When Mountains Walked, page 3
The bridge had not existed when Althea was here, Maggie was sure of that.
2
THE RIVER SWELLED more strongly against the raft’s prow in the afternoons. Green-brown, it was dangerous to drink, even though it looked perfectly clear and clean squishing up between the soft logs of the raft. Lighter than paper, the long white logs felt like suede under Althea’s bare feet. Balsa. A gigantic tree that grew in the rain forest, Johnny said.
Johnny Baines stood at the prow wearing his cane cutter’s straw hat so that his face was hidden in a wedge of shade. First he’d peer up at the canyon walls with his binoculars, then quickly take notes on his pad in minute, irregular handwriting. He had a contract from Standard Oil to map the strata, see if these were continuous with others where the company was drilling. Johnny wasn’t an exploration geologist but he was good at mapping. Years later, on another continent, he’d make a crucial contribution to World War II. Just now, in Peru, on his own account, he was trying to understand just why these rocks that had been so far underneath the ocean could end up high in the air. They’d floated, Johnny believed. When he explained Wegener’s theory to Althea, it made her think of baked Alaska.
At times they’d beach the raft so that Johnny could chip off samples. Sometimes he sent the oarsman’s fifteen-year-old boy up a cliff, barefoot, with the geologist’s hammer. The oarsman and the boy were interested in the rocks too. Some were full of fossils which Johnny said were crinoids, and the oarsman, roses.
Althea’s place was to recline against a fifty-kilo sack of rice under a small canvas awning built just for her. If not for the smell of the cow tied just behind her, she would have felt like Cleopatra on her barge. Who knows why, but some sections of the river had more flies than others; here she fanned herself with a palmetto leaf the boy had cut down to size when he saw the lady from the Estados Unidos swatting at the air around her face like a crazy woman. If the boy would fan her, if the boy were wearing golden cobra armbands, then she truly would have felt Egyptian.
Althea sighed, imagining herself pregnant, her belly bloated like the rice sack, but precious, the most precious thing floating up this river. Floating toward what? Thebes, or an Inca ruin? More likely, one more lost Peruvian town, all shanties made of sticks.
The country of hills and thorn scrub where they’d started was two days behind them now; the walls of the Rosario Canyon were beginning to rise, close in. All morning they’d glided along, the brown man moving the raft with one long, narrow oar. Early in the afternoon there began to be small dramas, a rapid or a boulder ahead. The oarsman would pull the raft onto the bank, and then he and his boy and Johnny would scramble up to whatever eminence they could in order to chart a path through the next stretch of river. Usually Althea amused herself collecting rocks and stones, leaving them in a pattern on the sand when they started up again. She never bothered showing them to Johnny; he had his own rocks, collected under his own criteria. At night he painted white dots on them, then code numbers in India ink, fine as insects’ legs.
The river beaches were small, each one a revelation nested in the arms of its cliff. They seemed untouched and useless to man, so that Althea imagined her footprints were the first since the world was made. She liked it that the beaches offered so little to do, although she was sorry to ruin them with her messy traces. Sometimes a bush with a red bird in it, sometimes a dead thing rotting on the sand or at the edge of the water, or a jam of driftwood like forked, naked corpses tossed into a pile. She was beginning to identify the smell of Peruvian dirt: it was rich, like dried beans, but not exactly pleasant.
Mostly she was dreaming about the baby whose sweet, dusty blue eyes she could see in the air in front of her. It had fair, thin, whitish hair. Though it wasn’t clear whether it was a boy or a girl, she could feel it, as palpable a person as any on this boat. It loved her, she loved it. Already she could imagine things that it might say, all the ways it would surprise her.
“All aboard! Darling? We’ve figured it out,” Johnny would shout to her, proudly, and kiss her brusquely on the cheek. Who is he, she wondered.
Then they’d get on again, the cow rolling her eyes in fright at the roaring and splashing of the water. Sometimes she’d quiver and shit in fear, and try her best to escape from the ropes that held her. Althea would stand up then, put her hand flat against the sweating hide, and say things that seemed to soothe the cow for a second or two. The first morning she’d thought the oarsman cruel as he tightened the gray rope around the cow’s horns and neck. Now she saw his mercy, for the cow was suicidal.
