When Mountains Walked, page 17
Yes, she said, yes. Still, wasn’t it dangerous for him to take a job in public?
“I am as you see me, no more, no less. They won’t bring me soup in a restaurant. I have no real profession. I sit in El Mirador raising trout and avoiding the authorities. If I walk a straight line, I hope they will consider me rehabilitated.” When the new president was elected, Vicente had seen the handwriting on the wall, and had written a letter to Lima repudiating the Black Rainbow experiment. Perhaps this letter was the reason he’d never been arrested. “If not?” He shrugged. “One can waste one’s life preserving it.”
“I’ll speak with Carson,” Maggie promised. Ashamed to have underestimated Vicente’s education, she resolved to push for him strongly, even if she had to give up part of her own salary. Well, there wasn’t much to spend it on in Piedras. “He’s the boss.”
“Claro, claro.” Would she go now to the telephone office, to call her parents with whom she had not spoken in so many months? No? Then to the house of the Wechslers? “In either case, I must leave you here. When I visit Cajamarca, I am constrained to avoid certain places.”
Maggie thought of movies she had seen. A message in a piece of bread. A whisper at the window. What was the worst that could happen? She hoped Vicente wouldn’t ask her and Carson to kill anyone. How had he known the Wechslers’ name?
11
ALTHEA COULD HAVE walked between these same stuccoed walls, broken by the stone portals of Spanish palaces. Pregnant with Uncle Christopher, she might have passed under this studded wooden gate, this one with a lion’s head knocker which had surely hung on it since the turn of the previous century. This endless nunnery wall would have been scrawled with the same palimpsest of political slogans, some fresh, others barely visible under coats of whitewash. Viva, Fuera, Muerte—Long Live, Out With, Death To—then a name. Lower down, festoons of pee stains.
Maggie could hear her grandmother chuckling. Who pisses on a nunnery? Dogs and men.
The street grew steeper and narrower, its houses newer. It became a manmade canyon lined with cement walls and gates of welded sheet iron. Some houses were protected by broken bottles set into cement. Wealthier palaces had electrified barbed wire tiered outward, like jails. After this morning’s encounter, Maggie felt rightly guarded against. Surely this was what Vicente felt, or even an Indian woman daring to walk up this street wearing her many short skirts of homespun wool.
The street had two axes of tilt, upward and sideways. The Wechslers’ side was higher, walls rising so abruptly they seemed ready to topple onto the street. Their gate was starred with rust, painted a faded green. Maggie rang the bell.
The first night after Maggie and Carson had arrived in Cajamarca, the Wechslers had come for Pisco sours at their cheap, damp-smelling hotel and soon whisked them out to dinner at a steak place. By the end of the meal they’d persuaded Carson and Maggie to move into one of their children’s bedrooms. Their driver, Muñoz, had showed up the next morning to fetch them. He’d bargained for them in the market, loaded the Wechslers’ Jeep with boxes of supplies. Not wanting to create misleading first impressions, Maggie and Carson had refused the Wechslers’ kind, repeated offer to have Muñoz drive them down into the canyon.
Carson and Klaus had hit it off. Klaus was a little older, but they’d led parallel lives, starting wild and ending up committed. Carson’s traveling days had been spent in Goa and India and Bali and Nepal; Klaus’s all over South America. Klaus had a wife and kids; at the Wechslers’ it was impossible for Maggie to avoid thinking of Maxine, Carson’s long-time girlfriend, as Carson’s wife. And Carson and Maxine had believed in neither marriage nor procreation. Besides friends in common, the two men each had friends who’d died of overdoses, others who’d ended up in ashrams, still others who’d started businesses and now drove gigantic Saabs and Volvos plastered with progressive bumper stickers.
Maggie enjoyed listening to them reminisce, even though it made her feel like an appendix to Carson’s real life. She’d never expected to be friends with Liliana, who was ten years older, was so well dressed, and had four children.
