When Mountains Walked, page 38
Tomorrow would be simple, anyway. Hair sample, plane reservation, farewells. She’d regret withdrawing her offer to help Julia deal with Althea’s possessions. Depending on how things worked out, maybe she could return in a few weeks.
Lester said, “Why don’t you tell us a little about her, then, in your own words, Julia?”
Maggie slid down to lean her head on the back of the sofa, stretch out her legs, and gaze for what might be the last time at Althea’s dado molding. She was inclined to sit in a new way, with her womb protruding. I should be the one to speak, she thought, haul out the ruby ring, make sure Althea’s priest is not forgotten.
Julia sighed. “I’m so upset. I don’t know where I’d start.”
Maggie said to the ceiling, “You know something? That afternoon when I was with her, just before she died, Mom? Grandma said she’d been too hard on you. She loved you, but she wished she’d been able to show you better.” She dropped her chin in order to stare at Julia’s face, her thin, straight nose and dark eyes, features she’d seen in some issue of National Geographic, features that, slightly blurred, gazed back at Maggie from every mirror.
Julia replied, with a lively resentment, “Fortunately, your grandfather made up for her neglect. Daddy gave me all the love I ever needed.”
“Even though he so often went away,” Lester mused, swirling the red wine in his glass. “Althea often spoke to me about how anguishing her husband’s absence was. Yet he made his daughter feel beloved. That’s wonderful, Julia.”
“Grandma took you places, didn’t she, Mom?” said Sonia. “When Grandpa went away?”
Yes, when Johnny went away, Althea had taken Julia on walks, even on trains, away for days at a time. Julia had found some of the trips quite frightening. They’d gone to the Juggernaut temple, seen people burning by the Ganges.
Althea would have met her lover on those outings, Maggie thought. Not would have, did. She did, I did, we both did. Julia had been introduced to Brother Jesunanda, and she’d hated him all the more because Johnny Baines had not been there.
Julia was recanting. “I’m sorry, Maggie, I should have acknowledged what you just said. It was very important. It’s been hard to be Althea’s daughter, as you all may know. Keep in mind how the death of my older brother rendered her unbalanced. Why else do you think Johnny interned her in a convent? I believe she never recovered. I must always have reminded her of losing her first child. She loved me, of course, but I knew from very early on that for some reason I made her upset. When she looked at me she’d get tears in her eyes. Sometimes she’d burst out crying. Can you imagine? I’ve had to work to understand her, and forgive. We all lose things in life.” Julia’s own eyes filled with tears, and she wailed a bit. “Oh, God!”
Maggie decided not to bring up Brother Jesunanda after all, not now. Some other year, she’d do it, at some other gathering by firelight, when everyone was together and Maggie was explaining how she’d come to conceive this son, this daughter. She could feel the child’s small, warm, surprisingly heavy body leaning against her thigh. This time it was a girl, dressed in long wool stockings, a jumper and beret. Perhaps she had no father, and Maggie had raised her all alone. How long would it take the family to accept this? Ten years, four, eight? Lately, Maggie had grown accustomed to predicting conversations, good and bad. Looking at her father’s face, her mother’s, even her sister Sonia’s, she saw how their expressions would alter when she insisted on Althea’s story, and knew it was better not to start discussing her current life with them. “Don’t have this child,” they’d say. Yes, another reason to get out of here as soon as possible.
24
MAGGIE PEERED at the poster, wondering when Carson had taken Lady Maggy’s picture. Who else in Piedras owned a camera? The baby’s pinched, bleary face had been blown up and plastered all over Cajamarca, starting on the airport road, where it had surely been intended to greet the motorcade of mine vice presidents as they arrived from Canada. Asesinos! the caption screamed over and over, around the rim of the plaza fountain, beside the door of the fancy white hotel, all down the nunnery’s long wall. Killers! Maggie had seen the same tiny face, on the front page of the Lima paper, floating here and there above a crowd of demonstrators. She hadn’t recognized it until now. Poor little hero, didn’t want to be, she thought, touching the gray and grainy, crinkled cheek, which had returned to the same cement color as on the day she’d first met Lady Maggy, the day Lady Maggy had had pneumonia, the day the past had begun to roar, unstoppably, into the future.
