The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Two

The Action for Development Center is located on Avenida Pardo in Miraflores. It’s in one of the last of the old low-rise buildings to resist the advance of “urban development,” the skyscrapers that have replaced these brick-and-wood houses and the gardens that surround them. Once the old houses were graced with shade, the rustle of leaves, and the chatter of sparrows — the effect of the ficus trees, once the lords of the street and now mere pygmies, reduced by the scale of the giant buildings. The good taste of Moisés — of Doctor Moisés Barbi Leyva, as the receptionist reminds me — has filled the house with colonial furniture that fits in perfectly with the building itself, which is one of those forties copies of the architecture of our colonial era: balconies with awnings, Sevilian patios, Moorish-style arches, tiled fountains. It has a certain charm. The whole house glows, and you can see people working in the rooms that face the garden, itself well trimmed and neat. Two armed guards who frisk me to see if I’m carrying a gun patrol the entranceway. While I wait to see Moisés, I look over the center’s most recent publications, all on view in a display case illuminated by fluorescent light: studies on economy, statistics, sociology, politics, and history, all nicely printed, with a kind of prehistoric seabird colophon on the title pages.

Moisés Barbi Leyva is the backbone of the Action for Development Center. Thanks to his ability to wheel and deal, to his magnetic personality, and his prodigious appetite for work, the center is one of the most active cultural entities in the country. What is extraordinary about Moisés, beyond his cyclonic will and his bulletproof optimism, is his ability to negotiate, an anti-Hegelian science that consists in reconciling opposites, like San Martín de Porres — also from Lima — getting a dog, a mouse, and a cat all to eat from the same plate. Thanks to Moisés’s eclectic genius, the center gets subventions, grants, and loans from capitalists and communists, from the most conservative governments and foundations as well as the most revolutionary, Washington and Moscow, Bonn and Havana, Paris and Beijing. They all think the center is their institution. Naturally, they are all wrong. The Action for Development Center belongs to Moisés Barbi Leyva and will belong to no one else until he dies. And doubtless it will die with him, because there is no one in this country capable of replacing him.

In Mayta’s time, Moisés was a radical revolutionary. Now he is a progressive intellectual. His genius lies in having maintained intact his image as a man of the left, of having actually strengthened it as the center prospered — and he along with it. In the same way, he has been able to maintain excellent relations with the most violently opposed ideological adversaries; he has been able to get along with all the governments this country has had in the last twenty years, without selling out to any of them. He has a masterly sense of proportion and distance and knows how to counteract any concession that might seem excessive toward any one side with a compensatory rhetorical outburst toward the other. When I hear him at a cocktail party speak out all too forcefully against the rape of our natural resources by multinational corporations or against imperialist perversions of our Third World culture, I know that this year the U.S. contributions to the center’s programs have been larger than those of the opposition. And if, at an exhibition or concert, I hear him alarmed about Soviet intervention in Afganistan or pained at the repression of Solidarity in Poland, it’s that this time he’s received some help from the Eastern Bloc. With feints and shifts like these, he can always prove his ideological independence and that of the institution he heads.

Every Peruvian politician capable of reading a book — there aren’t that many — considers him his intellectual mentor and is sure the center works directly for him. In a vague sort of way, they’re all right. Moisés has been wise enough to make all of them feel that getting along well with his institution is necessary for them, and that feeling is in fact no illusion, because the right-wingers linked with the center feel like reformers, social democrats, almost socialists by virtue of that connection; the same connection makes the left-wingers socially acceptable, moderates them, tricks them out with a certain scientific gloss, an intellectual varnish. Moisés makes the military men feel like civilians, the priests like laymen, and the bourgeois like proletarians, true native sons of the nation.

Because he is successful, Moisés arouses venomous envy. Many people say the very worst about him and make fun of the wine-colored Cadillac in which he is driven around. The most virulent bad-mouthing comes, of course, from the progressive intellectuals who, thanks to the center — to Moisés — eat, wear clothes, write, publish, travel to congresses, and increase their status as progressives. He knows what people say about him, but he doesn’t let it bother him. And if it does bother him, he covers it up. His success in life and the preservation of his image are based on a philosophy from which he never deviates: people may hate Moisés Barbi Leyva, but Moisés Barbi Leyva hates no one. His only enemies are abstract monsters — imperialism, latifundism, militarism, the oligarchy, the CIA, etc. — which are as useful for his purposes as are his friends (the rest of humanity). The intractable fanatic that Mayta was thirty years ago would doubtless have said that Moisés was the typical example of the revolutionary intellectual who “got sensualized,” which is probably the case. But would he have recognized that, despite all the deals he has to make and the acts he has to put on in this bedeviling country he lives in, Moisés Barbi Leyva has managed things so that several dozen intellectuals have earned a living, have worked instead of wasting their time in university cliques corrupted by frustration and intrigues, and at least the same number have traveled, taken special courses, and kept up a fertile association with their colleagues in the rest of the world? Would he recognize that, even if he is “sensualized,” Moisés Barbi Leyva has done, all by himself, what the Ministry of Education, the Institute of Culture, or any of the universities in Peru should have done? No, he wouldn’t recognize any of it. Because those things for Mayta were distractions from the primordial task, the only obligation for anyone with eyes to see and enough decency to take action: the revolutionary struggle.

