The Gringa Read online

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” she tells Ricky. “Me voy.” Her voice sounds too loud, as if the blackout has thrown everything out of scale. “Gracias para todo.”

  “¿A dónde va?”

  Before she can answer, a gasp goes through the crowd, mutters. A reddish glow has sprung up along an eastern hillside, orange sparks snaking skyward. The first low rumbles arrive seconds later, heavy thuds as if from a distant battle. With a loud sizzle, a volley of white fireballs rises toward the thick clouds, the whole hillside starts to sparkle and flash, an endless and intensifying barrage that makes everyone shield their eyes.

  “Puta madre,” Ricky mutters. Then, to his wife: “You see?”

  “What is it? What’s happening?” Leo says.

  “Your friend, the cholito,” he says, his face dull with contempt. “Ask him.”

  Sirens are ringing across the city; down below, the headlights of emergency vehicles bounce through the dark neighborhood. As the turmoil of light and sound begins to ebb, Leo has the sense of walking in a dream—murmurs, hazy air, faces played in light and shadow. Moment by moment the flames on the hill contract, until they’ve shrunk to a legible form, surprisingly clear, a silver sign seething in the dark:

  4

  “Adiós, Leonora,” Ricky says. “Cuídese bien.” He shakes her hand mechanically, already dismissing her, another name in the ledger he’d just as soon forget.

  For a long time after, Leo stands at the wall, overlooking the darkness. She knows she won’t sleep tonight. The bright lesion shimmers silently on the distant hillside—a message for someone, or a warning. She waits until the others have gone down—in the sudden stillness she could be floating or falling, she could still be asleep—then brings the chair from her room and sets it at the edge of the roof, the sign seared on her retinas, still there when she closes her eyes, when she rests her head atop the cool slate wall, still there hours later when the fire burns itself out.

  5

  “To narrativize is to dehumanize.”

  So begins Gabriel Zamir’s monograph Genocide/Historiography, published in 1986, three years before Leo Gelb first took his class. The book, a mishmash of theory, documentary research, personal recollection, and fictionalized “re-enactments,” earned him tenure at Stanford and suspicion among historians who feared the delegitimization of their field.

  It is not enough to say, à la Zinn, that all stories have a forgotten remainder, usually [people] who have endured too much cruelty to be admitted to the conscious narrative […] Even the apparent protagonists of history have always already been rendered alien and inaccessible. Once translated into an object of history, the subject is lost to history. He ceases to exist.

  Zamir’s point, as I understand it, is that all stories, whether imagined or based in fact, are by definition fictions, and not only due to the choices every author makes—inclusions and exclusions, emphases and compressions—nor the unconscious biases a rigorous historian knows to guard against. Zamir’s thesis is more radical: the demands inherent to storytelling inevitably contaminate the source material, warping it into a form with no claim to historical reality. Readers think they’re reading a “true story”—accurate, thorough, sufficient for understanding the world as it was—when in fact what they encounter is pure artifice, engineered to hold their interest, to provide a coherent sense of meaning. A “good story,” in other words: with a beginning, middle, and end; with characters whose desires are clear and relatable, whose actions have logical consequences—all that history, in its unbounded chaos, is not.

  “Everything is narrative,” he wrote. “Thus, history is impossible.”

  I wonder what Zamir would think of this story, this blind and hobbled attempt at history. My efforts to understand her, to find her humanity somewhere in these grim, yellowed clippings. The longer I try to write it, to shape the muck and muddle into something alive, something true, the more I see his point. “To narrativize is to dehumanize.” Who is this person on the page?

  My editor is unmoved by such ethical wool-gathering.

  “Screw all these ideas,” he says. “Two paragraphs: good guys, bad guys, body count. Then get right to the good stuff, the stuff people want to read. Like this demonstration,” he says, “the topless ladies? Why not lead with that?”

  I tell him “the good stuff” can’t be properly understood without context. There’s a whole country to be considered, the suffering of millions. There’s sociology, economics, language suppression. How disrespectful to make it all about Leonora Gelb.

