The Gringa

  “Where is Enrique?” she whispers.

  “Pose.”

  “Is there film in that camera?”

  “Just pose.”

  She moves around the room, flattening herself to the wall, throws herself seductively across her bedroll. “Is he going to live here?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Get up,” Marta barks. “Are you a fighter? Are you a revolutionary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Show me.”

  She bares her teeth and lunges in Marta’s direction. “More,” Marta says. “Are you angry?” Leo cocks a fist, kicks one leg as high as she can. She clasps her hands and points an imaginary gun at her roommate, growls deep in her throat and rushes at Marta until she slips and stumbles onto the blankets, knocking over the camera case as she falls.

  Marta lowers the camera, satisfied. “Soon I take you to meet someone. A printer, someone I know from a long time ago. He will help us.”

  “Help with what?”

  “El futuro,” Marta says.

  Leo holds excruciatingly still, but Marta says nothing more, only slides into her sleeping bag and reaches up to shut off the light. Far off in the neighborhood, a string of firecrackers goes off, echoing for several seconds, a welter of howls and barks arising in its wake. Leo lies in silence, staring at Marta’s dark shape and listening to the empty house. El futuro…el futuro…Wide awake, she picks up the camera and stands by the window, pulls back the curtain until moonlight floods the room, casting Marta in pewter. She holds her breath, squeezes the shutter.

  “Go to sleep,” Marta says.

  Leo lets the curtain fall. She remembers the burning silver sign, the locked door at the top of the stairs. Neto’s face on a placard, carried off into the distance.

  “Why isn’t Enrique going to live here?”

  She waits for Marta to scold her. But after a long silence, Marta’s voice comes disembodied through the dark.

  “Because he is dead.”

  4

  According to the civilian prosecutor, Leo first met Josea Torres Medina at Taberna Tambo, on the tenth of March. Torres is mentioned in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s report as a “reformed” subversive: detained twice, in 1989 and 1991 (the report states that he was “subjected to aggressive interrogation”), after the war he married an accountant, bought a flat in Surco, and opened a print shop specializing in brochures and manuals for government agencies. This respectability, the report says, was a useful front for the Pueblo Libre group, “but it is probable he was not told of their true plans.”

  Tambo, one of Lima’s oldest public houses, is tucked into the labyrinth of the old city, at the corner of two unlit alleys. It was once known as the “Cradle of the Revolution,” Damien Cohen told me—since the days of Simón Bolívar the bar has served as a gathering place for intellectuals, communists, anarchists, malcontents. Mariátegui was said to have launched his political party from a corner table. During the war you could find rival groups sharing tables, debating Stalin vs. Trotsky, the Chinese vs. the Cuban model; on particularly bloody days the tavern served as a field hospital where volunteer doctors tended to wounded demonstrators. But like everything in Lima, Tambo seems to have shed an old skin. When Damien took me there, the tavern was full of middle-aged men in suits and towering blond backpackers. A golf tournament was showing on the TV. When a group of teenagers wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and cartoon scowls peeked inside, the bartender promptly waved them back to the street.

  “You see? Nothing can happen here anymore,” Damien said, bemused. “Only reenactments of things.”

  The room is like something out of a Hemingway novel: a long zinc counter, marble café tables, cigarette smoke twisting under a lazy ceiling fan. Leo sips a foamy beer—her first drink in weeks—and shifts in the wobbly, cane-back chair. The walls are crammed with old photos of vintage cars, ladies in high-necked dresses, proud officers with handlebar mustaches—but the music is pure ’80s MTV: “One Night in Bangkok,” “Lucky Star,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

  The man who approaches the table is in his late thirties, lean and handsome, with a beaked nose and wavy hair tucked behind his ears, eyeglasses hanging from a thin chain around his neck.

  “So this is the gringa?” he says.

  “Es nuestra compañera,” Marta says, standing to kiss his cheek. “Give her respect.”

  “Of course,” he says, with a mock bow. “I beg your pardon.”

