Redeemers (52 page)

Led from a secret command post by Abimael Guzmán—a university professor who, in his own estimation, was “the fourth sword of Marxism,” along with Marx, Lenin, and Mao—the Senderistas had been preaching a form of “pedagogic terror” inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the terror of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In contrast to all known revolutionary traditions, where the target is always the “class oppressor,” the Shining Path singled out the people themselves for their attacks: peasants who chose not to cooperate with their putative liberators, workers who dared to defy calls for a strike. To these expressions of “false historical consciousness,” the Shining Path responded not with pamphlets or wall posters, but with guns and knives: mutilation as warning, summary execution as punishment.

In 1983 Mario Vargas Llosa had the opportunity to learn precisely how this “pedagogic terror” had taken hold in parts of Peru. The government of Belaúnde Terry was being held responsible by the radical press and the parliamentary left for the mysterious death of eight journalists in the province of Ayacucho, the mountainous center of Sendero operations. By way of response, the president appointed a blue-ribbon commission—consisting of three members (one of them Vargas Llosa) and eight advisors—to look into the matter. After investigating the scene of the crime for thirty days, and after hearing testimony that would eventually fill a thousand pages, the commission concluded that “the journalists were murdered by the peasants of Uchuraccay, with the probable complicity of residents in neighboring communities, in the utter absence of the Peruvian armed forces.”

Shortly thereafter Vargas Llosa published his own account of the affair in Western periodicals (including the
New York Times Magazine
), in which he explained the origins of the problem. The Indians of Uchuraccay, whose thousand-year-old culture had been under attack for some time by the guerrillas, had mistakenly assumed that the journalists were members of the Shining Path. Vargas Llosa's visit to Uchuraccay seemed to offer him an insight into the true nature of guerrilla movements in Latin America:

 

Perhaps this story helps to clarify the reason for the mind-shattering violence that characterizes guerrilla warfare in Latin America. These guerrilla movements are not “peasant movements.” They are born in the cities, among intellectuals and middle-class militants who, with their dogmatism and their rhetoric, are often as foreign and incomprehensible to the peasant masses as Sendero Luminoso is to the men and women of Uchuraccay. The outrages committed by those other strangers—the Government forces of counterinsurgency—tend to win peasant support for the guerrillas . . . The fact is that the struggle between the guerrillas and the armed forces is really a settling of accounts between privileged sectors of society, and the peasant masses are used cynically and brutally by those who say they want to “liberate” them. The peasants always suffer the greatest number of victims: At least 750 of them have been killed in Peru since the beginning of 1983.

 

By then his philosophical and moral convictions had been most clearly defined through his long and intense polemic with the Latin American intelligentsia, whom Vargas Llosa defined as “a decisive element in our political underdevelopment.” He referred specifically to the case of the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (author, wrote Vargas Llosa, of “the richest and most innovative poetry in the Spanish language . . . and also, of hymns of praise to Stalin”), and to the Cuban novelist-diplomat Alejo Carpentier (whose “elegant, skeptical tales” Vargas Llosa contrasted with his uncritical reverence for Castro). His criticism was aimed at others as well—for example, at the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, who had begun his career as a supporter of Francisco Franco. And, of course, at Gabriel García Márquez. For Vargas Llosa, García Márquez perfectly embodies the Latin American intellectual who insists that the choice in South America “is not between democracy and dictatorship (Marxist or neofascist) but between reaction and revolution, embodied in those infamous archetypes, Pinochet and Castro.” In Vargas Llosa's view, the Latin American intellectual, far from representing a fearless tradition of criticism, has been a guardian of the most rigid orthodoxy, “preventing the democratic option, which is actually the one preferred by our peoples, from acquiring an original expression of its own . . . adapted to the complex realities of our societies.”

