When Mountains Walked, page 31
Suddenly no one was talking; Vicente fiddled with the radio knobs. Reeew, reeeowr. “Algo para tí,” something for you. He turned up the volume to an unbearable pitch, then down again. “Shh, shh, Señora,” Luz María said, “los anuncios.” She nodded at Maggie, wide-eyed. On the radio, an engine roared, and then there was an echoing reverberation of wind. This was the sound logo of Radio Espacial, Space Radio, intended to imitate a flying saucer taking off.
“Ay, si,” said Maggie, pulling up her chair. Often she and Fortunata listened to these announcements; it was one of their amusements. The locutor machine-gunned from under his thyroid: For the district of Machipampa. Whoever has harvested bananas! Place them by the side of the road for pickup! Branches must be clean, uniform, and free of spiders. And he rang a bell: bing!
Machipampa was halfway to Ecuador, Vicente explained to Maggie.
Miss Fanny Morales, Fanny Morales, please call your mother at once. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Fanny Morales and her minor son, Isidro, please present this information to your radio station, Radio Espacial. Bing!
“What happened to Fanny?” Maggie wondered. Completing the stories was part of listening.
“Se escapó,” said Fortunata, stating the obvious.
“Her husband is in my mother’s family,” Luz Maria said. “She’s a whore.”
Fortunata gave Maggie a look. Meanwhile, the radio told everyone not to believe that Jesús Briceño Condori had been in jail for four years. No, Jesús was returning from a trip, and his mother could expect him home tomorrow, on the bus.
Another roar and whoosh, and the announcer’s voice began to skirl as if announcing lottery prizes. Now we have news for a stranger. For the German nurse in the valley of the Rosario River, your friends in Cajamarca ask you to contact them. I repeat: the nurse from Germany, contact your friends in Cajamarca without delay.
Now everyone talked at once. “That’s you,” Fortunata said somberly. “Someone in your family has died.”
“No,” Maggie said. “I’m not German, and I’m not a nurse.”
Vicente said, grinning, “They say you are German because you are blond.”
“Blond, yes, and tall, like a German, that’s why,” Luz Maria said excitedly.
“In my country, they say my hair is brown.”
Yes, said Vicente impishly, but didn’t she see that, from the point of view of black, it was yellow?
Fortunata said, “The radio makes mistakes, but still, it is you.”
Maggie was definitely the person. Radio Espacial had begun passing the message last night. At first the announcer had named the clinic of Piedras. He could write, but he could not read, so he spoke from memory. His messages evolved throughout the day; one learned to interpret. “There is no other nurse in the Rosario, you see?” insisted Luz María.
What time last night, Fortunata wanted to know. Why had Luz María and Vicente not run immediately to the clinic? No one answered, and Fortunata settled back in her chair and crossed her arms, having proven a long-standing point.
Bewildered, Maggie said, “How does the radio know I’m here?”
“You are the gringa famosa,” Luz Maria’s mother declared.
“You have friends in Cajamarca, no? They placed the announcement,” said Vicente.
Klaus and Liliana: of course, after twenty years they knew the tricks of rural communication. They were trying to get her out of Piedras, was Maggie’s first thought. Their grapevine must have said something about Carson’s toxic-waste campaign.
“Wechsler, Wechsler,” Vicente ruminated. “This is faster than sending his driver. But! If this was a true emergency, sending the driver is more sure. I say it is serious, important, but not a matter of life and death.”
Maggie felt cornered, as if the sky had emitted some bright beam upon her. I’m not going anywhere, she thought as the transistor continued down its urgent list. Anyone who sees a four-wheel-drive Jeep with a tire on its back, color brown, belonging to the Ministry of Education, please report its location to the office in Cajamarca. Bing!
“That Jeep. Its driver has relatives in Olluco,” remarked Uncle Zenobio. “He always goes.”
Fortunata again scolded Luz María. “You should have run to us last night, when you first heard this.” She slammed her palm flat on the table. “ Ve, Señora, escucha. You must go! Someone is dying, or is dead, or is in grave condition. If your mother wants to say her last words to you, then what?”
