The Gringa Read online

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. There was more clatter, and then he muffled the phone, said something to someone. “Look, think it over. Call me mañana. You know me—I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

  * * *

  —

  I had plans to meet Mark for lunch—ceviche and beer, a Saturday ritual—and as I walked down the Avenida Sol, I argued with Jack in my head. I was bothered by the call, offended, even—why in the world did he have to ask me?

  Mark’s office was near the post office, two rooms with a view of the mountains, upstairs from a shoe store. “What, already?” he said. “I thought you’d still be in bed.” There were two desks surrounded by file cabinets, shelves full of binders, a drafting table strewn with photographs, magazines, derelict power adapters. “Steph, you remember Andres, Babilonia’s resident scribe?”

  Stephanie was his editor and business partner, a Canadian journalist who wrote stories about local politics. She was tall and rangy, with a pinched nose and a cloud of blond curls. The first time I’d met her, the Dutchmen and I had been drinking for days. She didn’t hold me in the highest regard.

  “Hola, Andres,” she said. She wore a coarse wool sweater, moth-eaten at the wrists, a long peasant skirt, huaraches. “¿Cómo has estado?”

  “Andres is writing the great Babilonian novel,” Mark said. “It starts with a memory of the smell of roast guinea pig. It’s called In Search of Lost Mind.”

  She smiled dutifully. “Actually,” I said, “a weird thing just happened.”

  I told them about my conversation, playing up the absurdity of Jack’s coming to me, of all people. This was my usual approach to matters of any seriousness: I’d emphasize my incompetence, cop to it, lest anyone expect too much of me.

  Mark and Stephanie were looking at each other strangely. “It’s funny you say that. We were just talking about La Leo.”

  “Mark, no,” Stephanie said.

  “But we can help our friend, can’t we? Our fellow journalist?”

  “I’m not a journalist,” I said. I felt nervous suddenly, as if I’d wandered into an audition. “I told him to find someone else.”

  Mark went into the other room and rummaged, while Stephanie smoothed her skirt and avoided my eyes. He came back with a pile of old newspapers, which he sifted until he found what he wanted. “Look. Volume one, issue eight. See that dateline?”

  I squinted at the yellowed tabloid: 22 agosto, 1998.

  “It’s the day after she was arrested,” he said.

  The front page was dominated by two photographs, one of a mass grave in a town in central Peru, the other of a guerrilla fighter in a ski mask, rifle at the ready. The layout was amateurish, the images badly cropped. But it was the banner that struck me: a woman’s eyes, wide open. Her irises reflected what she was looking at: soldiers on the march. “LOS OJOS DEL MUNDO,” it read. THE EYES OF THE WORLD.

  “It never came out. By that morning, everyone in the house was dead. They pulled her off a city bus, mate. They made her watch.”

  “Who?” I said, turning the page. There was a story about a protest at an American-owned gold mine, a poem by Neruda, a photo of peasants with rifles slung across their backs. On the back page, an editorial flowed around a large, blank square.

  “It’s a fascinating story,” Mark said wistfully. Stephanie was typing on her clunky desktop, but I knew she was listening intently. “Someone should write it.”

  “Not me,” I said. “It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Aren’t you a writer?”

  “Not like this.”

  Mark cocked his head. “Like what, then?”

  It was a good question, one I’d asked myself a lot. The handful of reviews of my novel had been decidedly mixed: some called it “hip” and “knowing,” others “mannered” or “smug.” One writer dubbed it “Gen X’s The Big Chill.” But one line had stuck with me, kept me up at night: “In times such as these,” the reviewer asked, “why should we care about the narcissistic crises of the privileged class, however competently written?”

  For days I brooded over this, railing silently against the reviewer. When, at the one reading I gave, in Berkeley, a breathless older woman asked if I thought my novel was still relevant, “given everything that’s happened,” I was ready for her.

  “Empathy is always relevant,” I said. I gave a spiel about how a writer’s duty is to see beyond himself, how imagining the lives of others was an inherently political act. “If more people practiced empathy, maybe this war would never have happened,” I said.

