The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  In college she’d accompanied a psychology professor on a trip to Huancapí, in the Emergency Zone, to spend a month at a home for children who’d lost their parents in the war. The driver who picked them up at the bus station kept a rifle on his lap. The stories the children told, in words and in crude drawings, made her physically sick, she said. She couldn’t eat, she stayed awake at night watching the hills from her window, seeing movement behind every stone and shrub. All she wanted was to leave, to take the first bus back to Lima. “While we worried about parties, these children were watching their parents tortured and killed,” she said. “In this country. In my country. I didn’t know.”

  Soon after that, she’d switched to chemistry, relieved to be working with inanimate substances and immutable laws. Her former professor disappeared a few months later; her body, and those of two nuns, were found in a cave not far from the orphanage. They’d been raped, doused in red paint, and shot at close range. With a stab of nausea I realized I knew this case. I’d been reading it the day before. The Human Rights Watch report said it was impossible to determine whether they’d been killed by Sendero or the military. “Both sides committed atrocities,” it helpfully noted.

  On the night La Leo was arrested, Yesenia and her family had watched the news in horror and confusion. “What kind of person is this, Andres? Does she ever go to the campo? Does she know these children?”

  She spoke quietly, staring out at the city’s vast sparkle, the looming mountains. There was a huge country beyond those mountains: places I’d never seen, people I didn’t understand, things I’d believed had nothing to do with me. But one day soon, if all went as planned, there would be a story with my name on it. When Yesenia squeezed my elbow I felt nearly lightheaded with shame.

  “Everything in this country is ruined,” she said. “Everyone has suffered. Why does she want them to suffer more? Who is this person, Andres? Can you explain to me?”

  * * *

  —

  Later, I accompanied Yesenia back to San Borja, and we stood kissing inside the gate to her sister’s house, amid flowering vines and scattered plastic toys. I could taste the rum on her breath, and I thought how nice it would be to share her bed, sleep late, go out for a fancy breakfast—anything that didn’t involve Leonora Gelb. When I whispered in her ear, she gave a groan of regret and pushed me gently away.

  “I like meeting you, Andres. But I’m not like those girls from Babilonia, okay?”

  It took me close to an hour to find a taxi, wandering the streets until I came to a traffic circle where old women sold roasted potatoes and cars stopped to talk to girls in short dresses. Men talked in low voices. One girl chased another into the shadows. I waited a long time, smoking at the edge of this Dantean scene. I thought maybe I should talk to some of those people—but what would I say? I’d accomplished nothing since coming to Lima. The war had taken over my dreams, hijacked every conversation. I’d heard so many terrible stories. But they were just stories.

  The lights were still on at Damien’s. When I opened the door I heard voices and I stopped, not wanting to intrude on an argument. Damien stood outside the kitchen. There was a backpack propped against the wall, a mane of blond hair peering into the fridge.

  “You see, Andres?” he said. “Our party is getting bigger.”

  She straightened, beer bottle in hand, and my heart beat quickly, as if I’d been caught in some juvenile disobedience. My breath caught when I saw the bruise under her right eye, splotchy and tender, curving along her temple, fraying at the hairline.

  “Hola, Andres,” Stephanie said. She sounded tired beyond endurance, resigned to the unpleasantness of seeing me.

  I said, “Are you okay?”

  She sipped from the bottle and stared dead at me.

  “My friends, you are both welcome here,” Damien said. “But I regret to inform you I’ll be using the couch tonight. Andres, you won’t mind sharing the guest room?”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, I woke early and showered quickly, anxious to escape the apartment before the inevitable conversation. I’d slept poorly, drifting in and out of threatening dreams, minutely aware of every movement from the body next to me. Near dawn, I propped myself on an elbow and, breath held, studied her face, the mottled bruise garish against her pale skin. In my insomniac fog I had the sense that this, too, was somehow my fault.

