Redeemers (13 page)

The young Mariátegui, on January 3, 1915, wrote an enthusiastic review in
La Prensa
of
El cóndor pasa
in which he praised “the orientation that it has signaled in the sense of themes specifically national that are, indisputably, those that our writers may treat with greater precision and greater success among the public.” And he began to explore the significance of a contemporary figure who had led an uprising of Indians against
gamonalismo
in the highland zone of Puno. The man was Rumi Maqui (“Stone Hand” in Quechua), the combat name adopted by Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas. He was a former sergeant major of cavalry in the Peruvian army and a former provincial official. He had been sent to the Puno region by the government of President Guillermo Billinghurst to investigate massacres of Indians perpetrated in four of its districts. The ex-soldier was so appalled that finally, when he was almost fifty years old, he led a peasant uprising in the Azángaro district of Puno. It was a brief but intense rebellion, and the rebels set out on a march with the goal of seizing and dividing the large estates and the ultimate aim of restoring the empire of the Incas. The rebellion was crushed by the Peruvian army in 1916, shortly after its first major victory. Despite its failure, the rebellion seemed to demonstrate that the Andean Indians were not merely at the margins of what seemed to be the Peruvian nation. In response to the feudal exploitation, the violence and virtual enslavement imposed upon them by the
gamonales
, they were still capable—like Túpac Amaru II in 1780—of confronting their oppressors. Contemplating the figure of Rumi Maqui, Mariátegui had, in his own words, “a revelation.” The old could become new; “revolution has vindicated our most ancient tradition.”

Mariátegui had finally begun to earn a respectable income and his name was becoming more widely known. He wrote continually: about horses, the Peruvian Congress, literary criticism, poems, theatrical pieces (which were not produced)—a stream of tireless activity. The journal
Colónida
was filled with his literary rebellion, his youthful artistic spirit, but there was barely a hint of the political commitment that would soon become his passion and remain so for the rest of his life. He was more a poet excited about writing, an essayist concerned with metaphysical, even mystical subjects, dissatisfied certainly with the unjust reality of his country and the tired shibboleths of the social and cultural establishments. And he was aware of the political and social conflicts of Europe and would follow, with interest, the course of the Mexican Revolution.

A growing social consciousness led him into a polemic, in the pages of
La Prensa
, with José Mariano de la Riva Agüero, a friend of José Vasconcelos and a distinguished intellectual belonging to one of the more aristocratic groups within the oligarchic coalition that held power in Peru. He was a founder, in 1915, of the National Democratic Party. (Like Vasconcelos, he would become a Hispanicist—exalting the purely Spanish tradition of Latin America—and a pro-Nazi in the 1930s.) In 1917, still only twenty-three years old, Mariátegui would leave
La Prensa
and become chief editor (and congressional reporter) of
El Tiempo
. He continued to be an assistant editor of
El Turf
, where he still would publish pieces on religious themes and daily affairs. But his political journalism in
El Tiempo
was winning out and taking precedence over his many other interests.

In November 1917 two events connected with Russia came to affect his life. One was remote, in Russia itself: the revolution that would later become so important to him. The other occurred in Lima and touched him personally. It was “the scandal of the cemetery.” Mariátegui was one of a group of artist friends who persuaded a Russian ballerina named Norka Rouskaya, who was visiting Lima, to dance in a cemetery, among the tombs, to the music of Chopin's
Marche Funèbre
. A violin played the music while Rouskaya danced. That very night, there were angry accusations: “Profanation of the ashes of our venerated dead!” Almost all those involved were arrested. The reaction was not only ridiculous but symptomatic of the rigidities of Peruvian society. As all the witnesses would testify, including Mariátegui, there had never been any intention of sacrilege, only the desire to mount a presentation in praise of art. Nevertheless, the group had now fallen under the watchful eye of the police.

