The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  Well. That’s between you and your parents. But I have to tell you, it seems kind of sad.

  Because they seem like nice people. Honest people. Not the kind of people to deserve this treatment. But you disown them, disrespect them, use their money to finance the terucos. And despite all of this they are here, right now, in Lima, fighting for you.

  * * *

  —

  The dining room has gotten more crowded, the crush of late diners raising the noise to an incoherent babble. The meal sits like a stone in her gut—red wine, prawns, risotto thick as wet concrete. Sharp tingles between her legs: the bladder infection she’s been expecting sending its first signals, quick pangs like a knot of twine yanked tight.

  “Did you know there was a bomb outside this hotel?” her father says.

  Leo looks up from her crème brûlée. “What?”

  “It was years ago. They parked a van in front of the building. Three people died. The concierge told me about it. He said the front of the building was like a dollhouse. You could see people sitting up in bed.

  “I guess it was one of these terrorist groups,” he goes on. “Eat the rich. That kind of thing. It was pretty bad here for a while, I guess. You probably know all about it.”

  “Why would I know about it?”

  David sips gingerly at his port. “Sweetheart, relax. I meant you know about the history. You’ve studied Peru. This wasn’t so long ago. I’m sure some of your friends remember the war. Or the people you work with.”

  She folds her hands in her lap. “Everyone remembers.”

  “The irony is that we’re not all that rich. It’s not like I could buy this hotel. I couldn’t afford to come here every day. For lots of people it’s out of reach, I get that. But look around. Most of these people are working stiffs, like me.”

  Leo watches his face and tries to keep her composure. For an hour she’s fought growing alarm, told herself it was only natural for her father to want to see where she lives, to know she’s safe here, among the savages. But something in his voice, a studied nonchalance, plucks at her attention. She should not have accepted a third glass of wine.

  “Do people ever talk to you about it?” he says.

  “About what?”

  “The war, Leo. The bombs.” Another quick and empty smile. “I saw on the news, something about one of the terrorist groups trying to do it again, make some kind of comeback. I couldn’t really follow the Spanish—”

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  “They said it started someplace called Los Arenales. Isn’t that where you work?”

  “Dad—”

  He sets down the glass and considers his next words. “I worry about you, Leo. We haven’t seen you in so long, we don’t hear from you—all we know is what we see on the credit card bill. And then we hear you work in one of these neighborhoods, around these fanatics…Gracias,” he says, taking the check from the waiter. “You’re smart, Leo. You know how to handle yourself. But these people can rope you in before you know what’s happening. Like a cult. A guy at the State Department told your mother that in the ’80s—”

  “She called the State Department?”

  David frowns, hands the check back with a grateful smile. Leo’s never seen him so controlled, so two-faced. She had not thought him capable of it.

  “Try to see it our way, honey. Try to put yourself in our shoes. What’s the name of the group you work for? They told us there was a situation a few months ago, something about the Army and protestors. You weren’t involved, were you?”

  All she can do is stare, hold her roiling abdomen. She tries to remember where the exits are. She wonders whether he might try to follow her home.

  “You need to be careful, Leo. You’re a foreign national. If you get caught up with something like this…you might not know what’s happening. Maybe they ask for a donation, or to help with something harmless, handing out leaflets, or—”

  “What are you saying, Dad?”

  He scans her face a long time. “Oportunidad Para Todos. That’s it, right? Leo, your mother was told it’s a front for a terrorist group, the same one that kidnapped that guy from the InterAmerican Bank.”

  She shakes her head against the haze of wine and warm fat. Her tongue is so thick she can hardly get the word out. “Terrorists?”

  David leans toward her. “Sweetheart,” he says quietly, “I have two plane tickets home.” She startles, tries to stand, but his grip on her wrist is firm. “Just listen. You’ve done what you came to do. You had your adventure, helped the people you wanted to help. But things are dangerous now. Look around. Did they frisk you in the lobby? In the taxi today, we got stopped twice. You don’t want to be here if these people start shooting each other again.”