“My mother is in perfect health,” Maggie said.
“Tiene que ser,” Fortunata said, it must be. She recited for everyone the story of Julia’s evil plans for Althea, including a full description, first given to her by Maggie, of the horrors of U.S. nursing homes, where old people were given tranquilizer shots and strapped, drooling, into wheelchairs in front of televisions. “Your mother has interned your grandmother in one of those asylums. You are the only one who can rescue your abuelita.”
“The radio would mention health, and family,” Maggie repeated. “‘Call your mother,’ something like that!”
“They did not want to frighten you,” said Luz Maria’s mother.
“You should at least call home,” Luz Maria agreed in her small voice. “Call your families.”
“What will Carson say when he returns and doesn’t find me?”
“We will explain,” said Luz Maria.
“You cannot explain well enough,” Maggie said.
The Peruvians all laughed.
What if a baby got pneumonia again? What if someone else got sick? Maggie’s family could get doctors, but not the Piedrasinos. Carson had left her in charge of the clinic, and the clinic was all that stood between life and death for Piedras. She must wait until he returned, she told them. Anyway, they were both going to Cajamarca soon. How could she go to the United States before the water test came back? She indicated Lady Maggy. “For her sake, I’m not going,” she said. “Punto final.” Period.
Luz Maria fell silent, but Fortunata continued chipping away at Maggie’s objections. Vicente was now the assistant. The clinic was not alone. Carson would return tonight: he and Maggie could kiss in the bus’s door as Carson got off and Maggie climbed on. How could it be Maggie’s fault if someone died in Piedras? Even the best of doctors never really stood in the way of death itself. Proof was that doctors died, and the residents of the powerful United States. The worst would be if her grandmother passed away and Maggie had not spoken with her.
“She’s not dying,” Maggie said. “I spoke with her a week ago. She told me not to come.”
“We know nothing,” Vicente said. “Only that Klaus Wechsler always has a reason for what he does.”
…
Vicente had walked her home. The story of Althea had bemused him. How strange for Maggie to imagine her grandmother inside these very canyon walls! To wonder whether an ancestor had walked right here, or here, must be like trying to palpate the body of a ghost, or see the other world. “You must resemble her, no?” Then at the clinic door he’d said, “Lock this well. Your husband should not leave you here alone.”
…
Today, Sunday, Maggie had awakened feeling as if the floor were dissolving under her. Possibilities, all dire, spread in every direction. By noon, she’d tied herself in a thousand knots, and now it was three. Though the blasting heat was not yet fading, it was no longer fueled and growing. High time to dismiss Fortunata and quit gaping in this doorway, driving herself insane. She could use the river on her skin, to cool her off. A cool skin might bring a coolness toward everything.
She walked into the bedroom, put on her black panties and a sports bra under a shirt and jeans. Moving through the house, she couldn’t stop being amazed at the silence that was swallowing and engulfing everything. It was loud, like the sound of electricity passing through wires overhead. She stood in the door of the kitchen telling Fortunata she was going for a swim, on this side of the river, just above the bridge, at the trail that forked downhill, just past the stony field where that dwarf’s hole was. She’d be home in two hours. If not, Fortunata should please send Vicente or Don Sixto out to find her.
“I’ll tell Vicente to go look for you right away,” Fortunata said, smiling.
“Please don’t!”
“The river is not safe.”
“I never go in past my knees, as you’ve advised me, Fortunata. For safety’s sake, I think someone should know where I am.”
“You need to be rescued before getting in.”
Maggie walked up the road, enjoying how the dust puffed in and out between her toes. Soon it would be washed off.
Clambering down two enormous boulders, she dropped onto the small beach she had discovered. It was only ten yards long, bounded by two rock falls and the driftwood nest. She had never seen a footprint here besides her own. The bank had eroded further since last time; now it was a cliff in miniature, with sand turreted in layers where it had been laid down damp, had dried and hardened, and been cut by water as the river bend ate away the land.
