The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Four

“Sooner or later, the story will have to be written,” says the senator, moving around in his seat until he finds a comfortable position for his bad leg. “The true story, not the myth. But the time isn’t right just yet.”

I had asked that our conversation take place somewhere quiet, but he insisted that I come to the Congress Bar. Just as I feared, someone’s always interrupting us: colleagues and reporters come up to us, say hello to him, gossip, ask him questions. Ever since the attack that left him lame, he is one of the most popular members of Congress. We are talking intermittently, with long pauses. I explain once again that I’m not trying to write the “true story” of Alejandro Mayta. I only want to garner as much information, as many opinions about him as I can, so that later I can add a large dose of fancy to all that data, so I can create something that will be an unrecognizable version of what actually happened. His bulging, distrustful little eyes scrutinize me unsympathetically.

“As far as what’s happening today is concerned, no one should do anything that might hinder the great process of unification that is taking place among the democratic left-wing organizations, the only thing that can save Peru in today’s circumstances,” he says softly. “Mayta’s story, even if twenty-five years have gone by, may still make some old wounds bleed.”

He’s a thin man who speaks easily. He dresses elegantly and has lots of gray mixed into his thick curly hair. From time to time, his bad leg seems to give him some pain, because he rubs it hard. He writes well, for a politician. That skill opened to him the higher spheres of General Velasco’s military government, to which he was an adviser. He invented a good number of the high-sounding phrases that conferred a progressive aura on the dictatorship, and he was the editor of one of the confiscated newspapers. He wrote speeches for General Velasco (you could tell which ones, because certain sociojuridical expressions got tangled in the general’s teeth). He and his small group represented the regime’s radical wing. Now, Senator Campos is a moderate personality, attacked by the extreme right, the Maoist and Trotskyist ultra-left. The guerrillas have condemned him to death, and so have the liberty squads. These death squads — a sign of the absurd times we live in — declare that he is the secret leader of the subversives. A few months ago, a bomb destroyed his car, wounding his chauffeur and maiming his left leg, which he can no longer bend. Who threw the bomb? No one knows.

“But, after all,” he exclaims suddenly, just when I think there’s no way to make him speak and I’m about to leave, “if you’ve learned so many things already, you’d better know the main thing: Mayta collaborated with Army Intelligence and probably with the CIA.”

“That’s not true,” protested Mayta.

“It is,” countered Anatolio. “Lenin and Trotsky always condemned terrorism.”

“Direct action is not terrorism,” said Mayta, “but pure and simple revolutionary insurrection. If Lenin and Trotsky condemned that, then I don’t know what they did all their lives. Figure it out, Anatolio. We’re forgetting the most important thing. Our job is the revolution, the first task of any Marxist. Isn’t it incredible that a second lieutenant has to remind us of it?”

“Will you accept at least that Lenin and Trotsky condemned terrorism?” Anatolio made a tactical retreat.

“So long as we take careful note of the differences, I do, too,” Mayta agreed. “Blind terrorism, cut off from the masses, estranges the people from the revolutionary vanguard. We are going to be something else: the spark that lights the fuse, the snowball that turns into an avalanche.”

“You’re waxing poetic today.” Anatolio burst out laughing, with a laugh that seemed too loud for the small room.

Not a poet, he thought. A man with a dream, a man who’s been rejuvenated. And with an optimism he hadn’t felt for years. It was as if the mounds of books and newspapers piled around him were burning with a mild, all-encompassing fire that, instead of burning him, kept his body and his soul in a kind of incandescence. Was this happiness? The discussion of the Central Committee of the RWP(T) had been impassioned, the most emotional that he could recall in many years. Right after the meeting, he had gone to the Plazuela del Teatro Segura, to France-Presse. He translated for around four hours, and despite all that mindless work, he felt fresh and lucid. His report on the second lieutenant had been approved, as had his proposal to take Vallejos’s plan into consideration. Work program, action plan — what jargon, he thought. The agreement was, in fact, transcendent: to carry out the revolution now, once and for all. As he expounded, Mayta spoke with such conviction that he moved his comrades: he saw it in their faces and in the fact that they listened to him without interrupting even once. Yes, it could be done, as long as a revolutionary organization like the RWP(T) directed it — not a well-intentioned boy lacking ideological solidity. He half closed his eyes, and the image materialized, clear and sharp: a small, well-armed, well-equipped vanguard, with urban support and clear ideas about their strategic goals. Their accomplishments would be the focal point from which the revolution would radiate outward toward the rest of the nation — the flint and steel that would spark the revolutionary blaze. Hadn’t the objective conditions existed since time immemorial in Peru, a country with such glaring class contradictions? That initial nucleus, by means of daring attacks of armed propaganda, would set about creating the subjective conditions that would induce the workers and peasants to join the action. The figure of Anatolio, standing at the corner of the bed where Mayta was sitting, brought him back to the present.

“Well, I’m going down to see if there’s still a line.” He’d already gone down twice, and both times he’d found someone waiting at the outhouse door. Mayta saw him come out bent over, holding his stomach. What a good thing it was that Anatolio had come over tonight, what a good thing that today, when finally something important was happening, today when something new was happening, he had someone with whom to share the torrent of ideas in his head. The party has taken a decisive step, he thought. He was stretched out on his bed, resting on his right arm as if on a pillow. The Central Committee of the RWP(T), after approving the idea of his working with Vallejos, had named an Action Group — Comrade Jacinto, Comrade Anatolio, and Mayta himself — to prepare a schedule of activities. It was decided that Mayta would go to Jauja immediately, to see on the spot what Vallejos’s outfit looked like and what kind of contacts he had made with the Indian communities in Mantaro Valley. Then the other two members of the Action Group would also go up to the mountains, to coordinate the work. The RWP(T) meeting broke up with everyone in a state of euphoria, and Mayta remained exalted even as he translated releases for France-Presse. He was still euphoric when he reached his room on Jirón Zepita. Just where the dead-end street began, he saw a youthful figure waiting for him, teeth glistening in the semi-darkness.

“I was so shaken up by all that that I came by to see if we could talk awhile,” said Anatolio. “Are you very tired?”

“Just the opposite. Let’s go on up.” Mayta patted him on the back. “I’m all excited, too — it’s just what our little pal Vallejos says, pure dynamite.”