“How are you?” Moisés shakes hands with me.

“And how are you, comrade?” replies Mayta.

He was the second to arrive, a rare event, because for as long as the committee had been meeting he had been there to open the garage on Jirón Zorritos, the local headquarters of RWP(T). The seven members of the committee all had keys and all of them had at one time or another slept in the garage if they had no other place or if they had some work to do. The two university students on the committee, Comrade Anatolio and Comrade Medardo, studied for their examinations there.

“Today I beat you.” Comrade Medardo was shocked. “A miracle.”

“Last night I went to a party and didn’t get to bed until late.”

“You, at a party?” Comrade Medardo laughed. “Another miracle.”

“Something interesting,” Mayta explained. “But not what you’re thinking. I’m going to report to the committee right now.”

The outside of the garage had nothing that would even suggest the kind of activities that went on there. Inside, you saw first a poster with the bearded faces of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky that Comrade Jacinto had brought back from a congress of Trotskyist organizations in Montevideo. Stacked against the walls were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them, which they had never got around to handing out. There were a couple of chairs with their bottoms hanging out, and a few three-legged stools that looked as though they might belong either to a milkmaid or to a medium. Some mattresses were piled on top of each other and covered with a blanket. They were also used as seats when necessary. On a bookshelf made of boards and bricks, a few books covered with plaster dust languished, and in a corner there was the skeleton of a tricycle without wheels. The local office of the RWP(T) was so tiny that, with only a third of the committee present, it looked as though there was a quorum.

“Mayta?” Moisés leans back in his desk chair and gives me an incredulous look.

“Mayta,” I say. “You remember him, don’t you?”

He recovers his aplomb and his smile. “Of course, how could I ever forget him. But it’s just strange. Is there anyone anywhere in Peru who remembers Mayta?”

“Barely any. That’s why I have to squeeze out the memories of the few who do remember.”

I know he’ll help me, because Moisés is an obliging type, always willing to help anyone. But I realize at the same time he’ll have to break through his own psychological reservations, do himself a kind of violence, since he had worked closely with Mayta and they had certainly been friends. Is he made uncomfortable by the memory of Comrade Mayta in this office full of leather-bound books, a parchment map of old Peru, and some fornicating pre-Colombian deities from Huacas in a glass case? Does having to speak again about the activities and illusions he and Mayta shared make him feel he is in a slightly false situation? Probably. Remembering Mayta makes even me — and I was never one of Mayta’s political buddies — ill at ease, so the important director of the Action for Development Center must…

“He was a good guy,” he says prudently. At the same time, he looks at me as if to discover in my deepest, most secret innermost self my own opinion of Mayta. “An idealist, well-intentioned. But naïve, deluded. At least, as far as that rotten business in Jauja is concerned, I have a clean conscience. I told him he was getting into a mess and I tried to get him to reconsider. A waste of time, of course, because he was stubborn as a mule.”

“I’m trying to reconstruct the beginning of his political life,” I explain. “I don’t know much, except that when he was still a kid, before the university, or in the first year, he joined APRA. And later…”

“And later he became everything, that’s the truth,” says Moisés. “APRA, communist, revisionist, Trotskyist. Every sect, every group. The only reason he wasn’t in more is that in those days there weren’t more. Nowadays he’d have more options. Here in the center we are charting all the parties, groups, alliances, factions, and leftist fronts there are in Peru. How many would you think? More than thirty.” He drums his fingers on the desk and assumes a pensive attitude.

“But there’s one thing you have to recognize,” he quickly adds in a very serious voice. “There wasn’t a drop of opportunism in any of those changes. He may have been unstable, wild, whatever you like, but he was also the fairest person in the world. And another thing. He had a self-destructive streak. He was always heterodox, a rebel by nature. As soon as he got involved in something, he began to dissent and he ended up in the dissenting faction. Disagreeing was his strongest instinct. Poor Comrade Mayta! What a fucked-up life, don’t you think?”

