The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Seven

“What are you doing here, Mayta?” exclaimed Adelaida. “What do you want?”

Rospigliosi Castle marks the border between Lince and Santa Beatriz, neighborhoods that have become indistinguishable. But when Mayta and Adelaida were married, there was a class struggle going on between them. Lince was always modest, lower-middle-class tending toward proletarian, with narrow, colorless little houses, tenements and their alleys, cracked sidewalks and rocky little gardens. Santa Beatriz, on the other hand, was a pretentious neighborhood where a few well-off families built mansions in “colonial,” “Sevilian,” or “neo-Gothic” style-like this monument to extravagance, the Rospigliosi Castle, a castle with battlements and pointed arches made of reinforced concrete. The inhabitants of Lince viewed their neighbors in Santa Beatriz with resentment and envy, while the good citizens of Santa Beatriz looked down their noses at the Linceans and scorned them.

“I’d just like a word with you,” said Mayta. “And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see my son.”

Nowadays Santa Beatriz and Lince are the same: one decayed and the other improved, until they finally met at a median point. It’s a shapeless region, inhabited by white-collar workers, business and professional people neither rich nor impoverished, but hard pressed to get to the end of the month without money problems. This mediocrity is personified perfectly by Adelaida’s husband, don Juan Zarate, an employee of the Mail and Telegraph Service with many years’ service. His photo is next to the curtainless window. Looking through that window, I can see the Rospigliosi Castle. Since the building is used by the Air Ministry, it is surrounded by coils of barbed wire and sandbag walls, behind which I can see the guards’ helmets and rifle barrels. One of those patrols stopped me as I was on my way over here and frisked me from head to toe before letting me pass. The air-force men are on edge, their fingers wrapped around their triggers. Justifiably so, given the situation we’re in. In the photo, don Juan Zarate wears a suit and a tie and looks serious. Adelaida, clinging to his arm, also looks stern.

“That’s when we got married, over in Cañete. We spent three days there, in a house that belonged to one of Juan’s brothers. I was seven months’ pregnant. Barely shows, right?”

She is right. No one could ever guess she was so far advanced in her pregnancy. The photograph must be almost thirty years old. It’s unbelievable how well preserved this woman, who for a short time was the wife of my schoolmate from the Salesian School, is.

“It was Mayta’s child,” Adelaida adds.

I pay close attention to what she says and observe her carefully. I still can’t get over the impression her looks made on me when I walked into that lugubrious little house. I’d only spoken with her over the telephone and I never thought that harsh voice could be connected to a woman who was still attractive despite her age. Her hair is gray and falls in waves to her shoulders. Her face has soft features, with prominent, fleshy lips, and deep eyes. She crosses her legs: smooth, well-rounded, long, solid. When she was married to Mayta, she must have been a knockout.

“A fine time to be remembering your son,” Adelaida exclaimed.

“I always remember him,” Mayta replied. “It’s one thing not to see him and another not to think of him. We made a deal, and I’ve stuck by it.”

But there’s something desolate about her, a depression, an air of defeat. And an absolute indifference: it doesn’t seem to matter to her that the rebels have taken Cuzco and established a government there, that there were undecipherable shots last night in the streets of Lima, not even whether or not it’s true that hundreds of Marines have just reached the La Joya base in Arequipa to reinforce the army, which seems to have collapsed all along the southern front. She doesn’t even mention the events that have all of Lima in suspense and that — despite the genuine triumph it is for me to be speaking with her — distract me with recurring images of red flags, rifle shots, and shouts of victory on the streets of Cuzco.

“This is how you stick by it — coming to my house?” said Adelaida, pushing back a curl that had fallen over her forehead. “Do you have any idea the mess you’d be making if my husband finds out?”

As I listen to her tell how her wedding to Juan Zarate was moved forward so that Mayta’s child could be born with another name and another father, in a real home, I remind myself that I am wrong to be distracted: I haven’t got much more time. Being here is my reward for being persistent. Adelaida refused to see me several times, and the third or fourth time I called, she just hung up on me. I had to insist, beg, swear that neither her name nor Juan Zarate’s nor her son’s would ever appear in what I wrote. Finally, I had to suggest to her that since this was business — I wanted her to tell me about her life with Mayta and that final meeting just hours before he went to Jauja — I would pay for her time. She’s granted me an hour of conversation for a stiff price. She will not discuss anything she considers “too private.”

“It’s something special,” insisted Mayta. “I’ll be gone in a minute, you’ll see, I swear.”

“I thought he was on the run and had no place to go,” Adelaida says. “The usual thing. Because, from when I first met him until we separated, he always felt he was being watched. Rightly and wrongly. And full of secrets, even from me.”

Did she ever love him? She couldn’t have any other reason for living with him. How did she meet him? At a fair, by the wheel of fortune at Plaza Sucre. She bet on number 17 and someone next to her bet on 15. The wheel stopped right on 15. “What luck! The little bear,” exclaimed Adelaida. Her neighbor: “It’s yours. Will you accept it as a gift? How do you do? My name’s Mayta.”

“Okay, okay, I’d rather the gossip who lives across the hall not see us together here.” Adelaida finally opened the door to him. “Five minutes and that’s it, please. If Juan finds you here, he’ll be really mad. You’ve already given me enough headaches for one lifetime.”

Didn’t she suspect from his nervousness and his fidgeting that this unusual visit had been prompted by the fact that he was on the verge of doing something extraordinary? Not in the slightest. Because, in fact, she didn’t see any sign of nerves or excitement in him. He was his normal self: calm, badly dressed, a little thinner. When they’d got to know each other better, Mayta confessed that the meeting at the wheel of fortune in Plaza Sucre was not accidental: he had seen her, followed her, and hung around, looking for a way to strike up a conversation.

