shooting, beating the prisoners with their rifle butts, making them hop around like frogs, making them run the gauntlet, or just kicking in their teeth.

“The official figures list thirty-five dead,” he says. “Actually, they killed at least twice that many, even more. The newspapers said later that they’d thwarted an escape attempt.”

He makes a gesture of fatigue and his voice becomes a murmur. The convicts piled up on top of each other, like a rugby scrum, mountains of bodies, for self-protection. But that isn’t his worst prison memory. The worst was probably the first months, when he was brought from Lurigancho to the Palacio de Justicia for prosecution, in one of those crowded paddy wagons with metal walls. The prisoners had to ride hunched down, with their heads touching the floor. If they raised their heads even slightly to try to sneak a look out the window, they were savagely beaten. The same thing on the return trip: to get back on the wagon from the lockup, they had to run the gauntlet, a double line of National Guards. They had to decide whether to protect their heads or their testicles, because all along the route they were hit with billy clubs, kicked, and spit on. He remains pensive — he’s just returned from the bathroom — and he adds, without looking at me: “When I read that one of them’s been killed, I feel really happy.”

He says it with a quick and profound resentment that disappears a second later when I ask him about the other Mayta, that curly-headed, skinny guy who shook in that odd way.

“He’s just a sneak thief whose brain has melted away from cocaine,” he says. “He won’t last long.”

His voice and his expression sweeten when he talks about the food kiosk he ran with Arispe in building 4. “We created a genuine revolution,” he assures me with pride. “We won the respect of the whole place. We boiled the water for making fruit juice, for coffee, for everything. We washed the knives, forks, and spoons, the glasses, and the plates before and after they were used. Hygiene, above all. A revolution, you bet. We organized a system of rebate coupons. You might not believe me, but they only tried to rob us once. I took a gash right here on my leg, but they didn’t get a thing. We even set up a kind of bank, because a lot of cons gave us their money for safekeeping.”

It’s clear that for some reason he’s really reluctant to speak of the thing that interests me the most: Jauja. Every time I try to bring it up, he starts to talk about it, and then, very quickly, inevitably, he switches to some current topic. For example, his family. He tells me he got married in the time he was free between his last two terms in Lurigancho, but that he actually met his wife in jail, the time before. She would come to visit her brother, and he introduced her to Mayta. They wrote each other, and when he was released, they got married. They have four children, three boys and a girl. It was really hard on his wife when he was imprisoned again. During the first years, she had to practically kill herself to feed the kids, until finally he could help her, thanks to the kiosk. During those first years, his wife knitted, and peddled her work from door to door. He also tried to sell her knitting — there was some demand for sweaters — in Lurigancho.

As I listen, I study him. My first impression — that he is well-conserved, healthy, and strong — is false. His health can’t be good. Not only because of that problem with his kidneys that makes him go to the bathroom every other minute. He perspires a great deal; at times he chokes up, as if he were overcome by waves of vertigo. He dries his forehead with his handkerchief and sometimes, in the middle of a spasm, he can’t speak. Does he feel ill? Should we stop the interview? No, he’s fine, let’s keep going.

“It seems to me that you don’t want to talk about Vallejos and Jauja,” I say, point-blank. “Does it bother you because it was such a failure? Because of how it affected the rest of your life?”

He shakes his head.

“It bothers me because I realize that you know more about it than I do.” He smiles. “Yes, no joke. I’ve forgotten lots of things, and I’m mixed up about lots of others. I’d really like to help you out and tell you about it. But the problem is that I don’t know all that happened or even how it happened. It’s a long time ago, don’t forget.”

Is he just talking, is it a pose? No. His memories are hesitant, sometimes erroneous. I have to correct him every few minutes. I’m shocked, because this whole year I’ve been obsessed with the subject, and I naïvely supposed the major actor in it would be too, and that his memory would still go on scratching away at what happened in those few hours a quarter century ago. Why should it be that way? All that, for Mayta, was one episode in a life in which, before and after, there were many other episodes, as important, or even more so. It’s only normal that these other events would replace or blur Jauja.

