The Gringa Page 5

  “If they take you like that, it’s better you’re not innocent,” he says. “If they torture you, and they decide you’re innocent, it’s not possible to release you. You understand, chiquitita? They can’t be implicated in torture. So you have to disappear.

  “Your boyfriend, Chaski, knows this.” He puts his mangled arm around her as the three faces float past the corner again, gray and inert as pages from a history book. “In this country, to be innocent is the worst mistake you can make.”

  * * *

  —

  But I’m not sure how well she even knew Ernesto Paucar Rojas. They couldn’t have met more than a handful of times. Former employees of Oportunidad Para Todos told me he would sometimes stop by the office, a two-room concrete hut in the Las Brisas sector, before catching the bus to his classes in Lima. Maybe they rode together, Leo and Neto. Maybe they spent the hour practicing his English, practicing her Spanish. Yes, why not? Maybe she asked him about growing up in Los Arenales, about Chaski and the strange graffiti. He asked about California, about the swimming pools and red convertibles, the blond girls in bikinis he’d seen on Melrose Place and in Snoop Dogg videos. Most Peruvians I meet want to know about those girls. They want to know about the mansions.

  Or maybe they talked about their brothers: Manuel, who drove a taxi but wanted to study law, and Tito, who worked at an elementary school and was jailed when the union went on strike; Matthew, whose greatest challenge in life was the co-op board at the Murray Hill apartment Samira’s father bought them as a wedding gift. Leo would have been pleased by these conversations. She would have sought them out. At work she was just one more disposable do-gooder, but she wanted to be something else, to know Peru and its people from the inside. She wanted to make connections, to change herself. And what better proof she’d done so than this: she’d made a friend.

  “Why you are here?” Ernesto asked the last time they’d met, a week before Christmas. He avoided her eyes, doodled in the exercise book she held on her lap. She was starting to think he might have a crush on her.

  “I love it here,” she said. “I love this country.” He squinted, frankly skeptical. She’d showed him pictures of Stanford, described the old house in the Mission with its pear tree and unruly wisteria, its sagging back porch. “People like me have an obligation…” she began, but broke off, hearing the note of condescension.

  Yes, why not?

  I have her at the vigil at Nancy’s on the day of the funeral. But where did she go from there? I can see her joining the procession, linking arms with arenaleños as they picked their way from sector to sector, holding their banners and blown-up photos. The air full of sirens, bullhorns, chants shouted from the backs of pickup trucks. But Leo had seen plenty of protests—in downtown Lima the previous week alone there were marches by sanitation workers, veterans, municipal clerks, something called Poder de Juventud. Nothing was accomplished. They marched, screamed themselves hoarse, burned the occasional effigy—but no one expected anything to happen. No one thought the President and his ministers could be moved by shouting. So I can see her there, with that sad, angry crowd. But not for long.

  When she arrives at the office, she finds the front room scattered with picket signs and half-rolled banners. Someone has taped the giant photo of Ernesto to the wall: a handsome teenager in a pressed shirt and collar, his hair neatly combed. She can still hear the noise of the procession, its volume cresting as it winds toward Los Muertos. In the classroom, Chaski sits behind the teacher’s desk, hands folded, while an older man stands before him and sobs.

  “Mi Juancito,” the man says. “No tengo otro hijo, ¿me entiende?” He holds his hat over his heart, bows his head when Chaski slides something across the desk. Everything is as Leo left it: the faded map of Peru, half a dozen student desks, and an old flippable blackboard marked with verb conjugations: I have, You have, He/She has. “What will I do?” the man says as he takes the money. “My spouse, she died in the war.”

  When he leaves, Chaski looks up to meet Leo’s stare. “I hope you’re happy,” she says. “I hope that picture in the newspaper was worth it. How much are you paying the families, anyway?”

  His eyes follow her across the room. “Leonora—”

  “Did you read the story in El Comercio? They said it was a street gang that burned those cars. ‘Delincuentes.’ They didn’t mention ‘viene el Cuatro.’ You didn’t get your free publicity. That man’s son died for nothing. For your victory.”

