The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  * * *

  —

  DINCOTE files made public during the retrial indicate that the first meeting between Leo and the man she knew as Comrade Miguel took place on the evening of May 3. No details about what was discussed, only that Julian left the house “after a session of self-criticism.” The report notes “significant and growing tensions” within the group; “the American, Leona Gelb [sic], is not trusted, and has not been included in planning sessions.”

  It was a name she’d heard many times, always spoken in lowered voices, deferent tones, as one speaks the name of an older kid at school, admired and feared. Something, some overheard remark of Julian’s perhaps, made her think Miguel’s involvement went back to the war, that he’d been close to the founding council of the Cuarta Filosofía, if not a founder himself. He’s clearly their contact with the larger organization, their “handler”—she’s tried, from these occasional mentions, to glean something about the layers of authority, the lines of communication, but she knows better than to ask directly. She would have hoped, but not expected, to meet this Miguel one day. Given the mistrust noted in the files, one imagines the meeting was accidental. One imagines she wasn’t supposed to be there at all.

  She’d left the house before noon. Marta told her not to come back until nightfall. But she’s tired, raw from weeks of tedium, from dragging herself through landscapes of misery. Though the date she’d set for the next issue is a week away, she’s hardly gotten started—there are photos to be scanned, articles to be written, the unending struggle with a crashy computer. She’ll be up late every night until it’s finished, dragging herself from bed at dawn to take care of her housemates, their demands no less pressing for their invisibility.

  When she opens the gate in the cream light of sunset, she can feel it immediately: the house holding still, listening to itself—

  “—everything always hypothetical, always in the future—”

  The voice, Julian’s, drifts from a cracked second-story window. Leo catches the gate before it can bang shut. She steps silently past the rosebushes, breath held, and stands below.

  “—wait until conditions are perfect,” he says, an unfamiliar strain in his voice, almost pleading. “We can’t control every possibility—”

  Now Marta’s voice, farther from the window but somehow clearer: “We agreed to act as a group, not at the whims of an infant. We lost a cumpa and a truck, all so one rooster can crow—”

  “That’s it, Profesora: we agreed to act! If it were up to you—”

  An unfamiliar voice interrupts him—male, patient, gently humorous. “My friends, my friends, we’re not here to fight like children but to learn from our mistakes.”

  “Our mistakes?” Marta says.

  “Sí, compañera,” the man says. His voice is sober, reassuring. They are a unit, he reminds them. A family. Whatever internal disagreements, the outward results express the aggregate of that family’s desires. That’s how the government will see it, in any case, he says. “Action is paramount, Comrade Julian. Still, one must think of their family. You know this as well as anyone. Lenin clearly understood the dangers of spontaneity.”

  When she hears Julian’s voice again, it’s closer, stronger, the light from the window blocked by his form. “¿Sabes qué? Fuck Lenin. And fuck your boring newspaper, with its slogans from the Cultural Revolution. I’m tired of sitting at home, talking about political lines—”

  “And I am tired of losing,” Marta says. “I’m tired of cumpas getting killed.”

  “You think a slogan would have protected Macho?”

  “I think a leader would have protected him.”

  “Enough,” says the stranger, silencing them without raising his voice. “The point of self-criticism is to move forward, not to lay blame. Comrade Julian, it’s imperative you admit to your error. Macho was your responsibility. We cannot afford…Comrade?”

  Shuffling chairs, a flung door, loud footsteps on the stairs. A moment later the front door flies open and Julian emerges, in his freshly ironed work clothes. When he catches sight of Leo he hesitates, scowls as if she were a door-to-door salesperson, then yanks open the gate and stamps out to the street. Leo watches him go. A moment later, Marta appears in the doorway, her lips pursed in satisfaction. Behind her, the visitor descends the stairs, stopping to examine the needlepoint llama that hangs crooked on its nail: ¡Yo Soy Peruana!