“He convinced me that he’d fallen in love with me at first sight,” Adelaida adds in a sarcastic tone. Every time she mentions his name, she becomes bitter. Despite the fact that it all happened a long time ago, there’s an open wound somewhere inside her. “A total fraud, and I fell for it like the sucker I am. He was never in love with me. And he was so self-centered he never even realized how much he hurt me.”

Mayta took a look around: a sea of red flags, a sea of fists held high, a sea of rifles, and ten thousand throats hoarse from shouting. Being here in Adelaida’s house seemed incomprehensible to him, in the same way that it seemed incomprehensible that any son of his, even if he had someone else’s name, could live with these armchairs covered with clear plastic, surrounded by these walls and their cracked paint. Was I right to come? Wasn’t this visit merely a meaningless, gratuitous, sentimental gesture? Wouldn’t Adelaida figure something strange was going on? Was that song they were singing “The International” in Quechua?

“I’m going away and I don’t know when I’ll be back to Peru,” Mayta explained to her, sitting on the arm of the nearest chair. “I didn’t want to leave without meeting him. Would it bother you if I saw him for a minute?”

“It sure would bother me,” Adelaida cut him off brusquely. “He doesn’t have your name, and Juan is the only father he knows. Don’t you know what it cost me to get him a normal home and a real father? You’re not going to ruin it on me now.”

“I don’t want to ruin anything,” Mayta said. “I’ve always respected our deal. I just wanted to meet him. I won’t tell him who I am, and if that’s the way you want it, I won’t even talk to him.”

He said nothing about his real activities when they first began seeing each other, only that he worked as a journalist. You couldn’t say he was good-looking, with that gait of his, as if he were walking on eggs, and with those spaces between his teeth. He didn’t even have a good job, judging by his clothes. But in spite of all that, you liked something about him. What was there about this revolutionary that appealed to the cute employee of the Banco de Credito over in Lince? The airmen guarding Rospigliosi Castle are uptight. They stop every passerby and ask to see his papers. Then they frisk him in hysterical detail. Has something else happened? Do they know something that hasn’t been announced yet over the radio? A young girl carrying baskets who stubbornly refused to be frisked has just been hit with a rifle butt.

“When I was with him, I felt I was learning things,” Adelaida says. “Not that he was so well-educated. It was that he talked about things the other guys I went out with never mentioned. Since I didn’t understand anything, I was like a mouse hypnotized by a cat.”

She was also impressed by the fact that he respected her, that he was so relaxed, so sure of himself. He said beautiful things to her. Why didn’t he kiss her? One day, he brought her to meet an aunt of his over in Surquillo, the only relative of Mayta’s she would ever meet. Aunt Josefa prepared them a lunch, complete with little cakes, and was affectionate toward Adelaida. They were chatting away when suddenly dona Josefa had to step out. They stayed in the living room listening to the radio, and Adelaida thought: Now is the moment. Mayta was right next to her on the sofa, and she waited. But he didn’t even try to hold her hand, and she said to herself: He must really be in love with me. The girl with the baskets has finally resigned herself to being frisked. Then they let her go. As she passes opposite the window, I see her lips moving as she insults them.

“I’m begging you, don’t ask to talk to him,” Adelaida said. “Besides, he’s in school. Why would you want to meet him, what for? If he put two and two together, it would be awful.”

“Just by seeing my face he’s miraculously going to discover I’m his father?” Mayta mocks.

“It frightens me, like tempting fate,” Adelaida stuttered.

In fact, her voice and face were consumed with worry. It was useless to make any more demands. Wasn’t this flash of sentimentality, this desire to see the son he rarely remembered, a bad symptom? He was wasting precious moments; it was foolish to have come. If Juan Zarate found him, there would be a scene, and any scandal, no matter how small, would have negative repercussions for the plan. Get up, say goodbye. But he was glued to the armchair.

“Juan was postmaster here in Lince,” Adelaida says. “He would come to see me when I went to work at the bank and again when I got off. He followed me, he asked me out, he asked me to marry him once a week. He put up with my rejections and never gave up.”

“Did he offer to give his name to the child?”

“That was the condition I set for our getting married.” I glance at the photo taken in Cañete, and now I understand why the beautiful employee would marry this ugly, older bureaucrat. Mayta’s son must be thirty years old. Did he have the normal life his mother wanted for him? What can he think about the current situation? Is he supporting the rebels and internationalists, or is he backing the army and the Marines? Or, like his mother, does he believe that either alternative is pure garbage? “Even though he hadn’t kissed me by our fifth or sixth date, he gave me a big surprise.”

“What would you say if I were to propose to you?”

“Let’s wait until that day and you’ll find out,” she said, playing the coquette.

“I’m proposing, then,” said Mayta. “Would you marry me, Adelaida?”

“He hadn’t even kissed me,” she repeats, nodding. “And he proposed just like that. I cooked my own goose in all of this, so I can’t blame anyone else.”

“Proof that you were in love.”

“It isn’t that I was dying to get married,” she asserts. Once again, she makes the gesture I’ve seen several times: she throws her hair back off her face. “I was young, quite good-looking, and lots of guys were interested in me. Juan Zárate wasn’t the only one. And I said yes to the one who was as poor as a church mouse, the revolutionary, the one who had other problems, too. Wasn’t I a jerk?”

“Okay, I won’t see him,” Mayta says softly. But he still didn’t get off the arm of the chair. “Tell me something about him, at least. And about yourself. Has married life been good for you?”

“Better than my life with you,” said Adelaida, in a resigned, even melancholic tone. “I live quietly, without worrying whether the cops might barge in day or night, break the place up, and arrest my husband. With Juan, I know that we’ll be eating every day and that we won’t be evicted for not paying the rent.”

“To judge by the way you say it, you don’t seem so happy,” said Mayta. Wasn’t this conversation, at this precise moment, absurd? Shouldn’t he be buying medicines, picking up his money down at France-Presse, packing his bag?

