The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Eight

He looks like one of Arcimboldo’s figures: his nose a twisted carrot, his cheeks two quinces, his chin a protruding potato covered with eyes, and his neck a cluster of half-skinned grapes. His ugliness is so outrageous that it’s charming. If you didn’t know better, you’d say all that greasy hair hanging in tufts over don Ezequiel’s shoulders is a wig. His body seems even spongier than it really is, because it’s stuffed into those baggy pants and that tattered sweater. Only one of his shoes has laces; the other threatens to fall off with each step he takes. Nevertheless, don Ezequiel is not a beggar but the owner of the furniture and housewares store located in the Plaza de Armas of Jauja, next to the Colegio del Carmen and the Iglesia de las Madres Franciscanas. The gossips of Jauja say that this man before us is the richest merchant in the city. Why hasn’t he fled, like the other rich people? The insurgents kidnapped him a few months ago, and the vox populi has it he paid a high ransom. Ever since then, they’ve left him alone, because, as they say, he’s paid his “revolutionary taxes.”

“I know who sent you here. I know it was that son of a bitch Shorty Ubilluz.” He stops me dead as soon as he sees me walk into his store. “You’re wasting your time, I don’t know anything, I never saw anything, and I was never involved in that dumb bullshit. I have nothing to say. I know you’re writing about Vallejos. Don’t put me in it, or I’ll sue you. I’m telling you without getting mad, just so you’ll get the idea through your thick skull.”

As he speaks to me, his eyes are burning with indignation. His shouts are so loud that some troops on patrol in the plaza come over to see if there’s anything wrong. No, nothing. When they leave, I go into my usual routine: No reason to get upset, don Ezequiel, I’m not going to use your name, not once. Not a single person who participated in the action, not even Second Lieutenant Vallejos or Mayta, appears by name. No one could tell from what I’m writing what really happened.

“So why the fuck did you bother coming to Jauja?” he retorts, gesturing with fingers that look like hooks. “Why the fuck are you asking questions up and down every street in town? What the fuck is all this gossip-collecting for?”

“So I will know what I’m doing when I lie,” I say for the hundredth time this year. “At least let me try to explain it to you, don Ezequiel. Just two minutes of your time. Okay? May I come in?”

The light that bathes Jauja is like the dawn, like first light, hesitant, blackish, and in it the outline of the cathedral, the balconies, and the fenced-in garden constantly dissolve and reappear. The sharp breeze gives him goose bumps. Was it nerves? Was it fear? He wasn’t nervous or frightened, just slightly anxious, and not about what was going to happen but because of the damn altitude, which made him aware of his heart every second. He’d slept a few hours, despite the cold that came in through the broken windows, despite the fact that the barbershop chair was not an ideal bed. At five, a crowing rooster had awakened him, and the first thing he thought was: Today’s the day. He got up, stretched and yawned in the darkness, and, banging into one thing after another, went over to the washbowl filled with water. He sat down on one of the chairs where Ezequiel shaved his customers, and, closing his eyes, went over his orders. He was confident, serene, and if it weren’t for that shortness of breath, he would have felt happy. Minutes later, he heard the door open. In the glow of a lantern, he saw Ezequiel, carrying hot coffee in a canteen cup.

“Was it very uncomfortable sleeping in here?”

“I slept very well,” said Mayta. “Is it five-thirty already?”

“Just about,” whispered Ezequiel. “Go out the back way, and don’t make any noise.”

“Thanks for your hospitality,” Mayta said, bidding him goodbye. “Good luck.”

“Bad luck is what it was. My big mistake was being a nice guy, an asshole.” His nose swells up, and myriad wine-colored veins pop out. His frenetic eyes dance in his head. “My big mistake was to feel sorry for an outsider I didn’t know and to let him sleep for one single night in my barbershop. And who was it who came to me with the sad tale of how this poor fellow had no place to stay and wouldn’t I put him up? Who else but that son of a bitch Shorty Ubilluz!”

“But that was twenty-five years ago, don Ezequiel,” I say, trying to calm him down. “It’s an old story no one remembers. Don’t get so worked up.”

“I get worked up because that bastard isn’t happy with what he did to me then. Now he’s going around saying I’ve sold out to the terrorists. Let’s see if the army shoots me — the world will finally be rid of me.” Don Ezequiel snorts. “I get worked up because nothing ever happened to that smart-aleck shithead — but me, who knew nothing, who understood nothing, who saw nothing, they locked me up in jail, they broke my ribs, and they had me pissing blood, they kicked me so many times in the kidneys and the balls.”

“But they let you out of jail, you started over, and now you’re the envy of everyone in Jauja. Don Ezequiel, you shouldn’t let yourself get like this, don’t lose your temper. Forget it.”

“How can I forget it if you come around here bothering me to tell you things I don’t know anything about,” he says, growling, and stretches out his fingers as if to scratch me. “It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. The one who knew the least about what was going on was the only one to get fucked up.”

He went down the hall, made sure there was no one in the street, opened the half door of the barbershop, went out, and closed the door behind him. There wasn’t a soul in the plaza, and the timid light was barely strong enough for him to see where he was walking. He went to the bench. The Ricrán men hadn’t arrived yet. He sat down, put his suitcase between his feet, pulled up the collar of his sweater so he could breathe through it, and stuck his hands in his pockets. He would have to be a machine. It was something he remembered from his military instruction course: a lucid robot, who is neither early nor late, and, above all, who never doubts; a fighter who executes his orders with the precision of an electric mixer or a lathe. If everyone did just that, the toughest test, the one they’d face today, would be no problem. The second test would be even easier, and from then on, there would be a clear road to victory.

He heard roosters he couldn’t see; behind him, in the grass of the little garden, a toad croaked. Would they be late? The truck from Ricrán would park in the Plaza de Santa Isabel, where all the vehicles carrying merchandise for the market came. From there, divided into small groups, they would take up their positions. He didn’t even know the names of the two comrades who would go with him to seize the jail and then the telephone company. “Who’s today’s saint?” “St. Edmund Dantés.” Behind the collar that covered half his face, he smiled. He’d thought of the password while remembering The Count of Monte Cristo. Just then, the punctual joeboy appeared. His name was Feliciano Tapia and he was in uniform — khaki shirt and trousers, cap of the same color, and a gray sweater — carrying books under his arm. They are going to help us start the revolution and then go to school, he thought. We have to hurry, so they won’t be late for class. Each group had a joeboy attached to it as messenger, in case they had to communicate something unforeseen. Once each group began its withdrawal, the joeboy was supposed to return to his normal life.

“The guys from Ricrán are late,” said Mayta. “Could the mountain road be blocked?”

The kid looked at the clouds. “No, it hasn’t rained.”

It was improbable that a rainstorm or a landslide would close the road at this time of year. If it did happen, their backup plan had the Ricrán people heading across the mountains to Quero. The joeboy looked enviously at Mayta. He was just a little kid, with rabbit teeth and fuzz on his cheeks.

“Are your buddies on time like you?”

“Roberto is already on the corner by the orphanage, and I saw Melquíades on his way to Santa Isabel.”

It was quickly growing light, and Mayta was sorry he hadn’t checked over the sub-machine gun once more. He had oiled it the night before in the barbershop, and before going to sleep, he’d clicked the safety on and off, to check if the gun was loaded. What need was there for another check? Now there was some movement in the plaza. Women with cloaked heads were walking by, heading for the cathedral, and from time to time a van or a truck passed, loaded with bundles or barrels. It was five minutes to six. He stood up and grabbed his suitcase.

“Run to Santa Isabel, and if the truck’s there, tell my group to park in front of the jail. At six-thirty I’ll let them in. Got it?”

“I don’t have anything to hide, so I’ll tell you the way it was. The guy in charge of everything wasn’t Vallejos or the outsider but Ubilluz.” Don Ezequiel scratches the bumpy wattles on his throat with his black fingernails, and snorts. “He was responsible for what happened and what didn’t happen that morning. You’re wasting your time shooting the shit with anyone else. He’s the guy you want. That fuckup is the only one who knows just exactly what the fuck happened.”

