When Mountains Walked, page 21
She was comfortable here at the convent. Oh yes, she had fallen in love with the almost cruel simplicity of her barely furnished rooms, the chipped painted metal bed (white over green), the wooden washstand with its cool earthen jug, and the chair so plain it reached out to strip her of every clinging personal association. She was living in a doll’s house, a small and manageable representation of life. This was simply a stronger version of the joy she’d felt when she had become used to making herself at home in shacks, hotels, and rented houses: places with holes in the floor for toilets, rooms whose unpainted cement walls seemed to collapse inward at nightfall. Why did she enjoy feeling like a stranger? Because strange rooms expected her to exist. Only when Johnny was home did she begin to feel she’d lost herself, dissipated into a mist.
When dusk crept in through windows, now, Althea began her so-called prayers. She was versed in calling Johnny to her mind’s eye, vividly alive, as she imagined he existed to himself. Only rarely did he come to her lifelessly as a Catholic’s repetitious litany. Once or twice he would not come at all—because he had not thought of her that day, she’d managed to decide. Perhaps an infidelity had drained the life from their connection. One night she’d dreamed he was on a Hawaiian island, eating from a hollowed pineapple, surrounded by fat brown women. On one or two recent evenings she’d felt certain he was dead, and would stay that way unless she could bring him to fuller life in her mind.
Tonight’s sky had a hard yellow and orange skin. Johnny was outside it, far away in the freezing dark. The near sky was stiffening into a golden floor that looked almost solid enough for two people to walk across. Althea could feel it, cool metal clasping her ankles. If Johnny were here, she’d propose they hold each other’s hand and run straight off the earth’s flat edge. Skate across all that gold—avoiding those swirls of blood—and go, live out their dreams on a purple cloud island. Who would they be if they lived there? When Althea met Johnny, she thought Heaven was the promise of marriage. Again, when she had boarded the green and white Grace Line ship that would take them to Venezuela, she’d believed she was sailing for Eden.
She lifted her arm to show Johnny how the white choli sleeve was turning the color of tiger lilies.
The evening began to thicken, pressing on her its ancientness. Across the pale road, where several fishing families lived under roughly thatched pavilions, the spaces beneath the thorn trees were filling with a haze of fragrant smoke. Cooking fires of dung and wood, these were the same fires that had burned in India every evening since before time. Althea considered how easily she could have been born across the road, an Indian woman. She could have existed thousands of years ago instead of today. A camp follower heating rice for her mustachioed soldier—he’d come to her covered with wounds and dust, with blood on his saber, to rest while some battle for forgotten empires paused at dusk. Hindu thoughts were inherent in the smell of a dung fire. She must have been reincarnated ten thousand times to reach this hour, this place.
A toddler in a cotton shift ambled out of the trees, ran back and forth in the river sand until it fell down. It picked itself up, ran back under the trees. Where was its mother? Cooking, with an infant at her breast. The toddler seemed springy and independent. Had Christopher been like that child, he would not have died. She remembered his pale, fragile skin, the thinness of his skull.
Behind her, the sitting room was darkening, gray shadows pooling in the corners. Her shadow on the stucco wall was skinny and pyramidal, a Chinese mountain. She disliked being in this bungalow at dusk, where dead priests’ ghosts floated out through the thinning surface of the daylight. Her only remedy was turning on the ceiling bulb, but its electrocuting glare was another form of hell. The French founder of the convent had died in this room; his brother, five years younger, was dying now, in his own identical cottage two hundred yards away. One night shortly after moving in, Althea had dreamed of one of them so vividly she took it for a visitation. Old man gasping for breath, so old his skin had turned to silver. He’d looked up at his nuns, seen angels’ brown faces with white wings folded alongside rounded cheeks. Touched by women for the first time since a boy, he’d die convinced of Heaven.
With enforced dignity Althea walked out onto the verandah, letting the screen door slam because she did not want to turn her body, much less lift her arm. She’d draped the sari herself, and so it was in danger of falling off.