  “Daddy—”

  “I know you would never hurt anyone, but these people don’t know you—”

  “This is where I live!” She tries again to pull away. The room is impossibly large, repeated forever and without exit in the dark windows. With his free hand, David takes an envelope from his breast pocket and sets it before her. “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” he says with a meaningful gaze. “It’s five thousand dollars. Keep it, give it to your friends, I don’t want to know. But that’s all, you understand? The credit card won’t work anymore. What’s done is done. You don’t have to tell me anything. But Leo,” he says, squeezing until she looks into his eyes. “I want you on that plane with me on Monday.”

  * * *

  —

  Five thousand dollars. Five thousand…Her father’s voice rings in her ears as she squats by the toilet, willing the silky risotto, the slick mussels, to stay where they are. She’d rushed from the table dizzy and watery-eyed, her father calling after her, tourists and boozy ricos looking up as she passed.

  Yet another disguise: the sullen American daughter who can’t hold her wine.

  The bathroom floor is brownish-red marble, cool beneath her palms. From hidden speakers, Sinatra sings “Mack the Knife,” his voice clarifying the perfumed air. That she should find herself here, prostrate in this nest of vulgarity; that she should have come in the first place, like a dog to a whistle…Despite all she’s seen, the months of preparation, despite Neto and Josea and Álvaro—that she still springs to the sound of her master’s voice, sits vacant and docile while he lectures her about the fucking war…

  She knows now why he came alone. She would not have left with her mother, would not even have stayed at the table as long as she had. That was their gambit, the only card they could play: that in his innocent love he could convince her—and so it was not love, it was a ploy to get what they wanted, what they couldn’t accomplish through fair play or force. Typical, she thinks, gathering breath, typical American behavior: when you can’t have what you want, when you can’t control it, you reach for your wallet. Doubtless he would have doubled the offer.

  So why can she so easily see herself on that plane? A window seat high above the clouds, a glass of wine—why is the image so peaceful, fringed with sunlight? She could give Julian the money, sneak away without a word, then watch from a distance as the plan is carried out. Like her father said, she would have made her contribution—but with no risk of getting caught. Wouldn’t any of her comrades do the same?

  At the sound of the bathroom door opening, Leo holds her breath. She searches for a weapon—a box of tissues, her own shoe—would her father have gone to the authorities? Would he turn in his own daughter?

  But it’s only a housekeeper, humming to herself as she wheels a cart across the floor, singing a few words in Quechua while her cloth squeaks over the mirror. Leo hauls herself standing and straightens her dress before leaving the stall. The housekeeper is setting out an array of rolled hand towels, bars of fancy soap. When Leo catches her eyes in the mirror, she returns an insincere smile.

  “¿Todo bien, señorita?”


  She’s young, Indian, in a starched blue uniform and white collar. Seventeen, at most. A child, already cleaning other people’s shit. Five thousand dollars is more than this girl will see in her lifetime—the owners of this hotel, its well-heeled guests, have made sure of that. Their very lives depend on it. And Leo’s father wants her to be safe.

  “Todo bien, compañera,” Leo says.

  The girl blushes in confusion, checks to see if anyone else has heard before flashing another false smile and wheeling her cart to the door.

  No, Leo won’t leave. Not for money or parental love, not to make anyone feel better. She won’t be who they want her to be, who they’d raised her to be: an investment, they’d no doubt call it, one that’s now in jeopardy. Just getting up from that table had been a small victory. Escaping this sickening hotel will be another. She’ll walk out without a word, stop for no one. She won’t return her father’s desperate calls. She’ll follow through, for once in her life, match words with deeds. One victory leads to another. She has the taste of it in her mouth now. She means to keep winning.