There were rumors, insinuations, gossip, even a handbill that went around San Marcos University — all accusing him. Of being an infiltrator? Of being an informer? Then there appeared two articles containing disturbing facts about Mayta’s activities.

“An informer?” I interrupt him. “But all of you …”

Senator Campos raises his hand and stops me dead. “We were Trotskyists, just as Mayta was, and those attacks came from the Stalinists, so at first we paid no attention,” he explains, shrugging. “They always called those of us in the RWP half-breed squealers. Trotskyists and Stalinists always fought like cats and dogs. The basic idea was always ‘Your worst enemy is the guy most like you; get rid of him even if you have to sell your soul.’”

He falls silent, because once again a reporter has come up to ask if what they’ve said in another newspaper is true; namely, that because he’s been frightened by the threats on his life, the senator is preparing to flee the country, under the pretext that he is going to have his leg operated on again. The senator laughs. “A pack of lies. Unless I’m bumped off, the Peruvian people will have me around for quite some time.” The reporter leaves, happily writing down that last remark. We ask for another coffee. “I know, I know, we over here in the Congress abuse our privileges by drinking coffee several times a day, while, for people on the outside, coffee’s become a luxury item. But don’t worry, it won’t go on this way. The guy with the coffee concession had a reserve stock, but it’s giving out.” He goes on for a while, discoursing about the havoc the war has wrought: rationing, insecurity, the psychosis the people are living through these days, with the rumors about the presence of foreign troops in national territory.

“The fact is that our Soviet comrades knew everything,” he suddenly adds to what he had been saying to me. “The word had to be passed to them from above. Moscow, the KGB. That’s how they probably found out about Mayta’s duplicity.”

He puts a cigarette in his holder, lights it, takes a drag, and rubs his leg. His face has turned sad, as if he was wondering if he hadn’t told me too much. He and my old schoolmate fought the same fight, shared the same political dreams, the same underground life, the same persecution. How can he just tell me in that indifferent way that Mayta was a lousy stool pigeon?

“You know that Mayta was in and out of jail quite often.” He drops ashes in the empty coffee cup. “That must have been where they blackmailed him into working for them. Some people harden in jail; others get soft.”

He looks at me, measuring the effect of his words. He seems calm, sure of himself, with that amiable expression he never loses, even in the most heated arguments. Why does he hate his old comrade?

“Those things are always difficult to prove.”

There, in some moment of the past, an unrecognizable Mayta, wrapped in greasy scarves, passes notebooks written in invisible ink that contain names, plans, and places to an army officer obviously uncomfortable in civilian clothes and a distrustful foreigner who just can’t get his Spanish prepositions right.

“Impossible to prove, rather,” he clarifies. “And yet, on one occasion, we did find some things out for sure.” He takes a deep breath and lets me have it: “During the time of General Velasco, we found out that the CIA practically ran our Intelligence service. Many names were revealed. Mayta’s was one of them. And when we took a good look at things, remembering back, we saw a few events in a different light. His behavior was suspicious from the time he met Vallejos.”

“That’s a sizable accusation,” I tell him. “A spy for the army and a CIA agent at the same time …”

“Spy, agent — those are big words,” he modifies. “Informer, instrument, perhaps victim. Have you spoken with anyone else who knew Mayta then?”

“Moisés Barbi Leyva. How is it he knew nothing about all this? Moisés was involved in all the planning for the Jauja thing, he even saw Mayta the day before …”

“Moisés is a guy who knows a lot of things.” Senator Campos smiles.

Is he going to tell me now that Moisés is a CIA agent? No, he could never make an accusation like that against the director of a center that has already published two of his sociopolitical tomes — one of them with an introduction by Barbi Leyva himself.

“Moisés is a prudent man, full of interests to defend,” he blurts out, in a mildly acid tone. “His philosophy nowadays is what’s done is done. It’s the only way to live, if you want to avoid problems. Unfortunately, I’m not like him. I’ve never hesitated to speak up. That’s why I ended up with a game leg — I always say what I think. Someday I’ll get killed for it. What I can do, of course, is look my family in the eye without feeling shame.”

He turns aside for a moment, as if upset at allowing himself to be drawn into such an autobiographical outpouring.

“What does Moisés think of the Mayta of those days?” he asks me, keeping his eyes fixed on the toes of his shoes.

“He thinks Mayta was a rather naïve idealist,” I tell him. “A headstrong man full of conflicts, but a revolutionary through and through.”

He continues to meditate, shrouded in cigarette smoke. “I told you: it’s better not to take the lid off that pot. There are some stinks in there that would make lots of people choke.” He pauses a moment, smiles, and unloads: “It was Moisés who read the charge that Mayta was an infiltrator the night we expelled him from the RWP(T).”

He’s left me speechless. In the small garage, now turned into a courtroom, an adolescent, thundering Moisés ends his deposition by waving a handful of irrefutable evidence. Squealer! Informer! Pale, slumped over underneath the poster bearing the effigies of the ideologues, my schoolmate utters not a syllable. The door opened and Anatolio entered.

“I thought maybe you’d fallen in,” Mayta greeted him.

“Whew, now I can breathe more easily.” Anatolio laughed, closing the door. He had moistened his hair, face, and chest, and his chest glistened with drops of water. He carried his shirt in his hand, and Mayta watched him carefully lay it out at the foot of the cot. What a little kid he is, he thought. The bones of his slim torso were just barely visible, and a tangle of hair glistened in the middle of his chest. His arms were long and well shaped. Mayta had noticed him for the first time four years before, while he was lecturing at the Civil Construction Union. Every minute or so, a group of boys from the Communist Youth would interrupt him, chanting the usual party line against Trotsky and Trotskyism: Hitler’s allies, agents of imperialism, lackies of Wall Street. Anatolio was the most aggressive, a young guy with big eyes and dark hair, sitting in the front row. Would he be the one to give the signal for the others to attack him? Despite everything, there was something in the boy Mayta found likable. He had felt one of those twinges he’d had before — and been wrong then. This time he was right. When Mayta left the Union, his spirits more tranquil, he went up to the boy and offered to buy him a coffee, “so we can go on airing our differences.” He didn’t have to make the offer twice. Later on, when he was a member of the RWP(T), Anatolio would say to him, “You brainwashed me in the best Jesuit style, comrade.” It was true, he had done an affectionate and clever job on him. He’d lent him books, magazines, had convinced him to join a Marxist studies circle which he was leading, had bought him myriad coffees and persuaded him that Trotskyism was the only true Marxism, revolution without bureaucracy, despotism, or corruption. And now there he was, young and good-looking, naked from the waist up, standing under the single, dusty light in the room, flattening out his shirt. He thought: Ever since I got involved with Vallejos, I haven’t seen Anatolio’s face in my dreams. He was sure: not even once. A good thing Anatolio was in the Action Group. Of all the people in the party, Mayta got along best with Anatolio. It was also Anatolio over whom he had most influence. Whenever they’d agreed to go out to sell the Workers Voice or to pass out handbills in the Plaza Unión or at the entrances to the factories on Avenida Argentina, Anatolio never kept him waiting, even though he lived over in Callao.