“No, I’m not,” said Adelaida, who displayed more hospitality since Mayta had agreed not to see the boy. “Juan made me quit working at the bank. If I were still working, we’d be living better, and I’d see people, know what’s going on. Here in the house, I spend my time sweeping, washing, and cooking. Not exactly the kind of life to make you happy.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Mayta, looking around the living room. “And yet, compared to millions of people, Adelaida, you’re living very well.”

“Are you starting in with politics now?” She gets riled up. “In that case, get out. It’s your fault that I’ve come to hate politics above everything.”

They were married three weeks later in a civil ceremony in the Lince town hall. Then she began to know the real Mayta. Under that clear blue sky, and over the roofs of red tiles in Cuzco, wave hundreds, thousands of red flags, and the old façades of its churches and palaces and the ancient stones of its streets are red with the blood of the recent fighting. At the beginning, she didn’t understand all that stuff about the RWP. She knew that in Peru there was one party, the APRA, which General Ordía had outlawed and which Prado had made legal again when he took office. But a party called the RWP? Screaming demonstrations, shots fired in the air, and frenetic speeches proclaim the beginning of another era, the advent of the new man. Have the executions of traitors, informers, torturers, and collaborators with the old regime begun in the beautiful Plaza de Armas, where the viceregal authorities had Túpac Amaru drawn and quartered? Mayta gave her a partial explanation: the Revolutionary Workers’ Party was still small.

“I didn’t think it was important, because it seemed like a game to me,” she says, pushing back a falling lock of hair. “But before a month was out, one night when I was alone I heard knocking at the door. It was two investigators. Under the pretext of carrying on a search, they cleaned the place out — they even took away a bag of rice I had in the kitchen. That’s how the nightmare began.”

She barely ever saw her husband, never knowing if he was at meetings, at the print shop, or in hiding. Mayta’s life was not France-Presse, because he only got an hourly and extremely low wage from them. They couldn’t have survived if she hadn’t gone on working at the bank. She quickly realized that the only thing important to Mayta was politics. There were times when he’d come home with those guys and argue until all hours of the morning. “So the RWP is communist?” she asked him. “We’re the real communists,” he answered. Who is this man you’ve married? she began to ask herself.

“I thought Juan Zárate loved you and turned himself inside out to make you happy.”

“He loved me before you turned up,” she said. “And he must have loved me when he agreed to give his name to your son. But once he went through with it, he began to resent me.”

Did he mistreat her? No, he treated her well enough, but always made her feel that it was he who had been the generous one. With the kid, on the other hand, he was good, he took charge of his education. What are you doing here, Mayta? Wasting your last hours in Lima talking about all this? But some kind of inertia kept him from leaving. That they were talking about conjugal problems in that final conversation, when Mayta was already halfway to Jauja, disappoints me. I was hoping to find something spectacular, something dramatic in that last conversation, something that would throw a conflicting light on what Mayta was feeling and dreaming on the eve of the uprising. But, to judge by what I’m hearing, I see that you two spoke more about you than about him. Sorry for interrupting, let’s go on. So his political activities brought you suffering?

“I suffered more because he was queer,” she replies. She blushes and goes on, “More because I found out he’d married me to cover up what he was.”

Finally, a dramatic revelation. And yet my attention is still split between Adelaida and the flags, the blood, the shootings, and the euphoria of the insurgents and internationalists in Cuzco. Is that how Lima will be in a few weeks? On the bus I took to Lince, the driver assured me that the army, starting last night, had begun publicly shooting presumed terrorists in Villa el Salvador, Comas, Ciudad del Niño, and other new towns. Will we see the same lynchings and murders in Lima that were perpetrated in Lima when the Chileans occupied the city during the War of the Pacific in 1881?

I can hear, quite clearly, the lecture a historian gave in London, based on the account of the British consul in Lima. While the Peruvian volunteers sacrificed themselves to hold the line against the Chilean attack in Chorrillos and Miraflores, the Lima mob murdered the Chinese in their shops, hanging them, stabbing them, and burning them in the street after accusing them of being accomplices of the Chileans. Then they went on to loot the houses of the rich, terrified ladies and gentlemen who were praying the invaders would get there quickly. They discovered that they were less afraid of the Chileans than of those frenzied masses of Indians, cholos, mulattoes, and blacks who had taken over the city. Would something like that happen now? Would the hungry masses loot the houses of San Isidro, Las Casuarinas, Miraflores, Chacarilla, as the last vestiges of the army melted away before the final rebel offensive? Would there be a stampede toward embassies and consulates, while generals, admirals, functionaries, and ministers boarded planes and ships with all the jewels, dollars, and deeds they could dig out of their hiding places at the last minute? Would Lima burn, the way the city of Cuatro Suyos is burning now?

“It would seem you haven’t forgiven him for that,” I say to her.

“Whenever I remember, my blood freezes in my veins,” Adelaida admits.

That time? That night — rather, that dawn. She heard the car’s brakes, a skid out in front of the house. And since she lived in fear of the police, she jumped out of bed to take a look. Through the window, she saw the car. In the bluish light of dawn, she could see Mayta’s faceless silhouette get out of the car on one side. On the other side, she could make out the driver. She was going back to bed, when something — something strange, unusual, difficult to explain, to define — upset her. She pressed her face to the window. Because the other man had made a gesture as if to say goodbye to Mayta, a movement it didn’t seem right to make to her husband. The kind of obscene gesture you’d see jokers, drunks, and playboys make. But Mayta was never playful or familiar. So? The guy, as if he were saying goodbye, had grabbed his fly. His fly. He still held on to it, and Mayta, instead of slapping his hand away — Let go, you stinking drunk! — nuzzled up to him. He was hugging him. They were kissing. On the face, on the mouth. “It’s a woman,” she wished, hoped, begged heaven it would be, all the time feeling her hands and knees shaking. A woman wearing trousers and a jacket? The foggy glow kept her from seeing clearly who was kissing and rubbing her husband down there on that deserted street, but there could be no doubt — because of his size, his build, his head, his hair — it was a man. She felt the desire to run out, half dressed as she was, and shout at them: “Queers, queers!” But a few seconds later, when the two separated and Mayta walked toward the house, she pretended to be asleep. In the darkness, mortified with shame, she glimpsed him coming in. She hoped that he would be so drunk that anyone who saw them would say, “He didn’t know what he was doing or with whom.” But of course he hadn’t even had a single drink. Did he ever drink? She saw him undress in the darkness, except for the underpants he slept in, and slip into bed with her, carefully, so as not to wake her up. Then Adelaida began to throw up.