Outside, she could smell the cooking fires more strongly, hear the racket from the kitchen compound grow more insistent, the shouts more commanding. They must be lighting the torches. Soon they’d begin to walk.
She dreaded descending the steps, melting into the knotted crowd: people made of pure tendons, smelling of cow dung and burnt sugar. Crowding the narrow paths of the convent’s banana plantation, jostling, trying to keep an eye on the ground in case of cobras, her sari might loosen, its folds relax, the cloth spiral off and down her body, revealing her glories to a hundred poor. They’d wonder what the white woman had done to make her husband punish her, send her away. She was not a nun.
Unnatural. Accursed. Once in a while, she believed it of herself.
Tonight she’d dine with Mère Anandi and Brother Jesunandà in the beggars’ banquet hall, on the floor. She already took two meals a day there, embedded in a long row of nuns who were separated by one screen from the priests, by two screens from the beggars. Nuns came along slopping rice, beans, sambar, and yogurt from steel buckets onto banana leaves laid down on the scrubbed bare floor. Everyone ate with their hands. Althea had discovered a fondness for this style, for green banana curry, too. But if she sat on the floor tonight, she’d never rise clothed. How did hill women climb trees in saris? They clung like monkeys with bare strong toes, reached overhead with iron blades to lop branches for firewood, turning trees into spears like huge amputated asparagus, but never unveiling their own brown trunks.
For the fiftieth time Althea retucked her sari skirt as the bazaar woman had shown her. Circling the waist, pleating the cloth between a stiffened thumb and little finger, tucking it under itself. She drew the remainder up around her breasts, back, shoulder, head. Mère Anandi praised saris with such intelligence that Althea had to agree: they were the most gracious female costume in the world. But Althea had not gotten the hang of it. The great bunchy ball at her belly was always threatening to burst open. She’d chosen an inexpensive kind, sheer cotton with a simple border of white embroidered daisies. Its low quality was showing: the cloth was rebellious, creased, and limp.
Poor as it was, she wished she’d worn it as her wedding dress. She and Johnny had been married by a justice of the peace in New Orleans, and Althea still regretted the lack of pomp. She’d worn a linen suit that had unfortunately matched the linoleum floor, which tried to look like coffee and cream but looked instead like mixed digestive fluids. Johnny’s loud redheaded friend had been the witness.
It was unwifely, disloyal, to prefer over her wedding dress an outfit her husband had never seen; even more so to change her body from an American hourglass to a delicate Indian column without his consent—and not for him.
Still, she was in the convent, safe. She was looking forward to pleasing everyone, surprising them with her costume. Mère Anandi often said she wished she had been ordained here in India, so she could wear a sari like the local nuns. Then instantly she would deride herself: “Only a Frenchwoman still wishes for a sari after forty years in robes!” Althea didn’t understand Catholics. It seemed to her that Mère Anandi should not admit desires in public, even small ones. “Your habit is perfect,” Althea said, meaning it. Bride of Christ. Could married women ever shine that way, or were they all tarnished by rubbing against their husbands?
The sun’s red yolk was fattening and flattening itself onto the black frying pan of India’s dirt. Fully lit, on fire, Althea at last completed her promise to her marriage. Offering herself in the sari to her husband, she imagined herself floating free toward him, big and light, like a Christmas present or a meringue. A cumulus cloud full of sunlight. It might be Christmas morning where he was. If he was alive, he would rejoice among collapsing mountains.
Rejoice, Johnny, she told him. She offered him as gifts the sky and all things under it.
Now, after energetic quiet, the procession started singing all at once, a hundred untrained voices. They held w’s so long they turned to vowels, then abruptly stopped, leaving an unexpectedly protracted silence. And just when Althea stopped waiting, thinking the song was over, they burst forth again, wild joy. And silence once again.
