“You’re welcome, as long as you don’t bring her father along.” The message reached me by way of a go-between in Lima. And it intrigued me to such an extent that I decided to visit Lori Berenson in her cell in Cajamarca, for the second time in eighteen months. What was the problem with her father? What was the problem with me and her father? In the late summer of 2006 I had gone to Peru with Mark Berenson to see his daughter, a young New York woman who had been in prison there since 1995 on charges of terrorism.
During that trip, and during the writing afterwards, I realized that I found the father more interesting, and actually more likeable, than the daughter.
A somewhat bumbling university math professor who, due to circumstances, had become slightly radicalized. Well, radicalized; that depends of course on one’s own vantage point. Although he spoke almost no Spanish, after we visited his daughter in Cajamarca we had gone to the prison in Lima, where he greeted female guerilla fighters as though they were his best friends. Which perhaps they were.
But Mark Berenson, above all, seemed not entirely equipped to deal with the world in which he found himself. He was still writing letters to various American politicians in the hope that the U.S. government would take steps on his daughter’s behalf. Even though his daughter wanted to have nothing to do with America and had asked him, in my presence, to stop his attempts.
A certain, not entirely inexplicable paranoia was not foreign to him.
Alongside that, Mark Berenson became increasingly garrulous during our trip and told me things I felt I could not write down, despite my own lenience when it comes to violating the privacy of others. I enjoy prying, but it’s useful when all those involved know who is doing the prying. Once that’s forgotten, the prying soon becomes uncomfortable.
And the original question I had posed for myself, whether Lori Berenson truly was involved with the MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru) became, in hindsight, a detail that made almost no difference to me. After ten years in prison, the question of guilt or innocence becomes fairly irrelevant. Whatever the case, Lori had not been accused of acts of violence or even the illegal possession of weapons. Even those convinced of her collaboration with the MRTA (she and her family have always denied such involvement) admitted that if Lori had been a Peruvian citizen she would have been given no more than five or six years. As a Lima journalist told me: “She was convicted because she was an American with a big mouth.” Some time after my return to New York, I received an e-mail from Mark Berenson in which he said that, since his daughter’s arrest, he had not laughed as much as he had during his trip with me. That was a compliment and appealed to my vanity, but at the same time it confirmed my uneasy feeling. I had gone along as a journalist to write articles for a newspaper Mark Berenson could not read, because he speaks and reads no Dutch, but copies of which he wished to receive anyway, for his archives. Laughter was pleasant, but it was a side issue. At least for me.
And I asked myself whether I should go on with such projects if their most important effect was to leave me feeling slightly sullied.
Mark Berenson gradually disappeared from my life. Through him I did receive a bundle of poems sent from the prison in Lima by a female guerilla fighter, Milagros Chavez Gonzales. But because I cannot read Spanish, this ended up on my pile of unanswered mail, where it lies even today.
In November 2006, while in Potsdam to read aloud from the German translation of The Monkey Seizing Happiness, a novella that touches on the subject of the MRTA, I spoke during the inevitable question and answer session of my visit to Lori Berenson.
A man in the first row asked how I could justify talking to terrorists.
To be honest, I hadn’t expected that question and I had no desire to become entangled in a discussion about whether Lori Berenson was really a terrorist and whether the MRTA might deserve a somewhat more nuanced label. Terrorism, like fascism, is a word that immediately quashes all discourse. (Which makes it rather funny when a Dutch authoress claims during an interview that “Every writer or artist who takes himself seriously is, by definition, a terrorist.” At the same time, however, such a claim is intolerably gratuitous.
To the gentleman in Potsdam I replied: “Every writer arranges his authorship differently. I consider it my duty to talk with anyone who can enrich that authorship, even with you.” That evening I decided to stick to my resolution to go back to Peru. Not to visit Lori. I was finished with her, I figured. No, to visit the female guerrilla fighters in Lima again, the ones with whom I had spent a few enjoyable hours in the late summer of 2006. Mark Berenson had not been wrong about that. We had laughed. But not with his daughter in Cajamarca. Only in the prison at Lima had the atmosphere become convivial.
After more than ten years in prison, after torture and rape, after the deaths of many of your comrades, who in some cases were also your husband, what did you think then about the revolution? Could you still allow yourself to fall from faith after sacrifices like that? Those were questions to which I had received no answer in the late summer of 2006. Talk then had mostly hovered around questions of principle, such as: is it all right to marry a capitalist?
To make a start with the revolution is one thing. But how do you stop? In other words: how do you escape from your own fiction, knowing the huge price you’ve paid for that fiction? That fall I contacted Marie Manrique in Lima, a young Peruvian-American woman who had set up a foundation to assist political prisoners during their return to society. By political prisoners, the foundation meant the prisoners from the MRTA and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Even though the two movements had operated completely independent of one another, both in the prisons and on the outside – they had even fought each other. Sendero was much more violent than the MRTA. For Sendero’s political leader, the philosophy professor Abimael Guzmàn, who operated under the heteronym “C. Gonzalo”, as well as “Presidente Gonzalo”, dying for the revolution was no secondary consideration. It was part and parcel of the revolution. He based that claim, in fact, on the Prussian military strategist Moltke, who wrote: “War is sacred.” It was Sendero’s custom to leave behind notes on the bodies of people its soldiers had killed, bearing texts like: “This is the fate of all traitors.” Unlike the MRTA, Sendero practiced a clear distinction between political leaders and military leaders. When Presidente Gonzalo was arrested, no weapons were found. Only cigars and whisky.
