The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  Not for Leonora the kissing parties on Serra Quad, the Greek Row bacchanalia, day trips to Santa Cruz or bong-stupefied weekends in Lake Tahoe chateaux. Rallies and lectures, amateur slideshows, she sat uncomfortably in molded plastic chairs while speakers invoked Chomsky and Marcuse, Said and Debray, pounded their fists, spat words like “hegemony” and “superstructure” and “communiqué.” So what if her GPA suffered? So what if she slept five hours a night? Such concerns were nothing compared to the struggles of East Pali residents, or of Zanzibar, the prostitute she’d interviewed, who called in February and left a shy, incoherent message about the rain, something about a letter from her sister. Leo knew what she wanted. She told herself after mid-terms she’d buy Zanzibar a meal and some clothes. But she never called back.

  “Capitalism makes us invisible to each other, and to ourselves,” Zamir said in his Winter seminar on labor movements. He sat on the edge of the table while the students plunged chopsticks into takeout boxes. By now Leo had started writing for the Stanford Daily, pieces about working conditions for university maintenance crews, admissions and financial aid statistics for minority students.

  “And if we can’t see the Other, if the Other doesn’t exist…” he plucked an egg roll from her plate, “then we aren’t poisoning his water or stealing his pension or napalming his village. We’re maximizing efficiencies. Balancing accounts. It’s a disappearing trick: once there were a thousand Guatemalan peasants, but now—poof!—there’s a profitable banana plantation, with a reliable supply of cheap labor. Too much onion,” he said, burping into his fist. The students laughed, all except Leo. “Why is there only one Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto? Where is robust American competition when you need it?”

  By spring quarter she was busy with union drives, organizing wage workers at the tony Stanford Park Hotel. She went door-to-door in leafy Atherton and Menlo Park, leaving fliers in the hands of mistrustful nannies. She dreaded the summer, dreaded going home to her parents’ smiling ignorance, her brother’s mockery, the pale bloated bodies sunbathing at the swim club. She didn’t deserve a vacation. What had she accomplished in three frenetic quarters? A handful of squatters granted a reprieve? The administration agreed to “review” its policies on gay and lesbian students? The victories were tiny, cosmetic—you unionized a hundred workers, or fed a dozen kids, but there were thousands more behind them.

  “If you can reach just one person, make one life better…” her mother said. Leo ground her teeth and looked out the dorm window at the dry hills beyond campus. A massive satellite dish sprang from the horizon, pointing east into the haze. What did one person matter when the world’s very machinery was built to grind them into paste? She thought often of the photograph of Steve Biko, wrecked and abandoned on his gurney. She thought of the man in the alley, burning silently and alone. She watched the satellite dish rotating almost imperceptibly, its long sensors tracking signals, processing data. It was the machinery itself you had to reach. You had to learn its codes, speak its language, if you wanted your own message to get through.

  “You’re not ready. You don’t have the background, the research skills,” Zamir said in May.

  “I’ll work harder. I swear. Do you remember my paper on Breton Woods?”

  She had her heart set on a Fall graduate seminar, “Radical Underground Movements,” which famously drew on Zamir’s experiences in SDS. She knew courses could take her only so far, that until she got out of the bubble she’d always be a spectator, gawking at corpses through a car window. But what else could she do?

  “These are doctoral candidates, much older than you. They’ve worked in El Salvador and Chile, interviewed Muslim Brotherhood members in prison—”

  “I can hold my own,” she said.

  Zamir peered over his glasses. She was hardly the first ambitious student he’d found camped outside his office. Since his arrival in 1983 he’d been besieged by idealistic undergraduates with their dog-eared copies of Bicentennial of Blood, burning to make a difference. Looking at them, you knew their radicalism would survive precisely until the first job recruiters arrived their senior year. But when he saw Leo Gelb in the hallway he’d paused, daunted by her air of controlled urgency. He deflected it with irony, which worked on most students. But it hadn’t worked on Leo.

  “I’m sorry,” he said now. “You don’t have the prerequisites, so you can’t get credit toward the major. And it won’t help with graduate school. The name Zamir is not much in favor at the Kennedy School—”

  “Professor Zamir,” she said.

  He put down the sheaf of T.A. applications he’d been browsing. “Gabriel.”

  “I don’t want to go to grad school. I’m not here for credit, or a letter of reference, and I’m definitely not one of those girls who wait around after class to buy you coffee.”

  He leaned back and took off his glasses. “Then why are you here?”

  This time she was ready: “Because people are hungry and I’m not.”

  She squeezed her hands in her lap but held his gaze. Zamir took up the papers, relieved to have forced this tactical error.

  “ ‘They tell me: eat and drink, but how can I eat and drink when my food is snatched from the hungry? And yet I eat and drink.’ That’s Brecht,” he said. “A little romantic, but there you have it.” He expected an eager smile, but saw instead that her patience was strained. It was a good sign: the kids who played along were born sycophants, trained in the manners of the ruling class.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s not enough. Liberal guilt is boring. And temporary.” He turned away from her crestfallen expression. “Come back when you really are hungry.”

