The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  My story had swelled to nearly two hundred pages, chapters bursting with history, with supposition, with reconstructed or wholly imagined scenes. But for all my feverish work, my long nights of manic typing, I wasn’t satisfied. The Leonora emerging on the page bore only a passing resemblance to the original. She was still just a character, a golem pieced together from dirt and scraps. Like a golem she lacked the beating heart, the human desire. I slept with her each night, showered and ate and rode the bus with her, but she was still a stranger.

  “Andres, you take her too seriously,” Damien said, waving away the smoke from Carlito’s cigarette. He was tired of me. They all were. Like an eccentric uncle who’d come for the holidays and never left, they humored me, maneuvered around me, occasionally taking the time to correct my outrageous ignorance. “All of them. You overestimate them.” There was never a question of the plan being carried out, he said—DINCOTE was watching the house the whole time, had in fact supplied the weapons and uniforms recovered in the raid. “Augustín Dueñas could not have brought this off. The man could not organize a pizza party.”

  “Just because he was stupid doesn’t mean he wasn’t a psychopath,” Carlito said.

  “Desperation and psychosis are not the same thing,” Stephanie said.

  Carlito raised an eyebrow. “They are not mutually exclusive.”

  “And it wasn’t just them,” I said. “They were part of something bigger: safe houses, training camps, arms shipments. The Philosophers were everywhere. They were ready to restart the war.”

  There was a long silence. No one would look at me. Finally, Damien spoke.

  “Of all people, Andres, you believe this?” His smile was kind and devastating. “Haven’t you been through this? The ‘Axis of Evil’? Yellowcake uranium, shoe bombs?” He nodded at the TV, where Condoleezza Rice soundlessly lectured a panel of white men. “It is always the same. To mobilize the population, you need a pattern. You connect the dots. The media is always ready to help. But the dots don’t actually have to connect. They don’t even have to exist.”

  I slumped into the couch. After all these months, I was still nowhere. With no protagonist, I had no story, however tall the stack of pages on the desk.

  “You’re asking the right questions,” Stephanie said, sensing my despair. We’d barely spoken since she’d returned from Canada. She’d said nothing about her brother’s funeral and I was too craven to ask, offering instead sympathetic expressions and unsolicited helpfulness: I made the bed each day, did her laundry with mine, arranged her papers in neat piles. “But only La Leo knows the answers. When will you talk to her?”

  I froze, the bottle halfway to my lips. Carlito, amused, turned to watch. My mouth half-open, I forced myself to meet Stephanie’s astonished gaze.

  “You aren’t going to interview her,” she said.

  “Why would she talk to me?”

  “Have you even tried? For god’s sake, Andres, what are you thinking?” But the truth was it had never occurred to me to try for an interview with Leo. It could not have occurred to me, I realized, because I’d never quite believed in her, either.

  “I thought you said you wanted this story to matter,” Stephanie said.

  “I did. I do.”

  “Doesn’t Leonora matter? Who is your story really about?”

  * * *

  —

  You’ll want to know about torture.

  How could the story be complete without a catalog of atrocities, a loving description of methods used to question the prisoner, to punish her for her misdeeds? Call it “enhanced interrogation” or “detainee abuse,” call it national security or a violation of international norms—you’ll want specifics, significant details: the instruments used, the questions asked, the frequency and locations of her torment. You’ll want sounds and smells, vital signs. Verisimilitude: you want to feel as if you were really there.

  I could write anything. That she was forced into a dark hole not high enough to stand and left for days. That she was hydrated through a nasogastric tube and not allowed to urinate. Hung by the wrists, beaten with wet towels. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before. I could describe the feeling of being slapped, wall-slammed, the fear when the chair tips over, the flash of panic when the water hits the cloth. I could tell you she was raped, pissed on, her fingers broken one by one, that they stood her on a milk crate and gave her two wires to hold. And you’d believe it: after Abu Ghraib and Blackwater and Camp X-Ray, torture has entered our vocabulary, just another plot element—like Jack Bauer pressing his gun to someone’s teeth, or Saddam falling through the trapdoor. We savor the rush of satisfaction—even as we fret about habeas corpus, proclaim our enduring belief in human dignity. This is how the terrorists changed us: torture is part of the story we all live in now.