  “Compañera,” Marta says, “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “No hay problema,” says the stranger. He steps past Marta and extends his hand. “Soy Miguel. Y tú debes ser la gringa famosa.”

  She’s imagined him as a hardened guerrilla in a bandolier, or a stern older gentleman with goatee and monocle—but the man before her isn’t much older than Marta, trim and rumpled, with nerdy eyeglasses and unkempt hair. With a start Leo realizes she’s seen him before, she recognizes his canny, presumptuous expression, though she can’t say from where.

  “La compañera no habla español,” Marta says.

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” Leo says, hurrying to take his hand.

  “No Spanish? But then you must have a good translator, to write so well in your newspaper,” he says, in nearly unaccented English. He slouches against the doorjamb and picks at a fingernail; a gesture that strikes Leo as deliberate, an affectation. “It is you, writing the articles? I enjoyed the one about the labor laws. The comparison to Pinochet’s Chile is well argued.”

  “Everything in the paper is a collaboration,” Leo says. “My work is no more important than anyone else’s.”

  Miguel gives a solemn nod of approval. “Still, one deserves to have her work acknowledged.”

  “The compañera has many things to attend to,” Marta says. “The cumpas—”

  “The cumpas will wait.”

  Marta falls silent, her eyes dull with displeasure. Leo knows she’ll pay a price for this overstepping, intentional or not—but after weeks of waiting, she isn’t going to miss her chance.

  “I don’t need acknowledgment,” she says. “I only want to help.” Encouraged by his silence, she goes on. “I’ve been in this house for months. We all have. People are suffering. I know it’s important to be careful and think things through. But I’d like to be part of that discussion. I want to do more.”

  She stops, puzzled by his raised eyebrow, his wary, amused smile. “But why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you want to help? This isn’t your country. Why involve yourself with the troubles of people you don’t know?”

  The answer takes even Leo by surprise. “Because no one expects it of me.”

  No one speaks for several seconds. Then a broad, boyish smile spreads across Miguel’s face. “I understand this very well.” Turning to Marta, he says, “Compañera, I concur with your discretion. It is absolutely correct that the cumpas not see our friend or know anything about her. But let’s be sure we aren’t overlooking an asset—a revolutionary must use every available tool.”

  “Como quiere, compañero,” Marta says. “As you wish.”

  “And what do we call her?” he says, rubbing his chin. “ ‘The Gringa’ really won’t do.”

  Leo can’t help herself. “Linda,” she blurts out. “You can call me Linda.”

  Again he nods gravely, a gesture leavened by the wry gleam in his eye. She’s struck once more by his familiarity—the way he tightens his scarf, cocks his head as if remembering something, a kind of pretense or performance. “Well, Linda,” he says, stepping into the garden, “it’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you, comrade.”

  When the gate clacks shut, she scrubs victory from her face and turns to face Marta. But the door to the house stands empty, the entryway and living room dark and uninviting. She stands a long time, listening to Miguel’s footsteps fade, astonished at this unexpected developme
nt, wondering what it means. Julian gone, Marta furious with her—what will come of this accidental meeting?

  Linda, she thinks, watching the shadows of sparrows peck at fallen limes. She can feel her heart beating. Comrade Linda. Why should a name, a false name, give her such pleasure? She can imagine this person, working side by side with the others—her opinion taken seriously, her ideas about strategy, about justice. Finally she’ll have the chance to do something. One day soon, she’ll be able to say to Nancy: This is how we answered Neto’s death.

  Comrade Linda. She can picture her confident stride, her days full with purpose. Standing alone in the dark courtyard, she almost envies her.

  3

  The children were led into the hills by one of the nuns. When night came, they could see the glow of their burning village behind the ridge. They found a cave and waited there, hungry and parentless, for a week, the oldest—two eleven-year-old girls—helping tend to the youngest. Even the roughest boys cried in their sleep. A patrol of ronderos came and the nun spoke to them for a long time, pushing the air with her hands. When the ronderos returned the next morning, she sat with her back to the cave wall and didn’t look up as they took the children, shrieking and clutching one another, to their trucks.

