When Mountains Walked, page 25
Cries of welcome and embraces. They were pulled inside the store. “Doctor Calzón! Seño-o-ora!” Maggie drank two quick tumblers ceremonially offered on a tray. Immediately she felt sharp wires being threaded through her eyeballs and down across her cheekbones, to be tightened later. Yet it was impossible to avoid drinking more. She and Carson were led into the storeroom, seated side by side among the Piedrasinos, to toast with them the memory and to revere the mortal remains of he who in life was Don Nasir Salim Dabdoub Ahmed. Everyone was smoking cigarettes. The shave-head boy went around glumly refilling every empty glass. Nasir’s mouth had tightened, as if he felt shy at finding himself the center of attention. It amazed Maggie that he could be present, still so recognizable, yet unable to sit up.
At three-thirty, Carson and Maggie tried and failed to count their doses of cañazo, and beer, and white rum, and bad whiskey mixed with Coca-Cola. Maggie’s armpits and temples oozed yellow sweat. Conversations all blurred into one, girls whispering they needed birth control. Maggie had to tell them Catholic Charities forbade the clinic to dispense it, but that there were pharmacies in the city, and down here many women, including Doña Ema, knew how to care for themselves with cost-free herbs. Speaking of Ema, where was she? At home, ashamed, Maggie learned. Her husband had left her again, disclaiming the child, saying it belonged either to a truck driver or to Jesus, not him.
Maggie excused herself to pee. As she stumbled across the dry stones of the river flats, a white orb of blistering sunlight erased all corners of her recent memory. The present, visible world was thin and horribly precise, as if compressed between two lenses. Barely making it to a clump of bushes, she splattered her dusty sneakers. It felt grand to be alone and thoughtless, with tomorrow’s headache all there was to dread. She peered across the wavering expanse of sand toward Doña Ema’s, considering setting forth to see how Ema was. Unprofessional to show up drunk. Carson would worry. Besides, the riverbank was disheartening, seeming so vast as to require three days and a camel to arrive. When she headed back in, the earth rose up once toward her, and as she fell to her knees, she saw a small black snake, its tail vanishing among the roots of a thorn bush. Funny, she thought, Fortunata said there were no snakes in Piedras.
Each time she and Carson tried to leave, drunken people hauled them back by the elbows with dislocating force, plunking them into their chairs, where they ended up accepting more cañazo. The floor was slick; wet lips loomed and disappeared. Doña Albita leaned sharply sideways in her chair, dressed all in black and crying with abandon. When Maggie and Carson went to pay respects, Albita sank her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and asked Carson to help carry Don Nasir to his grave in the cemetery south of town. The procession would occur tomorrow.
“How do you say ‘remind me’?” Carson said. When Maggie translated, Doña Albita raised both feet from the floor in laughter, nearly falling over in two directions. “No me olvidaré,” she said, patting Carson’s arm, I won’t forget. Then, herself reminded, she began to weep again.
…
That night, having somehow arrived at home, the last thing Maggie saw was the blurred, ghostly ring of a chamber pot, which had mysteriously appeared under the bed for her to throw up into. The following day, the gringos awoke in such a state of wretchedness that when Fortunata came around, cajoling them to return, prescribing more drink as the only cure, they obeyed, willy-nilly.
Most mourners seemed never to have left. On the store steps, two men slept where they had fallen. Maggie and Carson stepped over them. When they walked into the storeroom there was a general guffaw as everyone recalled last night, when Maggie had tried to help the men who’d carried her home, moving her little feet in the air, like this! They twiddled their fingers. Fortunately today the cañazo was running low and toasts were made in beer. At midday Fortunata organized the slaughter and roasting of a calf, a pig, and twenty chickens. By midafternoon, Maggie felt she’d hit her stride, but it was already time for the burial.
Don Zoilo, the carpenter, brought the coffin he had built and painted black with a shaky silver cross and Nasir’s full name in capitals. Everyone filed outside and stood under the trees. No band was available to play sad boleros of the cavalry, thus the hammering of the coffin nails resounded from the back room, each blow accompanied by shrieks of refusal from Doña Albita that sounded like the same nails being pulled out.
