The Gringa

  The news accounts would describe a suspect in his thirties, light-skinned, average height. No one had seen him before. No one could say where he came from or where he went. It was speculated he was ex-military, or a former rondero. It was determined that he acted alone. Though asked many times, I’ve always said I saw no one, and I’ll say it again now: It happened too fast. One minute I was standing at her threshold, the next I was sprawled on the step, deaf and hyperventilating, Leo lying a few feet away, one hand clutching her glasses as though to protect them from the fall. How could I remember more than that? Given my position, how could I have seen anything at all?

  Sound came back slowly: a dog barking, one car and then another muttered past. Somewhere a neighbor raised a window, a woman started to shout. I couldn’t understand a word of it. When I was able to stand I turned toward the fence, hoping to see someone coming, someone who would know what to do. But everyone was gone. I went to the gate and looked both ways but the sidewalk was empty. It was an ordinary street, like you’d find anywhere.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t remember leaving her neighborhood, or what route I took to the malecón. At some point, I asked a passerby for the time and he said it was nearly four o’clock. I was out of cigarettes, still shivering, though the day had warmed up nicely, the last of the fog blown out across the city and into the parched foothills. The distant shantytowns were lost in gray haze, vanished like Brigadoon.

  There was blood on my shirt, dried spatters on one leg of my jeans. I sat on a bench and touched the stains again and again. The moment kept replaying: the darkness in the house behind her, the fatal half-step onto the porch. What shocked me most was that feeling of presence, the nauseous looming from everywhere and nowhere. Each time I recalled it my throat filled and I hunched over, but it was with me now and I would not escape it. When someone touched my shoulder I shouted and leapt to my feet, but it was only a beggar, a round-eyed girl carrying a baby. She stared at me, disheveled and terrified. I pushed every coin I had into her hand.

  How had it happened? As the sun began its descent, I tried to understand how I, of all people, had come to that doorstep, what inscrutable force had made me its witness. It was a dirty joke, an historical absurdity—but it had happened, I’d seen it, and even I understood that made it my responsibility. Leonora Gelb was dead. I was the last person she’d spoken to. To my dazed and troubled mind, it was as if I’d killed her myself.

  I couldn’t go back to Damien’s, I couldn’t face those people and their questions. By the time I got to Larcomar I was feverish, dizzy with thirst, desperate for the comfort of other, anonymous bodies. I gripped the escalator railing, dazzled by the flashing lights and rich smells, the gusts of conversation. The magnificent coastline scrolled north in a silent, sublime glow of cherry and tin. Below, over the main courtyard, a giant Peruvian flag snapped and billowed in the wind.

  “You believe this motherfucker, this son of a cockroach?” said the man on the next barstool, nodding at the row of televisions.

  “Incredible,” I said. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  I smoked and scanned the TV’s, dreading the appearance of that ravaged face. But instead I saw something curious: Barack Obama, now the presumptive nominee. He was giving a speech in Berlin. I listened for a while—something about tearing down walls, something about our common humanity—but it was hard to focus. The man next to me, a Peruvian man, kept talking to me, gesturing roughly and shifting his stool.

  We are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. Let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.

  “This fucking monkey,” the man next to me said.

  I left coins on the bar and found a seat at the edge of the terrace. My adrenaline had ebbed and what I felt now was exhaustion, an aching disembodiment. For the first time since that morning, I thought about the story. There would be no finishing it now, no fulfilling the promises I’d made. Without Leo, the story would always be incomplete, a hopeless, arbitrary muddle: the world according to Andres. It was truly my story now—I’d taken it from her. Already I couldn’t remember which parts I’d made up and which were true.

  Was it worth it? It was a cruel question. I was glad I hadn’t had time to ask.

  I sat a long time, watching the sun dissolve into the horizon like a liquid pearl. Eventually the dread returned, a shadow of fear sliding over me like a cloudbank. Her face loomed in my memory, wrecked and incomprehensible: Please, she’d said. Please. There was a rustling sound, a loud flutter that seemed to come from everywhere. My heart slammed. I leapt from the chair, an apology on my lips, and that’s when I saw them.

  They were floating far above me, far above all of us. Half a dozen paragliders, silhouetted by late sunshine. They rose into the sky, their gliders fanning over them in arcs of orange and gold. I couldn’t make out their faces, only arms and legs dangling, swinging lightly, dark bodies twirling in the updraft. Their shadows wheeled and dropped, swooped low over the terrace, eliciting gasps and applause.

  I couldn’t see the lines attaching them to their gliders. I couldn’t tell if anything connected them to the ground. I couldn’t breathe. I squinted in the glare and for one vertiginous moment I was up there with them, nothing holding me but the wind’s invisible fist. Everything was so small, so far down. A panicked sound escaped my throat, then a torrent—all the pent up fear, the confusion, an inchoate grief that heaved out of me in waves. People turned to look but I couldn’t stop sobbing—so hard my throat burned, my nose plugged. When a woman at the next table offered me a napkin, I turned and fled.

  In the restroom, I tried to wash the dried blood from my shirt, to scrub the panic out of my face. Soon I’d have to talk to someone, give some account of myself. I thought I should look presentable. A moment later the door flew open and three tanned, tattooed young men came in.

  “What are you doing, amigo?” one said. He wore a pink golf shirt and sunglasses atop his head. The other two huddled by the sink, arranging something—I saw a razor blade and a plastic bag, a little pile of powder on the faux-marble counter.

  “I said what do you want?” He puffed out his chest and stepped toward me. “¿No hablas español?” I could only shake my head and point to the toilet. He grabbed my arm, laughing as he shoved me toward the door.

