The Gringa Read online

  But Sendero was a nightmare—a long, bloodcurdling, wing-flapping horror whose shadow still loomed years after the country awoke. Anyone who would write about Leo Gelb has to understand this. From the moment their leader, Abimael Guzmán, launched his Maoist revolt until his unexpected capture twelve years later, Peruvians lived weightlessly, vulnerable at every moment, trapped between a violent personality cult and the vindictive rage of a lawless state. Between them, Sendero and the Army produced seventy thousand corpses, strewn from the Ayacucho highlands to the ancestral homes of Amazon tribes to Lima’s most exclusive enclaves. They lay in mass graves and secret prisons, they lay on busy streetcorners, or they lay nowhere at all—unidentified, unaccounted for, deep wounds that could never close. No one was immune, everyone at every level of society knew someone who was killed, or kidnapped, or disappeared, a generation wiped out as if by meteor or plague.

  The Cuarta Filosofía (Fourth Philosophy) was not the Shining Path—this, too, I had to learn. It was a footnote, one of a handful of militant groups whose ambitions were eclipsed by Sendero’s mayhem. Unlike Sendero, whose custom was to enter a town en masse, execute the mayor, and demand allegiance to Abimael, the Philosophers worked from within, gaining the trust of village councils and union leaders, the blessings of parish priests. Rough-cut Robin Hoods, they harassed only the wealthy and powerful, hijacking shipments of food and medicine, distributing the plunder in village plazas while bands played and armed cadres grilled chickens for the residents. Unlike Abimael, whose id-driven declarations ran to the grandiose (“The triumph of the revolution will cost a million deaths!”), the Philosophers projected modesty and determination: Only what is necessary, only what is right, was a common graffito, the two phrases encircling a large number 4.

  According to Gustavo Gorriti, Peru’s premier “senderologist,” both Sendero and the Cuarta Filosofía originated in the villages and farm communities of central and southeastern Peru—regions long exploited to the benefit of the distant capital, their resources pillaged, their darker-skinned residents treated with contempt. In these stony Andean reaches, Spanish was still a second language, subsistence farming the prevailing trade, and illiteracy the norm. Life expectancy was forty-five years, and a third of babies died before their first birthday. Discoveries of gold and zinc, copper and tin had brought not prosperity but cyanotic streams and poisoned aquifers, dynamited mountainsides, private roads for foreign corporations to move profits out of the country.

  “[The Philosophers] resisted Sendero’s rigid hierarchy and the bloody rhetoric of Abimael Guzmán,” Gorriti wrote in a 1999 postmortem, published in Caretas.

  They accepted democracy as a theoretical future, but did not believe it could be achieved until the oligarchy was dismantled and the economy reorganized according to socialist principles…Although they rejected Abimael’s vision of a Maoist peasant war, they had no illusions that change would come peacefully.

  Such distinctions mattered little to Peru’s military. In 1989 alone, more than four hundred Philosophers were killed in encounters with foot soldiers and helicopter patrols, or by ronderos—local militiamen armed by the government and given a free hand to cleanse their villages as they saw fit. Cadres were often lined up and executed with shots to the back of the head. The threat from Sendero was equally grave: Abimael brooked no competing ideology, his revolutionary fervor made no place for naïve sentiments about democracy and reform. Philosophers and Senderistas clashed in the hamlets of Apurímac and Junín, the deep gorges of the central sierra, and eventually the streets of Lima.

  “For a couple of years, you did not walk outside,” recalls Damien Cohen, a French journalist who covered the war for The Washington Post and has lived in Lima ever since. “This was in ’90, ’91. If you went somewhere, you called it in, you set a specific time when you’d be back. They were like children playing soldier,” he says. “Running around with Kalashnikovs, tin cans full of dynamite. Like it was a game, except the bombs were real.”

  Sendero and the CF fought for control of working-class barrios and pueblos jovenes—battles that went block to block and lasted for days. Youth groups and neighborhood councils were infiltrated, municipal buildings taken, dissenters driven out. At San Marcos, the public university near central Lima, dormitories were controlled by one group or the other, debates devolved into fistfights, parades erupted in gunfire.