A radio turned up full blast and broadcasting in English drowns out his voice. It’s a station set up for the American Marines and pilots, who are using the Colegio San José as a headquarters.

“There goes the radio station of the motherfucking gringos!” barks don Ezequiel, covering his ears.

I tell him how surprised I am not to have seen Marines on the streets, that all the patrols around are Peruvian soldiers and national guardsmen.

“The gringos must be sleeping it off or resting after screwing so much,” he bellows, enraged. “They’ve corrupted Jauja totally, even the nuns are prostitutes now. How could it be otherwise when they’ve got dollars and we’re dying of hunger? They say they even bring their water in by plane. It isn’t true that their money helps local commerce. Not a single one has ever come in here to buy anything. They only spend money on cocaine, you bet; they pay anything for cocaine. It’s a lie that they’ve come here to fight the communists. They’ve come to snort cocaine and screw Jauja girls. They even brought blacks with them, how the hell do you like that?”

Even though I’m paying attention to don Ezequiel’s tantrum, I don’t forget about what Mayta was doing that early morning twenty-five years ago, in that Jauja free of revolutionaries and Marines, as he walked down the morning street Alfonso Ugarte, carrying his weapon in his suitcase. Was he worried that the truck was late? He must have been. Even though they knew that someone was bound to be late, this first problem — even before the plan went into effect — must have troubled him. As to the plan itself, I think I’ve figured it out fairly well, despite all the lies and fantasies surrounding it, up until the moment when, about eleven in the morning, the revolutionaries were to leave Jauja and head for the bridge at Molinos.

From that point on, I get lost, because of the contradictions in the various accounts I’ve heard. I’m increasingly sure that only a small nucleus — perhaps only Vallejos and Ubilluz, maybe just those two and Mayta, perhaps only the lieutenant — knew everything they’d planned. The decision to keep the others ignorant of the entire plan hampered them terribly. What could Mayta have been thinking about on the last block of Alfonso Ugarte, when he saw on his left the adobe walls and the tile-covered eaves of the jail? That, to the right, behind the curtains in Ubilluz’s house, Shorty and the comrades from La Oroya, Casapalca, and Morocha, ensconced there since the night before or at least for some hours now, were perhaps watching him pass. Should he warn them that the truck hadn’t come? No, he should just follow orders. Besides, just from seeing him there alone, they would understand that the truck was held up. If it arrived in the next half hour, the Ricrán men would get into the fray. And if it didn’t, they would meet with them in Quero, where the latecomers were supposed to go.

He reached the stone façade of the jail, and as the lieutenant had said, there was no guard. The rusty door opened and Vallejos appeared. Signaling him to be quiet, he took Mayta by the arm and brought him in, after checking to see if anyone was following him. With a gesture, he told him to go into the warden’s office. Then he disappeared. Mayta observed the entranceway with its columns, the door of the room in front, which had the word Guardroom on it, and the little patio with cherry trees, which had long, thin leaves and clusters of fruit. In the room where he stood, there was the national emblem, a blackboard, a desk, a chair, and a small window. Through the dirty glass, he could just make out the street. He stood there with the suitcase in his hands, not knowing what to do.

Then Vallejos came back. “Just wanted to see if anyone noticed you come in,” he said in a low voice. “Didn’t the truck come?”

“Seems not. I sent Feliciano to wait for it and to tell my group to be here at six-thirty. Will we need the Ricrán people?”

“No problem,” said Vallejos. “Hide in here and wait. Don’t make a sound.”

Mayta was reassured by the calm and sureness of the lieutenant. He was wearing fatigues, boots, and a black turtleneck sweater instead of his commando shirt. He went into the warden’s inner office, which seemed to him a kind of large closet with white walls. That cabinet must have been a weapons locker, they must put rifles in those niches over there. When he closed the door, he found himself in semi-darkness. He had to struggle to open the suitcase, because the lock jammed. He took out the sub-machine gun and put the ammunition clips in his pockets. As suddenly as it came alive, the radio fell silent. What had happened to the truck from Ricrán?

“It had arrived very early at Santa Isabel, where it was supposed to go.” Don Ezequiel bursts into laughter, and it’s as if poison were pouring out of his eyes, mouth, and ears. “And when the thing at the jail began, it had already left. But not heading for Quero, where it was supposed to go, but for Lima. And not carrying communists or stolen weapons. No, sir. What was it carrying? Beans! As fucking crazy as it sounds. The revolution’s truck, just when the revolution was starting, went off to Lima with a shipment of beans. Why don’t you ask me whose beans they were?”

“I’m not going to ask you, because you’re going to tell me they were Shorty Ubilluz’s beans,” I say.

Don Ezequiel gives another one of his monstrous cackles. “Why don’t you ask me who was driving it?” He raises his dirty hands, and as if punching someone, he points to the plaza. “I saw him go by, I recognized that traitor. I saw him hanging on to the steering wheel, wearing a faggoty blue cap. I saw the sacks of beans. What the fuck is going on here? What do you think was going to happen — that damned son of a bitch was screwing Vallejos, the outsider, and me.”

“Tell me just one thing more, and then I’ll leave you in peace, don Ezequiel. Why didn’t you go, too, that morning? Why did you stay so peacefully in your barbershop? Why didn’t you at least hide?”

His fruit-like face contemplates me horribly for several seconds, in slow fury. I watch him pick his nose and tear at the skin on his neck. When he answers, he still feels the need to lie. “Why the hell should I hide when I had nothing to do with anything? What the hell for?”

“Don Ezequiel, don Ezequiel,” I chide him. “Twenty-five years have gone by, Peru’s going down the drain, people are thinking only of saving themselves from a war that isn’t even being fought by Peruvians, you and I might be dead in the next raid or skirmish. Who cares anymore what happened that day? Tell me the truth, help me to end my story before this homicidal chaos our country has become eats both of us up. You were supposed to cut the telephone lines and hire some taxis, using a phony barbeque over in Molinos as a pretext. Don’t you remember what time you were supposed to be at the telephone company? Five minutes after they opened up. The taxis were going to wait at the corner of Alfonso Ugarte and La Mar, where Mayta’s group was going to commandeer them. But you didn’t hire the cabs, you didn’t go to the telephone company, and when the joeboy came to ask you what was going on, you told him: ‘Nothing’s going on, it’s all gone to hell, run to school and forget you even know who I am.’ That joeboy is Telésforo Salinas, director of physical education for this province, don Ezequiel.”

“A pack of lies! More of Ubilluz’s slander!” he growls, purple with rage. “I knew nothing and I had no reason to hide or flee. Get out, go away, disappear. Stinking slanderer! Shiteating gossip!”

Hidden in the semi-darkness, with the sub-machine gun in his hands, Mayta could hear nothing. Nor could he see anything, except two streaks of light where the planks of the door met. But he had no difficulty guessing that at that very instant Vallejos was going into the barracks of the fourteen guards and was waking them up with his thundering voice: Ateeenshun! Rifle inspection! The officer in charge of the Huancayo armory had just told him he would be coming to hold an inspection early in the morning. Be careful, you’ve got to be fanatics about oiling both the outside and the bolts of the rifles. I don’t want anybody written up for a rusty piece. Second Lieutenant Vallejos didn’t want any more bad reports from the armory officer. The working weapons and the ammunition for each republican guard — ninety cartridges — would be taken to the guardroom. Fall in out in the patio! Now it would be his turn. The wheels were beginning to turn, the cogs were moving, this is action, this was it. Have the Ricrán guys gotten here yet? He looked through the cracks, waiting for the silhouettes of the guards carrying their Mausers and their bullets to the little room in front, one behind the other, and among them, Antolín Torres.

He is a retired republican guard who lives on Manco Cápac Street, halfway between the jail and don Ezequiel’s store. To keep the ex-barber from taking a swing at me or from having a fit of apoplexy, I have to retreat. Sitting on a bench in Jauja’s majestic plaza — disfigured now by police barriers and barbed wire on the corners where the municipal building and the sub-prefecture are — I think about Antolín Torres. I talked to him this morning. He’s been a happy man ever since the Marines hired him as a guide and translator.

