The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  But in this moment there was only the chilly light of the showroom, the tick and buzz of fluorescents, the whispers of other customers when they caught sight of the girl in black with a livid face and bleeding hands.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” A skinny Asian saleswoman stood flanked by two co-workers. They closed ranks at the Chanel counter, trying to maintain their staged elegance, like figures in a Nagel sketch that someone is about to burn.

  “No, I’m…” Leo was shaky-kneed, blood pounding. Police cars wailed past on Stockton Street, blue light fracturing across the mirrored counters. “I’m okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the saleswoman, “but you’ll have to leave.”

  Leo forced her breathing to slow. “I’m looking for the Men’s Department.” The woman folded her arms. Willing her hand not to shake, Leo took her Stanford Visa card from her pocket and summoned a voice learned in the shopping malls of her youth. “I’m here to buy a birthday present for my father. Is there a problem?”

  Before they could reply, she spotted the escalator and strode past the women with chin high. She rode up three flights, swallowing ripples of sobs, washed her face in the ladies’ room and browsed a good long time—until her eyes dried, her limbs stopped shaking, until she found the perfect gift: a silk tie, an abstract blaze of blue and red, designed, the label said, by Jerry Garcia.

  2

  In his landmark study, The Age of Terrorism, the historian Walter Laqueur stresses that the primary objective of political violence is publicity. “Propaganda by deed”: revolutionaries don’t set out to blow up buildings, or hijack airliners, or assassinate ministers—they set out to make people pay attention. To genocide, to racial segregation, police brutality, military occupation. You name it. Theft of land, of resources, of dignity; economic policies that condemn millions to poverty…What these things have in common is our indifference, the willed forgetting that rises like a veil between us and “those people”—until we see only massed shadows, hear only guttural, vaguely threatening sounds.

  To break through that forgetting is the terrorist’s real mission. To burn the veil to the ground. “It’s confusing when they kill the innocent,” Don DeLillo writes in Mao II. “But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands.”

  According to the government, the Pueblo Libre group, taking orders from higher-ups in the C.F., planned to attack Peru’s Congress and abduct legislators from the ruling party. It was to be presented as a hostage swap—as many as four hundred Philosophers were still being held in El Arca, Socabaya, and other prisons—but the military court deemed this motive a fig leaf. “The group planned to line the halls of government with corpses,” the judges wrote, citing an unnamed informer. “Knowing the President would not meet their demands, the terrorists planned to murder the [legislators] in cold blood to send a message to the country that the war had begun again.”

  The language of being noticed—that much I can understand. I can understand what brought her to Peru: her anger, her desire to help, to prove her life had meaning, to become someone other than the person she was raised to be. Reinvention—no one understands that better than I.

  But violence, weapons, the readiness to kill, maybe to die? Could one really offer one’s life for faceless, starving others? Could one do that? Where’s my imagination when I need it? Where’s empathy? Why can’t I see?

  The truth is I’ve never understood people like Leo, though I’d encountered my share. At the college I went to—an East Coast, brick-and-ivy affair—there were plenty of students who got involved in causes, “joined the Movement,” as people still sometimes said, though the phrase already had an air of nostalgia, like jousters at Ye Olde Renaissance Faire. I avoided those people. I stayed away from their sit-ins and marches, their angry chants and earnest folksongs. No Nukes! Meat is Murder! End Apartheid! Save the Whales! I couldn’t take such sloganeering seriously. Who was listening? To watch Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, Yasir Arafat or Bishop Tutu, on the nightly news and believe a dozen dreadlocked students in “Free Mumia” T-shirts could affect their decisions, you needed stronger drugs than I was into.

  But there was something else, something I would only come to understand about myself years later, during my own fruitless foray into activism, my brief flirtation with giving a shit: it was fear—fear of violence, of risking myself, a fear so ingrained I could not be near the people who would risk themselves. Those people: who slept on the quad in mock shanty towns, who disrupted graduation ceremonies, took the train to Washington to march for this or that, who later smashed windows and burned cars in Seattle. People whose commitment was unyielding, whose fury seemed personal, born of mistreatment or deprivation I’d never experienced. People who had nothing to lose. Even when I agreed with them, which I usually did, my sense that I had something to lose held me back. I stayed out of arguments, took another route to class, avoided contamination.

