The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Three

To get there from Barranco, you have to go to downtown Lima, cross the Rímac — a squalid creek this time of year — at the Ricardo Palma bridge, go along Piedra Liza and skirt the San Cristobal hills. It’s a long, risky, and at certain times of the day extremely slow route because of all the traffic. It also charts the gradual impoverishment of Lima: the prosperity of Miraflores and San Isidro progressively decays and grows ugly in Lince and La Victoria, then resurges illusively in the downtown area, with the tedious towers of banks, mutual-fund and insurance companies — among which nevertheless there proliferate promiscuous tenements and old houses that stay upright only by a miracle. But immediately after you cross the river, in the so-called Bajo el Puente sector, the city decomposes into vacant lots, where huts thrown together out of matting and rubble have sprung up, slums mixed in with garbage dumps that go on for miles. Once this marginal Lima was only poor, but now it’s a place of blood and terror as well.

When you come to Avenida de los Chasquis, the asphalt gives out and the potholes take over, but a car can still bounce along a few more yards, fenced-in lots on either side, and broken streetlights — the kids smash the bulbs with slingshots. Since it’s my second visit, I won’t be so dumb as to go beyond the store where I got stuck last time. My last trip involved some slapstick comedy. When I finally figured out that I was definitively stuck in the mud, I asked some boys talking on the corner to give me a push. They helped me, but before getting down to pushing, they held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me if I didn’t give them everything I had. They took my watch, my wallet, my shoes, and my shirt. They allowed me to keep my trousers. While they pushed the car, we talked. Were there many murders in the neighborhood? Quite a few. Political assassinations? Yeah, them too. Just yesterday, a decapitated body was found just down the way there, with a sign on it: “Stinking Squealer.”

I park and walk among dumps that double as pigpens. The pigs root around in these mounds of garbage, and I have to wave both hands around to keep the flies off. On top of and in between the mounds of garbage huddle the huts, made of tin cans, bricks, cement (some), adobe, wood, and with tin roofs (some). They are all half started, never finished, always decrepit, leaning on one another, collapsing or about to collapse, swarming with people who look at me with the same indolence as the last time. Until a few months ago, political violence did not affect the slums on the outskirts of Lima as much as it affected the residential neighborhoods and the downtown area. But now most of the people assassinated or kidnapped by revolutionary commandos, the armed forces, or the counterrevolutionary death squads come from these zones.

There are more old men than young, more women than men, and from time to time I have the impression that I’m not in Lima or even on the coast but in some village in the Andes: sandals, Indian skirts, ponchos, vests with llamas embroidered on them, dialogues in Quechua. Do they really live better in this stink and scum than in the mountain villages they have abandoned to come to Lima? Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists assure us that, as amazing as it might seem, this is the case. Their expectations for bettering themselves and for simply surviving are greater, it seems, in these fetid dumps than in the plateaus of Ancash, Puno, or Cajamarca, where drought, epidemics, barren land, and unemployment decimate the Indian towns. This is probably true. How else can you explain someone’s choosing to live in these dumps and this filth?

“For them, it’s the lesser of two evils, a better choice,” said Mayta. “But if you think that just because there is misery in these slums they must contain revolutionary potential, you’re mistaken. These people aren’t proletarians: they’re lumpen. They have no class consciousness, because they aren’t a class. They can’t even imagine what the class struggle is.”

“Then they’re like me.” Vallejos smiled. “What the fuck is the class struggle?”

“The motor of history,” explained Mayta, very serious, full of his role as professor. “The struggle that results from the contrary interests of each class in society. Interests innate in the role of each class in the production of wealth. There are those who own capital, those who own property, those who own knowledge. And there are those who own nothing but their labor: the workers. And there are as well the marginal people, those people from the slums, the lumpen. Are you getting confused?”

“Just hungry.” Vallejos yawned. “These talks always give me an appetite. Let’s forget the class struggle for today and have a nice cold beer. I’m inviting you to have lunch at my parents’ house. My sister is coming out. A big event. She’s worse off than if she were in a barracks. I’ll introduce you. And the next time we see each other, I’ll bring the surprise I told you about.”

They were in Mayta’s tiny room, Mayta sitting on the floor and the second lieutenant on the bed. From outside came the sounds of voices, laughter, and automobiles. Minute dust motes floated around them like weightless little animals.

“If you go on this way, you won’t learn anything about Marxism.” Mayta gave up. “The fact is, you don’t have much of a teacher. I always complicate the things I teach.”

“You’re better than many of the ones I had in military school.” Vallejos encouraged him with a laugh. “You know what happens to me? I’m really interested in Marxism, but all those abstractions get me. I’m much more open to practical, concrete things. By the way, should I tell you my plan for revolution before we have the beer, or later?”

“I’ll only listen to your inspired plan if you pass the test,” Mayta said, following his lead. “So what the fuck is the class struggle?”

“The big fish eats the little fish,” said Vallejos, cackling. “What else could it be, brother? To know that a landowner with a thousand acres and his Indians hate each other, you don’t have to do much studying. Well, did I get a hundred? Now, my plan is gonna knock your socks off, Mayta. Even more when you see the surprise. Will you come to lunch? I want you to meet my sister.”

“Mother? Sister? Miss?”

“Juanita,” she decides. “We’re better off calling each other by name. After all, we’re about the same age, right? And this is María.”

The two women wear leather sandals, and from the bench I’m sitting on, I can see their toes: Juanita’s are still, and María’s wiggle around nervously. Juanita is dark, energetic, with thick arms and legs, and dark down on her upper lip. María is small and light-skinned, with clear eyes and an absent expression.

“A Pasteurina or a glass of water?” Juanita asks me. “Better for us if you have a soda, because around here water is gold. Just to get it, you have to go all the way to Avenida de los Chasquis.”

The place reminds me of a cabin out in the San Cristóbal hills where two Frenchwomen, sisters in the congregation of Father de Foucauld, lived. That was long ago. Here the walls are also whitewashed and bare, the floor covered with straw mats; the blankets make you think this could be the dwelling of a desert nomad.

