The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Five

You get to Jauja by train. You buy your ticket the night before and get down to the Desamparados Station at six in the morning. I was told that the train is always packed, and sure enough, I have to fight my way onto a car. But I’m lucky and get a seat, while most of the passengers have to stand. There are no lavatories, so the more venturesome piss from the steps as the train rolls along. Even though I ate something just before leaving Lima, I start feeling hungry after a few hours. You can’t buy anything at any of the stops: Chosica, San Bartolomé, Matucana, San Mateo, Casapalca, and La Oroya. Twenty-five years ago, the food vendors would pile onto the train at every stop, carrying fruit, sodas, sandwiches, and candy. Now all they sell are trinkets and herb tea.

The trip is uncomfortable and slow, but full of surprises. First, there is the train itself, inching its way from sea level to an altitude of three miles. It crosses the Andes at Anticona Pass and stops when it reaches the foot of Meiggs Mountain. Looking at the sublime spectacle, I forget the armed soldiers posted in every car and the machine gun on the roof of the locomotive, in case of attack. How can this train stay in service? The terrorists are constantly cutting the highway to the central mountain range by blasting landslides out of the slopes. Road travel is practically impossible. Why haven’t they blown up the train, why haven’t they blocked the tunnels, or destroyed the bridges? Perhaps the terrorists have some strategic need to keep communications open between Lima and Junín. I’m glad; I couldn’t reconstruct Mayta’s adventure without making the trip to Jauja.

Peak follows peak, some separated by abysses at the bottom of which roar rushing rivers. The little train goes over bridges and through tunnels. It’s impossible not to think of the engineer Meiggs and what he accomplished here. Over eighty years ago, he directed the laying of these tracks in this geography of gorges, snow-capped mountains, peaks buffeted by wind, and under constant threat of flash floods. Did Mayta the revolutionary think about that engineer’s odyssey as he took this train for the first time one morning in February or March, twenty-five years ago? He would have thought about the suffering of the workers as they laid these rails, erected these bridges, and bored out these tunnels — the thousands of cholos and Indians who worked for a symbolic salary, at times nothing more than a fistful of bad food and some coca, who sweated twelve hours a day, splitting rocks, blasting stone, carrying ties, leveling the bed so that the highest railroad in the world would become a reality. How many of them lost fingers, hands, and eyes dynamiting the mountains? How many fell into these precipices or were buried by the landslides that rolled over the camps where they were sleeping, one on top of another, trembling with cold, groggy with fatigue, stupefied with coca, kept warm only by their ponchos and the breath of their buddies? He began to feel the altitude: a certain difficulty in breathing, the pounding blood in his temples, his accelerated heart rate. At the same time, he could barely hide his excitement. He felt like smiling, whistling, and shaking hands with everyone in the car. He was dying with impatience to see Vallejos again.

“I am Professor Ubilluz,” he tells me, stretching out his hand when I emerge from Jauja Station, where, after an interminable wait, two policemen in street clothes frisk me and pick through the bag in which I’m carrying my pajamas. “Shorty to my friends. And, if it’s all right with you, we are already friends.”

I wrote, telling him I was going to visit, and he’d come to meet me. Right around the station, there is a considerable military presence: soldiers with rifles, roadblocks, and barbed wire. And patrolling the street at a snail’s pace, an armored car. We start walking. “Are things bad here?”

“It’s been a bit quieter these past few weeks,” Ubilluz says. “They’ve actually lifted the curfew. We can go out to gaze at the stars. We’d forgotten what they look like.”

He tells me that a month ago there was a massive attack by the insurgents. The firing went on all night, and the next day there were bodies all over the place. They smelled so bad and there were so many of them that they had to be doused with kerosene and burned. Ever since, the rebels haven’t attempted another important action in the city. Of course, every morning you wake up and see the mountains covered with little red hammer-and-sickle flags. Every afternoon, the army patrols yank them out.

“I’ve reserved a room for you over at the Paca Inn,” he adds. “A beautiful place, you’ll see.”

He’s a little old man, neat, stuffed into a striped suit he keeps buttoned up, which makes him look like a kind of moving package. His tie has a tiny knot, and his shoes look as if they’ve been dipped in mud.

He’s got that ceremonious manner typical of mountain people, and his Spanish is carefully enunciated, although from time to time he uses a Quechua expression. We find an old taxi near the plaza. The city hasn’t changed much since the last time I was here. Outwardly, at any rate, there are few traces of war. There are no garbage dumps or crowds of beggars. The tiny houses seem clean and immortal, with their decrepit portals and complicated ironwork. Professor Ubilluz spent thirty years teaching science in the Colegio Nacional San José. When he retired — about the same time that the movement we took for a simple act of terrorism by a group of extremists began to take on the proportions of a civil war — there was a ceremony in his honor attended by all the graduates who had been his students. When he gave his farewell address, he wept.

“Whuddya say, brother,” said Vallejos.

“How are ya’, kid,” said Mayta.

“So you finally made it here,” said Vallejos.

“You said it.” Mayta smiled. “Finally.”

They hugged each other. How can the Paca Inn stay open? Do tourists still come to Jauja? Of course not. What would they come to see? All festivals, even the famous Carnival, have been canceled. But the inn stays open because the functionaries who come from Lima stay there, and, at times, so do military missions. None must be here now, because there are no guards anywhere. The inn hasn’t been painted for ages and looks miserably run-down. There is no staff, no one behind the desk: just a watchman, who does everything. After I leave my bag in the small, cobwebbed room, I walk down and sit on the terrace that faces the lake, where Professor Ubilluz is waiting for me.

Did I know the famous story about Paca? He points to the glittering water, the blue sky, the fine line of peaks that surround the lake. This, hundreds of years ago, was a city of greedy folk. The beggar appeared one radiantly sunny morning when the air was clear. He went begging from house to house, and at every one, he was chased away with insults and dogs. But at one of the last houses he found a charitable widow who lived with a small child. She gave the beggar something to eat and some words of encouragement. Then the beggar began to glow and showed the charitable woman his true face — he was Jesus — and gave her this order: “Take your son and leave Paca immediately, carrying all you can. Don’t look back, no matter what you hear.” The widow obeyed and left Paca. But as she was going up the mountain she heard a loud noise, like a huge drum, and out of curiosity turned around. She managed to see the horrifying landslide of rocks and mud that buried Paca and its inhabitants and the waters that turned the town into a tranquil lake filled with ducks, trout, mallards. Neither she nor her son saw or heard anything more, because statues can’t see or hear. But the citizens of Jauja can and do see both of them, in the distance: two rocky formations staring out at the lake from a spot to which processions of pilgrims go to devote a moment to the people God punished for being greedy and insensible and who lie under those waters on which frogs croak, ducks quack, and where, formerly, tourists rowed.

“What do you think, comrade?”

Mayta could see that Vallejos was as happy and excited as he was himself. They walked to the boardinghouse where the lieutenant lived, on Tarapacá Street. How was the trip? Very good, and most of all, very moving, he’d never forget the Infiernillo Pass. Without stopping his chatter, he took note of the colonial houses, the clear air, the rosy cheeks of the Jauja girls. You were in Jauja, Mayta, but you didn’t feel very well.

“I think I’ve got mountain sickness. A really weird feeling. As if I were going to faint.”

