When Mountains Walked, page 28
“That’s probably right.”
“He’s not a bad guy,” Carson said now. “He’s smart, and he cares, and he’s got the charisma to pull things off. I’ll definitely recommend him to Catholic Charities.”
Don’t minimize him, Maggie thought, he’s one of us. She looked at Carson’s long, thin thighs in black and rusty jeans as he sat relaxing in the wooden chair, looked at his sunburnt forehead, which seemed to have gotten loftier since she’d known him, and she tried to feel reassured. Last night, he’d spun out all kinds of plans, elaborations and contingencies, bringing Greenpeace into the struggle, even flying Vicente, the grass-roots leader, to New York—too bad Vicente didn’t wear feathers or he could end up addressing the UN. Carson had sounded like a little boy working out an elaborate fantasy, but when Maggie had asked herself, Why not? she’d realized she had no right to predict his failure.
All of Carson’s decisions and opinions, his calibrated judgments and perceptions—when and how had he fit them all together? Usually it amazed and delighted her when he exposed his inner world to her, yet for some reason, lately he was giving her a chill. What was she afraid of? That these two men would unite their purposes and leave her behind, alone in her confusion?
She said to Carson, hiding an unjustified desperation, “You know, you remind me of my grandpa Johnny Baines. On the surface you both act like you’re so logical, but when he finally figured out how to predict earthquakes, it was in a dream he had or something.” Carson had heard the story before, but she made him listen to it again. Six months before he’d died, Johnny Baines had handed an envelope to an assistant containing the projected dates and locations of four earthquakes in Japan, the Ryukyus, Chile, and California. Every one had come to pass, prompting a great posthumous scramble through Johnny’s notebooks. His figures hadn’t added up, and probably never would, though boxes of notebooks, their pages dense with notations, still sat stacked in Althea’s Cambridge basement, awaiting a genius of the future.
“Sure, of course,” Carson said. “I know how he did it, more or less.”
“How do you mean?” Maggie was pleased, relieved that he’d responded.
“It ate at him day and night.” Her husband pulled a pious face, mocking his own sincerity. “Not just his own kid, you know. Unnecessary death in general. You go to bed with it at night, and you wake up with it in the morning. Your granddad barely even knew how he’d processed all the information, but he was working on it all the time.”
“You’re like him,” Maggie said. “Some might use the word ‘obsessed.’”
“Yeah, well,” said Carson. “Craziness makes the world go round.”
“Doctor Underwear!” she teased him. To her surprise, it seemed she’d made him happy for a minute.
Encouraged, she followed him into the clinic, worrying aloud that Vicente and Don Sixto might blow the mine sky-high. No way, Carson reassured her. They’d never bite the hand they hoped, one day, would feed them.
“You don’t think he’s using us?”
“Of course he is. That’s what we’re here for. We’ll use him, too.”
That sounded ugly to Maggie. “For what?”
Vicente was the only person who could make sure that people didn’t drink the river water, said Carson with sudden, gloomy certitude. Abstinence was the only way to keep the heavy metals out of people’s bodies. No water plant ever would be built, or not for a dozen years. By then, Carson hoped, he and Maggie would be long gone.
“Don’t say that,” Maggie told him, unable to bear the thought of leaving Piedras.
“You’re right,” said Carson, misunderstanding her. “Yo say macho. I really want to win.”
That night, after a dinner of fried beef and onions, they lit an espiral and two candles, and after the room was full of smoke they pulled up the yellow mosquito net and made love. About halfway through, Maggie saw Carson’s left eye above her face, glinting into the dark. His chin was straining forward. From this odd perspective his eye was just a slit of pure dark pupil, glinting watery and dry at once. She felt as if she had just come out from behind the shoulder of the moon to witness all the stars, and everything; but she was out in space, with nothing around to hold her.
Afterward they lay together for longer than usual, not minding the heat. Carson left his arm lazily around her, and she traced the outlines of its muscles. Their whole sides were touching. In this heat, his naked skin made her feel pleasantly feverish. She said what a strange, far place this was to come to get to know each other.
