“Unless this lieutenant of yours who wants to start a revolution is an outcome of that visit,” said Medardo. “Instead of raiding us, infiltrating us.”
“After all these months?” Mayta demurred, afraid to reopen a discussion that would keep him from his cigarette. “We’ll know soon enough. Ten minutes have gone by. Shall we go?”
“We’ll have to find out why Pallardi and Carlos didn’t come,” said Jacinto.
“Carlos was the only one of the seven who led a normal life,” Moisés says. “A contractor, he owned a brickworks. He paid the garage rent, the printer, and he paid for the handbills. We all chipped in, but our contributions were nothing. His wife wished we’d drop dead.”
“And Mayta? At France-Presse he couldn’t have earned much.”
“And he spent half his salary or more on the party,” Moisés adds. “His wife hated us, too, of course.”
“Mayta had a wife?”
“Mayta was married as legally as can be.” Moisés laughs. “But not for long. To a woman named Adelaida — she worked in a bank. A real cutie. Something we never understood. You didn’t know Mayta was married?”
I knew nothing about it. They left together and locked the garage door. At the corner store they stopped off so Mayta could buy a pack of Incas. He offered them to Jacinto and Medardo and lit up his own so hastily he actually burned his fingers. Heading toward Avenida Alfonso Ugarte, he took several deep drags, half closing his eyes, enjoying to the fullest the pleasure of inhaling and exhaling those diminutive clouds of smoke that faded into the night.
“I know why I can’t stop thinking about the lieutenant’s face,” he thought aloud.
“That soldier boy’s made us lose a lot of time,” complained Medardo. “Three hours, for a second lieutenant!”
Mayta went on as if he hadn’t heard a word: “It’s either because he’s ignorant or because he’s inexperienced, or who knows why — he was talking about the revolution the way we never talked.”
“Don’t use dem big words wit’ me, sir, ah’s jus a worker, not uh intelleftual,” mocked Jacinto.
It was a joke he made so often that Mayta had begun to wonder if in fact Comrade Jacinto didn’t envy the intelleftuals he said he respected so little. At that moment, the three of them had to hug the wall to keep from being run over by a crowded bus that came sliding over the sidewalk.
“He talked with humor, joyfully,” added Mayta. “As if he were talking about something healthy and beautiful. We’ve lost that kind of enthusiasm.”
“You mean we’ve gotten old,” joked Jacinto. “Maybe you have, but I’m still growing.”
But Mayta wasn’t in the mood for jokes and went on speaking anxiously, hastily: “We’re too wound up in theory, too serious, too politicizing. I don’t know… Listening to that kid spout off about the socialist revolution made me envy him. Being involved in the struggle for so long hardens you, sure, but it’s bad to lose your illusions. It’s bad that the methods we use make us forget our goals, comrades.”
Did they understand what he wanted to tell them? He felt he was getting upset and changed the subject. When he left them on Alfonso Ugarte to go to his room on Zepita Street, the idea kept buzzing in his head. In front of the Loyaza Hospital, as he waited for a break in the river of cars, trucks, and buses that choked the four lanes, he suddenly understood an association that had been flitting, ghostlike, through his mind since the previous night. That’s what it was: the university. That disillusioning year, those courses on history, literature, and philosophy he’d signed up for at San Marcos University. He had quickly concluded that the professors had lost their love of teaching somewhere along the line, if in fact they had ever had any love for the great works and great ideas they were supposed to teach. To judge by what they were teaching and the kind of papers they expected from their students, it would seem that some kind of inversion had taken place in their dull, mediocre wits. The Spanish literature professor seemed convinced that it was more important to read what Leo Spitzer had written about García Lorca than to read Lorca himself, or to read Amado Alonso’s book on Neruda’s poetry than to read Neruda. And the history professor deemed the sources of Peruvian history more important than Peruvian history. For the philosophy professor, form was more important than ideas and their impact on action … Culture for them had dried up, had become a vain science, sterile erudition separated from life. He had told himself then that this was what was to be expected from bourgeois culture, from bourgeois idealism — leaving life behind. He had withdrawn from the university in disgust: real culture was just the opposite of what they were teaching.
But had he, Jacinto, Medardo, the comrades of the RWP(T), and those in the other RWP become just as academic? Had they forgotten the true hierarchy of things — that there was a difference between essentials and extraneous matters? Had their revolutionary work become as esoteric and pedantic as literature, history, and philosophy had for the professors at San Marcos? Listening to Vallejos was like being awakened from a dream: “Don’t forget the essentials, Mayta. Don’t get tangled up in superfluous things, comrade.” He knew nothing, had read nothing, was a virgin — all of that — but in one sense he had an advantage over all of them: the revolution for him was action, something tangible, heaven on earth, the reign of justice, equality, fraternity. He could guess what images the revolution took on in Vallejos’s mind: peasants breaking the chains the bosses had shackled them with, workers who went from being servants to being masters of machines and shops, a society in which surplus value no longer fattens up a minority but reverts back to the workers … and he felt a shiver run down his spine.
Wasn’t he at the corner of Cañete and Zepita? He woke from his reverie and rubbed his arms. Damn! How absent-minded can you get? The corner of Canete and Zepita was one he always avoided, because of the bad taste it left in his mouth whenever he went near it. Right there, in front of the newsstand, the gray-green car had stopped with a screech that still whined in his ears. Before he could figure out what was happening, four thugs got out and he saw four pistols pointed at him. He was frisked, pushed around, and shoved into the car. He had been in police stations and various jails before, but that was the worst and the longest time, the first in which he had been worked over. He thought he would go mad and considered suicide. Ever since, he had avoided that corner, out of a kind of superstition he would have been ashamed to admit. He turned onto Zepita and slowly walked the two blocks to his house. His weariness as usual concentrated in his feet. Damned flat feet. I’m a fakir, he thought. Walking on thousands of tiny needles … He thought: The revolution is a party for that brand-new lieutenant.
He had the second attic room in a house on a dead-end street lined with two-story buildings, an area about nine by fifteen feet, overflowing with books, magazines, and newspapers scattered all over the floor. There was a bed without a headboard, with a mattress and one blanket. A few shirts and some trousers hung from nails in the wall, and behind the door there was a mirror and a little shelf with his shaving things. A dangling bulb shone a dirty light on the room, which was made even smaller by its incredible disorder. As soon as he entered, he went down on all fours to drag out from under the bed — the dust made him sneeze — the chipped basin which was probably the object he treasured most in the place.
The rooms had no bath. In the patio, there were two common lavatories and a faucet, where all the neighbors got water for washing and cooking. During the day there were always lines, but not at night, so Mayta went down, filled his basin, and returned to his room — carefully, so he wouldn’t spill a drop — all in a few minutes. He undressed, lay down on his bed, and sank his feet in the basin. Ah, how restful. He had often fallen asleep giving himself a footbath, and would awaken sneezing and frozen to death. But he didn’t fall asleep this time. While the fresh, soothing sensation spread from his feet to his ankles and legs and the fatigue diminished, he thought that even if it had no concrete effect, it was a good thing that someone reminded him: what happened to those literati, historians, and philosophers at San Marcos should not happen to a revolutionary. A revolutionary should not forget that he lives, fights, and dies to make revolution and not to …