The Gringa Read online

  Julian shakes the fence and whistles, until two low, gray shapes dart across the site, snarling. “Hola, perritos,” he says, in a surprisingly tender voice. He takes something from his pocket and feeds it through the fence. “Oh, sí, sí, amores.” The dogs snuffle in the dirt and snap at each other and gobble up the treats. Julian pulls hard on a section of fence, opening a gap, and gestures for Leo to go first. When she hesitates, he laughs.

  “Mira,” he tells the dogs. “She wants to make a revolution without trespassing.”

  He moves through the construction site, skirting piles of timber and rebar, spools of cable, a pyramid of cinder blocks taller than she is. Behind them, the empty windows of apartment buildings stare darkly at the ocean. At the end of the path, where the earth is marked by rain channels and sudden drops, Julian holds out his hand. “Ven,” he says.

  She permits herself only a brief hesitation. He takes her arm, almost tenderly, and then twists, thrusting her down to her knees, one hand clamped to the back of her neck.

  “Viva la revolución. What do you think, Soltera? Was it worth the struggle?”

  When she opens her eyes, the long drop leaps up at her. Spotlights dazzle her eyes. She can’t breathe for the swirling wind, the dirt and grit flinging against her cheeks. Directly below, a labyrinth has been carved out of the cliff, a lattice of tiers and terraces stretching a hundred feet down, rough stone dynamited and jackhammered into wide platforms and long, curving passages—an Escher-like warren framed by stairways and concrete pillars, all struck in cold moonlight like a black-and-white photo, vivid and unreal.

  Julian turns her head to one side. “This is where the parking will be. Over here,” he says, “Pizza Hut. Tony Roma ribs. And Pollo Perú, chicken in the Andino style, owned by KFC. Down here, J. Crew and The North Face, alpaca sweaters sold by Mexicanos, Nike sneakers made in Vietnam, movie theaters owned by Argentinos, and the largest Tiffany store in South America, with gold from mines right here in Peru.

  He bends lower until his voice rasps in her ear. “But over here,” he says, turning her again, “this is the best, the highest achievement in the development of our country. For this we had twelve years of war, seventy thousand people dead. Yes, it’s been terrible, but now finally Lima will have the Hard Rock Café.”

  The contempt in his voice is so coiled that she closes her eyes and waits for him to let go, let her fall to an ironic death in the concrete shell of a Pizza Hut. A moment later he yanks her back to land and releases her, staring down as she gasps in the dirt.

  “Vía América. That’s what they call this atrocity. The American Way. No, Soltera, we don’t want your father’s money. This country has all the dollars it needs.”

  The wind drops, and in the sudden silence she hears the guard dogs hacking and coughing, a car alarm wailing pointlessly in the distance. “You’re lying,” she says, still sucking the air. She grits her teeth and says, “What are they going to say when you tell them you turned down money? Just because I’m a girl? Because your ego is too big to admit you need help?” It’s all been a test, she’s sure of that now. Nobody can see you here, the man in the plaza said. But he’d seen her. He’d been watching.

  Again the sound of the dogs retching, whimpering somewhere in the stockpiles. She climbs to her feet, dirt smeared on her clothes, her face. “When are you going to drop it, compañero?” she says. “There isn’t time for this game.”

  “Estúpida,” he says, his control fraying. “Why don’t you ask Chaski about the revolution? Ask him about Abimael, the great savior. Sendero was the best thing that ever happened to this government. Now they can do whatever they want. They can take over your neighborhood, your university, they can take you off the street, put you in a bag and break your ribs, put a gun in your mouth, a broom in your asshole. They can erase you, ¿entiendes? What’s your fucking money going to do about that?”

  “It’s already been decided,” Leo says. “Enough with the act. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

  He stares at her in mute fury. Again the pathetic growling, the high, breathy wheezing of an animal in pain. When he turns away she follows him—back toward the malecón, skirting pallets piled with bags of concrete, heaps of rock and scree. He snatches a cinder block from the high stack and steps into the light of the clearing, where a small gray shape lies squirming in the dust, darkness pooled around its head.

