When Mountains Walked, page 15
Enormous hen-and-chick plants, green and pink, grew from the tops of all the walls. Deep in the house, a radio faintly played. Maggie peeked into the cool and gloomy front room. Just inside the door was a life-sized saint in a glass case, with fake flowers and tinsel and a slitted wooden box for Doñations. Fortunata had mentioned how this family of devotees had rescued him ten years ago, when the priest had stopped coming and the church had fallen into disuse. Maggie stepped inside, wishing he’d speak to her as he must have spoken to her grandmother, but his blue glass eyes just stared obliquely into nothing. Had he lost his power? She prayed anyway, if yearning for resolution could be called a prayer. Outside, Carson yawned and waved his hand across his face to dispel mosquitoes.
Just then Luz Maria appeared clutching her baby, again wrapped tightly in its blanket. “I decided on Lady Maggy as a name,” she cried with false cheer. “It repeats my initials! Are you coming to say you’ll be her godmother?” Carson made a small, wry mouth while Maggie introduced him formally.
“She’s well,” Luz Maria said to the Doctor. “She sleeps.” She uncovered Lady Maggy’s face, submerged in its own fat cheeks. Maggie saw the tenderness of this life, how it had burgeoned and made room for itself. All at once the canyon seemed to arrange itself around the baby’s body, not exactly to protect it but to celebrate it.
Carson made a small movement of impatience, and Luz Maria led them back through the house to a walled courtyard. It had a packed-dirt floor where chickens scratched and a litter of puppies roistered, trying to catch their mother dog. When the puppies all turned at once to see the new arrivals, the bitch shook them off and raced around a corner. Corn cobs were drying on looped strings against one wall. There was a cement sink with an iron bucket standing in it, and a pigsty behind a fence, which stank. A radio blared away, connected to a long, dangerous-looking, twisted red and blue electrical cord coming down from a second-floor window. At the center of everything sat Luz Maria’s mother on a rocking chair. She was a widow in black, with a set mouth, who sat unraveling the sleeve of a pea-green sweater. She nodded at the gringos but didn’t smile.
Carson put out his arms and said, “Bebé.” His pronunciation of this word sounded a bit like Elvis Presley’s, though no one except for Maggie would have known this. Luz Maria handed the child over, her face registering objection.
He took Lady Maggy in his arms with such an obvious tenderness that anyone could imagine the uncountable numbers of children he’d taken from mistrustful mothers all over the world. Nonetheless, Luz Maria clamped her arms over her breasts, just as she’d done yesterday in the clinic, watching narrowly as he lay her baby on a bench. First he put his face close to the baby’s and asked her in English how she felt after her travails. Then he unwrapped her, gently scratched the bottoms of her feet, spread the palms of her hands, lifted her eye-lids, upper and lower, and peeked into her tiny ears. Pushing her nose tenderly, he picked her up and cooed at her, moving his head from side to side. Lady Maggy opened her fathomless black eyes but didn’t follow Carson’s gestures; her eyes seemed not to register. Was theirs a darkness of surface or of depth, Maggie wondered. She was a little scared of babies, not knowing what to expect. The child was awfully young.
“You aren’t watching me,” Carson warned the baby. “She’s been sick,” he said in English to Maggie, “but she’s also real small. Skinny. Unresponsive.” He jiggled her foot again to prove this. Lady Maggy shut her eyes.
“Aren’t Indian babies different?” Maggie said. Since childhood she’d seen them, riding impassively on their mothers’ backs. She was grasping at straws; Luz Maria was mestiza and could have nearly as much European blood as Maggie.
“I could be wrong,” Carson admitted.
“Maybe she’s just a little slow. Like her mom!”
Carson shrugged. Smiling a big, toothy smile, he gave Lady Maggy back to her mother. “Tell her to eat well, feed this kid, and bring her in next week. Say we’re keeping tabs on the recovery. We’ll weigh her up, give her some vitamin drops. In a couple weeks we’ll see clear signs of retardation, if they’re coming, but don’t mention that of course.”
