The Gringa

  They hated us for our freedom—that’s the story we were told. For being American: successful, peace-loving, the varsity quarterback envied and loathed by the hoodlums in the smokers’ lounge. They were savages, psychos—what else could explain it? Not that we’d wrecked their homelands and desecrated their holy sites. Not that we’d raped the planet, colluded in butchery, sold weapons to every sick thug with a medal on his chest and a crucifix above his bed. Forget our military bases ringing the globe, our nuclear subs prowling the oceans, forget every bomb we’ve ever dropped on poor, brown people. When Amurka does these things, you can bet we’ve got a damned good reason.

  When you do it, you’re a terrorist.

  Yes, I was a castaway, lost in Amurka: a country I didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to recognize. Every time I turned on the radio I heard something else I couldn’t understand: yellowcake uranium and smoking guns, flowers and chocolates, the unknown unknowns. None of it made sense, this new language laden with omens, illustrated with PowerPoint slides—but sense was not what we wanted. We wanted blood, we needed a story that justified our bloodthirst, something that walked like a duck, swam and quacked like a duck—so who the fuck cared if it was, in fact, a duck? The only logic that mattered now was narrative logic: it was not necessary that we believe the story, only that we admire its craftsmanship, the elegant arc of its action, its inevitable climax and satisfying denouement. And in fact nobody believed it, even those who swore by it, who brandished their fists at any profession of doubt. Doubt was the new enemy—as much as those monsters, those raghead cocksuckers who attacked us for no reason. Real Amurkans have no use for it.

  How thrilling it all was, how real! An endless procession of amazements and delights: whole villages leveled, museums ransacked, bombs dropped on places of worship, peasants and shopkeepers buried alive under the stones and timbers of the Amurkan rampage. Bounties offered in exchange for names, teenagers tossed into shipping containers, flown to third countries to be tortured while the neighbors counted their cash rewards. Napalm and white phosphorus, private corporations set loose in the wreckage to take what profits they could find. Drone strikes on weddings. Massacres in the dead of night.

  We waited for the weekly installment of this new hit series about villains and spies, dashing diplomats and backroom intrigue, bombs hidden in lingerie, a timer counting down in the trunk of a limousine, the handsome CIA agent who clips the wire in the nick of time. We could no longer say if we’d heard it on CNN or seen it on the silver screen. Abductions, secret prisons, citizens whisked off European streets, out of schools and train stations and mosques. Men hung upside down and beaten. Boys with tubes shoved up their noses. This is not my country, I said. I pinched myself, clicked my heels, but the wonders kept coming. Like a black mass or a sorcerer’s spell: they said the words, made furtive gestures, and one by one the laws stopped working—the Geneva Conventions, the Bill of Rights, the FISA statutes, anything inconvenient to the machinery of vengeance and control. Warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions, habeas corpus denied because no judge had the proper security clearance to hear the case. They granted themselves access to our business records, our phone records, our library books, the massive eye of foreign surveillance turning to the enemy within. If you see something, say something. We were struck mute and blind.

  This is not my country. I said it over and over again. We all did. We signed petitions, scrawled on placards, joined the great, screaming mob in its pointless regurgitations: Imperialism! Occupation! Police state! We marched up and down and around and back, clenched our fists and decried the monstrous things our government was doing, and when we opened our eyes our government was still doing them and—most terrifying—it was still our government. A representation of the country, a distillation of who we really are, what we really wanted. And what we really wanted was to kill people, a lot of people, to crush their homes, turn their hospitals into heaps of broken concrete. To lock children in cages in the Caribbean heat and leave them to die like animals. We wanted to inject people with poisons that would leave them shaking for the rest of their lives. To dislocate their shoulders, fracture their skulls, to hold power drills to their heads and tell them to pray. We wanted to piss on their holy books, show them our asses and fart at them, we wanted to slam them into walls, cram them into crawlspaces, drown them in buckets and bring them back to life. We wanted to show them—we wanted to make damn sure they understood—that the United States of Amurka is the most powerful nation in history, blessed by a god stronger and nastier than theirs, that the world belongs to us and if they dared challenge us we would fuck their shit up.

