“A few days ago, a guy in the neighborhood killed his wife because she was jealous of him,” María tells. “And his brothers-in-law saw him trying to cover up the crime by hanging one of those famous ‘Squealer Bitch’ signs on her.”
“Let’s go back to what brought me here,” I suggest. “The revolution that began to take shape during those years. The one Mayta and your brother were involved in. It was the first of many. It charted the process that has ended in what we are all living through now.”
“It may turn out that the great revolution of those years wasn’t any of the ones you think it was, but ours,” Juanita interrupts me. “Because — have all these murders and attacks produced anything positive? Violence only breeds violence. And things haven’t changed, have they? There is more poverty than ever, here, out in the country, out in the mountains, everywhere.”
“Did you talk about that?” I ask her. “Did Mayta talk to you about the poor, about misery?”
“We talked about religion,” Juanita says. “And don’t think I brought the subject up. It was him.”
“Yes, very Catholic, but no more — I’m free of those illusions,” Mayta murmurs, sorry he’s said it here, afraid that Vallejos’s sister will be offended. “Don’t you ever have doubts?”
“From the moment I wake up until I go to bed,” she says softly. “Whoever told you that faith and doubts don’t go together?”
“I mean”—Mayta grows bolder—“isn’t it a hoax to say that the mission of Catholic schools is to educate the elite? Is it really possible to infuse the children of the classes in power with the evangelical principles of charity and love for one’s neighbor? Have you ever thought about that?”
“I think about that and much worse things.” The nun smiled at him. “Rather, we both think. It’s true. When I took orders, we all thought that, along with power and wealth, God had given those families a mission as far as their disinherited brothers were concerned. That those girls who were the head of the social body — if we could educate them well — would take charge of making the rest of the body better, the arms and the legs. But now none of us thinks that is the way to change the world.”
And Mayta, surprised, listened to her tell about the scheme she and her schoolmates had worked up. They didn’t stop until the free school for the poor in Sophianum was closed. The little girls from paying families all had a little girl in the school, a poor girl. The better-off girls brought in sweets, clothes, and once a year visited the poor girls’ homes with presents. They would go in the family car with Mommy; or sometimes only the chauffeur dropped off the Christmas cake. Disgusting, shameful. Could you call that practicing charity? The nuns had brought the matter up so often, criticized, written, and protested so much that, finally, the free school of Sophianum was closed.
“Then we aren’t so far apart, after all, Mother.” Mayta was shocked. “I’m happy to hear you talk this way. May I quote you something a great man once said? That when humanity has fought all the revolutions necessary to end injustice, a new religion will be born.”
“Who needs a new religion when we already have the true one?” replied the nun, passing him the cookies. “Have one.”
“Trotsky,” Mayta clarified. “A revolutionary, an atheist. But he respected the problem of faith.”
“All that stuff about how the revolution liberates the people’s energy, you can understand right here.” Vallejos threw a stone at a pelican. “Did my plan seem that bad to you? Or did you say it just to bust my balls, Mayta?”
“It seemed a monstrous deformity to us.” Juanita shrugs, making a discouraged gesture. “And now I wonder if, deformity and all, it wasn’t better for those girls to have a place where they could learn to read and where they would get at least one Christmas cake a year. I don’t know, I’m not so sure anymore that we did the right thing. What were the results? At the school there were thirty-two nuns and twenty or so sisters. That’s the usual proportion in most schools. The congregations have collapsed … Was our crisis of social conscience such a good thing? Was the sacrifice of my brother a good thing?”
She tries to smile, as if excusing herself for having involved me in her confusion.
“It’s logical, it’s a piece of cake, it’s money in the bank.” Vallejos was getting excited. “If the Indians work for a boss who exploits them, they work unwillingly and produce very little. When they work for themselves, they will produce more, and that will benefit all of society. Need cigarettes, brother?”
“As long as a parasitic class doesn’t come into existence to expropriate and use for its own advantage the efforts of the proletariat and the peasants,” Mayta explained to him. “As long as a bureaucratic class doesn’t accumulate enough power to create a new unjust social structure. And to avoid that, Leon Davidovich conceived the permanent revolution. God, I even bore myself with these lectures.”
“I’d like to go to a soccer match, how about you?” Vallejos sighed. “I got out of Jauja to see the classic Alianza-U match and I don’t want to miss it. Come on, I’m inviting you.”
“What’s your answer to that question?” I say to her when I see she’s stopped talking. “Did the silent revolution of those years help the Church or hurt it?”
“It helped us, the ones who lost our false illusions, but it didn’t help the faith. As to the other nuns, I can’t say,” María says. And, turning to Juanita: “What was Mayta like?”
“He always spoke softly, courteously, and he dressed very modestly,” Juanita recalls. “He tried to shock me with his anti-religious attitudes. But I rather think I shocked him. He had no idea what was going on in the convents, seminaries, the parishes. He knew nothing about our revolution … He opened his eyes wide and said, ‘We’re not so far apart, after all.’ The years have proven him correct, don’t you think?”
And she tells me that Father Miguel, a priest in the neighborhood who mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, is, it seems, the famous Comrade Leoncio who led the bloody attack on the Palace of Government a month ago.
“I doubt it,” María protests. “Father Miguel was a loudmouth. Fiery as far as words go, but nothing but a blowhard. I’m sure the police or the freedom squads killed him.”
Yes, that’s what it was. Not a revolver or an automatic pistol, but a short, light sub-machine gun that looked factory-fresh: black, oily, and shiny. Mayta stared at it hypnotized. Making an effort, he took his eyes off the weapon, which trembled in his hands, and looked around, all the time with the feeling that from among the books and papers scattered around his room the informers were crawling out, pointing a finger at him, laughing their heads off: “We’ve got you now, Mayta.” “You’ve had it now, Mayta,” “Right in the act, Mayta.” This kid’s foolish, a nut, he thought. A … But he felt no ill will toward the lieutenant. Instead, the benevolence inspired by a prank played by a favorite child, and the desire to see him again as soon as possible. To box his ears, he thought. To tell him …
“When I’m with you, I feel funny somehow. I don’t know whether to tell you or not. I hope you don’t get mad. May I speak frankly?”
The stadium was half empty, and they had arrived very early. The preliminary match hadn’t even begun.
“Of course,” said Vallejos, exhaling smoke from his mouth and nose. “I can guess. Are you going to tell me my revolutionary plan is half-assed? Or are you going to get on me again about the surprise?”