“A bad beginning for the revolution.” Vallejos laughed, snatching Mayta’s suitcase out of his hands. Vallejos was wearing khaki trousers and shirt, boots with enormous soles, and he had a crew cut. “Some coca tea, a little snooze, and you’ll be a new man. At eight we’ll meet over at Professor Ubilluz’s place. A great guy, you’ll see.”

Vallejos had ordered a cot set up in his own room at the boardinghouse, the top floor of a house with rooms lining either side of a railed gallery. He left Mayta there, advising him to sleep awhile to get over the mountain sickness. He left, and Mayta saw a shower in the bathroom. I’m going to shower when I get up and again at bedtime every day I’m in Jauja, he thought. He would stock up on showers for when he’d have to go back to Lima. He went to bed fully clothed, only taking off his shoes before he closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep.

You didn’t know much about Jauja, Mayta. What, for example? More legend than reality, like that biblical explanation of the birth of Paca. The Indians who lived here had been part of the Huanaca civilization, one of the most vigorous conquered by the Incan Empire. Because of that, the Xauxas allied themselves with Pizarro and the Conquistadores, and took vengeance on their old masters. This region must have been immensely wealthy — who could ever guess, seeing how modest a place it is today — during colonial times, when the name Jauja was a synonym for abundance.

He knew that this little town was the first capital of Peru, designated as such by Pizarro during his Homeric trek from Cajamarca to Cuzco along one of those four Inca highways that went up and down the Andes in the same way the revolutionary columns snake their way nowadays. Those months when it could boast being the capital were its most glorious. Then, when Lima snatched the scepter from it, Jauja, like all the cities and cultures of the Andes, went into an irreversible decline and servitude, subordinate to that new center of national life set in the most unhealthy corner of the coast, from which it would go on ceaselessly expropriating all the energies of the country for its own use.

His heart was pounding, he felt dizzy, and Professor Ubilluz, with the lake as background, just goes on talking. I stop paying attention, pursued by the nightmare images I associated with the name Jauja when I was a child. The city for people with tuberculosis! Because they had been coming here since the last century, all those Peruvians suffering from that terrifying illness, mythified by romantic literature and sadomasochism, that tuberculosis for which the dry climate of Jauja was considered extraordinarily curative. They came here from the four cardinal points of the nation, first on mules over trails, then on the steep railroad built by the engineer Meiggs. All Peruvians who began to spit blood and who could pay for the trip and who had the money to convalesce or die in the pavilions of the Olavegoya Sanatorium, which, because of that continuous invasion, grew and grew, until, at one moment, it engulfed the city.

The name that centuries ago had aroused greed, admiration, dreams of gold doubloons and golden mountains came to mean perforated lungs, fits of coughing, bloody sputum, hemorrhage, death from consumption. Jauja, a fickle name, he thought. And pressing his hand to his chest to count the beats, he remembered that his godmother, in her house in Surquillo, in those days when he had gone on his hunger strike, had admonished him with her index finger in the air and her generous fat face: “Do you want us to send you to Jauja, you silly boy?” Alicia and Zoilita would drive him crazy every time they heard him cough: “Uh-oh, cousin, that’s how it begins, a little cough; soon we’ll see you on the road to Jauja.” What would Aunt Josefa, Zoilita, and Alicia say when they found out what he had come to Jauja to do? Later, while Vallejos was introducing him to Shorty Ubilluz, a ceremonious gentleman who made a little bow as they shook hands, and to half a dozen boys who looked more like lower-school kids from the Colegio San José and not secondary-school seniors, Mayta, his body still covered with goose bumps from the icy shower, told himself that soon, to those other images, another would have to be added: Jauja, cradle of the Peruvian revolution. Would that, too, be part of the place? Jauja of the revolution, like Jauja of gold, or Jauja for tuberculars? This was Professor Ubilluz’s house, and Mayta could see, through a dirty window, adobe buildings, tile or zinc roofs, a fragment of cobblestoned street, and the raised sidewalks because of the torrents that — as Vallejos had explained as they walked over — formed in the storms of January and February. He thought: Jauja, cradle of the socialist revolution in Peru. It was difficult to believe, it sounded so unreal, like the city of gold or the city of the consumptives. I tell him that at least outwardly there would seem to be less hunger and want in Jauja than in Lima. Am I right? Instead of answering, Professor Ubilluz, putting on a serious face, suddenly revives, on this solitary shore of the lake, the subject that has brought me to his land: “You have probably heard many stories about Vallejos, of course. And you will hear even more in the days to come.”

“It’s always the same, when you’re trying to delve into a historical event,” I reply. “One thing you learn, when you try to reconstruct an event from eyewitness accounts, is that each version is just someone’s story, and that all stories mix truth and lies.”

He suggests we go on to his house. A cart pulled by two burros catches up to us, and the driver agrees to take us to the city. He drops us off, half an hour later, in front of Ubilluz’s little house, nine blocks up on Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. It just about faces the jail. “Yes,” he tells me, even before I ask. “This was the lieutenant’s territory, that’s where it all started.” The jail takes up the whole block on the other side of the street and closes off Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. At that gray wall and those tile-covered eaves, the city ends. Beyond is the country: the fields, the eucalyptus trees, and the peaks. I see, just beyond, trenches, barbed wire, and soldier boys scattered here and there, doing guard duty. One of the persistent rumors last year was that the guerrillas were preparing to attack Jauja in order to declare it the capital of liberated Peru. But hasn’t the same rumor gone around about Arequipa, Puno, Cuzco, Trujillo, Cajamarca, and even Iquitos?

The jail and Professor Ubilluz’s house are in a neighborhood with a religious name, one that carries connotations of martyrdom and expiation: Cross of Thorns. It’s a modest place, low and dark, with a large framed photograph from which beams a gentleman of another era — string tie, straw hat, waxed mustachios, high starched collar, vest, Mephistophelian goatee — who must be the professor’s father or grandfather, to judge by the resemblance. There is a long chaise, covered with a multicolored poncho, and chairs painted in several different colors, all of them so worn they seem about to collapse. In a glass-doored bookcase, there are disorderly stacks of newspapers. Some buzzing flies circle our heads, and one of the joeboys helped pass around a plateful of sliced fresh cheese and some crusty little rolls that made Mayta’s mouth water. I’m dying of hunger and I ask Professor Ubilluz if there is someplace where I can buy some food. “At this time of day, no,” he says. “At nightfall, perhaps we’ll get some baked potatoes at a place I know. In any case, I can offer you some very good pisco.

“They say the most absurd things about my friendship with Vallejos,” he adds. “That we met in Lima when I was in the army. That we began to conspire then and that we went on plotting here, when he came to be chief of the jail. The only truth in all that is that I did retire from the army. But when I was in, Vallejos was still at his mother’s breast…” He laughs, with a forced little giggle, and exclaims, “Pure fantasy! We met here, a few days after Vallejos came to take up his post. I also have the honor to be able to tell you that I taught him all he knew about Marxism. Because you have to understand”—he lowers his voice and looks around with apprehension, pointing out, as he does so, some empty shelves—“that I had the most complete Marxist library in Jauja.”

