The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  “Is that why they call it the Ark?” she asked the soldier next to her. After the first hour, she’d stopped looking at the gun in his lap. Her head rang from lack of oxygen, swam with the smell of gasoline. “Because it’s stranded on top of a mountain?”

  The soldier looked straight ahead as they approached the first guardpost. “Because it’s full of animals.”

  * * *

  —

  She’d never seen blue before—not like the blue of the altiplano. A uniform, otherworldly blue, different in the morning than in the afternoon, the change undetectable from minute to minute until the flat milk-hue has everywhere darkened to violet. At midday the blue is a rich and unblemished liquid, like paint, so thick she can almost taste it. She spends hours dreaming up names: cornflower, royale, ciruela, heartsickness, night. When it’s all over, she thinks, when the last light leaves her eyes, it will be like sinking into this eternal blue, soaking through with it until you dissolve forever.

  Nirvana, Picasso, espacio, azul. In ten years she’ll never settle on the right name for it, nor feel she’s captured its truth.

  It’s the dark blue of emptiness, the color of aching cold. Each morning her first year she’s allowed into a small yard attached to El Arca’s north pavilion, the visits timed to avoid contact with other prisoners. When the door clangs shut, she’s alone in a ten-meter-by-ten-meter space, one corner dug up and dusty from someone’s attempt at a potato patch, the only sounds the moan of wind sluicing off nearby glaciers and the footsteps of the guard up on the walk, his coughs strangely close in the thin air. Shivering, lost in a coarse wool overcoat many sizes too large, she finds the spot where a trapezoid of sunlight sneaks between the towers and tilts her face to study the pure, heavy blue. It’s irrefutable, beyond understanding—it simply is, and this quality of detached consistency, of being only and entirely itself, terrifies her. Transfixed, she stands at the lip of an abyss—until the door bangs open and guards wordlessly take her back to the cell.

  How to describe this first year in El Arca? The malign cold, how it invaded her bones like a cancer, icicles stabbing the meat of her joints, a band of iron fire around her left arm where the break never healed right? How to convey the marrow-shiver and the thinning hair, the split skin of her fingertips that stung as if filled with crushed glass?

  Start with the cold, the dull, endless cold, the morning skin of ice in her water cup. Add stone-echoes, faceless and indecipherable, the thick-dirt taste of potato-and-flour soup, hard rolls that smell like bleach. Add the bare bulb hanging in its cage, the shock of the metal toilet seat, the ubiquitous reek of lemon disinfectant. Add the burn of recurrent pleurisy, the constant jaw-ache from grinding her teeth, giardia cramps that leave her writhing and feverish, soiling the sheets in her sleep. The dry rashes that climb her neck and cheeks, a hot tingling that cracks and suppurates and finally infects. Add the useless pain of shrinking breasts; the unexpected, throat-tearing shrieks that tail into laughter; the knocking of a shoe on the bedpost—sometimes for hours, to the rhythm of every song she’s ever known. The failed attempts to literally climb the walls.

  Add the certainty that she’s going crazy, that whatever substance—she imagines it as a clear, viscous glue—holds consciousness together is draining off week by unmarked week. The swift invalidation of any sense her life had meaning. The waning of memory—had any of it happened?—the past crowded out by brown walls, scuffed linoleum, the blank faces of nameless guards who mostly speak in gestures. The daily searches, made to squat naked while they scour her cell for contraband, to hold her arms over her head and frog jump across the floor. Weeks without hearing a human word. Faces she finds staring in the wall. The babbling, senseless stories she tells herself for hours until a guard cracks a stick against the door.

  Add the unbearable truth that no one is watching. No one. She’s been forgotten by the world, if she ever existed at all.

  Her back aches constantly, her spine frozen into the bent position in which she sleeps; she spends hours each day in an approximation of yoga, trying to remember the way Marta moved, how her torso arched, her eyes focused on one distant point. Clad in the overcoat and baggy cotton pants, her improvised stretches generate barely enough heat for her to stand up straight before spasms kick her in the lower back. Sometimes, holding an unsteady Warrior Pose, she can just make out Marta’s face, the bowed lips, the arch of her eyebrows, but the image is fading—as if Leo were on that transporter pad, becoming insubstantial, the real world shimmering away.