  “This is Comrade Michel—” Marta says, her hand lingering at his elbow.

  “Enough of that shit,” he says in English. “My name is Josea. You can tell me your name or not, I don’t care. Mucho gusto conocerte.”

  “Mucho gusto,” Leo says, as pleased by his disarming manner as by having been called “compañera.” He bends to kiss both her cheeks, bestowing upon her a smile both playful and fatherly—as if they’d met before, as if he knows her secrets—before turning the full wattage of his attention back to Marta.

  “You look good, cariña,” he says, and though she doesn’t reply, Leo spots a faint gleam in Marta’s eye, the subtlest of smiles drifting across her lips.

  Leo sits quietly while they catch up on old comrades, mutual acquaintances, trying to keep up with their inside jokes and indecipherable, rapid-fire slang. There’s an unfamiliar lightness in Marta’s voice; she laughs freely, touches the back of Josea’s hand. On the TV a man in a trenchcoat, a morose duck of a man, speaks into a bank of microphones. Starr to subpoena bookstore purchases, the caption reads. Lewinsky reportedly gave “phone-sex novel” to President Clinton.

  It’s been a trying week, her days full of busy work and a churn of optimism and impatience that’s made her feel almost manic. She beetled back and forth to the markets, bringing home hallway runners and ceramic teacups, blinds for the kitchen windows, colorful handwoven cloths to hang on the walls. At the art-supply store she bought a dozen easels, standing lamps, rolls of heavy paper, boxes of brushes and colored pencils, then piled it all outside the new metal door until the upstairs hallway was impassable. She dusted and redusted windowsills, sang along to the transistor radio, attempted Marta’s yoga poses until her legs gave out. She spent hours on her knees in the garden, turning the soil and kneading in rose food with bare, grubby fingers.

  She’s seen Marta only in flashes—gray glimpses at dawn, hazy shufflings late at night. At some point new photos appeared on the wall: a one-armed man selling magazines from a median; a pair of Indian girls, no older than thirteen, standing on a streetcorner in halter tops and makeup. Like the earlier photos, the images were stunningly sharp, almost hallucinatory, cropped uncomfortably tight; the subjects look straight into the camera but seem, at the same time, unaware of it—an intrusion, a violation, their innocent gazes made Leo feel uncomfortable, somehow accused. As the days passed her resentment grew: What was Marta doing when she wasn’t in the house? Where were Julian and Chaski? El futuro…When would she be told of the plans?

  After half an hour, Josea leans back, scans the room, picks at something on the tablecloth. “And tell me, cariña,” he says, “how is Casimiro?”

  Instantly the easy mood changes. Marta sets down her drink and folds her hands. “You were an hour late, compañero. Let’s not waste any more time.”

  Josea sits straighter and sucks his teeth. Leo watches his face, watches Marta, fascinated by the shifting dynamic. “Bueno, comandante,” he says. “If you’re determined to do this, then here’s what I require.”

  In the early years of the war, Peru’s many leftist groups published a multitude of newspapers—some polished and professional, distributed as far away as European capitals; others no more than photocopies handed out at demonstrations and union halls. Sendero sympathizers knew where to find their paper, El Diario, just as followers of PUM or Red Flag knew which newsstands carried theirs
. Like most, El Futuro, the Cuarta Filosofía’s paper, was shut down after the Tarata bombing, in accordance with the new anti-terrorism laws; the editor fled the country; the printing press was destroyed. Marta had explained all this on their way to the bar. Offhandedly, as if remembering a minor home repair, she’d said it was time someone brought El Futuro back to life.

  “From now on I talk only to the gringa,” Josea tells Marta. “After tonight, I won’t see you. I’m sure this upsets you terribly.”

  In a quiet voice he lays out the procedure: a café to be chosen beforehand, at a prearranged time Leo will drop off a SyQuest cartridge with the files. “Fonts, style sheets, everything has to be there,” he says. “If I don’t understand something, you’ll have to accept what I decide. You know how to use PageMaker?”

