The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (13 page)

“Do you think our relationship can go back to what it was before tonight?”

“Yes, the same as it was before,” said Mayta. “Nothing's really happened, Anatolio. Did anything really happen? Get it through your head, once and for all.”

Just for a brief second, and very faintly, the pitter-pat of little feet in the attic came back, and Mayta noticed that the boy stiffened and tensed up.

“I don't know how you can sleep with that noise every night.”

“I can sleep with that noise because I don't have any choice,” Mayta replied. “But it isn't true that you can get used to anything, as people say. I haven't gotten used to not being able to take a bath whenever I want. Even if I can't remember when I had an apartment with a private bath. It was probably when I lived with my aunt Josefa over in Surquillo a million years ago. Even so, it's something I miss every day. When I come home tired and I can only wash myself like a cat down in the patio and I carry a pan of water up here to soak my feet, I think how terrific it would be to take a shower, to get under the water and feel it wash away the filth, the problems. To sleep all refreshed … What a good life the bourgeoisie have, Anatolio.”

“There's no public bath around here?”

“There is one five blocks from here, where I go once or twice a week,” said Mayta. “But I don't always have the money. A bath costs the same as a meal at the university dining hall. I can live without bathing, but not without eating. Do you have a shower at your place?”

“Yeah,” said Anatolio. “The problem is, there isn't always water.”

“You lucky dog.” Mayta yawned. “See, in some ways you're a little bit bourgeois yourself.”

Again, Anatolio did not smile. They were silent and still, each one in his place. Although it was dark, Mayta noted the signs of dawn on the other side of the tiny window—a couple of car horns, indistinct voices, movement. Could it be five, or perhaps six? They had stayed up the whole night. He felt weak, as if he had made some great effort or had gotten over a serious illness.

“Let's sleep awhile,” he said, turning over on his back. He covered his eyes with his forearm and slid over as far as he could to make room. “It must be very late. Tomorrow, I mean today, we'll have to kick ass.”

Anatolio said nothing, but after a bit, Mayta felt him move, heard the bed creak, and glimpsed him stretch out, also on his back, next to him, but careful not to touch him.

“Mayta.”

“Yes, Anatolio?”

The boy said nothing, even though Mayta waited quite a while. He felt him breathing anxiously. Then Mayta's unruly body began to heat up again.

“Go to sleep,” he repeated. “And tomorrow all we think about is Jauja, Anatolio.”

“You can give me a hand job if you want,” Mayta heard him whisper timidly. And, in an even lower, frightened voice: “But nothing more than that, Mayta.”

Senator Anatolio Campos goes his way, and I remain at the head of the main staircase of the Congress, facing the river of people, mini-buses, cars, buses, the hustle and bustle of Plaza Bolívar. Until I lose sight of it along Avenida Abancay, I watch a decrepit city bus, gray and leaning over to the right, whose exhaust pipe, flush with the top of the roof, spouts a column of black smoke. Clinging to its doors, a cancerous growth of people miraculously hangs on, just grazing the cars, the light posts, and the pedestrians. Everyone's on his way home. On every corner, there's a compact mass waiting for the buses and mini-buses. When the vehicle stops, there is a melee of pushing, shouting, shoving, insults. They are all humble, sweaty people, men and women for whom this street fighting, all to clamber onto those stinking hulks—on which, when they finally get on, they travel a half hour or forty-five minutes, standing, crowded together, angry—is an everyday routine. And these Peruvians, despite their poorly made, slightly absurd clothes, their sleazy skirts, their greasy ties, are members of a minority blessed by fortune. No matter how modest and monotonous their lives may be, they have jobs as office girls or minor officials, they have their little salaries, their social security, their retirement guaranteed. Highly privileged people, compared with those barefoot
cholitos
over there: I'm watching them pull a cart filled with empty bottles, cutting through the traffic, spitting. I also see that family in rags—a woman of indeterminate age, four kids covered with scales of grime—who from the stairs of the Museum of the Inquisition stretch their hands out toward me automatically, as soon as they see I'm close: “Some spare change, boss.” “Anything you can give, mister.”

