The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  LIMA, JUNE 28 —The National Police have arrested two suspects for the outrageous attack on the Conquistador’s Club last month. The women, identified only as residents of San Juan de Lurigancho, are known sympathizers with terrorist groups. In a statement…

  [El Comercio, 7/1/98—my translation]

  For a long time she stares at the page, long enough for the lines to blur, for the dueño of the bodega to ask if she’s alright. As she had after Victor Beale’s disappearance, she feels dislocated, doubled. A headache springs up between her eyes.

  There’s tension in the house, raised voices drifting from the third floor. Ignoring them, Leo mounts the stairs two at a time, banging on the metal door until the voices quiet. A moment later, Marta comes down the stairs.

  “Who are they?” Leo demands, shoving the newspaper at her. “Tell me the truth.”

  Marta bats the paper away. Leo follows her down to the kitchen, shaking with anger. “They didn’t do anything, Marta. They weren’t even there. They’ll be tortured—”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “We have to do something. We have to help them.”

  “We are helping them,” Marta says. “Still you don’t understand?”

  Still trembling, sick to her stomach, Leo lowers herself into a chair. How had it never occurred to her someone else would be blamed? It means they’re in danger, all of them, the stories are all getting confused: those innocent women, Victor Beale, Álvaro, anything could happen now, that’s the only truth that matters.

  When Chaski enters the kitchen, Marta won’t look at him.

  “Compañera,” he says. “Come back upstairs. We need to resolve the question.”

  “I told you the discussion is over.”

  The contempt in Marta’s voice takes Leo aback, beyond the usual dislike with which Marta talks to Chaski, or about him. Josea’s warning is fresh in her mind; with the news about Victor Beale, about the women’s arrest, such disunity feels newly threatening, potentially fatal.

  “Marta,” Chaski says, then with a glance at Leo switches to Quechua, a long and patient monologue to which Marta hardly seems to be listening. He enumerates his concerns by counting on his fingers, emphasizes a point with a gentle rap on the table.

  “I’ve heard this all before,” Marta says in Spanish. “Such reformist garbage is what led to the problem in Los Muertos. Your analysis is incorrect, and a strategy based on incorrect—”

  “Incorrect according to you.”

  “I am in charge here,” Marta says.

  “No one came to this house for you, Marta. No one swore loyalty to you.”

  “They swore loyalty to the goals. If you don’t believe in those goals, you can leave.”

  Chaski’s voice is hard, more forceful than Leo’s heard in months. “Some of the cumpas are considering new goals. And new leaders.”

  Marta smiles at the challenge, raises her chin. “Are those cumpas also homosexuals?”

  The silence is sudden and sharp as an ice storm, so total the refrigerator makes Leo jump when it switches on. Chaski’s face stamped with concentration, as though Marta kicked him in his bad leg. Leo has to stop herself from leaping out of her chair—it sickens her, this rank bigotry, sickens her to think Marta had known all along, had been waiting for an advantageous moment to fling it in Chaski’s face

  But she holds her tongue. She can’t afford to take sides in this fight, to risk whatever confidence of Marta’s she still enjoys. Marta’s position is precarious now, mutiny in the air. Any hint of allegiance to Chaski will only discredit Leo. It will only weaken her hand.

  So this is revolutionary sacrifice, she thinks.

  Honor is to be useful without vanity.

  “Where is Victor Beale?” Leo says. Marta and Chaski turn to her and she meets their gazes one at a time. “Where is he? Tell me, one of you, or I’m leaving.”

  They all watch one another, Chaski anxious and unsteady, Marta’s face tight with assessment, calculation. “Is he in this house?” Leo says. When there’s no response she goes to the front hall, shouts up the stairs, “Are you up there, Victor Beale?”

