The Gringa

  But when? As one day melts into the next she grows restless, finds herself standing at a third-floor window, watching the street, wondering at every passing car. It’s a different city now, yes: a manic city, drunk on peace and awash in capital. But what of the hillside barrios teeming with refugees, the makeshift dwellings washing off in the first rains? What of ruined villages all over the countryside—wrecked schools, salted fields, no able-bodied men left to rebuild? What of Los Muertos? Were these the areas Señora Zavallos thought she should avoid? Were these the animals she had in mind?

  At night she lays awake watching lights slide across cracked plaster, remembering the open wound of Vía América, the long and gusty drop. She listens to the creaks of the empty house. When she closes her eyes, she can’t quite conjure Ernesto’s face.

  “We need space,” Julian said, when he left her at a bus stop on a dark stretch of the malecón. He wanted a big house, two entrances. “I don’t want my face in someone’s ass every time I turn around.”

  Space for what, she’d asked? And who else would be there? And what then?

  “Questions don’t help us,” he said. “You want to ask questions, stay in your fucking hostel.”

  The first time she uses the oven, the kitchen fills with a sweet, gamey smell, greasy smoke gusting from the door. She pulls out the broiler tray to discover the corpses of four mice, blackened and petrified, among charred scraps of paper, dead leaves, burned match-sticks. She lets out a cry and the tray clatters to the floor, scattering the tableau of rodent tragedy across the tiles. When her heart stops pounding, she sweeps the dead mice and ashes into a paper bag and dumps it all in the backyard’s overgrowth. She opens a package of steel wool, attacks the oven’s filthy insides until her hands chafe and bleed. Under the rangetop, decades of grease have fused to a stinking black glue; she chisels soot with a butter knife, gasping at the smell, and reminds herself of a formulation she once read about what it means to be a revolutionary:

  “Honor is to be useful without vanity.”

  * * *

  —

  And then, one morning, Marta is there. A week later, two weeks—there’s no record or testimony, no way for me to know. “Before the first of March, she was joined by a second Philosopher,” is all the government documents state. How many hours have I wasted trying to nail down the exact date? As if it could possibly matter—a Monday? a Thursday? As if someone’s life depended on it.

  “Up!” says the woman, her voice cutting through the dawn silence. “Get up now.”

  Leo startles on her bedroll, gropes for her glasses. The voice comes again—“You! You-self…Up, now!”—a brusque contralto emanating from the blurred form in the doorway. Her first muddled thought is that it’s Señora Zavallos, come to avenge some insult to her father’s memory.

  “What’s happening?” Leo groans—but the stranger has already scooped the bedding and marched out to the hall, the whole mass before her like a pregnant belly.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she shoves the blanket into Leo’s arms. “These room,” she says, pointing at the ceiling, waggling a forbidding finger. Her face is narrow and stern, her gaze unblinking. “No for you.”

  Out the living room windows, day is just breaking, fleet shadows flittering musically around the lime tree. There’s a duffel by the front door, two black cases with chrome latches. “Who are you?” Leo says, still shaking off sleep. “¿Quien eres?”

  “English!” the woman says. She points to the ground-floor bedrooms. “You…I…Sleeping.”

  “You’re moving in?” The woman’s face darkens with incomprehension. Leo sets her bundle on the new-swept floor and carefully touches her shoulder. “You live here?”

  All that is known about Angélica Ramos Urpay—Comrade Marta—was recounted in Gustavo Gorriti’s Caretas article: born 1966 in San Martín de Porres, a working-class barrio west of central Lima; her mother a migrant from Puno who cleaned houses for the wealthy, never married; attended the prestigious Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, just down the road from San Marcos, her tuition paid by one of her mother’s clients (Gorriti surmises it was the girl’s father), where she later taught photography from 1994 to 1997.

