When Mountains Walked, page 10
Don Héctor’s rug was a spotted cowhide; its leathery smell comforting, fatherly. The tiles beneath it, red and yellow and white and black, looked like a child’s fingerpainting.
He’d fed them veal soup and plantains; he had produced dry clothes. Althea was wearing a tucked shirtwaist dress belonging to his wife—when his wife was thinner, Don Héctor said—and a pair of her tan, pointed Mary Janes. Who could consider heels as country shoes? Althea would have preferred to wear Don Héctor’s oxfords; his feet were about the same size as hers. These Parisian imitations must pinch Mrs. Saavedra’s toes just as frightfully.
The Señora, her husband explained, disliked the country life, where she felt surrounded by the stupid and the ignorant. She was not interested in nature, and had visited the hacienda only once, just after the big house was built. The Señora de Saavedra, whose full name was Inés Monroy Bastos de Saavedra y Arce, lived in her family’s palace in the city of Trujillo with the couple’s four children, who, Althea was sure, were separated in age by the same intervals as Don Héctor’s annual three-month-long visits to the coast, which he undertook during the rainy season.
Or perhaps the woman had a lover, Althea thought, some fancy man in a striped suit and vest, more her style than Don Héctor. Don Héctor did not seem to keep a picture of his wife anywhere. Perhaps he had his own lover here, a warm brown woman.
Her gaze now fell on Johnny’s feet. Bare, long, pale, bony as the feet of crucified Jesus. Fortunately he had not lost his boots. They were drying on the verandah along with his notebook, out of reach of the many hungry-looking dogs who roamed outside. Lucky thing Johnny kept his notebook inside his shirt, in a double thickness of oiled cloth, or his work would have been lost.
Doubly lucky, Don Héctor chortled. Not just because of the notes but because of the boots. No one in Peru had ever seen size 44 feet! It would be possible to cut him a pair of leather sandals, but boots were better, especially for one whose feet were soft, unaccustomed.
“Do you feel the effects of the tea?” Don Héctor asked, looking at Althea.
Her thighs had stopped trembling. She nodded but didn’t explain. Couldn’t. The things around her were very interesting, and if she did not continuously hang on to them, she would begin inside her head to see and hear the yellow-brown water. She could see it from underneath, opaque with the light coming through it, and from above, roiling and giving back no evidence of the oarsman. She could remember small pieces of what had happened so quickly, including the sight of the oarsman flying into the air. The worst was the long absence afterward, when she could not account for where the boy’s father had gone—he had so recently been a person. When she tried to think about this, the water began to roar.
Perhaps they wanted to sleep, Don Héctor said. The Señora must be fatigued after the ordeal. Johnny looked at Althea, who did not want to be alone with the sound and color of the water, especially not in the lugubrious canopied bed where she sensed Mrs. Saavedra’s ancestors being born and dying. So she shrugged, no. Johnny voiced the no for both of them, not yet, but if Don Héctor had work to do? No, no, Don Héctor said. It was so seldom he saw anyone from outside, let alone foreign visitors, and despite these tragic circumstances he hoped they could recognize his gratitude for their presence. What did el Señor Baines think about the poetry of the Señor Walt Wheetman, the national poet of the United States? El Señor Baines had not drunk his tea.
He pronounced Baines as “Byness.” Would Señor Byness like to drink a coffee brandy and discuss? Johnny accepted a small cup and drank it off, then confessed he couldn’t remember much of the poetry he had learned in school. However, he said, Whitman could have used a dose of modesty.
“El hombre cósmico,” Don Héctor said.
“Listen, Don Héctor,” Johnny proposed, mangling the man’s name as badly by pronouncing Don “Dawn” (surely he took it for the short form of Doñald). “Listen, you’re a naturalist. Let’s talk about something else. Do you believe the earth is shrinking?”
“That is what we accept,” Don Héctor said, clearly intrigued. “As our planet cools, the crust remains too large, and so the mountains are formed. Like an apple.”
