The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Six

“It was the most terrifying encounter I ever had in my life,” says Blacquer. “I stood there blinking, not really believing he was actually standing there. Was it really Mayta? ‘Yes, it’s me,’ said Mayta quickly. ‘Can I come in? It’s urgent.’”

“Can you imagine me letting a Trot in?” Blacquer smiles, remembering the shiver that ran down his spine that morning when he found himself face to face with that apparition. “I don’t think you and I have anything to say to each other, Mayta.”

“It’s important, it’s urgent, it goes way beyond our differences.” He spoke vehemently, and seemed not to have slept or washed. You could see he was really excited. “If you’re afraid you’ll be compromised if you let me in, we can go anywhere you like.”

“We saw each other three times,” Blacquer adds. “The first two were before that meeting of the RWP(T) when they threw him out for being a traitor. I mean, for coming to see me. Me, a Stalinist.”

He smiles again, exposing his tobacco-stained teeth, and behind his thick glasses his myopic eyes look me up and down disagreeably. We are in the convalescent Café Haiti in Miraflores, which still hasn’t been put back together after the bombing: its windows still have no glass in them, the counter and the floor are both still smashed and scorched. But out here in the street you don’t see all that. All around us, people are talking about the same thing, as if everyone sitting at the twenty or so tables is having the same conversation. Could it be true that Cuban troops had crossed the Bolivian border? That for the last three days the rebels, along with the Cuban and Bolivian “volunteers” who support them, have pushed the army back? That the Junta has warned the United States that if it doesn’t intervene, the insurgents will take Arequipa in a matter of days and from there will be able to proclaim the Socialist Republic of Peru? But Blacquer and I skirt these momentous issues and chat about that insignificant, forgotten episode of a quarter century ago, the key to my novel.

“I really was one,” he adds after a while. “Like everybody else at that time. Weren’t you, after all? Weren’t you moved by the hagiography Barbusse wrote about Stalin? Didn’t you know by heart the poem Neruda wrote in his honor? Didn’t you have a poster with the drawing Picasso did of him? Didn’t you weep when he died?”

Blacquer was my first teacher of Marxism — thirty-five years ago — in a secret study group organized by the Young Communists in a house over in Pueblo Libre. At that time he was a Stalinist; I mean, a machine programmed to repeat official statements, an automaton who spoke in stereotypes. Now he is a man who has grown old, who survives by working in a print shop. Is he still a militant? Perhaps, but he’s nothing more than an outsider as far as the party is concerned: he’ll never rise in the hierarchy. The proof is the fact that he’s here with me right out in broad daylight — well, it’s a gray day with lowering, ashen clouds that themselves look like bad omens, in keeping with the rumors about the internationalization of the war in the south. No one’s hunting him down, while even the lowest-level leaders of the Communist Party — or of any party on the extreme left — are in hiding, in jail, or dead. I have only heard about his confused history, and I don’t intend to find out about it now. (If the rumors turn out to be true and the war really is growing more general, I’ll barely have time to finish my novel. If the war reaches the streets of Lima, my own front door, I doubt I’ll be able to do it.)

What I want to hear is his account of those three meetings they had twenty-five years ago on the eve of the Jauja uprising. They were opposites: the Stalinist and the Trotskyist. But I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that Blacquer, who seemed destined by fate to reach the Central Committee and perhaps to be head of the Communist Party, is today a nobody. It was something that happened to him in some Central European country — Hungary or Czechoslovakia — where he was sent to study and where he got involved in some mess or other. From the sotto voce accusations that circulated at the time — the usual: factional activity, ultra-individualism, petit-bourgeois pride, lack of discipline, sabotaging the party line — it was impossible to know what he had said or done to deserve excommunication. Had he committed the ultimate crime — criticizing the U.S.S.R.? If he did, why did he do it? All we know is that he was expelled for a few years, and lived in the infinitely sad limbo of purged communists — no one can be more an orphan than a militant expelled from the party, not even a priest who puts aside his vows — where he deteriorated in all possible ways, until, it seems, he could return, having gone through, I suppose, the obligatory rite of self-criticism. Coming back to the flock didn’t help him very much, judging by what’s become of him since. As far as I know, the party had him correcting the proofs of Unity as well as some pamphlets and leaflets. At least, that is, until the insurrection took on the dimensions it has now and the communists were declared outlaws and began to be persecuted or assassinated by the death squads. But it’s hardly likely that anyone, except through some monumental error or stupidity, is going to jail or murder the ruined and useless man Blacquer has become. His acid memories have probably ended his illusions. Every time I’ve seen him over the past few years — always in a group; this is the first time in ten or fifteen years that we’ve spoken alone — he’s impressed me as being a bitter man interested in nothing.

“They didn’t expel Mayta from the RWP(T),” I correct him. “He resigned. At that last session, to be precise. His letter of resignation appeared in Workers Voice (T). I clipped it out.”

“They threw him out,” he firmly corrects me in turn. “I know all about that Trot meeting, just as if I’d been there myself. Mayta told me all about it the last time we met. The third time. I’d like more coffee, if you don’t mind.”

Coffee and soda is all anyone can have, now that even saltines are rationed. Actually, they’re not supposed to serve more than one cup of coffee to a customer. But no one pays much attention to that law. The people around us are very excited, all talking loudly. Even though I try not to be distracted, I find myself listening to a young man with glasses: at the Ministry of the Exterior, they estimate that “several thousand” Cubans and Bolivians have crossed the border. The girl with him opens her eyes wide: “Could Fidel Castro be with them?” “No, he’s too old for that rough stuff,” the boy says, smashing her illusions. The barefoot, ragged boys in the Diagonal attack every car like a pack of dogs, offering to wash it, guard it, scrub the white-walls. Others wander from table to table, offering to make the customers’ shoes shine like mirrors. (They say the bomb that exploded here was placed by boys like these.) There are also clusters of women who assault the passersby and the drivers (when the lights turn red) to sell them blackmarket cigarettes. With the scarcities we’re forced to put up with, the one thing we don’t lack is cigarettes. Why doesn’t the blackmarket sell preserves and crackers, something we can use to stave off the hunger we feel when we wake up and when we go to sleep?

“I’ll tell you all about it,” said Mayta, panting. He spoke calmly and methodically, and Blacquer listened politely. He told him what he wanted to tell him. Had he acted properly or not? He didn’t know and didn’t care. It was as if all the fatigue of a sleepless night had suddenly welled up in him. “See? I had a good reason for knocking at your door.”

Blacquer remained silent, looking at him, his cigarette burning down between his thin, yellowed fingers. The little room led several lives — office, dining room, foyer — and was stuffed with furniture, chairs, a few books. The greenish wallpaper was water-stained. As he was speaking, Mayta had heard the voice of a woman and the crying of a child coming from upstairs. Blacquer remained so still that Mayta would have thought he was asleep, if it weren’t that he had his myopic eyes fixed on him. This sector of Jesús María was quiet, devoid of cars.

