When Mountains Walked, page 20
“The Rosario, no? You had that group—I forget—Rainbow? Don’t you hear about them?”
“Black Rainbow Movement,” Maggie said. “God, how everybody loved them.”
“Of course, if they made everybody rich with drugs, I would love them too,” Liliana said.
“What!”
“They had a cocaine business. You know that, right?”
“They aren’t rich now,” said Maggie disbelievingly.
“Indians don’t know how to save their money.” How did Maggie think the town of Piedad had bought its satellite dish? Had she ever been to El Mirador? She should see some of the houses up there. They were practically mansions, with red tile roofs and artificial trout ponds.
With a shiver, Maggie understood that Vicente’s house was one of these. And how would Liliana know? Had she seen it? Or had Klaus? She recalled the pin in Klaus’s map, Vicente’s recollection of the Wechslers’ name.
Liliana explained that even two years ago there had been an active airstrip at El Mirador, where small planes from Colombia had landed each day, taking away hundreds of pounds of basic cocaine paste per flight. An airstrip was not an uncommon way for a remote community or rebel group to subsidize itself. Being small, the Black Rainbow would have paid tribute to the Shining Path, yet there must have been plenty left to finance the golden age of Piedras. These makeshift airstrips on mountainsides and especially at the canyon bottoms were dangerous, however, so when the Peruvian military began to offer flatter, safer landings in the jungle, closer to the coca-growing region, even at a thousand dollars per landing Piedras lost the Colombians overnight. For a while the Shining Path had attacked the jungle bases, trying to get its business back, but the new Peruvian president had eventually crushed the rebels, guaranteeing the army’s monopoly. “Klaus makes a study of this thing,” Liliana concluded.
“So the Black Rainbow was basically a successful business,” Maggie said. “Nice that they shared the wealth.” No wonder there was a feeling in Piedras that everyone was waiting, waiting for the world to come back to them. Maggie told some white lies about Fortunata: how, as an ex-official of the Black Rainbow, she’d been instrumental in changing the clinic’s image, and had even persuaded the ex-commander to inspect it. “He came in incognito. In fact one of his kids was really sick. Fortunata only told us a long time afterwards, so we never figured out which one he was, but we’ve been getting patients ever since. Don’t tell my mom! Don’t tell Klaus either, I guess.”
“Now you really scare me,” Liliana said.
“I’m not scared,” said Maggie. “Carson’s not scared. It’s clear they’re helping us.” She reminded Liliana of what Klaus had said, that the Shining Path left him alone because his work was beneficial to the poor. “I mean, I really think there’s a sincerity there, don’t you?”
“Oh, Maggie, if you saw it here in Cajamarca just eighteen months ago! We never went outside the city. At night we remained indoors. You heard the car bombs once, twice a week.”
And the shooting of Klaus’s fellow professors, Maggie remembered. “You must have been terrified. But everyone in Piedras talks about how dangerous it was in Cajamarca and how peaceful it was down there. No car bombs. No murders, as far as I know. You should come visit. It’s so beautiful, so vertical, like living at the bottom of a Chinese painting.”
Liliana closed her eyes and let her legs float the length of the tub, so that Maggie had to do the same from the opposite end. With her eyes still closed Liliana said, “If you are not aware, you will not fear. If you are not in fear, you are in danger. When you are kidnapped, or dead, it is too late for your powerful government to protect you. I’m sorry to say it in this strong way. Nothing will probably happen, but I feel responsible.”
“I just don’t get why you think it’s more dangerous than right here.” Maggie could hear the silence of the canyon’s walls towering above Piedras. She longed to go back there. “Look, even your maid says she doesn’t understand where you and Klaus get all your money.” On her last visit she’d tried to explain to Clorinda about nonprofit funding. Clorinda had been making free with her opinions, as usual—Maggie should tell Carson to shave his beard because it made him look depressing, like the conquistador Pizarro; and the Wechslers were too rich. No Peruvian university professor could ever afford a car or a house like this. And Klaus’s experiments? Planting ají in the roots of a palm tree, or spraying laundry soap on potato leaves, or making bugs attack one another? Who’d pay for them? They seemed utterly unprofitable to Clorinda.
