The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (33 page)

“Felicio was all swollen up,” the justice of the peace tells me. Because of the beating he'd been given for trying to be a revolutionary.

Out of all those people from Quero who'd been with us, there was left in the gazebo only one old couple now. Both remember Zenón Gonzales's entrance—tied to a horse, barefoot, and with his shirt ripped, as if he'd struggled with the guards. Behind him came the rest of the joeboys, also tied up and without shoelaces. One of them—no one knows which one—was crying. A dark-skinned kid, they say, one of the little ones. Was he crying because they'd beaten him? Because he was wounded or frightened? Who knows. Maybe because of the lieutenant's bad luck.

And so, climbing up, always up, two by two, they went on for a period that to Mayta seemed like hours, but which couldn't have been because it hadn't grown a bit darker. They constantly changed partners: Vallejos and the lawyer, Mayta and Perico Temoche, or Vallejos and the joeboy, and Mayta and the lawyer. Two ran and two covered. They were together enough of the time to buck each other up, catch their breath, and move on. They would see the guards' faces at every turn, and they fired shots that never seemed to hit their target. There weren't three or four, as Vallejos had imagined, but many more; otherwise, they would have had to be ubiquitous to appear in so many different spots. They would peer out from the high ground, sometimes on both sides, although the more dangerous side was the right, where the wall of stones was very close to the path they were running along.

They were following them along the line of the ridge, and even though Mayta from time to time thought they had left them behind, they always reappeared. He'd already changed clips a couple of times. He didn't feel ill; cold, yes, but his body was holding up well under the tremendous strain of running at this altitude. Why hasn't anyone been wounded? he thought. After all, the guards had taken lots of shots at them. It's that the guards are being cautious, they barely stick out their heads and take potshots, just to do their duty, without pausing to aim, afraid of being easy targets for the rebels. It seemed like a game, a noisy but inoffensive ritual. Would it last until dark? Could they slip away from the guards? It seemed impossible that night would ever come, that this clear sky would ever darken. He didn't feel discouraged. Without arrogance, without even feeling sorry for himself, he thought: Rightly or wrongly, Mayta, you're doing just what you always wanted to do.

“Get ready, don Eugenio. Let's run. They're covering us.”

“You go on without me, my legs have given out,” said the justice of the peace very slowly. “I'll stay behind. Take this, too.”

Instead of handing it to him, don Eugenio threw him the revolver, which Mayta had to bend over to pick up. The justice of the peace was sitting down, with his legs spread apart. He was perspiring copiously and his mouth was twisted into an anxious grimace, as if he'd been left without air to breathe. His posture and his expression were those of a man who's reached the limits of his resistance, who's been rendered indifferent by exhaustion. Mayta understood there was no point in arguing with him.

“Good luck, don Eugenio,” he said, starting to run. He quickly crossed the thirty or forty yards that separated him from Vallejos and Perico Temoche and didn't hear a single shot. When he reached them, they were on their knees, firing. He tried to explain what had happened to the justice of the peace, but he was gasping so furiously that he couldn't get the words out. He tried to fire from the ground, but couldn't. His weapon was jammed. He fired the revolver, the three final rounds, with the feeling that he was doing it for fun. The wall was very close and there was a line of rifles aimed at them: the enemy caps appeared and disappeared. He heard them shout threats that the wind brought to them quite clearly: “Give up, damn you.” “Give up, motherfuckers.” “Your accomplices have already surrendered.” “Start praying, assholes.” It occurred to him: They've got orders to take us alive. That's why no one's wounded. They were only firing to scare us. Could it be true that the first group had given up? He was calmer and tried to tell Vallejos about don Eugenio, but the lieutenant cut him off with an energetic gesture. “Run, I'll cover you.”

Mayta realized, from his voice and face, that this time he was really alarmed. “Quickly, this is a bad spot, they're cutting us off. Run, run.” And he gave him a pat on the back.

Perico Temoche began to run. Mayta got up and ran, too, hearing the shots whistle by him. But he didn't stop. Gasping, feeling ice piercing his muscles, his bones, his very blood vessels, he kept on running, and even though he tripped and fell twice and once lost the revolver he held in his left hand, he got right up both times and went on, making a superhuman effort. Until his legs gave out and he fell to his knees. He huddled on the ground.