Sights—the reddish, crumbled earth of the convent’s dairy pen. Its cows blurred into humps of pencil shadow under the palm thatch roof where they rested for the night on their sides, like derailed boxcars. The fishing shacks. The pale road where a boy in a turban was just passing through a shaft of last light, driving home a camel along with his family’s buffalo and goats. The Kavita River’s oxbow, all day a sludgy olive-green bend cluttered with washermen, now blazing in the color of the sky.
Shabik-nnn! A! Taqir uuuu-la! The procession was here, curving around the corner of her bungalow. First came a bunch of little kids, jumping up and down, clacking sticks together. Next came the oldest with rattles, soft-drink caps strung in wooden frames, made in the craft workshop. They sounded so happy, Althea wished she knew the language they were singing in.
Came the main body of the procession. First an ancient lady in a mud-colored sari whose pattern would have been impossible to see even in daylight. She wore no choli underneath, and Althea could see her skinny flat dugs hanging like flaps of softest calfskin. This crone leaned on a stick with one hand, and in the other she carried a lantern, raising it as high as she could to light the way for those behind. Following her, a tiny boy pulling at the forward corner of a white bedsheet, walking very slowly, conscious of the importance of his task. Three old blind men clutched the cloth’s rear corners. Bodies gnarled like fig vines, chests parallel to the ground, they picked up and set down each foot in gentle deliberation, like chickens. Afraid of landing on a snake, Althea decided. A circle of boys surrounded the blind men, herding them away from the banana trunks.
Behind the blind men was the main chorus, a crowd of ordinary poor, with white nuns standing out. Althea hadn’t seen a nun before she was nineteen and married, when she and Johnny had first gone to New Orleans to board the Grace Line boat for South America. There had been two of them on that ship, missionaries bound for Venezuela. Johnny said their heads were bald. Their bodies must be white as grubs; they were waistless under insistently ugly gray habits. Their underwear knitted from itchy thread, oxfords thick-soled for kicking sinners’ shins. Not in India. In India nuns were beautiful. Even Mère Anandi, in her white cotton dress and Indian sandals, was light, bony, dry. On fire rather than putrid.
At the very rear Brother Jesunanda held a torch which flickered over his face. He smiled. In the shadows he looked like a painting of the young Rembrandt. Althea could not get used to the beauty of Indian men, beauty palpable as a woman’s, with glowing skin and deep eyes. They seemed to wear eyeliner, some of them. It made her feel nervous when Brother had knelt beside her, trying to teach her how to pray. Now she could feel him looking at her in the sari, approving of her effort.
He moved to the head of the procession, bowed to Althea. “Madame,” he said, “will you join in celebration?” She stepped off the verandah. As she put her hand on his forearm, like a bride, she felt the sari’s skirt begin to slip down. Clamping it with her left elbow, she strode into the mass of beggars. They smelled like rotten honey.
“Very graceful,” Brother approved. “Sari is a woman’s most adorning garment. Are you in mourning for your husband?”
“What do you mean?”
“White is for widows,” he said.
“Where I come from, white is for brides.”
“Ah,” he said, and suddenly let go of her arm.
They walked into the dark, among the soft rolled trunks of the banana trees. All around them the rattling of the drums, the keening of the people. Brother Jesunanda, whom she’d told about her sunset exercises, asked her laughing if she’d prayed to her husband again today. He joked that he was going to describe her pagan devotions to his nuns as an example they should not follow. Teasing, but he meant it, Althea knew. Brother Jesunanda had told her there was a grace available for the asking if you asked the right Person in the right Way. All she had to do was try it, try it even once. Althea had refused. Give it to me without asking, she’d told him, after that I’ll do anything you want.
14
Cheef! The bus stopped, let its breath out, right in front of the clinic. Before Maggie could start to get down, the neighbors’ dogs raced up and started skirling in the road. Auc, auc, auc, auc, auc, they barked, gulping air as a substitute for raw flesh.
She kicked her foot out the bus door to see if Bobby or Bestia or Chocolatín would clamp fangs on her sneaker. Somewhere in the mists of history, a Doberman had passed through Piedras, and today its mutts were especially fierce and frightening. Behind her, the driver’s assistant raised his arm and yelled “Fuera!” The dogs scattered, hunching backwards, growling and lifting their upper lips.