  I spent the morning at the National Museum, where an exhibit of photographs from the war had recently been mounted—to howls of protest from conservative politicians and supporters of the former president. The images were ghastly: a woman covered in blood, weeping over a child’s body next to a bombed-out minivan; militants in balaclavas patrolling the San Marcos cafeteria; campesinos gathered at an open grave; three teenagers with bandannas over their faces, pumping their fists on the roof of a concrete bodega. I couldn’t say which ones I’d seen before. When I found myself in a blind alcove surrounded by portraits of Comrades Julian, Marta, and Chaski, I felt the same dislocation as I’d felt the night before. Here were the people I was trying to write about. So why did it feel as though they were examining me?

  As I made my way to the elevators, my phone started to buzz. Lucrecia burst into the day’s lamentation: she was throwing up all night, in the morning she was too sluggish to get up and she’d been late for work. “I am scared my father will know,” she said. “You think is better I stay with Rosa until you come back?”

  The long wall opposite the elevators was taken up by the final photograph in the exhibit: a group of Quechua women sat on a bench holding up pictures of young men and women; behind their heads, a banner declared them to be the Abuelitas de la Ausencia, and pleaded for “a world in which our children don’t disappear.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Why don’t you stay with Rosa.”

  “But how long? Her room is very small and far from my work.”

  But I was only half listening, transfixed by the image of the abuelitas, the poignant resignation in their eyes. Someone had chosen them, I thought. Of all the relatives of the disappeared, they picked this exact group, told them to sit just this way.

  “Soon,” I managed. “Maybe a week?”

  “Always you say this,” she said bitterly. “Is too long. Please come back, Andres.”

  When I got back to Damien’s, Stephanie was at the kitchen table, scrawling in a notebook, a half-empty bottle of white wine sweating by her elbow. She wore sweatpants and a faded, flimsy T-shirt. The bruise around her eye had darkened to a sour yellow; again, she looked straight at me, as if daring me to notice.

  “Working on an article?” I said.

  “Writing to my brother.” A moment later, she closed the notebook and pushed the bottle toward me. “Wine?”

  We made small talk, exchanged observations of Lima—the worsening weather, the ubiquitous construction, the new airport with its fast food and high-end stores. The government had spent more than two hundred million dollars to renovate the airport, she said, though most Peruvians would never use it.

  “That’s what winning a war will get you,” she said.

  “So,” I said, anxious to steer clear of politics, “how are things in Babilonia?”

  She lifted her chin, the garish bruise unignorable. “How do they seem?”

  “I only meant—” I stopped, offended by her tone. But when she dropped her gaze and brought the glass to her lips, I saw how much effort it took to project this bravado.

  “Listen,” I said, not knowing what would come next. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  She laughed. “Oh?”

  “I’m sure Mark told you it’s not going very well. You’re probably not surprised. But I’m going to buckle down, start focusing. I’ve been trying to learn too much, pack too much into this thing, and it’s gotten me kind of paralyzed. You see? But now that I’ve done that, maybe
I can start sifting through it. Definitely I can. You know that thing Michelangelo said about the sculpture?” I hesitated, put off by her flat gaze, then forged ahead. “I’ve got to start cutting out the stuff that isn’t the sculpture. I think I’m ready, but that’s where maybe I don’t have enough experience, where I could use some help.

  “I want to do a good job,” I said. “You probably don’t believe me, but it’s true. So, yeah, I’m glad you’re here. I really think you can help me.”

  I made myself stop talking. Stephanie took a long sip, considering how to respond. “Andres, you think I came here to help you? Are you joking?” She shook her head and stood to wash her glass. “Do you really think—” she said, then wheeled back at me. “Do you think it matters, this silly article? This website? Stuck between stories about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, or some baseball player taking steroids. Who cares?

  “You want something that matters? Read a real newspaper. Read Der Spiegel or the AFP. For God’s sake, if My.World were a serious news outlet, do you honestly think they would have given the story to you?”

