But you have given up hope as far as Peru is concerned, I think. Totally and definitively, right, Mayta? You who believed in so much, who wanted so much to believe in a future for your unfortunate land. You threw in the towel, didn’t you? You think, or act as if you thought, that things here will never change for the better, only for the worse. More hunger, more hatred, more oppression, more ignorance, more brutality, more barbarity. Even you, like so many others, think now only about escaping before we completely collapse.
“To Venezuela or Mexico, where they say there are lots of jobs because of oil. Even to the United States, although I don’t speak English. That’s what I’d like to do.”
Again, his voice catches in his throat, worn out by his lack of conviction. I, too, lose something at that moment: my interest in this conversation. I know I’m not going to get from my false fellow student anything more than what I’ve already got: the depressing confirmation that he is a man destroyed by suffering and resentment, who has even lost his memories. Someone in essence quite different from the Mayta of my novel, that obstinate optimist, that man of faith who loves life despite the horror and misery in it. I feel uncomfortable, as if I’m abusing him by keeping him here — it’s almost midnight — in a predictable conversation that has no substance. This digging away at memories must be anguishing for him, this going back and forth from my study to the bathroom, a perturbation of his daily routine, which I imagine to be monotonous, animal-like.
“I’m keeping you up too late,” I say.
“Well, I do go to bed early,” he says, relieved, thanking me with a smile that puts an end to our talk. “Even though I don’t sleep much — I only need four or five hours. When I was a kid, on the other hand, I was a real sleeper.”
We get up and go out. On the street, he asks me where he can catch a downtown bus. When I tell him I’m going to drive him home, he stammers that it would be enough just to bring him closer. He can get a bus in Rímac.
There’s almost no traffic on the Vía Expresa. A light drizzle blurs the windshield. Until we get to Avenida Javier Prado, we talk only about the news — the drought down south, the floods up north, the problems on the border. When we get to the bridge, he sighs, visibly annoyed, that he’s got to get out for a minute. I stop, he gets out and urinates by the car, shielding himself with the door. When he gets back in, he mutters that at night, because of the humidity, his kidney problem is worse. Has he been to a doctor? Is he being treated? First, he had to make arrangements with the insurance. Now that he has it, he’ll have to go to the Hospital del Empleado to be examined, although it seems he’s got a chronic condition that can’t be cured.
We’re quiet until we get to Plaza Grau. There, suddenly — I just passed someone selling skin cream — as if it were someone else speaking, I hear him say, “There were two robberies, it’s true. Before the one in La Victoria, the one they locked me up for. What I told you is the truth: I had nothing to do with the kidnapping in Pueblo Libre, either. I wasn’t even in Lima when it happened. I was in Pacasmayo, working in a sugarmill.”
He is silent. I don’t press him, I don’t ask him anything. I drive very slowly, hoping he’ll decide to go on, afraid he won’t. The emotion in his voice surprises me, as does his confidential tone. The streets downtown are dark and deserted. The only noise is the car motor.
“It was when I got out of jail, after Jauja, after those four years inside,” he says, looking straight ahead. “Do you remember what was going on in the Valle de La Convención, out there in Cuzco? Hugo Blanco had organized the peasants in unions and had led them in a few land seizures. Something important, very different from what all the left had been doing. They had to have support, so what happened to us in Jauja wouldn’t happen to them.”
I stop at a red light, on Avenida Abancay, and he stops, too. It’s as if the person next to me were different from the one who was just in my study, and different from the Mayta in my story. A third, wounded, lacerated Mayta, whose memory is intact.
“So we tried to give them support, with money.” He is whispering. “We planned two expropriations. At that time, it was the best way to lend a hand.”
I don’t ask him who his accomplices were: his old comrades from the RWP(T) or those from the RWP, revolutionaries he met in jail, or others. At that time — the early sixties — the idea of direct action was in the air, and there were countless young men who, if they weren’t already taking action, spoke night and day about doing it. It couldn’t have been difficult for Mayta to link up with them, charm them, lead them in an action sanctified with the all-absolving name of expropriation. What happened in Jauja must have earned him some prestige among radical groups. I don’t bother to ask if he was the brain behind those robberies.
“The plan worked perfectly in both cases,” he adds. “There were no arrests, no casualties. We carried them out on two consecutive days, in different parts of Lima. We expropriated”—a brief hesitation before coming up with the proper vague formula—“several million.”
He falls silent once again. I see that he’s concentrating, looking for the right words to say what must be the most difficult thing of all. We are at the Plaza de Acho, a mass of shadows blurred by the fog. Which way? Yes, I’m going to take you all the way home. He points the way to Zárate. It’s a bitter paradox that, now that he’s free, he lives in the Lurigancho area. The street here is a combination of holes, puddles, and garbage. The car shakes and bounces.
“Since the cops knew all there was to know about me, we agreed that I wouldn’t bring the money out to Cuzco. That’s where we were supposed to hand it over to Hugo Blanco’s people. As a simple precaution, we decided that afterward I would stay away from the others. The comrades left in two groups. I helped them to leave myself. One group in a heavy truck, the other in a rented car.”
He is silent again for a moment, and coughs. Then, in a dry voice, with a touch of irony, he quickly adds: “That’s when the cops grabbed me. Not for the expropriations. For the robbery in La Victoria. In which I hadn’t been involved, about which I knew nothing. Now there’s a coincidence, I thought. Nice coincidence. Terrific. It has its positive side. It distracts them, it’s going to screw them up. They won’t connect me at all with the expropriations. But no, it wasn’t a mere coincidence …”
Suddenly I know what he’s going to tell me, I’ve guessed exactly what the climax of his story is going to be.
“I didn’t understand completely until years later. Maybe because I didn’t want to understand.” He yawns, his face red, and chews on something. “One day in Lurigancho, I even saw a mimeographed handbill printed by some damn little group or other that accused me of being a common thief. They said I had robbed I don’t know how much money from the bank in La Victoria. I paid no attention, I thought it was one of the usual low blows you get in political life. When I got out of Lurigancho, absolved for the La Victoria caper, eighteen months had gone by. I began to look for the comrades who’d taken part in the expropriations. Why, in all that time, hadn’t they sent me a single message, why hadn’t they contacted me? Finally, I found one of them. And we talked.”
He smiles, half opening his mouth and showing his remaining teeth. The drizzle has stopped and in the headlights I can see dirt, stones, garbage, the outline of poor houses.
“Did he tell you that the money never got into Hugo Blanco’s hands?” I ask.
“He swore he’d been against it, that he tried to convince the others not to pull a dirty deal like that,” Mayta says. “He told me dozens of lies and blamed it all on the others. He had asked them to consult me about what they were going to do. According to him, the others didn’t want to. ‘Mayta’s a fanatic,’ he says they said. ‘He wouldn’t understand, he’s too upright to do something like that.’ Out of all the lies he told me, I managed to pick out some truths.”