Suddenly, instead of continuing toward Plaza San Martín, I decide to go into the Museum of the Inquisition. I haven't been here for a long time, maybe since the last time I saw my schoolmate Mayta. As I go through the museum, I can't get his face out of my mind, as if that image of a prematurely aged, tired man that I saw in the photo in his godmother's house were evoked in some irresistible way by the place I'm visiting. What's the connection? What secret thread links this all-powerful institution, which for three centuries kept guard over Catholic orthodoxy in Peru and the rest of South America, and the obscure revolutionary militant who twenty-five years ago, for a brief moment, flashed like a bolt of lightning.

What was the Palace of the Inquisition is in ruins, but the eighteenth-century mahogany ceiling panels are in good condition, as a lecturing schoolteacher explains to a group of kids. Beautiful ceiling: the Inquisitors were men of taste. Almost all the Sevilian tiles the Dominicans imported to dress up the place have disappeared. Even the brick floors were brought from Spain; now you can't see them for the soot. I pause for a minute at the stone shield that proudly overlooked the archway of this palace, the shield with its cross, sword, and laurel. Now it sits on a broken-down sawhorse.

The Inquisitors set up here in 1584, after having spent their first fifteen years facing the Church of La Merced. They bought the property from don Sancho de Ribera, son of one of the founders of Lima, for a small sum, and from this spot they watched out for the spiritual purity of what is today Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. From this audience chamber, behind this massive table whose top is made of a single slab of wood, and which has sea monsters instead of feet, the Inquisitors in their white habits and with their army of lawyers, notaries, secretaries, jailers, and executioners struggled valiantly against witchcraft, Satanism, Judaism, blasphemy, polygamy, Protestantism, and perversions. All heterodoxies, all schisms, he thought. It was an arduous task, rigorous, legalistic, maniacal, that of the gentlemen Inquisitors, among whom there figured (their collaborators) the most illustrious intellectuals of the era: lawyers, professors, theological orators, versifiers, writers of prose. He thought: How many homosexuals could they have burned? A detailed investigation that filled innumerable pages of a file carefully stored away would precede each condemnation and auto-da-fé. He thought: How many mad people could they have tortured? How many simple people could they have hanged? Years would pass before the High Tribunal of the Holy Office would pass judgment from this table decorated with a skull, with silver inkstands with etched figures of swords, crosses, fish, and the inscription: “I, the light of the truth, guide your conscience and your hand. If you do not mete out justice, in your failure you work your own ruination.” He thought: How many real saints, how many daring people, how many poor devils could they have burned?

Because it wasn't the light of the truth that guided the hand of the Inquisition: it was informers. They were the ones who filled these cells, dungeons, moist and deep caves in which no sunlight enters, and from which the prisoner would emerge crippled. He thought: You would have ended up here in any case, Mayta. For your way of life, of sex. The informer was protected to the utmost and his anonymity guaranteed, so he could collaborate without fear of reprisals. Here, still intact, is the Door of the Secret. Mayta, with a feeling of anguish, peered through the crack, linking himself with that accuser who, without being seen by the accused, would identify him by a simple nod of his head. The accused could be sent to prison for many years, his property confiscated, himself condemned to a degrading life or burned alive. He got goose bumps: how easy it was to get rid of a rival. All you had to do was enter this little room and, with your hand on the Bible, testify. Anatolio could come, spy though the crack, nod, pointing at him, and condemn him to the flames.

A doubtfully spelled notice informs us that they didn't in fact burn very many: thirty-five in three centuries. It isn't an overwhelming statistic. And of the thirty-five—a meager consolation—thirty were garroted before the fire devoured their cadavers. The first to have the lead in the grand spectacle of the Lima auto-da-fé was not garroted first: Mateo Salade, a Frenchman, was burned alive because he had carried out some chemical experiments that someone denounced as “dealings with Satan.” Salado? he thought. This poor frog must have contributed the Peruvian expression
salado
, a person with bad luck. He thought: From now on, you won't be a
salado
revolutionary.

