When Mountains Walked, page 30
Christopher’s death had taken her into the unimaginable, some dark stratosphere where she could not remember time, how many days her son’s illness lasted. She’d sat next to him all day, all night, urging him to drink, drink, the same river water that had infected him, all there was, strained through several handkerchiefs. He refused to swallow. At first he whined, closed his lips, and turned away. Later he let the water dribble out. His skin shriveled on his bones. On the day when her houseboy returned with a load of firewood tied to his back, for boiling, it was too late.
He lay dead for two days in his crib. Then on the stone floor of a local ruin with other dead. Looking less and less like himself while Althea harangued the carpenter and warded off the priest.
When Johnny had returned, she saw him from an immense distance, thinking, You, you who know nothing, how can you imagine that you are actually taking charge? This distance had remained between them ever afterward. Johnny seemed to walk through the world in a caul of innocence, which Althea alternately saw as fortunate and evil, which she envied and despised. And now, like a snake, a horrid witch behind a curtain, she had seen her chance to strike, to spread her suffering to him.
…
“If you desire it,” Brother Jesunanda said, “I will hear your confession. Perhaps you need to cleanse your heart, empty it, before it can open properly.”
“I’m not a Catholic,” Althea said. “As I understand it, you’d have to baptize me first.”
“The rain is sufficient baptism in my religion,” Brother Jesunanda said. “I wonder whether you can consider it so.”
“I’m thinking about my husband,” Althea said. “And my son.”
“You have a son?”
“I have a son who died.”
“There can be no worse pain.”
“How would you know?” she whispered. She felt entitled to ferocity now, and with this stranger. This man in a skirt who did not want to be a person like the rest. “You don’t have any children.”
“Oh,” said the priest, “but I do have. Many children. Many are alive, but every one was taken from me.”
“Explain yourself,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Althea told him what she knew. He’d been born in Assam. He’d been a Hindu priest. In Calcutta, Assam was known as a place of magic and astrologers. The British ladies invited Assamese priests for parties, for divinations. There were rumors of a temple devoted to women’s private parts. Women who could not have children went there, and strange ceremonies were performed. The planets were made to align, and then they conceived. Althea giggled despite herself. “Can it be real?”
“What if those wives were the ones who had infertile husbands?” Brother Jesunanda said.
“I thought that was all gossip,” Althea said. She would have laughed at the idea, only Brother Jesunanda’s face looked sad, or at least serious: wanting her to understand and, above all, not to laugh at his religion.
“Yes,” he said. “God gave them all children through me. At first I liked it. My flesh was always weak. Later I changed, and I could not stand giving myself again and again to that . . . loss, that nothingness. We gave the ladies a drink to erase all specific memory of how the God had come to them. I should have had that too. Except for one, most would not know me in the street. But I recognized all, all.”
Althea was pierced by envy of the one woman who remembered him.
She said, “And so why didn’t you just become an ordinary man? A father?”
“I am a father,” he said, “in the Catholic way now. People have expected me to be a priest since I was four years old. Anywhere in India, they will find me.” He pinched up the chest of his robe. “Maybe I am too cowardly to live without this.”
“I am wondering,” Althea said, “whether I want my husband to be dead. For a year, since our child died, I have hardly made love with him. Only when I force myself, and then he knows. I tell him it is sadness, but now I think it is hatred that prevents me. I feel he does not deserve any happiness. I feel that all his happiness is at my cost.”
“You have come to the right temple,” Brother Jesunanda said. “Look at her face”—he nodded toward the Virgin—ask for your sickness to be removed.”
“I have. I am.”
“She had other children after Jesus,” Brother Jesunanda said lightly.
…
The chapel was full of flowers and candles. The procession knelt and prayed and sang in front of it. Althea felt like a child, dazzled by images and colors. She’d never become part of a parade before; her heart, her bones, her skin, were jumping to the rhythm of the drums. She let her voice rise and waver in approximation of the melody, not caring how she failed. Next to her a beggar woman wept, her face turned up, tears running down her flat wrinkled cheeks. Althea thought, Maybe I understand what she understands, the loss of barriers inside.