“I don’t know how long,” Mayta replied, as if the question had taken him by surprise. “It’ll all depend on how I do. I want to change my life-style. I don’t even know if I’ll come back to Peru.”

“Are you going to give up politics?” a surprised Adelaida asked him.

“In a way,” he said. “I’m going because of something you always used to get on me about. I’ve finally proven you right.”

“A little late, don’t you think?” she said.

“Better late than never.” Mayta smiled. He was thirsty, as if he had eaten fish. Why not just leave?

Adelaida had that expression of disgust on her face that he remembered so well, and the crowd didn’t even manage to understand until — noisy and cataclysmic — the first bombs exploded. Roofs, walls, the bell towers of Cuzco all began to collapse. Debris of all sorts — stones, roof tiles, bricks — flew all over. Then they started to machine-gun the people who were running. In their panic, the crowd created as many casualties as the bursts of fire from the strafing planes. In the confusion of moans, bullets, and screams, those with rifles fired at the sky dirty with smoke.

“You were the only person Mayta said goodbye to,” I assure her. “He didn’t even visit his Aunt Josefa. Doesn’t his visit, when you think about it after so many years, seem strange to you?”

“He told me he was leaving the country and that he wanted to find out how his son was doing,” Adelaida says. “Naturally, I understood everything later, when it was in the papers.”

Outside, there is a sudden flare-up of activity at the entrance to the Rospigliosi Castle, as if, behind the barbed wire and the sandbags, they were redoubling their guard. Out there, not even the horror of the bombing has brought the looting under control. Frenzied bands of escaped convicts are breaking into the downtown stores. The rebel commanders are ordering anyone found looting to be shot where he stands. The buzzards are tracing circles over the bodies of those shot, who are soon indistinguishable from the victims of the bombing. It all smells of gunpowder, rotten flesh, burning.

“Take advantage of things, so you can be cured,” whispers Adelaida, so low that I barely heard her. But her words have the same effect on me as a slap in the face.

“I’m not sick,” Mayta stuttered. “Tell me about the kid before I go.”

“You are sick,” Adelaida insisted, trying to look him in the eye. “Are you cured, maybe?”

“It isn’t a sickness, Adelaida,” I stammered. I could feel that my palms were sweaty, and I was even thirstier.

“In your case, it is,” she said, and Matya thought something had reawakened all her resentment of before. It was his fault: What were you doing there, why didn’t you leave? “In others, it’s degenerate, but that kind of vice has nothing to do with you. I know all about it, I talked to that doctor about it. He said it could be cured, and you didn’t want to try shock treatments. I offered to get a loan from the bank for the therapy, but you said no, no, no. Now that it’s all over, tell me the truth. Why didn’t you want to go through with it? Were you scared?”

“Shock treatment is useless for these things,” I said, muttering. “Let’s not talk about it. Could I please have a glass of water?”

Wasn’t it possible that marrying you was his “therapy,” ma’am? Couldn’t he have married her, thinking that living with a young, attractive woman would “cure” him?

“That’s what he wanted me to believe, when we finally got around to talking,” Adelaida says softly, pushing back her hair. “A lie, of course. If he had wanted to be cured, he would have tried. He married me to cover up. Above all, in front of his revolutionary buddies. I was the screen for his filthy activities.”

“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to answer this question. Did you two have a normal sex life?”

She doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable. Because there are so many dead and it’s impossible to bury them, the rebel commanders order them doused with anything flammable and burned. The rotting bodies scattered through the city must not be the cause of infection. The air is so thick and polluted that you can scarcely breathe. Adelaida uncrosses her legs, makes herself comfortable, and scrutinizes me. Otherwise, there is a clamor. An armored car has taken up a position in front of the barbed wire. There are more guards. Things must have gotten worse. It looks as if they’re getting ready for something.

As if she had read my mind, Adelaida says softly, “If they are attacked, we’ll be the first to be fired on.” The crackling of the bonfires of corpses doesn’t silence the irrepressible, maddened voices of the relatives and friends who try to stop the burning, who demand Christian burial for the victims. Swathed in smoke, stench, fear, and despair, some try to wrench the bodies away from the revolutionaries. From a monastery, church, or convent there comes a funeral procession. It advances, ghostlike, the people chanting prayers and imprecations amid the dying and the ruin that is Cuzco.

“I had no idea what normal or abnormal relations were,” she says, pushing back her hair in her ritual gesture. “I couldn’t make any comparisons. In those days, you didn’t discuss those things with your girlfriends. So I thought they were normal.”

