When Mountains Walked, page 11
Soon Johnny came back. After visiting his child’s grave, he stood in what had once been the plaza and shouted out his exhortation: “Move your town! Don’t repeat the disaster!”
The Peruvians pretended to listen, because they felt sorry for him. Where should they go? The town was here.
Johnny couldn’t work in Peru anymore. Althea never wanted to leave.
…
“I told him, why should they move their whole town for one white child when so many of their own had died?”
Maggie had made quick calculations in her head. “I guess you didn’t feel like having another baby for a while?” Julia was vague about her age, but it still seemed to have taken at least six more years before Maggie’s mother had come along.
Althea sighed heavily. She’d had Julia in 1940, in the British hospital in Calcutta. “Julia’s so unhappy with me,” said Althea with a glimmer of enthusiasm. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’ve always wanted someone to hear my side of things. You seem to be the only one I can speak to.”
“Grandma, you can tell me anything.”
“Watch out,” Althea had cackled, “I might just say your mama was a Hindu.”
That evening, Maggie had called her mother on the telephone. She understood Julia so much better, and wanted to capitalize on this new sympathy. Julia had grown up in an angel’s shadow. No wonder she was such a perfectionist. Of course Maggie hadn’t been planning to say any of this; even if she had, she’d have been prevented, for she and her mother had instantly become embroiled in their typical difficult conversation. Maggie mentioned that Althea had told her old stories of Peru, things she’d never heard before. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Julia had snapped. “My mother ought to write bestsellers.” Mother and daughter had fought on from there, submerging all nuances of the conversation with Althea.
The next year, her senior year, Maggie had taken an apartment closer to campus. Her visits to Althea had predictably diminished. Then she’d met Larry. By the time she recalled a fleeting expression crossing Althea’s face, and wondered what her grandmother might have said, or meant, or tried to say, she was in Piedras, forced to wonder what she had remembered, what invented.
7
ON THE MORNING of the first of August, six months to the day after they’d arrived in Piedras, sixty-three years after her grandmother had crawled out of the waters, Maggie Goodwin began the day as usual by studying medical books.
Today’s lesson was from chapter 27 of the Emergency Medical Technicians’ Manual. She submerged herself in the text, then took the quiz at the chapter’s end, hoping never to forget the difference between the two kinds of diabetic attacks.
Meanwhile, her husband worked on his educational mural. Since his clinic still stood empty, the Senor Doctor had begun a slightly vengeful prevention and education campaign, covering the north wall of the clinic with cartoon images no one could avoid or misinterpret as they walked past or arrived on the bus from Cajamarca. Today he would complete the final, hellish scene, showing where flies had walked before they landed on your food, how they laid their eggs and worms then hatched to gnaw you from within.
For lunch they ate fried Spam and onions, fried eggs, white rice, and hot peppers. Fortunata stood with her back to them, rinsing yams at the black sink; she’d eat when her employers finished. Carson sat down raising his arms, bent, as a surgeon does whose hands are scrubbed and ready. He was splattered to the elbows with many colors of cheap enamel paint, purchased from Don Nasir. Paint looked bad on a doctor, he said, so he was glad no patients came today.
“El Señor Doctor converts himself into a peasant,” the cook said graciously.
“Yo no campesino,” said Carson in his broken but improving Spanish. “Yo no doctor! Yo loco! Don Calzón!” Spreading his napkin in his lap, he took a couple of bites before testing his wife on her morning studies. He never confined himself to one topic, but asked her random questions: How do you treat a laceration? Where is the acromion? Which type of diabetes needs an immediate dose of sugar?
Then she and Carson and the cook all discussed his plans for one more mural, having to do with water. Carson wanted to put it on the south wall of the clinic, showing a man shitting in an irrigation ditch with a big red X over his backside. He was obsessed with fecal matters, Maggie teased. She didn’t want that image on the same bedroom wall she slept inside of every night. Fortunata, however, was in favor. The image was educational and funny; there was no kinder way of illustrating that bad habit. She did agree with Maggie that Carson mustn’t paint it onto his own clinic, lest people begin to make a certain type of joke. For a small consideration, Nasir would surely let him use the retaining wall of his tomato field on the east side of the road, halfway to town.