“I really wish I didn’t have to go across town at this time of night…”

“If you don’t mind being uncomfortable, stay here.”

All the comrades of the Central Committee of the RWP(T) had slept at one time or another in the little room. And occasionally, several at the same time, all piled on top of each other.

“I really don’t want you to have a bad night because of me,” said Anatolio. “You should have a bigger bed, in case of emergencies.”

Mayta smiled at him. His body, inflamed, had become tense. He made an effort to think about Jauja. Did they kick him out of the party after Jauja?

“Before,” he corrects me, getting satisfaction out of my discomfort. “Immediately before. If my memory doesn’t fail me, they announced that Mayta had resigned from the RWP(T). A pious fiction, so that the enemy wouldn’t see any cracks in our façade. But he was kicked out. Then the Jauja affair took place and there was no way to clear things up. Do you remember how they clamped down on us? Some of us were jailed, and the others went underground. Mayta was forgotten. That’s how history is written, my friend. On account of the confusion and the reactionary offensive unleashed because of the Jauja thing, Mayta and Vallejos turned into heroes …”

He becomes meditative, weighing the extravagant elements in the story. I let him reflect without pressing him, sure he hasn’t finished yet. The self-sacrificing Mayta transformed into a two-faced monster, weaving a really risky plot just to trap his comrades? It’s too hard to swallow, and besides, I think it would be impossible to justify in a novel unless I were to write about the unreal world of thrillers.

“Nowadays, none of that matters,” the senator adds. “Because the right failed. They wanted to liquidate the left once and for all. All they succeeded in doing was hold it up for a few years. Then came Cuba and in 1963 the Javier Heraud business. In ’65, the guerrillas from the Radical Left Movement and the National Liberation Front. Defeat after defeat for insurrectionist theses. Now they’ve got what they want. Except that…”

“Except that…” I say.

“Except that this is no longer revolution, but apocalypse. Could anyone have ever imagined that Peru would be living a permanent bloodletting like this?” He looks at me. “What’s going on now has definitively turned the page on the Mayta and Vallejos story. I’m sure there’s not a soul who remembers it. What else?”

“Vallejos,” I say to him. “Was he a provocateur, too?”

He takes a drag on his cigarette holder and breathes out a mouthful of smoke, turning his head to one side so the smoke doesn’t go into my face.

“There’s no proof about Vallejos. He may have been Mayta’s tool.” He gestures again. “Seems probable, doesn’t it? Mayta was a cunning old fox, Vallejos an unseasoned kid. But, I repeat, there’s no proof.”

He always speaks smoothly, greeting people who pass by.

“You know that Mayta spent his life changing parties,” he adds. “Always on the left. Was he just fickle, or was he clever? Even I — and I knew him well — could never tell. He was as slippery as an eel. There was no way to know him completely. In any case, he was with all of them at one time or another, all the progressive organizations. A suspicious pattern, don’t you think?”

“What about all the times he was in jail?” I ask. “The Penitentiary, the Sexto, the Frontón.”

“The way I hear it is that he never spent much time in jail,” the senator insinuates. “He was in lots of different jails, but never really in jail. All I know is that his name was on the Intelligence service books.”

He speaks with equanimity, without the slightest sign of ill will toward the man he’s accusing of lying day and night over the course of years, betraying and knifing in the back the people who believed in him, organizing an insurrection just so there’d be a pretext for a general repression of the left. He hates Mayta’s guts, no doubt about it. Everything he tells me, everything he suggests against Mayta must come from way back. He must have been thinking and rethinking it, saying and resaying it for twenty-five years. Is there any foundation of truth underneath this mountain of hatred? Is it all a game to vilify Mayta’s memory for all those who remember him? Where does this hatred come from? Is it political, personal, or both?

“It was really something Machiavellian.” He pries the butt out of the cigarette holder with a match and puts it out in the ashtray. “In the beginning, we couldn’t believe it — the refinement with which he’d set up the trap seemed impossible. A masterly operation.”

“Did it seem likely that the Intelligence services and the CIA would organize a plot like that?” I interrupt him. “Just to liquidate a seven-man organization?”

“Six, six.” Senator Campos laughs. “Don’t forget that Mayta was one of them.” But he quickly turns serious. “The target of the trap wasn’t just the RWP(T) but the whole left. A preventive operation: nip any revolutionary movements in Peru in the bud. But we ruined the surprise, there was a provocation, but it didn’t have the results they hoped it would. Insignificant as we were, it was the RWP(T) which saved the left from a bloodbath like the one going on now in Peru.”

“How did the RWP(T) make the plot fail?” I ask him. “The Jauja thing happened, didn’t it?”

“We made at least ninety percent of it fail,” he points out. “They only got ten percent of what they wanted. How many of us were jailed? How many had to hide out? They had us where they wanted us for four or five years. But they didn’t finish us off, which is what they wanted.”

“Wasn’t the price high?” I ask. “Because Mayta, Vallejos …”

His gesture silences me. “It’s risky being a provocateur and an informer,” he affirms with severity. “They failed and they paid the price, of course. Isn’t that how things work in that business? Besides, there’s other proof. Check the survivors. What’s happened to them? What did they do afterward? What are they doing now?”

It would seem that over the years Senator Campos has lost the habit of self-criticism.

“I always thought the revolution would begin with a general strike,” Anatolio said.