But they weren’t. They lived together and from time to time they made love. Which meant that on certain nights they hugged and kissed, finished rapidly, and went to sleep. Something superficial, routine, hygienic, something that — as she realized later — was incomplete, far short of her needs and desires. It isn’t that she didn’t like Mayta’s politeness — he always turned out the light beforehand. But she had the feeling that he was in a hurry, on edge, thinking about something else even as he caressed her. Was his mind somewhere else? Yes, as he asked himself at what moment this desire that had aroused his body by means of fantasies and memories would begin to fade, to sink, to plunge him into that well of anguish from which he would try to extricate himself by stammering stupid explanations that Adelaida, luckily, seemed to believe. His thoughts were on other nights or dawns, when his desire did not fade and even seemed to get sharper if his hands and mouth were kept busy, not with Adelaida, but with one of those little fags that, after great hesitation, he dared to seek out in Porvenir or Callao. In fact, they made love only a few times, and at first Adelaida didn’t know how to ask him not to finish so quickly. Later, when she was surer of herself, she did ask him. She begged him, implored him not to withdraw from her, exhausted, exactly when she had begun to feel a stirring, a vertigo. Most often, she didn’t even feel that, because Mayta would suddenly seem to be sorry for what he was doing. And she was such a sucker that, until that night, she had tortured herself wondering: Is it my fault? Am I frigid? Can’t I get him excited?

“May I have another glass of water?” Mayta said. “Then I’m on my way, Adelaida.”

She got up, and when she returned to the small living room, she brought, with the water, a handful of photographs. She handed them over without saying a word. The newborn child, the child a few months old in diapers, in Juan Zárate’s arms; at a birthday party, next to a cake with two candles; in short pants and in shoes, at attention, staring at the photographer. I examined them again and again, examining himself at the same time that he studied the features, the positions, the gestures, the clothes of his child, whom he had never seen and whom he would never see in the future. Would he remember these pictures tomorrow in Jauja? Would I remember them, would they go with me, would they give me courage on the march in the cold uplands, in the jungle, during attacks, while I wait in ambush? What did he feel as he looked at them? Would he feel, when he remembered them, that the struggle, the sacrifices, the murders were things he’d do for his sake? Right now, did he feel tenderness, remorse, anguish, love? No, just curiosity, and gratitude toward Adelaida for having shown him the photographs. Was this the reason that brought him to this house before he left for Jauja? Or, more than meeting his son, could it have been to find out if Adelaida was still resentful for that thing which doubtless was the agony of her existence?

“I don’t know,” says Adelaida. “If that’s why he came, he went away knowing that, despite the many years that had gone by, I hadn’t forgiven him for ruining my life.”

“But even though you knew, you stayed with him for quite a while. You even became pregnant.”

“Inertia,” she whispers. “Being pregnant gave me the strength to end the whole farce.”

She had suspected it for weeks, because her period had never been so late. The day she received the positive test results, she began to cry with excitement. Almost immediately, however, she was overcome with the thought that someday her son or daughter would know what she knew. Over the previous weeks, they had had several arguments about shock treatments.

“It wasn’t because I was afraid,” he said in a low voice as he looked at her. “It was because I didn’t want to be cured, Adelaida.”

So, in that last conversation, you two spoke about the unmentionable. Yes, and even Mayta had been much more frank than he’d been when they were living together. The procession kept picking up people from the streets it passed along, horrifying, somnambulistic men and women, children and old people stunned because they saw sons, brothers, grandchildren with their bones splintered, crushed by falling rubble, and burned in the hygienic fires. This chanting and tearful serpent squeezing through the ruinous, narrow streets of Cuzco seemed to console and reconcile the survivors. Suddenly, in the area that had been the Plaza del Rey, fighters and their supporters waving rifles and red flags tried to raise the spirit of the people and to keep them from becoming demoralized by starting a demonstration. There was an avalanche of shouts, stones, shots, and a terrified howling.

“If I didn’t know it was against your principles, I’d ask you to have an abortion,” said Mayta, as if he had prepared the statement. “There are plenty of good reasons. The life I lead, that we lead. Is it possible to bring up a child in the midst of that kind of life? What I do requires total dedication. I just can’t hang that around my neck. Anyway, if it isn’t against your principles. If it is, we’ll just have to do our best.”

She didn’t cry and they didn’t even argue. “I don’t know, let me see, I’ll think about it.” And at that moment she knew what she had to do, clearly and absolutely.

“So you lied to me.” Adelaida smiled, with a little air of triumph. “When you told me that you were ashamed of yourself, that it made you feel like garbage, that it was the disgrace of your life. I’m happy to see that you finally admit it.”

“It made and still makes me ashamed sometimes,” said Mayta. My cheeks were burning, and my tongue felt coated, but I wasn’t sorry to be talking about these things. “It’s still the disgrace of my life.”

“So then, why didn’t you want to get better,” Adelaida repeated.

“I want to be what I am,” I muttered, “I’m a revolutionary and I have flat feet. I’m also a queer. I don’t want to stop being one. It’s difficult to explain it to you. In this society, there are rules and prejudices; whatever seems abnormal seems a crime or a sickness. All because society is rotten, full of stupid ideas. That’s why we need a revolution, see?”

“And at the same time he told me himself that in the U.S.S.R. he would have been thrown into an insane asylum, and in China he would have been shot, because that’s how they deal with queers,” Adelaida tells me. “Is that why you want to start a revolution?”

Amid the dust of the collapsing buildings, the smoke from the fires, the prayers of the believers, the howls of the wounded, the despair of the unharmed, the sound of rifle shots echoed only a few seconds. Suddenly there came again the sound of screaming engines. Even before the people who had been throwing stones at each other, punching each other, and cursing each other could understand what was happening, bombs and machine-gun fire rained down on Cuzco.

“That’s why I want to start another revolution,” Mayta said, as he passed his tongue over his dry lips. He was dying of thirst but didn’t dare ask for a third glass of water. “No half measures, but the true, the integral revolution. A revolution that will wipe out all injustice, a revolution that will guarantee that no one will have any reason to be afraid of being what he is.”

“And you’re going to bring about that revolution with your pals from the RWP?” Adelaida laughed.

“I’m going to have to bring it about all by myself.” Mayta smiled at her. “I’m not in the RWP anymore. I resigned last night.”

