“And did it really work out as you wished?” I take up the conversation again. She looks away from the window, at me. The expression of alarm on her face when she heard the shots has been replaced by the sour expression which seems to be habitual in her. “The business about the boy.”
“It worked out until he discovered that Juan wasn’t his father,” she says. She remains there, with her lips parted, trembling, and her eyes, which stare fixedly at me, begin to shine.
“Well, that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, we don’t have to talk about your son.” I excuse myself. “Let’s get back to Mayta.”
“I’m not going to make another speech,” he said, to calm her. He drank the last drop of water. What if being so thirsty is a sign of fever, Mayta? “I’m going to be frank with you, Adelaida. I wanted to find out about my son before I leave the country, but I wanted to find out how you were doing, too. I’m no better off for having found out. I hoped I’d find you happy, at peace. But all I see is resentment, toward me and everybody else.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I resent you less than I resent myself. Because I made all my own trouble.”
Far off, there are more shots. From the surrounding valleys, ridges, peaks, and plateaus, Cuzco is a cloud of smoke filled with groans.
“Juan didn’t tell him. I did,” she whispers, in a hesitant voice. “Juan will never forgive me. He always loved Johnny as if he were his own son.”
And she tells me the old story that must gnaw at her day and night, a story that combines religion, jealousy, and grudge. From the beginning, Johnny favored his false father over his mother, was more attached to him than to her, perhaps because in some obscure way he sensed that it was Adelaida’s fault that there was a huge lie in his life.
“Do you mean that your husband takes him to Mass every Sunday?” Mayta said, thinking aloud. My memory brought back to me a whirlwind of prayers, chants, communions, and childhood confessions, the collection of colorful holy pictures I stored in my notebook as if they were precious objects. “Well, at least in that, he has something in common with me. When I was his age, I went to Mass every day.”
“Juan is a very devout Catholic,” said Adelaida. “Catholic, Apostolic, Roman, a pious old lady, he says jokingly. But it’s the absolute truth. And he wants Johnny to be that way, of course.”
“Of course.” Mayta nodded. But he was free-associating, thinking about the boys from the San José school in Jaula who had listened so attentively, almost hypnotized, to what he told them about Marxism and revolution. He saw them: they were printing the communiqués their leaders sent them, on mimeograph machines hidden under tarpaulins and boxes; they were distributing handbills outside factories, schools, markets, movie houses. He saw them multiplying like the loaves of bread in the Bible, every day recruiting scores of boys as poor and selfdenying as themselves, coming and going along dangerous paths, along snowdrifts in the mountains, slipping through obstacles and army patrols, sliding at night over the roofs of public buildings and the tops of peaks to leave red flags with the hammer and sickle. And I saw them arrive, sweaty, joyful, and formidable at remote encampments with the medicine, information, clothing, and food the guerrillas would need. His son was one of them. They were very young, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old. Thanks to them, the guerrillas would surely be victorious.
The assault on heaven, I thought. We shall bring heaven down from heaven, establish it on earth; heaven and earth were becoming one in this twilight hour. The ashen clouds in the sky met the ashen clouds from the fires. And those little black spots that flew, innumerable, from all four points on the compass toward Cuzco — they weren’t ashes but vultures. Spurred on by hunger, braving smoke and flames, they dove on toward their desirable prey. From the heights, the survivors, parents, wounded, the fighters, the internationalists, all of them, with a minimum of fantasy, could hear the anxious tearing, the febrile pecking, the abject beating of wings, and smell the horrifying stench.
“And so …?” I urge her to continue. Now we hear shots all the time, always far off, but neither of us looks out on the street again.
“And so the subject was never brought up in front of Johnny,” she goes on. I listen to her and I try to get interested in her story, but I still see and smell the carnage.
It was a taboo subject, down at the very roots of their relationship, undermining it like slow acid. Juan Zárate loved the boy, but he had never forgiven her that agreement, the price she made him pay to marry her. The story took an unexpected turn the day Johnny — he’d finished secondary school and entered pharmacy school — discovered his father had a lover. Don Juan Zárate had a lover? Yes, and she had her own little house. The very idea would have made Adelaida roar with laughter — jealousy was out of the question: that old coot, dragging his feet, practically blind, with a lover. She was dying of laughter. A woman is jealous when she is in love, and she had never loved Juan Zárate. She had stoically put up with him. She was just annoyed that, with the pittance he earned, he supported two households …
“But my son, on the other hand, was devastated. It drove him crazy,” she adds, in a hypnotic state. “He became embittered, shriveled up. That his father could have a sweetheart seemed like the end of the world to him. Was it because he’s been raised so piously? In a child, I would have understood a reaction like that. But how can you figure it in a young man twenty years old?”
“He suffered for your sake,” I tell her.
“It was religion,” Adelaida insists. “Juan brought him up that way, four-square religious. He went crazy. He wouldn’t accept that his father, who had taught him to be one hundred percent Catholic, could be a hypocrite. That’s what he said, and he was already twenty.”
She falls silent because the shots sound closer this time. I look out the window. It can’t be anything serious; the guards seem calm across the barbed wire. They are looking south, as if the shots come from San Isidro or Miraflores.
“Maybe he inherited it from Mayta,” I say to her. “When he was a kid, that’s how he was: an unwavering believer, convinced that you had to toe the line at every instant. He would make no compromises. Nothing bothered him more than someone who believed one thing and did something else. Didn’t he tell you about the hunger strike he went on so he could be like the poor? People like that aren’t usually happy in life, ma’am.”
“When I saw him suffering so much, I thought I could help him by telling him the truth,” Adelaida says softly, her face twisted. “I went crazy too, right?”
“Yes, I’m leaving, but one last favor,” Mayta said, and as soon as he was on his feet, he was sorry he hadn’t left earlier. “Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. Keep it to yourself.”
She had never taken seriously those secrets, precautions, fears, that distrust, despite the fact that, while they were together, she had seen the police in the house several times. The effect it had on her was like that of seeing grown men playing children’s games, a persecution complex that poisoned life. How can you enjoy life if you’re constantly afraid of a universal conspiracy of informers, the army, the APRA, the capitalists, the Stalinists, the imperialists, etc., etc., against you? Mayta’s words brought back the nightmare it had been to hear, several times a day: “Careful, don’t repeat this, don’t tell anyone, no one’s supposed to know, no one can …” But she didn’t argue. Sure, sure, not a word to anyone. Mayta nodded and with a half smile, waving goodbye, he went off hurriedly, walking that funny little walk of his, the walk of a man with blisters on the soles of his feet.