The Gringa

  A third-floor window opens with a metallic screech and a low voice calls Chaski’s name. With difficulty, he pushes himself standing, levers the crutches under his arm. “Linda?” he says, wrinkling his brow at the unfamiliar name.

  She shrugs. “Mucho gusto?”

  “Okay, now I’ll call you Linda,” he says, peering down as if he were the one protecting her. “But promise me you don’t forget who you really are.”

  * * *

  —

  As May wears on, the house grows quieter—like an airplane at cruising altitude, the roar and rattle of engines settling into the subliminal. Leo’s anticipation, the feeling of stumbling blind through heavy curtains, recedes to the background noise of her life. The days grow damp, the breeze carrying an autumn chill that settles in bones and in plaster. Chaski often keeps her company in the garden, crutching himself in circles or doing pushups on the flagstones to keep his other limbs from weakening. He tells her stories about his childhood, what he can remember before the war erased it all. When he asks about her family she just rolls her eyes, preferring to listen, relieved to focus, for once, entirely on someone else. They never discuss their moment of awkward intimacy, the abortive kiss that grows ever more slapstick in Leo’s memory. But the new sense of alliance, this shared and unshakable calm, is a constant reminder of that afternoon, and of the secret she keeps nestled like a jewelry box at the back of a drawer.

  Julian hasn’t come back since the night of Miguel’s visit. Without his brash pronouncements, his sarcasm and sudden storms, the house feels unfocussed, the silence punctuated and enlarged by the noise upstairs: the rhythmic thud of calisthenics, call and response, hours-long meetings underlined by Marta’s voice. Late in the afternoon, when she’s finished with the cumpas, Marta gathers her camera and a small backpack, reels off instructions, shopping lists, and then makes for the front door. Gone is the sense Leo once had of a roommate, a sister locked arm in arm; the longer Julian stays away, the more distant Marta becomes, almost invisible, the house containing the idea of her like a treasured painting in a museum, hidden in a gallery Leo is forbidden to enter.

  “I want to talk to you,” she says, stopping Marta in the courtyard. “I want to know about the plans.”

  “You don’t need to know these things.”

  “But I can help you. You don’t have to do everything.”

  “Stop trying to do more,” Marta says. “It’s like you want something in return.”

  Leo, stung, refuses to back down. She’d spent the afternoon polishing floors, scouring the stove until her hands burned. “Miguel said I should be included—”

  “Miguel is not here. Julian is not here.” Then, rethinking this harshness, she leans close to Leo and lowers her voice. “Be patient, Linda. Everything will be explained at the correct time.”

  With so many hours to fill Leo throws herself into The Eyes of the World, taking refuge in the glare of the computer screen and the feeling of ownership. Julian was right about one thing: the first issue was boring. Pages of recycled news items, statistics, crude pie charts—even her article on the labor laws was dry, academic. The paper had no real punch or urgency, it lacked the fierce heat of now. To peruse the next few issues is to see her trying on new ideas and new styles, reworking the template column inch by column inch, right down to the fonts and margins. Where the first issue was dour and exhortatory—an excerpt from the Havana Declaration, a full-page analysis of a W.H.O. report—those that followed deployed a knowing humor, a hip and intellectual seduction. The goal now was not to educate but to arouse, to inflame—next to a Greenpeace report on contaminated aquifers, an ad for bottled water; beneath an O.A.S. statement on human rights in Peru, an altered photo of the President with a powdered wig and a speech bubble that says, Aprés moi, le deluge!; above a photo of Bill and Monica, a steamy passage from Nicholson Baker’s phone-sex novel, Vox. The front page of Issue 2 was dominated by a photo from the Protesta de Tetas: riot cops, topless women, the headline in a gigantic tabloid font: The Beginning of Armed Struggle! The centerfold of Issue 3 was a collage of photos, both hers and Marta’s, dominated by a shot of the blasted cliffs of Miraflores, the giant tumor taking shape as a shopping mall, above a simple caption: ¿El Futuro?

