When Mountains Walked, page 16
“Buenos días,” Maggie said. What was his real name? She struggled to recall it.
He was attending meetings in Cajamarca. “Today I thought you might pass through this plaza, and so I waited for you here.”
The health office wasn’t open yet, and the Wechslers were hardly expecting her at any specific time. She could invite him to the Hotel Imperial, where they made real cappuccino, and crepes with caramel jam, and there were tablecloths. But then she’d have to pay for both of them, because it was expensive. This would not be the right protocol for starting a relationship with a revolutionary, even one who was retired.
After the long ride, she told him, she’d been looking for a coffee, but didn’t know where to go.
“The Caribe,” he said. “It’s good there.”
“It’s closed.”
“No.” He pointed up the side street where a man stood seemingly distracted, then glanced up and down and slipped inside.
Maggie had not noticed the child-sized door cut into the wood of a larger one, not sealed by the tax-evasion poster. Comandante Oquendo didn’t bother with furtive maneuvers. He just ducked in, and she followed.
Inside, it was as dark as King Tut’s tomb, illegal operations taking place without benefit of electricity. The place smelled of onions and steam. A few shafts of dusty light came in through the badly fitting shutters, like thin rays of hope in a dungeon or a church. Vicente walked to the back, weaving his hips between the tables. Maggie stood for a few seconds, afraid of bumping into something.
When her eyes had adjusted, Maggie saw a large woman sitting behind a counter piled with jars of candy and cartons of cigarettes. She wore a stained white smock and was obviously the tax-evading owner. Vicente was talking to her, leaning over, flirting the way a young man flirts with a woman past her prime. As Maggie walked up, he raised his voice slightly and introduced la Señora Doctora Maggie Goodwin de Miller, the nurse who with her husband was offering free medical services to all of the gente of the Rosario Valley. Maggie had saved a baby yesterday by giving it a shot.
“How good Don Vicente,” the proprietress said. Maggie beamed stupidly, barely recognizing her own name and description. Her knees were cold with excitement. Vicente Quispe Cruz, that was his name. When had he left Piedras?
The café owner was Doña Maclovia, and she exuded an earthy, postmenopausal confidence, the kind of woman who was often painted on murals to remind people that birth and death are an eternal cycle. Doña Maclovia laughed when Maggie ventured a small joke about whether this restaurant was closed or open. “Now that we have a government, we must pay,” she said. “Verdad?”
“Each living thing must eat,” Vicente said. “The peasant as much as the president, the rat as much as the cat, the shark as much as the politician.”
“Only in the glory will we receive our true patrimony,” Doña Maclovia said.
“Sooner,” Vicente said.
At the only empty table they sat with their backs to the wall, to maximize the light. Maggie felt they were in cahoots, passing judgment or handing out certificates to everyone else in the world. By now she could see quite well. The walls were sea green, soiled with smoke. Many small tables the size of her mother’s bridge table were scattered across the floor. At them, a full quota of customers bent over, slurping soup. All men, their clothes and skin faded to the colors of smoke and earth.
Doña Maclovia’s daughter came by, and they ordered chicken soup and coffee.
“So, how was your bus trip?” he asked.
“A nightmare.” All Peruvians loved to hear complaints about their roads; it made them feel superior and brave. “And your meetings?”
They would take place that afternoon, Vicente said. He was consulting with a group of campesinos who were hoping to dismantle the system by which they became enslaved to the agricultural credit bank. Maggie asked how they planned to escape, and he said, rather sarcastically, “With strong infusions of American dollars.”
Maggie laughed nervously.
“The small man carries the big man on his back.”
Maggie nodded mutely, and regretted having come. She had nothing to say to this person, nor to anyone else in this place.
All at once, half a dozen men pushed back their chairs and filed toward their table. Leaving, the first one tipped his gray fedora. He was a dignified man wearing a jacket and a thinning blue shirt buttoned tightly at the neck, but his expression wasn’t pleasant. Vicente nodded in curt acknowledgment. The next two men made eye contact with Vicente, then with Maggie. The fourth walked too close past their table, bashing into the edge where Maggie sat. He apologized with threatening insincerity, muttering something insulting—Vicente selling himself to gringos, Maggie thought.
