When Mountains Walked, page 39
“You should, Klaus. You’re burned out. I’m going, though. To Piedras, I mean.”
“Maybe you’ll have better luck with Carson than I did. Somehow I doubt it.”
“Me too,” Maggie said.
…
“How horrible is everything! I am sure you should not go back,” Liliana said. “I hate that poster. Now you say it was your same baby, that baby that you saved!”
“I am sure I should,” said Maggie. “I just found out I’m pregnant.” She begged Liliana to keep the news to herself, and especially not tell Klaus for a few days. Carson had to be the first man to know. “Look, I bought this water filter. I’ll be safe. I’ll only drink from this.”
What an amazing justification her expectant state provided! Liliana understood the decision immediately, risky as it was. If she told Liliana the whole story, Maggie thought, Liliana would still agree with her. This conjecture gave her so much strength that she decided not to test it.
…
Incongruously, there was no security at the bus station. Perhaps dawn was too early for soldiers. Here, to Maggie’s relief, the ordinary world continued. The same women selling steaming coffee from tin kettles, and cheese bread, and soda pop to travelers; and their same grubby kids playing with the same bottle caps. When the bus got under way, the pale sun slanted flat across from the edge of the altiplano, making the dewy fields look frosted.
Maggie had never felt as determined. If she could have flown out the bus window, leapt off the ledge called the Devil’s Balcony, landed in the river, and swum upstream to the clinic, she’d have done it. Instead, she itched, sweating in her seat while the bus made its jolting progress. Hurry, she silently urged the driver. Downshift, forget the brakes.
I’m taking you to meet your father, she told her child.
…
The clinic’s door was open, Carson’s painted plywood tent sign standing bravely in the road. She and Carson had joked about one possible translation: SANITARY POST, GRATUITOUS ATTENTION. Her husband wasn’t there, however. Only Fortunata answered Maggie’s call. She came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her skirt, and gave Maggie a giant hug. “I knew you were coming. I waited for you. Terrible things are everywhere. Your husband is at Doña Ema’s. He left half an hour ago.”
“Vicente? Have you seen him?”
“Yes, mi amor, Vicente is there also. Together, your two loves. They have a guest, un invitado. Run! They may all leave soon. Go by the river, not the road.”
Doña Ema, too, flung her arms around Maggie, squeezed her, and whispered yes, yes, it was all true. Her evil husband was dead, and the miracle child was still inside her. Because of it, Saint John had saved her life. “He kicks already! Feel.” The fetus’s heels rumbled distantly under Maggie’s palm while Ema explained that her husband was buried in an unmarked grave, reported drowned, God have mercy on him. Ema crossed herself. And Vicente, el Señor Doctor, and the mine director were all together, in the pigs’ house behind her garden. “With my two sons.”
The shed was overgrown with squash vines, half collapsed. Ema led Maggie around behind it, hissed a signal, and then pushed her through a rank, hairy wall of leaves. Inside, it was stifling hot, with an ammoniac smell. Bars and triangles of light came through the cane walls, landing on the faces of six men, all of whom looked like prisoners at first, POWs in a Japanese camp. Maggie discerned Carson, squatting on a river rock. “Hi,” she said to him. “How’s it going?”
“I didn’t want you here,” he warned her.
“I’m here anyway,” she said. Turning to everyone else, she greeted them in Spanish. Only Vicente answered. “Qué tal tu viaje?” How was your trip?
“Good. Well, my abuela died.”
“Pésame,” the men murmured in condolence.
“Klaus told me,” Carson said.
Vicente went on talking to Maggie. “We have a prisoner. I present to you Ignacio Garcia, director of La Tormentosa.”
She bent down to shake Ignacio’s hand, for he was sitting on the ground, his ankle closely chained to a wooden stake. “Glad to meet you. My husband told me about you.”
“Encantado,” Ignacio replied sarcastically. He had a coarse, rather pleasant face. His chin was covered with curly stubble.
Don Sixto sat above him on a stool with Carson’s shotgun across his knees. He grunted for Maggie to leave his line of fire.
“Disculpe,” she apologized, backing into the only place left to sit, against the wall between Boris and Limbert. Shifting aside, Boris said to her politely, “Welcome back, Señora.” He expected her to understand him, why he was here. She nodded and squeezed Boris’s young, hard-muscled arm. Again, she remembered being pregnant.