A long digression distracts him from Vallejos. Despite the fact that he’s an old, sick man — he’s had a kidney removed, he’s got high blood pressure, and varicose veins that put him through the tortures of the damned — that he’s retired from all political action, the authorities, a couple of years ago, when terrorist activities were at a fever pitch in the province, burned all his books and had him incarcerated for a week. They attached electrodes to his testicles to make him confess his complicity in the guerrilla campaign. What complicity could there be when it was common knowledge that the insurgents had him on their hit list — all because of some infamous calumnies. He gets up, opens a drawer, and takes out a piece of paper, which he then shows me: “The people sentence you to death, traitor scum.” He shrugs. He was old, and life no longer mattered to him. Let them kill him, what a crock of shit. He didn’t take any precautions: he lived alone and didn’t even have a stick for self-defense.

“So it was you who taught Vallejos Marxism.” I take advantage of his pause to interrupt him. “I thought all this time it had been Mayta.”

“The Trotskyite?” He twists around in his chair, gesturing scornfully. “Poor Mayta! He went around in Jauja like a sleepwalker, because of the mountain sickness …”

It was true. He had never felt anything like that pressure in his temples and that giddiness in his heart, which was suddenly punctuated by some disconcerting pauses in which it seemed to stop pumping. Mayta had the sensation of being empty, as if his bones, muscles, and veins had suddenly disappeared and a polar chill was freezing the huge void under his skin. Was he going to faint? Was he going to die? It was a sinuous, treacherous malaise: it came and went. He was at the edge of a precipice, but the threat of falling into the abyss never materialized. It seemed as though everyone in Shorty Ubilluz’s crowded little room realized what was happening to him. Some were smoking, and a grayish cloud, with flies in it, distorted the faces of the boys sitting on the floor, who from time to time interrupted Ubilluz’s monologue with questions. Mayta had lost the thread of the conversation. He was next to Vallejos on a bench, with his back resting against the bookcase, and even though he wanted to listen, he could only pay attention to his veins, his temples, and his heart.

In addition to his mountain sickness, he felt ridiculous. Are you the revolutionary who’s come to test these comrades? He thought: The three-mile altitude has turned you into a faded flower with a pounding heart. He could only vaguely hear Ubilluz explaining to the boys — was he trying to impress him with his confused knowledge of Marxism? — that the way to move the revolution forward was by understanding both the social contradictions and the traits the class struggle took on in each of its phases. He thought: Cleopatra’s nose. Yes, there it was: the unforeseeable element that upsets the laws of history and turns science into poetry. How stupid he had been not to foresee the most obvious thing, that a man who goes up into the Andes can suffer mountain sickness; why hadn’t he bought some pills to counteract the effect of the difference in atmospheric pressure on his body.

Vallejos asked him, “Do you feel okay?” “Sure, fine.” He thought: I’ve come to Jauja so this hick professor who doesn’t know shit can give me a class on Marxism. Now Shorty Ubilluz was pointing to him, welcoming him: the comrade from Lima that Vallejos had spoken to them about, someone with enormous revolutionary and union experience. He invited Mayta to speak and told the boys to ask him questions. Mayta smiled at the half-dozen beardless faces that had turned to gaze at him with curiosity and a certain admiration. He opened his mouth.

“He was the real guilty party, if we’re looking for guilty parties,” Professor Ubilluz repeats, with his vinegary expression. “He made fools of us. We thought he was the link with the Lima revolutionaries, with the unions, with the party, which consisted of hundreds of comrades. In reality, he represented no one and was no one. A Trotskyite, to top things off. His very presence sealed off any possibility that the Communist Party might support us. We were very naïve, it’s true. I knew about Marxism, but I had no idea of the strength of the party, and much less about the divisions among the left-wing groups. And Vallejos, of course, knew even less than I. So you thought that Mayta the Trotskyite indoctrinated the lieutenant? Not a chance. They barely had time to see each other, only when Vallejos could get to Lima. It was in this room right here that the lieutenant learned about dialectics and materialism.”

Professor Ubilluz comes from an old Jauja family in which there have been sub-prefects, mayors, and lots of lawyers. (Law is the great profession in the mountains, and Jauja beats most places even there in numbers of lawyers per citizen.) They must have been well-off because, he tells me, many of his relatives have managed to go abroad: Mexico, Buenos Aires, Miami. Not him. He’s going to stay here until the end, threats or no threats, and he’ll sink with whatever’s left when it’s over. Not only because he doesn’t have the means to leave, but because of his contrary nature, that rebelliousness that caused him, unlike his cousins, uncles, and brothers, who were busy with farms, small businesses, or legal practices, to devote himself to teaching and to become the first Marxist in the city. He’s paid for it, he adds: jailed countless times, beaten up, insulted. And even worse, the ingratitude of the left, which has now grown and is about to take power, but which forgets the people who opened the way and laid down the foundation.

“The real lessons in philosophy and history, the ones I couldn’t give in the Colegio San José, I gave in this little room,” he exclaims proudly. “My house was a people’s university.”

He falls silent because we hear a metallic sound and military voices. I get up to peek through the curtains. The armored car is passing by, the same one I saw at the station. Next to it, under the command of an officer, that’s a platoon of soldiers. They disappear around the corner of the jail.

“Wasn’t it Mayta who planned everything, then?” I abruptly ask him. “Wasn’t it he who orchestrated all the details of the uprising?”

The surprise reflected in his half-reddened face, which is full of white spots from his whiskers, seems genuine. As if he had heard incorrectly and knew nothing about what I was saying.

“Trotskyite Mayta the intellectual author of the uprising?” He carefully pronounces the words, with that overly precise mountain diction, which barely allows the syllables out of his mouth. “What an idea! When he got here, everything had already been arranged by Vallejos and me. He had nothing to do with it until the very end. I’m going to say something else. He was only informed of the details at the last minute.”

“Because you didn’t trust him?” I interrupt.

“Just as a precaution,” says Professor Ubilluz. “Well, if you prefer the word ‘trust,’ then yes, because we didn’t trust him. Not that we thought he was a squealer, but that he might be afraid. Vallejos and I decided to keep him in ignorance, as soon as we figured out that he had no one behind him, that he was on his own. Would it have been surprising that at the critical moment the poor guy would turn tail and run? He wasn’t one of us, and he couldn’t really take the altitude. He had no knowledge of weapons. Vallejos taught him how to shoot on a beach near Lima. A hell of a revolutionary to dig up! They say he was even a fag.”

He laughs, with his usual forced giggle. I’m just about to say that, unlike him, who wasn’t where he was supposed to be — and I hope he explains why — Mayta, despite his mountain sickness and his representing no one else, was alongside Vallejos when — to use Ubilluz’s own expression—“the potatoes fell in the fire.” I’m just about to tell him that lots of other people have said about him exactly what he’s saying about Mayta: that he was really the one to blame, that he was the deserter. But of course I say nothing at all. I’m not here to contradict anyone. My job is to listen, observe, compare stories, mix it all together and weave a fantasy. Again, we hear the metallic sound of the armored car and the trotting soldiers.

When one of the boys said, “It’s time to go,” Mayta felt relieved. He was feeling better, after having gone through some moments of agony. He answered the questions posed by Ubilluz, Vallejos, the joeboys, and at the same time he was keenly aware of the malaise that was crushing his head and chest and seemed to be churning his blood. Had he answered well? At least he seemed sure of himself, even if nothing was further from the truth, and in allaying the fears of the boys, he had tried not to lie even as he avoided telling truths that might dampen their enthusiasm.