He used to have a little farm, but the war ruined it. He was dying of hunger until the gringos came. His job is to accompany the patrols as they reconnoiter the area around Jauja. (His Spanish is as good as his Quechua.) He knows that his work may cost him his life. Many of the people in Jauja turn their backs on him, and the façade of his house is covered with graffiti: “Traitor” and “Condemned to Death by the Revolutionary Tribunal.”

From what Antolín has told me and from don Ezequiel’s curses, I conclude that relations between the Marines and the locals are bad, awful. Even the people who oppose the insurgents resent these foreigners they can’t understand, who, above all, eat well, smoke, and suffer no privations — in a town where even the formerly rich experience dearth. A sixty-year-old with a bull neck and a huge stomach, an Ayacucho man from Cangallo who has lived most of his life in Jauja, Antolín Torres speaks a wonderful Spanish spiced with Quechuanisms. “People say the communists are going to kill me. Okay, but when they come to kill me they’re going to find a guy who eats well, drinks well, and smokes American cigarettes.” He’s a storyteller who knows how to achieve dramatic effects with pauses and exclamations. That day, twenty-five years ago, he went on duty at eight, when he was supposed to replace Huáscar Toledo on guard duty at the front door. Huáscar wasn’t in the sentry box but inside with the others, oiling his Mauser in preparation for the visit of the armory officer. Second Lieutenant Vallejos was hurrying them, and Antolín Torres suspected something.

“But why, Mr. Torres? What was so strange about an arms inspection?”

What was strange was that the lieutenant was walking around with his sub-machine gun on his shoulder. What reason could he have for being armed? And why did we have to leave our weapons in the guardroom? This is really strange, sergeant. Where does this stuff come from about separating a trooper from his rifle for an inspection? Don’t think so much, Antolín, it gets in the way of promotion, is what the sergeant said. I obeyed, I cleaned my Mauser, and I left it in the guardroom along with my ninety cartridges. Then I went to fall in in the patio. But I could smell something fishy. But not what happened later. I thought it was something to do with the prisoners. There were maybe fifty in the cells. An escape attempt, I don’t know what, but something.

“Now.” Mayta pushed the door open. From being so long in one position, his legs were completely cramped. His heart pounded like a drum, and he was overwhelmed by a sensation of something final, irreversible, as he walked out into the patio with his oiled sub-machine gun. He took up a position in front of the judge’s office, facing the troops, and said, “Don’t force me to shoot. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Vallejos had his sub-machine gun trained on his subordinates. The bleary eyes of the fourteen guards swung back and forth from him to the lieutenant, from the lieutenant back to him, without understanding: Are we awake or dreaming? Is this really happening, or is it a nightmare?

“And then the lieutenant spoke, isn’t that a fact, Mr. Torres? Remember what he said?”

“I don’t want to drag you in, but I’ve become a rebel, a revolutionary socialist.” Antolín Torres imitates him and acts out the scene, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. “If anyone wants to follow me of his own free will, let him come. I’m doing this for the sake of the poor, the suffering, and because our leaders have let us down. And you, pay sergeant, buy beer on Sunday for everyone, and take it out of my back pay.” “While the lieutenant was speaking, the other enemy, the one from Lima, had us covered with his sub-machine gun, blocking the way to the Mausers. They made fools of us. The commander punished us with two weeks’ confinement to barracks.”

Mayta had heard Vallejos but hadn’t paid any attention to what he was saying because of his own excitement. “Like a machine, like a soldier.” The lieutenant herded the guards to their barracks, and they obeyed docilely, still not understanding. He saw that the lieutenant, after closing the door, bolted it. Then, with rapid, precise movements, his weapon in his left hand, he ran, with a large key in his other hand, to open a cell door. Were the Uchubamba men there? They had to have seen and heard what had just happened. On the other hand, the other prisoners, the ones in cells on the other side of the patio with its cherry trees, were too far away. From his position next to the guardroom, he saw two men come out behind Vallejos. There they were, yes, the comrades he until now only knew by name. Which one was Condori and which Zenón Gonzales? Before he could find out, an argument broke out with the younger of the two, a fair-skinned little guy with long hair. Even though Mayta had been told that the peasants from the eastern region usually had light skin and hair, he was shocked: the Indian agitators who had led the seizure of the Aína hacienda looked like two little gringos. One was wearing sandals.

“Gonna chicken out now, motherfucker?” he heard Vallejos say, his face close to one of the men. “Now that things have begun, now that the fat’s in the fire, you want to mouse out?”

“I’m not chickening out,” Zenón Gonzales said truculently, stepping back. “It’s that…it’s that…”

“It’s that you’re yellow, Zenón,” Vallejos shouted. “Too bad for you. Get back to your cell. I hope they send you away for a long time. Rot in the Frontón, then. I don’t know why I don’t just shoot you like a dog, you son of a bitch.”

“Wait up, hold it, let’s talk calmly without fighting,” said Condori, stepping between them. He was the one wearing sandals, and Mayta was happy to see someone who might be his own age. “Don’t go off the deep end, Vallejos. Let me talk to Zenón for a minute.”

In three strides, the lieutenant was at Mayta’s side.

“What a faggot,” he said, no longer furious as he was a moment before, but disillusioned. “Last night, he agreed. Now come the doubts — maybe it would be better to stay here, and later on we’ll see. That’s what you call fear, not doubt.”

What doubts moved the young leader from Uchubamba to provoke this incident? Did he think, when the rebellion was about to begin, that perhaps there were too few of them? Did he doubt that he and Condori could drag the rest of the community into the uprising? Did he have an inkling of the defeat? Or, simply, did he hesitate when he thought that he would have to kill people and that someone might kill him?

Condori and Gonzales whispered together. Mayta heard the odd word and sometimes saw them gesture. Once, Condori grabbed his comrade by the arm. He must have had some power over him, because Gonzales, even though complaining, remained respectful. A moment later, they came over.

“Okay, Vallejos,” said Condori. “Everything’s okay now. No problem.”

“Okay, Zenón.” Vallejos squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry I got mad. No hard feelings?”

The young man nodded. As he squeezed his hand, Vallejos said again, “No hard feelings. We’re doing this for Peru, Zenón.” Judging by his face, Gonzales seemed more resigned than convinced.

Vallejos turned to Mayta. “Have the weapons loaded into the taxis. I’m going to talk to the prisoners.”

He went off toward the cherry trees, and Mayta ran to the main entrance. Through the small window in the door, he looked out on the street. Instead of taxis, Ubilluz, and the miners from La Droya, he saw a small group of joeboys headed by the cadet commander, Cordero Espinoza.

“What are you doing here?” he asked them. “Why aren’t you at your posts?”

“We aren’t at our posts because everyone’s gone,” says Cordero Espinoza, with a yawn that warms his smile. “We got tired of waiting. We couldn’t be messengers for people who weren’t there. I was assigned the police station. I got there good and early, and no one else showed up. After a while, Hernando Huasasquiche came to tell me that Professor Ubilluz wasn’t at home or anywhere around here. And that he’d seen him driving his truck on the main road. A little later, we found out that the Ricrán people had just disappeared, the La Oroya men had either never come or had gone back. We got really scared! We got together in the plaza. We were all worried, just standing around waiting to go to school. We’d been fooled, the whole thing was some kind of phony story. Right then, Felicio Tapia turned up. He told us that the guy from Lima had gone to the jail after being stood up by the Ricrán men. So we went to the jail to see what was happening. Vallejos and Mayta had locked up the guards, captured the rifles, and freed Condori and Gonzales. Can you imagine anything as ridiculous as that?”

Dr. Cordero Espinoza is certainly right. What else could you say but that it was ridiculous? They take over the jail, they’ve got fourteen rifles and twelve hundred cartridges. But there aren’t any revolutionaries, because not one of the thirty or forty conspirators turned up. Was that what Mayta thought when he peered through the window and found only seven boys in uniform?