Maggie translated, sickened by the lies even a good cause seemed to require. Worse yet was her own selfishness. How could she have refused to travel to Cajamarca! Did she want more defective babies to be born? She managed a polite goodbye to Luz Maria. “And please give my saludos to your husband.”
Luz Maria looked confused, then laughed. “Who? Oh, him! He’s not my husband! Vicente visits me.”
Her mother suddenly cried, “Demasiado!” Too often!
“Life is complicado” Carson said brokenly to Luz Maria, who shrugged, not even trying to understand. In the mango grove, he told Maggie it was tough to diagnose a child so young—even an expert would want a hair analysis. He kicked himself for leaving his neonatology books in storage.
“I’ll have them shipped down when I go to Cajamarca,” Maggie promised. Since deciding to go, her thoughts had taken a new and thorny path. “I want to confess my awful thought. I gave this baby a shot, right? Now she turns out retarded? I mean, I’m not saying . . .”
Carson knew exactly what she meant. Doctors always had to deal with superstitions and local mores; they reaped the mistakes of past practitioners. Even the States had malpractice mania, a related syndrome. There was one consolation, as awful as Maggie’s thought: if his water theory was correct, Luz Maria’s wouldn’t be the only child with problems.
“Okay, then here’s an even worse thought,” Maggie said. “Say Oquendo has seen a few of these cases, and he’s maneuvering us into a position to be blamed, and that’s the reason why he came.”
Carson sighed. “You invited him.” Then he shrugged. “Look, he brought us a patient. She had pneumonia. You saved her. So far everything’s cool.”
“Do you, in this line of work—I mean, we have those guns, did you ever worry about getting killed?”
After a little while, Carson said, “Ingratitude. Ignorance. Misunderstanding.” It was the first half of the title of his divinity school paper, which he’d abandoned. Larry had strongly criticized it, saying even its title sounded like Marie Antoinette’s complaints.
10
MAGGIE WOKE UP gasping, her hands gripping the bar on the back of the seat in front of her. She’d slept only a few seconds, but during that time the bus had sailed off the tip of a curve and started falling, end over end, toward the bottom of the canyon. Luckily, her screams must have come out muffled, for her seat neighbor slept on stolidly, basket on lap, chin on chest.
Hard to believe that she wasn’t about to die. The bus must be driving along the edge of a cliff, for there was nothing to see outside except the full moon nailed to the middle of the sky. Her face swam in the window glass, smeared and dim as a corpse coming up in a river. It seemed unfair that the nightmare hadn’t exempted her from dying, that she’d have to die again, maybe in the next few hours. Even if the bus didn’t crash, it was easy to be murdered by bandits. According to Fortunata they always worked at night. Put rocks across the road; stopped the bus; killed the driver and anyone else who resisted; and then stole everything from the passengers, down to their clothes and shoes, leaving them naked on the freezing puna.
Bandit season had just begun. It ran from harvest to planting. When there was less farm work to do, the men of the Rosario went up into the hills to scratch for gold. Each family guarded its own secret vein. Don Nasir kept a scale and blowtorch, but the more enterprising doubled their profits in Cajamarca, where gold was higher and market goods cheaper. Bandits knew the system. Some were farmers from the sad, mean villages just inside the puna’s lip, others were ex-terrorists, continuing violent careers without a political excuse. During gold season, they waited for the bus to pass.
Last year, they’d killed eighteen people on this very road. Because of them, the mine maintained its army platoon to guard each shipment and was even said to be building an airstrip to fly the gold direct to Lima. What bandits might do to a gringa, Maggie hated to imagine. There had to be one person on this bus with clothes sewn full of gold.
She stared ahead, out the windshield, alert for roadblocks or suspicious movements. The road looked stiff as plaster, weirdly over-substantial in the headlights. Once in a while the lights bounced off an overhanging rock and shot back through the cabin, revealing the silhouettes of men’s heads up front and the curling tendrils of smoke from a cigarette.
…
It gave her confidence that she remembered her way from the bus station to Cajamarca’s main plaza, even without Carson. Down and down, then right. First, on the high road, she followed a mountain peasant woman in a tall straw hat and bunchy skirt, a gunnysack over her shoulders. Something small moved inside. Guinea pigs. The woman walked with a fast, rolling gait, like a partridge running away.