  Maybe that’s why it was so hard to get started, why I cringed when I watched Leo’s press conference, or thought of her wasting away in El Arca. Despite the broken arm and the piss-stained jeans, despite the weapons and the dead bodies, I recognized her. In the flash of her eyes, the tilt of her jaw, I saw familiar suburban streets, new clothes each September. Tennis lessons. Spring Break at the beach. In her voice I heard a confidence born of comfort, of always being told you have something valuable to say. She was a criminal, they said, she stood in the glare battered and howling and utterly foreign. But I took one look at La Leo and I knew exactly who she was: she was someone with something to lose and she’d lost it.

  * * *

  —

  Rabbi Arturo Eisen Villaran remembers the date of his first meeting with Leonora Gelb: April 26, 1998, a Friday.

  “It was my wedding anniversary. Thirty years,” he says with a proud smile. “We had tickets to the opera. Rigoletto. I’d planned a short service, nothing special. We’d lost a congregant that week, a very old woman. Very generous. I wanted to say a few words, her children were all there. But I was also eager to be home. You understand.”

  He remembers a damp night, warm, clouds over Miraflores, the orange glow above the nearby Parque Central. After the service his congregants milled in the lobby or smoked outside the door, brooded over by the guard in his fortified kiosk. The rabbi made sure to express condolences to each of the deceased woman’s three children, her many grandchildren. As he made his way to his office the guard took him aside and said there was a young woman lingering on the street, watching the synagogue.

  “A young woman? Does she look dangerous?”

  “No, señor.”

  “Does she want to come in?” he said with some impatience. “What’s the problem?”

  The guard shrugged. “She looks sad, señor.”

  At first Rabbi Eisen couldn’t see her, the walkway crowded with congregants. He shook hands, moved toward the fence—and then she was there, a small shadow on the sidewalk, half her face pale in the light from the synagogue’s windows.

  “Buen sábado,” he called out. He remembers her reluctance and the way she stood: arms stiff, eyes trained on the building as if to memorize every corner and eaves, every entrance. Her glasses were fogged, her clothes soaked with drizzle. Droplets of rain glimmered in her hair. When she did answer, he could hardly hear her for the crowd.

  “Buen sábado,” she said.

  It’s a very different Leo the rabbi describes, this forlorn and solitary figure—nothing at all like the shrieking battle-axe most people remember. If my dates are right it had been just over two weeks since the Radio 2000 incident. Macho dead. Chaski badly hurt, still bedridden. One can imagine her state of mind. One can imagine the vigilance, even paranoia gripping the house, squeezing the inhabitants until they could hardly breathe. The fear things have gotten out of control before they’ve even begun.

  Many times thes
e weeks, biding her time before she’s allowed to go back to the house, Leo has passed by here, lingered at this fence without quite knowing why. But in daylight the synagogue looks different, a silent gray fortress, a lifeless monument. All the lights and the careless chatter confuse her now, all the bodies at their ease. And this stout, kindly man with his gray face and imposing brow, his shirt collar pinching at the neck.

  “A beautiful night,” he says, brushing mist from his shoulders. “Would you like to come inside?”

  She hefts her backpack as congregants sneak glances from across the fence. “Are you the rabbi?”

  “I am,” he says. “Your accent—¿Estados Unidos?” He switches to English. “Where do you come from?”

  “California.”

  “How nice for you!” His son lives in Berkeley, he says, a place he has visited many times. “Don’t tell him I said this, but I go for the wine. You may not have noticed, but Peruvian wine…not so good.” He shrugs, checks his watch. “What’s your name?”

  Glancing at the guard, she says the first name that comes to mind: “Linda.”

  “A lovely name. Twice lovely. Well, Linda, the service is over, but people will stay for a while. You won’t come inside?”