Liliana said, “Well . . . We are getting overboiled. We will get a headache.”
They heaved out and sat on the stone edge, their private parts shielded from germs by Liliana’s plushy towels. Their skin steamed, their thighs spread on the stone. Bronzy skin next to white. Liliana’s pubic hair was thin and long like a beard. Maggie’s was dark and thick like a mat. They both looked meaty and monumental, like the women in early Picassos.
“What did she say to you? We may have to fire her,” Liliana mused. “Can you stand ten more minutes in hot water?”
“Sure, but I would hate it if you fired Clorinda. We were just chatting.”
“Klaus and I have to be very careful.”
“I told her Klaus got paid in marks.”
Both their heads were pounding, so they threw pitchers of cold water on each other first, blowing and stamping their feet, then jumped back in. Maggie arranged her now pulpy limbs in the water, recalling that she was likely bathing in the same tub where Atahualpa had experienced his last happiness on earth.
“I think I have to tell you,” Liliana began. “Klaus even decided not to say anything until he heard something more concrete.” Last month the grapevine had begun to say that the Black Rainbow was springing back to life. Other groups were stirring these days, as the people began to notice that, after five or six years of capitalism, they were still as poor and desperate as when they’d undertaken the path of terrorismo. “Sometimes the people, they have no memory, so stupid. And in Peru everything is rumors, nobody knows which one is true. Klaus was thinking not to tell you. After this with your family, not to upset you if it was nothing, only say you should be careful. Now that your clinic is working, maybe they will want to take advantage of the gringos in some way. Then today you told me all this thing, and I am thinking what if you are the new life of the Black Rainbow? I am glad if you buy a radio, then Klaus and I can call you. You and I can chat a little also. But please don’t say to Klaus I told you anything.”
Maggie agreed to get a radio. She didn’t want Liliana to worry about her. In return, she asked Liliana not to tell anyone about the Comandante’s visit to the clinic, not unless there was some disaster and the information became important. She needed to trust someone, and Liliana seemed the only candidate. It felt good to take her into confidence; having mentioned Vicente, she almost felt she’d told Liliana everything.
She stood up, her body a bright, ugly shrimp color. Vapor rose from her upper arms. She wished they could open a window, but there was none.
“Let’s go and buy that radio,” Liliana said.
Maggie demurred. She didn’t have the money with her. Next time. It was a big expense; she had to mention it to Carson.
“Good, okay, then come back even sooner,” insisted Liliana.
13
CHRISTMAS EVE, 1939. Christunanda Convent, Bengal, India. It was because the sunset clouds were flat across the bottom that they looked like miraculous islands floating in a golden ocean, and because Althea’s husband wasn’t here that she’d stared at them long enough to notice. For nearly an hour tonight, and every evening since seventy days ago when Johnny had left her at the convent, outside the village of Megha, whose name meant Clouds, Althea had stood at the window of her bungalow sending him love and protection.
She had soon discovered that there was little to do but pray, and so she did. Half of her praying was some kind of gazing, the other half was asking favors. To keep the earth from swallowing him up, a mountain from falling in on him, a boiling geyser from scorching him, and the wind from freezing him to death. To keep him from forgetting her. To give him joy and success in his work and scientific revelations. She’d stood here every evening watching day change to night, the sky turn from air to fire to liquid silver and finally to blood and darkness. She’d come to know this place, this hour, this light so intimately that, even if she were to be shocked out of a sleep begun on another continent, for the rest of her life she’d always be able to say, This is a Bengali sunset. That curl of bronze foil is the Kavita River, fringed by palm shadows. And this is the air that clasps the skin of my inner forearm, heavy and warm as a brass bracelet.
