Revolving a Rubik Cuba
Francis King
THE REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA by Mario Vargas Liosa
Faber & Faber, L9.95
The present of this novel is a future in which Peru is about to suffer the fate of Vietnam. An insurrection, supported by the 'Cubans and Bolivians, is attempting to topple the Lima government, which then turns to the United States for assistance. With his country on the verge of disintegra- tion and destruction, a famous Peruvian novelist who both is and is not the famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, embarks on a project to write a fiction about a real-life character, a Trotskyist revolutionary, who many years before was involved in an abortive and now forgotten coup with no more than three adults and seven adolescents as co-adjutants. A coup on such a pathetically small scale was, one would conclude, bound to end in ingnomi- nious failure. But, at the outset, let us remember, Castro's revolution was little more substantial.
In many ways the Peruvian novelist's quest for Alejandro Mayta resembles A.J.A. Symons's quest for Corvo. Painstak- ingly he travels about Peru, often at considerable danger to himself as the imminent civil war gathers about him, to search out and interview all those who knew his subject — the aunt who adopted him after the death of his mother, the wife who deserted him, confederates in the Trotskyist cell to which he belonged, fel- low prisoners in the gaols in which he was confined and sometimes even tortured. The novelists's declared object is to estab- lish the truth about the obscure revolution- ary in order to be able to tell the lies about him demanded by fiction. In this he differs from most other novelists who prefer to imagine their own 'truth' with as little reliance on researched facts as possible. The construction of the novel, an intri- cate marvel, can best be compared to that of a Rubik cube. The present tense is used for a present that is, in fact, the future. The past tense is used for what the enquiring novelist first learns and then, having learned, sets about half-forgetting and re-imagining. Sections of past and present are juxtaposed, like the unmatching squares of the cube, often so abruptly that, even with the guidance of tense, it becomes difficult to know precisely where one is situated in the narrative. This confusion becomes worse when Mayta, whose experi- ences are for the most part described in the third person, intermittently takes over the same kind of first perSon narration used by the novelist. When this occurs, one assumes that it is with an object in view: to demonstrate how, in a sense, any success- ful creator of a character becomes his creation.
Like actors in a film, knowing only as much of the script as concerns their own roles, the novelist's informants constantly force him to re-adjust his view. His own recollection of Mayta, from their shared schooldays, is of a man of simple, heroic idealism, tormented by the deprivation all around him. But the simplicity, the hero- ism and the idealism are all in turn called into question by his informants. Here, at all events, is one of those 'pure' revolu- tionaries, never at home in any party, since to be a member of a party is, inevitably, to acquiesce in compromises, trickeries, even dishonesties. There is something pathetic and absurd about the abortive coup, but there is also something noble and grand. It resembles a child's sketch for what Castro was subsequently to achieve in Cuba, thus giving to Latin Americans the conviction, previously denied to them, that a success- ful Marxist revolution was by no means impossible.
Since, as a deliberate irony, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is in fact, the fictionalised life of Alejandro Mayta, there is much in the narrative about the homosexuality that the author describes as the little revolutionary's Achilles heel. When his colleagues in the Troskyist cell resolve to expel Mayta, it is inevitable that they should give this homosexuality, pre- viously regarded with indifference, as one of their reasons. At the close of the book — when the separate squares of the Rubik cube at last click miraculously into their proper places — the novelist has succeeded in tracking down the real Mayta, who, after many years in prison, is now working in a café. So far from having practised homosexuality, he is disgusted by it. He is married, he has four children. The novel- ist, we learn, recreated him as a homosex- ual 'in order to accentuate his marginality'.
Although, curiously, the translator is named nowhere in the book, he must be American. This will, inevitably, not merely detract from any English reader's pleasure but make it initially difficult for him to accept that all the events are taking place, not in New York State, but in Peru. Words like 'guy', `joeboy"snotnose' and 'cute', and sentences like 'She has to be over 70, but she sure doesn't show it' and 'We'll have to kick ass' are bad enough. Worse is the constant use of the word 'fag', which to an English reader of my generation im- mediately suggests an activity at once more arduous and innocent than the one to which, in fact, it refers.
But the power of the novel is such that the irritation of these infelicities soon ceases to obtrude. At the outset the narra- tor sees Mayta and his story as holding `something ineffably moving, something that, over and beyond its political and moral implications, is like an x-ray of Peruvian misfortune'. It is with a brilliantly accurate x-ray of the South American revolutionary spirit that Vargas Llosa here presents us.
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