  This elicited thoughtful nods from the eight people in the audience. But inwardly I felt sick with shame. Why should readers care about characters like mine? Well-off, well-educated, mostly white, their ambitions and resentments played out over three hundred pages as their utopia slowly unraveled. Meanwhile there were American cluster bombs flattening whole Iraqi villages, soldiers getting their legs torn off. Meanwhile our leaders had lied to us, lied to the whole world. People—real people—were dying by the thousands, and here I was, a cheese plate and bottles of wine set out before me, talking about empathy. It came to me that I was a terrible fraud.

  “Listen,” Mark said, as though he’d read my thoughts. “This woman—American, smart, privileged. How does she end up a terrorist? Don’t you want to figure her out?”

  “Not really,” I said. I was still holding the newspaper, the empty square on the back page gaping up at me. A pull-quote read, We are the ones you want to forget. But we have not forgotten you. Leonora had been in my dream, I suddenly remembered. Tangled and trapped under heavy blankets, I couldn’t escape.

  “If he’s not interested, he’s not interested,” Stephanie said sharply, startling both of us. “Can’t you see he’s busy? We don’t want to keep him from La Luna.”

  I put my hands up. “Hey, it wasn’t my idea.”

  “Of course not,” she smirked. “No one would accuse you of that.”

  Mark squinted at her, then took a pack of cigarettes from his drawer and offered it to each of us. “Someone will write it, Steph,” he said quietly. “If not you, then someone else. Why not help him? He’s never written something—”

  “He’s completely ignorant!” She gestured at me as if I were a runway model. “Look at him—he knows nothing. Nothing. He’s a perfect American. He has no idea how little he knows.”

  That was enough for me. I put down the paper and said, “Look, it’s not going to happen. So everyone relax. I’ve got a new project I’m working on. Anyway, it really has nothing to do with me.”

  “It has everything to do with you,” Stephanie said.

  She snatched her sunglasses from the desk and disappeared down the hall, the soles of her sandals flapping flatly on the stairs. When I heard the street door bang shut, I turned back to Mark, who was straightening papers on the desk. He picked up Los Ojos del Mundo and stared into those unblinking eyes. Then he looked at me and smiled.

  “She’ll come around.”

  * * *

  —

  I’d met Lucrecia in the plaza on the first day the rains broke. I’d noticed her from a few benches away—her girlish hair, graceful neck, and widely spaced, regal eyes. A month later, I knew how she danced, how many Cuba libres it took to make her drunk, what she liked for breakfast, and not much else. She’d been engaged, she told me, but had recently broken it off. He was “un bruto,” she said, which could mean he was violent or just that he was rough, ignorant, beneath her. She carried herself with the tentative poise of a fugitive—when we walked into a bar or restaurant, I felt her eyes scan the corners. She didn’t tell me anything more about their relationship and I didn’t ask.

  Babilonians had a name for local women who dated gringos: “brichera,” a word that implied a certain canniness, promiscuity with an ulterior motive. Peruvian men used it as a synonym for prostitute.
You saw some enterprising women at the clubs every night, with a new gringo for each season—a scandal in Babilonia, where people’s Catholicism was even more resolute than in the capital, if no more devout.

  But Lucrecia was no brichera. She’d never dated a gringo, and always seemed embarrassed when a group of us took over a table or a dance floor. I didn’t worry she was after my money or thought we were getting married or anything like that. We had a nice time together, that was all.

  The morning of the soccer match, she’d stayed in the bathroom a long time, then sat quietly on the edge of the bed until I jolted upright.

  “A week,” she said, when I asked how long. She was always exactly on time, always two days after the full moon.

  “A week,” I repeated. “That’s not much.” Out the window, I watched a hummingbird hovering, lunging at the goldenrod with its needle beak. Lucrecia made a sound of despair and started tugging on her clothes.

  “Cariña,” I said, “¿qué te pasa?”

  She wheeled around, her sweater pulled halfway down, one bare, delicate arm pointed at me. “What you think?” she said in English. “What you think of me?” She yanked down her sweater and started looking for her shoes. I stopped her at the door, put my hands on her shoulders and summoned my most reassuring voice.

