When Mountains Walked, page 12
“Carajo!” Maggie cursed, then added gentler words, to the effect that all were scared.
The father got up and closed the valve. Fortunata thanked him profusely, and they stood waiting for the pressure to diminish. The transistor began another Ecuadoran ballad. Dead flowers, ashes, tombs, it was perfect for the occasion. The baby’s mother warbled unconsciously, nervously along under her breath, directing her song to the child.
Kerosene had collected in the ring below the burner. Too much: when Fortunata touched the pool with a lit match, blue and yellow flames poured across the stovetop, down onto the floor. Maggie jumped back shouting “Cierra!” The father wrenched shut the valve that led to the kerosene tank, and they all stared in awe at the flames on the stovetop and the floor, burning without visible support.
Maggie should have given the injection long ago. She had no idea whether the baby was still alive, or; if it was, how urgent the timing might be.
“Lo haré yo,” the husband said, I’ll do it. The flames were a small blue tiara on the cement. He stomped on it negligently and squelched it into nothing. The mother seemed in shock, her long jaw hanging open. If the baby was dead in her arms, surely she’d say something.
The man opened the valve slightly and struck a match, and the burner lit with a ripping sound.
“Ya,” said Fortunata, as if claiming credit.
Maggie ran into the clinic, where it was a relief to be alone. Unlock chest. Get vial, unwrap hypodermic. Needle pointing in air, she leafed furtively, hurriedly through the Merck and Where There Is No Doctor, feeling like she was cheating at school. Carson’s notes on drugs were tucked into the back of one of these books. Here, at last, she found that the pneumonia drug was Rocephin. No baby dosage on the ampule, nor the box, nor in the circular’s fine print. She decided to administer half a vial and hope the baby was not allergic.
Fortunata came in, eyes like Ping-Pong balls. “It’s him, it’s him, Black Rainbow, Comandante Oquendo, don’t say anything,” she said in a stage whisper, and ducked out again.
Maggie barely heard her through the pounding that began in her ears. She should have known. She knew. Or did she? She’d called him; he had come. Again she felt the slight, pulling dread she’d felt on first seeing these people. It’s down to me, she thought. Moving with infinite patience, she swam down the hall back into the kitchen, where the mother handed her the baby again. The infant was really not moving sufficiently and Maggie would never forget how she felt, too small, bones mobile under the skin. The skin on her forearms wanted to twitch, the backs of her knees. Poor wee mite.
“Todavía no hierve,” Fortunata mumbled, the water’s not boiling yet. The mother now put both hands over her face. Maggie decided not to look at the man again, not yet. The terrorist who scared no one except herself. Was he really the baby’s father? She wished his foot wasn’t showing in the corner of her visual field, for it reminded her of something. After years in rubber-tire sandals, most men’s feet around here resembled large clods of mud. This man wore the same coarse sandals but his feet had delicate, visible tendons. No, she could not remember. She must move on, concentrate, concentrate on this dying child.
She opened the blanket and peered at the baby, white as a Victorian photograph she’d seen once of a baby lying in state. In the photograph you could see how the infant’s cheeks had started to rot. Maggie laid her out on the kitchen table. The soft skull thwacked dully on the wood and she didn’t even whimper. Bad sign. Flipping the blanket open, Maggie saw the baby dressed in one of those fake-fur union suits she’d seen in the Cajamarca market. Orangish brown, matted polyester, a gorilla costume the color of a malnourished orphan’s hair. Unzip, pull, twist, expose the baby’s skinny, cold bottom. Spike diaphragm. Pull plunger, suck transparent liquid into the barrel of the needle. Swab, stick. She was amazed how the flesh didn’t resist, just like butter in its texture. The baby said, “Ih!” More breath than voice. But breath.
When Maggie turned her up again, her eyes flew open for an instant, counterweighted.
Fortunata handed her a pint whiskey bottle full of warm water, and Maggie closed the blanket over it and the child. The baby drew two huge breaths, her nostrils flaring. “Eunhh,” she exhaled wearily.
“Vive” the terrorist declared. She lives.