Maggie hoped that Luz Maria was burning now with some kind of avenging, redemptive fire. Where was Luz? Where was Vicente, where was anyone? Alone in the deserted plaza, Maggie could feel their presences emanating from all of these poster-plastered walls. Vicente. Carson. Fortunata. Luz. Were they in danger? The Lima paper hadn’t mentioned injuries or deaths, nor the names of anyone she knew, nor any relevant locations other than the province of Tocuyo, which contained the lake and the mine but was to Maggie an unfamiliar geographic designation.
By now it was likely that Calvin had heard of the Peruvian mine strike, so she was glad to be able to hope that his Wall Street Journal hadn’t printed a map, or anything else he and Julia could associate with Maggie. This morning, the strike had gone nationwide. All mines in Cerro de Pasco, La Oroya, Huancavelica, and Huancayo had declared a four-day stoppage. The miners had been joined by truckers, university students, ecological groups, and two or three political parties. The list of complaints was long against the government’s privatizations and its shortsighted, pro-foreign, anti-national, slavish, uncontrolled, corrupt extractive policies. So far the president was maintaining his usual stance of dictatorial imperturbability and had issued no statement. The problem had not attained significance; he was used to being criticized; he’d increase police visibility for a while as a reminder of what could be expected if his mood was further challenged.
It was dusk in Cajamarca, a clear lavender sky with bats flitting around the cathedral. On the ground only a few dogs trotted about their business in a city so still, it gave Maggie the sensation that her ears were plugged or her head was underwater. An unmanned tank squatted at the plaza’s higher end, its cannon pointing straight into the topiary garden, threatening to blast the features off the cedar Inca’s face. Looking into the black O of the cannon’s mouth, Maggie wondered whether there would be a bus tomorrow morning down to the canyon.
She’d taken one day too long to return, hopping the first available flights down the west coast of Mexico and Costa Rica, and catching the last seat on today’s eight-passenger prop, Lima to Cajamarca. Half the passengers had worn military uniforms. She’d sat across the foot-wide aisle from the scariest one, a pudgy man in tiger camouflage and sunglasses, a torturer or an anti-terrorism expert for sure. Yet he’d insisted on talking in English to Maggie, telling all about his years at Indiana University. She’d felt obliged to answer, second-guessing at normality while wondering whether he was applying imperceptible interrogation techniques to her. His name was Juan Carlos Yanez. He had a wife and three kids in Lima. Maggie asked their ages, repulsed by the temptation to announce her own impending motherhood. He said nothing of the mine strike until she felt compelled to broach the subject, asking in her most girlish manner whether it was the reason for his trip. He’d replied apologetically, “This is the disorder of my country.”
Yesterday, predictably, the Canadian vice presidents had not come. Two hours late, they’d faxed an apology and a revised arrival date, but the waiting crowd of one hundred fifty people had not been satisfied. They’d burned an effigy of Scrooge McDuck in the airport parking lot and smashed a dozen windshields. Today Cajamarca’s normally barren airport lobby was full of soldiers in black bulletproof vests, and two bomb-squad armored cars sat splayed in the vacant parking lot. Juan Carlos Yanez remarked that the Canadian delegation had decided not to come at all, citing personal safety as the reason.
Her heart raced, walking out to the taxi line without the slightest trouble, shaking hands with the torturer, and wishing each other good luck. Juan Carlos Yanez hadn’t batted an eye when she’d told him she was a health worker on vacation, meeting her husband in the historic city of Cajamarca. Now he wished her a pleasant trip. “This is nothing,” he reassured her. “It will—how do you say—blow out? blow away? I forgot. Which is the opposite of blowing up?”
“Blow over?”
“Yes, over, blow over! This will blow over in a couple of days,” he promised. “Enjoy. Until we meet again.”
Enjoy? She’d always hated that expression. She was glad he didn’t offer to share a cab to town.