“You’ve got a good education, sir.” Johnny began to talk about Wegener’s theory, which was all the rage at the University of California, where Johnny was to defend his Ph.D. dissertation in geology. “Did you ever notice how your continent fits together with Africa?” As Johnny went on, Don Héctor laughed aloud. At the end of Johnny’s lecture, he said, “Bravo, bravo. It takes a genius to state what a child can see. It is a revolution that you bring to me.” He rose from his chair, extended a hand. “Come, come.”
Althea had fallen into a reverie, absorbed in the pattern of spots on the cowhide rug, which resembled a galaxy of stars but in reverse, black on white. When Johnny touched her shoulder, she said, “Huh?” as if she’d been asleep.
“Come, darling.”
Don Héctor ushered them into his study. It was lined on one wall with shelves of books and on another with glass cases, which contained his specimens, gathered in the hills.
It was like a museum, Althea thought. Yards of patterned cloth, broken clay pots with brown designs on them, a frame full of butterflies on pins. Over the door was a badly stuffed black and white bear’s head, raccoonish, with eyes of folded black leather. Don Héctor said he had stuffed it himself, with saltpeter, following a book. His own ineptitude had made him marvel at the ancients who had dared to preserve the human dead. In the center of the room was a large glass box, and in it sat a large ball of loosely woven, white cotton cloth. Althea took it, at first, for a giant ball of string. This was a mummy, Don Héctor said. His workers had brought it from a cliff tomb. If Don Héctor did not offer a bounty for such specimens, the workers would loot all of the tombs anyway, breaking everything looking for gold. But there was no gold there, Don Héctor said, only in the ground and in the river. In the cliff tombs were these crude, unpainted pots, a few feather decorations, beautiful fabric, and the dead.
The mummy had been buried in the fetal position. Althea remarked that perhaps it was a child. Oh ho, no, no! An adult, Don Héctor said, a woman of age.
He offered to unwrap her. Althea said no, but simultaneously Johnny said yes, and so Don Héctor, apologizing to the Señora, opened the case and gently pulled out the body. It looked light as a bird in his small hands. He set it on the desk and lifted the veil. Althea stood riveted to the spot as the face was revealed, a face screaming in eternal pain with her hands lifted to her two cheeks as if at some last awful sight. Teeth showed in the open distorted mouth. The lips had shrunk back. She had long, long yellow fingernails that had grown after she was dead, Don Héctor explained, tilting the body to show how the left hand’s nails had grown out through the back of the fist. Her skin was rawhide. Her hair was black, unkempt as a horse’s tail; it had grown like the nails, Don Héctor said.
She smelled. “Was she buried alive?” Althea wanted to know.
Don Héctor again apologized to la Señora de Byness for the disturbing sight, but he begged to explain that the mummy’s horrible expression came only from the way the jaw had fallen open and the lips had drawn back as they dried. She was a woman of the elite, a priestess or a queen. She had been prepared after death, then buried high on a cliff, facing the rising sun. One day, he said, the studious ones would be able to tell us what the thoughts in her mind had been. Until then, Don Héctor would keep her safe in this glass case.
As close as he could get to her thoughts was this shoe: Don Héctor showed it to Althea. It was braided wool, impossibly fine. She sat in a chair to look at it. Try it on, Don Héctor said. She put it on one foot and stood.
The shoe fits, Cinderella, said Johnny. His face was open, soft with love and admiration.
Althea took it off, ending the instant in which she’d wished she could have lived that other life.
Certainly this Indian princess had suffered. Before or after dying. In her face no beauty remained.
And now, Don Héctor said, would Johnny like to see the geological samples? Johnny said yes, yes. Although he had not lost his notes, his case of fossils, so carefully marked in white paint and India ink, had sunk to the bottom of the river.
Don Héctor said that he had many duplicates. Johnny could study his collection and perhaps regain what he had lost. Perhaps too, since Johnny was a professional geologist, he could offer Don Héctor a more precise idea of what these animals had been, their habitat and names.
They began pulling out drawers, looking at brachiopods and crinoids. “This conodont marks a horizon,” Johnny said.