  “I went to one of these ‘debates,’ ” says Cohen, frowning over a cloud of cigarette smoke. “It was a conference about AIDS, nothing to do with the war. After two minutes, a boy is standing on a desk, shouting, ‘Homosexuality is bourgeois decadence, and blah blah blah Abimael this and blah blah Mao Zedong this.’ Then another one, something about Fidel, Mariátegui, this mindless screaming, both of them, while their comrades are bashing each other over the head.”

  He stubs out his cigarette with a bemused look. “Teenagers. Acne on their faces. You wanted to laugh at them. But if you laugh, someone shoots you in the head.”

  All of this is relevant, all of it was new to me. But my editor says to cut most of it. He says readers don’t need all the background. They won’t read it.

  “Forget the small print,” he says. “Just focus on the girl.”

  The small print: oligarchy, treason, rivers of blood. Who wants to think about such things?

  He may be right. Certainly I’ve heard it before: Character is destiny, my teachers always said. History and politics bog down a story. They’re extraneous, a distraction from what really matters: the protagonist’s experience, her feelings. Show, don’t tell—haven’t I taught students the same thing?

  But how else will readers understand, how can they see it through Leo’s eyes? And even this leaves out too much: decades of military dictatorship, the 1980 elections, endemic corruption. It leaves out Tarata and La Cantuta, rumors about the C.I.A…

  I can’t leave out Tarata—the 1992 truck-bomb that killed twenty-five residents of an apartment building in the upscale Miraflores district. I can’t forget the footage: the building weeping flames, its facade blown away. It was an awakening, a turning point for middle-class limeños who until now had regarded the war as a vague disturbance happening in a not-quite-real part of the country. It was one thing for thousands of poor Indians to die in distant provinces, but this was Lima. There were protests, resolutions; the newspapers howled at the smallest acts of civil disobedience, called out leaders for leftist sympathies. They demanded that the government put an end to the conflict by any means necessary. Sendero Luminoso, MRTA, Red Flag, CF: after Tarata the differences no longer mattered. They were all terrorists, and terrorists must be stamped out.

  Two days later, a pre-dawn raid at La Cantuta, a college on the outskirts of Lima. Hundreds of students face-down on the sidewalks, soldiers’ rifles pointed at their heads. Nine students and a professor were bound, hooded, and taken away; leaked documents later described their torture, murder, and cremation by a special forces unit that took orders from the President’s closest advisor.

  All that year, the violence spiraled: banks and government buildings were bombed, state officials and businessmen kidnapped, assassinated in public places. Car bombs became so common that even now, fifteen years later, limeños still cross to the other side of the street when they see an old model illegally parked. The government raided businesses, union halls, public gatherings, and rounded up leftists of any stripe. Journalists and aid workers disappeared; students were arrested for possessing socialist pamphlets, CDs by indigenous musicians; demonstrations were met with live ammunition. The President suspended the Constitution, curtailed due process, brought the courts to heel. Terrorism was redefined in markedly vague terms, brought under jurisdiction of a military with little use for notions of “human rights.”

  More history. More small print, I suppose.

  Then, in September, Abimael Guzmán was captured, dragged from a Lima safe house and hauled to the naval base i
n Callao, displayed to the media in a striped prison suit, pacing a metal cage. The President vowed to chase any remaining terrorists into the barrios, the mountains, to find and destroy their training camps without mercy “until the children and stepchildren of Abimael have been wiped off the face of the earth.”