“Nobody came? None? Not a single one?”

“Well, we’re here,” said the kid with the half-shaved head, and despite his confusion, Mayta remembered what Ubilluz had said about him when they were introduced: Cordero Espinoza, commander of his class, number one, a brain. “But it looks like the others have taken off.”

Shock, rage, an intimation of the catastrophe closing in on them? Or, rather, the tacit confirmation of something as yet undefined, which he’d feared since earlier, when the Ricrán men weren’t in the plaza, or maybe earlier still, when his Lima comrades from the RWP(T) decided to withdraw their support, or when he’d understood that his attempt at Blacquer’s to get the Communist Party involved in the uprising was useless? Was it since one of those moments that he’d been waiting, without even admitting it to himself, for this coup de grâce? The revolution wouldn’t even begin? But it has begun, Mayta, don’t you realize it, it has begun.

“That’s why we’re here, that’s why we’ve come,” exclaimed Cordero Espinoza. “Don’t you think we can replace those guys?”

Mayta saw that the joeboys were clustered around their commander and were nodding in agreement and support. But all he could think of at that instant was that some passerby, someone from the neighborhood, might take notice of that little group of schoolboys at the jail door.

“It struck me that we should volunteer right then and there. I didn’t even talk it over with my buddies,” remembers Dr. Cordero Espinoza. “It just hit me when I saw the look on poor Mayta’s face when he found out that nobody showed up.”

We’re in his office on Junín Street, where law offices abound. Law is still the profession in Jauja, even though, over the past few years, war and catastrophes have seriously dampened local legal business. Until fairly recently, in every Jauja family at least one or two sons came into the world with a briefcase of legal documents under their arms. Lawsuits are a sport practiced by all classes in this province, at least as popular as soccer and Carnival. In the throng of lawyers in Jauja, the old cadet commandant and top student at Colegio San José—where he used to teach a course on political economy a couple of times a week, until the war caused classes to be suspended — is still the star.

He’s an easygoing, friendly man. His office glitters with diplomas from the congresses he’s attended, the honors he’s won as city councilman, president of the Jauja Lions Club, president of the Committee for a Highway to the East, and various other civic functions. Of all the people I’ve talked with, he’s the one who evokes those events with the greatest precision, ease, and — at least it seems to me — objectivity. The handsomeness of his office contrasts with the entrance hall, which has a hole in the floor and half of one wall shattered. As he leads me through, he points to it, saying, “It was a guerrilla bomb. I’ve left it this way to remind me of the precautions I have to take every day if I want to keep my head on my shoulders.”

With the same wit, he told me, soon after, that when the guerrillas attacked his house, they were more efficient: the two dynamite charges burned it to the ground. “They killed my cook, a little old lady sixty years old. My wife and children, fortunately, were already out of Jauja.” They live in Lima and are about to leave the country. Which is what he will do as soon as he can wrap up his business. Because, as he says, with the way things are going, what sense does it make to go on risking one’s neck? Hasn’t Jauja’s security improved since the Marines came? Things are even worse. Because the people resent the foreign troops so much, they help the guerrillas — by hiding them, supplying them with alibis, or just by keeping quiet. They say something similar is happening among the Peruvian guerrillas and the Cuban and Bolivian internationalists. That there are confrontations between them. Nationalism, as we all know, is stronger than any other ideology. I can’t help liking the excadet commander: he says all these things naturally, without melodrama or arrogance, and even with a sense of humor.

“As soon as they heard me offer them as volunteers, they got all excited,” he continues. “In fact, the seven of us were like brothers. A kids’ game, compared to what we have today, right?”

“Yes, yes, we’ll be their replacements.”

“Open the door, let us in, we can do it.”

“We are revolutionaries and we’ll be their replacements.”

Mayta was looking at them, listening to them, and his head was filled with static, disorder.

“How old are you?”

“Huasasquiche and I are seventeen,” says Cordero Espinoza. “The others are fifteen or sixteen.” Lucky for us, because they couldn’t bring us up on charges, since we were still minors. They sent us to juvenile court, where they didn’t take the matter too seriously. Don’t you think it’s paradoxical that I was a pioneer in the armed struggle in Peru and that now I’m a target of the guerrillas?” He shrugs.

“I suppose that by that time there was no way for Mayta and Vallejos to turn back,” I say.

“Yes, there was. Vallejos could have let the guards out of the barracks where he’d locked them up and cursed them up and down: ‘You have demonstrated that you’re really nothing, pansies, if there really was an attack on the jail by subversives. Not a single one of you has passed the test I just put you to, shitasses.’” Dr. Cordero Espinoza offers me a cigarette, and before lighting his own, he places it in a holder. “They would have swallowed the story, I’m sure of it. He could have sent us off to school, put Gonzales and Condori back in the lockup, and gotten off scot-free. All of them could have, even then. But of course they didn’t. Mayta and Vallejos weren’t men who would just give in. In that sense, even though one was in his forties and the other in his twenties, they were more kids than we were.”

So it was Mayta who first accepted that romantic and preposterous offer. His hesitation and perplexity lasted a few seconds. He decided suddenly. He opened the main door, said, “Quickly, quickly,” to the joeboys, and as they invaded the patio, he looked down the street. It was empty of people and cars, the houses were all shuttered. His strength came back to him, his blood rushed through his veins, there was no reason to despair. He closed the door after the last boy. There they were: seven anxious and impassioned little faces. Both Condori and Gonzales were now carrying rifles, and they looked with fascination at the kids. Vallejos appeared behind the cherry trees, having finished his inspection of the prisoners.

Mayta went to meet him. “Ubilluz and the others haven’t come. But we have volunteers to take their places.”

Did Vallejos pull up short? Did Mayta see that his face twisted into a hideous grin? Did he see that the young second lieutenant labored to appear calm? Did he hear Vallejos say under his breath, “Ubilluz hasn’t come? Ezequiel either? The Parrot either?”

“We can’t go back now, comrade.” Mayta shook him by the arm. “I told you, I warned you that it would happen. Action selects. Now there’s no going back. We can’t. Accept the boys. They got all fired up coming over here. They are revolutionaries, what other proof could you want. Are we turning yellow, brother?”

The more he spoke, the more he convinced himself, and for a second time, he repeated his exorcism against good sense: “Like a machine, like a soldier.” Vallejos, mute, scrutinized him — doubting? trying to determine if what he was saying was also what he was thinking? But when Mayta stopped talking, the lieutenant once again became a tissue of controlled nerves and instant decisions. He then approached the joeboys, who had listened to the dialogue.

“I’m happy this has happened,” he said, standing among them. “I’m happy because, thanks to this, I know there are some brave men in this world like you. Welcome to the struggle, boys. I want to shake hands with every one of you.”

Actually, he began to hug them, to press them to his breast. Mayta took off his hat, hugging and being hugged, and behind clouds, he saw Zenón Gonzales and Condori joining in. A profound emotion overwhelmed him. He had a knot in his throat. Several boys wept, and the tears poured down their jubilant faces as they embraced the lieutenant, Mayta, Gonzales, Condori, and one another. Long live the revolution! shouted one, and another shouted: Long live socialism! Vallejos ordered them to be quiet.

“I don’t think I ever felt as happy as I did at that moment,” says Dr. Cordero Espinoza. “It was beautiful, so much naïveté, so much idealism. We felt as if our mustaches and beards had suddenly sprouted, as if we had grown taller and stronger. Probably not a single one of us had even set foot in a whorehouse. I, at least, was a virgin. And it seemed to me I was losing my virginity.”

“Did any of you know how to use a rifle?”

“In the military training course, they gave us some rifle classes. Maybe a few of us had fired shotguns. But we made up for inexperience right then and there. It was the first thing Vallejos did after hugging us: he taught us what a Mauser was all about.”

