When Mountains Walked, page 27
She had struck a chord. The crowd receded toward the door, forcing several people to step backwards, over the threshold and out. Then they all surged forward again.
“Order, order,” shouted Don Sixto.
Carson lifted his eyebrows at Maggie. He raised his hand. Don Sixto nodded to him, and Carson began to speak, in his most warm and calming voice, asking Maggie to translate. He wanted Doña Ema to tell him whether children had also been sicker when the nurses were in Piedras.
“Yes!” Doña Ema said belligerently. “No ve?” Don’t you see?
And were they sicker again now? And better in between? Had it been better when there were no outside doctors? This much Carson wanted to know.
“Yes!” Doña Ema said, looking ready to choke with anger and confused joy.
“And was not the mine closed during that same time? More or less?”
Doña Ema didn’t answer.
“Yes,” someone in the crowd said.
“This is important, thank you,” Carson said. If kids were getting sick, he asked people please to bring them in. A child might have a diarrhea that was curable, a simple matter of boiling water and maybe giving pills, or there might be poisons flowing from the mine. “I’ve sent a sample of our water to be analyzed. Soon I will know for sure.” Carson cleared his throat, swallowed, and went on. If what Doña Ema said was true, and children were sick and dying, why had he seen none of them? Even Boris and Limbert listened as he explained how he’d worked for twenty years in wars and refugee camps and in places where poverty was so dire that nobody picked up the corpses of beggars who died in the night. He hadn’t cured all patients, nor saved Nasir, but it had been his privilege to help many of those who came to him. “If you think I’m a murderer, if that’s what you all really want to think down here, you’re welcome to your opinion. I’m fed up with feeling like a suspect. If you all aren’t interested in what my wife and I are here to offer, then we’ll leave. Tell this bitch Doña Ema that ruining her party is the last thing we want to do.”
Rolling down the groove of translation, Maggie forgot to tone down the last sentence; it brought a gale of laughter from the back. Carson shoved his hands in his pockets and stared defiantly at Maggie. She moved closer to him, but didn’t dare take his hand.
The crowd was muttering. Though Vicente was looking at Carson, he loudly called for order and a return to the original proceedings. This was not the gringos’ trial. Did the boys want to say words in their own defense? Did the mother?
“Liars, thieves, speak of what you have done,” cried voices from the crowd.
“Poisons, toxins, all are being poisoned,” other voices said, until Don Sixto roared for silence. Anyone wishing to add his voice? Did the accused protest their innocence? Did all three admit guilt? Did they admit guilt?
Limbert mumbled yes and he was sorry. The older boy and his mother nodded mute agreement.
“Gracias,” Maggie said.
A shyness seemed to cast its shadow now across the crowd. Maggie caught Vicente’s eye, hoping he’d step forward, acknowledge the apology, and sift all these issues into some grand concluding argument. Having heard his powers of rhetoric, she believed he could do that in his sleep. Instead, he just grinned at her wackily. After a longish pause, full of rustling and whispering, one man at the back of the room called for castigo, punishment. The apology had come too late. What penalty might return these boys to a good path? As a mother, Doña Ema was at fault, even more than the boys.
“Chicote!” the crowd insisted.
“The whip!”
“The whip!”
“Ho, doggies,” Carson said to Maggie.
Don Sixto uncoiled the whip he’d been carrying inside his jacket, a four-foot bullwhip of round-braided rawhide, with a broomstick handle and a spray of knots at its business end. Shaking this at the whole crowd, he announced that the community had spoken. The proceedings would move outside.
Someone brought a bench and set it parallel to the river. The boys took their shirts off and sat down gripping its edge, facing away from the crowd. Doña Ema retired around the corner of the house and came back holding her cardigan sweater over her breasts. Her right arm bore the marks of her husband’s grip, where he’d held on while striking at her face. People muttered as they saw her. Maggie looked carefully below the sweater, making sure there were no more bruises, that the husband had not kicked her in the belly.