“The meeting is called to order,” said Comrade Jacinto. He was secretary general of the RWP(T) and the oldest of the five present. Two committee members were missing: Comrade Pallardi and Comrade Carlos. After waiting half an hour for them, they had decided to begin without them. Comrade Jacinto, in a gravelly voice, “read” the minutes of the last meeting, three weeks ago. As a precaution, they took no written minutes, but the secretary general jotted down the principal theme of each discussion in a notebook and now he was looking at it — he squinted as he spoke. How old was Comrade Jacinto? Sixty, maybe older. A solid, upright cholo, he had a crest of hair over his forehead and an athletic air that made him seem younger. He was a relic in the organization and had lived its history since back in the forties, when they held those meetings at the poet Rafael Méndez Dorich’s house. Trotsky’s ideas were brought to Peru by a handful of surrealists who had come back from Paris — Pablo de Westphalen, Abril de Viveo, and César Moro. Comrade Jacinto was one of the founders of the first Trotskyist organizations, the Marxist Workers’ Group (in 1946), the forerunner of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party. In Fertilizantes, S.A. (Fertisa), where he had worked for twenty years, he had always been a member (a minority member, of course) of the union directorate — this despite the hostility of APRAs and Communist Party men. Why had he remained a Trotskyist instead of joining one of the other groups? Mayta was happy about it, but never understood it. The whole Trotskyist old guard, all of Comrade Jacinto’s contemporaries, had stayed in RWP. Why, then, was he in the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (T[rotskyist])? So he wouldn’t lose touch with the young people? That must have been the reason, because Mayta doubted that the international Trotskyist polemic that raged over the revisionism of Michel Pablo, secretary of the Fourth International, mattered much to Comrade Jacinto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The points of view are clear, and the arguing is hot,” said Comrade Anatolio.

“You’re right,” grunted the secretary general. “We’ll vote with a show of hands. How many in favor?”

Mayta’s suggestion — to change the name of Workers Voice (T) to Proletarian Voice—was rejected, three to two. Comrade Jacinto’s vote broke the tie. The answer Medardo and Anatolio gave to Mayta’s and Joaquín’s argument about the confusion caused by the existence of two papers with the same name attacking each other was that changing the name would seem to be giving in to the divisionists, admitting that they were the real RWP, not the RWP(T). And wasn’t it the RWP(T) that was holding to the party line? Besides, to give them the name of the paper as well as the name of the organization — wasn’t that like rewarding betrayal? According to Medardo and Anatolio, the similarity of the titles, a transitory problem, would no longer confuse the workers as soon as the workers saw how the content of the articles, editorials, the news itself — the doctrinal coherence — defined the situation, revealing which was the genuinely Marxist, anti-bureaucratic newspaper, and which the fraud. The discussion was harsh, extremely long, and Mayta thought how much more fun he had had talking the night before with that silly, idealistic boy. I’ve lost this vote because I’m befuddled by lack of sleep, he thought. Oh, well, what difference did it make? If keeping the title meant they’d have more problems distributing Workers Voice (T), he would request a review of the decision when all seven members of the committee were present.

“You mean there were really only seven of you when Mayta met Second Lieutenant Vallejos?”

“So you remember Vallejos, too.” Moisés smiles. He studies the menu and orders a shrimp ceviche and scallops with rice. I’ve left the choice to him, having told him that a sensualized economist like himself could do a better job than I ever could. “Yes, seven. I don’t remember all their names — their real names — but I do remember their party names. Comrade Jacinto, Comrade Anatolio, Comrade Joaquín. I was Comrade Medardo. Have you noticed how the Costa Verde’s menu has declined since rationing went into effect? If we go on like this, every restaurant in Lima will close down.”

They’ve given us a table in back, and we can just barely see the ocean. It’s blocked by the heads of the other customers — tourists, couples, employees celebrating some company birthday. There must be an important politician or a member of the board of directors among them, because I see four bodyguards dressed in business suits, and carrying automatic rifles, sitting at a nearby table. They are silently drinking beer, keeping an eye on everything that goes on in the restaurant. The talk, the laughter, the clatter of dishes and glasses drowns out the surf.

“With Vallejos, then, you were eight,” I say to him. “Your memory’s tricked you.”

“Vallejos was never in the party,” he replies instantly. “The idea of a party with only seven members sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? Vallejos was never a member. As a matter of fact, I never met the man. The first time I saw him was in the papers.”