  In fact, she was not tortured—not during the two weeks at DINCOTE, nor the years in El Arca. She spent the first months steeling herself for it, convinced the waiting was itself a kind of overture. Comrade Miguel (she never stopped thinking of him as Miguel) had said there was nothing she could reveal that they didn’t already know, no one left to betray; she scoured her memory for some name or nuance of organization, anything she could withhold, anything worth torturing her for. But there was nothing. Her cumpas had made sure of it. Knowing her captors understood this, that she was beneath even their curiosity, was a humiliation more painful than any they could inflict.

  But there was something even worse, that she didn’t allow herself to think about until the second year, when she was moved from solitary to the pavilion for non-Sendero women. Her first cellmate, Sonia, was the one to explain it, rolling up her shirt to reveal the scars across her back, the burn marks around her nipples.

  “They can’t do it to you,” Sonia said. She walked with a heaving limp, her pelvis having been broken during her arrest. Once, she’d taught classes in self-defense to women in her village—classes the military said were terrorist training sessions. “If it happened to you, everyone would know.”

  “That’s not true,” Leo said, but her eyes throbbed with recognition. What can be done with impunity to others cannot be done to her. Even here, in these desolate altitudes, she has not escaped the bubble of perverse privilege. By the end of the year, she had a new cellmate, Natalia, captured ten years earlier with a column of militants near Jauja. Sonia was one of eighteen hunger strikers who, in October, 2000, were locked to a fence by Special Forces, then beaten with chains. As one of the strike leaders, Sonia was singled out for an example. Her body was not removed for three days from the spot where she was strangled. Maybe you read about it. More likely not.

  * * *

  —

  In her third year, she’s allowed to receive letters, of which there are many. They say things like, “Go home, whore,” and “Daughter of a Jewish cunt, my husband died in 1989 from one of your bombs.” They say, “You are an insult to the Movement and its martyrs” and “I hope El Arca burns to the ground while you scream.” Others come from as far away as Paris, Stockholm, Chiapas, Hebron. They say, “You are our sister.” They say, “Your sacrifice inspires all who continue the struggle.” A Chilean poet writes her an ode, “La Canción de la Filósofa” (Espíritu de fuego / al campo de sangre viniste de lejos…). The Committee to Free Leo is formed in Northampton, Mass.; they send their greetings, with a copy of the letter sent to President Bush, Secretary Powell, and every member of the U.S. Senate, demanding a suspension of diplomatic ties with Peru until she’s released. A law professor at UC Berkeley sends thirty pages of questions from his students. Churches from Orlando to Coeur d’Alene send prayers.

  “There is nothing I can tell you that you don’t know. The righteous are always persecuted, not least by those who worship the martyr Jesus Christ.” She holds Gabriel’s letter in trembling hands, reads it dozens of times, to be sure she hasn’t missed anything. The one letter she’s hoped for, when it
finally arrives it takes up less than one typed page, its language so distant she wonders if the department secretary wrote it.

  “One can support your ideals without condoning your actions,” Zamir wrote, a statement referenced by all parties in his disciplinary hearing the following year.

  “You will be remembered,” he assured her before signing by hand: ¡Venceremos!

  * * *

  —

  They would take what was owed to them. She understands it now, the deep symmetry—almost metaphysical—by which the universe maintains its equilibrium. For every action an equal and opposite. Sin and penitence. Everything has a price.

  Can the universe be so capitalist? Can it keep such a careful ledger? With all history’s bloodshed it could not be the case that the tally came out even, that perpetrators would suffer in their turn. The meek would not inherit even a handful of dirt—wasn’t that a given? No, in the end nobody was keeping track, all the stories about judgment, karma, eternal rewards just cruel hoaxes to keep the peasants’ mouths shut. What business does a revolutionary have musing on divine retribution, on cosmic quids and quos?

