The Gringa

  It was the same old song. Frustrated, lonely, Leo slumped against the wall and waited for the right moment to slip out. She became aware of a familiar face only a few feet away, a graduate student from Gabriel’s seminar. He had a wrestler’s build and a flat-top afro, skin the color of raw almonds. He stood by the door and nodded sardonically while the speaker exhorted the small crowd.

  “SQuIRT plans to launch an awareness campaign. We can’t allow the university to operate in secret anymore.” Around the room, chatters of approval, scattered applause. “I propose subcommittees for Outreach, Slogan Development, Fundraising—”

  At this the man near Leo smacked his hands together in a meaty, withering ovation. “Outreach! Fuckin’-A, that’s what we need. Slogans!”

  The speaker hesitated, then went on. “We’ve contacted reporters from the Chronicle, the Times, Mother Jones, asking them to look into Stanford’s complicity—”

  “How ’bout more posters? Get some more of that artwork up. Take these motherfuckers out to the woodshed!”

  “Sir,” said the speaker, “if I could just finish—”

  “Don’t fuckin’ ‘sir’ me.” Everyone in the room turned to look at him—Marlon was his name, or was it Martin? She recalled he was writing his dissertation on liberation groups in El Salvador. He’d spent months interviewing survivors of an army massacre. “I thought you meant to put a stop to this bullshit, not sit here talking about awareness. Did Texaco hire you?”

  “Listen, brother,” said the speaker, who was looking smaller by the second, “hear me out. There’s precedent. When Stanford refused to divest from South Africa—”

  “You’re gonna talk to me about South Africa?”

  The speaker winced. “No. Of course not.”

  “South Africa didn’t give a fuck about Stanford’s money. The APLA is what they cared about. ‘One settler, one bullet.’ Thinking someone would burn down their houses, blow up their banks.”

  The speaker laughed nervously. “I don’t think anyone wants to blow up a bank?”

  “We’re trying to accomplish something positive,” added the woman in the turtleneck, “not promote more male-driven violence.”

  Marvin rubbed his chin. “You’re raising awareness,” he said.

  The woman held her ground. “That’s right.”

  “Gonna give them some bad PR, aren’t you? Embarrass them. Appeal to their moral sense. I’ll tell you something,” he said. “If these people had a moral sense they wouldn’t be doing this shit in the first place. What you need is some action.”

  “Like what?” Leo said.

  Twenty pale faces turned to her. In a breath she understood that Martin recognized her, too, that she’d read her cue correctly. He walked up to the to the man in the dashiki. “Mind if I borrow this chair, brother?” He squeezed the back of the folding chair. When he smiled, the hair on Leo’s neck tingled. “What if there was someone in this chair you don’t like? A child molester, a raper of old ladies. He got no intention of giving up this chair. You gonna stand there and keep asking politely? You gonna tell people what a bad man he is?”

  Leo felt as if she weren’t getting enough air. Marlon picked up the chair and slammed it against the wall. The clanging shock wave spread through the room, driving people from their seats. He swung again, dislodging the plastic seat, which leaped backward and clattered on the floor and then he slammed the metal struts twice against the wall, then the floor, raised a booted foot and stomped until they buckled.

  He looked up and grinned. “Nobody gonna sit in that now.”

  But no one heard him, everyone shrinking toward the far walls, shouting their disapproval, scowling as they headed for the door. When the room was empty he turned to Leo, one eyebrow raised comically. “Good meeting?” he said.

  Leo gave him a shaky thumbs-up. “You must be hungry,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Marden Lee, who since 2002 has served as a California state assemblyman for an East Oakland district, remembers Leonora Gelb as “crazy smart, a little confused about things.” In his description her ardor and focus were miscast among students who viewed protest as another form of résumé-building and social justice as a competitive arena.

  “She was pure East Coast, you could see that,” he told me. “She dressed different, talked different. Maybe she had unrealistic expectations about what she was ready for. But this stuff was real to her, I’ll give her that.”

