Useful fools, p.1
Useful Fools, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
AUTHOR’S NOTE
DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by the Penguin Group
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by C. A. Schmidt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a
magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-
party websites or their content.
The song lyrics in this book are from the song Las Torres by Nosequien y los Nosecuantos. The song was
released in Peru in 1991.
eISBN : 978-1-440-67923-0
1. Sendero Luminoso (Guerrilla group)—Juvenile fiction. 2. Peru—History—1980—Juvenile fiction.
[1. Shining Path (Guerrilla group)—Fiction. 2. Peru—History—1980—Fiction.
3. Family life—Peru—Fiction. 4. Violence—Fiction. 5. War—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S34996Use 2007 [Fic]—dc22 2006036508
Published in the United States by Dutton Books,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders
http://us.penguingroup.com
To my mother and father
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a novel involves more people than I ever realized. In my case, Bob Becker, my first reader, knew how to be both honest and kind. Marieke Wyman and Brian Schmidt offered valuable teenage insights. Alice Hirata and Ann Pierson fought the winds on Assateague Island and helped fill the holes in my story. Lisa Simeone’s sensitive criticism opened stylistic windows I didn’t know existed. Adriana von Hagen, Sharon Stevenson, and Suzanne Timmons lived the war with me, read the book for me, and helped me survive both. Leslie Pietrzyk at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and Lee Bloxom at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, as well as their students, gave helpful critiques. As for Steve Meltzer, my editor at Dutton, I can only quote Stephen King: “The editor is always right.” (He was.) Finally, Alice, Peter, Jake, and Mark Hirata gave Gabriel a place to be happy while his mom was writing.
A novel like this is born from life. For me, it was a life in Peru, shared with Peruvians. Gracias to my stepdaughter, Jimena Lynch, for her love and friendship. Gracias to my godfamily, Octavia, Julián, Waldemar, Ann Mary, Sandra, and Alonso Rupaylla. Tengo suerte de ser su madrina y su comadre. I owe homage to María Elena Moyano and Barbara D’Achille, both horrifically martyred by Sendero Luminoso, and gratitude to Carlos Tapia and Carlos Iván Degregori, who helped me understand Sendero. And to the hundreds of Peruvians who amid war and terror found the courage to talk to me, thank you. Mil gracias.
Lastly, my heartfelt gratitude to Nicolás, for more reasons than I can say, and to Gabriel, for being the most wonderful son any writer—or mother—could have.
ONE
Alonso took aim. There, right within his sights.
Terrorist scum, he thought. His muscles tightened. You’re mine. The thought was warm honey, trickling down his throat.
Slowly, he drew his finger into a curl. Ever so gently, he squeezed the trigger.
BOOM!
The barrel slammed into his shoulder. The enemy crumpled. And then, with a scream of brakes, the bus jerked to a halt and Alonso lurched back into his own body. Not a superhero body. Just a lanky fifteen-year-old body crammed into a bus seat of torn vinyl and disintegrating foam. Alonso’s foot had fallen asleep. The daydream was over, and so was the long ride from the shantytown. The ticket boy was yelling for them to get off, and Alonso’s father was standing up. Passengers bumped and squeezed down the aisle and Alonso yawned.
“Get off, get off!” the ticket boy bellowed.
“Ya, ya,” Alonso muttered. He picked up his bag, a plastic sack stuffed with paintbrushes and drop cloths, and followed his father off the bus.
They were in Miraflores now. Two hours by bus from Alonso’s home in Salvador, a dusty shantytown at the edge of Lima. They jumped down the steps onto an avenue lined with ficus trees and apartment buildings, with cafés and banks and travel agencies whose poster-dotted windows promised to take you everywhere, here in Peru or around the world.
The bus pulled away. Through the stink of diesel Alonso caught a whiff of the sea.
Traffic streamed down the avenue, cars and taxis and rattle-trap microbuses with their fenders falling off. A gap opened and Alonso and his father raced across, dodging like bullfighters around a speeding taxi. The cabbie screamed curses, and Alonso glared back, but his father kept his eyes down. A tall man, he always walked that way. Like he was reading a novel in the cracks veining the sidewalk.
At the corner, Alonso glanced up at a street sign, trying not to fidget while his father sounded out the letters. His old man didn’t like to let on, but he’d never really learned to read.
“This is it,” his father said, turning down a side street.
Big houses with barred windows hunkered behind cement and stucco walls. Atop each wall hummed a double strand of electric wire, with signs to warn intruders away. Yellow signs, with black lightning bolts. In case anybody wondered if those wires were really hot.
Alonso’s old man stopped in front of a panel of doorbells set in a wall. A metal gate barred the way to glazed flagstones and a tower of glass and steel.
Alonso waited.
