When Mountains Walked, page 32
Remembering advice she’d read or heard, she maneuvered her feet downstream, sticking them out above the water, and was swept with terrifying speed past several large rocks. She was a boat now, her back scraped raw. Below her heels, she could see the next narrow gap between two yellow walls of cliff. The roar of the river got even louder. That was where she would die, where the water leapt down in figure eights between enormous rocks. Again she shrieked, but of course there was no answer except for the noise of the river. She was dead. She would have to forget Vicente, Carson, her mother, everyone. They’d have to forget whoever she had been.
The water went deep here, relatively smooth, though she could feel it swirling hard under her. Her face rode above the rippling waves. She spat. Time returned, grew long.
There was a wider spot ahead, no rocks, and the water became shallower. The roar of the river was high-pitched, almost optimistic. Unthinkingly, she flipped onto her side and belly and pulled for shore so convulsively she might have torn out of her skin.
The opposite bank rose under her, hit her chest. Here was a beach of black mud and smooth, egg-sized cobbles, with bushes growing out of it. The edge was slimy. She lay on her stomach, hyperventilating. The current was delicate here at the edge, a mere ripple in transparent water half an inch deep.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her at first. Eventually she stood up and splashed the black silt off her body, more or less, then walked gingerly across the stones. Standing up was strange, since gravity made her heavy again. Her cold wet feet were too soft for these rocks. How could she have left her shoes behind?
She was the only person on earth, ripped out and cold inside, as if an element of her soul had been removed.
She hobbled far enough onto the wide beach so that she could be sure no arm of water could reach out and grab her. There were long driftwood sticks jammed between the bigger rocks, and a rack of cows’ ribs half embedded in the sand and stones—the animal must have died in a flood. Years ago or last year? I am out of time, Maggie thought, here with Althea’s cow.
Everything was hard and glaring white. Except for the lack of any other living soul, there was no visible evidence that she was not simply relaxing on a beach. She could have been in Costa Rica, Carolina, India, anywhere. She sat down again on a hot rock, printing it with her wet underwear. It nearly steamed. What a fool I am, she thought. Tempting fate was asking to be proved wrong. Now I’ll have to walk back to Piedras, as naked as that retarded girl, La Lula.
She sat catatonically watching the too bright blood braided with water, running down through the short light hairs, lighter than the skin on top of her thigh. Best not to waste all that blood. Who knew when she’d be fed again? She put down her face and licked her thigh. It tasted like salt and rusty bucket.
This was a huge flat sandbar covered with stones and ringed with buzzing bright green thorn bushes. At the downstream end there seemed to be a small creek or river running flat below another stringy waterfall. I lost that boy, she heard her grandmother saying. She had no desire to investigate.
The bull’s blood bird tweeted red in the bush.
As Maggie’s reasoning powers returned, she understood that she could not be very far downstream from the bridge. She hadn’t even reached the second set of cliffs. She was on the Piedras Baja side, the Cajamarca side, the side of civilization. Ha! This stone beach seemed a place where she could easily fry to death before anyone came walking along. Perhaps she should hobble to its southern edge and start looking for a trail into the shrubbery. Trails were everywhere: people went all over with sheep, with goats, with fishing poles, and sometimes, like herself, for other reasons.
She thought she’d seen Vicente falling into the water too. She hoped he was dead, even though it would be her fault. Fortunata had known it—known Maggie had wanted him to find her.
…
Carson returned at ten o’clock that night, banging on the door like a policeman come to arrest her. Maggie had fallen asleep with the shotgun in her bed. She yelled that she was coming, put the safety on, and slid the gun into its place under the bed.
She ran to the door, pulling him in.
“What’s this?” Carson said, pleased. She rubbed against him, refused to let him take a shower. “Get on top of me,” she said, “hurry.”
“Did you miss me or something?” Carson asked. “I’m going to the mine more often!”
In a voice muffled by Carson’s weight, she told how she’d almost died. “The worst was thinking I’d lost you.” I did lose you, she thought, trying to embrace him again.