Meanwhile, the oarsman plied his oar, his boy toiled with a long pole, straining every muscle to get them all past the obstacle. Up front, Johnny peered down into the water, shouting warnings and gesturing with his arms. Right, left. Water washed up through the logs, everything was soaked in spray. Althea admired the oarsman’s knotty calves, his feet like a monkey’s; Johnny said he could walk on tacks or coals. Yet she was afraid, too, of his pulsing brown body, covered with shiny drops of sweat and river water, at work so close to her. It was difficult to accept his hand when he held it out to help her onto shore, but she always took it. The man must be about sixty. Everything about him was pure strength. He was missing two knuckles from his right forefinger.
Why?
When the waters were calm she went up front, sat next to Johnny, let her feet slide into the water. Once, she whispered that she was afraid of them. The man, even the boy. Johnny teased her, being her same old Johnny Baines, saying the oarsman’s father had been a cannibal in the Amazon jungle. Again, she believed whatever he told her, until he removed the curse.
That night they camped on a bigger beach. They came to it at three o’clock and Johnny wanted to go on—too early to stop. He said the oarsman was shirking, but the man stubbornly explained they’d not find a better place before dark. He wanted to scout the next stretch of river before morning; there was dangerous water ahead. Besides, it was hot between the canyon walls. Here there was shade, a bit of long grass for the cow, driftwood for a fire, and a waterfall with clean cold water for bathing and drinking.
Althea watched the boy untie the cow. She sank her muzzle into the river for a long time, then he took her to the grass and hobbled her. She was a young cow, too young to have had any calves yet. She was quite stupid, Althea realized, but she emanated some kind of emotional warmth. She seemed to recognize Althea, so that Althea felt the two of them were similar. Females, future mothers, one destined to devour the other.
While the men were making camp, she took her things up to the waterfall and let the cold, cold water blast down upon her head. Gasping, she looked down at her white body, the belly round as a shell. Maybe the cold would shock her womb into fertility. Tonight, she thought.
That night around the campfire, the oarsman spoke to Johnny in urgent, despairing tones. The river was terrible ahead, unnavigable. The Senor had agreed to turn around when they reached this point. The river was accursed, and many people had drowned in it. Johnny barked back, disagreeing. He expected a full six days of travel upstream. They’d spent two days before even reaching the beginning of the canyon, and only one day now below the clear rock walls. The oarsman defied Johnny to climb up the cliff with him and see, tomorrow morning. Johnny insulted him, said he was superstitious and a coward.
All right, the oarsman said. We will go on, then. But you will double my pay and we must leave the cow, she is too heavy. We’ll get her on the way back.
What will we eat, Johnny said. What will my wife eat?
Fish, the man said. If we are alive enough to be hungry.
Okay, we leave the cow. But forget the double pay. Either this or nothing.
In the tent that night, Althea asked Johnny why he didn’t listen to the oarsman. Domingo was his name. Domingo was a riverman, even if he didn’t know this section. Johnny said local men always did this. Porters, mule drivers. The trip was not their own quest. They wanted to get their money and go home as soon as possible to their wives and children.
Althea said she understood wanting to get home to a family. Besides, she said, if the raft breaks up, Domingo will have no more way of making a living.
He can make another raft in a week, Johnny said. That’s the beauty of these people’s lives.
What about me, Althea thought, but she didn’t say anything. She’d begged hard not to be left behind in horrible, cold Huaraz, where they’d been living for three months. Johnny was finishing his Ph.D. dissertation, trying to find the fault that was responsible for the mountain’s falling on the town again and again. People in Huaraz were unfriendly, mountain people passing by all wrapped in their blankets and never changing their expressions. If Althea greeted them, they turned their faces away from her. Stone people, Johnny said, was their name for themselves in Quechua.
