When Mountains Walked, page 19
“I love this writer,” said Maggie churlishly, hoping Liliana wouldn’t see the stupid tears that had welled up at the children’s rejection. “A chicken in every pot is all that matters to him.”
Liliana kept gazing at her until Maggie let the book fall closed, and said, “My mother wants me to fly home immediately. She’s taken my grandmother as a hostage. If I don’t drop everything and go, she’ll put her in an institution.” This was an ungenerous summation, but Maggie would have been even more ashamed to describe the way she’d experienced her mother’s letters. They’d made her yearn for snowflakes, new shoes, and her old Mazda sedan—even for Julia, with all her guilt trips and false certainties.
“I think your mami puts on you a lot of pressure,” Liliana said.
“How can she get under my skin from such a distance?” Maggie complained. “It makes me not even want to call her.” She was throwing herself on Liliana’s mercy, acting like a child—and because Liliana was a mother, expecting her to understand. That wasn’t fair. She sat up and put her feet on the floor and thanked Liliana for placating Julia, who, unsurprisingly, had called six times as often as she’d said.
“You have to call,” Liliana reasoned, “but after talking first to Grandma. Check out the real situation. Your mother easily becomes hysterical. Maybe if you explain to her everything, she will tranquilize herself.”
“That would be nice,” Maggie said.
…
Mexico City, 1964. When the Goodwins left Mexico City on the airplane, Maggie sat on a woman’s lap, a woman who was not her mother. A Mexican dowager in a wool suit, with varnished hair, orange skin, and enormous earrings like an Aztec emperor’s. Maggie, five, didn’t get a window, but she had learned the power of her own pert, North American cuteness, and now she prevailed on a stranger to help her see the view.
The woman squeezed Maggie, as if she might fall out as she looked at the various sights. Look, how small the cars. See the roofs of the houses, the avenues, the mountain ridges receding gray and yellow. The scratched thickness of the window seemed to separate them decisively from this dwindling, perfect, toy world which in any case was not the place Maggie was leaving behind.
As they banked over a residential section Maggie asked the lady to find her house for her. It was the one whose roof was covered with a red bougainvillea. It had a wall around it, with grass inside and an iron gate for the car.
The woman glanced helplessly across the seats at Maggie’s mother. Julia shrugged and smiled, abandoning the Señora to her own devices.
“Choose any one, the most beautiful house for yourself,” the lady said. She used the formal usted. Then she peered toward the window herself, gently pushing Maggie aside. “Oh, look, there’s a big house for you. With a bougainvillea! That house is yours, princesa. The castle for your return.”
Maggie knew this was a lie, the return most of all. The Goodwins were moving to Colombia. Lock, stock, and barrel, her father had said—a phrase that started with amusing clicks but at the end boomed shut behind you like a vault.
Maggie wriggled in the Señora’s arms and looked down.
“Do you see it?” the Señora asked. “Or is it that one? Look, there, I see the red bougainvillea.”
“Yes, there it is!” Maggie chorused with false agreement. Maybe the lady had seen it after all. Even if not, she wanted the lady to feel better, too. Scores of houses had ridged barrel tiles, all gleaming in the sun. It didn’t matter which she chose. No house, from the air, was hers.
At their real house the bougainvillea was red-violet mixed with pure scarlet, a color that could set fire to midnight. The vine grew up one of the corner posts of the front porch. Its twisted greenish-brown trunks were the forearms of a giant who had plunged his fists into the dirt and was holding on tightly to something underground.
…
“My granddaughter’s calling from where, the moon?” Althea said. “How are you, dear? And where?”
It was easy talking to Althea on satellite delay; she left a pause after her words into which Maggie could naturally answer. Perhaps it took an effort for her to speak. “In Cajamarca.”
“Where? Can’t hardly hear ye!”
“Cajamarca, Peru!” Maggie shouted.
“Oh, Cajamarca? Peru! I liked Cajamarca,” Althea said. “It was green. Johnny and I ate cheese.”
“That’s right. You remember Cajamarca well, then?”
“Mm-hm.”
“You know I’m living in Piedras! ?”
“Where?”
“Piedras? Chigualen! The hacienda! Where you washed up, remember?”
