The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (14 page)

You get to Jauja by train. You buy your ticket the night before and get down to the Desamparados Station at six in the morning. I was told that the train is always packed, and sure enough, I have to fight my way onto a car. But I'm lucky and get a seat, while most of the passengers have to stand. There are no lavatories, so the more venturesome piss from the steps as the train rolls along. Even though I ate something just before leaving Lima, I start feeling hungry after a few hours. You can't buy anything at any of the stops: Chosica, San Bartolomé, Matucana, San Mateo, Casapalca, and La Oroya. Twenty-five years ago, the food vendors would pile onto the train at every stop, carrying fruit, sodas, sandwiches, and candy. Now all they sell are trinkets and herb tea.

The trip is uncomfortable and slow, but full of surprises. First, there is the train itself, inching its way from sea level to an altitude of three miles. It crosses the Andes at Anticona Pass and stops when it reaches the foot of Meiggs Mountain. Looking at the sublime spectacle, I forget the armed soldiers posted in every car and the machine gun on the roof of the locomotive, in case of attack. How can this train stay in service? The terrorists are constantly cutting the highway to the central mountain range by blasting landslides out of the slopes. Road travel is practically impossible. Why haven't they blown up the train, why haven't they blocked the tunnels, or destroyed the bridges? Perhaps the terrorists have some strategic need to keep communications open between Lima and Junín. I'm glad; I couldn't reconstruct Mayta's adventure without making the trip to Jauja.

Peak follows peak, some separated by abysses at the bottom of which roar rushing rivers. The little train goes over bridges and through tunnels. It's impossible not to think of the engineer Meiggs and what he accomplished here. Over eighty years ago, he directed the laying of these tracks in this geography of gorges, snow-capped mountains, peaks buffeted by wind, and under constant threat of flash floods. Did Mayta the revolutionary think about that engineer's odyssey as he took this train for the first time one morning in February or March, twenty-five years ago? He would have thought about the suffering of the workers as they laid these rails, erected these bridges, and bored out these tunnels—the thousands of
cholos
and Indians who worked for a symbolic salary, at times nothing more than a fistful of bad food and some coca, who sweated twelve hours a day, splitting rocks, blasting stone, carrying ties, leveling the bed so that the highest railroad in the world would become a reality. How many of them lost fingers, hands, and eyes dynamiting the mountains? How many fell into these precipices or were buried by the landslides that rolled over the camps where they were sleeping, one on top of another, trembling with cold, groggy with fatigue, stupefied with coca, kept warm only by their ponchos and the breath of their buddies? He began to feel the altitude: a certain difficulty in breathing, the pounding blood in his temples, his accelerated heart rate. At the same time, he could barely hide his excitement. He felt like smiling, whistling, and shaking hands with everyone in the car. He was dying with impatience to see Vallejos again.

“I am Professor Ubilluz,” he tells me, stretching out his hand when I emerge from Jauja Station, where, after an interminable wait, two policemen in street clothes frisk me and pick through the bag in which I'm carrying my pajamas. “Shorty to my friends. And, if it's all right with you, we are already friends.”

I wrote, telling him I was going to visit, and he'd come to meet me. Right around the station, there is a considerable military presence: soldiers with rifles, roadblocks, and barbed wire. And patrolling the street at a snail's pace, an armored car. We start walking. “Are things bad here?”

“It's been a bit quieter these past few weeks,” Ubilluz says. “They've actually lifted the curfew. We can go out to gaze at the stars. We'd forgotten what they look like.”

He tells me that a month ago there was a massive attack by the insurgents. The firing went on all night, and the next day there were bodies all over the place. They smelled so bad and there were so many of them that they had to be doused with kerosene and burned. Ever since, the rebels haven't attempted another important action in the city. Of course, every morning you wake up and see the mountains covered with little red hammer-and-sickle flags. Every afternoon, the army patrols yank them out.

“I've reserved a room for you over at the Paca Inn,” he adds. “A beautiful place, you'll see.”

He's a little old man, neat, stuffed into a striped suit he keeps buttoned up, which makes him look like a kind of moving package. His tie has a tiny knot, and his shoes look as if they've been dipped in mud.

