The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  You? she seemed to ask. I couldn’t look away. They sent you?

  * * *

  —

  But I had to find a way. With two weeks left I would have to cross the line. I went to Calle Tarata, where a black obelisk marked the site where twenty-five people died. I went to La Cantuta, and then to the hillside where the murdered students were buried; to the ordinary house in Surco where Abimael had been captured; to the Vista de los Incas golf resort, on the spot where Los Muertos once stood. I took photos, scribbled notes—as if such tokens might cohere into a kind of presence. I stood across the avenue from the Chorrillos women’s prison, its block-long roof frilled with razor wire. She’s in there, I told myself, peering at the high walls. Leonora Gelb is in there right now. The walls stared back, stubbornly two-dimensional.

  One morning I took a bus downtown and stood on a long line of people waiting to visit Congress. The line followed a high, spiked fence, through which I could see flowerbeds, shade trees, an imposing statue of Bolívar on horseback. The ornate white building floated behind it all, majestic and dreamlike. Soldiers patrolled the line. Vendors and beggar children jostled around us and on the opposite corner protestors hoisted photos of Leo’s screaming face plastered over with the phrase ¡Muerte a terucos!

  I waited over an hour, fighting a growing sense of unreality, the feeling that I was just another tourist, waiting to be entertained—the soldiers, the protestors, were all part of the show. When a drunk started to put on an incoherent mime act, everyone in line laughed, until a soldier dragged him away, to a smattering of applause.

  Eight hundred sticks of dynamite. Five thousand rounds of ammunition. The court said they planned to storm this building, shoot hostages, overthrow a government. It named Leonora Gelb, of Cannondale, NJ, as the architect of this implausible bloodbath. This was the story I was supposed to be writing. But nothing in my experience equipped me to understand such a thing. As the high gates opened to let a file of soldiers in berets and desert camo pass through, it came to me that I didn’t even believe it.

  I left the line, sat on a bench and stared at my notebook. I didn’t believe it, any of it: that she intended to invade this fortress, to blow it up, to kidnap anyone. I’d never believed it. It was all, finally, beyond my ability to imagine. I sat a long time, amazed by this revelation. That’s why I couldn’t write it, I realized, why all the research in the world had not sufficed. How do you write a story that you don’t believe?

  * * *

  —

  That night I sat in bed staring at my computer, not typing a word. Stephanie lay reading with her back to me. Since the morning in Pueblo Libre she’d been gentler with me, mildly encouraging. She seemed to find my frustration amusing, even cute—as if I were a cocker spaniel trying to turn a doorknob. I must have made some sound of despair, because she turned to me with a look of concern.

  “Still stuck?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. She watched me, waiting. “I don’t think I can write it. But I have to write it.” I’d come that far, I said, spent months thinking of nothing else, but I still didn’t understand. “How do you do it? All these stories…death, torture, everyone killing everyone. How can anyone…” I shook my head at my own childishness. “I just wanted to do something that matters. Like you, what you write really matters.”

  She peered at me as if she saw something new, still too faint to understand. She used to believe it mattered, she finally said. She used to think risking her life to write stories about the war was an important political act. When she’d first come to Lima, in the last months of the war, she’d sought out student radicals and blacklisted reporters, lawyers for accused terrorists, aid workers who sheltered fighters coming in from the provinces. She’d spent a week at a training camp in the jungle, where fifty cadres studied bombmaking and read Sun Tzu. She recounted all this in a distant, wondering voice, as though it were someone else’s life. One day, at a protest in the Plaza San Martín, a woman she knew, a mother of five, was arrested. Soldiers dragged her to the ground and beat her, aiming their clubs between her legs, while Stephanie crouched behind a bench a few yards away.

  “What a reporter is supposed to do is take notes, maybe a photograph,” she said. “But that’s not what a human being is supposed to do.”

  “What did you do?”

