The Gringa

  “Show me,” she says. “Show me her body.”

  “Amiga,” he presses an eyebrow with two fingers. “Of course that’s not possible.”

  Another spasm in her belly doubles her over. “If she’s really dead,” she says, grimacing, “show me. If any of this is true. Otherwise, you can go fuck yourself, amigo. You can tell your stories to someone else.”

  The lieutenant shakes his head, taps his cigarette again but still doesn’t light it. He nods at the sling and asks, “How is your arm?”

  “It’s broken.”

  “You treat me like your enemy, Leonora, but actually I’ve been trying to help you. I wish you could understand.” He slides his cigarette back into the pack. “We have only a few minutes. Remember what I told you. There are going to be a lot of people, cameras. A lot of questions. You need to speak quickly. This is your only opportunity—”

  “If you want to help me, show me her body,” she says, lifting her chin defiantly.

  “It’s important you say the right things. It’s important that you remove yourself from this situation. It’s going to get worse. You don’t want a trial, you don’t want to be in El Arca, or one of these places. So tell them: it was a misunderstanding. You’re very sorry. You just want to go home.”

  With great effort, she brings a smile to her lips. “This is my home.”

  Deflated, he lets a hand fall to the desk. Someone knocks on the door and he barks Not now!, then stands and swipes a brown folder from the pile. Coming around the desk, he drops it in her lap. She’s careful not to let her smile fade. The garish color and glossy overexposure of the photograph momentarily confuses her. She closes her eyes, opens them, waits for the shapes to cohere.

  “You don’t belong here, Leonora. Let’s agree on this. This is not your story. Now it’s time to write yourself out of it. You weren’t really part of it, except as a kind of historical accident, a remainder. And now it’s ending,” he says. His tone is not unkind. “The book is closing. Do you want to be inside or outside?”

  She can feel him standing over her but she’s transfixed by the photograph: the body sprawled improbably, topless, face crusted with blood; the floor littered with discarded bandages, a wadded-up T-shirt, everything squalid in the camera flash, shiny as a wax museum. The woman’s hands pressed to her belly can’t cover the black, wet wound. Whoever holds the camera is present only as a faint smudge, the tip of a finger at the edge of the image. Otherwise, the woman is alone.

  “She was a mother,” Leo whispers. A shoeprint, its tread obscenely vivid, is stamped in the filth by Marta’s head. Leo hears her voice catch, feels another sharp squirm in her bladder. She had believed him—that’s the worst part. She’d been so eager to please him, to impress a higher-up. In that way she’d betrayed them all.

  “She was a mother, you shit. Hijo de puta. And you killed her.”

  “No, you did,” he says. Leo looks up sharply, expecting cruelty but seeing only regret. “You were supposed to be alone on that bus.”

  It’s too much. She lets the photo fall to her lap. Come with me. Please? It’s too much, one too many stories. A sob leaks from her throat before she can strangle it. It makes her furious, this weakness, as if she’s betrayed them all over again. To hide her tears she lunges up at Miguel, brandishing the lit cigarette, feeling as she rises the stab and squeeze in her bladder, a warm spurt into her underpants. He catches her wrist and they rock against the file cabinet, which totters and spills a stack of folders, a dozen more bright, gruesome photos scattering across the floor. With a muttered curse, he plucks the cigarette from her fingers. Squeezing her broken arm until she cries out and relents, he maneuvers her awkwardly back into the chair.

  “Do you believe me now?” he says. “Your being here has changed things, and not only for yourself. It is a kind of corruption. Do you understand?”

  She hides her face, sickened by the sound of her sobs. He slides the photo back into its folder, stoops to gather the scattered files, then stands over her and stares disgusted at the dark stain growing in the crotch of her jeans.

  “Get up now,” he says. “It’s time.”

  Her arm throbs, her thighs prickle with hot urine. Her body stinks of infection—pungent, like rotting citrus. The wet denim sucks at her skin.

  “If I have to carry you in there crying like an infant it will be worse.”

  “You’re the murderer,” she says. “You are. Not me. When this is over, you’ll be remembered for what you did. Your name will be written on the wrong page of history.”

  He nods at the cliché, reaches for his jacket. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. That’s what you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter how many mothers you kill.” She pushes herself out of the chair, grasping for words to distract him. “It’s not a story, it’s a war. A revolution. And we’re going to win. We’ve already won. All we had to do is start.”

  He waves off this speech and reaches for the door. “Who knows?”

  “Compañero,” she says, stepping meekly toward him, “you know.”

  Something in her voice, some sweetness or surrender, disarms him. He leans forward as if to let her kiss his cheek, recognizing her triumphant smile an instant too late. By then she’s sliding her hand out of her pants and pressing it to his face, smearing her wet palm across his cheek, his nose, over his lips, before he can shove her back. She laughs as she stumbles against the desk, as the ashtray falls to the floor with a ring of heavy glass—her broken arm banded by fire, her head knocking against the chair when she sits in the ashes—laughs as the door opens and the guard scans the room in alarm. She’s still laughing as he helps her to her feet and fumbles with the hood, laughing at Comrade Miguel, his cheap suit and iron back preceding them out the door.