  No, it was not my country. But what other country did I have?

  So I argued, shook my fist, wrote my polemics for My.World and read them at open mics. I bought a bumper sticker that read REGIME CHANGE STARTS AT HOME. The body count skyrocketed—ten thousand, a hundred thousand, millions driven from their homes—but back in Amurka, I still went to work each day, teaching young writers to show don’t tell. Diagramming plotlines. Expounding on empathy. Empathy, I told them, was what separated us from the animals. Art, I insisted, could still save the world.

  It was a lie, a convenient fantasy. No one knew that better than I.

  And one morning I woke to the image of a bland young Amurkan leading a naked Arab by a leash, grinning and flashing a thumbs-up, as if he were something she’d won on a game show.

  Not long after that, I boarded a plane—my apartment abandoned, my belongings all sold. I had no illusions about the value of this gesture, or any gesture. I only knew that if I stayed in Amurka I would lose something I needed, some ability to divide the world into true and false. The war, of course, would continue, but I would not be a part of it. I would wash my hands, sever the connection. From that moment on I was not an American: I was a phantom, an absence. I was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  —

  Mark arranged for me to stay with a friend in Lima, a journalist Stephanie had worked with in the ’90s. I arrived on a windy morning, fog shrouding the corrugated tin Pacific and the Callao shipyards as the plane descended. It had been years since I’d seen Lima. The airport was unrecognizable—what had been a filthy terminal swarming with pickpockets had been transformed into a gleaming emporium of jewelry and leather stores, cell-phone kiosks, a crowded Starbucks playing Amy Winehouse songs. The touts and taxi drivers and overflowing ashtrays were gone, replaced by security guards and LCD screens, the stench of broken toilets disinfected by the cool wash of money.

  The city, too, was bright and clean—nothing like the dreary, dangerous place I remembered. In the taxi, I gaped at giant supermarkets and manicured parks, upscale bakeries where ladies in sunglasses chatted at patio tables. After years in Babilonia, I felt like a caveman who’d just thawed from a block of ice.

  “So you want to write about the Bride of Satan,” Damien Cohen said.

  “ ‘Want’ might not be the right word,” I said.

  Damien was a tall, reedy Frenchman with a salt-and-pepper crew-cut and deep-set blue eyes that narrowed in secret amusement. He was a serious journalist—he’d spent years in Africa, writing about conflicts in Chad and the Sudan, first for Le Monde and then The Washington Post, before coming to Lima in 1992. Eight years later, he won a Pulitzer for his series on the implosion of the Fujimori government. He lived with his boyfriend, Carlito, in the Magdalena del Mar district, in a cozy flat with brushed-steel appliances and Georgia O’Keeffe on the walls.

  “My first advice to you is not to tell anyone your real subject,” he said, reclining on a white couch and offering me a Gaulois. “You’ll see, Andres. The Peruvians, it’s shocking. They all want to stab her in the throat.”

  “After all this time?”

  “She is the most hated person in Peru. More even than Abimael Guzmán.”

  Three days earlier, Leonora’s parole had been approved. The press went berserk
, running front-page photographs of dead soldiers and bombing sites, headlines like HIGH COURT LEGALIZES TERRORISM and VIENE EL CUATRO. There were demonstrations as far away as Piura, former ronderos brandishing weapons in the streets. Leo’s lawyer received hundreds of death threats and the presiding judge’s car was stoned. The next day the attorney general stayed the ruling, citing “irregularities” in the handling of the case. Leo would remain in prison, pending a full review.

  “Why you care so much about this person?” Lucrecia had asked that morning, as I hefted my backpack in the freezing gray silence. “Is so long ago.”

  “It’s just a job,” I said. “You won’t even know I’m gone. When I come back I’ll take you to a fancy dinner.”