  It was over. After twelve years limeños were desperate to forget the war, though their city was in ruins and thousands were missing. By the time Leo arrived, five years later, denial had taken hold, abetted by triumphant reports of foreign investment and double-digit growth. The media obsessed over the private lives of soccer players and socialites, once again ignoring starvation and disease in the countryside. But in the provinces, the barrios, those who had lost family members or spent time in the dictator’s dungeons didn’t forget what side their neighbors were on. Even now, you find graffiti in Lima districts, in forgotten villages—¡Viva Abimael! emblazoned on a water tower, or a giant 4 on the side of a Pizza Hut. Once, in Babilonia, I saw an argument erupt at an outdoor concert. Three men held their hands over their hearts, thumbs hidden: the number four. They faced off against a cohort of shorter, darker men in heavy sweaters and llama herders’ hats—Senderistas, my date said. We’d been there for hours, dancing ecstatically in cold sunshine, warmed by local beer. She dragged me away from the fight. Please, Andres, now, please…Anything could happen, she said, her voice pinched with fear. I was indignant. The pointlessness of it, the stupidity! The war was a million years ago, I said. My date pulled me steadily through the crowd. Why hold on to these old allegiances? It was tribal, I said, barbaric. Why would you want to ruin things when everyone was having a good time?

  * * *

  —

  She’s only been to Nancy’s house once. During her first week at Oportunidad, a small party to welcome Leo and the two German girls, whose names she’s already forgotten. They’d found their way through Campo Elíseo, one of Los Arenales’ original sectors, to an unpaved street of blocky two- and three-story homes painted coral and toothpaste-green. Inside they slurped pork stew from paper bowls and clinked bottles of Cuzqueña while Nancy’s husband—a small man with a neat mustache and V-neck sweater—sat smoking on the front stoop. The Germans babbled in perfect Spanish and Leo, alone on the couch, squinted at her lap and tried to follow.

  “California?” Nancy’s youngest son handed her a fresh beer and sat warily at the other end of the couch. He was seventeen or eighteen, with a wide face and prominent brow, and long-lashed, watchful eyes.

  “Sí.”

  “When—” he began, then shook his head to correct himself. “Which part?”

  “San Francisco. Pero yo nací en Nuevo Jersey.”

  Ernesto’s smile shifted all his features. He pulled his sweater up to reveal a faded concert T-shirt: PEARL JAMMIN’ AT THE GREEK, HALLOWEEN 1993, it read, over an image of Eddie Vedder swinging on a cable: gleaming eyes, bared teeth.

  “You know this place?” Ernesto asked. “You study in Berkeley University?”

  Leo laughed. She didn’t remember the concert, but it was likely her roommates had gone. “I went to another school, very close to Berkeley.”

  Ernesto nodded eagerly, half understanding. There was a knock at the back door and Leo heard Nancy talking to someone in low, impatient tones. Ernesto was taking accounting classes in Lima, he said. His teacher had said that after two years, if he scored well on the TOEFL, he could apply for a scholarship to the U.S.

  “Berkeley,” he said, pointing to the shirt, “is my dream. I have the most…the best English of the class. I gain a prize.”

  Leo was offering to help him study when the kitchen door slammed, rattling the windows. The German girls raised their eyebrows. “Neto, get upstairs,” Nancy said, striding back into the room. “Don’t you have a test tomorrow?”

  Leo had forgotten about that party in the busy weeks and months that followed. On the morning of the funeral, as she turns onto Nancy’s street, she remembers that knock at the kitchen door, Nancy’s worried expression, and it comes to her with a jolt that it must have been Chaski.

  She finds Nancy’s husband smoking on the stoop again, with a group of men arguing in low voices. They watch her suspiciously as she passes through the gate.

  “Who are you?” says a man in a black leather jacket.

  “I work with Nancy,” she says, adding, “Y soy una amiga de Ernesto.”

  The newspapers called it “Massacre in Los Muertos.” Four dead, including two children; three demonstrators not yet accounted for. Oportunidad Para Todos hasn’t reopened since that morning; instead of working at a Christmas dinner in a community kitchen, Leo spent the day deciphering the newspapers in her hostel, sharing a plate of noodles from a street cart with another Jewish girl, a backpacker from Ireland who left for Bolivia the next morning. She learned the names of the missing from the lobby TV.

  She hears Nancy’s voice as soon as she enters the house. “No, papito, don’t tell me that,” Nancy snaps at the phone, in the wry, exacting tone Leo’s heard her use on city officials and delinquent contractors. Through the kitchen door Leo sees her leaning against the refrigerator, smoking with fierce concentration. “Listen to me, Guillermo. Talk to Freddy. Today, you understand? Go up to Luri and find that idiot, okay?”