“As a provocation directed against the party, it couldn’t be any cruder,” he said finally, his voice devoid of inflection. The ash from his cigarette fell to the floor, and Blacquer stepped on it. “I thought you Trots were a little subtler with your tricks. You needn’t have bothered to visit me, Mayta.”

He wasn’t surprised: Blacquer had said, more or less, what he was supposed to say. Mayta admitted to himself that he was right: a militant should be suspicious, and Blacquer was a good militant. This he knew from the time they were in jail together. Before he answered, Mayta lit a cigarette and yawned. Upstairs, the child began to cry again. The woman quieted him down, in low tones.

“Just remember, I’m not here to ask your party for anything. I just wanted to inform you. This goes beyond our differences and concerns all revolutionaries.”

“Even the Stalinists who betrayed the October Revolution?” asked Blacquer quietly.

“Even the Stalinists who betrayed the October Revolution.” Mayta nodded. His tone changed. “I thought about taking this step all night before actually doing it. I’m as suspicious of you as you are of me. Don’t you realize that? Do you think I don’t know what I’m risking? I’m putting a powerful weapon in your hands and in the hands of your party. Nevertheless, here I am. Don’t talk about provocations even you don’t believe in. Just think a little.”

This is one of the things I understand least in this story, the strangest episode. Wasn’t it absurd to reveal details about an uprising to a political enemy, to whom — this was the icing on the cake — he was not even going to propose a pact, a joint action, from whom he was not going to ask a thing? What sense was there in all that? “Early this morning, over that radio over there, they said that red flags have been flying since last night over Puno, and that before tomorrow they will be flying over Arequipa and Cuzco,” someone says. “Fabrications,” someone else counters.

“When he came to see me, I also thought it didn’t make any sense,” agrees Blacquer. “First, I thought it was a trap. Or that Mayta had gotten involved in something, was sorry he ever did it, and was now trying to weasel out by creating complications and difficulties … Later on, after what happened, it was all clear.”

“The only clear thing in all this is a knife in our backs,” roared Comrade Pallardi. “To ask for help from the Stalinists for this adventure isn’t merely indiscipline. It’s purely and simply betrayal.”

“I’ll explain it to you all over again, if I have to,” Mayta interrupted him, without getting upset. He was sitting on a pile of back numbers of Workers Voice and was leaning on the poster with Trotsky’s face on it. Within a few seconds, an electric tension had galvanized the garage on Jirón Zorritos. “But before I do, comrade, clear something up for me. When you say adventure, are you referring to the revolution?”

Blacquer slowly savors his watery coffee and runs the tip of his tongue over his cracked lips. He narrows his eyes and remains silent, seeming to reflect on the dialogue taking place at a nearby table: “If this news is right, tomorrow or the day after, the war will be right here in Lima.” “Do you really think so, Pacho? A war would really be somethin’, doncha think?” The afternoon passes and the automobile traffic intensifies. The Diagonal is bumper-to-bumper. The beggar kids and the women selling cigarettes have also become more numerous. “I’m happy the Cubans and Bolivians have crossed the border,” exclaims an irritable guy. “Now the Marines in Ecuador have no reason to stay out. It may well be that they’re already in Piura or Chiclayo. I hope they kill the people they have to kill and that they put an end to all this once and for all, goddamn it.” I barely hear him, because, in fact, at this very moment his bloody speculation has less life to it than those two meetings in that Lima of fewer cars, fewer beggars, and fewer blackmarket dealers, where the things that are happening now would seem impossible: Mayta going to share his plot with his Stalinist enemy, Mayta fighting it out with his comrades in the final session of the Central Committee of the RWP(T).

“Coming to see me was the only sensible thing he did in that entire crazy business he got involved in,” adds Blacquer. He’s taken off his glasses to clean them, and he looks blind. “If the guerrilla war really took off, they would have needed urban support. Networks that would send them medicine and information, that could hide and nurse the wounded and recruit new fighters. Networks that would broadcast the actions of the advance guard. Who was going to create those networks? The twenty-odd Peruvian Trots?”

“Actually, there are only seven of us,” I correct him.

Had Blacquer understood him? He was still as a statue again. Leaning his head forward, realizing that he was sweating, trying to find the words that fatigue and worry were stealing from him, hearing from time to time, in that invisible upper floor, the child and the woman, I explained it to him again. No one was asking the militants of the Communist Party to go out to the mountains — he had taken the precaution not to mention to him Vallejos, Jauja, or any date whatsoever — or that they give up any of their theories, ideas, prejudices, dogmas, anything. Only that they be informed and alert. Soon they would be in a situation where they’d have only two alternatives: put their convictions into practice or renounce them. Soon they would have to show the masses they really wanted to topple the exploitive system and replace it with a revolutionary worker-peasant regime. Or they would show that all they had been saying was just rhetoric: they could vegetate in the shadow of the powerful ally that had adopted them and wait for the revolution to fall on Peru someday like a gift from heaven.

“When you attack us, then you seem like your old self,” said Blacquer. “What are you asking for? Make your point.”

“All I’m asking is that you be ready, nothing more.” I thought: Will I lose my voice? I had never been so exhausted. I had to make a huge effort to articulate every syllable. Overhead, the child began to wail again. “Because, when we act, there is going to be a massive counterstrike. And of course you all won’t be exempt from the repression.”

“Of course,” muttered Blacquer. “If what you’re telling me isn’t a lie, the government, the press, and everybody else will say that it was planned and executed by us, that it was paid for with Moscow gold and carried out under orders from Moscow. Right?”

“That’s probably the way it’ll be.” I nod. The child was crying even more loudly, and its wailing began to rattle me. “But now that you’ve been warned, you can take precautions. Besides …”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open, without the spirit to finish, and for the first time since my talk with Blacquer began, I hesitated. Sweat was pouring down my face, my pupils were dilated, and my hands shook. Adventure and betrayal?

“They’re the words that sum up what you’ve done, and I stand by them,” said Comrade Carlos in a flat voice. “Comrade Pallardi has simply spoken the truth.”

“Stick to the Vallejos business for now,” the general secretary chided him. “We said we would discuss the Jauja matter first. The meeting between Comrade Mayta and Blacquer comes second.”

“Right,” replied Comrade Carlos, and Mayta thought: They’re all turning against me. A lieutenant who plans a revolution as if it were a Putsch, without union support, without the participation of the masses. What else can this thing be called but an adventure?

“We could call it a provocation or a big joke,” Comrade Medardo interrupted. He looked at Mayta and added, with a lapidary gesture: “The party can’t sacrifice itself for something that hasn’t got a chance in the world.”