It wasn’t easy. Would the Lima working class support them once the revolutionary action began? Yes, but not right away. At the beginning, the workers would be indecisive, confused because of the misinformation the newspapers and radio would spread and because of the lies those in power and the bourgeois parties would tell. They would be paralyzed by brutality and repression. But that very repression would quickly open their eyes, revealing just which group was defending their interests, and which was, in addition to exploiting them, deceiving them. The revolutionary action would push the class struggle to heights of violence.

Mayta was moved by the boys’ wide-open eyes and their attentive immobility. They believe everything you tell them. Now, while the joeboys were saying goodbye to him, ceremoniously shaking his hand, he asked himself just what in fact the attitude of the Lima proletariat would be when the action began. Hostility? Scorn for that vanguard fighting for them out in the mountains? The fact was that APRA controlled the unions, that they were allied with the Prado government, and opposed to anything that smacked of socialism. It might be different with a few unions, like Civil Construction, in which the Communist Party had some influence. No, probably not. Those guys would accuse us of being provocateurs, of playing along with the government, of serving them on a silver platter the pretext for outlawing the party and deporting and jailing the progressives. He could imagine the headlines in Unity, the comments in the handbills they would distribute, and the articles that would appear in the Workers Voice published by the rival RWP. Yes, that would all hold true for the first phase. But, he was sure, if the uprising were to last, develop, undermine bourgeois power here and there, oblige it to discard its liberal mask and show its bloodied face, the working class would shake off its lethargy, all the reformist deceptions, all its corrupt leaders, all those illusions of being able to coexist with the sellouts, and would join the struggle.

“Well, the chicks have gone to roost.” Shorty Ubilluz went to the pile of books, pamphlets, newspapers, cobwebs in his studio and dug out a jug and some glasses. “Now let’s have a drink.”

“How did the boys seem to you?” Vallejos asked him.

“Very enthusiastic, but still wet behind the ears,” Mayta said. “Some of them can’t be more than fifteen, right? Are you sure you can depend on them?”

“You have no faith in our young people.” Vallejos laughed. “Sure we can depend on them.”

“Remember González Prada.” Shorty Ubilluz began to quote, sliding around the bookcases like a gnome and getting back into his chair. “The old fogies to the grave, and the young to work.”

“And every man to his assigned job.” Vallejos smacked his fist into his palm, and Mayta thought: I hear him and I have no doubts. It seems that everything will bend to his will, he’s a born leader, a central committee all by himself. “Nobody’s going to make these boys shoot anyone. They’re going to be messengers.”

“The messenger boys of the revolution,” Shorty Ubilluz baptized them. “I’ve known them since they learned how to crawl. They’re the best of the joeboys.”

“They’ll be in charge of communications,” Vallejos explained, waving his arms back and forth. “They’ll maintain contact between the guerrillas and the city; they’ll carry dispatches, supplies, medicine, matériel. And because they’re kids, they won’t be noticed. They know these mountains like the back of their hands. We’ve taken long hikes, and I’ve trained them in forced marches. They’re terrific.”

They jumped off ridges and landed on their feet without breaking their heads, as if they were made of rubber. They swam rushing creeks like fish, without being swept downstream or smashed against the rocks. They went through snow without suffering from the cold, and they ran and jumped at the highest altitudes without any problems. His heart rate had speeded up and the pressure of his blood on his temples was once again intolerable. Should he say something about it? Should he ask for some coca tea, anything, to relieve that anguish?

“Tomorrow, in Ricrán, you’ll meet the ones who will do the fighting,” Vallejos said. “Get ready to climb some mountains and to see llamas and mountain grass.”

Despite his malaise, Mayta became aware of the silence. It came from outside, it was tangible, it would be there whenever Shorty Ubilluz or Vallejos fell silent. Between a question and an answer, any time a speaker paused — that absence of motors, horns, screeching brakes, acceleration, and voices seemed to have its own sound. That silence must have covered Jauja like a night laid over the night; it was a thick presence in the room, and it rattled him. That exterior void, that lack of animal, mechanical, or human life out there on the street seemed so strange to him. He never remembered having experienced such an outrageous silence in Lima, not even in the prisons (the Sexto, the Panóptico, the Frontón) where he’d spent a few seasons. When Vallejos and Ubilluz broke it, they seemed to profane something.

His malaise had diminished, but his anxiety remained, because he knew the loss of breath, the racing pulse, the pressure, the icy chill could come back at any moment. Shorty toasted him, and he, making an effort to smile, raised the glass to his lips. The fiery pisco shook him. How absurd, he thought. It’s only 180 miles to Lima, and it’s as if you were a foreigner in an unknown world. What kind of a country is this where, by just going from one place to another, you turn into a gringo or a Martian? He felt ashamed of knowing nothing at all about the mountains, of knowing nothing at all about the world of the peasants. He paid attention again to what Vallejos and Ubilluz were saying. They were talking about a community on the eastern slope of the mountains, the one that ran right into the jungle: Uchubamba.

“Where is it?”

“Not far in miles,” says Professor Ubilluz. “Close, if you look on the map. But it might as well be on the moon if you want to get there from Jauja.” Years later, during Belaúnde’s government, they put in a highway that went one fourth of the way. Before, one could only get there on foot, over the peaks, down the gorges and slopes that meet the jungle.

Is there any way I can get there? Of course not, it’s been a battleground for a year now, at least. And, rumor has it, a huge cemetery. They say that more people have died there than in all the rest of Peru. I will not, therefore, be able to visit some key places in Mayta’s story; my investigation will be cut short. Besides, even if I could slip through the army and guerrilla lines, I wouldn’t learn much. In Jauja, everybody is sure that both Chunán and Ricrán have disappeared. Yes, yes, Professor Ubilluz has it from a good source. Chunán six months ago, more or less. It was an insurgent stronghold, and it seems they even had an antiaircraft gun. That’s why the air force wiped out Chunán with napalm — even the ants were killed.

There was another massacre at Ricrán, maybe two months ago. We never did find out what really happened. The people from Ricrán had captured a guerrilla detachment and, some said, they had lynched them for having eaten their crops and their animals. Other people said that they turned the rebels over to the army, which shot them in the plaza, up against the church wall. Then a revenge squad came to Ricrán and did a number five on them. Did I know what a number five was? No. Count off: one, two, three, four, you — outside! Every fifth person was hacked, stoned, or stabbed right there in the same plaza. Now there is no more Ricrán. The survivors are here in Jauja in that immigrant zone that sprang up on the north side, either here or wandering in the jungle. I shouldn’t have any illusions about what was going on. The professor takes a sip and picks up the thread of our conversation.

“Getting to Uchubamba was for tough guys, unafraid of snow or avalanches,” he says. For people without the varicose veins this old man has now. “I was strong and could take it then, and I got there once. A sight you can’t imagine, when you see the Andes turn into jungle, covered with vegetation, animals, mist. Ruins everywhere. Uchubamba, that’s the place. Don’t you remember it? Damn! Well, the members of the Uchubamba commune set all of Peru talking.”