  “Juancito isn’t dead, only missing—”

  “Like Ernesto.”

  Chaski sighs and looks away. “Nobody made the government do these things.”

  “But you knew they would,” Leo says.

  Wordless, he stands and clasps his hands behind his neck. He’s taller than she realized, his arms thin, almost fragile, one wrist encircled by a loop of red and gold yarn. When he stops at the blackboard, scanning the scrawled vocabulary, the plaintive tilt of his head makes Leo regret her accusation.

  “If somebody burns your car, that means you kill their baby?” he says. “If somebody takes your food, you break their arms? Why someone can’t defend his house without dying?

  “Juancito’s father, Eulogio? He had a business, a good business, selling books outside the university. After Tarata the police came and took everything. They beat him until he almost died. So Juancito left school and went to work delivering pizza in San Isidro. Only tips, and he has to buy the gas. He makes twenty dollars a week. Maybe twenty-five. But when someone steals the scooter, the dueño makes him pay the whole thing, six hundred dollars, or he says he’ll call his brother in the National Police and denounce Juancito as a terrorist. Nalda, who is also missing? Her cousin was at La Cantuta when the death squad came. They don’t kill him, but since he leaves the jail his mother has to feed him with a spoon. Her father works in a copper mine in Cajamarca. He sends one hundred dollars a month and comes home twice a year. The mining company makes a hundred million a year, and all of it leaves the country, because the dictator sold the rights. Nothing for Peruvians. Nothing for his own people.”

  He delivers this speech in a quiet voice, staring at the floor in disbelief. Out the window, a bus rattles past on the highway, the squeal of a cracked engine belt trailing toward Lima. When he looks up at Leo, she turns away.

  “That doesn’t make it right,” she mutters, hating herself, this useless anger. Chaski had known Ernesto, too. He’d known all of them. The mockery of the man with the maimed arm still rankles. He was right: she didn’t understand, not really. She hadn’t lived through any of it. Still, part of her wants to retort: But I’m here!

  “If there’s violence, let it be on their conscience,” she says. “We’re supposed to be better.”

  With a tired smile, Chaski untwists the chain around his neck. “If you’re fighting for your life, how do you worry about keeping your hands clean?”

  In silence, they straighten the classroom, moving desks, pushing the blackboard into the corner. As Chaski gathers the placards, folding the smiling faces of Ernesto, Nalda, and Juancito under one arm, Leo’s heart swells with sympathy: he’s young, smart, good-looking in a puppyish way. Surely he didn’t want to be here, she thinks. He must have ambitions, desires, dreams of being someone else. But he’s put those things aside. Has she ever been so selfless? Has anything she’s done not come back to herself?

  “What will you do now?” she asks as they walk outside.

  Chaski shrugs. “They don’t tell me yet. It’s not for me to decide.”

  “Who? Who decides?” She thinks of the woman in the cemetery, her flaming bottle. Of the graffito that appeared on the steps of the National Cathedral the morning after the massacre: Solo lo necesario. And the number 4.

  “Why do you want to know this?”

  “I want to understand,” she says. Then, blushing, “Where are these people? Maybe I want to meet them.”<
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  A dust-coated combi pulls to the side of the road and lets off passengers. Beyond it stands an abandoned playground, netless basketball hoops and a solitary picnic table. In three months she’s never seen children playing there. When the combi pulls away, two old women in bowler hats pick their way through the trash and dust. Chaski’s eyes follow them until they’ve vanished into the neighborhood.

  “They’re everywhere.”

  3

  In the first weeks of writing this story, I put together something I called the Leo File: an assortment of news clippings and photos and transcripts, downloaded documents, printouts from microfiche, lists and timelines, notes to myself. At first, as the folder got thicker, I felt reassured, a soldier going into battle with a pack full of gear. I spent hours staring at grainy images, reading page after page of history, politics, waiting for the story to open itself and let me in.

  But soon the Leo File came to oppress me—there was just so much, every article or photo led to others, every answer raised a dozen more questions. I bought a second folder, then an accordion file, but it, too, kept growing, expanding in the vacuum of my ignorance. Everything seemed relevant, everything in the last fifty years connected to Leonora somehow. With so much information, how could I ever begin?

