When Mountains Walked, page 33
She, Althea said. Maybe.
She. He. Be brave. And remember, we are in public here. There are others in the line behind you, waiting to confess.
…
A Hindu demoness to whom water looked like fire and fire like water—to whom evil presented itself as right and generous. A being with four fangs and naked breasts, suckling a healthy girl child, born with astonishing amounts of black hair.
“My great-grandmother was a full-blood Cherokee,” Johnny Baines decided aloud. “Once you have it in you, you never know when it might pop out.”
21
MAGGIE’S SOUL had been haunted by deficits, shadows, and unknown things far more than by the facts that everyone knew and accepted. Secrets and absences could control a person’s life. They’d pulled her here, to Piedras. She’d believed that when the secrets got explained, the hole in her soul would be filled in. And so, without quite acknowledging it, over the past few months she’d forged a chain of events and adopted it as her own history. Nights when she couldn’t sleep, or during hours spent idly staring at the river, faint memories had fit into uncomfortable suspicions. Eventually her speculations had begun to pull her forward like the river, into a vivid trance of moving pictures and experiences. She knew what Althea had thought and felt, what Althea had done and chosen. Deciding upon, or learning, her grandmother’s story had seemed like walking down paths inside herself, first this one and then that one, finding logic at each turning. Her evidence was scanty, pieced together, still leaving room for the interpretation Julia would have given: Althea was a perverse fabricator, teasing, or hiding something. Still, the logic by which Julia was Brother Jesunanda’s daughter had come to seem inevitable. The idea resonated, filled a gap. Julia’s tall, stalking posture often reminded people of women who carried water jars. Oddly, though, the corollary—that if Julia was an Indian’s child, then Maggie was an Indian’s grandchild—felt unimportant, except as a logical consequence of that chain of brain-racking she could now abandon. Now that she’d completed it, she hardly cared whether her story was strictly true.
She’d come home; she knew it. Whether by accident or fate, or as the result of her puny thinking and worrying and analyzing and deciding, Piedras was inside her, full of magic, the canyon’s sides her bones. Here, each day’s noon could last for hours. She would have expected to relax now, to sit with other people, half tipsy and replete, in the shade of the mango trees, forever. Of course, she should have known better. As soon as she’d told herself Althea’s story, the river had dragged her off, into deeper gaps and holes, whirlpools to pull her under. At the bottom she’d met a wet and dripping man. Maggie’s weirdest notion, which she would never have admitted to anyone, was that Vicente had been sent to her as a kind of emissary, proving the truth of what she had discovered. To harbor such convictions gave her dread. It wasn’t rational. It had to do with the way she felt in his presence.
That day she’d almost drowned, he’d found her again on the other side. He’d crossed the bridge, come running. Her clothes were in his hand, hanging there like an excuse. He’d tried to embrace her, putting both arms around her from the front. She’d pushed him away. “You almost killed me,” she’d said. “No, no,” he said. “No.” They’d stared at each other, wet, both shaking, shaking with cold. Then ear to ear, and crotch to crotch, their bodies had locked onto one another. She’d let herself feel protected in his arms, though he had not saved her. She’d thought about where his soul had formed, in the underworld where Atahualpa waited for deliverance, where her uncle Christopher lived, and her grandfather Johnny, and Domingo the lost raftsman. Her own soul had come back from there, from the black tunnel where the river had tried to take her. Now she was reborn, alive, raw, on the surface of the world, with Vicente saying he was glad.
He’d asked if she’d be happy, no matter what happened now. “Yes,” she said quickly, to cover a no that was roaring up inside her, louder than the water, but no was the answer to a completely different question.
For if she let Vicente reach her (and she seemed to have little choice in the matter, since most of what he said and did seemed to reach her automatically), the danger and requirement was losing Carson. She could foresee where the river wanted to drag her next. Vicente would give her a child. Perhaps he had already, even indirectly, by throwing her off balance, unprotected, into Carson’s arms.