No, the name means nothing to me. But I do remember very well the phenomenon Professor Ubilluz has evoked, as I warm the glass of pisco he’s just served me (a pisco called Devil of the Andes, a remnant of better days, when, he says, you could buy anything in the local shops, before this rationing that’s starving us to death and killing us with thirst). Although a complete surprise to official, urban, coastal Peru, about halfway through the fifties, expropriations of land began to take place in different parts of the southern and central mountains. I was in Paris, and I, along with a group of café revolutionaries, avidly followed those remote events, which were succinctly reported in Le Monde, from which we in our imagination reconstructed the exciting spectacle: armed with sticks, slings, rocks, with their elderly, their women and children, and their animals in front, they would move, at dawn or at midnight, en masse to the neighboring lands. They felt, no doubt rightly so, that they had been dispossessed from those lands by the feudal lord, or his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, or the great-grandson of the feudal lord, so they dug up the property markers and returned the land to the commune. They branded the animals with their mark, they set up their houses, and next day they began to work the land as their own.

“Is this the beginning?” we asked ourselves, openmouthed and euphoric. “Is the volcano finally reawakening?” Perhaps that really was the beginning. In the Paris bistros, under the whispering chestnut trees, we deduced, on the basis of four lines in Le Monde, that those seizures were the work of revolutionaries, new narodniks, who had gone out to the country to persuade the Indians to carry out the agrarian reform that for years every government had promised and none had implemented. Later we found out that the takeovers were not the work of agitators sent by the Communist Party or the Trotskyist groups, that their origin was not even political. They sprang up spontaneously from the peasant masses, who, spurred on by the immemorial abuse under which they lived, by their hunger for land, and, to some degree, by the heated-up atmosphere of slogans and proclamations in favor of social justice that prevailed in Peru then — after the collapse of the Odría dictatorship — decided one day to take action. Uchubamba? Names of other communities — those that took over lands and were kicked out again, bearing their dead and wounded, or still others, which managed to keep the land — whirl around in my memory: Algolán, in Cerro de Pasco; the Valle de la Convención communities, in Cuzco. But Uchubamba, in Junín?

“Yes, sir,” said Vallejos, exultant that he could surprise him that much. “Indians with light skin and blue eyes, more gringo than either of us.”

“First, the Incas conquered them and made them work under the aegis of the Quipumayocs of Cuzco,” lectured Shorty Ubilluz. “Later the Spaniards took away their best lands and made them go up to work in the mines. That is, to die in the mines after a little while, with their lungs turned to sieves. The ones that were left in Uchubamba they gave over for ‘Christianizing’ to the Peláez Rioja family, who bled them dry for three centuries.”

“But, you see, they couldn’t finish them off,” concluded Vallejos.

They had left Ubilluz’s house to take a walk, and they were sitting on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. Over their heads, they had a marvelous silence and thousands of stars. Mayta forgot the cold and the mountain sickness. He was in a state of exaltation. He was trying to remember the great peasant uprisings: Túpac Amaru, Juan Bustamante, and Atusparia. And so, though the centuries passed, and they went on being exploited and humiliated, the communities of Uchubamba had gone on dreaming about the lands they had lost and had gone on asking to have them returned. First, they asked the snakes and the birds. Later, the Blessed Virgin and the saints. After that, they asked all the courts in the region, in lawsuits they always lost. But now, just a few months or weeks ago, if what he had heard was true, they had taken the decisive step. One fine day, they had simply moved onto the lands with their hogs, their dogs, their burros, and their horses, saying, “We want what is rightfully ours.” All that had happened, and you, Mayta, didn’t you know about it?

“Not a single word,” Mayta said softly, rubbing his arms, goose-bumpy from the cold. “Not even a rumor. In Lima, we knew nothing about it.”

He spoke while gazing at the sky, amazed at the brightness of the stars in that jet-black, sparkling dome, and by the images that what he was learning called forth in his mind. Ubilluz offered him a cigarette, and the lieutenant lit it for him.

“It happened just as I’m telling you,” affirmed Vallejos. “They took over the Aína ranch, and the government had to send the Guardia Civil to get them out. The company that left Huancayo took a week to get to Uchubamba. They got them out, but only by resorting to shooting. Several dead and wounded, of course. But the community is still stirred up and unsettled. Now they know what they have to do.”

“It’s not that the Uchubamba community means to fight,” Shorty Ubilluz said. “They’re fighting already; they’ve already started the revolution. What we are going to do is simply channel it.”

The cold came and went, like vertigo. Mayta took a deep drag. “Does your information come from a good source?”

“As good a source as myself.” Vallejos laughed. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

“We’ve been there,” Shorty Ubilluz corrected him in his pompously proper enunciation. “We have seen and we have conversed with them. And we have left all things in readiness.”

Mayta didn’t know what to say. Now he was sure that Vallejos was not the green, impulsive boy he thought he was at the beginning, but someone much more serious, solid, and complex, with more foresight, with his feet solidly on the ground. He had gone much further than he had said in Lima, he had more people, and his plan had more ramifications than Mayta had imagined. It was a pity Anatolio hadn’t come. So the two of them could exchange ideas, reflect — to straighten out between them that confusion of fantasy and enthusiasm which was eating him up. What a shame that all the comrades from the RWP(T) weren’t here so they could see that it was no pipe dream but a burning reality. Although it still wasn’t 10 p.m., the three seemed to be the only people in Jauja.

“I hope you realize that I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you the Andes are ripe.” Vallejos laughed again. “Just as I told you again and again, brother — a volcano. And we’re gonna make it erupt, goddamn it!”

“Of course, we didn’t go out to Uchubamba empty-handed.” Professor Ubilluz again lowers his voice and looks around as if that episode could still get him into trouble. “We brought three sub-machine guns and a few Mausers the lieutenant got God knows where. Also first-aid equipment. We left it all well hidden in waterproof wrappings.”

He falls silent, to take a sip of his drink, and whispers that for what he’s telling me we could both be shot in the twinkling of an eye.

“As you can see, it wasn’t as harebrained as everyone thought,” he adds once the echo of the metallic passage of the armored car fades in the night: we’ve heard it going by the house all afternoon at regular intervals. “It was something planned objectively, scientifically, and it would have worked if Vallejos hadn’t made the stupid mistake of moving the date forward. We worked with the patience of ants, a real spiderweb. Wasn’t the area well chosen? Aren’t the guerrillas today lords and masters of the region? The army doesn’t even dare go there. Vietnam and El Salvador are nothing, compared to this. Your health!”

Out there, a man, a group of men, an entire detachment was a needle in a haystack. And under the mantle of glittering stars, Mayta saw it: thick, leafy, closed, hieroglyphic; and he saw himself, next to Vallejos and Ubilluz and an army of shadows, traversing it over sinuous paths. It wasn’t the Amazonian flatlands but an undulating forest, the brow of a mountainous forest, with slopes, gulches, gorges, narrow passes, defiles, ideal pitfalls where ambushes could be set up, where the enemy’s communications could be cut, where he could be dizzied, confused, driven mad, where he could be attacked when he least expected it, where he would be forced to disperse, to dilute his strength, to atomize himself in the indescribable labyrinth. His beard had grown, he was thin, in his eyes there was an unconquerable resolve, and his fingers had grown callused from squeezing the trigger, lighting fuses, and throwing dynamite. Any sign of depression he might feel would disappear as soon as he saw how new militants joined every day, how the front widened, and how there, in the cities, the workers, servants, students, and poor employees began understanding that the revolution was for them, belonged to them. He felt an anguished need to have Anatolio near, to be able to talk with him all night. He thought: With him here, I wouldn’t feel this cold.

