The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta Read Online Free PDF Page A

have pained him, he was a real intellectual. I still remember the hard tone in which he referred to intellectuals, in that last conversation we had in Plaza San Martín. They weren’t good for much, according to him.
    â€œAt least the ones from this country.” He was specific. “They get too sensualized too soon, they have no solid convictions. Their morality is worth approximately the price of a plane ticket to a youth congress, a peace congress, etc. That’s why the ones who don’t sell themselves for a Yankee scholarship, or to the Congress for the Freedom of Culture, let themselves be bribed by Stalinism and become party members.”
    He pointed out that Vallejos, surprised at what he had said and at the tone in which he had said it, looked him up and down, with his spoon suspended midway between his mouth and the bowl. He had upset him and, in a way, put him on his guard. A bad job, Mayta, a very bad job. Why did he let his temper and impatience get the better of him when the subject was intellectuals? What was Leon Davidovich, after all? He was an intellectual, and a genial one, and Vladimir Ilyich as well. But both of them had been, above and beyond everything else, revolutionaries. Didn’t you blow off steam against the intellectuals out of spite, because in Peru they were all reactionaries or Stalinists, and not a single one a Trotskyist?
    â€œAll I mean is, you can’t count much on intellectuals for the revolution.” Mayta tried to smooth things over, raising his voice so he could be heard over the huaracha “La Negra Tomasa.” “Not at first, in any case. First come the workers, then the peasants. The intellectuals bring up the rear.”
    â€œWhat about Fidel Castro and the 26 of July people in the mountains of Cuba, aren’t they intellectuals?” countered Vallejos.
    â€œMaybe they are,” admitted Mayta. “But that revolution is still green. And it isn’t a socialist revolution but a petit-bourgeois revolution. Two very different things.”
    The lieutenant stared at him, intrigued. “At least you think about those things,” he said, recovering his aplomb and his smile between spoonfuls of soup. “At least you don’t get bored talking about the revolution.”
    â€œNo, it doesn’t bore me.” Mayta smiled at him. “On the contrary.”
    My fellow student Mayta—he never became “sensualized.” Of all the impressions I have of him from those fleeting encounters we had over the course of the years, the strongest is of the frugality that emanated from his person, from his appearance, from his gestures. Even in his way of sitting in a café, of looking over the menu, of telling the waiter his choice, even in his way of accepting a cigarette, there was something ascetic. That was what gave authority, a respectable aura, to his political theories, no matter how wild they may have seemed to me, no matter how lacking in disciples he was. The last time I saw him, weeks before the party where he met Vallejos, he was over forty and had spent at least twenty years in the struggle. No matter how much anyone might dig into his life, not even his worst enemies could accuse him of profiting, even once, from politics. On the contrary, the most consistent aspect of his career was always to have taken, with a kind of infallible intuition, all the necessary steps so that things would turn out for the worst, so that he would be entangled in problems and complications. “What he is is an amateur suicide,” a friend we had in common once said to me. “An amateur, not a real suicide,” he repeated. “Someone who likes to kill himself bit by bit.” The idea set off sparks in my head, because it was so unexpected, so picturesque, like that phrase I’m sure I heard him use that time, in his diatribe against intellectuals.
    â€œWhat are you laughing at?”
    â€œAt the phrase ‘to