The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (29 page)

Was that the first sign that their calculations were wrong not just about the people involved in the uprising but about the people of Jauja? The purpose of the meeting was crystal-clear in his mind: inform the man on the street about what had gone on that morning, explain the class struggle in its historic and social sense, and show their conviction—maybe even give some of the poorest money. But in the center of the plaza, to which Mayta had made his way, there was no one but a street photographer, the little bunch of Indians petrified on their bench, trying their best not to look at the revolutionaries, and the five joeboys. They vainly waved and called to the groups of curious people on the corners near the cathedral and the Colegio del Carmen. If the joeboys tried to approach them, they ran off. Did the shots scare them? Could the news have spread already, so that these people would be afraid to be taken for revolutionaries if the police were suddenly to appear? Did it make any sense to go on waiting?

Cupping his hands over his mouth, Mayta shouted: “We are rebelling against the bourgeois order, so the people can throw off their chains! To end the exploitation of the masses! To give land to the people who work it! To stop the imperialist rape of our nation!”

“Don't shout yourself hoarse. They're far away and can't hear you,” said Vallejos, jumping off the little wall around the garden in the plaza. “We're wasting our time.”

Mayta obeyed and began walking alongside him toward the corner of Bolognesi, where the taxis, guarded by Gualberto Bravo and Perico Temoche, were waiting. Well, there was no meeting, but at least his mountain sickness was better. Would they get to Quero? Would the people who were supposed to be there really be there with horses and mules?

As if there were telepathic communication between them, Mayta heard Vallejos say, “Even if the Ricrán guys don't show up in Quero, there won't be any problem, because there are lots of horses and mules there. It's a cattle town.”

“We'll buy them, in that case,” said Mayta, patting the bag he carried in his right hand. He turned to Condori, who marched behind him: “How is the road to Uchubamba?”

“When it's dry, easy,” replied Condori. “I've done it a thousand times. It's only rough at night because of the cold. But as soon as you get to the jungle, easy as pie.”

Gualberto Bravo and Perico Temoche, who were sitting next to the taxi drivers, got out to meet them. Envious of not having gone with them to the banks, they kept saying, “Tell us about it, tell us.” But Vallejos ordered an immediate departure.

“We mustn't separate under any circumstance,” said the lieutenant, coming up to Mayta, who, with Condori and the three joeboys, was already in Mr. Onaka's taxi. “No need to speed. First stop, Molinos.”

He went to the other taxi, and Mayta thought: We'll get to Quero, we'll load the Mausers on mules, we'll cross the mountains, go down to the jungle, and in Uchubamba the community will receive us with open arms. We'll give them weapons, and Uchubamba will be our first base camp. He had to be optimistic. Although there had been desertions, and even if the Ricrán men didn't show up in Quero, he couldn't allow himself to doubt. Hadn't everything gone so well this morning?

“That's what we thought,” says Colonel Felicio Tapia, a doctor drafted into the army, a married man with four sons, one an invalid and another an army man, wounded in action in the Azángaro sector. He's passing through Jauja because he has to make constant inspections of the clinics in the Junín zone. “We thought the guards and the lieutenant we'd left locked up would take a long time to get out, and since communications were cut, they'd have to go to Huancayo to get reinforcements. Five or six hours, at least. By then, we'd be well on our way to the jungle. Who'd find us then? Vallejitos had chosen the place very well.

“It's the area where we've had the most trouble carrying out operations. Ideal for ambushes. The Reds are out there in their dens, and the only way to root them out is by saturation bombing, by destroying everything, and attacking with bayonets—which means heavy casualties. If people knew how many men we've lost, they'd be shocked. Well, I don't suppose Peruvians are shocked by anything nowadays. Where were we? Oh yeah, that's what we thought. But Lieutenant Dongo got right out of the cell. He went to the telegraph office and saw everything smashed, so he went down to the station and found the telegraph there working perfectly. He telegraphed, and a busload of police left Huancayo about the time we were leaving Jauja. Instead of five hours, we barely had a two-hour lead on them. How stupid! To knock out the telegraph at the train station would have taken two minutes.”

“So why didn't you do it?”