  What most intrigued me was the column she called “The Scorecard”: a list of recent actions against the state and its institutions, an accumulation of exploits that, taken together, give the impression of a wave gathering strength, that one day will crest and smash everything in its path. A bodega robbed in El Augustino, a protest at San Marcos against rising student fees, a fire in a police outpost on the southern highway—all framed as triumphs in an ongoing campaign: We congratulate our revolutionary brothers and sisters! Fliers confiscated at a high school in Los Arenales, commemorating Ernesto Castillo Rojas, Lilia Flores Naupa, and Juan Vargas Quispe, “who fell in defense of the residents of Los Muertos.” We shall never forget our proud martyrs!

  Starting with the third issue, she always included at least a dozen such entries. I was able to confirm a handful of the incidents in the archives of El Comercio and other mainstream papers—but the reports didn’t connect them to the Cuarta Filosofía or suggest any greater political significance. Others I couldn’t find at all. When I showed the list to Damien, he whistled in sly admiration.

  “Do you remember what Che Guevara said, Andres?” Of course I didn’t. “ ‘One aspect of revolutionary propaganda must always be the truth.’ ”

  I went back to these “Scorecards” again and again, trying to sort them out, to map for myself their relationship to that truth. I admit I felt an uneasy envy. Propaganda by deed—but in this case the deeds were someone else’s, or never happened at all. I thought of Colin Powell with his diagrams and maps, explaining Saddam’s nuclear stockpiles to the U.N. Security Council. I thought of Condi Rice’s mushroom cloud.

  “We create our own reality,” someone in the White House had recently told reporters. Who gives a damn about history when there’s a good story to tell?

  * * *

  —

  “Come,” Marta says, nudging Leo with the toe of her shoe. “Get up, let’s go.”

  Leo groans and rolls over, clutches for her glasses. “What’s wrong?”

  Marta’s face is hidden in shadow. “No questions. Bring nothing. We leave now.”

  On the bus, Leo sets her jaw and watches the passing city—neighborhoods she recognizes, others where she’s never set foot, heading east until the traffic-clogged avenues give way to narrow streets, the sky constricting and darkening as the buildings close in on either side. Men congregate on plastic chairs before unlit storefronts; empty lots echo with the scratch and holler of kids playing soccer in the dark. As they labor up into the hills, the city lays itself out in patterned light, appearing and disappearing behind dark humps of land, flickering through stands of eucalyptus trees. It’s not yet midnight—but Leo, lightheaded with curiosity, forces herself to keep her mouth shut.

  After almost an hour, they enter a quiet neighborhood of pastel bungalows and dusty lots. They alight in front of what looks like an auto-repair shop—derelict car bodies up on blocks, heaps of tires stacked six feet high like the walls of a hedge maze. Leo follows Marta across the street into a stretch of dense wood; she can make out a broad clearing—a large estate of some kind, or a park—on the other side, a distant squat building lit up like a dollhouse. They crouch low as they move toward the lights, an unsettling sense of familiarity creeping up on Leo. At the edge of the clearing Marta stops and reaches into her bag.

  “Put these on.” Leo looks down to find a black sweater, a ski mask. She blinks at Marta, opens her mouth. “You say you want to do more?” Marta says. “Show me.”

  LIMA, MAY 30—The Conquistador’s Club in Monterrico was the target of an act of vandalism. Two women intruded upon an evening program featuring the Bogotá String Quartet. Without provocati
on, they assaulted club personnel and defaced private property with obscene graffiti. The suspects are believed to be associated with the subversive elements that have shown renewed activity in recent months.

  [El Comercio, 6/2/98—my translation]

  The clubhouse sits at the edge of the woods, a modest Greek temple surrounded by a broad terrace that looks out on the eighteenth green. Through tall, brightly lit windows they can see people sitting in rows, the backs of their heads held still; strains of violin float across the fairway like an enchantment. It’s an oasis, a dream floating above the infernal city; the sky feels closer, riddled with starpoints, the air sweet with the tang of eucalyptus. As they squat by the side of the timer’s shack, sweating in the itchy masks, Leo can’t help but think of those grade-school bar mitzvot, of the places her father played golf, the club in Armonk where they’d held Grandpa Carol’s memorial: old, warty men sipping scotch and gobbling hors d’oeuvres, winking at waitresses a quarter of their age. It’s all too familiar—right down to the smell of cut grass and new money. How does she keep finding herself in these places?

