The Gringa

  “She was a little more serious than the rest of us, a little moody sometimes,” writes Rachel Schraft, now an admissions officer at Yale, “but otherwise she was just a normal teenager. I don’t remember ever talking about politics. It wasn’t our foremost concern in tenth grade, as you can imagine. She was just Leo.”

  A normal teenager. A perfect child. An excellent student. These are the terms people use to describe her—nothing that stands out, no damaging revelations or early glimpses of the avenging angel. One struggles to locate the real person, to bring La Leo to life. For a time she was a vegetarian—though this may have been prompted by health concerns. For two years she donated her allowance to a UNICEF-backed charity—but when the letters arrived from children in Zaire she couldn’t bring herself to read them. One notes the two thousand dollars she raised in a Walk-a-Thon for AIDS research. One notes the caption she chose for her yearbook photo: I have a dream. One finds, in other words, scattered markers of a dawning awareness that might loosely be called “political” but that prefigures the fury of the Lima press conference only when they are held up, deliberately, side by side.

  And yet, the dots must be connected, a route, however serpentine, established from Point A to Point B. This, I know, is the writer’s job: to dive into time’s landfill and emerge, gasping and shit-smeared, the lost wedding ring clutched triumphantly in his fist.

  “Nice American girls don’t wake up and decide to be terrorists,” my editor insists. By which he means to keep swimming. “You’ll figure it out,” he says, by which he means there are gaps in any story. If we can’t learn the facts we make educated guesses. If we don’t find the gold ring—if there’s none to be found—a scrap of scorched foil will do.

  But her childhood, by all accounts, was Arcadian, her family history an ordinary picture of middle-class striving and satisfaction. The house in Cannondale, sold in 2002, has been photographed many times, its suburban blandness remarked upon as if it were a shrewd disguise. That the Gelbs were unassuming, friendly, that they gave to the Sierra Club and the March of Dimes; that David coached the Millbrook Dodge Yankees, Matt’s Little League team, from 1982-1985; that Maxine volunteered at a nursing home in Paramus and led a petition drive to have a stoplight installed outside the Cannondale Library—such things have been noted, written about, picked over, have acquired in their triviality an air of sinister relevance. One learns of Maxine’s father, the radio and TV actor Carol Green (né Abramsky), blacklisted in the 1950s after writing an essay for The Daily Worker; and of David’s grandfather, Sam Rubin, a prominent labor organizer in the Paterson textile mills. One notes Maxine’s summer in Mississippi; one notes David received two draft deferments, that he worked pro bono for Newark community leaders after the ’67 riots. One learns of the family’s employment of a Dominican housekeeper. One notes Leonora’s rejection from Brown.

  In other words, they were liberals, the Gelbs. Good, modest, community-minded, garden-variety Jewish liberals. Like most Jews in Cannondale they considered themselves enlightened and lucky. They knew it was money that got them there, gave them lives their grandparents couldn’t have recognized. But they knew money was not enough, good fortune can be revoked without warning or explanation, replaced with slavery, extermination. And so they volunteered, they donated, they walked and ran and baked to benefit causes. They taught their children kindness and charity and above all reasonableness. Reason, the theory goes, is the bulwark against butchery. Reasonable people, the theory goes, can disagree, but in the end those who prevail do so through the soundness of their arguments, the humility of their convictions, the ability to see more than one side. To prevail through force or deception is no victory; to stoop to invective or violence is to be defeated in some transcendent, shameful way.

  I know these people, Jack. I know their concerns and aspirations, the particular smell of their self-regard. Their liberalism is a kind of insurance policy: having entered the land of privilege, one need only remember the less fortunate and one will be permitted to stay. It’s a doctrine of weakness, of vulnerability, a tragic misunderstanding of what it means to be American.