  Two days later, the newspapers will arrive at Álvaro’s furniture store. If the papers don’t come, they’ll meet here, at Tambo, exactly one week later. “No one comes to my shop under any circumstances,” he says. “Remember: I don’t know you people.”

  “Muy amable,” Marta mutters.

  “You’re lucky it’s a small job,” he says. He cleans the glasses hanging from his neck and scans the café. “I don’t do this anymore, cariña. My clients are respectable people, you understand?”

  “Politicos,” Marta says drily.

  “And others. I had a meeting today with Orient Express. They pay very well.”

  “ ‘Only what is necessary,’ ¿no?”

  He leans back in irritation, gestures to the bruise under Leo’s eye. “And what made it necessary to give her that?” Leo turns away, blushing furiously. “Now let’s talk about money,” he says. “This is a business, okay? We aren’t running around anymore painting slogans and throwing sticks at the army—”

  “Some of us were doing more than this, cariño…”

  Leo stands without excusing herself, pushes through the swollen crowd as another forgotten hit blares over the speakers—I wanna be…your sledgehammer…In the bathroom she holds the sides of the sink and studies the fading bruise in the mirror. Since that afternoon she’s felt like a grounded teenager, rebuked in some bid for adulthood. Over and over she’s replayed her decision to stay. But now everything is changing: no more whiling away days among flowers, no more playing Cinderella in an empty old house. She has a job to do, something important to the group. What will go into El Futuro, who will write it, what it should look like—all of this remains unclear. But already she feels more solid, enlarged by this new purpose. Ready to prove how useful she can be.

  Back at the table, Josea is winding a scarf around his neck. “Send my greetings to Comrade Julian,” he says. “Tell him the job will be taken care of, out of respect for his brother.”

  “Gracias, tío,” Marta says. “And my greetings to your wife.”

  Josea laughs. “I’m not your tío. Also, this craziness in Los Arenales…Don’t get ahead of yourselves, okay? I’m telling you as your friend.”

  “Don’t worry. You don’t know us, remember?”

  “But do you know yourselves?” He frowns and looks around the crowded room. “El Futuro. What happened to that, anyway? It turned out to be shit. Ciao, compañera,” he says, turning to kiss Leo’s cheek. “Enjoy the wax museum.”

  * * *

  —

  The moon hangs high in a cellophane sky when they leave Tambo, casting glimmers over the old buildings, the traffic circles and featureless apartment blocks. The scent of jasmine wafts like rotting food. Leo doesn’t speak or ask questions, concentrates on keeping up with Marta, mirroring her long, confident strides—as if one wrong move, one unwelcome comment, might undo the night’s giddy progress. Marta checks her watch frequently, takes unexpected turns, stopping on corners to peer anxiously in both directions until Leo wonders if she might be lost, or drunk. They walk for over an hour, Leo’s cheeks damp, the tip of her nose cold—through the silent Campo de Marte, dark trees standing sentinel, blocking out the lights of the surrounding city; down the Avenida Salaverry, still loud with traffic, with the chatter of families huddled around food carts and the lit windows of cheap comedores. It’s late, tomorrow’s chores massing in the back of Leo’s mind—but she doesn’t complain about the roundabout route or the growing chill because her terse, inscrutable companion has uncharacteristically begun to talk.

  “In San Martín de Porres, the district where I grew up, everyone was a leftist,” Marta says. People identified with the villages their families came from—one group loyal to Sendero, another to MRTA or Patria Roja. “These are your neighbors, your cousins—you know who is their girlfriend, who in the family is sick, you borrow bread or blankets from them if you don’t have money. So when the army comes and asks questions, no one says anything. You don’t inform on your neighbors.”

