The Gringa Read online

  In these pages, I’ve tried to sort through the evidence, to determine what she wanted, what she might have felt. From disparate fragments and glaring absences, I’ve tried to build a coherent narrative, one that does justice to the history and its many victims. I’ve tried to keep my own feelings out of it. I’ve tried to consider all sides.

  But it’s been more than a decade. The words—terror, freedom, democracy, war—don’t mean the same things anymore.

  “Leo!” the reporters shouted. Her hesitation had made them predatory. “Answer the question!”

  A man stood on a chair and yelled, “Fuck you, Leo! And fuck the Philosophers!”

  “How many of them did you have sex with, Leo?”

  “Leo, why did you come to this country? Why do you want to kill Peruvians?”

  “How are they treating you in jail, Leo? Have you been raped?”

  The soldiers moved to quiet them. Leo’s breath came heavily, a shadow of alarm playing across her face. Everyone waited. Just as it seemed there would be no answer, the prisoner cleared her throat.

  “The Cuarta Filosofía is not a terrorist organization,” she said.

  The sudden crush caught the soldiers off guard. Tape rolling, flashes exploding—“Leo!” they called out. “Leo!”

  “Is it terrorism to love freedom? Is it terrorism to hate injustice, to feed people who are hungry?”

  She lifted her broken arm as far as she could, the hand white and clammy, clenched with effort. When I watch the clip I see her trying to quiet the crowd, to finish what she wanted to say. But the press told a different story, repeated it until it became its own truth: La Leo raised her fist in defiance. She made a gesture of militant solidarity. She dug her own grave.

  “There are no terrorists in the Cuarta Filosofía,” she said. “It’s a revolutionary movement fighting to improve the lives of people who’ve been forgotten.” The objections resumed—what about the wounded students? what about Victor Beale?—and she craned her neck, voice cracking: “If it’s terrorism to help poor mothers and sick children, then I am a terrorist. If it’s a crime to stand for workers and the oppressed, I accept whatever punishment I’m given!”

  There it was: the red meat, the money shot. Every newspaper in Peru ran the photo the next morning—the hysterical savage, the white girl brandishing her fist—and the identical headline:

  ¡YO SOY TERRORISTA!

  It was a disaster, a kind of suicide. Her captors could not believe their ears. At the U.S. embassy, lawyers smacked their desks. In a room at the Lima Sheraton, where they’d waited three days to see their daughter, David hunched on the bed and sobbed; Maxine, standing, swore under her breath. Five days later, Leonora Gelb was sentenced to life in prison for treason and leadership of a terrorist group. The prosecutor stood before the judges in their canvas hoods and shrugged, the matter out of his hands.

  “Señores,” he said, “the prisoner has already confessed.”

  Now, all these years later, you want me to make sense of it, to explain the inexplicable: how a person of good intentions becomes an enemy of the people, how a child of privilege ends up in torment and squalor. You want me to explore her inner life, to make the connections, show you someone you can recognize.

  You want me to tell a good story.

  It starts like this: Leonora Gelb hated America. Not for its belligerence or its greed, not for its garish displays of wealth or callous disregard for those in need, not for the appalling body counts its every undertaking achieved, but for its hypocrisy, its galling insincerity, the unswerving insistence that America is a force for good. She hated America because it would never be what it claimed to be, would always mean something other than what it claimed it meant. It was a tragic sleight-of-hand, a disgrace—to be an American was to participate in the worst kind of metaphor: it meant someone, somewhere else, was dying for you.

  — Lima, October 2008

  I

  THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

  1

  Any beginning is an act of violence. A shattering of silence. The past flares up like a rag soaked in kerosene. I’ve been asked to tell the story of Leonora Gelb. Where else to start but with an act of violence?

  Los Muertos. A tiny settlement in the desert south of Lima—shanties and shipping containers, broken stone, plastic cisterns on rickety stilts. From above it must look as though a freight train fell out of the sky, the wreckage scattered over the dunes, scrap wood and metal clinging to the edge of a desiccated plateau. Only a few of the shacks have electricity, tapped illegally from a larger settlement half a mile away. A nearby arroyo serves as garbage dump and communal toilet. No running water. No police or doctors or schools. No one should live like this. But in Los Muertos more than a thousand people do.