  Leo was no liberal. She made that clear one morning in Lima, showed the world how unreasonable she could be. Reasonableness, she knew, never stopped a bomb from falling; enlightenment never stays the torturer’s hand. But to make the leap from these unremarkable roots to El Arca requires more than persistence, more than art. I’m asked to tell Leo’s story—with fragments, decryptions, the muck of others’ faulty recollections. To define her, fix her in a reader’s mind, though I myself see only blurs and blanks. It’s a crime, this empathy, a violation: from the safety of my desk chair, I’m to reach across the divide, touch her life, make the connection.

  * * *

  —

  The station wagon sped smoothly over the highway, the interior gloomy and sedate as the lights of commerce played over weary passengers. Leo leaned her cheek to the steamed window and watched car dealerships and carpet stores and office parks flash past. When they stopped at White Castle, she stayed in the car; the smell of what Matt and the others brought back in their grease-thinned paper sacks turned her stomach. She ground her teeth to hold back another inexplicable bout of tears.

  “I’m so pissed they didn’t play ‘New Year’s Day!’ ” Megan said, again and again. “But they played the other one,” Maxine said, raising her eyes to the rearview. “ ‘Bloody Sunday,’ you like that one, right Leo?” Leo barely heard. When they dropped the other girls at their houses, she grunted in sullen farewell. She would see them soon enough, at the swim club or the movies, at high-school dances and basement parties and secret forays into Greenwich Village and Herald Square. But she would never lose the image of Megan dancing at her seat, waving the cigarette lighter idiotically, singing a name that meant nothing to her: Biko! Be-caw! Beeeeeeeak-O!

  If stoned teenagers could sing that name without knowing, if they could join the mindless chorus and claim to care about something to which they would not give another thought until the moment, much later, when it flattered their sense of themselves to say, “I was there!”—then nothing that happened in South Africa, or Chile, or any of those other places could be said to mean anything here, inside the bubble. No one was watching. The man was really dead. Here in Cannondale, he had never lived.

  “Quite a day,” her mother said, when they pulled into the garage. Matt ran inside, leaving behind a cool silence, only the ticking of the engine and the scent of gasoline through the open window. “Are you feeling any better?”

  “I’m feeling fine.”

  Her mother reached back to smooth Leo’s hair and Leo jerked away, felt the tears coming up again. She was furious with herself, she wished she could wrinkle her nose and transport herself to her room without seeing her father or answering his kind and pointless questions, throw herself under the blankets and howl until her throat bled.

  “What’s going on with you?” Maxine said. “What happened with Megan and Rachel?”

  “Have you ever heard of Pinochet?” she asked. This was not the point, and Leo knew it, but she had to find a way to give voice to her wretchedness.

  Her mother drew back. “In Chile? Of course.”

  Something on her mother’s face pushed Leo over the edge. She rocked forward and blubbered helplessly, “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  For a minute or more she sniffled and hiccupped; she could feel her mother looking at her, feel her gaze go from concerned to perplexed to annoyed. She could hear her brother’s careless footsteps overhead, the murmur of her father’s voice.

  “Leonora, there are a lot of bad people in the world,” Maxine said finally. “A lot of ugly things happen.”

  Leo looked up in anguish. “But why?”

  The killer’s smile was fond and unbearable. “That’s just how it is.”

  Leo closed her eyes. She felt flattened, her jaw and joints ached. “Nobody
does anything. That’s why.”

  “Didn’t you see a million people at the concert? Of course people do something.”

  “Do you?” she said. “What do you and Dad do?”

  Maxine pressed her lips together and stepped out of the car. The pinging of the door chime filled the garage.

  “Huh?” Leo shouted after her. “What do you do?”

  Out of sight, her mother said, “We live our lives. We try to be good people, raise good children. That’s all anyone can do.”

  “That’s not enough!”

  After a pause, her mother said, “I know.”

  The garage door rattled back into motion, thicker gloom descending. She thought her mother had gone inside. But a moment later her voice came through the dark. “Time for bed, Leo. It’s been a long day. You can’t take things so personally.” Then the door closed, leaving Leo in the restless, cooling car, listening to a creaking house, the receding footsteps and imperceptible mutters of a family on its way to a good night’s sleep.

