The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  “She said there is no student with that name. She said no one with that name ever studied at Católica.”

  The streets are familiar now, the damp air has cooled in Leo’s bones. It’s long after midnight, her feet ache; but she’s held by Marta’s voice, awed by this sudden intimacy. It’s dizzying, the change—in a day she’s gone from housekeeper to confidante, traipsing home from the ball with glass slippers in hand. But still, something in the story nags at her—something insistent in Marta’s quick glances. Marta’s trying to tell her something, but she can’t yet take it all in.

  At the corner of Almagro, Marta stops in front of the bodega, closed up for the night, and peers down the dark street. “After the war,” she says, quieter now, “his name was on a list from Amnesty International. But the government says they can’t find him. They say he was at the headquarters of DINCOTE only a few days and then released. This is what they say when they have tortured someone to death. One day maybe they will find his bones in a garbage dump, or an arroyo. Or maybe never. It doesn’t matter.”

  Leo watches her, waits for something more. For the first time in days she thinks about Ernesto. She remembers Nancy’s husband, the stunned look in his eyes. With a shudder of intuition, she says, “Enrique. Casimiro—that’s Comrade Enrique. That’s Julian’s brother.” Marta stares at the street, a slight purse to her lips the only indication she’s heard. “Oh, god, I’m so sorry…”

  “I didn’t tell you this so you can be sorry. I don’t want your condolences.”

  Leo follows her gaze, and in that instant becomes aware of unfamiliar sounds—the distant tick of music, a mutter of muffled voices. There are lights burning in the third-floor windows of a house halfway down the street.

  “Then why did you tell me?”

  “People don’t remember these things,” Marta says. “They forget the war, like it was only a bad dream. Now they are buying televisions and cars, pretending it never happened. They pretend the people who are gone never existed. Everyone wants to believe this new dream. They will fight or kill to defend it. You understand?

  “You don’t have to stay,” Marta says, leaning closer. She touches Leo’s chin, examines the bruise along her cheekbone. “No one will follow you or ask where you’ve gone. I make that promise. You can say you were never here.”

  Leo can hardly get words out. “Like it was my own dream?”

  Marta’s eyes move across her face. A car passes, taking a speed bump too fast, striking sparks on the pavement. After a long silence, Leo says, “Who’s in our house?”

  When there’s still no answer Leo pulls the key from her pocket. Her cheekbone stings hot at the bruise, with embarrassment at how easily Marta deceived her. The meeting with Josea, the long walk, even Marta’s story—all a diversion, a sleight of hand to keep her away from whatever was happening at the house. After all she’s done, they still don’t trust her. They don’t think she belongs.

  Marta catches up to her at the gate. “Stop, Leonora,” she whispers.

  Fumbling, Leo drives the key into the old lock. “I have a right to know who’s here.”

  “Don’t talk about rights,” Marta says, reaching for her wrist. In the failing moonlight, they stare at each other and at the open gate, the dim light leaking out at their feet. Up above, the once dead house is aglow with life, restless with shadows in the upstairs windows. Marta’s grip is unshakable, her gaze flat as a stranger’s.

  “No one is here, compañera,” she says. “You have made a mistake.”

  5

  At her civilian retrial, in October, 2002, Leo insisted she’d had no idea who was living on the third floor of the house in Pueblo Libre. There were four or five of them, she said. She’d never seen them, didn’t know their names. They came and went as they wished, using the back stairway. What they did with their days was not her concern. She’d needed tenants—opening the art school was taking longer than anticipated—and so she’d put up fliers at the universities. When a man came to the door with cash in hand, she gave him a key, no questions asked.

  “This man you saw. Do you see his face now?” the prosecutor asked, pointing to the board where photographs of six corpses hung side by side.

  “No,” she said, her face showing no reaction. “The man who came to the door didn’t live there. He just wanted a place for his friends.”

