The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  Yo soy terrorista. She’d said the words and now everyone knows what they mean.

  “Mom,” she mumbles in her delirium, the rank, damp darkness miles under the ground. “Mom?” Her mother says she still loves her, nothing can change that. Now she’ll have to love her enough for two.

  You’ll be home for Christmas, sweet baby, her mother croons—a strange melody, something warped and old fashioned like the ancient 78s Grandpa Carol used to play. My baby’s coming back to me…

  * * *

  —

  Though I hardly saw her, Stephanie and I were growing closer. Since returning from Canada, she’d thrown herself into her work. She left early each morning for Los Arenales, where she was reporting on corruption in the neighborhood councils. In bed late at night we spoke quietly, and with a new candor. On occasion I asked her to read a few pages, to tell me what I’d missed or failed to understand. For all her disappointment she seemed resolved to help me—as if, now that we’d both accepted my limitations, we could move forward in a spirit of cooperation, even collegiality.

  We never spoke about her brother, though I always knew when she was thinking of him: a stillness came into her eyes and she seemed to shrink into herself, as if space were collapsing around her. I didn’t want to intrude on this grief—his death loomed so massive and unfathomable I sometimes felt myself on the verge of tears. But what comfort could I be? I wanted to empathize, to help her feel less alone. But all I could offer was cheap sympathy.

  Maybe that’s why it felt so important to write a story she’d approve of. If she could see what I was trying to do, I thought, she might be heartened, her faith renewed, even slightly. At worst it could distract her, provide comic relief. One night, I told her about the missing seventh body, laid out my theory that Leo thought someone survived the raid. I showed her a photo that ran in El Comercio in 2000: a blurry shot taken in Havana of a man in his thirties walking with a cane.

  She watched me with sad eyes, as though I were the one who needed consoling. “What if it really is Chaski?” I said, trying to sell it, to draw her out. “Wouldn’t that explain everything? Otherwise she’s just crazy, signing her own death warrant. There’s no way! Help me, Steph. Let’s think about this together…”

  “Andres,” she said. Her face was pink and puffy and a sweet warmth emanated from under the blankets. That morning I’d woken up with my arm around her. “Why did you come here?”

  “What? To write this story, you know that—”

  “No: Peru. Why did you come to Peru?”

  In the dim light the lines of her face were softer, her eyes clear and honest. I was obviously intelligent, she said. I’d had talent, a career, but I’d thrown it away for a life that seemed empty. “I know you said you were angry about the war. But lots of people were angry. There must be something more.”

  I was quiet a long time. I wanted to give her a good answer, a worthy answer, that might redeem me in her eyes. But she deserved better than that. So I told her the truth.

  “There was a protest. The day after the invasion. Seventy, eighty thousand people, right down Market Street.” I closed my eyes. I’d never told it to anyone. “Everyone was in shock. We couldn’t believe they’d done it. Bush, Cheney…after all the marches, all over the world—they didn’t care. And they’d done it in our name.”

  I’d gone with Jack and our other roommate, a poet I knew from Stanford. There was a meetup beforehand, an apartment full of angry people. A woman with a shaved head and steel rings along the rims of her ears paced the kitchen, pounding her fist on the counter. “You’re pissed off, right?” people kept asking me. “How angry are you?” As we stomped through the Civic Center other people fell in with us, kids in black sweaters, women in trenchcoats, some carrying signs, others concealing things under their clothes. I tried to feel solidarity, to believe what people were shouting about power and resistance and go with the spirit of the afternoon, wherever it took me. I’d never felt such anger—through me, all around me—it had an odor, a special pitch that made us vibrate like tuning forks, our sense of our bodies, our boundaries, blurring into a fearsome collective. It was thrilling and terrifying, enormous. I thought I could do anything.

  As night fell and we encircled the Federal Building, the energy began to gather. The people around me were silent and tense as we shoved toward the barricades. Spittle and rotten fruit sailed out of the dark and splatted against the cops’ shields. Sirens squawked, chants and screams carried to us from the periphery. You could feel the ugliness coming on, like a drug swirling into the blood supply. What had seemed a necessary outpouring of civic disapproval was on the verge of exploding. The group I’d come with were all wearing ski masks now. I caught the eye of the woman with the shaved head and she turned away. I understood they were waiting for a signal. When a phalanx of cops moved toward us, billy clubs cocked, they pulled bats and chains from under their coats and, whooping, raised them over their heads.

  “I ran,” I said. My whole body was tense, remembering. “I ran away. I don’t know how I got home. I guess I just kept running.”

  Stephanie was silent a long time. “It was the smart thing to do,” she said.

  “No,” I said. I turned away and squeezed my fists. Ridiculous tears stung my eyes. Half a million people had died. Half a million people died. When I saw those pictures from Abu Ghraib I couldn’t contain the shame. I couldn’t live with myself.

  “It’s stupid,” I said, my voice shaking, “I just feel like it’s my fault.”

  For a long minute she just watched me. Then she slid closer and put a hand on my chest. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.

  “Oh, Andres,” she whispered, “what a monster of ego you are.”