He speaks with absolute certainty, and I have to believe him. Why would he lie? In any case, what he says surprises me, even more than the number of militants in the RWP(T). I imagined it was small, but not as tiny as that. I had imagined a scenario that I now have to discard — Mayta bringing Vallejos to the garage on Jirón Zorritos, introducing him to his comrades, incorporating him into the party structure as secretary of defense… Another idea down the drain.

“Now, when I say seven, I mean seven full-time professionals,” Moisés clarifies after a moment. “There were also the fellow travelers, students and workers with whom we set up study groups. And we had some influence in some unions — Fertisa, for example, and Civil Construction.”

The waiter brings the ceviche, and the shrimp look fresh and moist. You can sense the picante in the very aroma. We drink and eat, and as soon as we finish, we get back down to business. “Are you sure you never saw Vallejos?”

“Mayta was the only one who saw him. For a long time, anyhow. Later on, we named a special commission. The Action Group. Anatolio, Mayta, and Jacinto, I think. They all saw him for sure, a few times at least. The rest of us, never. Don’t you understand? He was in the army. What were we? Underground revolutionaries. And him? A second lieutenant!”

“He’s been ordered to infiltrate our group,” said Comrade Joaquín. “At least that much is clear, I hope.”

“That’s what I thought at first, of course,” Mayta agrees. “Let’s review the facts, comrades. Are they that dumb? Would they send a lieutenant to infiltrate the party who spouts off about the socialist revolution at a birthday gathering? I got him to spill his guts, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His heart’s in the right place, but he’s naïve, emotional. He talks about revolution without knowing what it is. He’s an ideological virgin. The revolution for him is Fidel Castro and his happy band of bearded heroes taking potshots out in the Sierra Maestra. It sounds like a good thing to him, but he just doesn’t understand how it works. Mind you, I’ve only had a little time to sound him out, that’s as far as it goes.”

He sat down and was talking rather impatiently because over the course of the three-hour session he had finished off all his cigarettes and he was dying for a smoke. Why didn’t he believe Vallejos could be an intelligence officer ordered to gather information about the RWP(T)? And if he were? Was it so strange the army would resort to such a crude plan? Weren’t the cops, the military men, and the whole Peruvian bourgeoisie all crude? But the jovial and exuberant image of the young chatterbox again dispelled his suspicion.

He listened to Comrade Jacinto agree with him: “Maybe they have ordered him to infiltrate us. At least we have the advantage over him of knowing who he is. We can take the necessary precautions. If they’re giving us the chance to infiltrate them, it’s our revolutionary obligation to take advantage of it, comrades.”

That’s how a subject that had provoked innumerable arguments in the RWP(T) suddenly resurfaced. Should the party have as one of its goals infiltrating the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, in order to form cells made up of soldiers, sailors, and airmen? Or to indoctrinate the troops about their common cause with the proletariat and the peasants? Or was it a mistake to present the idea of a class struggle to the military, because over and beyond their social differences, there was an institutional link, an esprit de corps that united enlisted men and officers in an unbreachable unity? Mayta was sorry he had reported on the lieutenant. This was going to go on for hours. He dreamed about soaking his swollen feet in a washbasin. He had done it that morning when he came home from the party over in Surquillo, happy that he had gone over to give his aunt-godmother a hug. He had fallen asleep with wet feet, dreaming that he and Vallejos were running a race on a beach that could have been Agua Dulce, empty of swimmers, at dawn. He was falling behind, and the boy kept turning back to cheer him on, laughing. “Get a move on, come on, or are you getting so old you’ve run out of breath, Mayta?”

“Those meetings would drag on for hours. By the end, we’d all lose our voices,” says Moisés, digging into the rice. “For example: Should Mayta go on seeing Vallejos or be on the safe side and drop him? Things like that, you just didn’t decide in a minute. Oh, no. You had to analyze the circumstances, the causes, and the effects. We had to wring out a slew of hypotheses. The October Revolution, the relationship among socialist, capitalist, and bureaucratic-imperialist forces in the world, the development of the class struggle on all five continents, the pauperization of the neocolonial nations, monopolistic concentration…”

He started out smiling, but now his expression is sour. He puts the fork he was just raising to his mouth back down on his plate. Just a second ago, he was eating heartily, praising the Costa Verde’s cook: “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to eat like this with what’s going on?” Suddenly he’s lost his appetite. Have the memories he’s dredged up as a favor to me depressed him?