“A Sorelian detour, an anarchist error,” said Mayta sarcastically. “Neither Marx nor Lenin nor Trotsky ever said that a general strike would be the only method. Have you forgotten China? What was Mao’s method? Strikes, or revolutionary war? Slide back, or you’ll fall off the bed.”

Anatolio slid back from the edge.

“If the plan works, there will never be a coming together of the people and the soldiers,” he said. “It will be war to the death.”

“We have to break old patterns and discard empty formulas.” Mayta kept his ears open, because it was usually at that time of night that he would hear the sounds. Despite his anxiety, he would have preferred not to go on talking politics with Anatolio. What should they talk about, then? Anything, but not that militance that had established an abstract solidarity, an impersonal fraternity between them. He added, “It’s harder for me than for you, because I’m older.”

The two of them could barely fit on the narrow cot, which creaked if one of them made the slightest movement. They had removed their shirts and their shoes, but still had their trousers on. They had put out the light, and the glow from the streetlamp could be seen through the window. Far off, from time to time, they could hear the lewd howl of a cat in heat: it was nighttime.

“I’ll confess something to you, Anatolio,” Mayta said. On his back, resting on his right arm, he had smoked an entire pack in a few hours. Despite those pains in his chest, he still felt like smoking. His anxiety was suffocating him. He thought: Calm down, Mayta. Don’t make a fool of yourself, okay, Mayta? “This is the most important moment of my life. I’m sure it is, Anatolio.”

“It is for everybody,” said the boy, like an echo. “The most important in the life of the party. And I hope in the history of Peru.”

“It’s different for you,” Mayta said. “You’re a kid. And so’s Pallardi. You two are just beginning your lives as revolutionaries, and you’re starting out right. I’m over forty already.”

“You call that old? Don’t they say that life begins at forty?”

“No, it’s old age that begins at forty,” Mayta murmured. “I’ve been in this game for almost twenty-five years. Over the last few months, over this last year, most of all since we split up and there are only seven of us, all this time I’ve had one little idea ringing in my ear: Mayta, you’re wasting your time.”

There was silence, broken finally by the howls of the cat.

“I get depressed sometimes myself,” he heard Anatolio say. “When things don’t go right, it’s only human to paint the whole picture black. But I’m really surprised to hear you say it, Mayta. Because if there’s one thing I’ve always admired about you, it’s your optimism.”

It was hot, and when their forearms brushed, they were moist with sweat. Anatolio was also flat on his back, and Mayta could see in the semi-darkness his bare feet next to his own. He thought that at any moment their feet would touch.

“Get me right,” he said, covering up his discomfort. “I’m not depressed about having dedicated my life to the revolution. That could never happen, Anatolio. Every time I walk down the street and I see the country I live in, I know there can be nothing more important for me. I just wonder if I’ve wasted my time, if I’ve taken the wrong road.”

“If you’re going to tell me you’ve lost your belief in Leon Davidovich and Trotskyism, I’ll kill you,” Anatolio joked. “I hope I haven’t read all that crap just for fun.”

But Mayta wasn’t in the mood for jokes. He was experiencing exaltation and at the same time anguish. His heart was beating so hard, he said to himself, that Anatolio could probably hear it. The dust piled up on the books, papers, and magazines all over the room tickled his nose. Hold in that sneeze, or you’ll die, he thought, absurdly.

“We’ve lost too much time, Anatolio. In byzantine problems — mental masturbation totally unrelated to the real world. We’re disconnected from the masses, we have no roots in the people. What kind of revolution were we going to bring about? You’re very young. But I’ve been in this thing for a long time, and the revolution isn’t an inch closer to taking place. Today, for the first time, I’ve felt we were advancing, that the revolution wasn’t a dream, but flesh and blood.”

“Calm down, brother,” Anatolio said to him, stretching out his hand and patting him on the leg. Mayta recoiled, as if instead of affectionately touching him, Anatolio had punched him. “Today, in the Central Committee meeting, when you presented your proposal for going into direct action, when you asked how long we would go on wasting time, you went right to our hearts. I never heard you speak so well, Mayta. It came right from your guts. I was thinking: Let’s go out to the mountains right now, what are we waiting for. I felt a knot in my throat, I swear.”

Mayta turned on his side, making an effort, and saw Anatolio’s profile take shape against the cloudy background of the bookshelf. Anatolio’s curly hair, his smooth forehead, his white teeth, his slightly parted lips.

“We are going to begin another life,” he whispered. “Out of the cave, into the air, out of garage and café intrigue to working with the masses and directly attacking the enemy. We are going to plunge right into the heart of the people, Anatolio.”

His face was very close to the boy’s bare shoulder. A smell, strong and elemental, of human flesh assailed his nose and made him dizzy. His bent knees grazed Anatolio’s leg. In the semi-darkness, Mayta could just barely make out Anatolio’s unmoving profile. Did he have his eyes open? His breathing made his chest move rhythmically. Slowly, he stretched out his moist and trembling right hand, and feeling around, he found Anatolio’s trousers.

“Let me jerk you off,” he whispered in an agonizing voice, feeling that his whole body was burning. “Let me, Anatolio.”

“And, last but not least, there is one other matter we haven’t gone into, but that, if we want to get to the bottom of things, we’re going to have to bring up.” Senator Campos sighs — sorry, one might say, for bringing the matter up. “You know that Mayta was a homosexual, of course.”

“In our country, people always accuse their enemies of being homosexuals. It’s hard to prove, though. Does it have anything to do with Jauja?”

“Yes, you see it must have been the way they got to him,” he adds. “That’s how they got him up against the wall and made him work for them. His Achilles’ heel. All he had to do was give in once. What could he do then but go on collaborating?”

“I learned from Moisés that he got married.”

“All queers get married.” The senator smiles. “It’s the handiest disguise there is. Aside from the fact that it was a joke, his marriage was a disaster. It only lasted a minute.”

The Senate has been called to order, or maybe it’s the deputies, because a growing noise and the sound of briefcases hitting tables comes from the hall. We hear amplified voices. The bar empties. Senator Campos says softly: “We are going to appeal directly to the minister. The Chamber is going to demand that he tell us once and for all if foreign troops have actually entered national territory.” But he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. He goes on talking without losing that scientific objectivity he uses to cover up his hatred.