  Did Miguel send them? Had he ordered Marta to take Leo along? “Make her feel useful,” he might have said, knowing the risks of a comrade who feels separate from the others. Or maybe it was Marta’s initiative: to test Leo, to call her bluff and find out what she was capable of.

  Impossible to know. Impossible even to be sure it was them. But the scene has an appealing logic, a satisfying symmetry, simultaneously indulging her desire to go deeper, to do more, and reminding her yet again of who she really was. I think I’ll keep it.

  “Go quickly,” Marta says, pressing something smooth and cold into Leo’s hand.

  “There are people inside,” Leo whispers, staring at the spray-paint can, blood throbbing in her ears. As if on cue, the last mournful cello notes saw their way across the terrace, followed by applause. “What if someone sees me?”

  Marta squeezes harder. Her gaze behind the mask is flat with scorn. “What are you waiting for, compañera?”

  When the three sets of French doors swing open, spilling light and garbled conversation onto the terrace. Marta shoves her forward: “Go now, Linda.”

  Leo watches the elegant men and women stepping outside, the servers holding silver trays. Fifty yards, maybe less—all she has do is run, deliver the message, vanish into the dark. But her feet are held by invisible shackles, breath locked tight in her throat.

  “Just as I thought,” Marta says.

  The whole thing takes maybe thirty seconds. Snatching the can, Marta bounds from the shadows, growing taller and more fearsome as she races into the light. Her dark form barrels into the exiting patrons, who lurch to either side, gasping. She tips over one cocktail table, then another—smashing glass, cries of confusion—until she’s alone in a wide circle, floodlights throwing shadows across the terrace like the spokes of a wheel.

  “We claim this place in the name of the real Peru!” she cries, brandishing her weapon at the shrinking bodies. “¡Viva la revolución!” The crowd presses back toward the doors, faces twisted in disgust. Leo watches, awestruck, as Marta moves from one side of the terrace to the other, letters emerging in bright red on the flagstones:

  VIENE EL—

  Before she can write the last word a man in a dark suit rushes onto the patio, catches Marta from behind and lifts her, legs flailing, into the air. The spray paint can clangs to the terrace. A strange silence: everyone on the terrace held immobile, only Marta, struggling like a roped calf—and without thinking Leo springs from her hiding place, sprints into the dazzle of lights, the strangely vivid faces, all a blur. She rushes up the stairs, aims herself like a missile, a growl taking root in her belly, breaking out of her as a scream when she plants one foot and slams the other into the guard’s crotch with the sound of a baseball hitting a sandbag.

  Then they’re running for the shadows, vaulting the low stone wall and dropping to the cut grass, an alarm bell ringing behind them but somehow she knows no one is giving chase. Not yet. Across the springy green, the fairway and paved cart path and into the woods—the crunch of dead leaves and dry bark, Leo’s heart slamming, following always Marta’s deft and fluid shape as if they were tethered to each other, mirroring each other’s movements, until they come out on the road and plunge into the sad-lit labyrinth of old tires.

  Panting, wet-faced, they quickly strip off their masks and sweaters, shove them under a pile of rubber. There are lights flashing at the edges of Leo’s vision, sounds escaping her throat: an animal’s whimper, a mad, high laughter wanting to come out.

  “¿Estás bien?” Marta says. “Amiga, are you hurt? Linda?”

  She isn’t hurt. She feels enormous, fierce, as if she could wrestle a tiger. Her chest is full of delicious air, her vision impossibly sharp—somewhere voices are calling but they can’t touch her, here amid the smells of dirt and rubber, the sweet sting of cold. Let the fear come tomorrow, the memory of angry faces, how it felt to land that kick, to really hurt someone. For now she stands gripped in blood sparkle, eyes streaming, clinging to this exultation, this feeling of having come alive.

