The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

“That was foolish, compañera,” Marta says when she catches up. “Why do you take this risk?”

  “So you could rescue me,” Leo says. “Now we’re even.”

  The mall is too wide to shoot directly from above, so Leo backs along the fenceline, squinting into the roar of the ocean wind, searching for an angle. The image has to be perfect, complete—Peruvians needed to see the whole ugly tumor to appreciate what had been cut out. From one vantage point, the entire structure is visible but not the towering statue with its sleazy gaze; hurrying to another, they can capture only part of the mall, the rest obstructed by the jut of the parking garage. Marta stands on her toes, hooks her fingers in the fence and holds the camera overhead, but all she can get is a slice of the upper level: Sol Alpaca, Godiva, something called Sam’s Fifth Avenue.

  “It’s good,” she says, glancing back at the soldiers.

  “Not good enough,” Leo says.

  At a gap in the fence she plunges into the shrubbery, thorns and branches catching her clothing, scratching her arms. With effort she frees herself, picks her way down a gully of dirt and scree. How long now since Julian brought her here, how many lifetimes? The path falls steeply toward the highway, a crevasse of jutting rocks scattered with food wrappers, chunks of sod and broken concrete, a New York Yankees cap crushed and half-buried in the soil. The wind fists into her mouth as she edges downward. It was a test, she thinks, looking back up, guessing at the spot where he’d pushed her to her knees—the first of many. Everything has changed since that night. But it’s still a long way down.

  “More stupidity,” Marta says, descending carefully behind Leo, her sliding steps sending showers of pebbles into space.

  And suddenly it’s there, spread out before them: Vía América in all its philistine glory. Sunlight knifes off plate glass and unlit neon, reflects in giant LCD screens and brass railings and steel café tables. The corners and angles distort their perspective, giving the many-tiered tableau a dreamy depthlessness. Devoid of people, the mall and winding cliffs look like an artist’s rendering—nature superimposed by glorious modernity, overwritten by it, liquidated.

  At the far end, cantilevered above the ocean, the crown jewel sits dazzling and impregnable. Its cavernous entrance flanked by giant red guitars, the Hard Rock Café beams an empty smile into the sunset, like a warrior with one foot propped on a carcass. She can’t help but admire the nerve of the builders, their determination to erase everything—history, language, culture, geography, blasted and hammered and ultimately consumed by this gleaming shell. They almost succeeded.

  The clouds shift, sunlight casting a scarlet glow over the facade, where giant red letters proclaim their message:

  SAVE THE PLANET

  “That’s the shot,” Leo says, giddy with satisfaction. “Take the photo and let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  The captain and his men are waiting up above, calling angrily through the fence, gesturing with their rifles as Leo and Marta scramble back to the road. After hurried apologies, they put the checkpoint and the towering Columbus behind them, moving swiftly up Avenida Larco where the city’s horns and pedestrians start to reassert themselves. The noise comes as a relief after the unreal calm of Vía América. Leo walks in long strides, propelled by triumph. A tourist! She’d gotten what she wanted by acting like a tourist, like exactly the kind of foolish parasite they’d built it for in the first place. A block later the thought comes to her with searing, delightful irony: She was Vía América’s first customer.

  At the bus stop, she turns to Marta, pulling her into an embrace. “I’ll be back soon,” she says, squeezing too hard. “Tell Julian we did it. Tell him everything’s ready.”

  Gently, Marta extracts herself. “Yes, I will tell him.”

  Something in her voice, a somber note, makes Leo pull back. For the first time since Leo’s known her, Marta won’t look at her.

  “You’ll be there? Tonight, when I get back,” Leo says. “Won’t you?”

  Slowly, Marta takes off her sunglasses, and the shape of her mouth steals Leo’s breath. In an instant the breadth of her error comes to her. Of course Marta won’t be there. Nobody will. When she gets back from Los Arenales the house will be empty, down to the third-floor crawlspace, her computer, the shed in the backyard. In a flash she sees the immaculate kitchen, the neatly made beds, easels standing in rows—the rest will be gone, all of it, anything that could identify them or reveal anything about their plans. He’ll leave her the radio and her clothes, her passport, maybe the stupid llama hanging by the door. But she’ll never see Julian again.