  Did.

  It’s almost Christmas, 1997. The bulldozers arrive at first light, grumbling across the desert in a long, hazy line. One moment there’s nothing, brown pallor, an ocean of dunes and steep gullies. The sky a colorless sweep paling at the horizon. Then the dust-plume appears: a faint smudge in the distance, a growing blur on the hard-packed road below. Now the faint sound of engines, the curtain of dust, glints of metal—a disruption, an arrow through the stillness. A beginning.

  From the rocky scarp at the edge of the cemetery, the best vantage on the road, Leonora Gelb hugs herself and watches the caravan approaching: bulldozers, SUVs, troop carriers, the rear brought up by five gray schoolbuses. An acre of bleached niche walls and half-toppled crosses spreads behind her, sinking into scrub and trash. The air smells of woodsmoke, a thin tang of metal, like adrenaline rising.

  She turns to the woman standing next to her. “¿Por qué los buses? What are the buses for?”

  “There are still a lot of people to remove,” Nancy says, without taking her eyes off the road. “Also, probably, they expect problems. Hija, you shouldn’t stay.”

  “Did someone tell them we would be here?” Leo says, gently emphasizing the plural, nosotros: we.

  Nancy presses her lips together. She’s short, heavy around the middle, but with a cloud of wavy black hair that Leo envies. She’s Leo’s mother’s age, or a bit younger, with the same flat, frank way of speaking easily mistaken for coldness. “Of course someone told them. There are no secrets in this country, only informers.” Her walkie-talkie rasps and she coughs into it: “Sí, mi amor. They are coming now.”

  “But why would anyone inform? We’re trying to help these people.”

  Nancy squints at the demonstrators, some scattered among the wood shacks and roofless blocks of concrete, others clustered around a man standing on a crate in the road. Mange-scarred dogs root in piles of trash, heavy teats dragging in the dust.

  “These people are very poor. The government can make promises we can’t make.” She nods at the still-distant caravan, its rooster-tail of dust falling in sepia air. “You do them a favor, you never have to see this place again.”

  Los Muertos is the newest sector of Los Arenales, a vast and jumbled patchwork of settlements an hour from the colonial pomp of central Lima. Nancy has lived in Los Arenales most of her life; in the early 1970s, when the military government opened the land to homesteaders, hers was among the first families to build, foraging for scrap wood and thatch, sharing one small generator to run what tools they had. They were llama herders, subsistence farmers, illiterates from the provinces fleeing starvation and infant mortality. A barren plot far from the city was the only chance they’d ever have. They built it from nothing, asked nothing from Lima except to be left alone. Twenty-five years later, Los Arenales has half a million residents, shopping malls, a vocational college; Nancy’s house has three floors and a satellite dish.

  And it keeps expanding. Each year a new wave of migrants—“invaders,” as they are commonly called by limeños of greater means—arrives with cloth bundles, no shoes, desperate to get their children under shelter before t
he heat sets in, before thieves strip them of clothing, photo albums, even their Bibles. Nancy’s NGO, Oportunidad Para Todos, provides some assistance as they struggle to tame their patches of dirt: to find jobs, diapers, medicine; to hang on long enough to demand services from the government. Los Muertos is no different from these earlier settlements, except in one respect: they built too far west. On a clear day you can see out to the ocean, an expansive downhill sweep of virgin dunes and empty beach. Bidding opened over the summer; in October, the government awarded the lease to an international chain of golf resorts.

  The bulldozers have turned off the main road and begun the long climb to the cemetery. Again, Nancy counts the demonstrators, troubled by their meager numbers: a few dozen local residents, teachers, shopkeepers, and members of the neighborhood councils, all gathered now at Los Muertos’ one tiny bodega—a gray concrete cube that sells cigarettes and powdered milk through a locked grate.

  “Okay, Leo,” she says. “You have to go now.”

  Leo turns to her in surprise. “What? Why? I want to help.”

  “Not with this. Listen to me. It’s not safe here.”

  “I don’t care,” she says, wincing at the petulance in her voice. “Just give me something to do.”

  “You want to do something? Take the jeep. You know how to drive? The keys are on the seat. Take it back to the office. Don’t argue, okay? You shouldn’t be here.”

