The Gringa

  They emerge at the edge of a meadow and she lingers by the split-log fence. In the near distance, two vicuñas stand drinking from a stone fountain; three others dot the meadow’s farther side. Too many thoughts fill her head—suspicions, questions, half-made theories of why he’s sought her out. Soon enough, she hears him approaching, but this time she doesn’t wait for him to speak.

  “You’re a coward,” she says.

  “Leo—”

  “You brought me to that house. You brought all of us. You said you needed my help, you were going to do something. Then you left.”

  “I was shot,” he says.

  She fixes him in a stare. “That’s not why.”

  Chaski’s mouth opens and closes. He turns to watch the vicuñas poking their noses into the wind. “No, that’s not why.”

  She’s never seen vicuñas up close before—like a cross between a deer and an ostrich, with scrawny legs and long, fragile necks. There’s something foolish and dainty about their woolly middles, too vulnerable. One raises its head to look at them, then prances madly to the other side of the fountain. When she looks again at Chaski, she knows absolutely that what her comrades have said about him is false.

  “I left because I don’t want to lie anymore. About anything,” he says. “The lying is like a sickness. It will kill all of us.

  “I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen, Leo. Where has it gotten me? The glorious revolution. Where has it gotten any of us? Nacho, Casi, Neto and Nalda. So many people I knew hurt or dead. Some of them are dead because of me. Always we say we want to fight, that everyone will be happy after the war. But you can’t be happy if you’re dead.”

  “It’s not about happiness,” Leo says, trying to believe it. “It’s not about you or me…”

  “I know people who can help you,” he says. He reaches for her hand. “There’s a place you can stay. You need to leave that house.”

  She bats his hand away. “Are you crazy?”

  “You don’t understand what’s happening. Things are not what you think.”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  “I know what they think. I know how they talk about you. You’re in danger, Leo.”

  “My name is Linda,” she says.

  “No, it’s not.”

  She fumbles for a cigarette, realizes with a pang of misery that she left them on the bridge. “Did you tell them about Josea?”

  Chaski looks up sharply. It’s the first time she’s seen him genuinely angry and it shocks her. “Álvaro was from the same village as me. Our grandmothers were cousins—”

  “Did you tell them?”

  “Do you think I could do that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what anyone can do.”

  A distant gabbling on the path behind them, and then the schoolchildren come racing past, shrieking and shoving, their harried teacher chasing after them with a torn map. That morning Leo had woken alone. She’d gone looking for Julian in the kitchen, on the second floor, but when she heard his voice behind Marta’s closed door she tiptoed back downstairs and out into the garden.

  “What’s going to happen?” she says. “If you’re really my friend, tell me what I don’t know.”

  He can only hold her gaze for a second. When he reaches up to touch the cross at his neck she understands: he doesn’t know any more than she does. They’d never trusted him, either.

  “You see? You are a coward,” she spits, suddenly overcome with fury—at her own ignorance, everyone’s ignorance, their unforgivable blindness. “You can’t help me. You can’t help anyone.” She can hear the ugliness in her voice but part of her is strangely excited. “Stay away from me. You’re not a Philosopher. We don’t need people like you.”

  When he speaks again the resignation in his voice fills her with contrition. She wants to take it all back, to cling to his legs and beg forgiveness.

  “Anyone can be a Philosopher, Leo. Any angry kid in Los Arenales or Lurigancho or La Ensenada del Chillón. Out in the campo everyone’s a Philosopher. All they have to do is say it.” He offers a last, sad smile. “Isn’t that what you did?”

  She watches him retreat down the path, limping toward a sky streaked with pink cream, until the shade swallows him. From the other direction the schoolchildren’s shrill voices float over the meadow, past the ludicrous vicuñas, who stand at the fence in naïve curiosity. Following the sound, she finds the children clustered before a high glass enclosure, jostling one another, chanting a ragged song and smacking their palms against the glass.