Settling her hips between the boys’, she stared at Vicente, absorbing him. A thin line of light curved down his cinnamon cheek. His smile was as quick and wry and bright as usual. “We were plani-ficando,” he explained.
“Sigan, go ahead. I don’t want to interrupt.”
“What news have you heard outside?” he asked her.
The intensity of his gaze made her feel faint. How could anyone not notice? “Today a nationwide miners’ strike began,” Maggie intoned, “paralyzing extractions and costing millions of dollars in foreign exchange. Cajamarca is full of tanks and soldiers. Pues, everything is quiet. There was going to be a vigil in the plaza tonight, but now it has been canceled. Three-day curfew for the duration of the strike. What else. Oh, the Canadian delegation won’t come, I heard. The president is ignoring us, so they’ll probably do the same.”
Ignacio groaned.
“Everything is not quiet,” Carson told Maggie. “Not at all. What time did you leave the Wechslers’ this morning?”
“Five. There was nothing on the radio. When did you, um, capture Ignacio?”
“This is his second day with us.” He’d been racing back from the airport. Just above the El Mirador turnoff, Cantinflas had found the road blocked by a row of large stones. Several men emerged from the roadside bushes and invited themselves into the front seat. When they asked Cantinflas to drive back downhill to Piedras, he did not resist. Cantinflas was friendly toward the Rainbow, especially with a pistol at his head.
They hid Ignacio at Doña Ema’s. The people had wanted to shoot him on the spot, as revenge for the killings at La Tormentosa, but Vicente had stopped them.
“What killings? Maggie said. ”The newspaper said there hadn’t been any!”
Two nights ago at the mine, a mass of Rosarinos, mine workers, and their wives and children had assembled in silence on the muddy soccer field, waiting for the Canadian delegation. They carried protest signs, but also wreaths of welcome.
Hours passed. As night began to fall, the news had come: no plane had landed.
Who threw a rock? Was a rock thrown?
One nervous conscript fired into the crowd. Panic among the miners: they leapt forward to throw their children to the ground. The soldiers, fearing attack, opened fire, killing two miners, one ten-year-old boy, and one woman; and wounding six people, including children ages six, ten, and fifteen. Many of the soldiers wept when they saw the bodies left behind on the field. They said they’d tried to aim high, and it must have been true. Otherwise, there could have been ten times as many dead.
“That wasn’t in any news,” Maggie repeated dumbly.
“Are you surprised?” Vicente asked her. “Luz Maria was standing in the front line, but por suerte she is all right.”
“You should have let me drive on,” Ignacio said. “I would have forbidden them to fire.”
“Silencio,” Don Sixto growled.
“He was barely leaving the airport when it happened,” Boris whispered to Maggie.
Again Vicente called on el Señor Doctor to speak his judgment. “Continuamos?”
“Free me!” Ignacio pleaded. “No one cares about me as a hostage.”
Everyone ignored him.
“If they kill Ignacio, they’ll all eventually get killed, I’m telling them,” Carson said to Maggie. “Vicente agrees with me, but we’re kind of a minority. Why don’t you translate?” He predicted that the army would be called out. The air force, even. The murder of a mine official would mean that terrorism had revived. Could a handful of canyon folk and miners stand up against the national armed forces?
The question was whether they should let Ignacio go free, in which case he promised not to prosecute them and to do his best for the water cleanup. In the end, cooperation with the mining company was the only answer. Anyone harboring fantasies that the Piedrasinos might run the mine themselves should recognize the impossibility of this and drop their foolishness right now.
“Mentiras,” lies, Don Sixto declared. “He will do none of that.”
There was always kidnapping, then, Carson went on reasonably. Kidnapping offered leverage and minimized the potential loss of life. They had the candidate right here. There would be no further need for suicidal demonstrations. In English he said to Maggie, “Safest thing for this guy. Out there they want to lynch him.”
“I am trying to explain,” Ignacio pleaded. “They will never ransom me, they told me this. It’s the anti-terrorism policy. Not even a negotiation. Believe me! I should have had this tattooed on my arm!”
“We will kill you, then,” Don Sixto said, shifting the long gun on his knees.
“He’s a general’s son,” Maggie contributed. “How can he be as unimportant as he says?”
Don Sixto nodded, agreeing for once with Maggie.
“You don’t know my father,” Ignacio said. “The world’s hardest man. That policy is his. Because I am his son, he will not make any exception.”
