Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

go over some questions with you for a little while?”
    Persian history, Charlemagne, the Aztecs, Charlotte Corday, the external factors of the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the birth and death of Danton: hoping she would have an easy question, hoping she would pass. They went back to the first courtyard, sat down on a bench. A newsboy came in hawking the evening papers, the boy who was next to them bought El Comercio and a moment later said bastards, that was too much. They turned to look at him and he showed them a headline and the picture of a man with a mustache. Had they put him in jail, exiled him, or killed him, and who was the man? There was Jacobo, Zavalita: blond, thin, his blue eyes furious, his finger pointing to the picture in the newspaper, his drawling voice protesting, Peru was going from bad to worse, a strange Andean trace in that milky face, where you stuck your finger, pus came out, as González Prada had said, seen on occasion and from a distance on the streets of Miraflores.
    “Another one of those?” Ambrosio asks. “Lord, San Marcos was a nest of subversives, boy.”
    Another exact model of one of those, he thinks, in revolt against his skin, against his class, against himself, against Peru. He thinks: is he still pure, is he happy?
    “There weren’t so many, Ambrosio. It was only by chance that the three of us came together that first day.”
    “You never brought those friends from San Marcos home,” Ambrosio says. “On the other hand, young Popeye and his schoolmates were always having tea at your place.”
    Were you ashamed, Zavalita? he thinks: that Jacobo, Héctor, Solórzano didn’t visit your home and the people you lived with, didn’t meet your old lady and listen to your old man, that Aída didn’t hear Teté’s delightful idiocies? He thinks: or that your old man and old lady shouldn’t know who you hung around with, that Sparky and Teté shouldn’t see Martínez’ toothless half-breed face? That first day you began to kill off the old folks, Popeye, Miraflores, he thinks. You were breaking away, Zavalita, entering another world: was it then, was it then that you shut it off? He thinks: breaking with what, entering what world?
    “They heard me talking about Odría and they left.” Jacobo pointed to a group of candidates going off and he looked at them with a curiosity that had no irony. “Are you people afraid too?”
    “Afraid?” Aída straightened up immediately on the bench. “I say that Odría is a dictator and a murderer and I’ll say it here, in the street, anywhere.”
    Pure, like the girls in Quo Vadis, he thinks, impatient to go down into the catacombs and come out into the arena and throw herself into the lions’ claws and fangs. Jacobo was listening to her disconcertedly, she’d forgotten about the exam, a dictator who’d risen to power at bayonet point, she was raising her voice and waving her arms and Jacobo was nodding and looking at her sympathetically and he’d suppressed parties and the freedom of the press and now all worked up and had ordered the army to massacre the people of Arequipa and now bewitched and had jailed, deported and tortured so many people that no one even knew how many, and Santiago was looking at Aída and Jacobo and suddenly, he thinks, you felt tortured, exiled, betrayed, Zavalita, and he interrupted her: Odría was the worst tyrant in the history of Peru.
    “Well, I don’t know if he’s the worst or not,” Aída said, pausing for breath. “But he’s one of the worst, that’s for sure.”
    “Give him time and you’ll see,” Santiago insisted, with drive. “He’ll be the worst.”
    “Except for that of the proletariat, all dictatorships are the same,” Jacobo said. “Historically.”
    “Do you know the difference between Aprismo and Communism?” Santiago asks.
    “We can’t give him time to become the worst,” Aída said. “We have to overthrow him before that.”
    “Well, there are a lot of