The Gringa Read online

  “What do they teach you at Stanford University, Andres?” Oswaldo’s arm was still heavy on my shoulders. “This was very big news. Amnesty International, the Red Cross, even your Slick Willie got involved.”

  They showed her on the TV again, screaming—and then a picture of the former president of Peru waving something over his head, a passport. Mark came over with the limeñas, who stood whispering with their backs to the rest of us. “Don’t you remember, Ossie?” he said. “Andres majored in dancing.”

  “Ah yes, he’s the King of Salsa.” It was a standing joke: I couldn’t dance to save my life.

  “I studied creative writing,” I said, stressing the words as if they didn’t embarrass me. “I was there on a fellowship. I’ve told you a hundred times.”

  “Yes, don’t you listen, Os?” Jeroen said. “He is a writer.”

  “Writers don’t follow the news?” Oswaldo said.

  “Not in America. They live the life of the mind.”

  They both watched me, clearly enjoying their little Teutonic tagteam. “Are we going to La Luna or what?” I said. Lucrecia was eyeing me levelly. “What?” I said.

  Flor leaned over. “My brother was there. He…living in Lima, same block with this house. DINCOTE go up his roof, the”—she asked Rosa for a word—“the snipers. They make he and his girlfriend to hide in one room with the baby.”

  “DINCOTE?” I asked.

  Mark patted my arm. “Counterterrorism.”

  Rosa took a cigarette from the pack on the table. “These estúpidos.” She was big-boned, with wide nostrils and streaks of crimson in her hair. She had a rough, jokey manner and spoke better English than her friends. “Why they no stay in the jungle and shoot their mothers? Always they say they want help poor people, so why always is poor people who die?”

  Flor looked at her lap. “Yes, but Cuarta Filosofía no is Sendero.” In Spanish, she said her uncle had been the head of a sanitation workers’ local, in Abancay. After a group of Philosophers marched with them in a demonstration, the army stormed their union hall. Her uncle had been missing now for nineteen years. There was a framed picture of him on her parents’ table, surrounded by flower petals and votives. Flor stared blankly at each of us in turn. She picked up a french fry and frowned at it.

  That’s when one of the blondes turned to the table. “¿Qué piensas?” she asked Flor, impatience coloring her cheeks. “¿Tenemos que aguantar bombas, matanzas, por tu tío?” She waved a finger in the air. The Philosophers declared war on the government, she said. If your uncle the garbage man hadn’t joined them, nothing would have happened to him.

  Flor looked stricken, as if she couldn’t decide whether to hide her eyes or flip her plate in the blonde’s face. “Well, it’s complicated—” Mark said, but Rosa cut him off.

  “Shut your mouth, hija de perra,” she told the blonde. “Only a fat, rich girl could say something like that.”

  The limeña’s face twisted with indignation. “Escuchame, cholita—”

  “Only a stupid girl whose daddy buys a Mercedes for her quinceañera could be so ignorant—” Rosa said, pushing away from the table. Quickly, Mark and the Dutchmen stepped between the girls.

  “Who wants another?” I said, and headed for the bar.

  As I waited for Paddy to notice me, I could still hear them arguing. I could sense that face on the TV overhead. The night was being ruined, it seemed—and for what?

  In truth, none of it seemed real to me. It had happened in another world, one that didn’t exist in the same way ours did. The images on the TV—a pit full of decomposing bodies, a burning apartment building—these things were just footage. The screen contained them and made them luminous. All I knew about the war was what I’d gleaned from late-night conversations, from the way my Peruvian friends hurried past police officers, or flinched at sudden noises. But I did know what could happen when a government feels vulnerable, when it feels it has no choice but to stamp out the threat. I knew, too well, how quickly self-defense turns into something instinctive and vicious. I’d learned all that back home.

  But here, at least, the war was over. There was no more Shining Path, no soldiers in the street. Why not leave it on the other side of the screen, where it couldn’t touch us anymore?