“Casi,” Maggie said, almost. The infant was breathing with a heavy desperation, chest and belly seesawing. The mother reached for her, but Maggie didn’t let go, not yet. She clung to the child, to the returning life, wanting to hold it forever. Meanwhile, the full kettle had started to hiss and rattle menacingly. Before it steamed, Maggie showed how far from the spout to hold the infant.
Fortunata suggested adding eucalyptus leaves to the kettle. “Perfecto,” Maggie said. She was tired. She wished they would all go home now. They could cut branches on the way. If the baby was no longer in her arms, it could slip away and start to die again. If so, she didn’t want to watch, or even know about it.
“Fortunata will cut,” the man said. Fortunata took the knife, slipped out. The closest eucalyptus tree was half a kilometer uphill. The speed of her exit, Maggie thought, disproved Fortunata’s boast that she’d never been scared of Comandante Oquendo.
Maggie restated the prescription for home treatment, looking the Comandante flatly in the eyes, pretending to impress details upon him. This might be the only moment when she could ever look at him without being seen in return. He did not appear dangerous. His skin was velvety; the few lines in his face seemed to belong to the normal range of human expressions. His face was widest at the cheekbones. There was humor in it, intelligence. The density of his hair amazed her.
He grinned, or rather his eyes sparkled at her slightly—he’d seen her trying to inspect him, and was, again, amused. How could she think he wouldn’t notice?
Quickly Maggie turned to the mother and repeated not to scorch the baby in the steam, and to test the water in the whiskey bottle too. Her heart pounded. He knows I know, she thought.
The terrorist pointed to the half-full vial of antibiotic on the counter. He pinched and waggled the baby’s foot again, to show that it was still limp. The baby’s face was still cement-colored. Maggie wondered whether Rocephin was dangerous. She hadn’t read the side effects listed on its wrapper. Maybe, since she was sure this was pneumonia, it was best that all concerned should feel she hadn’t held back treatment.
“Muy bien,” she said, and laid the baby out again on the table. She was acquiescing. Doing just what this man told her, just what Carson told her not to. Where was her own judgment, and what could guarantee it? She was tempted to jab the baby through her clothes, to get it over with, but she forced herself again to unwrap her. The little body was quite warm now, thanks to the hot water bottle. This time, as the needle went in, the infant managed an “Ah” that was close to protest.
The mother took the baby and wrapped her up again, covering her face. Maggie shrugged. “Ahora, manda Dios,” she said, pointing to the ceiling, above which chance and law played freely across the sky.
“La voluntad de Dios,” Comandante Oquendo said lightly. God’s will.
Maggie agreed. She wondered what Carson could be doing. She left the room with what she hoped was an air of responsible authority.
The clinic looked even starker and longer than usual. There was little to clean up. Maggie tossed out the drug circular, then fished it out of the wastebasket for later study, then threw it out again. The idea of poring over all that small print gave her a headache, and she knew she’d learn more by simply asking Carson. For a third time she fished it out and put the box and circular on the counter, an answer to his question: Are you sure?
No point in praying or nail-biting. She logged the case, checking the date on their calendar, a gift from the hardware store in Cajamarca: it showed a pudgy Caucasian baby sitting behind a basket of apples, a fruit that did not grow well in Peru. Today was the day of San Celsio—the inventor of the thermometer or a martyr boiled to death?
No-name Baby was their sixteenth patient. An auspicious number, Maggie thought. The baby must not die. If it did, Maggie hoped to feel something different from the cascade of selfish paranoia that had begun to shake her mind. It mattered most deeply to the baby whether it lived or died, and since the baby did not yet know this, Maggie must not forget it.
The kitchen sounds were turning frisky, festive. Fortunata had turned up the radio, which was playing a huaynito. The terrorist said something that made the women laugh.
Just as Maggie was deciding to retreat to the bedroom, Fortunata called, “Doctora Maggi! Vert!” She always pronounced Maggie “Ma-hee,” like the Swiss powdered soup or the Hawaiian sushi fish.
They’d hung a bedsheet over the kitchen door opening. The pot and kettle were boiling, each with a large messy branch of eucalyptus sticking out. Dry, comma-shaped leaves littered the floor. Piedras’s afternoon heat had thickened, and so the kitchen’s air was doubly thick, fragrant as hot jelly. The Peruvians were all huddled around the table drinking coffee. Their foreheads glistened.