  I can add nothing to this bio. Ramos’s mother, Luz María, died in 2006; her school records (as if a grade in freshman biology might bear on this mess) vanished long ago. I keep a copy of her faculty photo in the Leo File, clipped from an article about the raid—a photo recognizable to most Peruvians, one of the images most closely associated with the Cuarta Filosofía. There’s something vulnerable in the bow of Marta’s lips, the scattering of freckles on her thin neck, but it is not a conventionally pretty face, not soft or symmetrical. There’s a severity in her gaze, something both intimidating and guarded. One can imagine her smiling patiently, but never with delight. It’s a face that inspires fascination, pity even, but not empathy—viewed side by side with photographs of Augustín Dueñas and Mateo Peña, Comrade Marta’s face is most convincingly that of a terrorist. I can’t look away.

  After taking the rest of her belongings to one of the downstairs bedrooms, Leo finds her in the kitchen, sipping from a mug and examining the spotless oven. She’s long and elfin, with narrow hips, an almost flat chest. She wears cargo pants and a plain black tank top; her lean biceps flex as she washes out the pot. Leo feels shy and careful around this stranger, keenly aware the space no longer belongs to her.

  “Tenemos que amoblar este sitio,” the woman says. “We need beds, and pots to cook with, plates. It must look like a house where somebody lives.”

  Leo answers her Spanish with English. “We do live here.”

  “No. Don’t accustom yourself to this. You understand? It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “I only meant—”

  “Maybe we stay here one week, maybe one month. Then somewhere else. It is not our role to decide.” She gestures at the tile floor, the bright window. The sun has crept over the backyard wall, shining on the tall grass. “This is a story we are telling for this moment. But you must not believe it.”

  Seeing Leo’s shrinking expression, the woman holds out the other mug. Leo accepts it cautiously, happy to find it full of hot coffee.

  “Chaski comes tomorrow. You go to the market so we can get the house ready.”

  Ready for what? Leo stops herself from asking. Chancing Spanish, she says quietly, “Is it permitted to ask for your name?”

  The woman blows into her mug. “You will call me Marta.”

  On a hunch, Leo says, “But this is also a story?”

  Marta looks up in surprise, a smile curling her mouth’s corners. The waiting has come to an end, the weeks of solitude—soon, Leo thinks, the house will be filled with people, conversations, plans. And she and this Marta will be at the center: roommates, comrades. Maybe they will be friends.

  “Soy Leonora,” she says, holding out her hand. “I don’t have another name.”

  “You will.”

  3

  It was a glamorous case, L’Affaire Gelb, a cause célèbre in international circles and among the hand-wringers of the intellectual class. Grim as it was her story had sex appeal, an air of adventure, Leo as American archetype: the swashbuckler who got in over her head. First came the rumors, garbled dispatches barely audible beneath the clamor of Bill and Monica: American citizen…political prisoner…guerrillas. Then news of the military trial—life sentence…hooded judges…inhumane conditions—and photos of the press conference: the tiny white woman surrounded by swarthy men in body armor. We were not shown the weapons, the guns and grenades taken from Pueblo Libre. We did not see car bombs or corpses, carnage from the war Peruvians were trying to forget. For us there was no war. There was no context or history—only a burned-out house, a President strutting among bodies: outrageous. Only the wounded girl raising her fist: unbowed. And despite being the world’s most inveterate bully, or maybe
because of it, America does love an underdog.

  First the left-wing press, then NPR and the nightly news, a segment on MacNeill-Lehrer, a four-page spread in Time. Peru’s actions were “excessive,” “unacceptable,” “counter to the norms of civilized nations”; its government was “authoritarian,” its anti-terrorism laws “brutal” and “unbefitting of a democracy.” Suspension of habeas corpus, domestic spying, indefinite detention, torture—such practices were hateful to Americans, they offended our most cherished ideals. We were reminded of Latin America’s penchant for dictators, its overactive militaries and secret police. There but for the grace, we thought. It was 1998, 1999. Such things could never happen here.