Don Sixto commanded the boys to stand at the garden fence. “Pantalones,” he reminded them. Maggie could feel the crowd, implacable behind her as the boys lowered their jeans to the knees. Below the waist their bodies were pale, their buttocks so smooth and sculpted they seemed to require the pain, the scars. The light was all but gone; their flesh looked ashy gray. It was not cold, but Maggie was sure the boys felt cold—she was shivering herself, her whole skin tight with its own intactness. Vicente came to stand next to her and Carson. In a low voice he explained that this was how peones were punished by their overseers in the days of the hacienda.
“Why do you do think it’s good?” Carson asked.
“Can’t we leave Doña Ema out of this?” asked Maggie.
No, people thought twice after receiving humiliation. Whipping was mild. In other villages, if there were incorrigible persons, thieves, rapists, murderers, and the people could not live with them, and the police did not help, then miscreants were hanged, stoned, beaten to death, or even burned alive. Two years ago, across the canyon, the people had burned a witch inside her own house. Vicente pointed upward.
“A wealthy widow with land, but no children,” Maggie guessed.
He nodded, surprised. “How did you know?”
“Please.” She swerved back to her former theme, asking him to forgive, postpone Doña Ema’s punishment. Hadn’t she suffered enough?
“It is she who sends them,” said Vicente.
“I’m not doing it,” Carson announced, as Don Sixto asked for those who had been harmed to step forward. But Vicente nudged Carson and Maggie into a group of ten people: men, women, Fortunata, and a girl of fourteen. Don Sixto handed the whip to the first man. “Dale,” he said. Give it to them. Doña Ema began to weep and beg in a high screaming voice. The man holding the whip laughed at her. He had a hard but pleasant face. He shook the whip short and sharp, stepped close to the boys, and lashed each of them on the buttocks with the full force of his arm, forehand, backhand. “For what you did, sucios, to Merceditas.” Both boys yelped. On their buttocks the welts came up rosy bright. Then he stood behind Doña Ema, his face working. He called her a shameless one, but he would hurt her less, because her husband had begun her punishment. At his blow Doña Ema gave a shriek followed by a series of loud, insincere, but frightened cries.
Next was the man whose dead wife’s portrait had been torn. He struck Ema lightly, saying his wife had been her friend. To the boys he said, “Learn to respect,” and hit each one with a full backswing on the buttocks, then overhand across the shoulders. Limbert fell down crying in the dirt. Boris bent down to pull his brother up, and spoke to him through gritted teeth. Still on the ground, Limbert glanced fearfully back at the crowd. His face looked swollen, damaged from the inside. He got up, awkwardly hitching his pants, and the boys stood arm in arm, leaning on each other. Drops and smears of blood streaked their backsides and shoulders.
Carson touched Don Sixto’s arm. “Hey, enough,” but Don Sixto ignored him. The third man stepped up briskly and dealt a mighty lash to Doña Ema, so that the skin across her midback split open on a diagonal and she fell sideways onto the bench, crying unfeignedly and with all her might. The man explained, “Because with you no one can live in peace.” Then he tapped each of the boys, saying, “Don’t steal!” Someone cried, “Harder! Like that they’ll never learn.”
The whip came to Carson, but Carson refused it, taking Maggie’s arm instead. “Come on, Maggie. They can finish this without us.” Maggie was afraid to leave. She whispered: Carson should acknowledge Limbert’s apology, call Doña Ema to the clinic. Anxiously, she repeated the same to Vicente, who bowed slightly and formally announced their departure. The Doctores were going home, having decided that as physicians their job was to cure pain, not to cause it. He ordered Doña Ema and her boys, and everyone else, to observe the Christian compassion shown by these very people who had been uncaringly harmed by the criminal family. “May shame penetrate your souls more deeply than the strongest physical blow, and may you decide to reform.”
“No más daño ” said Carson, no more damage. Then he laughed and added, “No más water stealing, either!”
The boys turned to look at him, their soft mouths slack with pain and disbelief. Maggie felt they were her own sons, whom she’d fed so many times. What would happen to them now?
Walking away, she could hear the crowd arguing loudly about whether to continue the castigo. Her scalp shrank, her back tingled, lashed by eyes and opinions.