“No te metas,” Vicente retorted. Mind your own business.
“Cuídate,” warned the man. Watch out.
The fifth man stopped, and was introduced as Vicente’s uncle. He had a wide, smooth, pleasant face with small teeth, separated like a smiling cat’s. Maggie thought better of giving him a hand to shake. He cut his eyes at her, and asked Vicente whether they still had an appointment.
“Don’t worry, Uncle,” Vicente told him. “This is Doña Maggie. She looks like a gringa but is one of us. She and her husband are doctors in our valley.”
“I don’t see her,” the uncle said.
“One o’clock,” Vicente called after him. The uncle gone, Vicente grumbled a bit about his former associates. They were lacking in intelligence, they’d gone sour, they could consider nothing new. He had to leave them all behind.
“You’re well known in Cajamarca,” Maggie observed.
Vicente barked a laugh. “Too well. Momentito,” he said, and got up and went to the kitchen, where she could hear him scolding and asking questions. Coming back, he shrugged and said that the soup was all finished. “Because of me,” Maggie said, “isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Vicente cleared his throat. “Doctora, you already know that I am Comandante Oquendo.”
“Yes.” Maggie shrank down in her chair.
“I know about you also. For example. You are divorced. Your uncle is buried in Huaraz. Your mother was born in la India, and if I saw her photo, I would think she was a rich Limeña. You worked with rebels in El Salvador. Your father had shoe factories in Mexico and Colombia. Correcto?”
“His businesses failed,” Maggie said. “Now he works in his brother’s hardware store.”
“Making you a true South American,” Vicente said teasingly. “I was wondering why you would choose this work, as the daughter of an international business owner.”
“Citizenship of the heart,” Maggie dared to say.
“So it is. Before I met you, I thought your cook liked you too much,” Vicente admitted. “Many say you have another motive for coming to Piedras. Unfortunately, due to historical reality, in my country that is how we think. Those who say they want to help are either selfish liars or insane. Having observed you, I changed my opinion. I will stop the evil tongues.”
The main one being his own, Maggie thought. He was too young to be a killer. Thirty-two, tops. His fingers were thin, his feet not much bigger than hers. But the killers of the world were often young. Their faces always surprised Maggie when she saw them in the newspaper. Vicente was listing all the motivations that local people attributed to Maggie and Carson. They were CIA. They were counterterrorism experts sent to spy on, arrest the Piedras population. They were drug agents. They went out at night in a silent helicopter with an infrared scope to find Inca tombs, then secretly dig up the golden artifacts for sale at a huge profit on the global antiquities market. They were becoming millionaires in Piedras—buying babies for resale to sterile Europeans. They’d sterilize any adult man or woman who walked into their clinic. Children they’d anesthetize and secretly remove one kidney. Or else they’d just drug the children, or kill them, and freeze them in that child-sized freezer (visible on the counter if you looked in the front door), and shove the bodies into suitcases, to be mailed north and dismembered, the vital organs and limbs used to repair the bodies of sick old white people. Gringos were Pishtacos. Piedras mothers threatened to send their misbehaving offspring to the clinic to have a shot. Worse, a house call. “Be good, or I’ll call that gringa to come and give you an injection.”
Maggie’s mind reeled. She was glad she’d never understood what enmity had surrounded her and Carson. To think they’d felt bored! She said, tremulously, and resenting it, “Is your real name Vicente? Or Oquendo, Comandante Oquendo? What may I call you?” She wished there were something to fiddle with on the surface of the table, but nothing had been provided. There was only thick transparent vinyl over a flowered plastic tablecloth, made in China, of appalling ugliness.
Vicente shrugged. “Oquendo was my name of war.” The Black Rainbow days had been a game of adolescence, he said, and like adolescence they were gone. She must call him by the name his mother gave him, the name everybody used. Vicente.
Maggie said, “You’ll send us patients, then, Vicente?”
“Have I not already done so?”