Where she must stay, because of the poison in the water, because of the crisis in the valley, because of the vows she’d made.
…
It helped that Vicente did not show up at the clinic for three days. Plenty of patients came, five or six a day. Carson muttered that they hardly needed an unreliable Peruvian assistant. Typical! Vicente had just been paid; he must be off squandering, drinking, visiting the city; he’d be back when the money ran out. Maggie tried to adapt Carson’s mean interpretations to her own lover’s feelings, abandonment, humiliation—but she couldn’t bring herself to see Vicente as a typical macho, now boasting of his exploit in some Cajamarca bar. She did lecture herself that if Vicente meant to convey that he regretted and denied what they had done together, it was only fair and she should take it calmly, since it was the same message she’d been planning to give to him.
Self-lecturing didn’t work. She was dying to see Vicente and couldn’t bear his absence. The best she could do was to keep burying her fingernails in the wooden frame of the clinic’s front door, to stop herself from flying out to search for him, falling on the ground at his feet, begging for a crumb, an explanation.
She forced herself to make love with Carson, hoping that the motions of their bodies would erase this chaos of unendurable emotions, dissipate the implacable chill that had begun to rise inside her, turning her away from him. Again, she left out her diaphragm—to do away with a barrier, to tempt fate to bind them irrevocably together. Meeting her husband’s eyes, she silently begged him to notice how she was feeling, as if she were stuck in the small end of a telescope. If he’d only notice, and ask her if anything was wrong, she could have answered no. But Carson didn’t.
I can’t let this happen, she thought. It’s up to me to save us. She lay awake half the night wondering, planning what to say. It was ethical not to mention Vicente, as long as he was only a catalyst for deepening her bond with Carson. She could no longer hold back, though; there was no time. She could already be pregnant. Madly, she liked the idea.
“What if I wanted a baby?” she asked Carson at breakfast.
“Is that a real question? ‘What if?’”
“Yeah. What if?” His sperm was leaking out of her, onto the chair. It would serve you right, she thought, if some of it has swum the other way.
“Well, I don’t know! Funny way to put it, don’t you think?”
“What if I was really asking?”
Carson looked at her, grimacing. “Mm. Then I guess it would be a problem. We can talk about it if you want, but you know how I feel about it, right?”
Gulping, she said, “Tell me again?”
“That it would be irresponsible of me to bring a person into the world whose existence I don’t believe in. I don’t think it would be good for that person. You understand.”
“I do.” Maggie considered a possible child in her belly. Don’t listen to him, she told it.
“So if you wanted a child, as you say, I wouldn’t know what I could do for you. When we got married, you agreed you didn’t want kids.”
“I know.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
She shook her head. Carson shrugged. “Sorry,” he said, and touched her leg briefly before going back to eating his eggs. She watched him finish. “I don’t know what I can do,” he said, getting up with his plate. He stood over her. “All right?”
“Yeah, well, I guess,” she said. Why had she bothered? This was the conversation she’d expected to have. But why couldn’t Carson examine himself for a change? He seemed to think his principles were made of something better than mere human feelings. “Sorry,” she muttered. “It kind of occurred to me.” No, that was a retraction. “Strongly! I’ve felt it since the third day we were here. Otherwise I wouldn’t bring it up.” She fumed on in thought: Can’t you see I’m trying to save us? This isn’t just about a baby. I’m begging you, but you can’t see that, and that’s a worse problema.
“Right, okay.” Carson stood waiting to be dismissed. She turned to finish her breakfast, wishing he’d go away on his own. “What’s eating you?” he said, not having left. ”Why do you have to bring this up right now? Your timing sucks, I can tell you.”
“I know how it sounds,” she was able to say, “but what if I can’t help it? Asking a question doesn’t mean I need to have a baby right this second!” He was right about her timing. If she was already pregnant, she’d just given him reason to think she’d tricked him into it. What if he said yes? What if he said yes, and she was pregnant, and then the baby turned out to be Vicente’s? This was not an entertaining irony to be stuck in. For the first time, she regretted adopting Althea’s precedent so wholeheartedly.