“Now you must be presented to Don Vicente Quispe Cruz, and this is Doña Luz Maria.” Maggie shook their hands. The man, Vicente, announced that the baby had been saved. Luz Maria uncovered her at last. “Duerme,” she announced, and leaned back so Maggie could examine the tiny face. Asleep indeed, and she’d turned the proper color, weak milky tea. Maggie gently touched her hair.
In the time it took to walk them to the door, Maggie remembered over and over again that she’d saved this life. Carson would be proud. She was tempted to take the afternoon at face value, decide that their work in Piedras had begun, and start to believe that she and her husband would never endure another afternoon when they chirped and teased each other, pecking at a frozen, amputated silence between them.
She thanked Luz María, told her the child would wake up hungry. Luz María gave her a look that was loving and pitying and grateful all at once; it made Maggie want to jump out of her skin, as if she must now do some further, impossible thing. “Keep her warm,” Maggie insisted, “keep boiling eucalyptus.”
Vicente gripped her hand strongly. “Gracias, Doctora.”
“Not Doctora,” Maggie said.
“Señora. Doña Maggie,” Vicente said. “How much?”
“Gratuito.”
He stood there and made a little speech about poverty and humanity and understanding. Everything he said was true, though she hated how he said the gringos didn’t understand the people, their farms, their animals, their trees, their sufferings. To her relief, he concluded by saying that Doña Maggie had shown true human compassion, and if God willed, they could all reach comprehension, here in the valley of the Rosario.
Maggie asked for permission to repeat the speech to Carson. Vicente nodded and said, “You will tell him everything.”
On impulse, Maggie leaned over and kissed the baby’s head. It was fuzzy and fragrant, like a geranium leaf. “Congratulations, baby with no name.”
Luz María said, “I cannot choose! Do you like ‘Lady’?”
“It’s beautiful,” Maggie said. In fact “Lady” sounded false, a kind of brand name for a child. What did it have to do with Peru?
“I’ll name her ‘Lady Maggy,’” Luz María teased, smiling a gummy smile. “You will baptize her, be her godmother. You and I will be comadres. Okay?”
Maggie smiled, but didn’t say yes or no. On the one hand were Luz Maria’s feelings; on the other, educational expenses and unforeseen obligations. Somewhere else, both closer and farther away, bulkier uncertainties shifted.
“Ya,” Fortunata said, “you saved her. You will stand at her baptism. When the priest comes in October.”
Maggie promised to consider the idea. Meanwhile, night had crept out of the river and up the sides of the mountains. She watched Vicente and Luz Maria walk north toward the iron bridge and pass into the dove-colored shadow that had fallen across the road. They were going back into the land of Althea, she permitted herself to think.
8
ALTHEA WOULD NEVER forget watching her child’s face change: how the bruises of rot spread and bloomed, from the edges of his nostrils, from under the skin of his cheeks; how his lips hardened and his stillness grew deeper and deeper, the stillness of death that was worse than anything, evil and unmistakable, stiller than a wooden doll, stiller than stone or anything that had never been alive, until she no longer could remember what her living child had looked like. Yet she knew that if she was ever to find Christopher again he would be there, in Peru, nowhere else. Thus it amazed her that she allowed Johnny Baines to take her hand and pull her into the dark car, leaving Christopher behind in his shining white sliver of a coffin, there under the high valley’s too blue sky, in the graveyard surrounded by its White wall: stacked sarcophagi like apartment houses in the center, young eucalyptus trees shivering in the wind, newly planted in the earthquake victims’ section. As the car drove away, Althea turned again and again to look back, but the rear window was always full of the snowy, misshapen peak of Huascaran, with the new dent in its face where the avalanche had come from. Thanks to Johnny and geology, she knew the mountain was already starting to collapse again.
She was relieved when the road curved and the walls of the valley rose and she could no longer see the mountain.
Within the week, Christopher’s parents had shipped to New Orleans through the Panama Canal, then flown to California where Johnny defended his dissertation. As a doctor of geology, uninterested in petroleum, he obtained work in India, mapping for the British Crown. India would be a little like Peru, he reassured Althea, who thought she’d be glad if it wasn’t.
