The Gringa Page 3

  “But why?” was her mother’s reaction. “I don’t understand.”

  They stood at the edge of the dance floor while the band broke down and the bride and groom said goodbye to their wedding party in the marble foyer. Her father was on the terrace overlooking the vineyard, having a cigar with the bride’s father and brothers. It had been a lavish affair, $200 centerpieces and scale models of Venetian bridges, gondoliers roaming the ballroom with accordions. Leo was as appalled by the show of wealth as she was by the behavior of Matt’s business-school buddies, who’d had crystal shot glasses engraved for the occasion and who leaned on the bar and licked salt and lemon off the bridesmaids’ necks. Gabriel had a name for such people: he called them “the ruling class,” and Leo’d had more than enough of them at Stanford.

  “What about the LSATs?” her mother was saying. She wore a billowing crêpe de chine dress in rose and ochre that Leo thought made her look like a stuffed mushroom. “There are application deadlines, you wanted to visit Yale. I can’t understand this.”

  “No, you wanted me to visit Yale,” Leo said, immediately regretting her combative tone. She’d chosen to tell her mother first not only because Maxine had once, long ago, been active in political causes—a college summer in Mississippi registering voters, a month canvassing for Bobby Kennedy—but because Leo suspected her father would be genuinely crushed. Still, she knew her mother was telling the truth: having spent decades swaddled in suburban privilege and cut off from reality, Maxine really couldn’t understand it. It was as if that idealistic young woman had never existed.

  “Mom, please, I need you to listen—”

  “Tell it to your father, Leonora. See what he thinks,” Maxine said, waving to the wedding planner across the room. Matt and Samira would fly to Italy in the morning for a two-week honeymoon, then take a cruise ship back to New York, where a job at an investment bank awaited him. Her parents planned to stay in Napa another few days. They had reservations at the French Laundry. “This makes no sense at all.”

  Leo closed her eyes. There was no way to explain. It would sound ridiculous to say that her work, her Stanford degree, her whole life made her feel complicit, ridiculous to say that $200 centerpieces and crêpe de chine were killing her. The whole production: the swing band, the fake Rialto built for the ceremony, the groomsmen’s immaculate shaves. The way everyone in this room felt immune to misfortune. It was all killing her. She was choking, as if someone had wadded up satin bunting and rammed it down her throat.

  “I can’t live with myself, Mom.”

  Maxine took off her heels and winced. “Don’t take that out on the rest of us.”

  She didn’t call them for ten days after arriving in Lima. Let them worry, she thought. Let them indulge their worst fantasies about poor, brown people. The first time she rode the bus to Los Arenales, packed in with drowsing swing-shift workers and old campesinas in wool sweaters, she knew she’d been right. She belonged here—among people who understood that life was an uncompromising struggle, who knew what things were really worth. They jounced south on the Panamericana, through gray slums that stank of truck exhaust, tiers of half-built hovels the color of sand or toothpaste, barely visible against the dry hills. The land emptied and flattened, punctuated now by the occasional lumberyard or unfinished brick wall, by desultory outposts of concrete and rebar. Lima, its belligerence, its traffic and noise and jostle, fell far behind. The bus slowed, easing itself onto the patched dirt thoroughfare that led into Los Arenales. Passengers took out handkerchiefs, pulled shirt collars over mouths and noses as they rocked slowly through a street market that reeked of fish. Pedestrians parted to let the bus pass. Out the window, men in tire-tread sandals bent under canvas sacks, squat women in bowler hats, black skirts hemmed with muck. A boy of five or six urinated on the side of a combi with no tires. A teenage girl in a new white dress chased another through the makeshift stalls.