  “I see.” The prosecutor was a short, fastidious man of Japanese origin. He wore a cheap tan suit and shoes that had been polished too many times. “So you lived in this house full of terrorists for six months and you didn’t know what they were doing. You didn’t know they had acquired”—he checked his notes—“eight hundred and twenty sticks of dynamite, timers and blasting caps, sixty-four hand grenades, eight Zastava assault rifles and ten FAL rifles with more than five thousand rounds of ammunition. You never saw the stolen uniforms or the blueprints. The terrorists held meetings with superiors and conducted training exercises, all while you were downstairs knowing nothing. Can you tell me, are all Americans so stupid?”

  Leo took grim satisfaction in the insult. “Señor, there were no terrorists living in the house. And I think only some Americans are stupid.”

  She was rewarded by low laughter from the gallery, a momentary lessening of tension. Even her red-eyed, desperate lawyer looked up with something like hope.

  The prosecutor sat on the edge of the judges’ table. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Señorita,” he said, mildly astonished, “if you had no contact with these people, how can you know they were not terrorists?”

  * * *

  —

  According to Gustavo Gorriti, the original cohort of eight Philosophers arrived in Lima between March 8 and March 13, escorted by Julian and Chaski, who had met them in Abancay with a rented van and taken a circuitous route back via Nazca and the coastal highway. All but two were from the Huambalpa region of Ayacucho; the others came from farther north, in the mountainous La Mar province. The youngest, Faustino “Macho” Risco, was seventeen; the oldest, Freddy “César” Huatay, thirty or thirty-one.

  “We thought it was students, leaving and returning each day, fooling around in the yard,” a neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous, told La Republica after the raid. Others added that Pueblo Libre was rapidly changing, as the revived economy brought an influx of residents with neither the family names nor the fair skin of older inhabitants. Juan Carlos Castille, a third-generation libreño, told Expreso: “Once you have this element living among you, it is inevitable there will be problems.”

  Today Pueblo Libre feels like just another upper-middle-class neighborhood, Lima’s equivalent of Noe Valley or the Marais: cafés, gelato, the tourist draw of the Museo Larco. Rents are rising. Traffic is a problem. Air quality, high tuition, finding good help—these are all problems. Everybody’s got problems. Once I saw a group of thirty-somethings outside a restaurant, waving frantically at passing cars: S.O.S., their signs read—handwritten, in English. Save Our Sushi.

  I have a different problem. A narrative problem: What was she doing all that time? From the cumpas’ arrival until the date of the first newspaper, a month later, there’s no concrete record, surprisingly little speculation. There are no secret tapes, no photos from the inside. The Leo File is silent. If one discards the outré theories—sex parties, Satanic rituals—one is left with a giant blank, a high white wall. What was happening behind it? What are the quotidian habits of a “terrorist mastermind”?

  I’m overthinking it, Jack says, getting hung up on things no one can know. He’s tiring of these conversations, starting to wonder if he made a mistake. He tells me to draw on my own experience, to use my imagination.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he says. “Just try to have a little fun.”

  She wakes at five each morning, drags herself to the kitchen to make coffee, which Marta takes to the third-floor. The metal door clangs shut and sh
ivers overhead. She leaves baskets of bread and cheese, a bowl of oranges, boiled eggs, oatmeal, at the bottom of the stairs, lingering at the muffled sound of voices from above: Marta’s low drone, the restless shuffles of invisible men. On warm days the voices resonate through the bathroom pipes; Leo stands dripping in the shower, straining to make out the words.

  The rest of the morning is taken up by shopping, lugging home ten-kilo bags of potatoes, a backpack laden with bread, fruit, sacks of rice, meat if it’s cheap; the afternoon by cleaning, washing towels, hanging them to dry. Her arms grow ropy and taut, her hands white and chapped by bleach, soil-brown under the nails. On good days she finds an hour to work in the garden—her garden, as she’s come to think of it. By late March she’s brought daisies and violets into bloom, coaxed a spray of goldenrod in the sunniest corner. But the rosebushes are still barren, twisted like prisoners at the base of the wall. Marta’s voice drifts from a third-floor window. The metal door clangs and shivers.

  “What do you talk about all morning?” she asks Marta.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” she says, chafed by the condescension. There’s been no talk of what happens next, no mention of El Futuro. “But maybe there’s something else I can do?”

  “When there’s something for you to do you’ll be told.”