  “Shining Path, Sandinista, Weather Underground, same diff,” he says. “Poor people with dynamite. Rich people with tanks. A few spoiled kids pissed off at their parents.” Readers don’t want ideas, he says. They want conflict, romance, they want to see hopes dashed, obstacles surmounted, sinners redeemed. “Wake up, dude,” he says. “You’re a writer. You tell stories. So get on with it.”

  Leo Gelb is the story, he says. “Find the college boyfriend who broke her heart. Figure out what her daddy did to make her so angry. ‘Portrait of the Terrorist as a Young Woman’—people love that kind of shit.”

  I remind him that she’s not a story, she’s a person. That seventy thousand people died in the war. Real people. What did it matter what readers want?

  “I get that,” he says. “I admire your integrity. But I’ve got a business to run and you’ve got a deadline. Fix it.”

  * * *

  —

  Miraflores is quiet in the milky, failing light. Lovers walk arm in arm through the park, nannies push strollers through clusters of pigeons—everything softened by humidity, blurred like a Monet riverscape. She buys a cup of Jell-O from a vendor and savors the cold, sweet wriggling in her throat, watches the Lima gentry on their evening promenade—as if nothing has happened, no one’s grandmothers have been humiliated, no one’s children murdered. As if these things hadn’t been done in their name.

  In a corner of her room, the copy of Moby-Dick lies splayed and gathering dust, a shiny new American Express card taped to the inside cover. To my own little Ahab, her father had written. May you never stop chasing your dreams.

  Across the street, the bright café bustles with activity: bowtied waiters glide among sidewalk tables, silver-haired men take their wives’ coats. Over the clink of glasses, the sweet voice of Edith Piaf warbles into the night. A waiter opens a bottle of champagne, popping the cork with a flourish; the seated couple smiles up at him, their laughter thickened by the warm air. One more step, Leo tells herself. Take one step, then the next—or spend your life on this bench, enjoying the show.

  When the waiter reappears she hurries to cross the street. “Got a light, amigo?” she calls out. She touches her lips with an imaginary cigarette. “¿Fuego?”

  She almost laughs at his confusion. When Julian reaches into his apron, she says, “Oh, shit, I forgot my cigarettes! Thanks anyway”—then saunters past the cosmetics store, the frozen-yogurt shop, and into the anonymous night to wait.

  For ten minutes she wanders the back streets, admiring Spanish bungalows and prim townhouses, wrought-iron balconies, high walls trussed by bougainvillea. Her vision is sharp, her sense of smell heightened—since the fever passed she’s felt honed, whittled down; she moves through her surroundings watchful as a cat. At a corner, she stops before a long gray building surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. She studies the impassive facade, the arched windows and mounted security cameras that lend an air of vigilance, of dignity. When the footsteps come behind her, she doesn’t turn around.

  “What did I tell you?” he says, his breath hot on her neck. “I said don’t go back there. Are you stupid? You don’t speak fucking English?”

  “What is this place?” she says, nodding at the dark building. “What’s with all the cameras?”

  “You don’t listen to Chaski, either?” His face close to hers, the blue of his eyes surp
rises her, their lower lids plump with fatigue. “You’re gonna get people hurt, Soltera. Maybe you’ll get yourself hurt.”

  She moves down the fence until she can read the plaque affixed to the gate: Sociedad de Imanuel. She can just make out the silver mezuzah at the door: a synagogue. She hasn’t been to one since they buried Grandpa Carol, two years ago. Of all the places to find herself, she thinks—remembering that morning, her mother’s profound loneliness, the way her father kept a hand on Maxine’s shoulder to steer her through her grief. Leo stood apart, alone with her sadness—though family friends offered kind words she was unconsoled, their tender communions held out no meaning.

  “Who are you?” Julian says. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to help you.”

  He steps back, sneering in disbelief. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Yes, you do,” she says, ignoring the trembling in her knees. “Or do you want more kids getting killed like Ernesto? That’s why Chaski wanted me to talk to you. Isn’t it? Because you need something. So cut the bullshit and tell me.” She takes a breath and lowers her voice. “Look, Neto was my friend. I can’t leave without doing something.”