Carson tightened his arm and said, “Aw . . . babe!” as if she had surprised him. But he seemed distracted, too, a little; she was glad they’d had that long conversation earlier, because it helped her to imagine what was going on inside him now.
He dropped off to sleep. Maggie lay awake a long time, worrying about Doña Ema, Lady Maggy, and all the misery that had been summoned for tomorrow. It was nearly four A.M. when she crept out into the clinic room and unfurled the banner. It had sequined insets and close-set silver stitching that glinted in her flashlight’s beam. Crystal blood dripped from Atahualpa’s severed neck—she rerolled the flag around its broomstick, wondering whether she was really ready for what these people knew was needed.
…
Forty people had lined up by eight, and forty more by nine. Vicente told them all to wait while the clinic prepared itself. An impromptu soccer game got started in the road; a woman brought a pail of peach tea and began to sell it by the glass. On Vicente’s orders, benches appeared, planks on beer cases against the outside walls, with several more inside. People stood around discussing Carson’s mural; he was delighted. Maggie took the top sheet off the bed and strung it up to allow for private examinations. Carson explained triage to Fortunata, who’d be standing at the door.
Just before they started seeing patients, Carson took Vicente aside, and the two of them spoke conspiratorially, looking at the floor, as Vicente and his friend had done on the night Nasir was killed. Maggie, setting up the ledger, watched them from the corner of her eye. She felt possessive, envious. To combat these unworthy feelings, she used unworthy tactics, reminding herself of belittling comments Carson had made about Vicente.
Soon it was clear what they’d planned, for Vicente told Fortunata to go out front and send everybody home until tomorrow, except agudos, moribundos, and mothers with babies and children.
No one was very ill, so they took the youngest babies first. Vicente held each infant while Carson, grim and focused, touched the soles of its feet with the tip of a ballpoint pen, glancing at its face and nodding encouragingly, as though the infant were answering difficult questions. Maggie wrote down each baby’s name and date of birth, then Carson’s evaluation. Listless or alert. Dehydrated. Parasites? Underweight, overweight, average. Malnourished. Robust, healthy, pale. Lastly, Vicente clipped a strand of each child’s hair, which Maggie sealed into an envelope against the day when they’d have lots of money to analyze these samples. Only a few mothers refused this dangerous service, which could have led to their babies’ death by sorcery.
Some of the mothers’ mouths hung open, like the babies’, but for different reasons. Each hour Maggie instructed them, in groups, to get their water from the hillside streams and boil it. She handed out packets of rehydration salts; since there were no baby bottles here, mothers must feed their youngest from their own lips, like birds. She warned them that the water would taste of salt, but that it was good and healing. Some mothers of healthy babies looked jealous, as if the shiny packets were talismans or presents, so she gave away some extras.
Two infants seemed to have the same vague gaze and twitchy, listless limbs as Lady Maggy. Children aged four, ten, and fourteen had suffered cognitive impairments, and there were many instances of a creeping rash that spread, turned scaly, and never went away. Two underpigmentations of the skin, and seventeen tales of stillbirth, early death, spontaneous abortion, and monstrous deformities, all of which Maggie recorded as “unconfirmed verbal reports,” with approximate dates.
Fortunata’s voice rang with gladness as she stood in the door calling the names of the next three women who could move to the indoor benches. She kept officious order, shoving patients back into line, pulling them forward by the upper arm if they seemed in need of attention. Maggie teased her that she needed a whip like Don Sixto’s. Numerous people were curious about the rushing-water toilet, and Fortunata sent them around the back where a nephew charged them ten centavos each to use it. When Vicente noticed the flow of traffic up and down the hall, he put a stop to the enterprise.