  “When?”

  “Two weeks.”

  She turned away and pulled the blankets tight. “You won’t come back.”

  “Lulu,” I said.

  “You will go dancing and meet a rich limeña and she will say, ‘Why you want to go back to those rough, stupid cholos?’ ”

  “And I’ll say, ‘Because I am a rough, stupid cholo.’ ” I stooped to kiss her forehead. “Try not to think about it. It’s two weeks. Maybe three.”

  Damien showed me the small guest room off the kitchen and handed me a spare key. “Mi casa es tu casa. Help yourself to anything you need. I’m sure you already have many sources to speak to,” he said, “but let me know if I can be of help.”

  My head was abuzz from being at sea level after years at high altitude. I was nervous: it was opening night and I still hadn’t read the script.

  “The truth is,” I said, laughing, “I don’t really know where to start.”

  * * *

  —

  It was simple: I needed the money. Fifteen thousand dollars: enough to keep me in Babilonia for two or three years. After that, who knew? The news from the U.S. was all bad—the market had slid another ten percent, Bear Stearns collapsed—but there was an election coming up, the end of the Bush nightmare in sight at last. “Hope and change, dude!” Jack said when I spoke to him last. Who was to say a new President couldn’t fix everything, put all the murderous genies back in their bottles?

  It was also true that I needed an exit—temporary, a little breathing space, time for everyone to think things over. After the night at La Luna, Lucrecia had begged me to forgive her: she’d seen Ronaldo, her ex, in church and confided in him in a moment of confusion, she said. She’d had no idea he would show up at the club. She wanted to be with me, she said. If I still wanted her, she wanted to be with me.

  “Of course I want you,” I told her. But neither of us knew exactly what that meant, not now, and it seemed best to spend some time apart until we did.

  In the meantime, I had to figure out a way into the story. Stephanie was right: I knew nothing, had none of the requisite background, had never been around any of the people—passionate activists, jailbirds, table-bangers—Leonora must have known. What I knew of Peru’s history could have fit in a shot glass. The war, the military dictatorships, the centuries of oppression and neglect—I was as innocent of these things as I was of Japanese cinema or string theory. I hadn’t come to Peru to study history, after all. I’d come to escape it.

  But to write this story I’d need a crash course, enough to keep from embarrassing myself. I’d brought a few books with me—Gorriti, Fanon, Mariátegui—and soon I’d acquired many more: revolutionary theory, memoirs of activists and political prisoners. At a café near Damien’s apartment, I spent hours downloading transcripts and communiqués, white papers, human-rights reports, highlighting and underlining until long after midnight. I read all eight thousand pages of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s 2003 report. My notebook quickly filled with timelines, genealogies, lists of villages with unpronounceable Quechua names. None of it made sense to me: the flood of words, of terminology. By the end of the day I’d forgotten everything I’d read.

  When I’d written my novel I’d done very little research: I read a book about communes, another on the dot-com crash, spent two weeks in Oregon on Stanford’s dime. For plot, I pored over The Great Gatsby, my not-so-secret model—my narrator was a modern-day Nick Carraway, a scholarship kid thrust among people of outrageous privilege. For the characters and their discontents, I drew shamelessly on my own circle of artists and strivers, on people like Jack Durst—the young millionaires who proliferated in San Francisco and disappeared just as quickly. I did no interviews. What need? I had no obligation to real people or events, only to the story. The details were less important than how it was told, the music of the sentences; context mattered less than a vivid description or a startling insight.

  Leo’s story was different. I’d known that since the night I’d watched the crowd at Paddy’s rouse itself to fury. She was a symbol of so many things, the tip of an iceberg that rammed the hull of Peru and nearly took the whole ship down. No one was unaffected; nearly everyone had lost family members, or fled their home, or kept their children inside for fear of car bombs. Their daily lives were shredded, their streets blown up—and here I was, years later, hoping to make a buck off catastrophe.

