The Gringa Page 6

  “Maybe you should run for office,” her mother is saying. “Of course it would be easier if you had a law degree. You sound tired, Leo. Are you alright? You have to be careful, baby, you have no idea what you could catch down there.”

  Leo clutches the phone and squints into the lobby’s gloom, the waxed, checkerboard floors and winding staircase of an old colonial house gone to wreck. Ricky watches from the reception desk, looking up from his heavy, leatherbound ledger.

  Now it’s David’s turn: “We worry about you, sweetheart. Why don’t you ask someone you work with to recommend a doctor? I’ll pay for it.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she groans. “I’m already starting to feel better. Anyway, the office is closed for a while.”

  In fact, the office is closed indefinitely. Last week an article in El Comercio named Oportunidad Para Todos among several groups being investigated for their role in the Los Muertos Massacre, and in the “coordinated lawlessness” of the funeral procession, at which nearly a hundred arrests were made.

  “There must be private clinics. Good ones, for people like you.”

  “People like me?”

  “It’s your health, Leo,” he sighs. “It’s no time to stand on principle.”

  “Who am I, Dad? Am I a celebrity? A visiting dignitary?”

  “Go to one of the nice neighborhoods. That’s where the best doctors are. Please, Leo,” he says. “Do you have any idea what your mother’s going to put me through?”

  She slumps to the floor, head knocking the wall loudly enough that Ricky looks up. The nice neighborhoods. The best doctors. He doesn’t have to say the rest of it: Where the Jews live. She’s been hearing it all her life. Unlike Maxine, Leo’s father cares nothing for politics—“They’re all crooks,” he’d long ago diagnosed, correctly—but his sense of the world comes filtered through an idea of Jewish exceptionalism as unshakable as it is infuriating. At least Maxine goes to synagogue once a year, to say Kaddish for her father. David wouldn’t even know how to get there. His Jewishness has no spiritual content, no historical consciousness. But drop the name of a famous actor or sports hero and he’s sure to ask, “Did you know he’s Jewish?” He considers it a travesty that Philip Roth hasn’t won the Nobel Prize. His most urgent criticism of Henry Kissinger is that he renounced his religion.

  “Dad, it’s a stomach infection, not a national emergency. Nobody cares who I am. I’m nobody.”

  “You’re somebody to me, Leo,” he says. “You’re my daughter and I love you.”

  “¿Todo bien?” Ricky asks when she bangs the phone into the cradle.

  Leo hauls herself toward the lobby bathroom. “Mis padres,” she says, and swirls a finger around her ear—a gesture she knows immediately to be Maxine’s. “Locos.”

  An hour later she forces herself into jeans, girds herself with a dry roll and a banana and sets off into the sad rumble of doves, the wash of January heat. In a farmacia on Abancay, shivering under fluorescent lights, she pantomimes her distress until the bent old pharmacist shakes a dozen pills from a box. Leo’s face has thinned, her cheekbones sharpened. Short of breath, a little dizzy, she makes herself walk faster. She doesn’t need a doctor or a nice neighborhood; if the fever won’t leave her, she’ll have to vanquish it, stomp it out on the grim, clogged avenues.

  Down constricted cobblestone streets puddled with water and piss, where vendors hawk cheap schoolbooks, wristwatches, contraband blue jeans, plastic bowls of every imaginable size. Moneychangers and pickpockets prowl and swarm, drawing back when she meets their eyes. She walks hours without stopping—no map, no destination—ignoring the stares of shopkeepers, bored cops. Through neighborhoods of silent, unused factories, others of long streets crammed with tiendas, crowded lunch counters, used appliances, crates on the sidewalk filled with lengths of pipe, pirated books, inflatable plastic toys. The hot sun nearly invisible, pale and distant, Leo rests briefly, sitting on benches below statues of winged angels or horsemen, catches herself drowsing, flings herself into motion again. She’s determined to understand this city of moldering colonial mansions and concrete eyesores, of sedans with tinted windows and dark-skinned boys who thread into traffic selling newspapers, chewing gum, plastic bags of colored liquid. She’s determined to know it from the inside.