Althea said she would go now to rest. She left the two men discussing the Cretaceous period.
Doors seemed to open in front of her and close behind her. Looking at the strange engulfing bed, she decided that only Johnny’s presence there could protect her from ghosts. The French doors of the parlor pulled her through themselves. She walked outside, down the colonnade of arches to the end of the outer verandah. The house was shaded by many mango trees whose large leaves littered the ground like varicolored boats. A hundred yards away she spied a small chapel. It might help to pray, Althea thought, for the oarsman’s life, or at least his soul. Though her father had been a Foursquare Baptist who hated Catholics, and she herself had been baptized in a river, she sometimes crossed herself when passing cemeteries. It felt good to have something to do at those times.
The chapel was not locked, but its heavy brown doors were stiff and ill fitting, hard to push. Inside, it smelled strongly of dust. The walls were bright turquoise, the floor of stone. There were hard benches for the humble and a plush padded one for Don Héctor and the family who never came. The altar was wood, painted gold, flanked by columns like wrung towels. Fat, painted angels’ heads pouted from the four corners of the ceiling. There were Gospel animals, and slaves groaning under the altar; beside it lay a litter with a tiny throne on it and an angel Gabriel dressed in grubby satin knee pants. In the central compartment of the altar stood a woman in a blue velvet dress who must be Mary, wringing her hands and looking up to the sky for help. On one side of her was a knight on horseback in a cape, and on the other side some gentler saint with a dark beard who looked down at her with his blue glass eyes full of tears.
What is wrong with you, little one, the saint seemed to be saying.
My husband just as good as killed that oarsman, Althea answered. He might as well have shot that man. And I didn’t stop him.
The oarsman is with us now, the saint said. In our hole under the river, in our secret place under the mountain. He is happy, with us.
What about his boy, Althea asked.
Pray for Johnny, the saint said.
Althea prayed, but it did not seem to be enough.
It’s not enough, she told the saint.
Sacrifice, said the saint. You are right. You will pay, and your husband too. There is an order that cannot be escaped. If you wish, though, you can pay a little more.
I wish, Althea said. Her hands went to her belly and she curled over. It felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach.
And another thing, the saint said. You will have a baby soon.
…
“That child was a miracle,” Althea had said to Maggie. “Chahld,” and “murkle.” She never lost her Texas drawl, despite having traveled to the far ends of the earth. “That’s what I’d say if I were a religious woman. But I’m a scientist’s wife, so I say I got that chahld from Johnny Baines.”
“Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between,” Maggie remembered saying. It was her junior year at Brandéis, the year she’d lived with Althea, and she was taking a course in critical theory. Thinking was a novelty. She loved it when the professor said you couldn’t ascribe just one cause to any situation. At the time of this conversation with her grandmother, she hadn’t yet understood that multiple causality was not the same as having things both ways.
“Julia, now, Julia was a different type of miracle,” Althea said quietly. She looked down, stirring the tea in her cup. Her face was in a shadow; more than ten years later, her granddaughter would wish she’d seen its expression.
Maggie was still struggling to absorb the new, traumatic version of the canyon trip, with the oarsman sacrificed to Johnny’s well-known stubbornness. At the moment it didn’t seem preferable to the old version, a fairy tale whose repetition she and her sister had demanded all through childhood. The young couple bathing in waterfalls, climbing up a cliff to find mummies; the raft barely eluding whirlpools, and the oarsman wrestling and straining to bring them safely ashore at the hacienda.
Maggie thought, At least they didn’t barbecue the cow.
It was late on a November afternoon in Cambridge. She remembers how the shadows crept out from under the furniture and the long mirror acquired a lugubrious white sheen. How cold the house was! Her grandmother never turned the thermostat above sixty-two. Maggie was amazed at this old woman sitting on the couch, talking, wearing one thin cardigan for insulation. After a lifetime in the tropics, how could she be immune? Later, when Maggie had followed more of Althea’s route through life, she would know just how bone-chilling the tropics can be, how at night the mountains and the forest were cold in a way that makes a person yearn for a straightforward low temperature.
