When Mountains Walked, page 14
She could feel his happiness beginning to glow out of the open pores of his skin. I’m close, he said. Close! Are you? Immediately she began to condense herself willfully onto a single dark, intensely material point. She grew smaller and smaller, denser and denser, until she could bear it no more, and imploded.
Opening her eyes, she saw him looking into them, smiling, and she saw on his dreamy face that he believed she was an angel, a far kinder and more beautiful person than she knew herself to be (a person with the black hole inside her creating ever more strange ideas). She didn’t care about earthquakes at all. She didn’t care about saving anyone. She just wanted to bring Johnny into the same evil, magnificent world she lived in. Then he could truly save her.
“I’ll go,” he said. “You’re right.”
They rolled onto their backs. Their mingled sweat began to dry into fine tidal grains, but without the slightest cooling. Althea turned her head toward the window, which was shaded by thick hibiscus leaves. Dimness offered no mercy. The sun’s blunt heat pressed down, trapped under the corrugated roof.
There was a thinness in the air between them, and Althea realized that Johnny had taken Mongolia from her, taken it for his own. Now there would be hurry. Today had just become the last day of gardener. The last day of cook and of maid. She would have to tell them, pay them all. Time began racketing forward again, a heavy metallic momentum. She slipped out from under the limp mosquito mesh and stood for a moment enjoying the larger, unconfined air. Then into the bathroom to splash water from the bucket over her back. Wet toe-prints, drops, smears followed her footsteps, looking bloody on the dark red tiles.
Later, on the day they left their bungalow, she saw a fire at the bottom of Johnny’s eyes, saw his body move with the contained elasticity of a stalking cat, like a soldier’s whose goal was killing. She hadn’t seen him so focused in a year, yet she felt neither relieved nor indulgent. He ordered her out of the bedroom while he stuffed handfuls of already dirty clothing into his duffel bag. She told herself of course he ought to be excited—he was visiting the greatest earthquake of all time, Altai 1938. Instead of reproducing Johnny’s emotions within her own, as she was used to doing, she began to be afraid of this departure, which up to now had belonged to her.
9
PEELED, BOILED POTATOES with cheese sauce, fried chicken, and a salad of avocado, tomatoes, and lime—Fortunata produced a surprise banquet to celebrate Maggie’s triumph. She’d made food enough for six, so Maggie invited her to stay. They sat eating like friends in a restaurant, sharing a liter of beer.
The night bus to Cajamarca roared by. “You can no longer escape,” Fortunata observed.
Maggie said she did not desire to.
“The Comandante liked you,” Fortunata said. “What a good idea to invite him.”
“Truly?”
“Truly!” Fortunata had been afraid he’d never come. He was a fugitive; he’d suspect a trap. Even during the Rainbow, he’d rarely shown himself. His philosophy was to let the people rule themselves until a problem came along.
“I’m a problem!” Maggie joked. She wished there were a second bottle of beer to share. “So what should we do next?” The idea of the future was unexpectedly exhausting.
Fortunata told her to wait with confidence.
What if the gringa hadn’t saved that baby? Would Comandante Oquendo exact some retribution?
“Tch! Don’t talk like that, Señora.”
Now they realized it was Saturday, for they heard the Pentecostal preacher howling faintly, all the way from Piedras Baja. Behind him was a mini-beeping rhumba of programmed electronic rhythm. The congregation must finally have bought its sound system. Standing up, Fortunata imitated the preacher, looming over Maggie, intoning, “Saca! Saca! Diablos!” Out! Out! Devils! She invited Maggie to come and experience the electrified service, with artificial lightning and the sounds of a storm at sea.
Tonight of all nights, Maggie would have loved to see people falling down in ecstasies, and to fall down herself, exorcised and pure. Alas, she’d feel too self-conscious to enter any trance, especially knowing Carson might come home in the middle of it.
With her own forefinger she smeared toothpaste on her friend’s incisors, to cover the sinful scent of alcohol, then sent Fortunata off. She locked the inside bolt with the gigantic padlock she’d bought at a motorcycle shop in the States, on recommendation of a friend who traveled. It had cost her fifty dollars. Tonight, its rippling coils and red, uncrushable viper’s head seemed fully justified.