That night Johnny lay awake on his folding cot, thinking and thinking. From a foot away, Althea could hear the noise inside his skull. Near midnight, she reached across the gap between them, lifted the sheet, and touched Johnny’s side with her finger, but he didn’t pay any attention.
The next day was almost continuously terrible, the raft bucking, awash. The ropes that held the logs together began to bite and loosen. Johnny stood in the bow; the oarsman and his boy worked in such a deep silence that Althea worried they might do something to cause Johnny to fall in. It would have been easy as they negotiated whirlpools with rocks underneath them. Once, the boy got out and towed them up a rapid as long as a giant’s bowling alley. Afterward there was no more calm river. Althea got soaked to the skin, no longer reclining but standing, hanging on to the ropes of her canopy. The bread got wet and so did Johnny’s drawing paper, even though it was encased in two waterproof canvas bags.
“I’m not finding anything, that’s the hell of it,” Johnny shouted. “These oilmen, they claim to be scientists, but they shoot the messenger if there isn’t anywhere to drill.” He had wanted to work for the oil company a few more times, to save money for his own, less profitable seismological idiosyncrasies.
The child, Althea thought. What will I feed it when there’s no money? “We’ve got to go on,” she said.
“That’s my girl,” said Johnny.
A boy, Althea thought.
By four o’clock, the shadows were beginning to creep down the canyon walls, and they had not yet found a beach wide enough for tents. Domingo suggested they could tie the raft to any overhanging tree, or stake it on any patch of dirt, but Johnny wanted just to get around the corner of the next cliff. Luckily, there was some flat water there, almost a lake but for the deep pulling current.
Even if Althea had felt like making love, it was no night for romance. Menace hung in the darkness, as if this beach were haunted by the evil spirits and ghosts Domingo said lived in the upper parts of the Rosario River. At two in the morning, Johnny heard a rustling noise like voices and put his head out of the tent. He reached back and grabbed his hunting rifle by the barrel, sliding it out of its long ugly holster, then slid through the flap and was gone. Althea heard him shouting in Spanish, but she was too afraid to go and see what was happening. She got off the cot and lay on the canvas floor instead, just in case.
The oarsman had been trying to slip away in the darkness, abandon them. Johnny said he was so mad he wanted to shoot the bastard and his kid right there and then, except that if he was going to shoot them, he might as well have let them go. So he tied them to a tree instead, and covered them with their own blankets against the cold.
It was a matter of principle now, Johnny said. The vein on his forehead was pumping, and Althea could see the lines where he gritted his jaw. Half a day more upriver, then they could call it quits. He seemed to be defying Althea to join the rebellion herself, but she was quelled by his gray eyes, sharp as picks. Johnny left Domingo’s kid tied to the tree while he and the oarsman walked up as far as they could, to see what was coming next. They crossed the river on a series of gravel bars, wading in thigh-deep water, Johnny keeping the gun above his head. Then the two of them disappeared around a long bar of rock. They were gone an hour and Althea began to half listen for a shot, to worry that the oarsman had overpowered Johnny. She’d be left with the boy, maybe the boy and his father. She imagined the fate worse than death. Would she be able to love that kind of baby? She didn’t think so. It was a certain person, this pale child who wanted to come to her. When she felt his presence—and it had been given her to know he’d be a boy—she knew her husband would come back in one piece.
Soon he did. Ahead was not as bad as yesterday, Johnny said. He’d offered Domingo double pay to continue, just until noon. Johnny wanted to find one or two familiar strata, but if he didn’t, he had to be able to say he’d gone twenty miles up the canyon.
Domingo seemed satisfied, if a little grim; he admitted there was an hacienda up this way; they should already have reached it.
Johnny kept the rifle in reach, though wrapped in oilcloth.