He's got that ceremonious manner typical of mountain people, and his Spanish is carefully enunciated, although from time to time he uses a Quechua expression. We find an old taxi near the plaza. The city hasn't changed much since the last time I was here. Outwardly, at any rate, there are few traces of war. There are no garbage dumps or crowds of beggars. The tiny houses seem clean and immortal, with their decrepit portals and complicated ironwork. Professor Ubilluz spent thirty years teaching science in the Colegio Nacional San José. When he retired—about the same time that the movement we took for a simple act of terrorism by a group of extremists began to take on the proportions of a civil war—there was a ceremony in his honor attended by all the graduates who had been his students. When he gave his farewell address, he wept.

“Whuddya say, brother,” said Vallejos.

“How are ya', kid,” said Mayta.

“So you finally made it here,” said Vallejos.

“You said it.” Mayta smiled. “Finally.”

They hugged each other. How can the Paca Inn stay open? Do tourists still come to Jauja? Of course not. What would they come to see? All festivals, even the famous Carnival, have been canceled. But the inn stays open because the functionaries who come from Lima stay there, and, at times, so do military missions. None must be here now, because there are no guards anywhere. The inn hasn't been painted for ages and looks miserably run-down. There is no staff, no one behind the desk: just a watchman, who does everything. After I leave my bag in the small, cobwebbed room, I walk down and sit on the terrace that faces the lake, where Professor Ubilluz is waiting for me.

Did I know the famous story about Paca? He points to the glittering water, the blue sky, the fine line of peaks that surround the lake. This, hundreds of years ago, was a city of greedy folk. The beggar appeared one radiantly sunny morning when the air was clear. He went begging from house to house, and at every one, he was chased away with insults and dogs. But at one of the last houses he found a charitable widow who lived with a small child. She gave the beggar something to eat and some words of encouragement. Then the beggar began to glow and showed the charitable woman his true face—he was Jesus—and gave her this order: “Take your son and leave Paca immediately, carrying all you can. Don't look back, no matter what you hear.” The widow obeyed and left Paca. But as she was going up the mountain she heard a loud noise, like a huge drum, and out of curiosity turned around. She managed to see the horrifying landslide of rocks and mud that buried Paca and its inhabitants and the waters that turned the town into a tranquil lake filled with ducks, trout, mallards. Neither she nor her son saw or heard anything more, because statues can't see or hear. But the citizens of Jauja can and do see both of them, in the distance: two rocky formations staring out at the lake from a spot to which processions of pilgrims go to devote a moment to the people God punished for being greedy and insensible and who lie under those waters on which frogs croak, ducks quack, and where, formerly, tourists rowed.

“What do you think, comrade?”

Mayta could see that Vallejos was as happy and excited as he was himself. They walked to the boardinghouse where the lieutenant lived, on Tarapacá Street. How was the trip? Very good, and most of all, very moving, he'd never forget the Infiernillo Pass. Without stopping his chatter, he took note of the colonial houses, the clear air, the rosy cheeks of the Jauja girls. You were in Jauja, Mayta, but you didn't feel very well.

“I think I've got mountain sickness. A really weird feeling. As if I were going to faint.”

“A bad beginning for the revolution.” Vallejos laughed, snatching Mayta's suitcase out of his hands. Vallejos was wearing khaki trousers and shirt, boots with enormous soles, and he had a crew cut. “Some coca tea, a little snooze, and you'll be a new man. At eight we'll meet over at Professor Ubilluz's place. A great guy, you'll see.”

Vallejos had ordered a cot set up in his own room at the boardinghouse, the top floor of a house with rooms lining either side of a railed gallery. He left Mayta there, advising him to sleep awhile to get over the mountain sickness. He left, and Mayta saw a shower in the bathroom. I'm going to shower when I get up and again at bedtime every day I'm in Jauja, he thought. He would stock up on showers for when he'd have to go back to Lima. He went to bed fully clothed, only taking off his shoes before he closed his eyes. But he couldn't sleep.

You didn't know much about Jauja, Mayta. What, for example? More legend than reality, like that biblical explanation of the birth of Paca. The Indians who lived here had been part of the Huanaca civilization, one of the most vigorous conquered by the Incan Empire. Because of that, the Xauxas allied themselves with Pizarro and the Conquistadores, and took vengeance on their old masters. This region must have been immensely wealthy—who could ever guess, seeing how modest a place it is today—during colonial times, when the name Jauja was a synonym for abundance.