  I trust you. In a flash that leaves her lightheaded she sees what he’d wanted: a clean break. From here on in she can only be a liability. The logic is as sound as it is merciless. Only a child would ask for more.

  As a bus looms up the avenue, headlights soft in the dusk, she tries to hold off the wave of grief that’s cresting above her, larger than any she’s ever known.

  “Come with me to the printer,” she manages. “One hour. Marta? Please.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. There’s something I have to do.”

  “Then let me come with you. I’ll get to the printer a little later. It won’t matter. Or I can meet you somewhere. I won’t ask anything. I promise, I won’t make trouble.” In one miserable rush, the tears come. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, furious with herself. “I know it’s right. I understand. But”—in one hiccup the wave crashes down, burying her under her own wretchedness—“I’ll miss you.”

  Marta’s voice is strained, scratchy. “Compañera, control yourself.”

  “One hour,” she says, blinking away her tears. “I’ve earned this one thing.”

  The bus pulls to the sidewalk, a kid of fourteen or fifteen hanging from the door. ¡Vamos, vamos chicas! ¡Ya sale, vámonos! Marta stands awkwardly, her face softening from resolution to reluctance and, at last, compassion.

  “I’ll ride with you as far as the highway,” she says. “No more. I’m already late.”

  “For what?” Leo says, burning with humiliation. “Where are you going?”

  Marta hands the kid two coins and pulls Leo onto the crowded bus. “San Martín de Porres,” she says. Then, deciding something: “I have to see my son.”

  * * *

  —

  Not for many months, until that first New Year’s Eve in El Arca, will she remember the first thought that went through her mind. Standing at the window of her cell, watching the dark and frozen landscape, she’ll hear the quick, distant sizzles of an inmate’s homemade firecrackers and it will crash through her memory: the lurch of the bus, the smash of glass and banging on metal, the appearance, amid screams and flailing arms, of men in black masks, guns drawn, pouring in from both ends of the aisle.

  Terrorists, is what she thought. The bus had just passed Calle Tarata. It’s a terrorist attack.

  She’ll draw her knees up on the narrow mattress and let herself remember Marta as the soldiers took her from the bus: limp and expressionless, dangerously coiled. Shivering violently, Leo will use her tin cup to gouge a thick splinter from the pallet and whittle it to a point, working methodically with no concern for time or discovery. When her instrument is smooth and sharp, she’ll choose a spot above her head where the layers of paint are soft and make her mark:

  1

  “How old is he? Your son.”

  “Almost six. His birthday comes in October.”

  Will you be there? Leo almost asks. Squeezed into the narrow seat, she takes Marta’s hand and holds it in her lap. She keeps her eyes on the road ahead, the windshield smeared with soot, taillights crawling through new mist.

  “What’s his name?”

  Steadily, as though trying not to break something, Marta says, “His name is Casimiro.”

  Leo nods, as if to endorse the choice. The gears of the bus grind and stick. Tw
o teenage girls watch the distraught gringa and whisper to each other. As the bus edges up the avenue, Marta winds the film from her camera, flips open the back and hands the roll to Leo. They’ve gone only a dozen blocks when some of the passengers turn to look out the back window, murmurs of confusion and alarm quickly spreading row to row.

  “And yours?” Leo says weakly.

  “I can’t—”

  Leo looks up in anguish. “Please. Tell me your name.”

  Marta closes her eyes. “Angélica.”

  Angélica. She turns the name over in her mind. Angélica. She doesn’t trust herself to speak without crying. “Tell me more.”

  Marta shakes her head. A hush has fallen over the passengers, a restless dark outside the windows where four SUVs have pulled even with the bus, flanking it. “There’s too much.”

  “Tell me,” she says, feeling space open around her, the twilight isolating her in weightless ether. For a moment she’s back on the rooftop of Ricky’s hostel, all of Lima silent and insubstantial, one light blazing in the distance. “Tell me everything.”

