The Gringa

  “Oye, gordita, ¡no seas mala!” Chaski says, teasing a pregnant girl of seventeen or eighteen, who sits between towers of aluminum pots. “Give me a better price. The boys are hungry. How will they eat?”

  “They can eat their fathers’ balls, amigo.”

  Chaski feigns shock. “Yes, okay, but they still need something to cook them in!” They both laugh, and the girl kicks him flirtatiously in the shin.

  Leo waits in silence, furtively peeling bills when Chaski nods to her. Armful by armful, she lugs their purchases to the truck—bundles of towels thin as paper napkins, plastic plates, curtains—ignoring the stares of children who trail her at a distance. So Julian has a brother, she thinks. First Marta, now Enrique—her sense of the group, the house and its purpose, is shifting daily, the hazy equations by which she tries to ascertain her own function. She wonders when she’ll meet this Enrique, if he’ll be pleased with what she’s done. She wonders if Enrique will be the one to tell her what comes next.

  She’s pulled from this reverie by the sound of raised voices, a heavyset woman snatching an electric kettle out of Chaski’s hand.

  “Get out of here, joven. Where are we, in the campo? I gave you a fair price.”

  “But mamá,” Chaski says, “a few soles, it’s not so much—”

  “Tengo seis hijos con hambre, amigo,” she says. “¡Eres como un judío!”

  “Okay, mamita, okay!” Chaski says, laughing. He holds out his hand for the money, but Leo, startled, doesn’t notice.

  Como un judío, she’d said: Just like a Jew.

  Leo stares at the older woman, who swats the dust off the kettle with a filthy rag. She’s never heard it firsthand before, so casual, so unnoticed. She can’t quite place it—as if some comic-book villain, laughably familiar, had walked up to shake her hand.

  “Amiga?” Chaski says.

  Leo blinks at him, sees the confusion on his face. He has no idea. She counts out the coins, slaps them into his oblivious palm. The woman, still muttering in Quechua, takes the money without looking up.

  * * *

  —

  There’s long been a minor preoccupation with Leonora Gelb’s Jewishness—her family’s “self-professed” or “alleged” Jewishness—as though it were, depending on the context, either the source or the disproof of her guilt. Though the Gelbs belonged to the Temple Beth Shalom, in Alden, NJ, from 1975 to 2002, they rarely attended. Neither Leo nor her brother was bar mitzvahed; they did not attend Sunday school; the entirety of their religious education seems to have been yearly Seders at the Greens’ home in Armonk and a Broadway outing to see Fiddler on the Roof. Early articles referred to the family as “lapsed” or suggested David had “renounced” his faith. In 2000, when the Central Conference of American Rabbis sent a delegation to Lima, some reporters wondered whether the Gelbs’ “rediscovery” of Judaism was a cynical stratagem. An editorial in El Comercio called them “judíos manqués.”

  As a child Leo never thought of herself as Jewish. In Cannondale, Jews were as unremarkable as station wagons; she was more surprised to learn that a friend had gone to Mass. Only at Stanford, surrounded by skateboarding Californians and fleeced Colorado nature-kids, did she start to feel a difference in herself—her “East Coastness,” as one suitemate put it. She saw herself through their eyes—darker, more solitary and intense—saw these same qualities in some of her colleagues at the Daily, in speakers at rallies whose anger was honed with irony. Among campus activists, being Jewish was a complicated matter—one took pains to disapprove of Zionism, to express solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians and admiration for Arafat, the freedom fighter. “To be Jewish has nothing to do with Israel,” Gabriel, who came from an Orthodox French family, often said. Yet she couldn’t deny her involuntary affinity for the Jews she knew, the protectiveness she felt for these people (she would not say “her people”). She would not call it kinship, but she couldn’t deny a sense of recognition. She tried not to talk about it.

  “We don’t concern ourselves with technicalities, bloodlines and things like this,” Rabbi Arturo Eisen Villaran, head of the conservative Sociedad de Imanuel, in Miraflores, told me. “If a person comes to us in trouble, we do what we can to help.”