  “Ti-gre! Ti-gre!”

  Their teacher is still absent. A few boys toss garbage and small rocks over the top of the wall; the girls scream, shrinking back in fear and delight when a low-slung, muscled puma emerges from behind a boulder and stalks fluidly past. Leo catches her breath. Sand-colored, graceful as a slow-beating heart, the puma scans its shabby prison, only the twitch of an ear betraying its awareness of the taunting children. Unperturbed, it moves back into shadow and vanishes, reappears on the far side of a heavy tree bough, flanks rippling, impossibly long strides carrying it from one end to the other in a determined, dreamlike glide.

  “Ti-gre! Ti-gre!”

  She stands among the children, the outline of her face mingling with their reflections in the glass. As they scream and bang, the puma makes another pass, moving with purposeful steps to the far end of the enclosure where it lifts its nose to sniff regally at the air.

  Fifty yards away, the vicuñas gambol blithely on the meadow. Watching them, the great cat lowers itself to its haunches. How easy it is to imagine: the lunge and flash of muscle, the cloud of dust. How quickly the vicuña’s shrieks would go silent. How could they put them here, side by side, she thinks? Her hands shake with terror and loneliness. She wants to slap the children’s nasty little faces. She wants to run all the way home, hide under a mound of blankets. What cruelty or sick humor doomed these animals to such torment?

  “Ti-gre! Ti-gre!”

  The puma glides solemnly past, turns to look at Leo and then, uninterested, away.

  3

  The weapons were delivered on the morning of August 12—guns, ammunition, and grenades acquired from a Panamanian dealer based in Guayaquil, Ecuador, paid for in American cash. Alfi Nuñez, who drove the van, testified that he arrived in Pueblo Libre at 1:15 a.m. and waited as instructed on the Avenida Venezuela until two men got in, blindfolded him, and drove through side streets. They stopped on a quiet block across from a three-story house. There were no lights on, but as they unloaded the crates Nuñez said he looked up and saw “a white girl wearing a red bandanna” watching from a third-story window. He remembers thinking this strange—he’d heard stories of gringos who fought in Colombia or Argentina, but never Peru. Peruvians, he thought, had more pride.

  When Nuñez testified, Leo’s attorney was forbidden to raise his status as an “arrepentido”: he’d spent three years in El Arca before being paroled in return for cooperation. There were hundreds of such penitents, during and after the war—they were often shown in televised purification ceremonies, wearing white hoods and gloves, kissing the Peruvian flag. Thus sanctified, their stories became unimpeachable and led to the arrest or disappearance of thousands.

  “This woman you saw,” Leo’s attorney said, “did anyone speak to her?”

  “No, señor.”

  “Nobody gave her instructions?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Are you sure she was involved? Maybe she was an innocent spectator.”

  Nuñez emphatically disagreed. The gringa was a part of everything, he said. In fact, he was certain she was in charge of the operation. The cumpas who’d met him were just muscle, following orders. In fact, he said, as he was leaving the courtyard the woman might have made a sign in the window for him to see. With her finger, she might have traced the number four.

>   * * *

  —

  So now there are guns.

  Later that weekend, thieves broke into a warehouse in the Industrial Zone belonging to the Contreras Garment Company, which manufactured uniforms for the security detail of Peru’s Congress. A company official would later confirm that the uniforms recovered from Calle Almagro were the stolen garments.

  As for the much-reported “blueprints of Congress,” they were not submitted as evidence and have never been shown to the public. In his affidavit, Lieutenant Lang referred not to blueprints but to “a detailed map showing the exact location of every legislator.” This likely refers to a seating chart customarily made available to the press, enabling reporters to call specific lawmakers during important votes—a distinction rarely made in the media, though it would have been known to anyone reporting on Leo’s case.

  Guns, dynamite, uniforms, blueprints…It’s all coming together.

