The Gringa

  He reminds her of the demonstration at Los Muertos. Hadn’t she seen Leonora leaving the area with Mateo Peña?

  “No, señor.”

  “No?”

  “I was not with her then,” Nancy says. “I was looking for my son. Who is now dead.”

  There are murmurs in the gallery, the scrape of chairs. Because he was a terrorist! someone shouts, and is quickly removed. The judges ask for quiet. They remind Nancy that the purpose of the trial is to establish the prisoner’s guilt or innocence—“not to express personal grievances from long ago.” The prosecutor makes a last attempt, asking if Nancy, a respected leader of her community, believes the charges against the prisoner. The defense lawyer’s objection is overruled.

  “I don’t believe she was a Philosopher, no.” For the first time she looks at Leo, with an expression hung between resignation and grief. “I believe she would have liked to be. But she wasn’t.”

  The proceedings continue for two weeks, some days lasting until long after dark, until the mass of reporters and protestors outside lights up like a carnival, with its own generators and vendors and street performers. Riot police have to clear a path for the car to edge through, Leo huddled in the back, dazzled and overwhelmed. Other days, the judges hardly take their seats before some procedural question forces a recess and she’s whisked back to Chorrillos, where for the first time in four years she has access to newspapers, magazines, pirated copies of novels passed among the thieves, prostitutes, and drug mules who make up the prison’s population. She avoids the yard, takes meals alone in her cell, cowed by the ardor of these women, who crowd her in the corridors to ask if it’s true what they’ve heard about El Arca, if she’s seen sisters or husbands who were sent there during the war. Lights-out comes as a mercy; Leo cries herself silently to sleep—not because she might go back to El Arca but because they’ve made her into someone who wants to.

  “Your whole life still ahead of you,” Maxine says during the one permitted visit. Leo holds her hands and notes the bony, freckled wrists, how thin and battle-hard her mother has grown. “Please, honey, think: marriage, children—”

  “A house in the suburbs?” she says.

  “You’re only thirty. There’s so much time. Say what they want you to say, Leo. Do whatever they want. For once in your life, just be—”

  “A good girl?”

  Her mother doesn’t flinch. “Normal.”

  Who is Leonora Gelb? That’s the question the prosecutor asks the judges. Which of these stories is easier to believe? The sworn testimony of good people, Peruvian people, who paid the price for the terrible choices made by Philosophers and Senderistas—or the incoherent excuses her lawyer has presented, the convenient gaps and romantic clichés? When he replays the footage of the press conference, Leo holds still, heart in her throat, trying to recognize the girl in the dirty sling and piss-dark jeans. So long ago now she’s not sure anymore whom she’d thought she was protecting, what purpose she’d thought her gesture could serve. Or had she wanted only to prove something to herself?

  “I would sacrifice you without hesitation,” Julian told her one night, after sex. “If the revolution demanded it. If I could save myself and keep fighting.”

  “I would never sacrifice you,” she said. “Any of you.”

  He’d run a fingertip across her bare knee. “You see why nobody trusts you?”

  What was true then is true now, she thinks, unable to sleep, her brain speedy with the city’s stimulations. She watches lights flow across the ceiling, hugs the lumpy pillow, tries to imagine Marta breathing nearby. But does it still matter?

  “The person you’ve heard described is not someone I know. The woman referred to by the witnesses, the one who signed those receipts, even the one in the video,” she tells the judges. “I have never met this woman. She doesn’t exist.”

  She turns to the silent room—the lawyers, her parents, rows of faceless spectators beneath windows made opaque by morning sun. “She was invented by people who wanted to distract the country from terrible injustices. They wanted to tell a different story than the one Peruvians were living every day. I don’t recognize her. She is me, but she is also a stranger, una extranjera. And I have tried to understand why.”