  “Travelers should be alert to lingering and unpredictable terrorist activity, as well as rampant street crime,” read the notice her mother sent: the U.S. State Department’s advisory for Peru, a diplomatic translation of Maxine’s bourgeois hysteria. Leo knows she’s just as guilty. Hasn’t she stayed at Ricky’s hostel, with its flow of white-faced tourists, rather than take a room in Los Arenales? Hadn’t she fled Los Muertos at the first sign of trouble? Her life, she decides, has been a series of gestures, edging ever closer to the line, too afraid to cross. If she’s ever to help anyone, she’ll have to rid herself of this fear.

  That night she sits on the roof of the hostel, her feet swollen and blistered, listening to the news on an old tune box Ricky loaned her. On her lap lies a copy of Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, an English translation she picked up at a stall in Breña. On every side the city is an immensity of orange lights muted by humidity, twinkling to the syncopated noise of car alarms, sacked by the meaty smell of the river a few blocks to the north.

  “I’ve been in this war for a long time,” says a twangy voice on the radio, one of Bill Clinton’s advisors. “It’s a vendetta, that’s all it is. The President’s political enemies out to get him.”

  “Who’s going to win that war? Who’s going to win it and why?”

  Leo lays the book on her lap. Three weeks, she thinks. Three weeks since Ernesto was taken, since the people of Los Muertos lost everything. The country is moving on already, distracting itself with trifles. How many limeños remember Ernesto’s name?

  The first pages of Mariátegui’s book say it all: invasion, conquest, centuries of race-based brutality. Having stolen all the arable land, the Spaniards made their own laws, hired their own thugs, brutalized the native residents who stayed on as tenant farmers. They forbade the cultivation of food crops needed in Peru, preferring the sugar and cotton that fetched high prices abroad. They grew ever wealthier, ever more powerful, while the land’s rightful owners starved.

  If Peru is to progress, Mariátegui wrote in 1928, it is imperative this feudalism be liquidated.

  * * *

  —

  Leo stayed at the Hostal Macondo, three blocks from Lima’s main plaza, from October 3, 1997 to February 8 of the following year. One wonders why she never took a room in Los Arenales, as most of Oportunidad Para Todos’ volunteers did, given the long commute. When I put this question to Manrique “Ricky” Díaz Poma, the Macondo’s proprietor from 1996 to 2000, he frowned as if at a nuisance.

  “Who knows?” he told me. “She was different, that one. Muy rara.”

  On the night of her arrival, she’d rung the bell sometime after two AM only to learn the room she’d reserved by fax had been given away hours earlier. “But I have to sleep,” she’d said, pressing back panic. The hostel was on a badly lit corner, deep in the maze of the immense city. The taxi was long gone. Shamefaced, she slid a twenty-dollar bill across the ledger. “¿Por favor?”

  Ricky rubbed sleep from his face, took a blanket from a pile, and led her up three flights, down halls littered with energy-bar wrappers and beer bottles, through a third-floor fire exit and up a last narrow staircase to the roof. The amber lights of Lima ran into the hills like the arms of a starfish. The room was a windowless storage shed with a flimsy tin door and a padlock. The springs of the narrow cot sang like a swarm of crickets; one bare bulb spun a web of shadows at her feet.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Muchas gracias.” Ricky bowed sardonically and handed her the key. Two days later he offered her a real room, with a window and a closet, but she turned it down. She’d gro
wn attached to her rooftop cell, proud of the modesty of her needs. She never forgave him for having seen her fear.

  On the sixth day of her fever, Ricky knocks on the metal door of her room, rousing her from heavy sleep. “Please come now,” he says, his face stern, mistrustful. Achy and blurred, she wonders if she forgot to pay him. “Someone waits for you.”

  In the lobby, she finds Chaski staring bemusedly at the gaudy old furniture. Ricky walks quickly back to the front desk, surveying the lobby as though to make sure nothing was stolen.