“All we need is sun,” says María. “Father Charles de Foucauld. I read his book In the Heart of the Masses. It was famous at one time.”

“I read it, too,” says Juanita. “I don’t remember much. I never did have a good memory, even when I was young.”

“What a shame.” Nowhere do I see a crucifix, an image of the Virgin, a religious picture, a missal. Nothing that might allude to the fact that the inhabitants are nuns. “About that lack of memory. Because I …”

“Well, that’s something else. Of course I remember him.” Juanita chides me with a look, as she hands me the Pasteurina. Then her tone changes: “I haven’t forgotten my brother, of course.”

“What about Mayta?” I ask her, swigging that tepid, overly sweet stuff straight from the bottle.

“I remember him, too.” Juanita nods. “I saw him only once. At my parents’ house. I don’t remember much, because that was the next-to-the-last time I talked to my brother. The last time was two weeks later. All he did was talk about his friend Mayta. He really liked him and admired him. His influence was … Perhaps I’d better say nothing.”

“Ah, so that’s what it’s about.” María uses a piece of cardboard to shoo the flies away from her face. Neither wears a habit, only flannel skirts and gray blouses. But in the way they wear their clothes, in the way their hair is held back in a net, in the way they talk and move, you can see they are nuns. “At least it’s about them and not about us. We were nervous, now I can say it, because publicity is bad for the things we do.”

“And just what is it we do?” mocked Mayta, with a sarcastic laugh. “We’ve taken over the town, the police station, the jail, we’ve got all the weapons in Jauja. What now? Head for the hills like mountain goats?”

“Not like mountain goats,” replied the second lieutenant, without getting angry. “We can go on horseback, burro, mule, by truck, or on foot. On foot is best, because there’s no better way to get around in the mountains. It’s easy to see you don’t know much about the mountains, buddy.”

“It’s true, I really don’t know much about them,” admitted Mayta. “I’m really ashamed.”

“Well, we can help you there. Come with me tomorrow to Jauja.” Vallejos nudged him with his elbow. “You’ll have a free place to stay, and free food. Just the weekend, man. I’ll show you the country, we can go to the Indian towns, you’ll see the real Peru. But listen, now: don’t open the surprise. You promised. Or I’ll take it back.”

They were sitting on the sand at Agua Dulce, gazing over the deserted beach. All around them were fluttering sea gulls, and a salty, moist breeze wet their faces. What could this surprise be? The package was wrapped so carefully, as if it contained something precious. And it was really heavy.

“Of course I’d like to go to Jauja,” said Mayta. “But…”

“But you can’t pay the bus fare,” Vallejos cut in. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you a ticket.”

“We’ll see. Let’s get back to business,” Mayta insisted. “Serious business. Did you read the little book I gave you?”

“I liked it and I understood everything, except for a couple of Russian names. Know why I liked it, Mayta? Because it is more practical than theoretical. What Is to Be Done? What Is to Be Done? Lenin knew what had to be done, buddy. He was a man of action, like me. So my plan looked like kid stuff to you?”

“Well, at least you read Lenin, and at least you like him. You’re making progress.” Mayta avoided answering directly. “Want me to tell you something? You were right, your sister really impressed me. She didn’t seem like a nun. She made me remember old times. When I was a kid, I was as devout as she is, did you know that?”

“He looked older than he was,” Juanita says. “He was in his forties, wasn’t he? And since my brother looked younger than he was, they looked like father and son. It was during one of my rare visits to my family. At that time, the two of us were cloistered. Not like these snots who live half the time in the convent and half the time out on the street.”

María protests. She waves her piece of cardboard in front of her face very fast, driving the flies crazy. They’re not only all around us, buzzing our heads: they dot the walls, like nailheads. I already know what’s in this package, Mayta thought. I know what the surprise is. He felt a wave of heat in his chest and thought: He’s crazy. How old can Juanita be? Undecipherable: petite, ramrod straight; her gestures and movements released waves of energy, and her slightly bucked teeth were always biting her lower lip. Could she have been a novice in Spain and lived there for a long time? Because her accent was remotely Spanish, the accent of a Spanish woman whose j’s and r’s had lost their edges, the z’s and c’s their roundness, but whose spoken Spanish hadn’t yet taken on the Lima drawl. What are you doing here, Mayta? he thought, feeling uncomfortable. What are you doing here with a nun? He unobtrusively stretched out his hand and felt for the surprise. Yes, indeed — a gun.

“I thought the two of you were in the same order,” I say to them.

“Then you are sadly mistaken,” María replies. She smiles often, but Juanita is serious even when she makes jokes. Outside, there is a furious barking, as if a pack of dogs were fighting. “I was with the proletarian nuns, she with the aristocratic nuns. Now both of us are lumpen.”

We begin talking about Mayta and Vallejos, but without knowing it, we digress into a discussion of local crime. At the beginning, the revolutionaries were quite strong here: they solicited money in broad daylight, even held meetings. They would kill people from time to time, accusing them of being traitors. Then the freedom squads appeared, cutting off heads, mutilating, and burning real or supposed accomplices of the revolutionaries with acid. Violence has increased. Juanita believes, nevertheless, that there are still more ordinary crimes than political crimes, and that common murderers disguise their crimes as political assassinations.

“A few days ago, a guy in the neighborhood killed his wife because she was jealous of him,” María tells. “And his brothers-in-law saw him trying to cover up the crime by hanging one of those famous ‘Squealer Bitch’ signs on her.”

“Let’s go back to what brought me here,” I suggest. “The revolution that began to take shape during those years. The one Mayta and your brother were involved in. It was the first of many. It charted the process that has ended in what we are all living through now.”

“It may turn out that the great revolution of those years wasn’t any of the ones you think it was, but ours,” Juanita interrupts me. “Because — have all these murders and attacks produced anything positive? Violence only breeds violence. And things haven’t changed, have they? There is more poverty than ever, here, out in the country, out in the mountains, everywhere.”

“Did you talk about that?” I ask her. “Did Mayta talk to you about the poor, about misery?”

“We talked about religion,” Juanita says. “And don’t think I brought the subject up. It was him.”

