Redeemers (14 page)

And Europe, specifically Italy, gave him even more. Limited by his physical condition (which was already worsening) and the furious pace of his literary activity—first as a means to rise out of poverty and then to take his place in the world of letters—he was not a man with much experience of women. During a trip to Genoa, in a country inn near the city, Mariátegui encountered an Italian intellectual named Anna Chiappe (he would later meet Croce at her home). They became lovers.

He thought they would soon marry. He felt he would need more income and so he began to write a series of
Letters from Italy
for the newspaper
El Tiempo
of Lima. As honest as he always tried his best to be, some of these letters include his thoughts on his “discovery” of woman. In 1921 they married and Sandro, the first of his four sons, was born in Rome.

What he had done in Italy, he wrote, was “wedded woman and some ideas.” He depicted (and treated) his wife as an intellectual equal. He cannot be termed a feminist in the modern sense but he was one of the first Latin American intellectuals to recognize and respect the role of the woman in a modern society. And along with woman, he would discover the work of Sigmund Freud; again an intellectual trailblazer for later developments, he would put Freud on a par with Marx and incorporate this discovery into his political vision. In Lima, Anna would bear him three more sons, Sigfrido (after Siegfried, an epic hero of his childhood, bedridden readings), José Carlos, and Javier. He would have a loving family during his few, last, immensely productive years.

As a Marxist, he was already prone to what dogmatic party theoreticians would qualify as “errors.” He had chosen communism but he was always an individualistic communist, intolerant of intolerance, which would later lead to tensions between Mariátegui and the Latin American emissaries of the Comintern. He read and admired Antonio Gramsci and was present in 1921 at the Livorno Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, where, led by Gramsci and other socialists of the left, the famous schism occurred that gave birth to the Italian Communist Party. But his appreciation of culture as an instrument of revolution was due above all to the anarchist Georges Sorel, from whom he drew the need for a “new language” and the “perennial value of myth in popular movements,” which Sorel characterized as “the creation of a concrete fantasy that works on a scattered and downtrodden people to revive and organize their collective will.”

He became a friend of Piero Gobetti, a follower of Croce and a radicalized liberal who nevertheless wrote frequently for the journal
L'Ordine Nuovo
, the communist publication co-edited by Gramsci. This Italian capacity to join distinct and, within limits, opposing positions on the pages of the same publication would later leave its mark on the most important enterprise of his life, the journal
Amauta
. (It was a tendency that would be revived in Italy decades later after the defeat of fascism.)

In 1922, Mariátegui attended an international conference sponsored by the League of Nations. There, in his own small conference, he (together with César Falcón, Carlos Roe, and Palmiro Machiavello) created the first cell of the Peruvian Communist Party. And now it was time to go home.

Before he left Europe, Mariátegui traveled to France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium. He spent his days investigating the revolutionary movements that had spread across the continent since the end of the Great War.

Finally the family of three set out for Peru. Europe had granted Mariátegui the experience of observing a Western order created in the previous century that had fallen apart and was now forming into something new, unexpected, dangerous, and also hopeful. In Richard Morse's phrase, Mariátegui had “seen the forging and testing of ideologies in the crucible of action.”

And from the vantage point of Europe, he discovered himself anew as a Latin American:

 

Along the roads of Europe, I met the country of America that I had left and in which I had lived almost as a foreigner and an absentee. Europe showed me how much I belonged to a primitive and chaotic world; and at the same time it set upon me, it clarified for me, the duty of an American task.

 

V

In April 1923, back in Lima, Mariátegui had to earn a living once again, and for a family of three. Now he would meet another great figure of Peruvian political thought, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. They were of the same age but could not have been physically and socially more different. Haya de la Torre was tall, elegant, of aristocratic lineage, educated in the best schools of Peru, an inspiring orator. He was a friend of the poet César Vallejo, a frequent visitor at the home of Mariátegui's first political mentor González Prada, and frequently corresponded with many leading Hispanic intellectuals, including José Enrique Rodó, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Vasconcelos.

Like Mariátegui he was a Marxist but his rise to prominence, socially and intellectually, had been much more rapid and ostentatious. At the National University of San Marcos he had been president of the Peruvian Student Association, a position that involved him being treated as an advisor (though for the most part symbolically) to the president of Peru, the “moderate” dictator Augusto B. Leguía, who was very much in need of legitimization. But Haya de la Torre would soon leave the presidential fold by supporting a workers' strike and organizing demonstrations in favor of the famous student movement for university reform that had begun in Córdoba, Argentina. When he and Mariátegui met (they had already known of each other) he was already founder and director of the People's Universities that bore the name of González Prada. He could not, nor did he want to, ignore a comrade returning to the fatherland. He gave him work on his magazine (called
Claridad
) and the opportunity to give a series of lectures within the People's Universities on the subject “History of the Worldwide Crisis.”

Turmoil over official state support for the Catholic religion, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century confrontations between Liberals and Conservatives, would send Haya de la Torre into exile and elevate Mariátegui, as his chosen replacement, to the helm of
Claridad
. President Leguía had announced that a public ceremony would be held, entrusting the Peruvian nation to the protection of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Haya de la Torre saw it as an assault on freedom of religion and joined in the widespread public protests, which were successful. The ceremony was canceled but the government saw Haya de la Torre, because of his fame and his incendiary oratory, as the most prominent figure in the protest movement. Leguía expelled him from the country. Haya de la Torre would embark on a long journey of socialist tourism, beginning with Mexico (where José Vasconcelos would hand him a banner to mark the foundation of the A.P.R.A., the Popular Revolutionary American Alliance), a socialist political program intended to reach all of Latin America. He then went off to Russia, where he decided that the concept of the proletariat made no sense for underdeveloped Peru, where the masses were peasants, and began his movement away from the communists toward a more nationalist form of moderate socialism.