  * * *

  —

  It was time. I’d been there too long, leaning on people who had problems of their own. I couldn’t abide this feeling of indebtedness. Dr. Rausch was right: every story had to end.

  “If you’d asked me a month ago,” Damien said, “possibly I could have done something, put you in touch with someone. Before the parole was approved.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  He set down his coffee cup and chose his words carefully. “It’s dangerous now. There have been threats. Even an experienced journalist would think twice…”

  “It’s okay, really.” In the past week I’d called everyone I could think of—government officials, lawyers, even Raúl Quintana, the former Senderista. No one called back. Leo wasn’t giving interviews, her exact whereabouts were unknown, though the media roared with speculation and invective. Secretly, I was relieved that Damien couldn’t help. I told myself it was enough to have tried.

  That afternoon, I took a bus downtown and waited in line at Aerocontinente. A pretty representative in a powder-blue suit was reluctant to let me buy a ticket in someone else’s name. But when I offered to pay in American cash, she brightened immediately.

  “I want you to come to Lima,” I told Lucrecia. I gave her the flight information, said I’d be waiting when she got off the plane. There was nothing to be afraid of, I said.

  “Andres,” she said.

  I crossed into the Plaza de Armas, drifting in circles among flowerbeds still torn up from Independence Day revelry. “It can’t wait any longer,” I said. We had to face reality, to do what was necessary. I still cared about her, I said. I didn’t want her to go through it alone.

  “I am not alone. There is my mother, my sisters. So you don’t have to worry.” I caught only a trace of accusation, of regret. Finally, she said it: “Also, there is Ronaldo.”

  I hadn’t known if I’d be jealous, or offended, but I felt neither of those things. What I felt instead was a keen disappointment in Lucrecia. She’d insisted so many times she was through with Ronaldo—he was uneducated, thoughtless, she’d said. He’d rather get drunk with his friends than spend time wit
h her. It was a common enough story, but Lucrecia had always claimed to want something more.

  “Ronaldo can’t help you,” I said. “He won’t. Lulu, you know that.”

  She sighed in frustration. “But he is here.”

  “Is he going to take you to the doctor? Is he going to arrange everything? Please, just come to Lima. It will be so much easier. I’ll be with you the whole time.” I didn’t know if I believed what I was saying, but I didn’t want her to stay with Ronaldo. She was too good for him. How could I let her throw her life away? “Afterward, we’ll take a little vacation. We’ll start over.”

  I was sitting on a bench across from the Presidential Palace. An old woman sat next to me, her two small grandchildren throwing breadcrumbs to pigeons.

  “Andres, what do you think of me?” Lucrecia finally said. “Do you think I would do something like that? To my baby? Do you think I am some kind of brichera? You think I’m a whore?”

  The old woman stared at me. I got up and paced, one hand over the phone. “You don’t want to help me or start over, only to rid yourself of a problem,” she was saying. “You’re a liar. You and your gringo friends are the same.”

  “It’s not a lie…” I began. But she deserved to hear the truth. “I don’t want a baby, Lu. I don’t want to be a father.”

  She made a sound, high and startled, as if something had been snatched out of her arms. I could hear her sobbing, small hiccups that nicked at my heart like a scalpel.

  “You are already a father, Andres.”

  Here it was then: the moment I’d been putting off since the morning in Babilonia when I’d held her and promised everything would work out. Even then I must have known it couldn’t work out for both of us.

  “No, mi amor. I can’t be the baby’s father.” I stopped myself from apologizing. Let her hate me, I thought, if it helps her get on with her life. “Maybe you’re right. If Ronaldo wants to be with you, maybe that’s the best thing.”

  I closed my eyes and waited. The wind picked up, tossing dirt and food wrappers across the plaza. I suddenly wished, with all my heart, I were back at La Luna. Already I suspected I’d never see the place again.

  “You will always be this baby’s father, Andres,” Lucrecia said. “It doesn’t matter where you go or even if you forget about him. You made this baby with me. It’s a part of you. You should love something that you make. Do you know why?”

  My voice sounded strange in my own ears. “Why?”

  “Because he will love you. This baby will love you, even if he knows everything about you.” She was calm again, poised. She’d been preparing a long time for the worst thing to happen, and now that it had, she’d found she was its equal. “He will look up to you, his American father, and think you are a like a hero, like a superhero so far away. What kind of person doesn’t love someone who loves him like that?”

  * * *

  —

  After twenty-five minutes, the judges stood and filed out, leaving stacks of documents on the long table which a clerk quickly collected. Her lawyer sat holding the sides of his folding chair, staring at the empty seats, eyes narrowed as though he were trying to remember something he’d been told years before and could not, at the time, have known was important. The courtroom was the size of a small classroom: cinder-block walls and two rows of chairs set up before the judges’ table, no flags or other trappings of officialdom, only rusty brackets spaced along the top of one wall and a thick steel door with an improbably dented gold knob.

  “Señores, I was given only one day to review two thousand pages of what the government is calling evidence. Señorita Gelb is not identified anywhere by name. It takes some time simply to know what she has said and what has been said about her.”