She washed all the dishes, swaying to radio huaynos, then got into bed and tried to sleep. Her eyes kept flying open, hard and shiny as a China doll’s, and in the darkness, just as blind. Would Carson return tonight or in the morning? Or after some unforeseeable interval of days? She turned on the light and tried to read her Russian novel, but by now all the characters were snarled in awful fates. She wished she’d brought along the British country farce her mother had recommended, something light or, God forbid, even inspirational.
Cheer up, she told herself. She’d saved a baby today. She’d made new and important friends for the clinic. Why feel that doom and retribution were due to land upon her? Why feel guilty that Carson hadn’t been there? He’d had his own case, the mine accident, to deal with. This situation had been hers. She rolled flat on her back, nearly gasping with excitement as she recalled Fortunata’s nervousness when the couple first stepped into the kitchen, and how Luz Maria had thrust the baby into her arms, and the way Vicente’s eyes had met hers. Best of all had been the way the infant had gasped alive the second time Maggie stuck her with the needle.
Surely, if there was danger, Fortunata was friend enough to warn her. It was best that Carson had been away, and not just for Maggie’s ego. He might have made a ruinous remark. He’d never believed the Black Rainbow was as innocent as everybody said. After tearing a thumbnail prying out rocks, he’d concluded that force, only force, could have obtained all that road-building cooperation for which Comandante Oquendo was so famous. Maggie had argued that peasants didn’t find rock-moving as onerous as Carson did. To end the argument, she’d admitted that Carson might be right, that Nasir and Fortunata could have lied, each for their own reasons.
Today, though, had been a real victory, even Carson would have to admit. A baby had been saved. The Comandante had brought a patient. Why torture herself with speculations? That would be Carson’s advice.
She turned on her belly resolved to sleep, to rest, to have a dream; but instead spent the next hours corkscrewing in the sheets. Around two A.M. she began to hear the faint sound of an engine. It came and went phantasmally at first. Twenty minutes later, the truck pulled up. She leapt from bed, ran to the door. First a banging fist, then Carson’s voice came shouting: “It’s me, babe, let me in!” She slid aside the bolt. Barelegged under her T-shirt, she didn’t care how Cantinflas’s truck headlights seared her exposed thighs. Let them see, she thought, my husband is here, the only man on earth with rights over my flesh. Nevertheless, she skipped into a shadow when he pushed both doors wide open.
He dropped his bag on the clinic’s counter. “What a trip!”
Maggie cried, “Tell all,” as she ran into the bedroom to pull on her jeans. When she came back, dressed, Carson was bolting the door, Cantinflas having raced off to Cajamarca with the patient strapped down in his truck bed with a saline IV and a leg splint. Carson had stabilized the wound, but the man needed surgery and Cantinflas was driving to Cajamarca Hospital, twenty hours straight through from the mine, chewing coca leaves to stay alert.
Carson was starving. Maggie uncovered the enamel bowl and watched him wolf down the leftovers of Fortunata’s banquet, talking between bites. He still fascinated her unreasonably, down to the way he scattered pinches of damp coarse salt so carefully over his avocado. There had been no rock fall. It was a gunshot wound, with a bad exit and a shattered tibia. From what he could gather, it had happened during a gang fight. “Wish you’d been there to interpret, honey,” he said. “I understood about half of what Ignacio was explaining.”
“Ignacio?”
“The mine director. I made friends with him.” Ignacio said the canyon was fraught with a tension far more significant than any residue of stamped-out terrorists. The wounded man was from Huancayo. He’d been shot by a local. When the Canadians reopened La Tormentosa, they’d hired almost no Rosarinos. Instead, they’d trucked in professionals from Cerro de Pasco, Huancayo, and Ayacucho, violent hardhats whose families had mined for generations, loyal to the death, underground. Conditions were terrible, but wages were forty dollars a week. Locals vainly insisted that since La Tormentosa was not a shaft mine, there was no reason for the company to prefer shaft miners. La Tormentosa used new methods of extraction, profitable in grams of gold per ton of rock. The Canadians were grinding up a whole mountain, crushing it, and dissolving it in acid. Their machines were huge mountain-eating monsters with titanium teeth. There was no time to hire ignorant farmers. Some of the ignorant farmers resisted this idea, thus the envy and the fight. Sadly, typically, the miners harmed each other rather than uniting against the administration. “Get this, though,” Carson said. Going up, he’d looked down upon a gorgeous blue alpine lake, half covered by a white plume. Cyanide. They were using the lake as an effluent basin.