She’d had herself dropped off in the plaza, taking a two-block detour when she saw the bottom of the Wechslers’ street was also stuffed with military vehicles, all parked facing downhill at the plaza, leaving no room to squeeze between the stone foundations and armor plate. Tanks, paddy wagons, canvas-covered personnel trucks. The police station was on the next, uphill corner. On previous visits she’d enjoyed the frisson of walking past it, smiling at the impassive twenty-year-old guards inside their boxes and wondering why the wall of flabby, bullet-ripped sandbags had never been removed. She’d played a mental game with the ancient Black Maria that stood perpetually at the door, transforming it into a sinister barouche, ready to whisk the vampire police chief to his next dark opera. Scarred with bullets and deep gouges, its windows dull with age and disaster under heavy, kinked steel mesh, the Black Maria was no longer a monument, a message, a symbol, a reminder. It was ready for action, ready to eat someone.
…
She pressed the Wechslers’ buzzer and stood waiting to hear Clorinda’s flip-flops on cement. Instead there came a clopping of hard heels, and an unfamiliar pair of black eyes peered out through the peephole of the gate. Maggie rapidly explained that she was a friend. “Soy amiga de los Senores, Klaus y Liliana Wechsler.” Wordlessly, the peephole closed and the heels again receded.
“Liliana!” Maggie yelled, thinking she heard her friend’s intonations from the far end of the driveway.
“Shh, shh,” Liliana said, opening the screeching gate. “Come inside.”
They walked to the back patio, where Klaus sat at his computer, as usual. “Ay yay yay,” he said when he saw Maggie. No, her parents hadn’t called, not yet.
…
She knew how lucky it was to have Klaus Wechsler’s friendship. Two weeks ago, when Julia had called for Maggie to fly north, he’d decided to go down with Liliana and give Maggie and Carson a piece of his mind. He’d been watching them head for trouble long enough.
Give up the water project, was Klaus’s heartfelt advice. It was futile, dangerous. Failing that, he’d passionately insisted that Carson, Maggie, and Vicente remain in the background, if not for their own safety, then to avoid political taints and accusations that would undermine their cause. This had been an artful argument, convincing not only Vicente and Carson, but even Don Sixto and other hard-core committee members.
Klaus had some odd power to predict the future, Maggie thought. He was the only reason why she’d been able to circulate through Cajamarca freely, why Carson and Vicente had not been immediately arrested after the march at La Tormentosa. Following Klaus’s advice, the demonstration had been led by Don Sixto, Marco Antonio, and Luz Maria. They were the water campaign’s local organizers, known to be working with the miners’ union. Klaus’s thinking had been confirmed when Ignacio Garcia had stepped out of his office to sneer at the assembled crowd, “Where is your leader, that Communist gringo doctor?” Don Sixto’s answering indigenous roar had driven Carson out of Ignacio’s head, temporarily at least. Carson’s name had never reached the authorities, but arrest warrants had been issued for Marco Antonio and a couple of union members. Five miners were in jail, including one who’d been caught stealing dynamite. They weren’t in a normal jail, but an informal and illegal pokey behind the mine’s army barracks. Their legs were in irons, Klaus said. He’d found a lawyer for them, but it was difficult to get a person out of jail who wasn’t officially in. No charges had been filed, and the mine had powerful friends. “The more you learn about how things work here, the more you want to weep,” Klaus said. He was considering moving back to Germany, at last giving in to Liliana’s dearest dream.
An old Kreuzberg radical, Klaus had worked with Vicente and the Black Rainbow for years, coordinating their airstrip and advising them in dealings with the Shining Path, the Peruvian army, and the Colombians. When the new president was elected, Klaus had advised Vicente to write his recanting letter. Klaus himself had never been known as a rebel sympathizer, so when he’d offered to keep tabs on campesino organizations, the new government had embraced him eagerly. He’d even been able to keep a small and sanctioned finger in the cocaine business.
One faction of ex-Black Rainbows still considered Klaus a friend, and fed him information about other groups and factions. Earlier this year, they’d hatched a new project together, Klaus serving as banker for periodic deposits of gold dust Vicente was collecting from his remaining loyalists. The Rainbow intended to use the gold as capital for small loans. Klaus had successfully limited himself to an advisory role up to the day Vicente came to Cajamarca with a sack of unrefined gold dust, begging Klaus to store it. It was leading to envy and infighting among the Rainbows, like in the bad old days of the cocaine business. “He came too late,” Klaus said. “Some guy got killed.”