  Marta hurries after her. “Lower your voice…”

  She rushes up the stairs, Marta right behind her, and yanks on the metal door until it rattles and bangs in its casings. But she knows he’s not there, even as she’s shouting into a dark stairwell she knows they’d never keep him so close. Before she knows where she’s going, she brushes past Marta and flings open the front door, hurrying past the spindly rosebushes and along the side of the house, into the forbidden backyard, until she comes to the old metal shed.

  “Stop, Linda!” Marta hisses, following close behind.

  “Is he in here?” Leo smacks the shed and the sound sets the neighbor’s dog howling. “I’ll leave tonight, Marta. I swear it.” Above the rooftops of Pueblo Libre, a clammy orange dusk is descending. Leo takes out a cigarette, lights it with a shaking hand. “If you don’t trust me I can’t stay.”

  In the late mist Marta looks suddenly smaller, more solitary. She stares at Leo, her eyes busy with calculation. “He’s not here,” she says. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Then where is he.”

  “I don’t know. No one here knows.” She crosses her arms, twists her lips into a bitter smile. “So you see, Linda? We are not trusted either.”

  Leo sucks at the cigarette, her thoughts caroming from relief to disgust: another false alarm, another event she’ll never touch.

  “Four months,” she says. “We’ve been here four months, Marta.”

  “No,” Marta says. “We’ve been here for years.”

  Slowly, Leo’s heart stops pounding. The air is cool, expectant. She can sense Chaski watching from the kitchen window. What does he see when he looks at her? What do any of them see?

  That’s when she remembers the beggar girl, standing at the site of Vía América while the drills shrieked and jackhammers chewed up the cliffs. She thinks of the wrecked garage, the massive hunks of concrete spilling down the cliffs to the ocean.

  You have a good heart, señorita, the girl had said—as if the heart could possibly matter, as if, against the world’s grinding machinery, a heart were anything more than a small, throbbing lump of meat.

  “Come inside,” she tells Marta, not knowing if the steel in her voice is real or just another bid for respect. In the end, she thinks, it will hardly matter. “Let me tell you my idea.”

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, Comrade Chaski left. Accompanying him were Alonso Pantoja Sánchez and Osmán Arce Borja—a.k.a. Comrades Tadeo and El Blondi. They walked out of the house at 8:06 a.m., turned south, and proceeded to Lorenzo Garza’s bodega, where Tadeo bought a liter of milk, before disappearing from the pages of DINCOTE’s report. There’s no speculation as to why they left or where they went—and in fact the number of fighters who remained would be a matter of dispute in the days after the raid. In his affidavit, DINCOTE’s Lieutenant Jaime Lang Ovieda admitted to frustration at this sudden departure. The government’s priority was to keep the Pueblo Libre group together, he insisted, so as to make their eventual capture easier: “A single, definitive operation, it was felt, would minimize the risk to the public.”

  That night, Leo sits against the bedroom wall while Marta gathers her belongings. One by one she peels the photos from the wall, piling them unceremoniously in one of the camera cases, which she latches shut and slides into the hall. Things will be better now, more honest, Marta says. The group is stronger without Chaski and his “clique.” The cumpas who stayed are dependable, ready to act.

  “They’re men,” she says. “They aren’t afraid to fight.”

  “But how long will they stay?” Leo says. “First Julian, now Chaski. Soon it will be just you and me.”

  “Or maybe you will also leave.�
�

  A week ago, Leo would have shuddered at the accusation. But Marta’s right: things really are clearer now. “You need me,” she says. “If you’re going to carry out the plan, you need me here.”

  The plan. It’s all she’s thought about since it sprang, fully formed, from her mouth the other night. She and Marta had sat up for hours while Leo described her vision: the demolition of Vía América, its utter destruction, the vulgar behemoth sliding like a calved glacier into the sea.

  It could be done. Over and over she’d insisted it could be done, convincing herself as much as her comrade. Even after the accident, the construction site was not well guarded, she said. Marta knew how to use explosives. Surely some of the other cumpas did, too. Surely they knew where to get them? She closed her eyes, shuddered as if in the throes of a righteous orgasm: it was perfect, a direct strike at capitalism, at exploitation, the decadence of the elites. The message would be clear and unignorable, delivered in spectacular fashion.