  Among more familiar images of Leonora—shouting at the press conference, being led in handcuffs to a waiting helicopter—I found one taken at a café in Miraflores. Here she is, relaxing at a sidewalk table, smiling over a bottle of Inca Kola. Her face is flushed and healthy, bare shoulders splashed with sun, a copy of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth lying next to a vase with a fake pink carnation. She could be anyone: a college student on semester abroad, a backpacker taking a day’s leisure. The undated photo ran in the Bergen Record, her parents’ local paper, during the trial. From the decorations in the park behind her, I’d guess it was taken soon after New Year’s, 1998.

  I’d guess she was there on Chaski’s instructions. That it was Chaski who’d told her to order the foul-tasting Inca Kola—No ice, no glass—and then to wait. He hadn’t said anything more. It seems plausible, this first meeting, even necessary. Or did I read it in a novel by Graham Greene?

  She’d imagined a smoke-filled warren, maybe underground, a metal door, a password. But the Café Haiti is bright and loud, crowded with locals in designer sunglasses, European tourists who leave expensive cameras right on the table. Across the street the prim park bustles with pedestrians, sidewalk easels, nannies pushing strollers. Then as now, Miraflores, with its broad avenidas and sweet, peppery ocean air, is worlds away from Los Arenales. The jewelry boutiques and department stores would not seem out of place on Fifth Avenue or in Union Square. If her mother could see her now, Leo thinks, she’d feel much better.

  She waits more than an hour, sipping the nasty soda and watching schoolchildren and businessmen walk past. She tries to look confident and casual, trustworthy. More than once she resolves to leave, remembering suddenly the woman in the ski mask racing through Los Muertos—that wasn’t what Leo wanted, not someone she could ever be. But Ernesto and the others are still missing, she reminds herself. For all their persistence Nancy and her friends haven’t heard anything, not even confirmation of his arrest. To do nothing is impossible, immoral, she reminds herself, staring blankly at her book. To let it be other people’s problem, other people’s lives. That’s not why she came to Peru.

  When she looks up, a waiter is standing over her, arms crossed. “¿No viene tu amigo?” he says. Thick and broad-chested, not quite tall, he wears a tiny silver ring in one ear, a thatch of dark hair at his chin. His eyes are a surprising cool blue. “Your friend, he doesn’t come?”

  “Soon,” she says, checking an invisible watch.

  “Sorry,” he says in English. “You keep this table, you gotta spend more money.”

  She rolls her eyes, picks up her book. “Where does it say that?”

  Then he’s sitting across from her, arms folded on the back of a chair. “Perros, son hombres, no? Men are dogs.” He’s Leo’s age, maybe younger, his voice low and swampy, something predatory in his smile. “You meet someone in a discoteca last night, maybe go back to the hotel with him, now he doesn’t want to see you. Qué terrible.”

  “Excuse me? It’s none of your business. Déjame en paz,” she says. The oversweet drink has begun to sit heavily in her stomach. All afternoon a tingling headache has lurked at the base of her scalp. “Leave me alone. I just want something to drink.”

  “Inca Kola,” he says.

  “Is it a problem?”

  He shakes his head slowly. “No problem, Soltera. Only you pay now, okay?”

  She ignores the insult—soltera, spinster—and takes out two filthy bills, worn cottony thin. He gives a mock bow and walks to the back of the café, stands against the bar with one foot on the rail. Over his shoulder, he says something to the bartender, who looks her way and laughs. She tries to ignore them, to focus on her book, but the sourness in her stomach has tightened to a small sharp ache, like a hot pebble. She’d bought lunch at a street market: a bowl of thick soup with a webbed, pimply chicken foot floating in the murk. She’d drunk every drop, gratified by the old cook’s approving stare.

  When the waiter comes back he lays one of the bills flat on the table. “Lo siento, Soltera. We don’t accept these.”

  “What?”

  “It’s counterfeit.”

  “No, it’s not,” she says. Just that morning she’d changed her last dollars on the street, haggling the rate with a slow-eyed young woman and her calculator. “What about the other one?”

