The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (23 page)

They were married three weeks later in a civil ceremony in the Lince town hall. Then she began to know the real Mayta. Under that clear blue sky, and over the roofs of red tiles in Cuzco, wave hundreds, thousands of red flags, and the old façades of its churches and palaces and the ancient stones of its streets are red with the blood of the recent fighting. At the beginning, she didn't understand all that stuff about the RWP. She knew that in Peru there was one party, the APRA, which General Ordía had outlawed and which Prado had made legal again when he took office. But a party called the RWP? Screaming demonstrations, shots fired in the air, and frenetic speeches proclaim the beginning of another era, the advent of the new man. Have the executions of traitors, informers, torturers, and collaborators with the old regime begun in the beautiful Plaza de Armas, where the viceregal authorities had Túpac Amaru drawn and quartered? Mayta gave her a partial explanation: the Revolutionary Workers' Party was still small.

“I didn't think it was important, because it seemed like a game to me,” she says, pushing back a falling lock of hair. “But before a month was out, one night when I was alone I heard knocking at the door. It was two investigators. Under the pretext of carrying on a search, they cleaned the place out—they even took away a bag of rice I had in the kitchen. That's how the nightmare began.”

She barely ever saw her husband, never knowing if he was at meetings, at the print shop, or in hiding. Mayta's life was not France-Presse, because he only got an hourly and extremely low wage from them. They couldn't have survived if she hadn't gone on working at the bank. She quickly realized that the only thing important to Mayta was politics. There were times when he'd come home with those guys and argue until all hours of the morning. “So the RWP is communist?” she asked him. “We're the real communists,” he answered. Who is this man you've married? she began to ask herself.

“I thought Juan Zárate loved you and turned himself inside out to make you happy.”

“He loved me before you turned up,” she said. “And he must have loved me when he agreed to give his name to your son. But once he went through with it, he began to resent me.”

Did he mistreat her? No, he treated her well enough, but always made her feel that it was he who had been the generous one. With the kid, on the other hand, he was good, he took charge of his education. What are you doing here, Mayta? Wasting your last hours in Lima talking about all this? But some kind of inertia kept him from leaving. That they were talking about conjugal problems in that final conversation, when Mayta was already halfway to Jauja, disappoints me. I was hoping to find something spectacular, something dramatic in that last conversation, something that would throw a conflicting light on what Mayta was feeling and dreaming on the eve of the uprising. But, to judge by what I'm hearing, I see that you two spoke more about you than about him. Sorry for interrupting, let's go on. So his political activities brought you suffering?

“I suffered more because he was queer,” she replies. She blushes and goes on, “More because I found out he'd married me to cover up what he was.”

Finally, a dramatic revelation. And yet my attention is still split between Adelaida and the flags, the blood, the shootings, and the euphoria of the insurgents and internationalists in Cuzco. Is that how Lima will be in a few weeks? On the bus I took to Lince, the driver assured me that the army, starting last night, had begun publicly shooting presumed terrorists in Villa el Salvador, Comas, Ciudad del Niño, and other new towns. Will we see the same lynchings and murders in Lima that were perpetrated in Lima when the Chileans occupied the city during the War of the Pacific in 1881?

I can hear, quite clearly, the lecture a historian gave in London, based on the account of the British consul in Lima. While the Peruvian volunteers sacrificed themselves to hold the line against the Chilean attack in Chorrillos and Miraflores, the Lima mob murdered the Chinese in their shops, hanging them, stabbing them, and burning them in the street after accusing them of being accomplices of the Chileans. Then they went on to loot the houses of the rich, terrified ladies and gentlemen who were praying the invaders would get there quickly. They discovered that they were less afraid of the Chileans than of those frenzied masses of Indians,
cholos
, mulattoes, and blacks who had taken over the city. Would something like that happen now? Would the hungry masses loot the houses of San Isidro, Las Casuarinas, Miraflores, Chacarilla, as the last vestiges of the army melted away before the final rebel offensive? Would there be a stampede toward embassies and consulates, while generals, admirals, functionaries, and ministers boarded planes and ships with all the jewels, dollars, and deeds they could dig out of their hiding places at the last minute? Would Lima burn, the way the city of Cuatro Suyos is burning now?

“It would seem you haven't forgiven him for that,” I say to her.

“Whenever I remember, my blood freezes in my veins,” Adelaida admits.