Mayta felt that the pile of Workers Voice he was sitting on had begun to tip over and he thought how ridiculous it would be if he slipped and took a fall. He stole a look at his comrades, and understood why, when he came in, they had greeted him so distantly, and why no one was absent from this meeting. Were they all against him? Even the members of the Action Group? Would Anatolio be against him, too? Instead of depression, he felt a wave of rage roll over him.

“And, ‘besides,’ what?” Blacquer encouraged me to go on.

“Rifles,” I said in a small voice. “We have more than we need. If the Communist Party wants to defend itself when the bullets start flying, we’ll give you weapons. Free of charge, of course.”

Blacquer was lighting his ten millionth cigarette of the morning. But his matches went out twice in a row, and when he took his first drag, he choked. “You’re sure that this time it’s for real.” I saw him stand up, smoke pouring out of his nose and mouth, poke his head into the next room, and shout, “Take him for a walk. We can’t talk with all that crying.” There was no answer, but the child instantly quieted down. Blacquer sat down again, to stare at me and calm down.

“I still don’t know if this is a trap, Mayta,” he said, muttering. “But I do know one thing. You’ve gone crazy. Do you really think the party would ever, under any circumstances, join forces with the Trots?”

“Not with the Trots. With the revolution,” I answered. “Yes, I do think so. That’s why I’m here.”

“A petit-bourgeois adventure, if we want to put it precisely,” said Anatolio, and when I realized how much he was stuttering, I knew exactly what he was going to say next, that he had memorized what he was saying. “The masses have not been invited to participate and don’t figure in the plan in any way. By the same token, what guarantee is there that the people from Uchubamba will rise up if we go out there? None at all. Have any of us seen those imprisoned leaders? No. Who’s going to run this show? Us? No. A lieutenant with a Putschist, ultra-adventurist mentality. What role are we being offered? To be the caboose, the cannon fodder.” Now he did turn and he did have enough guts to look me in the eye. “My obligation is to say what I think, comrade.”

That’s not what you thought last night, I mentally answered him. Or maybe it was that his attitude last night had been a fake, just to keep me off guard. Carefully, so I would have something to keep me busy, I straightened up the newspapers I had been sitting on and leaned them back against the wall. By then, the whole thing had become clear: there had been an earlier meeting in which the Central Committee of the RWP(T) had decided on what was now happening. Anatolio must have been there. I felt a bitter taste, a pain in my bones. It was too much of a farce. Hadn’t we talked over so many things last night in the room over on Jirón Zepita? Didn’t we review the action plan? Will you say goodbye to anyone before you go out to the mountains? Only my mother. What’ll you tell her? That I’ve won a scholarship to go to Mexico: I’ll write you once a week, Mama. Had there been in him any hesitation, doubt, contradiction — was he uncomfortable? Not a thing. He seemed enthusiastic and very sincere. We were in bed in the dark, the cot creaked, and every time the sound of the racing little feet above our heads came back, his body, pressed against mine, tensed up. That sudden vibration showed me, just for an instant, patches of Anatolio’s skin, and I anxiously waited for it to happen again. With my mouth against his, I said, suddenly, “I don’t want you to die, ever.” And a moment later: “Have you thought that you might die?” With a voice made soft and languid by desire, he answered me instantly: “Of course I’ve thought about it. And it doesn’t matter to me at all.” In pain and trembling, on the pile of Workers Voice, which once again threatened to tip over, I thought: Actually, it does matter quite a bit to you.

“I thought it was just a pose, that he was having emotional problems, I thought that …” Blacquer stops talking because the girl at the next table has burst out laughing. “It would happen from time to time among the comrades, the same way that one fine day a soldier wakes up and thinks he’s Napoleon. I thought: This morning, he woke up and thought he was Lenin arriving at the Finland Station.”

He’s quiet again, because of the girl’s laughter. At another table, a man shouts instructions: Fill tubs, pots, pans, barrels, and put them in every room, in every corner, even if you have to use salt water. If the Reds come in, the United States will bomb us and the fires will be even worse than the bombs. That should be our top priority, believe me — enough water available to put out the fire as soon as it starts.

“But, despite the fact that it sounded fantastic, it was the truth,” Blacquer goes on. “It was all the truth. They had more than enough weapons. The second lieutenant had pilfered lots from an army armory, right here in Lima. He had them hidden somewhere. You knew that he gave Mayta a sub-machine gun, right? It seems it was from that lot he stole. The idea of rebelling must have been an obsession Vallejos had even when he was a cadet. He wasn’t crazy, his plan was sincere. Stupid but sincere.”

The false smile bares his stained teeth. With a brusque gesture, he pushes aside a small boy who tries to shine his shoes. “They had no one to give them to, they had no one to shoulder those rifles,” he mocks.

“How did the party react?”

“Nobody thought it of any importance, nobody believed a single word. Not about the rifles, not about the uprising. In the summer of 1958, months before the barbudos marched into Havana, who was going to believe those things? The party reacted in a logical way. I had to sever all relations with the Trot, because he had to have some trick up his sleeve. Naturally, I did exactly that.”

A lady tells the man who’d been talking about filling the pots of water that he’s an ignoramus. When the bombs start falling, all you can do is pray! Pots of water against bombs! What did he think, that war was like a carnival, stupid asshole? “I’m sorry you’re not a man, lady, or I’d knock your teeth down your throat,” roars the gentleman. To which the lady’s male friend gallantly adds, “I’m a man, come on and knock mine down my throat.” It looks as though they’re going to fight for real.

“Trap, madness, whatever — we don’t want to have anything more to do with it,” quoted Blacquer. “And I don’t want you here ever again.”

“Just what I expected. You all are what you are, and you’ll go on being just that for quite a while.”

The two men are pulled apart, and as quickly as they got wrangled up, they calm down. The girl says, “Don’t fight among yourselves. In times like these, we have to be united.” A hunchback is looking at her legs.

“It was a real blow for him.” Blacquer shoos away another kneeling boy trying to shine his shoes. “To come to see me, he had to overcome lots of inhibitions. No doubt about it, he actually thought the insurrection could flatten the mountains that separated us. Spineless naïveté.”

He throws his cigarette butt away, and instantly a ragged, filthy figure jumps on it, picks it up, and anxiously takes a drag, to extract one final mouthful of smoke. Was he like that when he decided to visit Blacquer? Was I that anguished when I realized that zero hour was coming and there were only a handful of us to carry out an uprising, and we lacked even a minimal support organization in the city?

“The coup de grâce was yet to come,” Blacquer adds. “His own party was going to expel him as a traitor.”

That’s what Jacinto Zevallos had said, exactly that. For the veteran, the worker, the Trotskyist relic of Peru to say it, was the most upsetting thing to occur at a meeting where he had already heard so many hostile words. Even more painful was Anatolio’s turnaround. Because he both respected and cared for old Zevallos. The secretary general was speaking indignantly, and no one moved a muscle.