She sat on a rock at the top and took off her sandals, then slid down the sand cliff leaving two wide round tracks of bare heels. The sand was brownish gray and warm. She walked across it to the sharp nest of driftwood that was her fortress. Stones had caught in the forks and roots of broken trees whose shapes lacked only a bit of a carver’s alteration to become frozen representations of souls screaming in Hell. One particular root was so vivid that she only had to glance at it to see the stiff faces and writhing limbs. A bearded face stared at her, trying to exclaim that it was proof that souls were trapped in matter. Just so, the vastness of the canyon seemed to indicate that the world was beyond comprehension.
She undressed to her black underwear, exposing her pale limbs and waist to the sky’s shock. Folding jeans and T-shirt into a neat, soft square, she laid them on a barkless driftwood limb.
I am a child, she thought. Only my grandmother knows where I am, and how I am, and who.
She eased into the chilly gray-green water just below the boulder, gasping, inch by inch. The water sucked at her calves, leaving holes behind them. The river roared past, just a few feet beyond this cove which was not completely sheltered. Holding on to a thick, jammed branch, Maggie lowered herself to lie flat in the water. Floating, she held tight while the current pulled at her arm sockets. Her fingers stiffened, burning against the branch. If she let go, she would be swept away and killed. Impaled or crushed, chewed up, spat out by the hydroplant’s gates.
She knew how her skin would feel after this, immaculate, tightened. She hung her face into the water. Exhilaration made her breath short. Not only fear, but a near faint of delight. The muscles of her ribs clenched, cold. The crease under her buttocks tingled, the backs of her legs ached with joy. Carefully, one hand at a time, she moved her grip onto a lower branch where she could straighten her arms, let her whole head go under. She raised her face, gasped, and dropped it into the water, kept it down, opening her eyes to the opaque water, flat as paint. Slowly, dimly, rocks appeared, like giant eggs a foot below. The current blurred everything. The palpitation of her own body roared in her ears, indistinguishable from the river, river, river.
The water hammered at the seam of her skull and rippled bubbling down her skin.
She pulled herself against the current and, hand over hand, got out, a tree frog climbing, wet and mostly naked, up the driftwood branches.
The desert canyon walls were hot, white. Across the river was a cliff, like a step two hundred yards from shore, made entirely of compacted oyster shells. The air was still, dry, vaguely misty, and the sky unclear, a pearly gray-blue. High above the front of this cliff, on an updraft, a hawk soared in stillness. The dry sand smelled of lime peels; her soles fried; she had to run from water to shade and back again. She felt ten years old, alone; for this part of the day she had lost her skin. She was nothing but eyes.
Hours in the river, by the river. Drinking the water, lying in the pee-warm margin. Sitting in the shade. All day in the river, the water brown, her underwear crotch growing heavy with sand the color of lead. This was Peru. It was also nowhere. She gathered colored rocks into a pile, found some animal’s shoulder bone. Watched the old birds soaring. Felt her face burn. One day she hoped to find her own ruin or her own piece of ancient pottery, even a gleaming golden grain amidst the sand, but today she was too young for that.
How long had she been there when Vicente came, wavering out of heat and light, toward her? She felt the interruption, looked up, and there he was, a black spider silhouetted against the glittering air above her. He stood on the same bank, fifty yards uphill, on the wrong trail.
“Hola,” he said, swooping down to sit beside her. She hunched away from him like the child she was. His voice quietly roared her name, “Maggie!” No one else pronounced her name like this, tentative and resonant, like a bell never struck before.
Vicente, dark Vicente. She stared at the web of his thumb, the line where brown outer skin met pink inner skin. “Hola,” she finally said.
He told her she was stupid to swim alone; she could easily drown. “You try,” she told him, and showed him where to hold on.