  And yet: they took her brother. There is no other way to understand it. They reached out for him, claimed him as payment for a debt he had not incurred. If they can’t kill her or torture her they’ll get their pound of flesh elsewhere—and who better than Matt, starry-eyed Matt, with his perfect family and his perfect life, his job on top of the world? Through the lengthening days of September, warm winds lashing the altiplano, leaving the prisoners nervous and forlorn, Leo stands at the kitchen window and watches a curl of smoke rise over distant Yuyantambo. She’s seen the footage: the monstrous dust cloud, the perfect collapse. Tiny bodies plunging from the highest floors. Matt would not have jumped. He would have waited to the last, refusing to believe good fortune could abandon him. She’s tried to imagine his face, as if holding it in her mind could somehow comfort him. But the face she sees is Ernesto’s. This failure is the worst of all her many betrayals, clear proof that Matthew’s life was taken to spare hers.

  “No, no, you can’t think this way,” says Rabbi Eisen, resting a hand on her wrist. “This thing, this horrible thing—I don’t think it’s too much to call it evil, as your President does—it is not God’s work.”

  Leo utters a crazed laugh, a cold tear oozing from her weak left eye. She sweeps the rabbi’s hand away. A guard stands uncomfortably, scratching himself in the corner. She throws him a malevolent glare: no one in El Arca is allowed to see her cry.

  “I told you,” she says miserably, “I tried to tell you.” After refusing his visits for more than a year, Leo finally agreed to see the rabbi—to make her mother happy, to have an extra visitor not subject to the quota. Once a month she gets ninety minutes in this empty storeroom; the first time, in June, the pavilion captain apologized that there was no crucifix. “How can you just accept it? How can anyone?”

  The rabbi opens his large hands. “Linda…” He shakes his head. “Leonora, I don’t accept it. Of course I don’t.”

  “It’s such bullshit. That He’ll take care of it. Why would He? Has He taken care of anything else?” She paces the room and the rabbi notes how loose the prison clothes hang on her, how she is becoming child-sized. He notes the sores on her skin, the blue vein crossing her forehead, the milk seeping from her eye. “I’m supposed to believe this is fair, that it’s some kind of message? Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I don’t think—”

  “Get a better secretary!” she laughs bitterly. “Like it will change anything!”

  “Leonora, there is no message. God doesn’t send messages like some criminal in the Mafia. We can’t understand this. But we can endure it. We have to.”

  “Endure it! That’s all you people ever say.” She shakes her head, momentarily confused by the rabbi’s presence. Is he another lawyer? Has he come from New York? “It’ll all be made right later, in Heaven. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”

  “No. I’m not going to say that.”

  “I won’t debate it with you. With someone like you.”

  “I don’t want to debate it—”

  “Then why the fuck are you here!”

  Frowning, the rabbi lifts himself out of the uncomfortable chair and moves toward her. Leo pushes the air to ward him off, but he puts an arm around her, then another, warning the guard with his eyes not to interfere. She squirms, terrified by the embrace of another body, feels a scream gathering, her knees softening, her own breath damp against her face as she turns her mouth to the rabbi’s shirt and wails.

  When her tears are exhausted, Rabbi Eisen reaches into his satchel and lays two items on the chair. He gently unfolds the first, drapes the silk tallis over his shoulders and kisses the fringe. He asks the guard for a match and kneels to light the candle, which throws looming yellow shadows across the bare walls.

  “Would you like to say Kaddish?” Weak and compliant, she kneels at his side. When he takes her hand she gives no resistance. “Did your brother have a Hebrew name?”

  * * *

  —

  But there has to be a price—hadn’t they always said so? Fanon and Said, Gandhi and King. Julian, in his occasional eloquence. Jesus, too. “Someone will pay,” was the rough refrain. How could anyone survive this world without subscribing to some version of it? “There are consequences for what we do.”