“Yes, comrade, to ask help from those Creole Stalinists for this project behind our backs, and in the party’s name, is more than mere fractionization. It is betrayal. Your explanations make matters even worse. Instead of recognizing your mistake, you have simply explained your reasons. I have to request your separation from the party, Mayta.”

What explanations did I give them? Even though none of those who were there at that session would even admit it took place, I feel the unquenchable need to believe it did, and just as Blacquer described it. What could I say to them that would justify my visit to the arch-enemy? With the aid of hindsight, it doesn’t seem so inconceivable. The Reds who may enter Lima tomorrow, or the day after, belong to a vast Marxist spectrum, which includes Communist Party members, Trotskyists, and Maoists, all apparently fighting under one flag. The revolution was too important, serious, and difficult to be monopolized by anyone, to be the private property of a single organization, even if that organization had interpreted Peruvian reality more correctly than the others. The revolution would be possible only if all revolutionaries, setting aside their quarrels, but without giving up their individual concepts, united in a concrete action against class enemies. Badly dressed, in his forties, sweaty, overexcited, blinking, he tried to sell them that marvelous toy which had changed his life and which — he was sure — could change theirs and that of the entire left: action, purifying, redemptive, absolute action. Action would file away the rough spots, the rivalries, the byzantine differences; it would abolish the enmities born out of egoism and the cult of personality; it would sweep away the groups and factions in an unquenchable current that would carry along all revolutionaries, comrades.

That’s why I went to talk to Blacquer. Not to reveal any key information to him: I mentioned no names, no dates, and not a single location. And I in no way compromised the RWP(T). The first thing I told Blacquer was that I was speaking only for myself and that any future agreements would have to be made party to party. I went to see him without requesting authorization, so I could save time, comrades. Wasn’t I on my way to Jauja? I went simply to notify them that the revolution was going to begin, so they could come to the proper conclusions, if, that is, they really were the revolutionaries and Marxists they said they were. So they would be ready to take part in the struggle. Because the reactionaries would defend themselves, would fight like cornered rats, and so as not to be bitten, we all had to form a common front … Did they listen to me until I finished? Did they make me shut up? Did they throw me out of the garage on Jirón Zorritos, kicking and insulting me?

“They let him speak several times,” Blacquer assures me. “There was a lot of tension, and a lot of personal things came to the surface. Mayta and Joaquín almost started swinging at each other. And then, instead of killing him off once and for all, they picked him up off the floor where they’d left him like a dirty rag, and they gave him an out. A Trotskyite melodrama. I suppose that last meeting of the RWP(T) is going to be quite useful to you.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But I still don’t get it. Why do Moisés, Anatolio, Pallardi, and Joaquín absolutely deny that it ever took place? Their version of what happened shows discrepancies in many areas, but they all agree on this one point: Mayta’s resignation reached them by mail, he resigned on his own when he went to Jauja, once the RWP(T) decided not to participate in the uprising. Bad collective memory?”

“Bad collective conscience,” Blacquer says in a low voice. “Mayta couldn’t have made up that meeting. He came to tell me all about it a few hours after it happened. It was the coup de grâce, and it must still trouble them. Because, as they started piling charge after charge on him, everything started coming out, even his Achilles’ heel. Can you imagine them being that cruel?”

“What you really mean to say is that the end of the world is coming, buddy,” a confused patron exclaims. The girl is still laughing her dumb and happy laugh, and the beggar kids leave us in peace for a moment as they start kicking a can around among the pedestrians.

“He actually told you about that?” I’m surprised. “It was a subject he never mentioned, not even to his best friends. Why did he come to you at that particular moment? I just don’t understand.”

“At the beginning, I didn’t get it either, but now I think I do,” says Blacquer. “He was a revolutionary, one hundred percent, don’t forget. The RWP(T) had just thrown him out. Perhaps he thought that would make us reconsider our refusal. Maybe now we would take his plan seriously.”

“As a matter of fact, we should have expelled him a long time ago,” affirms Comrade Joaquín. He turned to look at Mayta in such a way that I thought: Why does he hate me? “I’m going to tell you what I think without pulling any punches, as a Marxist and as a revolutionary. I’m not surprised at what you have done, not about the plot, not about having secretly talked with that Stalinist policeman Blacquer. You can’t do anything straight, because you aren’t straight, you’re just not a man, Mayta.”

“Let’s keep personal differences out of this,” the secretary general interrupted him.

What Joaquín said took him so by surprise that Mayta couldn’t say a word. All I could do was shrink back. Why did it surprise me so much? Wasn’t it something that was always in the back of my mind, something I always feared would come up in debates, a quick low blow that would lay me out and keep me on my back for the rest of the discussion? With a cramp in every part of his body, he leaned back on the pile of newspapers. I felt a hot wave roll over me and in despair I thought: Anatolio is going to stand up and confess that we slept together last night. What was Anatolio going to say? What was he going to do?

“It isn’t a personal difference, because it’s directly related to what’s happened,” replied Comrade Joaquín. Even with all my fear and perturbation, Mayta knew that Joaquín really did hate him. What did I ever do to him that was so serious, so wounding to him that he would take this kind of revenge? “That way of doing things of his, complicated, capricious, that idea of going to see our worst enemy, is feminine, comrades. It’s a subject that’s never been brought up here out of consideration for Mayta, the very kind of consideration he didn’t have for us. Is it possible to be a loyal revolutionary and a homosexual at the same time? That’s the real question we’ve got to decide, comrades.”

Why does he say homosexual and not fag? I thought absurdly. Isn’t fag the right word? Recovering, he raised his hand, signaling to Comrade Jacinto that he wanted to speak.

“Are you sure that it was Mayta himself who told them he’d gone to see you?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Blacquer nods. “He thought he had done the right thing. He wanted to have a motion approved. That once the three who had to go went up to Jauja, the ones who stayed in Lima would again try to set up an agreement with us. It was his biggest mistake. For the Trots, who couldn’t figure out how they were going to get out of the Jauja operation — which they never believed in, and which they thought Mayta had dragged them into — this was the perfect pretext. They could get rid of Jauja and Mayta all in one shot. Which meant splitting up even more. That’s always been the Trots’ favorite sport: purges, divisions, fractions, and expulsions.”

He laughs, showing his nicotine-stained teeth.

“Personal differences have nothing to do with it, and neither do sexual or family differences,” I answered, without taking my eyes off the back of Anatolio’s head, as he sat on one of the little milking stools, his eyes fixed on the floor. “And that’s why I’m not going to pay attention to that provocation. Because there’s only one way to respond to what you said, Joaquín.”

“It’s against the rules to get personal. Threats are also against the rules.” The secretary general raised his voice.

“Well, are you homosexual or not, Mayta?” he heard Comrade Joaquín say right to his face. I saw that his fists were clenched, that he was ready to defend himself or to attack. “At least be frank about your vice.”