  When I got back to the table, Rosa and Flor were putting on their coats. “Why we are dance with these pitucas?” Rosa said, sniffing at the limeñas, who’d turned to flirt with the American students. “You go with them, Andres. Be careful your money!”

  Lucrecia was watching me, her mouth pressed into a line. She had stick-straight black hair that she tucked behind small ears, a narrow face with a faint scar on her forehead that I liked to trace with a fingertip. She was soft-spoken and agreeable; until that morning we’d never argued about anything. I couldn’t imagine her hating anyone, shrieking like that face on the TV. It was what I liked most about her.

  I raised her hand to my lips. “Are you ready to dance with the King of Salsa?”

  She snatched her hand away. “This no United States,” she said. She poked me in the chest and said I should go with the limeñas. “Is better! Is better!” she kept saying, tears in her eyes.

  “Good work, Andres!” said Oswaldo, as Rosa and Flor led her away. “Another peruana is not talking to you. Soon you have to go to La Paz to find a girlfriend.”

  Jeroen tried to stifle his laughter. Mark poured a beer and pushed it toward me.

  “She is your girlfriend?” said one of the limeñas, as if something smelled terrible.

  Over our heads, the toy train chugged around the room, ducking into little tunnels, letting out puffs of steam. “No, no, no.” Jeroen raised a bottle to the television, where Leonora Gelb was still screaming, jaw snapping open and shut. “Andres’s heart belongs to his countrywoman.”

  Everyone found this hilarious. “Stop calling her my countrywoman,” I said. “I’m not responsible for everything some stupid fucking American does. None of it has anything to do with me, okay? Leave me out of it.”

  They all stared at me until the train came around again, whistling idiotically. “Well, I think it’s time for someone to go dancing,” Oswaldo said.

  The limeña put down her glass. “Somos todos Americanos,” she explained, then flounced back to the bar. Mark watched her go, then shrugged and drained his beer. Now there were soldiers on the TV, a bombed-out mosque, President Bush grinning in the Rose Garden.

  “Yes, Andres,” said Oswaldo. “We are all Americans. You must not forget.”

  * * *

  —

  I’d come to Babilonia when I was thirty-three—Jesus’s age, people often told me—and I hoped I’d never leave. From the minute I stepped off the plane, I felt an easing of the heart, a relief that was almost dizziness. The thin air, the bursting browns and greens of the Andes: almost hyperreal. A cloudless sky the color of blueberries, everything struck in cold sunlight. It felt like a secret paradise, surrounded by icy mountains that promised to keep the rest of the world out.

  Sitting in a café that first afternoon I was overcome by a cold sweat, vertigo. Next thing I knew, a waitress was fussing over me, stroking my hair. She brought sugar and coca tea and rubbed my back as I shook off the altitude sickness. The next night, she took me dancing. I remember looking up, drink in hand, to find myself surrounded by Peruvian women, all teeth and shiny black hair, a sweaty club full of Israelis, French, Germans, Australians, everyone untethered and ecstatic. I remember smiling and smiling. I remember thinking, I am someone else now.

  I found a room in a hillside neighborhood of whitewashed stucco, blue shutters, and wrought-iron balconies. There was a low, rickety bed and a desk by a window, with a view of a little garden. I set up my laptop, unpacked a few books, then stood on the balcony looking out over Spanish tile roofs, steep streets paved with stones worn smooth over centuries. I felt so happy I laughed aloud.
When I walked down to the café each day I felt an unfamiliar solidity where my feet touched the ground. When I sat reading in the plaza in the chill afternoon light, the altitude buzzed at my temples and shone a faint penumbra around objects in my peripheral vision. I felt larger somehow, substantial, already a part of this place. It was real, I thought, in a way I’d never been real before.