  After Josea Torres’ death, arrangements were made to print The Eyes of the World at a shop in Los Arenales owned by Eladio Huatay, a cousin of Comrade César. On the afternoon of August 18—five days before the Grand Opening of Vía América—Leo brought the files for the eighth issue to Huatay, with unusual instructions: he was to prepare everything but hold the print run until she returned later that week. There would be one last file, she said, a photo image for the back page. Once she’d delivered it, the issue—“el último,” he recalls her saying—would be complete.

  It’s growing dark by the time she leaves Huatay’s shop, a still and silent dusk that seems to start beneath her feet, rising like bathwater. She takes a winding route through Las Brisas, not admitting to herself where she’s going until she’s standing across from the boarded-up offices of Oportunidad Para Todos. Ten months, she thinks. Almost a year in Peru. She remembers the optimism she’d felt at first, the exhilaration, speaking to a room full of Quechua women, mapping simple English sentences: Can you help me? How much does this cost?

  But they didn’t need English, she thinks. In that, Julian’s mother was certainly right. They didn’t need bank accounts or bookkeeping skills. They needed justice.

  In four days, they’ll have it, she thinks, wondering suddenly if she’ll ever see this place again, if she’ll ever come back to Los Arenales. Julian says there are arrangements, that after Vía América they’ll go somewhere safe, just for a while. “Trust me,” he says, “You’ll have nothing to worry about.” Wistful, she looks at the pavement, bends to pick up a dirt-crusted bottlecap—a souvenir, she thinks, pressing it into her palm until it leaves a deep impression. Then she goes to see Nancy.

  For a moment she can’t recognize the woman who comes to the door. She’s lost at least twenty pounds, her hair is limp, gray at the roots, the skin of her neck gone papery.

  “Leo. What are you doing here?” Nancy says.

  “I wanted to see you,” Leo says. She stands tall, tries to project confidence, reassurance. She’s the bearer of good news, after all. “I wanted to see how you are.”

  “How we are? We’re the same. What did you think?” Nancy scans the street before stepping back from the door. “Okay, Leo, come in. My god, how skinny you are.”

  The living room has also changed—the couch moved to make room for a console TV, the table replaced by a bigger one. Ernesto’s face stares back from every wall and windowsill—generic, smiling images like the ones that come inside store-bought frames.

  “We didn’t know what happened to you,” Nancy says. “Were you traveling?”

  “I’m sorry I never came. I didn’t want to make things worse.”

  Nancy’s hands shake as she takes her cigarettes from the coffee table. “How could you make it worse?” From upstairs comes a low thud, a shuffling noise, as if someone were dragging something in circles. But Leo can’t take her eyes from the photos. When she looks up, Nancy has fixed her in a hard stare.

  “Have you seen your friend Chaski?”

  “Not for a long time,” Leo says. And it’s true: the man she saw at the zoo was not her friend. He had a different name, a different face. “Have you?”

  “Oh, yes. The son of a bitch was here. He came just a few days after they found Neto. To express his sadness. To tell us all the cumpas”—she spits out the word—“felt our loss. She sweeps an arm at the new television and table. “You see their compensation. Payment for a fallen soldier. I hope you stay away from that maricón,” she says, just as another thud sounds over their head. “They were looking for him only a few days ago.”

  “Who was looking?”

  Someone calls for Nancy in a weak, frightened voice. “Wait here,” she says. “I was making dinner. We’ll eat together and you’ll tell me your adventures.”

  While she’s gone, Leo examines the photos one by one: Ernesto as a boy of ten in shorts and a blue jersey, one foot on a soccer ball; as a teenager perched on a stone wall with half a dozen other kids; an infant propped up between his older brothers. His broad, credulous face is unfamiliar, not the face on all the placards.

  They hadn’t been close, Leo thinks with a pang of guilt. Not really. She’d called him a friend but in truth she’d known little about him. After he died he became a convenient rallying cry, a sign of her virtue and righteousness. It was a kind of cruelty, she thinks, flushing with self-loathing, a theft. What gave her the right?