“I know a better place,” he said. He led her under the bushes, where the stream ran out from under the waterfall, still and cool. In the shade of the cliff they clambered up slippery spray-wet rocks to where a column of icy water fell and fell and fell through a cylinder of wet black stone. The air in here was wintry, damp. He stripped off his clothes and stepped under the waterfall shouting. She watched him closely, the water an exploding star above his head, sluicing down his burnished chest and dripping through the black nest of pubic hair, off the tip of his penis. His eyes were squinting shut. Next it was her turn. The water shattered her. It was unbearable, cold, absolute zero, the opposite of all the experiences she’d had since coming to Piedras, since leaving Larry, since learning she must learn to be alone. It was powerful enough to erase everything and bring her back to innocence.
Nearby the sand was warm and dry and soft. Where no one could see, they lay down together, panting. The bull’s blood bird chirped invisibly.
Maggie felt as if she had already kissed Vicente, under the waterfall and many times before that. Nights, unknowing, ever since her sexy dream in Cajamarca. Of course she had been leading herself toward this since the first time she’d talked to Fortunata, luring him to her. Why had she not felt the convergence as inevitable before yesterday? The smell of his mouth had been familiar from her adolescence.
He’d dressed again for warmth. Now she unbuttoned his shirt, one by one. His chest was heaving as if he were waiting for her to stab him. There were drops on his neck, which she dried with her tongue. He placed his shirt under her hips. He put one warm palm under her black bra and pressed her nipple between two fingers. Teasingly, with the forefinger of his other hand, he questioned the band of her panties. She nodded. Her fingers were in his mouth, and his brown throat tasted like water on her tongue, as his fingers went inside her. She couldn’t wait for him to get inside more truly. “Desire for union,” Vicente explained, pressing back as she pressed against him. She laughed at his earnestness.
When they had finished, they looked at each other and began again. My fault, said Maggie to herself, with Vicente inside her again. She couldn’t imagine wanting anything more just then, no matter what the cost. Or even because of the cost.
Afterward, Maggie ran her hand over his thick, short hair. It felt just as she’d imagined, peltlike. She gazed into his face, which could never again return to being unfamiliar, then she lay beside him, and they stared up at the white sky together without saying anything. After a while he kissed her hair, saying he wanted to keep them safe by arriving separately in Piedras. “You’re tired,” he said. “Don’t get back in the water by yourself.”
…
In the water again, she held her peeled branch. Cold roar in her ears, goose bumps on her skin. One last dip, she thought, chilled. To cleanse myself. To erase what I have done.
She decided to try floating head-down, to let her hair swing into the current and the water wash between her legs. The branch was smooth and low. It was troublesome to hook her knees properly over one branch, shins under another, but at last she did it, safely. Her hair turned to seaweed and got longer. Her skin sloughed off, dissolving into the river.
Hands gripped her knees. They were hard hands, strong. She gasped and swallowed water. Someone to kill me, she thought, trying to lift her neck, open her eyes to see who. Vicente. Vicente! His face hung close. “Wait!” he said, but she’d already kicked him with her knee. As her eyes and mouth rose from the water again she saw him lurching forward, holding his nose with one hand full of a gob of blackish blood. His other hand still reached for her. Sorry, she cried, swallowing water because her head was under. Her two knees slid off the branch, and with a long scrape down her thigh the current took hold of her and pulled her down. She tried to push her feet toward the bottom, but could not find a thing below the surface except the rush of water and more water, going up her nose, into her mouth. Her eyes saw one flat plane, so she closed them.
Swept out past the edge of the big boulder, she entered the main current and was rolled onto her back. Gasping, her face came out in one long scream toward the sky. What an idiot I am, she thought. I’m going to die, I’ve killed myself. Her head went under and her eyes opened in the stinging, foamy yellow water. She was spun over and over. Coughing, flailing both feet, arching her back and hooking her free arm overhead, she scraped her forearm on something sharp. Grabbing it, she felt it yielding, sinking as she tried to buoy herself. It was a dead tree, green or waterlogged, floating in the current as fast as she was. Now it crashed against her shoulders, knocked and pushed her, crowding from behind, trying to grab her in its sharp stabbing twigs and push her under. She lost all hope as she and the tree were entangled, arm in arms. They bashed quickly over a big stone, which freed her from the dead and clutching branches.