  They called her a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, the folk hero who stood up to a brutal regime—like David with his slingshot or Nelson Mandela, like Luke Skywalker or that kid in Tiananmen Square. There were T-shirts and fundraisers, a letter-writing campaign, a benefit concert in Golden Gate Park. The cities of Berkeley and Madison passed resolutions. Eddie Vedder was photographed wearing a Free Leo! pin. The story felt familiar, its pulse beat to a rhythm we knew: the outcry would build, the petitions and editorials, an off-the-cuff comment by Madeleine Albright, a presidential finger poked into the camera. And in the end, we assumed, the U.S. would get its way, as the U.S. usually does. We waited for the news flash: footage of diplomats spiriting her across the tarmac, the press conference at Dulles or JFK. She would appear on Good Morning America, she would accept an award from the ACLU—then she’d vanish forever from the vast, churning kaleidoscope of America’s attention.

  But it didn’t happen that way.

  “There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” Ari Fleischer informed us from the White House three years later, at the dawn of a new era. In this era, one does not defend political violence. One does not speak of uneven playing fields or collateral damage, of cancelled elections or stolen oil or the snapped necks and empty stomachs of realpolitik. In 1998 one might still talk of “rebels” and “revolution” with a certain romance. One might applaud “the megaton detonation of self-respect,” as Gabriel Zamir did in Bicentennial of Blood, to describe the topplings of Batista and Somoza, uprisings in Chiapas and East Timor, to admire the Afghan mujahideen.

  But in 2001, one no longer spoke of such things. One watched what one said and what one did. There were no more rallies in Bryant Park, no more screeds in Mother Jones or portraits of La Leo on the grassy quads of the Ivy League. In the ruins of Lower Manhattan, the smolder of a Pennsylvania field, her name was forgotten, her face too blurry to recognize. Since 2001 we’ve learned to distrust fine distinctions. We’ve reconsidered the dictator’s point of view and found it somewhat more reasonable. Tyranny, torture, patriot, self-defense—in the accelerating mayhem there was no time for semantics, for the splitting of hairs. There was only one word for her now, a meaningless word, an unspeakable word:

  Leo, are you a terrorist?

  But all this, too, is irrelevant, my editor says, all beside the point. Afghanistan and Dick Cheney, the Geneva Conventions. Blackwater. Halliburton. Guantánamo Bay.

  “Who the hell is Subcomandante Marcos? You think our readers know what’s in the PATRIOT Act? Stick to the story, dude,” he says. “Let someone else explain how the world works.”

  But what is the story? What does it really mean? I stare at her picture and see an anger too deep for easy explanation, for the reassuring clichés of the bildungsroman. How to get past the headlines and stock images, to scrape away encrusted myth until the real Leo gleams in my palm?

  I don’t want to explain how the world works. I just want to tell the truth. But all I have are stories: incomplete, self-serving, warped by time and grief and fear. Like peering through frosted glass, Leonora’s just a shadow, dim and receding—until, in the end, there’s no one there.

  * * *

  —

  “Remember the Rule of Three,” Maxine says. “You have to wait three years, or plant new rosebushes three feet away. Do you know how long they’ve been dead?”

  “They’re not dead.”

  “Well, Leo, it’s summer there, right? Have they flowered? You’re not a magician, you know.”

  Leo closes her eyes and leans against the doorway of the bodega, letting sunshine bake into her scalp. “They’re not dead, mom,” she says. “It just takes a little work. You don’t just throw things out.”

  It’s an old argument, familiar roles, but her own words sound strange to her, as if she’s playing a part in some amateur production written in a foreign language. When she tries to picture her mother sitting at the kitchen table in Cannondale, the day’s crossword puzzle and a mug of tea before her, what comes to mind is Nancy, how she’d smoked her cigarettes down to the nub, barking into the phone after her son disappeared.

  She’s spent the last few days working in the courtyard, ripping out weeds, turning hard, dry soil, trimming and staking the anemic lime tree. She spread compost around the bare, twiggy rosebushes, vowing to coax new buds before summer’s end. There’s dirt under her fingernails, long, itchy welts on her arms. Chaski hasn’t come; Leo’s vowed to be patient, to stay focused on immediate tasks, however unglamorous. One afternoon she took a bus to Breña to browse at an art-supply store. She brought back sketchpads, boxes of charcoal, thumbtacks, half a dozen painter’s smocks—but when she dumped her booty on the floor of the upstairs studio, the pile it made looked improbably small.

