Notes on The Real Life . . .

Fascinating Passages

“Not even friendship comes before the revolution for a revolutionary: get that through your head and never forget it” (65).

Such an astonishing thing to hear Mayta say, considering he is actually the one being blinded by the relationship, by his erotic attraction to Vallejos, to the extent that he underestimates the whole revolution.  These moments where Mayta was shown to grapple with his sexual orientation, to grapple with being human and being in love, were some of the most powerful for me—politics and Peru aside.

“That’s how I work.  And I think the only way to write stories is to start with History—with a capital H.” / “I wonder if we ever really know what you call History with a capital H,” Maria interrupts.  “Or if there’s as much make-believe in history as in novels” (67).

This portion of dialogue—as well as other moments in the text when Llosa pondered his creative process—really got me thinking about how be forge fiction and forge history in very similar ways.  Both are constructed and artificial.  Who is to say that a story has less validity as a piece of history than, well, a piece of history?  I think this has a lot to do with the way Llosa blurred the lines here between tenses, perspectives, scenes, etc.

Striking Imagery

His feet worked like clock hands permanently set at ten minutes to two (5).

Mayta saw it: thick, leafy, closed, hieroglyphic; and he saw himself, next to Vallejos and Ubilluz and an army of shadows . . . where he would be forced to disperse, to dilute his strength, to atomize himself in the indescribably labyrinth (132).

Now we’re leaving the open country and in the darkness I can make out an agglomeration of low and tenuous shadows: the shacks.  Made of adobe, corrugated sheet metal, boards, and straw matting, they give the impression of being half-finished, interrupted just as they were taking shape (308).

Character-Driven Moments

Moises makes the military men feel like civilians, the priests like laymen, and the bourgeois like proletarians, true native sons of the nation (28).

That’s what you see in the photo: a tired man.  Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that’s much older, the fatigue of a life that has reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta’s case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, policial deceptions, want, bad food, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling a victory (14).

“. . . He had a self-destructive streak.  He was always heterodox, a rebel by nature.  As soon as he got involved in something, he began to dissent and he ended up in the dissenting faction.  Disagreeing was his strongest instinct” (31).

Could there have been anything as captivating for a man like Mayta that out of the blue having someone stick a sub-machine gun in his hands? (66)

He says he doesn’t care if the terrorists win, because “nothing could be worse than what we’re already living” (110).

. . . and Adelaida thought: Now is the moment.  mayta was right next to her on the sofa, and she waited.  But he didn’t even try to hold her hand, and she said to herself: He must really be in love with me. 

A total orphan.  That’s what he became, by being a militant in smaller and smaller, even more radical sects, looking for an ideological purity he never found (141). 

“It’s easy if you know the topography of the mountains, if you know how to fire a Mauser, and if the Indians rise up” (15).

“It bothers me because I realize that you know more about it than I do.”  He smiles (295).

Narration Through Aphorism

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing (79).

I only want to garner as much information, as many opinions about him as I can, so that later I can add a large dose of fancy to all that data, so I can create something that will be unrecognizable version of what actually happened (81).

Miscellaneous Excerpts/Notes

Maya demurred, afraid to reopen a discussion that would keep him from his cigarette (46).

I like the way this desire to smoke helps direct the pacing of the scene, and likewise in the scene with Adelaide, when Mayta continuously asks for a drink of water.  It’s almost neurotic.

“I don’t know how you can sleep with that noise every night.” / “I can sleep with that noise because I don’t have any choice,” Mayta replied (103).  What a GREAT way to show that Mayta has been wrestling with his sexuality without saying he’s been wrestling with his sexuality.

Were the mountains accepting him? (137).

And I shall think, remember, and imagine until, just before dawn, I give form to this episode in the real life of Alejandro Mayta.  A whistle blew and the train began to move(145).

Indeed, this is often how we create stories—by thinking, remembering, and imagining in equal parts.  And only then does the train begin to move.

“You’re the Mayta of the Jauja business with Lieutenant Vallejos?”  I hesitatingly ask. / “No, I’m not that one,” he blurts out, realizing what’s going on.  “He’s not here anymore” (284).

Huge irony in this scene.  I loved the anti-climax here.

Best Song About Trotsky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B4bsqYxwo0

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta | Peter | Thoughts

Initially thoughts and points before jumping into passages I like/demonstrate some of the initial points.

-First the use of time – The quick and unmarked shifts between present and past provide many layers to the story. In addition to having the narrators point of view, and the point of view of his interview subject, Llosa throws us into the past to provide internality and externality of Mayta. It’s somewhat jarring at first but ultimately an extraordinarily effective way to related the story. Huge amount of craft on Llosa’s part.