  “Get out of here, cumpa,” he said in English. “This is no place for you.”

  * * *

  —

  In the last chapters of my novel, The Light Inside, the commune fell apart, a predictable outcome but one that couldn’t be avoided—the story simply demanded it. There had been breakdowns, power struggles, infidelities. Eventually a fire, set by one of their own, destroyed most of the camp. In the final scene, my narrator, a failed poet-turned-product manager, stands in the ashes, reflecting on the “beautiful idea” that first brought them there:

  We’d wanted to do something more, to be something more. We wanted to make ourselves believe in something other than ourselves, something larger—but we could only pervert it, only contaminate it, turn it into a funhouse-mirror version of itself and in so doing empty it of all meaning.

  The last image is a bird’s-eye view of the characters setting out along different roads, “while the smoke of our folly spread heavy on the valley.”

  It’s a well-written scene, I suppose. One reviewer commended its “lyrical grandeur” and “unflinching examination of post-postmodern consciousness,” whatever that means. But I can’t read it now without thinking: What bullshit. I’d believed, at the time, that I was saying something new, something worth saying. I believed empathy had given my characters independent lives. But in truth I’d never really understood them—not their doubt or their fear, not their consuming ambition. I wanted to understand, to know them in myself. But they were just words, just language connected by the logic of stories, a logic
that is vast and beautiful but should never be mistaken for truth.

  I’d wanted to do better this time. To atone for my cowardice, for my failure to cross the line. Leo was my last chance but she was gone now. Soon I’d have to answer questions, but I had nothing to say, no useful information. Only what I’d written: a patchwork of lies, not worth much of anything anymore.

  It was almost midnight when I turned onto Damien’s street. All the lights were on, shadows moving behind the curtains. My phone showed twelve messages in the past few hours. I didn’t know what I would tell them. I didn’t know what I’d do the next day, the next month. Would I go back to Babilonia, or pack up and find another town, another country, somewhere no one knew anything about me? I thought maybe I’d get a job with Oswaldo’s tour company, spend a year or two roaming South America before finding somewhere to settle down. Or never stop, just keep running as I’d run from everything. It wasn’t so hard, really.

  Or maybe I’d finally do something worthwhile, something to be proud of—volunteer in Jeroen’s clinic, or take a job with an NGO. Maybe I’d apply to the Peace Corps, or join Doctors Without Borders. Maybe somewhere, someday I’d find the barricade I was prepared to throw myself at, burn my lungs with tear gas, put my body on the line. People did such things, I thought. Real people. Why not me?

  What was most likely, I knew, was that I’d go back to the U.S., back to its endless wars and ugly election, to the financial catastrophe that was now unavoidable. I’d find a job, an apartment, buy furniture, hang tasteful art on the walls. I’d meet a nice girl and start thinking about the future: a family, a house, a 401(k). Eventually the years in Peru would come to seem like a dream, something I told at cocktail parties—stories to be wondered at, but not believed.

  As I neared the house, a taxi pulled to the curb and stopped. Its hazard lights made a faint ticking in the still night. I watched someone get out, pay the driver, drag a small bag from the backseat. She stared at the house, and at the houses on either side. Then, looking around as though she knew someone was watching, she hurried to the door.

  It was Lucrecia. In the light from the window her face was stark and lovely, her features carved like fine marble. Everything was too vivid: her eyelashes against her cheeks, her long fingers as she swept a strand of hair behind one ear. She was so small, so overwhelmed by the vast, alien city. I was wide awake, my heart racing. She shifted her bag and took a breath of determination. When she knocked you could hear it all the way down the street.

  I almost cried out, or ran back the way I’d come. But something held me. I couldn’t move from that spot. I had the strangest feeling of lightness, almost swooning—as if I were watching the whole thing from the outside: the girl on the front step, the man in the shadows. It was impossible to know what either of them would do.

  She knocked again, louder this time. The shadows in the window stopped. Time stopped. She looked over her shoulder. And then everything moved in the same direction.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No one could or should write about the history of modern Peru without acknowledging the nearly seventy thousand people, of all ages, backgrounds, and beliefs, who died during the conflict in the 1980s and 1990s. I only hope I have honored their lives and struggles with this work.

  This book demanded a thorough education, for which I have the following generous friends to thank: Patricia Bárrig Jó, Luz María Bouroncle, Stephanie Boyd, Guillermo Bronstein, Malu Cabellos, Rafael Cabellos Damián, Marco Cadillo, Lucien Chauvin, José de la Cruz, Jorge Frisancho, Gustavo Gorriti, César Guadalupe, Juan Carlos Guerrero, Oswaldo Jalving, Camilo León Castro, Nancy Mejía, Margarita Mendoza, Lili Medina Mezvinsky, Jaime Rossi, Annie Thériault, and Verónica Villarán.

  For reading, encouraging, and sustaining me, thank you to Julie Barer, Michael Barron, Catherine Besteman, Bill Clegg, Laura Cogan, Joshua Furst, Doug and Alyssa Graham, Scott Hutchins, William Merryman, Jeff O’Keefe, Eric Puchner, David Shields, Sarah Shields, Mark Slouka, Mark Sundeen, Vauhini Vara, and Oscar Villalon.

  My sincere thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Ucross Foundation, the Fundación Valparaíso, and Colorado State University, for sheltering and supporting me.

  And to the excellent, dedicated folks at Melville House: Dennis and Valerie, Athena Bryan, Andréa Córdova, Stephanie deLuca, Amelia Stymacks, Tim McCall, and everyone else who helped to make this happen.

  Finally, eternal gratitude to Tina Pohlman, mi compañera de armas.