“You’re better than many of the ones I had in military school.” Vallejos encouraged him with a laugh. “You know what happens to me? I’m really interested in Marxism, but all those abstractions get me. I’m much more open to practical, concrete things. By the way, should I tell you my plan for revolution before we have the beer, or later?”
“I’ll only listen to your inspired plan if you pass the test,” Mayta said, following his lead. “So what the fuck is the class struggle?”
“The big fish eats the little fish,” said Vallejos, cackling. “What else could it be, brother? To know that a landowner with a thousand acres and his Indians hate each other, you don’t have to do much studying. Well, did I get a hundred? Now, my plan is gonna knock your socks off, Mayta. Even more when you see the surprise. Will you come to lunch? I want you to meet my sister.”
“Mother? Sister? Miss?”
“Juanita,” she decides. “We’re better off calling each other by name. After all, we’re about the same age, right? And this is María.”
The two women wear leather sandals, and from the bench I’m sitting on, I can see their toes: Juanita’s are still, and María’s wiggle around nervously. Juanita is dark, energetic, with thick arms and legs, and dark down on her upper lip. María is small and light-skinned, with clear eyes and an absent expression.
“A Pasteurina or a glass of water?” Juanita asks me. “Better for us if you have a soda, because around here water is gold. Just to get it, you have to go all the way to Avenida de los Chasquis.”
The place reminds me of a cabin out in the San Cristóbal hills where two Frenchwomen, sisters in the congregation of Father de Foucauld, lived. That was long ago. Here the walls are also whitewashed and bare, the floor covered with straw mats; the blankets make you think this could be the dwelling of a desert nomad.
“All we need is sun,” says María. “Father Charles de Foucauld. I read his book In the Heart of the Masses. It was famous at one time.”
“I read it, too,” says Juanita. “I don’t remember much. I never did have a good memory, even when I was young.”
“What a shame.” Nowhere do I see a crucifix, an image of the Virgin, a religious picture, a missal. Nothing that might allude to the fact that the inhabitants are nuns. “About that lack of memory. Because I …”
“Well, that’s something else. Of course I remember him.” Juanita chides me with a look, as she hands me the Pasteurina. Then her tone changes: “I haven’t forgotten my brother, of course.”
“What about Mayta?” I ask her, swigging that tepid, overly sweet stuff straight from the bottle.
“I remember him, too.” Juanita nods. “I saw him only once. At my parents’ house. I don’t remember much, because that was the next-to-the-last time I talked to my brother. The last time was two weeks later. All he did was talk about his friend Mayta. He really liked him and admired him. His influence was … Perhaps I’d better say nothing.”
“Ah, so that’s what it’s about.” María uses a piece of cardboard to shoo the flies away from her face. Neither wears a habit, only flannel skirts and gray blouses. But in the way they wear their clothes, in the way their hair is held back in a net, in the way they talk and move, you can see they are nuns. “At least it’s about them and not about us. We were nervous, now I can say it, because publicity is bad for the things we do.”
“And just what is it we do?” mocked Mayta, with a sarcastic laugh. “We’ve taken over the town, the police station, the jail, we’ve got all the weapons in Jauja. What now? Head for the hills like mountain goats?”
“Not like mountain goats,” replied the second lieutenant, without getting angry. “We can go on horseback, burro, mule, by truck, or on foot. On foot is best, because there’s no better way to get around in the mountains. It’s easy to see you don’t know much about the mountains, buddy.”
“It’s true, I really don’t know much about them,” admitted Mayta. “I’m really ashamed.”
“Well, we can help you there. Come with me tomorrow to Jauja.” Vallejos nudged him with his elbow. “You’ll have a free place to stay, and free food. Just the weekend, man. I’ll show you the country, we can go to the Indian towns, you’ll see the real Peru. But listen, now: don’t open the surprise. You promised. Or I’ll take it back.”
They were sitting on the sand at Agua Dulce, gazing over the deserted beach. All around them were fluttering sea gulls, and a salty, moist breeze wet their faces. What could this surprise be? The package was wrapped so carefully, as if it contained something precious. And it was really heavy.
“Of course I’d like to go to Jauja,” said Mayta. “But…”
“But you can’t pay the bus fare,” Vallejos cut in. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you a ticket.”
“We’ll see. Let’s get back to business,” Mayta insisted. “Serious business. Did you read the little book I gave you?”
“I liked it and I understood everything, except for a couple of Russian names. Know why I liked it, Mayta? Because it is more practical than theoretical. What Is to Be Done? What Is to Be Done? Lenin knew what had to be done, buddy. He was a man of action, like me. So my plan looked like kid stuff to you?”
“Well, at least you read Lenin, and at least you like him. You’re making progress.” Mayta avoided answering directly. “Want me to tell you something? You were right, your sister really impressed me. She didn’t seem like a nun. She made me remember old times. When I was a kid, I was as devout as she is, did you know that?”
“He looked older than he was,” Juanita says. “He was in his forties, wasn’t he? And since my brother looked younger than he was, they looked like father and son. It was during one of my rare visits to my family. At that time, the two of us were cloistered. Not like these snots who live half the time in the convent and half the time out on the street.”
María protests. She waves her piece of cardboard in front of her face very fast, driving the flies crazy. They’re not only all around us, buzzing our heads: they dot the walls, like nailheads. I already know what’s in this package, Mayta thought. I know what the surprise is. He felt a wave of heat in his chest and thought: He’s crazy. How old can Juanita be? Undecipherable: petite, ramrod straight; her gestures and movements released waves of energy, and her slightly bucked teeth were always biting her lower lip. Could she have been a novice in Spain and lived there for a long time? Because her accent was remotely Spanish, the accent of a Spanish woman whose j’s and r’s had lost their edges, the z’s and c’s their roundness, but whose spoken Spanish hadn’t yet taken on the Lima drawl. What are you doing here, Mayta? he thought, feeling uncomfortable. What are you doing here with a nun? He unobtrusively stretched out his hand and felt for the surprise. Yes, indeed — a gun.
“I thought the two of you were in the same order,” I say to them.
“Then you are sadly mistaken,” María replies. She smiles often, but Juanita is serious even when she makes jokes. Outside, there is a furious barking, as if a pack of dogs were fighting. “I was with the proletarian nuns, she with the aristocratic nuns. Now both of us are lumpen.”
We begin talking about Mayta and Vallejos, but without knowing it, we digress into a discussion of local crime. At the beginning, the revolutionaries were quite strong here: they solicited money in broad daylight, even held meetings. They would kill people from time to time, accusing them of being traitors. Then the freedom squads appeared, cutting off heads, mutilating, and burning real or supposed accomplices of the revolutionaries with acid. Violence has increased. Juanita believes, nevertheless, that there are still more ordinary crimes than political crimes, and that common murderers disguise their crimes as political assassinations.