  “Lulu, it’s okay.”

  “Qué estúpida soy,” she cried, her features puckered in misery. “Qué estúpida.”

  “You’re not stupid. Calm down and we’ll talk about it.” Somewhere up the hill, a brick of firecrackers hissed and spattered, followed by the deep-throated boom of an M-80. “Everything will be okay,” I said. For no reason at all, I added, “I’m your friend.”

  She sniffled, drew her sleeve across her nose. “My friend,” she said.

  Now it had been nearly a week since I’d seen her. The Dutchmen and I had been out a few times, but I’d avoided La Luna. Lucrecia knew where to find me, I reasoned. For now, the kindest thing to do was give her space. We’d talk about things once she’d calmed down. We’d figure out what was best for everyone.

  But late on a Thursday night, Oswaldo and I tramped through the plaza, ducking into the arcades where the Quechua women were wrapping their bundles. “Only an hour or two,” he’d insisted—which was how things usually began. He was leaving in the morning for a five-week tour: he’d drag twenty Germans through Argentina and Chile and come home with enough in tips to hold him for six months or more. Earlier in the week, he’d met a woman from Pucallpa, in the jungle—a “charapa,” as they were called, “so, so hot,” Oswaldo said. If he didn’t show up tonight, he’d lose his chance.

  “You owe me, Andres,” he pointed out, which was true.

  La Luna was an enormous, sunken ballroom—part Studio 54, part last-days-of-Rome—a warren of stone with thick, cracked columns blazing in and out of strobe. Balconies and catwalks hugged the walls, which were covered in DayGlo petroglyphs; at the far end, a DJ booth shaped like a UFO jutted over the dance floor. But the glitz and flash couldn’t hide the club’s essential squalor: the wobbly chairs, the dangerously overloaded outlets, the slick and filthy bathrooms. Every so often the circuit breakers blew, plunging the whole carnival into darkness. The bartenders moved an astonishing amount of beer, using cigarette lighters to flip the caps off the bottles.

  “I see Jeroen!” Oswaldo shouted, pointing to a table across the floor. Lucrecia and her cohort were there, with two Peruvian men I didn’t know. I vaguely remembered Flor saying her brother was coming to visit from Lima. Madonna’s “Music” crashed and bleeped through the club; on a catwalk, half a dozen girls danced out of sync, eyes shut, reveling in the attention gusting up from below.

  I volunteered to get beer and plunged into the frantic crowd. “Cumpa, where you been?” shouted the owner, when he spotted me at the bar.

  “Busy!”

  “Make sure your friends are drinking, okay? Oye,” he slid two bottles toward me and flashed his wolfish smile, “you like the local girls, no?”

  “Thanks for the beer,” I said. Lucrecia was waiting. I was suddenly sure she’d come to tell me everything was fine, it was a false alarm. We’d dance and get drunk and go home in sweaty, blissful relief. I was eager to get that process started.

  “You gotta be careful, OK? This brichera you’re with,” he said. “Who’s this guy she’s bringing here?”

  “Don’t call her that,” I said. I peered through the crowd, trying to make out my group through the anarchy of bodies. “That guy’s not with her. It’s her friend’s brother.”

  He squinted at me and shrugged. “I just don’t want any fighting.”

  I shoved my way out, threading between whirling couples. The smell of cigarettes and body odor was overwhelming. “Andres, how wonderful he is here!” cried Rosa, embracing me with exaggerated pleasure while the Dutchmen laughed. When I bent to kiss Lucrecia’s cheek she looked up with pleading eyes. Flor’s brother and his friend eyed me blankly.

  “Soy Andres,” I said, extending a hand.

  “Ronaldo,” said the one next to Lucrecia. The other crossed his arms.

  “¿Cerveza?” I pushed a bottle toward them. Jeroen plucked the other from my hand. When I asked Lucrecia to dance, she looked appalled. “¿Rosita? Vamos,” I said.

  Rosa clasped her hands. “You mean I am dance with the King of Salsa? Oh, gracias señor, gracias!”

