“It’s that you’re yellow, Zenón,” Vallejos shouted. “Too bad for you. Get back to your cell. I hope they send you away for a long time. Rot in the Frontón, then. I don’t know why I don’t just shoot you like a dog, you son of a bitch.”
“Wait up, hold it, let’s talk calmly without fighting,” said Condori, stepping between them. He was the one wearing sandals, and Mayta was happy to see someone who might be his own age. “Don’t go off the deep end, Vallejos. Let me talk to Zenón for a minute.”
In three strides, the lieutenant was at Mayta’s side.
“What a faggot,” he said, no longer furious as he was a moment before, but disillusioned. “Last night, he agreed. Now come the doubts — maybe it would be better to stay here, and later on we’ll see. That’s what you call fear, not doubt.”
What doubts moved the young leader from Uchubamba to provoke this incident? Did he think, when the rebellion was about to begin, that perhaps there were too few of them? Did he doubt that he and Condori could drag the rest of the community into the uprising? Did he have an inkling of the defeat? Or, simply, did he hesitate when he thought that he would have to kill people and that someone might kill him?
Condori and Gonzales whispered together. Mayta heard the odd word and sometimes saw them gesture. Once, Condori grabbed his comrade by the arm. He must have had some power over him, because Gonzales, even though complaining, remained respectful. A moment later, they came over.
“Okay, Vallejos,” said Condori. “Everything’s okay now. No problem.”
“Okay, Zenón.” Vallejos squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry I got mad. No hard feelings?”
The young man nodded. As he squeezed his hand, Vallejos said again, “No hard feelings. We’re doing this for Peru, Zenón.” Judging by his face, Gonzales seemed more resigned than convinced.
Vallejos turned to Mayta. “Have the weapons loaded into the taxis. I’m going to talk to the prisoners.”
He went off toward the cherry trees, and Mayta ran to the main entrance. Through the small window in the door, he looked out on the street. Instead of taxis, Ubilluz, and the miners from La Droya, he saw a small group of joeboys headed by the cadet commander, Cordero Espinoza.
“What are you doing here?” he asked them. “Why aren’t you at your posts?”
“We aren’t at our posts because everyone’s gone,” says Cordero Espinoza, with a yawn that warms his smile. “We got tired of waiting. We couldn’t be messengers for people who weren’t there. I was assigned the police station. I got there good and early, and no one else showed up. After a while, Hernando Huasasquiche came to tell me that Professor Ubilluz wasn’t at home or anywhere around here. And that he’d seen him driving his truck on the main road. A little later, we found out that the Ricrán people had just disappeared, the La Oroya men had either never come or had gone back. We got really scared! We got together in the plaza. We were all worried, just standing around waiting to go to school. We’d been fooled, the whole thing was some kind of phony story. Right then, Felicio Tapia turned up. He told us that the guy from Lima had gone to the jail after being stood up by the Ricrán men. So we went to the jail to see what was happening. Vallejos and Mayta had locked up the guards, captured the rifles, and freed Condori and Gonzales. Can you imagine anything as ridiculous as that?”
Dr. Cordero Espinoza is certainly right. What else could you say but that it was ridiculous? They take over the jail, they’ve got fourteen rifles and twelve hundred cartridges. But there aren’t any revolutionaries, because not one of the thirty or forty conspirators turned up. Was that what Mayta thought when he peered through the window and found only seven boys in uniform?
“Nobody came? None? Not a single one?”
“Well, we’re here,” said the kid with the half-shaved head, and despite his confusion, Mayta remembered what Ubilluz had said about him when they were introduced: Cordero Espinoza, commander of his class, number one, a brain. “But it looks like the others have taken off.”
Shock, rage, an intimation of the catastrophe closing in on them? Or, rather, the tacit confirmation of something as yet undefined, which he’d feared since earlier, when the Ricrán men weren’t in the plaza, or maybe earlier still, when his Lima comrades from the RWP(T) decided to withdraw their support, or when he’d understood that his attempt at Blacquer’s to get the Communist Party involved in the uprising was useless? Was it since one of those moments that he’d been waiting, without even admitting it to himself, for this coup de grâce? The revolution wouldn’t even begin? But it has begun, Mayta, don’t you realize it, it has begun.
“That’s why we’re here, that’s why we’ve come,” exclaimed Cordero Espinoza. “Don’t you think we can replace those guys?”
Mayta saw that the joeboys were clustered around their commander and were nodding in agreement and support. But all he could think of at that instant was that some passerby, someone from the neighborhood, might take notice of that little group of schoolboys at the jail door.
“It struck me that we should volunteer right then and there. I didn’t even talk it over with my buddies,” remembers Dr. Cordero Espinoza. “It just hit me when I saw the look on poor Mayta’s face when he found out that nobody showed up.”
We’re in his office on Junín Street, where law offices abound. Law is still the profession in Jauja, even though, over the past few years, war and catastrophes have seriously dampened local legal business. Until fairly recently, in every Jauja family at least one or two sons came into the world with a briefcase of legal documents under their arms. Lawsuits are a sport practiced by all classes in this province, at least as popular as soccer and Carnival. In the throng of lawyers in Jauja, the old cadet commandant and top student at Colegio San José—where he used to teach a course on political economy a couple of times a week, until the war caused classes to be suspended — is still the star.
He’s an easygoing, friendly man. His office glitters with diplomas from the congresses he’s attended, the honors he’s won as city councilman, president of the Jauja Lions Club, president of the Committee for a Highway to the East, and various other civic functions. Of all the people I’ve talked with, he’s the one who evokes those events with the greatest precision, ease, and — at least it seems to me — objectivity. The handsomeness of his office contrasts with the entrance hall, which has a hole in the floor and half of one wall shattered. As he leads me through, he points to it, saying, “It was a guerrilla bomb. I’ve left it this way to remind me of the precautions I have to take every day if I want to keep my head on my shoulders.”
With the same wit, he told me, soon after, that when the guerrillas attacked his house, they were more efficient: the two dynamite charges burned it to the ground. “They killed my cook, a little old lady sixty years old. My wife and children, fortunately, were already out of Jauja.” They live in Lima and are about to leave the country. Which is what he will do as soon as he can wrap up his business. Because, as he says, with the way things are going, what sense does it make to go on risking one’s neck? Hasn’t Jauja’s security improved since the Marines came? Things are even worse. Because the people resent the foreign troops so much, they help the guerrillas — by hiding them, supplying them with alibis, or just by keeping quiet. They say something similar is happening among the Peruvian guerrillas and the Cuban and Bolivian internationalists. That there are confrontations between them. Nationalism, as we all know, is stronger than any other ideology. I can’t help liking the excadet commander: he says all these things naturally, without melodrama or arrogance, and even with a sense of humor.