  “What did you do?” Leo says. She tries to squat next to the dog but Julian hauls her standing. “What did you do to him?”

  The dog jerks pitifully, its eyes rolled up, back legs pumping without rhythm, as though it were caught in a terrifying dream of pursuit. Its muzzle matted with a foam of blood and mucus, its eyes wide and bright and uncomprehending, chest rising and falling rapidly. With each exhale the whining grows fainter and more strained.

  Julian, still holding the cinder block, looks down at the dog, jaw set with pity. “I’m telling you one more time, Soltera,” he says. “Go home. This isn’t a place for you.”

  Leo’s voice belongs to someone else: “I can’t.”

  With a sigh, the door creaks open. “Ay, pobrecita,” he tells the dog. “I know, mi amor. You’ve suffered enough.” Hearing something in his voice, the dog turns its frightened eyes to them, and before Leo can stop him Julian raises both arms and hurls the cinder block down on the dog’s skull.

  “You want to help us, Leonora?” he says. He lifts the concrete block and smashes it down once more. The dog’s body straightens and quivers violently and then is still. She can feel herself falling, the dust of the construction site tilting, but her body doesn’t move, anchored once again by Julian’s grip. A rivulet of milky blood winds through the dirt toward her shoes, Leo stuck in a half-crouch, one hand petting at the air above the dog’s body. When he speaks again a shard of terror burrows into her throat’s tender pit.

  “You want to know what we need?” She nods through tears, as he lights a cigarette and hands it to her. “We need a house.”

  ANDRES

  The first time I heard the name Leonora Gelb, I was at a soccer match with a pair of Dutchmen, a Brit, and three Peruvian girls. Late March or early April—the rainy season had sputtered out, the mountain air begun to dry. We sat on the home team’s side of the stadium, a little hungover, floating woozy in a blast of Andean sun. The noise of the crowd came through a layer of soft, warm cotton and I leaned against the concrete and spread my arms behind my friends’ backs. Life was pretty good.

  “You must be so proud of your countrywoman,” said Oswaldo, a ridiculously tall Aryan who led groups of European tourists around South America. He spoke flawless English, but his heavy accent sounded like Peter Sellers playing a Nazi. “Someone for you to look up to, I think.”

  I leaned over Lucrecia, whom I’d been dating, if that’s the right word, and tried to flag one of the little kids selling bottled water. Lucrecia ignored me and whispered something to her friends in Quechua. It was Lima’s best team, Universitario—or “La U”—against Babilonia, as we called the provincial town we lived in. Nobody expected Babilonia to win. Babilonia never won.

  “It was an unusual strategy,” said Jeroen. “Brilliant, if you think about it.” He was broad and dark, with the hooked nose and heavy stubble of a football hooligan—which is exactly what he was. He’d been in Babilonia the longest and owned a full wardrobe of the team’s uniforms. He worked for some kind of nonprofit, something to do with AIDS. He was always trying to get me to volunteer. He also claimed to write poetry. “Instead of sending the military to make trouble, you send a girl. Who would suspect?”

  “Because of budget cuts,” Oswaldo said. “Slick Willie had to find cheaper ways to overthrow foreign governments.”

  Jeroen waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t be stupid. The American President has nothing to do with the military budget. He’s a spokesman, only for television. He has no power at all. Don’t you remember Rea
gan and that idiot colonel—”

  “Ah, bullshit. You think George Dubya Bush”—his Texas twang sounded more like a constipated squirrel—“has no power? Tell that to the good people of Baghdad.”

  “Exactly my point! Even the Americans wouldn’t re elect such an imbecile if they thought he actually—”

  They went on like that. I closed my eyes and let the sun seep into my brain. I’d been listening to their arguments for years, since soon after I arrived in Peru. I’d quickly come to understand the Dutch penchant for certitude. They had no use for doubt. Sometimes I envied them.

  Mark leaned over from the other side of the girls. “You lot are forgetting one thing.” The smoothest of us all, Mark, a Londoner, had tousled blond hair and reddish stubble, a movie star’s jaw and a slow grin. He was co-founder of a local English-language newspaper, The Navel, that came out every few weeks. You saw copies of it in café bathrooms, or trampled on the floor of the Irish pub. I’d lined my one shelf with it.