“Yes, very Catholic, but no more — I’m free of those illusions,” Mayta murmurs, sorry he’s said it here, afraid that Vallejos’s sister will be offended. “Don’t you ever have doubts?”

“From the moment I wake up until I go to bed,” she says softly. “Whoever told you that faith and doubts don’t go together?”

“I mean”—Mayta grows bolder—“isn’t it a hoax to say that the mission of Catholic schools is to educate the elite? Is it really possible to infuse the children of the classes in power with the evangelical principles of charity and love for one’s neighbor? Have you ever thought about that?”

“I think about that and much worse things.” The nun smiled at him. “Rather, we both think. It’s true. When I took orders, we all thought that, along with power and wealth, God had given those families a mission as far as their disinherited brothers were concerned. That those girls who were the head of the social body — if we could educate them well — would take charge of making the rest of the body better, the arms and the legs. But now none of us thinks that is the way to change the world.”

And Mayta, surprised, listened to her tell about the scheme she and her schoolmates had worked up. They didn’t stop until the free school for the poor in Sophianum was closed. The little girls from paying families all had a little girl in the school, a poor girl. The better-off girls brought in sweets, clothes, and once a year visited the poor girls’ homes with presents. They would go in the family car with Mommy; or sometimes only the chauffeur dropped off the Christmas cake. Disgusting, shameful. Could you call that practicing charity? The nuns had brought the matter up so often, criticized, written, and protested so much that, finally, the free school of Sophianum was closed.

“Then we aren’t so far apart, after all, Mother.” Mayta was shocked. “I’m happy to hear you talk this way. May I quote you something a great man once said? That when humanity has fought all the revolutions necessary to end injustice, a new religion will be born.”

“Who needs a new religion when we already have the true one?” replied the nun, passing him the cookies. “Have one.”

“Trotsky,” Mayta clarified. “A revolutionary, an atheist. But he respected the problem of faith.”

“All that stuff about how the revolution liberates the people’s energy, you can understand right here.” Vallejos threw a stone at a pelican. “Did my plan seem that bad to you? Or did you say it just to bust my balls, Mayta?”

“It seemed a monstrous deformity to us.” Juanita shrugs, making a discouraged gesture. “And now I wonder if, deformity and all, it wasn’t better for those girls to have a place where they could learn to read and where they would get at least one Christmas cake a year. I don’t know, I’m not so sure anymore that we did the right thing. What were the results? At the school there were thirty-two nuns and twenty or so sisters. That’s the usual proportion in most schools. The congregations have collapsed … Was our crisis of social conscience such a good thing? Was the sacrifice of my brother a good thing?”

She tries to smile, as if excusing herself for having involved me in her confusion.

“It’s logical, it’s a piece of cake, it’s money in the bank.” Vallejos was getting excited. “If the Indians work for a boss who exploits them, they work unwillingly and produce very little. When they work for themselves, they will produce more, and that will benefit all of society. Need cigarettes, brother?”

“As long as a parasitic class doesn’t come into existence to expropriate and use for its own advantage the efforts of the proletariat and the peasants,” Mayta explained to him. “As long as a bureaucratic class doesn’t accumulate enough power to create a new unjust social structure. And to avoid that, Leon Davidovich conceived the permanent revolution. God, I even bore myself with these lectures.”

“I’d like to go to a soccer match, how about you?” Vallejos sighed. “I got out of Jauja to see the classic Alianza-U match and I don’t want to miss it. Come on, I’m inviting you.”

“What’s your answer to that question?” I say to her when I see she’s stopped talking. “Did the silent revolution of those years help the Church or hurt it?”

“It helped us, the ones who lost our false illusions, but it didn’t help the faith. As to the other nuns, I can’t say,” María says. And, turning to Juanita: “What was Mayta like?”

“He always spoke softly, courteously, and he dressed very modestly,” Juanita recalls. “He tried to shock me with his anti-religious attitudes. But I rather think I shocked him. He had no idea what was going on in the convents, seminaries, the parishes. He knew nothing about our revolution … He opened his eyes wide and said, ‘We’re not so far apart, after all.’ The years have proven him correct, don’t you think?”

And she tells me that Father Miguel, a priest in the neighborhood who mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, is, it seems, the famous Comrade Leoncio who led the bloody attack on the Palace of Government a month ago.

“I doubt it,” María protests. “Father Miguel was a loudmouth. Fiery as far as words go, but nothing but a blowhard. I’m sure the police or the freedom squads killed him.”

Yes, that’s what it was. Not a revolver or an automatic pistol, but a short, light sub-machine gun that looked factory-fresh: black, oily, and shiny. Mayta stared at it hypnotized. Making an effort, he took his eyes off the weapon, which trembled in his hands, and looked around, all the time with the feeling that from among the books and papers scattered around his room the informers were crawling out, pointing a finger at him, laughing their heads off: “We’ve got you now, Mayta.” “You’ve had it now, Mayta,” “Right in the act, Mayta.” This kid’s foolish, a nut, he thought. A … But he felt no ill will toward the lieutenant. Instead, the benevolence inspired by a prank played by a favorite child, and the desire to see him again as soon as possible. To box his ears, he thought. To tell him …

“When I’m with you, I feel funny somehow. I don’t know whether to tell you or not. I hope you don’t get mad. May I speak frankly?”

The stadium was half empty, and they had arrived very early. The preliminary match hadn’t even begun.

“Of course,” said Vallejos, exhaling smoke from his mouth and nose. “I can guess. Are you going to tell me my revolutionary plan is half-assed? Or are you going to get on me again about the surprise?”

“How long have we been seeing each other?” asks Mayta. “Two months?”

“We’re really tight, though, right?” Vallejos says as he applauds a kick made by a small, extremely agile wing. “What were you going to say?”

“That sometimes I think we’re wasting our time.”

Vallejos forgot the match. “You mean, about lending me books and teaching me Marxism?”

“Not because you don’t understand what I teach you,” Mayta clarified. “You’re smart enough to understand dialectical materialism, or anything else.”

“That’s good,” said Vallejos, returning to the match. “I thought you were wasting your time because I’m a jerk.”