Maggie babbled, flustered, that she hadn’t meant to discount the gift of Luz Maria’s visit. She tried to reiterate that she and Carson were sincere; that besides a few medicines, sincerity was all they had to offer. They could cure accidents and diseases, but only if people asked for help. She managed to insert that they were splitting a salary offered by the Peruvian government for one person; they certainly had no dollars to offer, though Maggie knew that the lack of an economic base in Piedras was the most fundamental health problem everybody faced, blah blah.
Vicente said that the true wealth of this life was for human beings to live in love and friendship. For this reason he had met her here in Cajamarca, to confirm a sentiment, to apologize for having mistrusted her and caused her and her husband many problems.
Coffee arrived, hot and thick as Maggie remembered. Vicente loaded his cup with sugar and she followed his example. He asked whether it was true that her grandparents had arrived in Piedras on a raft, the only part of Fortunata’s relato that seemed less than credible to him.
“They came from the north,” Maggie told him. “After their raft broke up, they walked.”
Maybe it was possible after all, Vicente said, since only after the building of the hydroelectric plant had the waters swelled upstream and the Rosario become innavigable. Piedras was once an oroya crossing, with a rope to stabilize a balsa raft. The mine owners built the first bridge in 1967—a good thing, since nowadays the waters were too strong for any raft.
In the old days, that part of the river was known by the name of its hacienda, Chigualén. Most of the hacienda’s workers lived in a clutch of hovels on the Piedras side, indentured servants without the right to vote, virtual slaves under the law. They crossed the river each day on the raft to work in the fields of their patrón. Don Héctor was not among the worst. He had a true love for his workers, and they in turn felt lucky to have him instead of someone else. When agrarian reform came in 1965, they did not kill him or destroy his property. Most other landowners returned to the coast, proving their lack of affection, but Don Héctor stayed on, keeping half of his house and the small plot permitted by the government, farming it himself, wearing rubber sandals like a campesino. He’d died in 1979 at the age of ninety-one, asking to be buried in the earth he loved.
People said he was a brujo, a witch, for day and night he walked the hills, gathering plants, bones, and stones. He cured his peones using Indian methods, which worked on them because they were Indians, or because there was nothing else. After he died, his fat book on local herbs had been taken away by one of his sons. His four children still lived on the coast, in the palaces and quintas of his wife’s family. They’d left behind only his piano, which was too big to carry over the mountains, and so it remained in the chapel, one leg propped up by bricks. Yes, it was possible that Don Héctor Saavedra Ibánez had had some magical powers. On the day agrarian reform was announced, he got so angry that he placed the gypsy curse on General Velasco. Within a week, Velasco was having his leg amputated.
As Vicente spoke, Maggie kept stifling a seditious thought: this uneducated peasant had a greater curiosity about the world than Carson, who’d had every advantage. She reminded herself that there were different kinds of intelligence, some that shone and others that bit down. She asked Vicente how he’d come by his interest in Piedras. He replied that anything was fascinating when sufficient attention was paid to it. This was what Maggie believed as well. She’d have listened to him for hours, but now he asked where she was going.
She was going to ask the health officer about pollution from the mine.
“Bad idea,” he said, instantly serious. “You will be removed from your post.”
“Ayúdame.” Help me. Maggie blurted this out, as if he had stepped on her chest and this was the squeak that emerged. She told him about the cyanide plume. “Don’t tell Luz María.” Vicente nodded encouragingly, compelling her to continue. Like the walk of the drunk she had seen in Piedras, each statement seemed to become a mistake that must be corrected with another. Mercury, cadmium, lead, cyanide. Retardation. Deformity. Stillbirth. Cancer. Was Vicente Lady Maggy’s father? She didn’t dare to ask. He cocked his head, listening. He ticked his spoon against the enamel mug.
She felt her words drawn down and weighed.
“Don’t we have to do something?” Maggie concluded.
“If your feeling is so great as you say, Doctora, you will not be able to avoid action.”
She raised herself up in her chair and insisted that a person could not wait for certainty, nor for everyone else to decide to do what was necessary. It sounded as if she were willing to take up arras against the enemies of the people, yet it was not a statement she was willing to retract. It seemed important not to go back on her words, so she made herself stop talking.