While the lieutenant gave the joeboys a lesson on how to fire a rifle, Mayta explained what had happened to Condori and Zenón Gonzales. They didn’t raise the roof when they found out they had no one else to count on. They weren’t outraged to learn that the whole revolutionary body might consist of them and the little group of soldier boys. They were serious as they listened, and asked no questions. Vallejos ordered two boys to get some taxis. Felicio Tapia and Huasasquiche took off on the run. Then Vallejos got Mayta and the peasants together. He had restructured the plan. Divided into two groups, they would seize the police station and the Civil Guard post. Mayta was listening, but out of the Corner of his eye he took note of how the peasants reacted. Would Gonzales be saying, “See? I told you I was right to have my doubts about all this.” No, he said nothing. He was inscrutable as he listened to the lieutenant.

“Here come the taxis,” shouted Perico Temoche, from the main door.

“I was never a real taxi driver,” Mr. Onaka assures me, pointing melancholically to the empty shelves in his store, shelves that used to be filled with food and domestic articles. “I was always the owner of this store, which I ran. You may not believe it, but it was the best-stocked shop in Junín province.”

Bitterness twists his yellow face. Mr. Onaka has been a favorite victim of the rebels, who have robbed his store an incredible number of times. “Eight,” he informs me. “The last was three weeks ago, with the Marines already here. So you see, gringos or no gringos, it’s the same shit. They came at six, wearing masks. They locked the door and said, ‘Where’s the food hidden, pig?’ Hidden? Go look for it and take whatever you can find. It’s because of you that I haven’t got a thing. They found nothing, of course. Why don’t you take my wife instead? She’s all you’ve left me. Why don’t you take my wife instead? She’s all you’ve left me. Why don’t you kill me? Have a good time, kill the guy whose life you’ve ruined. We don’t waste bullets on vultures, one of them said. And all that happened at six in the afternoon, with the police, soldiers, and Marines walking the streets of Jauja. Doesn’t that prove that they’re all the same bunch of crooks?” He snorts, takes a deep breath, and looks at his wife, who, bent over the counter, tries to read the paper by bringing the page right up to her eyes. Both of them are decrepit.

“Since she could take care of the customers by herself, I did a little taxi driving with the Ford,” Mr. Onaka continues. “It was my bad luck that I got tangled up in the Vallejos business. I cracked up the car because of it, and I had to spend a fortune fixing it. Because of that, I was hit on the head — they split my brow right here — and thrown in jail, while they investigated and found out that I wasn’t an accomplice but a victim.”

We are in a corner of his run-down store, each standing on his own side of the counter. At the other end, Mrs. Onaka looks away from her newspaper every time a customer comes in to buy candles or cigarettes, the only things the store seems well stocked with. The Onakas are of Japanese descent — the grandchildren of immigrants — but in Jauja they’re called “the Chinks,” a misnomer that doesn’t bother Mr. Onaka.

Unlike Dr. Cordero Espinoza, Mr. Onaka doesn’t accept his disasters with philosophical good humor. Anyone can see he’s demoralized, resentful about everything. He and Cordero Espinoza are the only people, among all those I’ve talked to in Jauja, who speak openly against the guerrillas. The others, even those who have been victims of their attacks, keep absolutely silent about the revolutionaries.

“I had just opened up when the Tapia kid — the family lives over on Villarreal — shows up. An emergency, Mr. Onaka. You have to take a sick lady to the hospital. I started up the car, the Tapia boy sat down next to me, and then the little actor said, ‘Hurry up, the lady’s dying.’ In front of the jail, there was another taxi being loaded with rifles. I parked behind it. I asked the lieutenant, ‘Where’s the sick lady?’ He didn’t even answer me. Right then, the other guy, the one from Lima, Mayta — right? — steps up and sticks his gun in my chest: ‘Do what you’re told and you’ll be all right.’ I thought I’d shit in my pants — if you don’t mind my saying so. I was really afraid. After all, those were the first revolutionaries I’d ever seen. What a jerk I was. At the time, I had a little money. I could have gone away with my wife. We could be living out our old age in peace.”

Condori, Mayta, Felicio Tapia, Cordero Espinoza, and Teófilo Puertas got into the car after loading it with half the rifles and ammunition. Mayta ordered Onaka to drive off: “If you make any funny moves, you’re dead.” He was in the back seat, and his mouth was dry as cotton. But his hands were sweating. Squeezed in next to him, the cadet commander and Puertas were sitting on the rifles. In front, with Felicio Tapia, was Condori.

“I don’t know why I didn’t crash or run someone over.” Mr. Onaka speaks out of a toothless mouth. “I thought they were thieves, murderers, escaped convicts. But how could the lieutenant be with them? What could the Tapia kid and the child of that gentleman Dr. Cordero be doing mixed up with murderers? They talked about the revolution and I don’t know what else. What is this? What’s going on? They made me take them over to the Civil Guard station, on Jirón Manco Cápac. The guy from Lima, Condori, and the Tapia boy got out there. They left the other two guarding me, and Mayta said to them, ‘If he tries to get away, kill him.’

“Afterward, the kids swore it was only playacting, that they would never have shot me. But now we know that even kids kill, with hatchets, stones, and knives, right? Anyway, now we know lots of things that nobody knew then. Easy now, boys, don’t get excited. You know me, I wouldn’t hurt a fly, and I’ve given you credit lots of times. Why are you doing this to me? And besides, what’s going on over there? What are they going to do at the station? The socialist revolution, Mr. Onaka, said Corderito — the guy whose house they burned down and whose office they almost blew up. The socialist revolution! What? What is that? I think it was the first time I ever heard the words. That’s when I found out that four grown men and seven joeboys had chosen my poor Ford to carry out a socialist revolution. Holy shit!”

At the door of the station there were no guards, and Mayta signaled to Condori and Felicio Tapia: he would go in first, they should cover him. Condori looked calm, but Tapia was very pale and Mayta saw that his hands were red from holding on so tight to the rifle. He walked into the room bent over, with the safety off the sub-machine gun, shouting: “Hands up or I’ll shoot!”

In the half-darkened room, Mayta surprised a man wearing underpants and an undershirt in mid-yawn, a yawn that froze, turning his face into a stupid mask. He sat there staring, and only when he saw Condori and Felicio Tapia appear behind Mayta, they too pointing rifles at him, did he raise his hands.

“Watch him,” said Mayta, and he ran to the back of the building. He passed through a narrow hall that led to an unpaved patio. Two guards, wearing trousers and boots but without shirts on, were washing their faces and hands in a basin of soapy water. One smiled at Mayta, mistaking him for a buddy.

“Get your hands up, or I’ll fire!” Mayta said, not shouting this time. “Hands up, goddamn it!”

The two obeyed, and one of them moved so quickly that he knocked the basin over. The water darkened the dirt of the patio. “What’s all the racket, for Christ’s sake?” called out a sleepy voice. How many could there be in there? Condori was next to him, and Mayta whispered, “Take these two out,” without taking his eyes off the room where he’d heard the voice. He crossed the little patio on the run, bent forward. He passed under a climbing vine, and on the threshold of the room, he stopped short, holding back the “Hands up!” he was about to shout. It was the sleeping room. There were two rows of bunks against the walls, and on three bunks there were men, two sleeping and the third smoking, flat on his back. A transistor radio was next to him, and he was listening to country music. When he saw Mayta, he choked and jumped to his feet, staring fixedly at the sub-machine gun.

“I thought it was all a joke,” he stuttered, dropping the cigarette and placing his hands on his head.

“Wake those two up,” said Mayta, pointing to the sleeping men. “Don’t make me shoot: I don’t want to kill you.”

Without turning his back on Mayta or taking his eyes off the weapon, the guard edged along sideways, like a crab, until he reached the others. He shook them. “Wake up, wake up, I don’t know what’s going on.”

“I was expecting shots, a huge racket. I thought I’d see Mayta, Condori, and the Tapia kid bleeding, and that in the confusion the guards would shoot me, thinking I was an attacker,” says Mr. Onaka. “But there wasn’t a single shot. Before I knew what was going on inside, the other taxi came with Vallejos. He’d already captured the police station over on Jirón Bolívar and locked Lieutenant Dongo and three guards in a cell. He asked the kids: Everything okay? We don’t know. I begged him: Let me go, lieutenant, my wife is really sick. Don’t be afraid, Mr. Onaka, we need you because none of us drives. Can you imagine anything as dumb as that? They were going to make a revolution and they didn’t even know how to drive a car.”

