“I’m trying to reconstruct the beginning of his political life,” I explain. “I don’t know much, except that when he was still a kid, before the university, or in the first year, he joined APRA. And later…”
“And later he became everything, that’s the truth,” says Moisés. “APRA, communist, revisionist, Trotskyist. Every sect, every group. The only reason he wasn’t in more is that in those days there weren’t more. Nowadays he’d have more options. Here in the center we are charting all the parties, groups, alliances, factions, and leftist fronts there are in Peru. How many would you think? More than thirty.” He drums his fingers on the desk and assumes a pensive attitude.
“But there’s one thing you have to recognize,” he quickly adds in a very serious voice. “There wasn’t a drop of opportunism in any of those changes. He may have been unstable, wild, whatever you like, but he was also the fairest person in the world. And another thing. He had a self-destructive streak. He was always heterodox, a rebel by nature. As soon as he got involved in something, he began to dissent and he ended up in the dissenting faction. Disagreeing was his strongest instinct. Poor Comrade Mayta! What a fucked-up life, don’t you think?”
“The meeting is called to order,” said Comrade Jacinto. He was secretary general of the RWP(T) and the oldest of the five present. Two committee members were missing: Comrade Pallardi and Comrade Carlos. After waiting half an hour for them, they had decided to begin without them. Comrade Jacinto, in a gravelly voice, “read” the minutes of the last meeting, three weeks ago. As a precaution, they took no written minutes, but the secretary general jotted down the principal theme of each discussion in a notebook and now he was looking at it — he squinted as he spoke. How old was Comrade Jacinto? Sixty, maybe older. A solid, upright cholo, he had a crest of hair over his forehead and an athletic air that made him seem younger. He was a relic in the organization and had lived its history since back in the forties, when they held those meetings at the poet Rafael Méndez Dorich’s house. Trotsky’s ideas were brought to Peru by a handful of surrealists who had come back from Paris — Pablo de Westphalen, Abril de Viveo, and César Moro. Comrade Jacinto was one of the founders of the first Trotskyist organizations, the Marxist Workers’ Group (in 1946), the forerunner of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party. In Fertilizantes, S.A. (Fertisa), where he had worked for twenty years, he had always been a member (a minority member, of course) of the union directorate — this despite the hostility of APRAs and Communist Party men. Why had he remained a Trotskyist instead of joining one of the other groups? Mayta was happy about it, but never understood it. The whole Trotskyist old guard, all of Comrade Jacinto’s contemporaries, had stayed in RWP. Why, then, was he in the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (T[rotskyist])? So he wouldn’t lose touch with the young people? That must have been the reason, because Mayta doubted that the international Trotskyist polemic that raged over the revisionism of Michel Pablo, secretary of the Fourth International, mattered much to Comrade Jacinto.
“Workers Voice,” said the secretary general. “That’s the most urgent matter.”
“Left-wing childishness, being in love with contradiction, I don’t know what to call it,” says Moisés. “The affliction of the ultra-left. To be the most revolutionary, to be further to the left than So-and-so, to be more radical than the other guy. That was Mayta’s attitude all his life. When we were in APRA Youth, snotnose punks still wet behind the ears, APRA still underground, Manuel Seoane gave us a talk about Haya de la Torre’s theory of historical space and time, how he had refuted and gone beyond Marxist dialectic. Mayta, of course, declared that we had to study Marxism so we would know just what we had refuted and gone beyond. He formed a circle, and within a few months the APRA Youth had to discipline us. And that’s how, without our knowing it, we ended up collaborating with the Communist Party. The concrete result was the Panóptico prison. Our baptism of fire.”
He laughs and I laugh. But we’re not laughing at the same thing. Moisés is laughing at the games played by the precociously politicized children he and Mayta were then, and by laughing he tries to convince me that it was all unimportant, a case of political measles, anecdotes gone with the wind. I’m laughing at two photographs I have just discovered in the office. They face each other and balance each other out in their silver frames: Moisés shaking hands with Senator Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was in Peru promoting the Alliance for Progress, and Moisés next to Premier Mao Ze-dong in Beijing, with a delegation of Latin Americans. In both, he flashes a smile of neutrality.
“The person in charge may report,” says Comrade Jacinto.
The person in charge of Workers Voice was Mayta. He shook his head to dispel both the image of Lieutenant Vallejos and the drowsiness that had been bothering him since he had awakened that morning after only three hours of sleep. He stood up and took out the three-by-five card with the outline of what he intended to say.
“That’s the truth, comrades. Workers Voice is our most urgent problem, and we have to resolve it today, right now,” he said, stifling a yawn. “In fact, there are two problems and we should take them up separately. The first, the problem of the name, has come up because the divisionists have withdrawn. The second is the usual problem, money.”
All of them knew what was going on, but Mayta spelled it out for them in great detail. Experience had shown him that being prolix in presenting an idea saved time later on in the discussion. Item one: Should they go on calling the party newspaper Workers Voice, with the T added! After all, the divisionists had brought out their own paper, which they called Workers Voice, even using the same logo, to make the working class believe that they represented the continuation of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party and that the RWP(T) was the splinter group. A sleazy move, of course. But facts have to be faced. How could there be two Revolutionary Workers’ Parties without the workers getting confused? And two Workers Voice, even if one of them had the letter T for Trotskyist all over it, would confuse them even more. By the same token, the articles for the next issue were already set, over in the Cocharcas print shop, so a decision had to be made right away. Would it be Workers Voice (T), or should the name be changed? Mayta paused to light up a cigarette, and to see if Comrades Jacinto, Medardo, Anatolio, or Joaquín would say anything. Since they remained silent, Mayta went on, exhaling smoke. “The other matter is that we need five hundred soles to pay the printer. The business manager told me that beginning with the next issue they’ll have to charge us more, to meet the rising cost of paper. Twenty percent.”
The Cocharcas shop charged them two thousand soles to print a thousand copies, two pages each, and they sold the paper for three soles. Theoretically, if they sold out the issue, they would have had a profit of a thousand soles. In practice, the stands and paperboys charged a fifty percent commission for each copy, so that — naturally, they had no advertising — they lost fifty cents per copy. They only made a profit on the copies they sold themselves outside factories, universities, and unions. But, except for rare occasions — and those stacks of yellowed papers that demoralizingly surrounded the central committee of the RWP(T) in the garage on Jirón Zorritos were testimony to how rare they were — they had never sold out the thousand copies. Besides, many of the copies that made it to the street weren’t sold but were given away. The Workers Voice always ran at a loss, and now with the split, things had got worse.