This lengthy process of disenchantment, for which Vargas Llosa (like Octavio Paz in Mexico) was widely vilified, reached something of a climax in his report on the events in Uchuraccay, which he held up as a macabre metaphor, expressing the perverse limits to which ideological zeal can lead. At that moment, overcome with, in his own words, “amazement, indignation, and regret,” he conceived
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
. It was a novelized anatomy of the archetypal Latin American guerrilla of the 1970s and '80s, the portrait of a redeemer.

 

VI

Zavalita, the principal character in Vargas Llosa's
Conversation in the Cathedral
(1969), memorably opens that novel by asking, “When did Peru get screwed up?” The question seems almost upbeat compared with the vision of their country shared by the protagonists of
The Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta.
The novel takes place in a fictitious locale afflicted by both civil and international war. The book begins and ends with a description of the garbage “that's invading every neighborhood in the capital of Peru,” symbolizing not waste but social decomposition: drugs, hoarding, prostitution, and acts of violence committed by the poor against each other. Every character registers this horror, which grows by leaps and bounds as the story advances. “Things will get worse and worse . . . We thought we had touched bottom.” In
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
the memorable phrase is not a question, but a dark affirmation: “There are no limits to our deterioration.”

An alter ego of Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist and former leftist who has spent fifteen years in Europe, returns home to investigate the circumstances surrounding the life of one Alejandro Mayta, who at the beginning of 1958—a few months before Castro's victory in Cuba—participated in a failed guerrilla insurrection in Jauja, which had been Peru's provisional capital after the Spanish Conquest. (Though Mayta is a wholly fictitious creation, the rebellion itself did occur, in 1962.)

Using the same methods that Vargas Llosa employed in his investigation of the events in Uchuraccay, the writer in the novel tries to reconstruct Mayta's life through a series of individual testimonies, which taken together are partial, inconsistent, or simply unclear: “With each new fact, more contradictions, conjectures, mysteries, and incongruities crop up.” And finally, as in the real-life case of Uchuraccay, many details of the event remain unresolved. But unlike the real Vargas Llosa, the novelist in
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
is searching for something more than “the facts of the case.” He is after “a certain symbolic presence embodying what came later, an omen whose meaning no one was capable of interpreting at the time.” The unsuspected reality—ideological violence—was then a daily fact of life in Peru, Colombia, and various Central American countries. The author wants to identify the human archetype at the heart of this new phenomenon, the revolutionary personality consecrated to an absolute ideal and therefore capable of dying or causing others to die. The fact that Vargas Llosa himself spent some years pinning his hopes for Peru on just such people, and then many more years rejecting their solutions, imparts a deeply personal note to the narrative.

Alejandro Mayta comes to revolution not through social or economic deprivation, but from a truncated religious vocation. Like so many Latin American radicals, he has studied at a religious high school (technically a seminary), though his instructors were not Jesuits (as is commonly the case with educated radicals) but Salesians. Though it is not explored in the novel, the difference between the two religious orders is important. In those days, the Jesuits prepared the children of elites for the exercise of power. The Salesians, an order created at the end of the nineteenth century, concentrate on young men from the humbler social classes, to whom they teach the kind of skilled trades that put them in direct contact with workers, peasants, or (in the case of Peru) inhabitants of the shantytowns that surround the capital and other cities. The Jesuits specialize in rhetoric and dialectics: they are the legitimate sons of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent (though under the influence of Pope John XXIII, the Jesuits would alter their orientation between the 1960s and 1990s). The Salesians, in contrast, exalt the dignity of manual labor: they are the product of Leo XIII's late nineteenth-century encyclical
Rerum
novarum
.

Mayta starts out preparing for the priesthood. He attends Mass every day. He crosses himself with conspicuous devotion. He takes Communion frequently. His friends call him “a little saint.” The experience of an intensive religious education awakens within him a sense of piety laced with guilt. But in his youth, Mayta experiences a process of conversion not very different from that undergone by Chernyshevsky and other Russian revolutionaries, like Stalin himself—a change of catechism by which ex-seminarians pass, with no inner doubts, from one dogmatic creed to another. Mayta's new faith becomes the revolution; his new prophet, Leon Trotsky.