“Private conversations are not allowed,” insisted the secretary general. “And if you want to fight, go outside.”

“You’re right, comrade,” said Mayta, looking at Jacinto Zevallos. “No conversations and no fights, nothing to distract us from our business. This argument isn’t about sex. We’ll take it up another time, if Comrade Joaquín thinks it’s so important. Let’s go back to our agenda. And I hope I won’t be interrupted, at least.”

I’d recovered my self-control, and they actually did let me speak. But even as he spoke, he knew inside that it wasn’t going to be much use. They’d already decided, that’s right, behind my back, to wash their hands of the insurrection, and no amount of talk was going to change their minds. As he spoke, he never revealed his pessimism. I forcefully repeated all the reasons I’d already given them, which circumstance gave them, reasons that even now, despite reverses and objections, still seem irrefutable to me as I heard them spoken aloud.

Didn’t the objective conditions exist? Weren’t the victims of latifundism, bossism, and capitalist and imperialist exploitation a revolutionary potential? If that is the case, then the revolutionary vanguard would create the subjective conditions by means of armed acts of propaganda, striking at the enemy in pedagogic operations that would mobilize the masses and gradually incorporate them into the action. Weren’t there lots of examples? Indochina, Algeria, Cuba — there they were, the proof that a determined vanguard could start the revolution. It was false to say that Jauja was a petit-bourgeois adventure. It was a well-planned action and it had its own small but sufficient infrastructure. It would be successful if all of us would do our jobs. It was also false to say that the RWP(T) was being dragged along in the operation: it would have ideological control over the revolution, Vallejos would only have military control. We would have to take a more liberal, more generous, more Marxist, and more Trotskyist point of view, comrades. We cannot afford sectarian squabbles. Here in Lima, you’re right, support is weak. That’s why we have to be open to support from other left groups, because the fight is going to be long, difficult, and …

“There is a motion on the floor asking for Mayta’s expulsion, and that’s what we have to discuss,” remembered Comrade Pallardi.

“Didn’t I make myself clear when I said we shouldn’t see each other ever again?” said Blacquer, closing the door of his house.

“It’s a long story,” replied Mayta. “I can’t compromise you anymore. Because I came to speak to you, I’ve been expelled from the RWP(T).”

“And because I spoke to him, my party expelled me,” Blacquer says in his bleak voice. “Ten years later.”

“Your problems with the party came about because of those conversations?”

We’ve left the Haiti and we’re walking along Miraflores Park, toward the corner of Larco, where Blacquer will take a bus. A thick mass of people stroll among and trip over the vendors who have their trinkets spread out all over the ground. The excitement the news of the invasion has caused is general. Our chat is spattered with the words Cubans, Bolivians, bombings, Marines, war, Reds.

“No, that’s not true,” Blacquer clarifies. “My problems began when I started questioning the party line. But I was castigated for reasons that outwardly had nothing to do with my questions. Among the many charges brought against me was that I had supposedly flirted with Trotskyism. They said that I’d proposed to the party a plan of action that involved the Trots. The same old story: discredit the critic, so that anything he says is garbage. In that kind of game, nobody’s better than we are.”

“So you were also a kind of victim of the Jauja thing,” I say to him.

“In a way.” He looks at me again, with his old, parchment-colored face humanized by a half smile. “Other proofs of my collusion with the Trots existed, but they didn’t know about them. I inherited Mayta’s books when he went out to the mountains.”

“I don’t have anyone else to give them to,” I said jokingly. “I am bereft of comrades. Better you than the informers. If you look at it that way, you needn’t have any scruples. Take my books and learn something.”

“There was a huge amount of Trotskyite shit, which I read in secret, the way we read Vargas Vila in secondary school.” Blacquer laughs. “In secret, right. I even ripped out the pages where Mayta had written down his initials, so there’d be no criminal evidence.”

He laughs again. There is a small crowd of people all craning their necks, trying to hear a news bulletin from a portable radio some passerby holds over his head. We just catch the end of a communiqué: the Junta for National Restoration announces to the community of nations the invasion of the fatherland by Cuban-Bolivian-Soviet forces. The invasion began at dawn, and the enemy has violated our sacred Peruvian soil at three places on the border, in the province of Puno. At 8 p.m., the committee will address the nation on the radio and television to report on this outrageous affront, which has electrified all Peruvians and made them into a single fist in defense of … So it was true, they had invaded. It must also be true, then, that the Marines will be moving in from their Ecuadorian bases, if they haven’t already. We start walking again, among people either stunned or frightened by the news.

“It doesn’t matter who wins, because I lose anyway,” Blacquer suddenly says, more bored than alarmed. “If the Marines win, I lose because I must be on their list as an old agent of international communism. If the rebels win, I lose because I’m a revisionist, a socialist-imperialist, and an ex-traitor to the cause. I’m not going to follow the advice that guy in the Haití was giving. I’m not going to fill pots and pans with water. For me, the fires may be the solution.”

At the bus stop, in front of the Tiendecita Blanca, there is such a crowd that he’ll have to wait a long time before he can get on a bus. In the years he spent in the limbo of the expelled, he tells me, he understood the Mayta of that day. I hear him, but I’m distanced from him, thinking. That the events in Jauja contributed years later, even indirectly, to Blacquer’s fall to the status of nonperson in which he’s lived is yet another proof of how mysterious and unforeseeable the ramifications of events are, that unbelievably complex web of causes and effects, reverberations and accidents that make up human history. It seems, in any case, that he doesn’t resent Mayta’s impulsive visits. It even seems that at a distance he respects Mayta.

“Nobody’s abstaining, you can count the hands,” said Jacinto Zevallos. “Unanimity, Mayta. You are no longer a member of the RWP(T). You have expelled yourself.”

There was a sepulchral silence, and no one moved. Should he just leave? Should he say anything? Should he walk out, leaving the doors open or just tell them to go fuck themselves?

“Ten minutes ago, we both knew we were enemies to the death,” shouted Blacquer furiously as he paced in front of Mayta’s chair. “And now you act as if we’d been comrades all our lives. It’s grotesque!”

“Don’t anybody leave,” said Comrade Medardo softly. “I have a request for a reconsideration, comrades.”

“We are in different trenches, but we are both revolutionaries,” said Mayta. “And we resemble each other in something else: for you and for me, personal matters always take a back seat to politics. So stop bitching and let’s talk.”

A reconsideration? All eyes were fixed on Comrade Medardo. There was so much smoke that from the corner where he was sitting, next to the pile of Workers Voice, Mayta saw their faces as if in a cloud.

“Was he desperate, crushed, did he feel his world was collapsing?”