-The novel is very aware of the fact that it’s a novel. This allows the narrator, and hence the author, to comment on: politics (specifically the divisions and fallout from Marxism to Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, etc.), history, “present day” trash and filth filled Peru, social issues (the various thoughts about homosexuality), and finally, the actual construction of a narrative and the idea of truth.

-I’m a long opponent of writing about writing because the genre seems to have been coopted by people who simply have nothing to write about. In the case of Llosa, he clearly has a lot to write about and the writing on writing serves a broader function re: the construction of narrative/story and questions the importance of truth. So, I put him in the category of people who write about writing for a worthwhile end – although it’s nearly ad nauseum… 

-Meta at its pinnacle, or close...

-In general, although much of it is history and politics (not to mention the fact that our narrator’s opening and final opinion doesn’t explicitly change), it was effective as literature, a telling of history, and also eliciting emotions of both revolutionary joy and hopelessness. And it didn’t fail as an epistemological venture (and I’m a huge zealot on this idea: often holding the position that if one’s interested in epistemological discussions, one ought to study academic philosophy first…)

-Lastly, the novel/narrator often contradicts itself on universal values, i.e., we can and will know the truth/it’s impossible to know the truth. This idea of truth ties into the idea of real, which makes me think about the title. Many times I thought there’s a reason this book isn’t called “The TRUE Life…”

On the Dialogue

--Much of the book is dialogue, and when characters speak they speak for long periods of time. He has a reflective and explanatory sensibility.

“Mayta agreed, ‘Blind terrorism, cut off from the masses, estranges the people from the revolutionary vanguard. We are going to be something else: the spark that lights the fuse, the snowball that turn into the avalance.’

‘You’re waxing poetic today.’ Anatolio burst out laughing… “(83) 

Passages of Value/ Some Sentences I liked

“The assault on heaven, I thought. We shall bring heaven down from heaven, establish it on earth; heaven and earth were becoming one in this twilight hour. The ashen clouds in the sky met the ashen clouds from the fires. And those little black spots that flew, innumerably, from all four points on the compass toward Cuzco—they weren’t ashes but vultures. Spurred on by hunger, braving smoke and flames, they dove on towards their desirable prey. From the heights, the surrvioviors, parents, wounded, the fighters, the internationalists, all of them, with a minimum of fantasy, could hear the anxious tearing, the febrile pecking, the abject beating of wings, and smell the horrifying stench.” (200-201)

“…I still have a vivid impression of his insecurity and histrionics. Ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid meeting writers I like, so that the same thing that happened with the poet Cardenal doesn’t happen with them. Every time I try to read him, something like acid flows out of the book and ruins it—the memory of the man who wrote it.” (80)

The senator (On writing, crafting, truth)

“’I don’t know if I’ve acted properly in speaking to you so frankly,’ he says to me. It’s one of my defects, I know it. But in this case, for political reasons, it would be better not to stir up the mud and spatter people with it. But, after all, you aren’t a historian but a novelist. If you had said, I’m going to write an essay, a sociopolitical study, I wouldn’t have said a word. Fiction is different. You can believe what I’ve said or not, of course.’

            I inform him that all the testimonials I get, true or false, are useful to me. Did it seem to him I would disguard his assertions? He’s wrong. What I use is not the truth of testimonies but their power to suggest, their power as inventions, their color, their dramatic strength…” (101)

“Nowadays, Mayta thought, they use electric shocks on the testicles, sodium-pentothal injections, immersion in tubs of shit, cigarette burns. Not much progress in this field.” (Great tear on torture 108.)

“One person was sure I’d never be allowed to enter Quero, because the army uses it as a concentration camp and torture center. ‘That’s where they bring prisoners from all over the Mantaro Valley to make them talk. They use the most up-to-date methods. When they’ve finished with the prisoners, they take them up in helicopters and drop them out over the Jungle to terrorize the Reds, who are supposedly watching from below.” (246)

“As I fall asleep, I hear a rhythmic noise. No, it isn’t the night birds. It’s the wind , which slaps the waters of Lake Paca against the terrace of the inn. That soft music and the beautiful, starry night sky of Jauja Suggest a peaceful land and happy, tranquil people. They lie. Because all fictions are lies.” (276)

The Professor asking

“’Does it make any sense to be writing a novel with Peru in this condition and Peruvians all living on borrowed time?’ Does it make any sense? I tell him it certainly does because I’m doing it.” (140)

“…he’s impressed me as being a bitter man interested in nothing.” (149)

“A lady tells the man who’d been talking about filling the pots of water that he’s an ignoramus. When the bombs start falling, all you can do is pray! Pots of water against bombs! What did he think, that war was like a carnival, stupid asshole?” (157).