She woke up the next day, and the idea was in her head, perfected by a night’s sleep. She caressed it, she turned it over, she spun it around as she got dressed, waited for the bus, and rattled toward the Banco de Crédito in Lince, and while she checked the balance in an account in her Lilliputian office. At eleven, she asked permission to go to the post office. Juan Zárate was still there, behind the four-paned windows. She managed to let him see her, and when he greeted her, she answered with a Technicolor smile. Juan Zárate, of course, took off his glasses, straightened his tie, and dashed out to shake her hand. The breakdown is total. The broken-up streets are strewn with more dead, more houses collapse, and those still standing are looted. Few of those who moan, weep, steal, die, or search for their dead seem to hear the orders given on every corner by the rebel patrols: “The order is to abandon the city, comrades. Abandon the city, abandon the city.”

“I’m still shocked that I had the nerve,” says Adelaida, looking at her honeymoon photo.

So that, during that last conversation, in this little living room, Mayta spoke to the woman who had been his wife about intimate, ideal things: the true, the integral revolution, the one that would abolish all injustices without inflicting new ones. So that, despite the last-minute reverses and setbacks, he felt, as Blacquer assured me, euphoric and even lyrical.

“If only our revolution would light the way for the others. Yes, Adelaida. I hope our Peru sets the example for the rest of the world.”

“It’s better to be frank, and that’s just how I’m going to talk to you — frankly.” Adelaida couldn’t believe her own self-confidence and daring. Even as she was saying these things, she was able to smile, strike a pose, and shake her hair in such a way that the head of the Lince post office looked at her in ecstasy. “You were wild about marrying me, isn’t that right, Juan?”

“You said it, Adelaidita.” Juan Zárate bent forward over the little table in the Petit Thouars coffee shop where they were having a soda. “Crazy about you, and even more than crazy.”

“Look me in the eye, Juan, and answer me truthfully. Do you still like me as much as you did years ago?”

“More than ever.” The head of the Lince post office swallowed hard. “You’re even prettier now than then, Adelaidita.”

“Well then, if you like, you may marry me.” Her voice hadn’t failed her, and it doesn’t fail her now. “I don’t want to cheat you, Juan. I’m not in love with you. But I’ll try to love you, to comply with your wishes, I’ll respect you, and I’ll do whatever I can to be a good wife.”

Juan Zárate stared at her, blinking. The soda in his hand began to tremble.

“Are you speaking seriously, Adelaidita?” he managed finally to blurt out.

“I certainly am.” And even now she didn’t hesitate. “I ask only one thing from you. That you give your name to the child I’m expecting.”

“Give me another glass of water,” said Mayta. “I just can’t stop drinking, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You’ve been making speeches,” she said, getting up. She went on, from the kitchen: “You haven’t changed a bit. You’re even worse. Now you want to start a revolution not just for the poor but also for the queers. I swear you make me laugh, Mayta.”

A revolution for the queers, too, I thought. Yes, for the poor queers, too. He wasn’t the slightest bit angry about Adelaida’s burst of laughter. Amid the smoke and pestilence, you could make out the columns of people fleeing from the destroyed city, tripping over the broken pavement, covering their mouths and noses. The dead, the badly wounded, the very old, and the very young remained among the ruins. And looters, who, defying asphyxiation, fire, and sporadic bombing, broke into the houses still standing, looking for money and food.

“And he accepted,” I conclude. “Don Juan Zárate must have really loved you, ma’am.”

“We had a church wedding while we waited for my divorce from Mayta to go through.” Adelaida sighs, looking at the Cañete photograph. “It was two years before the divorce was official. Then we had a civil ceremony.”

How did Mayta take this story? Without any surprise, certainly with relief. He had gone through the charade of telling her how very concerned he was that she should marry that way, with no feelings at all.

“Wasn’t that what you did with me? But with one difference. You tricked me, and I told Juan everything.”

“But your calculations were wrong,” said Mayta. He had just finished the glass of water and was feeling bloated. “Don’t you remember that I warned you? Right from the beginning, I warned you that …”

“No more speeches, please,” Adelaida interrupted him.

She is silent, tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair, and I can see by the look on her face that she has estimated that the hour is up. But I look at my watch and there are fifteen minutes left. Just then, we hear shots: one isolated report, then two more, than a burst of fire. Adelaida and I jump to the window and look out. The guards have disappeared, no doubt crouching behind the barbed wire and sandbags. But on the left, seemingly unconcerned, a patrol of airmen advances toward Rospigliosi Castle. It’s true that the shots sounded quite far away. Executions in the slums? Has the fighting on the outskirts of Lima begun?

“And did it really work out as you wished?” I take up the conversation again. She looks away from the window, at me. The expression of alarm on her face when she heard the shots has been replaced by the sour expression which seems to be habitual in her. “The business about the boy.”

“It worked out until he discovered that Juan wasn’t his father,” she says. She remains there, with her lips parted, trembling, and her eyes, which stare fixedly at me, begin to shine.

“Well, that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, we don’t have to talk about your son.” I excuse myself. “Let’s get back to Mayta.”

“I’m not going to make another speech,” he said, to calm her. He drank the last drop of water. What if being so thirsty is a sign of fever, Mayta? “I’m going to be frank with you, Adelaida. I wanted to find out about my son before I leave the country, but I wanted to find out how you were doing, too. I’m no better off for having found out. I hoped I’d find you happy, at peace. But all I see is resentment, toward me and everybody else.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I resent you less than I resent myself. Because I made all my own trouble.”

Far off, there are more shots. From the surrounding valleys, ridges, peaks, and plateaus, Cuzco is a cloud of smoke filled with groans.

“Juan didn’t tell him. I did,” she whispers, in a hesitant voice. “Juan will never forgive me. He always loved Johnny as if he were his own son.”

And she tells me the old story that must gnaw at her day and night, a story that combines religion, jealousy, and grudge. From the beginning, Johnny favored his false father over his mother, was more attached to him than to her, perhaps because in some obscure way he sensed that it was Adelaida’s fault that there was a huge lie in his life.