  The house reminds her of a dormitory, full of music at all hours, thunder on the back stairs, the dislocated rumblings of unseen bodies. She’s not to see those bodies—Marta has made that clear. She’s not to mount the stairs, or raise the kitchen blinds when the cumpas are in the backyard. This is to protect her, Marta says. It’s to protect all of them. The men upstairs—she assumes they’re men—are a rumor, a theory: like mice, or ghosts, their noise is everywhere and nowhere. The metal door clangs. When, in rare moments, the house is silent, she can almost believe she’d dreamed up the whole affair, so unlikely is it that she, Leo Gelb, would find herself living there. (Ironically, this is also how some commentators have seen her—Gorriti: “the American who rented the house and who was tried and mistakenly convicted for her role in the plot” [italics mine].) By dark, the noise has ebbed, the men have settled, and Leo remembers how the house once felt, in that first week when she was alone. Marta leaves without a word after dinner, camera bag slung over her shoulder, and rarely returns before midnight. Leo knows better than to ask where she goes.

  One night she wakes to voices, low mutters through the floor. Cracking the bedroom door, she sees light down the hall, pads carefully toward the kitchen. At the sound of Julian’s voice, she presses her back to the living room wall like a child.

  “And how long? Enough of the fucking talking. Sitting here like a bunch of women, doing nothing. What are we waiting for, the next election?”

  “Calm yourself,” Marta says. “Going too fast is how you end up with a disaster like Los Arenales.”

  “Sí, Profesora. And too slow is how you have a disaster like this country.”

  She hasn’t heard his voice in weeks, had not expected the heat of humiliation with which it fills her. The bruise under her eye has shrunk to an ocher smudge, a prickle of fury. She’s practiced how she’ll speak to him—careful but dignified, her loyalty intact. But when the anger ebbs she finds it leaves not fear but anticipation, a feeling of tentative hope: something would soon happen, a larger purpose would be revealed. Julian’s done his worst, she thinks. He taught her the lesson he wanted her to learn. To both of their surprise, she’s still here.

  “There are many things to discuss,” Marta is saying. “We need to establish a political line, lay out our principles. There can be no action without consideration—”

  “You want a line? No more killing and torture. Close El Arca, let the prisoners go. That’s the line.”

  “And what then? Who will guide the cumpas’ ideology? You have to think like a scientist, hermano, not an adventurist.”

  “Don’t call me hermano,” Julian growls. “And fuck your science, okay?

  When a chair scrapes over the tiles Leo slips back to her room, more restless than ever. She sleeps badly, wakes late and has to rush to make breakfast. All morning she fights a feeling of confinement, of tense expectation. She’s exhausted by solitude, shaking like a top wound too tight. When her chores are done she takes the bus to Miraflores, but even the warm ocean air can’t quell this resentment: Will she never see the bigger picture?

  At a tourist shop she finds something truly hideous: a framed needlepoint of a llama, with long, flirtatious eyelashes, its fur a nauseous orange against a purple background. The llama sports a bowler hat, the kind worn by married Quechua women. Beneath this revolting figure, white, cursive letters read ¡Yo Soy Peruana! She carries the monstrosity to the cash register in exultation, imagining Julian’s annoyance. There’s a spot at the bottom of the stairs where the llama will fit perfectly. It will be the first thing anyone sees when they come through the door.

  * * *

  —

  El Futuro was an anachronism, as Josea pointed out, a reminder of the war’s heady promise and its ultimate failure. Moreover, it was known to the government. “So unless you want a reunion in El Arca,” he’d said, “you’ll need a new name.”

  With no further instruction, Leo takes the task upon herself—a way to put her stamp on things, to demonstrate her value. For days she makes lists on scraps of paper, tries names out loud while hanging wet sheets. El Tiempo? New Dawn? The Messenger? She tests them out on the computer—a clunky black Dell she bought at a mall in San Isidro, along with a flatbed scanner and SyQuest drive, set up on two card tables in the dining room—and tries to fashion a convincing front page.