  Julian smiles his shark smile. He lights a cigarette and peers through the smoke. “What do you want, a gun? You want to join the revolution, carry a gun like Jane Fonda? You gonna assassinate the President? Or maybe you just want a boyfriend, some sexy revolutionary in your bed?” He steps closer, until her back is pressed to the fence. “You got money, Soltera? You give me money, I’ll find you a boyfriend. I don’t care what Chaski told you. We’re not babysitters. You don’t have anything we need.”

  Leo looks down, barely containing a smile. At last it was out. “Then why did you agree to meet me in the first place?”

  “No sé,” he says, taking a thoughtful drag. “I thought maybe you’d be prettier.”

  He waits, grinning, for her reaction. When she gives none he turns abruptly, walks away down the silent avenue. From the hunch of his shoulders, the practiced way he flicks his cigarette into the gutter, she knows he can feel her watching. He’s performing for her—but there’s something forced in his delivery, self-conscious, as if he knows he’s shown his hand. She lets him go, playing out the line, knowing he won’t get far; when he glances back, she steps into the street, keeping her distance for a block or two. There’s no hurry now, she thinks. He’s not fooling her anymore.

  At the far corner a soldier stands guard outside a jewelry store, his shadow moving in and out of the light. “You’re not very smart, comrade,” she says when she catches up to Julian. Before he can retort, she takes his arm, pulls him close when he tries to yank it away. “I know where to find you. I know your name, where you work. How stupid is that? People are dying. People are disappearing while you waste time insulting me. Maybe you don’t really want to do anything. Maybe you just want to show everyone how big your dick is. Go stick it in someone else. I came here to help.”

  “You sound so tough, Soltera,” he whispers. “But you were better when you were playing a rich girl in the café. More natural. Who are you pretending to be now?”

  Their silence leaves only the faint clocking of the soldier’s boots on the pavement. “Give me a cigarette,” she says. Bored, he shakes one from the pack and hands it to her. As she approaches, the soldier draws himself up, rifle held to his chest. In the window behind him, a triple-strand diamond necklace glitters on black velvet.

  “Light?” she says, flashing her most genuine smile. “¿Fuego?”

  He sets the rifle at his feet and pulls a lighter from his pocket. Leo sucks in the smoke and stifles a cough, lets her voice come low and husky.

  “How old are you?” she asks. “¿Cuántos años tienes?”

  “Veinte y dos.”

  She arranges her mouth into an alluring smirk. “Qué pena. Too young.”

  To his astonished face she shrugs vampishly, stands at the window another moment—long enough to break it, or spit in the soldier’s face. She can feel Julian watching from the shadows, both of them waiting, learning what she can do. Heart in her throat, she runs a fingertip down the glass, savoring the soldier’s confusion.

  “Buenas noches, amigo,” she finally says, and leans up to kiss his cheek. He doffs his cap, still smiling, as she saunters away, every nerve ending sparkling.

  “You see?” she tells Julian. “I can be anyone you want.”

  * * *

  —

  The boy was nine when the Shining Path came to his village in Vilcashuamán. It was a cold spring morning; early rains had loosened the soil and left the stones of the plaza dark and slick. Most of the men were in their fields, so there was no one to greet the fighters, teenagers mostly, who arrived wearing heavy ponchos and wool hats, the men all unshaved and the women with their hair cut short. They carried knives and slingshots and one rifle between them, taken from a police station near Huambalpa.

  “We claim this town as a strategic base, in the name of the glorious revolution,” their leader said. They took the mayor and police captain to a field and shot them, and three of the girls dragged the schoolteacher into the square and beat him unconscious.

  The boy watched with his schoolmates from their classroom window. The Senderistas came inside and told them the revolution needed their help. They could protect their parents, said one of the girls who’d attacked the teacher, by doing chores for the cumpas: collecting food from every family in the town, patrolling the fields and footpaths, reporting what the adults said and who they said it to. She drew a picture on the chalkboard of a hammer crossed with a scythe and said, “You are Red Pioneers. Your bravery will help us defeat the Yankee imperialists and their genocidal puppets. The strength of the revolution is forged in the furnace of armed struggle.”