He knew that this little town was the first capital of Peru, designated as such by Pizarro during his Homeric trek from Cajamarca to Cuzco along one of those four Inca highways that went up and down the Andes in the same way the revolutionary columns snake their way nowadays. Those months when it could boast being the capital were its most glorious. Then, when Lima snatched the scepter from it, Jauja, like all the cities and cultures of the Andes, went into an irreversible decline and servitude, subordinate to that new center of national life set in the most unhealthy corner of the coast, from which it would go on ceaselessly expropriating all the energies of the country for its own use.

His heart was pounding, he felt dizzy, and Professor Ubilluz, with the lake as background, just goes on talking. I stop paying attention, pursued by the nightmare images I associated with the name Jauja when I was a child. The city for people with tuberculosis! Because they had been coming here since the last century, all those Peruvians suffering from that terrifying illness, mythified by romantic literature and sadomasochism, that tuberculosis for which the dry climate of Jauja was considered extraordinarily curative. They came here from the four cardinal points of the nation, first on mules over trails, then on the steep railroad built by the engineer Meiggs. All Peruvians who began to spit blood and who could pay for the trip and who had the money to convalesce or die in the pavilions of the Olavegoya Sanatorium, which, because of that continuous invasion, grew and grew, until, at one moment, it engulfed the city.

The name that centuries ago had aroused greed, admiration, dreams of gold doubloons and golden mountains came to mean perforated lungs, fits of coughing, bloody sputum, hemorrhage, death from consumption. Jauja, a fickle name, he thought. And pressing his hand to his chest to count the beats, he remembered that his godmother, in her house in Surquillo, in those days when he had gone on his hunger strike, had admonished him with her index finger in the air and her generous fat face: “Do you want us to send you to Jauja, you silly boy?” Alicia and Zoilita would drive him crazy every time they heard him cough: “Uh-oh, cousin, that's how it begins, a little cough; soon we'll see you on the road to Jauja.” What would Aunt Josefa, Zoilita, and Alicia say when they found out what he had come to Jauja to do? Later, while Vallejos was introducing him to Shorty Ubilluz, a ceremonious gentleman who made a little bow as they shook hands, and to half a dozen boys who looked more like lower-school kids from the Colegio San José and not secondary-school seniors, Mayta, his body still covered with goose bumps from the icy shower, told himself that soon, to those other images, another would have to be added: Jauja, cradle of the Peruvian revolution. Would that, too, be part of the place? Jauja of the revolution, like Jauja of gold, or Jauja for tuberculars? This was Professor Ubilluz's house, and Mayta could see, through a dirty window, adobe buildings, tile or zinc roofs, a fragment of cobblestoned street, and the raised sidewalks because of the torrents that—as Vallejos had explained as they walked over—formed in the storms of January and February. He thought: Jauja, cradle of the socialist revolution in Peru. It was difficult to believe, it sounded so unreal, like the city of gold or the city of the consumptives. I tell him that at least outwardly there would seem to be less hunger and want in Jauja than in Lima. Am I right? Instead of answering, Professor Ubilluz, putting on a serious face, suddenly revives, on this solitary shore of the lake, the subject that has brought me to his land: “You have probably heard many stories about Vallejos, of course. And you will hear even more in the days to come.”

“It's always the same, when you're trying to delve into a historical event,” I reply. “One thing you learn, when you try to reconstruct an event from eyewitness accounts, is that each version is just someone's story, and that all stories mix truth and lies.”

He suggests we go on to his house. A cart pulled by two burros catches up to us, and the driver agrees to take us to the city. He drops us off, half an hour later, in front of Ubilluz's little house, nine blocks up on Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. It just about faces the jail. “Yes,” he tells me, even before I ask. “This was the lieutenant's territory, that's where it all started.” The jail takes up the whole block on the other side of the street and closes off Jirón Alfonso Ugarte. At that gray wall and those tile-covered eaves, the city ends. Beyond is the country: the fields, the eucalyptus trees, and the peaks. I see, just beyond, trenches, barbed wire, and soldier boys scattered here and there, doing guard duty. One of the persistent rumors last year was that the guerrillas were preparing to attack Jauja in order to declare it the capital of liberated Peru. But hasn't the same rumor gone around about Arequipa, Puno, Cuzco, Trujillo, Cajamarca, and even Iquitos?