  What I’d been was an aspirant, all purpose and energy, trying to attach to my name some lasting significance, to make myself, in some way, more. More than what, I couldn’t have said. I’d fancied myself a writer, built an identity on little more than that fancy, then shouldered the stone hard and long enough that it began to be true. I went to graduate school, published a few stories, won a couple of minor prizes. At thirty, I sold a novel, The Light Inside, about shiftless post-grads and Silicon Valley washouts who start a commune in rural Oregon. As publication approached I felt myself accelerating, gliding on a runway, ready to lift off into a bright future. Alone in my apartment, I couldn’t stop touching my book. I pressed it to my face and smelled the paper. I’d done something of consequence, made a mark on this world that never before had cause to know me.

  None of it mattered. Two days before the novel was released, the invasion of Iraq began. The newspapers were full of stories about yellowcake uranium and Tomahawk missiles, diagrams of F-14 jets; on television we watched night-vision bombing runs and billowing oil clouds, we heard experts describe the effects of nerve gas and anthrax. Our days shuddered with passionate intensity: we argued, we accused, we marched. “I feel just horrible,” my editor told me. “What awful luck.” Bookstores were canceling orders; readings and interviews were postponed indefinitely. “You’ll write another one,” she said cheerily. I felt vaguely mistreated, like a pedestrian who gets doused by a car speeding through a puddle. Something had been promised and not delivered, some inner worth gone unrecognized. I couldn’t imagine going through all that again.

  And it was just beginning: the war, the long and bloody occupation with its daily updates and mesmerizing graphics and escalating body counts. A procession of deadly mistakes, of unknown unknowns, lies upon lies denied and finally dismissed as the trivial whimperings of a “reality-based community.” We wandered amid this cacophony of lies, arid statistics, footage, and told ourselves this was not our country. But we had no other—most people couldn’t find a way out, or couldn’t imagine it.

  I could.

  After a year, I hardly remembered life back in the States. After two, I was an honorary resident: “medio-peruano” they called me. I knew most of the waitresses in most of the cafés by name. I knew bouncers and bartenders all over town. Never much of a dancer, in Babilonia I was first out on the floor, flaunting my fake salsa with the prettiest woman in the room. My laptop sat unopened month after month, but I’d let it slip that I’d published a novel, and now I was something of a local poet laureate; people were more impressed than they should have been. It was as if, in this Andean Neverland, I was allowed to be the person I’d always wanted to be: easygoing, accomplished, admired. The locals had a name for that person: They called him Andres.

  For a while I’d taken Spanish lessons in a school run by a Dutchwoman—Oswaldo’s ex, which was how I’d met him and Jeroen. Browsing in the English-language bookstore, I fell into conversation with Mark, whose office was down the block. Others came and went—Toni, the Aussie, who fell in love with a peruano, opened a restaurant, failed, and went home; Kate, a bawdy Irishwoman who worked with illiterate mothers; Geert, a thuggish Rotterdammer who dated our friend Luz, beat her up once, and told us all to fuck off on his last night in town. We were a kind of royalty, to use Fitzgerald’s phrase: the expats who lounged in the cafés and at Paddy’s, who always picked up the tab. It was a life almost unbelievable in its pleasantness, its absence of real demands. I could write or not write, I could forget about the war, about Americans, for weeks on end. And if sometimes I spent whole mornings staring at the ceiling, wondering what this new life meant, by noon the sharp sunlight had returned to me that peculiar presence, absolute, the sense that there was nothing at stake. And the nights always ended at La Luna.

  But recently the horizon had begun to creep closer: The money from my book advance had dwindled, the small investments I’d hoped would keep me in Peru forever were looking shaky as the stock market teetered. I resolved to spend less, to live more modestly, but each month my budget grew gloomier. If something didn’t change, if some rabbit didn’t leap from my hat, I would not be able to stay. The idea of going back to the States filled me with such dread I could only look away, laugh it off, buy another round. I could not be that person again.

  My third year in Babilonia, I’d finally started a new book. I had a bunch of scenes, a notebook full of ideas. It was about all of us—our adventures, our conquests, the hilarious things that happened here. I was thinking of calling it The Moon Also Rises. I knew I’d never finish it.