  She stood over me while I took this in. One of her hands held the back of the chair and I watched the flutter of her pulse in a vein at her wrist. Her fingers were long and bony, ringless, bitten at the cuticles. A child’s hand.

  “Please help me,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  That’s how, early the next morning, I found myself walking through the streets of Magdalena, heading away from an ocean hidden by heavy fog. Stephanie was a step ahead, her outline slightly blurred by mist, though the blocks to the north glowed with clean sunshine. We soon entered a neighborhood of well-tended parks and corner cafés; a few women pushed strollers and talked into cell phones but otherwise the streets were quiet, the houses shuttered and immaculately maintained. On a narrow side street she stopped across from a large house painted forest green, the windows framed with black shutters. Wrought-iron spikes fenced off a circular cobblestone driveway and a stone fountain; a black Toyota was parked at the front door. Inside the fence, rosebushes climbed furiously, pink and yellow and blood-red flowers open to the unquiet sky.

  “Who lives here?” I said.

  “I have no idea.”

  I looked at Stephanie, then back at the house. A Frisbee lay on the driveway, and behind it an overturned Big Wheel. I could smell the luxuriant roses from across the street. I felt her watching me as I took in the neighboring rooftops, the puddles of recent rain, the soft clatter of branches in the breeze. When I crossed the street and stood before the fence I began to grow anxious. I had the sense of standing at an invisible threshold. I resisted the urge to turn back and make sure she was still there.

  The house was silent, no movement behind the windows. It was impossible to imagine anything but the most generic domesticity taking place here. From this close I could see the imperfections in the facade: pockmarks here and there, especially on the third floor, where layers of paint couldn’t entirely conceal the clusters, like needlepoint, around the windows. The shutters couldn’t hide the old scorch marks.

  I hugged myself against the chill and looked for any sign of the people who lived there. Even a shadow, or the sound of laughter, would have broken the spell. It was an actual house—not a description in a newspaper, not footage. And if the place was real then what had happened here was real, too. At some level I hadn’t grasped that until now.

  The wind dropped, the rustle of branches fell still. A neighbor’s dog started to bark. I crossed back to Stephanie, who watched me with eyes narrowed in something like compassion. When I stepped onto the curb, she hooked her arm through mine.

  “Why don’t you start here?”

  III

  THE BEGINNING OF ARMED STRUGGLE

  1

  “Two miles,” the professor said. “Two miles.” He stomped to the edge of the stage and crouched, as if to impart a secret. “You could walk there. You could ride your bicycle in ten minutes. But you wouldn’t. Would you?”

  He was young, maybe forty, thick black curls and mischievous eyes behind plastic frames. He spoke in a lilting, unplaceable accent, but his delivery—wry, purposely overblown—cut through the morning haze and made two hundred students fidget in their seats.

  In the front row, Leo pushed into her seat and studied the gum-stained floor. It was her first college class—History 10: Introduction to Your Country. Though the day was hot, she wore dark slacks and the new sweater Maxine had given her when—finally—they left the dorm. Already Leo felt sweat beading at her hairline and behind her ears.

  “East Palo Alto, just across the freeway, is the murder capital of the United States. The average family of four earns less than your tuition.” He walked back to the lectern and rapped out figures with a knuckle. “The high-school graduation rate—high school—is less than thirty percent. Sixty-five percent of men over fifteen have been in prison. Drug addiction, life expectancy, home ownership, health outcomes—every conceivable statistic puts East Palo Alto closer to San Salvador than to Stanford. And yet most students at this fine university will never see it. Do you think that’s an accident?”

  Again, the discomfort of low coughs, a clock ticking, mutters from the back row where the lanky athletes lounged. The student next to Leo—a heavyset Hispanic girl with a heart-shaped face and lips lined in black—scribbled furiously in her notebook, circling something in a whirl of blue ink. When Leo smiled, she cast back a cold, irritable gaze.