“’If I didn’t know it was against your principles, I’d ask you to have an abortion,’ said Mayta, as if he’d prepared the statement.” (194)

The narrator on the novel “’Something inspired by his life. Not a biography but a novel. A free history of the period, Mayta’s world, the things that happened in those years’” (15)

“Revolutionaries wore ties in those days.”

“His ugliness is so outrageous that it’s charming.” (207)

On Mayta – “’I don’t know, maybe not, he was like granite.”’ (41)

On the university system “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… He had withdrawn from the university in disgust: real culture was just the opposite of what they were teaching.” (48)

“My last trip involved some slapstick comedy. When I finally figured out that I was definitively stuck in the mud, I asked some boys talking on the corner to give me a push. They helped me, but before getting down and pushing, they held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me it I didn’t give them everything I had.” (52)

“If… I also succumb to despair, I won’t write this novel. That won’t help anyone. No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.” (79)

Other Places

 On 96 – the discussion w/ the politician – on homosexuality, and how it leads to the downfall of society. It’s hilarious, on one level, because it’s juxtaposed with the politician, who’s clearly the actual source of the stratification of Peru. The narrator explicitly address the inherent contradictions between the senator and his description of Mayta on 98.

On 107, the discussion of informers, how easy it was to get people thrown into jail at the time. By looking through the slit.

Still reflecting on what/how to put into my work, but I will revisit this book w/out a doubt. 

Compendium--The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

General Ideas/Questions

Early on, wondering why we need the filter of this first-person narrator.

For a while, I wondered whether Mayta was an actual person or not, and then I spent a while wondering whether it mattered. I'm still not sure I've come to a conclusion.

Page 66: "This is make-believe, a novel,' says Juanita, with a smile that forgives me for my transgression. 'This isn't at all like the real story, in any case.'" I'm not sure how seriously to take this comment in the context of the story, and indeed this idea was one I'd already been considering, that the project of our character's book was the book that we were reading.

Page 166: "…that's the Mayta of those days, the one I perceive best among all the other Maytas." This is the line where I finally put together at least some variation of a logical reason for all the different tenses and POVs--they're all meant to be different fragmentary representations of the person the author is attempting to recreate.

Passages

Page 14: "That's what you see in the photo: a tired man. Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that's much older, the fatigue of a life thathas reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta's case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, political deceptions, want, bad food, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling a victory. And nevertheless, in that exhausted and tense countenance, there glows as well, somehow, that secret, intact integrity in the face of setbacks which it always thrilled me to find in him over the years, that juvenile purity, capable of reacting with the same indignation to any injustice, in Peru or at the ends of the earth, and that honest belief that the most urgent task, the one that could not be shirked, was to change the world." So much of the story to this point has moved quickly, but here we pause for nearly an entire page just to look at a picture, to fully explore a character in a single moment -- everything else has discovered character in summary, but here close detail gives us a different yet equally fragmented glance into this person who we only know via memory.

Page 44: "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." Normally I hate moves like this, which seem forced almost entirely to build a nonexistent tension. Here, however, it works well because I believe it. I believe that the narrator really doesn't have an answer, and I'm just as invested as he is in following his journey. I feel him truly flummoxed and attempting to work through it.

Page 110: "I know he's wrong, that it can still get worse, that there are no limits to our deterioration, but I respect his grief and keep my mouth shut." In many ways, this line alone feels like a key to all the thematic elements of the book (putting aside the trickery of differing POVs and all of that). There is a dread that follows everyone in this story, a dread of things falling apart, of the revolution failing and destroying what society there was out of good intentions, of a constant downward spiral. Also, this idea of an overbearing silence/fear -- Mayta has his secret, no one wants to open the hornet's nest that our narrator keep asking questions about, the narrator is terrified of being on the streets at all times of day.

Page 232: He had an ambiguous feeling, exaltation and anxiety, because even though the police were locked up, and their weapons captured, and the telephone and telegraph knocked out, wasn't their little group extremely vulnerable? Could you begin a revolution just like that? He gritted his teeth. You could. You had to be able to." I love the idea of this ambiguous feeling. Plus, the oscillation of this vulnerability even as it seems like they have all their bases covered, and yet the ridiculousness of thinking that anything in this small moment could begin a revolution -- especially the hilarious boy scout walk as this small group of 10 people marches down the streets proclaiming revolution.

Techniques

We start with the personal, with our main character taking a morning run, which then expands into a full view of the neighborhood/world, where we're quickly immersed into the way that this universe works, and that understand is then quickly used to funnel us back into the personal, but a different person (Mayta) by describing his responses to the world. All of this allows us as readers to nearly immediately understand everything we need to get in order to know the way the book will function -- POV, place, main characters and their relationship to the narrator, in a page and a half.