  * * *

  —

  The first shipment of dynamite arrived sometime in the first week of June: two hundred eighty-eight sticks of dynamite, stolen from a copper mine in the faraway town of San Juan de Lucanas and delivered, according to an affidavit submitted by Lieutenant Jaime Lang Ovieda, commander of DINCOTE’s elite Grupo 14, “while the innocent women and children of Pueblo Libre slept.”

  Neither the affidavit nor Lang’s internal report indicate who arranged and paid for this operation and the military judges didn’t ask. Nor did they question the precision of the number—two hundred eighty-eight, out of an eventual eight hundred twenty, enough to demolish a building twice the size of Congress. Lang’s affidavit was not introduced at the civilian retrial, having somehow disappeared in the intervening years. Leo’s lawyer objected to the prosecutor’s frequent references to such missing documents. Those objections were overruled.

  On June 5, just before the morning shift change, a temporary support in the Vía América parking garage collapsed, and a sixty-foot slab of cantilevered concrete smashed to the tier below. Seven workers were killed. For two days the accident dominated the media, including photos of giant concrete chunks that slid down the cliffs and broke up on the coastal road. Somehow no cars were hit.

  “Thank God the damage was not worse,” Lima’s mayor told TV reporters. El Comercio’s headline read ¡MILAGRO!

  When Leo returns a few days later, the cleanup is well underway. Trucks line up along the malecón to cart out the rubble, and a squadron of policemen herd reporters and gawkers across the street. The few remaining protestors are confined to a section of the median barely visible from the construction site: the tireless abuelas, the crazy Indian in his loincloth, chanting and shaking his tambourine. She stands damp-cheeked in the chill, the hot reek of fresh asphalt, watching landscapers install a series of undulating metal canopies and a black marble pedestal in the park-like area atop the cliff. Escalators descend from a grassy promenade into the guts of Mammon—perhaps in the exact spot where, months ago, Julian tried to scare her away.

  Since the night at the Conquistador’s Club she’s been jumpy and unstrung, unable to sleep. The power she’d felt racing toward the guard, the exultation as he fell—she’d been, for one dizzy instant, outside of time, observing herself without fear or doubt, a body set in motion by the necessary act, chosen by it. They’d taken separate buses back to Pueblo Libre. She hasn’t seen Marta since that night.

  “Señorita?”

  A tug at her elbow and Leo turns to find a girl standing behind her. Fifteen or sixteen, maybe five feet tall, her face is round and dusky, her cheeks abraded with rash. In one arm, she cradles a baby in a thick blanket. Her other hand holds out a battered box of Chiclets.

  “Por favor,
señorita,” she says. “Cómprame.”

  The blurt of a siren drives the crowd back several steps. “How old is your baby?” Leo asks. The girl shakes the box and gazes at the infant, who stretches a tiny hand toward the sound. Something in the gesture reminds Leo of Nancy, her furious determination in the days after Ernesto disappeared. She points to the construction site and says, “Do you know what they’re building here?”

  “No sé,” the girl says. “Cómprame.”

  “It’s a shopping mall. For rich people. They’re doing all this for the ricos.”

  The girl’s face is blank. When Leo hands her a coin she lowers her eyes. “You have a good heart, señorita. Jesus Christ loves you.”

  When she’s gone, Leo lights a cigarette and watches the workers cart rubble from the wrecked garage. The tambourine jingles faintly in the sunset glare. In that morning’s paper, an unnamed official wondered if the construction accident had been an act of sabotage. “Obviously there are people who don’t want progress,” he said, referring to the incident at Los Muertos. “Nobodies,” he called them. “Psychopaths.” He’d dismissed reports of a long list of safety violations at the site.

  Leo had been disgusted when she first read the comments. But now, watching a line of workers descending into the maw, Leo recalls the article with nervous fascination. “An insult to the new Peru,” the official had said. The logic isn’t hard to follow: Who could see such ugliness without wanting to tear it down or blow it up?

  By the next weekend, a date for the grand opening had been set: August 23, 1998, “a day for all Peruvians to celebrate the country’s progress,” the mayor proclaimed. A proposal to honor the dead workers with a small statue was voted down. Instead, the government offered twenty thousand soles—about six thousand dollars—to each worker’s family. A city alderman was heard to remark that, for those families, “this is the best thing that ever happened to them.”