She had sent him away, not knowing how long it would take him to return. The festering, spreading war made travel daily more impossible. He’d gone from Calcutta to Moscow; now he was probably in Mongolia; he might return through Shanghai if the Japanese didn’t invade it.
Imagining where he was, she used a mental version of Johnny’s mapping calipers. He was gone so far that she had to lift the ball of the earth, so far around the curve that he could never see Althea’s sunset breaking and spilling like red egg yolk across the horizon. For him it would be long past midnight, his sunset having fallen during the still white heat of Althea’s afternoon. Althea had gone into the principal’s office at the charity school to examine the globe that was kept there. Mongolia was north-northeast, wedged between the USSR and China. Mongolia! Outer Mongolia! Unreachably far away.
She imagined the freezing steppe wind slamming against Johnny’s tent, so loaded with ice and yellow dust that it was like a careening wall of stone, almost heavy and thick enough to hold back the dawn. Darkness at noon, so Johnny had predicted, due to the tremendous dust of the collapsing mountains. Even in its aftermath, the earthquake was a disaster. Althea tried to think of Johnny’s earthquake without reexperiencing her own.
Here, the sun slid away as peacefully as a coin into a magician’s envelope, pulling from the earth a warm sigh of farewell that barely troubled the heavy leaves of the convent’s banana plantation, whose rustling only seemed to deepen the ancient, living stillness of another Indian evening.
Johnny’s earthquake was the biggest of all time. There was not one biggest but many: all of the world’s biggest temblors were equal and the same. Any one could fling a hill into the air. These were convulsions beyond which the earth could bear and produce no more. The crust split. Deaths and losses varied depending on who lived in a place, what kinds of houses they built. It was worst if the earth shook at night while they slept. Of course, for the earth there was no day or night. Althea took comfort thinking that hardly anyone had been there for the Altai quake. A tremor with no one to experience it was wonderful. Aftershocks were another story. The original shock had been stronger than Huaraz’s. Its aftermath would be what she had felt—thousands of nasty surprises, spread over months. For these, Johnny would arrive in time.
Althea hadn’t heard a thing since his telegram from Moscow, which had arrived the first day of November, just two short weeks after he’d left Calcutta. He’d gone off with the names of the Russian seismologists whose work had been translated into English, with whose help he’d hoped to reach Mongolia. Now he’d written: WITH TADZIEFF FLYING ULAN BATOR TOMORROW STOP LOVE. Would he remember it was Christmas? Althea imagined a circle of men—Russian scientists, bearish, worn out and unshaven—passing a flat steel flask around a fire, vodka burning down their throats while faces seared. She hoped Johnny would think of her, and know she was sending her thoughts to him, at least today.
On his departure she had proposed a pact: to think of each other every day at sunset. Johnny had called her idea childish. He might see no sky at all, his nights would begin at different times, so he might as well just think of Althea whenever he thought of her. Which was constantly, darling, every minute.
She would have to be satisfied, but now she wished he could have lied more thoroughly and simply said yes. He’d disliked her request, though he’d shrugged and teased, saying why would she miss him when she was the one who was sending him away? Why indeed, she wondered. Had she pushed her husband from her? Since Christopher’s death she’d been unnaturally dependent on trivial displays of affection. Johnny said she mocked the depths of his feeling. He’d turned the tables, saying as he left that he’d come back from Mongolia only if she could remember that he loved her, even if he did not comply exactly with her requests.
She had promised, she had lied. She’d wanted him to refuse to leave her. Too late.
Far across the convent grounds, she could hear a faint racket, which must be the Christmas Eve procession forming up in the kitchen compound. A drum rattle, inconclusive flute trill, bossy shouts. Then silence again. Christunandà’s head nun, Mère Anandi, had explained at tea how the procession would wind around the grounds, stopping to bless each building, dormitory, and cottage, even the dairy cows’ enclosure. Althea’s bungalow, built overlooking the river by the French priest who had founded the order, would be their first stop. A hundred converts, widows and orphans and old men, would sing in honor of the founder, then invite Althea to join the parade, to walk back through the banana plantation toward the Christmas feast.