Coffee was under way when they heard a truck barreling up the river road, too fast. Carson worried aloud that the driver was drunk and would crash into the boulder that sat where the road curved a little, leaving downtown Piedras. Last month, they’d had three patients from just such an accident. They’d rushed outside to see men rolling in the road uttering loud moans, but soon it was clear that they’d been saved by their own drunkenness, which had made them limp as rag dolls as they’d bashed against the insides of their truck. They’d been drinking their way from Nasir’s to the house in Piedras Baja where a woman sold her own cane liquor at one sol per liter. After Carson had released them, splinted and bandaged, they’d driven off, one wheel making a frightful noise against the dented fender, only to crash again just as harmlessly into a ditch a hundred meters farther on. This time the doors popped open and an astonishing number of empty bottles had rolled out.
Today’s truck successfully negotiated the curve. Seconds later, it came to a screeching halt in front of the clinic. A door slammed and someone came running in, someone heavy. Carson leaped up and met him halfway. It was the mine director’s driver, a man nicknamed Cantinflas because of his scruffy disordered air and low-riding trousers.
Cantinflas said there had been a small accident at the mine. Accidentito. He chopped at his calf with the side of his hand. Dinamita. His hands exploded in the air. Rock had flown, a man had broken his leg.
“Why didn’t you bring him?” Carson said angrily in English, then translated his own question while Maggie overrode him, more politely. Cantinflas replied as Maggie had expected, that the road was too rough for a man with a shattered calf. The Canadian mining company maintained the east-side road with its own machinery, yet it was worse than the west side, because it rained more on the east side and the mountains were steeper. Eight hours down and the patient would have been screaming.
Carson started packing his kit. Maggie followed him from room to room. “You can’t leave me here,” she said. It had been their cardinal rule: Carson went no farther than half an hour from the clinic.
“No shots,” Carson said, stuffing gauze into a zip-lock bag. “‘Take two aspirin, call me in the morning.’ Cures most things.” He laughed.
“I know, I know,” said Maggie. “Doesn’t the mine have its own doctor?”
“No!” Carson glared at her now. “You want me to sit here painting flies on piles of mierda?”
Maggie had no answer. She let him go into the kitchen alone, to wash his arms with turpentine.
“Bye, darling. You can handle it.” He climbed into the mine director’s pickup and cranked up its smoked purple window, staring ahead into his own individual future. Before he could shut it entirely, Maggie hung her forearms into the cab, hoping he’d kiss her good-bye, but he didn’t, even though Cantinflas was taking his time fussing with cassette tapes. She pleaded to come along, her hands gripping the edge of the open window. If he’d agreed, she would have dived straight in. But he didn’t. He promised, with exasperated patience, to return as soon as possible, late that night or the next morning.
Cantinflas turned the key. “Bye,” her husband said. “Good luck,” said Maggie, still wishing he’d kiss her. Instead, he cranked up the purple window, forcing her to remove her fingers. A legitimate defense against the dust, Maggie told herself. The muffled sound of Cantinflas’s tape player came through the glass, playing the first strains of a song. “Billie Jean, she’s not my lover,” Michael Jackson grunted. As soon as Maggie had recognized the song, the singer, the truck roared off.
The fact that the song was old and bad only made her envy of Carson more humiliating. She stood in the road watching the slender silver Toyota disappear into its own brown cauliflower of dust; stood in the silence until she began to feel the canyon walls towering and towering, making her smaller and smaller.
It was one o’clock when she looked at her watch and decided it was time to go back inside. She could have sat in the kitchen with Fortunata, listening to Andean songs, but she was afraid she’d either burst into tears or say something disloyal, so she passed by, not looking in. From her bedroom she heard Fortunata clattering pots, an invitation. It touched Maggie’s heart, but she was grateful to have the childish luxury of refusing. Soon the cook gave up, and turned the radio louder so that Maggie could hear it from the bedroom.