  Oswaldo pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Please, señor. Educate us.”

  “Why would the U.S. want to overthrow the government? Fujimori was very right-wing. He opened the country to foreign investment, slashed public spending, destroyed the unions. From the Americans’ perspective, he was ideal.”

  Jeroen stuck a finger in the air. “But he was a dictator! And Americans hate tyranny. They believe in democracy and freedom. It’s why they start all their wars.”

  The other two laughed. I put a hand on Lucrecia’s knee, but she just watched the field, twenty-two men scrambling in unpredictable discord. Her friend Rosa glared at me.

  Mark sipped his beer and put an arm around Flor. I’d introduced them at La Luna the night before. I had a vague memory of watching them make out on the dance floor. “Still, they must have known of her activities,” he allowed. “The U.S. does like to know what its people are doing.”

  Mark had studied political science at Cambridge. He’d been in Peru almost ten years, including two in Lima, married to an heiress. He’d come back to Babilonia with an amethyst stud in one ear and a tattoo on his arm and started his newspaper, which combined current affairs with reviews of expat clubs and restaurants, and tongue-in-cheek items like “Ten Easy Ways to Avoid Being Choke-Robbed at a Discoteca.”

  Oswaldo stood and stretched, provoking grumbles from behind. He peered down from his great height. “The U.S. likes to know what everyone is doing. Sí, Andres?”

  “Careful, Ossie,” Jeroen said in a stage whisper. “They’ll hear you.”

  It was a favorite pastime among my friends—“slagging off” the U.S., as Mark called it. They insisted on saying “you” when they talked to me about the government or the military, any of a thousand sins: Iraq, Israel, Britney Spears. When the conversation turned to Guantánamo Bay, or Predator drones, or “la CIA,” the ribbing took on a sharper edge. I tried to stay out of these conversations. I didn’t care about any of it, I told them. That’s why I’d come to Babilonia: so I didn’t have to care.

  “But it is outrageous,” Jeroen said, that peculiarly Dutch look of scorn on his sunburned face. “You learn it from your government, sticking your nose in other people’s business. There is no respect. You talk about democracy and freedom but wherever you go you have nothing but guns and bombs. Let’s look at Iraq—”

  “Let’s not,” I said.

  “It’s a classic example. Classic! This is where she learned this arrogance. Peru should keep her in prison forever. If this were the U.S. you would execute her.”

  He kept staring at me, but I refused to meet his gaze. Just then a defender snuck the ball away from a Lima midfielder and started streaking downfield. The crowd shrugged to its feet and cheered him on. Rosa and Flor screamed, pumped their fists, but Lucrecia sat quietly, hands in her lap. She turned her sad eyes to me. It was a Saturday afternoon, warm for the first time in months, the beer smoothing the edges and softening the light. The player with the ball seemed very small, surrounded by emptiness, advancing with silent grace toward the waiting goalie. Everything was lovely.

  * * *

  —

  Everything was lovely. If there’s a description of that time, this would be it. Lovely and light, ultimately meaningless. And that’s how I wanted it. It’s how everyone wanted it, or at least that’s what I told myself. I suppose I knew it couldn’t last.

  We stopped off at Paddy’s, the Irish pub on the main plaza, to pass the hours before heading out to dance. Paddy’s was a landmark, a starred favorite in Lonely Planet. Its booths and barstools were always full of tourists, from college kids who’d come to hike the Inca Trail to European retirees grateful for an English-speaking bartender and a pint of Guinness. Trust-funders from Lima came to trawl for dates. From the balcony you could watch Peruvian teenagers congregating in the main plaza, hippies and shamans twirling sticks, gringos haggling with campesinas who sold handicrafts on the sidewalks, drunk locals pissing on the side of the cathedral, crossing themselves as they staggered away. If you stood there long enough, Mark said, you’d learn everything there was to know about Peru.

  On the way upstairs, someone slapped me on the back. “Good fucking game, no?” It was the owner of La Luna, one of the many limeños whose names I never remembered.

  “We almost beat you,” I said.