  She propped herself on an elbow. In the dim light I could just make out the shape of her brow, her thin nose. The faded bruise had left a ghostly map around her eye. “I wrote the story. Almost nobody picked it up. The International Herald-Tribune cut it to ninety words and ran it on page ten.”

  “Stephanie—” I said.

  “What I’m saying is Leonora Gelb isn’t a mystery to me. Under the right circumstances, around the right people, that could easily have been me.” She poked my arm and I startled. “Who knows, Andres? Maybe it could have been you.”

  She was joking, but I was surprised at how it stung. I knew it would never have been me—caring about something enough to put my privilege, my safety on the line. Not this me, not Andres. We both knew.

  What I wanted to tell Stephanie, what I wanted to convince myself, was that I hadn’t always been this way. Once, a long time ago, I’d thought of myself as a good person, an honorable person. I recycled, donated to Oxfam, gave other drivers the right of way. I was part of the solution, as we used to say—though how that worked wasn’t entirely clear. It had something to do with writing, with teaching writing, something about how art could help create a better world.

  But after seeing the images from Abu Ghraib I could no longer tell myself such lies. I knew I was responsible, that the empathy I extolled was just a front for cowardice. I couldn’t bring myself to read my students’ stories—anguished tales of teenage cutters, lonely vampires, prom dates gone awry—or to consider my own novel, with its tiny, foolish concerns. A fever of renunciation stole over me, a suffocation I felt each time I saw the photos: bruised men lying atop one another, Lynddie England with her leashed prisoner, the black-hooded scarecrow on his electric torture-box. When the term ended I sold everything I owned—furniture, stereo, a vintage Fender Telecaster, my long-suffering Ford Probe—all the meaningless accumulations that sickened me, that felt like a kind of pollution. Not until my apartment was empty, my footsteps echoing on the hardwood, was I able to breathe again.

  In Babilonia, I’d kept my possessions to a minimum: one towel, one set of sheets, just enough clothing to get by. I could have afforded a bigger room, something with a kitchen, but I preferred that small space—as if I were a package that might break if it slid around too much. I took no pride in this austerity; there were no politics behind it, no principles. It was a compulsion, a kind of spiritual anorexia: I needed to be free, and the more things that clung to me the less free I could feel. That’s what I didn’t tell people about life in Babilonia: it wasn’t what I did or felt, it was about who I needed to be.

  But I couldn’t be that person anymore. Leo’s story, everyone’s stories, Stephanie’s black eye, the murdered children in Pakistan—it was as if a charm had lifted, as if the outside world I’d tried so hard not to think about had started to think about me. What it saw was all too easy to imagine: someone who had given nothing, suffered nothing, who’d told himself a bogus story of reinvention but who, in reality, had changed nothing more than his mailing address. A novelist, a layabout, a teacher, the Salsa King—in times like ours, didn’t it all amount to the same thing?

  I had two weeks left to atone. The next afternoon, I went back to Pueblo Libre alone. I walked Calle Almagro a dozen times, considered the house from different angles—the Big Wheel still lay wheels-up in the garden, the Toyota sat dormant at the door. As night came on, the dark house receded like a missing tooth. When I heard a neighbor’s gate rattle open I hurried off, a stealthy gringo, a fugitive. Back at Damien’s I sat in front of Leo’s photo, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I didn�
��t know which of us was staring at the other. It’s your last chance, I kept thinking. I opened the computer and typed a single line. I typed it again, in boldface. I tried a different font. Then I took a red marker from the drawer and scrawled it across the photograph: WHO AM I?

  * * *

  —

  Again the court approved her parole, and again the protests flared. A radio station urged listeners to demonstrate outside the homes of the judges and lawyers, and the Justice Ministry was repeatedly defaced with right-wing graffiti. Outside the Chorrillos prison, demonstrators set tires on fire and spilled trash into the avenue. The mayor took to the airwaves, warning the attorney general of “dangerous reactions” throughout the city if Leonora were to be released.

  “La Leo is safe where she is,” he said. “Outside, who can say what would happen?”

