The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (36 page)

On Tuesday, at 8 p.m., when I drive over to pick him up at the ice-cream parlor, Mayta is waiting for me, carrying an airline bag, which probably contains the clothing he wears at work. He's just washed his face and combed that wild hair of his; a few drops of water run down his neck. He's wearing a blue striped shirt, a faded, much darned checked jacket, wrinkled khaki trousers, and heavy shoes, the kind used for hiking. Is he hungry? Shall we go to a restaurant? He says he never eats at night and that it would be better if we were just to look for a quiet place. A few minutes later, we're in my study, face to face, drinking soda. He doesn't want beer or anything alcoholic. He tells me he gave up smoking and drinking years ago.

The beginning of the chat is rather sad. I ask him about the Salesian School. He did study there, correct? Yes. He hasn't seen any of his schoolmates for ages, and knows only the slightest bit about a few of them, professional men, businessmen, or politicians—the ones whose names appear in the papers. And nothing about the priests, although, he tells me, just a few days ago he ran into Father Luis on the street. The one who taught the youngest students. A little old man, almost blind, bent over, dragging his feet, propelling himself along with a broomstick. He told Mayta that he was in the habit of taking his little strolls on Avenida Brazil, and that he had recognized him, but Mayta smiles; of course he had no idea to whom he was speaking. He must be a hundred years old.

When I show him the material I've gathered about him and the Jauja adventure—articles clipped out of newspapers, photocopies of reports, photographs, maps with routes traced on them, cards on the participants and on witnesses, notebooks with data and interviews—I see him sniff, look through it, and handle it, an expression of stupor and embarrassment on his face. Several times, he gets up to go to the bathroom. He has a problem with his kidneys, he explains, and constantly feels like urinating, although most of the time it's a false alarm and there are only a few drops.

“On the bus, at home, at the ice-cream parlor, it's a real pain. It's a two-hour commute, I told you already. I just can't make it all the way, no matter how much I pee before I get on. Sometimes there's nothing I can do except wet my pants like a baby.”

“Were the years in Lurigancho tough?” I stupidly ask.

Disconcerted, he stares at me. There is total silence outside on the Malecón de Barranco. You can't even hear the surf.

“Well, you don't live like a prince,” he answers after a bit, shamefaced. “It's hard, especially at the beginning. But you can get used to anything, don't you think?”

Finally, something that jibes with the Mayta of the witness accounts: that modesty, that reticence when it comes to speaking about his personal problems or revealing his inner feelings. What he never did get used to was the National Guard, he soon admits. He hadn't known what hate was until he discovered the feeling they inspired in the prisoners. Hatred mixed with absolute and total terror, of course. Because when they come through the wire fences to stop a riot or break up a strike, they always do it by shooting and beating, no matter who gets it, the righteous and the sinners.

“It was at the end of last year, wasn't it?” I say. “When there was that massacre.”

“December 31,” he says, nodding. “A hundred or so came in to celebrate New Year's Eve. They wanted to have some fun, to bring in the New Year with a bang, as they said. They were all stinking drunk.”

It was around 10 p.m. They emptied their rifles from the doors and windows of the cell blocks. They stole all the money, liquor, marijuana, and coke they could find in the prison, and until dawn they went on having fun, shooting, beating the prisoners with their rifle butts, making them hop around like frogs, making them run the gauntlet, or just kicking in their teeth.

“The official figures list thirty-five dead,” he says. “Actually, they killed at least twice that many, even more. The newspapers said later that they'd thwarted an escape attempt.”

He makes a gesture of fatigue and his voice becomes a murmur. The convicts piled up on top of each other, like a rugby scrum, mountains of bodies, for self-protection. But that isn't his worst prison memory. The worst was probably the first months, when he was brought from Lurigancho to the Palacio de Justicia for prosecution, in one of those crowded paddy wagons with metal walls. The prisoners had to ride hunched down, with their heads touching the floor. If they raised their heads even slightly to try to sneak a look out the window, they were savagely beaten. The same thing on the return trip: to get back on the wagon from the lockup, they had to run the gauntlet, a double line of National Guards. They had to decide whether to protect their heads or their testicles, because all along the route they were hit with billy clubs, kicked, and spit on. He remains pensive—he's just returned from the bathroom—and he adds, without looking at me: “When I read that one of them's been killed, I feel really happy.”