  The synagogue door glows warmly, strains of familiar music carry on the air. She remembers the night she and Julian stood in this spot, what seems like years ago, how she demanded he let her help. She’d been so naïve then, so ignorant. She thinks of her grandfather’s funeral, of the sunlight that came in cold sheets through the temple’s soaring windows. Of seventh-grade bar mitzvot—boys in Brooks Brothers suits, girls with perms and their first high heels, running amok in country-club hallways, scheming to acquire mixed drinks from libertine aunts. A line of Jaguars and Mercedes waiting to be parked by black and Puerto Rican valets. Disgusting. She can see Chaski’s pale, delirious face. And Macho—she can’t even picture his face, and that’s worse.

  “You wouldn’t want me in there,” she says. “I don’t belong here.”

  He remembers feeling perplexed by her hesitation, the toughness she tried so hard to convey. “Too hard,” he says. “This nice girl, I thought. Why is she out here all alone?”

  “I think you belong,” he tells her. He leans closer, until she can smell the cigarette smoke, warm and salty, on his breath. “I’m joking. It’s shabbos. Everyone is welcome.”

  The mist has started to thicken. It will be late when she gets back to Pueblo Libre, barely enough time to finish her chores, maybe half an hour to work on the newspaper. Why can’t she make herself turn away? Macho is dead. She never laid eyes on him. What pathetic instinct keeps drawing her here?

  “Maybe another time,” she says.

  The rabbi offers a solemn bow. “The door is always open, Linda.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  As she turned away he was again struck by how small and alone she was. He considered walking after her but he still had to make some notes for the morning service, and the opera would start in less than an hour. “I thought I might give her my ticket,” he recalls, spreading his hands in bafflement. “Can you imagine?”

  Four months later he would be startled by the same feeling, when he turned on the TV and saw La Leo snarling at a roomful of reporters, her face bruised, her arm broken, the footage of the burning house looping across a split screen. He may have been the only Peruvian to respond to that spit-flecked tirade with tears of pity.

  * * *

  —

  When days passed and there was no knock on the door, no swarm of police vans, the paralyzing fear slowly drained from the house, replaced by grim resolve and the sense of timelessness one feels in an unfamiliar airport, between flights. Routine gradually reasserted itself, but Leo couldn’t shake the memory of Chaski’s pale, vomit-streaked face, the feathers of blood on the stairs, the fear in Julian’s eyes. For days Julian slept on the floor by Chaski’s bed—the only one permitted to see him—and answered Leo’s questions in monosyllables, if at all. He left the house only for shifts at the café. The bullet had smashed Chaski’s tibia and narrowly missed the artery. The doctor cleaned shards of bone from the wound and stitched it closed; he’d done what he could to set the bone before he wrapped the leg in plaster. He frowned at the cheap bed linens, the dusty bedroom with its water-stained walls. The leg would heal, he told Julian, but without an X-ray only God knew if Chaski would have full use of it.

  Since then the house has been too quiet. No more music, no thumping up and down the stairs. Braced with new urgency, Marta spends even more time upstairs with the cumpas, the drone of her voice vague but omnipresent, lingering in the upper reaches of Leo’s awareness. She leaves the house earlier in the evenings and comes back later each night. In the stillness, Leo feels newly volatile, liable to tear up or slam a door for no reason. She spends hours on hands and knees in the garden, cool soil etching itself into the lines of her palms. The violets are thriving; the rosebushes have straightened and grown sturdy, but still no buds have appeared. She remembers the Mexican gardener who used to come to the house when she was a girl—what was his name?—how he mowed so methodically, how Maxine’s roses flourished under his care. What had he seen when he looked at their family? What would he think of her now?

  When the cleaning is done, when she can find no more ways to be useful, she flees into sprawling Lima, carrying a notepad and disposable camera in a woven satchel. It feels good to get out of that cold house, good to stretch her legs, break a sweat. No one has mentioned the newspaper since the night Chaski was shot, but Leo often recalls how the ink smelled, the clean feeling of the new pages in her hand. Privately she’s decided on a date for the second issue: May 10, the one-month anniversary of Macho’s death. If Marta won’t help she’s determined to do everything herself.