Maggie bent down and pretended to grab a rock from the bus’ metal step. The beasts receded long enough for her to get off and avail herself of a genuine stone. Only after the bus had left did they start wagging their tails and smirking, dishonestly, as if apologizing for not having recognized her at first.
A neighbor’s skinny yellow bitch ran up and sniffed her jeans hems, thoroughly and delicately, seeming to approve of all Maggie’s adventures.
It was eight P.M. There were clouds over the moon. The clinic’s lights were on, the generator beating like a heart. Maggie felt like the protagonist of a Central European fairy tale, arriving home after years lost in a forest. Missing was the high-piled snow for buttery squares of light to fall on. The clinic was the first light for miles: starting above Piedras Baja, all the houses and hovels had hunkered invisibly along the road. Corte de la luz. The power was out; it had given her a chill.
The clinic was locked and chained from the outside. Carson must have turned the generator on for her and gone out walking, as he and Maggie often did on power-cut nights. They’d gaze at the stars spilled across the sky like cottage cheese. Passing other houses, they’d glimpse a candle through a shutter’s crack or hear intimate murmurs—a hovel might salute them in a human voice. Mostly, though, Piedrasinos went to sleep at sunset when the lights were cut, as they’d always done before the hydroelectric plant.
Maggie could not read the combination lock. She wished the bus had stayed, to shine its headlights on the numbers, but the driver was long gone, running through the first eight notes of the Bridge on the River Kwai theme on his electric horn. He roared up the river flats, imperiling an audible pack of racing, barking dogs. The flats were a stretch of exhilaration for drivers after the terrors of the mountain road. His joy would end in three kilometers, where the road turned uphill to wind even more tortuously to the El Mirador fork, past Piedad, to end at La Tormentosa, the last place.
The headlights flickered epileptically entering the riverside trees, then stopped at the center of town, where they stayed fixed longer than usual. The driver must be getting refreshments before going up, leaving his lights on to illuminate the darkened store.
At last the lock loosened and fell open in her hand. She pushed the door open and walked into the lit room, receiving a shock like cold deep water. Why had the shelves been cleared? Why was the refrigerator gone? Had those things ever existed?
She stared, but the objects would not appear. Had Carson moved up to the mine already? Had he sold the fridge, finally admitting it was useless? Did he know Maggie had betrayed him deep within her mind? Had he returned to the United States? There was no note on the counter. She said his name once, quietly. “Carson?” The rooms absorbed the sound, gave nothing back. In the hall beside the bedroom door, she could see his white doctor’s coat hanging on its nail, a horrifying bit of normalcy. How often had she imagined, for her own amusement, that some apparently innocent transition was really the first scene of a horror movie? She blinked hard, as if a readjustment of focus would bring back the right view.
He must be dead in the bedroom, lying on the bed with his throat cut. Bandits! If she called his name once more, they’d jump out and kill her too.
She fled up the road toward the village, evil breathing at her back.
Liliana was right, Piedras was dangerous. There was nowhere to escape to, no one to call for help. The police post was hours uphill, and where was Carson? After two hundred yards she stopped, panting. No one had followed but the night, which now asked for recognition, pressing upon her its gentle, natural stillness, its silence emphasizing the river noise. The road was luminous under the moon. Above her were two horizons, the canyon rims, two softly jagged lines that seemed to be spreading slowly apart because of how the wind was moving the clouds. The clouds were battleship gray, and the moon glinted behind them, yellow as a hepatic eyeball, its golden light dispersed. The mountains were black velvet, much darker than the sky. She felt uncertain that she’d actually come from beyond the top of the right-hand horizon just that very day, and from a city. Believing this was as difficult as believing that the refrigerator and Carson and the medicines were all gone.
They had to be somewhere. Nothing was ever missing, Maggie thought, things merely got displaced to where you couldn’t find them.
