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.