“Now, when I say seven, I mean seven full-time professionals,” Moisés clarifies after a moment. “There were also the fellow travelers, students and workers with whom we set up study groups. And we had some influence in some unions — Fertisa, for example, and Civil Construction.”
The waiter brings the ceviche, and the shrimp look fresh and moist. You can sense the picante in the very aroma. We drink and eat, and as soon as we finish, we get back down to business. “Are you sure you never saw Vallejos?”
“Mayta was the only one who saw him. For a long time, anyhow. Later on, we named a special commission. The Action Group. Anatolio, Mayta, and Jacinto, I think. They all saw him for sure, a few times at least. The rest of us, never. Don’t you understand? He was in the army. What were we? Underground revolutionaries. And him? A second lieutenant!”
“He’s been ordered to infiltrate our group,” said Comrade Joaquín. “At least that much is clear, I hope.”
“That’s what I thought at first, of course,” Mayta agrees. “Let’s review the facts, comrades. Are they that dumb? Would they send a lieutenant to infiltrate the party who spouts off about the socialist revolution at a birthday gathering? I got him to spill his guts, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His heart’s in the right place, but he’s naïve, emotional. He talks about revolution without knowing what it is. He’s an ideological virgin. The revolution for him is Fidel Castro and his happy band of bearded heroes taking potshots out in the Sierra Maestra. It sounds like a good thing to him, but he just doesn’t understand how it works. Mind you, I’ve only had a little time to sound him out, that’s as far as it goes.”
He sat down and was talking rather impatiently because over the course of the three-hour session he had finished off all his cigarettes and he was dying for a smoke. Why didn’t he believe Vallejos could be an intelligence officer ordered to gather information about the RWP(T)? And if he were? Was it so strange the army would resort to such a crude plan? Weren’t the cops, the military men, and the whole Peruvian bourgeoisie all crude? But the jovial and exuberant image of the young chatterbox again dispelled his suspicion.
He listened to Comrade Jacinto agree with him: “Maybe they have ordered him to infiltrate us. At least we have the advantage over him of knowing who he is. We can take the necessary precautions. If they’re giving us the chance to infiltrate them, it’s our revolutionary obligation to take advantage of it, comrades.”
That’s how a subject that had provoked innumerable arguments in the RWP(T) suddenly resurfaced. Should the party have as one of its goals infiltrating the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, in order to form cells made up of soldiers, sailors, and airmen? Or to indoctrinate the troops about their common cause with the proletariat and the peasants? Or was it a mistake to present the idea of a class struggle to the military, because over and beyond their social differences, there was an institutional link, an esprit de corps that united enlisted men and officers in an unbreachable unity? Mayta was sorry he had reported on the lieutenant. This was going to go on for hours. He dreamed about soaking his swollen feet in a washbasin. He had done it that morning when he came home from the party over in Surquillo, happy that he had gone over to give his aunt-godmother a hug. He had fallen asleep with wet feet, dreaming that he and Vallejos were running a race on a beach that could have been Agua Dulce, empty of swimmers, at dawn. He was falling behind, and the boy kept turning back to cheer him on, laughing. “Get a move on, come on, or are you getting so old you’ve run out of breath, Mayta?”
“Those meetings would drag on for hours. By the end, we’d all lose our voices,” says Moisés, digging into the rice. “For example: Should Mayta go on seeing Vallejos or be on the safe side and drop him? Things like that, you just didn’t decide in a minute. Oh, no. You had to analyze the circumstances, the causes, and the effects. We had to wring out a slew of hypotheses. The October Revolution, the relationship among socialist, capitalist, and bureaucratic-imperialist forces in the world, the development of the class struggle on all five continents, the pauperization of the neocolonial nations, monopolistic concentration…”
He started out smiling, but now his expression is sour. He puts the fork he was just raising to his mouth back down on his plate. Just a second ago, he was eating heartily, praising the Costa Verde’s cook: “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to eat like this with what’s going on?” Suddenly he’s lost his appetite. Have the memories he’s dredged up as a favor to me depressed him?
“Mayta and Vallejos did me a huge favor,” he murmurs, for the third time that morning. “If it hadn’t been for them, I would still be in some dinky group trying to sell fifty copies of a biweekly newsletter, knowing all the time the workers would never read it, or that, if they did read it, they would never understand it.” He wipes his mouth and gestures to the waiter to remove his plate.