  2

  “Oh, it was such a happy house. Always full of food and laughter. And music. Even when we were small children. My father was a great lover of jazz. Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Chet Baker. Every Sunday we walked home from the church and my father played those records until the whole house felt brighter, like there was more sun. Which is good, in this city with its ugly weather.”

  Señora Zavallos is a tall woman in her forties, pale and nervous, with graying hair pulled back in a severe bun. There’s something lonely in her green eyes—and behind it something offended by this loneliness. “My father used to say a life without music is like a marriage without sex,” she says, running her fingertips along the banister as they climb to the third floor. “He would invite his students to the house and play records all night. They loved him, those students. They taught him about Charlie Parker, Miles Davis—”

  “What did your father teach?” Leo says.

  “Economics. He was head of the department at Católica. Students would fight for seats in his class. That was before the trouble.” At the top of the stairs, the señora opens a door, sniffing mistrustfully. “Of course you know about that.”

  Leo peers into the cavernous, empty room—windows along one long wall, the other marked and discolored where mirrors and a barre had once been anchored. A short hallway leads to a changing room with a toilet. The mention of a third-floor dance studio with its own entrance was what had drawn her attention to the ad, which declared WE SPEAK ENGLISH in bold type.

  “Not really,” Leo says now. “I mean, we didn’t hear a lot about it in the U.S.”

  “I’m not surprised,” the señora says.

  “But it’s over, right? I mean,” she says, putting on her best frightened gringa—“it’s safe here?”

  “Lima’s a different city now.” The señora crosses the floor, her steps echoing on scuffed parquet, and shoves at a stuck window until it flies open. She frowns at something on the street below. “You’ll learn which areas to avoid.”

  They’d arranged to meet at a bus stop on the Plaza de la Bandera, then strolled through orderly Pueblo Libre, past dignified homes and small, well-kept parks that gave off tropical warmth and the smells of dying plant life. Fog simmered low in the sky, flattening all sound. The señora talked ceaselessly, pointing out the elementary school, the dry cleaners, the pasteleria that specialized in banana-cream cakes for quinceañeras. Leo spotted the house from a block away—three boxy, whitewashed floors behind a high wall, bigger and uglier than the houses surrounding it. The señora tried several keys before she was able to open the gate. When Leo saw the flagstone courtyard, a jaunty lime tree in the center, bare rosebushes at the base of the wall, her heart prickled with satisfaction.

  “You plan to have art classes?” the señora says, inspecting a long crack in the wall of the second-floor hallway. “What a nice idea. There are very talented students at Católica, if you’re looking for teachers. Don’t take anyone from San Marcos. You can’t trust them. Are you a painter? When I was an adolescent I used to paint watercolors.”

  “I’m not really an artist,” Leo says. The señora looks at her queerly. “My friends have the talent,” she explains. “I’ll run the business, design ads, make schedules, things like that. I’m not so creative. I’m more…motivated.”

  “The administradora,” Señora Zevallos says, pleased by the explanation.

  “Exactly!”

  Downstairs, light floods through the living room’s tall windows. Despite the morning’s humidity, the house feels dry and dusty, chilly from disuse. The señora leads her down a narrow hallway into a kitchen tiled white with tiny blue cornflowers; she rises on her toes, turning a slow pirouette to point out the cabinets and the pantry, the ancient stove scored by vigorous scrubbing. A back window looks out on a decrepit toolshed, a dry birdbath, an unplastered brick wall trussed with bougainvillea.

  Leo counts out hundred-dollar bills on the counter—“I will accept only American money,” the señora said over the phone—and asks about Arequipa, where the señora now lives with one of her sisters. The weather is better, the señora says, but the people are closed and haughty. She doesn’t know her neighbors; she spends her days caring for her sister’s two children, walking to the market without being greeted by a single person.

  “And your mother and father?”

  The señora tucks the cash into her purse. “My father lives in Chicago with my oldest sister and her husband. My mother…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When they took my father away, when he was gone. She couldn’t bear it. Three months, they would not tell us where he was. They would not even tell us if he had been arrested. But of course we knew.”