  * * *

  —

  I remember Gabriel Zamir, but he wouldn’t remember me. The morning after the Twin Towers fell I found my way to a “listening session” where students—some in tears, others seething, hands locked behind their necks—spoke of their oppression. They flailed their arms, quoted Susan Sontag or Eldridge Cleaver or the Dalai Lama, talked about people they knew in New York. Everyone knew someone. Everyone had a friend or an uncle who worked in Lower Manhattan. No one in that room knew anyone who’d died, but they might have—that was the point, it could have touched any of us. It was all very sad and incoherent. When Zamir, in his wise and thespian way, began to read a poem about life in Gaza, I slipped out into another dazzling California day.

  I never took a class from him. I was a writer, on a fellowship, I was hard at work on The Light Inside. But even in undergrad I’d stayed away from professors like Zamir: the provocateurs, the public figures whose righteousness seemed to demand more than just keeping up with the material. You had to do something, become someone, make a difference. But I didn’t want to make a difference. I wanted to write.

  For years after Leo’s arrest he was regarded with suspicion—denounced by the Gelbs, censured by his colleagues. Were it not for his influence, they said, his contacts…But that’s just another worn-out story: the one about innocence led astray. How many thousands of students passed through his classroom? How many joined causes, made their voices heard, then went on to lives of benign but meaningless achievement?

  How many wound up in El Arca?

  Since 9/11 he’s been a familiar talking head, a reliable Jeremiah decrying the falsehoods of the War on Terror. I remember watching him on CNN the night of my own pointless foray into what he called “lived history,” the night I took to the streets. When, years later, I emailed him about Leonora he responded in the practiced language of a politician. He suggested I read Gustavo Gorriti. He asked how I’d come to live in Peru.

  Why are you here?

  I never wrote back.

  * * *

  —

  All summer, back in Cannondale, she felt her strangeness like a sheen on the skin. It marked her in the drugstore, the cheese shop, everywhere she didn’t belong. She worked long days at a foo
d bank in Newark, waking at five to be there when the first trucks rolled up to the bays. While her high-school friends made photocopies in air-conditioned law firms, or followed the Grateful Dead up and down the East Coast, Leo languished amid stacks of canned goods, crates of wilted lettuce, boxes of bananas so rife with fruitflies they looked blurry. Her co-workers, all Hispanic or black, traded glances of amusement and disdain for the white girl wasting her summer vacation.

  “Jesus, Leo,” her brother complained when she came home stinking of rotten fruit. “I thought you were feeding the bums, not bringing them home with you.”

  Matt was playing summer league, preparing for his varsity year. He ate and slept with his glove. Her father’s beaming pride for his son, her mother’s pinched deference, were beyond Leo’s comprehension.

  “You could come with me,” she told her brother. “Mom? Dad? They can always use another set of hands.”

  “Yeah, right,” Matt said. “How’s Dad supposed to pay for Stanford if he hangs out with you at the soup kitchen?”

  “It’s not a soup kitchen. Our clients have jobs, they have families. They can’t earn enough—”

  “Clients!” he said. “Get a load of Gordon Gecko!”

  They all enjoyed their private joke, the one about Leo’s bleeding heart. Saint Leo, her mother took to calling her. On the phone with his brother, Warren, a Republican Congressman in Virginia, she heard her father say, “Leo’s taking care of the family karma.” But behind the fond glances she sensed he was afraid. When she tried, one night, to tell him about Gabriel’s class, about Zanzibar and Webb Ranch, the kids in East Pali who hadn’t been to school in years, he grew silent and wary—as if even now, safely back in the suburbs, his little girl was in danger of contamination.

  “What if it were you?” she said, provoked by his discomfort. “What if you’d grown up with nothing?”

  “Nobody handed anything to me, Leo,” he said. “Those people don’t have it any harder than your grandparents did.”

  “Those people? Please, Dad. If you don’t know the difference between you and some kid in Oakland—”

  “Where do you think my parents grew up? The Lower East Side was just as poor, even poorer—”

  “It’s not the same,” she insisted.

  “My father worked seven days a week. His mother supported him and his sisters doing laundry by hand for the whole building. Sewing their buttons. They didn’t have their own toilet until he got them out of the city.”

  She remembered her grandparents’ house in Paterson: the creak of thin floorboards, the drawer full of sugar packets swiped from diners. Her grandmother refused to set the heat above 60 degrees. Leo knew what her father said to be true, she smelled the thrift on her paternal grandparents. It smelled like cheap soap.

  “But they got out.”

  “That’s right,” he said pointedly.

  “At least they had the opportunity to work themselves to death. At least their neighborhoods weren’t full of drugs. The cops weren’t shooting them for being black.” She forced herself to breathe. “I’m saying, they believed in opportunity, in education—”

  “Are there people who don’t believe in those things?” She could only sputter in reply. Her father pushed back his chair. “What’s the score, Matty?”

  She ached to get back to Stanford, to things that really mattered. She worked twelve-hour days, came home and locked herself in her room with the reading list for Gabriel’s seminar. He wouldn’t stop her from auditing, she was sure of it. She avoided her brother and his belching friends, ignored the phone messages from Rachel and Megan. These were not her people, not anymore—but who were?