“He was confident, calm, even optimistic, or at least that’s how he appeared.” Blacquer moves his head in negation. “He wanted to show me that being expelled didn’t affect him in the slightest. It might well have been true. Did you ever meet one of these guys who discovers sex or religion in old age? They get anxious, fiery, indefatigable. That’s how he was. He had discovered action and he seemed like a kid with a new toy. He looked ridiculous, like an old man trying to do the latest dance steps. At the same time, it was hard not to envy him a little.”

“We’ve been enemies for ideological reasons, and for the very same reasons we can be friends now.” Mayta smiled at him. “Being friends or enemies, as far as we’re concerned, is purely a matter of tactics.”

“Are you going to go through the rite of self-criticism and request membership in the party?” Blacquer ended up, laughing.

The veteran revolutionary in decline who one fine day discovers action and throws himself into it without thinking, impatient, hopeful that the fighting and the marching are going to recompense him for years of impotence — that’s the Mayta of those days, the one I perceive best among all the other Maytas. Were friendship and love things he understood only in political terms? No: he talked that way only to win Blacquer over. If he had been able to control his sentiments and instincts, he wouldn’t have led the double life he led, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the intrinsic split between being, by day, a clandestine militant totally given over to the task of changing the world, and, by night, a pervert on the prowl for faggots. There’s no doubt that he could pull out all the stops when he had to — we see the proof of it in that last attempt to attain the impossible, the support of his arch-enemies for an uncertain revolt. Two, three buses pass and Blacquer still can’t get on. We decide to walk down Larco; maybe on Benavides it’ll be easier.

“If news of this gets out, the only people who will gain by it will be the reactionaries. It’s also a black eye for the party,” Comrade Medardo explained delicately. “Our enemies will be rubbing their hands with glee, even the ones from the other RWP. There they go, they’ll say, tearing themselves to bits in one more internal struggle. Don’t interrupt me, Joaquín, I’m not asking for an act of Christian forgiveness or anything like that. Yes, I’ll explain what kind of reconsideration I’m talking about.”

The atmosphere of the garage on Jirón Zorritos had thickened. The smoke was so dense that Mayta’s eyes were burning. He saw that they were listening to Moisés with relief burgeoning on their faces, as if, surprised at having defeated him so easily, they were thankful that someone was giving them an out whereby they could leave with a clear conscience.

“Comrade Mayta has been castigated. He knows it, and so do we,” added Comrade Medardo. “He will not come back to the RWP(T), at least not for now, not as long as current conditions last. But, comrades, he’s said it. Vallejos’s plans are still in effect. The uprising will take place, with or without us. Whether we like it or not, it’s going to affect us.”

What was Moisés’s point? Mayta was surprised to hear Moisés refer to him still as “comrade.” He suspected what the point was, and in an instant all the depression and anger he had felt when he saw all those raised arms in favor of the motion disappeared: this was a chance he’d have to take.

“Trotskyism will not participate in the guerrilla war,” he said. “The RWP(T) has unanimously decided to turn its back on us. The other RWP isn’t even aware of the plan. But the plan is serious and solid. Don’t you see? The Communist Party has a great opportunity here to fill a vacuum.”

“To stick its neck in the guillotine. A great privilege!” growled Blacquer. “Drink your coffee and, if you like, tell me about your tragic love affair with the Trots. But don’t say a word about that uprising, Mayta.”

“Don’t make up your minds now, not even in a week — take all the time you need,” Mayta went on, paying no attention to him. “The main obstacle for you all was the RWP(T). That obstacle has vanished. The insurrection is now the sole property of a worker-peasant group of independent revolutionaries.”

“You, an independent revolutionary?” Blacquer said, enunciating carefully.

“Buy the next issue of Workers Voice (T) and you’ll see for yourself,” said Mayta. “That’s what I’ve become: a revolutionary without a party. See? You’ve got a golden opportunity here. To run things, stand at the head of it all.”

“That was the resignation you read,” Blacquer says. He takes off his glasses to breathe on them and clean them with his handkerchief. “A decoy. No one believed in that resignation — neither the guy who signed it nor the ones who printed it. So why did they bother? To trick the readers? What readers? Did Workers Voice (T) have any readers beyond the — how many, seven — the seven Trots in the party? That’s the way history is written, comrade.”

All the stores on Avenida Larco are closed, even though it’s still early. Because of the news about the invasion down south? Around here, there are fewer people than on the Diagonal or in the park. And even the gangs of beggars that overrun the streets and the cars are thinner than usual. The side of the Municipal Building is covered with an enormous graffito in red paint: “The People’s Victory Is Coming Soon.” It’s decorated with the hammer and sickle. It wasn’t there when I passed by three hours ago. A commando came with paint and brushes and painted it right in front of the cops? But now I realize that there are no police guarding the building.

“Let’s at least give him a chance, then, to do a little less damage to the party,” Comrade Medardo went on cautiously. “He should resign. We’ll publish his resignation in Workers Voice (T). Besides, it would be proof that the party bears no responsibility for whatever he does in Jauja. A reconsideration in that sense of the word, comrades.”

Mayta saw that various members of the Central Committee of the RWP(T) were nodding in approval. Moisés/Medardo’s proposal might be accepted. He thought it over quickly, balancing the advantages and disadvantages. Yes, it was the lesser of two evils. He raised his hand: Could he speak?

At Benevides, there are as many people waiting for buses as there were at the Tiendecita Blanca. Blacquer shrugs: patience. I tell him I’ll wait with him until he gets on. Several people near us are talking about the invasion.

“Over the years, I’ve come to realize that he wasn’t so crazy,” Blacquer says. “If the first action had lasted longer, things might have turned out the way Mayta planned. If the insurrection had caught on, the party would have been forced to enter and try to take over. As it has with this revolt. Who remembers that, for the first two years, we opposed it? And now we’re fighting the Maoists for control, right? But Comrade Father Time shows no pity. Mayta was twenty-five years too early with his plans.”

Intrigued by the way he talks about the party, I ask him if he was readmitted or not. He gives me a cryptic answer: “Only halfway.” A lady with a child in her arms who seemed to be listening to him suddenly interrupts us. “Is it true the Russians are in it, too? What did we ever do to them? What’s going to happen to my daughter?” “Calm down, nothing’s going to happen. It’s a lot of baloney,” Blacquer consoles her as he waves at an overloaded bus that just keeps on going.

In an atmosphere totally unlike that of the meeting a few minutes earlier, the secretary general whispered that Comrade Medardo’s proposal was reasonable. It would keep the divisionists of the other RWP from taking advantage. He looked at him: there was no problem about having the central figure comment. “You have the floor, Mayta.”

“We talked for quite a while. In spite of what had just happened to him, he became euphoric, talking about the uprising,” says Blacquer, lighting a cigarette. “I found out that it would take place in a matter of days, but I didn’t know where. I would never have imagined Jauja. I thought maybe Cuzco, because some groups were seizing land there. But a revolution in the Jauja jail — who’d ever think of a thing like that?”

