The Gringa

  * * *

  —

  She remembers the first time she heard the term “death squad.” Sixth grade, maybe seventh, flopped on the couch with homework. David in his armchair, muttering over the newspaper, Matthew sprawled on the carpet, mashing buttons on a hand-held football game. Her fingers smelled of formaldehyde from the morning’s frog dissection. She remembers the map on the television, the slick, foreign names: Nicaragua, El Salvador. A red-faced Congressman slapping the lectern. The U.S. did not belong there, he said. We had no business funding death squads.

  “What does that mean? ‘Death squads,’ ” Leo said. She had a picture in her mind of undercover cops: leather jackets, fake mustaches. Like The A-Team.

  “Nothing,” her father said behind his paper. “Don’t worry about it, Leo.”

  “It means we’re killing people,” Maxine said from the kitchen door. “It means we help the people we like kill the people we don’t like.”

  “Maxi,” her father said.

  “Why shouldn’t they hear it?” Maxine said. “It’s on the television.”

  Leo turned back to the TV: men in camouflage, dark faces sweaty and unshaven, lying in the dirt; others in neat uniforms, standing at attention on an airport runway.

  “Why don’t we like them?”

  “Because they’re poor,” Maxine said. “Here, Leo, have a banana.”

  * * *

  —

  What you could not do in Cannondale: You could not make connections. Between Thomas Jefferson and Pablo the gardener, between the weaponry on the library lawn and the price of fruit. There was no big picture, no throughline: the squeegee men, the swim club, the hostages home from Iran; the varsity football player who pumped cheap gas on summer break, the ROTC pamphlets in the guidance office. The giant malls along the highway and the boarded-up houses you saw on visits to your father’s parents in Paterson, how your mother checked all the locks whenever you stopped at a light.

  There were no businesses in Cannondale, no commerce to mar the lush hills and leaf-scattered lawns. This was called “zoning,” your mother explained, an obscure, inoffensive word like aglet or photosynthesis. A kind of natural law. Across the highway, the town of Millbrook didn’t have zoning. It had a diner, where your father and brother went after Little League games. It had a liquor store, a pawn shop with golf clubs in the window, a bowling alley and a dilapidated motel and, according to Maxine, no Jews. When your friend’s older sister was caught in that motel with a boy from Millbrook, the gossip in the school cafeteria, at the nail salon, was laced with disgust: she had crossed the barrier, this girl, contaminated Cannondale, made a connection. She was never seen again.

  * * *

  —

  She remembers Fantasy Island, where rich people got anything they wanted: the beautiful woman, the dead come back to life. She remembers Sanford & Son. Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel told you each night what you needed to know: three black kids shot point blank on the subway. Twenty-one Hispanics shot point blank in McDonald’s. Three hundred thousand dead of famine in Africa. A billion people in China. The numbers were interchangeable, make-believe: a thousand, a million, who understood the difference? Two hundred fifty-one Marines killed in Beirut (“Why were they there?” asks Leo), and the same month seven thousand U.S. troops invade an island you’ve never heard of. (Population: Who cares?) No one can explain why.

  “I don’t think anyone knows,” your father says.

  “But that’s not fair,” says the twelve-year-old terrorist. She remembers helicopters over fallow fields, soldiers with rifles jogging down a beach. “They can’t just do it because they want to.”

  Your mother makes a sound like strangling. “Kiddo, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  She remembers when Matt voted for Reagan in the mock election. “Mondale wants to take our money away,” he coolly explained. She remembers Grandpa Carol’s garden, where tomatoes hung like plump jewels and the carrots pulled long and smooth from the soil. Grandma Bess made sticky rugelach and Leo slept in a room with a canopy bed and tall windows and watched fireflies glistering over the reservoir.

  In El Arca, where mice long ago relieved her mattress of its stuffing, she recalls the exact scent of that garden in summer, the thick, particular splash of sunfish jumping in the reservoir. “Hard work, Petunia,” Grandpa Carol said, surveying his Westchester estate while she hung upside down from the crabapple tree. “Hard work.” She remembers when they watched Gandhi in freshman history: boys in the back snickering at the men in loincloths, whistling at the women with baskets on their heads, the tense, sulky mood that took her when Gandhi was shot.