“Cyanide,” Maggie repeated. The word had an evil sound.
“Mercury, too, I bet. Arsenic. The fish are gone. No trout, even in the river. Stuff ends up down here. We’re drinkin’ heavy metal.” He drained his water glass, slammed it on the table for effect. “Can’t boil that shit out. Good thing we’re adults. We’ll just get liver cancer.” Wiping his lips, he predicted defective babies. All the fault of the new president and his gung-ho policy toward foreign exchange. “They won’t regulate. Those Canadians have their pristine wilderness up north. Peru? Who cares?”
Maggie hadn’t seen him so animated in months. Carson described the mining camp, a raw scarred mountainside covered with the shabby tents and grim cement houses of the workers. They had recreated a village from the central highlands, complete with livestock and women cooking in pots outdoors. Lots of kids and dogs underfoot. There was a cinderblock school and a health post, both unstaffed; and a long barracks for the soldiers who guarded the operation and rode on the trucks that once a month carried the gold out to Cajamarca, whence it was flown to Lima on a plane rented from the Peruvian air force, thence to Geneva or elsewhere.
The mine director was okay, surprisingly. Ignacio Garcia, a city boy in a fancy leather jacket. He must be the son or nephew of a minister, or a bureaucrat who licensed mine operations. He lacked any skills for this post, but the Canadians didn’t care; they’d hired him because a Peruvian was less likely to ruffle feathers or be the target of an expensive kidnapping. Ignacio knew it. He was not a stupid man, even if it had taken him six months to notice that a gringo doctor was available. Ignacio’s job was to do nothing. He devoted his time to studying chronicles and myths of the eastern slopes of the Andes. Last night, he’d gone on and on about lost aviators, gold, and the failed Franciscan missions. Despite his pedantry, Carson had found Ignacio far more human than most such officials he’d met during his travels, almost human enough to be shocked by the miners’ misery. Carson kicked himself for not listening to Maggie, not going up the mountain sooner. “We talked about setting up a clinic, once a week. Any objections?” They wouldn’t pay, but Ignacio might provide supplies out of some slush fund or other. “He’s got TB up there.”
Objections? Maggie stared at Carson’s wrist, its hairs, and the corner bone half hidden in his shirt cuff. Why would she object? “What would I do, stay here?” she asked. To be left behind seemed a kind of punishment, though she knew she shouldn’t feel so, not after today.
“We didn’t talk details.” Carson pushed his plate away. “Ah. Thanks. Right now I’m exhausted, darling. How was your day, anyway?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“Heap big terr’ist came to visit. No—no, wait. You saved somebody’s life.” He touched her cheek. “Were you okay, all alone?”
“I did, I saved a baby,” Maggie declared. “I had to give her a shot.”
“What kind?”
“Rocephin. I kept the box.”
“Tell me how you made the diagnosis.”
She followed him as he walked into the bedroom, stripped off his clothes, and hung them on the chair, his male body shining. He praised her medical work; before she’d finished he apologized, asked to hear the rest in bed. Maggie agreed. After all, he’d spent sixteen hours riding up and down the mountain, and it was past three A.M., and she’d been talking for a while already. She lay on the bed. His neck was getting burnt, leathery, but the rest of him had stayed transparent, skin like a painting by El Greco. She reached to touch the small, hairy hollow in the center of his chest. “Let me just take a shower,” he said.
She tucked the mosquito net in place, took off her own jeans again, pulled up the sheet. His shower was quick. When he came down the hall, into the bedroom in his towel, damp and smelling of pink Lux, Maggie forgot what else she was going to say, because he was standing close enough to the bed for her to pull his towel off.
She admired him with all his dark-haired mystery hanging right at her eye level. “What’s the big idea?” he said.
“You,” she said.