  She takes the bus to the farthest corners of Lurigancho, where partly finished streets give way to dirt lanes and parched ravines, scrub brush punctuated by mud-brick shanties and makeshift tents. In the bustling corners of San Martín de Porres, in Comas, she observes the hustle and jostle of vendors, the desperation of beggars and half-clothed children; in crowded Barrios Altos the sidelong glances of the perpetually surveilled, the cramped irritability of caged rats. On the medians of clogged thoroughfares, she photographs bent backs and clenched jaws, faces marked by infection and shoe-treads bound with twine, the way young men look away when the police in their armored vehicles drive past. Brown faces, all of them, a different nation than the one she sees in Pueblo Libre or Miraflores. She’s heard people talk about “two Peru’s,” but they’re both right here, superimposed on each other and on the city’s streets and plazas—the blessed and the desperate jockeying in the same precarious space.

  Though she covers much of the sprawled city, often walking ten miles a day, she never goes to Los Arenales, held back by a reluctance that soon turns to self-recrimination. What would she say to Nancy? What could she ever do to help? Leo’s mother would be appalled at this dereliction, she knows, having trained Leo in the requisite niceties of her class—and this, she decides, is her justification: the impotence of sympathy, the reactionary falsehood of the condolence call. She won’t bother Nancy with kind words, gestures that do nothing but absolve the gesturer of responsibility. She won’t set foot in Los Arenales until she has something to show for it all.

  In late afternoon she often finds herself on the malecón, drawn to the shrieks of gulls, the rumble of machinery. Her legs wobbly with fatigue, her camera full, the odor of broken stone stings in her sinuses. Above the ocean’s labored respiration, jackhammers rattle in tooth-shaking tedium, cut off by the clatter of rocks crashing out of a dumptruck. She stands at the fence, shielding her eyes from the glare and the twisting dust, as a crane drags long, steel beams into the sky.

  Vía América. She imagines the finished product, the parking lots and promenades swarming with well-to-do shoppers—all well-dressed, fair
-skinned, unlike the workers scurrying through the construction site, complexions paled by the grit of concrete and salt. No, none of these men will ever shop here—if they tried they’d be trailed by security guards, ushered to the nearest exit. In this, it would be no different from Fifth Avenue or the Rue de Rivoli, from the boutiques and restaurants she’s gone to all her life. She remembers the disgust on Julian’s face the night he tried to scare her away. “You’re in the wrong place,” he told her. But he was wrong, she thinks bitterly. She was exactly where she was expected to be.

  Some days small clusters of protestors gather across the street—teenagers from Poder de Juventud, three Abuelitas de la Ausencia, a crazed-looking Indian in buckskins, waving a tambourine. They hoist pickets, shout slogans that tatter in the gusting winds. One or two cops stand watch at the corner, bored by the performance, knowing as well as the demonstrators that nothing will come of it. No one will even know they were there.

  What good is protest when only its most anodyne manifestations are permitted? she wrote in The Eyes of the World, issue no. 2. She titled the editorial “A Revolutionary Is Someone Who Acts.” Does such street theater not acknowledge the dictator’s power, while allowing him to claim tolerance and freedom of speech? Does he not owe such “activists” a debt of gratitude?

  She shuts her notebook, embarrassed. Who is she to write such exhortations? When has she ever acted? Not in Los Arenales, or the Plaza de Armas. Not at Radio 2000. She talks, pounds her fist—Something has to be done!—then runs and hides while others die. On the bus back to Pueblo Libre, she avoids the eyes of the other passengers, pressed cheek to shoulder as they squeak and smash along the avenue. The radio spits more nonsense from the U.S.—Kathleen, Paula, Monica, names out of a sorority house, or a bad sitcom—and she groans aloud at the unforgivable silliness. When she enters the courtyard and slams the gate she’s flooded with relief: to be here, in a place where things matter, where something can still be done. If only she were one of the people doing it.