The newspapers sensationalized the girl’s suicide and fanned public opinion. A few days later, the police announced that they had captured the head of the group — Mayta — and that his accomplices would be captured momentarily. According to the police, Mayta admitted his guilt and gave all the details. His accomplices and the money vanished. At the trial, Mayta denied he had ever taken part in the kidnapping, denied he had even known about it, and insisted that he was tortured into making a false confession.
The trial lasted several months, and at the outset it got a lot of attention in the papers. But that quickly faded. Mayta was sentenced to fifteen years: the court found him guilty of kidnapping, criminal extortion, and complicity in a homicide. He swore he was innocent. That on the day of the kidnapping he was in Pacasmayo looking into a possible job, as he said again and again, but he could provide no witnesses, no proof. The testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Fuentes was especially damning. Both were sure that Mayta’s voice and physical appearance were those of one of the men in ski masks. Mayta’s lawyer, an obscure shyster whose performance during the entire trial was awkward and halting, appealed. The Supreme Court upheld the original sentence two years later. The fact that Mayta was set free after serving two-thirds of his time certainly corroborates what Mr. Carrillo told me at Lurigancho: that his behavior during those years was exemplary.
On Tuesday, at 8 p.m., when I drive over to pick him up at the ice-cream parlor, Mayta is waiting for me, carrying an airline bag, which probably contains the clothing he wears at work. He’s just washed his face and combed that wild hair of his; a few drops of water run down his neck. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt, a faded, much darned checked jacket, wrinkled khaki trousers, and heavy shoes, the kind used for hiking. Is he hungry? Shall we go to a restaurant? He says he never eats at night and that it would be better if we were just to look for a quiet place. A few minutes later, we’re in my study, face to face, drinking soda. He doesn’t want beer or anything alcoholic. He tells me he gave up smoking and drinking years ago.
The beginning of the chat is rather sad. I ask him about the Salesian School. He did study there, correct? Yes. He hasn’t seen any of his schoolmates for ages, and knows only the slightest bit about a few of them, professional men, businessmen, or politicians — the ones whose names appear in the papers. And nothing about the priests, although, he tells me, just a few days ago he ran into Father Luis on the street. The one who taught the youngest students. A little old man, almost blind, bent over, dragging his feet, propelling himself along with a broomstick. He told Mayta that he was in the habit of taking his little strolls on Avenida Brazil, and that he had recognized him, but Mayta smiles; of course he had no idea to whom he was speaking. He must be a hundred years old.
When I show him the material I’ve gathered about him and the Jauja adventure — articles clipped out of newspapers, photocopies of reports, photographs, maps with routes traced on them, cards on the participants and on witnesses, notebooks with data and interviews — I see him sniff, look through it, and handle it, an expression of stupor and embarrassment on his face. Several times, he gets up to go to the bathroom. He has a problem with his kidneys, he explains, and constantly feels like urinating, although most of the time it’s a false alarm and there are only a few drops.
“On the bus, at home, at the ice-cream parlor, it’s a real pain. It’s a two-hour commute, I told you already. I just can’t make it all the way, no matter how much I pee before I get on. Sometimes there’s nothing I can do except wet my pants like a baby.”
“Were the years in Lurigancho tough?” I stupidly ask.
Disconcerted, he stares at me. There is total silence outside on the Malecón de Barranco. You can’t even hear the surf.
“Well, you don’t live like a prince,” he answers after a bit, shamefaced. “It’s hard, especially at the beginning. But you can get used to anything, don’t you think?”
Finally, something that jibes with the Mayta of the witness accounts: that modesty, that reticence when it comes to speaking about his personal problems or revealing his inner feelings. What he never did get used to was the National Guard, he soon admits. He hadn’t known what hate was until he discovered the feeling they inspired in the prisoners. Hatred mixed with absolute and total terror, of course. Because when they come through the wire fences to stop a riot or break up a strike, they always do it by shooting and beating, no matter who gets it, the righteous and the sinners.
“It was at the end of last year, wasn’t it?” I say. “When there was that massacre.”
“December 31,” he says, nodding. “A hundred or so came in to celebrate New Year’s Eve. They wanted to have some fun, to bring in the New Year with a bang, as they said. They were all stinking drunk.”
It was around 10 p.m. They emptied their rifles from the doors and windows of the cell blocks. They stole all the money, liquor, marijuana, and coke they could find in the prison, and until dawn they went on having fun, shooting, beating the prisoners with their rifle butts, making them hop around like frogs, making them run the gauntlet, or just kicking in their teeth.
“The official figures list thirty-five dead,” he says. “Actually, they killed at least twice that many, even more. The newspapers said later that they’d thwarted an escape attempt.”
He makes a gesture of fatigue and his voice becomes a murmur. The convicts piled up on top of each other, like a rugby scrum, mountains of bodies, for self-protection. But that isn’t his worst prison memory. The worst was probably the first months, when he was brought from Lurigancho to the Palacio de Justicia for prosecution, in one of those crowded paddy wagons with metal walls. The prisoners had to ride hunched down, with their heads touching the floor. If they raised their heads even slightly to try to sneak a look out the window, they were savagely beaten. The same thing on the return trip: to get back on the wagon from the lockup, they had to run the gauntlet, a double line of National Guards. They had to decide whether to protect their heads or their testicles, because all along the route they were hit with billy clubs, kicked, and spit on. He remains pensive — he’s just returned from the bathroom — and he adds, without looking at me: “When I read that one of them’s been killed, I feel really happy.”
He says it with a quick and profound resentment that disappears a second later when I ask him about the other Mayta, that curly-headed, skinny guy who shook in that odd way.
“He’s just a sneak thief whose brain has melted away from cocaine,” he says. “He won’t last long.”
His voice and his expression sweeten when he talks about the food kiosk he ran with Arispe in building 4. “We created a genuine revolution,” he assures me with pride. “We won the respect of the whole place. We boiled the water for making fruit juice, for coffee, for everything. We washed the knives, forks, and spoons, the glasses, and the plates before and after they were used. Hygiene, above all. A revolution, you bet. We organized a system of rebate coupons. You might not believe me, but they only tried to rob us once. I took a gash right here on my leg, but they didn’t get a thing. We even set up a kind of bank, because a lot of cons gave us their money for safekeeping.”
It’s clear that for some reason he’s really reluctant to speak of the thing that interests me the most: Jauja. Every time I try to bring it up, he starts to talk about it, and then, very quickly, inevitably, he switches to some current topic. For example, his family. He tells me he got married in the time he was free between his last two terms in Lurigancho, but that he actually met his wife in jail, the time before. She would come to visit her brother, and he introduced her to Mayta. They wrote each other, and when he was released, they got married. They have four children, three boys and a girl. It was really hard on his wife when he was imprisoned again. During the first years, she had to practically kill herself to feed the kids, until finally he could help her, thanks to the kiosk. During those first years, his wife knitted, and peddled her work from door to door. He also tried to sell her knitting — there was some demand for sweaters — in Lurigancho.