She needn’t have worried about Carson’s ever agreeing. “Jeez,” he said. “You’re so unhappy and pissed off. Are you getting enough sleep? I’m sorry, dear, I know you’re under stress. We all are. Things are kind of stressful around here right now.”
She jerked her shoulder away from his touch. “Try considering that what’s bothering me might actually be the thing I say is bothering me!” She glared at him until he shrugged and went away. Then she put her head down on the table and cried, too disgusted with herself, and him, even to wish he’d notice.
That day one of the new mothers came in, wondering if a second child, a twin, was stuck inside her. Placing her hand under his on Doña Justita’s soft yellow belly, Carson asked Maggie to palpate. Hernia or tumor? It didn’t move. “The second,” Maggie whispered. Carson’s lips were pale and tight as he wrote out a chit, telling the woman she must give this to the health officer in Cajamarca as soon as possible, an authorization for x-rays and treatments, paid for by the government. Doña Justita looked at it askance and hid it in her bosom. Would she go? If she did, would she get any kind of help?
So this was the enemy, and this was how it hid itself, and showed itself. I’d do anything for you, Doña Justita, Maggie thought, ashamed, for there was nothing. Surreptitiously, she pressed her own belly, finding nothing there either.
When Vicente came in the next morning, Maggie barely recognized him, back in his disguise as an unrelated person. As he explained how his neighbor in El Mirador had begged for help with an overripe tomato harvest, Maggie traced the faint bruises under both his eyes, knowing they weren’t from sleeplessness or a hangover, as Carson was joking. “You must be kidding, Vicente. Tell me how you got those.” His arms had given way as he was trying to pitch a full tomato crate up onto the truck, Vicente lied. Maggie could barely breathe, recalling how she’d given the shiners to him herself. He’d probably waited for them to fade a bit before returning to work.
After that, all he had to do was ask how Maggie felt after nearly drowning. He’d heard the story yesterday. Was it true? Was she all right? “I think I’ll never be the same,” she said, hearing her own voice falter, Carson behind her saying, exasperatedly, “Ffft!”
She waited several minutes and then, holding all her dignity, walked outside and hid in Carson’s outhouse. Sitting on the toilet’s closed lid, she cried for everything she’d lost, everything she could not modify in herself. Her feelings were as intractable as mountains; she’d lost all capacity to crush them. When she emerged, Vicente was waiting for her on the path.
“I refuse to make you suffer,” he began.
“It’s not you,” she told him. “I wish we could run away from here.”
“We can’t, Señora. We have this work to do.”
…
Twice each day she waited in the kitchen for the radio message to be repeated. If it was, she’d vowed to obey it and go immediately to Cajamarca. But the summons never came again. Although its absence was a silent accusation, without it she could find no reason, no excuse to leave.
She met Vicente in a deserted herder’s hut far up the canyon’s side. They spent hours together, naked, glorying. These were the golden days of August, when wheat fields clung to the middle folds of the vast, black, bald-topped mountains like square gold sequins. The sky was dry and blue and brilliant, and the air so clear, so sharp and warm and slicing, that it became once and for all self-evident to Maggie that there is no division between sky and air, that the heavens always touch the ground.
She had sufficient time to examine Vicente’s face, every inch of his skin. The slatted muscles of his thighs. His purple nipples. He was perfect, the perfect color, she told him, setting their forearms next to each other. No, she was—white was, he replied. Maggie was outraged. No! But Vicente rejected her perception that her skin was now sunburnt, a shade equivalent to his. At last he admitted that no skin was white, not even hers. Perdón, sorry, he said—then what about a sky just before sunset, during the rains? I’ll call you that. As he spoke, he caressed the hollow where her inner thigh met her body, where the skin was a color that Maggie could not see. In the end they agreed: not enough colors had been invented.