  “It’s just a movie,” her friend Rachel snorted. “God, Leo!”

  She came home that night to India on the television: ambulances, dead cows, mothers lying next to their children in the street. Men with bandaged faces, blinded by the chemicals in the air. This happened before she saw Gandhi, but in her memory, in my memory, the two are fused.

  “Mom, look,” Matt said. Palm trees, soldiers, smoke from a hundred bonfires drifting past the factories of Bhopal. It was people, her brother said. He turned up the volume and wailing filled the room. “Look, Leo. They’re burning people.”

  * * *

  —

  The colonel was a handsome man, square-jawed, salt and pepper at his temples. His slow, boyish smile left you with an impression of ease, as if he were slouching, though he sat ramrod straight. He reminded Leo of those senior boys, athletes mostly, whose popularity was so vast they could afford to be nice to everyone. The colonel, proud in his uniform, raised his arm and swore to God and Leo put down her geometry proofs to listen. He spoke thoughtfully, brow creased with sincerity—he wanted to understand the question, to give an honest answer. Leo almost sympathized.

  “I do not recall,” he said. Maxine squeezed her gin and tonic, chewing on the ice. “I do not recall,” the colonel said to another question. He whispered something to the man next to him; they laughed and then the colonel turned back to the questioners, a touch of insolence in his posture, and said it again: “I really don’t recall.”

  No one believed him. Leo turned up the volume. No one believed him, but the strange thing was he didn’t seem to care. This man, Oliver North, didn’t expect anyone to believe him. He didn’t want them to. He pursed his lips, nodded with great seriousness, and suddenly she understood: he was humiliating them, daring them to call him a liar, knowing that nobody would. He was demonstrating the depth of their powerlessness, rubbing their noses in it, then offering a sympathetic smile they were also not to believe.

  “I believe he’s already answered that question, Senator,” said the man next to the colonel. Snickers from the gallery, from reporters crosslegged on the floor. Leo clutched a pillow to her stomach. The colonel folded his hands. He was really enjoying himself.

  “I don’t recall! I don’t recall!” Maxine said. “You asshole.”

  The facts of the affair didn’t interest Leo. They seemed too small, like some pathetic sixth-grade cabal. She couldn’t take her eyes off the colonel—his easy confidence, the glimmer of his medals. By now she knew what a death squad was. The whole country knew: they’d seen the bodies on television, they’d read about the murdered nuns. Something had happened to separate Cannondale from Millbrook, from Managua and Beirut, from Gandhi (It’s just a movie!). Something tectonic. And in the gloom of that chasm slithered men like Oliver North. It hadn’t happened by accident. She listened more closely to the words: freedom fighter, constitution, help me God. She watched his slow, taunting smile and she started to make connections.

  * * *

  —

  “Have you signed your postcard yet?” The voice called through the hot crush of the crowd. “You, with the hair! Sign a postcard, Curly. Let the dictator hear your voice.”

  Leo stopped to look for the source of this directive. Rachel
and Megan bumped into her from behind, the three girls forming a snag in the human current, the swarming heat of Giants Stadium in June, seventy thousand people smashing their way from hot-dog stand to bathroom to the blazing exposure of seats in the upper tier. She kept one eye on Matt’s blue jersey as it winked through the swirl of bodies. Music thudded in the girders and concrete, snatches of melody escaping from the entrances to the stands.

  An arm waved at her from behind a table. “C’mere, Curly, help free political prisoners!” Now she saw the speaker: a man in his twenties, feathered hair, a perfect tan.

  “Whatever,” Rachel said. “Hey, you think that guy in the Zeppelin T-shirt will buy us beer?”

  “Is her mom cool?” Megan said. “Leo, does your mom care if we drink?”