  It takes several minutes to get to the presentation room. The guard leads her down hallways that double back on themselves, up stairways and through open spaces where sound expands, down once more, the sharp ring of the lieutenant’s shoes always just ahead—disorienting her, as they’ve done each time they brought her to the office. Who do you think you’ve got here? she wants to ask. Who do you think I am?

  When the hood comes off she’s standing at an unmarked door, in another featureless hallway. Fluorescent light makes the air feel cold, almost lunar; from everywhere comes the sourceless muttering, the drone and whirr of machinery. As she blinks in the glare she starts to hear sounds on the other side of the door: chairs scraping, a phone ringing, voices calling out greetings, a density of human sound unfamiliar after days in the cell. She shivers, tries to rub life back into her broken arm. There are a lot of people inside, more than she expected. For the first time since they brought her here, she feels afraid.

  “Remember what I told you.” The lieutenant stands behind her, staring over her shoulder in square-jawed formality. Next to him, a skinny young soldier watches her, his eyes rimmed with hatred. “You’ll have one or two minutes. Don’t waste time.”

  Behind him a row of tall windows looks out on a city street, the trunks of palm trees and a sliver of a grassy median. An old man offers newspapers to passing cars. The morning is gray and clean and fills her with longing. There was someone else there, on Calle Almagro that night. For three days she’s hoarded the memory, held it next to her body like precious contraband. As the car pulled away from the burning house, before the hood came over her eyes—in that instant she’d seen him: a flash, then darkness. For days she’s tried to remember, to make the fleeting image clear. But it was barely a glimpse—of frightened eyes, dark hair, hidden among the handful of terrified neighbors. She can’t be sure her brain hasn’t filled in the other details—a certain twist to his mouth, a crutch under one arm—to reassure her, to write the ending she wants to believe, the one in which he came back for her.

  “It’s not over,” she tells Lieutenant Lang. “You think
it’s over, but it’s not.”

  His gaze doesn’t leave the door. “I’m sorry. It’s over.”

  “There will always be someone else. History always has remainders.” She stares at the soldier—no older than eighteen, with dark, mottled skin and a widow’s peak—until he turns away in fury. “Anyone can be a Philosopher.”

  The guard reaches for the door, but the lieutenant, frowning, stops him.

  “Why do Americans always talk about history?” he says. “Something you know nothing about. Something you’ve never understood. It’s an abstraction to you, something that happened before the last commercial break. So you come here, or to Chile, or Nicaragua, to perform another thirty-minute episode. If it goes badly, or you get tired of it, you change the channel. You turn it off.

  “You think the people aren’t real people, that they disappear when you stop watching,” he says. He gives a thin smile. “I wonder, what will happen to your country when you find out that you, also, are characters in a story? And you don’t even know who’s telling it.”

  He nods to the guard, who punches a code into the keypad. “Goodbye, Leonora. I’m sorry your stay in Peru wasn’t more enjoyable. But then, I really don’t know what you came here to accomplish.”

  There’s a beep and a click, the guard yanks open the door and a storm of sound rushes out at them.

  “At least I came,” she says.

  The lieutenant pats her on the shoulder. “Is that all?”

  Then he turns her toward the frenzy of flashing lights, the blast of voices, a hundred pairs of eyes that stare hungrily, bodies surging forward to see what will emerge.

  “Say whatever you want to say, compañera,” he tells her. “But here’s my advice to you: Say it loud.”

  V

  DARKNESS AT NOON

  They were two years apart, and somewhere in the dim, disintegrate reaches of memory she sees her parents bringing Matthew home from the hospital, sitting close together on the sofa while she clambered for a glimpse of what was in the bundle.

  “Now we’ve got two of them,” she hears her father saying, his hand warm and comforting on Leo’s head. “Look, Maxi. They’re exactly the same.”

  Her mother, face drawn and drowsy, looked up and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t look anything alike.”

  * * *

  —

  They were never close. To Leonora’s quiet compliance, her love of books, of reading at the kitchen table while her mother cooked, following the words with a fingertip, Matthew brought a storm of sound and movement, endless clamor and, soon, questions, the inborn assertiveness and arrogations of the baby. She can’t remember a time when he wasn’t a nuisance, or when she wasn’t rankled by the pleasure her father took in his confident physicality, his shrugging, uncomplicated speech. Because they’re both boys—she understood this almost immediately. As a child she resented it, not because her brother had taken something that belonged to her but because he knew it had always belonged to him. Later, she remembers pitying her parents, otherwise intelligent people who’d somehow been gulled. They knew better than to prefer this brute with the baseball glove and comb-damp hair, this hale fellow from whom they’d recoil if they met on the street. It was unfair of her, and she knew it—Matthew was their son, it was only natural they love him—but she couldn’t help but think less of them for it.

  The week before his garish wedding, Matt jokingly introduced Leo to her soon-to-be sister-in-law as “my former babysitter.” Samira looked apologetic. She was lovely, tall and dignified, the daughter of an Argentine financier who’d fled the junta. They’d met in business school. As the best man—also a stranger to Leo—told it in his toast, Matthew stood out on Division Street and stopped traffic until Samira agreed to go out with him. Apparently, she was engaged to someone else at the time.