“Oh, yes,” Althea said, and seemed to be gathering breath for a further statement, but here the satellite took advantage of her pause. There was a clip on the line, then a long, enforced silence in which Maggie could hear the signal bouncing up into outer space and down again.
“What did you say, Grandma?”
“Maggie? Is this Maggie Goodwin speaking?” Fumbling sounds, a thump, as if Althea had dropped the phone. “Just a minute.”
Maggie began the conversation again, shouting, “How are you feeling, Grandma?”
“Fine, dear.”
“Mom said you fell. Are you okay?”
“How boo how,” Althea said.
“How boo how?” Maggie said. “What does that mean?”
“Chinese for ‘Good, not good.’”
“You mean so-so?”
“That’s pretty good where I come from.”
“How was it in the hospital?”
’“Turn to the wall, Mrs. Baines!’ Ha! They found what they deserved.”
“Julia thinks I should come up right away.”
“She’ll boss you right around if you let her. Don’t you worry about me.
Maggie wavered, wondering whether it was cowardly or prudent not to discuss Julia’s more sweeping intentions. “So where did you learn Chinese, Grandma?”
“Shan tsao-liao,” she said. “That’s ‘earthquake.’ Means ‘the mountains walked.’ There’s my whole Chinese vocabulary. I learned it at an aftershock. With Johnny.”
“I thought you stayed in a convent. I thought you weren’t allowed to go into the field.” A camp hand had tried to molest Althea early on, Maggie recalled; later, she’d had Julia.
“Near the end he took me along to Kansu. But even that was long ago. Well, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching,” Althea said politely. She was no longer speaking Chinese, but imitating the sound of shekels dropping into the telephone. “Honey, so glad you called.”
“I saw his grave, Mr. Saavedra’s grave,” shrieked Maggie, unable to contain herself.
“What’s that?”
“Don Héctor? The hacienda owner?”
“Oh, yes. He’d be dead by now.”
“I think about you all the time, Grandma. I’m following in your footsteps!”
“I’d think you’d find them kind of slow.” Althea panted a little of her laughter into the phone while another person spoke to her from the background, a man. Lester? Maggie saw a dapper tweedy character with pink baby cheeks. “Well, I do hope you come visit, but not before Christmas,” Althea said. “And it is lovely to hear from you, dear, and enjoy yourself, and give my love to your husband, whatever his name was, and boil your water, and please don’t worry about your old grammaw. I don’t want to waste any more of your money. So nice of you to call.”
Click.
…
“Let me tempt you to stay longer,” Liliana said at dinner. “Tomorrow we can go to the baths. The market. I have found such a wonderful wood-carver. Horseback riding, if you are interested. You can get relaxed, then argue with your mami, and then you will need to rest some more. Stay all week, as long as you like. For us it is really nice. Me, I don’t like any of the other wifes around here.”
I guess I’m a wife, after all, Maggie thought with some discomfiture.
“Too many mining engineers coming in,” Klaus grumbled. “They rarely bring their families, but if they do, the women aren’t that interesting.”
“Those wifes,” said Liliana. “Canadians. Minnesotans. Fat and pale. They look eck-sackly like rabbits.”
At this comparison, the children brightened. Klaus Junior stuck out his incisors and singsonged, “I am Mrs. Olaffsen!” They had been told to speak English at this meal, for the benefit of the guest.
“Never do that in front of her,” Liliana told him with feigned severity. “Mrs. Olaffsen is a rabbit, but that is our secret, just between us.”
The children nodded at each other, making bunny ears with their hands and wiggling their noses. Liliana told them that since they were bunnies now, they should nibble their peas and carrots, which they were permitted to do without utensils.
Maggie repeated that she was needed at the clinic, but she sounded feeble, even to herself. Just now she would have liked to live with the Wechslers forever.
“Carson can manage alone,” Liliana insisted, reaching down the table to wipe the children’s smeared faces one by one. “He will appreciate you more when you return. Men! He’s just like my Klausito, who hardly notices me until I go away to Buenos Aires.”
“Darling, how untrue!” Klausito said.
