“I asked him to have it taken,” says doña Josefa, putting it back on the mantel. “So I could have a remembrance of him. See these photos? They’re all relatives, some really distant ones. Most are dead now. Were you two very friendly?”
“We didn’t see each other for many years,” I tell her. “Later we ran into each other a few times, but only rarely.”
Doña Josefa Arrisueño looks at me, and I know what she’s thinking. I would like to ease her doubts, to calm her, but it’s impossible because at this point I know as little about my plans for Mayta as she herself does.
“What will you write about him?” she whispers, running her tongue over her thick lips. “His life?”
“No, not his life,” I answer, trying to say something that won’t confuse her even more. “Something inspired by his life. Not a biography, but a novel. A very free history of the period, Mayta’s world, the things that happened in those years.”
“Why him?” she asks, working herself up. “There are others who are more famous. The poet Javier Heraud, for example. Or the people in the Radical Left Movement, de la Puente, Lobatón, the ones people always talk about. Why Mayta? No one remembers him.”
She’s right. Why? Because his case was the first in a series that would typify the period? Because he was the most absurd? Because he was the most tragic? Because his person and his story hold something ineffably moving, something that, over and beyond its political and moral implications, is like an X-ray of Peruvian misfortune?
“In other words, you don’t believe in the revolution.” Vallejos pretended to be shocked. “In other words, you are one of those who believe that Peru will always be the same until the end of the world.”
Mayta smiled and shook his head. “Peru will change. The revolution will come,” he explained, with infinite patience. “But it will come in its own time. It’s not as easy as you say.”
“In fact, it is easy — I say so because I know so.” Vallejos’s face glistened with sweat, and his eyes were as fiery as his words. “It’s easy if you know the topography of the mountains, if you know how to fire a Mauser, and if the Indians rise up.”
“If the Indians rise up.” Mayta sighed. “As easy as winning the lottery.”
He’d never dreamed that his godmother’s birthday party could be such fun. He had thought at the outset: This guy’s a provocateur, an informer. He knows who I am and wants to loosen my tongue. But after talking with him awhile, he was sure he wasn’t any of those things; he was a stray angel with wings who had no idea where he’d landed. Yet he felt no desire to tease him. He liked to listen to him talk about the revolution as if it were a kind of game or a set in a match, something you could bring off with a little effort and ingenuity. There was so much confidence and innocence in the boy that it made him want to go on listening to his crazy ideas all night. He wasn’t tired anymore and he was on his third glass of beer. Pepote kept dancing with Alci — the chotis “Madrid,” by Agustín Lara, sung by all the guests — but the lieutenant didn’t seem to care a bit. He had dragged a chair next to Mayta’s, and straddling it, he explained that fifty determined, well-armed men using Cáceres’s hit-and-run tactics could light the fuse of the Andes powder keg. He’s so young he could be my son, Mayta thought. And so cute he must have all the girls he wants.
“And what do you do for a living?” Vallejos asked.
It was a question that always made him uncomfortable, although he was ready for it. His answer — half truth, half lie — sounded falser to him than it had at other times. “I’m a journalist,” he said, wondering how Vallejos would react if he heard him say, “I do what you talk about. Revolution. What do you think of that?”
“For which paper?”
“For France-Presse. I do translations.”
“So you speak frog.” Vallejos made a face. “Where’d you learn it?”
“By himself, with a dictionary, and a grammar someone won in a raffle,” doña Josefa tells me. “You may not believe me, but I saw him with my own eyes. He would lock himself up in his room and repeat words for hours and hours. The parish priest in Surquillo would lend him magazines. He would say to me, ‘I already understand a little, godmother. I’m picking it up.’ Finally, he did understand it, because he would spend days reading books in French, believe me.”
“Of course I believe you,” I tell her. “I’m not surprised he learned by himself. When he got some idea in his head, he saw it through. I’ve known few people as tenacious as Mayta.”
“He could have been a lawyer, a professional man,” laments doña Josefa. “Did you know he got into San Marcos on the first try? And high up on the list. He was still a boy, sixteen or seventeen at the most. He could have had a degree when he was twenty-four or twenty-five. What a waste, my God! And for what? For politics, that’s what. Pure waste!”
“He didn’t stay at the university long, isn’t that right?”
“Within a few months, or a year at the most, he was thrown in jail,” doña Josefa says. “That’s when the calamities began. He didn’t come back here, he lived by himself. From then on, it went from bad to worse. Where’s your godson? Hiding out. Where’s Mayta these days? In jail. Have they let him out? Yes, but they’re looking for him again. If I were to tell you the number of times the police came here to turn the place upside down, to treat me disrespectfully, to scare me out of my wits, you’d think I was exaggerating. If I tell you fifty times, I’m shortening the list. Instead of winning cases with the mind God gave him. Is that any kind of life?”
“Yes, it is,” I gently contradict her. “A hard life, if you like, but also intense and coherent. Preferable to many others, ma’am. I can’t imagine Mayta growing old in some office, doing the same thing day after day.”
“Well, you may be right,” doña Josefa agrees — more from good manners than out of conviction. “From the time he was a child, you could see he wouldn’t have a life like everyone else’s. Has anyone ever seen a snotnose kid stop eating one day because there are people in the world going hungry? I didn’t believe it, right? He had his soup and left the rest. And at night he had his bread. Zoilita, Alicia, and I would tease him: ‘You gorge yourself when no one can see you, you trickster.’ But it turned out that wasn’t so. That’s all he ate. And if he was like that as a kid, why wouldn’t he be the way he was when he grew up?”
“Did you see And God Created Woman, with Brigitte Bardot?” asked Vallejos, changing the subject. “I saw it yesterday. Long legs, so long they come right out of the screen. I’d like to go to Paris someday and see Brigitte Bardot in the flesh.”
“Shut up and dance.” Alci had just gotten loose from Pepote and was tugging Vallejos out of his chair. “I’m not going to spend the whole night dancing with this lug. It’s like dancing with a leech. Come on, a mambo.”
“A mambo!” the lieutenant intoned. “Terrific! A mambo!”
A minute later, he was spinning like a top. He was a good dancer: he moved his hands, he knew trick steps, he sang. He inspired the others, who began to form wheels, conga lines, change partners. Soon the room was a whirl that left you dizzy. Mayta got up and pushed his chair against the wall to give the dancers more space. Would he ever dance like Vallejos? Never. Compared with Mayta, even Pepote was an ace. Smiling, Mayta remembered how he always felt like a Neanderthal whenever he had to dance with Adelaida, even the easiest dances. It wasn’t his body that was awkward; it was that timidity, modesty, visceral inhibition that came from being so close to a woman that turned him into a bear. That’s why he had decided not to dance unless forced into it, as when cousin Alicia or cousin Zoila made him, which could happen any moment. Did Leon Davidovitch know how to dance? Sure he did. Didn’t Natalia Sedova say that, revolution aside, he was the most normal of men? An affectionate father, a loving husband, a good gardener; he loved to feed rabbits. The most normal thing in normal men is that they like to dance. To them, dancing did not seem, as it did to him, something ridiculous, a frivolity, a waste of time, a forgetting of important things. You are not a normal man, remember that, he thought. When the mambo was over, there was applause. They had opened the windows facing the street to let fresh air into the room, and Mayta could see the couples with their faces pressed against the window frames, the lieutenant with his masculine eyes bulging, gazing hungrily at the women. His godmother made an announcement: there was chicken soup, and she needed help to serve it. Alci ran to the kitchen. Vallejos came and sat down next to Mayta again, sweating. He offered him a cigarette.