  Leo keeps her voice low. “Because he taught economics?”

  “Of course not. He wasn’t a Marxist! His department didn’t tolerate the garbage they taught at San Marcos.”

  “Then why?”

  She takes a last look at the kitchen, smiling sadly. “It was the music. All those students coming over at night. Someone had to notice.” She turns to Leo, her voice sharp with accusation. “All they did was listen to records and drink pisco. They never even talked about the war.”

  Outside, the señora locks the gate behind her and hands Leo the keys. She points to the bodega at the corner. “If you wait there, you’ll get a taxi quickly enough.”

  “I’ll walk. I like to find my way around the city.”

  The señora’s expression is bemused, disapproving. “It was a beautiful city at one time. But now the people are animals. It was better during the dictatorship, even with the long lines for bread and coffee. It’s terrible that I would wish for that time. Isn’t it?”

  “Things always seem better when they’re over.”

  The señora buttons her sweater and peers into the haze, as if testing the wind. “No. Things seem precisely as they were. But what comes next is always worse. Good luck, Leonora. I hope the school succeeds. I’d like to visit one day.”

  Knowing she’ll never see the señora again, Leo chances an awkward hug. “Please come anytime.”

  * * *

  —

  Four years later, at the civilian retrial, Leo was astonished to see Señora Zavallos enter the courtroom as a government witness, previously unnamed—as were nearly all the witnesses, to protect them from “terrorist reprisals.” She had aged visibly, her skin stretched against her skull, one hand trembling in her lap. After confirming that she owned the devastated house in the photographs, she held her chin high and identified the defendant as the young woman who came to see her on that February morning.

  “She was a fool. You could see that right away. Going around with so much money. So arrogant. I tried to tell her about the neighborhood and its history but she wasn’t interested. She thought she knew everything. Immediately, she acted as if the h
ouse belonged to her, as if she could do whatever she pleased.”

  Gently, the prosecutor asked why, if the señora had such a poor opinion of the defendant, she had agreed to rent the house to her. “I needed the money,” she said quietly. She scanned the faces in the galley. “It’s a terrible thing, to be so desperate.”

  * * *

  —

  She takes a corner room on the second floor, with large windows that squeal horribly when she cranks them out. The room is bright and breezy, with a high ceiling and ornate crown molding. Years of dust and flaked paint have accumulated in the corners. She spreads her dirty laundry on the floor, uses Moby-Dick for a pillow, wakes at dawn to the crow of a neighbor’s rooster and the acute sense that she’s alone in the enormous city. At the corner bodega she buys sponges and a broom, floor polish, bread and a wheel of rubbery cheese for her breakfast, Nescafé and condensed milk, a flimsy saucepan scorched on the bottom. The old dueño nods affably as he counts her change.

  “¿De dónde es?” he says, squinting through thick glasses. “Where from?”

  “United States, señor.”

  “¡Americana!” He points to an old Dallas Cowboys calendar on the wall: buxom, silver-skinned cheerleaders.

  She can’t stop herself: “Somos todos Americanos, señor.”

  By midday she’s acquired two scratchy blankets, a sleeping pad, a Bugs Bunny beach towel. She mops the floor of her bedroom with old rags while the radio she liberated from Ricky’s stammers the latest absurdities from Washington: “I would never walk away from the people of this country and the trust they’ve placed in me…” For a week she keeps herself busy, scouring grime from windowsills, pulling cobwebs from the corners, scrubbing grout until it gleams. Her eyes sting from mingled fumes, her arms and shoulders burn. No word yet from Julian. In the late afternoons she strolls the neighborhood in widening circles—from sleepy blocks lined with shade trees, flowerbeds in the medians, to boulevards frantic with construction: pert row houses, a new supermarket the size of an airport hangar. Waiting. Learning her surroundings. She smiles at the passersby—her neighbors—carrying her secret like a candy under her tongue, the knowledge that at last she’s doing something. That soon she’ll do more.