Her energy felt as thin and grating as the dawn that bleached the mountains, roof tiles, and high walls. It was miraculous to be alive and walking, light as a ghost, into the city. Bottle caps, torn plastic bags, dead leaves, broken glass, all the refuse of the road glinted with an edge of extra reality, as if she’d taken psilocybin. Useless to wonder whether she should have come as each foot hit the ground with a satisfying certainty. Her bag was light, and for the moment she knew where she was going.
This must be how Carson feels, she thought.
At a chopped-off corner she turned down into the skinny tilted streets where a few people hurried along the high, narrow, broken sidewalks. Explosions of rattling steel: store owners rolled up their iron curtains to show liquor, irrigation pipes, shovels, brooms, radios, blankets, hams. Clothing stores had horrifying Caucasian mannequins, male and female, made of plaster in long, un-Peruvian proportions. The men had flattop haircuts and leered with gorilla teeth; the women pouted like sex dolls. This one wore jeans and a cotton bra, that one showed off navy-blue elastic socks, one long one short, under a plaid school skirt. Her pink skin was chipped to white beneath, her breasts grubby at the tips from being pinched.
Nearer the town’s center, buildings grew older. The sun turned to liquid gold with diagonal shadows.
A man drove up slowly behind her, murmuring in a voice full of meaning. In case Maggie didn’t understand, he rolled down his window and showed his tongue, a magenta worm writhing in his blocky purple face.
She could not escape, she thought, no matter how purely transparent to the world she felt. Just as she was blond here, she was also tall.
How often Julia had complained without the slightest embarrassment about the incompetence, the gamecock vanity of foreign men; and laughed about how the Hindus cleaned their rear ends with their hands. Once, Maggie had dared to chide her mother for cultural arrogance. “Don’t kid yourself,” said Julia. “They think you’re just as stupid and filthy.”
“But Mom, you were born in India!”
“You don’t think of yourself as Mexican! Do you?”
Sometimes, Maggie had retorted.
Right now she was aiming for a cup of coffee at the Restaurant Caribe, before the government offices opened, but she found its front door sealed by a screaming orange poster announcing it was closed for avoiding the new sales tax. The windows, too, were shuttered, padlocked.
She’d go back to the plaza, kill half an hour at Atahualpa’s death stone. She and Carson had visited it together; it would be fun to tell him she’d gone back.
Even at this hour, a dozen young guys were draped around the fountain, chatting and smoking in a large patch of sun. To avoid them, she circled into the surrounding topiary zoo, wandering behind a snail, around a swan, past a green Inca’s head six times as large as life. His cedar hair was due for a trim.
The air was mint cool, liquid in the shadows. Its smell put Maggie’s teeth on edge, reminding her of the trip to Maine her family had made when they’d first come up from Colombia, and Calvin had proclaimed a vacation before they’d even found a house, before they’d left the Howard Johnson’s.
…
A log cabin! When the Goodwins’ rented car pulled up and Maggie saw it, red under the bluish shade of sharp-needled trees, like a toy or an illustration, she half expected the door to swing open, revealing a pioneer woman in a long dress, mobcap, and apron: Abraham Lincoln’s mother displaying a fresh-baked pie.
Inside, the logs were varnished, like the skin of a roasted, basted turkey. All very American. Julia lectured her girls about the rag rugs on the floor, representing industry and thrift. In the cupboard, Maggie and her sister discovered mismatched plates with pictures of sleighs and bridges and presidents. Sonia claimed the best one, a creepy green interior featuring an empty cradle. On TV, a peacock spread its rainbow tail.
Summer in Maine was colder than winter in Colombia. The bright sun gave no heat; the lake water turned lips blue-black, the same color as itself. Sonia and Julia didn’t get wet. They built a fire and sat in the cabin all day, keeping the windows closed because Sonia was still delicate from her typhoid. When Maggie came in from watching red squirrels or loitering near the ice machine, the place smelled sickly of sour milk, warm Coke, and VapoRub. Sonia was a teenager now, eating whatever she pleased. Ice cream, Jell-O, so many sodas she let them go flat without even finishing. Maggie had needed three dental fillings on arriving in the States, so she could only sneak the dregs from Sonia’s soda bottles. Fur thickened on her teeth. She didn’t care.