Due to the inebriate state of the pallbearers and mourners, the procession to the walled cemetery was solemn and disorderly, Doña Albita stumbling along half carried by four of her largest women friends who were barely more competent at walking. Ahead of her the coffin tipped and lurched as if Nasir were fighting to get out. Stops were called where the coffin must be put down lest it fall onto the road and God forbid break open. Carson, alone among the pallbearers, did not weep or stagger. Pale and cadaverous with drink, he walked as if following the edge of a ruler until he was told to stop.
When at last the coffin was lowered by ropes into the grave, one man fell to his knees and began tilting slowly into emptiness, and would have fallen in had Carson not grabbed the tail of his jacket. Its vents ripped as the man regained a sitting position at ground level. He began to weep and blubber. Another man pulled Carson to the head of the grave and asked him to make Nasir’s last oration, since he was the most superior person present.
All the men removed their hats. Carson’s face looked clammy as he stood atop the pile of dirt. “I’m not superior,” he slurred in English. “I’m your doctor, Don Calzón.”
“Go on,” Maggie said. “I’ll help.” She climbed a little way up the dirt pile.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Carson said, still in English, “I don’t know what to say.”
“Mention Syria,” Maggie whispered, for Carson had been there. But he just stared fixedly over the black heads of the crowd.
“Señoras y Señores.” Maggie translated, inspired. “My husband says, ‘I am a doctor, and my job is to postpone the ultimate finality, which you see and contemplate before you.’”
“Amen,” someone said.
Carson gave her a startled, oddly happy look. “Tell them I’m the last person who should ever be standing here,” he went on. “I feel I should have saved this man. He was my best friend here, I guess.”
“My husband wishes he could have saved this man, his friend and ours,” and Maggie extolled Nasir’s virtues for a while. “But all doctors fail, all worldly means are finite. What comes beyond will prove the grace of our futility.”
“Amen,” said the whole crowd. The first shovelful of dirt fell on the coffin. Doña Albita screamed. Who would take care of her now?
…
In the week after the funeral, they treated someone every day. More colds; a woman with malaria, which she called tertian fever; a teenage boy with Down’s syndrome who had begun to masturbate in public (a Pentecostal exorcism had only made him worse); a farmer who’d walked nine hours to reach the clinic after a neighbor had tried to extract one of his molars with pliers (Carson gave him a shot for pain, and then cash for bus fare and a Cajamarca dentist). And two miscarriages, and a baby born dead. Doña Ema never appeared, but she was all right, still pregnant, Fortunata said. Maggie didn’t mention her to Carson, lest he say Ema deserved to be abandoned.
His experience orating on the dirt pile was hard to describe in words, Carson said, but it had made him want to stay in Piedras. He had to help these people, now that they’d offered him their trust. Three infant mortalities could be normal, but he was more and more convinced there was a problem in the river. Lady Maggy hadn’t returned for her checkup, but her troubles seemed clear. Even the teenager’s Down’s syndrome might be traced to maternal toxicity. He’d go up to the mine and start that clinic, as its director; Ignacio García, had invited him to do. How long ago, only a week? Ignacio was unlikely to act against his own employers. Nonetheless, Carson could sound him out, look around. He fumed that they had no money for hair analysis, and that the water test was so slow and so expensive. The Cajamarca lab had sent the sample down to Lima, telling Maggie to come back in a month or so.
Vicente dropped in at four o’clock on an afternoon that was beginning to seem slow. Carson and Maggie were sitting in the kitchen telling Fortunata how fickle they felt, to be relieved on a day when nothing bad had happened. When next the buzzer rang, they laughed with ironic pride, until they saw it was Vicente. He’d stepped inside and was holding his white hat, blinking in the sudden shade. “Hola, Vicente,” Maggie said excitedly from the hallway. “Carson, Vicente! Vicente, Carson!”
“We’ve met before,” Carson said.
They retired to the kitchen, where Fortunata clucked like a hen, as flustered as the first time the Comandante had appeared.
“Por favor, Fortunata,” Vicente said, motioning her out of the room.
