adds in a very serious voice. âThere wasnât 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, donât you think?â
âThe meeting is called to order,â 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, âreadâ 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 itâhe 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 Dorichâs house. Trotskyâs ideas were brought to Peru by a handful of surrealists who had come back from ParisâPablo de Westphalen, Abril de Viveo, and César Moro. Comrade Jacinto was one of the founders of the first Trotskyist organizations, the Marxist Workersâ Group (in 1946), the forerunner of the Revolutionary Workersâ 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 directorateâthis 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 Jacintoâs contemporaries, had stayed in RWP. Why, then, was he in the Revolutionary Workersâ Party (T[rotskyist])? So he wouldnât 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.
â Workers Voice ,â said the secretary general. âThatâs the most urgent matter.â
âLeft-wing childishness, being in love with contradiction, I donât know what to call it,â says Moisés. âThe 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 Maytaâs 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 Torreâs 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 thatâs how, without our knowing it, we ended up collaborating with the Communist Party. The concrete result was the Panóptico prison. Our baptism of fire.â
He laughs and I laugh. But weâre 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. Iâm laughing at two photographs I have just discovered in the office. They face
Elmore - Carl Webster 03 Leonard