When Mountains Walked, page 26
Vicente must think Carson was baiting him, avoiding him—and he was. Yet Maggie knew that her husband was also sincere. He hated technology. In the shower he sang of pickin’ pawpaws in de pawpaw patch.
In her mind Larry said again, “You can’t say the cat is gray. You have to ask the cat.” Asking the cat wasn’t enough. Who knew what answer the animal might be inclined to give on a particular day, or how its eyes were built.
She gripped her mug with both hands as hard as possible, palm prints melting flat against the hot enamel, and listened to her husband and Vicente talking. With the moral clarity of a four-year-old child, she saw how they deceived each other on the surface, circling like two dogs unconscious that their interests were identical. She wanted each of them to see that the fire inside the other was the same. She’d brought them to this table; now it was essential to make them understand how close they were to one another.
Julia had always told her that she lacked common sense.
Carson shifted his chair heavily and said, “I’m sorry, Vicente. You’re going to have to work this out for yourselves down here. Maggie and I aren’t development experts. We’re health workers.”
She hurried to translate.
Vicente pursed his lips. “You are our crazy gringos. You have returned our lost hopes to us. Even one small ray of light is an enormous change. Little by little, we have to believe, our hopes will become reality.”
“Little by little!” Maggie cried. “Can’t we make something happen? My husband’s starting a clinic at the mine. Weren’t you planning to talk to the director, Carson?” Turning to him, she said in English, “Weren’t we training an assistant?”
“Maggie!” Carson said.
“You know how I feel.”
Carson’s long, pale fingers were splayed flat across the dark tabletop. He said, “On’t-day elieve-bay everything you ear-hay. Want to be careful here.”
Vicente gave Maggie an alert look, but she didn’t translate. She remembered his three words of English on the night of Nasir’s death. He’d understood enough, and Carson had meant him to. At the moment she disliked both of them.
Vicente said, in a ministerial tone, “Señora Maggie, your husband is right. See what happened here this week. When killing begins, misery only grows. Meanwhile, a small positive step can bring great joy. Health is the greatest wealth. I constantly say to our people, no matter how far we have fallen, there is only one thing to do. We must lift ourselves up and go forward, salir adelante, toward the positive. So my mother used to say. I only repeat her words.”
“That’s really true,” Carson said without irony. “Muy verdado.”
Which was more dangerous, Maggie wondered, loving an idea or loving a person? Or loving a person who loved an idea?
“Speaking of stealing,” Vicente said. “What time is it?”
It was four-thirty by Carson’s watch.
“We cannot let this day pass,” said Vicente. “We have prepared a community meeting. It would be important for both of you to attend.” Don Sixto, an old friend, was waiting at the store in town, ready to call forth the Piedrasinos. “Vamos?”
Carson and Maggie looked at each other, shrugged. “We don’t need a public scene,” Maggie said.
“You must understand, the apology is not only for you. It is for everyone. You will help us to heal our community trust.” The boys had terrorized Piedras for years. As children they’d cut off dogs’ tails with machetes. They lurked on hidden paths to grab the breasts and crotches of young girls. They stole chickens, and ate them, when the owners went to Cajamarca. Last October, during the feast of Piedras’s patron saint, they’d entered unguarded houses to steal radios, money, and jewels. Only yesterday a case of beer had vanished from Doña Albita’s. Who else would take advantage of a new widow? Now, on top of her sorrow, Doña Albita would have to pay for the plastic case and twelve glass bottles.
October’s fiesta thefts had been denounced to the police. The boys and their mother had spent an hour in the police checkpoint, high on the other side of the canyon, but the matter had slid away, evidently lubricated with some Doñation. No items were recovered. They’d all been sold to miners and truck drivers on the road above Piedras. “But their mother is the cause,” Vicente concluded.
“No kidding,” Carson said. Taking pleasure in his outrage, he told Vicente about his long-standing water feud with Doña Ema. Some mornings he still had to march out with his shovel. On top of that, whenever Carson left the house, she and her boys had the gall to show up and eat the gringos’ food.
