The Gringa Read online

  The Gringa

  Copyright © Andrew Altschul 2019

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: February 2020

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Melville House UK

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  A portion of this novel was originally published in Zyzzyva, under the title “They Hate Us for Our Freedom.”

  ISBN 9781612198224

  Ebook ISBN 9781612198231

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956590

  Book design by Euan Monaghan, adapted for ebook

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  I: The Wretched of the Earth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Andres

  II: A Conspiracy of Hope

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Andres

  III: The Beginning of Armed Struggle

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Andres

  IV: The Eyes of the World

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  V: Darkness at Noon

  Acknowledgments

  For my mother and my father

  “Peruvian people! Like enraged thunder, your hardy voice begins to express itself in the vibrant, purifying tongue of revolutionary violence…The great journey is begun.”

  Abimael Guzmán, Let Us Develop the Guerrilla War!

  “Is history possible? Is anyone serious?”

  Don DeLillo, Mao II

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Leonora Gelb hated America.

  She hated its heart and its soul, its sick mind and its flabby, diseased body. She hated its dreams of itself, its fantasies about the rest of the world—paranoid, arrogant, weaponized—and she hated its waking realities: the sprawled, filth-strewn cities and prim, stingy towns, the metastatic freeways and supersized cars, the factory farms and clear-cut hills and amber waves of subsidized grain. She hated its festering landfills and its first-class hotels, its frenzied shopping malls and all-you-can-eat buffets, hated its fast-food abattoirs and five-star, whites-only restaurants, the elegance of its ivory towers and the proud ignorance of its gun-toting, flag-waving patriots—ignorance fostered in crumbling public schools and enforced by corporate media all too happy to dance to the hegemon’s tune. She hated America’s wage-slaves and its business overlords, its gated subdivisions and wasted ghettos and its shared national pastimes: the gladiatorial sporting events and disgusting beauty pageants and goose-stepping parades, the idiot sitcoms and smug TV news anchors and its movies—god, its movies—about intellectual dwarves with superior firepower who heroically, democratically slaughter everything in their path.

  Leonora—“Leo” to her family, “Comrade Linda” to her friends in the revolution—hated American culture as much as its gunboat economic policies. And what, really, was the difference? The Dirty Harrys and the Marlboro Men who brandished their big dicks and dared you to read their lips, make their day. The pop sensations, barely pubescent girls taught by men to pantomime a grotesquerie of sex for money. The murderous video games and diabetic soft drinks and breakthrough pharmaceuticals to cure phony ailments the populace had to be taught to suffer. All rammed down the throat of the developing world, safe delivery ensured by nuclear submarine, by armed battalion, underwritten by Chevron and the World Bank and relentlessly promoted by lie after slavering lie—lies for which no one would ever be punished, because in America it’s not a lie if it turns a profit; not a lie if it upholds the racial hierarchy; not a lie if it oozes from the mouth of someone we admire: soldier, sexpot, self-made tyrant.

  When I look at her photograph, that’s the first thing I see: her outrage, her refusal to believe the lies. In the shape of her mouth, stretched in a wet scream, the flared muscles of her neck, I see her fury at a government without integrity, a President who deceived the world with impunity. In her piss-soaked jeans, the broken arm stiff at her side, I see her disgust with a country that would spy on its own people, ignore its own laws, kill its own children.

  Certainly you’ve seen this photograph, taken at the infamous press conference in Lima, Peru on August 25, 1998, three days after her arrest. You’ve noted, in the way she leans toward the reporters—a Doberman on a leash—her contempt for a press that whistled while thousands were rounded up, held in secret prisons, subjected to all manner of abuse; a press that branded as disloyal any who insisted upon the truth. Who hasn’t seen this image, nor wondered at the small figure surrounded by soldiers with impressive weaponry, against the backdrop of a foreign flag? No one who’s viewed the footage can forget her gale-force anger, the threat conveyed by her every gesture. No one can ignore her clenched fist.

  But her eyes tell a different story. When I look into her eyes—small and gray behind thick glasses, open shockingly wide—I don’t see the violent criminal so many have described. I see vulnerability, the pain of betrayal. I see innocence of a kind.

  How to explain this incongruity, to bridge the gap between that bedraggled figure and her iron fury? How to sort out the truth from the lies?

  It’s been ten years since that disastrous press conference. I’ve been asked to find the real Leonora Gelb—a task for which no one could be less qualified.

  * * *

  —

  “People think they know something about my daughter, but they don’t know a damned thing,” her mother told Newsweek, in September, 2000, on the second anniversary of the military trial. “They think she’s some kind of radical, but that’s just what the Peruvian government wants them to think. If they could only see the real Leo, they’d know my daughter would never hurt a fly.”