Recently, however, Liliana had floated into her mind as one example of a mother. On this next visit Maggie had planned to scrutinize her more carefully, to see whether a woman was a continuous person before and after giving birth. Back in the States, as soon as her friends had children, Maggie rarely saw them again. If she did, they mostly talked about their kids’ precocities and problems, asking after Maggie’s life in pitying afterthought. With the advent of her new sensations down in Piedras, Maggie had wondered belatedly whether she’d discounted her friends’ new orientation too quickly, in ignorance of the reasons for it. What if having children was the true purpose of life?
Now, with all of the uncertainties and bloody possibilities (however distant) that had recently arisen at the clinic, Maggie decided to let the idea of motherhood slide for a few years. She hoped she wasn’t just finding an excuse not to make a real decision. Well, but in the most extreme case—which Maggie, standing in front of the Wechslers’ gate, was momentarily prepared to imagine—having a child might make her more vulnerable, more conservative, easier to suborn . . . Here, she stopped herself.
Either she was being responsible and realistic or else she’d gone a little cuckoo down there in the canyon. She could still observe Liliana in hopes of gaining some perspective.
Picbit, pichita, thin rubber flip-flops sounded on cement, approaching from the other side of the gate. With a rusty creak, the peephole flipped open to show the black eyes of the Wechslers’ housemaid, Clorinda. She was smiling, Maggie could tell. “Señora, hola, como está.”
Maggie was glad to be recognized. “Hola, Clorinda. Don’t call me Señora. It makes me feel old.”
“Very good, Señora.” Clorinda giggled and shut the peephole. With some ungreased clattering and screeching, the gate now opened. “Pas’,” she whispered. She was a short, round woman who always wore the tightest clothes she could find. Today she had on white stretch pants and a striped blue and white top over a torpedo bra. Since Maggie’s last visit, she’d gotten a perm of crisp shiny curls like a doll’s hair.
Maggie complimented her, forgetting her ruminations momentarily.
“Qué hay?” Clorinda asked. What’s new? “Y su esposo?” And your husband?
“Lo he abanDoñado,” Maggie teased, I have abandoned him. Clorinda made a sympathetic face, sucking air between her molars, and led her into the house, whose silent, immaculate rooms always had the deserted smell of fresh floor wax.
“Seño-o-ora!” Clorinda yodeled. Maggie enjoyed her insouciance. Last visit, they’d talked expansively, Clorinda exposing her husband problems, Maggie admitting she felt ashamed of her divorce. Would Clorinda have heard of Comandante Oquendo, of the Black Rainbow’s ideal kingdom at the bottom of the canyon?
The memory of Vicente was like a secret intoxication, or an infection she was bringing into the house. Her skin itched with it.
No answer to Clorinda’s yells. Clorinda explained that Liliana had just returned from Buenos Aires, where she’d deposited the older son and daughter in their boarding school. Just now she might be at the market. The Señor was working in the back, and the two younger kids, Laurita and Klaus Junior, were at school; they’d return later in the afternoon. Somehow, as Clorinda spoke, Maggie understood that the two older kids were traviesos, drug addicts who needed to be in the prison of a boarding school, that Liliana was easily cheated in the market, and that the Señor worked too hard. Clorinda might soon say of Maggie, “That skinny gringa came again from the Rosario in those ugly boots of hers, without her husband.”
Liliana decorated her home in the style of long-term expatriates all over the world, with a bareness both elegant and rustic: pillows covered with local weavings, spotted cowhides on the floor, and a mask over the fireplace, a demon with mirror teeth. Her own paintings hung on all four walls. They depicted faceless figures tied down by many strings in a pale, abstract landscape. Maggie wondered whether these related to Liliana’s life in Buenos Aires or some more recent form of social torture. The smell of oil paint was exhilarating, though, and she caught herself vowing to do some pencil sketches of the canyon. Last time she’d been here, she’d made and broken a thousand resolutions. To wear makeup all the time, modulate her tone of voice, keep cut flowers always in the house. She’d understood a phrase that had echoed through her childhood, bitterly repeated by her mother: that for most of Johnny’s career, the Baineses had lived “on the economy.” As a child Maggie had visualized her grandparents cresting an abstract wave of thrift, but now, living on the economy herself, she understood why Althea had felt insecure, displaced at British parties. This was a feeling she should treasure (and she thought again of Vicente), for it must resemble how poor people felt visiting the world of gadgets and advertisements. If only every afflicted soul could know that this disease was universal, a disease without a heart.