Maggie admitted she hadn’t accomplished a thing since arriving in Cajamarca. Tonight she’d call her mother, get it over with, and send a fax to Carson’s friend asking him to ship down a neonatology text. Most importantly, she had to find a lab to analyze her flask of lake water. This errand would mean missing the bus, which left before anything was open.
“You’re staying, good,” Liliana said. “Carson will understand.”
First thing tomorrow, they’d go to the Baños del Inca, the place where Atahualpa had been soaking on the night the Spanish army arrived. It was a series of tubs cut into stone by a culture before the Incas, channeling the water of a hot spring. Maggie was surprised that Liliana would dream of dipping even one painted toenail into the water; she’d heard the baths were filthy. Nowadays they were at the end of a public bus line.
“You must go early, to one special bath inside a house, where you pay more.” Liliana wanted to know what else to plan for Maggie. Did she have errands, medicines to buy? Another nap, a movie, the market? Munoz was available to drive them anywhere.
Maggie said that she might like to visit the contraband stall in the market, buy a two-dollar bottle of Chilean red wine for Carson, maybe a flat-weave bedside carpet, and a wooden tray.
“What else?” Liliana asked. Maggie couldn’t think of anything, so Liliana turned to her husband and children. “Let’s help Maggie. What special treats can she buy?”
“A whole salami, and apples, and blue cheese, and chocolate pudding, the kind that comes in a plastic bag, and onion bread, and a tin of Danish butter cookies,” added the other Wechslers. “And milk jam, and a brass elephant, and, and, a dirt bike, and a pregnant mother bunny like we have, a computer game, a camera, boxes of bandages, and a holy painting, and a truck to carry it all.”
“Don’t forget a radio,” Klaus said.
…
“We women need each other,” Liliana said. Her golden body wavered under the water’s smoking surface. “All women need to gossip for two hours each day. Otherwise, our teeth rot.” She tapped an eyetooth with her fingernail. “Maggie, seriously. No woman can survive just talking to her husband. Children give you something, but in the end they are only children. You have none, you want babies, oh how I forgot! Ay, we worry about you, Klaus and I.”
Last night, Maggie had made her phone call to Julia. Refusing to fly home had been just as wrenching as she’d expected. Hanging up, she’d felt a monster, unloving, unforgivable. Klaus had toddled off to bed pronouncing Althea perfectly able to defend herself, especially with help from Lester Weeks. If Maggie wanted to get involved, she must recognize her own decision, not merely succumb to her mother’s manipulations. It was precisely what Carson would have said. Maggie and Liliana disagreed: Maggie might need to fly north and rescue Althea from the nursing home, but only after trying to influence and placate her mother from a distance. Julia needed more frequent doses of communication. Maggie must soon return to town, to make another phone call. Until then, Julia would receive a series of newsy, affectionate, generic, and cajoling letters, dated a week apart but composed by Maggie and Liliana in a rush of creativity that had lasted long past midnight.
Certain passages had made them scream with laughter.
Now it was not yet seven A.M., and Maggie couldn’t think of anything to say to her new friend. Near dawn she’d been awakened by a dream: Vicente kicking in the door. He’d been wearing his little white cowboy hat with a veil firmly tucked into his shirt collar, but Maggie had recognized his eyes burning behind the gauze. The dream meant she was attracted to him sexually—not too surprising, though it made her feel dumb that she’d have to learn it in a dream.
Outside the bathing shack, there was faint laughter and cries from the people sitting in the open-air tubs downstream. They were bathing and washing clothes in her and Liliana’s used water. On the other side of the humped dirt road, Munoz waited in the Jeep, asleep with a newspaper over his face.
“You’ve helped me so much this visit,” Maggie finally said. “Maybe it’s your turn now?” She considered Liliana’s likely woes.
“This whole visit is your turn,” Liliana declared, touching Maggie’s thigh underwater. “My life is calm for now. It was not always, and still I have my little things and problems. But you! When I saw you yesterday, I heard the wheels inside your head. Turning, Rroom, vrooom! I thought, I would go crazy in that canyon. How can that little girl continue?”
“I’m not alone,” Maggie said. “I talk to my cook, and I have Carson. That’s one more confidant than you, isn’t it?”
“No-no-no. Your cook is not a friend!”
“Why not? I see her every day.”