  But who was the real Leo? The “sweet, brilliant child” her mother described? The diligent student, lover of animals, hard worker, caring neighbor, fitful gardener, champion of the needy, role model for her younger brother, Matthew? Or the hardened revolutionary, a soldier of fortune who came to Peru to foment violence in a country that had known far too much of it? Was she the clueless dupe her lawyer made her out to be? A naïve young woman blinded by love? Or a cold-eyed conspirator, the “Gringa Mastermind” behind a plague of deadly crimes?

  Leonora Harriet Gelb was born August 9, 1971, to David and Maxine Gelb (née Green) of Cannondale, NJ, a newly incorporated suburb in the northeast corner of the state. Matthew came twenty months later. She graduated from Alden Regional High School in 1989; she was class salutatorian, National Merit Scholar, and editor of the school newspaper, The Aldenian, but her high-school years were otherwise unremarkable. In 1993 she received a B.A. in History from Stanford University, where she studied with the controversial political historian Gabriel Zamir. She minored in Art History. Her GPA was a respectabl
e 3.28.

  For a time it was assumed that Zamir first put Leo in contact with the Cuarta Filosofía—one of several militant groups that brought Peru to the brink of collapse in the 1980s and early 1990s. He has always denied it. Over the years he’s taken pains to distance himself from the matter. “I knew her only briefly and professionally,” he wrote to me recently, “but I found Leo Gelb to be an excellent student, uncommonly perceptive and dedicated, with a deep concern for the plight of workers, minorities, and the poor.”

  One wishes he had more to say about his notorious former advisee. But like everyone who knew her, he measures his words. “Of course I don’t condone her alleged actions,” he told me, “but the Peruvian government’s treatment of her is a deplorable violation of international law.”

  He signed off with the old battle cry: ¡Venceremos!

  Her voice was low and gentle, sentences lifting interrogatively, in the California style. Her laughter was rare but light. A spray of pale freckles across the bridge of her nose made her look younger than she was; a smile made rueful by baby fat cheeks. She never found a way to keep her wiry copper hair under control—in college she wore bandannas, in Lima she tied it back with yarn or rubber bands, but it soon sprang out in unruly clumps.

  In El Arca, the notorious military prison, her hair would grow loose and wild. Fourteen thousand feet above sea level, the thin air tight with cold even in summer. Over time her face would lose its plumpness, her skin grow scaly with psoriasis, hands chapped and arthritic from the relentless cold. Her nose bled, her teeth ached until she couldn’t eat solid food. She walked the length of her cell for hours, hunched over to preserve body heat. The bladder infections to which she’d always been prone kept her feverish for weeks. When they finally let her out she was almost unrecognizable. I would not have known La Leo if not for her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  The 1998 press conference was the first time most Peruvians had seen her: eight hectic minutes in which her fate was all but sealed. Raw-eyed, hoarse, she marched into the room without an introduction, turning upon the reporters her battered, vengeful gaze.

  “The real danger to Peruvians is not the Cuarta Filosofía, it’s their own government! The worst violence in this country is state violence! Ask the campesinos whose land was stolen, whose children are dying. Ask the people whose brothers and husbands have disappeared. Don’t just repeat the government’s lies!”

  It was a Tuesday morning, the ragged end of a restive, clammy winter. The basement room stank of shoe polish and spilled coffee. Three days earlier, on the evening of August 22, the house she was renting in the leafy Pueblo Libre neighborhood had been sacked by Special Forces, ravaged, its windows blown out, its white walls strafed. They’d dragged the bodies of six Cuarta Filosofía cadres from that house, flaunted them to reporters while the President walked through the wreckage and shook soldiers’ hands. A demon, he’d called her, flapping her passport at the TV cameras. A psychopath. For three days she’d been locked away while the press stoked public fury. A military court convened in secret, masked and anonymous, to consider her fate. Now she stood surrounded by nervous soldiers, their rifles at the ready—as if to sell her, to sell the idea of her: Someone who required such precautions must be dangerous indeed.

  But the demon was doll-sized, something farcical about her wild, wiry hair, her wet pants. This was the menace they’d been told to expect? In her powder-blue sweatshirt and granny glasses she looked more like a third-grade teacher than a murderous subversive. They could not match this figure to the footage the whole country had seen: the burning house, the smashed gate, smoke whirling up into searchlights like a vision of apocalypse. They did not see a monster—until she opened her mouth to speak.

  “No one can deny the terrible inequality! No one can deny the racism and exploitation that keep millions in poverty while a tiny group enriches itself.” Her Spanish was perfect but her accent still wooden. It gave her statement a mechanical, robotic air. “This country was founded on violence! Built on violence! The wealthy protect their privilege with violence! They sell your resources to foreign corporations and if you protest they send soldiers, tanks, they—”

  “Just shut up, already!” someone called out. There was low laughter, a ripple in the crowd. They could see steam on her glasses, the stain creeping down her thighs.