  A bearish man of sixty-five, with a powerful grip and a large, bloodstone ring on the pinky of his right hand, Rabbi Eisen has led the temple since 1987. Educated at Brandeis, he speaks excellent English, his accent threaded with humor. On his office walls are photos of the rabbi embracing Peruvian politicians and businessmen, and one of him praying at the Western Wall. During Leonora’s solitary confinement he made several trips to El Arca on the family’s behalf. There were rumors he intervened with Interior Minister Rudolfo Gallegos de Silva, whose wife belongs to the temple; but such an intervention, if it happened, had no obvious effect.

  “This is a family that has been through a terrible time,” Eisen said with a shrug. “The trouble is not because they are Jewish or not Jewish, so I respond to them not as a Jew or a rabbi but as a human being.” When I asked if he thought Leo’s heritage influenced her politics, if the much-noted Jewish concern for social justice might have led her to the Cuarta Filosofía, he laughed dismissively.

  “I can tell you absolutely there is nothing in Jewish teaching that says this. Help the suffering, yes. Heal the world—tikkun olam—fine, of course. But we draw the line at violence.” He gazed out the window and into the temple’s courtyard, where a reinforced security post stood below loops of razor wire. “There were no Jews in the Shining Path. There were no Jews in Cuarta Filosofía. Peruvian Jews are not associated with the left. We’re a small community, quiet people. We don’t get involved like this.”

  “But she’s not Peruvian,” I reminded the rabbi.

  He folded his heavy hands on the desk. I could see him wondering something about me, and then deciding. “She should thank God,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  When she and Chaski get back to the house, the gate is open, the courtyard and flowerbeds littered with scrap wood. A man stands over a sawhorse, running a table saw from a cord that leads into the house. The sound of hammering drifts from the upstairs windows, along with a horrible metal rasping Leo feels in her molars.

  “Chaski, oye negrito, you got everything? Where you been?” Julian sits in a second-floor window, shirtless, smoking and peering at the street. “What do you think of this place? Like Club Med, right?”

  The house is full of workers, men in worn jeans and T-shirts who hurry to take the planks and blankets off Leo’s hands. Broken slats and loose screws litter the living room floor, a paint-spattered tarp lies heaped at the base of the stairs. Chaski greets the workers in Quechua; most answer with a grunt or a curt nod.

  “I didn’t know you were a millionaria, Soltera,” Julian says when he comes downstairs, brushing sawdust from his work pants. His gut is pudgy, but his shoulders are strong, his nipples large and dark red, enswirled by hair. “Did you hire a maid and a cook, too? Look at this place. Pueblo Libre? Is that a joke?”

  “You said big and inconspicuous,” Leo says. “It’s hard to do both.”

  He takes out a cigarette. “I shouldn’t have listened to Chaski. Of course you find a house like this. Just like home, no?”

  Leo stares at her hands. She’s sulky and overheated, still unsettled by the exchange over the tea kettle. “What’s wrong with Pueblo Libre?”

  “You see all the mamis on the street gossiping? This is a family barrio—” he spits the word as if it were a food-borne illness. “Police are everywhere. They arrest you for lying on a park bench. We should be somewhere like Lurigancho—con el pueblo, with the people we’re fighting for.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she says. “They don’t need revolutionaries in Lurigancho. That’s exactly where they expect us to be.”

  Amused, Julian drops his cigarette in a coffee can. �
��You think you’re a revolutionary?”

  For the rest of the afternoon she stays out of sight, busying herself in the kitchen, muttering to herself as she cleans and stacks new plates and cookware. He said he would do everything he could to help…says a woman on the radio, the latest Clinton accuser. He touched me. He put his hand on my breast. Fuming, she flips to another station. She can’t shake the look on Chaski’s face when she’d told him she was Jewish—as if she’d just claimed the sky was made of water, and she could breathe it. Why can’t anyone stay focused on what really matters?

  “You got enough food for these guys?” Julian says when she ventures back to the living room. He buttons his crisp, white shirt and fixes her with his stare. “Chaski’s gotta take the truck back to Miguel, but maybe you want to go to the store first?”

  “That’s very thoughtful,” she says. She reaches for the broom, sweeps screws and splinters toward the door. “What are they doing upstairs?”