  They were sheltered at a camp in an old soccer stadium, fed potato soup and beans and given blankets to share when it got dark. The air stung with cold, and rustled with the laments of thousands of the displaced. Soldiers cursed and fought between the flimsy tents. Occasionally, a soldier came for one of the older girls, who slipped back later mute and shaking. Two of the village children were reunited with their parents in a frenzy of tears; others found cousins or neighbors who took them in. The rest stayed at the camp for two months. They wore oversized uniforms or donated clothes peeled from bales crusty with starch. The officers “adopted” certain children, giving them extra food in exchange for chores. Chaski was again chosen as a runner; he took messages from the stadium to the barracks outside, where soldiers played cards or just paced, bored and drunk. He had no friends in the camp—the story of his parents’ collaboration had spread among the refugees so he was looked on with pity but never trusted.

  Eventually he was sent to distant cousins in Lima. They had four young children and shared a weedy lot and a common stove with two other families, each of whom lived between unfinished concrete walls with tarps for roofs. There was no school. If a child fell sick there was a clinic two kilometers away in Lurigancho where mothers lined up at dawn. Two brothers from Ica sold coffins for the babies who died in line.

  Chaski’s relatives made him pay for his food by shining shoes outside the government buildings downtown. By the time he was twelve, he was a pickpocket and a thief. At fourteen, they threw him out and he lived with a pack of street kids in a cluster of plywood shanties next to a ravine that stank of human shit and spilled over in the rains. It was here the university students found him. On their weekly visits they brought food and warm clothes. They talked to the kids about fairness and equality. The Indios were here first, they said—why should they be the ones living in filth while the invaders had houses big enough for a whole village, with special rooms for their wine and cigars? Peru was a rich country, with mountains of gold, rivers of oil, they said. There was enough money for everyone—cholo or criollo, male or female, Quechua- or Spanish-speaking. The problem was that some people wanted more, even if that meant others got less, or nothing. Those people had built a system that let them decide for everyone else.

  “There aren’t so many of them,” said the leader, whom the others called Comrade Enrique. “There are more of us. In every part of the country. That’s called democracy. If we want a different system, we have a responsibility to change things.”

  Enrique read them Mariátegui and John Stuart Mill and “The Declaration of the Rights of Man.” He taught them about Manco Inca and Tupac Amaru II and Bolívar the Liberator and Fidel, who stood up to a tyrant and won. It was the first school Chaski had had since he was nine. When Enrique spoke, his restlessness quieted and he remembered how he’d felt when the rebels first came to his village and chose him as their messenger: smart and important, with something to offer. He thought of the men whose shoes he shined in the plaza, who left a coin and then drove away in taxis. He had never ridden in a vehicle that wasn’t crammed with people and animals. When the revolution came, Chaski decided, everyone would get to ride in taxis.

  “No,” he says, in answer to Leo’s question. He tilts his face to the feeble sun, distant pain tugging at the corners of his mouth. Small birds chitter atop the garden wall. “I didn’t meet Marta until later, when Enrique came back from the campo.”

  By then, Chaski was sixteen and living in the stairwell of the San Marcos dormitory. The war had begun to affect daily life—whole neighborhoods closed down, blackouts almost every night. Chaski took posters and heavy, locked duffels to drop-off points throughout the city. On weekends he and other Red Pioneers were sent to demonstrations and highway blockades where they swarmed the organizers and tore their banners, raising the flag of 14 de Junio.

  “I met Marta only one time,” he says. “Then, Tarata.”