“No, you’re no jerk.” Mayta smiled at the lieutenant’s profile. “The fact is, when I’m talking to you, knowing what you’re thinking, knowing you yourself, I think that theory, instead of helping you, can actually get in your way.”

“Darn! Almost a goal. Nice shot.” Vallejos got up to clap.

“In that sense, understand?” Mayta went on.

“I don’t understand a thing,” Vallejos said. “Now I am a jerk. Are you trying to tell me to forget my plan, that I was wrong to give you the sub-machine gun? What do you mean, brother? Goal! All right!”

“In theory, revolutionary spontaneity is bad,” Mayta said. “If there is no doctrine, no scientific knowledge, the impulse is wasted in anarchic gestures. But you have an instinctive resistance to getting tangled up in theory. Maybe you’re right. Perhaps, thanks to that instinct, what happened to us won’t happen to you …”

“Us?” asked Vallejos, turning to look at him.

“From worrying so much about being well prepared in doctrinal terms, we forgot the practical, and …”

He fell silent because there was a huge uproar in the stands: firecrackers were going off, and a rain of confetti came down on the field. You’d made a mistake, Mayta.

“You haven’t answered me,” Vallejos insisted, without looking at him, contemplating his cigarette. Was he an informer? “You said us, and I asked who us is. You didn’t answer, buddy.”

“Revolutionary Peruvians, Marxist Peruvians,” Mayta spelled it out, scrutinizing him. Was he an agent ordered to find out about them, to provoke them? “We know a lot about Leninism and Trotskyism, but we don’t know how to reach the masses. That’s what I meant.”

“I asked him if he at least believed in God, if his political ideas were compatible with the Christian faith,” Juanita says.

“I shouldn’t have asked you that, brother,” Vallejos begged pardon, contrite, the two of them immersed in the flood of people emptying out of the stadium. “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to tell me anything.”

“What can I tell you that you don’t already know?” Mayta said. “I’m happy we came, even if the match was no good. It’s been ages since …”

“I want to tell you just one thing,” Vallejos declared, taking him by the arm. “I understand that you have your doubts about me.”

“You’re nuts,” said Mayta. “Why should I have doubts about you?”

“Because I’m a soldier, and because you don’t know me all that well,” said Vallejos. “I can understand that you’d hide certain things from me. I don’t want to know anything about your political life, Mayta. I play fair and square with my friends, and I think of you as a friend. If I pull a fast one on you, you’ve got a way to even the score — the surprise …”

“The revolution and the Catholic religion are incompatible,” asserts Mayta softly. “Don’t fool yourself, Mother.”

“You’re the one who’s fouled up. You’re also way behind the times,” Juanita jokes. “Do you think I’m put out when I hear religion called the opiate of the people? It may have been, probably was, in any case. But that’s all finished. Everything is changing. We’re going to bring about the revolution, too. Don’t laugh.”

Had the era of progressive priests and nuns already begun then in Peru? Juanita says yes, but I have my doubts. Anyway, it was in such an early stage of development, as yet so inarticulate, that Mayta couldn’t have had any idea of it. Would he have been pleased? The ex-child who had gone on a hunger strike to be like the poor, would he have been happy that Monsignor Bambarén, bishop of the slums, wore his famous ring with the pontifical coat of arms on one side and the hammer and sickle on the other? Would he have been happy that Father Gustavo Gutiérrez conceived liberation theology by explaining that bringing about the socialist revolution was the obligation of every Catholic? That Monsignor Méndez Arceo advised the Mexican faithful to go to Cuba as they used to go to Lourdes? Yes, no doubt about it. Maybe he would have gone on being a Catholic, as have so many these days. Did he give one the feeling that he was dogmatic, a man of rigid ideas?

Juanita thinks it over for a moment. “Yes, I think so, a dogmatic man.” She nods. “At least he wasn’t at all flexible about religion. We only spoke for a while, perhaps I didn’t understand what kind of man he was. I thought about him a lot later on. He had a huge influence on my brother. He changed his life. He made him read, which was something he almost never did before. Communist books, of course. I tried to warn him: ‘You know he’s catechizing you?’”

“Yes, I know, but I learn a lot of things from him, sister.”

“My brother was an idealist, a rebel, with an innate sense of justice,” adds Juanita. “He found a mentor in Mayta, one who manipulated him as he saw fit.”

“So, as far as you’re concerned, Mayta was calling the shots?” I ask her. “Do you think he planned it all, that he put the Jauja business into Vallejos’s head?”

“No, because I don’t know how to use it.” Mayta was doubtful. “I’ll make you a confession. I’ve never even fired a cap gun in my entire life. But, going back to what you said before about friendship, I have to warn you about one thing.”

“Don’t warn me about anything, I already asked you to excuse my indiscretion,” said Vallejos. “I’d rather hear one of your speeches. Let’s go on with double power, that idea of undercutting the bourgeoisie and the imperialists slowly but surely.”

“Not even friendship comes before the revolution for a revolutionary: get that through your head and never forget it,” said Mayta. “Revolution, above all things. Then comes the rest. That’s what I tried to explain to your sister the other afternoon. Her ideas are good, she goes as far as a Catholic can. But that’s just not enough. If you believe in heaven and hell, then what happens here on earth will always take a back seat to all that. And there will never be a revolution. I trust you and I think of you as a great friend. If I hide anything, if …”

“Okay, okay. I’ve already asked you to forgive me, can’t we forget it?” Vallejos wanted to shut him up. “So you’ve never fired a gun? Tomorrow we’ll go over by Lurín, with the surprise. I’ll give you a lesson. Firing a sub-machine gun is much easier than the thesis of double power.”

“Of course, that was what had to happen,” Juanita said. But she does not seem all that sure, judging by the way she says it. “Mayta was an old hand at politics, a professional revolutionary. My brother was an impulsive kid Mayta could dominate just by his age and his knowledge.”

“I don’t know. I’m just not sure,” I said to her. “Sometimes I think it was the other way around.”

“That’s silly,” said María, joining in. “How could a kid get a savvy old guy like that involved in as crazy a deal as that?”