  The professor was taller than he seemed; his corduroy jacket, patched at the elbows, and air of weariness made him a caricature of the rumpled professor. He roamed the stage and described the communities they would study this quarter: migrant laborers in the garlic fields of Gilroy; a Vietnamese enclave in San José; addicts and prostitutes in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district; streetgangs in West Oakland. They would visit these communities and talk to people. “Real people,” he said, “not headlines, not simulacra. Go alone, go in groups. Take public transportation or your new BMW. I don’t care.”

  At this, the grumbling crested. “Isn’t this supposed to be a history class?” someone called out. “This doesn’t sound very historical.”

  “It’s dangerous,” a girl said. “You can’t make us go where we might get hurt!”

  “Or catch a disease,” another student added, to snickers and shushes.

  Leo squeezed her seat and forced herself not to turn around. She could picture the kids in the back: feet propped up, baseball caps turned backward, tank tops and Donald Duck flip-flops and the long, glossy hair of the West Coast girls she’d admired and feared since her arrival. They reminded her of her brother and his teammates, who took over the basement after Saturday games and waited for Maxine to bring them snacks, who got quiet if Leo chanced to enter the room and erupted into laughter when she left.

  The professor batted his eyes sardonically. “And why not?”

  Again the peremptory voice: “Uh, cause history is, like, the past?”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed them with a handkerchief. “What I meant was, ‘Why can’t I make you go somewhere you don’t want to go?’ Listen, my friend, I don’t care how much money your father makes or whether he plays golf with the Attorney General. I’m a tenured professor and this is my class. If you want credit you’ll do what I tell you to do.” He peered toward the back of the room and his smile spread broad and full. “Are there any other questions?”

  The silence was broken only by the slap of seats being vacated, the squeak of sneakers. Leo couldn’t look up, her face hot. It was unseemly, this pleasure, almost erotic—hearing those kids overpowered, crushed. When the door shut behind the last defector, the rush she felt was dizzying, almost primitive.

  “Now we’ve trimmed the fat,” the professor said, to a burst of relieved laughter. To Leo’s right, the Hispanic girl still slashed at her notebook. “Why is the murder capit
al of the country two miles from this bastion of privilege? How did it happen? By the end of the quarter, I want you to have an answer. It is not an accident,” he said. “ ‘No reason’ is not acceptable. It’s the most popular lie you’ve ever been told.” He peered at the clock. “Tell me why those people are over there, and you’ll earn a B for the course.”

  Having spent years among the children of the ruling class, Gabriel Zamir knew what would come next. He didn’t have to wait long.

  “How do we get an A?” Leonora said.

  “For that,” he said, squinting fondly, “you’ll need to explain why you are here.”

  * * *

  —

  Stanford Out of South Africa. Students for a Free Tibet. East Palo Alto Community Law Project. The Economic Justice Council. By the end of the quarter she’d joined them all, racing from table to table on White Plaza, attending meetings in basement classrooms, dormitory common areas, a used bookstore on University Avenue where she sat on a milk crate, choking on the sweet smoke of clove cigarettes. The expeditions to Gilroy and the Tenderloin were bracing, unsettling—standing under a fierce sun while a fieldworker answered questions in broken English, or watching an aging hooker fall asleep in a diner booth, Leo weathered her profound discomfort, the stinging knowledge that she didn’t belong there, outside the bubble. She knew that was the point. She got a B+ for the class. She knew she deserved it—despite an exhaustively researched paper on migrant workers, she hadn’t answered Zamir’s question to his satisfaction or her own.

  The Homelessness Action Coalition. The Lesbian/Gay Alliance. Chicano Solidarity. So many causes, so little time. She could not pass a flier without pulling off a tab, or hear a bullhorn without promising to attend the next meeting. Students for Environmental Action. Students for a Sweat-free Stanford. Concerned Students for a Meatless World. The banners hung from the balconies of the Student Union, slogans unfurling, flower-like, in the night: “Just Say No to Defense Contracts!” “Stanford Endowment = Rape and Pillage Fund” “What Part of DIVEST Don’t You Understand?”