  That’s what those nineteen men and their masters believed. It’s what steadied their hands up to the instant of collision. And doesn’t Leo herself believe it, even now? If you poke the beast with a sharp enough stick it must rouse itself with slavering fury, come at you with everything it has. In his own excess will the enemy’s weakness be revealed! In the soil of his unrighteousness are planted the seeds of his destruction!

  What garbage. What wishful thinking. A ten-year-old couldn’t be made to believe it. What will really happen—what has always happened—is as obvious to Leo as it is painful to consider: the panic, the murders and abductions, the secret prisons and unmarked graves. Faceless courts and public burnings, machines of death deployed across the sky. The blithe justifications, the endless lies.

  “Listen to me, sweetheart,” Maxine says. “You’ve got to make up your mind. Stanley says the deal’s still on the table, but it’s not going to stay that way. People are getting distracted. The State Department is going to pieces. Please, Leo,” she says, “just say the word.”

  “I already told you.”

  “We can still get it done. Your uncle Warren can talk to the Armed Services people. Stanley will fix it with the Peruvians. They’re as eager as we are to put it all—”

  “Mom,” Leo whispers. “I can’t.”

  “You can.” Maxine’s gaze could dissolve glass. “David, you talk to her.”

  “Leo, honey,” he says, but he’s unfocused, wrecked by what’s happened, suddenly an old man. He holds a handkerchief to his face like an oxygen mask. “We just want you home. We need you.”

  It’s early November, the first time she’s seen them since August. The Interior Minister had denied her request to attend Matthew’s funeral. Word has gone around the pavilion. Even the women who’d hazed her endlessly, spat on her in the yard, left their shit curled outside her cell, treat her delicately. They leave a wide berth when she passes, as if the message were a plague, and she the doomed carrier.

  “She won’t do it for us,” Maxine says without taking her eyes off Leo. “She won’t do it for anyone. She doesn’t care what this is doing to us. Do you, Leo? You don’t care how hard it is to come here every month, how we have to sleep in that shithole in Puno, ride on that disgusting bus for hours with chickens. Do you know how much fucking money we’re spending? Do you have any idea how much all this costs?”

  “Maxi—”

  “She doesn’t care about anything or anyone,” she says, blazing with the anger that’s s
ustained her since Matt’s death. “None of them do.”

  On the way back to her cell, Leo is uncooperative and loud, calling for the comandante, clinging to bars and knobs. At the entrance to her hall she refuses to move; a second guard is summoned to help drag her the rest of the way. Natalia is on work duty and Leo overturns her mattress, rummages through her clothes until she finds the photograph of Natalia and her four siblings, which she tears into small pieces and flings through the grate, all the while singing at the top of her lungs—Vengan todos a ver, ¡Ay, vamos a ver!, en la plazuela de Huanta, amarillito, ¡Flor de Retama!—until the pavilion captain is called and the guards drag her into the hall and throw her to the concrete, kicking at her ribs until she coughs up blood. She’s still singing weakly as they drag her to a solitary cell, douse her with water, and shut out the light.

  When the doctor visits two days later he trusses her ribs and gives her an injection that fills her head with lava.

  “You’re a stupid girl,” he says, regarding her as if she were a species of rodent. The pavilion is locked down, yard access revoked for three days to punish those who took up Leo’s song. She’ll be kept in solitary for two weeks, her visitor privileges cancelled for a month. “Why make so many problems? These people have nothing to do with you.”

  When he leaves, she shudders with relief, lowers herself to her less-painful side and cries. There won’t be any deal—not with the Armed Services people, the Peruvians, not with anyone. It’s too late for that. Even if she were to do what they ask—plead forgiveness, betray everyone, admit to her own irrelevance—it wouldn’t matter. That’s what her mother won’t see: Leo, too, is part of the price.