  “We!” He turned to someone behind him. “Mira este caballero. He thinks he’s from here.” He had a rough, swampy voice, blue eyes with an arrogant twinkle. “Okay, so the cholos score one goal. Maybe it’s the altitude. We gotta give them something or they all become terrorists.” A few heads turned at the top of the stairs, but he slid right past. “See you at the club tonight,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  He reached out and tousled my hair. “I know you, cumpa. I’ll see you later.”

  We commandeered a table and bought hamburgers for the girls, big bottles of beer for ourselves. Mark was the mayor of Paddy’s, working the room, hugging the bartender, introducing himself to anyone he didn’t know. The walls were covered with Irish street signs, beer posters, a pink neon clock in the shape of a giant bottlecap. A toy train chugged overhead along a track bracketed to the walls—the Shamrock Express, Paddy’s pride and joy. The Eagles were on the stereo and a table of students raised their mugs and sang along. It was all pointless and perfect. The TV showed silent highlights from the soccer match and the limeños howled in victory and then a clip of a white girl in frumpy eyeglasses, with a nimbus of wild, wiry hair, screaming herself red in the face.

  “Andres, you also studied at Stanford University.” Oswaldo towered like a lit candle over everyone’s heads. “Maybe you had a class with her.”

  I’d already forgotten the earlier conversation. “With who?”

  “La Leo. Andres, are you already drunk?”

  I held Lucrecia’s hand, though she seemed not to notice. Rosa was shouting into her cell phone while Flor eyed Mark as he chatted with two blond women—limeñas, by the looks of them: glossy hair, designer jeans, expressions of absolute entitlement.

  “Please, Oswaldo, you must be realistic,” Jeroen said. “Can you imagine these two in the same class? Andres, tell me: Who is the president of Peru? What is the capital? You see? He is not a political person.”

  “Yes, he is a lover of peace.”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing,” I said.

  The clip ran in slow motion, again and again, the woman shouting at the camera, head tilted like a snarling dog. Shouts arose in the bar: “¡Puta! ¡Maldita!” “Go fuck yourself!” someone said. A string of curses too fast for me to catch: lesbian, witch, cunt.

  “Who is that?” I said.

  Oswaldo rested a long arm across my shoulders. “That is your countrywoman.”

  She couldn’t have been taller than 5’2”, a round face, freckly skin and a doughy, pointed chin. Everything about her was unlikely:
the nerdy glasses that magnified her eyes, the intensity of her screaming, neck muscles strained. And the caption, which read, “LEONORA GELB CONFIESA QUE ES TERRORISTA.”

  “What did she do?” I said.

  “Don’t you read newspapers?” Oswaldo said. “They were planning to attack the Congress and take hostages. It was ’97 or ’98, I think. The army shot up a whole house of them.” They showed it on the television: a big, three-story house, a high stucco wall scorched and pocked with bullet holes, broken glass, a battered wooden gate and one spindly tree snapped at its base. Inside, a stairwell spattered with blood, then some kind of arms cache: rifles, dynamite, a heap of what looked like military uniforms. The caption read, “LA CASA DE C.F. EN PUEBLO LIBRE.” Apparently, she was up for parole.

  The story had begun to sound familiar—even her name, as if I’d once been aware of it and forgotten. But so many things were like that now, every time I looked at a U.S. newspaper online, or someone sent me a magazine from back home, I thought I’d read it before, or someone had told me about it, or they’d already made a movie from the novel based on the true story. I couldn’t keep track of it all, and I didn’t want to. War, poverty, torture, people blowing each other up in the name of some ideology or other—all those things I couldn’t do anything about. Why think about them at all?

  Besides, it didn’t affect our lives up here. Nothing did. The sun went down and the party started. Whatever you wanted from life—girls, drugs, a certain forgetfulness—Babilonia offered it cheaply and in abundance; what you didn’t want could be left at lower altitudes, in other countries. No matter what was happening elsewhere, at midnight we’d load up on Cuba libres, head to La Luna and dance for hours, then stumble out into an icy dawn, glaciers glowing pink at the horizon: one more blissful, vanishing day in this city twelve thousand feet above sea level, twelve million miles from home.