He takes me by the arm, but just to whisper in my ear: “As for what we’ve discussed here, I haven’t said a word about anything. Not about Mayta, not about Jauja, nothing. No one’s going to accuse me of undermining the democratic left in these times by reviving a polemic about prehistoric events. If you were to use my name, I’d have to deny everything,” he goes on as if he were joking, although both of us know that just below his light tone there lies a warning. “The left decided to bury that episode, and that’s the only reasonable idea just now. A time will come for a full airing of the matter.”
“I understand you perfectly, Senator. Don’t worry about a thing.”
“If you were to have me say something, I’d have to sue you for libel,” he says, winking at me and at the same time patting, as if by accident, the bulge in his jacket where his pistol is. “Now you know the truth, use it — but not my name.”
He extends a cordial hand toward me and winks again in a roguish way: he’s got short, thin fingers. Hard to imagine them squeezing a trigger.
“Have you ever envied the bourgeoisie?” Mayta asked.
“Why are you asking me that?” says Anatolio, surprised.
“Because I, who was always scornful of them, envy them something,” Mayta said. Would he laugh?
“What’s that?”
“Being able to take a bath every day.” Mayta was sure the boy would at least smile, but he never saw even the slightest sign of it. He was still sitting on the edge of the cot. He’d turned a bit to the side, so that now Mayta could see his long, dark, bony, serious profile, bathed in the light coming through the window. He had wide, prominent lips, and his large teeth seemed to glow.
“Mayta.”
“Yes, Anatolio?”
“Do you think our relationship can go back to what it was before tonight?”
“Yes, the same as it was before,” said Mayta. “Nothing’s really happened, Anatolio. Did anything really happen? Get it through your head, once and for all.”
Just for a brief second, and very faintly, the pitter-pat of little feet in the attic came back, and Mayta noticed that the boy stiffened and tensed up.
“I don’t know how you can sleep with that noise every night.”
“I can sleep with that noise because I don’t have any choice,” Mayta replied. “But it isn’t true that you can get used to anything, as people say. I haven’t gotten used to not being able to take a bath whenever I want. Even if I can’t remember when I had an apartment with a private bath. It was probably when I lived with my aunt Josefa over in Surquillo a million years ago. Even so, it’s something I miss every day. When I come home tired and I can only wash myself like a cat down in the patio and I carry a pan of water up here to soak my feet, I think how terrific it would be to take a shower, to get under the water and feel it wash away the filth, the problems. To sleep all refreshed … What a good life the bourgeoisie have, Anatolio.”
“There’s no public bath around here?”
“There is one five blocks from here, where I go once or twice a week,” said Mayta. “But I don’t always have the money. A bath costs the same as a meal at the university dining hall. I can live without bathing, but not without eating. Do you have a shower at your place?”
“Yeah,” said Anatolio. “The problem is, there isn’t always water.”
“You lucky dog.” Mayta yawned. “See, in some ways you’re a little bit bourgeois yourself.”
Again, Anatolio did not smile. They were silent and still, each one in his place. Although it was dark, Mayta noted the signs of dawn on the other side of the tiny window — a couple of car horns, indistinct voices, movement. Could it be five, or perhaps six? They had stayed up the whole night. He felt weak, as if he had made some great effort or had gotten over a serious illness.
“Let’s sleep awhile,” he said, turning over on his back. He covered his eyes with his forearm and slid over as far as he could to make room. “It must be very late. Tomorrow, I mean today, we’ll have to kick ass.”
Anatolio said nothing, but after a bit, Mayta felt him move, heard the bed creak, and glimpsed him stretch out, also on his back, next to him, but careful not to touch him.
“Mayta.”
“Yes, Anatolio?”
The boy said nothing, even though Mayta waited quite a while. He felt him breathing anxiously. Then Mayta’s unruly body began to heat up again.
“Go to sleep,” he repeated. “And tomorrow all we think about is Jauja, Anatolio.”
“You can give me a hand job if you want,” Mayta heard him whisper timidly. And, in an even lower, frightened voice: “But nothing more than that, Mayta.”
Senator Anatolio Campos goes his way, and I remain at the head of the main staircase of the Congress, facing the river of people, mini-buses, cars, buses, the hustle and bustle of Plaza Bolívar. Until I lose sight of it along Avenida Abancay, I watch a decrepit city bus, gray and leaning over to the right, whose exhaust pipe, flush with the top of the roof, spouts a column of black smoke. Clinging to its doors, a cancerous growth of people miraculously hangs on, just grazing the cars, the light posts, and the pedestrians. Everyone’s on his way home. On every corner, there’s a compact mass waiting for the buses and mini-buses. When the vehicle stops, there is a melee of pushing, shouting, shoving, insults. They are all humble, sweaty people, men and women for whom this street fighting, all to clamber onto those stinking hulks — on which, when they finally get on, they travel a half hour or forty-five minutes, standing, crowded together, angry — is an everyday routine. And these Peruvians, despite their poorly made, slightly absurd clothes, their sleazy skirts, their greasy ties, are members of a minority blessed by fortune. No matter how modest and monotonous their lives may be, they have jobs as office girls or minor officials, they have their little salaries, their social security, their retirement guaranteed. Highly privileged people, compared with those barefoot cholitos over there: I’m watching them pull a cart filled with empty bottles, cutting through the traffic, spitting. I also see that family in rags — a woman of indeterminate age, four kids covered with scales of grime — who from the stairs of the Museum of the Inquisition stretch their hands out toward me automatically, as soon as they see I’m close: “Some spare change, boss.” “Anything you can give, mister.”
Suddenly, instead of continuing toward Plaza San Martín, I decide to go into the Museum of the Inquisition. I haven’t been here for a long time, maybe since the last time I saw my schoolmate Mayta. As I go through the museum, I can’t get his face out of my mind, as if that image of a prematurely aged, tired man that I saw in the photo in his godmother’s house were evoked in some irresistible way by the place I’m visiting. What’s the connection? What secret thread links this all-powerful institution, which for three centuries kept guard over Catholic orthodoxy in Peru and the rest of South America, and the obscure revolutionary militant who twenty-five years ago, for a brief moment, flashed like a bolt of lightning.
What was the Palace of the Inquisition is in ruins, but the eighteenth-century mahogany ceiling panels are in good condition, as a lecturing schoolteacher explains to a group of kids. Beautiful ceiling: the Inquisitors were men of taste. Almost all the Sevilian tiles the Dominicans imported to dress up the place have disappeared. Even the brick floors were brought from Spain; now you can’t see them for the soot. I pause for a minute at the stone shield that proudly overlooked the archway of this palace, the shield with its cross, sword, and laurel. Now it sits on a broken-down sawhorse.