He shrugs and blows smoke out his mouth and nose. He's old before his time, his mustache stained by nicotine. He gasps. We are talking in the infirmary at the Jauja barracks. From time to time, Colonel Tapia glances into the waiting room crowded with sick and wounded being looked after by nurses.

“You know, I don't know why we didn't do it. Underdevelopment, I suppose. In the original plan, in which there were going to be some forty people, I think, not counting the joeboys, one group was supposed to seize the station. At least that's how I remember it. Then, in the confusion of changing plans, Vallejitos must have forgotten about that. Probably no one remembered that there was a telegraph at the station. The fact is, we left happy, thinking we had all the time in the world.”

In fact, they weren't very happy. When Mr. Onaka (whining that he couldn't go to Molinos with his wife sick, that he didn't have enough gas to get there) started up, the incident with the watchmaker took place. Mayta saw him appear suddenly, snorting like a wild bull, right in front of the glass door with gothic letters on it: “Jewels and Watches: Pedro Bautista Lozada.” He was an older man, thin, wearing glasses, his face red with indignation. He was carrying a shotgun. Mayta took the safety off his sub-machine gun, but he was calm enough not to fire—after all, the man was howling like a banshee, but he wasn't even aiming his gun at them. He was waving it around like a cane, shouting: “Fucking communists, you don't scare me,” while stumbling around by the curb, his glasses bouncing on his nose. “Fucking communists! Alight if you've got any balls!”

“Get going and don't stop,” Mayta ordered the driver, sticking his finger in his back. At least, no one shot that old grouch. “He's a Spaniard,” Felicio Tapia said, laughing. “What does alight mean?”

“Everyone in Jauja says you are the most pacific man in the world, don Pedro, a person who makes no trouble for anyone. What got into you that morning that you went out and insulted the revolutionaries?”

“I don't know what got into me.” He talks through his nose, his toothless mouth dripping saliva. He lies under the vicuña blanket in his chair in the shop where he's passed the more than forty years since he came to Jauja: don Pedro Bautista Lozada. “I just got mad. I saw them go into the International and carry out the money in a bag. That didn't bother me. Then I heard them give communist cheers and shoot off their rifles. They didn't care that their stray shots could hurt someone. What was all that foolishness? So I took my shotgun, this one I have between my legs in case of unannounced guests. Then I noticed I hadn't even loaded it.”

The dust, the junk, the disorder, and the character's incredible age remind me of a movie I saw when I was a kid:
The Prodigious Magician
. Don Pedro's face is a prune and his eyebrows are bushy and huge. He's told me he lives alone and prepares his own food—his principles forbid him to have servants.

“Tell me something else, don Pedro. When the police from Huancayo arrived and Lieutenant Dongo began to look for guides to track down the rebels, you refused to go. Could it be you weren't really so mad at them? Or was it that you were unfamiliar with the Jauja mountains?”

“I knew them better than anyone, good deer hunter that I was,” he drones and dribbles, wiping away the gook that pours out of his eyes. “But even though I don't like communists, I don't like cops either. I'm talking about then, because nowadays I don't even know what I like anymore. I only have a few watches left and this spit that keeps slipping out because I have no teeth. I'm an anarchist and will be one until I die. If anyone walks in here with bad intentions, guerrilla or police agent, this shotgun goes off. Down with communism, goddamn it. Death to the cops.”

The taxis, one behind the other, passed through Plaza Santa Isabel, where they were to have loaded the Ricrán truck with the weapons captured at the jail, the police station, and the Civil Guard post. But no one around Mayta in the jam-packed car in which they could barely move was complaining about the change. The joeboys couldn't stop hugging each other and cheering. Condori, reserved, looked at them without partaking of their enthusiasm. Mayta was silent. But this happiness and excitement moved him. In the other taxi, the same scene was undoubtedly taking place.

At the same time, Mayta was taking note of the driver's edginess, watching him carefully, worried about the sloppy way he was driving. The car bounced and pitched. Mr. Onaka went into every pothole, hit every rock, and seemed intent on running over every dog, burro, horse, or person who crossed his path. Was it fear, or deliberate? Just then, only a few hunderd yards outside Jauja, the car went off the road and smashed against a pile of rocks alongside the ditch, flattening a fender and throwing the passengers into each other and against doors and windows. The five of them thought Mr. Onaka had done it on purpose. They roughed him up, insulted him, and Condori gave him a punch that split his eyebrow. Onaka whined that he hadn't crashed on purpose. When they got out of the car, Mayta smelled eucalyptus: a cool breeze from the nearby mountains was wafting it in. Vallejos's taxi doubled back, raising a cloud of red dust.