In honor of the occasion, she’d put on a sari, for the first time in two years in India. Seven yards of starched white gauze were wrapped, pleated, folded, twisted around her body. Rolled in these bindings she felt stiff and delicate as a fever victim.
The convent was a hospital, site of Althea’s delayed convalescence from Huaraz. In its quiet she knew more perfectly how the ground would writhe and buck underneath Johnny’s cot, sending him running outside into a darkness that screeched like molars being ripped in half. Time could not be known as long or short; the violence would not fit into sense. Every morning she relived the mornings when the quake had not been finished. Thousands of tremors, as if the earth were dying slowly and the first shock had not already provided enough of a bad memory to taint the rest of her life. Some were terrifying replicas of the first shock, others so nightmarishly gentle that again she’d be taken unawares, wonder what was wrong with her leg, whether she had a charley horse in calf or thigh.
Days passed, the tremors didn’t stop, the river ran black. Without wings, she was condemned to walk the unreliable earth. Her body could not be stopped from trembling.
The kitchen floor had wriggled and she’d run screaming from her doorframe, like Chicken Little, exposing her baby to the sky, appealing, begging: At least, sky, you won’t fall in on us, will you? She’d wanted the air to pull Christopher away.
And then he had indeed been taken, not by earth or fire or air, but by water. By the small worms Don Héctor had mentioned, secret children of the earthquake’s boa. All that was left of Christopher was his soft skull inside her own face and her womb turned into a desert and her brain a black hole that emanated stellar streams of thoughts, which were not as her own thoughts had been, but instead were the thoughts of a new and unknowable person whom she did not love as she had loved herself before. Herself. That was as big a disappearance as the unconscious never-questioned way she had trusted the earth to provide a place for her foot when it came down to stop the body’s falling. Never again.
And that, all of that evil, was what she wanted Johnny to know; and to her shame, she wanted him to know far more than she wanted him to love her. She’d hate him until he found out.
…
After he dropped her off at the convent, and his train had finally disappeared around the hills’ green shoulder, leaving behind only its rippled black ponytail of smoke, she’d felt her stomach go hollow and she had known she might never see him again. He could easily be drowned in the ocean, crushed under a falling building, bitten by a microbe as Christopher had been, or even attacked by partisans, or Japs or Nazis or Mongolian bandits. What kind of woman sent her husband to a place where he might die? What kind of woman sent her husband away at all? Perhaps she had secretly intended to murder him?
Words were a form of violence she knew now how to use. Lying was one of her new and dark abilities. She had lied to Johnny, not outright but with wiles and tactics, the concealment of her own motives (had she even known what these were before?), the use of his own vocabulary to influence his judgment. Words like “measurements” and “observations.”
Pressing Johnny to listen to the BBC announcer until he was caught by the story of the international scientific teams, forming and moving toward the area. She had felt proud then of her power, hypnotizing Johnny. She wanted him to be devastated, to realize that he was condemned to trust what he could not trust at all. Sending him was a vengeance.
She repented of it now. His absence was a vortex, an invisible eyeless hurricane. It was a mystery how this chair, this table, continued to exist without him. This was not the worst thing. The worst thing was how she’d plainly proven to herself that the center of her own study was Johnny, while Johnny’s study was the world. This was insulting, and she could not change it.
By now he must have changed, making irrelevant all her study heretofore. She’d sent him off for this purpose, knowing the earthquake would succeed where all her words and wishes had not. She might have lost him, she now realized. His absence changed her too. Chairs and tables had not disappeared. They sat there proving Johnny’s marginality. She slept differently in the bed, flinging her arms and legs wide in dreams, waking up stark in the middle, no longer leaving room for him.