She left her shoes behind, in front of the church. And moved onward, stepping on the sari, pulling it down. She recovered it, gripping the white cotton between one elbow and her ribs.
They went on toward town, past the cow barn’s long roof and the red, hoof-trampled mud of the corral. The drummers stopped while Brother Jesunanda blessed the great mild Zebu where they crouched now in utter darkness. Stepping aside, out of the torchlight, Althea finally managed to shove a bigger hank of her sari beneath the waist belt. Now it hung crooked but secure.
Next, by the gate, they stood silently before the cottage where the French priest was dying, tended by Indian sisters. Brother Jesunanda came from the front of the crowd to find Althea, led her to the window to look in. Usually the cottage was off limits. “Look, he is in Heaven already.” The window lit by lanterns was a stage. Inside, the old father lay gasping, an edge of warm light along the ridge of his enormous Gallic beak. Women bending over him, touching him, their brown round faces framed in white. With a slight shock she recognized the scene, her first dream ever to come true.
The procession went out onto the high riverbank. No longer a green bend clotted with washermen, the Kavita was filling up with violet steam like a magician’s prelude. They walked through the soft sand under coconut palms. The sand was still warm from the day.
Brother Jesunanda came up from behind her. “Someone might have thought these were an offering,” he whispered. His mouth at her ear, his breath smelled of wine. How could that be? “To themselves.” He pushed the sandals into her hand. “Put them on,” he commanded.
“They were an offering,” Althea said.
“You’ll get worms. You’ll cut your feet in town. You are not one of us, your feet are soft. Put them on.”
“All right,” Althea said, throwing them down in front of herself. Flap, flap.
She had learned she was a member of the Untouchable caste; her own servants wouldn’t eat food her shadow had fallen upon; yet Brother Jesunanda had carried her sandals. He had done that for her, she thought, a thing as horrifying for him as washing beggars’ feet.
The last red bubble of sun was gulped under the horizon. The sky went black. Town was full of thousands of people shouting and writhing. The Indigents’ Procession funneled into the main street behind an enormous image of a black-haired goddess carried on men’s shoulders. An elephant stood at the side of the road, handing out glasses of milk with its trunk. It swung each glass into a bucket, lifted it dripping, in relaxed rhythm. “Take one,” Brother Jesunanda said. “It is the essence of the festival.”
The milk was sour, thick, and sugared, with a musky green-brown undertaste. “What is it?”
“Bhang lassi. A gateway to God.”
It went down all in one piece, like saliva. She thought she’d vomit, but didn’t.
“Don’t leave me,” Althea said as the crowd pressed against her, nearly lifting her off her feet. She began melting into the stream of endless life, color and stink and noise. Someone threw a handful of colored powder on her, staining her sari purple and red and yellow. It will never come out, she thought. The priest’s strong fingers gripped her forearm, saving her from a whirlpool. They swam together through the gates of the white temple that had always stood at the end of the road. Althea had never been inside—it was barred to non-Hindus. “Don’t worry,” Brother said, reading her thoughts, “I am with you. And you with me. Remember only that.” The domes lit by the moon looked like vertical bunches of bones. There were bonfires inside, and a maddening sound of hundreds of bells all ringing at once.
19
MAGGIE STOOD holding the sides of the clinic door with her two hands, letting air reach her armpits and ribs. Tears welling around the edges of her eyes were only slightly cooling. She stared fruitlessly up the road, raging at its emptiness and at her own need to stand and stare. Carson would come back on tonight’s bus, or with Cantinflas, unpredictably. She knew all this; she’d agreed to it; yet she desperately needed to talk to Carson. Why was she always home when Carson left, but he was never here when urgent summons came for Maggie? Why did she stand here so loyally, when he never asked permission before enacting his own plans?