She continued walking toward the town. As she got closer, the river seemed to bring a faint human roar, barely distinguishable above the water’s noise. A light, woman’s voice rose skipping over the rapids: inarticulate, clear tones, next a laugh, or a wail. A bigger party than usual at the general store? Most nights there was at least a dogfight happening, a couple of guys in chairs drinking beer and little boys kicking the dogs to keep them going. Maybe the refrigerator was being auctioned off.
When dusk crept in through windows, now, Althea began her so-called prayers. She was versed in calling Johnny to her mind’s eye, vividly alive, as she imagined he existed to himself. Only rarely did he come to her lifelessly as a Catholic’s repetitious litany. Once or twice he would not come at all—because he had not thought of her that day, she’d managed to decide. Perhaps an infidelity had drained the life from their connection. One night she’d dreamed he was on a Hawaiian island, eating from a hollowed pineapple, surrounded by fat brown women. On one or two recent evenings she’d felt certain he was dead, and would stay that way unless she could bring him to fuller life in her mind.
Tonight’s sky had a hard yellow and orange skin. Johnny was outside it, far away in the freezing dark. The near sky was stiffening into a golden floor that looked almost solid enough for two people to walk across. Althea could feel it, cool metal clasping her ankles. If Johnny were here, she’d propose they hold each other’s hand and run straight off the earth’s flat edge. Skate across all that gold—avoiding those swirls of blood—and go, live out their dreams on a purple cloud island. Who would they be if they lived there? When Althea met Johnny, she thought Heaven was the promise of marriage. Again, when she had boarded the green and white Grace Line ship that would take them to Venezuela, she’d believed she was sailing for Eden.
She lifted her arm to show Johnny how the white choli sleeve was turning the color of tiger lilies.
The evening began to thicken, pressing on her its ancientness. Across the pale road, where several fishing families lived under roughly thatched pavilions, the spaces beneath the thorn trees were filling with a haze of fragrant smoke. Cooking fires of dung and wood, these were the same fires that had burned in India every evening since before time. Althea considered how easily she could have been born across the road, an Indian woman. She could have existed thousands of years ago instead of today. A camp follower heating rice for her mustachioed soldier—he’d come to her covered with wounds and dust, with blood on his saber, to rest while some battle for forgotten empires paused at dusk. Hindu thoughts were inherent in the smell of a dung fire. She must have been reincarnated ten thousand times to reach this hour, this place.
A toddler in a cotton shift ambled out of the trees, ran back and forth in the river sand until it fell down. It picked itself up, ran back under the trees. Where was its mother? Cooking, with an infant at her breast. The toddler seemed springy and independent. Had Christopher been like that child, he would not have died. She remembered his pale, fragile skin, the thinness of his skull.
Behind her, the sitting room was darkening, gray shadows pooling in the corners. Her shadow on the stucco wall was skinny and pyramidal, a Chinese mountain. She disliked being in this bungalow at dusk, where dead priests’ ghosts floated out through the thinning surface of the daylight. Her only remedy was turning on the ceiling bulb, but its electrocuting glare was another form of hell. The French founder of the convent had died in this room; his brother, five years younger, was dying now, in his own identical cottage two hundred yards away. One night shortly after moving in, Althea had dreamed of one of them so vividly she took it for a visitation. Old man gasping for breath, so old his skin had turned to silver. He’d looked up at his nuns, seen angels’ brown faces with white wings folded alongside rounded cheeks. Touched by women for the first time since a boy, he’d die convinced of Heaven.
With enforced dignity Althea walked out onto the verandah, letting the screen door slam because she did not want to turn her body, much less lift her arm. She’d draped the sari herself, and so it was in danger of falling off.
Outside, she could smell the cooking fires more strongly, hear the racket from the kitchen compound grow more insistent, the shouts more commanding. They must be lighting the torches. Soon they’d begin to walk.