  “It always feels like this, at first,” Damien said. “You are always the outsider, the dilettante. You have to move ahead anyway. Part of it is bluffing.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  He laughed and poured more wine. After a week I had not started writing. There was too much to learn, the war was a labyrinth that expanded endlessly. Before sleep each night, I took out The Eyes of the World, gently handling its yellowed pages. I looked into the eyes on the banner, studied the photos. The blank square on the back page taunted me. What belonged in that empty space? If I stared at it for long enough, what image would emerge?

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t talk to me about this one. She is of no interest to me,” said Raúl Quintana, a doughy, forty-one-year-old mestizo, as we sat in his mother’s living room, on the tenth floor of a building in the Residencial San Felipe apartment complex, and sipped tea. “Yet another tool of this genocidal puppet government: the fetish of an irrelevant child. Every day they follow her with their cameras a hundred children die like flies in the campo. Why don’t you write about those children?”

  “I’d like to write about all of it,” I said.

  He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Why don’t you write about the farmers whose land was stolen by the army? Poor campesinos, like my father. If they resisted, the government killed them. Like insects. Is this not more important than a gringa whore?”

  It was my first attempt at an interview, and I’d already broken Damien’s rule. Quintana, who’d gone by the nom de guerre Comrade Rayos, had been captured in Junín near the end of the war and spent three years in El Arca. Damien had met him years ago, while writing about Shining Path cadres trying to transition back to normal life. As I’d waited outside the building, I’d braced to meet an actual revolutionary—I imagined him tall and commanding, with an aura of controlled violence. But Quintana looked more like an accountant than a terrorist. He wore thick eyeglasses, black trousers, a red sweater with pictographs of llamas across the chest. The only thing about him that suggested his former life was a furtiveness to his eyes and movements. Before he let me in, he called Damien, then put me on the phone for “voice confirmation.”

  “May I ask about the first time you participated in an action?” I said now. I slid my new voice recorder across the coffee table, hoping to convey confidence. “What was that experience like?”

  Quintana reached out and turned the recorder off. “Why don’t you write about the American mining corporation, Tuttweiler, Incorporated, that is killing Peruvians in Cajamarca?” He stood and paced before the picture windows, the gray city framed behind him. On one wall of the apartment, a pewter Jesus hung twisted from his cross. A stack of canvasses leaned against another wall: watercolors of soaring con
dors and Inca chieftains that Quintana sold at the weekend markets. “People who are removed from the land they have lived on for centuries, the mountains they worship blown up with dynamite, their water filled with cyanide. Because they don’t have title,” he said, spitting the last word like an obscenity.

  “You have heard of the priest, Father Antonio? He tries to organize the people, and one night four men on motorcycles come, private security of Tuttweiler, Incorporated. They beat him with chains. He is in the hospital for a week and when he goes to his house someone has broken all the windows and shit on the floor. Why don’t you write about this? When a complaint was made to the U.S. embassy, they said the men who attacked Father Antonio were employed by a Peruvian subcontractor, so it is not the responsibility of Tuttweiler, Incorporated.”

  “It’s outrageous.”

  “Why don’t you write about the ministers who line their pockets with bribes? Why don’t you write that the people who live on this land will not receive one centavo from the gold that is found there? Why don’t you write that since conquest the Peruvian has been enslaved and murdered by one foreigner after another?

  “I will tell you why you don’t write this,” he said, holding a finger in the air. “You don’t write this because of the presence of the American corporation. Without this, you can write about the barbaric Peruvian who brutalizes his own people, so the people of the United States can feel lucky not to live with such a violent regime. But because of Tuttweiler, it is impossible to say this is not a story about Americans. Impossible to declare your innocence. And Americans do nothing in which they cannot declare their innocence.”

  He turned to watch the city, hands clasped behind his back. I didn’t know what to ask next. It was my first conversation with someone who’d actually been in the war, who might see things the way Leonora saw them, and already it was a failure.