I listen to his flat laugh again. Without thinking, we start walking again, toward the bus stop on 28 de Julio. Time passes, and there he is, sweating, his clothes wrinkled and filthy, shadows under his eyes, his stiff hair all messed up. He’s sitting on the edge of his chair in Blacquer’s poor, tiny, crowded living room. He talks, waves his arms, and punctuates his words with decisive gestures. In his eyes, there is an irrefutable conviction. “Is the party going to refuse to enter into history, refuse to make history?” he berates Blacquer.

“Everything about this incident turned out to be contradictory,” I hear Blacquer say half a block later. “Because the very RWP(T) that expelled Mayta for wanting to involve them in Jauja threw itself into something even more sterile: the ‘expropriation’ of banks.”

Was it Fidel Castro’s entrance into Havana, which had taken place in the meantime, that transformed the prudent RWP(T), which had slid out of Mayta’s conspiracy, into a bellicose organization that set about emptying the banks of the bourgeoisie? They attacked the branch of the Banco Internacional that we’ve just passed — Joaquín was captured in the operation — and then, a few days later, the Banco Wiese in La Victoria, where Pallardi fell. These two actions disintegrated the RWP(T). Or was there, as well, a modicum of guilty conscience, a desire to prove that, even though they’d turned their backs on Mayta and Vallejos, they were capable of risking all on a single toss of the dice?

“Not remorse, not anything even like it,” says Blacquer. “It was Cuba. The Cuban Revolution broke through the taboos. It killed that superego that ordered us to accept the dictum that ‘conditions aren’t right,’ that the revolution was an interminable conspiracy. With Fidel’s entrance into Havana, the revolution seemed to put itself within reach of anyone who would dare fight.”

“If you don’t take them, the guy who owns my house will sell them all off in La Parada,” Mayta insisted. “You can pick them up after Monday. And there aren’t that many, anyway.”

“Okay, I’ll take the books.” Blacquer gave in. “Let’s say I’ll store them for you for the time being.”

At the 28 de Julio stop, we find the same mob we found at the earlier stops. A man wearing a hat has a portable radio, and — nervously watched by all those around him — he’s trying to find some station broadcasting news. He can’t find one. All he gets is music. For almost half an hour, I wait with Blacquer. Two buses pass by, packed to the roof, without stopping. Finally I say goodbye, because I want to get home in time to hear the message of the committee about the invasion. At the corner of Manco Cápac, I turn around: Blacquer is still there; I can make out his ruinous face and his air of being lost as he stands at the edge of the sidewalk, as if he didn’t know what to do or where to go. That’s the way Mayta must have been that day after the meeting. And yet Blacquer assures me that after leaving him his books and showing him where to hide the key to his room, Mayta left exuding optimism. “He grew under punishment” is what he said. No doubt about it: his resistance and his daring became stronger in adversity.

Although all the stores are closed, the sidewalks in this part of Larco are still crowded with people selling handicrafts, trinkets, and pictures: views of the Andes, portraits, and caricatures. I thread my way around blankets covered with bracelets and necklaces, watched over by boys with ponytails and girls wearing saris. The air is filled with incense. In this enclave of aesthetes and street mystics, there is no perceptible alarm, not even any curiosity about what’s going on down south. You’d say that they don’t even know that in the last few hours the war has taken a much more serious turn and that at any minute it could be right here on top of them. At the corner of Ocharán, I hear a dog bark: it’s a strange sound that seems to come from the past, because ever since the food shortage began, domestic animals have disappeared from the streets. How did Mayta feel that morning? The long night had begun in the garage on Jirón Zorritos with his expulsion from the RWP(T), then moved on to his agreement to disguise it as a resignation, and ended with that conversation with Blacquer, which transformed him from an enemy into a confidant, a shoulder to cry on.

Sleepy, hungry, and exhausted, but in the same frame of mind he was in when he returned from Jauja, and still convinced that he had acted properly. They hadn’t thrown him out because he’d gone to see Blacquer: they’d agreed on the pullout before. Their feigned anger, the accusations of betrayal were just a trick to preclude any possibility of reviewing the decision. Was it out of fear of fighting? No, it was their pessimism, their lack of willpower, their psychological inability to break with routine and go on to real action. He had taken a bus and had to stand, hanging on to the rail, crushed between two black women carrying baskets. Didn’t he know that way of thinking all too well? “Wasn’t it your own for so many years?” They had no faith in the masses because they had no contact with them; they doubted the revolution and their own ideas because the intriguing that went on among sects had rendered them incapable of action.

Looking at him, one of the black women began to laugh, and Mayta realized he was talking to himself. He laughed, too. But if that’s the way they thought, then it was better that they didn’t take part, because they’d just be dead weight. Yes, they would be missed, because now there would be no urban support in Lima. But as new adherants emerged, a support organization would spring up here and elsewhere. The comrades of the RWP(T), when they saw that the vanguard was respected and that the masses were joining them, would regret their indecision. The Stalinists, too. The meeting with Blacquer was a time bomb. When they saw that the trickle was turning into a raging torrent, they would remember that the door was open and that they would be welcome. They would come; they would participate. He was so distracted that he forgot to get off at his corner and only realized he’d passed it two stops later.

He reached the alley completely worn out. In the patio, there was a long line of women with pots, all shouting because the first one was taking too long at the tap. He went into his room and stretched out on the bed, without even taking off his shoes. He just didn’t have the energy to go down and get in line. But how good it would have been now to sink his tired feet in a pan of cool water. He closed his eyes and, fighting sleep, chose the words for the letter he was to bring that afternoon to Jacinto so it could come out in the issue of Workers Voice (T) that was at the press.

That issue barely covers four pages, a single sheet folded in four, now so yellow that as I pick it up — sitting in front of the television, where the generals of the Junta have yet to appear, even though it’s eight o’clock — I get the feeling it’s going to crumble in my hands. The resignation is not on the first page, which consists of two long articles and a smaller one, boxed, at the bottom. The editorial, set in small caps, takes up the left column: “Halt, Fascists!” It concerns some incidents that took place in the central mountains regarding a strike over two mining contracts with the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. When the police removed the strikers, they shot a few of them, one of whom later died. This is not random violence but is, instead, part of a plan to intimidate and immobilize the working classes, a plan hatched by the police, the army, and reactionary groups, in accord with Pentagon and CIA Latin American policy. What’s it all about?

They’ve started playing military music, and pictures of the national emblem and the flag are followed by busts and portraits of national heroes. Are they going to start or what? To halt the advance, every day more powerful and unstoppable, of the workers toward socialism. Those methods cannot surprise anyone who has learned the lessons of history: they were used by Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and now Washington is applying them to Latin America. But they will not succeed, they will be counterproductive, a nutrient fertilizer, as Leon Trotsky wrote: For the working classes, the blows of repression are like pruning for plants. There they are: the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, and behind them, the advisers, the ministers, the heads of garrisons and military units in the Lima region. Their somber faces seem to confirm the worst rumors. The editorial in Workers Voice (T) ends with an exhortation to workers, peasants, students, and progressives to close ranks against the Nazi-Facist conspiracy. They’re singing the National Anthem.