  In August, Matt got a letter from the coach at the University of Connecticut. Would he like to spend a few days on campus, playing exhibition games with other promising high-schoolers? “We’re going to need a great third baseman in a year or two,” the coach had handwritten at the bottom.

  “It’s a great opportunity,” Leo’s father said, staring at his son like a schoolgirl with a crush. Maxine would drive up with him the following Monday. “Try not to miss us too much, Leo,” she said.

  They were having dinner on the back patio, amid the smell of cut grass, the buzz and crackle of insects frying in the bug-zapper. Grilled steaks, bread and wine in abundance, Phil Rizzuto calling a Yankees game on the radio. It was all she could take.

  “What about the car?”

  “The car?”

  “How am I supposed to get to work?” Leo said. “Did anyone think of that?”

  “Chill out,” Matt said. “The bums will survive for a few days without your help.”

  “My help?” She looked around the table for support. “It’s my job.”

  “How much are they paying you?” he said. “I thought a job is where they pay you. Your job pays you, Dad. Right?”

  “Okay, Matt, cool it,” David said.

  She felt her control fraying and folded her hands in her lap. Three months of rolled eyes and patronizing smiles, three months being treated like an impostor by people whose privilege was so immense they could not even see it.

  “You have no idea,” she said quietly. “Instead of swinging a bat at a stupid ball all day, maybe you should try to learn something. Take a look around you—”

  “Leo,” her father said.

  “No, Dad. You all sit here and act like I’m doing something cute, but you have no idea. The people I meet. You don’t care about any of it.”

  “That’s enough, Leo,” her mother said. “Can we please enjoy a family dinner?”

  She fought to keep her voice even. “Yes, we can. That’s the whole point. Where do you think this steak came from? Who do you think picked that corn?”

  Matt peered at his gnawed cob. “I thought it came from FoodTown.”

  “How much did you pay for all this furniture? How much were these plates? Don’t you get it?” she cried. She dug her nails into her forearms. “Everything in this house has somebody’s blood on it. Your whole fucking lifestyle!”

  “Now you listen to me, Leonora,” Maxine said. “Get off your high horse. It’s your lifestyle, too—your clothes, your tuition—”

  “I know that!”

  She flung herself from the table and stamped across the yard. She was furious at herself, at her family, at the desperate people who lined up at the food bank every morning in the ringing heat. They would not stop coming, no matter what Leo did there would be more of them every day. It was pointless, a bad joke—worse, it was a zero-sum game: she and her family had what they had because those people didn’t.

  That’s why she was here, she realized, kicking the soil around her mother’s roses. The answer was as obvious as it was terrible: She was here because they were there.

  * * *

  —

  The poster read WHAT YOUR $$$ BUYS, and featured a blurry photo of two small children, just ribcages with limbs, lying dead in the street, being eaten by dogs. “Stanford’s Endowment Funds 5 of the 10 Worst Corporations in the World,” it said, and at the bottom: Stanford Quorum for Investment Responsibility and Transparency

  It was all over campus when students returned in September. A memo from Student Activities urged “restraint” in advertising materials, to “keep the discourse elevated and the campus beautiful.” A week later, SQuIRT responded with a new poster featuring an Ecuadorian woman with a grapefruit-sized facial tumor superimposed with the Texaco star. An editorial in the Daily referred to the group as “extremists”; in the “socially conscious” co-op where Leo now lived, disapproval was taken for granted. SQuIRT was “giving activism a bad name,” a senior told Leo. They were “too aggressive for our community,” he said, they needed to “focus on ideals and solidarity.” One night in the library she saw a piece of paper taped by the elevator: WHAT YOUR $$$ BUYS, it read, over an image of three kneeling students drink
ing from funnels while a sweaty crowd cheered them on. At the bottom, in the same font SQuIRT used, was the name of a fraternity and the date of a party.

  “When the university’s greed for corporate profits blinds us to atrocities, we have a responsibility to stand up and say, ‘No!’ As members of this community, we cannot support genocide, environmental devastation, the desecration of tribal lands.”

  The speaker was a thin, bearded white man in a brown and gold dashiki. He had a narrow face and a long, sharp nose, and he held a hand overhead, palm out, as he spoke. “Eight million dollars in Texaco. Two million in Unocal. And that’s just the endowment. Millions in defense contracts this university takes in each year. Are we going to ratify criminal behavior with our silence?”

  “No,” said a few voices, with no particular enthusiasm.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said, hand cupped to his ear.

  The meeting was in a windowless basement classroom; concrete walls and a metal door made it seem chilly, though it was a warm October night. Leo had expected a horde of rabid activists, but there were barely twenty people in attendance, including an elderly man in the front row who nodded and slapped his knee at inappropriate moments.

  “We should call for a boycott!” someone said.

  “Boycott Stanford?” someone else said, to low laughter.

  A young woman in a black turtleneck stood up. “We need to make our demands clear—a list of unacceptable companies, student oversight of investment decisions—”

  “A manifesto!” someone said. “We’ll hand it out to incoming students—”

  “They don’t care what students think. We have to get parents involved!”