Indeed, it was not as hard as the day before, until eleven A.M. They began negotiating a combination of problems, not nearly as bad as others they’d seen even that morning, when the nose of the raft got pulled under by a wave roaring off one boulder, and the tail of the raft slued sideways and hit another boulder. The oar caught and flipped, throwing Domingo into the air, and then the raft began falling rapidly back toward the whirlpool. While the accident was happening they entered another kind of time, faster and slower at once, so that Althea later remembered Johnny shouting, but at the time everything was one simultaneous shouting, her ears full of inward and outward sound. Johnny was shouting to warn her about a long tree trunk jammed sideways, four feet above water level; it knocked Althea between the shoulders and suddenly she was in the water, water the color of dying leaves, water full of light and motion. She kicked, hoping to propel herself upward—no resistance, her foot was out in air. Twisting like a fish she wriggled, poked her head out, saw a steep beach the size of a bed, and swam to it without thinking of anything or anyone else.
Eventually she and the boy and Johnny were squatting together on that rocky sand. Domingo had disappeared. He didn’t know how to swim, his son said. Maybe he’d been swept down to last night’s campsite, where he could get himself to shore, Althea suggested.
They were all soaked and shivering. They could not stay where they were. Cautiously they swam around the corner of the cliff to another small beach. Then, froghopping boulders, swinging from trees, avoiding the water, in less than an hour they reached the beach where they’d camped last night. The boy was crying. It was no longer difficult for Althea to accept a hand as he helped her negotiate certain gaps. The cow was here, cropping grass, but Domingo was nowhere.
At the beach’s southern end the boy discovered a faint trail leading away from the river, and they decided to follow it. Soon Althea’s legs were covered in red-brown dust. Her bare feet began to bleed, so Johnny ripped his shirtsleeves off and tied them around. How can this be happening to me, she thought over and over, finding herself helpless, stripped, alone, crawling over the body of the awesome world.
And in this way, Althea and Johnny Baines, together with the boy, Wifredo’Sánchez Aliaga, reached the Hacienda Chigualén on August x, 1931.
3
A DESICCATING WIND blew through the canyon, thickening the gringo doctors’ hair with dust. They stood at the front door of the clinic, locked and bolted since four years ago.
“Five years without aspirin,” Nasir intoned. “Thus we lived the people’s revolution.”
Wham! Wham! The Chinese lock resisted the first blow of his hammer, but not the second. Sliding aside the thick iron bolt, Nasir stood back and kicked his heel against the crack between the clinic’s narrow double doors, which popped open instantly. “Pedazo de mierda,” he growled, fingering the snap lock that had held the doors, like a button holding together a knitted shawl.
“He says ‘piece of shit,’” Maggie translated for Carson.
Carson practiced “mierda” under his breath while Nasir permanently disabled the snap lock with a chisel, explaining that the nurses had installed it in order to come and go at any hour, independent of one another. “You, Doctores, are decent people, and will not need it.”
Carson fingered the hand-forged sliding bolts, one inside and one outside. “What’s he say?”
“He says we’re decent people because we intend to sleep on the same side of the door.” In Spanish, Maggie defended the bad, unmarried women to Nasir. “Maybe they only wanted to independizarse.”
Nasir grunted disapprovingly. “Ask yourself, Señora—freedom, for what purpose?”
Carson observed that anyone could come along and bolt the door from the outside, thus trapping them in the clinic.
This was the instant Maggie would have regretted leaving Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the clinic stood open now before them, full of all the possibilities of the year to come. There was nothing to see at first except for a scintillating body of dust, raised by the canyon wind and the doors bursting open. As it thinned and fell, Maggie saw that the room was nearly bare. The floor was of cured cement. A broom leaned in the corner, a black comma worn to the stitching. The examining table was homemade, draped with a coarse grubby sheet. Against the far wall was a counter and a stool and a set of wooden shelves, empty but for a stack of folders and scattered debris: brown medical bottles, tiny boxes, balls of hair.
On Maggie, the vacant space exerted an ecstatic pull. She glanced at Carson.
“I’ve seen better,” he said, lacing his fingers through hers. His voice was low and flat, reminding her that, once upon a time, he’d tried to leave this kind of life behind. She hoped she’d been right to convince him to drop out of Harvard Divinity School. “I’ve also seen worse.”