“Perhaps the explanation is in all that,” he reflects, playing with his cigarette holder. “Is it possible to be sure of a homosexual? An incomplete, feminine being open to all kinds of weakness, and that includes being an informer.”

Growing excited, carried away by the theme, he forgets Mayta and Jauja and explains to me that homosexuality is intimately linked to the division of classes and to bourgeois culture. Why, if this isn’t so, are there virtually no homosexuals in socialist countries? It’s no accident, it doesn’t come about because the air of those latitudes makes people more virtuous. It’s a shame the socialist countries are fomenting subversion in Peru. Because there is a lot to imitate in those countries. The culture of idleness, that dispirited emptiness, that existential insecurity typical of the bourgeoisie that even comes to have doubts about the sex it was born with. Being queer is to lack definition — a good image.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” he heard him say. “To take advantage of me because we’re friends, because I’m in your house. Aren’t you ashamed, Mayta?”

Anatolio was sitting up, on the edge of the bed, with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, holding up his chin. A slick shine from the window fell on his back and gave his smooth skin a dark green glow in which you could see his ribs.

“Yes, I’m ashamed,” Mayta whispered. He struggled to speak. “Forget what happened.”

“I thought we were friends,” the boy said, his voice breaking, his face turned away from Mayta. He passed from rage to disdain and back to rage. “What a lousy trick, fuck! Did you think I was a queer?”

“I know you aren’t,” whispered Mayta. The heat of a moment before had given way to a cold that went right through his bones: he tried to think about Vallejos, about Jauja, about the exalting and purifying days to come. “Don’t make me feel worse than I already feel.”

“And how the fuck do you think I feel?” whined Anatolio. He moved, the little cot groaned, and Mayta thought the boy was going to stand up, slip on his shirt, and leave, slamming the door behind him. But the cot became quiet once again, and those taut shoulders were still there. “You’ve fucked it all up, Mayta. What a jerk you are. You sure picked a good moment. Today, of all days.”

“Did anything really happen?” Mayta murmured. “Don’t be such a kid. You’re talking as if we’d both died.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you died tonight.”

Just then, they heard above their heads tiny sounds: light, multiple, invisible, repugnant, shapeless. For a few seconds it seemed like an earthquake. The old beams in the ceiling vibrated and it seemed as though they would fall down on the two of them. Then, in the same arbitrary way they had begun, the sounds disappeared. On other nights, they set Mayta’s nerves on edge. Today he listened to them thankfully. He felt Anatolio’s rigidity and saw his head pitched forward, listening to see if the rats were coming back: he had forgotten, he had forgotten. And Mayta thought about his neighbors sleeping three in a bed, four in a bed, eight in a bed, in those little rooms lined up in the shape of a horseshoe, indifferent to the garbage, the sounds of rats. At that moment, he envied them.

“Rats,” he stammered. “In the attic. Dozens of them. They chase around, fight, then they calm down. They can’t get in here. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Anatolio said. And then, after a moment: “Where I live, in Callao, there are rats, too. But under the floorboards, in the drains, in … But not over my head.”

“At first, I had nightmares,” Mayta said. He was speaking more clearly. Regaining control over his muscles, he could breathe. “I’ve set out traps, poison. Once we even got the city to fumigate. Useless. They go away for a few days and then they come back.”

“Cats are better than poison or traps,” said Anatolio. “You should get yourself one. Anything would be better than that fucking symphony over your head.”

As if she thought Anatolio had been talking about her, the cat in heat began to howl obscenely down the street. Mayta’s heart gave a leap: Anatolio seemed to be smiling.

“In the RWP(T), an Action Group was formed to prepare the Jauja thing with Vallejos. You were one of its members, right? What were your activities?”

“We had few activities, although some were quite funny.” With an ironic gesture, the senator cheapens the whole episode and turns it into mischief. “For example, we spent an afternoon grinding up charcoal and buying saltpeter and sulfur to make gunpowder. We didn’t turn out a single ounce, as far as I remember.”

He moves his head, amused, and slowly lights another cigarette. He exhales upward and contemplates the spirals on the capitals of the column. Even the waiters have gone, and the Congress Bar seems larger. There, in the center of the hall, a burst of applause resounds. “I hope the Chamber will make the minister tell us the whole truth. We want to know if there are American Marines in Peru.” The senator reflects, forgetting me for a few seconds. “And if the Cubans are in fact ready to invade us from Bolivia.”

“We in the Action Group began to confirm our suspicions”—he quickly returns to the subject. “We had already put Mayta under surveillance, without his noticing it. Ever since he turned up without any prior notice, with that stuff about having found a revolutionary army man. A second lieutenant who was going to start the revolution in the mountains, whom we were supposed to support. Just think back, imagine it’s 1958. Wasn’t it suspicious? But it wasn’t until later, when, despite our misgivings, he got us involved in the Jauja adventure, that he began to smell really fishy.”

While his accusations against Mayta and Vallejos don’t upset me, the senator’s methods do: he’s as slippery as a snake, like quicksilver — impossible to catch in your bare hand. He speaks in an absolutely objective way, so that, listening to him, you’d think that Mayta’s duplicity was axiomatic. At the same time, despite all my efforts, I can’t get a single bit of incontrovertible evidence out of him, nothing beyond that web of suppositions and hypotheses he weaves all around me. “People are saying now that the Cubans are probably already over the border and that they are the ones fighting in Cuzco and Puno,” he suddenly says, loudly. “Now we’ll find out for sure.”

I bring him back to our subject. “Do you remember any specific things that made you suspect Mayta?”

“Any number of things,” he says instantly, as he exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Things that, taken in isolation, might not mean anything but, grouped together, become damning evidence.”

“Are you thinking of something concrete?”

“One day, out of the blue, he suggested we bring other political groups into the insurrection project,” says the senator. “Beginning with the CP. He’d even begun to negotiate. Do you realize what that meant?”

“Frankly, no,” I reply. “All the left-wing parties, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, accepted years later the idea of an alliance, joint operations, even combining in a single party. Why was something suspicious then that hasn’t been thought so ever since?”

“Ever since means twenty-five years later,” he says with irony. “A quarter century ago, a Trotskyist just could not propose that we invite the Stalinists to work with us. In those days, it would have been something like the Vatican suggesting that all Catholics convert to Islam. The very suggestion was a confession. The Stalinists hated Mayta with all their heart. And he hated them, at least he appeared to. Can you imagine Trotsky calling Stalin in to work with him?” He nods in regret. “His game was obvious.”