  They saw each other throughout the fall of 1990, though he doesn’t characterize the relationship as a serious one. They frequently went out after Zamir’s seminar, ending the night in her co-op’s kitchen, where they’d share a bottle of wine while Marden recounted his trip to El Salvador, or talk about his childhood on the south side of Chicago. Leo could hardly mask her admiration: here was someone who saw the bubble from the outside, who knew it for the cruel, racist lie it was. She spent weekends at the house in Berkeley where he lived with six activists and community organizers, all black, all several years older. They greeted her with nods and polite smiles, referred to her as “Marden’s groupie” or “the white girl.” She knew she deserved their suspicion. Why should they accept her when she’d done nothing to earn their respect?

  Marden took her to lectures and gatherings in Oakland, angry meetings in mold-stained venues that bore little resemblance to a Stanford classroom. Political discussion alternated with tutorials on the rights of citizens arrested during civil disobedience, self-defense demonstrations, lessons on how to withstand the effects of tear gas, what to say in an interrogation. She knew she was getting closer, becoming someone Cannondale wouldn’t recognize. She relished the thought of her mother seeing her there, of meeting her brother across a barricade. She relished their fear.

  In November, she and Marden joined a protest outside the office of Stanford’s president to demand the hiring of more minority faculty. When Marden and a handful of others forced their way into the building, he told Leo to stay outside. They were arrested an hour later, dragged onto a bus while reporters trotted alongside. She watched from a bench as they pumped their fists out the bus windows and flashed victory signs.

  “I should have been inside,” she said that night, after bailing him out of jail. “I shouldn’t have listened to you.”

  Marden lay on the bed, hands clasped behind his head. “Wasn’t the place for you. How’s it gonna look if you’re on that bus?”

  He was still glowing with the day’s success. Through the floor she could hear music, his housemates joking in quick, easy voices. She crossed her arms and said, “It would look like solidarity. Who cares what it looks like?”

  “Like white guilt,” Marden said. The phrase stung. All quarter, sitting to the side while Zamir’s grad students clustered at the seminar table, she’d struggled with it, the same embarrassed feeling she’d had when she saw the photos of Steve Biko—as if she were simultaneously naked and invisible. What was she doing, out here, pretending to care what happened inside that frame? What was the point?

  “Listen,” he said. He sat up, his voice gentle. Too gentle—Leo felt a stab of alarm. “I know you want to help. But it’s not your fight. What do you got on the line?”

  She felt heat rising in her face. She would not say, “My self-respect,” or, much the same thing, “My desire to live in a better world.” Me, me, me, she thought—however you spun it there was something grimy and selfish about her, something that undermined every ideal she espoused. Even Marden, she thought, flushing with self-hatred: wasn’t part of the attraction what being with him said about her?

  “Why does it matter?” she said, clutching at something that was rapidly receding. “If I’m willing to fight for your liberation, why do my reasons matter?”

  His sad smile was a blow to the gut. “ ’Cause you think it’s my liberation.”

  * * *

  —


  She returned from winter break to a campus galvanized by the prospect of war. There was a line in the sand, boots on the ground, American flags and “Support Our Troops” signs on the lawns of Palo Alto, as they were in Cannondale. You could not pass a television without glimpsing the cruel, mustachioed Saddam, always in uniform, surveying his weapons with a Stalinesque frown—so unlike the kindly George Bush, who wore shirtsleeves and leaned out of a jeep to shake hands with a young soldier, who addressed the nation in the sorrowful voice of a strict father unbuckling his belt for the child’s own good.

  “This is our Vietnam!” cried the campus demonstrators. “Read My Lips: No Blood for Oil!” chanted students outside the Hoover Institute. As the deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait approached there were honk-ins and walkouts, impromptu concerts on Serra Quad. Gabriel taught class in a superhero costume of red, white, and blue, a Stetson perched ludicrously on his head. “The sword of justice is raised!” he cried, firing off a pair of cap guns. “Freedom must not be trammeled upon!”

  It all sounded the same to Leo: the angry speeches, the jingoistic grunting of pundits, blithe pronouncements of generals and senators who insisted war was the last resort. Nothing would stop it, anyone could see that. To its advocates and opponents alike the idea of war had an almost sexual power, uniting them in a strange, ritualistic seduction—though no one could doubt who, in the end, would get fucked.