Writing two completely disparate moments in the same paragraph/moment with no transition: a scene of backstory at the same time as a scene in present time -- sometimes (page eight, the dialogue particularly) without even telling us that we're switching timelines other than through clues in the action itself.

Lots and lots of lengthy lists.

By chapter three, we're incorporating three moments into the same scene seamlessly -- Mayta is conversing with Vallejos, with Vallejos' sister the nun, and our narrator is conversing with the two nuns from different convents, all jumping back and forth without transitions.

Page 95: "'You know that Mayta was a homosexual, of course.'" We've seen this for a while in the text, which I'm slowly coming to the decision that the past-tense of this story is an actual novel being worked on while we're seeing the accumulation and gathering of knowledge in the present tense. So, here we're learning something in the time of the narrator that has already been established in the past -- or, we're seeming to learn it before the narrator, in a way.

Page 112: "Did Mayta…He would have…he began to feel the altitude…" Here we're jumping from supposition about him into the actual story of Mayta (whether that's his actual story or the novel being written or something else I haven't considered), an easy transition that almost feels unnecessary since we've switched so many times before.

Page 115: "You were in Jauja, Mayta, but you didn't feel well." The transitory techniques are changing. Mayta is being addressed rather than narrated now, and a few pages earlier his story bled into its own moment in the middle of paragraphs. Something about the text is changing here -- it almost feels like the balance of power between narrator and character is shifting.

Page 120: "It was true. He had never felt anything like that pressure in his temples and that giddiness in his heart…" And now, the text is clearly interacting with itself. The present-day story's dialogue is now creating responses in the past-day characters. The narration of the third person is taking our present-day first-person POV as a launching pad for the actions that have already happened.

Page 152: "'Actually, there are only seven of us,' I correct him." Mayta has taken over the I perspective, suddenly, as well as the present tense. Is the story taking over the novel, have the two characters simply switched roles? On the next page, we jump into a backstory that's Mayta and past tense -- suddenly, the book has fallen back in time to the actual story our narrator was writing, it seems, with Mayta as the protagonist and his history being relayed in memory.

Page 204: "But Juan Zarate has. Every so often, he would come to Lima from Pucallpa or Yurimaguas, where he was working in lumber camps, and they would have lunch. But ever since this stuff began--the attacks, the kidnappings, the bombings, the war--he hasn't written or come: he's either dead or he is one of them." While it's likely that this Adelaide talking, it certainly seems possible to be a moment where, possibly for the first time, we're jumping into an omniscient third-person POV that's following someone other than Mayta or a person in direct contact with Mayta. This is complicated, and pointed out, explicitly on the next page, where "Mayta's son is not asleep. In the small headquarters dugout, he argues, trying to impose his point of view." That's a hilarious nod to the reader, in my opinion, while also fitting perfectly in story. I want to be able to do that some day.

Page 230: "It seemed incredible that everything was going so well, Mayta." Is this Mayta thinking of himself in third person, or the narrator speaking to the character he's created, or something else?

Chapter eight, instead of one or two large players, we're now introduced to bit players who each had momentary parts in the attempted revolution. An interesting technique when so much of the novel has explored, slowly, the lengthy machinations of a small moment in time, to here go quickly through these moments.

Page 249: "He really should say, "We left."" Interesting that for all the second-nature telling of the stories, all the people lying about their part in each moment, the story that we're told, from Mayta's point of view, never changes. That is always consistent, never seeming to go back to rewrite or redefine.

Stories/lines/ideas to steal/attempt

Been a while since I've said this, but I just flat want to steal the premise of the book -- or at least the premise as I see it here, about five pages in. I love this idea of a tell-all book about a famous political activist (I keep imagining it as a Chairman Mao-type, rather than the revolutionary Mayta's described as) from the perspective of a close friend. It loses something in describing it, and I've deflated about halfway on the idea just in writing those last few sentences, but I was immediately wanting to try writing it when I started reading.

Page 22: "…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…'"

Page 51: "Most people are honest because they have no choice…"

Page 123: "My job is to listen, observe, compare stories, mix it all together and weave a fantasy."

Page 145: "And I shall think, remember, and imagine until, just before dawn, I give form to this episode in the real life of Alejandro Mayta."

Page 157: "A hunchback is looking at her legs."

Great Fire Notes

Fascinating Passages

In the interest of coherence, an infinity of impressions have been sacrificed and, along with them, some experienced truth.  So it must be reworked.  In the meantime, the thing emerges as worth doing (87).