“I never believed it,” Anatolio said. “Some of the others in the party do believe it. I always defended you, saying it was a bunch of lies.”

“If talking about it is going to make you forget it, okay, let’s talk.” Mayta spoke softly. “If not, let’s not talk about it. It’s hard for me to talk about it, Anatolio, and I’ve always been confused about it. I’ve been in the dark about it for years and years, trying to understand.”

“Do you want me to take off?” Anatolio asked. “I’ll leave right away.”

But he didn’t move a muscle. Why couldn’t Mayta stop thinking about those families in the other little rooms, piled up in the darkness, parents, children, stepchildren, sharing mattresses, blankets, the stale air and the bad smells of the night? Why did he have them before his mind’s eye now, when he normally never thought about them?

“I don’t want you to go,” he said. “I want you to forget what happened, and for us never to mention it again.”

A car, making an incredible racket, impertinent, doubtless ancient and patched up from one end to the other, crossed a nearby street, shaking the windows in their frames.

“I don’t know,” Anatolio said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to forget it and let everything go back to being what it was. What got into you, Mayta? How could you do it?”

“Well, since you really want to know, I’ll tell you,” he heard himself saying, with a firmness that surprised him. He closed his eyes, and fearing that once again his mouth would disobey him at any moment, he went on: “Ever since the Central Committee meeting, I’ve been happy. It’s as if I’d got new blood, because of this idea of going into action. I was … you know how I was, Anatolio. That was why I did it. Excitement, enthusiasm. It’s wrong, animal instincts blind our reason. I felt a desire to touch you, to caress you. I’ve felt the same way many times since I met you. But I was always able to control myself, and you never noticed. Tonight I just couldn’t contain myself. I know that you could never want to have me touch you. The most I could ever hope to get from someone like you, Anatolio, would be to let me jerk him off.”

“I’ll have to inform the party and request them to expel you.”

“And now I really do have to say goodbye,” Senator Campos suddenly says, looking at his watch, his head turning toward the Chamber. “There’s going to be a discussion of the plan to lower the draft age tofifteen. Fifteen-year-old soldier boys, can you imagine? Of course, the other side uses grade-school kids …”

He stands up, and I do likewise. I thank him for the time he’s given me, even though, as I tell him to his face, I find myself frustrated. Those harsh charges against Mayta and his interpretation of Jauja as a mere trap do not seem well-founded to me. He goes on smiling amiably.

“I don’t know if I’ve acted properly in speaking to you so frankly,” he says to me. “It’s one of my defects, I know it. But in this case, for political reasons, it would be better not to stir up the mud and spatter people with it. But, after all, you aren’t a historian but a novelist. If you had said I’m going to write an essay, a sociopolitical study, I wouldn’t have said a word. Fiction is different. You can believe what I’ve said or not, of course.”

I inform him that all the testimonials I get, true or false, are useful to me. Did it seem to him I would discard his assertions? He’s wrong. What I use is not the truth of the testimonies but their power to suggest, their power as inventions, their color, their dramatic strength. And I certainly do have the feeling that he knows more than he’s told me.

“And I was blabbing like a parrot,” he replies, without changing expression. “There are things I wouldn’t tell even if they were to skin me alive. My friend, let’s render unto time what is proper to time and to history what is proper to history.”

We walk toward the main exit. The hallways of Congress are crowded: commissions come to meet with members of Congress, women with steno pads, and supporters of various political parties, who, under the eye of men wearing armbands, stand on line to go up to the gallery above the Chamber of Deputies, where the debate on the new draft law promises to be red-hot. There are security agents everywhere: police with rifles, detectives in street clothes carrying sub-machine guns, and the personal bodyguards of the congressmen. These last are not allowed in the Chamber, so they stroll about the halls, not even bothering to hide the pistols they carry in holsters or simply stuck into their trouser tops. The police carefully frisk everyone who crosses the vestibule, obliging them to open all packages, purses, and briefcases. They are looking for explosives. But even these precautions haven’t prevented two attacks within the Congress itself over the past weeks: one of them was really serious — dynamite that exploded in the senatorial chamber, leaving two dead and three wounded. Senator Campos limps, supporting himself on a cane, and waves to all and sundry. He escorts me to the door. We pass through that space crammed with people, weapons, and political disputation that seems like a minefield. I get the feeling that all it would take would be a minor incident and the whole Congress would blow up like a powder keg.

“How wonderful, a breath of fresh air,” the senator says, at the door. “I don’t know how many hours I’ve been here, and the air is just foul with so much smoke. Okay, I’ve contributed my widow’s mite. I smoke a lot. I’ll have to give it up one of these days. I know I can do it — I’ve already given up smoking half a dozen times.”

He takes me by the arm, but just to whisper in my ear: “As for what we’ve discussed here, I haven’t said a word about anything. Not about Mayta, not about Jauja, nothing. No one’s going to accuse me of undermining the democratic left in these times by reviving a polemic about prehistoric events. If you were to use my name, I’d have to deny everything,” he goes on as if he were joking, although both of us know that just below his light tone there lies a warning. “The left decided to bury that episode, and that’s the only reasonable idea just now. A time will come for a full airing of the matter.”

“I understand you perfectly, Senator. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“If you were to have me say something, I’d have to sue you for libel,” he says, winking at me and at the same time patting, as if by accident, the bulge in his jacket where his pistol is. “Now you know the truth, use it — but not my name.”

He extends a cordial hand toward me and winks again in a roguish way: he’s got short, thin fingers. Hard to imagine them squeezing a trigger.

“Have you ever envied the bourgeoisie?” Mayta asked.

“Why are you asking me that?” says Anatolio, surprised.

“Because I, who was always scornful of them, envy them something,” Mayta said. Would he laugh?

“What’s that?”

“Being able to take a bath every day.” Mayta was sure the boy would at least smile, but he never saw even the slightest sign of it. He was still sitting on the edge of the cot. He’d turned a bit to the side, so that now Mayta could see his long, dark, bony, serious profile, bathed in the light coming through the window. He had wide, prominent lips, and his large teeth seemed to glow.