He says it with a quick and profound resentment that disappears a second later when I ask him about the other Mayta, that curly-headed, skinny guy who shook in that odd way.

“He's just a sneak thief whose brain has melted away from cocaine,” he says. “He won't last long.”

His voice and his expression sweeten when he talks about the food kiosk he ran with Arispe in building 4. “We created a genuine revolution,” he assures me with pride. “We won the respect of the whole place. We boiled the water for making fruit juice, for coffee, for everything. We washed the knives, forks, and spoons, the glasses, and the plates before and after they were used. Hygiene, above all. A revolution, you bet. We organized a system of rebate coupons. You might not believe me, but they only tried to rob us once. I took a gash right here on my leg, but they didn't get a thing. We even set up a kind of bank, because a lot of cons gave us their money for safekeeping.”

It's clear that for some reason he's really reluctant to speak of the thing that interests me the most: Jauja. Every time I try to bring it up, he starts to talk about it, and then, very quickly, inevitably, he switches to some current topic. For example, his family. He tells me he got married in the time he was free between his last two terms in Lurigancho, but that he actually met his wife in jail, the time before. She would come to visit her brother, and he introduced her to Mayta. They wrote each other, and when he was released, they got married. They have four children, three boys and a girl. It was really hard on his wife when he was imprisoned again. During the first years, she had to practically kill herself to feed the kids, until finally he could help her, thanks to the kiosk. During those first years, his wife knitted, and peddled her work from door to door. He also tried to sell her knitting—there was some demand for sweaters—in Lurigancho.

As I listen, I study him. My first impression—that he is well-conserved, healthy, and strong—is false. His health can't be good. Not only because of that problem with his kidneys that makes him go to the bathroom every other minute. He perspires a great deal; at times he chokes up, as if he were overcome by waves of vertigo. He dries his forehead with his handkerchief and sometimes, in the middle of a spasm, he can't speak. Does he feel ill? Should we stop the interview? No, he's fine, let's keep going.

“It seems to me that you don't want to talk about Vallejos and Jauja,” I say, point-blank. “Does it bother you because it was such a failure? Because of how it affected the rest of your life?”

He shakes his head.

“It bothers me because I realize that you know more about it than I do.” He smiles. “Yes, no joke. I've forgotten lots of things, and I'm mixed up about lots of others. I'd really like to help you out and tell you about it. But the problem is that I don't know all that happened or even how it happened. It's a long time ago, don't forget.”

Is he just talking, is it a pose? No. His memories are hesitant, sometimes erroneous. I have to correct him every few minutes. I'm shocked, because this whole year I've been obsessed with the subject, and I naïvely supposed the major actor in it would be too, and that his memory would still go on scratching away at what happened in those few hours a quarter century ago. Why should it be that way? All that, for Mayta, was one episode in a life in which, before and after, there were many other episodes, as important, or even more so. It's only normal that these other events would replace or blur Jauja.

“There is one thing, above all others, that I just can't understand,” I say to him. “Was there a betrayal? Why did the people who were involved just disappear? Did Professor Ubilluz countermand the orders? Why did he do it? Fear? Because he didn't believe in the project? Or was it Vallejos, as Ubilluz declares, who moved the date of the uprising forward?”

Mayta reflects for a few seconds in silence. He shrugs his shoulders. “That part never was clear and never will be,” he says in a low voice. “That day, it looked like betrayal to me. Later it got even more complicated. Because I hadn't known beforehand the date they'd set for the revolt. Only Vallejos and Ubilluz knew it, for security reasons. Ubilluz has always said that the date they'd agreed on was four days later, and that Vallejos moved it forward when he found out he was going to be transferred, because of an incident he'd been involved in with the APRA people two days earlier.”