Some of the young writers for
El Tiempo
, including Mariátegui himself, had grown impatient with the moderate line of the newspaper. Along with César Falcón and Félix del Valle, he decided to found a socialist journal,
Nuestra Época
. They would model it after the famous journal
España
(directed by Luis Araquistáin), in which many of the Spanish Generation of '98, including Miguel de Unamuno, had published their work. In the first issue, Mariátegui published an article entitled “Bad Tendencies: The Duty of the Army and the Duty of the State.” It led to an incident where a group of angry officers surrounded and jostled him physically, trying to goad him into a duel.

By now he was known as a socialist writer but he was not yet under the influence of orthodox Marxism; rather he was suffused with a general sentiment not necessarily connected with revolution but focused on the working class and trade unionism. He and his friend Falcón agreed to participate in the creation of a Committee for Socialist Organization and Propaganda but refused to support the transformation of the committee into a political party. This reluctance to participate in a struggle for power was a quality Mariátegui always displayed. His way would never be the road to power but rather the moral force of independent criticism.

Mariátegui and Falcón went on to found the first newspaper of the left in Peru. They called it
La Razón
(Reason). In its pages they supported a workers' strike for an eight-hour day and the reduction of prices on basic food supplies. And from those same pages they hailed the student strike in Córdoba, Argentina, with its international ramifications for students throughout Latin America. Always fascinated with events in the broader world, Mariátegui closely followed revolutionary Russia, the politics of Woodrow Wilson, the Great War sweeping Europe.

As might be expected, he and his friends soon had to face the government of the dictator Augusto Leguía. They were given a simple choice: prison or exile (an exile encouraged and even partially financed by the regime). The choice was no choice. Mariátegui had to leave Peru.

 

IV

He arrived in Paris at the end of 1919 and made contact with the novelist and militant communist Henri Barbusse, the Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland (whose novels he had read and admired), and the socialist, anti-imperialist group associated with the journal
Clarté
. And in Paris he discovered a real proletariat, numerous and active, a class that barely existed in Peru. “My finest memories,” he would write, “are the meetings in Belleville, where I felt the religious warmth of the new multitudes at their highest intensity.” The inclination toward religion, evident in his juvenile poems, took a new, definitive direction, channeled into his political enthusiasm. He would never use poetry again to express his deepest thoughts. In one of his essays at the time he quoted Barbusse: “To do politics is to move from dreams to things, from the abstract to the concrete. Politics is the applied work of social thinking; politics is life . . .”

In Europe, Mariátegui gradually experienced an interior and profound transformation. Not only did he stop writing poems but he published much less. It was a time for him to read books and judge facts. He wrote and later published his
Letters from Italy
and very little else. In retrospect, he seemed to be taking a breath, in preparation for his plunge into public life and for works he hoped to write after his return to Peru. And from the moment he set foot in Europe, he understood intuitively that something fundamental had changed in history:

 

Victory came to those peoples who believed they were fighting because this war would be the last . . . a period has begun of the decadence of war, the decadence of bellicose heroism, at least in the history of thought and art. Ethically and aesthetically, war has lost a lot of ground in recent years. Humanity no longer considers it beautiful . . . Contemporary artists prefer an opposite, antithetical theme: the sufferings and horrors of war.

 

He left for Italy at the end of the year. One of the attractions may have been a warmer climate but, for a man like Mariátegui, it would have surely been much more important to enter the culture of an Italy that had intrigued Peruvians at least since the turn of the century. In the northern industrial city of Turin, the proletarian culture he had so appreciated in Paris was laid out before him with its most intense contradictions, including the rapid growth of modern industry alongside widespread misery. Here in postwar Italy, all the contemporary political currents were present or in formation: socialism, communism, Catholic trade unionism, the incipient Fascist movement under Benito Mussolini, the background effects of the recent war, the aesthetic influence of modernism, and the dynamic, visual creativity of the futurists, who considered modern technology and the modern city as means toward the material redemption of the world (with a faith in the central importance of energy and vitality that would lead most of them into fascism).

