PEARL K. BELL
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ity remains essential to his artistic vision and his fictional methods.
In his most recent book,
The Real Life ofAleJandro Mayta,
he sets out to
explore the nature of political commitment through a Trotskyist rev–
olutionary who in the late fifties had organized an uprising in the
Andean village of Jauja. The novelist who narrates the story had
been a schoolmate of Alejandro Mayta but lost track of him in the
years after the abortive uprising. Jogging along
die
streets of Lima
one morning- a Lima of the mind that is drowning in garbage and
on the verge of devastation in a war between guerrillas supported by
Russian and Cuban troops, and the ruling junta shored up by United
States Marines-he decides to find out what happened to his unlucky
school friend.
In a kaleidoscopic series of interviews with former comrades of
Mayta, his ex-wife, the aunt who raised him, those who respected
him and those who despised him, the novelist hopes to piece together
the truth about the Andean fiasco and, along the way, learn why
Mayta became a revolutionary, and whether his fervid idealism sur–
vived the years of imprisonment and obscurity that followed the An–
dean adventure. Bit by bit the pieces of the past fall into place. The
uprising, it turns out, was a preposterous farce. Mayta's splinter
group had only seven members, none of whom had any faith in their
bumbling, inarticulate comrade as a revolutionary leader. He is in–
competent at mustering the weapons and men he needed, and his
cadre in the end consists of seven local schoolboys for whom the up–
rising is a great lark. They don't know what Mayta is talking about
when he cries, "Why don't we sing 'The International,' comrades?"
so they belt out their school song and the national anthem instead.
When he tries to enlist some peasants into his toy army, the bold
conspirator is unnerved when they ask what help they can expect
from the Soviet Union. "He didn't have the heart to talk to them
about the betrayed revolution, the Stalinist bureaucratization, about
Trotsky. He felt it wouldn't be prudent to confuse them with all that
stuff just yet." Some Trotskyist.
The portrait of Mayta as a complex exemplar of revolutionary
temperament and circumstance gradually becomes more sharply de–
fined, and so does the author's sardonic exasperation with the revo–
lutionary's political naivete and his grandiose hopes for his two-bit
conspiracy. Neither does Vargas Llosa ignore the poignancy of
Mayta's futile dedication. Yet in the end we are left with a nagging
question about the modernist techniques Vargas Llosa employs in