  The thicker the crowd, the better a dancer I was—and the crowd at La Luna was always thick. The DJ played “Roadhouse Blues” and we reeled and stumbled to the center of the floor. Rosa stared over my shoulder while we danced, lights glinting off the ruby stud in her nose.

  “Where is your friend Marco?” she shouted into my ear. “Flor is very sad!”

  I hadn’t seen Mark since our lunch the previous weekend. But Jack was emailing me every day. Don’t leave me hanging, amigo! He could give me until the middle of May, he said. And he’d pay three dollars a word—a fortune, even by U.S. standards. Five thousand words sound doable? 15 Grovers buy you lot of wampum.

  Once or twice that week I’d gone online to read about Leo Gelb and the furor her parole hearing had stirred. There had been threats against her lawyers and the judge; family members of soldiers who died in the war were going on television to vent their disgust. Next to each article, the same image appeared: the red-faced, screaming gringa. If I looked at it for too long, I felt myself grow uneasy, then inexplicably angry.

  A slow song came on and I put a hand on Rosa’s waist, swaying and dipping. Over her shoulder I watched our friends sitting glumly at the tables—all but Oswaldo, who was talking to an older, heavily made-up woman: his charapa, I decided, a brichera if I’d ever seen one. After this song, we’d go back to the table. I’d apologize to Lucrecia for my insensitivity and she’d hold my arm. Then the happy reconciliation could begin.

  “How long is Flor’s brother staying?” I asked Rosa.

  She squinted and drew back, and then an open-mouthed smile of surprise and delight spread across her face. “No es su hermano,” she shouted. “Is not Flor’s brother!”

  It was past midnight, the club a near-solid mass of undulating bodies, a vast undulation of heads swept by colored beams of light. Next time I looked, Ronaldo had an arm across the back of Lucrecia’s chair, talking to the side of her head. Her eyes searched the dance floor. Jeroen and the other Peruvian stood talking animatedly, the Dutchman pointing an index finger which the other man batted away.

  “Voy al baño,” I told Rosa, nodding toward the stairs.

  She kept dancing, arms overhead, bangles shimmying down her wrists. She closed her eyes and wriggled her fingers sardonically. “Ciao, Andres,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  From the balcony’s cooler climes, I watched the dance floor convulsing, a thousand faces flashing in and out of existence. There was a shiver near the bar as bouncers tried to
break up a fight, the flailing, frantic activity of a struggling animal inching toward the door. As I caught my breath, I felt as if I were looking back not only through distance but through time, at something already freezing into memory: the dancers on their catwalks, all those bodies spasming. I watched a waitress moving against the tide, carrying a tray of bottles to a table—our table, I realized, though Oswaldo and his charapa were no longer there, only Jeroen and Ronaldo and three other Peruvian men, Lucrecia hunched over, face hidden in her hands.

  “Hola, Andres. What a surprise to see you here.”

  Startled, I nearly stuck my nose into the cloud of blonde hair at my shoulder. Stephanie stood with her elbows on the balustrade, staring over the crowd. Her cheeks were flushed, hair damp at the temples. She wore a sleeveless black T-shirt and the same peasant skirt; instead of sandals, she had on a pair of stylish, high-heeled boots.

  “I’m speechless,” I said. “I’d never think to see you here.”

  She set her lips in a hard line. “Why not?”

  “Don’t know, La Luna seems too…”

  “Fun?”

  “I was going to say ‘seedy.’ I figured you for the classier places. Actually, I figured you didn’t come to discotecas at all.”

  “I like to dance,” she said. She smiled to herself, a sweet and private smile. “Actually, I’m on a date.”

  I tried not to seem surprised. “I thought I was, too.”

  I didn’t find her attractive, not exactly. There was something too austere in her bony shoulders and small breasts, the slight upturn of her nose, something stingy. But in the crucible of La Luna we were off our guard—though we might dislike each other, there was a kind of recognition, the reflexive comfort we expats always felt with one another. I felt this as a calming of my heart, what one might feel when reunited with a long-estranged sibling. We were strangers with too much in common.