“I’m going away and I don’t know when I’ll be back to Peru,” Mayta explained to her, sitting on the arm of the nearest chair. “I didn’t want to leave without meeting him. Would it bother you if I saw him for a minute?”
“It sure would bother me,” Adelaida cut him off brusquely. “He doesn’t have your name, and Juan is the only father he knows. Don’t you know what it cost me to get him a normal home and a real father? You’re not going to ruin it on me now.”
“I don’t want to ruin anything,” Mayta said. “I’ve always respected our deal. I just wanted to meet him. I won’t tell him who I am, and if that’s the way you want it, I won’t even talk to him.”
He said nothing about his real activities when they first began seeing each other, only that he worked as a journalist. You couldn’t say he was good-looking, with that gait of his, as if he were walking on eggs, and with those spaces between his teeth. He didn’t even have a good job, judging by his clothes. But in spite of all that, you liked something about him. What was there about this revolutionary that appealed to the cute employee of the Banco de Credito over in Lince? The airmen guarding Rospigliosi Castle are uptight. They stop every passerby and ask to see his papers. Then they frisk him in hysterical detail. Has something else happened? Do they know something that hasn’t been announced yet over the radio? A young girl carrying baskets who stubbornly refused to be frisked has just been hit with a rifle butt.
“When I was with him, I felt I was learning things,” Adelaida says. “Not that he was so well-educated. It was that he talked about things the other guys I went out with never mentioned. Since I didn’t understand anything, I was like a mouse hypnotized by a cat.”
She was also impressed by the fact that he respected her, that he was so relaxed, so sure of himself. He said beautiful things to her. Why didn’t he kiss her? One day, he brought her to meet an aunt of his over in Surquillo, the only relative of Mayta’s she would ever meet. Aunt Josefa prepared them a lunch, complete with little cakes, and was affectionate toward Adelaida. They were chatting away when suddenly dona Josefa had to step out. They stayed in the living room listening to the radio, and Adelaida thought: Now is the moment. Mayta was right next to her on the sofa, and she waited. But he didn’t even try to hold her hand, and she said to herself: He must really be in love with me. The girl with the baskets has finally resigned herself to being frisked. Then they let her go. As she passes opposite the window, I see her lips moving as she insults them.
“I’m begging you, don’t ask to talk to him,” Adelaida said. “Besides, he’s in school. Why would you want to meet him, what for? If he put two and two together, it would be awful.”
“Just by seeing my face he’s miraculously going to discover I’m his father?” Mayta mocks.
“It frightens me, like tempting fate,” Adelaida stuttered.
In fact, her voice and face were consumed with worry. It was useless to make any more demands. Wasn’t this flash of sentimentality, this desire to see the son he rarely remembered, a bad symptom? He was wasting precious moments; it was foolish to have come. If Juan Zarate found him, there would be a scene, and any scandal, no matter how small, would have negative repercussions for the plan. Get up, say goodbye. But he was glued to the armchair.
“Juan was postmaster here in Lince,” Adelaida says. “He would come to see me when I went to work at the bank and again when I got off. He followed me, he asked me out, he asked me to marry him once a week. He put up with my rejections and never gave up.”
“Did he offer to give his name to the child?”
“That was the condition I set for our getting married.” I glance at the photo taken in Cañete, and now I understand why the beautiful employee would marry this ugly, older bureaucrat. Mayta’s son must be thirty years old. Did he have the normal life his mother wanted for him? What can he think about the current situation? Is he supporting the rebels and internationalists, or is he backing the army and the Marines? Or, like his mother, does he believe that either alternative is pure garbage? “Even though he hadn’t kissed me by our fifth or sixth date, he gave me a big surprise.”
“What would you say if I were to propose to you?”
“Let’s wait until that day and you’ll find out,” she said, playing the coquette.
“I’m proposing, then,” said Mayta. “Would you marry me, Adelaida?”
“He hadn’t even kissed me,” she repeats, nodding. “And he proposed just like that. I cooked my own goose in all of this, so I can’t blame anyone else.”
“Proof that you were in love.”
“It isn’t that I was dying to get married,” she asserts. Once again, she makes the gesture I’ve seen several times: she throws her hair back off her face. “I was young, quite good-looking, and lots of guys were interested in me. Juan Zárate wasn’t the only one. And I said yes to the one who was as poor as a church mouse, the revolutionary, the one who had other problems, too. Wasn’t I a jerk?”
“Okay, I won’t see him,” Mayta says softly. But he still didn’t get off the arm of the chair. “Tell me something about him, at least. And about yourself. Has married life been good for you?”
“Better than my life with you,” said Adelaida, in a resigned, even melancholic tone. “I live quietly, without worrying whether the cops might barge in day or night, break the place up, and arrest my husband. With Juan, I know that we’ll be eating every day and that we won’t be evicted for not paying the rent.”
“To judge by the way you say it, you don’t seem so happy,” said Mayta. Wasn’t this conversation, at this precise moment, absurd? Shouldn’t he be buying medicines, picking up his money down at France-Presse, packing his bag?
“No, I’m not,” said Adelaida, who displayed more hospitality since Mayta had agreed not to see the boy. “Juan made me quit working at the bank. If I were still working, we’d be living better, and I’d see people, know what’s going on. Here in the house, I spend my time sweeping, washing, and cooking. Not exactly the kind of life to make you happy.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Mayta, looking around the living room. “And yet, compared to millions of people, Adelaida, you’re living very well.”
“Are you starting in with politics now?” She gets riled up. “In that case, get out. It’s your fault that I’ve come to hate politics above everything.”
They were married three weeks later in a civil ceremony in the Lince town hall. Then she began to know the real Mayta. Under that clear blue sky, and over the roofs of red tiles in Cuzco, wave hundreds, thousands of red flags, and the old façades of its churches and palaces and the ancient stones of its streets are red with the blood of the recent fighting. At the beginning, she didn’t understand all that stuff about the RWP. She knew that in Peru there was one party, the APRA, which General Ordía had outlawed and which Prado had made legal again when he took office. But a party called the RWP? Screaming demonstrations, shots fired in the air, and frenetic speeches proclaim the beginning of another era, the advent of the new man. Have the executions of traitors, informers, torturers, and collaborators with the old regime begun in the beautiful Plaza de Armas, where the viceregal authorities had Túpac Amaru drawn and quartered? Mayta gave her a partial explanation: the Revolutionary Workers’ Party was still small.
“I didn’t think it was important, because it seemed like a game to me,” she says, pushing back a falling lock of hair. “But before a month was out, one night when I was alone I heard knocking at the door. It was two investigators. Under the pretext of carrying on a search, they cleaned the place out — they even took away a bag of rice I had in the kitchen. That’s how the nightmare began.”