“Why did you go swimming!” Carson sat up.
“I was only in knee-deep. I slipped.”
He had to inspect her wounds. She showed him the cuts, scrapes, and bruises, which were beginning to be sore. These marks must be Vicente’s thumbs, from when he’d tried to grab her thighs and save her; they were camouflaged amidst many others. Just this once and never again she’d lie, she told herself, so as never again to lie to Carson. “I’m sorry,” she said. He pinned her arms to the bed and kissed her. “Please, oh please,” she said. He smelled sweaty, but not so strong that she couldn’t make up her mind to enjoy it. Camembert and yeast. She asked him to hold her down, so that she could barely move, while he put his penis inside her. Carson was bigger, heavier than Vicente. For almost two years now she had all but forgotten the possibility that he was different from other men, that there could be anyone different. Tonight she had to drive the notion of Vicente out of her head, the sensations of his dense, narrow body writhing on top of her, muscles hard as a snake’s. Luckily, she’d only made love with him twice, or there might have been some clue, some new, strange movement adjusted to that different body.
She concentrated, hard, on Carson, on his strong bony chest, the tuft of hair between his breasts. The hairs around his nipples, growing inward like a passion flower. How could he not know? With Vicente she’d come skittering, like a strong breeze across water, then dropped into some vast dark openness where she could feel him trying to reach her. With Carson, because she was a bit distracted, having lost the right to take what she needed from him, he came before her.
“May I?” she said, looking up at him. It was a life-and-death matter to come—not to be left behind, alone, like a whale suffocating on a beach.
“Sure, honey.”
This orgasm slammed through her like hitting a boulder in the current. La Lula, she thought, I’m La Lula. I’ll come for anyone.
There Carson was: he’d reappeared beside her in three dimensions, pale and moist, as if he’d just been baked for her. She knew he was willing to stay.
He got up to wash but she lay there, his sperm itchy and alive on her thigh. She hadn’t used her diaphragm for either man. That was stupid, she now realized. One would not erase the other. The situation was recrystallizing around all three of them like cyanide in a test tube. Someone could be killed if we aren’t careful, Maggie thought, feeling distantly the shotgun, heavy in its lair beneath her side of the bed. If Carson found out, she couldn’t tell how he’d react, and there didn’t seem any safe way of testing in advance. Do I love him, she wondered.
When she heard him leaving the bathroom, she forced herself not to think about anything except what was in front of her. She stared at his long, pale, dark-haired body until he said to stop it—she looked as though she were looking at the last thing in the world. “Don’t turn off the light,” she said. “I have to tell you what else happened yesterday, while you were gone.” They lay with one finger interlaced, watching the long-legged mosquitoes softly bouncing against the yellow netting and probing its holes with their hairlike proboscises, while Maggie told about the radio announcement. Again she lied, by omission, but she decided it was part of the same, first lie, the lie she’d tell just once, once so that never again.
About the radio, Maggie did agree with Fortunata: Althea must need her. For some reason, she could not voice this fear to Carson. She felt that her tongue was being controlled by someone else, hearing herself explain that the way the radio message had been phrased, it sounded like Liliana was calling in the chips. Liar, liar, boomed voices in her head; these softened when Carson announced that he had an important fact to add, a fact Maggie could not have known, which added support to the Liliana theory. At the mine, Ignacio had turned on Carson, had accused him of getting embroiled with seditious peasants, enemies of the state. He’d threatened to call the dreaded investigative police if Carson persisted in criticizing the mine’s effluent water, which was pure. Furthermore, to seal this line of conjecture, the mine director possessed a radio telephone, a direct line to the police in Cajamarca. It made sense to think that Ignacio had called the police, and that Liliana and Klaus had found out somehow and were worried, trying to warn them.