“There is one thing, above all others, that I just can’t understand,” I say to him. “Was there a betrayal? Why did the people who were involved just disappear? Did Professor Ubilluz countermand the orders? Why did he do it? Fear? Because he didn’t believe in the project? Or was it Vallejos, as Ubilluz declares, who moved the date of the uprising forward?”

Mayta reflects for a few seconds in silence. He shrugs his shoulders. “That part never was clear and never will be,” he says in a low voice. “That day, it looked like betrayal to me. Later it got even more complicated. Because I hadn’t known beforehand the date they’d set for the revolt. Only Vallejos and Ubilluz knew it, for security reasons. Ubilluz has always said that the date they’d agreed on was four days later, and that Vallejos moved it forward when he found out he was going to be transferred, because of an incident he’d been involved in with the APRA people two days earlier.”

That there was such an incident is true; it’s documented in a small Jauja newspaper. There was an APRA demonstration in the Plaza de Armas in honor of Haya de la Torre, who made a speech in the atrium of the cathedral. Vallejos, in civilian clothes, Shorty Ubilluz, and a small group of friends stationed themselves at one corner of the plaza, and when the entourage passed by, they pelted them with rotten eggs. The APRISTA toughs scattered them. Vallejos, Ubilluz, and the others tried to fight back, and then they took refuge in Ezequiel’s barbershop. That’s all we know for sure. Ubilluz and other people in Jauja assert that Vallejos was recognized by the APRA people and that they noisily protested the participation of the head of the prison, an officer on active duty, in action directed against an authorized political meeting. Vallejos was told that because he took part in the demonstration he was going to be transferred. They say he received an urgent message from his immediate superior in Huancayo. That’s what probably pushed him into moving the rebellion up four days, without telling the others about it. Ubilluz swears he only found out what happened when the lieutenant was dead and the other rebels were in jail.

“At first, I didn’t believe it. I thought they’d chickened out,” says Mayta. “Later on, I just didn’t know. Because, months or years later, some of the people originally involved ended up in the Sexto, the Frontón. They were jailed for other reasons — union or political stuff. They all swore that they were surprised when the uprising occurred, that Ubilluz had given them a different date, that there was no desertion, no change of heart. Frankly, I just don’t know. Only Vallejos and Ubilluz knew the first date. Did Vallejos change it? He didn’t tell me. But it isn’t impossible. He was a really impulsive guy, really capable of doing something like that, even if he ran the risk of being all alone. What we used to call a willful individualist in those days.”

Is he criticizing Vallejos? No, it’s a distanced, neutral observation. He tells me that on the first night, when Vallejos’s family came to claim his body, his father wouldn’t speak to him. He came in when they were interrogating Mayta, and Mayta stretched his hand out to him. But the father wouldn’t take it and even looked at him angrily, with tears in his eyes, as if Mayta were responsible for everything.

“I just don’t know, it might have been like that,” he repeats. “Or there might have been a misunderstanding. That is, Vallejos was sure of support that wasn’t actually promised. At the meetings they brought me to in Ricrán between Ubilluz and the miners, they talked about revolution, and everyone seemed in agreement. But did they really offer to take a rifle and come out to the mountains on the first day? I didn’t hear them say they would. Vallejos just assumed everything, he had no doubts. It may be they just made some vague promises, moral support, they would help from a distance, with their group continuing their normal lives. Or it may be that they did commit themselves and that out of fear, or because the plan didn’t convince them, they just backed out. I couldn’t say for sure. I just don’t know.”

He drums his fingers on the arm of the chair. There is a long silence.

“Were you ever sorry you got mixed up in it?” I ask him. “I imagine that in jail you must have thought quite a lot over the years about what happened.”

“Repenting is something Catholics do. I stopped being a Catholic many years ago. Revolutionaries don’t repent. They go through self-criticism, but that’s different. I went through mine, and that’s that.” He seems angry. But a few seconds later he smiles. “You don’t know how strange it is for me to talk politics, to remember political events. It’s like a ghost that comes back from the pit of time to show me the dead and make me see forgotten things.”