“Fortunata’s going to be disappointed,” Carson predicted. Wrongly, for as he spoke, the rhythm of roar, then blows, then cries began again. They stopped to listen, and decided from the interplay of sounds that Ema had been exempted.
It was fully dark now. At the river terraces’ first steep upward tilt they shuffled, hoping not to catch their toes under a root or miss a sudden undulation of the ground. Carson went first, asking which way they’d come. “Keep heading uphill,” Maggie reminded him.
They soon lost the trail, eventually thrashing out onto the road’s knee-deep ridge of dust and gravel. The pale road held reflected starlight, moonlight; they could walk on it without a struggle. Maggie pulled up even with Carson and confessed how ashamed she’d felt, facing Doña Ema. Worse, she would have whipped the boys. Not that she’d wanted to, but she would have been afraid not to. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”
“Hey, we learned a lot,” said Carson. “Now we hardly need the water test.”
His face was invisible in the darkness. His head, with the outline of his straw hat, was darker than the sky behind. It was like talking to a photographic negative. “If a totally justified war broke out,” Maggie asked him, “would you kill?”
“But of course,” he said, “wouldn’t you?”
17
WHEN MAGGIE opened the clinic door the next morning, a dozen people were waiting outside: Vicente, Luz Maria with Lady Maggy slung in a shawl on her back, Don Sixto and Marco Antonio, Fortunata, and a delegation of mostly women, several of whom were pregnant. They’d come to talk with el Senor Doctor about the poisons in the water.
“Why didn’t you ring the timbre?” Maggie chided them, trying to overcome a creepy feeling as she invited them inside. How long had they been sitting there?
Everyone seemed preoccupied, though, subtly agitated. Maggie felt it too—a light, suspended horror in the air. The recent past had begun to seem a fixed, phantasmagorical background, or some long tunnel they’d all come walking down together. She could hardly remember how she’d felt in Cajamarca, much less at any previous time. Her heart began to pound when she saw that one of the women carried a broomstick wrapped in red satin. It had to be the Black Rainbow’s banner. To Maggie’s relief, she propped it in a corner by the front door.
This must be what it felt like, she thought, when Althea got dragged into the current of the river.
At Fortunata’s suggestion, the men carried all the kitchen furniture into the clinic room to hold the conferencia. Carson sat at one end of the table, Vicente at the other; Maggie at Carson’s right hand. Fortunata and Don Sixto took the remaining chairs, until Maggie gave hers up for Luz Maria and Lady Maggy.
Facing backwards over her mother’s shoulder, Maggie’s namesake consisted mainly of an amazing new thatch of black, shiny hair. How was she, Maggie whispered, ducking to have a look. “She’s beautiful!” she lied. Lady Maggy’s expression was thin and sour, and she had bruiselike crescents under her eyes. When Maggie cooed and twiddled her fingers, the baby’s pupils slid up toward the ceiling. Soon Luz Maria slung her around to the front. Maggie tried to tell herself that Lady Maggy was just a lumpish infant, and that Luz was feeling shy at being separated from the rest of the women, who stood together by the examining table, rustling and whispering like schoolgirls. But she knew better.
She wished she weren’t so repelled by this poor child. How much worse it must have been to be Althea, she admonished herself, helplessly watching her own son’s life dripping out of his anus. She forced herself to caress Lady Maggy’s hair before standing back among the women.
“We think we are being poisoned,” Vicente announced. Several of the women cried out in agreement. Fortunata and Don Sixto were ready to march up to the mine. By tomorrow, they could get the whole valley to participate. Marco Antonio thought it better to wait and try to coordinate a strike by the miners’ union. A strike! No, one woman said, the miners would never agree. Several arguments broke out at once; the women lost their shyness and approached the table as a group. The marchers must carry weapons to defend themselves against the army guards, said Don Sixto. Escopetas, porras, pistolas, machetes, piedras. Shotguns, clubs, pistols, machetes, stones. No, said Vicente, they’d go in peace, bearing a white flag. Only women should go, women and children. But women were sure to be ignored—no, women and children would be shot at, just the same as men . . . “Momento, momentito. Calma, por favor,” said Carson. The hubbub did not diminish, so he stood up.