India: a hazy flatland the color of lions. It was white, or yellow, or brown, the color of eternal dust. It could almost have been "West Texas, Althea thought, except that its mud-brick towns and patchwork fields were not green, not irrigated. A geometry of monotone shadings, scratched into or built up out of the earth.
Not a river to be seen. No mountain, no ocean.
They had traveled for so long her eyeballs felt dirty, cracked, the roots of her hair swelling grease into her scalp. Her insteps had puffed to bonelessness and were sticking out of her shoes. Nights and days had run together into one dull, irritated mass: San Francisco, Hawaii, Singapore, each place stranger than the previous one.
Landing in Delhi, she felt gravity catch her, focusing her into this new place which was the farthest away of all. It must be opposite her hometown of Amarillo on the globe. Opposites attract, she thought, having each other in common. She’d never believed in Chinamen hanging upside down in hats. Here below them a double row of large, dark green spreading trees lined a narrow, precise stripe of road. The trees were bigger than oaks, wider than cottonwoods, solider than mesquite; they were impressive from the airplane; they’d found a way to grow in a dry landscape. Soon she would see how each tree would shelter a world of shade and singing birds, and monkeys, and women with water jars who rested, chatting together, until they’d regained the strength to hoist the heavy, shapely brass urns back onto their heads or hips and carry the water home to husbands and flocks of children.
Johnny scratched her companionably between the shoulder blades. She was startled to realize he was asking for her attention by this gesture. She sat up, vacating his view out the window.
“We’ll be all right here,” he said, pleading for her acknowledgment.
She forced herself to smile and nod, but she could not say yes.
She was to take comfort, in this country of skinny, desperate people, in seeing how the bones of life were bare and no one turned away. There was nowhere to turn, but still they didn’t try. It was a land where babies died and women wailed for them. Not like the States, where each house built up its lie that life was complete, for other people.
Johnny’s job was in Bihar, the dry, hot desert heart of the subcontinent. A train from Delhi all night, then two hours on a cart drawn by a pony the size of a poodle, whipped mercilessly by a wizened ancient who wore a dirty white turban on his head and a sagging diaper of the same color to cover his private parts. A clean white beard grew out of his black face. He was not a Negro but an Indian person. Althea felt uneasy around him. He reminded her of the boatman who had drowned, though he and Domingo didn’t look at all the same.
She was uneasy in Bihar, generally, though Johnny had told her its rocks were stable. She disbelieved: the ground didn’t feel right to her; it felt as if one day or night it could suddenly begin to squirm as the ground had done in Huaraz. She actually felt better after hearing, from the British women at the club, that Bihar too had had its earthquake, back in the 1900s, hot sand spouting from the barren ground. After that, she could make love with Johnny, cautiously.
She didn’t go with him to the field, but instead grew versed in seeing him from afar.
All day he was a tiny stick figure drilling holes and provoking explosions. At dusk he trudged across some range of darkening hills while the sun spilled crimson devastations, orange wealth across the sky. She was not allowed to go with him, so it was only in her mind that she lay on the cot in Johnny’s olive-green tent, watching him log the day’s measurements by kerosene lantern, worrying about his eyesight until he came to her and they fell asleep together, once more, in the circle of one shared horizon.
After two months he was finished. His independent research on the tensions in stable rocks was well received, and good for his reputation. Next he would work in Assam, where a fault called the Chedrang had shifted. Two British tombs had left their plinths and leapt to touch, a distance of one and a half meters. A road had moved aside so that the view from a curve improved. Johnny was excited about measuring these displacements. Althea wondered what it meant that Chedrang’s earthquake, Assam 1897, had broken a single crystal wineglass in Leghorn, Italy. Beauty, an opera singer’s voice singing from far; but from near, cracks in the earth had opened, closing with great force, buildings had collapsed in unhearable noise, leaving ten thousand dead, crushed and bleeding, burnt and diseased. The mountains had lifted twenty-six feet. Althea dreaded going to Assam, where she’d have to see the many British graves, shaded by cedars near the stone Episcopal churches, for she counted herself among grieving survivors. But she’d have only an absence, not even a stone.
