Read Online The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online

left, including the important man and his bodyguards with their automatic rifles. In addition to being able to hear the sound of the sea again, we can just make out, over on the left, among the Barranquito jetties, a few surfers waiting for their wave, sitting astride their boards like horsemen. “An attack from the sea would be really easy,” someone says. “There’s no beach patrol. We’ve got to tell the boss.”
    â€œWhat is it about Mayta that interests you so much?” Moisés asks me, as he uses the tip of his tongue to check the temperature of the coffee. “Of all the revolutionaries of those years, he is the most obscure.”
    I don’t know how to go on. If I could, I would tell him, but at this moment I only know that I want to know, even invent, Mayta’s story, and as lifelike as possible. I could give him moral, social, and ideological reasons, and show him that Mayta’s story is the most important, the one that most urgently needs to be told. But it would all be a lie. I truthfully do not know why Mayta’s story intrigues and disturbs me.
    â€œPerhaps I know why,” Moisés says. “Because his story was the first, before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Before that event which split the left in two.”
    He may be right, it may well be because of the precursory character of the adventure. It’s also true that it inaugurated a new era in Peru, something neither Mayta nor Vallejos could guess at the time. But it’s also possible that the whole historical context has no more importance than as decor and that the obscurely suggestive element I see in it consists of the truculence, marginality, rebelliousness, delirium, and excess which all came together in that episode of which my fellow Salesian School chum was the leading character.
    â€œA progressive military man? Are you sure there is such a thing?” mocks Comrade Medardo. “The APRA people have spent their lives looking for one, so he could make their revolution for them and open the doors of the Palace to them. They’ve grown old without finding him. Do you want the same thing to happen to us?”
    â€œIt’s not going to happen.” Mayta smiles. “Because we aren’t going to stage a barracks coup but bring about the revolution. Don’t worry, comrade.”
    â€œWell, I for one am worrying,” said Comrade Jacinto. “But about something more terrestrial. Did Comrade Carlos pay the rent? I don’t want the old lady down here again.”
    The meeting was over, and since they never left all at once, Anatolio and Joaquín had gone first. Mayta and Jacinto waited a few minutes before leaving. Mayta smiled as he remembered that night. The old lady had walked in unexpectedly right in the middle of a hot discussion of the agrarian reform that Paz Estenssoro’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement had instituted in Bolivia. Her entrance had left all of them stupefied, as if the person who opened the door were an informer and not that fragile little figure with white hair and a bent back, leaning on a metal cane.
    â€œGood evening, Mrs. Blomberg,” Comrade Carlos reacted. “What a surprise.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you knock?” protested Comrade Jacinto.
    â€œI don’t have to knock on the door to my own garage, do I?” retorted the offended Mrs. Blomberg. “We agreed that you would pay the rent on the first. What happened?”
    â€œWe’re a bit behind because of the bank strike,” said Comrade Carlos, stepping forward, trying to block Mrs. Blomberg’s view of the poster with the bearded men and of the stacks of Workers Voice . “Here’s the check, see?”
    Mrs. Blomberg calmed down when she saw Comrade Carlos take an envelope out of his pocket. She looked over the check carefully, nodded, and said goodbye, muttering all the while that in the future they should pay on time because at her