  The boy was the first to volunteer. His mother and father owned the town bodega, where the mayor had his office in a back room, and the boy worried that the fighters would come back for them. The Senderista hugged him and asked if he was a fast runner. He would carry messages between the cumpas, she said. She taught him a song about Abimael called “The Sword” and said the students should stand at the window each morning and sing loud enough for the town to hear. If the teacher objected, the boy was to tell her immediately.

  “Sí, señorita,” he said.

  “Don’t call me señorita. That’s the language of the colonialist oppressor. Now we are equal,” she said, clenching his hand. “Compañeros.”

  A week later she asked the boy if all his classmates were singing the song. “Who sings the loudest?” she asked. They took the worst singers outside and forced them to strip naked and sing while another cumpa pointed the rifle at them. The whole town witnessed this humiliation. Later, the father of one of the bad singers found out who had informed on them, and the messenger boy’s parents were dragged out of their bodega and into the square. The Senderistas stripped them from the waist down and told them to kneel with their backsides facing the church. The bad singer’s father had denounced them as government collaborators. The town’s only phone was in the bodega, and he had told the Senderistas that the boy’s parents called the militares and asked for help.

  “This is how we deal with snitches,” said the leader. Another cumpa yanked back the boy’s father’s hair and the leader cut out his tongue, and then the mother’s, and tossed them in the dust where stray dogs fought over them.

  The boy saw all of it. He stood in the door of the school, held back by the girl who’d recruited him. She wrapped her arms around him and sang softly in his ear while his parents were dragged away moaning and spitting blood. “It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay, little errand boy.” She used the Quechua word for “runner”: Chasq’i. She said his parents would get better when the revolution was over. Everyone would get their tongues back, so they could sing about the victory.

  “So, Soltera, are you sur
e you want to be a revolutionary?”

  Leo shakes herself out of reverie, the image of the young boy and his parents lingering though it’s Julian’s face that hovers close to hers. They’re sitting on a bench in a roundabout a few blocks from the ocean. The townhouses and apartments have given way to stately manors that rise above whitewashed walls set with jagged glass. Behind them, a statue of a man on horseback sits on a pedestal, sword raised. The sky is bruised, roiled with clouds; scraps of fog twist in the treetops, the mist coating her face.

  “What happened to his parents?”

  “They died. Of course. The army came in and killed all the Senderistas. Then they killed a lot of villagers they said were loyal to Sendero.”

  “So they weren’t the collaborators?”

  “No, they were,” he says, turning his cruel smile on her. She can feel herself shivering, a shaking beneath the skin. “But these people,” he says, nodding at the nearest house, “they don’t know anything about it. To them, it’s a bunch of crazy cholos. This is the problem, not the President or the army. These people, who choose to know nothing.”

  She peers at the house, a three-story monument of oversize white bricks and broad verandas under a steep, red-tiled roof. “Who lives there?”

  “Ricos,” he says with a wave. “Foreigners. Killers. You see, Soltera? There’s nothing you can do here. Go back to the United States. The revolution thanks you for your service.”

  “I’ve got money.”

  He watches her for a long moment, nodding steadily. Now that she’s said it, she’s sure it’s what he was waiting for. “You can have it,” she says. “Whatever you need.”

  Julian stands again, beckons her into the street, which ends at the long, curving malecón, at the top of high cliffs overlooking the ocean. She keeps two paces behind, face lowered against the stinging wind; the gusts rise as they move south, fisting into her mouth, drawing water to the corners of her eyes. After a few minutes he stops at the edge of a construction site, several acres of the malecón scraped flat and sectioned off by chain-link fence. Through torn plastic sheeting, she sees scattered trailers, backhoes and pickup trucks, piles of steel beams—and beyond it all the edge of the cliff, jagged and convex as though something reared up from the sea and took a bite out of the land. The clouds have broken apart, the sky brilliant with moonlight, the ocean a sheet of corrugated pewter. The plastic snaps and smatters in the wind.