He said, “I should get back to my China puzzle” (176).

These two passages, while they ostensibly refer to Leith’s writing project, give me a better sense of how Hazzard feels about her own work, and this novel in particular.  At least that’s my theory.  The process of writing is likened to assembling a puzzle, but one that requires sacrifice and prioritizing, one that is anything but straightforward.  Most importantly, though, Leith sees the importance of the thing he is constructing, and decides not to abandon it.  I have found this to be true with my own projects.

. . . Peter watched these disputations, thick-bodied women stumping off to fetch cake and a bowl of sugar . . . the airy room, the light of Asia, and strange red lilies in a vase could do nothing for them (83).

I found this passage really intriguing because of the sexist subtext in it.  There were also other places in the novel where a character (usually Exley) would size up women in a wholly physical sense and make snap judgments about their worth.  How impressive that Hazzard, a female author, was able to capture that degradation in such a natural, subdued way, without making it come across overblown.

Vocabulary

antipodes: places diametrically opposite each other on the globe.

imprecations: curses, maledictions

unguent: ointment or salve used on wounds

deciduous: falling off or shed at a particular season

inanition: exhaustion from lack of nourishment;

pusillanimous: lacking courage or resolution; cowardly;

avuncular: of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an uncle:

jingoistic: a person who professes his or her patriotism loudly and excessively, favoring                             vigilant preparedness for war and an aggressive foreign policy

Sensuality (as in the senses)

Leith encountered on a landing the smell of hospital—of military hospitals behind the lines, to which regulation antiseptic soups and soaps were common.  Field hospitals, by contrast, smelt thickly of mortality: reek of spilt intestines and festered blood, of agony, fear, decay (13).

Filth was in fact on Peter Exley’s mind those first weeks: the accretion filming the Orient, the shimmer of sweat or excrement . . . and the great clots and blobs of tubercular spittle shot with blood, unavoidable underfoot: what Rysom called “poached eggs . . .” (73).  Really felt grounded in the scene here—much more visceral and appealing for me than  some of Leith’s sections.

With celluloid spoon, the professor probed slack pudding (18).

She thought his eyes, well, beautiful (12).

Interesting Dialogue

“Her age is the devil.” / “And partly the attraction.” (147).

“You look a sight, I must say . . . as if you’ve been pulled backward through a hedge.” (152)

He asked, “Why do I tell you this?” / “You’re telling yourself.” (199).

Aphoristic Language

A man who hasn’t killed is incomplete, analogous to a woman who has never given birth (133).  Prime example of Hazzard’s use of aphorism.

Woman’s sympathy should be complete, untainted by the reproach of common sense” (188).

How, with the evidence before them, men can contemplate more war is incomprehensible and terrifying (317).

Strategies/Choices of the Author

-Hazzard has a habit of interrupting dialogue, the first part spoken, the second part reported by the omniscient narrator who, for a moment, is pretending to be limited (24).  I’m thinking this could be interesting for a time, but it seems overused.

-Found the section(s) with Peter Exley much more visceral and appealing, at least for the most part.  The details and sensuality of things were given more attention, reflecting inward on Exley’s persona, (70-. . .

-Leith doesn’t seem to have anything definite at stake until around page 120-130, when it becomes clear that he is infatuated with Helen, and serious about her.

-Narrator says that Leith has “killed, hand to hand,” but we very rarely catch a glimpse of this, or even the notion that Leith is struggling with it.

-repeated use of “another man might have” or “any other man . . .” to show intimacy between Peter and Aldred, the uniqueness of their relationship (145).

- Helen looks at me as no one has for years.  Perhaps, no one ever (101).  POV shifts to first person here, in the middle of the section, without warning.  Hazzard does this a few times, and I feel resistant to it, but I want to believe it’s doing something important.