Maggie was proud of her immunity to all things Sonia succumbed to. Amoebas, three kinds of worms, now typhoid fever. Staunchly she marched through bog and rain with her father, learning how to catch the slimy, pretty trout. She got credit for being brave about impaling worms, removing hooks, and slitting fish bellies. She tried to get credit beyond Sonia’s by not whining, nor letting her poor father know that, the whole time, what she really wanted to do was run out into the walled garden of their old house in Cartagena and pick a green mango and eat it with salt. Knowing that her father wanted the same thing (or at least his version) was what gave her strength to follow him.
“Daddy’s had trouble,” Julia had admonished her two girls. “Be on your tippy-toes.”
Tippy-toes was not enough. The day after they got back to Connecticut, their father said he was going to work, but he went to the airport instead and was gone for five months. When he returned, they were still living in the Howard Johnson’s, but snow had fallen and the pool had frozen. Julia had forced the girls to go to school in discount snowsuits whose thin nylon shooshed like a washing machine, so that when she climbed onto the yellow school bus, Maggie could hardly hear her schoolmates’ taunts. “Is this what people wear in South America?”
Calvin brought a stuffed caiman for Maggie, a fringed shawl for Sonia, and for their mother a rough emerald set on a golden heart. He swore he’d never leave again. Maggie was almost too big for his lap, but she crawled up on it to ask him why he hadn’t taken everybody with him. She was thinking only of herself; perhaps her mother knew this, for Julia had laughed like a platter dropping on the floor.
…
Here was Peru’s coat of arms, all carved in shrub. Cedar, blackish green and dense. It must have taken twenty years to achieve these shapes. The stone lay flat in the shadow of a spouting whale. A meter square, roughly cut. A plaque said this was the actual stone on which Atahualpa was garroted by the Spanish, not decapitated, as the ignorant campesinos’ myths would have it.
Either way, Maggie would have been better prepared for a replica. How long to wash off the stains of blood and fire?
Four hundred years ago, twenty generations, the Spanish rode in one evening and found Atahualpa soaking in his spring-fed hot tub. That day he’d won a battle against his brother: they were having a civil war. Atahualpa was illegitimate, but his father’s favorite. He’d received he tiny force of conquistadores with majestic distraction, flicking wet bangs out of his face. Hours later he was a captive, his army decimated. He ransomed himself with a roomful of gold, but the Spanish didn’t have the slightest intention of setting him free. Atahualpa hadn’t prepared for the fact that they didn’t consider him to have a soul. On this stone, he’d converted to Christianity, then, minutes later, they’d garroted him, pressing even his wretched cries back down into his throat. A black rainbow had appeared in the sky. Within weeks the Inca empire was gone forever, and the conquistadores were the richest men on earth.
People in Piedras loved to think about the caravans of gold that had been sent to ransom Atahualpa. On word of his execution, the gold had been thrown into caves and lakes as the Incas girded for the short and fruitless war. Yet the treasure was still theirs, hidden beyond the eastern crest of the hills, in the black rain forest where no one lived anymore.
The plaque was also engraved with a poem, supposedly Atahualpa’s dream on the night before his execution. Maggie read under her breath in Quechua, trying to shape her mind and tongue to the emperor’s despair.
Ima phuyun haqay pbuyu What cloud is that cloud
yanayasqaq wasaykamun? Dark, that follows me?
Mamaypaq waqayninchari Perhaps it is the weeping of my mother,
paraman tukuspa hamun. Turned into the rain that falls.
“You meditate on the death of Atahualpa,” a man’s voice said. “What do you feel?”
Some plaza lout, not genuinely interested in history. Maggie whirled around, ready to defend herself, or vanish.
It was Comandante Oquendo.
“What are you doing here?” she cried, shocked even to recognize him here, and without his cowboy hat. Today he wore a collared shirt and black leather sneakers.
He squinted into the sun. “Buenos días, Doña Maggie,” he said pleasantly, reminding her of her manners.