  In the three months she’s worked for Nancy, Leo has never seen her so anxious. It started with the graffiti—¡La tierra es la vida! and ¡El Perú es de todos!—that appeared in red paint soon after the demolition was announced. Slogans followed by the phrase Viene el Cuatro—or sometimes just the number 4. For weeks now, a terseness among the volunteers and employees of Oportunidad, a sense of waiting. When she got to work yesterday, she found Nancy arguing with a man in his early twenties, someone Leo had seen lingering outside the office, chatting with students in her ESL class. He had high, prominent cheekbones, a beguiling smile. People greeted him warily, kept half a step away and looked at their feet. When Leo asked a student his name, she frowned as if at a mildly sour odor. “Le llaman ‘Chaski,’ ” the student said.

  “Not here. Not in Los Arenales,” Nancy was saying when Leo came in. She folded her hands on her desk and thrust her chin at him. “Tell your friends to stay away. We don’t want that kind of help.”

  “Compañera, you don’t understand!” Chaski said, with a salesman’s grin. He was bronze-skinned and lanky, his hands always moving. “No one is trying to take control away from the councils…”

  Nancy wagged a finger at him. “No soy tu compañera.” When she saw Leo, she lowered her voice, pointing with her eyes until Chaski looked up, too. They spoke in Quechua then, and Leo, unnerved, hurried to the back room to prep for class.

  Now the first of the bulldozers crests the rise and turns onto the broad dirt thoroughfare. The SUV’s follow, red lights twirling. Quickly, the demonstrators spread among the shacks in pairs, each with a length of heavy chain and a set of handcuffs. Sensing that Nancy will soon join them, Leo reaches for her arm.

  “I can help. Anything. Really. Just tell me. What can I do?”

  All last night, sleepless in her hostel, she’d asked herself the same thing. On the dawn bus from Lima she set her jaw, bolstered her determination. It was their home, she reminded herself. It was all they had. But what could she do? If protest turned to confrontation, how would she react? She’d squeezed into Nancy’s jeep with six other arenaleños, then waited at the edge of the cemetery while the few remaining residents dragged trash and tires into the road. No one looked at her. When she hauled a dusty tire onto the pile an older man nodded once and walked away.

  Gently but firmly, Nancy pulls her arm away. “Look around you, Leo. Do you see other volunteers? The German girls, that boy from Holland whose name I can’t remember, the flaquito—” A teenage girl rushes over, a red-faced infant slung across her back, and speaks rapidly in Quechua. “Okay, mamita, ya voy,” Nancy tells her, then turns back to Leo and pulls her into a brisk embrace.

  “Your friends have the sense to stay away,” she says. “It’s better you do the same. Take the car and get out of here, Leo. This is something for arenaleños.”

  Leo squeezes her fists in mute frustration. Across the road, the last residents have lined up next to the buses. A soldier points a bullhorn at them: One bag for one person. Control your children. No dogs. So what if she isn’t from Los Arenales? If she isn’t Peruvian? She’s here, isn’t she? Unlike the German girls, she came to help. Didn’t she?

  “They’re not my friends,” she manages as Nancy hurries away.

  With a blast of sand and grit, the bulldozers come to a stop before the first shanties. Soldiers jump from the troop carriers and fan out along the road and the commander shouts into the bullhorn that demolition will start in five minutes. Demonstrators dart across the road, hurling insults at the soldiers; skinny men stare blankfaced from the doors of their homes. A low, swirling wind has kicked up, making everything look washed out, monochrome—like documentary footage. Through the rising dust Leo spots Ernesto, the youngest of Nancy’s three sons, moving between shanties with a camcorder held to his face.

  “Neto!” Leo shouts. He looks around in confusion. “Neto, over here!”

  “Leo!” he says, then something else drowned out by the bullhorn.

  “What?”

  He waves an arm urgently and she takes half a step toward the road, driven back by the piercing signal of a bulldozer in reverse. “Go back!” Neto is shouting. “Get out of here, Leo!” She tries to answer him but then sirens cut through the wind and with a fearsome rasp the bulldozers grind their gears and edge forward. Leo covers her nose against the swirling dust, falls back among the headstones as the first bus turns and pulls past her, stunned faces at every window.