Usually they made love, but sometimes instead they’d lie side by side gazing up at the burning, cloudless sky, one leg thrown over the other’s, while Vicente told stories of the rain forest where he’d once heard the cry of a bird, or Maggie joked about how postmodernism had driven her out of the United States. She even asked him what would happen if they conceived a baby. His mouth came down, a hairsbreadth from her lips. “I want everything with you.” They kissed, for they had nothing left to say.
After spending time with him, Maggie often felt unbalanced by happiness. On her way down the mountain, she’d stop and contemplate the poisoned river, gaze across at the hamlets they’d visited as a medical team before returning home. Nevertheless, Fortunata noticed a change in her demeanor, and hinted around until Maggie paid her a little extra from her own salary to ensure the cook’s discretion.
Meanwhile, she continued to make love with Carson. Although she’d decided that he’d never had any idea what went on inside her, nor any desire to find out, she hadn’t gotten over needing him to trust her and to stay the way he was. Even if she loved Vicente more, could she really survive as a fugitive’s wife? How much did she love Peru?
She’d have found it amazing that she didn’t explode, except that her contradictions and betrayals were eclipsed by the evil that flowed down the valley, and by the urgency of fighting against it. They all three felt it, insidious and massive, blocking out the future just as the canyon walls blocked the sight of the outer world. Each day, they worked together gathering evidence that, indeed, they, like all the other people of the Rosario, were being poisoned, slowly dying. They tried to drink nothing but beer and Coca-Cola, but it was hard to avoid the river water altogether. Sitting around Albita’s store, drinking until late each night, they named themselves as comrades in arms. Sometimes Maggie even imagined Carson already knew everything, and didn’t mind.
Carson and Vicente did the examinations and Maggie kept the books, her neat graphs and columns belying the horror of the mounting evidence. Tumors, rashes, white patches on the skin, babies with palsied, listless limbs. Almost as comic relief, Doña Ema showed up every other day, reporting one small pain after another. She was growing larger. Carson repeated to her each time that the miracle baby was healthy, but clearly Ema was lonely, and also she worried about her husband, who was said to be wandering in the hills, drunk, half out of his mind, uttering threats against her and everyone.
…
“Mañana, when Carson travels to the mine,” Vicente said on Friday, “you should accompany him, Señora. I had the idea to go by myself to visit more of the high villages. I won’t ask to see the sick. I’ll talk to the women, play with their children, and tell them our perspective about sanitation, birth control, and especially water, as we have been doing.”
Maggie despised Carson’s look, bored and superior, as he told Vicente that he was not yet authorized to represent the clinic. “None of us should leave,” she interrupted. “Sunday is Saint John’s Beheading, so tomorrow is the procession, verdad?”
“How did I forget!” Vicente cried. “No one will be anywhere. They will all be here.”
“What about the miners?” Carson asked.
“Many will come,” said Vicente.
“They won’t shut down La Tormentosa, not for this,” Carson predicted.
“Shouldn’t we join the festival? We’re invited,” said Maggie, explaining to Carson about Uncle Zenobio’s relationship with the statue, arguing how good it would be to participate in this community event. Things had been getting so depressing. Personally, though she didn’t say it, she was eager to do whatever was required to get Saint John’s attention. Even if the stories about him were pure superstition, surely it was harmless, worth the gamble to join his festival? Fortunata said dancing was a promesa to which Saint John always responded. Carson argued it was wicked to rely on magic, for it cut you off from real solutions.
But what if there were no solutions? And who could prove the stories wrong? Maggie had always begged the sky for aid when she was desperate. She’d even constructed a rationale for the practice: admitting you were at wits’ end could open you to new possibilities beyond the tendentious, habitual strategies that hadn’t worked or had caused your problems in the first place. She knew, partly from Althea’s story, that the sky didn’t always send help at the time or in the way one wished. Yet she wanted to prove that she was ready for the truth; in any case, she was unwilling to give up the idea of setting invisible forces in motion. Maybe, before the test results came in, everything could be rectified—the lab sheets rendered blank, the water clean and harmless.