Tired by now of all her comic books, she lay on her belly under the mosquito net rereading the dog-eared Russian novel her husband had suggested she bring along for the new life overseas. She kept losing her place, her attention wandering from the anguish of the characters back to her own certainty that Carson’s absence would somehow cause a dire case to arrive.
It was three-thirty when Fortunata appeared in the bedroom doorway saying “Pacientes.” With a weird relief, Maggie sat up in bed, threw back the mosquito net, and felt with her toes for her shoes.
Let it be a clean machete slash to the foot, she thought.
They were already planted in the middle of the clinic room’s polished cement floor, a man and woman. The woman held a baby, wrapped so tightly in its gray blanket Maggie couldn’t see its hair. It looked inanimate. The man seemed to be in his late twenties. Maggie noticed he was tall for a Peruvian, almost as tall as she was, and that he exuded physical strength, a kind of glow shining through the absurd, faded orange T-shirt that proclaimed him, in English, “World’s Greatest AUNT!” On his head was a little white plastic cowboy hat. Seeing Maggie, he jerked it down nervously. Country people could be so shy, she thought, touched.
His wife had dressed up for the visit in a gray A-line skirt, an electric-blue sweater, and dusty black pumps. Her face was hard and pure, Andean. She looked ten years older than her husband, but Maggie knew she wasn’t.
“Si?” Maggie said to them. The man shifted his body behind the woman, preventing her from running out of the room. He glanced at Maggie from under his hat, and she felt his dark gaze strike her cheek, burning as if he’d slapped her.
Something solidified in her chest, a deep, pulling sensation indistinguishable from dread.
Where was the Doctor? the man asked brusquely. Away, Maggie told him, but before she could elaborate, he shrugged and said to his wife, “Vamonos, pues,” let’s leave, then.
In a loud voice Maggie began to talk, trying to hold them in one long sentence explaining that the Señor Doctor had gone to the gold mine, leaving her in charge, in charge, and since this child was obviously very, very sick, she had the clear duty to ask them not to leave. She was authorized, trained, ready to offer treatment. “No pueden irse,” she concluded, you can’t go. She addressed the husband, who’d stood shaking his head the whole time she’d been talking.
“Far is the mine,” the woman whispered. “Eight hours.” Then she cried out, “Doctora!” and thrust the infant forward so that Maggie had to accept it or let the bundle drop to the floor.
Maggie lifted a flap of blanket and saw the baby’s face, opaque, white, and rough as a plaster cast. It was limp, so light in her arms that if the upper lip hadn’t fluttered slightly at the touch of the air, she’d have thought it was already a ghost.
The mother leaned over Maggie’s shoulder. She smelled of wood smoke, and faintly too of urine. “Ve, ve,” she said, see, see—as much to comfort the baby as to communicate with Maggie.
The man began explaining. Hace tres días, three days ago, the baby became sick. Anoche, last night, she got worse. Fiebre, fever.
Why had they waited so long to bring her to the clinic? If the baby died, they’d say, The Doctor norteamericano wasn’t home, and his wife, who doesn’t know anything, she killed our child.
“Pulmonía,” the man said firmly. His wife was nodding. “Pulmonía.”
“I will examine her.” Maggie’s arms shook as she tipped the infant to peer inside its nostrils. Blocked and green. She tried to find a pulse, fingering the tender flesh of the neck, behind the ear, but she felt nothing and was afraid to press too hard. The baby definitely seemed to be alive, though barely lukewarm. Did she feel pain?
Surely I will kill her, Maggie thought.
Putting her ear to the baby’s lips, she tried to feel, or hear, her breath. Was that a tiny sigh or Maggie’s imagination? Suddenly the baby inhaled, shuddering in her arms, but the baby’s eyes stayed closed.
“A veces no respira,” the mother said apologetically. Sometimes she doesn’t breathe.
Maggie saw it was going to be impossible to get her to swallow oral medicine.
“Inyección,” she said.
“Penicilina,” the mother said at once.