“Mayta and Vallejos did me a huge favor,” he murmurs, for the third time that morning. “If it hadn’t been for them, I would still be in some dinky group trying to sell fifty copies of a biweekly newsletter, knowing all the time the workers would never read it, or that, if they did read it, they would never understand it.” He wipes his mouth and gestures to the waiter to remove his plate.

“When the Vallejos business began, I no longer believed in what we were doing,” he adds, with a funerary air. “I realized full well that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, except back to jail once in a while, into exile once in a while, and to political and personal frustration. Nevertheless… Inertia, something like that, or something I can’t define. A panic about feeling disloyal, a traitor. To the comrades, to the party, to your own self. A terror about wiping out in one shot something that, for better or for worse, represented years of struggle and sacrifice. Priests who leave the Church must feel the same thing.” He looks at me at that moment as if he had just noticed I was still there.

“Did Mayta ever feel discouraged?”

“I don’t know, maybe not, he was like granite.” He is thoughtful for a moment and then shrugs. “Maybe he did, but secretly. I suppose we all have those flashes of lucidity in which we see we are at the bottom of a well, without a ladder. But we would never admit it, not for a second. Yes, Mayta and Vallejos did me a big favor.”

“You repeat it so often it seems as though you don’t believe it. Or that the favor hasn’t really been of any use to you.”

“It really hasn’t been much use to me,” he affirms with a sad gesture.

And when I laugh and make fun of him, telling him that he’s one of the few Peruvian intellectuals who have achieved independence, and that, in addition, he is one of the few about whom one can say that he does things and helps to do things for his colleagues, he disarms me with an ironic look. Am I talking about Action for Development? Yes, I am: it’s helped Peru and certainly contributed more to the nation than twenty years of party militancy. Yes, it also helped the people whose books it published; it got them grants and liberated them from that whorehouse of a university. But it had frustrated Moisés. Not in the same way the RWP(T) had, of course. He had always wanted — he looks at me as if wondering whether I’m worth the revelation — to be one of them. To do research, to publish. An old, very ambitious project that he knew full well he would never carry out: an economic history of Peru. General and detailed, from the pre-Inca cultures to our own times. Forgotten, like all his other academic projects! To keep the center alive meant being an administrator, a diplomat, a publicity agent, and, most of all, a bureaucrat twenty-four hours a day. No — twenty-eight, thirty. For him, the day was thirty hours long.

“Don’t you think it’s wonderful that an ex-Trotskyist who spent his youth fulminating against the bureaucracy should end up a bureaucrat?” he asks, trying to recover his good humor.

“There’s nothing more to be said,” protested Comrade Joaquín. “There’s nothing more to be said about the subject and that’s it.”

How right you are, thought Mayta, nothing more to be said, and besides, what was it they were discussing? A while ago — it was Comrade Medardo’s fault, because he had brought up the question of the participation of soldiers’ soviets in the Russian Revolution — they were arguing about the sailors’ rebellion in Kronstadt and how it was crushed. According to Medardo, that anti-socialist rebellion, in March of 1921, was solid evidence of the doubtful class consciousness of the troops and of the risks of relying on the revolutionary potential of soldiers. On a talking spree, Comrade Jacinto explained that, instead of speaking about their behavior in 1921, Medardo should remember what the Kronstadt sailors had done in 1905. Weren’t they the first to rise up against the tsar? And in 1917, weren’t they ahead of the majority of factories in forming a soviet? The discussion then drifted to Trotsky’s attitude toward Kronstadt. Medardo and Anatolio remembered that in his History of the Revolution he had approved, as a lesser evil, the repression of the uprising because it was objectively counterrevolutionary and aided both the White Russians and the imperialist powers. But Mayta was sure that Trotsky had rectified that thesis later and clarified it: he didn’t participate in the repression of the sailors, which had been, exclusively, the work of the Petrograd committee, headed by Zinoviev. He even went so far as to write that it was at the time of the liquidation of the rebel sailors during the Lenin government that the first manifestations of the anti-proletarian crimes of Stalinist bureaucratization had emerged. Finally, because of an unforeseen twist, the discussion ground to a halt on the question of whether the translations of Trotsky into Spanish were any good. “There’s no way we can vote on this,” Mayta stated. “Let’s see if there’s a consensus. Even though it hardly seems probable to me, I recognize that Vallejos may be under orders to infiltrate us or provoke us in some way. On the other hand, as Comrade Jacinto has said, we should not pass up the opportunity to win over a young officer. Here’s my proposal. I’ll make contact with him, I’ll sound him out, I’ll see if there is any way to attract him. Without, of course, giving him any information about the party. If I smell something suspicious, that’s it. If I don’t, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Either because they were tired or because he was persuasive, they accepted. When he saw those four heads nod in agreement, he was overjoyed: now he could go out and buy cigarettes, have a smoke.