  “I admire this guy so much,” the best man said. He was another clean-shaven athlete, a ruling-class trainee. “I kind of want to be him. He won’t take no for an answer.” The bride and groom had arrived at the reception in a horse-drawn carriage driven by a black man in top hat and tails. Leo asked her mother if they’d specifically requested a black man. Maxine didn’t speak to her for the rest of the night.

  * * *

  —

  But he was her brother, and for a time—before adolescence and cliques and girlfriends and SATs, before Stanford and Rutgers, half a decade in which they saw each other once a year and spoke by phone on birthdays, if at all—they’d been friends, building forts in the basement, conspiring to hide David’s ties. Once, when their parents went to Europe for a month, they stayed at Grandpa Carol’s; four-year-old Matt, afraid of the big, echoey house, begged her to sleep in his room and she complied. Once, when a fifth-grader called her a forgotten name, Matt bloodied his nose. She could pick him out of a crowd with an ease that surprised her—his face, his gait, imprinted on the circuits of her brain. When he did call, she knew who it was before he spoke. The one time he visited her at Stanford, he wound up in bed with one of her suitemates; when they emerged from her room, grinning, at noon, Leo hated the girl irrevocably—this desire to protect Matt, to tend to imagined injuries, confused her. How can you love someone you wouldn’t choose? How can distaste coexist with the certainty he’ll belong to you forever?

  Years ago, she’d found a photograph of David as a young man and for the first time was struck by how Matt had come to resemble him. This was shortly before the wedding, the move to Peru already planned but still secret, and the photo seemed deeply meaningful, a validation of her decision to take responsibility, to give the world as much of herself as she could manage. They were adults now, destined to become their parents in one way or another. A day would come when they would have to ask what their lives had meant. She wanted to have a better answer.

  * * *

  —

  It’s this photograph, a black-and-white portrait taken while David was in law school, that comes into her mind on the September morning when she gets the news. Sleepless, shivering, she sits on the edge of a straight-backed chair and squints at the comandante of El Arca—a former Army colonel who treated his assignment as a kind of grim sociological experiment—as he forces his face into an expression of concern.

  “What do you want from me?” she says, shaking her head to clear it. After three years of frozen mornings, the cobwebs hang moist and sticky until midday.

  “This is a terrible thing,” he says. He comes to stand by her chair but is reluctant to touch her. She’ll be forgiven her kitchen shift for the day, of course. If the phones are working, he’ll permit a brief call. Her father’s face persists—the posed smile, the confident eyes—however many times the comandante says her brother’s name.

  “I don’t understand,” she repeats. She inspects her forearms, scratches at scaly gray scabs of psoriasis. Her eyes are getting worse, damaged by the cold, by the knife-dazzle of the Andean sun. “Was he on one of the planes? What are you saying? Why would he do something like that?”

  The comandante chews back impatience. “Cantor Fitzgerald. This is the name of his company?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where he works. What does that have to do with anything?”

  The comandante sits on the edge of the desk. When he offers a cigarette she tears off the filter before lighting it.

  “It is my understanding,” he says, “that they were on the highest floor.”

  * * *

  —

  As a child, Matthew was obsessed with Star Trek. He wanted to be James T. Kirk, and often affected the clipped speech and brash swagger of the starship captain. He was fascinated by the transporter room—when they drove somewhere he closed his eyes and cried, “Energize!” and didn’t open them until they arrived. He pretended they’d all been teleported there, their molecules scrambled and beamed to the destination. He’d look around at their new surroundings, then nod c
urtly to their father: “Let’s go.”

  He insisted Leo play the game with him, pestered her insufferably if she refused. “How do you even know you made it?” she’d ask, relishing his irritation.

  “Look, Stupid: We’re here.”

  “I’m here. But how do you know you are? How do you know you’re the same person who left the house?”

  “Up yours, Leo,” he said, for years his favorite expression. But the question seemed valid to her: If they took all your atoms apart, broke your joints and synapses and scattered and then reassembled them, could it be said you were still you? You might look the same, act the same, for all outward purposes you would be identical to the person who’d disappeared in a fizzle of light. But what if it was only a trick? What if the original you, dissolved into energy, was gone?

  Arriving at National Penal Establishment No. 15–18, Yuyantambo District, had felt like that: as if everything that made up Leonora had disintegrated and been reconstituted. She’d closed her eyes in a bare courtroom where hooded judges made incomprehensible sounds, and when she opened them she was someone else: her body the same, her thoughts the same, but in some essential way she was different, wiped clean, an alien to herself. Riding in the jouncy pickup truck, wrists bound and chained to a ring on the floor, she recalled the arid, blatantly fake landscapes in which Kirk and Spock materialized: Styrofoam rocks, hulking humanoids snarling from caves. The prison, too, looked fake—her first glimpse of it, far across the altiplano, brought to mind a lonely farmstead, too perfectly staged to convey isolation and otherworldliness. The truck seemed to approach for hours—what she’d taken for a silo resolved into four brick guardtowers, the farmhouse into a sprawled compound of three-story buildings encircled by a minefield.