“Do you mean that your husband takes him to Mass every Sunday?” Mayta said, thinking aloud. My memory brought back to me a whirlwind of prayers, chants, communions, and childhood confessions, the collection of colorful holy pictures I stored in my notebook as if they were precious objects. “Well, at least in that, he has something in common with me. When I was his age, I went to Mass every day.”

“Juan is a very devout Catholic,” said Adelaida. “Catholic, Apostolic, Roman, a pious old lady, he says jokingly. But it’s the absolute truth. And he wants Johnny to be that way, of course.”

“Of course.” Mayta nodded. But he was free-associating, thinking about the boys from the San José school in Jaula who had listened so attentively, almost hypnotized, to what he told them about Marxism and revolution. He saw them: they were printing the communiqués their leaders sent them, on mimeograph machines hidden under tarpaulins and boxes; they were distributing handbills outside factories, schools, markets, movie houses. He saw them multiplying like the loaves of bread in the Bible, every day recruiting scores of boys as poor and selfdenying as themselves, coming and going along dangerous paths, along snowdrifts in the mountains, slipping through obstacles and army patrols, sliding at night over the roofs of public buildings and the tops of peaks to leave red flags with the hammer and sickle. And I saw them arrive, sweaty, joyful, and formidable at remote encampments with the medicine, information, clothing, and food the guerrillas would need. His son was one of them. They were very young, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old. Thanks to them, the guerrillas would surely be victorious.

The assault on heaven, I thought. We shall bring heaven down from heaven, establish it on earth; heaven and earth were becoming one in this twilight hour. The ashen clouds in the sky met the ashen clouds from the fires. And those little black spots that flew, innumerable, from all four points on the compass toward Cuzco — they weren’t ashes but vultures. Spurred on by hunger, braving smoke and flames, they dove on toward their desirable prey. From the heights, the survivors, parents, wounded, the fighters, the internationalists, all of them, with a minimum of fantasy, could hear the anxious tearing, the febrile pecking, the abject beating of wings, and smell the horrifying stench.

“And so …?” I urge her to continue. Now we hear shots all the time, always far off, but neither of us looks out on the street again.

“And so the subject was never brought up in front of Johnny,” she goes on. I listen to her and I try to get interested in her story, but I still see and smell the carnage.

It was a taboo subject, down at the very roots of their relationship, undermining it like slow acid. Juan Zárate loved the boy, but he had never forgiven her that agreement, the price she made him pay to marry her. The story took an unexpected turn the day Johnny — he’d finished secondary school and entered pharmacy school — discovered his father had a lover. Don Juan Zárate had a lover? Yes, and she had her own little house. The very idea would have made Adelaida roar with laughter — jealousy was out of the question: that old coot, dragging his feet, practically blind, with a lover. She was dying of laughter. A woman is jealous when she is in love, and she had never loved Juan Zárate. She had stoically put up with him. She was just annoyed that, with the pittance he earned, he supported two households …

“But my son, on the other hand, was devastated. It drove him crazy,” she adds, in a hypnotic state. “He became embittered, shriveled up. That his father could have a sweetheart seemed like the end of the world to him. Was it because he’s been raised so piously? In a child, I would have understood a reaction like that. But how can you figure it in a young man twenty years old?”

“He suffered for your sake,” I tell her.

“It was religion,” Adelaida insists. “Juan brought him up that way, four-square religious. He went crazy. He wouldn’t accept that his father, who had taught him to be one hundred percent Catholic, could be a hypocrite. That’s what he said, and he was already twenty.”

She falls silent because the shots sound closer this time. I look out the window. It can’t be anything serious; the guards seem calm across the barbed wire. They are looking south, as if the shots come from San Isidro or Miraflores.

“Maybe he inherited it from Mayta,” I say to her. “When he was a kid, that’s how he was: an unwavering believer, convinced that you had to toe the line at every instant. He would make no compromises. Nothing bothered him more than someone who believed one thing and did something else. Didn’t he tell you about the hunger strike he went on so he could be like the poor? People like that aren’t usually happy in life, ma’am.”

“When I saw him suffering so much, I thought I could help him by telling him the truth,” Adelaida says softly, her face twisted. “I went crazy too, right?”

“Yes, I’m leaving, but one last favor,” Mayta said, and as soon as he was on his feet, he was sorry he hadn’t left earlier. “Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. Keep it to yourself.”

She had never taken seriously those secrets, precautions, fears, that distrust, despite the fact that, while they were together, she had seen the police in the house several times. The effect it had on her was like that of seeing grown men playing children’s games, a persecution complex that poisoned life. How can you enjoy life if you’re constantly afraid of a universal conspiracy of informers, the army, the APRA, the capitalists, the Stalinists, the imperialists, etc., etc., against you? Mayta’s words brought back the nightmare it had been to hear, several times a day: “Careful, don’t repeat this, don’t tell anyone, no one’s supposed to know, no one can …” But she didn’t argue. Sure, sure, not a word to anyone. Mayta nodded and with a half smile, waving goodbye, he went off hurriedly, walking that funny little walk of his, the walk of a man with blisters on the soles of his feet.

“He didn’t cry, there was no melodrama,” Adelaida adds, staring into space. “He asked me a few questions, as if out of mere curiosity. What was Mayta like? Why did we get divorced? Nothing else. He seemed to calm down, to the point that I thought: Judging by what little effect it’s had on him, telling him seems to have been a waste of time.”

But the next day, the boy disappeared. Adelaida hasn’t seen him for ten years. Her voice breaks, and I see her wring her hands as if she wants to tear the skin off.

“Is that how Catholics behave?” she whispers. “To break off with a mother because of something that at worst was only a mistake. Everything I did, didn’t I do it for his sake?”