  On the night Bush’s ultimatum expired, she drifted at the edge of a candlelight vigil, under skies that seeped orange rain. “SAVE THE IRAQIS!” read the homemade signs. “WAR IS HARMFUL TO CHILDREN!” The students sang songs written before they were born. They hugged each other and cried real tears and as midnight approached they looked mournfully to the sky as if expecting to see fighter jets in formation, slashing the darkness like a cat’s claws.

  “These poor, poor people,” a familiar voice said into her ear. “Where’s your candle, Leo? What if Ol’ George is looking down, saying, ‘If that redhead chick’s got a candle, I’ll call off the troops’?”

  The air smelled of patchouli oil and early jasmine, the fog so thick it felt cottony. She hadn’t seen him in months, had refused to let herself leave pathetic messages. “Save your sympathy for the Iraqi people,” she told Marden, groaning at her own cliché.

  “Saddam must be sleeping easier, knowing these rich kids are on his side.”

  She tried to punch him but didn’t have the energy. It was all pointless: the war, the candles, another scripted drama. She had to remind herself that actual people would die. “Let’s go back to the co-op and watch CNN. I think I have some beer.”

  “What about you?” he said. “You on someone’s side?”

  In San Francisco’s Civic Center the next day, she followed him through a crowd of thousands, a surly and liquid mass that swelled and shifted, insinuating itself between buildings, swamping police lines, thumping drums and clanging pots and pans in an endless rattle that set the nerves on edge. The weather had cleared, the sky packed with fist-shaped clouds that wheeled around City Hall’s gold dome. Speakers shouted into bullhorns, cursing President Bush and the oil companies. Signs stabbed the air—Stop the Madness! Fags Against War! An Eye for an Eye ≠ Justice!—as waves of outrage rolled through the plaza in deep, orgasmic shudders.

  She hadn’t eaten. Hunger and the buzz of coffee brought a sweat to her hairline. Unshowered under her long-sleeved shirt, she could smell her own slightly horsey scent mixed with his sharp musk. She was supposed to be in the library, working on an art history paper. While the bombs fell, while innocent people were maimed and incinerated, she was supposed to write a paper on Caravaggio. Unthinkable. She knew this was how most people lived, by somehow finding ways to write papers on Caravaggio while children in other countries were murdered, but Leonora would not be like most people.

  “If you’re doing this, you gotta be ready,” Marden said at dawn. He told her to wear black, to take off her rings, leave her ID at home. They’d taken the train from Palo Alto, and Leo practiced glaring at well-dressed commuters until they turned away.

  As the sun moved behind the stately buildings, the undertow shifted toward Market Street and the financial district. The crowd was still growing, fed by side streets, a cacophony of carhorns met by angry howls. Leo’s pulse banged in her head. Cops in riot gear lined the sidewalks; cries of “Pig!” and “Fascist!” followed by the crack of glass bottles against plastic shields, metal thuds as bodies were thrown across the hoods of cars. Marden pulled her through the current and into a courtyard where a dozen men and women clustered nervously. A pink-faced teenager with a shaved head and full-sleeve tattoos handed out ski masks. Leo clutched hers in both hands and looked at Marden.

  “You can still go home,” he said.

  “Vámonos,” the tattooed kid said.

  As they neared Powell Street, the crowd barely moving, Leo kept her eyes on Marden’s back. Into her head came a litany of things she needed to do—the Caravaggio paper, another on Plath and Sexton. It was her turn to clean the co-op kitchen. Her father’s birthday was next week and she still had not bought him a gift. Her stomach hardened into a hot nut. Children were going to die for no reason, she reminded herself. What did Renaissance art matter?