“No problem,” said Mayta, relieved to see them again. “What about the police station?”

“A breeze,” answered Vallejos. “Well done, I congratulate all of you. And we have ten more rifles.”

“We aren’t going to have enough men for so many rifles,” said Mayta.

“We’ll have enough,” replied the lieutenant, as he looked over the new Mausers. “In Uchubamba there are more than enough, right, Condori?”

It seemed incredible that everything was going so well, Mayta.

“They loaded another pile of rifles in my Ford,” Mr. Onaka says, sighing. “They ordered me to drive to the telephone company, and what else could I do?”

“When I got to work, I saw two cars there, and I recognized the Chink from the store, that Onaka character, the crook,” says Mrs. Adriana Tello, a tiny, wrinkled-up old lady with a firm voice and gnarled hands. “He had such a face on that I thought he’s either gotten up on the wrong side of the bed or he’s a neurotic Chinaman. As soon as they saw me, some guys got out and went into the office with me. Why should I have been suspicious? In those days there weren’t even robberies in Jauja, much less revolutions, so why be suspicious? Wait, we’re not open yet. But it was as if they hadn’t heard a word. They jumped over the counter, and one turned Asuntita Asís’s — may she rest in peace — desk over. What’s all this? What are you doing? What do you want? To knock out the telephone and telegraph. Good gracious! I’ll be out of a job. Ha, ha, I swear that’s just what I was thinking. I don’t know how I can still laugh with all the things that are going on. Have you seen the impudence of these gringos who say they have come to help us? They can’t even speak Spanish, and they walk around with their rifles and just go into any house they please, what nerve. As if we were their colony. There must not be any more patriots left in our Peru when we have to put up with that kind of humiliation.”

When she saw Mayta and Vallejos kicking the switchboard apart, smashing the machinery with their rifle butts, and pulling out all the wires, Mrs. Adriana Tello tried to run out. But Condori and Zenón Gonzales held her while the lieutenant and Mayta finished breaking things up.

“Now we can take it easy,” said Vallejos. “With the guards locked up and the telephone line cut, we’re out of immediate danger. We don’t have to split up.”

“Will the people with the horses be in Quero?” Mayta was thinking aloud.

Vallejos shrugged. Could anyone be counted on?

“The peasants,” murmured Mayta, pointing at Condori and Zenón Gonzales, who, after the lieutenant signaled to them, had released the woman, who ran, terrified, out of the building. “If we get to Uchubamba, I’m sure they won’t let us down.”

“We’ll get there.” Vallejos smiled. “They won’t let us down.”

They’d go on foot to the plaza, comrade. Vallejos ordered Gualberto Bravo and Perico Temoche to take the taxis to the corner of the Plaza de Armas and Bolognesi. That would be where they’d meet. He went to the head of those who remained and gave an order that left Mayta with goose bumps: “Forward, march!” They must have been a strange, unimaginable, disconcerting group — those four adults and five schoolboys, all armed, marching along the cobblestone streets toward the Plaza de Armas. They would attract attention, they would stop anyone on the sidewalks, they would cause people to come to windows and doors. What did the good citizens of Jauja think as they saw them pass?

“I was shaving, because in those days I’d get up sort of late,” says don Joaquín Zamudio, ex-hatmaker, ex-businessman, and now vendor of lottery tickets on the streets of Jauja. “I saw them from my room and thought they were rehearsing for the national holidays. But why so early in the year? I poked my head out the window and asked: What parade is this? The lieutenant didn’t answer me and instead shouted: Long live the revolution! The others shouted: Hurrah, hurrah! What revolution is it? I asked them, thinking they were fooling around. And Corderito answered: The one we’re starting, the socialist revolution. Later I found out that they went along just the way I’d seen them, marching and cheering, and robbed two banks.”

They marched into the Plaza de Armas, and Mayta saw few passersby. When people did turn to look at them, it was with indifference. A group of Indians with ponchos and packs, sitting on a bench, just followed them with their eyes. There weren’t enough people for a demonstration yet. It was ridiculous to be marching, because instead of looking like revolutionaries, they looked like boy scouts. But Vallejos set the example, and the joeboys, Condori, and Gonzales followed suit, so Mayta had no choice but to get in step. He had an ambiguous feeling, exaltation and anxiety, because even though the police were locked up, and their weapons captured, and the telephone and telegraph knocked out, wasn’t their little group extremely vulnerable? Could you begin a revolution just like that? He gritted his teeth. You could. You had to be able to.

“They walked through the main door, practically singing,” says don Ernesto Durán Huarcaya, ex-president of the International Bank and today an invalid dying of cancer on a cot in the Olavegoya Sanatorium. “I saw them from the window and thought that they couldn’t even get in step, that they couldn’t march worth a damn. Later, since they headed straight for the International Bank, I said here comes another request for money, for some carnival or parade. There was no more mystery after they got inside, because they turned their guns on us and Vallejos shouted: We’ve come to take the money that belongs to the people and not to the imperialists. I’m not going to put up with this, hell no, I’m going to face them down.”

“He got down on all fours under his desk,” says Adelita Campos, retired from the bank and now a seller of herb concoctions. “A real macho when it came to docking us for coming in late or pinching us when we passed too close to him. But when he saw the rifles — zoom — down he went under the desk, not even ashamed. If the president did that, what were we employees supposed to do? We were scared, of course. More of the kids than of the old guys. Because the boys were bawling like calves: Long live Peru! Long live the revolution! They were so wild they could easily start shooting. The person who had the great idea was the teller, old man Rojas. What could have become of him? I guess he’s dead, probably someone killed him, because the way things have been going in Jauja, no one dies of old age anymore. Somebody kills you. And you never know who.”

“When I saw them come up to my window, I opened the box on the left side,” says old man Rojas, ex-teller at the International Bank, in the squalid quarters where he’s waiting to die in the Jauja old-folks home. “That’s where I had the morning deposits and the small bills we used to make change, nothing much. I raised my hands and prayed: ‘Holy Mother, let them believe this one.’ They did. They went right to the open box and took what they saw: fifty thousand soles, or thereabouts. Now that’s nothing, but then it was quite a tidy sum, but nothing compared to what there was in the box on the right — almost a million soles that hadn’t yet been put in the vault. They were amateurs, not like the ones that came later. Shh, now, sir, don’t repeat what I’ve told you.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all.” The teller trembled. “It’s early, only a few people have come in.”

“This money isn’t for us but for the revolution,” Mayta interrupted him. He spoke into the incredulous faces of the employees. “For the people, for those who have sweated. This isn’t stealing, it’s expropriation. You have no reason to be frightened. The enemies of the people are the bankers, the oligarchs, and the imperialists. All of you are being exploited by them.”

“Yes, of course,” the teller said, quaking. “What you say is true, sir.”

When they got out into the plaza, the boys went on cheering. Mayta, carrying the moneybag, went up to Vallejos: Let’s go to the Regional, there aren’t enough people here for a meeting. He saw very few people, and although they looked at the insurgents with curiosity, they wouldn’t come too close.

“But we’ve got to move quickly,” agreed Vallejos, “before they bolt the door on us.”

He started running, and the others followed him, lining up in the same order in which they’d been marching. A few seconds of running eliminated Mayta’s ability to think. Shortness of breath, pressure in his temples: the malaise came back, even though they weren’t running that quickly, but almost, as it were, warming up before a game. When, two blocks later, they stopped at the doors of the Regional Bank, Mayta was seeing stars and his mouth was hanging open. You can’t faint now, Mayta. He entered with the group, but in a dream. Leaning on the counter, seeing the shock on the face of the woman in front of him, he heard Vallejos explain: “This is a revolutionary action, we’ve come to recover the money stolen from the people.” Someone protested. The lieutenant shoved a man and punched him.