Meanwhile, Marie Manrique had left the foundation she’d set up. In Lima, however, there is a restaurant staffed exclusively by former political prisoners. They say the food there is reasonable.
When I let Manrique know that I wanted to pay another visit to the female MRTA prisoners in Lima, she wrote back: “And will you be going to see Lori too?” I didn’t think Lori would appreciate ever having another visit from me. What I remembered clearly from the last time was how her father had forced Lori to show me her cell, then said to her: “Play something on your guitar.” Thinking back on that visit, I felt like speaking the word “shame” in the same way Marlon Brando spoke the word “horror” in Apocalypse Now. That Lori might have no desire for a second visit was not at all hard for me to understand.
But Manrique let me know that Lori would be glad to receive me, as long as I didn’t bring her father along. Then I could not, and would not, back down.
The reply I received from Lori by way of Marie Manrique was so painful that I decided not to tell Mark Berenson about my trip to see his daughter. He himself goes to see her only twice a year, in the winter and again in the summer. He can’t go any more often, he says, because he is still teaching.
In early January of 2008 I flew from Lima to Cajamarca, a city at an altitude of 2,800 meters in the north of Peru. The prison is just outside the town, a drive of a little less than thirty minutes from the center. The last stretch of road is so bad, however, that a number of taxi drivers refused to take me to the prison, claiming that that the trip would destroy their vehicle.
Marie Manrique had told me what I could bring Lori: political books, fresh fruit and cheese. But not the cheese known as “mantecosa”, because Lori couldn’t stand that. Remembering from my last visit that Lori was quick to anger, I had gone to a cheese shop in Cajarmarca and, with the help of a Spanish pocket dictionary, had called out three times: “Queso con excepcion de mantecosa.” My Spanish, too, is rudimentary, but unlike Lori’s father I don’t live in the conviction that I am speaking Spanish when I simply corrupt English words.
I had brought along books by Chomsky, Arendt and Coetzee in Spanish. This latest novel of Coetzee’s could be seen as a political book.
The guards were friendly. Unlike the Peruvian men in front of and behind me, I was not frisked. Which felt almost like an insult. I received a few stamps on the back of hand and was let in.
When bringing in fresh fruit for a prisoner, you are allowed to take only four of any one variety. Otherwise, it is feared, the prisoner might use them to brew alcohol. But the restriction turned out to apply only to smaller fruit sorts. Of the four mangos I had with me, two were confiscated. Until the female guard heard that the mangos were for Lori. Then they were all allowed to enter the prison. Lori apparently enjoys a certain popularity among the guards.
As far as I know, there are no recent photographs of Lori Berenson. She is fairly small, and her movements are nervous. She has the tendency to look around constantly, even when she is conversing with you. Her shoulder-length, somewhat ropey hair looks like it hasn’t been washed for a long time. Unlike the female political prisoners in Lima, who do their best to groom themselves well and succeed wondrously well, she remains ostentatiously unkempt. I could be mistaken, but her emphatic unkemptness seems like a sort of vanity. She was wearing the very same blue sweater she’d had on eighteen months earlier.
Her hands are still red and swollen. The result of her former, protracted stay at high altitudes. She wears plain spectacles.
Just like last time, she takes the bags of presents and tosses them in a corner. You could see that as ingratitude, but I believe it’s hard to imagine what ten years’ imprisonment, including solitary confinement, does to a person. She still works in the prison bakery she set up herself.
She sells pies and croissants, both to prisoners and to people outside. In the shoulder bag she always carries, I saw at a certain point a hefty pile of fifty-sol banknotes (fifty sols is a little over eleven euros.) She sleeps four hours a night. The rest of the time she works.
Her bakery crew consists of four men, several of them crippled, almost all of them in on charges of rape. Lori glosses that over. According to her, they simply had relationships with women who were underage and were convicted because they were too poor to pay for a good lawyer.
At a certain point Lori told me that the male prisoners really enjoy playing soccer. “Do you play soccer?” she asked.
“I haven’t played in a long time,” I said.
“Do you do any sports at all?” “Hardly,” I said.
Soon after that she told me she was getting a divorce. During her incarceration she had married a political prisoner. After he was released he started a relationship with another woman.
After lunch Lori said she really had to concentrate on her work now.
Before I left she took a quick look at the books I’d brought. Chomsky found favor in her eyes.
“Come again soon,” she said. I promised I would. I showed the guards the stamps on my hand, they gave me back my passport and I left the prison. Outside, waiting for a taxi amid a flock of sheep, I realized that we hadn’t talked about politics.
Two days later, in the prison in Lima, the female MRTA prisoners received me like an old flame. But a discussion of the revolution couldn’t get off the ground there either.
With the help of a pocket dictionary I was able to carry on halting but lengthy discussions with Milagros Chavez Gonzales. She had no desire to talk about the revolution. Poetry was what interested her now. From her cell she was taking a correspondence course in writing.
She pointed to a man, a visitor like me. “That’s my teacher,” she said.
“And the woman next to him?” I asked.
Sitting beside him was a woman with gray hair and spectacles.
Milagros shook her head. “She’s a prisoner,” she said. “She’s Sendero.” From all sides I’d heard that the revolution was dead in Peru. The prophets Marx, Lenin and Mao will never regain their former popularity.
Maybe they will disappear completely. But the soil they’ve turned is still fertile. Other prophets will take their place, have already taken their place.
The revolution is not dead, the revolution is asleep.
Sendero Luminoso’s slogan is still unmitigatedly true and unmitigatedly attractive: “Everything is an illusion, except for power.”