Exactly, Mother. Mayta was a revolutionary from the shadowy side. He had spent his life conspiring and fighting in insignificant little groups like the one he was a member of. And suddenly, just when he was reaching the age at which people usually retire from militant activism, someone turned up who opened the doors of action to him for the first time. Could there have been anything as captivating for a man like Mayta than out of the blue having someone stick a sub-machine gun in his hands?

“This is make-believe, a novel,” says Juanita, with a smile that forgives me for my transgression. “This isn’t at all like the real story, in any case.”

“It won’t be the real story, but, just as you say, a novel.” I confirm her ideas. “A faint, remote, and, if you like, false version.”

“Then why work so hard at it?” she insinuates with irony. “Why try to find out everything that happened, why come to confess to me like this. Why not just lie and make the whole thing up from top to bottom?”

“Because I’m a realist, in my novels I always try to lie knowing why I do it,” I explain. “That’s how I work. And I think the only way to write stories is to start with History — with a capital H.”

“I wonder if we ever really know what you call History with a capital H,” María interrupts. “Or if there’s as much make-believe in history as in novels. For example, the things we were talking about. So much has been said about revolutionary priests, about Marxist infiltration in the Church … But no one comes up with the obvious answer.”

“Which is?”

“The despair and anger you feel at having to see hunger and sickness day and night, the feeling of impotence in the face of so much injustice,” said Mayta, always choosing his words carefully so as not to offend. The nun noticed that he barely moved his lips as he spoke. “Above all, realize that the people who can do something never will. Politicians, the rich, the ones in the driver’s seat, the ones with power.”

“But why would you lose your faith because of that?” asked Vallejos’s sister, astonished. “I would think it would make it stronger, that it would …”

Mayta went on, his tone hardening: “No matter how strong your faith is, there comes a moment when you say, That’s it. It just can’t be possible that the remedy for so much iniquity is the promise of eternal life. That’s how it was, Mother. Seeing that hell was right here in the streets of Lima. Especially over in El Montón. Ever been to El Montón?”

Another shack city, one of the first, no worse, no more miserable than this one where Juanita and María live. Things have gotten much worse since that time when Mayta confessed to the nun; the shacks have proliferated, and in addition to misery and unemployment, there is murder now. Was it really the spectacle of Montón that fifty years ago transformed the devout little boy that Mayta was into a rebel? Contact with that world has not had the same effect, in any case, on Juanita and María. Neither gives the impression of being desperate, outraged, or even resigned, and at least as far as I can see, living with iniquity has not convinced them that the solution is assassination and bombs. They went on being nuns, right? Would the shots fade into echoes in the Lurín desert?

“No.” Vallejos aimed, fired, and the noise wasn’t as loud as Mayta thought it would be. His palms were sweaty with expectation. “No, they weren’t for me, I lied to you. The books, well, in fact I bring them all to Jauja so the joeboys can read them. I have faith in you, Mayta. I’m going to tell you something I wouldn’t even tell the person I love most in the world, my sister.”

As he spoke, he put the sub-machine gun in Mayta’s hands. He showed him how to brace it, how to take off the safety, how to aim, squeeze the trigger, load and unload.

“A big mistake. Never talk about things like that,” Mayta admonished him, his voice shaken by the jolt he had felt in his body as he heard the burst of fire and realized from the vibration in his wrists that it was he who had fired. Off in the distance, the sand extended, yellowish, ocher, bluish, indifferent. “It’s a simple matter of security. Nothing to do with you, but with the others, don’t you understand? Anyone can do whatever he likes with his life. But no one should endanger his comrades, the revolution, just to show a friend he trusts him. And suppose I worked for the cops?”

“That’s not your style. Even if you wanted, you couldn’t be a squealer.” Vallejos laughed. “What do you think? Easy, huh?”

“You know, it’s really easy,” Mayta agreed, touching the muzzle and burning his fingers. “Don’t tell me any more about the joeboys. I don’t need proof of your friendship, jerk-off.”

A hot breeze had come up and the salt flats looked as if they were being bombarded with grains of sand. It was true that the second lieutenant had chosen the perfect place — who would hear the shots in this solitude? He shouldn’t think he knew all he had to know. The main thing was not loading, unloading, aiming, and firing, but cleaning the weapon and knowing how to take it apart and put it back together.

“I told you because I had a purpose.” Vallejos returned to the subject, gesturing at the same time that they should head back to the highway, because the land breeze was going to suffocate them. “I need your help, brother. They’re boys from the Colegio San José, over in Jauja. Really young, fourth or fifth year. We got to be friends playing soccer on the little field near the jail. The joeboys.”

They walked on the sand with their heads bent to the wind, their feet buried up to the ankles in the soft earth. Mayta quickly forgot the shooting lesson and his anger of a moment before, intrigued by what the second lieutenant was saying.

“Don’t tell me anything that’ll make you sorry you did,” Mayta reminded him, even though he was beside himself with curiosity.

“Shut the fuck up.” Vallejos had tied his handkerchief over his face to protect himself from the sand. “The joeboys and I went from soccer to having a few beers together, then to little parties, to the movies, and to meetings. Since we’ve been holding these meetings, I’ve tried to teach them the things you teach me. A teacher from the Colegio San José helps me out. He says he’s a socialist, too.”

“You give classes in Marxism?” Mayta asks.

“You bet, the only true science,” Vallejos says, gesticulating. “The antidote to all those idealist, metaphysical ideas they get pumped into their heads. Just as you yourself would have said it in your own flowery style, brother.”

A moment before, when he was showing Mayta how to shoot, he was a dextrous athlete, a commander. And now he was a timid boy, awkwardly telling him his story. Through the rain of sand, Mayta looked at him. He imagined the women who had kissed those clean-cut features, bitten those fine lips, who had writhed under the lieutenant’s body.

“You know you really knock me out?” he exclaimed. “I thought my classes in Marxism bored you to death.”

