The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

development of the class struggle on all five continents, the pauperization of the neocolonial nations, monopolistic concentration…”
    He started out smiling, but now his expression is sour. He puts the fork he was just raising to his mouth back down on his plate. Just a second ago, he was eating heartily, praising the Costa Verde’s cook: “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to eat like this with what’s going on?” Suddenly he’s lost his appetite. Have the memories he’s dredged up as a favor to me depressed him?
    â€œMayta and Vallejos did me a huge favor,” he murmurs, for the third time that morning. “If it hadn’t been for them, I would still be in some dinky group trying to sell fifty copies of a biweekly newsletter, knowing all the time the workers would never read it, or that, if they did read it, they would never understand it.” He wipes his mouth and gestures to the waiter to remove his plate.
    â€œWhen the Vallejos business began, I no longer believed in what we were doing,” he adds, with a funerary air. “I realized full well that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, except back to jail once in a while, into exile once in a while, and to political and personal frustration. Nevertheless… Inertia, something like that, or something I can’t define. A panic about feeling disloyal, a traitor. To the comrades, to the party, to your own self. A terror about wiping out in one shot something that, for better or for worse, represented years of struggle and sacrifice. Priests who leave the Church must feel the same thing.” He looks at me at that moment as if he had just noticed I was still there.
    â€œDid Mayta ever feel discouraged?”
    â€œI don’t know, maybe not, he was like granite.” He is thoughtful for a moment and then shrugs. “Maybe he did, but secretly. I suppose we all have those flashes of lucidity in which we see we are at the bottom of a well, without a ladder. But we would never admit it, not for a second. Yes, Mayta and Vallejos did me a big favor.”
    â€œYou repeat it so often it seems as though you don’t believe it. Or that the favor hasn’t really been of any use to you.”
    â€œIt really hasn’t been much use to me,” he affirms with a sad gesture.
    And when I laugh and make fun of him, telling him that he’s one of the few Peruvian intellectuals who have achieved independence, and that, in addition, he is one of the few about whom one can say that he does things and helps to do things for his colleagues, he disarms me with an ironic look. Am I talking about Action for Development? Yes, I am: it’s helped Peru and certainly contributed more to the nation than twenty years of party militancy. Yes, it also helped the people whose books it published; it got them grants and liberated them from that whorehouse of a university. But it had frustrated Moisés. Not in the same way the RWP(T) had, of course. He had always wanted—he looks at me as if wondering whether I’m worth the revelation—to be one of them. To do research, to publish. An old, very ambitious project that he knew full well he would never carry out: an economic history of Peru. General and detailed, from the pre-Inca cultures to our own times. Forgotten, like all his other academic projects! To keep the center alive meant being an administrator, a diplomat, a publicity agent, and, most of all, a bureaucrat twenty-four hours a day. No—twenty-eight, thirty. For him, the day was thirty hours long.
    â€œDon’t you think it’s wonderful that an ex-Trotskyist who spent his youth fulminating against the bureaucracy should end up a bureaucrat?” he asks, trying to recover his good humor.
    â€œThere’s nothing more to be said,” protested Comrade Joaquín. “There’s nothing more to be said about the subject and that’s it.”
    How right you are, thought