  * * *

  —

  Düd, are you still in Peru? read the email I received the next morning. It was from my old San Francisco roommate, and sometime friend, Jackson Durst. I was unsettled as soon as I saw his name. Give me a shout, k? Have I got a job for you!

  It was past ten o’clock, clean morning sun sheeting across the window. My room was an unheated cube, with adobe walls and wood floors slick with wax polish. The bathroom sink ran only cold water, the shower equipped with what they called a “ducha electrica”—basically a heating coil screwed to the end of the pipe. On a good day, you’d get about five minutes of tepid drizzle before the contraption shorted out; on a bad day, if you weren’t wearing rubber flip-flops, you could find yourself lying in a puddle in the dark with the worst headache of your life.

  I went out to the balcony for a smoke. My clothes from the night before hung on the rail, to air out the cigarette stench. I’d lived with Jack Durst for two years, in a run-down Craigslist apartment with a spectacular view of Market Street and the Bay Bridge. We didn’t see much of each other—I was working on my novel, and he was doing something for a website called HookupLookup, where he’d been the fifth employee. When HookupLookup was acquired by Match, he made a small fortune; he bought a four-bedroom Beaux-Arts cottage on Liberty Hill and launched The Durst Report, a news aggregator spiced with opinion pieces by artists and celebrities. Jack’s ambition and flamboyance were catnip to investors—soon he’d swallowed up several competitors and renovated an old machine shop in the Dogpatch, adding three stories, a bowling alley, and a rooftop tiki bar. Naturally, he christened it “Durst Castle.” To better reflect these expanding horizons, the website was relaunched with a new design and a new name: My.World.

  For a time I was a semi-regular contributor. Whether from generosity or an overestimation of my literary fame, Jack let me post at will—at last count, I’d written sixteen pieces, all essentially saying the same thing: the war was a travesty, our leaders were evil, etc. They weren’t very original, but they made me feel better. And he paid very well. But there came a day when I couldn’t write them anymore, when the world let me see just how irrelevant they were, how risible my indignation. When I left for Peru I stopped returning Jack’s emails. That part of my life was over, I told myself.

  It was another bracing, searingly bright day. After coffee and the daily gamble with electrocution, I headed downhill. In the warming air all the smells of Babilonia rose from the stones: bread baking in the pastelería, animal blood from the butcher’s stalls, decades of excrement from the toilet built into the side of a church. I got a shave and took out cash—careful not to look at my account balance—all the while trying not to think about Jack’s email. Somehow, I already knew what he wanted.

  “You gotta write it, dude,” he said, when I called him from the Telefónica office on the main plaza. “The story’s got your name all over it!”

  “The story?”

  “A terrorist,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “A real-
life American terrorist. And a girl! Do you have any idea how many clicks this shit’ll get?”

  Already I regretted calling him. I still don’t know why I did. Maybe I’d convinced myself he wanted something else, something easier. I needed the money, that was certainly true. Or maybe I just wanted to hear a voice from back home, a reminder that I’d once existed. I had days like that sometimes, when I couldn’t remember how long I’d been gone. A night at La Luna was the usual cure.

  “Says here she’s getting parole pretty soon,” he was saying. “She’s got an apartment in Lima. Is that anywhere near you?”

  “No.”

  “Whatever. I’ll fly you there. First class. Just let me know how many puka shells or whatever it costs, a’ight? Think you can put something together by the end of the month?”

  “Forget it, Jack.” I said, “No way.”

  There was a clatter and a hum as he took me off the speakerphone. “Listen, dude. Who better than you? Think about it: you’re the same age, you both went to Stanford—”

  “I was on a fellowship,” I said, as if this exonerated me.

  “—you live there, you know Peru. Remember those columns you wrote? It’s right up your alley. Holy shit, it’s like fate!” he said. “You’re exactly where I need you to be.”

  “I don’t know anything about this,” I said, loud enough that the cashier looked up. My head was pounding. I reached for a cigarette but remembered I’d left them at the barber shop. “Listen, Jack, thanks for thinking of me. But it just isn’t me.”