“Qué tal, Señora, qué tal su viaje.” How was your trip? Clorinda asked.
Maggie told how she’d sneaked into the Restaurant Caribe and unexpectedly run into a former patient from down in the Rosario. “Oh, qué genial,” Clorinda marveled. “La Señora se vuelve revolucionaria." Oh, how fabulous, Madam is becoming a revolutionary. The Caribe was where seditious meetings were always held. Leftist professors, union leaders, students, unrepentant terrorists, and disgruntled members of the police reached agreements and disagreements in that café. It was never open, never closed.
“He invited me,” said Maggie. “I didn’t know.”
“‘He’!” said Clorinda, giggling. “Who is this ‘he,’ tell?”
“The father of a sick baby,” Maggie said. “I forgot his name.”
…
Shillong, northeast India, 1944.
Althea usually refused these invitations, but Johnny had been gone into Nagaland for weeks, and in recent days she and four-year-old Julia had begun recovering from the same serious cold, coughing in their damp chilly bungalow. A party would be nice. Possibly Julia could be turned loose in back bedrooms with other children; and maybe, just once, it would be fun for Althea to spend time with other women.
Mrs. A’s houseboy opened the door, motioned Althea and Julia toward the sitting room. Julia sniffled and clutched Althea’s hand as they reached the inner door. The place was just as Althea had expected, warm from a coal fire, smelling of freesia. The walls were yellow and the decor lavish: a silk-cushioned divan, oil portraits, a tiger-skin rug. Julia crouched to inspect the tiger’s teeth—real fangs, shiny from crunching the bones of other animals. She touched one with a fingernail. “Smelly tiger,” she said to her mother. “Pee-pee smell.”
“Shh!” Althea bent down to confirm this observation, then agreed that tigers stank. More likely Wullie, Mrs. Abercrombie’s horrid, nearly hairless terrier, had lifted his tight little hind leg above the tiger’s snarling head, to prove who was superior. There lay Wullie, on his cushion by the fireplace, wearing his striped sweater. Julia was not allowed to pet him. She didn’t want to. Once, she’d tried and he’d snarled at her, showing stumpy brown teeth.
Colonel Abercrombie’s wife, the hostess, was not in sight. She was in the back of the bungalow, chugging her secret dose of paregoric. There were no children present. At scattered tables women with long upper lips and narrow chins sat talking, leaning toward each other, oblivious to the mother and child standing just inside the door. The volume of noise was double what it usually would have been. Althea paused, wondering what kept them so absorbed and excited. Generally they murmured, more genteel and boring than they’d ever be in England. Finally Mrs. Liddell stood up: “Oh! Dear!” She fluttered across the room, whispered to Althea, took her arm. In the next room was the sensation of the party, an Assamese soothsayer, see, there, installed in an armchair in the corner, surrounded by British ladies.
A few women’s heads turned in time to see Althea stunned by the sight of this priest, a man in cotton robes with golden skin. He could have been Brother Jesunanda’s twin, except that he wore large rings on all his fingers—diamond, tiger eye, ruby, to harness the influences of the nine planets. Mrs. Liddell whispered the explanation. They’d brought him from a temple beside the Brahmaputra where they worshiped the menstruation of the earth. Althea must ask her husband why its spring ran red once a year. That made it a temple for women, its priests devoted to satisfying women’s scandalous requests. Whoever dared approach this teller was told sometimes of a past life, sometimes of the future. Sometimes of the present: Sally Batchelor’s husband was sleeping with an Indian girl he kept in town. Was Althea brave enough? Not all the ladies were. Some wondered whether he’d talked to their servants in advance. Almost all he said was true, some was useful. He’d flatly refused to predict anything about the war, especially who would come back and who not.
Bridget de Jager’s cook was the thief who’d stolen a ring.