  In the front room, three women sit at a card table, studying a pile of folders; Leo recognizes one of them from her ESL class. Newspapers cover the floor and couch; coffee mugs sit on windowsills, the ancient television, the bottom stair. Nancy hangs up and considers her cigarette, takes another long drag before smashing it into an ashtray.

  “Leo, hija,” she says. The women look up. “Nobody told you? I’m sorry, the office is still closed.”

  “No, pero…” When she’s nervous her Spanish regresses to short, tenseless sentences. “I know. I come for the funeral.”

  Nancy searches for the cigarette pack. “The idiots,” she says distractedly. “The cemetery is ruined. The army is still there. If they try to go to Los Muertos, they’ll need more coffins. Marisol,” she says, “what did they say?”

  The woman from Leo’s class, hair dyed copper and pulled into a bun, shuffles her notes. “Channel 2 said maybe next week.”

  “The others?” Marisol shakes her head. “Call again,” Nancy says. “Leo, you want something to drink? You want a cigarette? I’m sorry it’s so disorganized. There are a lot of people we have to talk to. No one important in this city ever goes to their office. Manuel and Tito are in Lima, but I have to be here—”

  “I’m sorry about Ernesto.”

  Nancy links her arm through Leo’s. “Okay, hija. Don’t worry, he’ll come back soon. Look, it’s so hot here today. All the classes are cancelled. Those other girls, the Germans, I don’t know—maybe this isn’t why they came to Peru, you know?”

  “Let me help,” Leo says. “Give me something to do.”

  “Call Bill Clinton,” one of the women mutters.

  “Shut up, María Luisa,” Nancy says, not ungently.

  “I can talk to someone. You have a photo of Ernesto?” She trails off, noticing the image on the front page of the morning paper: three children, none older than ten, crying next to a heap of broken wood. “Maybe I go to the embassy—”

  “The embassy? Why would they care?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, embarrassed, envious of the women at the table, their shared purpose. “Because I’m American?”

  Marisol fixes Leo in a stare. “Somos todas Americanas,” she says.

  “You’re very generous,” Nancy says. “The people who can help are lawyers, ministers, judges. Can you write a petition of habeas corpus?” She sits on the arm of the couch and balances the ashtray on her knee. “Don’t worry. Neto will come home. This isn’t 1990. People don’t disappear.”

  “What about Chaski?” Leo says. “Does he know people like that?”

  At this, the women turn to Nanc
y, talking over one another in Quechua. “Don’t talk to me about Chaski,” Nancy says, poking her cigarette at Leo. “Those assholes don’t care about my Neto. Los Arenales was quiet, you understand? And now you see? Babies. They killed two babies. And where is your friend Chaski?

  “Listen to me,” she says. “Go back to Lima. The office will open in a few days, then you come back and keep teaching these fat cows how to speak English. Until then, it’s better you are invisible. You aren’t arenaleña, you aren’t peruana. If you start talking to people it only justifies their suspicions.” She brushes ashes from her lap and moves toward the stairs. “Don’t make a mistake, hija.”

  When Leo steps outside, the men stare bluntly. The morning heat prickles under her sweater. At the end of the street, the noisy crowd is passing by on its way to the funeral. Ernesto’s face floats through the intersection on a placard—outsized, black and white—followed by those of the other two missing protestors.

  Nancy’s husband sits at the edge of the stoop, hands spread over his knees. “Don’t worry, señor,” Leo says, squatting next to him. “Neto will come home.” He stares blankly at her. A thin scar slants up one side of his nose, ending in a white lump at the corner of his eye, like the head of a tiny worm. “He didn’t do anything,” she says. “They have to let him go. He’s innocent.”

  “The innocent people were on the buses,” says the man in the leather jacket. He has wavy gray hair, a deep, avuncular voice. “The soldiers helped the women up the steps. For Neto and his friends, they pulled hoods over their heads and threw them in the trunk of a car.” Leo looks from one face to the next, then back to the man, who slowly takes off his jacket. His right forearm is a gnarled tangle of flesh, his last two fingers missing, the skin sealed so tight it twists the remaining fingers into a claw.