“We've gotten ahead of them,” he heard Perico Temoche say. And an instant later: “Where's Vallejos? Do you see him?” There was a long pause, with gasps. “Mayta, Mayta, I think those motherfuckers have got him.”

Through the sweat that clouded his vision, he saw that down there where the lieutenant had remained to cover them—they'd run about two hundred yards—there were some greenish silhouettes moving about.

“Let's run, come on,” he said, panting, trying to stand up. But neither his arms nor his legs would move. Then he bellowed, “Run, Perico. I'll cover you. Run, run.”

“They brought Vallejos in at night, I saw him myself, didn't all of you?” says the justice of the peace. The two old folks with us in the gazebo confirm what he says by nodding. Don Eugenio points again to the little house with the shield on it, the government office. “I saw it from there. They put us prisoners in that room with the balcony. They brought him in on a horse, wrapped in a blanket they could barely pull off him because it stuck to the blood pouring out of all his wounds. He was very dead when they brought him into Quero.”

I listen to him ramble on about who killed Vallejos and how. It's a story I've heard many times from so many people, both in Jauja and in Lima, that I know no one can tell me what I don't already know. The former justice of the peace for Quero will not help me determine which among all the hypotheses is the correct one. That Vallejos died in the exchange of fire between the insurgents and the Civil Guards. That he was only wounded and Lieutenant Dongo finished him off, to avenge the humiliation Vallejos inflicted when he captured his police station and locked him up in his own jail. That he wasn't wounded when they captured him, and was executed on orders from above, out there in the Huayjaco flatlands, to set an example to officers with revolutionary fancies. The justice of the peace recites all these hypotheses and—with his usual prudence—intimates that he accepts the thesis that Vallejos was executed by Lieutenant Dongo.

Personal vengeance, the confrontation between the idealist and the conformist, the rebel and authority: these are images that correspond to the romantic appetites of our people. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they can't be true. The fact is that this part of the story—under what circumstances Vallejos died—will never be cleared up. We won't even know how many times he was shot: there was no autopsy, and the death certificate doesn't say a thing. The witnesses give the most disparate accounts: from a single shot in the back of the neck to a body turned into a sieve. All we know is that he was dead when they brought him into Quero tied to a horse, that from here they brought him to Jauja, and that his family took him back to Lima the next day. He was buried in the old cemetery in Surco. It's not used anymore; the old headstones are in ruins, and the paths are covered with weeds. Around the lieutenant's tomb, which gives only his name and the date of his death, there is a thick crop of wild grass.

“And did you see Mayta when they brought him in, don Eugenio?”

Mayta, who never took his eyes off the guards gathered around down below, where Vallejos was, began to catch his breath, to come back to life. He was still on the ground, pointing at nothing in particular with his jammed sub-machine gun. He tried not to think about Vallejos, about what could have happened to him, but about recovering his strength, getting to his feet, and catching up to Perico Temoche. Taking deep breaths, he sat upright, and then, almost bent double, he ran, without knowing if he was being shot at, without knowing where he was going, until he finally had to stop. He threw himself on the ground with his eyes closed, waiting for the bullets to pierce his body. You are going to die, Mayta. This is what it is to be dead.

“What should we do, what should we do?” stammered the joeboy at his side.

“I'll cover you,” he said, panting, trying to pick up the sub-machine gun and aim.

“We're surrounded,” whimpered the boy. “They're going to kill us.”

Through the sweat pouring down his forehead, he saw guards all around him, some prone, others hunched down. Their rifles were all pointed at them. Their lips were moving, and there were some unintelligible sounds. But he didn't have to understand to know that they were shouting: “Give up! Drop your weapons!” Surrender? They would kill him, in any case. Or they would torture him. He pulled the trigger with all his strength, but it was still jammed. He worked the action for a few seconds, listening all the time to Perico Temoche's whimpering.

“Put down your guns! Put your hands on your heads!” bellowed a voice that was very near. Or you're dead.

“Don't cry, don't give them the satisfaction,” said Mayta to the joeboy. “Go ahead, Perico, throw away your rifle.”

He threw the sub-machine far away, and, imitated by Perico Temoche, he stood up with his hands on his head.

“Corporal Lituma!” The voice seemed to come from a bullhorn. “Frisk them. One false move, shoot them.”