Lloas, Mario Vargas. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. New York: FSG, 1986. Print. “That’s what you see in the photo: a tired man. Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that’s much older, the fatigue of a life that has reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta’s case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, political deception, want, bad food, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling a victory.” (14) “She’s right. Why? Because his case was the first in a series that would typify the period? Because he was teh most absurd? Because he was the most tragic? Because his person and his story hold something ineffably moving, something that over and beyond it’s political and moral implications is, like an X-ray of Peruvian misfortune?” (15) “But after talking with him a while, he was sure he wasn’t any of those things; he was a stray angel with wings who had no idea where he’d landed.” (16) “‘Shut up and dance.’ Alci had just gotten loose from Pepote and was tugging Vallejos out of his chair. “I’m not going to spend the whole night dancing with this lug. It’s like dancing with a leech. Come on, a mambo.” (18)—I was waiting for more of this levity. I really enjoyed this beat. “He was still in that adolescence in which politics consists exclusively of feelings, more indignation, rebellion, idealism, dreams generosity, disinterestedness, mysticism.” (20) “‘What he is is an amateur suicide,’ a friend we had in common once said to me. ‘An amateur, not a really 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.” (23) “Later they invent theories to justify their betrayal.” (23) “Stacked against the walls were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them, which they had never got around to handing out. There were a couple of chairs with their bottoms hanging out, and a few three-legged stools that looked as though they might belong either to a milkmaid or to a medium. Some mattresses were piled on top of each other and covered with a blanket.” (30)—a vivid, political description of a new place. “Disagreeing was his strongest instinct.” (31) “He laughs and I laugh, but we’re not laughing at the same thing.” (33) “They face each other and balance each other out in their silver frames: Moises shaking hands with Senator Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was in Peru promoting the Alliance for Progress, and Moises next to Premier Mao Ze-dong in Beijing, with a delegation of Latin Americans. In both, he flashes a smile of neutrality.” (33) “‘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 the moment as if he had just noticed I was still there.” (41) “‘The search for perfection, for the pure.’ Moises smiles. ‘He was a very good Catholic when he was a boy. He even went on a hunger strike so he could know how the poor lived. Did you know that? That’s maybe why he was that way. When you start looking for purity in politic, you eventually get to unreality.’” (43)—This is a repeat of an earlier scene: I felt like I was in on a joke. “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.” (45) “‘Ten minutes have gone by. Shall we go?’ ‘We’ll have to find out why Pallardi and Carlos didn’t come,’ said Jacinto. ‘Carlos was the only one of the seven who led a normal life,’ Moises says. ‘ A contractor, he owned a brickworks. (46) —why does this work? “At that moment, the three of them had to hug the wall to keep from being run over by a crowded bus that came sliding over the sidewalk.” (47)—surprising and realistic ‘The Spanish literature professor seemed convinced that it was more important to read what Leo Spitzer had written about Garcia Lorca than to read Lorca himself...” (48) “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 hearth, the reign of justice, equality, fraternity.” (48) “They helped me, but before getting down to pushing, they held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me if I didn’t give them everything I had.” (53) —what a strange contradiction. “‘’He had no idea what was going on in the convents, seminaries, the parishes. He knew nothing about our revolution...He opened his eyes wide and said, ‘We’re not so far apart, after all.’’” (61) “Through the rain of sand, Mayta looked at him. He imagined the women who had kissed those clean-cut features, bitten those fine lips, who had writhed under the lieutenant’s body.” (69) “No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.” (79) “A man with a dream, a man who’s been rejuvenated. And with an optimism he hadn’t felt for years. It was as if the mounds of books and newspapers piled around him were burning with a mild, all-encompassing fire that, instead of burning him, kept his body and his soul in a kind of incandescence.” (83) “It would seem that over the years Senator Campos has lost the habit of self-criticism.” (92) “‘In byzantine problems—mental masturbation totally unrelated to the real world. We’re disconnected from the masses, we have no roots in the people. What kid of revolution were we going to bring about? You’re very young. But I’ve been in this thing for a long time, and the revolution isn’t an inch closer to taking place. Today, for the first time, I’ve felt we were advancing, that the revolution wasn’t a dream, but flesh and blood.” (94) “Senator Anatolio Campos goes his way and I remain at the head of the main staircase of the congress, facing the river of people, mini-buses, cars, buses, the hustle and bustle of Plaza Bolivar. Until I lose sight of it along Avendia Abancay, I watch a decrepit city bus, gray and leaning over to the right, whose exhaust pipe , flush with the top of the roof, spouts a column of black smoke...‘Some spare change, boss.’ ‘Anything you can give mister.’ (105) — One of the few lengthy descriptions of the environment. “The most contemporary of the tortures is the hood—a cloth placed over the nose or in the mouth, through which water was poured, so that the victim could not breathe. (108) “Three cops: they threw her into their car, stripped her—after heading her up for fighting back—and raped her. Then they let her out in front of her ouse, saying, ‘just be thankful we didn’t shoot you.’” (110)—these are cops speaking. “‘It’s always the same, when you’re trying to delve into a historical event’ I reply. ‘ One thing you learn, when you try to reconstruct an event , from eyewitness accounts, is that each version is just someone’s story, and that all stories mix truth and lies.” (118) Was he going to faint? Was he going to die? It was a sinuous, treacherous malaise: it came and went. He was at the edge of a precipice, but the threat of falling into the abyss never materialized.” (120) “Between a question and an answer, any time a speaker paused—that the absence of motors, horns, screeching brakes acceleration, and voices seemed to have its own sound. That silence must have covered Jauja like a night laid over the night; it was a thick presence in the room and it rattled him.” (126) “There is a placid silence, the kind you find in books by the Spanish writer Azorin, broken from time to time by the cry of a night bird, invisible under the eaves of a house.” (143) Beginning on page 154, the narrative got a little confusing. Well, more confusing than it had been. “The false smile bares his stained teeth. With a brusque sesture, he pushes aside a small boy who tries to shine his shoes. ‘They had no one to give them to, they had no one to shoulder those rifles,’ he mocks.” (156) pg. 162—Is this in Mayta’s mind? “That the events in Jauja contributed years later, even indirectly, to Blacquer’s fall to the status of nonperson in which he’s lived is yet another proof of how mysterious and unforeseeable the ramifications of events are, that unbelievably complex web of causes and effects reverberations and accidents that make up human history.” (165) “That they were talking about conjugal proglems in that final converations , when Mayta was already halfway to Jauja, disappoints me. I was hoping to find something spectacular, something dramatic in that last conversation, something that would throw a conflicting light on what Mayta was feeling and dreaming on the even of the uprising. But to judge by what I’m hearing, I see that you two spoke more about you than about him. Sorry for interrupting, let’s go on.” (187) —this structure was getting confusing. We weren’t staying in one POV, we weren’t staying in one point in time, and we weren’t following any narrative conventions. somnambulistic (194)—what a word. “‘I want to be what I am,” I muttered, “I’m a revolutionary and I have flat feet I’m also a queer. I don’t want to stop being one. It’s difficult to explain it to you. In this society, there are rules and prejudices; whatever seems abnormal seems a crime or a sickness. All because society is rotten, full of stupid ideas. That’s why we need a revolution, see?” (195) “The effect it had on her was like that of seeing grown men playing children’s games, a persecution complex that poisoned life. How can you enjoy life if you’re constantly afraid of a universal conspiracy of informers, the army the APRA, the capitalists, the Stalinists, the imperialists, etc., etc., against you?” (202) “Once again, I have to allow the airmen to frisk me. They let me pass. As I walk along, past houses sealed up with stone and mud, all around me I hear noises that are no longer exclusively shots. There are hand grenades exploding and cannon being fired.” (206)—Nice raising of the imaginary stakes. “In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events. This investigation, theses interviews, I didn’t do it all so I could relate what really happened in Jauja, but so I could lie and know what I’m lying about.” (287) “That soft music and the beautiful, starry night sky of Jauja suggest a peaceful land and happy, tranquil people. They lie, because all fictions are lies.” (276) “And so, climbing up, always up, two by two, they went on for a period that to Mayta seemed like house, but which couldn’t have been because it hadn’t grown a bit darker.” (267) “Although he was tired and still occasionally bothered by the altitude, Mayta felt fine. Were the Andes finally accepting him after tormenting him for so long? Had he received his baptism?” (258) “Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.” (246)—I think I’ve heard Susan say something like this before, regarding Riverside.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta Notes