“That little joke cost us fifteen minutes, maybe more,” says Juan Rosas, sub-contractor, truck driver, and owner of a bean and potato farm. He happens to be in Jauja, recovering from a hernia operation at his son-in-law's house. “We were waiting for another car to replace the Chink's. Not even a burro came by. The worst bad luck, because there were always trucks on that road coming and going to and from Molinos, Quero, or Buena Vista. That day, nothing. Mayta told Vallejos, ‘You go on with your group—the one I was in—and see about the horses.' Because no one thought the Ricrán people would be waiting for us. Vallejos didn't want to go. So we stayed. Finally, a pickup came by. Fairly new, a full tank, good retreads. Not bad. We stopped it, there was an argument, the driver didn't want to cooperate, we had to scare him. In the end, we just commandeered it. The lieutenant, Condon, and Gonzales were up front. Mayta got in the back with the plain folk—us—and all the Mausers. We were concerned about the loss of time, but as soon as we got started again, we began to sing.”

The pickup jumped along the roadbed filled with potholes, and the joeboys, their hair flying all over, their fists in the air, cheered Peru and the socialist revolution. Mayta, sitting with his back against the cab, looked at them. Then, suddenly, it occurred to him: “Why don't we sing ‘The International,' comrades?”

The little faces, white with dust, nodded agreement, and several said, “Yes, yes, let's sing it.” But then he realized that none of them knew the words or had ever heard “The International.” There they were, under the diaphanous mountain sky, in their wrinkled uniforms, looking at him and looking at each other, each one waiting for the others to begin singing. He felt a wave of tenderness for the seven boys. They were years away from being men, but had already graduated into the revolution. They were risking everything in the marvelous spontaneity of their fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years, even though they lacked political experience and any ideological formation. Weren't they worth more than the experienced revolutionaries of the RWP(T), who had stayed back in Lima, or the lettered Dr. Ubilluz and his worker-peasant legions, who had evaporated that same morning? Yes, they were. They'd chosen action. He wanted to hug them.

“I'll teach you the words,” he said, standing up in the bouncing truck. “Let's sing, sing along with me. ‘Arise, ye prisoners of starvation …'”

Screeching, out of key, exalted, laughing themselves sick because of their mistakes and cracked voices, raising a left fist in the air, cheering the revolution, socialism, and Peru: that's how the mule drivers and farmers on the outskirts of Jauja saw them, and also the rare travelers trekking down toward the city through waterfalls and bushy ferns, along that rocky, humid gorge that runs from Quero to the provincial capital. They tried to sing “The International” for quite a while, but because Mayta couldn't carry a tune, they never got it right. They ended up singing the National Anthem and the anthem of the Colegio Nacional de San José de Jauja. Then they reached the Molinos bridge. The truck didn't stop until Mayta forced it to by banging on the roof.

“What's the problem?” asked Vallejos, sticking his head out the half-open door.

“Weren't we going to blow up this bridge?”

The lieutenant made a face. “How? With our hands? The dynamite's at Ubilluz's place.”

Mayta remembered that in every one of their discussions Vallejos had insisted on blowing up the bridge. With it destroyed, the police would have to go up to Quero on foot or on horseback, which would be one more advantage.

“Don't worry.” Vallejos quieted him down. “We've done enough. Keep on singing, it makes the trip go faster.”

The pickup started to move again, and the seven joeboys began singing and joking once more. But Mayta didn't sing along. He stood with his back against the cab, and as he watched the landscape with its huge trees go by, he listened to the sound of the waterfalls, the trill of the finches, and felt the clear air filling his lungs with oxygen. Lulled by the happiness of the adolescents, he let his imagination run wild. How would Peru be in a few years? A busy hive, whose atmosphere would reflect, on a national scale, the atmosphere of this truck, stirred by the idealism of these boys.