  She angled toward the table and the man tilted his head sardonically. He held up a white card. “Augusto Pinochet?” He had an Australian accent and a chipped front tooth that gave his smile a leering edge. His shirt bore the same logo that was on her ticket and on banners all over the stadium: a lit candle wrapped in barbed wire. Above the candle it read: A Conspiracy of Hope. “Want to write to him?”

  “No,” she said, trying to sound flirtatious. She wanted him to call her Curly again.

  “Do you even know who Augusto Pinochet is?”

  “No.”

  “Course you don’t.” He regarded her sadly. “Chile, ’73? Kissinger’s best friend? He’s your man in South America. Totally psychotic.” There were brochures spread on the table, binders full of photographs. Two women stood next to him in tight T-shirts with the same logo, waving at the men walking by. “Alrighty, don’t like Pinochet? We’ve got Deng, Mubarak, Gorbachev. Pick a card, any card. Here—” he flapped a postcard under her nose. “P. W. Botha. Fantastic! Help smash apartheid.”

  A muffled roar crested around them as Joni Mitchell played her finale, “Big Yellow Taxi.” Leo pictured her mother back at the seats, dancing by herself. It was supposed to be Leo’s birthday present—a daylong concert including U2, her favorite as well as Rachel’s and Megan’s. For months they’d swapped pictures of Bono, the most beautiful boy they’d ever seen; in the parking lot, she’d spent a whopping $15 on a War T-shirt. But so far the day had been boring—and hot—her mother singing along with people they’d never head of: Peter, Paul, and Mary? Jackson Browne? When a salsa band took the stage and Maxine started moving her hips, hands in the air, Leo’s embarrassment was so profound it felt like vertigo.

  “You do know what apartheid is?” the man was saying. “They teach you that?”

  Leo rolled her eyes. “I know what it is.”

  “Good! Puts you ahead of most of this lot.” He slid an open binder toward her. “Did you know today’s the tenth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising?”

  At first she couldn’t tell what she was looking at, the jumbled images, a collage of faces and limbs. Slowly she began to make out bodies heaped on concrete or face-down in the dust, sniffed by dogs, children sprawled on bloody mattresses, strewn like garbage. He turned the pages slowly, as though revealing secret delights. “Happens all over the world. People tortured, raped, buried alive. People like you, your brother, born in the wrong country, under the wrong regime. You know about Steve Biko?”

  Leo slid the binder closer. This photograph was different: a single body on a gurney, covered by a sheet. Only his battered face was visible. The gurney sat in an empty hallway, squalid but clinical, somehow official.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Torture. Twenty-two hours straight. He was a youth activist, very popular. Until you lot killed him. How do you like the music, by the way? Y’having a good time?”

  Behind her, Rachel and Megan were asking for their ticket stubs. Matthew was waiting for his hot dog. But Leo felt space opening around her.

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  He crooked a finger and leaned across the table. “The U.S. is South Africa’s number-one friend. Didn’t know that? Most of their guns, their tanks, you sold to them. It’s good business for your arms dealers. Who d’you think makes the decisions, anyway?

  “These people wouldn’t be in power if it weren’t for you,” he said. “Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Shimon Peres. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. But you’re not, are you?”

  “I’m fifteen.”

  “Your mum and dad, then. Didn’t know they were killers, did you?”

  Leo could not look up, her eyes drawn to the dead body, its solitude. She suddenly hated the man behind the table, wanted to shove some insult at his smug face.

  “What’s a card going to do?”

  Another cheer went up inside the stadium and the man leaned closer. “Sorry?”

  Her face grew hot. “What good is a postcard going to do?”

  He pondered this, then shoved a stack of cards at her. “Just send them. Give them to your friends. Maybe they’ll let some of these prisoners go free.”

  “Why would they set them free?” she said. He straightened with a familiar, reluctant insolence, but she would not relent. “It’s just a stupid postcard. My grandmother sends me postcards every month.”

  The man sucked his teeth while the women glared. “Look, Curly. Are you planning to start a revolution?” He peered at her T-shirt. “You and Bono? Who are you? Nobody. This is the only thing someone like you can do.” He squeezed her hand closed on the stack of cards. “Write the bloody postcard, alright? Tell your father to donate to Amnesty International. Now run on back inside. You don’t want to miss Bryan Adams.”