“Would you mind if we spoke a bit more about Mayta, Professor? Going back to that trip you all made in March of’58. He’d met you and the joeboys; he knew that you had contact with the Uchubamba communities and that it was there that Vallejos thought he would launch the guerrilla war. Did he do anything more, did he learn anything more on that first trip?”

He looks at me with his beady, disenchanted eyes as he raises his glass of pisco. He smacks his lips, satisfied. How can he make that little drink last so long? He must sip a drop at a time. “When this bottle’s empty, I know I’ll never have another drop until I die,” he says softly. “Because things will get worse and worse.” Since I stopped drinking a long time ago, the pisco goes to my head. My thinking’s out of kilter; I’m dizzy, just as Mayta must have been with his mountain sickness.

“The poor guy got the surprise of his life,” he says, in the contemptuous tone he uses when he talks about Mayta. Is it just resentment of Mayta, or is it something more general and abstract, a provincial’s resentment of everything and everyone from Lima, the capital, the coast? “He came here with all the experience of a revolutionary who’s already been to jail, sure he was going to take over, and he found that everything had already been taken care of, and well taken care of.”

He sighs, with an expression of grief over the pisco that’s running out, over his lost youth, over that guy from the coast he and Vallejos had taught a lesson to, over the hunger everyone’s experiencing, and the uncertainty everyone’s living through. In the short time we’ve been talking, I’ve come to realize that he’s a man full of contradictions, difficult to understand. Sometimes he gets excited and justifies his revolutionary past. Other times, he blurts out remarks such as, “At any moment, the guerrillas will come in here, pass sentence on me, and hang a ‘Stinking Traitor’ sign around my neck. Or a death squad will charge in, cut the balls off my corpse, and stick them in my mouth. That’s what they do around here — in Lima, too?” Sometimes he gets angry at me: “How can you go on writing novels in this nightmare?” Will he ever go back to what matters most to me? Yes: there he goes.

“Of course I can tell you what he did, said, saw, and heard on that first trip. He stuck to me like a leech. We organized a couple of meetings for him, first with the joeboys and later with comrades who had seen fighting. Miners from La Oroya, from Casapalca, from Morococha. Men from Jauja who had gone to work in the mines of the great imperialist octopus of the time, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. They would come back for holidays and occasionally for weekends.”

“Were they also committed to the project?”

Vallejos and Ubilluz said they were, but Mayta wouldn’t have sworn to it. There were five of them. They had talked the following morning, also in Shorty’s house, almost two hours straight. He thought the meeting was terrific and that communication with all of them was easy — above all, with the Parrot, the best-read and most politicized of the bunch — but at no time did any of them say they would give up their jobs and leave their homes to fight. At the same time, Mayta wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t do so. They’re sensible, he thought. They were workers and knew what they were risking. They were seeing him for the first time. Wasn’t it logical they would be cautious? They seemed to be old friends of Ubilluz. At least one of them, the one with a mouth full of gold teeth, the Parrot, had been a militant in APRA. Now he said he was a socialist. When they talked about the gringos in Cerro de Pasco, they were decidedly anti-imperialist. When they talked about salaries, accidents, the diseases they contracted in the tunnels, they were absolutely revolutionary. But every time Mayta tried to get them to say exactly how they would participate in the uprising, their answers were vague. When they went from the general to the specific, their resolve seemed to weaken.

“We also went to Ricrán,” adds Professor Ubilluz, dropping out his pearls one by one. “I brought him myself, in a truck that belonged to one of my nephews, because Vallejos had to stay at the jail that day. Ricrán, which has now disappeared. Do you know how many villages like Ricrán have been destroyed in this war? A judge was telling me the other day that, according to a colonel on the General Staff, the secret statistics of the armed forces list half a million dead, since all this started. Yes, I brought him to Ricrán. Four hours of bouncing around, climbing up to a valley about twenty-five hundred feet above sea level. Poor Trotskyite! His nose began to bleed, and his handkerchief was soaked. He just wasn’t cut out for high altitudes. The gorges scared the hell out of him. He got dizzy just looking, I swear.”

He thought he would die, fall off a cliff, that his nose would never stop bleeding. Nevertheless, that twenty-four-hour trip to the Ricrán district, way out there in a corner of the mountains, was the most stimulating thing that he did in Jauja. A land of condors, snow, clear sky, jagged, ocher peaks. He had thought: “Incredible how they can live at these altitudes, dominate these mountains, sow and cultivate on these slopes, build a civilization in this wasteland. The men to whom Shorty Ubilluz introduced him — a dozen subsistence farmers and artisans — were highly motivated. He was able to communicate with them because they all spoke Spanish. They asked him lots of questions, and infused with enthusiasm, he gave them even more assurances than he gave the joeboys about the support of the progressive sectors in Lima. How encouraging it was to see the naturalness with which these humble men, some wearing sandals, talked about the revolution. As if it were imminent, concrete, decided, irreversible. There were no euphemisms at all in their conversation: they talked about arms, hideouts, and their participation in the action from day one on. But Mayta did have one difficult moment. What help would the U.S.S.R. give them? He didn’t have the heart to talk to them about the betrayed revolution, the Stalinist bureaucratization, about Trotsky. He felt it wouldn’t be prudent to confuse them with all that stuff just yet. The U.S.S.R. and the other socialist countries would help, but later, when the Peruvian revolution was a fact. Before, they would lend only their moral support — words, not deeds. The same as some Peruvian progressives. They would extend a hand only when all the others pressed them to do it. But they would be pressed, because the revolution, once in motion, would be unstoppable.

“In sum, Ricrán left you with your mouth hanging open,” Vallejos said. “I knew it would, brother.”

They were in front of the train station, in a small restaurant with oilcloth on the tables and calico curtains on the windows: the Duckpull. From their table, Mayta could see the mountains, on the other side of the railing and the tracks. They were turning black and gray after having been ocher and golden. They had been there for several hours, ever since lunch. The owner knew Ubilluz and Vallejo and would come over to chat with them. Whenever he did, they would change the subject, and Mayta would ask about Jauja. Where did that name “Duckpull” come from? Because of a local game played on the festival of January 20 in the Yauyos neighborhood: they would dance the pandilla and they would hang up a live duck that horsemen and dancers would try to decapitate by grabbing at it and pulling.

“Lucky times those, when there were ducks to decapitate in the Duckpull festival,” growls Professor Ubilluz. “We thought we had touched bottom. And yet there were ducks within reach of anyone’s budget, and people in Jauja ate twice a day, something that children today can’t even believe.” He sighs again. “It was a beautiful festival, more fun and more to drink even than during Carnival.”

“All we ask is that when we get moving, the party comes through for us,” Vallejos said. “They’re revolutionaries, right? I’ve read every single Workers Voice you gave me, backwards and forwards. Every single article is about the revolution. Well, I hope they’ll come across with actions to back up their words.”

Mayta became nervous. It was the first time Vallejos had let him know he had doubts about the support of the RWP(T). Mayta hadn’t mentioned a word about the internal debates concerning the project and concerning Vallejos himself.