  “The poor girl. They will tear her to pieces,” Damien said, glancing up from a magazine at the TV, where the old footage ran in silence, captioned by one word: ¿Libre? Carlito was in the shower, singing at the top of his lungs, getting ready for another night at El Castillo. The tension between them had settled into polite indulgence; when I saw them together they spoke in complete sentences and rarely touched. Carlito’s dislike for me had hardened into disdain, expressed occasionally in small gestures but more often in a bland astonishment that I was still there at all, that I hadn’t simply dissolved of my own insubstantiality. Damien was never anything less than gracious, but I’d begun to sense a mild anticipation when I talked about my progress, as if he’d heard a rumor I might be leaving soon.

  “You won’t join us?” he said now. “Yesenia has been asking for you…”

  “That’s the last thing I need,” I said. She’d left me a message that day, asking if I would give her another dance lesson. The old Andres would never have turned her down.

  “Poor, poor Andres,” Damien said. “Life was much simpler in Babilonia, no?”

  In the next room, Carlito’s hair dryer whined to life. Damien turned to straighten photos on a shelf. When I saw the back of his neck—slightly sunburned, as if he’d just cut his hair—the care with which he lined up their books, I felt a surge of affection and gratitude. He’d put up with me for two months. What had he gotten in return?

  “I’m going to finish soon,” I said. “Really. A few more days. Some loose ends.”

  His hands stopped moving but he didn’t turn around. “You know you can stay as long as you need.”

  The next day, as I walked up the Avenida Brasil with its proliferation of fast-food restaurants and its gladiatorial combi traffic, I vowed to live up to my word. I would take care of a few last items, plow ahead, meet my deadline—and to hell with what I believed, what I could or couldn’t imagine. Something had happened, that much was undeniable; figuring it out, telling the real story, had become an obsession. Leo’s world had taken over, expanded to the very edges of my awareness. Nothing else mattered.

  The house was the largest on the block, broad and angular in a way that made it look flat against the whitish sky. Its neighbors shrank back as if to hide from its many windows. In the wet weather, the green paint around the windows looked darker and the roses—some withered and losing petals, others open obscenely wide—stood garish against the walls. But something had changed—had that curtain been drawn yesterday? Was the car parked in a different spot? Feeling my blood quicken, as if from a slug of strong coffee, I walked to the gate. Part of me was shocked to find it open.

  “¿Sí?” said the woman who came to the door.

  I’d expected a skinny criolla, possibly blonde, but this woman had the bronze complexion and wide features of an indigena. She was in her thirties, short and broad-shouldered. She wore a pink sweater and a long skirt, and her bare painted toenails stood out against the white tile of the entryway.

  “Me llamo Andres,” I said. My heart thudded with disbelief. I could hardly get the words out. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “¿Sí, señor?”

  “Can I come inside? I’d like to see your house.”

  Her bemused smile slowly turned anxious. She moved to fill the doorway. From what I could see, the inside was nothing like I’d imagined: high ceilings, wall-to-wall carpet, warm light from hidden recesses. It confused me, as if everything had been rearranged since my last visit. Behind her, a tiny raincoat slumped on the floor beside a pair of Dora the Explorer boots, and over a small glass table hung a crude needlepoint of a llama in a bowler hat, the phrase ¡Yo soy peruana! scrawled in jaunty yarn letters.

  “Don’t be frightened,” I said. “I know it’s a strange thing to ask…”

  “¿Que quiere aquí, señor? We don’t want to buy anything.”

  I felt myself smiling crazily. “Of course not. I just want to look, okay?” She watched me steadily. I had the urge to rush past her and I closed my eyes until it went away. I gestured at the house as if maybe she’d never seen it before. “Something happened in this house.”

  At this the woman raised her chin, recognition smoothing her features. From another room, a man’s voice called out but she ignored it. She took a step toward me and pulled the door shut behind her.