“Sometimes they do — to be frank — and other times I get lost,” Vallejos admitted. “Permanent revolution, for example. It’s too many things all at the same time. So I’ve scrambled the joeboys’ brains. That’s why I’m always asking you to come to Jauja. Come on, give me a hand with them. Those boys are pure dynamite, Mayta.”

“Of course we’re still nuns, but without the disguise.” María smiles. “We’ve got a surplus of jobs, not vows. They free us up from teaching and let us work here. The congregation helps us out as best they can.”

Do Juanita and María have the feeling they really are helping in a positive way by living in this shack city? They must. Otherwise, the risk they run by living here under these conditions would be inexplicable. A day doesn’t go by without some priest, nun, or social worker in the slums being attacked. Setting aside whether what they do is useful or not, it’s impossible not to envy them the faith that gives them the strength to withstand this daily horror. I tell them that as I walked here I had the feeling I was crossing all the circles of hell.

“It must be even worse there,” Juanita says, without smiling.

“You’ve never been in this place before, young man?” María interjects.

“No, I’ve never been in El Montón,” Juanita replied.

“I have, often, when I was a kid, when I was such a devout Catholic,” said Mayta. She noticed that he had an abstracted — nostalgic? — expression on his face. With some boys from Catholic Action. There was a Canadian mission in the dump. Two priests and a few laymen. I remember one young, red-faced, tall priest who was a doctor. ‘Nothing I’ve learned is of any use,’ he would say. He couldn’t stand the fact that children were dying like flies, he couldn’t bear the high incidence of tuberculosis, and that at the same time the newspapers were filled with page after page on parties, banquets, the weddings of the rich. I was fifteen. I would go back to my own home and at night I could not pray. God doesn’t hear, I would think. He covers His ears so He can’t hear and His eyes so He doesn’t have to see what’s going on in El Montón. Then one day I was convinced. To fight against all that, I had to stop believing in God, Mother.”

To Juanita, it seemed like drawing an absurd conclusion from correct premises, and she told him so. But she was moved by the fervor she saw in him.

“I’ve had my moments of anguish about my faith, too,” she said. “But, happily, I’ve never gotten to the point of demanding a reckoning from God.”

“We don’t talk only about theory, but about practical things as well,” Vallejos went on. They were walking along the highway toward Lima, trying to flag down a truck or a bus, the sub-machine gun concealed in a bag.

“Practical things — you mean like how to make Molotov cocktails, set dynamite charges, manufacture bombs?” mocked Mayta. “Practical things — you mean like your revolutionary plan of the other day?”

“Everything in its proper time, brother,” Vallejos said, as always in a jovial tone. “Practical things — I mean like going to the Indian communities to see the problems of the peasants on site. And to see solutions. Because those Indians have begun to move, to occupy the lands they have been demanding for themselves for centuries.”

“To recover them, you mean,” Mayta said softly. He fixed a curious gaze on Vallejos. He was disconcerted, as if, despite the fact that they had been seeing each other for so many weeks, he was just now discovering the real Vallejos. “Those lands belonged to them, don’t forget.”

“Exactly, the recovery of lands is what I mean,” agreed the second lieutenant. “We go and talk with the peasants, and the boys see that those Indians, without the help of any party, are beginning to break their chains. That’s how the boys are learning the way the revolution will come to this country. Professor Ubilluz helps me out with the theory, but you’d help me much more, brother. Will you come to Jauja?”

“Well, I have to say you’ve left me gaping,” Mayta said.

“Shut your mouth before it gets filled with sand.” Vallejos laughed. “Look, that bus’s going to stop.”

“So you’ve got your group and all,” repeated Mayta, rubbing his eyes, which were irritated from all the dust. “A Marxist studies circle. In Jauja! Plus you’ve made contact with peasant groups. Which means that …”

“Which means that, while you talk about the revolution, I do it.” The lieutenant gave him a pat on the back. “Fuckin’ right. I’m a man of action. You, you’re a theoretician. We’ve got to put it all together. Theory and practice, buddy. We’ll get the people moving, and no one’ll be able to stop them. We’ll do great things. Shake hands and swear you’ll come out to Jauja. Our Peru is a great place, brother!”

He looked like an excited, happy kid, with his impeccable uniform and his crew cut. Once again, Mayta felt happy to be with him. They took a corner table and ordered two coffees from the Chinese storekeeper. Mayta imagined they were both the same age, both boys, and that they had sealed their friendship with blood.

“Nowadays, there are lots of priests and nuns in the Church just like that Canadian priest from El Montón,” the Mother said, not at all upset. “The Church has always known what misery is, and, whatever you say, it has always done what it could to alleviate it. But now, it’s true, it has understood that injustice is not individual but social. The Church no longer accepts the fact that the few have everything while the majority has nothing. We know that under today’s conditions purely spiritual aid is nothing but a joke … But I’m wandering from the subject.”

“No, that is the subject,” Mayta urged her on. “Misery, the millions of hungry people in Peru. The only subject that counts. Is there a solution? What is it? Who’s got it? God? No, Mother. The revolution.”

The afternoon has slipped by, and when I get around to looking at my watch, I see I’ve been there for almost four hours. I would have liked to hear what Juanita heard, to hear from Mayta’s mouth how he lost his faith. Over the course of our conversation, children have appeared at the half-open door from time to time: they poke their heads in, spy on us, get bored, and go away. How many of them have been recruited by the insurgents? Did my old schoolmate ever tell me about his trips to El Montón to lend a hand to the Canadian mission? How many of them will kill or be killed? Juanita has stepped over to the nearby clinic to see if there are any problems. Did he go every afternoon, after classes at the Salesian School let out, or did he only go on Sundays?

The clinic is open from eight to nine, run by two volunteer doctors who take turns; in the afternoons, a male and a female nurse come to give vaccinations and first aid. Did Mayta help the redheaded, desperate, angry priest bury the babies wiped out by hunger and infection, did his eyes fill with tears, did his heart pound in his breast, did his childish, believer’s imagination soar to heaven to ask why: Why do you permit this to happen, Lord? Next to the clinic, in a shack made from boards, is the office of Communal Action. Along with the clinic, that office is the reason why Juanita and María are in the slum. Did the Canadian mission where Mayta did volunteer work look like this one? Did a lawyer go to that one to give free legal counsel to the neighborhood, was there also a technical adviser to advise them on establishing businesses? Mayta would go there, would plunge into all that misery, his faith would begin to falter, and at the Salesian he wouldn’t say a word about it. With me, he went on talking about serials and how terrific it would be to see a picture based on The Count of Monte Cristo.