“Mayta.”

“Yes, Anatolio?”

“Do you think our relationship can go back to what it was before tonight?”

“Yes, the same as it was before,” said Mayta. “Nothing’s really happened, Anatolio. Did anything really happen? Get it through your head, once and for all.”

Just for a brief second, and very faintly, the pitter-pat of little feet in the attic came back, and Mayta noticed that the boy stiffened and tensed up.

“I don’t know how you can sleep with that noise every night.”

“I can sleep with that noise because I don’t have any choice,” Mayta replied. “But it isn’t true that you can get used to anything, as people say. I haven’t gotten used to not being able to take a bath whenever I want. Even if I can’t remember when I had an apartment with a private bath. It was probably when I lived with my aunt Josefa over in Surquillo a million years ago. Even so, it’s something I miss every day. When I come home tired and I can only wash myself like a cat down in the patio and I carry a pan of water up here to soak my feet, I think how terrific it would be to take a shower, to get under the water and feel it wash away the filth, the problems. To sleep all refreshed … What a good life the bourgeoisie have, Anatolio.”

“There’s no public bath around here?”

“There is one five blocks from here, where I go once or twice a week,” said Mayta. “But I don’t always have the money. A bath costs the same as a meal at the university dining hall. I can live without bathing, but not without eating. Do you have a shower at your place?”

“Yeah,” said Anatolio. “The problem is, there isn’t always water.”

“You lucky dog.” Mayta yawned. “See, in some ways you’re a little bit bourgeois yourself.”

Again, Anatolio did not smile. They were silent and still, each one in his place. Although it was dark, Mayta noted the signs of dawn on the other side of the tiny window — a couple of car horns, indistinct voices, movement. Could it be five, or perhaps six? They had stayed up the whole night. He felt weak, as if he had made some great effort or had gotten over a serious illness.

“Let’s sleep awhile,” he said, turning over on his back. He covered his eyes with his forearm and slid over as far as he could to make room. “It must be very late. Tomorrow, I mean today, we’ll have to kick ass.”

Anatolio said nothing, but after a bit, Mayta felt him move, heard the bed creak, and glimpsed him stretch out, also on his back, next to him, but careful not to touch him.

“Mayta.”

“Yes, Anatolio?”

The boy said nothing, even though Mayta waited quite a while. He felt him breathing anxiously. Then Mayta’s unruly body began to heat up again.

“Go to sleep,” he repeated. “And tomorrow all we think about is Jauja, Anatolio.”

“You can give me a hand job if you want,” Mayta heard him whisper timidly. And, in an even lower, frightened voice: “But nothing more than that, Mayta.”

Senator Anatolio Campos goes his way, and I remain at the head of the main staircase of the Congress, facing the river of people, mini-buses, cars, buses, the hustle and bustle of Plaza Bolívar. Until I lose sight of it along Avenida Abancay, I watch a decrepit city bus, gray and leaning over to the right, whose exhaust pipe, flush with the top of the roof, spouts a column of black smoke. Clinging to its doors, a cancerous growth of people miraculously hangs on, just grazing the cars, the light posts, and the pedestrians. Everyone’s on his way home. On every corner, there’s a compact mass waiting for the buses and mini-buses. When the vehicle stops, there is a melee of pushing, shouting, shoving, insults. They are all humble, sweaty people, men and women for whom this street fighting, all to clamber onto those stinking hulks — on which, when they finally get on, they travel a half hour or forty-five minutes, standing, crowded together, angry — is an everyday routine. And these Peruvians, despite their poorly made, slightly absurd clothes, their sleazy skirts, their greasy ties, are members of a minority blessed by fortune. No matter how modest and monotonous their lives may be, they have jobs as office girls or minor officials, they have their little salaries, their social security, their retirement guaranteed. Highly privileged people, compared with those barefoot cholitos over there: I’m watching them pull a cart filled with empty bottles, cutting through the traffic, spitting. I also see that family in rags — a woman of indeterminate age, four kids covered with scales of grime — who from the stairs of the Museum of the Inquisition stretch their hands out toward me automatically, as soon as they see I’m close: “Some spare change, boss.” “Anything you can give, mister.”

Suddenly, instead of continuing toward Plaza San Martín, I decide to go into the Museum of the Inquisition. I haven’t been here for a long time, maybe since the last time I saw my schoolmate Mayta. As I go through the museum, I can’t get his face out of my mind, as if that image of a prematurely aged, tired man that I saw in the photo in his godmother’s house were evoked in some irresistible way by the place I’m visiting. What’s the connection? What secret thread links this all-powerful institution, which for three centuries kept guard over Catholic orthodoxy in Peru and the rest of South America, and the obscure revolutionary militant who twenty-five years ago, for a brief moment, flashed like a bolt of lightning.

What was the Palace of the Inquisition is in ruins, but the eighteenth-century mahogany ceiling panels are in good condition, as a lecturing schoolteacher explains to a group of kids. Beautiful ceiling: the Inquisitors were men of taste. Almost all the Sevilian tiles the Dominicans imported to dress up the place have disappeared. Even the brick floors were brought from Spain; now you can’t see them for the soot. I pause for a minute at the stone shield that proudly overlooked the archway of this palace, the shield with its cross, sword, and laurel. Now it sits on a broken-down sawhorse.

The Inquisitors set up here in 1584, after having spent their first fifteen years facing the Church of La Merced. They bought the property from don Sancho de Ribera, son of one of the founders of Lima, for a small sum, and from this spot they watched out for the spiritual purity of what is today Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. From this audience chamber, behind this massive table whose top is made of a single slab of wood, and which has sea monsters instead of feet, the Inquisitors in their white habits and with their army of lawyers, notaries, secretaries, jailers, and executioners struggled valiantly against witchcraft, Satanism, Judaism, blasphemy, polygamy, Protestantism, and perversions. All heterodoxies, all schisms, he thought. It was an arduous task, rigorous, legalistic, maniacal, that of the gentlemen Inquisitors, among whom there figured (their collaborators) the most illustrious intellectuals of the era: lawyers, professors, theological orators, versifiers, writers of prose. He thought: How many homosexuals could they have burned? A detailed investigation that filled innumerable pages of a file carefully stored away would precede each condemnation and auto-da-fé. He thought: How many mad people could they have tortured? How many simple people could they have hanged? Years would pass before the High Tribunal of the Holy Office would pass judgment from this table decorated with a skull, with silver inkstands with etched figures of swords, crosses, fish, and the inscription: “I, the light of the truth, guide your conscience and your hand. If you do not mete out justice, in your failure you work your own ruination.” He thought: How many real saints, how many daring people, how many poor devils could they have burned?