  At Católica, she says, allegiances were more fluid. The children of Lima’s business and military elite strolled the well-tended grounds speaking of cultural hierarchies, economic slavery, linguistic genocide. Though outright protest was rare, student groups claiming loyalty to political parties both legal and illegal organized symposia and art exhibits, demonstrations of traditional dances, film screenings about the bloodletting in the provinces. She met Josea at a debate about Cuba. He was a graduate student in psychology and the leader of a group that called itself 14 de Junio.

  “He was very popular. A good speaker.” With a glance at Leo, the flicker of a smile, she adds, “And very attractive.”

  Josea took her to meetings in other parts of the city—the back room of a bookstore, the basement of a half-empty office building. “You go to a streetcorner, and there is an old woman selling candy, if you tell her the password she unlocks a door. All of this is so exciting when you are young. Like in a James Bond movie.” Eventually, Josea was asked to recruit a small group for an “orientation” at a farm an hour from Lima. That’s where they met Casimiro.

  He was tall and fair-skinned, his blue eyes finely alert, crimped at the corners with private humor. The son of a retired general, he spoke little, but projected a calm competence that reassured anyone near him, man or woman. He was also a student at Católica, and though he was among the youngest at the meeting it was obvious to everyone that he would one day be the group’s leader.

  Over the next few months, the three of them went to meetings several times a week, often staying out late for beer and french fries, arguing over the readings of Hegel and Marx, Lenin and Mao, debating whether post-capitalist Peru should follow the precepts of Plato’s Republic or be organized like the communal ayllus of the Inca empire. In time, they could sense they were being groomed, singled out for their dedication. They were interrogated by handlers, probed for ideological inconsistency. They were sent into the slums to speak to neighborhood councils and youth leaders. After a year, Marta and Casimiro were sent to a training camp on the edge of the jungle. Josea was not invited.

  “They wanted to split us apart,” she says. “Monogamy is a threat to the group. It means you are loyal to one of your cumpas more than all the others.”

  They spent a month in a tiny outpost with no electricity, miles from any roads, no radio or phone contact with the outside world. They never learned the names of the other recruits. They ran for hours, lungs burning from the altitude, received instruction in how to handle rifles and handguns, how to rig dynamite with a timer, to pack a car with TNT for maximum explosive force. This was where she first took Marta as her nom de guerre. At the end of the month, Casi was put in charge of a cadre of students from Católica and San Marcos. By the time they returned to Lima, with instructions to go about their normal lives, they had become lovers.

  “Josea was so sad. I don’t know if he was jealous for me or for Casi. But you see how he is: such a Romeo! Soon he had ten new girlfriends. Then he has no energy left for the Movement.”

  The Tarata bombing happened a few months later, the government moved quic
kly to militarize the city and gain control of the universities. Hundreds of students and faculty were arrested. At San Marcos, radicals barricaded themselves inside dorms and classrooms, emerging in spasms of gunfire. Marta and Casi woke one morning to the sound of helicopters flying low over the neighborhood. Already a crowd had formed outside Católica’s gates and they hurried to join the march. There were chants and raised fists, students thrown up against walls, bursts of tear gas that sent people running into side streets. They didn’t hear the troop carrier roll up behind them until it came to a stop, trapping a dozen protestors beneath an overpass.

  “I want six!” shouted the commander, as soldiers spilled out, throwing students to the pavement, pointing rifles at their heads. They tore open bookbags and ripped back pockets, forced their fingers into men’s mouths and under women’s belts. “Give me six! Give me six! ¡Vámonos!” When Marta looked back she saw Casi being dragged away, his legs limp, a soldier smashing his head with the butt of a rifle.

  “He had in his pocket a red bandanna,” she says. “That was all. No weapon or propaganda. Just a red bandanna. It was enough.”

  Over the next several days, most of the students were released. But no one heard from Casi. She went first to the local police station, then the army garrison, but no one would tell her anything. She tried to contact his father, the general, but he would not speak to her. After two weeks, she and a group of friends went to the university president to demand he make a formal inquiry to the military. For eight hours, they refused to leave the administration building. Finally, the president’s secretary brought them a reply.