She dreaded descending the steps, melting into the knotted crowd: people made of pure tendons, smelling of cow dung and burnt sugar. Crowding the narrow paths of the convent’s banana plantation, jostling, trying to keep an eye on the ground in case of cobras, her sari might loosen, its folds relax, the cloth spiral off and down her body, revealing her glories to a hundred poor. They’d wonder what the white woman had done to make her husband punish her, send her away. She was not a nun.
Unnatural. Accursed. Once in a while, she believed it of herself.
Tonight she’d dine with Mère Anandi and Brother Jesunandà in the beggars’ banquet hall, on the floor. She already took two meals a day there, embedded in a long row of nuns who were separated by one screen from the priests, by two screens from the beggars. Nuns came along slopping rice, beans, sambar, and yogurt from steel buckets onto banana leaves laid down on the scrubbed bare floor. Everyone ate with their hands. Althea had discovered a fondness for this style, for green banana curry, too. But if she sat on the floor tonight, she’d never rise clothed. How did hill women climb trees in saris? They clung like monkeys with bare strong toes, reached overhead with iron blades to lop branches for firewood, turning trees into spears like huge amputated asparagus, but never unveiling their own brown trunks.
For the fiftieth time Althea retucked her sari skirt as the bazaar woman had shown her. Circling the waist, pleating the cloth between a stiffened thumb and little finger, tucking it under itself. She drew the remainder up around her breasts, back, shoulder, head. Mère Anandi praised saris with such intelligence that Althea had to agree: they were the most gracious female costume in the world. But Althea had not gotten the hang of it. The great bunchy ball at her belly was always threatening to burst open. She’d chosen an inexpensive kind, sheer cotton with a simple border of white embroidered daisies. Its low quality was showing: the cloth was rebellious, creased, and limp.
Poor as it was, she wished she’d worn it as her wedding dress. She and Johnny had been married by a justice of the peace in New Orleans, and Althea still regretted the lack of pomp. She’d worn a linen suit that had unfortunately matched the linoleum floor, which tried to look like coffee and cream but looked instead like mixed digestive fluids. Johnny’s loud redheaded friend had been the witness.
It was unwifely, disloyal, to prefer over her wedding dress an outfit her husband had never seen; even more so to change her body from an American hourglass to a delicate Indian column without his consent—and not for him.
Still, she was in the convent, safe. She was looking forward to pleasing everyone, surprising them with her costume. Mère Anandi often said she wished she had been ordained here in India, so she could wear a sari like the local nuns. Then instantly she would deride herself: “Only a Frenchwoman still wishes for a sari after forty years in robes!” Althea didn’t understand Catholics. It seemed to her that Mère Anandi should not admit desires in public, even small ones. “Your habit is perfect,” Althea said, meaning it. Bride of Christ. Could married women ever shine that way, or were they all tarnished by rubbing against their husbands?
The sun’s red yolk was fattening and flattening itself onto the black frying pan of India’s dirt. Fully lit, on fire, Althea at last completed her promise to her marriage. Offering herself in the sari to her husband, she imagined herself floating free toward him, big and light, like a Christmas present or a meringue. A cumulus cloud full of sunlight. It might be Christmas morning where he was. If he was alive, he would rejoice among collapsing mountains.
Rejoice, Johnny, she told him. She offered him as gifts the sky and all things under it.
Now, after energetic quiet, the procession started singing all at once, a hundred untrained voices. They held w’s so long they turned to vowels, then abruptly stopped, leaving an unexpectedly protracted silence. And just when Althea stopped waiting, thinking the song was over, they burst forth again, wild joy. And silence once again.
Sights—the reddish, crumbled earth of the convent’s dairy pen. Its cows blurred into humps of pencil shadow under the palm thatch roof where they rested for the night on their sides, like derailed boxcars. The fishing shacks. The pale road where a boy in a turban was just passing through a shaft of last light, driving home a camel along with his family’s buffalo and goats. The Kavita River’s oxbow, all day a sludgy olive-green bend cluttered with washermen, now blazing in the color of the sky.