  “Sick?” Chaski says, as he and Leo make their way upstairs. The air is hot and stale, layers of cigarette smoke hanging in gray sunlight. On the second floor, a woman stands in her underwear, screaming in Italian at someone inside her room.

  “Still getting used to the food,” Leo says.

  “Many tourists have this problem.”

  “I’m not a tourist.”

  His laughter is warm and bright, without mockery. “Yes, you are still a tourist.”

  The air is cooler on the roof. When the enormous bells of the church across the street toll the hour, she can feel the vibrations in her teeth. Chaski stops at the door to her cell and peers into the dark and musty lair.

  “This is where you live?”

  “What did you expect? The Sheraton?”

  He looks almost crestfallen. All at once she remembers a dream—he was standing on a beach at dusk, a Hula-Hoop gyrating at his hips. The screech of seagulls loud and rhythmic, like sirens; when she looked closer the hula-hoop was just an oily old tire. She yanks the sheets from the bed and flaps them to drive out the sweaty air. It’s the first she’s heard from Chaski since the abortive meeting at the Café Haiti. In lucid moments she’s cursed him, cursed his obnoxious friend and wondered what she’ll do next—something better, with smarter people. But where would she begin?

  “Did you come here to criticize my room?” she says now. “Or do you have another friend you want me to meet? The last one was really nice.”

  He stifles a smile. “Comrade Julian doesn’t know you. You can understand this?”

  “Comrade Julian is an asshole. I don’t even know why I was there.”

  He paces her tiny room, stooping to read the spines of the books piled on the chair: the Fanon, Gabriel’s Bicentennial of Blood, a leather-bound copy of Moby-Dick her father randomly gave her as a going-away present. In the back of her mind she can hear her mother warning her about “strange men,” but Chaski’s crooked smile is disarming. Since the day at Nancy’s office she’s felt oddly comfortable around him, even protective—as if they’d known each other a long time and, for whatever reason, he looked up to her.

  “The chicos are still missing,” he says. “There are helicopters over Los Arenales every day.”

  “What am I supposed do about it?” Leo says, wilting onto the damp sheets.

  “This is a good question.” He frowns at the flimsy walls, the gummy gray floor. “How much you pay here?”

  Something in his tone catches her attention and she sits up, quickly regretting the sudden movement. “I’m not rich. Not all Americans are rich. Is that what you thought?”

  “No? How much does Nancy pay you?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Carefully, he sits at the far end of the bed, slightly hunched, hands in his lap like a schoolboy. “People help in whatever way they can,” he says, shrugging. He stares at the floor, at the twirl of shadows from the bulb overhead. When he looks up, she’s reminded again of how young he is—twenty or twenty-one, she guesses. But his eyes, clear and earnest, are much older. “Julian made a mistake. He has to be careful, of course. But he needs you, Leonora. We need someone like you.”

  “For what?” she says, just as a new torpor makes her head loll. She lays back on the stinking sheets, the fever reaching out for her again.

  “Soon,” Chaski is saying. He’s standing over her now, a worried expression on his face. “First you get healthy, OK? Don’t worry about anything. I’ll come back soon.”

  After what seems like several minutes, she realizes she hasn’t answered him. She tries to sit up, but her body has become part of the mattress: warm and damp and leaden. The bells are ringing again, shuddering the tin roof, swelling the room with echoes. When he speaks, she can’t find him in the dark.

  “Don’t return to the café, Leo. Stay here, or go to a museum, or the beach. Go shopping. You’re a tourist, remember? And don’t speak Spanish. Even to the dueño.”

  “¿Por qué?” she manages, dissolving into the fever. “¿Por qué?”

  “Because you’re a gringa. This is what they expect of you. So we let them believe.”

