Read The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta for Free Online Page A

you.” Comrade Medardo was shocked. “A miracle.”
    â€œLast night I went to a party and didn’t get to bed until late.”
    â€œYou, at a party?” Comrade Medardo laughed. “Another miracle.”
    â€œSomething interesting,” Mayta explained. “But not what you’re thinking. I’m going to report to the committee right now.”
    The outside of the garage had nothing that would even suggest the kind of activities that went on there. Inside, you saw first a poster with the bearded faces of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky that Comrade Jacinto had brought back from a congress of Trotskyist organizations in Montevideo. Stacked against the walls were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them, which they had never got around to handing out. There were a couple of chairs with their bottoms hanging out, and a few three-legged stools that looked as though they might belong either to a milkmaid or to a medium. Some mattresses were piled on top of each other and covered with a blanket. They were also used as seats when necessary. On a bookshelf made of boards and bricks, a few books covered with plaster dust languished, and in a corner there was the skeleton of a tricycle without wheels. The local office of the RWP(T) was so tiny that, with only a third of the committee present, it looked as though there was a quorum.
    â€œMayta?” Moisés leans back in his desk chair and gives me an incredulous look.
    â€œMayta,” I say. “You remember him, don’t you?”
    He recovers his aplomb and his smile. “Of course, how could I ever forget him. But it’s just strange. Is there anyone anywhere in Peru who remembers Mayta?”
    â€œBarely any. That’s why I have to squeeze out the memories of the few who do remember.”
    I know he’ll help me, because Moisés is an obliging type, always willing to help anyone. But I realize at the same time he’ll have to break through his own psychological reservations, do himself a kind of violence, since he had worked closely with Mayta and they had certainly been friends. Is he made uncomfortable by the memory of Comrade Mayta in this office full of leather-bound books, a parchment map of old Peru, and some fornicating pre-Colombian deities from Huacas in a glass case? Does having to speak again about the activities and illusions he and Mayta shared make him feel he is in a slightly false situation? Probably. Remembering Mayta makes even me—and I was never one of Mayta’s political buddies—ill at ease, so the important director of the Action for Development Center must…
    â€œHe was a good guy,” he says prudently. At the same time, he looks at me as if to discover in my deepest, most secret innermost self my own opinion of Mayta. “An idealist, well-intentioned. But naïve, deluded. At least, as far as that rotten business in Jauja is concerned, I have a clean conscience. I told him he was getting into a mess and I tried to get him to reconsider. A waste of time, of course, because he was stubborn as a mule.”
    â€œI’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…”
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œBut there’s one thing you have to recognize,” he quickly