“The Doctor speaks,” Vicente said. “Let us listen.”
This was the real beginning, Maggie thought, as Carson spoke into the hush, saying it was not yet time for a confrontation. The valley must make a concerted, reasonable plan, not just form a mob and rush uphill. Soon they’d have the laboratory analysis.
“They won’t care about the analysis,” argued the woman who had brought the flag. “They’ll only make another, proving that the water is clean.”
Carson was a step ahead of her. “Right, Señora, correcto.” This was why it was important to prove that people’s health was being affected. “We don’t know that yet, cierto?”
“What about my daughter,” said Luz Maria.
“We aren’t sure,” Carson placated her.
“Marcharemos,” Don Sixto simultaneously said, we will march.
“Let us listen to the Doctor,” said Vicente. “In any case, we never rush to battle unprepared.”
Waiting for the water test would not be a waste of time, Carson said, if the clinic registered all medical problems that seemed to come from water. Hair samples would be taken for analysis. Scientific data would be their most powerful weapon against the mine’s inevitable resistance.
There was a murmur and a shifting of chairs. “They are not witches,” Vicente said. “I give my word. When they will cut your hair, it is for a good purpose.”
Maggie looked around the table, around the room, and saw the faces the color of saddle leather, and on them a charred stillness that was the ancient mask of distrust. Carson kept on talking. Health was the first priority. Pregnant women and young children must not drink from the river or the lake, but fetch their water from streams and waterfalls, until further notice.
Health was the first priority, one of the pregnant women slowly admitted.
They agreed to wait, to hold another meeting once the lab results were in. Meanwhile, the clinic would inspect the population. Half the week, they’d work in Piedras; then Carson, Vicente, and Maggie would visit nearby villages and set up temporary consultorios in the plazas. Not only mothers and children but all sick people must come, since, as Carson reminded everyone, a person might not know the real reason for his problems, and every illness deserved attention, no matter what its cause. On Saturday, Carson would travel to the mine. Marco Antonio would go up separately, speak to the miners’ union representative.
The women would spread word.
“Prepárense,” Vicente teased Carson and Maggie. Prepare yourselves. He left with the others, but promised to be back early tomorrow morning. Maggie was glad to see the Black Rainbow’s banner still reposing in the corner. She didn’t mention it to Carson, though; instead, she helped him move the chairs and table back into the kitchen, and they sat down to eat fruit salad, tea, and rolls with jelly, the breakfast they had missed.
“Look how he invites himself onto clinic staff,” Carson grumbled.
“Obviously we need him,” Maggie replied. “I thought we’d decided that already.” When Vicente had entered the room this morning, she’d felt it again, the unfabricated resonance between them. She wondered if he felt it too, or whether it was some quasi-romantic delusion of hers. He was the only person she’d met in Piedras with whom she felt the possibility of a natural, deep friendship. Fortunata was her friend, of course, but Fortunata was from another planet, a different type of friend.
“He needs us more,” said Carson. “He needs this crisis.” Carson was resigned to working with Vicente, but he wanted Maggie to know that he didn’t believe a word of that life story. Vicente must have plagiarized it from one of those adult comic books Maggie loved so much. She tried to convince her husband that guerrilla war was essentially a melodrama, but this was not what Carson meant.
“He’s a pathetic schmo,” Carson said. “The Inca empire—give me a break’.” People might love him, but they wanted four wheel drive and MTV, not Inca jobs breaking rocks or weaving llama hair.
“I would have thought you’d be more worried that he’s dangerous,” Maggie said. What an odd way to defend someone, she thought. “You know, like Klaus and Liliana said.”
“It’s possible.” Carson shrugged. “But I did talk to the police about him. They know he’s here, they simply can’t be bothered to arrest him. El Mirador is too remote. They don’t like walking. Vicente’s a smart guy. He knows all that. He says it himself—drug money was the only reason his empire worked. If his Colombians are never coming back? Training him, leaving him in place here? Best thing that could ever happen.”