  Energize.

  At night she hears distant music—Senderistas marching in the next pavilion, chanting their loyalty to Abimael and the revolution, though Abimael is in another prison and the revolution has been dead for years. She knows why they keep singing: to stitch the past together, to keep a sense of themselves intact. But she has no songs and no one to sing with, nothing to keep her memories from dispersing like dandelion spores. How long had she lived in that house? What had she thought to accomplish? After a few months her presence in that narrative has grown hazy, the events of the previous year confined to images, words on paper, the electronic belch of the judges’ verdict, rendered through a voice-distortion machine. Hard to recall what she knew and what she didn’t, whom she’d met, what role she’d played. Maybe she really was the “main architect of the terrorist conspiracy,” or maybe the “unfortunate pawn of criminals who took advantage of her idealism and romantic disposition.” With each passing week it gets harder to choose; both stories are preposterous, equally incoherent, by the time winter brings its brittle stillness to the altiplano, she’s no longer certain she was ever there.

  How do you know you’re the same person?

  Because there was no Cuarta Filosofía—not then, not ever. That’s what she’s decided. The whole idea of it was chimerical, a projection of an archetype that was itself just a well-told tale. There was no Julian, no Chaski—for sure, there were people who went by those names, but they had no more reality than characters in a novel, and like characters they began to evaporate the minute you closed the book. There were no cumpas, no newspaper, no guns—maybe there was not even a house. Maybe it was all just fantasy, an abstraction. Such thinking is not uncommon. In the books I read—recollections of political prisoners, exiles, heretics—the physical agonies are backdrop to the real terror of having one’s existence negated: You accomplished nothing. No one remembers you. You never lived. Or rather, in such places—the Auschwitzes and Robben Islands, the gulags and black sites, the shitholes beyond description—those agonies are mere precursor, catalyst for the true submission: to let go of one’s personhood as a child lets go of a kite, to disown one’s story, to disappear.

  Disappeared. The word’s cruelty makes her shudder. A transitive verb, a deliberate erasure. Casimiro, Ernesto, a burning man without a name. Had any of them existed? She watches the thick blue give way to Andean night, the outlines of mountains and buildings swamped by darkness. In such moments she’s briefly recalled to the truth of her old self, like a swimmer surfacing after a long dive. I’m here, she thinks, I’m still here. A tiny victory. But soon the stars come out, countless billions, excruciatingly clear. Their loneliness is too large to contain in her body. She turns from the window, steadies herself with familiar objects. She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and starts to remember.

  * * *

  —

  “Just another month or so. Maybe three months at the outside. I know it’s a long time, baby, but you have to be strong,” Maxine says. “A year. God, I can’t believe it’s been a year. Something’s going to change. I know it. So many people are working on this. Stanley’s taking meetings every day. Lautenberg’s Chief of Staff is on board. Your uncle Warren’s talking to people. Right, David? No one’s going to forget about you, baby, not as long—”

  She stops, her face frozen in open-mouthed surprise. They’d arrived late for this first visit, the bus from Puno hav
ing broken down twice. Visiting hours end in twenty minutes and the comandante refuses to make an exception.

  “Baby,” Maxine says. “Oh, Leo…”

  “It’s alright, Mom.” They are separated by a wide table, a partition that rises to chin level, another that reaches to the floor. The walls, painted the color of old toothpaste, smell of ammonia and cheese. Her father stands a few feet back, next to a skinny guard with a prominent red birthmark on his forehead. “I’m fine. I’m okay.”

  It’s been a year since she’s spoken English, a year since she’s answered anything but commands. Her cheeks are burning. It’s too warm in the visitors room. She can hardly muster the words to reassure them, has to contain nervous giggles at her mother’s expressions of horror and wretchedness.