Shabik-nnn! A! Taqir uuuu-la! The procession was here, curving around the corner of her bungalow. First came a bunch of little kids, jumping up and down, clacking sticks together. Next came the oldest with rattles, soft-drink caps strung in wooden frames, made in the craft workshop. They sounded so happy, Althea wished she knew the language they were singing in.
Came the main body of the procession. First an ancient lady in a mud-colored sari whose pattern would have been impossible to see even in daylight. She wore no choli underneath, and Althea could see her skinny flat dugs hanging like flaps of softest calfskin. This crone leaned on a stick with one hand, and in the other she carried a lantern, raising it as high as she could to light the way for those behind. Following her, a tiny boy pulling at the forward corner of a white bedsheet, walking very slowly, conscious of the importance of his task. Three old blind men clutched the cloth’s rear corners. Bodies gnarled like fig vines, chests parallel to the ground, they picked up and set down each foot in gentle deliberation, like chickens. Afraid of landing on a snake, Althea decided. A circle of boys surrounded the blind men, herding them away from the banana trunks.
Behind the blind men was the main chorus, a crowd of ordinary poor, with white nuns standing out. Althea hadn’t seen a nun before she was nineteen and married, when she and Johnny had first gone to New Orleans to board the Grace Line boat for South America. There had been two of them on that ship, missionaries bound for Venezuela. Johnny said their heads were bald. Their bodies must be white as grubs; they were waistless under insistently ugly gray habits. Their underwear knitted from itchy thread, oxfords thick-soled for kicking sinners’ shins. Not in India. In India nuns were beautiful. Even Mère Anandi, in her white cotton dress and Indian sandals, was light, bony, dry. On fire rather than putrid.
At the very rear Brother Jesunanda held a torch which flickered over his face. He smiled. In the shadows he looked like a painting of the young Rembrandt. Althea could not get used to the beauty of Indian men, beauty palpable as a woman’s, with glowing skin and deep eyes. They seemed to wear eyeliner, some of them. It made her feel nervous when Brother had knelt beside her, trying to teach her how to pray. Now she could feel him looking at her in the sari, approving of her effort.
He moved to the head of the procession, bowed to Althea. “Madame,” he said, “will you join in celebration?” She stepped off the verandah. As she put her hand on his forearm, like a bride, she felt the sari’s skirt begin to slip down. Clamping it with her left elbow, she strode into the mass of beggars. They smelled like rotten honey.
“Very graceful,” Brother approved. “Sari is a woman’s most adorning garment. Are you in mourning for your husband?”
“What do you mean?”
“White is for widows,” he said.
“Where I come from, white is for brides.”
“Ah,” he said, and suddenly let go of her arm.
They walked into the dark, among the soft rolled trunks of the banana trees. All around them the rattling of the drums, the keening of the people. Brother Jesunanda, whom she’d told about her sunset exercises, asked her laughing if she’d prayed to her husband again today. He joked that he was going to describe her pagan devotions to his nuns as an example they should not follow. Teasing, but he meant it, Althea knew. Brother Jesunanda had told her there was a grace available for the asking if you asked the right Person in the right Way. All she had to do was try it, try it even once. Althea had refused. Give it to me without asking, she’d told him, after that I’ll do anything you want.
14
Cheef! The bus stopped, let its breath out, right in front of the clinic. Before Maggie could start to get down, the neighbors’ dogs raced up and started skirling in the road. Auc, auc, auc, auc, auc, they barked, gulping air as a substitute for raw flesh.
She kicked her foot out the bus door to see if Bobby or Bestia or Chocolatín would clamp fangs on her sneaker. Somewhere in the mists of history, a Doberman had passed through Piedras, and today its mutts were especially fierce and frightening. Behind her, the driver’s assistant raised his arm and yelled “Fuera!” The dogs scattered, hunching backwards, growling and lifting their upper lips.
Maggie bent down and pretended to grab a rock from the bus’ metal step. The beasts receded long enough for her to get off and avail herself of a genuine stone. Only after the bus had left did they start wagging their tails and smirking, dishonestly, as if apologizing for not having recognized her at first.