“In any case, if he had any crises, he certainly concealed them,” Moisés says. “That’s one thing I always envied him: how sure he was about what he was doing. Not only in the RWP(T), but before, too, when he was a Moscow man and in APRA.”

“How do you explain all those changes? Did he just change ideologies, or were there psychological reasons?”

“I’d say moral reasons,” Moisés corrects me. “Although to talk about morality in Mayta’s case may seem incongruous to you.”

In his eyes, there burns a malicious light. Is he expecting a little insinuation from me so he can start gossiping?

“It doesn’t seem incongruous to me at all,” I assure him. “I always suspected that Mayta’s political shifts were more emotional and ethical than ideological.”

“The search for perfection, for the pure.” Moisés smiles. “He was a very good Catholic when he was a boy. He even went on a hunger strike so he could know how the poor lived. Did you know that? That’s maybe why he was that way. When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.”

He observes me for a moment in silence while the waiter pours our coffee. Many of the Costa Verde’s customers have left, including the important man and his bodyguards with their automatic rifles. In addition to being able to hear the sound of the sea again, we can just make out, over on the left, among the Barranquito jetties, a few surfers waiting for their wave, sitting astride their boards like horsemen. “An attack from the sea would be really easy,” someone says. “There’s no beach patrol. We’ve got to tell the boss.”

“What is it about Mayta that interests you so much?” Moisés asks me, as he uses the tip of his tongue to check the temperature of the coffee. “Of all the revolutionaries of those years, he is the most obscure.”

I don’t know how to go on. If I could, I would tell him, but at this moment I only know that I want to know, even invent, Mayta’s story, and as lifelike as possible. I could give him moral, social, and ideological reasons, and show him that Mayta’s story is the most important, the one that most urgently needs to be told. But it would all be a lie. I truthfully do not know why Mayta’s story intrigues and disturbs me.

“Perhaps I know why,” Moisés says. “Because his story was the first, before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Before that event which split the left in two.”

He may be right, it may well be because of the precursory character of the adventure. It’s also true that it inaugurated a new era in Peru, something neither Mayta nor Vallejos could guess at the time. But it’s also possible that the whole historical context has no more importance than as decor and that the obscurely suggestive element I see in it consists of the truculence, marginality, rebelliousness, delirium, and excess which all came together in that episode of which my fellow Salesian School chum was the leading character.

“A progressive military man? Are you sure there is such a thing?” mocks Comrade Medardo. “The APRA people have spent their lives looking for one, so he could make their revolution for them and open the doors of the Palace to them. They’ve grown old without finding him. Do you want the same thing to happen to us?”

“It’s not going to happen.” Mayta smiles. “Because we aren’t going to stage a barracks coup but bring about the revolution. Don’t worry, comrade.”

“Well, I for one am worrying,” said Comrade Jacinto. “But about something more terrestrial. Did Comrade Carlos pay the rent? I don’t want the old lady down here again.”

The meeting was over, and since they never left all at once, Anatolio and Joaquín had gone first. Mayta and Jacinto waited a few minutes before leaving. Mayta smiled as he remembered that night. The old lady had walked in unexpectedly right in the middle of a hot discussion of the agrarian reform that Paz Estenssoro’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement had instituted in Bolivia. Her entrance had left all of them stupefied, as if the person who opened the door were an informer and not that fragile little figure with white hair and a bent back, leaning on a metal cane.

“Good evening, Mrs. Blomberg,” Comrade Carlos reacted. “What a surprise.”

“Why didn’t you knock?” protested Comrade Jacinto.

“I don’t have to knock on the door to my own garage, do I?” retorted the offended Mrs. Blomberg. “We agreed that you would pay the rent on the first. What happened?”

“We’re a bit behind because of the bank strike,” said Comrade Carlos, stepping forward, trying to block Mrs. Blomberg’s view of the poster with the bearded men and of the stacks of Workers Voice. “Here’s the check, see?”

Mrs. Blomberg calmed down when she saw Comrade Carlos take an envelope out of his pocket. She looked over the check carefully, nodded, and said goodbye, muttering all the while that in the future they should pay on time because at her age she wasn’t in any shape to go around collecting rents from house to house. They had a fit of laughing, forgot the discussion, and began to dream up scenarios. Could Mrs. Blomberg have seen Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky? Could she be on her way to the police station? Would the garage be raided that night? They had told her they were renting the garage as the headquarters for a chess club, and about the only thing the old lady wouldn’t see in her quick visit was a chessboard or a pawn. But the police never came, so Mrs. Blomberg must have noticed nothing suspicious.