  When the door swings shut, she takes up a bar of soap—beet red and speckled with pumice. Leaning over the wide basin, she makes three slashing marks across the mirror: the number four. She can feel it behind her as she walks away, a crude and garish sign superimposed on her reflection. No one could miss it, or mistake its message:

  You are not safe.

  2

  The raid began at the height of the morning rush hour. Thursday, August 6, 1998. According to government records more than forty members of DINCOTE’s special forces took part in the operation, including a dozen from the elite Grupo 14. They converged on a house in the Jacaranda neighborhood, less than a mile from the sprawling Defense Ministry compound known as the Pentagonita, with orders, according to those same records, to “minimize casualties.”

  The house—two stories of slapdash construction set off from the street by a high, rusting fence—was empty. Instead of armed subversives they found a kitchen full of unwashed pots, floors strewn with blankets and cigarette butts, copies of the day’s tabloids, as if the people who’d been living there had left on a few minutes’ notice. In the overgrown backyard, under a rotten pallet, agents found a hinged concrete slab with a length of rope for a handle. Opening it, they stared down into what one reporter described as “a scene from the Dark Ages”: a stone well, two meters by three meters and reeking of excrement, at the bottom of which lay the body of Victor Beale.

  His death was determined to have been caused by diabetic shock due to starvation. His bloated body had wounds to the head and abdomen, but rather than torture these turned out to have been made by rats. In a corner of the filthy well lay a crumpled copy of The Eyes of the World.

  “So they have the newspaper, so what?” Julian says. He stands at the stove, waiting for coffee, while on the radio the President fulminates against the traitors. “You find it in lots of places. Schoolchildren are reading it.”

  “Schoolchildren don’t kill people,” Marta says, “or make demands of the government.”

  The kitchen is dim, voices dampened by the blankets over the windows. Leo is half-listening, poring over El Comercio. The light is sallow, smoke-filled; it feels as though they haven’t left this room, this very table, for weeks.

  “You don’t like killing, Profesora? Maybe you should go back to teaching.” He sets three mugs on the table. “¿Quién sabe? Maybe they gave it to him to wipe his ass. Eh, Linda? You see how useful your newspaper can be?”

  “It’s our newspaper,” Leo says without looking up. Cangallo. A gathering of veterans was interrupted by protests over military pensions, reads a story on p. A-18. She sets her cigarette on the edge of the heavy glass ashtray.

  “As usual you are not thinking,” Marta says. “Until now, only a few hundred people know about our paper. Now the President is talking about it on the radio. Who are these cumpas? Why do they kill an innocent person? What is the strategy?”

  Julian waves this off. “Strategy isn’t our problem.”

  “Dying is our problem,” Marta says. “Torture, this is our problem. El Arca.”

  Leo hardly hears these arguments anymore, the dog-like snapping of jaws as Marta and Julian jockey for control. They’ve all spent too much time in one another’s company, confined to airless rooms that smell of pasta and wet towels, only the chatter of the radio to distract them. Since the night Josea and Álvaro were killed, no one has left the house—only Leo, and only for groceries and the dinner with her father. Most of the day, Julian and Marta are locked away with the cumpas—working out the plan, they tell her, choreographing its many aspects. The garden is Leo’s refuge, but after an hour the damp chill settles into her joints and she retreats to the mute computer but the bladder infection makes it hard to sit for long. She thinks sometimes of Señora Zavallos and her father, a house lit up with jazz, aswirl in chatter. In El Arca she’ll remembers these weeks as one stage in the inexorable contraction of her world: from city to barrio, barrio to house, to a stone cell not shown on any map. She’ll huddle knees-up in a corner and pray to grow smaller still.

  “We have to say something about this,” Leo tells them now.

  Marta and Julian lock eyes. “Comandante?” he says, with exaggerated courtesy.

  “We say nothing,” Marta says.

  “We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. The whole country is talking about it.” Leo reaches for a pen. “We could say this is what happens when the government is unresponsive to the people: things get out of control, violence is inevitable…”

  Marta’s voice is flat and dangerous. “You will say nothing.”