“When the Vallejos business began, I no longer believed in what we were doing,” he adds, with a funerary air. “I realized full well that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, except back to jail once in a while, into exile once in a while, and to political and personal frustration. Nevertheless… Inertia, something like that, or something I can’t define. A panic about feeling disloyal, a traitor. To the comrades, to the party, to your own self. A terror about wiping out in one shot something that, for better or for worse, represented years of struggle and sacrifice. Priests who leave the Church must feel the same thing.” He looks at me at that moment as if he had just noticed I was still there.
“Did Mayta ever feel discouraged?”
“I don’t know, maybe not, he was like granite.” He is thoughtful for a moment and then shrugs. “Maybe he did, but secretly. I suppose we all have those flashes of lucidity in which we see we are at the bottom of a well, without a ladder. But we would never admit it, not for a second. Yes, Mayta and Vallejos did me a big favor.”
“You repeat it so often it seems as though you don’t believe it. Or that the favor hasn’t really been of any use to you.”
“It really hasn’t been much use to me,” he affirms with a sad gesture.
And when I laugh and make fun of him, telling him that he’s one of the few Peruvian intellectuals who have achieved independence, and that, in addition, he is one of the few about whom one can say that he does things and helps to do things for his colleagues, he disarms me with an ironic look. Am I talking about Action for Development? Yes, I am: it’s helped Peru and certainly contributed more to the nation than twenty years of party militancy. Yes, it also helped the people whose books it published; it got them grants and liberated them from that whorehouse of a university. But it had frustrated Moisés. Not in the same way the RWP(T) had, of course. He had always wanted — he looks at me as if wondering whether I’m worth the revelation — to be one of them. To do research, to publish. An old, very ambitious project that he knew full well he would never carry out: an economic history of Peru. General and detailed, from the pre-Inca cultures to our own times. Forgotten, like all his other academic projects! To keep the center alive meant being an administrator, a diplomat, a publicity agent, and, most of all, a bureaucrat twenty-four hours a day. No — twenty-eight, thirty. For him, the day was thirty hours long.
“Don’t you think it’s wonderful that an ex-Trotskyist who spent his youth fulminating against the bureaucracy should end up a bureaucrat?” he asks, trying to recover his good humor.
“There’s nothing more to be said,” protested Comrade Joaquín. “There’s nothing more to be said about the subject and that’s it.”
How right you are, thought Mayta, nothing more to be said, and besides, what was it they were discussing? A while ago — it was Comrade Medardo’s fault, because he had brought up the question of the participation of soldiers’ soviets in the Russian Revolution — they were arguing about the sailors’ rebellion in Kronstadt and how it was crushed. According to Medardo, that anti-socialist rebellion, in March of 1921, was solid evidence of the doubtful class consciousness of the troops and of the risks of relying on the revolutionary potential of soldiers. On a talking spree, Comrade Jacinto explained that, instead of speaking about their behavior in 1921, Medardo should remember what the Kronstadt sailors had done in 1905. Weren’t they the first to rise up against the tsar? And in 1917, weren’t they ahead of the majority of factories in forming a soviet? The discussion then drifted to Trotsky’s attitude toward Kronstadt. Medardo and Anatolio remembered that in his History of the Revolution he had approved, as a lesser evil, the repression of the uprising because it was objectively counterrevolutionary and aided both the White Russians and the imperialist powers. But Mayta was sure that Trotsky had rectified that thesis later and clarified it: he didn’t participate in the repression of the sailors, which had been, exclusively, the work of the Petrograd committee, headed by Zinoviev. He even went so far as to write that it was at the time of the liquidation of the rebel sailors during the Lenin government that the first manifestations of the anti-proletarian crimes of Stalinist bureaucratization had emerged. Finally, because of an unforeseen twist, the discussion ground to a halt on the question of whether the translations of Trotsky into Spanish were any good. “There’s no way we can vote on this,” Mayta stated. “Let’s see if there’s a consensus. Even though it hardly seems probable to me, I recognize that Vallejos may be under orders to infiltrate us or provoke us in some way. On the other hand, as Comrade Jacinto has said, we should not pass up the opportunity to win over a young officer. Here’s my proposal. I’ll make contact with him, I’ll sound him out, I’ll see if there is any way to attract him. Without, of course, giving him any information about the party. If I smell something suspicious, that’s it. If I don’t, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”