“Unless this lieutenant of yours who wants to start a revolution is an outcome of that visit,” said Medardo. “Instead of raiding us, infiltrating us.”

“After all these months?” Mayta demurred, afraid to reopen a discussion that would keep him from his cigarette. “We’ll know soon enough. Ten minutes have gone by. Shall we go?”

“We’ll have to find out why Pallardi and Carlos didn’t come,” said Jacinto.

“Carlos was the only one of the seven who led a normal life,” Moisés says. “A contractor, he owned a brickworks. He paid the garage rent, the printer, and he paid for the handbills. We all chipped in, but our contributions were nothing. His wife wished we’d drop dead.”

“And Mayta? At France-Presse he couldn’t have earned much.”

“And he spent half his salary or more on the party,” Moisés adds. “His wife hated us, too, of course.”

“Mayta had a wife?”

“Mayta was married as legally as can be.” Moisés laughs. “But not for long. To a woman named Adelaida — she worked in a bank. A real cutie. Something we never understood. You didn’t know Mayta was married?”

I knew nothing about it. They left together and locked the garage door. At the corner store they stopped off so Mayta could buy a pack of Incas. He offered them to Jacinto and Medardo and lit up his own so hastily he actually burned his fingers. Heading toward Avenida Alfonso Ugarte, he took several deep drags, half closing his eyes, enjoying to the fullest the pleasure of inhaling and exhaling those diminutive clouds of smoke that faded into the night.

“I know why I can’t stop thinking about the lieutenant’s face,” he thought aloud.

“That soldier boy’s made us lose a lot of time,” complained Medardo. “Three hours, for a second lieutenant!”

Mayta went on as if he hadn’t heard a word: “It’s either because he’s ignorant or because he’s inexperienced, or who knows why — he was talking about the revolution the way we never talked.”

“Don’t use dem big words wit’ me, sir, ah’s jus a worker, not uh intelleftual,” mocked Jacinto.

It was a joke he made so often that Mayta had begun to wonder if in fact Comrade Jacinto didn’t envy the intelleftuals he said he respected so little. At that moment, the three of them had to hug the wall to keep from being run over by a crowded bus that came sliding over the sidewalk.

“He talked with humor, joyfully,” added Mayta. “As if he were talking about something healthy and beautiful. We’ve lost that kind of enthusiasm.”

“You mean we’ve gotten old,” joked Jacinto. “Maybe you have, but I’m still growing.”

But Mayta wasn’t in the mood for jokes and went on speaking anxiously, hastily: “We’re too wound up in theory, too serious, too politicizing. I don’t know… Listening to that kid spout off about the socialist revolution made me envy him. Being involved in the struggle for so long hardens you, sure, but it’s bad to lose your illusions. It’s bad that the methods we use make us forget our goals, comrades.”

Did they understand what he wanted to tell them? He felt he was getting upset and changed the subject. When he left them on Alfonso Ugarte to go to his room on Zepita Street, the idea kept buzzing in his head. In front of the Loyaza Hospital, as he waited for a break in the river of cars, trucks, and buses that choked the four lanes, he suddenly understood an association that had been flitting, ghostlike, through his mind since the previous night. That’s what it was: the university. That disillusioning year, those courses on history, literature, and philosophy he’d signed up for at San Marcos University. He had quickly concluded that the professors had lost their love of teaching somewhere along the line, if in fact they had ever had any love for the great works and great ideas they were supposed to teach. To judge by what they were teaching and the kind of papers they expected from their students, it would seem that some kind of inversion had taken place in their dull, mediocre wits. The Spanish literature professor seemed convinced that it was more important to read what Leo Spitzer had written about García Lorca than to read Lorca himself, or to read Amado Alonso’s book on Neruda’s poetry than to read Neruda. And the history professor deemed the sources of Peruvian history more important than Peruvian history. For the philosophy professor, form was more important than ideas and their impact on action … Culture for them had dried up, had become a vain science, sterile erudition separated from life. He had told himself then that this was what was to be expected from bourgeois culture, from bourgeois idealism — leaving life behind. He had withdrawn from the university in disgust: real culture was just the opposite of what they were teaching.

