The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (35 page)

“Know which one he's talking about, Carrillo?” the warden asks one of his assistants.

“Sure, sure,” says a fat man, his gray hair in a crew cut and his belly slopping over his belt. “The other Mayta. Wasn't that one mixed up in politics?”

“Yes,” I say. “That's the one I'm looking for.”

“You just missed him, as you might say,” he quickly explains. “He got out last month.”

I think I've lost him and that I'll never find him and that maybe it's better that way. It could be that, instead of helping me, a meeting with the flesh-and-blood Mayta would undo everything I've accomplished so far. Don't you know where he's gone? No one has an address where he might be found? They don't, and have no idea where he might be. I tell the warden not to bother coming with me, and as we go downstairs, I ask him if he remembers Mayta. Of course he does; he's been here as long as the oldest convict. He came in as a simple office boy, and now he's vice warden of the whole penitentiary. He's seen God only knows what things!

“A very correct, easygoing prisoner, never got into any trouble,” he says. “Ran a food kiosk in building 4. Hardworking guy. He managed to support his family while serving his sentence. He was here at least ten years the last time.”

“His family?”

“Wife and four kids,” he adds. “She came to see him once a week. I remember Mayta very well. Walked as if he were walking on eggs, right?”

We're crossing the patio, between the wire fences, heading toward the guardhouse, when the vice warden stops. “Hold it. Arispe may have his address. He inherited the food kiosk. I think they're still partners, even now. I'll have him brought down, maybe you'll be lucky.”

Carrillo and I remain in the patio, standing in front of the wire fences. To kill time, I ask him about Lurigancho and he, like the warden, says that there are always problems here. “Because here we've got, and I really mean it, the bad ones, people who seem to have been born for the express purpose of doing indescribable things to their fellow man.” Off in the distance, breaking the symmetry of the buildings, stands the one reserved for fags. Do they still lock them up there? Yes. Not that it's of any real use; despite the walls and the bars, the other prisoners get in and the fags get out. Business as usual. Anyway, since they've got their own building, there are fewer problems. Before, when they were mixed in with the others, the fights and murders they'd cause were much worse.

I remember, from my first visit, a short talk I had with one of the prison doctors about the rapes of incoming prisoners. “The most common problem is infections of the rectum, complicated by gangrene or cancer.” I ask Carrillo if there are still as many rapes. He laughs. “It's inevitable, with people who have nothing else, don't you think? They have to let go somehow.” Finally, the prisoner the warden had called down appears. I explain that I'm looking for Mayta, does he know where I might find him?

He's a respectable-looking guy, dressed relatively well. He listens without asking any questions. But I see that he has doubts, and I'm sure he's not going to tell me anything. I ask him to give Mayta my telephone number the next time he sees him.

Suddenly he decides. “He works in an ice-cream parlor,” he says. “In Miraflores.”

It's a small ice-cream parlor which has been there for many years. It's on Bolognesi Street, a street I know very well because when I was a kid I knew a beautiful girl who lived there. She had the improbable name of Flora Flores. I'm sure the ice-cream parlor was there then and that I went in with the beautiful Flora Flores to have a sundae. It's an unusual place for a street where there are no stores, only the typical Miraflores houses: two stories, front lawn, the inevitable geraniums, bougainvillea, and poincianas with big red flowers. I have an attack of nerves as I turn off the Malecón onto Bolognesi. Yes, it's exactly where I remember it, a few steps away from that gray house with balconies, where Flora's sweet face and incandescent eyes would appear. I park a short distance from the ice-cream parlor, but I can barely get the key out of the ignition, because I've suddenly become jittery.

“Alejandro Mayta,” I say, stretching out my hand. “Right?”

He looks at me for a few seconds and smiles, opening a mouth not overpopulated with teeth. He blinks, trying to remember me. Finally, he gives up.

“I'm sorry, but I can't place you,” he says. “I thought you might be Santos, but you aren't Santos, right?”

“I've been looking for you for a long time,” I say, leaning on the counter. “You're going to be surprised,” I warn him. “Just now, I've come from Lurigancho. The guy who told me how to find you was your partner in building 4—Arispe.”