Maybe this woman knew what to do; maybe she’d had other children treated for pneumonia. Pneumonia was one of the most frequent killers in any poor mountains, carrying off the old, the young, the weak. Carson’s admonitions rang in Maggie’s mind: Don’t give shots. Never cave in when patients write their own prescriptions, especially if they’re illiterate peasants. Never, never. Never, never. “Pulmonía, inyección,” Maggie at last agreed, her thin voice shouting in her own ears, barely overriding Carson’s. Now, what should be in the needle? Hadn’t the government nurses killed a baby just like this one? Would an infant’s treatment be in one of Carson’s medical manuals, and if so, which one?
The mother stood aside, a jittery shadow, clamping her arms across her breasts. Maggie wondered how many other children she had, how many she had lost. They hadn’t named this baby yet. It was a seven-week-old infant. Maybe they were waiting to see if she would really grow up to be a person.
God help me if the child’s allergic, Maggie thought, she’ll turn red, swell up, and die. No one would care about her good intentions. The terrorists would swoop down . . .
Steam from a kettle and a hot water bottle would be as important as the antibiotic.
“We’ll go to the kitchen,” Maggie announced. “Boil water, and hold the infant in the smoke”—she couldn’t remember the word for steam—“while I prepare the inyección.”
Both parents watched, black eyes inhaling light. The father’s eyes were clear, untroubled, intelligent. He’d agreed to Maggie’s plan. “Vamos,” he ordered.
The mother nodded. Her face was relaxed, almost sleepy, as Maggie handed the baby back to her. With a routine gesture, she flipped the blanket back down over the baby’s face. Keeping her warm was good, but Maggie hated seeing her face disappear again like that.
The three of them passed down the dark narrow hall, through the ridged green plastic fringe that hung in the kitchen door. The kitchen was full of people.
“Buenas tardes,” the baby’s father said. He took his hat off, smiled a wry, lopsided smile.
“Ah! Ah! Perdón!” Fortunata jumped up from the table where she’d been sitting with Doña Ema and Ema’s two sons. Such guilt was unnecessary, Maggie thought, although she did wonder when the visitors had come in. Somehow she hadn’t heard them.
Fortunata and Doña Ema both began to babble incoherently. The boys continued sitting, staring inches before their eyeballs, like students asked a question, until Fortunata barked, “Vayanse!” They and their mother filed out, mumbling perfunctory goodbyes. At the door of the kitchen, the older boy, Boris, turned back, smiling, as if he planned to stay and watch.
“Chss!” Fortunata shooed him, like a dog. Then she hastily swept up the greasy plates into the sink while the transistor continued a weak, scratchy pasillo ballad. The baby’s mother sat down at the table.
Fortunata asked Maggie whether the patients had introduced themselves.
“No—this is an emergency! Fortunata, we need hot water!”
“La bebita está muy mal,” the baby’s father explained. “Tiene pul-monía.”
Maggie asked Fortunata to fill both kettles and heat them on the stove, but the cook was riveted to the middle of the floor, saying she was so sorry the Doctor was not here. While the husband told her sharply not to worry, everything was fine, correcto, the Doctora was sufficient, Maggie walked between them and filled the kettles herself, feeling momentarily invincible, like Carson, cutting through whatever obscure emotions were paralyzing others.
“Mi amor es inocente,” a radio baritone revealed. “Mi amor es un volcán.” By the smears on the plates, Maggie saw that Fortunata had fed her guests the same lunch as the Doctores had eaten: Spam, eggs, rice, ají. When she turned around, Fortunata was bustling aimlessly, rearranging chairs so that the husband could sit down too.
“Fortunata, fuego!” Maggie commanded, but Fortunata seemed to have forgotten how to dominate the cooktop. She lit a match, whose head flew off. She burnt her finger on a second, and still the stove wouldn’t light.
The baby’s mother pulled the blanket-bundle up to her face. Coarse wool, it looked as if it had been gathered from mouse nests. She pressed her lips on it, murmuring to the infant inside. Fortunata pumped the stove, her fat arms wobbling. She wasted several more matches before discovering that the fuel valve was closed; when she opened it, kerosene sprayed all over the walls and ceiling. Fortunata dabbed at the liquid with a rag while the kerosene kept spraying.