Communication was complicated, babies squalling and squirming, Maggie taking notes and simultaneously translating in two directions, Vicente whispering apt-pupil questions in her ear to be relayed to Carson. “He says to ask what hour of night he usually cries” or “We use a plant to cure cystitis.” Carson said Vicente would be a great health worker one day; all he needed was experience. In the past, when he’d told Maggie the same things, she’d felt both flattered and diminished. Watching the same scene from the outside, she recognized what had demeaned her: Carson’s implicit belief that medical knowledge was the most important in the world, and that anyone who learned it was thereby fundamentally improved, Vicente was not to be defined by this, she saw. He received Carson’s praises with a silvery smile, which only caused Carson to insist further, Vicente to be even more polite. Maggie felt secretly delighted by their battle.
…
The next day’s patients were mostly men, who mostly said they were not sick but had come to the clinic in response to a summons from Comandante Oquendo. After Vicente prompted and explained, each one yielded up his list of maladies. Malaria, asthma, badly mended bones. Maggie could hardly bear to inscribe their conditions in the ledger, since most were incurable, at least on Piedras’s terms, and Carson could only offer the advice to return to a strategy of endurance. This felt wrong, for each man’s confession had seemed to weaken him; each had uttered a hope of cure, however secretive and humble. What was the purpose of arousing hope just to dash it, Maggie wondered. What would be the end result of this campaign? Writing down their names—Fausto, Sandalio, Nemesio, Pamfilo, Porfirio, Xenon—she felt she was enrolling martyrs for the future peasant uprising.
They did find a bunch more skin conditions and gastrointestinal problems—and two cancers, so Carson began to say the incidence was high.
Today he’d decided to communicate directly with his patients. The interviews were more laborious but less confusing, since only one person tended to be talking at a time. Now when he explained things, or needed a missing word, he looked to Vicente, not to Maggie, and so did the patients. He admonished Vicente to take notes and study them each night. “Do you read English?”
Vicente shook his head.
“That will make it harder, at least for the short term.”
He’d been considering giving Vicente all of the study materials, Maggie saw. She’d been replaced: she was no longer Carson’s assistant, now merely a scribe, a secretary. From inside a silence that at first was crystalline, then corrosive, she reminded herself that this was what she’d wanted, this was what she’d planned, for these two men to work together and connect. Yet whenever Carson turned to her and said, “Got that?” she had to roll her eyes and blink, to hold back the tears of rage.
Late in the afternoon, Vicente overrode one of Carson’s diagnoses. “That man has susto. Or else he is bewitched. Don’t you think so, Doctora?” He turned to Maggie, who had given up expecting to be talked to. She got flustered, said she didn’t know. She saw Vicente’s eyes flicker, watching her swim up out of the dark tunnel where she’d been lost, or hiding. “Maybe so,” she said. Encouraged, the man told his story about fighting with his neighbor over a land boundary, then the next day he’d tripped and fallen from a high place. After that, he’d gradually lost the power of speech, until now he could only whisper. He had several other enemies.
He should go to a shaman, Vicente recommended; the brujo of Meado de Vaca was powerful in placing and removing curses.
“Sounds good,” Maggie said, “as long as we find nothing else wrong with him, right Carson?” She whispered to her husband that the man must feel guilty about cursing his neighbor. Maybe witchcraft was like therapy, and would undo the problem.
Carson shrugged. “He could have the big C. He smokes.” Only tests would show it. For now, he could try the shaman, and return in a week if magic failed.
“Cáncer,” Maggie translated for Vicente after the man had left. She was ashamed of her flippancy.
“Susto,” Vicente insisted, fright. This patient lived near a friend of his, who reported that the man’s nightmares and orgasms woke the neighborhood.
“Susto,” Maggie wrote. Susto was a common supernatural ailment, which Fortunata had explained but Maggie had not completely understood. She assumed that the term covered a range of ills—worms, hypothermia, psychosis. Speech was affected. Those afflicted turned pale and sweated; sometimes they died.
For the rest of the afternoon, Vicente made sure to ask Maggie’s opinion, even when Carson bridled at the unnecessary delays. Soon she felt herself on solid ground again, safely rescued from the pit into which she’d been descending. Vicente’s childhood predisposed him, she thought with some gratification, to be upset at how casually a man could treat his wife.