He had to help, move, but he didn’t do a thing, because he knew that if he stepped away from the counter, he’d fall down. Propped on his elbows, he pointed his weapon at the group of employees — some shouting, some seemingly about to defend the man who had protested — and saw Condori and Zenón Gonzales grab the man from the big desk, the one Vallejos had hit. The lieutenant pointed his sub-machine gun at him with a menacing gesture. The man finally gave in and opened the safe next to his desk. When Condori had finished putting the money into the bag, Mayta began to feel better. You should have come a week earlier to acclimatize yourself to the altitude, you just don’t know how to do things.

“Are you okay?” Vallejos asked him on the way out.

“A touch of mountain sickness from running. Let’s hold the meeting with whatever people are here. We’ve got to do it.”

One of the boys euphorically shouted: “Long live the revolution!”

“Hurrah!” bellowed the other joeboys. One of them pointed his Mauser at the sky and fired. The first shot of the day. The other four followed. They invaded the plaza, cheering the revolution, firing shots in the air, and telling people to gather around.

“Everyone’s told you there was no meeting, because nobody wanted to hear what they had to say. They called to the people walking on the square, standing in doorways, anyone — but no one would come,” says Anthero Huillmo, ex-street photographer, now blind and selling novenas, religious pictures, and rosaries from eight in the morning until eight at night at the cathedral door. “They even tried to stop the truck drivers: ‘Stop!’ ‘Get out!’ ‘Come on!’ But the drivers had their doubts and just stepped on the gas. But there was a meeting. I was there, I saw it and heard it. That was before God saw fit to send that tear-gas grenade that burned my face. Now I can’t see, but then I could and did. Actually, it was a meeting held exclusively for me.”

Was that the first sign that their calculations were wrong not just about the people involved in the uprising but about the people of Jauja? The purpose of the meeting was crystal-clear in his mind: inform the man on the street about what had gone on that morning, explain the class struggle in its historic and social sense, and show their conviction — maybe even give some of the poorest money. But in the center of the plaza, to which Mayta had made his way, there was no one but a street photographer, the little bunch of Indians petrified on their bench, trying their best not to look at the revolutionaries, and the five joeboys. They vainly waved and called to the groups of curious people on the corners near the cathedral and the Colegio del Carmen. If the joeboys tried to approach them, they ran off. Did the shots scare them? Could the news have spread already, so that these people would be afraid to be taken for revolutionaries if the police were suddenly to appear? Did it make any sense to go on waiting?

Cupping his hands over his mouth, Mayta shouted: “We are rebelling against the bourgeois order, so the people can throw off their chains! To end the exploitation of the masses! To give land to the people who work it! To stop the imperialist rape of our nation!”

“Don’t shout yourself hoarse. They’re far away and can’t hear you,” said Vallejos, jumping off the little wall around the garden in the plaza. “We’re wasting our time.”

Mayta obeyed and began walking alongside him toward the corner of Bolognesi, where the taxis, guarded by Gualberto Bravo and Perico Temoche, were waiting. Well, there was no meeting, but at least his mountain sickness was better. Would they get to Quero? Would the people who were supposed to be there really be there with horses and mules?

As if there were telepathic communication between them, Mayta heard Vallejos say, “Even if the Ricrán guys don’t show up in Quero, there won’t be any problem, because there are lots of horses and mules there. It’s a cattle town.”

“We’ll buy them, in that case,” said Mayta, patting the bag he carried in his right hand. He turned to Condori, who marched behind him: “How is the road to Uchubamba?”

“When it’s dry, easy,” replied Condori. “I’ve done it a thousand times. It’s only rough at night because of the cold. But as soon as you get to the jungle, easy as pie.”

Gualberto Bravo and Perico Temoche, who were sitting next to the taxi drivers, got out to meet them. Envious of not having gone with them to the banks, they kept saying, “Tell us about it, tell us.” But Vallejos ordered an immediate departure.

“We mustn’t separate under any circumstance,” said the lieutenant, coming up to Mayta, who, with Condori and the three joeboys, was already in Mr. Onaka’s taxi. “No need to speed. First stop, Molinos.”

He went to the other taxi, and Mayta thought: We’ll get to Quero, we’ll load the Mausers on mules, we’ll cross the mountains, go down to the jungle, and in Uchubamba the community will receive us with open arms. We’ll give them weapons, and Uchubamba will be our first base camp. He had to be optimistic. Although there had been desertions, and even if the Ricrán men didn’t show up in Quero, he couldn’t allow himself to doubt. Hadn’t everything gone so well this morning?

“That’s what we thought,” says Colonel Felicio Tapia, a doctor drafted into the army, a married man with four sons, one an invalid and another an army man, wounded in action in the Azángaro sector. He’s passing through Jauja because he has to make constant inspections of the clinics in the Junín zone. “We thought the guards and the lieutenant we’d left locked up would take a long time to get out, and since communications were cut, they’d have to go to Huancayo to get reinforcements. Five or six hours, at least. By then, we’d be well on our way to the jungle. Who’d find us then? Vallejitos had chosen the place very well.

“It’s the area where we’ve had the most trouble carrying out operations. Ideal for ambushes. The Reds are out there in their dens, and the only way to root them out is by saturation bombing, by destroying everything, and attacking with bayonets — which means heavy casualties. If people knew how many men we’ve lost, they’d be shocked. Well, I don’t suppose Peruvians are shocked by anything nowadays. Where were we? Oh yeah, that’s what we thought. But Lieutenant Dongo got right out of the cell. He went to the telegraph office and saw everything smashed, so he went down to the station and found the telegraph there working perfectly. He telegraphed, and a busload of police left Huancayo about the time we were leaving Jauja. Instead of five hours, we barely had a two-hour lead on them. How stupid! To knock out the telegraph at the train station would have taken two minutes.”

“So why didn’t you do it?”

He shrugs and blows smoke out his mouth and nose. He’s old before his time, his mustache stained by nicotine. He gasps. We are talking in the infirmary at the Jauja barracks. From time to time, Colonel Tapia glances into the waiting room crowded with sick and wounded being looked after by nurses.

“You know, I don’t know why we didn’t do it. Underdevelopment, I suppose. In the original plan, in which there were going to be some forty people, I think, not counting the joeboys, one group was supposed to seize the station. At least that’s how I remember it. Then, in the confusion of changing plans, Vallejitos must have forgotten about that. Probably no one remembered that there was a telegraph at the station. The fact is, we left happy, thinking we had all the time in the world.”

In fact, they weren’t very happy. When Mr. Onaka (whining that he couldn’t go to Molinos with his wife sick, that he didn’t have enough gas to get there) started up, the incident with the watchmaker took place. Mayta saw him appear suddenly, snorting like a wild bull, right in front of the glass door with gothic letters on it: “Jewels and Watches: Pedro Bautista Lozada.” He was an older man, thin, wearing glasses, his face red with indignation. He was carrying a shotgun. Mayta took the safety off his sub-machine gun, but he was calm enough not to fire — after all, the man was howling like a banshee, but he wasn’t even aiming his gun at them. He was waving it around like a cane, shouting: “Fucking communists, you don’t scare me,” while stumbling around by the curb, his glasses bouncing on his nose. “Fucking communists! Alight if you’ve got any balls!”

“Get going and don’t stop,” Mayta ordered the driver, sticking his finger in his back. At least, no one shot that old grouch. “He’s a Spaniard,” Felicio Tapia said, laughing. “What does alight mean?”

“Everyone in Jauja says you are the most pacific man in the world, don Pedro, a person who makes no trouble for anyone. What got into you that morning that you went out and insulted the revolutionaries?”

“I don’t know what got into me.” He talks through his nose, his toothless mouth dripping saliva. He lies under the vicuña blanket in his chair in the shop where he’s passed the more than forty years since he came to Jauja: don Pedro Bautista Lozada. “I just got mad. I saw them go into the International and carry out the money in a bag. That didn’t bother me. Then I heard them give communist cheers and shoot off their rifles. They didn’t care that their stray shots could hurt someone. What was all that foolishness? So I took my shotgun, this one I have between my legs in case of unannounced guests. Then I noticed I hadn’t even loaded it.”

