“He didn’t tell you that the plan was too important for it to be the exclusive monopoly of a Trotskyist splinter group?” I insist. “Why would he have bothered trying to get help from the other RWP, and even from the Communist Party?”
“He never said a word,” Professor Ubilluz answers quickly. “He told us nothing about it and tried to conceal from us the fact that the left was divided and that the RWP(T) was insignificant. He deceived us, deliberately and treacherously. He talked about the party. The party this and the party that. I thought he was talking about the Communist Party, which would have meant thousands of workers and students.”
In the distance, we hear a flurry of rifle shots. Or is it a clap of thunder? We hear it again in a few seconds, and remain silent, listening. We hear another salvo, even farther off, and the professor says softly, “It’s dynamite caps the guerrilla fighters set off out in the hills. To break the nerve of the garrison soldiers. Psychological warfare.” No: it was ducks. A flock flew over the reed patches, quacking. They had gone out for a walk, and Mayta had his bag in his hand. Within a short hour, he would be on the return train to Lima.
“There’s room for everyone, of course,” Vallejos said. “The more, the merrier. Of course. There will be enough weapons for all who want to fight. All I ask is that you carry out your negotiations fast.”
They were walking on the outskirts of the city, and in the distance some roofs with red tiles glowed. The wind sang through the eucalyptus trees and the willows.
“We have all the time we need,” said Mayta. “No need to rush things.”
“Yes, there is,” said Vallejos dryly. He turned to look at him, and there was a blind resolve in his eyes. Mayta thought: There’s something else, I’m going to find out something else. “The two leaders of the Uchubamba land seizure, the ones who led the takeover of the Aína hacienda, are here.”
“In Jauja?” asked Mayta. “Why haven’t you introduced them to me? I would have wanted to meet them.”
“They’re in jail and are not receiving guests.” Vallejos smiled. “That’s right — prisoners.”
They had been brought in by the Civil Guard patrol that had gone out to undo the land takeover. But it wasn’t certain the two would remain in Jauja for long. At any moment, an order could come, transferring them to Huancayo or Lima. And the whole plan depended to a great extent on them. They would lead them from Jauja to Uchubamba quickly and surely, and they would guarantee the collaboration of the communities. Did he see why there was so little time?
“Alejandro Condori and Zenón Gonzales,” I tell him, naming names before he has a chance to do it. Ubilluz gapes. The light from the bulb has faded and we are almost in darkness.
“Right, those are their names. You are very well informed.”
Am I? I think I’ve read everything that came out in newspapers and magazines about this story, and I’ve talked with an infinite number of participants and witnesses. But the more I investigate, the less I feel I know what really happened. Because, with each new fact, more contradictions, conjectures, mysteries, and incongruities crop up. How did it happen that those two peasant leaders, from a remote community in the jungle region of Junín, ended up in the Jauja jail?
“A fantastic accident,” Vallejos explained. “I had nothing to do with it. This was the jail they were sent to because this is where they would come before the prosecution. My sister would say that God is helping us, see?”
“Were they in with you before they were captured?”
“In a general way,” says Ubilluz. “We spoke with them during the trip we made to Uchubamba, and they helped us hide the weapons. But they only came in with us all the way in the month they were imprisoned. They really got close to their jailer. That is, the lieutenant. I think he didn’t tell them the whole plan until the thing blew open.”
That part of the story, the end, makes Professor Ubilluz uncomfortable, even though so much time has passed. About that part he knows only what he’s heard, and his role is both disputed and doubtful. We hear another volley, far off. “They may be shooting the accomplices of the terrorists,” he says, grunting. This is the time they usually choose to take them from their homes, in a jeep or an armored car, and bring them to the outskirts. The corpses turn up the next day on the roads. And suddenly, with no transition, he asks me, “Does it make any sense to be writing a novel with Peru in this condition and Peruvians all living on borrowed time?” Does it make any sense? I tell him it certainly does, since I’m doing it.
There’s something depressing about Professor Ubilluz. Everything he says has a sad cast to it. Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I can’t get rid of the notion that he’s always on the defensive and that everything he tells me is aimed at some kind of self-justification. But doesn’t everyone do the same thing? Why is it I have no confidence in him? The fact that he’s still alive? That I’ve heard so much gossip and so many rumors about him? But am I not also aware of the fact that in political controversies this country was always a garbage heap, until it became the cemetery it is today? Don’t I know the infinite horrors which have no basis in fact that enemies ascribe to each other? No, that isn’t what seems so pitiful to me in him, but, simply, his decadence, his bitterness, the quarantine in which he lives.
“So then, in short, Mayta’s part in the plan of action was nil,” I say.
“To be fair, let’s say minimal,” he corrects me, shrugging his shoulders. He yawns, and his face fills with wrinkles. “With him or without him, it would have turned out the same. We let him in because we thought he was a political and union leader of some importance. We needed the support of workers and revolutionaries in the rest of the country. That was to be Mayta’s function. But it turned out he didn’t even represent his own group, the RWP(T). Politically speaking, he was a total orphan.”
“A total orphan.” The expression rings in my ear as I bid Professor Ubilluz goodbye and go out onto the deserted streets of Jauja, heading toward the Paca Inn, under a sky glistening with stars. The professor tells me that, if I’m afraid of such a long walk, I can sleep in his tiny living room. But I prefer to leave: I need air and solitude. I have to quell the static inside my head and put some distance between me and a person whose mere presence depresses my work. The volleys have ceased, and it’s as if there were a curfew, because there’s not a soul around. I walk down the middle of the street, banging my heels, making every effort to be noticed, so that if a patrol comes along, they won’t think I’m trying to sneak by. The sky glows — an unusual sight for someone from Lima, where you almost never see the stars through the mist. The cold chaps my lips. I don’t feel as hungry as I did in the afternoon.
A total orphan. That’s what he became, by being a militant in smaller and smaller, ever more radical sects, looking for an ideological purity he never found. He was the supreme orphan when he threw himself into this extraordinary conspiracy to start a war in the heights of Junín, with a twenty-two-year-old second-lieutenant jailer and a secondary-school teacher, both of them totally disconnected from the Peruvian left. It certainly was fascinating. It kept on fascinating me for a year after I made the investigation, just as much as it fascinated me that day when I found out in Paris what had happened in Jauja … The wretched light of the widely spaced streetlights wraps around the old façades of the houses, some with enormous gateways and ironclad doors, wrought-iron bars on their windows, and shuttered balconies. Behind all that, I can imagine entrance-ways, patios with plants and trees, and a life once upon a time ordered and monotonous and now, doubtless, beside itself with fear.