  The lawyer had addressed the judges from his seat—unlike the prosecutor, he was not allowed to approach the table. Leo had met him for the first time an hour before the trial and he spent much of that time berating her for refusing the bilateral transfer. He, too, had been made to wear a hood as they were taken to the courtroom. When he and Leo entered, the prosecutor had already finished his presentation; for reasons of national security, they were not allowed to know what he said.

  “Thank you, señor,” one of the judges had replied, his voice distorted into a raw, fishlike belch. In their gray coats and shapeless hoods they reminded Leo of chess pieces, the jade bishops on the board in Grandpa Carol’s library. She knew they were men only by their hands. Another judge motioned to the back of the room, where two officers in dress uniform stood silently; one officer was given a piece of paper, which he glanced at, nodded, and left the room. They sat in silence, until the door opened again and four guards stood over Leo and the lawyer.

  “What’s happening?” she said. Her lawyer cracked his knuckles and looked at the ceiling.

  “See you tomorrow, Oscar,” said the prosecutor on his way out.

  A guard pulled Leo to her feet. “What’s happening? When does the trial start?”

  The lawyer offered his hand. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “The trial is over.”

  The new trial will be nothing like the first, everyone has assured her of that—her mother, the woman from the embassy, her new lawyer, approved by the Interior Ministry a week before opening statements are to begin. One morning, without warning, she’s taken from her cell and rushed through the administrative building to the carpool, where three black SUVs wait with engines running. As they bounce down mountain roads to the airstrip she stares at the floor, refusing to look out the window—the villages, the campesinos working their terraced plots, the new shape of the shifting sky, any of these could undo her. All illusions, she tells herself, mirages. Soon enough they’ll be replaced by the same brown walls she’s stared at for four years. When a soldier offers a cigarette, she smokes with the window rolled up, terrified to let the sweet air of lower altitudes touch her skin.

  “I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” the woman from the embassy says when she meets Leo at the women’s prison in Chorrillos. For four years they’ve refused calls for a new trial—from the U.S. government, from Amnesty International, from the Interamerican Court. The visits by Congressmen and diplomats are a thing of the past. The Bush administration’s priorities have changed since September 11, as Leo knew they would; the human-rights community now has far bigger things to worry about.

  And then, a month ago, the Supreme Military Council threw out her conviction and remanded the case to civilian court. “I wish I could say we had something to do with it,” the woman from the embassy says. Peru’s new government has promised change, a break with the past, a corrective to the brutality of the previous administration. But it can’t be seen as caving on such a visible issue. They sit in an office in the prison and Leo can’t help but glimpse the pale Lima sky, smell the nearby ocean, she can’t block out the sounds of gulls, skateboards, arguments, hawkers, on the avenue outside. After so long on the altiplano, the humidity of Chorrillos slicks her skin like a balm. “It’s hard to know if they want you out of their hair, or just to make a show of how reasonable Peru can be.”

  “Will there be anyone else?” Leo asks.

  “Like who?”

  In four years, she’s heard nothing of her cumpas, no hint of a survivor. She’s believed in him, dreamed of him, looked for his messages in cracks of cold stone. She talks to him in her bed at night. Keep going, she says. Don’t ever come back.

  “No, nobody.”

  The woman peers at Leo. “You’ll have a chance to make a statement. Keep it short, respectful. Not political.” She gathers her papers, offers her hand. “Remember, Leonora: Everything has changed. Everything.”

  The trial is held in a high-ceilinged room in the Lurigancho prison. A hundred or more people sit in the gallery: journalists, government officials, observers from the O.A.S., members of victims’ groups. Their conversations condense overhead into a ki
nd of weather, brightening and darkening according to what is said by the witnesses, the rulings of the three judges. When she’s brought in each morning, Leo quickly locates her mother and father, always in the same place a few rows behind the defense table. The same young woman sits next to them—light brown hair, ringless ears, perfect posture. Alone in the back, Rabbi Eisen coughs wetly into a handkerchief. Once the judges enter she won’t permit herself to look back, but she keeps their positions in her mind, tiny bright dots amid the dark tide poised over her.

  Señora Zavallos, Lorenzo Garza, a teller from American Express. Alejandra Vega, who’d sold her the computer and scanner. Alfi Nuñez, who delivered the guns. One by one they tell their stories, along with many witnesses she’s never met: reformed terrorists who claim to have coordinated with the Pueblo Libre group, to have taken orders indirectly from “La Gringa”; DINCOTE agents who followed her all over Lima, even to places she never went; an elderly couple from San Martín, whose daughter fought and died with the Cuarta Filosofía in the 1980s, who’d agreed to shelter “a group of friends from Lima” on their farm the day after the attack on Congress was to have been carried out.

  “Did you know something about these friends? Their names? Why they were coming?”

  The old man speaks so quietly the judges ask him to repeat himself. He can bring himself to look only at his wife. “Well, I heard maybe there were foreigners with them.”

  When Nancy Rojas is called, she won’t meet Leo’s eyes. Her hair has gone completely white, her skin sallowed by years of heavy smoking. When asked her marital status, she clears her throat and says, “Widow.”

  She knew the defendant, had worked with her for several months, the prosecutor says. Had she been aware of any subversive activity?

  “No, señor.”