Yes, Ignacio, whom Carson had liked so well at first, had been vehemently unreceptive. He’d forced Carson to promise never to mention toxic waste again, on pain of being barred from the property of the mine and possibly expelled from Peru. According to Ignacio, all effluents were processed through a Canadian machine. The trout had died years ago, fished out. Infant mortality was fifty percent already. There was malnutrition; pregnant women drank as much alcohol as men. These peasants wanted free money. Innocent Carson had fallen into their hands. The mine had been in operation half a century—did Carson notice Piedras full of grown-up idiots?
Maggie laughed, imagining the mine director’s face when Carson had raised his eyebrows and murmured, “Quizás, don’t you?” They’d been drinking whiskies. After this, Carson had dropped the subject, and a semblance of friendship had returned.
“Sly, sly,” she said, pushing his near nipple down inside its aureole. “What about me, should I go to Boston?”
Carson said to go wherever her heart told her to be. The water test would be ready soon. If she was willing to wait, they could go up together. She licked her finger and blew on it so that his nipple would stand up. “Heart says stay.” Did it? It was going like a jackhammer. She lay her palm flat on Carson’s ribs, felt them moving lightly as he breathed, felt also a faint thudding from inside.
Carson’s chest, where it rose pale and heroic, had the shape of the side of a white tulip. What a good man he was. She knew she must protect him, so he could do what he had come to do. She’d wanted to feel the normal gratitude after sex; she hadn’t bargained on this magnified adoration. Was it love or guilt? Did she love Carson truly, truly? How ever could she tell, now that she’d fractured their relationship? She felt he had forgiven her without knowing what she’d done. He was someone to live up to. He must never find out. Tomorrow she would tell Vicente that what had happened was an accident. She couldn’t leave Piedras before doing that—cutting it off.
Carson was glad she’d decided to stay. He needed her, he didn’t know what he’d do without her, especially now with all this horror going on.
“Maybe the mine director’s right,” Maggie said. “None of this is really happening.”
“Yes it is,” Carson said.
20
ALTHEA REMEMBERED Mongolia as the pink liver between yellow China and the green USSR. It wasn’t hard to fill it with Johnny’s images of barrenness, vodka, and clouds of dust. Nor the roar of mountains falling, a sound she knew herself.
Johnny had come back dirty, changed, like a war veteran, with a layer of unhealthy fat, a beard, and a new tin suitcase full of a smelly long coat and forty pounds of scholarly papers in languages and alphabets he didn’t know how to read. These papers were given to him in Moscow, where he’d spent three weeks on his way back.
He told her he had made one lifelong friend he’d never see again, and that he could now feel the earth’s tensions through the soles of his feet, although not in a “rigorously quantifiable” way. He had intuitions, he said.
Althea was changed too, but Johnny hadn’t noticed and she hadn’t talked about it.
Turning from the window, she saw the corners of her room filling up with liquid darkness. On the still-lit wall behind her was a maroon scarecrow shadow moving its skinny arms. She could make it dance, since it was she. A mad puppet tangling herself in the shadow of the folding wooden screen she’d bought after the procession. Sandalwood lacework: vines, birds, flowers, and buxom wasp-waisted Hindu nymphs stroking meek deers’ necks, the necks interlaced, forming hearts. It took up half the living room, but Johnny had not noticed it. She would not tell him, then, how she’d commissioned it from a young artist, a tubercular man with a wife and six children, one blind eye, and the face of a saint.
Before Johnny left, two hundred yards was the distance from home at which she had begun to feel afraid. But to find this artist, she’d left the convent, walked between mud walls, across threshing floors, through shared courtyards where women and children stared at her and then ran into their lightless hovels. Ever since the night of the procession, she felt she had a right to enter any temple, any sanctum.
She was accustomed to not telling Johnny things. His absence always ended at the moment of his arrival, so the events and adjustments that had absorbed her while he was gone disappeared suddenly, as if they hadn’t come to pass. There was never enough time before he went away again to tell Johnny everything that happened while he’d been gone the time before. He was not interested in the mundane things that fascinated Althea: piebald and skewbald rats, the cobra behind the water jar, or the milk seller’s brass bucket. She had always believed that she could not fully rejoice in those or any other of the details of life unless shared with another human being whom she could imagine interested. So she seduced her friends, in letters, working hard not to bore or frighten them.