“That’s what you see in the photo: a tired man. Tired from not having slept enough, from having walked a lot, or, maybe, tired from something that’s much older, the fatigue of a life that has reached a boundary, not old age yet, but something that might well be old age if behind it there is, as in Mayta’s case, nothing but lost illusions, frustrations, mistakes, enemies, political deceptions, wan, bad good, jail, police stations, an underground life, failures of all kinds and nothing even remotely resembling victory. And nevertheless, in that exhausted and tense countenance, there glows as well, somehow, that secret, intact integrity, in the face of setbacks which it always thrilled me to find in him over the years, that juvenile purity, capable of reacting with the same indignation to an in justice, in Peru or at the ends of the earth, and that honest belief that the most urgent task, the one that could not be shirked, was to change the world.” P.14

-Pretty in depth character analysis, perhaps says too much at the outset, but certainly sets up expectation and creates a grandness around the character. This description is nicely rooted in a photo and introduces the idea of the deception of photos, of the way something may look or seem, which is integral to the story too. Also, reveals something of the writer/narrator and what he is looking for, what he is drawn to in Mayta as a character, as a failure and in whatever ways a victor.

“I know he’ll help me, because Moises is an obliging type, always willing to help anyone. But I realize at the same time he’ll have to break through his own psychological reservations, do himself a kind of violence, sine he had worked closely with Mayta and they had certainly been friends. Is he made uncomfortable by the memory of Comrade Mayta in this office full of leather-bound books, a parchment map of old Peru, and some fornicating pre-Colombian deities from Huacas in a glass case? Does having to speak again about the activities and illusions he and Mayta shared make him feel he is in a slightly false situation? Probably. Remembering Mayta makes even me—and I was never one of Mayta’s political buddies—ill at ease, so the important director of the Action for Development Center must…” p.30

-Again, carrying the physical space into the interior and opening up the tension involved in even bringing up Mayta, which reinforces the worthiness of learning about him. The discomfort mentioned here is one that persists throughout and, over time, accumulates to show a sort of mockery of socialism, communism and revolution.