  * * *

  —

  ¡SINVERGÜENZA! reads another clipping in the Leo File: SHAMELESS! In this photo, printed from the archives of a defunct tabloid, an old woman in the sturdy shoes, canvas skirts, and knee-high stockings of a campesina stands on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. Her thick gray braid hangs over one bare shoulder. There’s something unhinged in the pits of her eyes, her stretched and toothless mouth. Behind and around her, demonstrators hoist placards, encircled by cops in white helmets, backdropped by the old, canary-yellow buildings with their ornate wood balconies. The forbidding Presidential Palace, with its gray stone and high, spiked fence, is just visible at the photo’s edge. With one hand the woman waves her brassiere overhead; her heavy breasts stare at the camera like an accusation.

  My friend Yesenia Francia Durán recognized the image immediately. “The Protesta de Tetas,” she said. “I was there!”

  In 1998 Francia was teaching chemistry at a private school in San Borja, participating in political street theater on weekends. “We live at this time a double life,” she told me. “You have to be so careful. Everyone knows there is a line. You think you know where it is. You think you know which person you are. But you don’t know.”

  Her theater troupe was called Bufón: the Jester. “We go to the Plaza San Martín and draw a line, one side is Democracy, with games and dancing, the other side is Dictatorship, everyone with blindfold and tape on the mouth. Or we stand across the street from Congress, holding big mirrors for people to see themselves.” Groups like Bufón were officially tolerated, proof to the outside world that freedom had returned to Peru. But they knew their existence was provisional. Like everyone in Lima, they knew they were being watched. One morning, all the students in her class brought in photographs they’d received in the mail. All the photos were of Francia: walking on a street near her house, waiting at a dark bus stop, shopping. In every one, she was alone.

  “The government knew everything I did,” she said. “They knew me better than I knew myself.”

  The “Protesta de Tetas,” as it came to be known, was organized by the Abuelitas de la Ausencia—the Grandmothers of Absence—a group that had been demonstrating since the end of the war to demand information about missing family members. A ragged assortment of other groups, including Bufón, had joined the march, which Francia remembers indistinctly, as just one of many humiliating failures. When I asked if Leonora, living only blocks away, might have been there, Francia shrugged and smiled her charming smile.

  Yes, why not?

  She might well have stumbled upon it, heading back through the city center after another day of aimless walking. The fever sputtering out, a calm hardiness reasserting itself in her appetite, a pleasant ache in her calves. From blocks away, she might have heard the swell of voices, the clamor of pots and pans, felt the energy carried on the air. She would have known she shouldn’t be there. Chaski had been clear. But it had been a month since Neto was taken—what had Chaski, or Julian, or anyone else, done about it?

  By the time she crosses into the Plaza, there are three women standing on benches, bras in hand. Two others balance on the lip of the giant brass fountain, supported by arms from below. The
y gesture to the crowd, keening imprecations at the cops—¡Asesinos! Murderers! Liars!—who stare back uneasily and flick cigarettes into the flowerbeds. Ernesto’s face bobs on a handful of placards, along with Nalda’s and Juancito’s—alien faces, made strange by their familiarity.

  You would lie to your own mothers! shouts one of the women.

  They would kill their mothers! cries another.

  Their mothers are whores! says a man in the crowd.

  When a line of mounted police emerges from between two buildings, one of the women raises a mischievous eyebrow and puts her hands on her hips, provoking a ripple of laughter. From somewhere in the crowd rises the first strains of an old song—

  Vengan todos a ver, ¡Ay, vamos a ver!

  En la plazuela de Huanta, amarillito ¡Flor de Retama!

  —and the onlookers stiffen in response, quickly taking it up. Old men fish scraps of red fabric from their pockets and wave them overhead.

  The blood of the people perfumes the air,

  With jasmine, violets, geraniums, and daisies—

  And gunpowder! And dynamite!

  And gunpowder! And dynamite!

  It’s an old protest song, “Flor de Retama,” a lament for student demonstrators massacred by the military regime in the 1960s. Years later, during a week-long lockdown, Leo’s cellmate will teach her the words: Oh come, come all, to see! They’ve come to kill the students, the proud students of Huanta…But now she understands only that it’s a provocation: the line of cops is tightening, their eyes beneath the white helmets growing hard.