A neighbor’s skinny yellow bitch ran up and sniffed her jeans hems, thoroughly and delicately, seeming to approve of all Maggie’s adventures.
It was eight P.M. There were clouds over the moon. The clinic’s lights were on, the generator beating like a heart. Maggie felt like the protagonist of a Central European fairy tale, arriving home after years lost in a forest. Missing was the high-piled snow for buttery squares of light to fall on. The clinic was the first light for miles: starting above Piedras Baja, all the houses and hovels had hunkered invisibly along the road. Corte de la luz. The power was out; it had given her a chill.
The clinic was locked and chained from the outside. Carson must have turned the generator on for her and gone out walking, as he and Maggie often did on power-cut nights. They’d gaze at the stars spilled across the sky like cottage cheese. Passing other houses, they’d glimpse a candle through a shutter’s crack or hear intimate murmurs—a hovel might salute them in a human voice. Mostly, though, Piedrasinos went to sleep at sunset when the lights were cut, as they’d always done before the hydroelectric plant.
Maggie could not read the combination lock. She wished the bus had stayed, to shine its headlights on the numbers, but the driver was long gone, running through the first eight notes of the Bridge on the River Kwai theme on his electric horn. He roared up the river flats, imperiling an audible pack of racing, barking dogs. The flats were a stretch of exhilaration for drivers after the terrors of the mountain road. His joy would end in three kilometers, where the road turned uphill to wind even more tortuously to the El Mirador fork, past Piedad, to end at La Tormentosa, the last place.
The headlights flickered epileptically entering the riverside trees, then stopped at the center of town, where they stayed fixed longer than usual. The driver must be getting refreshments before going up, leaving his lights on to illuminate the darkened store.
At last the lock loosened and fell open in her hand. She pushed the door open and walked into the lit room, receiving a shock like cold deep water. Why had the shelves been cleared? Why was the refrigerator gone? Had those things ever existed?
She stared, but the objects would not appear. Had Carson moved up to the mine already? Had he sold the fridge, finally admitting it was useless? Did he know Maggie had betrayed him deep within her mind? Had he returned to the United States? There was no note on the counter. She said his name once, quietly. “Carson?” The rooms absorbed the sound, gave nothing back. In the hall beside the bedroom door, she could see his white doctor’s coat hanging on its nail, a horrifying bit of normalcy. How often had she imagined, for her own amusement, that some apparently innocent transition was really the first scene of a horror movie? She blinked hard, as if a readjustment of focus would bring back the right view.
He must be dead in the bedroom, lying on the bed with his throat cut. Bandits! If she called his name once more, they’d jump out and kill her too.
She fled up the road toward the village, evil breathing at her back.
Liliana was right, Piedras was dangerous. There was nowhere to escape to, no one to call for help. The police post was hours uphill, and where was Carson? After two hundred yards she stopped, panting. No one had followed but the night, which now asked for recognition, pressing upon her its gentle, natural stillness, its silence emphasizing the river noise. The road was luminous under the moon. Above her were two horizons, the canyon rims, two softly jagged lines that seemed to be spreading slowly apart because of how the wind was moving the clouds. The clouds were battleship gray, and the moon glinted behind them, yellow as a hepatic eyeball, its golden light dispersed. The mountains were black velvet, much darker than the sky. She felt uncertain that she’d actually come from beyond the top of the right-hand horizon just that very day, and from a city. Believing this was as difficult as believing that the refrigerator and Carson and the medicines were all gone.
They had to be somewhere. Nothing was ever missing, Maggie thought, things merely got displaced to where you couldn’t find them.
She continued walking toward the town. As she got closer, the river seemed to bring a faint human roar, barely distinguishable above the water’s noise. A light, woman’s voice rose skipping over the rapids: inarticulate, clear tones, next a laugh, or a wail. A bigger party than usual at the general store? Most nights there was at least a dogfight happening, a couple of guys in chairs drinking beer and little boys kicking the dogs to keep them going. Maybe the refrigerator was being auctioned off.