  “You just look pale. David, isn’t she pale?” David’s face, his closely held fear, doesn’t change. He’s disheveled from the long bus ride, his eyes bloodshot from lack of oxygen. He watches Leo secretly, looks away when she meets his gaze. “Do you eat? Is the food…We brought you lots of things,” Maxine says, gesturing at the floor. But the packages were taken at the main post. “Fruit, and warm sweaters. Chocolate. Oh, God,” she says, pressing fingertips to her temples, “David, I can’t stand this.”

  Leo, helpless: “It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay.” A dull scratching sound, she looks down to find something squeezing into the gap between partition and floor: her mother’s big toe, painted in chipped, coral pink. When Leo touches the tip of her own toe to her mother’s, Maxine’s eyes glaze over in an access of misery.

  “Señora,” the guard says, taking half a step forward. The toe is withdrawn.

  The time lurches and vanishes, like water glugging out of a jug. Her mother talks about her conversations with Governor Whitman, with staffers on the House Foreign Relations Committee, with the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. The call she got from Jesse Jackson, whose compassion was an inspiration, who has promised to visit Lima before the end of the year.

  “Rabbi Eisen has been so reassuring. He says he’ll come next month. Did you know he has a son in Berkeley? Such a small world.” In the escalating pitch of her mother’s chatter, Leo can sense Maxine tightening her grip, honing herself for the long battle: something evil has taken her child, she’s under no illusions about it, something too foul and eternal to be named. To get Leo back will be her life’s most grueling, perilous effort. She may, herself, have to die.

  “Get this, Leo,” David says, wrenching himself out of stupor. “I get a call in my office—an agent from ICM. They want to talk about film rights to your story!” His laughter is so forced she digs a fingernail into her forearm. It breaks her heart to see him so helpless, devastated at having learned the truth his whole life was arranged to conceal: that no one is immune to misfortune. “Who do you think should play me? I was thinking maybe James Woods. Or Alan Alda. Maybe Sandy Duncan for your mom. Remember her? Peter Pan?”

  Soon enough, the guard says the hour is over. “We’ll be here every month,” Maxine says. She fixes her eyes on Leo as if to keep her from disappearing. “Sometimes both of us, sometimes just one of us. For as long as it takes. I swear, Leo,” she says, and the grimace of terror flashes again, “we will be here, no matter what.”

  “Señora,” the guard says, stepping forward, “por favor—” but before he can touch her Maxine leaps up at him, forcing him back toward the door. “This is my daughter!” she cries. “Mi hija. Don’t tell me about time, you little fried-egg fuck!”

  For months they’ll laugh about it. “Fried-egg fuck!” David says when their spirits are down, when “another month” has turned into a year, when Reverend Jackson’s visit has come and gone and Senator Lautenberg stops returning their calls. It’s good for a laugh, for desperate moments when it strikes all of them how fleeting an hour is, how vanishingly small. Over time they’ll grow comfortable with the guards. They’ll come each month with bags full of candy, DVDs of American movies, cheap fleece jackets, lipstick and tampons for the guards’ wives. Maxine brings cartons of vitamins for the many prisoners whose children live with them. This largesse will win them not a single extra minute of visitation, but eventually the guards will allow them privacy, standing outside the room with their backs to the window. When her parents return in November, 2001, after a three-month absence, they’ll be ushered into a room with no partitions, permitted this one time to embrace their surviving child—a moment so terrifying that Leo is relieved, the next month, when regular protocols are restored.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you Andres?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Am I talking to the famous Andres?” The voice was rough, sardonic, like a poke in the chest. He sounded a little drunk. In hindsight, I may have suspected who it was. I may even have been expecting the call.

  “What is this about?” I said. I turned to the car window so Carlito couldn’t hear. Above the long terminal, airplanes descended through the thick fog one after another—lights first, like knives slashing through potato soup.

  “Are you enjoying your vacation?” the voice said. “Hanging around with the rest of the fucking gringos over there? You find some rich cunt in Lima to sit on your face?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you—”

  “You should stay there, with the other faggots, Andres,” he said. “It’s safer.”

  Carlito was watching me, and I stepped out into the parking lot, pausing while a plane roared in takeoff and wobbled up into the gray. When the noise faded, I could hear another voice: Give me the phone, Lucrecia was saying. Give me the phone, you asshole.