Had the young men who robbed the clinic presented an apology, he wanted to know.
No, said Carson and Maggie at once. They hadn’t forgiven the theft, but its memory was fading. They’d changed the back door lock, and Don Zoilo had added a bar. The refrigerator sat inert inside its sack, awaiting the next government yellow-fever vaccination campaign. “My boots are still missing,” complained Carson. He asked Vicente, “Quién fue?” Who was it? Maggie added, more seriously, that despite getting most of their stuff back, they feared being robbed again.
Vicente looked grave. That was the problem. Even if restitution was imperfect, it must include an apology, or the community remained in jeopardy.
Impatient now, Carson asked, “Quién?” Maggie wished he’d thank Vicente instead.
“Sus vecinos,” Vicente answered, your neighbors. He twitched his lips and chin upriver. Boris and Limbert, the sons of Doña Ema.
“Big surprise,” said Carson.
“You promised me I’d laugh,” said Maggie to Vicente.
“They were sleeping with the nurses,” Vicente told her. “That’s why they had the back door key. Boris was twelve when he started. Limbert ten, I think.”
“You owe us a fuller explanation,” Carson persisted.
“Bien,” said Vicente. He’d start from the beginning, if that was all right.
16
THE KETTLE BOILED, but the gringos sat listening to its breath like a congested lung. Carson gripped his knees and glared at them like a rheumatic old man. Maggie glanced nervously back and forth from him to Vicente, who had talked for nearly an hour, addressing much of his speech to Carson. Now he caught Maggie’s eyes and held them in a deep, burning stare. It pulled a flash from her core, which she would rather he hadn’t seen. Yet she didn’t dare look away, after all he had said.
“Water’s boiling,” Carson announced. Maggie pretended not to hear his words as a command, one of her recent tricks. Soon Carson sighed, got up, and made the coffee himself.
She could see so clearly the hovel where Vicente had been born, with its unglazed windows and walls of rough brown adobe bricks—all because of how he’d said it: “I first saw light in a hut with a packed dirt floor.” In the rhythmic, slightly antiquated Spanish of the mountains she had felt his inevitability, as if she had known his story always.
He’d been born into chattel slavery, his parents peones on a small hacienda in the southern part of the country. Freed by the agrarian reform, but unable to subsist on their granted plot, they’d walked to the city of Cuzco. There Vicente’s father had been blinded, welding without a mask. Afterward he could only drink and sit in the sun of the courtyard. Everyone else worked: mother and younger sister knitting sweaters for tourists, Vicente shining shoes, his two brothers carrying loads, and Alida, his older sister; attending the counter in an electrical shop. Father attacked mother on nights when he was drunk, dragging her out of bed by the hair, once even managing to break her forearm in a door. Yet she refused to leave him, knowing that without her, he could not survive. She asked her sons to protect her as best they could, and to understand that their father’s rage was directed at his sufferings and degradation, not at her. She was a saintly woman; she insisted on education for her children.
At the university Vicente had studied archaeology. If he’d written a thesis, his topic would have been Inca administration, which he still considered the most enlightened social system ever devised. He’d also played charango in a student ensemble, traveling all over Peru trying to revive traditions among families like his own, displaced peasants in city slums. One by one, friends in the group began to disappear; slowly the others learned they’d been arrested on suspicion of inciting the populace under cover of flutes and drums. If it is true that pride is dangerous, it was also likely that Sendero was recruiting quietly among the spectators, but it was also incontrovertible that none of the musicians was a member of anything more radical than the band itself.
On that inevitable day when the secret police arrived at the university, Vicente had managed to escape down a side alley. Leaping a wall, he’d watched two lovers, a boy and a girl, blown to a pulp against the wall just opposite. He’d taken refuge at an uncle’s, never returning to the university, visiting his family only late at night. Yet he hadn’t wanted to leave Cuzco, for fear of what might happen to his mother. That was when he’d begun to use the name Oquendo, naming himself after a revolutionary poet.
He’d lived in this manner for several months, until his sister Alida was raped by a rich man’s son, and next by the police to whom she’d dared to report the crime. Out of shame she’d run away to Lima, to make her life in the streets. It had been in search of justice for Alida that Vicente had first contacted the Sendero Luminoso.