  “The people of this country won’t tolerate these abuses—”

  “Why were there guns in the house, Leo?” another voice called. And then a deluge: “Who stole the military uniforms?” “Leo, why did you have blueprints of Congress?” “Were you working with the Cubans? Leo?”

  “Is this justice?” she cried. “Is it democracy—”

  “Leo, were you the girlfriend of Augustín Dueñas?”

  “Do you work for the C.I.A.?”

  “Where is Mateo Peña, Leo?” “Did you know Angélica Ramos was in the Shining Path? Did you know she was a killer?”

  “—when thousands of children go to bed hungry—”

  “Are you a terrorist, Leo?” At this she pulled up, blinking. The room took a breath. “Leonora, are you a terrorist?”

  Her eyes scanned the back wall as though looking for a familiar face. The question came again and she licked her lips, a whole country waiting for her answer.

  Years later, in the forsaken silence of her prison cell, she would still lie awake contemplating a word. It was an arbitrary sign, of course, a meaningless abstraction. During the weeks of her civilian retrial, in 2002, while the crowd outside the courtroom hurled insults, clanged pots and pans in protest, she would turn the word over in her mind, try to understand its nature, to find her reflection in its empty depths.

  “Leonora, are you a terrorist?”

  * * *

  —

  The present work is, among other things, an attempt to answer that question. It was begun in April, 2008, ten years after her arrest, trial, and conviction. It was begun under circumstances that are somewhat cloudy—even, or especially, to me—but in the most concrete sense it began as an article for My.World, the self-styled “online omnivorous media behemoth” launched five years prior by Jackson Durst. (You’ll recall the site’s ambitious tagline: All the news.) From the start it was a poor fit for that outlet, owing to the complexity of the subject matter and the attention span of the target audience—to say nothing of the limitations of its author. Put simply, it should never have been assigned to me. But it was, and I’ve done what I could. What was it Donald Rumsfeld said about going to war with the army you have?

  Subsequent events further hindered my progress. Which is to say, I had neither the experience nor the skills necessary to the undertaking. (And yet you insisted, Jack!) Anyone might have predicted this; many in fact did. But poor preparation and a general lack of knowledge rarely dissuade the powerful once they’ve set their course. Quite the opposite, actually—as our country’s recent misadventures once again make plain. Once fate pointed its palsied finger there was no turning back—the story, it would seem, was doomed from the start, destined for this sorry, unsatisfying form.

  I suppose it’s also true that my background, my obsessions and personal concerns, played a role, whatever my best intentions. Detachment, objectivity, qualities natural to responsible journalists, seem not to be my strengths. If they were, I might never have left the U.S. I might have stayed to enjoy the ongoing calamity of our own dirty war, with its unsavory protagonists and hideous mistakes. But for all that I set out, if reluctantly, to tell Leonora’s story, not my own. I set out to understand her, to say something valuable and true. I knew there was more to her than a photo, more than shocking headlines—of course I knew. What I didn’t know, what I could not have known, was what her story would come to mean to me, nor how badly I would need to see it through.

  What I knew—and I knew it immediately—was this: Leonora Gelb hated America. Long before she lan
ded in Lima, before she’d ever heard of the Cuarta Filosofía or its role in Peru’s long and ugly conflict. Had America not imposed its will on the world through economic blackmail and nuclear threats? Had it not propped up dictators, cancelled elections, murdered priests, sent the C.I.A. to protect profits at the expense of those who’d lived on the land for centuries? Was it not the world’s largest arms dealer, selling guns and bombs to any street thug willing to lower a tariff or privatize a gold mine? When confronted about its actions, had it not lied time after time?

  And when all else failed, when the lies did not suffice, America would call up the troops, launch the aircraft carriers, shoot first and answer questions later—confident always in the flag-waving, lapel-pin-wearing, bumper-sticker-sticking support of the American People. A bovine People, oblivious, ready to kill and die for the fictions of their country’s goodness. Ready to swear, hand over heart, that America stood for something, believed in something, shone as a beacon unto someone for something—liberty, democracy, equality, peace—that it manifestly did not.

  How could she belong to such a People? How could I?

  * * *

  —

  Leo, are you a terrorist?

  In another photo, this one from 1991, she stands with the editors of the Stanford Daily on a hillside overlooking the campus. Smiling and tan, clowning among themselves, she and her colleagues are the picture of freedom, their bright futures all but visible outside the frame. The managing editor stands behind her, two fingers over her head like rabbit ears, or a peace sign.

  Was she, or was she not, a terrorist? Did Leonora Gelb, in the prosecutor’s words, “knowingly aid, collaborate with, and provide material support to the Cuarta Filosofía in their plans for violent overthrow of the government”? Was she ready to take hostages, plant bombs? Was she willing to kill, or to die?