“Maggie, you can never be one of them.”
And if I was, she thought despairingly, I could never prove it to anyone. She slid into the water, whose warmth gently spread her vertebrae apart. Beams and slabs of dusty light shot in between the planks. In her dream, Vicente had complained of heart trouble. The instant she’d touched him with a stethoscope, her flesh turned to bouncing rubber, powerless to resist as he swept her off her feet, out onto a bus that was passing by the clinic.
She shoved Vicente out of her mind, and said, “I find Clorinda pretty entertaining. She’s smart, I think. I enjoy my talks with her.”
Liliana sighed. “Clorinda! When we are traveling in the Cheep, Klaus and I, and we pass through a village like hers or yours, I ask myself, How can they live? Well for them, it is their life, and they have their fiestas and their burials and all their ways which are very picturesque, but for you and me it is pure delusion to think we can live like that. And you are helping them, giving them medical services, and yes that’s nice. For them! Who is nice for you? Not your servants. That is certain. Servants never think like that. The more closer you feel, the more they cheat you in the end. It has happened to me many times. And our husbands, Klaus and Carson? Yes, they love us, but! Men carry their justification inside them. For a woman this part of a man is fascinating. How can he never think he will become someone else than who he is? But for us, in that way they are useless. That’s also why I say, we women need each other.”
“You’re right,” Maggie capitulated. She was inwardly horrified at Liliana’s beliefs, though she suspected they were largely true and she, Maggie, too chicken to admit it. Momentarily she adopted Liliana’s vantage point, or the vantage point she thought Liliana expected her to have, and from it considered Carson, his seriousness, his purpose. All of his traits seemed proper to a man, and just then she loved him as much as she had ever desired to love anyone. There was an admixture of guilt in this, surely—guilt and the magic of distance—still, in a burst of gratitude, she told Liliana that Carson had saved her. As long as she had Carson, she was okay.
Liliana snorted. “For some women it’s okay to take her mission from the man. But for you? When I see you both together you seem—you don’t seem completely yourself. Maybe you love him, but you are like this,” and she stood halfway out of the water and hunched her shoulders slightly.
“Who wants to be myself?” Maggie said. “That’s boring.” Yet it felt good for Liliana to insist that she was a better, stronger person than she felt herself to be. She sank underwater, eyes shut, and listened to the suffocating throb of her own blood in her eardrums. She felt Carson’s hands touching her belly, his tongue lapping urgently at the insides of her legs. At the very top it turned into Vicente’s tongue, with Vicente’s face close behind it. She felt him knowing her, as if he were thinking of her right now. She burst to the surface, pushing her wet hair back from her forehead and saying she was not afraid of her husband. Afraid of losing him perhaps.
“Same thing, no?” Liliana said. She stood up, the water surging around her waist, her nipples dilated like large dark rosebuds. Naked, her body was luscious and complete.
“Not at all,” Maggie said gravely. At this Liliana laughed with satisfaction, asking what Maggie meant. Clearly, for Liliana, the conversation had at last begun. She must have had affairs, Maggie thought. A man in Buenos Aires? Did she regret staying in Peru for Klaus?
Maggie decided not to shift the conversation onto a safe topic, such as her wish to have a baby (anyway, they’d talked of it last night, Liliana advising Maggie to misplace her diaphragm, or store it amongst the needles of her sewing kit, speaking with such urgent sincerity that Maggie had yearned to translate her words directly into action). She suddenly saw that Liliana was right. To be seen and known was as necessary as breathing; a child could never know her, and maybe Carson couldn’t either. That might be all right, yet the need would never disappear. Just now, in fact, she was in danger of displacing it onto Vicente Quispe Cruz, who would probably disappoint her, even worse than Carson. Better to reveal herself now, to Liliana.
“I am afraid of myself,” she said. And even more afraid, she thought, of where things might be going, including this conversation. What was the difference between hope and fear? She held herself stiffly against the stone lip of the tub, awaiting the next generous intrusion, but for the first time Liliana seemed to suffer a blunting of her instincts; she just nodded and said that considering where Maggie lived, she must have to rely on herself abnormally, more than anyone should. She was talking about herself now, Maggie thought.