I study him carefully, to see how he reacts. He seems neither surprised nor upset. He looks at me with curiosity, the hint of a smile still on his dark face. He's wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I see hands that are rough, the rough hands of a porter or a day laborer. What I notice most is his absurd haircut. Someone has really chopped him up: his head looks like a mop, laughable. He makes me remember my first year in Paris, when I was really poor, and a friend of mine and I would get our hair cut at a school for barbers, near the Bastille. The students, just kids, would cut our hair for free, but they would leave us looking like my invented classmate. He looks at me, squinting up his dark, tired eyes—crow's-feet at each end—with distrust growing in them.

“I've been investigating you for a year now, talking with the people who knew you,” I say. “Imagining you, even dreaming about you. Because I've written a novel that in a remote way deals with the Jauja business.”

He looks at me without saying a word, quite surprised now, not understanding, not sure he's heard correctly, but very jumpy.

“But …” he stammers. “Why would you even bother, how can it be …”

“I don't really know why, but that's what I've been doing all this year,” I say to him quickly, afraid of his fear, afraid he'll refuse to talk to me now or ever again. I try to explain: In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events. This investigation, these interviews, I didn't do it all so I could relate what really happened in Jauja, but so I could lie and know what I'm lying about.

I realize that, instead of calming him down, I'm confusing and alarming him. He blinks and stands there with his mouth open, mute.

“Now I know who you are. You're the writer.” Now he's out of the difficulty. “Sure, I recognized you. I even read one of your novels, at least I think so, years back.”

Just then, three sweaty boys come in from some game, judging by the equipment they're carrying. They order ice cream and sodas. While Mayta takes care of them, I observe how he handles himself in the ice-cream parlor. He opens the freezer, fills the ice-cream dishes, opens the bottles, reaches for the glasses with an ease and familiarity that reflect a lot of practice. I try to imagine him in building 4 in Lurigancho, serving fruit juice, packages of cookies, cups of coffee, selling cigarettes to the other convicts, every morning, every afternoon, over the course of ten years. Physically, he doesn't seem worn down; he's a tough-looking guy, and carries his sixty-plus years with dignity. After settling the bill of the three athletes, he comes back to me, with a forced smile on his face.

“Damn,” he says. “That's the last thing I'd ever imagine. A novel?”

And he moves his head incredulously from right to left and left to right.

“Naturally, your real name never appears even once,” I assure him. “Of course I've changed dates, places, characters, I've created complications, added and taken away thousands of things. Besides, I've invented an apocalyptic Peru, devastated by war, terrorism, and foreign intervention. Of course, no one will recognize anything, and everyone will think it's pure fantasy. I've pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends.

“Of course,” he says, as if he were spelling it out, scrutinizing me with doubt, deciphering me bit by bit.

“I'd like to talk with you,” I add. “Ask you a few questions, clear up a couple of points. Only what you want to tell me or feel you can tell me, naturally. I've got a lot of puzzles bouncing around in my head. Besides, this conversation is my final chapter. You can't refuse me now, it would be like taking a cake out of the oven too soon—the novel would fall apart.”

I laugh, and so does he, and we hear the three boys laughing. But they're laughing at a joke one of them has just told. And then a woman comes in and asks for a quart, half pistachio and half chocolate. After handing her the ice cream, Mayta comes back to me.

“Two or three years ago, some of the guys from
Revolutionary Vanguard
came to see me in Lurigancho,” he says. “They wanted to know all about Jauja, a written account. But I wouldn't do it.”

“I don't want anything like that,” I say. “My interest isn't political but literary, that is …”

“Yes, I see,” he interrupts me, raising a hand. “Okay, I'll give you one evening. No more, because I don't have much time, and, to tell you the truth, I don't like talking about that stuff. How about next Tuesday? It's better for me, because on Wednesday I don't start here until eleven, so I can stay up late the night before. All the other days, I have to leave home at six, because I have to take three buses to get here.”

We agree that I'll pick him up when he finishes work, after eight. Just as I'm leaving, he calls me back. “Have an ice-cream cone, on the house. So you see how good our ice cream is. Maybe you'll become a regular customer.”