  The statement has come to her in pieces, on the drive across the city each morning, the hours in the court’s antechambers flipping through newspapers, watching CNN coverage from Afghanistan and Washington: the wailing mothers, the preening politicians, bodies blackened and left to die. It never stops, she thinks. Nothing changes. It moves from place to place, different faces, different weapons, but it ends the same way.

  “I came to this country motivated by love and by concern for the people who suffer. I felt I had a moral obligation to help them. I did not want to be someone who saw suffering and drove right by.” What happened next is a matter of interpretation, she says. In one version, she’s an activist—feeding the hungry, writing articles about injustice; in another, she’s La Leo, plotting violence, shrieking with fury. But in either story she was only a secondary character, never the protagonist. Now, as then, she is only the person others decide she is.

  “I love this country, even after everything that’s happened to me. I would never do anything to hurt the Peruvian people.” She bows her head, takes a breath. When she looks up, it’s her mother’s face she sees, upturned and pale, made childish by hope. The woman next to her, so dignified and sad—at last her name comes to Leo’s mind: Samira.

  “I’ve made mistakes. But I am not a terrorist,” she says. “Yo no soy terrorista. I know that’s not who I am.”

  The verdict comes in before the car has arrived at Chorrillos. The driver makes a U-turn on the Panamericana, speeding back to the courthouse flanked by police cruisers. Her parents barely have time to get to their seats. The life sentence is vacated, the lead judge announces. Treason is not an appropriate charge for a foreigner.

  The judge holds up a hand to quiet the protests. Twenty years, she says. The possibility of parole after ten. “The charge of terrorism is not proved,” she proclaims. Leonora Gelb is convicted of collaborating with the Pueblo Libre group. “But she, herself, was not one of them.”

  While everything around her erupts into motion, Leo stays in her seat, insensible to the cheers and chants, the awkward congratulations offered by her lawyer, the shouts of soldiers clearing the room. “Baby!” someone is calling, “Baby!” but Leo feels no surprise or anger, only profound emptiness, as though a drain has opened at the bottom of her awareness, her ability to recognize faces, to understand their words, flooding out into the glare. By dusk she’ll be back on the altiplano, clattering toward El Arca in a pickup truck much like the one that brought her four years ago, back in a frozen cell engulfed by silence. Only then will it come back to her: the judge’s raised chin as she read out the ruling; the woman from the embassy who stood at the door, shouting into a cell phone; the hot crush as they led her to the van, guards circling to protect her from all the bodies, so many bodies, their arms flailing, signs and photos, Peruvian flags waving—or was it to protect her from their voices, the deafening music of all those voices screaming the same name, though bereft as she was she couldn’t say whose?

  * * *

  —

  The end of my story, when it came, was both surprising and inevitable, as the end of any good story should be. Late one morning my phone rang with a familiar number.

  “I’d like to speak to you,” the rabbi said. “Can you come this evening?”

  When I arrived, the synagogue was bright and festive. Rabbi Eisen greeted everyone at the door. “I’m glad to see you again!” he said. He seemed to really mean it.

  “I should have realized it was shabbos,” I said. “Wouldn’t tomorrow be better?”

  He found this quite funny. “Come inside. Introduce yourself. There will be food and wine afterward.”

 
The service was short and mostly lighthearted. I sat toward the back, mouthing along with distantly remembered prayers, blushing when the rabbi mentioned “our guest tonight, a friend from the United States” and everyone turned to get a look. Later, in his office, I was stunned to find a copy of The Light Inside atop a pile of books on his desk.

  “I ordered it from Amazon,” he said. “I was curious. I don’t meet many writers.”

  “Let me know what you think,” I said, though I hoped he wouldn’t read it.

  “Of course, of course,” he said, leaning back with a nod of sabbath contentment. “Andres,” he said, “there’s someone I think you should meet.”