  But what sounds impressive in the raw autumn air of the garden looks flimsy and old-fashioned on screen. They need an inspiring name, something that speaks to the now, to this generation’s seething discontent, that tears away the cynical lies about progress and reconciliation and wakes people up again. ¡Despierta!, she decides, convinced of it for a day or two. Wake Up! But it sounds like a publication for children, or evangelical Christians. Ojos Abiertos reminds her of an optometrist’s newsletter. She collects stories from newspapers and magazines, scribbles thoughts in the margins; she looks through a stack of Marta’s photographs and mentally notes which to include. Whatever their plans for the paper, they’ll need a name, and soon, but everything—The Spark, The Argument, El Militante—sounds forced, artificial, nothing speaks to the strength of purpose, the moral urgency she wants to convey.

  Then, one morning at the bodega, an old Bryan Adams song comes on the radio. She has a quick, vivid memory of her high-school friends Rachel and Megan dancing to “Summer of ’69” at Giants Stadium a decade ago. Walking home, she remembers the fight with her mother, the unbearable pressure of sadness and anger—it probably was PMS, she decides—and in a jumble recalls Peter Gabriel and his African backup singers, a paper she’d written on youth movements in South Africa, the morning Winnie Mandela visited Gabriel’s class, striding into the lecture hall as if she’d stepped out of the pages of the Iliad or the Mahabharata. She can feel something coming to her, asserting itself through the white noise of memory—Chaski in the jeep as they fled Los Muertos: Where were the cameras?—runs awkwardly the rest of the way home, humming to herself: the man is dead…the man is dead. The photos she saw that day, the body on the gurney, Ernesto’s gentle smile. Has it been three months already?

  She picks a stately font, positions her title across the top of the page and stretches it to fill the margins. One by one she tries Marta’s photos, scanning and cropping, but none is exactly right. The banner should reach out for readers, freeze them where they stand: a bolt of awareness, an epiphany. At the bottom of the stack she finds what she needs; her hands shake as she lays it on the scanner and waits for the image to unfurl, one line at a time, on the monitor. Her blood starts to tingle: There, she thinks, there it is, staring awestruck into t
he monochrome glow of her own eyes, bright with rage on the night Marta told her to pose.

  THE EYES OF THE WORLD. It’s perfect, she thinks, laughing as she swipes a tear from her cheek. It says all there is to say about responsibility and historical necessity, about the power of collective action. You can’t read those words, see that image, and turn away. If the world had been watching in Los Arenales, Ernesto would still be alive. They’ll run his picture on the front page, she decides, with a description of what had been done to him. Volume one, issue one. Such things won’t happen once people are made to see.

  * * *

  —

  April 5 marked the anniversary of the President’s auto-golpe, the 1992 “self-coup” in which he’d dissolved Congress, slashed civil liberties, and put in place the machinery of what many Peruvians describe as a police state. As in previous years, demonstrators gathered outside the Palace of Justice that morning—pensioners and students, a contingent of nuns leading prayers. The Abuelitas de la Ausencia lined the steps of the high court, leveling their gaze at passersby, while in the park across the Paseo de la República, Bufón mounted a production of Julius Caesar for picnicking families, with the actors dressed as characters from Sesame Street.

  Shortly after one p.m., a band of masked vigilantes descended on the crowd—some on foot, others on motorcycles—wielding heavy chains and spray paint. Eleven people were hospitalized for concussions, fractured ribs, second-degree burns. Several actors were beaten and doused with orange paint. The abuelitas were bound, stripped to the waist, and shoved face-down on the Palace stairs, the word PUTA scrawled on their backs. Police officers made no attempt to intervene. Though a spokesman for the President condemned the violence, no arrests were ever made.

  The image of the violated women ran on page five of El Comercio the next day. (I also came across it in an obscure academic text, Por Amor de la Madre: Las Guerras Sucias desde una Perspectiva Freudiana, and, somewhat bizarrely, a coffee table photo-book, Mujeres Poderosas de Las Américas.) While the incident had little effect on the national discourse, it may have galvanized the Pueblo Libre group—the same photo appears on the back page of the first issue of The Eyes of the World, with an accompanying editorial titled “We Must Resume the Struggle!”