He used to like coming to Miraflores, helping his old man on the occasional paint job. But not anymore. He was sick of it. Sick of the smell of paint, of the stubble of latex on his skin. They’d spent the past four Saturdays in Miraflores, whitewashing cement walls covered in Sendero Luminoso graffiti. Long live the People’s War. Long Live Chairman Gonzalo. Sendero—the Shining Path—loved dramatic strokes of red. It usually took three coats to cover the graffiti, but people in Miraflores were willing to pay.
Today it was an apartment lobby. Fashionable ocher or yellow. But what Alonso really wanted was to be back in Salvador at the clinic his mother ran, helping Dr. Pablo with the kids. Alonso wanted to be a doctor himself. Not a painter.
Staring upward, he counted. Twelve, maybe fourteen stories. From that penthouse up there, you’d see the Pacific Ocean. Waves, and a ragged line of cliffs. And atop one of those cliffs, Rosa’s apartment building.
Rosa. Just the thought of her made Alonso’s gut clench.
Rosa was Dr. Pablo’s daughter. She came to the clinic with her father every Saturday. They’d been coming for years. But lately, just thinking about Rosa made Alonso’s scalp tingle, like it was set with tiny electrodes. He kept imagining her hair. Brown hair, the color of mahogany. But shot through with fire, as though her curls had trapped the hot rays of the sun.
Alonso bounced his heels against the sidewalk. His father shot him a glance and pressed a button.
“Yeah?” The voice over the intercom was fuzzy.
“We’re here to paint the lobby,” Alonso’s father grunted.
A surge of frustration shot through Alonso. Right at this moment, Rosa and her father were driving into Salvador.
As the gate buzzed open, he swallowed a curse. He followed his father over the flagstones and let the gate clang shut behind him.
The sooner they finished painting, the sooner he could get back to Salvador.
Rosa yawned as her father steered off the high way. They’d left home an hour ago, turning away from the sandstone cliffs of Miraflores, where their apartment’s view gazed out over the Pacific. Driving east. Away from the sea and toward the hills. Toward Alonso, though that was a secret thought that made Rosa squirm, made her face heat up so she stared out the window, hoping her father wouldn’t notice.
The car swung up the hill, wheels bumping over the dirt road. Rosa watched through the dusty glass as the first huts of Salvador appeared, faded shacks of woven cane that huddled like tired burros beside the road. Ahead of them, black and white and smeared with mud, with a dented rear bumper that hung by a string, a patrol car blocked the road.
A cop stepped out of the patrullero and stalked toward them. He had a machine gun slung from his shoulder and his hand encircled the pistol grip.
Rosa’s heart fluttered like a fly against a windowpane. She glanced at her father, but Papá was rolling down his window, smiling. “Buenos días, señor.”
The cop didn’t smile back. “Documentos,” he barked.
With a sigh, Papá bent over, twisting below the steering wheel to grope for his wallet. The cop started to fidget, index finger hovering over the gun’s trigger.
It’s just a roadblock, Rosa told herself. At worst, the cop would ask for a bribe. A few soles, señor. To fix the brakes on the patrol car. He’d say it with an oily smile. He’d thank Papá afterward.
Wrists to belt, the cop hitched up his trousers and the gun twitched in Rosa’s direction. Rosa sank in her seat, lower and lower, out of the line of fire. She was practically on the floor when her father finally popped up with his wallet in his hand. His glasses were skating down his nose and he looked so ridiculous—so Papá, somehow—that Rosa suddenly felt better. She straightened as her father handed over the documents.
Driver’s license, voter I.D., physician’s I.D., vehicle registration. Papá stuck his head out the window, trying to meet the cop’s eyes. Papá always seemed to think that if he looked hard enough, he’d find the person inside.
The cop made a little jab with the machine gun. “Where are you going?”
“To the Cesip, señor.”
“The what?”
“The Cesip.” The cop glared and Papá tried again. “Say-SEEP,” he pronounced. “The Center to Promote Children’s Health. It’s a clinic. I’m the pediatrician there.” Papá started to explain about the Cesip, about the Mothers’ Club and the volunteer doctors and the shantytown kids needing shots and checkups and—
“Ya, ya.” The cop shoved the documents back through the window, as though he no longer cared whether Papá were a terrorist or a doctor. Papá fumbled, trying to slip his documents into his wallet and go on explaining. But the cop stepped back and sent them on with a bored wave of his gun.
Papá dropped his wallet to the floor and popped the clutch.
“Why’d they set up a roadblock?” Rosa watched the cop walk back to his car. “Why here?”
Papá gunned the engine and sped up the hill.
Salvador. A panorama of dust and rocks and sand. Piles of bricks and endless rows of huts made of those woven cane mats, esteras. No telephone wires, though. No running water. And now a roadblock. “Papá?”