  * * *

  —

  Of course I’d imagined it many times: me on one side of a table, she on the other, the recorder propped between us to capture every precious word. Prison guards glaring, listening for codes, plans of escape, ready to stop the meeting if it encroached on state secrets. I was the dogged interviewer, charming but firm, leading her time and again from the comfortable shallows to that place where she’d be forced to confront herself. Alternately, we might stroll together in a Lima park on a sunny day, stopping at the seaside for beer and ceviche. Or take in a movie. What all these scenarios had in common was that they could never happen—and I suppose I preferred it that way.

  What I hadn’t imagined was this ordinary Sunday, the sun just a pale outline behind drifting clouds, this slip of paper in my hand on which the rabbi had written Leonora Gelb’s address.

  “Destroy it afterward,” he’d said as he pressed it into my palm. “Better if you swallow it.”

  “Seriously?”

  He really got a kick out of that. “The look on your face! Andres, come on. Relax.”

  I’d spent Saturday in a state of nervous near-collapse. I read everything I’d written so far, tore up dozens of pages, scribbled notes and questions which I later compiled, condensed, revised and re-revised. I pored over dates and places, lists, decrees, the infinite verbiage of revolution and reaction. I didn’t know how much time I’d have, whether we’d be alone, what topics were off-limits, what the rabbi had told her about me. For all I knew he’d said nothing, thinking only to introduce two expatriates, two failed Jews of his acquaintance. It even occurred to me this might be his crazy idea of a date.

  “The main thing is to keep an open mind, to really listen,” Damien said. She was just a human being, however large she loomed in my imagination. He usually went into interviews with three prepared questions, broad enough to invite digression, to open unexpected doors. The rest, he said, was just conversation, with all its repetitions and awkward pauses and serendipities, just two people trying to connect.

  “Three questions?” I said. “I’ve got about three hundred.”

  “You have to decide what’s most important.”

  I looked into the dregs of wine clouding the bottom of my glass. “Who am I to make that decision?”

  “You’re the writer.”

  I was awake for another hour, desperately slashing my list, trying to distill everything into a few crucial questions, three keys to unlock the mysteries. Before going to sleep I drafted an email to my former literary agent. It had been a long time, I said, but I hoped she remembered me. I deleted and rewrote the email half a dozen times. A monster of ego, Stephanie had called me—and of course she was right. Though my story was unworthy, woefully incomplete, I couldn’t help but want to see it out in the world, to see it live. People needed to read it, I thought. Only in that way could my monstrousness lead to something real and true, something that wasn’t, in the end, about me at all.

  Though it was after midnight, my agent wrote back almost immediately. She said it was good to hear from me, that she’d wondered where I’d disappeared to. As for the project I’d described, she was “very (!!!) interested.” She wanted to see an outline as soon as I could put one together. She saw “tremendous potential” in the story. Creative nonfiction, she said, was all the rage.

  * * *

  —

  It was almost noon when I crossed into Miraflores. The clouds starting to thin, chilly sunlight rinsing storefronts and windshields along the avenues. Even on a Sunday the cranes and backhoes were in full swing, the construction boom still booming, families skirting concrete barriers and police tape as they made their way home from church. The newspapers had described the “beachfront palace” David Gelb bought for his daughter, but in fact her apartment was a mile inland, in a neighborhood of simple two-story cottages that had been partitioned into units. There were small gardens bordered by fan palms and magnolia trees, cats stretched on stoops. It was a quiet and pleasant place, and I couldn’t help but think of Pueblo Libre, of the family now living in Leo’s house.

  We don’t want writers. We want peace.

  I’d come half an hour early, leaving time for the inevitable failure of nerve. As I walked, I rehearsed our meeting: Should I speak English or Spanish? Should I shake her hand? Part of me didn’t believe it was happening, that the person I was going to meet was the same person I’d been reading and writing about for so long—or rather that the person I’d been writing about was someone you actually could meet. As if a figure from a painting were going to leap out of the frame—or, even more fantastical, I was going to jump into that two-dimensional world.