His sensitivity was surprising. Just from the side of his face, Maggie could tell the quickness of his understanding. She began to watch for what he was observing. The lines in the face of a woman who had trouble sleeping, the hooflike feet of Piedras’s poorest man. Often, when she was struck by the humble nobility of a person who’d endured a round of sorrows, Vicente turned and looked at her. Several times too she had the weird sensation that she could hear his mind saying things to her in English.
It was after dark when Doña Ema hobbled in, supporting herself on a stick of driftwood. Carson greeted her with gravity and kindness, helping her into a chair. He put gauze and an enormous bandage on her split back, and advised her to bathe her fading bruises in water boiled and cooled. He soothed her, saying her injuries weren’t serious, no broken bones, no apparent damage to the coming child. Then he asked about her husband, but Ema didn’t want to speak of him.
Vicente warned, “Far away, he’ll be, if he knows we have our justice again.”
“Do you feel safe at home?” Carson asked, with a quelling glance at Vicente.
“I have my sons,” Doña Ema said. As if in answer to Maggie’s unspoken thoughts, she added, “They’re always with me now.”
“How are they feeling?” Maggie asked. Rumor had it the boys had been beaten severely.
“They are very strong.”
After Ema left, Carson said to Vicente, “You should never have threatened her husband.” Abuse cases were delicado, requiring a confessional’s secrecy; only the victim could call for leaks to outside authority. Ema had been right not to reveal where her husband was. Who knew what he’d do to her next? “In this clinic, Vicente, you are my assistant. You are no longer Comandante Oquendo. Comprende?”
Vicente grunted.
Carson looked at him, and as if giving in to a temptation, sniffed, “I never liked that woman, but I never felt the need to beat her.”
But what Vicente did, he had to do, Maggie thought.
A few seconds later Vicente said to Carson, “I am ready to do whatever is correct, Doctor. Thank you for explaining your criterios.”
In this, Carson seemed to hear an intent that pleased him. Maggie heard another.
…
At dinner, she told Carson that the dates she had recorded, when babies had died or been born with problems, so far seemed to correspond with the dates of operation of the mine. She showed him the graph she had begun to make. “Excellent,” he said.
Carson admitted he was glad to feel the urgency again; he hadn’t felt it since treating wounded soldiers in Angola. He thanked Maggie for rescuing him from Harvard. Today he’d realized something important. He loved his work. Loved to fight against the odds. Loved it when you saw that all moral issues were based on the finality of human pain. That finality was horrible, but to fight against it made him feel alive, even though he knew in the end that he could never really win. If it was okay for Maggie to hear this, part of the problem had been the death of his long-time lover, Maxine. He’d mistaken grief for a more general despair, but that was over now. Had he stayed at Harvard, futility would have become his middle name, his permanent condition. He’d even begun to appreciate Vicente. “You foresaw how this could work,” he said to her. “I’m glad you kept pushing.” His speech on Nasir’s grave had been the turning point. Public relations wasn’t always insincerity. It could be the art of causing better things to happen.
“Next time, listen to me sooner,” Maggie told him, wondering why she felt farther away from Carson than ever before. Yet she was unable to say anything to bring him closer, as if she were trapped in another dimension from which communication was impossible.
He agreed. They went to bed, exhausted.
…
El Hoyo was no paradise, though it had a plaza, two cross streets, and a few acacia trees planted in crumbling cement tubs. The place looked as though it had been hit by a neutron bomb. Its plaza was empty, its fountain dry, and the bust of Admiral Grau stared emptily back toward 1928 when it had been set atop its pillar. Most houses were shuttered and padlocked. Vicente said the people must be out working in their high potato fields.
They ambled past the municipality, whose several colors of paint were peeling down to the brown adobe bricks beneath, and stopped at a little store, where Carson bought Cokes for all three of them from a young, thickset man of about twenty, whom Vicente curtly ordered to set up the medical table, over there, under the trees.