That time? That night—rather, that dawn. She heard the car's brakes, a skid out in front of the house. And since she lived in fear of the police, she jumped out of bed to take a look. Through the window, she saw the car. In the bluish light of dawn, she could see Mayta's faceless silhouette get out of the car on one side. On the other side, she could make out the driver. She was going back to bed, when something—something strange, unusual, difficult to explain, to define—upset her. She pressed her face to the window. Because the other man had made a gesture as if to say goodbye to Mayta, a movement it didn't seem right to make to her husband. The kind of obscene gesture you'd see jokers, drunks, and playboys make. But Mayta was never playful or familiar. So? The guy, as if he were saying goodbye, had grabbed his fly. His fly. He still held on to it, and Mayta, instead of slapping his hand away—Let go, you stinking drunk!—nuzzled up to him. He was hugging him. They were kissing. On the face, on the mouth. “It's a woman,” she wished, hoped, begged heaven it would be, all the time feeling her hands and knees shaking. A woman wearing trousers and a jacket? The foggy glow kept her from seeing clearly who was kissing and rubbing her husband down there on that deserted street, but there could be no doubt—because of his size, his build, his head, his hair—it was a man. She felt the desire to run out, half dressed as she was, and shout at them: “Queers, queers!” But a few seconds later, when the two separated and Mayta walked toward the house, she pretended to be asleep. In the darkness, mortified with shame, she glimpsed him coming in. She hoped that he would be so drunk that anyone who saw them would say, “He didn't know what he was doing or with whom.” But of course he hadn't even had a single drink. Did he ever drink? She saw him undress in the darkness, except for the underpants he slept in, and slip into bed with her, carefully, so as not to wake her up. Then Adelaida began to throw up.

“I don't know how long,” Mayta replied, as if the question had taken him by surprise. “It'll all depend on how I do. I want to change my life-style. I don't even know if I'll come back to Peru.”

“Are you going to give up politics?” a surprised Adelaida asked him.

“In a way,” he said. “I'm going because of something you always used to get on me about. I've finally proven you right.”

“A little late, don't you think?” she said.

“Better late than never.” Mayta smiled. He was thirsty, as if he had eaten fish. Why not just leave?

Adelaida had that expression of disgust on her face that he remembered so well, and the crowd didn't even manage to understand until—noisy and cataclysmic—the first bombs exploded. Roofs, walls, the bell towers of Cuzco all began to collapse. Debris of all sorts—stones, roof tiles, bricks—flew all over. Then they started to machine-gun the people who were running. In their panic, the crowd created as many casualties as the bursts of fire from the strafing planes. In the confusion of moans, bullets, and screams, those with rifles fired at the sky dirty with smoke.

“You were the only person Mayta said goodbye to,” I assure her. “He didn't even visit his Aunt Josefa. Doesn't his visit, when you think about it after so many years, seem strange to you?”

“He told me he was leaving the country and that he wanted to find out how his son was doing,” Adelaida says. “Naturally, I understood everything later, when it was in the papers.”

Outside, there is a sudden flare-up of activity at the entrance to the Rospigliosi Castle, as if, behind the barbed wire and the sandbags, they were redoubling their guard. Out there, not even the horror of the bombing has brought the looting under control. Frenzied bands of escaped convicts are breaking into the downtown stores. The rebel commanders are ordering anyone found looting to be shot where he stands. The buzzards are tracing circles over the bodies of those shot, who are soon indistinguishable from the victims of the bombing. It all smells of gunpowder, rotten flesh, burning.

“Take advantage of things, so you can be cured,” whispers Adelaida, so low that I barely heard her. But her words have the same effect on me as a slap in the face.

“I'm not sick,” Mayta stuttered. “Tell me about the kid before I go.”

“You
are
sick,” Adelaida insisted, trying to look him in the eye. “Are you cured, maybe?”

“It isn't a sickness, Adelaida,” I stammered. I could feel that my palms were sweaty, and I was even thirstier.

“In your case, it is,” she said, and Matya thought something had reawakened all her resentment of before. It was his fault: What were you doing there, why didn't you leave? “In others, it's degenerate, but that kind of vice has nothing to do with you. I know all about it, I talked to that doctor about it. He said it could be cured, and you didn't want to try shock treatments. I offered to get a loan from the bank for the therapy, but you said no, no, no. Now that it's all over, tell me the truth. Why didn't you want to go through with it? Were you scared?”