Was this all true? Vicente wanted to know.
It was, admitted Maggie.
“Desgraciados,” Vicente said, so bitterly convinced that Maggie regretted her assent. She tried to explain that the boys were not all bad. They made her laugh; they’d taught her the steps of the huayno. As for the lunches, she’d invited them, keeping tabs on Doña Ema’s pregnancy.
Vicente ignored her babbling. Time to go, he said. Maggie should summon Fortunata.
It was with relief that she went behind the house and found the cook, sitting on her tiny wooden bench, shelling beans into the dishpan, humming, facing the river, not watching her own hands. Though Maggie apologized for interrupting, Fortunata stood up immediately, setting the palangana on the ground. Of course she wanted to come. Those boys had stolen her husband’s watch right off his wrist, one night when he was drunk.
…
Don Sixto was a very short, potbellied, bowlegged farmer. Under the Black Rainbow, he’d been chief justice officer. With him was a younger man, also from El Mirador, who had thick curly hair and had lost his middle incisors. They’d drunk liters of beer while they waited in the store. Four tall brown bottles were grouped on the table. Their mules, a dark bay and a buckskin, were tied up in the shade outside.
Don Sixto wore a taupe windbreaker, a plaid shirt, and very clean, deeply cuffed blue jeans over his dusty boots. He looked a little more prosperous than the others. In another life he would have been a businessman, a burgher, a man of substance, Maggie thought, until with a jolt of recognition she realized he was exactly that. How flawed her upbringing had been! Behind a gate, under her mother’s influence, she’d been imbued with subtly disrespectful assumptions. Now she was in the real Peru. What did people think of her? At least she recognized Vicente as an equal.
Don Sixto stood up when he saw Maggie, Carson, Vicente, and Fortunata. Introducing himself to the two gringos, he added, after his name, “At your service.” The young man’s name was Marco Antonio, and he would come along with their party. Maggie made a point of shaking Marco Antonio’s hand; his breath smelled of his rotting teeth.
As plans and formalities proceeded, she couldn’t take her eyes off Don Sixto’s nose: its tip went down so far that his nostril openings were vertical. Six or seven hairs grew into them from his upper lip. This feature made him appear capable of evil, though Maggie told herself it wasn’t fair to physiognomize. Otherwise, his face had the tight, magical sheen of certain older Peruvians who knew the limits of their lives, what was a man, what was a woman, and what was God. Such people seemed charmed, and held in security, by this knowledge.
Combined with a capacity for evil, Maggie thought, emotional security was bad, not good.
He put on his straw hat, darkened to gold with age, with permanent sweat stains around the headband. “Vamos,” he said.
Doña Albita came out, but she didn’t charge for the beers. She said, “Regalo,” gift, and wished them luck in their errand to confront the youthful desgraciados.
They walked outside, into the arena of packed dirt, waiting while Marco Antonio untied a large wooden drum from the back of his mule’s saddle. Don Sixto knew the way to Doña Ema’s house; he’d been there two days ago. Why, Maggie wondered, feeling caught up in forces she did not understand. Yet this was just the inclusion they’d been waiting for. They were part of the community. She reached for her husband’s hand. Carson was asking what would go on at Doña Ema’s, overriding Fortunata’s eager assurances that now they’d see, now they’d participate, this was how it all had been under the Rainbow.
“We present the case,” Don Sixto said, speaking slowly and with ponderous hand gestures, presumably to help Carson understand him. “We adjudicate a penalty.”
“And if they are not home?”
“But yes, they are.”
Marco Antonio went ahead, striding at an alarming speed up the stone stairway and along the steep, narrow dirt paths, beating the drum with rapid, full strokes of his arm. Maggie and Carson were last in line, as conspicuous as newlyweds or the sponsors of a feast, until people began to emerge from doorways and run down from smaller paths to add themselves behind. Skinny dogs skedaddled or barked, children watched from doorways. More and more people joined the crowd. Eventually Maggie was followed by at least half of Piedras. She recognized faces from the wake at Doña Albita’s.