  The bus let them off at the side of a small plaza, where old men sat playing chess and women carried flat boxes holding cigarettes, candy, soap, phone cards, and biscuits slung around their necks. Leo was instantly mobbed by drivers who shouted and fought to pull her to their three-wheeled moto-taxis; she chose the least aggressive, a tall, deeply tanned man in his sixties with close-cropped white hair who offered his arm as she stepped over puddles. They puttered from one sector to another, shuddering into potholes and darting, flylike, across busy avenues with unmarked, unobserved lanes, pedestrians cowering by berms of rubble. Leo’s teeth clacked, her backside banged painfully on the metal seat. By the time she arrived at the office, in a half-deserted neighborhood of warehouses, and presented herself to Nancy, she had resolved never to go home.

  When she finally spoke to her parents she’d been working at Oportunidad for a week and she was so obviously happy that her mother could only ask, with barely concealed exasperation, if she was taking care of herself. “They give the LSATs in Lima once a year,” Maxine said, but Leo could hear in her careful tone the acceptance of defeat. Her father asked about the food. He said he couldn’t wait to visit. Leo hung up the payphone and beamed at the shabby lobby of her hostel—antediluvian stuffed furniture, weird statues hiding in gloom under the stairs. She’d done it, she’d really done it—already she had an ESL class of her own and Nancy was training her to teach basic reading skills. She’d met men and women from all over Los Arenales, people who’d helped build their sectors with their bare hands, taught themselves to be bricklayers, nurses, firefighters, teachers—taking care of one another, protecting one another in those first vulnerable years. A well-dressed man in his thirties, the head of a neighborhood council, wept with pride as he showed her an old photo and recalled the square of parched land his family came to when he was nine. “My father,” he said, crossing himself, “he never had anything. All he wanted was to work.”

  On Monday, she’d gone with the German girls to San Sebastian, one of the newer sectors, and helped dig a trench for water mains. The two-room brick houses had no glass in the windows, blue tarps for roofs, but each had a little picket fence protecting a few square feet of dirt. Panting in the dank air, her back cramping, Leo gripped the shovel and heaved until skin peeled from her hands. With every load of dirt, every stone she pried out with her fingers, she felt the years of uselessness, of bitter acceptance, receding. No more studying problems from afar. No more pointless demonstrations in Sacramento. No more grant applications or fundraisers, begging for crumbs to keep other human beings alive. Here in Los Arenales she would finally accomplish something. Side by side with arenaleños, she could build a new reality with her own two hands.

  In her third week the government posted an eviction notice on the side of the bodega in Los Muertos. Nancy and two lawyers went to Lima to try to get a court order but the judge, whose wife was the niece of the Vice Minister of Tourism, refused to see them. The graffiti started appearing two weeks before Christmas: Viene el Cuatro. “What does it mean,” she asked a co-worker, “ ‘Here comes the Four’?” But the woman frowned and waved her off. Her foreman at the trench said, “It’s a game. People call themselves Philosophers. It’s nothing.” But as she walked through Los Arenales—some sectors still muddy clusters of construction materials; others with supermarkets and electronics stores, motorcycle dealers and strip clubs—she had the growing recognition of how little she yet knew. Behind the determination of its older residents, the frantic scrabbling of newcomers, there were histories and allegiances she couldn’t make out, codes and gestures, competitions for influence, matrices overlaid like the schematic of a complex machine. It was one thing to teach English, to lay pipe—to help. But she would not truly belong here until she understood these invisible networks, until she could read the map behind the map. Back in Lima, stiff and exhausted, she lay awake imagining the long bus ride, the way the land changed slowly, until at last they were somewhere else. She chided herself for her fantasy of having become someone different. She wasn’t t
here yet.

  * * *

  —

  The protest at Los Muertos is a matter of record, of history. Not hard to find in newspaper archives or other chronicles of the time. “Somehow she left, I don’t know,” is what Nancy Rojas told me. “Maybe with Chaski, or whatever that asshole’s name was,” she said. “It’s possible, yes. Why not?”

  From there, the scene goes blank. One of countless gaps to be filled in. But who am I to say what happened?

  My friend says, “You’re the writer, Andres.”