Seeing them talk about him, the soothsayer exclaimed a faint greeting, waving his long, translucent hand: Come! All the women watched as Althea towed her child toward him. Such a funny child, golden, small, her mouth set into a hyphen. Why did that woman insist on bringing her everywhere? Could the Baineses not afford an ayah? The husband was often away. Texan bloke, a grizzled Wild West prospector, he never found a thing.
Althea thought them all ridiculous, and their husbands, who ineffectually paraded on the maidan hoping to be called up to fight. Johnny’s work was secret now, mapping jungle routes to Burma. The Baineses enjoyed pretending he was a madman searching for gold under the jungle duff. An easy pretense, not so far from truth, they joked to one another.
Althea was tall and rawboned, pale eyes like a shooter’s. She wore a blue paisley cotton dress, the same one in which she was often seen; it had pin tucks in front, its own cloth belt, and an ungenerous gathered skirt with a flat, slightly faded place behind showing where she sat on it. Her hair was streaked with gray and fell in lank, sandy waves to her shoulders. The child was finer. Even her ordinary frock adapted itself to her small body, as does the clothing of an aristocrat. She would be tall like her mother, yet Julia’s sallow skin and moon face looked suspiciously Eurasian to the British. Mrs. Baines insisted that her daughter’s looks came from French and Cherokee ancestors of her husband’s, but with him gone so often and so long, and the way she avoided female company . . . who knew?
No Englishman would have found Althea attractive. Women also recoiled from a scraped rawness that shone from her face. This was what a woman became when she lived like a native—that is, did not have enough money. It happened to missionary wives, too, the ones who went off into villages and ate bugs and lost their husbands to poisoned arrows. White skin could not withstand native life. Measures must be taken or a woman’s face grew over with fine, fine wrinkles. Her mouth puckered. She’d be old before her time.
The fortuneteller cried, “American lady!”
She went to him, her only welcome.
“This child,” he said, taking Julia’s hand. “She has the mark of the God.”
“She was an answered prayer,” Althea said. She and the priest gazed into each other’s eyes for a moment that extended and extended, overlong. At last Althea whispered the name of the convent where she’d stayed.
Julia jerked her hand back and put it behind her skirt. She heard the man tell Althea that her husband would succeed in his life work, but in a way that would disappoint him. The goddess Durga would grant Johnny a vision, but when he tried to explain, no one would listen. His real mission was spiritual; he must find satisfaction inwardly. If he resolved this karma, he’d be reborn in the pure realm of those gods who have minds but no bodies.
What about me? Althea said.
“This child,” the soothsayer told her, “will be as a stranger to you. She must walk her own path. Only in her daughter will you find your own true child.”
Then the soothsayer took Julia’s small face in his hands. “The lives of the God’s children can be difficult,” he said. “If you truly want to be the God’s child, you must allow other people to be less perfect than you are. Forgive them. Remember, they are not like you.”
Julia squinted at him. His teeth reminded her of Wullie’s. He wore a diamond on his thumb, where rings should never be. She did not want to be the God’s child. She had a real father and she wished him to come home.
“What did he say to you, your daughter?” the ladies all asked at once.
“He told Julia she was a chosen daughter of God.” Althea laughed lightly, certain that India’s pervading mysteries would protect her as she spoke a blatant, dangerous truth. “I wonder what it means? She must have a great destiny.”
Julia hid her face in Althea’s skirt while her mother lied about her. She was trained never to ask for anything in these houses, but her eyes drank up the details with an outsider’s hunger: soft furniture, carpets, parquet floors. Going with her mother everywhere, she saw what Althea did not: how the other women invited her out of pity, the women whose chins tipped up, whose dresses were soft and new.
She kept her face scrunched in the blue cotton paisley until the women began to say, “Are you shy? Come, pretty girl! Little goddess! Have a piece of cake!”
Althea replied in the voice she expected her daughter to imitate: “Yes, thank you, ma’am.”
Julia acquiesced, repeating the words as she stared down in mortification at Althea’s dusty laced oxfords, counting the stitches around the sole. Six, seven . . . No, she did not want to be a child of the God.