  “Fixing things. Getting ready.”

  There’s that word again. “Don’t you think we should have asked the señora?”

  He picks up one of the blocky new chairs and examines it. “Why?”

  “Out of respect? If you want me to take care of the house, I have to think about what the señora will say.”

  “Fuck the señora.”

  “She’s been good to us.”

  “Good?” he says. “What’s good? Taking our money, that’s good?” He lights another cigarette and pointedly tosses the match to the floor. “The señora is a bourgeois criolla who ran out of money. Now she has our money. She better be good to us.”

  “You don’t know anything about her.”

  “No, you don’t know anything about her. You think your friend the señora would rent this house to Chaski?” He nods at one of the workers, a short, dark man with a low brow and a widow’s peak. “Or Artemio? You don’t see what people in this country are like. They treat you different. It doesn’t matter what we do to the house. If the señora sees Artemio she’s going to call the militares to bury him in a fucking hole.”

  Artemio stares, clearly having no idea what Julian is saying. Chaski examines a curtain rod and avoids her eyes. She wishes Marta were home—she’s tired of being surrounded by men, lectured by men, their certainties and their careless gestures.

  “Sometimes you need to trust people,” she says.

  “A revolutionary doesn’t trust anyone.”

  “I wonder if Enrique agrees with you.”

  Julian freezes, the cigarette held halfway to his mouth. “What did you say?”

  “Amiga—” Chaski warns.

  “Your brother. Enrique. Maybe you should check with him first.”

  Pleased to have silenced him for once, Leo goes back to sweeping, pushing dust and stray chunks of foam into a pile. Someone calls down that the work is finished, but gets no answer. When she next looks up, Julian is standing too close. He takes the broom from her hands and leans it, very gently, against the wall.

  “Go into your room, Soltera. Stay there until we leave.”

  “What?” she laughs. “Come on, Julian. All I’m saying—”

  “Shut your mouth. This is my house now.”

  “I signed the lease,” Leo says. “It was my money.”

  He rubs the back of his neck and closes his eyes. Then he seizes her arm and drags her toward the front door. Chaski looks up in helpless alarm, but before he can speak Julian has whisked her outside, hustling her through the courtyard where she trips over the extension cord, dragging her in halting half-steps toward the gate and throwing her against the wall so her breath flies out in a silent cough.

  “Are you living here?” Julian’s eyes are dull and hard. She gasps for breath and he shakes her. “You said you wanted to help, remember?”

  She nods, eyes watering. “Yes.”

  “You’ll do anything. You remember? Now I’m telling you what to do: shut your fucking mouth. If someone wants your opinion they’ll ask. But no one’s going to ask.”

  Helplessly she scans the upstairs windows but finds only reflections of warped sky. “That’s not—how you inspire loyalty—”

  The blow is unexpected, twirling her and stealing her balance so she crouches with her cheek pressed to the wall. For a second she can’t hear anything, and then her head fills with roaring, a hot throb that spreads down her throat and behind her eyes. Her glasses have fallen, but before she can retrieve them he pulls her to her feet, propels her through the gate and past the empty truck. Without a word he shoves her into the street and releases her—she takes two wild steps and stumbles, only a split second to brace herself, to hope there are no cars coming, before she hits the pavement hands first and curls up to protect her head.

  “You want loyalty, find the Three Musketeers,” he says. “I told you you were in the wrong place, Soltera. But you don’t listen.”

  She fights to calm her breathing, to hold back tears, until she hears the wood gate slam shut. A sob builds in her chest but she strangles it. The street is silent. She knows she has to get up before someone sees her. Her palms are burning, seeping blood and asphalt grit. She should get up, limp to the bodega, wait for a taxi. Who would blame her for leaving now?

  All her belongings are inside, her passport, the credit card. Her head is ringing, blood oozing over her wrists. If she goes back inside, she knows, she’ll have to obey him, submit to his authority, his casual cruelty. But to leave now, just as something is starting to happen, would be to admit that she doesn’t belong here, to prove he was right. She pictures herself knocking at the door of Ricky’s hostel, bleeding and pitiful, or slinking through the lobby of the Sheridan, riding the elevator with nervous tourists, and her throat grips with misery: to come this far only to admit she’s not cut out for it, to pass up a chance to help because someone is mean to her. Aren’t people’s lives more important than that? Isn’t Neto’s?