She even went to the Missing Persons Bureau, though the boy was nearly of legal age. I’m sorry to see how tormented she is and I understand that she’s added this episode to the list of Mayta’s crimes, but, at the same time, I feel distant from her grief, nearer to Mayta, following him through the streets of Lince toward Avenida Arequipa, to get the bus. Did he walk slumped over because of the bitterness of that visit to his ex-wife and the frustration of not having seen that son he would certainly never see? Was he demoralized, pained? He was euphoric, charged with energy, impatient, mentally allocating the time he had left in Lima. He knew how to overcome reverses by an emotive leap, knew how to draw strength from them for the task he had in front of him. Before, the simple, precise, daily manual labor that wiped out his depression and self-pity was painting walls, working in the Cocharcas print shop, distributing handbills on Avenida Argentina and Plaza Dos de Mayo, correcting proofs, translating an article from French for Workers Voice. Now it was a flesh-and-blood revolution, the real thing, which would begin any moment now. He thought: The revolution you are going to start. Was he going to waste time torturing himself because of domestic complications? He went through his pockets, took out the list, reread what he had to buy. Would they have his severance pay ready for him at France-Presse?

“At first, I thought he’d killed himself,” Adelaida says, furiously wringing her hands. “That I’d have to kill myself to make up for his death.”

They learned nothing about him for weeks and months, until one day Juan Zárate received a letter. Serene, measured, well-thought-out. He thanked Juan for what he had done for him, said he wished he could repay him for his generosity. He said he was sorry that he had left in such a brusque fashion, but he thought it best to avoid explanations that would be painful to both of them. He shouldn’t worry about him. Is he high up in the mountains which are beginning to fade into the night? Is he one of the men who jumps and runs back and forth among the survivors — his sub-machine gun on his shoulder, his pistol in his belt — trying to impose order on chaos.

“The letter came from Pucallpa,” says Adelaida. “He didn’t even mention my name.”

Yes, his severance pay was ready — and in cash, not a check: 43,000 soles. He could buy everything on the list and still have some left over. Naturally, he did not bid the editors at France-Presse a fond farewell. When the chief asked him if he could stand in for someone on Sunday, Mayta said he was going to Chiclayo. He walked out in high spirits, hurrying toward Avenida Abancay. He never had the patience to go shopping, but this time he went to several stores, looking for the best-quality khaki trousers, a pair that could stand up to a harsh climate, rough terrain, and heavy action. He bought two pairs, each in a different store, and then, from a vendor out on the sidewalk, he purchased a pair of sandals. The vendor lent him his bench, leaning on the walls of the National Library, so he could try them on. He went into a pharmacy on Jirón Lampa. He was about to take out his list and hand it to the pharmacist, when he stopped himself, repeating, as he had thousands of times in his life, “You can’t take enough precautions.” He decided to buy the bandages, the antiseptics, the coagulants, the sulfa, and the other first-aid materials Vallejos had told him to get, in several different pharmacies.

“And you haven’t seen him since then?”

“I haven’t,” Adelaida says.

But Juan Zárate has. Every so often, he would come to Lima from Pucallpa or Yurimaguas, where he was working in lumber camps, and they would have lunch. But ever since this stuff began — the attacks, the kidnappings, the bombings, the war — he hasn’t written or come: he’s either dead or he is one of them. Night has fallen and the survivors have huddled together to protect themselves from the cold and the darkness of Cuzco. The crowd babbles in its sleep, hearing spectral planes and bombs that multiply those of the previous day. But Mayta’s son is not asleep. In the small headquarters dugout, he argues, trying to impose his point of view. The people should return to Cuzco as soon as the noxious fumes from the fires dissipate, and begin to rebuild. There are commanders with other opinions: there they will be all too easy a target for renewed bombings, and a slaughter like today’s hamstrings the masses. It would be better for the people to stay in the country, scattered in the outlying districts, settlements, and camps, less vulnerable to air attacks. Mayta’s son replies, argues, raises his voice in the glare of the small fire. His face seems tanned, scarred, serious. He hasn’t taken his sub-machine gun off his shoulder or removed his pistol from his belt. The cigarette between his fingers has gone out and he doesn’t realize it. His voice is that of a man who has overcome all tests — cold, hunger, fatigue, retreat, terror, crime — and is sure of an inevitable, imminent victory. So far, he has never been wrong, and it doesn’t look as though he’ll make any mistakes in the future.

“The few times he came, he would pick up Juan and they’d go out together,” Adelaida repeats. “He never came to see me, never called me, and never let Juan even mention the possibility of his visiting me. Can you understand that kind of resentment, that kind of hate? At the beginning, I wrote him lots of letters. Later I just gave up.”

He picked up the package, handed over the receipt, and went out. With the sulfa and Mercurochrome from the last pharmacy, he’d finished up the list. The packages were big and heavy. When he got to his room on Jirón Zepita, his arms hurt. He had his bag ready: the sweaters, the shirts, and right in the middle, the sub-machine gun Vallejos had given him. He packed the medicine and looked over the piles of books. Would Blacquer come to take them? He went out and hid the key between the two loose boards on the landing. If Blacquer didn’t come, the landlord would sell them to make up for the unpaid rent. What did that matter now, anyway? He took a taxi to Parque Universitario. What did his room, his books, Adelaida, his son, or his former comrades matter now? He felt his heart pounding as the driver put the valise on the luggage rack. The bus would leave for Jauja in a few minutes. He thought: From this trip, there is no return, Mayta.

I get up, I give her the money, I thank her, and she sees me to the door, which she closes as soon as I cross the threshold. It seems strange to see the phony façade of the Rospigliosi Castle in the fading light. Once again, I have to allow the airmen to frisk me. They let me pass. As I walk along, past houses sealed up with stone and mud, all around me I hear noises that are no longer exclusively shots. There are hand grenades exploding, and cannon being fired.