Sendero had arranged for the guilty parties to meet with certain accidents, and then had demanded of Vicente certain acts of loyalty as repayment, which he’d found himself unwilling to perform. He’d fled Cuzco in the back of a beer truck, crouching in a small cavity amongst the plastic cases. After searching fruitlessly for Alida in the pueblos jóvenes of Lima, he’d joined the newly formed Black Rainbow Movement, which sent him north into the highlands. At first he’d mostly scribbled on walls and sat around in chicherías trying to raise peasants’ consciousness. Slowly, as the guerrilla war guaranteed the isolation of rural villages, he and his group had recognized the need for autonomous local governments. It was the perfect opportunity; Piedras had been the fourth village to accept them.
He was candid about the airstrip, and how its enormous profits had slowly destroyed the Black Rainbow in spasms of greed, corruption, and egoism. Even up to now, the so-called Golden Age of Piedras had left behind its scars: the insoluble dissatisfaction of some people, weak characters Vicente thought, who for a short time had lived as they believed the outside world had always lived at their expense, on wealth obtained without sweat. He’d tried to teach them that their minds were diseased, destructive, unnatural, feverish, and monstrous, no different from the conquistadores’. But these minds had already changed, become unable to listen. With the airstrip defunct, they were tortured by the shadow of the mine, La Tormentosa. People found it unbearable to watch Canadians extracting tons of gold from their own mountain, letting not a grain fall to the valley’s bottom. Nasir had been murdered by three such malcontents, former Rainbow members. The gold they’d stolen had amounted to a couple of thousand dollars. A tenth of what Maggie had suspected, yet, as Vicente said, it was enough to prevent them from ever returning, as long as they had the good sense to invest in a minibus and set it running on some route in Lima, or Trujillo.
As for the matter at hand, the theft of the clinic’s refrigerator, Doña Ema’s sons had similar bad ideas, gleaned mostly from the television and the example of their wretched parents. Ema’s husband had abandoned her yet again, claiming the miracle baby was not his. People said she was lucky to be rid of the man. He’d been unbalanced ever since his army service. People were afraid of him, and of his boys. Yet Vicente believed that the boys’ hearts might not yet be fully hardened. They were frustrated young men, thwarted by lack of opportunities in Piedras.
“Can’t you invite the mine to use your old airstrip?” The idea had come to Maggie in a flash. Her voice faded as she heard herself expounding yet another infantile scheme.
The mine was building its own airstrip, Carson said to her.
“I know!” said Maggie bullishly. “Wouldn’t they like to save that money?”
Vicente said, “For various reasons, the old airstrip is not safe.”
Carson spoke to Vicente directly now, in his broken Spanish. You couldn’t stop progress. He didn’t think Vicente wanted to. “How do you say, ‘You want a piece of the action’? He’s a fool if he doesn’t.” Carson drank his coffee black. Now, with the bottom half of his face hidden by the enamel mug, Maggie saw his eyes narrowing mistrustfully as he observed Vicente’s efforts to shake condensed milk down from the bottom of the can, where it would be clinging like a half inch of library paste. She decided not to fetch the can opener, even if it meant going without milk herself.
Vicente smiled wryly, set the can aside, and declaimed the old saying that Peru was a beggar sitting on a throne of gold. In this much he agreed with the malcontents, that it was hard to watch one’s possibilities being trucked away to Canada. The mine should hire local workers, help pay for a school. Unfortunately, there was no one in the Rosario capable of negotiating such concessions.
“Don’t look at me,” said Carson. He asked Maggie to explain that miners were hardly better than slaves, and that under current policies, designed to encourage foreign investments, no one in the universe could ever persuade the corporation to dilute its profits. In Carson’s opinion Piedras would be better off without the mine, period. Lately, he’d been making a list of crops they saw on walks: mangoes, oranges, limes, several kinds of papayas, sugar cane, peppers, squash, tomatoes, peas, beans, tree tomatoes, and the huge green striated melon that was trained to grow on roofs or hang from trellises, and from which a refreshing drink was made.