“Yes, lieutenant.”

Uniformed figures with rifles came running from all sides. He waited, motionless, for them to come at him, convinced they would beat him, his fatigue and the coldness increasing with every second. But he only felt shoves as they searched him from head to foot. They ripped the pouch off his belt, and calling him “rustler” and “thief,” they ordered him to take the shoelaces off his sneakers. They tied his hands behind his back with a rope, and did the same to Perico Temoche. Mayta heard Corporal Lituma sermonizing the boy, asking if he wasn't ashamed to be a “rustler” when he was just a snotnose. Rustlers? Did they think they stole cattle? He felt like laughing at the stupidity of his captors. Then he was struck in the back with a rifle butt and ordered to move. He walked, dragging his feet, which were swimming inside his loose sneakers. He was ceasing to be the machine he'd been. He began to think, doubt, remember, and ask himself questions again. He felt he was trembling. Wouldn't it be better to be dead than to have to drink the bitter brew he had ahead of him? No, Mayta, no.

“The delay in returning to Jauja wasn't caused by the two casualties,” says the justice of the peace. “It was the money. Where was it? They went crazy looking for it, and it just didn't turn up. Mayta, Zenón Gonzales, and the joeboys swore that it was on the mules, except for the
soles
they'd given to the widow, Teofrasia Soto de Almaraz, for her animals, and to Gertrudis Sapollacu for lunch. The guards who captured Condori's group swore they didn't find a penny on the mules, only Mausers, bullets, and some pots of food. They spent a lot of time interrogating us about the whereabouts of the money. That's why we got to Jauja at dawn.”

We, too, are going to arrive later than we had planned. The hours flew by in the Quero gazebo, and it's getting dark fast. The pickup's lights are on. All I can see are dark, fleeting tree trunks and the stones and shiny pebbles we bounce over. I vaguely think about the risk of being ambushed at one of the switchbacks, about being blown up by a mine, about getting to Jauja after curfew and being locked up.

“What could have happened to the money from the robbery?” don Eugenio wonders, unstoppable now in his evocation of those events. “Could the guards have split it up?”

Just one more enigma to add to the others. In this case, at least, I have some solid clues. An abundance of lies clouds the whole story. How much could the insurgents have taken away with them from Jauja? My guess is that the bank employees inflated the amount and that the revolutionaries never knew how much they had stolen, because they never had time to count it. They carried the money in bags, which they tied to the mules. Did anybody know how much was in each bag? No one, probably. Probably, too, their captors emptied some of the money into their own pockets, so the total sum returned to the banks was barely fifteen thousand
soles
, much less than the amount the rebels “expropriated,” and much, much less than the amount the banks said they had stolen.

“Perhaps that's the saddest part of the story,” I think aloud. “That what had begun as a revolution—as crazy as it was, it was a revolution, nevertheless—should end in a dispute as to how much they had stolen and who ended up with the loot.”

“That's life,” philosophizes don Eugenio.

He imagined what the Lima newspapers would say, tomorrow, the day after, or the day after that; what the comrades from the RWP and the RWP(T) would say, and what their enemies in the PC would say, when they read the exaggerated, fantastic, sensationalist, yellow-journal versions of what happened which would appear in the papers. He imagined the meeting the RWP(T) would devote to distilling revolutionary doctrine from the episode, and he could almost hear the inflections and tones of each of his old comrades, asserting that reality had confirmed the scientific, Marxist, Trotskyist analysis the party had made, and completely justified its distrust and its refusal to participate in a petit-bourgeois adventure destined to fail.

Would anyone suggest that their distrust and refusal had contributed to the failure? The idea would never even occur to them. Would the rebellion have turned out differently if all the cadres of the RWP(T) had participated in it, and resolutely? He thought so. That would have brought the miners in, as well as Professor Ubilluz, and the Ricrán people. Things would have been planned and executed better, and right now they'd be on their way to Aína safe and sound. Were you being honest, Mayta? Did you try to think lucidly? No. It happened too fast, everything was too compressed. In tranquillity, when all of it was over, it would be necessary to analyze what had taken place from the beginning, to determine objectively if the rebellion would have had better luck if it had been conceived differently, with the participation of those who did take part as well as the RWP(T), or if a different plan would merely have delayed the defeat and made it more bloody.