Free The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

charts the gradual impoverishment of Lima: the prosperity of Miraflores and San Isidro progressively decays and grows ugly in Lince and La Victoria, then resurges illusively in the downtown area, with the tedious towers of banks, mutual-fund and insurance companies—among which nevertheless there proliferate promiscuous tenements and old houses that stay upright only by a miracle. But immediately after you cross the river, in the so-called Bajo el Puente sector, the city decomposes into vacant lots, where huts thrown together out of matting and rubble have sprung up, slums mixed in with garbage dumps that go on for miles. Once this marginal Lima was only poor, but now it’s a place of blood and terror as well.
    When you come to Avenida de los Chasquis, the asphalt gives out and the potholes take over, but a car can still bounce along a few more yards, fenced-in lots on either side, and broken streetlights—the kids smash the bulbs with slingshots. Since it’s my second visit, I won’t be so dumb as to go beyond the store where I got stuck last time. 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 to pushing, they held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me if I didn’t give them everything I had. They took my watch, my wallet, my shoes, and my shirt. They allowed me to keep my trousers. While they pushed the car, we talked. Were there many murders in the neighborhood? Quite a few. Political assassinations? Yeah, them too. Just yesterday, a decapitated body was found just down the way there, with a sign on it: “Stinking Squealer.”
    I park and walk among dumps that double as pigpens. The pigs root around in these mounds of garbage, and I have to wave both hands around to keep the flies off. On top of and in between the mounds of garbage huddle the huts, made of tin cans, bricks, cement (some), adobe, wood, and with tin roofs (some). They are all half started, never finished, always decrepit, leaning on one another, collapsing or about to collapse, swarming with people who look at me with the same indolence as the last time. Until a few months ago, political violence did not affect the slums on the outskirts of Lima as much as it affected the residential neighborhoods and the downtown area. But now most of the people assassinated or kidnapped by revolutionary commandos, the armed forces, or the counterrevolutionary death squads come from these zones.
    There are more old men than young, more women than men, and from time to time I have the impression that I’m not in Lima or even on the coast but in some village in the Andes: sandals, Indian skirts, ponchos, vests with llamas embroidered on them, dialogues in Quechua. Do they really live better in this stink and scum than in the mountain villages they have abandoned to come to Lima? Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists assure us that, as amazing as it might seem, this is the case. Their expectations for bettering themselves and for simply surviving are greater, it seems, in these fetid dumps than in the plateaus of Ancash, Puno, or Cajamarca, where drought, epidemics, barren land, and unemployment decimate the Indian towns. This is probably true. How else can you explain someone’s choosing to live in these dumps and this filth?
    â€œFor them, it’s the lesser of two evils, a better choice,” said Mayta. “But if you think that just because there is misery in these slums they must contain revolutionary potential, you’re mistaken. These people aren’t proletarians: they’re lumpen. They have no class consciousness, because they aren’t a class. They can’t even imagine what the class struggle is.”
    â€œThen they’re like me.” Vallejos smiled. “What the fuck is the class struggle?”
    â€œThe motor of