Juanita and María tell me they worked for a few years in the bottling plant at San Juan de Lurigancho, but that since the plant closed they have devoted themselves exclusively to Communal Action. Their respective orders send them enough to live on. Why did he confide just like that in a person he was meeting for the first time? Because she was a nun, because she inspired affection, because the nun was the sister of his new friend, or because he suddenly felt a wave of melancholy, remembering the ardent faith he’d felt as a Salesian student?

“When the terrorism started, we were really frightened,” María says. “We thought they’d blow the place up and destroy everything. But so much time has passed that we don’t even remember anymore. We’ve been lucky. Even though there’s been some violence around here, they haven’t touched us yet.”

“Is your family very Catholic?” asked Mayta. “Didn’t you have problems with …?”

“They’re Catholics, but more out of routine than conviction.” The nun smiled. “Like most people. Sure I had problems. They were really astonished when I told them I wanted to be a nun. For my mother, it was the end of the world. For my father, it was as if I had been buried alive. But they’ve gotten used to it.”

“One son in the army and one daughter in the convent,” said Mayta. “It was the usual pattern in aristocratic families in colonial times.”

“Come on out,” called Vallejos from the table. “Talk with the rest of the family, too, and don’t monopolize my sister — we never get to see her.”

Both teach morning classes in the little school they’ve set up in Communal Action. On Sundays, when the priest comes to say Mass, the place turns into a chapel. He hasn’t come often of late: someone blew up his church and he’s had problems with his nerves ever since.

“It doesn’t look as if it was the freedom squads that did it, but some neighborhood kids who wanted to play a little trick on him, knowing he’s so chickenhearted,” María says. “The poor man has never said a single word about politics, and his only weakness is chocolate. But after the blast, and with his nerves, he’s lost more than twenty pounds.”

“Does it seem to you that I speak of him with some anger and resentment?” Juanita makes a curious face, and I see she is not asking just for the sake of asking. It’s something that must have been bothering her now for a long time.

“No, I didn’t sense anything like that,” I say to her. “What I’ve noticed is that you try to avoid mentioning Mayta by name. You always beat around the bush instead of saying ‘Mayta.’ Is it because of the Jauja thing, because you’re sure he pushed Vallejos into it?”

“I’m not sure about that,” Juanita denies it. “It’s possible that my brother is also to blame. But even though I don’t want to, I realize that I still resent him a little. Not because of Jauja. But because he made him doubt. That last time we were together, I asked him, ‘Are you going to become an atheist like your friend Mayta? Are you going that way, too?’ He didn’t give me the answer I was looking for. He just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘I probably will, sister, because the revolution is the most important thing.’”

“Father Ernesto Cardenal also said the revolution was the most important thing,” María recalls. She adds that — she doesn’t know why — the redheaded priest Mayta talked about reminded her of the visits to Peru of, first, Ivan Ilyich, and then Ernesto Cardenal.

“Yes, it’s true, what would Mayta have said that afternoon when we talked, if he had known that we would be hearing things like that from within the Church,” Juanita says. “Even though I thought I was up on everything, I was shocked when Ivan Ilyich came. Could it be a priest saying those things? Had our revolution gotten to that point? It certainly wasn’t a silent revolution any longer.”

“But Ivan Ilyich wasn’t anything,” interposes María, her blue eyes filled with mischief. “You had to hear Ernesto Cardenal to get the good stuff. Where we were teaching, some of us asked special permission to go to the National Institute of Culture and the Teatro Pardo y Aliaga to see him.”

“Now he’s a government minister in his country, a real political figure, right?” asked Juanita.

“Yes, I’ll go to Jauja with you,” Mayta promised him in a low voice. “But, for God’s sake, let’s be discreet. Above all, after what you’ve told me. What you’re doing with those boys is subversion, comrade. You’re risking your career, and lots of other things.”

“Look who’s talking. And who fills my head with subversive propaganda every time we meet?”

They started laughing, and the Chinese man who was bringing them their coffee asked what the joke was. “A traveling-salesman joke,” said the lieutenant.

“The next time you come to Lima, we’ll fix a date for me to go to Jauja,” Mayta promised him. “But give me your word you won’t say a thing to your group about my visit.”

“Secrets, secrets, you’ve got a mania for secrets,” Vallejos protested. “Yeah, I know: security is vital. But you can’t always be so finicky, brother. Shall I tell you about secrets? Pepote, that creep from your aunt’s party, took Alci from me. I went to see her and I found her with him. Holding hands. ‘Let me introduce my boyfriend,’ she said. They set me up as their audience.”

It didn’t seem to bother him, since he laughed as he told the story. No, he wouldn’t say a thing to the joeboys or to Ubilluz, it would be a surprise. Now he had to take off. They parted with a heartfelt handshake, and Mayta watched him leave the store, ramrod-straight and solid in his uniform, walking toward Avenida España. As he watched him disappear, he thought that this was the third time they were meeting in the same place. Was it smart? The police station was just down the way, and it wouldn’t be odd to see informers having coffee there. So he had formed — on his own, taking his chances — a Marxist circle. Who would have guessed? He half closed his eyes and saw, at an altitude of about nine thousand feet, their adolescent, mountain-Indian faces, their rosy cheeks, their stringy hair, their wide mountaineer’s chests. He saw them chasing a ball, sweating, excited. The second lieutenant running with them, as if he were one of them, but he was taller, more agile, stronger, more skillful, kicking, charging, and with every jump, kick, or charge, his muscles would harden. After the game, he saw them crowded into a whitewashed adobe room — through the windows, you could see white clouds skimming over purple peaks. They would be listening attentively to the lieutenant, who would be showing them Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, saying, “Boys, this is pure dynamite.” He didn’t laugh. He felt not the slightest desire to make fun of him, to say to himself what he had been saying about Vallejos to his comrades in the RWP(T): “He’s very young, but he’s made of good stuff.” “He’s good, but he’s got to grow up.” He felt, at this moment, considerable admiration for Vallejos, a bit of envy for his youth and enthusiasm, and something more, something intimate and warm. At the next meeting of the Central Committee of the RWP(T), he would request a discussion because the Jauja business was now taking on a new character. He was about to get up from his corner table — Vallejos had paid the check before he left — when he discovered the bulge in his trousers. His face and body burned. He realized he was trembling with desire.