  I had only one question: Was it worth it? I’d settled on it just before dawn, the apartment silent and still as though time had stopped. There were so many things I wanted to ask, too many for an hour, or a year. But they all boiled down to the same thing. Passing a boxy gray building, I noticed a handwritten sign in an upper window: No Somos Terroristas, Somos Peruanos, it said. Two houses later, another sign: Si no quieres al Perú, ¡VETE! If you don’t love Peru, get lost. For some time I’d been hearing distant voices, the choppy noise of a street gathering, and now I could make out, far down the block, a dozen or so people lingering on the sidewalk, a few men standing in the street. When a car passed, they raised their arms and shouted things I couldn’t hear. Drivers honked in response, and the crowd answered with a muddled cheer.

  It would come out later that the host of Ciudad de Reyes, a right-wing radio show, had disclosed her address that morning, encouraging listeners to “show how this proud country feels about terrorists.” But as I retreated to the corner, then took a lap around the block, all I knew was that there was trouble, and trouble was what I’d spent my life trying to avoid.

  One street over, the world was quiet. A breeze came up and rustled branches. Squirrels chased each other manically around a tree trunk. I smoked two cigarettes and reminded myself the war was over. It had been over for so long people’s memories of it had faded, mutated and crystallized into something with more shine than substance. What was happening in front of Leo’s apartment was therefore a kind of reenactment, the people shouting and honking just performers, no more threatening than the men in Babilonia’s airport who dressed up as Inca warriors, waving golden axes at delighted tourists.

  I stamped out the cigarette and checked my watch. There was no trouble, I told myself. Stories can’t hurt anyone. I walked back to her street, buoyed by this realization. I was right on time.

  The crowd had grown to maybe thirty people, mostly middle-aged, a few elderly men and women hanging back in the shade of a ficus while others banged on pots and blew into kazoos and poked signs and photographs over the fence. A few faces turned as I walked up, but I made no acknowledgment. They were mere details, peripheral to what was about to happen. The noise was terrific, shrill and nasty; I wondered if the gate was locked but somehow knew it wouldn’t be, and as I strode up the path and took a deep whiff of jasmine, I felt a surge of well-being: I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

  The crowd fell silent when I knocked on the door. I waited, glanced up at the windows, and knocked again. I could feel them behind me; their presence was like a cloak that wrapped around
the scene, isolating the house from everything around it. In another second I knew there was someone on the other side of the door, waiting. I leaned close and spoke clearly:

  “It’s me.”

  What happened next could not have taken more than a few seconds, though my memory has slowed it down, distended it into a scene of lavish, cinematic clarity. The door opened and in a glimpse I took in the strange figure: so much smaller than I’d expected, so pale and ordinary my first instinct was that she couldn’t be the one. And yet it was her, absolutely: Leonora Gelb, in a long-sleeved dress, a star of David at her collar, head covered by a sheer scarf with a pattern of yellow and brown flowers she was still tying under her chin. I took it all in: the mottled and prematurely lined forehead, cheeks patched with ruined skin, the way she stood square in the doorway as if to project something of herself into the world, to test the waters before going in.

  And then her eyes, filmy and impossibly large, swimming behind thick glasses. She was nearly blind—ten years at high altitude had scarred her retinas—and yet I felt captured in an instant, evaluated, digested and filed away for later consideration. It stole my words, every version of a greeting failed me—here she was, the woman I’d invented, Leonora Gelb in her undeniable truth.

  “Please—” she said, and stepped onto the porch. Behind me, someone gasped. Just one word—“Please”—and I’ll never know whether she meant to invite me inside or whether the word was meant for someone else’s ears, someone I had not been aware of, whose presence was suddenly all around us, fixing us like moths in amber. As my hearing exploded into a thin, high whine I could not understand how our places had shifted, I could not follow the choreography—had he come from behind the building or had she pushed me aside?—but then I was slumped on the doorsill, my hands frantically searching my body though my eyes never left her: Leonora, the real Leonora, flat against the wall like a specimen, her eyes open and bright despite the obscene darkness spreading around her heart.