Yesterday, a garbled message had come across Radio Horizonte, summoning a person who might have been Maggie to contact friends who might have been the Wechslers. Fortunata had already given her opinion: Maggie should have gone to Cajamarca on yesterday’s bus. Her grandmother was dying, or about to be locked up in an asylum. Fortunata was in the kitchen, having come in on a Sunday, unable to resist being the first to know what Maggie decided to do. Maggie was avoiding her. They’d exhausted all discussion yesterday, Maggie’s point being not to abandon the clinic while Carson was still away, unless there was an emergency, in which case the radio message would surely be repeated. In hopes of that, today Fortunata had left the radio on full blast. The message had not been read out all morning, but now Fortunata claimed that Sunday’s announcer was usually hung over. Furthermore, once should have been enough—Maggie was not a child! Maggie was sick of Fortunata’s arguments.
The cook’s interest had a prurient quality, yet she gave far more importance to Maggie and her doings than Carson ever had. Truly, she’d remarked today, why was Maggie so dependent on her man? “As a woman, better to make him run after you!” Maggie, sick at heart, had been unable to voice an answer. “Ay, Señora,” Fortunata had said ruefully, “me preocupas,” you worry me.
Despite the cook’s busy presence, the house felt empty without Carson, without patients. A continuity had been broken, leaving the stasis of this blistering day, not a shadow anywhere.
Maggie needed to make a decision—perhaps she had, in being unable to push off from such a vacuum. She felt paralyzed. It was too hot to do anything, even to read her Russian novel. She was trapped here with her mind, her stupid thoughts which she was unable to replace with any others. Last night, she’d prayed for Carson’s return, offering up in exchange all of her selfishness, all her grating imperfections, particularly those which arose in his proximity. Today she was furious with him, and with herself. How, she asked herself for the thousandth time, had she let him become so important? Why didn’t she just take off? Yesterday’s bus was long gone, but she could be packing her small bag right now. She could even hear him telling her, “Go on ahead and go! What makes you think I’d mind?”
Come back, she thought. You don’t know how much I need you.
The ocher heat stank on the dead and useless road. Nothing moved until, just as Maggie turned to go back inside, a bull’s blood bird flicked in and out of the branches of a nearby thorn bush. It flew across the road and hid in the bushes there. A sign, she hoped. Between thorny moments, willed acts, and forced decisions, vivid life made a flashing appearance.
…
Yesterday, Luz María had come to invite her to lunch at Piedras Baja, saying that her mother had made a giant pot of ají de gallina—even enough for Fortunata!—this after Vicente had asked her to consider Maggie’s lot, how lonely she must feel and scared without her esposo. Maggie had been unable to suppress her elation—not only to be invited with such tenderness, nor to be distracted and fed things Carson wasn’t, nor even that it would be her first meal at anybody’s house in Piedras, but also (mostly) at the summons from Vicente, a call she felt inside her bones. She’d tried to explain to Luz María the expression in English, “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away,” but Luz María had only smirked and shrugged. Just as well.
Ten people had sat at tables in Luz Maria’s courtyard, with the radio playing its staticky haunting music, and the dogs and chickens underfoot, and the pig smell. They’d eaten and drunk beer all afternoon, Vicente sitting next to Maggie, and Luz at the far end of the table. Lady Maggy had lain at Luz’s feet in a battered cardboard box, swaddled in crocheted blankets despite the heat. She seemed to be staring at her own fingers, focusing at last. Whatever she became, it was clear that Luz would never abandon her.
For the first half hour, Maggie had found herself compulsively bringing Carson into the conversation, repeating his remarks and divulging his ideas, but it was soon made clear that no one wished to dwell upon the valley’s fears and dangers, not today. Luz’s uncle Zenobio, a burly man wearing a teal-green, counterfeit “Denver Coyotes” baseball cap, announced that in two weeks he was sponsoring a festival for John the Baptist, the saint he kept in his house. That was the holy feast of Saint John’s Beheading, and they’d already entered a period of promesas, atonements, and self-examination. “Would we give our life for devoción?” Uncle Zenobio hoped so. He invited Maggie and her esposo to his party on that night, here at the hacienda.