  “Nobody here wants you, you understand? You and your friends, with your gringo money—you faggots—” He was stumbling now, having made his point without exhausting his contempt. “If you come back to Babilonia—you’ll see—” He sputtered a few more insults and then the line went dead.

  “Trouble?” Carlito said. I smoothed mist from my hair and watched the sliding doors, the mob of taxi drivers accosting passengers as they came out.

  “Just some friends screwing around.”

  He smiled to himself and pushed in the car lighter. “I wouldn’t worry. This is just the way of life for some people. You aren’t the first to have trouble with a girl from Babilonia. It’s like a sport with them. Americans are the biggest prize—so much money but so naïve, so easy to convince they are loved without other motives.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” I said. “You don’t know anything about her.”

  “Ah yes. I forgot that I am speaking with a historian, the great analyst of the Peruvian people. Perdóname, Andres.”

  I was already riled by Ronaldo’s call, with its reminder of my long absence, my abdication. I’d talked to Lucrecia only twice since inviting her to Lima, and though I repeated the offer I was secretly relieved she hadn’t accepted. Maybe the problem would resolve itself, I found myself thinking. If Ronaldo was back in the picture, maybe it was best for everyone that I quietly slipped away.

  I knew such thoughts marked me as a monster. But the alternative was impossible to imagine. When I tried to picture it—Lucrecia and me huddled over a cradle in my unheated room—it seemed more like a sitcom than a potential future. Carlito was right: I didn’t know Lucrecia, not really. In the short time we’d been together I hadn’t learned the first thing about her. I knew far more about Leonora Gelb—someone I’d never met and couldn’t understand at all.

  “Andres, permit me, but you don’t seem happy,” Carlito said, peering into the bright mist, each light with its halo. His concern sounded almost genuine. “You are a burdened man. Why? Because of this girl?”

  I tried to laugh it off. He was the last person I would confide in, the one who’d understood me from the first.

  “It’s nothing,” he went on. “It’s life. Isn’t that why you came to Peru? Why don
’t you go back to Babilonia?” he said. He waved off my protest. “I’m not insulting you. Listen. You were happy there, no? You have people who miss you. Why stay here?”

  I tried to meet his eyes but finally looked away. “I can’t,” I said.

  “Why? Because of this idiot on the phone?”

  “Because of my story,” I said. “I can’t leave until it’s finished.”

  He leaned back and took a deep drag. Smoke poured up from his mouth and into his nose. “Forget about Leonora Gelb, Andres. Forget the Philosophers. Why does this matter to you? No one wants to read stories about terrorists, believe me.”

  Of course I’d had the same idea many times: walk away, let someone else write it. It had become a favorite fantasy, a sweet liquor for sleepless nights. “Everyone’s story is worth reading,” I said. It sounded weak, even to me, the kind of cliché I’d been forcing upon students for years. “They weren’t just terrorists. They were something else, too.”

  A fresh crowd of arrivals had begun to pour out of the terminal; cars jockeyed and nosed into the curb. Carlito watched me with something like pity.

  “Go back to your people, Andres. Go and be the King of Salsa.”

  “That’s not who I am anymore,” I said.

  “Do you really believe this?”

  He honked the horn, and I squinted into the mass of travelers, faces stunned and hopeful as newborns. Stephanie was making her way across the parking lot, hair pulled back, face pale in the orange mist. A violent embarrassment stung my eyes. I squeezed into the shadows, hoping she wouldn’t recognize me. What was I still doing there?

  * * *

  —

  Inti Raymi had come and gone. Independence Day was just around the corner. Winter had settled on Lima, perceptible mostly as a change in the light—the days still clammy, nights swaddled in mauve, everything flattened by the season, made two-dimensional and transient. True to his word, Jack had wired me a thousand-dollar kill fee, and sent a conciliatory email: Let’s find something else for you to write, k düd? How close are you to Costa Rica? When I checked My.World a few days later, he’d posted Leo’s photo, one paragraph about her arrest and parole, and a quote from Gabriel Zamir. He’d made it the homepage story. He called it “The Gringa.”