  Best of all, if they acted soon and were careful in their preparations, nobody had to get hurt.

  “When will we tell the others?” Leo says now. Her stomach aches from too much nicotine. She had not spoken to Chaski after the scene in the kitchen. His pale face in the window had withdrawn when she and Marta headed back inside. Now it’s too late. Leo hates herself for failing to stand up for him, for choosing Marta and the revolution over someone who’d been kind to her, who’d trusted her. But there’s no time now for regret. Chaski may feel disappointed, even betrayed—but one day he’ll understand.

  “The opening is in less than two months,” she says. “We need everyone’s input. We’ll make a list, assign each person a task. Once we break it down—”

  Marta says quietly, “Linda.”

  Leo, nodding—“Right, okay.”

  “You understand, there can’t be a ‘we.’ ”

  She understands. She’d worked out the logic herself: the gringa’s hands have to stay clean. But to hear it spoken aloud fills her with an unexpected dread. In El Arca she would have years to remember this conversation, to recall how the word—we—grew large until it dwarfed her, how she stayed up nights considering the question: Who is “we”?

  It doesn’t matter. After months of talk there’s finally a plan—it’s perfect, glorious, and hers. If the cost of this parentage is that she be removed from the plan, that she watch it grow and take wing independent of her ministrations, at least she’ll know it belongs to her, could not have been conceived without her. It stings, this removal, throbs like an abscess. But it is not too high a price.

  “In the campo, we learned to trust our leaders,” Marta says. She takes out a cigarette, but her feigned nonchalance can’t mask the note of unease. “We learned to listen to them. If the group isn’t united, it’s vulnerable. Anything can happen.”

  One day, she says, someone came, a commander, very respected. He said two men from a nearby village had been arrested, accused of being with Sendero. The villagers feared that the army would soon arrive. The commander was going to defend the village, he said. He was looking for fighters to accompany him.

  “Did you go?”

  Marta shakes her head. “Casi wouldn’t allow it. We argued. Some of the others disobeyed but I stayed. He was our leader.” She takes a long drag, blowing the smoke into a dark corner. “Everyone who went to that village was killed. They found three cumpas on the Cuzco road with plastic bags tied over their heads.”

  Leo stares at her hands. She reaches for her cigarettes but finds the pack empty. Something in Marta’s story is nagging at her. “14 de Junio. The group you were in. It was part of the Shining Path, wasn’t it?” When there’s no answer, she says, “That’s why the army didn’t let Casi go. He was in Sendero.”

  “A lot of people called themselves a lot of things. All that matters is what they did.”

  Leo nods, reaches for Marta’s cigarettes. All around them the room holds its breath, the sharp, still point on which the night turns.

  “Why did you tell me this story, compañera?” she says.

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “To scare me?”

  “You are already scared.”

  With that Marta hoists her bedroll and lifts her camera case from the floor. Her footsteps recede down the hall and up the stairs, to Chaski’s old room. Leo listens to the creaking of Chaski’s bed-springs overhead. The rest of the house is as silent as the day she moved in.

  “But I’m still here.”

  * * *

  —

  What happened the next day, or the day after that, can never be known. DINCOTE’s report ends with Chaski’s departure, what came after having been destroyed or withheld, if it was ever written. I have no more telling newspaper items, no more curious details from Gorriti’s article or Rabbi Eisens with their serendipitous meetings. I have only questions that can’t be answered, truths lost to the black hole of time. It was inevitable, I suppose, this boundary. I’ve come to the end of my story, the line beyond which I can’t see.

  Or maybe I’ve come to the beginning.

  It was the Fourth of July.

  5

  “It’s a sad day to be an American, Leo, I’ll tell you that much. Can you believe this crap?”

  Leo smokes against the wall of the bodega, white sun slanting across her chest.