The dust, the junk, the disorder, and the character’s incredible age remind me of a movie I saw when I was a kid: The Prodigious Magician. Don Pedro’s face is a prune and his eyebrows are bushy and huge. He’s told me he lives alone and prepares his own food — his principles forbid him to have servants.

“Tell me something else, don Pedro. When the police from Huancayo arrived and Lieutenant Dongo began to look for guides to track down the rebels, you refused to go. Could it be you weren’t really so mad at them? Or was it that you were unfamiliar with the Jauja mountains?”

“I knew them better than anyone, good deer hunter that I was,” he drones and dribbles, wiping away the gook that pours out of his eyes. “But even though I don’t like communists, I don’t like cops either. I’m talking about then, because nowadays I don’t even know what I like anymore. I only have a few watches left and this spit that keeps slipping out because I have no teeth. I’m an anarchist and will be one until I die. If anyone walks in here with bad intentions, guerrilla or police agent, this shotgun goes off. Down with communism, goddamn it. Death to the cops.”

The taxis, one behind the other, passed through Plaza Santa Isabel, where they were to have loaded the Ricrán truck with the weapons captured at the jail, the police station, and the Civil Guard post. But no one around Mayta in the jam-packed car in which they could barely move was complaining about the change. The joeboys couldn’t stop hugging each other and cheering. Condori, reserved, looked at them without partaking of their enthusiasm. Mayta was silent. But this happiness and excitement moved him. In the other taxi, the same scene was undoubtedly taking place.

At the same time, Mayta was taking note of the driver’s edginess, watching him carefully, worried about the sloppy way he was driving. The car bounced and pitched. Mr. Onaka went into every pothole, hit every rock, and seemed intent on running over every dog, burro, horse, or person who crossed his path. Was it fear, or deliberate? Just then, only a few hunderd yards outside Jauja, the car went off the road and smashed against a pile of rocks alongside the ditch, flattening a fender and throwing the passengers into each other and against doors and windows. The five of them thought Mr. Onaka had done it on purpose. They roughed him up, insulted him, and Condori gave him a punch that split his eyebrow. Onaka whined that he hadn’t crashed on purpose. When they got out of the car, Mayta smelled eucalyptus: a cool breeze from the nearby mountains was wafting it in. Vallejos’s taxi doubled back, raising a cloud of red dust.

“That little joke cost us fifteen minutes, maybe more,” says Juan Rosas, sub-contractor, truck driver, and owner of a bean and potato farm. He happens to be in Jauja, recovering from a hernia operation at his son-in-law’s house. “We were waiting for another car to replace the Chink’s. Not even a burro came by. The worst bad luck, because there were always trucks on that road coming and going to and from Molinos, Quero, or Buena Vista. That day, nothing. Mayta told Vallejos, ‘You go on with your group — the one I was in — and see about the horses.’ Because no one thought the Ricrán people would be waiting for us. Vallejos didn’t want to go. So we stayed. Finally, a pickup came by. Fairly new, a full tank, good retreads. Not bad. We stopped it, there was an argument, the driver didn’t want to cooperate, we had to scare him. In the end, we just commandeered it. The lieutenant, Condon, and Gonzales were up front. Mayta got in the back with the plain folk — us — and all the Mausers. We were concerned about the loss of time, but as soon as we got started again, we began to sing.”

The pickup jumped along the roadbed filled with potholes, and the joeboys, their hair flying all over, their fists in the air, cheered Peru and the socialist revolution. Mayta, sitting with his back against the cab, looked at them. Then, suddenly, it occurred to him: “Why don’t we sing ‘The International,’ comrades?”

The little faces, white with dust, nodded agreement, and several said, “Yes, yes, let’s sing it.” But then he realized that none of them knew the words or had ever heard “The International.” There they were, under the diaphanous mountain sky, in their wrinkled uniforms, looking at him and looking at each other, each one waiting for the others to begin singing. He felt a wave of tenderness for the seven boys. They were years away from being men, but had already graduated into the revolution. They were risking everything in the marvelous spontaneity of their fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years, even though they lacked political experience and any ideological formation. Weren’t they worth more than the experienced revolutionaries of the RWP(T), who had stayed back in Lima, or the lettered Dr. Ubilluz and his worker-peasant legions, who had evaporated that same morning? Yes, they were. They’d chosen action. He wanted to hug them.

“I’ll teach you the words,” he said, standing up in the bouncing truck. “Let’s sing, sing along with me. ‘Arise, ye prisoners of starvation …’”

Screeching, out of key, exalted, laughing themselves sick because of their mistakes and cracked voices, raising a left fist in the air, cheering the revolution, socialism, and Peru: that’s how the mule drivers and farmers on the outskirts of Jauja saw them, and also the rare travelers trekking down toward the city through waterfalls and bushy ferns, along that rocky, humid gorge that runs from Quero to the provincial capital. They tried to sing “The International” for quite a while, but because Mayta couldn’t carry a tune, they never got it right. They ended up singing the National Anthem and the anthem of the Colegio Nacional de San José de Jauja. Then they reached the Molinos bridge. The truck didn’t stop until Mayta forced it to by banging on the roof.

“What’s the problem?” asked Vallejos, sticking his head out the half-open door.

“Weren’t we going to blow up this bridge?”

The lieutenant made a face. “How? With our hands? The dynamite’s at Ubilluz’s place.”

Mayta remembered that in every one of their discussions Vallejos had insisted on blowing up the bridge. With it destroyed, the police would have to go up to Quero on foot or on horseback, which would be one more advantage.

“Don’t worry.” Vallejos quieted him down. “We’ve done enough. Keep on singing, it makes the trip go faster.”

The pickup started to move again, and the seven joeboys began singing and joking once more. But Mayta didn’t sing along. He stood with his back against the cab, and as he watched the landscape with its huge trees go by, he listened to the sound of the waterfalls, the trill of the finches, and felt the clear air filling his lungs with oxygen. Lulled by the happiness of the adolescents, he let his imagination run wild. How would Peru be in a few years? A busy hive, whose atmosphere would reflect, on a national scale, the atmosphere of this truck, stirred by the idealism of these boys.

The peasants, owners of their own lands by then; the workers, owners of their own factories by then; government officials, conscious that now they were serving the community and not imperialists, millionaires, political bosses, or local parties, would feel the same. With discrimination and exploitation abolished, the foundations of equality established through the abolition of inherited wealth, the replacement of the elitist army with a popular militia, the nationalization of private schools, and the expropriation of all companies, banks, businesses, and urban property, millions of Peruvians would feel that now indeed they were progressing, the poorest first. The hardest-working, most talented, and most revolutionary would get the important jobs, instead of the richest or the best connected.

And every day the chasms that separated the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, the whites from the Indians, blacks, and Asiatics, the coastal people from the mountain and jungle people, the Spanish speakers from the Quechua speakers, would be bridged just a bit more. Everyone, except the tiny group that would flee to the United States or die defending their privileges, would take part in the great production effort to develop the country, end illiteracy, and do away with the stranglehold of central authority. The fog of religion would fade with the systematic rise of science. The worker and peasant councils, in their factories, on their collective farms, and in government ministries, would prevent the outsized growth and consequent ossification of a bureaucracy that would freeze the revolution and use it for its own benefit.

What would he do in that new society, if he was still alive? He wouldn’t accept any important place in government, in the armed forces, or in the diplomatic service. Maybe a political post, a minor one, perhaps in the country, on a collective farm in the Andes, or on some colonization project in the Amazon region. Social, moral, and sexual prejudices would give way little by little, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone, in that crucible of work and faith that Peru would be in the future, that he would be living with Anatolio. By then, they would have gotten back together, and it would be more or less obvious that, alone, free of stares, with all due discretion, they could love each other and enjoy each other. He secretly touched his fly with the hand grip of his weapon. Beautiful, isn’t it, Mayta? Very. But how far off it seemed …