“The party will come through. But it has to be sure this is a serious, well-planned action that is likely to succeed.”

“Well, it was during those days that our Trotskyite saw that our project was neither hastily organized nor mad.” Professor Ubilluz returns to the subject. “He just couldn’t believe that we had prepared things that well.”

“It’s true, it’s more serious than I’d thought.” Mayta turned to Vallejos. “You know you completely faked me out? You had a network of insurgents, made up of peasants, workers, and students. I tip my hat to you, comrade.”

They put on the lights in the Duckpull. Mayta saw that buzzing insects were beginning to smash into the bulb that swayed over them, hanging from a long wire.

“I, too, had to take precautions, as you did with me,” said the lieutenant, speaking suddenly with that aplomb which, when it emerged, made him into another man. “I had to be sure I could confide in you.”

“You learned the lesson well.” Mayta smiled at him. He paused to take a deep breath. Today the mountain sickness bothered him less. He was able to sleep for a few hours, after having had insomnia for two days. Were the mountains accepting him? “Two more comrades, Anatolio and Jacinto, will be coming next week. Their report will be decisive as far as the party’s going all the way is concerned. I’m optimistic. When they see what I’ve seen, they’ll understand that there’s no reason to hold back.”

It was here, no doubt about it, during his first visit to Jauja, that the idea that brought him so many problems lodged in his head. Did he share it with them in the Duckpull? Did he unfold it in a low voice, choosing his words carefully so he wouldn’t upset them with revelations about the divisions in what they thought was a united left? Professor Ubilluz assures me he didn’t say anything about it. “Even though this body of mine is the worse for wear, my memory is still good.” Mayta never told him about his intention to involve other groups or parties. Could he have told only Vallejos about it? In any case, it’s certain that he had already decided on the plan in Jauja, because Mayta was not impulsive. If he went to see Blacquer and, probably, the people from the other RWP when he went back to Lima, it’s because he had seriously thought things over in the mountains.

It was on one of those insomniac, heart-pounding nights in the boardinghouse on Tarapacá Street, as he listened to his friend’s tranquil breathing and his own roaring pulse. Wasn’t what was at risk too important for just the tiny RWP(T) to take charge of the uprising? It was cold, and he curled up under the blanket. With his hand on his chest, he felt his heart beat. The logic was crystal-clear. The divisions on the left derived to a large extent from the absence of real action, from their sterile gesturing: that’s what made them splinter and eat each other alive — that, even more than ideological controversies. Guerrilla fighting could change the situation and bring together the genuine revolutionaries by showing them just how byzantine their differences were. Yes, action would be the remedy for the party politics that resulted from political impotence. Action would break the vicious circle, would open the eyes of the opposing comrades. Someone would have to be daring and rise to the occasion. “What do Pabloism and Anti-Pabloism matter, when the revolution is at stake, comrades?” He imagined in the cold of the Jauja night the sky spattered with stars, and he thought: This clear air is inspiring you, Mayta. He dropped his hand from his chest to his penis and, thinking about Anatolio, began to rub it.

“He didn’t tell you that the plan was too important for it to be the exclusive monopoly of a Trotskyist splinter group?” I insist. “Why would he have bothered trying to get help from the other RWP, and even from the Communist Party?”

“He never said a word,” Professor Ubilluz answers quickly. “He told us nothing about it and tried to conceal from us the fact that the left was divided and that the RWP(T) was insignificant. He deceived us, deliberately and treacherously. He talked about the party. The party this and the party that. I thought he was talking about the Communist Party, which would have meant thousands of workers and students.”

In the distance, we hear a flurry of rifle shots. Or is it a clap of thunder? We hear it again in a few seconds, and remain silent, listening. We hear another salvo, even farther off, and the professor says softly, “It’s dynamite caps the guerrilla fighters set off out in the hills. To break the nerve of the garrison soldiers. Psychological warfare.” No: it was ducks. A flock flew over the reed patches, quacking. They had gone out for a walk, and Mayta had his bag in his hand. Within a short hour, he would be on the return train to Lima.

“There’s room for everyone, of course,” Vallejos said. “The more, the merrier. Of course. There will be enough weapons for all who want to fight. All I ask is that you carry out your negotiations fast.”

They were walking on the outskirts of the city, and in the distance some roofs with red tiles glowed. The wind sang through the eucalyptus trees and the willows.

“We have all the time we need,” said Mayta. “No need to rush things.”

“Yes, there is,” said Vallejos dryly. He turned to look at him, and there was a blind resolve in his eyes. Mayta thought: There’s something else, I’m going to find out something else. “The two leaders of the Uchubamba land seizure, the ones who led the takeover of the Aína hacienda, are here.”

“In Jauja?” asked Mayta. “Why haven’t you introduced them to me? I would have wanted to meet them.”

“They’re in jail and are not receiving guests.” Vallejos smiled. “That’s right — prisoners.”

They had been brought in by the Civil Guard patrol that had gone out to undo the land takeover. But it wasn’t certain the two would remain in Jauja for long. At any moment, an order could come, transferring them to Huancayo or Lima. And the whole plan depended to a great extent on them. They would lead them from Jauja to Uchubamba quickly and surely, and they would guarantee the collaboration of the communities. Did he see why there was so little time?

“Alejandro Condori and Zenón Gonzales,” I tell him, naming names before he has a chance to do it. Ubilluz gapes. The light from the bulb has faded and we are almost in darkness.

“Right, those are their names. You are very well informed.”

Am I? I think I’ve read everything that came out in newspapers and magazines about this story, and I’ve talked with an infinite number of participants and witnesses. But the more I investigate, the less I feel I know what really happened. Because, with each new fact, more contradictions, conjectures, mysteries, and incongruities crop up. How did it happen that those two peasant leaders, from a remote community in the jungle region of Junín, ended up in the Jauja jail?

“A fantastic accident,” Vallejos explained. “I had nothing to do with it. This was the jail they were sent to because this is where they would come before the prosecution. My sister would say that God is helping us, see?”

“Were they in with you before they were captured?”

“In a general way,” says Ubilluz. “We spoke with them during the trip we made to Uchubamba, and they helped us hide the weapons. But they only came in with us all the way in the month they were imprisoned. They really got close to their jailer. That is, the lieutenant. I think he didn’t tell them the whole plan until the thing blew open.”

That part of the story, the end, makes Professor Ubilluz uncomfortable, even though so much time has passed. About that part he knows only what he’s heard, and his role is both disputed and doubtful. We hear another volley, far off. “They may be shooting the accomplices of the terrorists,” he says, grunting. This is the time they usually choose to take them from their homes, in a jeep or an armored car, and bring them to the outskirts. The corpses turn up the next day on the roads. And suddenly, with no transition, he asks me, “Does it make any sense to be writing a novel with Peru in this condition and Peruvians all living on borrowed time?” Does it make any sense? I tell him it certainly does, since I’m doing it.

There’s something depressing about Professor Ubilluz. Everything he says has a sad cast to it. Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I can’t get rid of the notion that he’s always on the defensive and that everything he tells me is aimed at some kind of self-justification. But doesn’t everyone do the same thing? Why is it I have no confidence in him? The fact that he’s still alive? That I’ve heard so much gossip and so many rumors about him? But am I not also aware of the fact that in political controversies this country was always a garbage heap, until it became the cemetery it is today? Don’t I know the infinite horrors which have no basis in fact that enemies ascribe to each other? No, that isn’t what seems so pitiful to me in him, but, simply, his decadence, his bitterness, the quarantine in which he lives.