Althea often lay in wait for Maggie, wanting to chat a little before sending her up to study. They’d sit and talk and drink tea or wine while the evening fell. Althea turned on the lamps at seven, then Maggie was free to go. Darkness and cold were the drawbacks to living with her grandmother. Twenty years ago, when Althea and Johnny had bought their house, the neighborhood had been disreputable. Now values had multiplied tenfold and snobbish cars gleamed in the newly bricked driveways. Althea could be miserly and abrasive, but Maggie forgave her, for in all other ways she was more amusing, more advanced than Julia. Althea hid her Burmese ruby in the sugar bowl; she declared to Maggie that she believed in sex.
That day Maggie tucked the moth-eaten alpaca blanket more tightly under her own feet, and was quiet, letting Althea tell how she and Johnny had stayed six weeks at the hacienda. Johnny had written his report, relying on Don Héctor’s rock collection. Althea had loved their dinners with the hacendado, listening to Don Héctor’s tales. The Franciscan priests had failed to civilize the mountains. Seeing male and female Indians dressed in shifts, they’d believed Satan had sent a parade of women to tempt them to break their vows. Don Héctor was a Catholic, but he also believed in exorcisms and coincidences, in hoards of gold guarded by malignant rainbows. He’d tickled Johnny by recounting the Andean theory about earthquakes. They were caused by a gigantic boa shifting underground: black, with a squashed head, it could also turn itself into small, small worms and suck the life from children.
He’d sent his peones downriver to seek the oarsman or his body, but nothing was ever found. Come the time for his North American guests to leave, he had loaned them mules; they’d ridden as far as Cajamarca, then taken a car to the coast. “When they’d reached Huaraz again, their servants had given up on them and had divided all of their belongings. Most of the servants came back to work, with deep apologies for the things they’d taken.
“I didn’t tell Johnny I was pregnant for a long time. I knew it, standing in front of that statue, but I wanted evidence before I told Johnny.
“I sometimes like to think the oarsman was waiting for his boy at home. Not drowned at all.” She smiled a faint smile. “Your uncle Christopher. He’d be fifty this year. Sometimes, child, I believe I can see just what he would have looked like. My firstborn. But I lost that boy. He died,” she said. “He died in Huaraz before he turned two.”
…
There was always cholera after an earthquake, from the bad water. The rivers could run green and yellow, red and black. Poisons seeped from inside the earth. Impossible to prevent a baby from putting its mouth on anything. Harder still to cure a young child of cholera when there was no good water, no wood to boil what water there was.
Now that she was studying medicine, Maggie learned how the child’s body would have been placed in a sling with a hole in it, because the diarrhea was constant, leaving him too weak to cry. Shit would have run like water through the hole into a bucket. Clear as water that rice had been boiled in. The body wasting, pale. The eyes sinking, like a fish left too long on melting ice.
Maggie could not conceive what it would mean to lose a child. Nor how she’d feel if an earthquake came while Carson was away, collapsing the Rosario Canyon’s walls, turning the river into a fissure full of neon lava.
During Althea’s earthquake, Johnny Baines had been away in Lima buying supplies. All the roads had been destroyed; it had taken him a week to return; by then his son was in the ground. Althea had wanted to keep the body, poor Christopher, poor angel, but the Peruvians took him away from her. It sounded crazy now, but she couldn’t bear to put him in his little white coffin before Johnny had said goodbye to him, too. He lay rotting, ugly in his crib. Peruvians came: a woman held Althea in an embrace of iron, pinning her arms while the priest lifted up the corpse. She went to the church, begging for Christopher to have a paper crown and wings, like the other infants who had not been baptized. The priest said Christopher was too old. He’d had the power of speech. Althea insisted the saint had given her a child in order to take him away again, and so he deserved the angel costume. The priest agreed. All Peruvians believed such tales. Johnny would have stopped it, but Christopher went into the ground as an angel, in that cemetery which was to be buried in the next earthquake, when the face of the mountain again fell on Huaraz.