  Honor is to be useful without vanity, she thinks, pushing herself off the pavement.

  Then, with a wave of disgust: Eres como un judío.

  The street is empty, even the sparrows have stopped chittering. She can still feel the handprint hot on her face. A great fatigue settles in her bones as she steps onto the sidewalk. The gate is locked. She knocks—lightly, and then louder, and when she hears a voice on the other side she says quietly that she’s sorry, that she’ll keep quiet from now on, that she’d thought she was being helpful but she understands this was arrogance, a product of her privilege. She won’t question or argue anymore. She’s sorry, she says again. Please, let me come inside. When the gate opens she walks straight across the flagstones. She doesn’t stop to pick up her glasses or look at the men in the living room. She goes to the back of the house, but the room where she’s been sleeping is crowded with furniture; her bedding has been moved across the hall. Leaving the door open she curls up on the soft pile, clutches a corner of a blanket and pushes it, dry and fuzzy, into her mouth, sucking on the sour, dampening cloth, and refusing to choke.

  * * *

  —

  Marta wakes her with hot tea, a towel bundled with ice that she presses to Leo’s cheek. “Hold this,” she says. She opens a bottle of peroxide and cleans the cuts on her hands and forearms; the torn flesh burns and throbs and Leo clenches her sore jaw until her body shakes. Marta works quickly to pick out the dirt and gravel, making gentle sounds of disapproval when Leo tries to pull away.

  The windows are dark, the house quiet. Someone has left her glasses by the bed, the arms bent so badly they sit lopsided on her face.

  “Does he do that to you?” Leo says, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

  Marta frowns into her tea. “No,” she says, which only makes Leo feel smaller. She remembers Chaski’s face when Julian dragged her outside, the workers standing around like spectators. She climbs to her feet, the room briefly tilting. In the
bathroom, she brushes her hair with fierce, stinging strokes. The house is empty, the living room cleared of trash, the rickety new chairs pushed against one wall. There are beds in the second-floor bedrooms, new shutters locked across the windows, thin mattresses piled in the hallway. The stairs to the dance studio are blocked by a steel mesh door. She shakes the knob with all her strength, but the door barely shivers. She stares at the door a long time. Julian was right: it’s not her house anymore.

  Back in their room, Marta sits cross-legged on her sleeping pad, a toothbrush in her mouth. One black case lies open at her side, a camera nestled in protective gray foam. Marta hums to herself, cleaning a lens with a cloth.

  “Is he afraid of you?” Leo says.

  “I’m older than he is.” Seeing she’s not satisfied, Marta lays the lens in her lap. “In the war, the people I was with”—she pauses to choose her words—“there were many women in command. It’s different now. Here. But Julian knows to respect me.”

  “Were you a commander?”

  Marta stares at her lap, as if thinking back upon a puzzle. “No.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  This brings a thin smile to Marta’s face. She screws the lens into a camera, scans the room, and finally points it at Leo.

  “Pose.”

  “What?”

  “Pose. For the camera.”

  Leo holds still until the shutter clicks. “You’ve known him since the war?”

  Marta looks at her over the viewfinder. “You look like a passport photo. Pose.”

  Impatiently, she throws back her head and approximates a saucy smile. “Good,” Marta says. “Again.” Leo cocks her hip, runs a hand through her hair. She bats her eyelashes, attempts a smoldering gaze.

  “I know him since I was a student,” Marta says. “More I know his brother.”

  “Enrique.”

  “How do you know this name?”

  Leo takes off her glasses and stares out the window, at shifting shadows, faint light from a streetlamp creeping over the property wall. Such a huge city, she thinks, remembering Lurigancho, the man with the mangled arm, the man at the protest who’d dragged her from the fountain. All just hints, glimpses of something too large for her to see. She wonders if there are others like Marta and Julian and Chaski—in other houses like this one, waiting, getting ready. Maybe, somewhere, there’s even someone like her.