Did he stop taking an interest in politics only in these last ten years? Was it during the time before in jail? Or when he was imprisoned because of Jauja? He remains silent, deep in thought, trying to clarify his memories. Could he have forgotten that, too?

“I hadn’t thought about it until now,” he says softly, mopping his forehead. “It wasn’t a decision I made consciously. It just happened, the force of events. Remember that when I went to Jauja for the uprising I had broken with my comrades, with my party, and with my past. I was alone, politically speaking. And my new comrades were only that for a few hours. Vallejos died, Condori died, Zenón Gonzales went back to his community, the joeboys went back to school. See what I mean? It isn’t that I gave up politics. You might say that politics gave me up.”

The way he says it makes me disbelieve him: he speaks in hushed tones, his eyes not meeting mine, as he wiggles around in his chair. He never saw his old friends from the RWP(T) again?

“They were good to me when I was in jail, after Jauja,” he says vehemently. “They came to see me, they brought me cigarettes, they arranged it so I’d be included in the amnesty the new government put into effect. But the RWP(T) broke up a little afterward, because of what happened at La Convención, the Hugo Blanco business. When I got out of jail, the RWP(T) and the other RWP no longer existed. Other Trotskyist groups with people from Argentina sprang up. I didn’t know any of them, and I was no longer interested in politics.”

As he says these words, he gets up to go to the bathroom. When he comes back, I see he’s washed his face as well. Sure you don’t want to go out and get something to eat? He assures me he doesn’t and repeats that he never eats at night. We sit there, each one immersed in his own thoughts, without speaking. The silence continues to be total tonight in the Malecón de Barranco. There are probably only silent lovers protected by the darkness, and not the drunks and marijuana smokers that raise such a ruckus on Friday and Saturday nights.

I tell him that in my novel the character is an underground revolutionary, that he’s spent half his life plotting and fighting against other tiny groups as insignificant as his own, and that he flings himself into the Jauja adventure not so much because Vallejos’s plans convince him — inwardly, he may be skeptical about their chances for success — but because the lieutenant opens the way to action for him. The possibility of taking concrete action, of producing verifiable and immediate changes in everyday reality electrifies him. The minute he meets that impulsive young man, he realizes how inane his revolutionary activities have been. That’s why he embarks on the insurrection, even though he senses it is virtually suicide.

“Do you recognize yourself in that character?” I ask him. “Or does he have nothing at all to do with you, with the reasons why you followed Vallejos?”

He continues to look at me, thoughtful, blinking, not knowing what to say. He raises his glass and drinks the rest of the soda. His vacillation is his answer.

“Those things seem impossible when they fail,” he reflects. “If they succeed, they seem perfect and well planned to everyone. For example, the Cuban Revolution. How many landed with Fidel on the Granma? A handful. Maybe even fewer than we had that day in Jauja. They were lucky and we weren’t.” He meditates for a moment. “It never seemed crazy to me, much less suicidal,” he affirms. “It had been well thought out. If we had destroyed the Molinos bridge and slowed down the police, we would have crossed the Cordillera. In the jungle, they never would have found us. We would have …”

His voice fades. His lack of conviction is so apparent that you’d say it was senseless to go on trying to make me believe something even he didn’t believe. What does my supposed exfellow student believe in now? At the Salesian School, half a century ago, he ardently believed in God. Later, when God died in his heart, he believed with the same ardor in the revolution, in Marx, in Lenin, in Trotsky. Then Jauja, or perhaps before that, those long years of insipid activism, weakened and finally killed that faith as well. What came to replace it? Nothing. That’s why he gives the impression of being an empty man, without the emotion to back up his words. When he began to rob banks and take part in kidnappings, could he believe in anything except getting money any way he could? Something inside me refuses to accept that. Above all now, as I look at him, dressed in those walking shoes and that shoddy clothing; above all, now that I’ve seen how he earns a living.