“The problem in the waters may be grave,” said Vicente. “Lamentably, in Peru it can be dangerous to involve the authorities.” They’d been given extraordinary powers to fight against the Shining Path. These powers had gone to their heads, and had not yet been legally removed.
Maggie argued that as a gringa maybe she could accomplish things a Peruvian couldn’t.
Vicente bit his lip. As gringos she and her husband might be able to bypass the bureaucracy completely. They must think carefully. A report today would not save Lady Maggy. Even if the health officer did not remove the Doctores immediately from the Rosario, he would ask for a laboratory analysis, a long list of confirmed cases. “When he receives the report, he will put it in a file. When the file grows fat, he will send it away to Lima. Doña Maggie, you and I should discuss this matter further, with your husband. Surely together we can design a full solution.”
“Please do come, and meet Carson.” She allowed herself to imagine the three of them at the kitchen table, plotting to take over the valley again. Peacefully. Legally. A water treatment plant, or at least a filter in every hovel. Medicines, literacy classes. Solar ovens and fruit cooperatives. Prenatal and well-baby care. An official pardon for Vicente.
Maggie looked into his black eyes and saw past the surface, saw at depth his intelligence, luminous and redemptive and detached and honest. His thin mouth smiled with dry, sly humor. No wonder he’d been able to manage a whole section of the canyon. He smiled at her more broadly, and she smiled back, almost willing to let go of her seriousness, though she knew she’d better not.
At this point Doña Maclovia threw open a window at the back and coarse, thin light the color of sheep’s wool filled the room. The air from outside was cool and smelled of nothing at all. Only one man was left eating. The light bathed his creased forehead, whitened his unwashed shock of hair, and just then it seemed to Maggie that this place was more real and alive than anywhere she’d ever been.
“Thank you for your sincerity,” Vicente said.
“And you for yours,” said Maggie.
The other man finished his soup and left. Doña Maclovia called to Vicente, “Mi vida,” my life, and asked when he’d come back again. Alas, she was closing now.
“Not before you have died of love,” he flirted.
Maggie and Vicente emerged blinking into the sun.
Maggie said, “I ask myself if I should be afraid of you.”
“Only if we are left alone,” said Vicente. Seeing her look of alarm, he said, “That is a piropo, mere flattery. Never be afraid of me, jamás”
Jamás. The most satisfying word for never, encompassing eternity both past and future. Never feel afraid of him. Fortunata had used this word. She looked at Vicente. She’d already decided that his face had an appealing subtlety or mildness to it, like that of her friend Katie’s British husband, whose good looks Maggie hadn’t particularly noticed until Katie had said she’d married him partly because she’d thought she could look at him without ever getting tired. Now Maggie decided she could trust Vicente’s face, or what she sensed in it.
He said, “Yet, I want to ask for something more. I want to be trained as a medical assistant. Can you ask your husband?”
He was a supplicant, Maggie realized, recoiling. He stood before her, scrubbed, in his cheap clean clothes, squinting into the sun, and she recalled a man who had once come to the gates of the Goodwin house in Cartagena, a tattered man holding a baby deer he’d caught and was trying to sell. The tiny creature’s eyes had been crusted, weak, but so had been the man’s. Julia had sent him away, saying that such cruelties were not to be encouraged.
“You?” Maggie blurted.
“Doña Maggie, you cannot stay in Piedras forever. And I, I simply need a job.”
In fact, their contract stipulated training a local successor; it was one of Carson’s disappointments that they hadn’t found a single candidate. She told Vicente this, but added that, to be quite honest, his qualifications might be considered negative.
Did she think all revolutionaries were thugs? He had studied at the university for five semesters. There everyone had been intoxicated by violent ideologies, but in the school of his own experience he’d unlearned them. Bombs and assassinations were as destructive as they seemed to be. Nowadays, thank God, they gave a bad name to any cause. He smiled ironically as he said it had long been time for Peru to build a healthy path to the future. Maggie must understand? A path as enduring as an Inca highway, but not one made of stone.