At the highest point, just as the procession turned downhill, Ofelia came skipping down. She was squeezing a very young brown puppy. Shifting it into the crook of one arm, she slipped her free hand into Maggie’s, and turned her calf to show the pig’s bite, now a deep, ugly blue scar. It hadn’t affected her light step, even at this pace, which was keeping Maggie at the edge of her breath.
Where was everybody going, Ofelia wanted to know.
They stopped at the side of the path, and while Carson knelt to examine Ofelia’s leg, Maggie explained about the robbery. Ofelia’s eyes grew round. She’d heard the boys took a bunch of drugs, then vomited all night. She would have liked to come along and see the justice, but this puppy needed its mother. She swung the hapless creature by its front legs for Maggie to admire its fat pink belly. A bad way to hold a puppy, Maggie admonished her, feeling unnecessarily stern. Anyway it didn’t matter, as her advice had no effect.
“Estás bien,” Carson said.
“Ya’sé,” Ofelia chirped, I know. This dog was a female and her name was Flor de Papa, Potato Flower. The name of a song. She slung it over her shoulder and ran off singing in a thin voice, copied from the falsetto of female huayno stars: “La flor de papa, la flor de papa!” She was almost of an age to be fondled by one of those twerps, Maggie thought, hurrying to catch up with the others.
Dusk was falling as they crossed the river road. Doña Ema’s house was already guarded by a half-dozen able-bodied men. The house looked smaller, scabby; all of the melons had been harvested from its roof. For once Maggie did not want to enter, nor did she fantasize a different existence for herself inside, full of smoky warmth, roly-poly babies crawling all over the floor, and visits to the river where she might glimpse the pale sexual ghosts in their secret world below the waters. Instead, she heard Liliana’s voice in her head, asking how people could live in such a place. This was just the kind of dwelling described in rural health manuals, where Chagas beetles dropped from the thatch, bit you, and infected you with a microorganism that produced few symptoms until your heart failed three years later. She poked Carson, intending to ask him the insect’s elevation range, but the crowd was swelling forward.
The bottom half of Doña Ema’s door was blocked by a grubby sheet of plywood. Don Sixto slid this aside and ducked into the front room, motioning the rest to follow. He must have found a switch, for suddenly the room was lit by one bare and searing bulb. It was empty of furniture. Guinea pigs cheeped under a pile of black potato sacks. The dirt floor was littered with potato peels, corn husks, and the guinea pigs’ tiny poops and urine stains. One wall bore a faded, torn, dusty poster of an Argentine rock star with a shoulder-length perm, aggressively wielding his microphone. Where had the boys gotten this, Maggie wondered. She felt sorry for them.
Quickly the room filled with so many people that Maggie thought its walls might burst. She was mashed in amongst bony bodies, fat bodies, male and female bodies smelling raw or oily, smoky, drenched in hair oil, flesh different from her own. She wanted to lose herself and Carson in the crowd, but its mass kept jostling, opening toward the front, pressing from the back, as if digesting the two of them toward a designated place in the front of the room.
“Ema!” Don Sixto called in a loud voice.
The door’s fringe rustled. Maggie craned her neck to see Ema half tangled in the plastic strands, wearing a baggy dress. Her eyes were always small, but this evening they looked like gun slits in a bunker. Bruises, Maggie recognized, healing but still puffy, yellow-green. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to show herself at Nasir’s funeral. “Hé?” She tilted her chin back, crossed her arms over her chest.
“But this woman has been beaten,” Carson announced. “Doña Ema, are you all right?”
“Qué te importa,” what do you care, Doña Ema answered. “Estoy divinamente bien.” She was divinely well.
“She’s accustomed,” someone whispered.
“Your sons,” Don Sixto commanded.
Brazenly, she lied that they’d gone uphill to get her donkeys.
“Veremos,” said Don Sixto. We’ll see. “You know why we have come.”
Doña Ema looked at the group, at Fortunata, at Maggie and Carson. She nodded.
“Say the reason,” Vicente ordered her.