“So then, in short, Mayta’s part in the plan of action was nil,” I say.

“To be fair, let’s say minimal,” he corrects me, shrugging his shoulders. He yawns, and his face fills with wrinkles. “With him or without him, it would have turned out the same. We let him in because we thought he was a political and union leader of some importance. We needed the support of workers and revolutionaries in the rest of the country. That was to be Mayta’s function. But it turned out he didn’t even represent his own group, the RWP(T). Politically speaking, he was a total orphan.”

“A total orphan.” The expression rings in my ear as I bid Professor Ubilluz goodbye and go out onto the deserted streets of Jauja, heading toward the Paca Inn, under a sky glistening with stars. The professor tells me that, if I’m afraid of such a long walk, I can sleep in his tiny living room. But I prefer to leave: I need air and solitude. I have to quell the static inside my head and put some distance between me and a person whose mere presence depresses my work. The volleys have ceased, and it’s as if there were a curfew, because there’s not a soul around. I walk down the middle of the street, banging my heels, making every effort to be noticed, so that if a patrol comes along, they won’t think I’m trying to sneak by. The sky glows — an unusual sight for someone from Lima, where you almost never see the stars through the mist. The cold chaps my lips. I don’t feel as hungry as I did in the afternoon.

A total orphan. That’s what he became, by being a militant in smaller and smaller, ever more radical sects, looking for an ideological purity he never found. He was the supreme orphan when he threw himself into this extraordinary conspiracy to start a war in the heights of Junín, with a twenty-two-year-old second-lieutenant jailer and a secondary-school teacher, both of them totally disconnected from the Peruvian left. It certainly was fascinating. It kept on fascinating me for a year after I made the investigation, just as much as it fascinated me that day when I found out in Paris what had happened in Jauja … The wretched light of the widely spaced streetlights wraps around the old façades of the houses, some with enormous gateways and ironclad doors, wrought-iron bars on their windows, and shuttered balconies. Behind all that, I can imagine entrance-ways, patios with plants and trees, and a life once upon a time ordered and monotonous and now, doubtless, beside itself with fear.

In that first visit to Jauja, nevertheless, the total orphan must have felt exultation and happiness such as he never felt before. He was going to act, the revolt was becoming tangible: faces, places, dialogues, concrete action. As if suddenly his whole life as a militant, a conspirator, a persecuted individual, a political prisoner was justified and at the same time catapulted into a higher reality. Besides, it all coincided with the attainment of something which until a week ago had seemed a wild dream. Hadn’t he dreamed? No, it was as true and concrete as the imminent revolt: he had had in his arms the boy he had desired for so many years. He had made him experience pleasure and he had experienced pleasure himself. He had heard him whimper under his caresses. He felt a burning in his testicles, the prelude to an erection, and he thought: Have you gone crazy? Here? Right in the station? Here, in front of Vallejos? He thought: It’s happiness. You have never felt like this before, comrade.

Nothing’s open, and I remember from a previous visit, years ago, before all this, the eternal shops of Jauja at dusk, illuminated with kerosene lamps: the tailor shops, the candlemaker’s shop, the barbershops, the jewelers, the bakeries, the hat stores. And also that hanging from the balconies you could sometimes see rows of rabbits drying in the sun. Suddenly I’m hungry again, and my mouth waters. I think about Mayta. Excited, happy, he got ready to return to Lima, certain that his comrades in the RWP(T) would approve the plan of action without reservations. He thought: I’ll see Anatolio, we’ll spend the night talking, I’ll tell him everything, we’ll laugh, he’ll help me to get the others excited. And later … There is a placid silence, the kind you find in books by the Spanish writer Azorín, broken from time to time by the cry of a night bird, invisible under the eaves of a house.

Now I’m leaving the town. This is where it took place, this is where they did it, in these little streets, so tranquil, so timeless then, in that plaza of such beautiful proportions, which twenty-five years ago had a weeping willow and a border of cypresses. Here in this land where it would be difficult to imagine that things could be worse, that hunger, murder, and the danger of disintegration would reach the extremes of today. Here, before returning to Lima, when they said goodbye in the station, the total orphan indicated to the impulsive second lieutenant that in order to give a greater impetus to the start of the rebellion he should consider a few armed acts of propaganda.

“And just what is that?” Vallejos asked.

The train was in the station and people were shoving their way on. They talked near the stairs, taking advantage of the last minutes.

“Translated into Catholic language, it means to preach by example,” said Mayta. “Actions that educate the masses, that take hold in their imagination, that give them ideas, show them their own power. One armed act of propaganda is worth hundreds of issues of the Workers Voice.”

They were speaking in low tones, but there was no danger of their being heard, because of the pandemonium all around them.

“And you want more armed acts of propaganda than taking over the Jauja jail and seizing the weapons? More than seizing the police station and the Civil Guard post?”

“Yes, I want more than that,” said Mayta.

Capturing those places was a belligerent, military act, which would seem like a traditional military coup because a lieutenant was doing it. It wasn’t sufficiently explicit from the ideological point of view. He would have to take maximum advantage of those first hours. Newspapers and radios would be reporting nonstop. Everything they did in those first hours would reverberate and remain engraved in the memory of the people. So he would have to take full advantage and carry out acts that would have a symbolic charge to them, whose message would be both about revolution and about the class struggle, which would reach the militants, students, intellectuals, workers, and peasants.

“You know something?” said Vallejos. “I think you’re right.”

“The important thing is how much time we have.”

“A few hours. With the telephone and telegraph lines cut and the radio out of commission, the only way to sound the alarm is for someone to go to Huancayo. While they go and come back and mobilize the police — let’s say, five hours.”

“More than enough for some didactic action,” said Mayta. “Action that will show the masses that our movement is against bourgeois power, imperialism, and capitalism.”

“Now you’re making a speech.” Vallejos laughed, hugging him. “Get on, get on. And now that you’re going back, don’t forget the surprise I gave you. You’re going to need it.”

“The plan was perfect,” Professor Ubilluz said several times during our chat. What went wrong then, Professor? “That it was changed, rushed, turned upside down.” Who did all that? “I couldn’t tell you, exactly. Vallejos, naturally. But perhaps influenced by the Trotskyite. I’ll wonder about that until I die.” A doubt, he says, that has eaten away at his life, that is still eating away at it, even more than the infamous calumnies against him, even more than being on the insurgents’ blaklist. I have gone halfway back to the inn without running into a patrol, armored car, man, or beast: only invisible chirps. The stars and the moon render visible the quiet, bluish countryside, the fields, the eucalyptus trees, the mountains, the small houses along the road sealed up with mud and rocks, just like those in the city. The waters of the lake, in a night like this, should be worth seeing. When I get to the inn, I’ll go out to look at them. The walk has restored my enthusiasm for my book. I’ll go out on the terrace and the dock, no stray or intended shots will interrupt me. And I shall think, remember, and imagine until, just before dawn, I give form to this episode in the real life of Alejandro Mayta. A whistle blew and the train began to move.