  She’s seen little of her new housemate, who’s gone each morning by the time Leo wakes, leaving a yoga mat under the living room window, a coffee mug set to dry on the kitchen counter. Once, Leo cracked open the door to Marta’s bedroom and found it empty but for a bedroll and the locked black cases. To one wall were taped a dozen black-and-white photographs: street children in tattered clothes; empty, trash-strewn lots; an old Indian woman bent under a basket. The images were urgent, disquieting, the focus so sharp they seemed hyperreal. Leo stared for a long time, mesmerized—like Marta herself the photos contained secrets, their surfaces hiding things she can’t yet understand.

  After hanging up with her mother, she heads home, mentally ticking off the day’s remaining chores: bathmats, a mop and floor polish, oil the window cranks, do something with the overgrown backyard. She hears the banging from a block away; when she rounds the corner, Chaski is standing outside the gate, peering up at the house. A battered pickup truck idles in the street behind him.

  “Where have you been?” she says, trying to sound playful. “It’s already Friday!”

  “Please, we go now?” he says. “Miguel needs his truck by three.”

  He drives offhandedly through the city’s snarled center, one wrist slung over the wheel, the other flipping channels on the AM radio. The cloying smell of gasoline seeps through the floorboards; Leo keeps her window down as they cross the river, taking in the slums on the other side, the windowless huts of dusty pink, toothpaste blue. She bites her tongue to keep from asking questions: about Julian, about Marta, who else is coming, what is the plan? She steals glances at Chaski’s freshly shaved jaw and remembers the day he came to the hostel, how he’d sat on her bed while she swooned with fever. It’s hard to think of him as a fighter, a revolutionary. But then she remembers Julian’s story about a boy whose parents were mutilated right in front of him, and a surge of anger and compassion hardens her stare. Of course he’s a fighter, she thinks. What choice did he ever have?

  In San Juan de Lurigancho, the sidewalks are frantic with activity, storefronts and cafeterias spilling bodies into the current. On the grassless median old women sell bowls of stew from battered pots to shirtless men carrying slings full of firewood or pushing mud-caked wheelbarrows. Chaski honks at a passing moto-taxi, waves to someone down a street heaped with broken asphalt. Two teenagers in the door of a bodega call his name.

  “Is this where you live?” Leo says.
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  “Not anymore,” Chaski says. “During the war, too many problems here. Soldiers, helicopters…for someone who looks like me, not so safe. Also,” he laughs, “everyone here looks like me.”

  He’d bounced from district to district, sleeping in rooms with a dozen strangers, or with others who’d fled their villages for the relative safety of Lima’s multitudes. Eventually he wound up at San Marcos, taken in by militant students who controlled two floors of a dorm with bars on the windows and sentries in the stair, the electricity long since having been cut.

  “Is that where you met Julian?” Leo says.

  “No. I met Julian because of Enrique.”

  “Enrique?”

  Chaski gives her a strange look as he pulls a U-turn in front of a fenced lot stacked with furniture. “His brother.”

  A burly, red-faced man with thick gray hair greets them at the gate. He gives Leo a quick nod, but then grips Chaski by the shoulders and hugs him hard. Not until the two men disappear into a small office at the back of the lot does Leo recognize him: the man from Nancy’s house, with the mangled arm.

  A few minutes later, three kids start hauling furniture out to the sidewalk: bed frames, crude wooden chairs, mattresses thin as seat cushions. Soon the truck is stacked and cluttered as an attic. For another hour, Chaski hurries her through the cramped stores and dark, constricted bazaars of Lurigancho. At every turn people greet him with kisses on both cheeks, rumpling his hair, hardly acknowledging the gringa standing next to him, her pockets full of cash.