The seven members of the Trotskyist sect that Mayta finally joins read and reread the sacred texts (Marx, Trotsky's
Permanent Revolution
, Lenin's
What Is to Be
Done?
) and argue interminably about the precise implications for Peruvian society of every chapter, passage, and idea. At times they resemble the Byzantine theologians who used to argue over the gender of angels, and at others they parallel—in a weaker form, and without being at all aware of the fact—some of the tensest moments in the history of messianism, the expectant wait for the savior who will restore harmony to the universe. In the Peruvian case, as in all others, the prospect of the millennium offers a rich utopian vision, one that dates back to the ideas of Mariátegui. The peasants will become owners of the land they work; the industrial proletariat will acquire the factories where they labor. There will be an end to all exploitation, inequality, fanaticism, and ignorance. Political bosses and their imperialist masters will be no more. Banks, private schools, businesses, and urban real estate will all be nationalized. Popular militias will replace a professional army based on class distinctions. And in accord with the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism,

 

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.

 

“The assault on heaven . . . ,” Mayta thinks to himself, somewhat anticipating what would later become the Theology of Liberation. “We shall bring heaven down from heaven, establish it on earth.”

Some come to regard him as an agent of the CIA; others imagine he has connections with the KGB. (To accentuate Mayta's compulsion toward marginality, Vargas Llosa decides, perhaps unnecessarily, to make him also a closet homosexual, seeking in some undetermined way to achieve through social revolution his personal sexual redemption.) All of this tends to overpower the narrative with an atmosphere of factionalism and intolerance. Mayta celebrates his fortieth birthday sharing a garret with rats; he is the object of a police dragnet, is wholly absorbed in “sterile polemics,” and spends time composing “masturbatory pamphlets.”

Lieutenant Vallejos, an army officer (who in fact existed in real life), offers him the concrete possibility of revolutionary action by inviting him to join in the Jauja insurrection with other conspirators, including a high school teacher and a justice of the peace. Fifteen years later each has a different—and generally contradictory—view of “Mayta, the Trotskyist” and his role in the events, but all agree that for him the Jauja experience had a “purifying, redemptive” character.

The reality of revolution is, of course, far less lofty than its ideal. Stupidity, misjudgment, ignorance, fear, treason, innocence, and bad timing—all abort the insurrection. Vallejos and some of his younger collaborators, a few hardly into adolescence, are killed. Mayta is captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.

In the final chapter of the novel, the author and Mayta finally meet. Fifteen years have passed since the futile attempt at insurrection in the mountains. Not a trace remains of Mayta's earlier unsettling characteristics. He quietly tends a small ice-cream parlor in Miraflores, a prosperous suburb of Lima, and supports a wife and four children. In confinement he was a model prisoner. Indeed, his pride and joy is not the attempt at social upheaval years before (although neither is he ashamed of it), but rather the tiny revolution of order, cleanliness, and good conduct that he had championed in prison. He has no wish to speak of events past. (“You don't know how strange it is for me to talk politics, to remember political events. It's like a ghost that comes back from the pit of time to show me the dead and make me see forgotten things.”)

His interlocutor is mistaken, perhaps, in consigning all of this to apathy, moral irresponsibility, cynicism—to the great black hole of disenchantment. For Mayta expresses no anger or regret for what he has been. He manifests a genuine interest in the affairs of daily life—in his family, in his neighborhood, in tangible things, not in the abstractions of the ideal. Perhaps without being fully aware of it, he has returned to the humble, slightly anarchistic philosophy of the Salesian Fathers: to work with one's hands among the poor. Having discarded his youthful conviction, Mayta appears to have experienced—along with Vargas Llosa himself—yet another conversion. He has exchanged the absolute for the real.