“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.

“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.

“A little farther is the new town where I live,” he says. “I walk here to take the bus. Will you remember how to get back after you let me off?”

I assure him I will. I’d like to ask him how much he makes at the ice-cream parlor, how much of it he spends on the bus, and how he uses what’s left. Also, if he’s tried to get any other work, and if he’d like me to try to help, give him a recommendation. But all my questions wither before I can get them out.

“At one time, people said there were possibilities in the jungle,” I hear him say. “I was thinking that over, too. Since it would be hard to leave the country, maybe I should go to Pucallpa, to Iquitos. They said there were lumber camps, oil wells, job possibilities. But it was a lie. Things in the jungle are the same as they are here. In this new town, there are people who’ve come back from Pucallpa. It’s all the same. Only the cocaine dealers have work.”

Now we’re leaving the open country and in the darkness I can make out an agglomeration of low and tenuous shadows: the shacks. Made of adobe, corrugated sheet metal, boards, and straw matting, they give the impression of being half finished, interrupted just as they were taking shape. There is no pavement, no sidewalks, no electricity, probably no water or drains either.

“I’ve never been out here,” I tell him. “It’s huge.”

“Over on the left, you can see the lights of Lurigancho,” Mayta says as he guides me through the maze of the slum. “My wife was one of the founders of this new town. Eight years ago. Some two hundred families started it. They came at night in small groups, without being seen. They worked till dawn, nailing boards together, hauling rope. The next day, when the guards came, the place already existed. There was no way to get them out.”

“So, when you got out of Lurigancho, you didn’t know where you lived?” I ask him.

He says no with a shake of his head. And he tells me that the day he got out, after almost eleven years, he came alone, walking through the open country we’ve just crossed. Throwing stones at the dogs that tried to bite him. When he got to the first shacks, he began to ask, “Where does Mrs. Mayta live?” And so he reached home and gave his family the surprise of their life.

We’re right in front of his house. I have it in my headlights. The facade is brick, and the side walls too, but the roof hasn’t been finished yet. It’s corrugated sheet metal, not even nailed to the house, but held in place by piles of stones set at regular intervals. The door is a board held to the wall with nails and rope.

“We’re fighting to get water,” Mayta says. “That’s our biggest problem here. That and garbage, of course. You sure you can find your way back to the street?”

I assure him I can, and I say that, if he doesn’t mind, I’ll get back to him soon and we’ll talk some more and he can tell me more about Jauja. Maybe he’ll remember more details. He nods, and we say goodbye, shaking hands.

I have no trouble getting out to the road that goes to Zárate. I drive slowly, stopping to take note of the poverty, the ugliness, the abandon, and the despair of this new town. I don’t even know its name. No one’s on the street, not even an animal. On all sides, there are mounds of garbage. The people, I suppose, just throw it out of their houses, resigned, knowing that no city garbage truck is ever going to pick it up, lacking the spirit to join together with other neighbors to carry it farther away, to the open country, or to bury or burn it. They, too, have thrown in the towel. I imagine what daylight would reveal: neighborhood kids playing on pyramids of filth, swarming with flies, roaches, rats, vermin of all kinds. I think about the epidemics, the stench, the premature deaths.

I’m still thinking about the garbage in Mayta’s slum when on the left I see Lurigancho in the distance and I remember the mad, naked inmate sleeping on the immense garbage heap in front of the odd-numbered cell blocks. And shortly afterward, when I am all the way across Zárate and the Plaza de Acho and I’m on Avenida Abancay, on the road that takes me to Vía Expresa, San Isidro, Miraflores, and Barranco, I can already imagine the seawalls in the neighborhood where I have the good fortune to live, and the garbage you see — I’ll see it myself tomorrow when I go running — if you crane your neck and peek over the edge. The garbage dump that the cliffs facing the sea have become. And I’ll remember that a year ago I began to concoct this story the same way I’m ending it, by speaking about the garbage that’s invading every neighborhood in the capital of Peru.