  He smooths the bill on the table, scratches at a corner. “Qué pain in the ass,” he mutters. “You got a credit card?”

  “No.” She fumbles in her pocket. “This is crazy.” Two well-coiffed women at the next table watch and whisper behind their hands. The heat in her belly gives a sudden stab. She doesn’t know if the waiter is flirting or just tormenting her for fun—it wouldn’t be the first time she’s been the object of what limeños consider their rough charm.

  “You kidding? Your father didn’t give you a credit card? He lets his little girl walk around this dangerous place with no money?”

  “I have money,” she says.

  “Yeah? How much?” He leans in and speaks quietly, his eyes dark now and unblinking. “Can’t do anything without money, Soltera. Maybe you got some back at the hotel? You want to call the Sheraton?”

  “I’m not staying at the Sheraton.”

  “No shit? Where you staying?”

  She swipes the bills off the table and closes her book. When she stands, the headache lunges across her eyes, the taste of the greasy soup bubbles into her throat. “Is there a manager I can talk to?”

  “This is a good attitude,” he says. “Muy princesa. Like a nice American girl.”

  “Keep those bills,” she says. “I’ll come back with the money. Te prometo.”

  “Now throw it at me.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, throw the bills in my face,” he says, flashing the sharklike smile. Bells are ringing all over Miraflores, swelling in her skull as though she were underwater. “Treat me like your servant, like a spoiled princess.”

  “I can’t believe—”

  “You’re not listening,” he says. When he touches a fingertip to the back of her hand, she flinches. “Throw the money at me and get out of here and don’t ever come back. Tell Chaski no more rich gringas. Now go. But first, tell me I’m an asshole.

  “Do it,” he says. Her hand closes unconsciously around the wrinkled bills. His finger strokes her knuckles. “Do it in English.”

  “Asshole,” she whispers.

  “Louder.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she shouts, and when he straightens up laughing she flings the money in his face and snatches her book off the table.

  “¡Muchas
gracias, Soltera!” he calls after her, turning to the other patrons. “These gringos, ¡carajo! Who do they think they are?”

  * * *

  —

  More of the parents, I think. More of what she’s pushing against.

  “Listen to this,” Maxine says. “A young woman, twenty-three, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States. The young intern wrote long love letters…You can’t believe this lunacy. Who is this Matt Drudge person?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Leo says. “It’s politics. Of course it’s stupid.”

  “No shame. ‘The love of her life’? It’s like a soap opera. Who cares?”

  “You do, I guess.”

  “They’ll stop at nothing, these people,” Maxine says. “It’s despicable.”

  Eyes squeezed shut, Leo squats below the hostel’s payphone in her pajamas, monitoring the weather in her intestines, which is momentarily calm after three days of squalls. She’s hardly left her rooftop room except to use the toilet, edging her way down unlit stairs in the middle of the night, praying she’ll reach the bottom before her guts squirm and liquefy. Days of squalid lethargy, the tiny cell swelling with heat, perfused with her body’s salty, loamy smell. Sirens outside, the pounding of feet on metal, the fire door flung open and laughter of backpackers—French, Australian, Dutch—returning from the clubs late at night. She sleeps in hourlong bouts, twisted in the damp sheet, her fever so high its heat lingers in the pillowcase.

  But to miss the weekly phone date would be to invite a German opera of allegation and remorse, building to an aria about trust betrayed, priorities misplaced, and unthinkable parental suffering—or worse, Maxine might call the hostel directly to beg assurance from Ricky, the dueño, that her daughter has not been eaten by cannibals. Leo concentrates on breathing while Maxine’s indignation spools out, her mindless allegiance to Bill Clinton puzzling as it’s ever been. Hadn’t he thrown millions of poor people off the welfare rolls? Didn’t he kowtow to the same neoliberals and investment bankers who’d bankrupted half of the developing world? But to raise such trifles with Maxine—the erstwhile campus activist, the Red-Diaper baby—is to provoke a recital of platitudes about the “little people” and “Camelot” and Leo, dysenteric, doesn’t have the strength.