  “Nothing happened here, señor,” she said. She spoke in the voice of a mother scolding a child. “Whatever you are talking about, it was a long time ago. No one wants to remember things like that. Who are you to come here and bother us on a Sunday?”

  “I’m a writer,” I said. To my ears, it sounded limp and desperate. I sensed the neighbor woman listening on the other side of the wall. “I’m sorry to intrude. But I need to understand what happened. This is history, people’s lives. It’s important.” I held out my hands as if to receive alms. “All I need is five minutes.”

  When I sputtered to a stop, she waggled a finger in my face. “Don’t tell me what is important. This is not your house. It’s not a museum. We bought this house. Our children live here. It has nothing to do with you.”

  I was still smiling like a moron. I almost took her hand. “Just five minutes?”

  She crossed her arms. For an instant my heart leapt. “The war is over. We don’t want writers, we want peace. Go away now,” she said, stepping back inside. “If I see you again across the street, watching like a thief, I am going to call the police.”

  * * *

  —

  Another loophole was discovered, paperwork to be processed, protocols followed to the letter. It could be weeks, the news reports said, or not at all. Lucrecia was calling every day. Her father suspected something, she said. If he found out, he would throw her out of the house. Jack had stopped calling entirely.

  Desperate to accomplish something, to check even one thing off my list, I went to San Isidro to visit Dr. Rausch in his clinic. We had more to talk about, I told myself—our interview had ended badly, before I’d gotten what I needed. It was a fine, chilly morning, the air tight and clear—football weather, Fitzgerald would have called it. I found the address on a wide lane of fan palms and fruit trees. A guard told me to go around the side, where I was buzzed through a plain steel door into a pleasant waiting area. A rococo settee upholstered in striped satin sat below a framed print of Picasso’s “Don Quixote.” By the slow blink of the receptionist’s eyes, I knew I was not the usual visitor, that the men who usually stood in this room wore suits and gold watches, brusquely making arrangements for daughters or wives who waited in the car.

  “It’s perfectly natural, of course,” said Dr. Rausch. “You must forget the expectations of others, the so-called conventional wisdom. What is wise about allowing lives to be ruined?”

  He sat behind a giant mahogany desk, half of which was covered with globes of various sizes—new and antique, some with topographic texture, others lit from within. He had not been surprised to see me—as if he, too, sensed something unfinished.

  “Is that how you felt during the war? As a doctor did you think it
was your duty to help people, even if those people were…” I could not come up with the right word. I did not want to say “terrorists.”

  He frowned and steepled his gnarled hands. “Those years hardly matter now.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Have you read your Joyce, my friend? ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ But it is the idea of history itself that keeps us asleep, prisoners to an imagined continuity. Once we discard this idea, we wake immediately. We are free.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s talk about why you’re really here.”

  He showed me around the clinic: the procedure room with its gleaming steel fixtures and immaculate sinks; the recovery area, bedecked with vases of silk flowers and photos of tropical beaches. Only the absence of windows distinguished it from any other doctor’s office, that and the air of poised watchfulness. There was no margin for error, I understood—if something should go wrong even the power and money of the men who brought their mistresses here could not protect Dr. Rausch. Those same men—judges, politicians, executives—would crush him under the full opprobrium of Peruvian law.

  “Most women need only an hour or two to rest. It’s quite amazing, how quickly the body heals itself. More than one has told me she feels like a new person entirely.” He leaned on his cane with both hands, rheumy eyes sunken in their orbits. I must have looked nervous, searching for something to rest my eyes on. I felt dizzy, disoriented—I’d never imagined myself in a place like that.

  “You’ll come at night,” he said as he led me back to the waiting area. “Your friend shouldn’t eat for twelve hours before the procedure. Call that day and let the girl know when you’ll arrive.”

  “Wait,” I stammered. I’d only wanted information, I said. “I don’t know yet, if this is the best…option?”

  He fixed me again with those wet, steady eyes. On the wall behind him, Picasso’s Quixote was just a jumble of black lines under a burning sun.