  He sits on the stoop, his casted leg extended like a giant white sausage, metal crutches lying at his side. His T-shirt hangs limp from bony shoulders; his once-contagious smile has been wrecked by the long convalescence, rebuilt as watchful sobriety. Helping him down the stairs Leo tried not to think about his sharp ribs, his sour, exhausted smell. Though he was frail, his body against hers felt solid, her face pressed to his flank. When was the last time she had been this close to another person, or felt an arm on her shoulder? When had she been so needed?

  “Enrique was the first person who trusted me, or asked what I thought. We used to make jokes about him in Quechua, right next to him, laughing so hard. We called him llanqa Yanchachiq, our ‘Pink Teacher.’ But Enrique knew Quechua. He studied it at Católica. I used to think, why does a person like this care about me? Why does he spend his time talking to these dirty cholos?”

  “But why shouldn’t he?” Leo says, still absorbing his story, restless with tenderness, the urge to avenge it all: the lost childhood, the wrecked leg. “More people should act like Enrique. That’s one of the things in this country that has to change.”

  Chaski digs in his pocket for a cigarette. “Who will change it? You?”

  He smokes and peers at the latest heap of cuttings, arcs of goldenrod waving at the ground. “Enrique was a good teacher. Not just about history. He taught us how to see. But there were things he couldn’t see. After a long time, with cumpas getting hurt, or dying, I started to think, ‘Who is going out there with the tear gas and the soldiers, and who is giving the orders?’ Now he’s a hero. A martyr. But how many cholos died and no one says they are heroes?”

  “There are no heroes. We’re all fighting the same war, Chaski.”

  He sucks his teeth, as if to keep something sour off his tongue. “Call me Mateo. Chaski is the name they gave me.”

  “That’s my brother’s name: Matthew,” she says. Maybe that explains it, the familiarity, the protectiveness. She sinks her trowel into the soil and reaches for her own cigarettes. She hasn’t spoken to her family since just after Radio 2000. She’d tried to sound as if everything was normal, but Maxine, as always, could sense something was wrong. “Did you even know I have a brother?”

  “Enrique, Julian, Miguel…even Abimael. What is this war for them? You see what happens on the street, Leo. You see what happens to Macho.”

  Leo sits on the step next to him. “You have to call me Linda now.”

  He shifts to peer at her and another spasm of pain twists his features. Instinctively, she presses a hand to his back, edges closer on the step.

  “You sound different,” he says when the pain passes. “When I met you, you talked about conscience. Now…”

  “When you met me, Macho was alive. Neto was
alive.”

  “You didn’t want people to get hurt. The revolution needs people like that, too.”

  “People like that end up under bulldozers.”

  Even Leo is startled by how harsh this sounds, how hardened. Embarrassed, she looks away. From an upstairs window come the rough, indistinct sounds of laughter—she’s struck, not for the first time, by the oddity of her situation, alone in a house full of anonymous men. When she turns back Chaski’s face is close, his eyes concerned. For an instant she’s seized by the thought of kissing him—not desire, just a certainty that it will happen, her body drifting toward his like a leaf in an eddy—but something in his eyes makes her falter, off balance, she leans awkwardly against him, touches her lips sloppily to the corner of his mouth.

  “Leo—” he says.

  “My name is Linda,” she stutters, struggling to sit up, to manage a rush of emotions: surprise, embarrassment, confusion. His face is gentle, almost pitying, his eyes alight not with attraction but wariness, patience, reading her, waiting for her to see.

  “Amiga,” he says gently, urging her to push farther, look closer—and all at once she sees. All at once a dozen recollections make sense: the standoffishness of the workmen, countless belittling comments from Julian, Marta’s scorn. Why Leo’s always felt this odd comfort, even before she knew him—never the vigilance, the ugly shield held at the ready. With Chaski it was not necessary. She’s always known, always seen. How could she not have understood until now?

  For another moment they watch each other, until he sees that she’s entered into the secret. It mustn’t be spoken—not here, with so much trust on the line; she agrees to this with a small, sad smile. So this is conspiracy, she thinks, squeezing his arm. This is what it feels like on the inside.