Now she had discovered her capacity to swallow words altogether. It took the same force as for the earth to twitch the Megha road aside from its destination, or to lift a flat stream into waterfalls. She would never in her life tell anyone about the procession, or Brother Jesunanda.
One more month and she would know beyond a doubt.
…
Inside the lit dining room, Mother Superior’s habit fell in unimpeded folds, her ramrod spine refusing the chair’s support. Brother Jesunanda leaned toward her, facing Althea without seeing her, following Mother’s conversation with interest and respect. Across from Brother, two empty chairs waited for Johnny and Althea to sit down.
“Tonight we have a ready-made topic,” Brother Jesunanda said in his fluting English. “Mr. Baines must tell us of the earthquake.”
Johnny began from vastly far away, repeating what he’d told Althea on their first date back in Texas, a lecture she’d found seductive. Geologic time, stones’ time, both speeded up and infinitesimally slow. Continents bulged like margarine, sea bottom rose into the sky, becoming the storehouse of ice. Continental drift. Stating the obvious, how Africa’s hunched back should nestle against Latin America’s breast and knees like lovers, or a mother sleeping with her sick child. In seventy thousand million years, they’d see India shoved under Russia, Italy under Europe. San Francisco, an icy isle where puffins bred.
Kangra 1905, Assam 1897, the Allah Bund. There was suddenness, too, in geology. Some earthquakes destroyed everything human; those were what Johnny studied. Earthquakes killed twenty thousand people at a time, raised and lowered the foothills five, ten, twenty feet. He’d measured all of India’s quakes. He’d studied the faults of South America. Chile. Peru, where the mountain ate his and Althea’s child.
“To us it’s a catastrophe when the earth gapes open and what we stand on turns to jelly, but to the geologic god—if you will, Sister, Brother—and to even vaster gods whose time is to geology’s as geology’s is to ours—these are only foldings and unfoldings. Ocean bottom turns to a desert and the deserts are replaced by rivers are replaced by coral seas. Forms of life appear and disappear. Do the mountains suffer? No.”
Johnny lifted his glass of wine and drank, and Althea knew he had forgiven the earth.
Brother Jesunanda toasted Johnny’s god, but he gave Althea nothing.
The next Sunday she told Johnny she had gotten into the habit of confession. In the chapel she stood in line behind a hundred skinny women in red saris, waiting for Brother Jesunanda. They carried baskets of flowers and food which they’d leave outside the confession box.
Why did I not see that nothing has changed for him, she thought. These must be the infertile wives, and one unfaithful one.
She knelt at the curtain. British fabric, ugly, nubbled. Father^ she said.
Yes? His voice.
Good, since it would not be a confession for any other priest, she thought wryly.
I will leave my husband for you, she said.
But I will not leave my temple for you, he said.
But it’s your child, I am sure of it.
She thought she heard him gasp. Are you sure? How do you know? How do you know it is mine? Did you not follow my advice?
Of course I did, Althea said, I slept with my husband right away. Only to buy time, so I could think. With you I knew I had conceived, the very next morning. It was like a miracle. I felt so happy. It’s you I love. I have come back to life. My husband hardly knows me, he never knew me, he doesn’t care to know me. But you . . .
Silence.
I’ll know when it is born whose child it is. And then—
Every child is God’s child, Brother Jesunanda said. I am . . . sorry, but I cannot intervene. What would I do in the United States? I’d die. You cannot make me into your creature, memsahib. Your servant. I have served you as I could already.
How can you think I’d want you to be my creature. I thought we would live here, together.
I have already told you I cannot be anything but a priest in India. And you would not survive here, with a child, alone. Where would you get money? India will eat you alive. Then there is nothing between us. Take the child, he is good for you. My gift.