“Shock treatment is useless for these things,” I said, muttering. “Let's not talk about it. Could I please have a glass of water?”

Wasn't it possible that marrying you was his “therapy,” ma'am? Couldn't he have married her, thinking that living with a young, attractive woman would “cure” him?

“That's what he wanted me to believe, when we finally got around to talking,” Adelaida says softly, pushing back her hair. “A lie, of course. If he had wanted to be cured, he would have tried. He married me to cover up. Above all, in front of his revolutionary buddies. I was the screen for his filthy activities.”

“If you don't want to, you don't have to answer this question. Did you two have a normal sex life?”

She doesn't seem to be uncomfortable. Because there are so many dead and it's impossible to bury them, the rebel commanders order them doused with anything flammable and burned. The rotting bodies scattered through the city must not be the cause of infection. The air is so thick and polluted that you can scarcely breathe. Adelaida uncrosses her legs, makes herself comfortable, and scrutinizes me. Otherwise, there is a clamor. An armored car has taken up a position in front of the barbed wire. There are more guards. Things must have gotten worse. It looks as if they're getting ready for something.

As if she had read my mind, Adelaida says softly, “If they are attacked, we'll be the first to be fired on.” The crackling of the bonfires of corpses doesn't silence the irrepressible, maddened voices of the relatives and friends who try to stop the burning, who demand Christian burial for the victims. Swathed in smoke, stench, fear, and despair, some try to wrench the bodies away from the revolutionaries. From a monastery, church, or convent there comes a funeral procession. It advances, ghostlike, the people chanting prayers and imprecations amid the dying and the ruin that is Cuzco.

“I had no idea what normal or abnormal relations were,” she says, pushing back her hair in her ritual gesture. “I couldn't make any comparisons. In those days, you didn't discuss those things with your girlfriends. So I thought they were normal.”

But they weren't. They lived together and from time to time they made love. Which meant that on certain nights they hugged and kissed, finished rapidly, and went to sleep. Something superficial, routine, hygienic, something that—as she realized later—was incomplete, far short of her needs and desires. It isn't that she didn't like Mayta's politeness—he always turned out the light beforehand. But she had the feeling that he was in a hurry, on edge, thinking about something else even as he caressed her. Was his mind somewhere else? Yes, as he asked himself at what moment this desire that had aroused his body by means of fantasies and memories would begin to fade, to sink, to plunge him into that well of anguish from which he would try to extricate himself by stammering stupid explanations that Adelaida, luckily, seemed to believe. His thoughts were on other nights or dawns, when his desire did not fade and even seemed to get sharper if his hands and mouth were kept busy, not with Adelaida, but with one of those little fags that, after great hesitation, he dared to seek out in Porvenir or Callao. In fact, they made love only a few times, and at first Adelaida didn't know how to ask him not to finish so quickly. Later, when she was surer of herself, she did ask him. She begged him, implored him not to withdraw from her, exhausted, exactly when she had begun to feel a stirring, a vertigo. Most often, she didn't even feel that, because Mayta would suddenly seem to be sorry for what he was doing. And she was such a sucker that, until that night, she had tortured herself wondering: Is it my fault? Am I frigid? Can't I get him excited?

“May I have another glass of water?” Mayta said. “Then I'm on my way, Adelaida.”

She got up, and when she returned to the small living room, she brought, with the water, a handful of photographs. She handed them over without saying a word. The newborn child, the child a few months old in diapers, in Juan Zárate's arms; at a birthday party, next to a cake with two candles; in short pants and in shoes, at attention, staring at the photographer. I examined them again and again, examining himself at the same time that he studied the features, the positions, the gestures, the clothes of his child, whom he had never seen and whom he would never see in the future. Would he remember these pictures tomorrow in Jauja? Would I remember them, would they go with me, would they give me courage on the march in the cold uplands, in the jungle, during attacks, while I wait in ambush? What did he feel as he looked at them? Would he feel, when he remembered them, that the struggle, the sacrifices, the murders were things he'd do for his sake? Right now, did he feel tenderness, remorse, anguish, love? No, just curiosity, and gratitude toward Adelaida for having shown him the photographs. Was this the reason that brought him to this house before he left for Jauja? Or, more than meeting his son, could it have been to find out if Adelaida was still resentful for that thing which doubtless was the agony of her existence?