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

When he left them on Alfonso Ugarte to go to his room on Zepita Street, the idea kept buzzing in his head. In front of the Loyaza Hospital, as he waited for a break in the river of cars, trucks, and buses that choked the four lanes, he suddenly understood an association that had been flitting, ghostlike, through his mind since the previous night. That’s what it was: the university. That disillusioning year, those courses on history, literature, and philosophy he’d signed up for at San Marcos University. He had quickly concluded that the professors had lost their love of teaching somewhere along the line, if in fact they had ever had any love for the great works and great ideas they were supposed to teach. To judge by what they were teaching and the kind of papers they expected from their students, it would seem that some kind of inversion had taken place in their dull, mediocre wits. The Spanish literature professor seemed convinced that it was more important to read what Leo Spitzer had written about García Lorca than to read Lorca himself, or to read Amado Alonso’s book on Neruda’s poetry than to read Neruda. And the history professor deemed the sources of Peruvian history more important than Peruvian history. For the philosophy professor, form was more important than ideas and their impact on action … Culture for them had dried up, had become a vain science, sterile erudition separated from life. He had told himself then that this was what was to be expected from bourgeois culture, from bourgeois idealism—leaving life behind. He had withdrawn from the university in disgust: real culture was just the opposite of what they were teaching.
    But had he, Jacinto, Medardo, the comrades of the RWP(T), and those in the other RWP become just as academic? Had they forgotten the true hierarchy of things—that there was a difference between essentials and extraneous matters? Had their revolutionary work become as esoteric and pedantic as literature, history, and philosophy had for the professors at San Marcos? Listening to Vallejos was like being awakened from a dream: “Don’t forget the essentials, Mayta. Don’t get tangled up in superfluous things, comrade.” He knew nothing, had read nothing, was a virgin—all of that—but in one sense he had an advantage over all of them: the revolution for him was action, something tangible, heaven on earth, the reign of justice, equality, fraternity. He could guess what images the revolution took on in Vallejos’s mind: peasants breaking the chains the bosses had shackled them with, workers who went from being servants to being masters of machines and shops, a society in which surplus value no longer fattens up a minority but reverts back to the workers … and he felt a shiver run down his spine.
    Wasn’t he at the corner of Cañete and Zepita? He woke from his reverie and rubbed his arms. Damn! How absent-minded can you get? The corner of Canete and Zepita was one he always avoided, because of the bad taste it left in his mouth whenever he went near it. Right there, in front of the newsstand, the gray-green car had stopped with a screech that still whined in his ears. Before he could figure out what was happening, four thugs got out and he saw four pistols pointed at him. He was frisked, pushed around, and shoved into the car. He had been in police stations and various jails before, but that was the worst and the longest time, the first in which he had been worked over. He thought he would go mad and considered suicide. Ever since, he had avoided that corner, out of a kind of superstition he would have been ashamed to admit. He turned onto Zepita and slowly walked the two blocks to his house. His weariness as usual concentrated in his feet. Damned flat feet. I’m a fakir, he thought. Walking on thousands of tiny needles … He thought: The revolution is a party for that brand-new lieutenant.
    He had the second