  The jeep pitches across the desert in sharp turns, stretches of hard rattle and sudden drops that hammer in Leo’s jaw. The driver checks the rearview often, his face slowly relaxing, eyes growing thoughtful. There’s no sign of the skirmish behind them, only a faint smell of burning gasoline on the wind. Up ahead, Los Arenales’ haphazard skyline notches the horizon; soon the dunes start to flatten as they descend toward a semi-paved road marked with lean-to’s and brick huts. Leo, her throat raw, teeth faintly chattering, stares straight ahead, gripping her knees in the first bloom of shame.

  “You’re hurt?” the driver asks, glancing at the side of her face.

  “What was that back there?” she says. She still won’t look at him. “Chaski—that’s your name, right? What the fuck was that?”

  Little by little, the roadside fills with civilization: lumber piles, streetlights, an open tent emblazoned with a beer logo. With each flash of shadow, she sees again the masked figure running through the cemetery, arm cocked, the flaming bottle—it was a woman, she realizes, remembering the long braid at her back. Somehow this makes it worse.

  “Nancy told you not to come, didn’t she? You and those—” she rolls the word around on her tongue—“philosophers.”

  Amusement lifts his high brow. He has thick black hair sweeping back from his temples, a wide and artless gaze. Over a black T-shirt he wears a tiny gold cross on a thin chain. “Relax, Leonora. It’s not so bad.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Everybody knows your name. You’re the gringa. The one who came to help us.”

  His mockery only makes the nausea worse. Her head throbs, her stomach clenches. When she swipes at her cheek, blood streaks her fingers. She remembers the smash of glass, the sudden heat. She’d run away so quickly.

  “Don’t call me ‘gringa.’ ”

  “But you are a gringa.”

  “I’m American.”

  “Somos todos americanos,” Chaski says—We are all Americans—gently teasing, trying to soothe her. But his solicitude only stokes the anger that’s been building since she got into the jeep.

  “Why did you leave?” she says, turning now to look at him. “Why aren’t you back there burning things with your friends?”

  “My friends?”

  “What if someone was in that car? You could have killed them.”

  Chaski absently fingers the little cross. “Is it better they do nothing? They should lie down while the government takes away everything?”

  Leo sits back and peers at the hazy skyline, patches of light blue shifting as the fog burns off. It was she who’d done nothing. Who’d stood like a frightened child and then fled at the first opportunity. Again she hears the crack of breaking thatch. Again sees the burning car, flames skittering across the hood, Ernesto and the others pumping their fists on the roof of the bodega while she cowered below. Shame wells higher in her throat, a taste like polished silver.

  “We have to go back,” she hears herself saying. “We have to help them.” When Chaski doesn’t answer, she smacks the seat with her palm, her fury only deepened by the childish gesture. “Did you see them back there? Nancy and the others? Neto was on the roof! What’s going to happen to them? And you just drive away like they don’t matter? What did you even come for, if you just take off when it gets bad?”

  He waits until her breath is spent. “Those people had no chance. Los Muertos had no chance. It was finished the minute the government decided. Nancy knew that.”

  “Then why—” she sputters, but he stops her with another bright smile.

  “I thought you are supposed to be smart, Leonora. What happened at Los Muertos was a victory, you don’t understand?”

  “A victory?”

  “Where were the cameras? Was anyone there from TV? A thousand people lose their homes because of a hotel for rich people. Isn’t this a big story? Los Muertos could not be saved,” he says. “Nobody thought the bulldozers would stop. We don’t want them to stop! Why, so a thousand people can keep living with no light, no water, shitting in a ditch, every time it rains they are dying from cholera? You want to save that?”

  He stamps on the brake as a rusty, overcrowded minibus pulls ahead of them, spewing a brown cloud over the windshield. “Now people will know. They’ll talk about this on the radio, or the TV, and they’ll see the government is lying when it says all the problems were because of the war. They will see how the murderers attack their own people. And they will say that something must be done.”