Back in Peru, entrusted with the journal because of Haya de la Torre's respect for his abilities, Mariátegui used his lectures at the People's University to reinforce his developing ideas of socialism and revolution. From Sorel he drew the idea that violence was legitimate but could not be bloodthirsty violence. The objective should be a just victory, supported by a communitarian spirit. And he insisted on the use of the term “Bolshevik” as a positive adjective. He wanted to justify the ideas of Lenin but at the same time reserve for himself the liberty to think freely and independently.

He remained in charge of
Claridad
, now clearly identified as a publication critical of the authoritarian government and strongly socialist. (The fifth issue of the journal dealt almost entirely with Lenin.) His strong support for the workers' movements earned him, in January 1924, a brief spell in jail. In March of the same year he began a business venture, the Obrera Claridad Publishing House, but it had barely got off the ground when an infection triggered gangrene in his good, right leg. It was amputated and he would spend the rest of his life in a wheel-chair. But with the courage he had always shown, he rapidly returned to his intellectual labors.

The Mexican Revolution had begun to disappoint him. Later, near the end of the decade, he would sum up his views about the direction it had taken. The Revolution had merit as a “bourgeois democratic movement,” but he criticized its acceptance of capitalist principles and the concessions that the victorious
caudillos
had made to North American capital and to the Catholic Church. And perhaps worst of all, the large estates were still intact. The problem of “the Indian and the land” was always near the very center of Mariátegui's thought, and toward the end of his short life, it became his overwhelming preoccupation. Sadly, he would not live to see the agrarian reform of Lázaro Cárdenas, beginning in 1936, which divided the large haciendas and emphasized the
ejido
, the cooperative communal farm with both private and public features. It was a shift in the course of the Mexican Revolution that would have pleased though perhaps not satisfied this sensitive writer and human being who would be most remembered as the prophet of indigenism.

 

VI

After the amputation, Mariátegui moved back to the front lines of political thought, in articles for the journal
Mundial
. With the series of writings published under the title of
Peruanicemos al Perú
(Let Us Peruvianize Peru), he begins the powerful flow of his mature thinking, not merely as a brilliant commentator but as a theorist of value with his own developing ideas.

To Peruvianize? To make a nation a more authentic nation? The strange thing is that it does not sound strange in Latin America. For one important reason. Since their origin, the nations of “Our America” have lived a double life. The official language, the forms of government, the states themselves, our institutions stem from Western European culture, while the autochthonous original populations, in many cases the majority and in others a strong ethnic undercurrent, have been relegated to social, economic, and political inferiority. Some of our thinkers have argued that European culture is clearly superior, more rational, more just, and therefore, though it came later in time, a historical improvement. Others (it was the great hope of Martí, Rodó, and the earlier Vasconcelos) predicted a fruitful union in the future between these two cultures. In accord with the idea of progress prevalent in the early twentieth century, this great confluence would happen at the level of race, through racial mixture (
mestizaje
). Mariátegui finds both of these views seriously wanting: “In Peru we have less intellectual nationalism, much more rudimentary and instinctive than how western nationalisms define the Nation.” He is uneasy with those intellectual flights that ignore historical reality and presuppose a homogeneity where only division and fragmentation really exist.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the separation of the races in Peru was endorsed and aggravated by the difficult geography of the country (desert eastward to towering mountains and then to jungle) and, in many areas, by the lack of adequate roads. The Indians were in the mountains (with a small presence of mestizos). Those more Hispanicized, whether creole by blood or culture, were in the lowlands and especially in the cities of the coast. For the cities it was cheaper to import Chinese workers than truck Indians down from the Andes, cheaper to supply the cities with grain on boats from Chile and California. In the mountains the
ayllu
system had decayed and nearly disappeared.
Ayllu
, a Quechua word, was the term dating back to the Incas for an Indian community bound by the ties of extended family, working together on communal land. Each
ayllu
assumed descent from some mythical ancestor. The chief of the a
yllu
was the
curaca
, and it was not a hereditary position but chosen through a religious ritual or named directly from Cuzco, the Inca capital city.

At the end of the eighteenth century, after the defeat of the uprising led by Túpac Amaru (one of a string of such uprisings across the centuries), the viceregal government had eliminated the designation of
curaca
(Mariátegui's mother came from a former
curaca
family), and the void of local government over the scattered Indian populations was then filled by the feudal landowners, the
gamonales
so despised by Mariátegui and who, answering to no one, neither the national state nor local customs, imposed their arbitrary power.

This was the reality, said Mariátegui, not the hallucinations of intellectuals who, to make things worse, based their politics on an empty ideology:

 

Peruvian politics—bourgeois on the coast, feudal in the sierras—has been characterized by ignorance of the value of human capital. Its rectification—on this level as in everything else—begins with the assimilation of a new ideology. The new generation feels and knows that the progress of Peru will be fictitious, or at least it will not be Peruvian, if it does not provide the work, does not signify the well-being of the Peruvian masses, four-fifths of whom are peasant and Indian.

 

Most Marxists have tended to believe that the subject
belongs
to a specific place and time. Mariátegui wants to believe that
the subject is essentially history
, history that is a process of the will, that we human beings are essentially historical beings, that we live a constant historical process:

 

Peru is still a nationality in formation. The sediments of western civilization are constructing it on the inert indigenous strata. The Spanish Conquest annihilated indigenous culture. It destroyed autochthonous Peru. It thwarted the only
peruanidad
[“Peruvianness”] that has existed. A truly national politics cannot omit the Indian, cannot ignore the Indian. The Indian is the foundation of our nationality in formation.