“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 Matya’s story intrigues and disturbs me…But it’s also possible that the whole historical context has no more importance than as décor 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.” P.44

-Genius set-up of the writing of the novel as an integral piece of the novel’s narrative structure. It sets up the journey, that we will discover along with this author the reason for the book, which invites closeness, a trust, which is incredibly important before fracturing/blurring the narratives.

“‘I wonder if we ever really know what you call History with a capital H,’ Maria interrupts. ‘Or if there’s as much make believe in history as I novels. For example, the things we were talking about. So much as been said about revolutionary priests, about Marxist infiltration in the Church…But no one comes up with the obvious answer.’” P.67

-Asks the reader to question both the book, and the idea of the book, and then moves, after this passage, deftly into the Mayta time-switch, the first, I think. The idea of knowing you should disbelieve, actually creates a strange trust of the untrue, of history rather than History, and invites all of it, in its paradoxical mess, to hang together as one. Already I’m prepared for Mayta to be many different people and for this writer man to be disappointed.

-calumny: slander; the making of false and defamatory statements to damage reputation

“But of course I say nothing at all. I’m not here to contradict anyone. My job is to listen, observe, compare stories, mix it all together and weave a fantasy.” P.123

-And yet, this so perfectly evades the responsibility of the novelist, which is to present only that which we ought to consider, as the curator of the story.

“But Blacquer and I skirt these momentous issues and chat about that insignificant, forgotten episode of a quarter century ago, the key to my novel.” p.147

-the difference, perhaps, between the key to a historical event and the key to a novel, in that it lives in the tiny, small turns, the individual, the invisible

“He would have to be a machine. It was something he remembered from his military instruction course: a lucid robot, who is neither early nor late, and, above all. Who never doubts; a fighter who executes his orders with the precision of an electric mixer or a lathe.” P.210

-Such great commentary on what it means to be soldier, and the machine comparison seems so apt. Also a great way to implicate an electric mixer.

“What would he do in that new society if he was still alive? He wouldn’t accept any important place in government, in the armed forces, or in the diplomatic service. Maybe a political post, a minor one, perhaps in the country, on a collective farm in the Andes, or on some colonization project in the Amazon region. Social, moral, and sexual prejudices would give way little by little, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone, in that crucible of work and faith that Peru would be in the future, the be living with Anatolio.” P. 244

-Mayta’s beautiful, delusional idealism and optimism, but what makes him a compelling character

“Tales. In Quero, there’s not a sign of either insurgents or soldier. I’m not surprised that reality contradicts these rumors. Information in this county has ceased to be objective and has become pure fantasy—in newspapers, radio, television, and ordinary conversation. ‘To report’ among us now means either to interpret reality according to our desires or fears, or to say simply what is convenient. It’s an attempt to make up for our ignorance of what’s going on—which in four hear of hearts we understand is irremediable and definitive. Since it is impossible to know what’ really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.” P.246

-Um, so relevant, esp in our internet age

“I’m shocked, because this whole year I’ve been obsessed with the subject, and I naively supposed the major actor in it would be too, and that his  memory would still go on scratching away at what happened  in those few hours a quarter century ago. Why should it be that way? All that, for Mayta, was one episode in a life in which, before and after, there were many other episodes as important, or even more so. It’s only normal that these other events would replace or blur Jauja.” P.295

-Such a lovely new perspective to come flying in at the end, it feels like refreshing breeze. To open this up and ask if we are even after the right narrative, rather than to offer some kind of definitive answer to the unanswerable questions being posed throughout.

“I too, lose something at that moment: my interest in this conversation. I know I’m not going to get from my false fellow student anything more than what I’ve already got: the depressing confirmation that he is a man destroyed by suffering and resentment, who has even lost his memories. Someone in essence quite different from the Mayta of my novel, that obstinate optimist, that man of faith who lives life despite the horror and misery in it. I feel uncomfortable, as if I’m abusing him by keeping him here—it’s almost midnight—in a predictable conversation that has no substance.” P.303

-Raises the level of the significance of this story and questions of the role of history and memory, what the value should be. Ultimately, his book is, like the quote above, an ignorant attempt at reconciling the unreconcilable. While simultaneously tying up several narrative threads. Pretty impressive.