But even though the Holy Tribunal didn't burn many people, it did torture an enormous number. After the informers, physical torture was the most frequently used device for sending victims, of both sexes, of all conditions and states, to the auto-da-fés. Here we see in all its glory a real circus of horrors, the instruments the Holy Office used—the verb is mathematically precise—to “extract the truth” from the suspect. Some cardboard dummies instruct the visitor about the pulleys and strappados—the rope from which the suspect was hung, hands tied behind his back and a hundred-pound weight strapped to his feet. Or how the victim was stretched out on the “pony,” an operating table that used four tourniquets to wrench out the limbs, one by one, or all four at once. The most banal of the devices was the stock, which immobilized the criminal's head in a yoke as he was beaten. The most imaginative was the rack, of surrealistic refinement and fantasy—a kind of chair in which, using a system of hand and ankle cuffs, the executioner could torture the legs, arms, forearms, neck, and chest of the criminal. The most contemporary of the tortures is the hood—a cloth placed over the nose or in the mouth, through which water was poured, so that the victim could not breathe. The most spectacular was the brazier, placed next to the condemned person's feet, which had previously been basted with oil so that they would roast evenly. Nowadays, Mayta thought, they use electric shocks on the testicles, sodium-pentothal injections, immersion in tubs of shit, cigarette burns. Not much progress in this field.

Ten times over, he thought: What are you doing here, Mayta? Is this a time for wasting a single minute? Don't you have more important things to do? But he was moved even more deeply by the small wardrobe that for months, years, or in perpetuity, the people accused of Judaism, witchcraft, or of trafficking with the devil or of having blasphemed, and who had “vehemently repented,” abjured their sins, and promised to redeem themselves, had to wear. A room full of costumes: amid these horrors, this seems more human. Here is the “crown,” the conical hat, the hair shirt, white, embroidered with crosses, serpents, devils, and flames, in which the condemned marched to the Plaza Mayor—after a stop at the Callejón de la Cruz, where they were to kneel before a Dominican cross—where they would be whipped or sentenced. Garments they might also have to wear day and night, for as long as their sentence required. That's the final image, the one that remains fixed in my memory, when, my visit over, I head for the exit, the idea of those condemned people who would go back to their normal business, wearing that uniform, which would inspire horror, panic, repulsion, nausea, scorn, and hatred wherever they went. He imagined what those days, months, and years must have been for the people who had to deck themselves out that way and be pointed out in the street, avoided like mad dogs. He thought: This museum is really worth a visit. Instructive, fascinating. Condensed in a few striking images and objects, there is an essential ingredient, always present in the history of this country, from the most remote times: violence. Violence of all kinds: moral, physical, fanatical, intransigent, ideological, corrupt, stupid—all of which have gone hand in hand with power here. And that other violence—dirty, petty, low, vengeful, vested, and selfish—which lives off the other kinds. It's good to come here to this museum, to see how we have come to be what we are, why we are in the condition in which we find ourselves.

At the entrance to the Museum of the Inquisition, I see that at least another dozen old people, men, women, and children have joined the family in rags I saw before. They constitute a sort of grotesque royal court of tatters, grime, and scabs. As soon as they see me, they stretch out their black-nailed hands and beg. Violence behind me and hunger in front of me. Here, on these stairs, my country summarized. Here, touching each other, the two sides of Peruvian history. And I understand why Mayta accompanied me obsessively on my tour of the museum.

I virtually run to the Plaza San Martín to catch the bus. It's late, and a half hour before the curfew, all traffic stops. I'm afraid the curfew is going to catch me in between my house and Avenida Grau. It's only a few blocks, but when it gets dark there, it's dangerous. There have been muggings, and just last week a rape. Luis Saldías's wife—they just got married, he's a hydraulic engineer, and they live right across the street from me. Her car broke down and she was outside after curfew, walking home from San Isidro. Right in those last few blocks, a patrol caught her. Three cops: they threw her into their car, stripped her—after beating her up for fighting back—and raped her. Then they let her out in front of her house, saying, “Just be thankful we didn't shoot you.” That's the standing order they have when they catch someone violating curfew. Luis Saldías told me everything, with his eyes filled with rage, and he added that, ever since, he's happy whenever someone shoots a cop. He says he doesn't care if the terrorists win, because “nothing could be worse than what we're already living.” I know he's wrong, that it can still get worse, that there are no limits to our deterioration, but I respect his grief and keep my mouth shut.