“You,” he said. He looked down at her as she kissed him, and he said what a pretty sight she made. She grabbed his ass and pulled its halves gently apart, which caused his knees to buckle. Quickly she slid aside to let him duck under the net.
…
They didn’t wake up until ten, when Maggie gradually felt the sunlight trying to penetrate the wall beside her. She stretched and lay contented; her small waking movements woke Carson too. “Today is going to be not boring,” she predicted.
“Let’s hope,” said Carson.
She could have told him about Vicente, but they made love again instead.
Despite yesterday’s dramas, the clinic smelled more than normally of dust, as if it wanted to return to its years of hibernation. Carson agreed to lock up and walk to Piedras Baja, find Luz Maria, and give the baby his official bill of health.
“We worked,” Maggie exulted aloud. “Both of us.” They posted a note, promising to return by two.
The sky was the deep, opaque turquoise of a fifties postcard. Tons of light fell out of it. On the white dry road, they held hands except where rocks or ruts prevented them. For some time they stood on the bridge, twenty feet above the river’s brown rush. Maggie considered telling about the Comandante here, but the waters were too loud and the world felt too complete around her. Carson said it was amazing how this water could look so natural, combing and seething around the rock pylons, when it was also full of poison. As soon as they stepped on dry land, he told Maggie she had to go up to Cajamarca right away and report the mine effluent to the authorities. He’d filled a Coke bottle with lake water and it needed to be analyzed.
Maggie didn’t want to leave the valley just yet. Was Carson sure there was a problem?
Carson believed she ought to go—there was a bus that afternoon. Their friend Klaus Wechsler would know how to get the water tested and what to do with the report.
They’d begun to walk under the first wall of the hacienda’s casco, tall and thick as the wall of a prison. Maggie said, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.” In one sentence she divulged the visit of Comandante Oquendo. “We should ask him what he thinks.”
Carson stopped walking. “Hold it, wait, no way.” He hoped Maggie saw the folly of dragging the Black Rainbow’s leader out of retirement. Given that he hadn’t revealed himself, it might even be dangerous to let on that they knew who he was.
“I think he knows I know.”
Carson rolled his eyes. “I kinda hope not.”
“He’s probably already aware of this problem. Maybe he has some ideas!”
“Yeah, like blowing up the mine. This is serious, dear. We’ve got to bring Klaus Wechsler in on this. He’ll help us figure out what to do. About the water and about your newfound friend.”
Klaus Wechsler was famous as the gringo who’d stayed on teaching at Cajamarca University even while nine Peruvian professors were murdered by the Shining Path. Carson had gotten his number at a cocktail party in Lima. “He’s this crazy German,” the man had said. “Nice guy, though. Wife’s Argentine. He’s going to be your only other gringo in the area, and he’s lived there forever, so you’ll want to get to know him.” Of course, it had turned out that Klaus and Carson had several friends in common.
Maggie admitted that Klaus might have some ideas.
“Look, I know the bus ride is a pain,” Carson went on, “but you’ll have fun with Klaus and Liliana. You need a vacation.”
“Then so do you,” Maggie retorted. One day she’d cease to be infuriated by the calm, reasonable way Carson told her about herself.
“You know I can’t go,” he said in a heavy, falling tone. “Don’t be so insecure. Look at it this way, this could be a bigger contribution than we ever hoped to make. The most important mission of your life, honey.” They could save hundreds of people, without even making them say “Ah” or take their clothes off.
Don’t condescend to me, she thought. In this grove, the mango trees were in flower, darkly-bright green crowns surrounded by a coral haze. Pollen drifted thickly on the ground. If she left Carson in Piedras, everything that happened to him would be real, her own experiences barely worth remembering.
Among the dirty stucco buildings, squadrons of extra-small mosquitoes hung aimlessly until the foreigners drew near. Then they hummed excitedly, zeroing in on the fragrance of unfamiliar blood. The gringos wandered amongst courtyards, threshing floors, pillars, and mazy walls, waving their arms against the bugs, until at last they came across a little boy who said he’d lead them to Luz Maria, who lived with her mother in what must have been an overseer’s cottage or a guest house, connected to the main house by a pillared walkway. Maggie and Carson stood disconnectedly outside the open door while the boy went inside.
