Seeing Red the Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

By R.Z. Sheppard

Misty Lima, with its quaint colonial architecture and pleasant neighborhoods, is being squeezed by invading slums. Running along a seaside road, a jogger sees servants and municipal workers dumping garbage on the cliffs. In his latest novel, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa supersedes this real present with a likely future. In the provinces, government forces supported by U.S. Marines battle insurgents backed by the Soviet Union, Cuba and Bolivia. But it is the past that is central to the book. Its narrator is a Vargas Llosa-like writer in search of information for a novel about his former Marxist classmate Alejandro Mayta. Was he a hero or just a "forty-year-old man with flat feet, who's spent his life in the catacombs of theoretical revolution?"

Alejandro is an illusive character because his friends and enemies tell contradictory stories about him, but more important because the narrator repeatedly reminds the reader that his investigations are a preparation for lying, for conjuring a fiction. Such modernist hugger-mugger has great potential for tedium. But Vargas Llosa's lucid intellect and technical gifts allow him to toy with uncertainty and shuffle time with deceptive ease. A good deal of Peru's mournful history and wretched present are economically conveyed. Leaving the Museum of the Inquisition, the narrator is confronted by a score of beggars. "They constitute a sort of grotesque royal court of tatters, grime, and scabs," he observes. "As soon as they see me, they stretch out their black-nailed hands and beg. Violence behind me and hunger in front of me. Here, on these stairs, my country summarized."

This and similarly graphic scenes serve to frame the novel's artfully related subjects: the fiction writer's need to acknowledge the deceitful nature of his craft, and the political activist's need to convince himself that his ideology is the only truth. The tragedy of Alejandro Mayta is that the give-and-take of public affairs is too perplexing for his blind faith. Like the narrator, he cannot escape the comic ironies that respect no certitudes. When free as an Andean condor, Mayta is a dedicated Communist. Imprisoned, he is a revolutionary whose zeal leads to reforming the convicts' commissary and a modest career in capitalism.