  She turns away, her anger evaporating as quickly as it came. Propaganda by deed. That’s the phrase that comes to her—a phrase she first learned in Gabriel’s class, one she heard repeated by Black Power activists, environmental warriors, old Berkeley hippies. Move past the rhetoric. Action is its own explanation. Until now she hadn’t grasped the cold calculation. She hadn’t known it stank of kerosene.

  “But you’re the ones who attacked,” she says, exhaustion making her voice raspy. “It was a peaceful demonstration until your friends showed up.”

  “I told you, they’re not my friends.”

  “That’s what Nancy said, wasn’t it? She didn’t want violence. That’s why she told you to stay away. She didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “Leonora,” he says, “tell me a story where somebody doesn’t get hurt.”

  The jeep noses up an unpaved grade, where a gas pump and concrete hut sit at the side of the highway. Chaski gets out and tosses the keys onto her lap. When he disappears into the bodega she closes her eyes, stamps her feet on the floorboards while the traffic passes hot and roaring a few yards away. People had lost everything. They were herded like animals and they lost everything and she’d run. “The gringa who came to help us”—she flushes, seeing now what they must think of her: so earnest, so insistent, demanding a chance to do something. But when the chance came, she’d done nothing—nobody had. ESL hadn’t helped the people of Los Muertos. Opportunity hadn’t saved their homes. All Nancy and her colleagues had managed was to make noise, maybe get arrested. What was the point?

  She could go back—that’s why Chaski left her the keys, wasn’t it? She could find her way to Los Muertos, tend to whomever was left. They could clean up, maybe even start to rebuild—there would be wood, unburned thatch…But that would be just another pointless gesture, pure symbolism. The memory of the woman in the ski mask comes back to her, the blast of heat. The force of what happened crests above her like a giant wave; she hunches under it, puts her face in her hands and lets out a single, shaky sob.

  When Chaski slides back into the jeep he hands her a paper napkin, leans over to examine the light hatching of cuts on her cheek. “How did you get these?”

  “What does ‘Viene el Cuatro’ mean?” she says.

  “It’s a slogan,” he says. “You know, like political parties have.”

  “A political party? When are the elections?”

  He smiles, then plucks the keys from her lap and they merge onto the highway, accelerating past combis, moto-taxis, rusted Japanese sedans—arenaleños flocking to jobs and markets in Lima. He offers her a plastic bottle of Coca-Cola, but she waves it away.

  “Elections aren’t important,” he says, honking when a panel truck cuts him off. “The dictator was elected. Elections only decide who will have more money in their pockets.”

 
“What does it mean?”

  He raises his chin without looking at her. “It means someone is watching.”

  “Who? Philosophers?”

  Chaski lets out a dry laugh. In the hills to the east, adobe huts cling to the slopes like pieces of a filthy jigsaw puzzle. A victory. But nothing had changed today. No one had been helped. She squints at the gray hillside, at a tiny, bent figure climbing an endless stair.

  “They were real people,” she says, clutching at what’s left of her indignation. When she gets no answer she lunges for the steering wheel and shakes it violently, provoking a volley of horns as they swerve across the lane. “You can’t just sacrifice them. You can’t just say there’s nothing you can do.”

  Chaski lifts his hands from the wheel, leaving her in unsteady control as the jeep speeds ahead. Leaning back, he unscrews the Coke bottle and takes a long drink.

  “Amiga, when did I say there is nothing you can do?”

  2

  Here’s what I knew about the war: I knew there’d been one. A dirty one, though like most Americans I didn’t yet know what that meant. I’d heard of the Shining Path—maybe in some long-ago history class or cable documentary—but I couldn’t have told you the first thing about their beliefs or their tactics. I couldn’t have said when the war began (1980) or when it ended (1992), or how close it came to bringing down the Peruvian state. When friends referred to “Sendero Luminoso,” I nodded gravely, mirroring their grief. But I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to know details, body counts, who butchered whom. I didn’t want to hear the arguments, though I knew they still festered; the fury and righteousness, the fear of one’s neighbor, were too familiar, reminders of a life I’d tried to leave behind.