The other article is about Ceylon. It’s true, at that time Trotskyism had taken hold there. The text asserts that Trotskyism is the second most powerful force in the Parliament and the most powerful among the unions. From the way the tenses go, it would seem the article was translated from the French — by Mayta himself, perhaps? The names, beginning with that of Madame Bandaranaike, the Prime Minister, are difficult to remember.

Okay, the National Anthem is over, and the representative of the army, the usual spokesman for the Junta, steps forward. In an unusual move, he skips the pompous patriotic rhetoric he normally uses, and instead gets right to the heart of the matter. His voice has less of a military ring and is more tremulous. Three military columns, made up of Cubans and Bolivians, have penetrated deep into our territory, supported by planes which, beginning last night, have been bombing civilian targets in Puno, Cuzco, and Arequipa. An open violation of all international laws and agreements. There are many casualties, and considerable property damage. In the very heart of the city of Puno, bombs have destroyed part of the Social Security Hospital, causing an as yet undetermined number of deaths. The description of the disasters takes him several minutes. Will he tell us if the Marines have crossed the Ecuadorian border?

The small box at the bottom of the page announces that shortly the RWP(T) will present at the union hall of the Civil Construction Union its previously postponed program on “The Betrayed Revolution: A Trotskyist Interpretation of the Soviet Union.” To find Mayta’s resignation, you have to turn the page. It’s in a corner, below an extensive article entitled “Let’s Set Up Soviets in the Barracks!” With no heading or frame: “Resigns from the RWP(T).” The spokesman now assures us that the Peruvian troops, despite the fact that they are fighting against superior numbers and greater logistical support, are heroically resisting the criminal invasion of international communist terrorism, and have the decided support of the civilian populace. The committee, invoking martial law, has this afternoon activated three new divisions of reservists. Will he tell us if U.S. planes are bombing the invaders?

Comrade Secretary General of the RWP(T)

Lima

Comrade:

I take this opportunity to communicate to you my irrevocable decision to resign from the ranks of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist), in which I have been a militant for more than ten years. I have taken this decision for personal reasons. I wish to be independent again and to act under my own responsibility, so that anything I might say or do will not compromise the party in any way. I need my freedom of action in these moments in which our country is foundering once again in the struggle between revolution and reaction.

My voluntary withdrawal from the RWP(T) does not mean that I am breaking with the ideals that have marked the path of revolutionary socialism for the workers of the world. I would like, comrade, to reaffirm once again my faith in the Peruvian proletariat, my conviction that the revolution will become a reality that will once and for all break the chains of exploitation and obscurantism which have weighed so heavily on our people for centuries. The process of liberation will be carried out in the light of that theory — more solid and stronger than ever before — conceived by Marx and Engels and implemented by Lenin and Trotsky.

I request that my resignation be published in Workers Voice (T) so that the public will be informed.

Long live the Revolution!

A. Mayta Avendano

He’s only said it at the end, very quickly, with less firmness, as if he wasn’t very sure. In the name of the Peruvian people, who are gloriously fighting in defense of Western civilization and Christianity in the free world, against the onslaught of collectivist and totalitarian atheism, the Junta has requested and obtained from the government of the United States of America support troops and logistical supplies to repel the communist Russo-Cuban-Bolivian invasion that seeks to enslave our homeland. So this is true as well. Here we go. The war is no longer a Peruvian affair. Peru is just one more theater for the war the Great Powers are waging, directly and through satellites or allies. Whoever wins, the fact is that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, will die. If Peru survives, it will be prostrate. I was so sleepy I didn’t feel I had enough energy even to turn off the TV.

His anxiety was justified when he turned around: Anatolio was pointing a pistol at him. He wasn’t afraid, just sorry: the delay it would cause! And what about Vallejos? The plan had to be carried out step by step with absolute precision, and it was clear that Anatolio wasn’t there to kill him but to keep him from getting to Jauja. He strode firmly toward the boy to try to convince him to be reasonable, but Anatolio stretched out his arm energetically and Mayta saw that he was going to squeeze the trigger. He raised his hands over his head, thinking: To die without even having fought. He felt a lacerating sadness; he’d never be with them, there on Calvary when the Epiphany began. “Why are you doing this, Anatolio?” His own voice disgusted him: a real revolutionary is logical and cold, not sentimental. “Because you’re a faggot,” said Anatolio in a calm, leaden, forceful, irreversible tone, one Mayta wished he could use just now. “Because you’re a queer and you’ve got to pay the price,” confirmed the secretary general, his jaundiced face and pointy ears jutting forward. “Because you’re a faggot and disgusting,” added Comrade Moises/Medardo, sticking his profile over Comrade Jacinto’s shoulder. The whole Central Committee of the RWP(T) was there, one behind the other, all armed with pistols. He had been judged, sentenced, and they were now going to execute him. Not for indiscipline, errors, or betrayal, but — how petty, how asinine — for having slid his tongue, like a stiletto, between Anatolio’s teeth. He lost all composure and began to cry out for Vallejos, Ubilluz, Lorito, the peasants from Ricran, the joeboys: “Get me out of this trap, comrades.” With his back soaking wet, he woke up. From the edge of the bed, Anatolio was looking at him.

“I couldn’t make out what you were saying,” he heard him whisper.

“What are you doing here?” Mayta stuttered, still partly in his nightmare.

“I just came by,” said Anatolio. He was looking at him without blinking, with an intriguing little light in his eyes. “Are you mad at me?”

“The truth is that you’re hard to figure,” Mayta said softly, without moving. He had a bitter taste in his mouth, his eyes were bleary, and he still had goose bumps from the scare he’d had. “The truth is, you’re a cynic, Anatolio.”

“You taught me everything,” said the boy gently, always looking him in the eye with an undefinable expression that irritated Mayta and made him remorseful. A horsefly began to buzz around the light bulb.

“I taught you to screw like a man, not to be a hypocrite,” said Mayta, making an effort to control his rage: Calm down, don’t insult him, don’t hit him, don’t argue. Just get him out of here.

“The Jauja idea is crazy. We talked it over, and we all agreed that you had to be stopped,” said Anatolio without moving, with a certain vehemence. “No one was going to kick you out. Why did you go to Blacquer? No one would have expelled you.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” said Mayta. “This is all ancient history. Why don’t you just leave.”

But the boy didn’t move a muscle and didn’t stop looking at him with that look that had both provocation and scorn.

“We aren’t comrades or friends anymore,” said Mayta. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I want you to give me a blowjob,” said the boy slowly, looking him in the eye and touching his knee with his five fingers.