“Nasir!” Maggie cried, remembering the day Vicente had met her in the plaza; but Klaus didn’t care to hear her piece together the sequence of events. She let him go on. After Nasir’s murder, Klaus had suggested setting up a corporation in whose name the gold could be assayed, refined, sold, and deposited in a bank; but the Rainbow was unable to elect any of its members to act as the gold’s official owners. Vicente was the only one they trusted, but his name couldn’t appear on any paper. Were Vicente suddenly to become rich, suddenly it would become worthwhile for the police to imprison him and confiscate his assets. The Rainbow’s gold would be absorbed into the bricks of some police chief’s swankienda, newly constructed in a fancy Lima neighborhood.
On Maggie’s last visit, just before she’d gone to the United States, Klaus and Liliana had shown her what twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold dust looked like. One inch of sand—black, because the ore was mostly silver—lying on the floor of a terrarium. Liliana had scattered sticks and an empty saucer on it to substantiate the claim that her son’s pet lizard had once lived there.
…
Tonight, Klaus told Maggie he’d driven down the canyon twice since she’d last seen him. Knowing the new government’s thuggish mentality, he’d begged permission to sell off all the hoarded dust and use the money to buy water filters. Gold dust was unlimited, diffusing slowly downstream in the river water. A sluice system could be built, and within a year the Black Rainbow could collect enough money to Doñate a small ceramic filter to each family in the valley. Eventually, Piedras could build its own purifying plant.
Both Carson and Vicente had rejected such weak half-measures. Twenty grand? That was a hundredth of what was needed. Why should the people pay to repair the mine’s callous and murderous negligence? No, the mine must halt its toxic contributions. It must share its profits, too.
Once upon a time, Klaus said, Vicente had been amenable to reason. Under the influence of Maggie’s husband, he’d become a lot more stubborn lately. Carson seemed to think he was personally immune to danger, besides being oblivious to the danger he might bring to others.
“It’s my fault,” Maggie told him. “I brought the Black Rainbow to the clinic.”
Klaus could not agree. He’d recognized Carson’s type the day he’d met him. The Black Rainbow would have come to him eventually. “I have no idea what those two are doing right now,” he said. “Carson didn’t once come up to Cajamarca. Ignacio Garcia, he was at the airport. As soon as he knows his bosses aren’t flying in, he takes off in his truck. Smart. Only he should have run in the other direction.”
“I could have hitched a ride with him,” Maggie joked.
“Garcia is disgusting,” Klaus said. “A little son of his father. His father is General Federico Garcia Mesa. A man you never want to meet.”
“He hates his father, I bet,” said Maggie. Even at a distance, Ignacio had always seemed to her a tortured character, charming, immoral, and self-hating. Sleazeball was Carson’s word.
“You sound like my wife,” Klaus said. “Liliana would find the reason to forgive a snake for biting her.”
During the initial demonstration at the mine, Ignacio had ordered the army platoon to put down their guns. He’d been soothing, conciliatory, offering 100 percent sympathy and support. His bosses would be ready to cooperate, but only if real proof of danger and damage was being offered. Surely the Piedrasinos understood that a single sample of lake water was insufficient, not to say irrelevant, misleading? Cyanide was biodegradable. The lake toxins were most likely the campesinos’ fault, runoff from their farms around its shore: ash from burning off the corn stems, fertilizer, pesticides. Water got purified, anyway, oxygenated as it ran over rocks, downhill. Many samples must be taken, a thorough study begun. Why only the lake—why had the river not been tested before declaring such a crisis? Why had the Piedrasinos not begun by cooperating instead of being so antagonistic? As for the clinic’s data on local health problems, the Canadian company would be happy to run the numbers through their own computers. They had several full-time staff working just on ecology. It was not too late to arouse a spirit of harmony.
Klaus laughed. “We had a hard time, after that speech, to unconvince Don Sixto from setting off a ton of dynamite.”
“I have to get back down there,” Maggie said.
“I don’t advise that.”
“Oh, come on, Klaus. What would you do if you were me?”
“You won’t see me returning. If I were you? I’d leave the country. I might, like I said.”