  A few feet away, a naked woman, painted with blue and orange flames, hurled herself at a policeman. “You fucking murderers! Baby killers!” The cop barely got his shield up in time; three others grabbed the woman’s flailing limbs and she growled deep in her throat and spat at one cop’s facemask and he pulled a canister from his belt and sprayed her in the eyes. Up and down the mobbed avenue, small groups rushed the lines and darted back; Leo felt herself duck, felt something whiz overhead and then a great shattering as the window of a shoe store evaporated, raining glass on the police. Her mind whirled—this was the real thing, not a lecture or a photograph. On every side windows smashed, alarms squealed, cops dragged writhing bodies to the sidewalk and raised their nightsticks. She looked up at the surrounding office buildings, where tiny faces watched the melee from dozens of windows. She couldn’t imagine what they saw.

  “Wait,” Leo said, snatching at Marden’s sleeve. He shrugged her off. The air was suddenly bitter with smoke. “Where are we going?”

  But he was already forging ahead. Someone handed her a length of heavy pipe and then they were pushed apart by a riptide of bodies in skin-tight skeleton suits who rushed across the street, leaping onto cars, and barreled full-force into the police line. At the next intersection, the Chevron building soared skyward out of a cloud of white smoke, like the space shuttle on its launchpad. Its gilded revolving doors were guarded by an arc of police cruisers and orange water barrels, beyond which was mayhem: cops and protestors colliding, spinning in pairs as if it were a lurid high-school dance. A fire engine edged forward, its sides crawling with people; amid the shrieks of sirens she heard a hot whoosh and then a cruiser was in flames, an ecstatic cheer flickered all around her.

  She couldn’t find Marden, couldn’t breathe through the smell of gasoline. The pipe hung heavy at her side. A surge in the crowd knocked her off balance, and when she righted herself they were sprinting past, a dozen bodies in black masks, smashing into the cops with loud grunts and the clamor of metal on pavement and then she was running after them, struggling to get closer to those golden doors—she could hear herself screaming, could hardly see through greasy tears—she stumbled and went down and a pile of bodies fell on top of her and rolled and quickly scattered. There was another explosion, there were cops on the ground, protecting themselves with riot shields. She rose to her knees uncertain and disoriented. They were counting on her. She could hear the thud of clubs against soft tissue, taste filthy copper on her tongue—Why are you here?—as she climbed to her feet a skeleton-suited body fell into her and she shoved him back with an animal cry and shook herself free.

  Step by step she pushed forward, dazzled by flames, until s
he was only a dozen yards from the revolving doors. Her nose ran, a fist of gas stabbed sour into her throat. When the smoke briefly cleared she saw a body on the ground, set upon by five cops, one of whom tore off the attacker’s mask while the rest slammed nightsticks at his limbs, drove the butts into his belly, kicked at his ribs. She could not move. The sirens wailed and the man on the ground curled up and rolled side to side but she could not make herself move forward. When the cop holding the mask took a running step and aimed his boot at Marden’s head Leo dropped the pipe she was still holding and ran.

  Retching, eyes streaming, she elbowed across the current, stumbled on bottles and bricks and tripped at the curb, tearing the flesh from her palms as she fell. She dodged through a gap in the police line and headed away from Market Street, at each intersection turning from smoke and noise into the eerie stillness of downtown. She could hear herself panting, whimpering; she stopped on a dark corner to pull off the mask and retch hot mucus into a trash can. She clutched her side, leaned against a building, but then a fire engine screamed past and she started to run again. In Union Square there were cops everywhere, lining every sidewalk. She wiped her nose, spat in the gutter, and ducked into the first set of doors to stand blinking and heaving in the crystal white light of Macy’s perfume department.

  Later that night the war would begin. Baghdad lit up with tracer fire, glowing submarine green on CNN, the silent and unreal world of alien life forms doomed to extinction. There would be Tomcats and Prowlers, Hellfire and SCUDs, bombs that found their targets and bombs that found something else. Human shields, Abrams tanks, retreating Iraqi soldiers slaughtered from the air while oil fires billowed black and greasy against the sky. There would be questions about the war’s legitimacy—stories about U.S. arms sold to Saddam, doctored satellite photos, PR firms paid to invent Iraqi atrocities. Through it all you could hear the chatter of Blitzer and Holliman and Shaw, the stern compassion of Brokaw, and the bland assurances of the President, who that first night explained to us, “There are things worth fighting for.”