  When the bus jolts to a stop, Marta sits up straighter. She scans the other passengers. There’s a moment of silence, almost elegiac, and then voices rushing through the street, surrounding the bus, hands slapping on the walls, the roof. With each blow Marta grows more still, withdrawing to that place Leo has never been able to enter. A shimmer rises in the windows, blue and red, now dark with rushing shadows, now blindingly alive.

  “When I see you again. That’s when I will tell you.”

  Leo watches the side of her face, as fascinated by its lovely severity as she’s always been. Flashlight beams pierce the windows, darting over the rows of passengers, ghostly faces coming in and out of existence. When the doors fly open, soldiers’ boots hammering on the steps, Leo squeezes Marta’s hand once more, then lets it go.

  “By then I’ll already know. Won’t I?”

  Marta’s thrusts her hand deep into the camera bag. She’s trained her sights on the first soldier. She’s already rising.

  “Sí, mi hermana,” she says. “Then you’ll know.”

  5

  One would hardly call it a mirror, this thick sheet of aluminum bolted to the wall, warped and dented over time. No amount of polish could bring light to its depths—the image it offers is dim and elusive, a shade from some Greek tragedy, or one possible future glimpsed in a faulty crystal ball. When she leans over the sink her face looms from the murk pale and ghastly, the scraped forehead and yellowing bruise along her cheekbone, the cracked lips and fever-bright eyes.

  Good, she thinks, adjusting the canvas sling on her arm, squeezing and opening the numb hand. Let them see me like this. Let them see exactly who I am.

  “Señorita,” says the guard outside, knocking once, recalling her to the small, locked washroom with its faded green tile and blazing fluorescence, its sickening smell of bleach covering something sour and bodily. She’d slept little, kept awake by Marta’s sobs from the next cell. ¿Dónde estás? ¿Mi vida, dónde estás? she cried for hours, gasps of pain escalating to wails. But no one came.

  “Aquí, aquí,” Leo answered. She knelt on the cold floor and pressed her face to the bottom of the door. “I’m here.”

  Near dawn there was a sudden commotion, voices in the corridor, the squeak of a wheeled gurney. Leo hunched by the door, too exhausted to cry out. An hour later they brought her breakfast—a bowl of cold oatmeal and a juice box. She gagged and spat, dizzy with hunger, but wouldn’t eat. The heat in her bladder had spread through her abdomen, her joints swollen and creaking. She grit her teeth, eased herself into her stiff clothes. When she caught herself combing her hair with her fingers, she laughed aloud—her friends are dead and dying, but like a good girl from Cannondale she still tries to look her best.

  “Señorita,” says the guard. He unlocks the door to find her leaning over the basin, a worm of pinkish spit dangling from her lip. “¿Terminaste?” he says, hesitant as all the others who’ve been told to treat this tiny, wrecked person like a live grenade.

  “I couldn’t go. It hurt too much.” When she swallows, pain bristles along her scalp. The guard eyes her, uncomprehending. “Never mind,” she says. “Vámonos.”

  The hallway hums with ambient noise, a subliminal grumbling rhythmic and ambiguous as speech. When they’d brought her here, stunned and hyperventilating—was it two nights ago or three?—there was a sack over her head, one small hole for air. She could still hear the gunshots and the rotors, still smell the fuel. They’d taken the sack off only for a moment, to give her a glimpse from the back of the car: the smashed-in gate, snipers on ladders, everything floodlit like a Hollywood production.

  “Is this your house?” the men in the car shouted. She shook her head, blind with shock. She could not clear the image from her mind—Marta on the sidewalk, twisting in agony, terrified faces looking out from the windows of the bus. It couldn’t have happened. A nightmare, she was desperate to wake up. It couldn’t have happened.

  “Is it your house?” the men demanded. There were flames in a second-floor window, flashes from the rooftop. A radiant vision, isolated and unreal. All she could manage was I don’t know.