That there was such an incident is true; it's documented in a small Jauja newspaper. There was an APRA demonstration in the Plaza de Armas in honor of Haya de la Torre, who made a speech in the atrium of the cathedral. Vallejos, in civilian clothes, Shorty Ubilluz, and a small group of friends stationed themselves at one corner of the plaza, and when the entourage passed by, they pelted them with rotten eggs. The APRISTA toughs scattered them. Vallejos, Ubilluz, and the others tried to fight back, and then they took refuge in Ezequiel's barbershop. That's all we know for sure. Ubilluz and other people in Jauja assert that Vallejos was recognized by the APRA people and that they noisily protested the participation of the head of the prison, an officer on active duty, in action directed against an authorized political meeting. Vallejos was told that because he took part in the demonstration he was going to be transferred. They say he received an urgent message from his immediate superior in Huancayo. That's what probably pushed him into moving the rebellion up four days, without telling the others about it. Ubilluz swears he only found out what happened when the lieutenant was dead and the other rebels were in jail.

“At first, I didn't believe it. I thought they'd chickened out,” says Mayta. “Later on, I just didn't know. Because, months or years later, some of the people originally involved ended up in the Sexto, the Frontón. They were jailed for other reasons—union or political stuff. They all swore that they were surprised when the uprising occurred, that Ubilluz had given them a different date, that there was no desertion, no change of heart. Frankly, I just don't know. Only Vallejos and Ubilluz knew the first date. Did Vallejos change it? He didn't tell me. But it isn't impossible. He was a really impulsive guy, really capable of doing something like that, even if he ran the risk of being all alone. What we used to call a willful individualist in those days.”

Is he criticizing Vallejos? No, it's a distanced, neutral observation. He tells me that on the first night, when Vallejos's family came to claim his body, his father wouldn't speak to him. He came in when they were interrogating Mayta, and Mayta stretched his hand out to him. But the father wouldn't take it and even looked at him angrily, with tears in his eyes, as if Mayta were responsible for everything.

“I just don't know, it might have been like that,” he repeats. “Or there might have been a misunderstanding. That is, Vallejos was sure of support that wasn't actually promised. At the meetings they brought me to in Ricrán between Ubilluz and the miners, they talked about revolution, and everyone seemed in agreement. But did they really offer to take a rifle and come out to the mountains on the first day? I didn't hear them say they would. Vallejos just assumed everything, he had no doubts. It may be they just made some vague promises, moral support, they would help from a distance, with their group continuing their normal lives. Or it may be that they did commit themselves and that out of fear, or because the plan didn't convince them, they just backed out. I couldn't say for sure. I just don't know.”

He drums his fingers on the arm of the chair. There is a long silence.

“Were you ever sorry you got mixed up in it?” I ask him. “I imagine that in jail you must have thought quite a lot over the years about what happened.”

“Repenting is something Catholics do. I stopped being a Catholic many years ago. Revolutionaries don't repent. They go through self-criticism, but that's different. I went through mine, and that's that.” He seems angry. But a few seconds later he smiles. “You don't know how strange it is for me to talk politics, to remember political events. It's like a ghost that comes back from the pit of time to show me the dead and make me see forgotten things.”

Did he stop taking an interest in politics only in these last ten years? Was it during the time before in jail? Or when he was imprisoned because of Jauja? He remains silent, deep in thought, trying to clarify his memories. Could he have forgotten that, too?

“I hadn't thought about it until now,” he says softly, mopping his forehead. “It wasn't a decision I made consciously. It just happened, the force of events. Remember that when I went to Jauja for the uprising I had broken with my comrades, with my party, and with my past. I was alone, politically speaking. And my new comrades were only that for a few hours. Vallejos died, Condori died, Zenón Gonzales went back to his community, the joeboys went back to school. See what I mean? It isn't that I gave up politics. You might say that politics gave me up.”