But had he, Jacinto, Medardo, the comrades of the RWP(T), and those in the other RWP become just as academic? Had they forgotten the true hierarchy of things — that there was a difference between essentials and extraneous matters? Had their revolutionary work become as esoteric and pedantic as literature, history, and philosophy had for the professors at San Marcos? Listening to Vallejos was like being awakened from a dream: “Don’t forget the essentials, Mayta. Don’t get tangled up in superfluous things, comrade.” He knew nothing, had read nothing, was a virgin — all of that — but in one sense he had an advantage over all of them: the revolution for him was action, something tangible, heaven on earth, the reign of justice, equality, fraternity. He could guess what images the revolution took on in Vallejos’s mind: peasants breaking the chains the bosses had shackled them with, workers who went from being servants to being masters of machines and shops, a society in which surplus value no longer fattens up a minority but reverts back to the workers … and he felt a shiver run down his spine.

Wasn’t he at the corner of Cañete and Zepita? He woke from his reverie and rubbed his arms. Damn! How absent-minded can you get? The corner of Canete and Zepita was one he always avoided, because of the bad taste it left in his mouth whenever he went near it. Right there, in front of the newsstand, the gray-green car had stopped with a screech that still whined in his ears. Before he could figure out what was happening, four thugs got out and he saw four pistols pointed at him. He was frisked, pushed around, and shoved into the car. He had been in police stations and various jails before, but that was the worst and the longest time, the first in which he had been worked over. He thought he would go mad and considered suicide. Ever since, he had avoided that corner, out of a kind of superstition he would have been ashamed to admit. He turned onto Zepita and slowly walked the two blocks to his house. His weariness as usual concentrated in his feet. Damned flat feet. I’m a fakir, he thought. Walking on thousands of tiny needles … He thought: The revolution is a party for that brand-new lieutenant.

He had the second attic room in a house on a dead-end street lined with two-story buildings, an area about nine by fifteen feet, overflowing with books, magazines, and newspapers scattered all over the floor. There was a bed without a headboard, with a mattress and one blanket. A few shirts and some trousers hung from nails in the wall, and behind the door there was a mirror and a little shelf with his shaving things. A dangling bulb shone a dirty light on the room, which was made even smaller by its incredible disorder. As soon as he entered, he went down on all fours to drag out from under the bed — the dust made him sneeze — the chipped basin which was probably the object he treasured most in the place.

The rooms had no bath. In the patio, there were two common lavatories and a faucet, where all the neighbors got water for washing and cooking. During the day there were always lines, but not at night, so Mayta went down, filled his basin, and returned to his room — carefully, so he wouldn’t spill a drop — all in a few minutes. He undressed, lay down on his bed, and sank his feet in the basin. Ah, how restful. He had often fallen asleep giving himself a footbath, and would awaken sneezing and frozen to death. But he didn’t fall asleep this time. While the fresh, soothing sensation spread from his feet to his ankles and legs and the fatigue diminished, he thought that even if it had no concrete effect, it was a good thing that someone reminded him: what happened to those literati, historians, and philosophers at San Marcos should not happen to a revolutionary. A revolutionary should not forget that he lives, fights, and dies to make revolution and not to …

“Let’s get the check,” says Moises. “Enough talk. I’ll pay. Rather, the center will pay. Stick that wallet where the sun won’t shine on it.”

But there is no more sun. The sky has clouded over, and when we leave the Costa Verde, it looks like winter. One of those typical afternoons in Lima, wet, with a low sky that threatens and blusters, promising a storm that never comes. When he picks up his pistol at the entrance—“It’s a 7.65 Browning,” he tells me — Moises checks to see if the safety is on. He puts it in the glove compartment.

“At least tell me what you’ve got so far,” he says as we roll along Quebrada Armendariz in his wine-colored Cadillac.

“A forty-year-old man with flat feet, who’s spent his life in the catacombs of theoretical revolution (or should I say revolutionary intrigue?),” I sum up for him. “In APRA, an APRA dissident; in the Communist Party, a Communist Party dissident; finally, a Trotskyist. Every variant, all the contradictions of the left during the fifties. He lived underground, was jailed, and lived in permanent indigence. But …”

“But what?”

“But the frustration didn’t embitter him or even corrupt him. He stays honest, idealistic, despite that castrating life. Does that sound about right?”

“Basically, yes,” affirms Moises as he slows down to let me off. “But have you ever thought how difficult it is to be corrupted in this country of ours? You have to have opportunities. Most people are honest because they have no choice, don’t you think? Did you ever wonder how Mayta would have reacted if he’d been given a chance to be corrupted?”

“I figure he always behaved in such a way that he never put himself in the path of corruption.”

“You don’t have much to go on yet,” concludes Moisés.

Off in the distance, we hear shots.