“We’ll walk you,” Juanita says.

We talk for a while at their door, in the dusk that will soon be night. I tell them not to bother, that I’ve left the car about three-quarters of a mile away, why should they walk all that way?

“It’s not to be nice,” María says. “We don’t want you to get mugged again.”

“I haven’t got anything for them to steal,” I tell them. “Just the car key and this notebook. The notes don’t mean anything — whatever hasn’t found its way into my memory doesn’t get into the novel.”

But there’s no way to dissuade them and they go out with me into the stench and heat of the dump. I walk between them and I call them my bodyguards as we make our way through the crazy terrain consisting of shacks, caves, stands, pigsties, children tumbling down the garbage hills, unexpected dogs. The people all seem to be at their doors or walking through the heat, and you hear conversations, jokes, curses. Once in a while, I trip on a hole or on a stone, no matter how carefully I walk, but María and Juanita walk easily, as if they know every obstacle in the road by heart.

“Thefts and muggings are worse than the political crimes,” Juanita repeats. “Because of unemployment and drugs. There were always thieves in the neighborhood, of course. But, before, they went out of the neighborhood, to steal from rich people. Because there’s no work, because of drugs, because of the war, there’s not a drop of neighborhood solidarity left. Now the poor rob and kill the poor.

“It’s become a big problem,” she adds. “As soon as it gets dark, unless you have a knife — and if you do, you’re one of the killers — unless you just don’t know what you’re doing or you’re dead drunk, you just don’t walk around here, because you know you’ll get mugged. The thieves break into houses in broad daylight and the assaults often turn into murder. The people’s despair is boundless, that’s why these things happen. For instance, the poor guy the people from the next slum found trying to rape a little girl: they poured kerosene over him and burned him alive.”

“Just yesterday, they found a cocaine laboratory here,” María says.

What would Mayta say about all this? In those days, drugs were almost nonexistent, a toy for refined night people. Now, on the other hand … They can’t keep medicines in the clinic, I listen to them tell me. At night, they bring all the drugs home and hide them in a safe place, under some trunk. Because every night thieves break in to steal the bottles, the pills, the ampules. Not to get better — that’s what the clinic is for, and the medicines are free. They take them to get high. They think any medicine is a drug and take whatever they find. Lots of thieves turn up at the clinic the next day, suffering from diarrhea, vomiting, and worse. The neighborhood kids get high on banana skins, on floripondio leaves, on glue, on anything. What would Mayta say about all that? I can’t even guess, and besides, I can’t concentrate on Mayta’s memory, because in the context of so much misery his story shrinks to nothing and evaporates. Any unknown face is a tempting target — is it María who’s talking?

“This is also the red-light district of the zone,” Juanita adds. Or is it that in this ignominious context it isn’t Mayta but literature that seems useless? “Really painful, don’t you think? To sell yourself to live is bad enough. But to do it here, surrounded by garbage and pigs …”

“The explanation is that they get business here,” notes María.

That’s a bad thought. If, like the Canadian priest in Mayta’s anecdote, I also succumb to despair, I won’t write this novel. That won’t help anyone. No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. Do they feel secure trotting around the neighborhood at night? Up till now, thank God, nothing’s happened to them. Not even with the crazy drunks who might not be able to recognize them.

“Maybe we’re so ugly we don’t tempt anyone.” María guffaws.

“Both doctors have been attacked,” Juanita says. “But they still keep coming.”

I try to go on talking, but I get distracted. I try to go back to Mayta, but I just can’t, because again and again the image of the poet Ernesto Cardenal eclipses Mayta’s image. Cardenal’s image when he came to Lima — fifteen years ago? — and made such an impression on María. I haven’t told them I also went to hear him at the National Institute of Culture and at the Teatro Pardo y Aliaga, and that he made a vivid impression on me, too. I haven’t said that I’ll always be sorry I heard him, because since then I haven’t been able to read his poetry, which I had liked before. Isn’t that wrong? Does one thing have anything to do with the other? It must, in some way I can’t explain. But the relationship exists because I feel it.

He came on stage dressed like Che Guevara, and in the question-and-answer session he responded to the demagoguery of some agitators in the audience with more demagoguery than even they wanted to hear. He did and said everything necessary to earn the approbation and applause of the most recalcitrant: there was no difference between the Kingdom of God and communist society; the Church had become a whore, but thanks to the revolution it would become pure again, as it was becoming in Cuba; the Vatican, a capitalist cave which had always defended the powerful, was now the servant of the Pentagon; the fact that there was only one party in Cuba and in the U.S.S.R. meant the elite had the task of stirring up the masses, exactly as Christ had wanted the Church to do with the people; it was immoral to speak against the forced-labor camps in the U.S.S.R. — how could anyone believe capitalist propaganda?

And the final act of pure theater: waving his hands, he announced to the world that the recent cyclone that hit Lake Nicaragua was the result of some ballistic experiments carried out by the United States … I still have a vivid impression of his insincerity and his histrionics. Ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid meeting the writers I like, so that the same thing that happened with the poet Cardenal doesn’t happen with them. Every time I try to read him, something like acid flows out of the book and ruins it — the memory of the man who wrote it.

We’ve reached the car. The door on the driver’s side has been broken open. Since there was nothing to take, the thief, to get even, has slit the seat, and the stain indicates that he’s urinated on it. I tell Juanita and María that he’s done me a favor, because now I’ll have to change the seat covers, which were worn out, anyway. But they, sincerely sorry for me, and angry, pity me.