  As they sped across the city the car radio crackled and spat: Se acabó. It’s over. She thought she would vomit, or suffocate. They shoved her through long corridors, righting her when she stumbled, yanked the hood off in time for her to see the cot flying up at her. No one spoke to her until the morning, and that was the lieutenant.

  The lieutenant. It still sounds ridiculous, as if he’d chosen this new role as a joke but now refused to go back to the old one.

  The guard knocks on the lieutenant’s door, cracks it open, closes it. “Espérate,” he tells Leo, pointing to a chair. She ignores him. If she sits the hall will start to spin, the sickly lights and gummy, whitewashed walls press her toward unconsciousness. There’s a tremor in her knees, soreness in her jaw. Her head swims with all she’s been told: Julian, Álvaro and Josea, Casi, her own parents. Can it all be true? In this building, with its garbled echoes, the question seems beside the point. ¿Dónde estás? The anguish in Marta’s voice, her despair—these were real. The rest of it has become unstable, vague as her reflection in the metal mirror: Marta stepping off the bus, the soldiers drawing back, spatters of soundless white light against the dusk. The body on the sidewalk, one hand flexing slowly. They’d dragged Leo away before she could get to her friend, thrust her into the car before she could tell Marta she was there, she would not leave her. Two men sat on Leo’s back, a hard metal muzzle pressed to her neck as they hurtled and squealed toward Pueblo Libre.

  Had she seen these things, or are they mere phantasms, products of a fevered mind? Even this “presentation”—who’s to say there will be real journalists, that their articles will ever be read? Who’s to say her conversations with the lieutenant aren’t themselves scenes in some larger drama whose arc she can’t make out?

  From somewhere above comes a series of distant thumps, the muted rattle of something dragging—as though she were underwater, as though this cold hall were at the bottom of the ocean. She saw a movie once in which the hero found himself in an immaculate hotel room but there was nothing outside, nothing. The same inscrutable hum at the edges of existence. She wonders if the sound is inside her head.

  Then she’s back in the office, in the uncomfortable swivel chair. The lieutenant—the man she’d once called Comrade Miguel—watches her with troubled eyes. She already knows what he’s going to say.

  “Are you feeling better?” he asks vaguely, putting off unpleasantness. She has a memory of seeing him hang up the telephone, though whether this took place days or seconds ago she couldn’t say.

  “I don’t believe you,” she mumbles, lowering her head to the desk.

  “Leonora—”

  “You’re full of shit. I don’t believe any of it.
”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “You can have your little presentation. I don’t care. Why don’t you do it for me?” She gives a dull laugh, anything to stop him from saying it. “Tell them whatever you want. None of it matters.”

  “Angélica Ramos has died.”

  Cheek resting on her forearm, Leo considers the statement, parses its odd verb tense. Why not is dead? Why not just died?

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Your friend the artist,” she says, her breath wet on the crook of her elbow, “Mira—that was bullshit, too, wasn’t it? A cautionary tale.” With profound effort, she hauls her head off the desk. “Now Marta. Okay, cumpa,” she says, reaching for his cigarettes, her fingers too clumsy to spark the lighter. “Message received.”

  Lieutenant Lang gently takes the lighter and lights her cigarette. He shakes his own from the pack and taps the filter on the desk without lighting it.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Please, believe me.”

  Leo sucks on the cigarette, hard enough to shock herself awake. This is no place for you. The first words he’d said to her, a hundred years ago, in the Plaza de Armas. Stupid gringa. Trying to tell her something, even then.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. Isn’t that what you said?” She ignores his look of pity, pushes herself out of the chair. If this really is an act, if they’re watching everything she does, why not make it a star turn? “I didn’t believe in you, either. You’re not very convincing, you know that? I never believed you. Get a better disguise.”

  As if for the first time, she looks around the office: the heavy black file cabinet, the map of Lima divided into color-coded zones, a framed photo of Miguel shaking hands with the President, another at the base of the Statue of Liberty, his arm around an attractive black woman. A suit jacket hangs from a hook on the back of the door. For some reason this offends her more than anything he’s said: that he wears a suit to work, that this murdering toad plays the part of a man who wears a suit.