Before I go back to Barranco, I take a little walk around the neighborhood, mentally trying to put things in their proper order. I stop for a while under the balconies of the house where that superlative beauty Flora Flores lived. She had long, chestnut-colored hair, slender legs, and violet eyes. Whenever she came to the rocky beach at Miraflores, wearing her black bathing suit, the morning would fill with light, the sun would glow hotter, the waves roll more joyously. I remember that she married a pilot and only a few months later he crashed into a peak in the Cordillera, between Lima and Tingo María. Years later, someone told me that Flora had remarried and was living in Miami. I go up to Avenida Grau. Right on this corner, there was a gang of boys with whom we—the Diego Ferré and Colón boys, from the other end of Miraflores—would have hard-fought soccer matches at the Terrazas Club. I remember how anxiously I'd wait for those matches when I was a kid, and how terribly frustrating it was when I was only on the second team. When I get back to the car, half an hour later, I've partially recovered from my meeting with Mayta.

The incident that caused him to be sent back to Lurigancho, the reason he spent the past ten years there, is well documented in newspapers and judicial archives. It occurred in Magdalena Vieja, not far from the Anthropological Museum, at sunrise one January day in 1973. The president of the Pueblo Libre branch of the Banco de Crédito was watering his patio—he did it every morning before getting dressed—when the doorbell rang. He thought it was the milkman, coming by earlier than usual. At the door there were four men, their faces covered with ski masks and their pistols pointing straight at him. They went with him to his wife's room. They tied her up in her own bed. Then—they seemed to know the place well—they went into his only daughter's bedroom. (She was nineteen years old, studying to become a travel agent.) They waited until the girl got dressed and told the gentleman that, if he wanted to see her again, he should pack fifty million
soles
into an attaché case and bring it to Los Garifos Park, near the National Stadium. They disappeared with the girl in a taxi they'd stolen the night before.

Mr. Fuentes reported everything to the police and, following their instructions, carried an attaché case stuffed with paper to the Los Garifos Park. There were plainclothesmen stationed all around it. No one approached him, and Mr. Fuentes received no communication for three days. Just when he and his wife were getting desperate, there was a second telephone call: the kidnappers knew that he had called the police. They would, however, give him one last chance. He was to bring the money to a corner of Avenida Aviación. Mr. Fuentes explained that he couldn't get fifty million
soles
, that the bank would never give him that kind of money, but he would give them his life savings, some five million. The kidnappers insisted: fifty million or they'd kill her.

Mr. Fuentes helped himself to some money, signed notes, and succeeded in getting together nine million, which he brought that night to the place the kidnappers had indicated—this time, without telling the police. A car skidded to a halt, and the person on the passenger side grabbed the attaché case, without saying a word. The girl turned up some hours later at her parents' home. She had taken a taxi at Avenida Colonial, where her captors had left her. They'd held her for three days, blindfolded and partially chloroformed. She was so distraught that she had to be taken to the Hospital del Empleado. A few days later, she walked out of the room she was sharing with a woman just operated on for appendicitis, and, without saying a word, jumped out of a window.

The newspapers sensationalized the girl's suicide and fanned public opinion. A few days later, the police announced that they had captured the head of the group—Mayta—and that his accomplices would be captured momentarily. According to the police, Mayta admitted his guilt and gave all the details. His accomplices and the money vanished. At the trial, Mayta denied he had ever taken part in the kidnapping, denied he had even known about it, and insisted that he was tortured into making a false confession.

The trial lasted several months, and at the outset it got a lot of attention in the papers. But that quickly faded. Mayta was sentenced to fifteen years: the court found him guilty of kidnapping, criminal extortion, and complicity in a homicide. He swore he was innocent. That on the day of the kidnapping he was in Pacasmayo looking into a possible job, as he said again and again, but he could provide no witnesses, no proof. The testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Fuentes was especially damning. Both were sure that Mayta's voice and physical appearance were those of one of the men in ski masks. Mayta's lawyer, an obscure shyster whose performance during the entire trial was awkward and halting, appealed. The Supreme Court upheld the original sentence two years later. The fact that Mayta was set free after serving two-thirds of his time certainly corroborates what Mr. Carrillo told me at Lurigancho: that his behavior during those years was exemplary.