  “You were in Lima all this time?” Nancy says, standing over the stove and smoking. “This ugly city? Why not see Chile, Argentina? These are civilized places.”

  “I got involved with something,” she says. “Another organization.” Nancy’s hands move slowly, her back straight, while Leo talks in generalities: the art school, the classes they’ll offer, the frustrations of bureaucracy. The grand opening is this weekend, she says, though there are some last-minute details to work out.

  “We’re going to have a real impact. Something people won’t forget. I promise.”

  Nancy’s hands fall still. “And what about your family? Don’t they want you to come home?”

  She shakes off the memory of her father in the hotel driveway, golf bag at his side, emptying his wallet as if she were a mugger. How sad he’d looked, how beaten. “They know this is more important. They raised me to think about other people, to do something for them. Like you raised Neto.”

  “Strangers,” Nancy says. “People you don’t know or understand.”

  “Those are the people we have to learn to understand. Isn’t that what we did at Oportunidad? If we only help the people we know we perpetuate inequality and hatred. The class system—”

  She breaks off, seeing Nancy’s wariness harden into impatience. Without a word, Nancy sets her cigarette on the edge of the stove and leaves the room, returning a moment later with a folded sweatshirt which she thrusts at Leo.

  “Take this. It belonged to Ernesto. But you should have it.”

  Tentatively, Leo holds up the bulky sweatshirt—baby blue with gold block letters: UC BERKELEY. “He always talked about it,” Nancy says. “It was his dream, where all the great American revolutionaries came from. He thought it was so cool, the students with their marches, fighting the police. Isn’t that where those students were shot?”

  “I think that was in Ohio.”

  “Four students. Four.” She sets two plates on the table and scoops spaghetti from the pot. “Nothing like it was here. At San Marcos, La Cantuta—”

  “I know.”

  “Hundreds of them,” she says. “Babies. Following these psychotics in Sendero, these butchers who didn’t care about them. I told Neto, ‘Don’t get mixed up with them. These people don’t care about you.’ They talk about helping people, but what kind of help brings the army into our neighborhood? Taking our money for their taxes, then blowing up the schools and banks we built with our own hands.

  “After Los Muertos, where was Chaski?” she says, brandishing a fork. “
Where were you, Leo? Who helped those people when their homes were destroyed? My family came here with nothing, you understand? Nothing was here. But we built a community. We didn’t do it for ourselves—we did it for our children! Why should we build it if our children are going to die before they can make something for their own children?

  “I hope you understand me,” she says. For an instant, the old Nancy is visible—her proud chin, her formidable gaze. “El pueblo no lo necesita. They say they are fighting for el pueblo, but el pueblo no lo quiere.”

  Throughout this speech, Leo holds the sweatshirt in front of her like a shield. Now she folds it carefully, her face burning. “I know how you must feel.”

  “Hija, you know nothing. You are as stupid as the day I met you.”

  At the front door, Nancy takes her elbow. “Do you know what he said? That son of a bitch, when he came to buy us a television? He said Neto was a hero. His death was a call to arms! Is that why you came? To tell me this nonsense, that my son was a hero?”

  Leo’s voice is barely audible. “No. He wasn’t a hero.”

  “Then why? What was he?”

  From every side she feels Ernesto watching, his face trapped forever behind cheap glass. She makes herself look into Nancy’s eyes. “He was useful,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  As the Grand Opening approaches, silence tightens its grip on the house. In the halls, the stairwells, Leo and the others exchange nods and move quickly past. At night she and Julian hold their breath, gnaw on their knuckles to keep gasps and grunts from leaking out.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispers afterward. “It’s all taken care of.”

  “The cumpas know the plan? They understand what they have to do?” She shakes an empty cigarette pack, tosses it in the corner. “How do they know where to put the dynamite? How will you get it all over there?”