  Leo lowers her eyes to hide her indignation. Since Julian’s return, they’ve hardly spoken—glimpses in the morning, Marta pale, raw-eyed, as though she’d been pleading with someone all night long. I have to see him, she’d said, on the night Josea and Álvaro were killed; Leo hasn’t had the courage to ask whom she’d meant. Late one night she found Marta at the kitchen table, smoking and writing on a legal pad. Mi vida, te extraño tanto, Leo read, before Marta snatched up the pad and walked out.

  “We have to make it clear we weren’t involved,” Leo says, keeping her voice even. “We have to remind people that our goal is to help—”

  “Nobody cares who killed Victor Beale,” Marta says. “Who knows if a person named Victor Beale ever existed? This is not the point.”

  “What is the point, Comandante?” Julian says.

  “The newspaper,” she says. “Maybe somebody died reading Los Ojos del Mundo. But how did he have that issue when all the copies were burned in Álvaro’s office?”

  He stops with the unlit cigarette halfway to his mouth. In the silence the image forces its way across Leo’s consciousness: the bloated body, twisted by cold, the lightless eternity, the rats. Nausea gathers in her throat but she bites it back. Impossible: to die like that. Impossible to inflict it on someone, a stranger. But what if there was no body? What if it were all just someone’s fantasy, no more real than “The Banker,” Leo’s own creation? She glances again at the article on the table: A gathering of military veterans…The protestors carried brass musical instruments which they played loudly as the veterans spoke. Could the government have made up the story? Could they be so brazen as to have invented Victor Beale?

  “Let’s say you’re right,” Julian says. “What do you want to do about it? Run away, forget everything?”

  “No,” Marta says. “I want to move faster.”

  At this a slow smile emerges on Julian’s face. Leo looks helplessly from one to the other, as if watching through a pane of glass. How easily she finds herself on the outside, even now. She uncaps her pen, crosses out the first line of the article. A military parade, she writes. It sounds more official, more pompous. A better target. And “musical instruments”? It sounds like a high-school marching band, some half-s
erious skirmish involving pom-poms and poodle skirts.

  No, she thinks. Victor Beale can’t go unanswered. The government can’t take control of the truth in this way. It can’t be permitted to determine what’s real.

  A bomb, she writes. The military parade was interrupted by a bomb.

  * * *

  —

  Of all the things she’ll wonder about in El Arca, all the unanswerable questions that keep her company through years of ice and stone, none will confound her, or bring as much secret amusement, as the question of Julian. How, after months of rancor and suspicion, they’d ended up sharing a bedroom, a bedroll, smacking their bodies together every night like rutting pigs until they rolled apart and slept, legs tangled, yanking one blanket back and forth until dawn.

  It was not loneliness or desperation, not the clinging together of terrified souls. Certainly nothing as foolish as love. She’ll consider and reject each of these clichés, coloring at the thought of the garbage the lawyers had wanted her to spew: that he’d seduced her, that she was drawn to his strutting masculinity, rendered helpless and quivering by the allure of revolution personified. She’d laughed in their faces, but in private she wept furiously: that they’d see her as such a pathetic dupe, such a girl, her life’s most urgent effort reduced to the silly tropes of romance.

  On the night they’d learned about Josea and Álvaro, Julian stayed awake long after the others had gone upstairs. Leo woke to find him standing at the window, head bowed. The taste of him still in her mouth from the kiss in the taxi. She pulled him down to her bedroll and undressed, put his hands where she wanted them, moving against him until his body’s own ferocity took over. Sex, for Leo, had never been about romance—romance was a waste of time, superfluous to the act itself, to pleasure. But that night was about more than pleasure: it was an opening, a secret compact. She’d seen his fear, his vulnerability; taking it into herself she’d helped him to master it, but only by making him acknowledge it, by asserting her right to share it, a right he could never revoke.