Maggie was embarrassed not to have recognized Saint John in his brown, off-the-shoulder robe; she’d always liked the idea of him, living out in the wilderness, eating bugs and honey. She told Uncle Zenobio that her grandmother had been a devotee of this saint, which led to the story of how her grandparents had washed up at Piedras, and of the conception and tragic death of Maggie’s uncle. Uncle Zenobio was very excited to hear of Maggie’s connection. He told of the many miracles Saint John had performed, of punishments he’d meted out, once pushing into the river a vanload of people who’d come to his festival just to get drunk. All agreed that Maggie belonged in this valley as much as anyone. “You shall dance with us, Señora!” Uncle Zenobio paid for a brass band to come from Cajamarca. Saint John made a tour of town, on the shoulders of his devotees, before returning to stand all night before the church, watching people dance and celebrate him, all at Zenobio’s expense. When the procession passed the clinic’s door, Maggie and Carson must come out and join it. Uncle Zenobio’s great lament was that no priest could be persuaded to make the trip to town to say a Mass that day, not since Don Hector’s death. The new priest didn’t approve of dancing, and he overcharged. “Extortionist,” Uncle Zenobio grumbled. “All he cares about is money.”
Rolling on a wave of convivial condemnation, Maggie had announced that thing she’d never said aloud before, that her mother, Althea’s second child, was the daughter of a priest. (It would never get back to Julia, she was sure.) As she spoke, it sounded true, and her audience immediately confirmed it. When you lose a child, you urgently must make another one, reflected Luz Maria. Priests had lots of children, Fortunata said. They were no different from other men—no, worse, said Luz; most men were willing to give their child a name, if nothing more. Only Vicente noticed how noble it was of Maggie’s grandfather to take Julia as his own.
Held within these people’s understanding, their amused, wide tolerance, Maggie had felt a missing piece of her soul flying back to live inside her. She wished Julia could be here, or at least the tormented part of Julia’s spirit—yes, it would need to be disembodied from the rest of her. Perhaps that tormented part is simply me, Maggie thought. Perhaps I was sent out into this world to resolve my mother’s sadness.
Luz Maria said, “Huascaran fell upon Huaraz again four years ago. My mother heard it on the radio. Many dead. It would be good to predict the seismic movements.”
Vicente laughed, and said her name reproachfully: “Luz Maria!”
“If you can predict a thing, you can avoid it,” Luz Maria insisted.
“One never knows,” said Vicente. “Where there has been one earthquake there can always be another, eso si, but defining the moment is another matter.”
“You cannot predict an earthquake” was Uncle Zenobio’s opinion. “But I am in accord with the Huarasinos. Here in the Rosario we have had temblores, but if we moved Piedras, where would it go? Higher on the mountain, there is no flat ground. The puna has sufficient towns.”
Luz Maria said furiously, “Our earthquakes here are not so large.”
Fortunata said that always before an earthquake, an old woman came to every house asking for food and water. If you helped her, she placed a secret mark so that the house was spared, but people who turned her away felt the brunt of the disaster. This woman was very ugly and old, and she usually had a little dog with her. She was the earth goddess, Pachamama.
“The saints protect us,” pious Zenobio corrected her, “if we have faith.” Turning to Maggie, he said, “Pachamama, giant boas, talking rocks—all that is superstition.”
“What color dog?” Luz María wanted to be sure to recognize the goddess.
Fortunata gave her a disgusted look. “What does it matter? A small dog.”
“The ancient ones lived higher up the mountain,” said Vicente to Maggie. “I’ve seen their ruins, from before the Incas.” Piedras was an ancestral location, surely because of its river crossing. Someday he’d show Maggie the ruins, if she wished.
Maggie did wish, of course. Though as a proper wife she made sure to mention inviting Carson, she was certain he’d be uninterested. So far, he’d refused to see the dwarf’s cave and Maggie’s swimming place.
“The river cuts and cuts,” Luz María observed. “We are moving downward.”
“That’s geology!” Maggie happily declared. She would have liked this conversation, both intimate and desultory, to go on forever. She was about to tell Luz María, of whom she was no longer jealous, that it had taken the scientific world hundreds of years to see the point that Luz, untutored, had just made.