  When she next spots Ernesto, he’s on the roof of the bodega with two other kids, all wearing bandannas over their faces. Nancy and five other councilmembers have handcuffed themselves to the bodega’s grate; two soldiers struggle toward them, dragging a welding rig over the rocky ground. There’s a brief lull, not quite silence, and then it begins: with a rumble and boom, a terrible crunching, the crack and rustle of thatch as the first shanty collapses into a matchstick pile, pathetically small.

  Crouching next to a plastic cistern, Leo watches the bulldozers square off before the next row of shacks. Mouth open, heart pounding—something in her had not believed it would really happen. Soldiers move along the fences, spraying pepper spray into the eyes of protestors, dragging others through the dust while the dogs snarl and feint at their legs. And what now? What will you do about it? Go back, Leo. You can’t do anything, Leo. The worst part is, she knows they’re right: if she throws herself at a soldier, she’ll be overpowered in seconds; if she lies down in the street she’ll get shoved onto a bus, deported, or worse. It doesn’t matter what she does—by tomorrow there will be nothing left of Los Muertos but splinters, dented pots, heaps of smoldering thatch. The people who lived here will be forgotten. No handcuffs or camcorders can change that.

  But impotence is no excuse. It’s not good enough, not nearly—has she come all this way to stand and watch while human lives get smashed? “The world’s not perfect, Leo,” her mother said before she left, a statement so banal and cynical that, recalling it now, she lurches toward the bodega out of spite. Nauseated, choking on sand, she shields her eyes, pushes into the wind at a slant between two SUVs parked nose to nose. She puts a hand on the hood to steady herself—and in that instant something smashes into the windshield, a hot and stinging impact that whips past her face, startling her into a crouch.

  When she looks up there are flames sheeting across the glass, dancing across the black metal hood—she stumbles back toward the cemetery, hands and feet propelling her across the dusty street, another crash behind her, another wave of heat—an
d then she sees them through the haze of smoke and dust, like shadows in a dream: half a dozen figures sprinting through the settlement, faces covered in black ski masks, holding bottles stuffed with lit rags. Soldiers chase them between shanties, weapons drawn. Gasping in the stink of gasoline and burning plastic, Leo’s paralyzed, exposed, she can’t see Nancy or Ernesto through the hot, warped air—she staggers out of the path of another departing schoolbus, eyes streaming, hurls herself toward the nearest headstones but pulls up at the sight of another body racing toward her, a split-second impression of a black mask, a cocked arm holding flame—and then the jeep skids up behind her and someone is calling her name.

  “Leonora, get in!” he says, “Come on, amiga, vámonos.”

  She swipes at her eyes, retching on oily smoke. He leans across the seat and opens the passenger door, motions urgently—the man from the office, the one Nancy was arguing with, in her panic she can’t come up with his name.

  “Come on, trust me!” he says. “Let’s go.”

  The smash of another bottle, clatter of old wood collapsing—or is it gunfire?—and then she’s running to the jeep, pulling the door shut and ducking low, fumbling for the seatbelt as they swerve precariously downhill. They skirt the cemetery and lurch out into the dunes, Leo still clutching for the seatbelt, rolling her window pointlessly up and down, checking the glove box—for what?—wheezing and choking down bile, and forcing herself not to look back.

  * * *

  —

  In retrospect, she’d made a mistake—though there may have been no right way to tell her parents about the decision. She’d already waited months, biding her time at the Mission Outreach Project in San Francisco, distributing clean needles to the same ruined and hopeless clients, explaining in grade-school Spanish to a flood of undocumented mothers how to find services, get their children into school, apply for housing assistance—a job she’d held for three years but that had quickly come to seem pointless once she realized it would never end: for every client she helped, a hundred more were waiting. She lived in a dilapidated house on Bryant Street, six kids in a four-bedroom that got tagged every night. Her housemates were vegans and weed dealers and wanna-be Rastas several of whom were, like Leo, secretly studying for the LSATs. When she learned about Oportunidad Para Todos from Gabriel Zamir, who’d profiled Nancy Rojas in a book about Latin American NGOs, she wrote to them immediately. But then Matthew and Samira set their wedding date, and so she delayed yet again, and then she’d given away most of her belongings and sold her squeaky Volvo to buy a one-way plane ticket and was leaving in less than a week.