Her father glanced at the rearview mirror. “I don’t know, Rosa. There’s been a lot of graffiti lately.”
Through the dust billowing around the car, Rosa made out a scribble of red on a wall. Long live the People’s War! “There’s graffiti everywhere.” She tried to sound soothing. “Even Miraflores.”
Papá frowned. “Salvador’s different.”
“You sound like Tía Virginia,” Rosa teased.
A muscle twitched in her father’s jaw. “This has nothing to do with your Tía Virginia.” He slammed the stick into third gear. “Or anyone else in your mother’s family.”
Rosa slumped in her seat.
How had Tía Virginia put it last Sunday? Salvador—that final rolling r a landslide of aristocratic distaste—is just FULL of cholos.
Cholos. Citified Indians. Black-haired, dark-skinned, and poor. Like Alonso.
Rosa pressed her forehead against the window, watching an old man plod up the road. He carried a huge bundle of straw on his back, and his bare ankles were white with dust. Cholos, she thought.
If Alonso ever felt the way she wanted him to feel, what then? How would Mamá’s family react? Rosa could just imagine.
Tía Virginia, this is Alonso. No, Tía, he’s not the gardener. He’s my boyfriend.
And Tía Virginia, a wrinkled old matriarch in saucer-sized sunglasses. Turning to Papá to hiss, “I told you so.”
Because she had. Last Sunday at the beach house, in front of a dozen of Mamá’s Alcázar relatives. All of them golden-haired and elegant in their Ray-Bans and imported sandals. And Papá in his flip-flops, a beetle amid a flock of butterflies. A mestizo. Not quite cholo, not quite white. Mamá had done the unthinkable, marrying him.
Tía Virginia had done her best. Waved an indulgent hand, that fat diamond sparkling in the sunlight. “When Rosa was a child, Pablo, a few cholitos as playmates . . .” No harm done, the hand said. All the Alcázars had played with cholitos at one time or another. The maid’s kids. The gardener’s nephew. “But Rosa is a señorita now! And Salvador is just full of cholos!”
Rosa sighed, remembering, as her father steered toward the low-slung blue building that was the Cesip.
Throughout the long drive up the hill, he hadn’t said a word. But he’d been stroking his moustache every time his hand came off the gearshift, and Rosa knew what he was thinking. Road-blocks. Graffiti. Maybe Tía Virginia was right, for all the wrong reasons. Maybe he was crazy to bring Rosa to Salvador.
As they parked and the engine coughed and died, a black-haired wisp of a woman stepped from the Cesip’s doorway. “Rosa!”
She was Alonso’s mother, Magda. With Alonso’s cinnamon-colored skin and black eyes, and with a gold-capped front tooth that glinted whenever she smiled. Magda enfolded Rosa in a hug and Rosa kissed her cheek and looked around for Alonso.
“They got some work, painting,” Magda murmured. Rosa flinched, and Magda’s voice dropped to a comforting whisper. “They’ll be back by lunchtime.”
“¡Caramba!” Papá slammed the car door. “What is that?”
Spidery red letters, crawling across the Cesip’s facade. PC del P. Shorthand for Sendero Luminoso’s name for itself, the Communist Party of Peru.
Papá flushed purple. “I thought we were off-limits! Magda, don’t you—”
“That?” Magda waved a disparaging little hand. “It’s just graffiti.” She slipped an arm around Rosa’s waist. “Your father’s a mother hen, you know that?” Magda bobbed her head like an anxious chicken. “Bok-bok,” she clucked. “Bok-bok-BOK!”
Rosa burst out laughing and her father, still grumbling, followed them up the steps.
The day’s work had begun.
The apartment building had a wide lobby, with a ceramic tile floor and two elevators. Mejía, the building superintendent, spread paint-mottled drop cloths over the tile while Alonso dug brushes from his sack and his father jimmied open a can of paint.
It was Mejía who had hired Alonso’s father for the job. They came from the same mountain village, and they had the same flat cheekbones, the same obsidian-chip eyes, spoke the same Quechua-accented Spanish. But Mejía’s eyes glinted over a crooked-toothed smile, and he filled the lobby with chatter about his last visit home. He’d gone back for the village’s annual festival, the patronato. The party had left everyone massively hung over. “Nobody knows how to drink anymore,” Mejía complained. “We’ve all gone soft.” He turned to Alonso. “Your grandfather used to go on three-day benders. On the fourth day he’d be up before dawn, watering the fields.” He shook his head admiringly. “Strong as an ox. But your old man was a mean drunk, no, Carhuanca?” Alonso’s father, pouring paint into a tray, didn’t reply. Mejía winked at Alonso, then disappeared behind a door.
Alonso painted a glistening yellow stripe down the wall.