  As she pushed through the concourse, Leo felt she’d won a small victory. She was pleased with her sarcasm, the anger she’d brought to the man’s face. But climbing to the seats, late sun stabbing over the stadium rim, that sense of triumph leached away, leaving in its place the image of the gurney, the dead man’s face so small and alone. They’d just left him there, an unclaimed body, a nobody. Already, she’d forgotten his name.

  For the rest of the concert she felt dazed, a little out of breath. The air around her felt still and dead. The sky thickened with indigo and the stage glowed far below, across a sea of writhing bodies. Matthew fell asleep with his head in their mother’s lap. Megan and Rachel moved down three rows to talk to some older boys. They tossed their hair and laughed while the boys punched each other and passed a joint down the line.

  “Are you OK?” Maxine asked. “You got a little sunburn. Put your sweatshirt on.”

  Her face was tight, her skin tingled. “I’m fine.”

  In the sky above the stadium, helicopters hovered and banked, spotlights sweeping the crowd. For some time a drum had been tapping out a slow metronome, insistent and ominous. The stage was dark; all the stadium lights were dark. Over and over, the halting drum struck; one by one people lit matches, held up cigarette lighters, until the stands glimmered with thousands of tiny flames.

  “You’re freezing,” Maxine said. The thudding drum grew more urgent, and then a low guitar note stabbed into the darkness. It came again, a cruel, droning sound, and then the singer, Peter Gabriel, was alone in the spotlight, his voice nasal, clutched in the back of the throat like a man singing through pain:

  Oh, Biko…Biko…Biko.

  Leo’s teeth started to chatter. She thought she must have heard it wrong. From the massive speakers the name came again, ghostly and unmistakable, thousands of voices singing along.

  The man is dead, he sang. The man is dead.

  She couldn’t sit still. She felt a kind of desperation, a shrinking from that voice and from the galaxy of lights. When she stood she nearly lost her balance. One helicopter sat high in the sky, its silver beam steady and watchful. Biko…Biko…The drum held its unbearable rhythm, the guitar rang out relentlessly. The sound of bagpipes rose like whirring crickets, fluttering and crackling in the summer air. There were women on stage now, black women in colorful dresses and head-wraps;
their languorous deathwail washed across the sky.

  The man is dead, he sang—crouched at the edge of the stage, beckoning—And the eyes of the world are watching now.

  She hugged herself, shivering, shook off the arm her mother put around her. The women on stage swayed together, crying their wordless chant over and over. It was grief—pure, liquid grief that crashed in waves all around them. The body on the gurney, abandoned and worthless, a body no one would ever take home—it was this body they cried for, not just his death but his aloneness. Everyone swayed and chanted, when she looked down she saw Megan, the arm of one of the boys around her waist, waving a lighter over her head, and without warning Leo burst into tears.

  She knew she was ridiculous. Hunched over in her seat, she knew she was exhausted, sunburned. It was all ridiculous: the song, the phony African women, even the photograph—puny and ridiculous and beside the point. She could feel her mother fussing over her. She knew her friends would look at her with scorn and she hated them. She wanted to take Megan’s cigarette lighter and burn her with it so she would stop singing—she had no right. None of them did. She shivered and sniffled but she couldn’t stop picturing the dead body in the hallway, still there, still alone. And these people singing.

  The stage was empty, the women returned to darkness though their chant echoed through the stadium. Only the tap-tap-tap of the heavy drum, receding into the tide of applause. The crowd released itself, returned to plastic seats, rows strewn with cardboard, sticky with spilled beer. She could hear herself sobbing but she didn’t try to stop, not when her mother draped the sweatshirt over her, not when the lights came up and Rachel cried “Leo!” in astonishment and disgust, when Matt roused himself and howled with laughter and announced to their section, “My sister’s on the rag!”

  * * *

  —

  What else shall I write about the terrorist’s origins, her influences and early indoctrinations? What more would you like to know?