  “I swear,” her brother says, “if I hear one more person defending him…I mean, seriously, we’re like the laughingstock of the planet. It’s a sad day to be an American,” he says again. “Maybe you’ve got the right idea, Sis.”

  She allows herself a cold smile. Matt only calls her “Sis” when he feels superior, a subtle reminder that she’s older and yet, in the family’s reckoning, so much less accomplished. Already in the course of a five-minute phone call he’s managed to mention his promotion, his new office on the 103rd floor—“with a view out to, like, Bermuda”—and his salary, a truly stomach-turning sum which nevertheless is not quite enough for him to buy the bigger apartment he and Samira have decided they need.

  “What is it you do, again?” she asked.

  “Arbitrage.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He laughed and played along. “Beats me!”

  Now he starts in again, about the scandal, the taped phone calls, the stained blue dress—“No shame, this dumbass! Doesn’t he understand he works for us?”—caught up like the rest of the world in a kabuki show of no consequence, oblivious to the world’s true agonies. For all his sheltered arrogance, she’d thought Matt had more sense.

  It hardly matters now, she thinks, peering into the dim bodega, at the old dueño behind the counter. In a few weeks such trifles will be reduced to their true proportions, drowned out by the euphonious rumbles of the plan as it erupts, at long last, into reality.

  “Don’t blame me,” Matt says. “I voted for Jack Kemp. Hey, Leo,” he says, “did they ever find that guy?”

  “Who?”

  “The one you told me about. Your friend from work or something. Remember?”

  It takes a second to realize whom he means. Seven months on, it’s hard to picture Neto’s face—and when she does, it’s not the bashful kid in the Pearl Jam T-shirt she sees but the black-and-white image on a thousand picket signs. At one point she’d told herself she was doing all this for Neto. What does it mean that she hardly remembers him?

  “Yeah,” she says. “They found him.”

  “Is he okay? I mean, where was he?”

  Matt’s concern is so unexpected, so out of character, that she almost tells him everything: how it all feels so precarious, how she hasn’t slept for weeks. She wants to tell him about the plan, how she’s imagined it down to its most minuscule detail, to lay it out for him in all its beauty. But her baby brother—with his co-op apartment and perfect wife and view of Bermuda—would never understand.r />
  “He’s fine. It was all a misunderstanding.”

  Even Matt can hear the lie. “Leo, are you okay? The ’rents are kind of freaking out. Dad says they haven’t talked to you in like a month.”

  “What do they want to talk about?”

  “Well…” he says, as if talking to a mental patient, “the credit card, for one thing. I guess they want to know where all that money’s going. They’re worried about you.”

  “Of course they do. Of course it’s all about money. People like Mom and Dad—” She stops herself. Another lecture, another editorial—what did it matter? Inside, the TV on the counter flashes an image of towering palm trees, lush grass, a profusion of rosebushes. The entrance to Vía América, she realizes with a groan. A crane is lowering something onto the black pedestal: a statue of Christopher Columbus, chin raised to the city, arms outstretched. Just then someone tugs at her belt and she looks down to find a beggar boy touching his hand to his mouth in hunger.

  “I don’t know, Matt,” she says. “Maybe it’s not going so well.”

  “So leave,” he says, sounding, in his blunt surety, just like their father. “Come home. If something’s bothering you. Just quit.”

  “Quit?”

  “You don’t owe these people anything, Leo. Your happiness is all that matters.”

  Stunned, she stares at the phone. The proprietor comes out from behind the counter, brandishing a broom at the beggar boy. Your happiness—?

  “—coming down there, maybe around Labor Day,” Matt is saying. “You can show me around, have a last hurrah. Samira really wants to spend time with you. She hardly knows you. What do you say, Sis? You must be ready for a good meal and a shower.”

  The voice is so earnest, almost beseeching, she has to remind herself who’s on the other end: just another American, looking for someone to save.

  Your happiness—?

  “I have a shower,” she says, then sets the phone in its cradle, savoring how his empty chatter shrinks to nothing.