Looking at the floor, Doña Ema muttered that it was because her sons had stolen the refrigerator of the gringos and then they had returned it.
Standing in the poverty of her rooms, Maggie understood that Doña Ema could not get her sons to work at all. They did not want to be campesinos—and why should they, Maggie thought, when the world above the canyon was so large and so luxurious, in their imaginations one great Hollywood, New York, and Buenos Aires. Alas, they could not leave their mother, especially now that she was alone again and pregnant. Since they would not work, Ema must live from whatever they stole, and they were too young and dumb and spoiled to rely upon. This time, they’d gotten her into real trouble. Or was it Maggie who was truly most responsible? She should never have given Ema that advice on getting pregnant.
Don Sixto faced the crowd and spoke in the voice of the archangel Michael, surely audible throughout the house and yard. “Because they stole! Not because they returned. They only returned because we fished them out. And how did we fish them out? Why is this the first house I decided to investigate? Why, if there is robbery, even during a saint’s festival or a funeral, is it here that lost objects come to rest? Why is it a good idea to inquire of Doña Ema and her sons? Because you three have no shame! No respect for your neighbor, nor women, even animals. Everyone knows it, even the authorities who by their own corruption permit you to continue hardening your hearts. When the ex-Comandante and I came to you, we asked only for the return of the stolen objects and an apology to the North American doctors. No punishment. Yet you did not complete your charge. Do you not agree that where there is no shame, no repentance, no learning, no regret, then punishment must come? Only then, the criminal feels in the flesh the wrongness of his acts and decides not to repeat them.” Don Sixto concluded by turning sideways, opening his windbreaker and showing something to Doña Ema. “Bring your sons!”
“What is that?” Maggie whispered to Fortunata, fearing the worst.
“He carries a whip,” Fortunata whispered back. “Chicote.” The crowd in the room murmured in a way that made Maggie glad she had not stolen anything in Piedras.
“Silencio!” cried Don Sixto.
Marco Antonio came in and reported that no one had seen the boys leaving the house.
“Ya, ya,” said Doña Ema, and ducked under the curtain into the next room. In two seconds the boys appeared. They wore jeans and tattered sneakers. The older one, Boris, had a baseball cap turned backwards.
A thin, white-haired man standing next to Maggie shouted, “They stole the silver frame from my wife’s portrait.” And he made a ripping motion with his hands to show how they’d left the image of the departed one.
The two boys stared at the floor while the assembly pushed forward, shouting accusations, until Don Sixto cried for order. He made the boys stand against the wall where everyone could see them, and in flowery language listed the particulars of the theft. “Doctor Calzón, testify, say to them what you have to say.”
Carson half turned toward the crowd and said, in his own bad Spanish, that medicine was property of the sick. The boys could have killed someone.
The boys’ expressions remained studiously blank. Obviously they’d learned the power of not caring, or of seeming not to.
“What do the people think?” Don Sixto cried.
“It is as he has said,” an old woman cried out. “To steal medicines is grave.”
There were murmurs of assent.
“What does the Señora Doctora have to say to these boys and to their mother?”
Maggie turned to the crowd. Her tongue felt like a large, dry towel.
“Go on,” Don Sixto said.
She took a breath, but found no word behind it. She stared at Doña Ema, silently begging for her pity and her understanding, but Don Sixto was glaring at her, and so, weakly, she began, “My husband . . . My husband and I . . . now . . .” The boys had been right to steal the refrigerator, she thought. It was an expensive, useless item.
Doña Ema stared back, menacingly, out of her battered face. She said, “What do you care, gringa? When you go home you will have refrigerators and cars to your liking. No one goes to your whorish clinic anyway. We know your injections and your pills are poison, poison for our children. I will never bring my child to you. Your clinic is accursed. After visiting you the babies grow thin and sick, they will not eat, they have diarrhea until finally they die. My grandmother told me about the Pishtaco, and I never believed he was anything more than a ghost until today, when I see him standing in front of me. Not one but two Pishtacos, male and female! Ask yourselves why this woman has no child!”