Mariátegui avidly observes it all. He does his first, detailed political analyses and extends his political awareness across the boundaries of Europe, toward the East. He recognizes that Gandhi is a “practical idealist”; notes that in Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (the later Atatürk) is leading a movement of social and political liberation; and notes that at the congress that founds the Third International in 1920, there are delegates from China and Korea.

He is open to evaluating the most divergent thinkers. He reads the liberal Benedetto Croce, the socialist Antonio Gramsci, and the soon to be official “philosopher of Fascism,” Giovanni Gentile. He had come to Europe with a feeling that Marxist theory was “confused, heavy, cold” but in Italy he had come “to see its true light and retain its revelation.” Much of this new excitement was due, in the words of the scholar Richard Morse, to “the vitalist and voluntarist vision of Marxism” that he had absorbed under the influence of Croce. The Italian idealist philosopher had only briefly flirted with Marxism as such but he was especially opposed to any notion of rigid, immutable laws. Mariátegui will agree. He will become a romantic Marxist, always wary of the reduction of reality to rigid concepts or the flow of history to some preordained necessity. He is impressed that in postwar Italy, important intellectual figures had their connections as well as their differences. Croce had been the teacher of both Gramsci, who would become the principal founder of the Communist Party of Italy, and the Fascist Giovanni Gentile. Such linkages did not imply a communion, in any sense of the word, but the possibility of an incessant, open debate, which Mariátegui approved and celebrated. But he was never blind to the world around him, and until 1923, when he returned to Peru, the world around him was Italy. Before the Fascist seizure of power (in October 1922), their
squadristi
had been in the streets for years with their clubs and daggers and quarts of castor oil. Mariátegui understood what Gentile's loyalties signified, and he also knew, well before many others did, what fascism meant to the future of freedom of thought:

 

Now a liberal philosopher like Benedetto Croce—a true philosopher and a true liberal—has opened up this process [the process, Mariátegui meant, of positioning Marx as the philosopher who could judge the value of contemporary philosophy] in terms of inevitable justice in the face of another philosopher, an idealist and a liberal as well, a successor and exegete of Hegelian thought, Giovanni Gentile, who would accept a post in the brigades of Fascism, in promiscuous association with the most dogmatic neo-Thomists and the most incandescent anti-intellectuals.

 

He respects Croce but he cannot agree with him on the value of the liberal state, put into doubt in many quarters by the debacle of the Great War, which was the true end of the nineteenth century. With the Italian example before him, he thought that the liberal democracies of his time were easy prey for the dictatorial zeal of the right.

He tried to evaluate the phenomenon of Mussolini. The epic-heroic style of Il Duce may have chimed somewhat with his own romantic conception of existence, especially while still under the influence of José Vasconcelos. If so, it was a suspension of judgment that did not last:

 

“Fascism” is the illegal action of the conservative classes, fearful that the legal actions of the State would insufficiently defend their continued existence. It is the illegal action of the bourgeoisie against the possible socialist illegal action: the revolution.

 

In the Fascist march on Rome, he saw not only “the capitalist response shattering revolutionary perspectives” but surely heard an echo of the Latin American generals and the boots of their armies.

Europe would expand his perceptions in politics and also his aesthetics. Italian futurism spoke not just for the urbanized present but also for uncontrolled action and he could clearly see the dangerous direction toward which these artists were heading—as was an Italy full of men of violence resentful at how little their country had gained in the Great War. A number of the futurists were veterans of the war but far less weary of it than the “lost generation” of American, French, and some English writers who were drawn to Paris and produced the greatest literature of the 1920s.

He never became a reductive Marxist, judging literature by ideological norms. He would always like D'Annunzio's poetry despite its creator's role (and military adventures) as a poetic inspiration for fascism. But it was a French literary movement that most attracted him, one that spread far beyond France, and he valued it for what he saw as its potential for the liberation of the human mind. Later, in 1928, he would describe his feelings about the broader uses of surrealism: “Super-realism is a preparatory step for true realism . . . One has to release one's fantasy, liberate fiction from its old moorings, so as to discover reality.”