Because it wasn’t the light of the truth that guided the hand of the Inquisition: it was informers. They were the ones who filled these cells, dungeons, moist and deep caves in which no sunlight enters, and from which the prisoner would emerge crippled. He thought: You would have ended up here in any case, Mayta. For your way of life, of sex. The informer was protected to the utmost and his anonymity guaranteed, so he could collaborate without fear of reprisals. Here, still intact, is the Door of the Secret. Mayta, with a feeling of anguish, peered through the crack, linking himself with that accuser who, without being seen by the accused, would identify him by a simple nod of his head. The accused could be sent to prison for many years, his property confiscated, himself condemned to a degrading life or burned alive. He got goose bumps: how easy it was to get rid of a rival. All you had to do was enter this little room and, with your hand on the Bible, testify. Anatolio could come, spy though the crack, nod, pointing at him, and condemn him to the flames.

A doubtfully spelled notice informs us that they didn’t in fact burn very many: thirty-five in three centuries. It isn’t an overwhelming statistic. And of the thirty-five — a meager consolation — thirty were garroted before the fire devoured their cadavers. The first to have the lead in the grand spectacle of the Lima auto-da-fé was not garroted first: Mateo Salade, a Frenchman, was burned alive because he had carried out some chemical experiments that someone denounced as “dealings with Satan.” Salado? he thought. This poor frog must have contributed the Peruvian expression salado, a person with bad luck. He thought: From now on, you won’t be a salado revolutionary.

But even though the Holy Tribunal didn’t burn many people, it did torture an enormous number. After the informers, physical torture was the most frequently used device for sending victims, of both sexes, of all conditions and states, to the auto-da-fés. Here we see in all its glory a real circus of horrors, the instruments the Holy Office used — the verb is mathematically precise — to “extract the truth” from the suspect. Some cardboard dummies instruct the visitor about the pulleys and strappados — the rope from which the suspect was hung, hands tied behind his back and a hundred-pound weight strapped to his feet. Or how the victim was stretched out on the “pony,” an operating table that used four tourniquets to wrench out the limbs, one by one, or all four at once. The most banal of the devices was the stock, which immobilized the criminal’s head in a yoke as he was beaten. The most imaginative was the rack, of surrealistic refinement and fantasy — a kind of chair in which, using a system of hand and ankle cuffs, the executioner could torture the legs, arms, forearms, neck, and chest of the criminal. The most contemporary of the tortures is the hood — a cloth placed over the nose or in the mouth, through which water was poured, so that the victim could not breathe. The most spectacular was the brazier, placed next to the condemned person’s feet, which had previously been basted with oil so that they would roast evenly. Nowadays, Mayta thought, they use electric shocks on the testicles, sodium-pentothal injections, immersion in tubs of shit, cigarette burns. Not much progress in this field.

Ten times over, he thought: What are you doing here, Mayta? Is this a time for wasting a single minute? Don’t you have more important things to do? But he was moved even more deeply by the small wardrobe that for months, years, or in perpetuity, the people accused of Judaism, witchcraft, or of trafficking with the devil or of having blasphemed, and who had “vehemently repented,” abjured their sins, and promised to redeem themselves, had to wear. A room full of costumes: amid these horrors, this seems more human. Here is the “crown,” the conical hat, the hair shirt, white, embroidered with crosses, serpents, devils, and flames, in which the condemned marched to the Plaza Mayor — after a stop at the Callejón de la Cruz, where they were to kneel before a Dominican cross — where they would be whipped or sentenced. Garments they might also have to wear day and night, for as long as their sentence required. That’s the final image, the one that remains fixed in my memory, when, my visit over, I head for the exit, the idea of those condemned people who would go back to their normal business, wearing that uniform, which would inspire horror, panic, repulsion, nausea, scorn, and hatred wherever they went. He imagined what those days, months, and years must have been for the people who had to deck themselves out that way and be pointed out in the street, avoided like mad dogs. He thought: This museum is really worth a visit. Instructive, fascinating. Condensed in a few striking images and objects, there is an essential ingredient, always present in the history of this country, from the most remote times: violence. Violence of all kinds: moral, physical, fanatical, intransigent, ideological, corrupt, stupid — all of which have gone hand in hand with power here. And that other violence — dirty, petty, low, vengeful, vested, and selfish — which lives off the other kinds. It’s good to come here to this museum, to see how we have come to be what we are, why we are in the condition in which we find ourselves.

At the entrance to the Museum of the Inquisition, I see that at least another dozen old people, men, women, and children have joined the family in rags I saw before. They constitute a sort of grotesque royal court of tatters, grime, and scabs. As soon as they see me, they stretch out their black-nailed hands and beg. Violence behind me and hunger in front of me. Here, on these stairs, my country summarized. Here, touching each other, the two sides of Peruvian history. And I understand why Mayta accompanied me obsessively on my tour of the museum.

I virtually run to the Plaza San Martín to catch the bus. It’s late, and a half hour before the curfew, all traffic stops. I’m afraid the curfew is going to catch me in between my house and Avenida Grau. It’s only a few blocks, but when it gets dark there, it’s dangerous. There have been muggings, and just last week a rape. Luis Saldías’s wife — they just got married, he’s a hydraulic engineer, and they live right across the street from me. Her car broke down and she was outside after curfew, walking home from San Isidro. Right in those last few blocks, a patrol caught her. Three cops: they threw her into their car, stripped her — after beating her up for fighting back — and raped her. Then they let her out in front of her house, saying, “Just be thankful we didn’t shoot you.” That’s the standing order they have when they catch someone violating curfew. Luis Saldías told me everything, with his eyes filled with rage, and he added that, ever since, he’s happy whenever someone shoots a cop. He says he doesn’t care if the terrorists win, because “nothing could be worse than what we’re already living.” I know he’s wrong, that it can still get worse, that there are no limits to our deterioration, but I respect his grief and keep my mouth shut.