Carson ruminated for a moment. “What if we had two hostages? Him and a North American doctor? I volunteer.” Carson offered himself on the condition that the Rainbows must not kill Ignacio. Killing hostages was a bad idea; besides, Ignacio and Carson had been friends, if only for one evening. In return for his life, the director must swear not to try to escape, and if caught, to testify to his captors’ kindnesses. He was not to be tortured psychologically. His total suffering would be not much greater than anyone else’s.
“Thank you,” Ignacio said. “I swear, on my mother’s grave!”
“Carson keeps his pistol,” Vicente quickly said. “Carson is not really a hostage.”
“Right,” Carson said. “I’ll just make this event more visible, and maybe stop the army from killing all you guys.”
Don Sixto protested. How could they prove they meant business unless they were willing to carry out a threat?
“Kill me, if you really have to do someone in, Sixto,” Carson said. “Of course, I hope you would restrain yourself.” He went on. No one had to be the wiser that the Rainbow’s threats were empty. They’d benefit from the bad reputation of other guerrilla groups, especially Sendero. All the Canadian company had to do was fund a bank account. Klaus Wechsler could confirm the deposit. It wasn’t as if they were asking for assassins to be freed. Their demands were reasonable. Public opinion would be on their side, as long as the hostages were gently treated.
“We must ask for more than money,” Vicente added. “A school. Jobs.”
“They can put money in, take it out the next day,” Don Sixto reasoned. “They can let us rot without an answer. If they hire us to be miners, they will let the socavones fall in on us.”
“Not if all the newspapers have heard about us,” Carson told him. The miners’ union was already faxing Lady Maggy’s face all over the world. Once the kidnapping party had had time to escape, the Rainbow would issue another statement and a list of demands.
Boris spoke up now. The worst was if the army found them. They were so incompetent, so cruel. The army would kill them all, including the hostages.
“If it’s an American,” Vicente said bitterly, “they’ll try to shoot around him.”
“Tal vez,” perhaps, Ignacio said heavily. He recognized the realities described. If he had to stay a captive, he was as eager to run, and keep on running, as anyone. They should leave as soon as possible, but where would they go?
“We are from this zone,” Don Sixto said with finality. “When we want to hide ourselves, not even the devil can find us.”
“Shall we vote?” Vicente said.
The vote was unanimous, Maggie abstaining. The party would leave in one hour, heading first for El Mirador.
“One second,” Carson said. Whether the Canadian company answered their demands in sixty days or not, he asked the Rainbows to promise to let the mine director go at the end of that time. He’d stay on as a substitute himself, depending on what had gone down.
“Too much,” Vicente told him. “We will make that decision in its own time.”
…
Sneaking back along the riverbank, Carson told Maggie his new nickname. The Rainbows called him el Che, because Che Guevara had been a doctor too. With one difference: the real Che had never minded shooting people in the head, and el Che Gringo would rather die himself than permit such actions.
Was he a leader, a martyr, a hostage, the doctor of an expedition? He delighted in this confusion. He complained to Maggie, in jest, that she’d succeeded all too well in her efforts to change his life. “My career has developed into this P.R. stunt. What do you think, now I’m an American hostage! I’ll be famous all over the world.”
“I’m going to be a hostage too,” Maggie said. “You can’t leave me behind.”
As Carson’s mouth was opening, before he could form an answer, she quickly shouted, “I mean it. I’ll turn you all in!”
“You’re strong. I guess I don’t see why not.” Carson had always trusted her. “There could be some advantages. Let’s see what Vicente says.”
They shoved raincoats into their backpacks, grabbed all the dry noodles from the kitchen. Fortunata wept when they told her of their plans. “You will all die,” she told Maggie.
“Pray for me,” Maggie said.
Carson got the pistol out. “I want one too. The shotgun,” Maggie said, dancing on her toes behind him. Carson understood her feelings, but reminded her that he’d loaned his shotgun to Don Sixto. It was going to be impossible to get it back, since Don Sixto was handing down his ancient bolt-action rifle to Boris. “You don’t need the weight,” Carson said. “When these guys run, we’ll both be lucky to keep up. Anyway, you’ve never practiced. You’ll have to trust in me. Are you ready to die with me, darling?”
“No,” Maggie told him rudely. Then, “I’m sorry. I can’t say yes to that question. I’m no martyr. I wasn’t brought up Catholic like you.”
“You’re right,” Carson said. “This is a pro-life mission. We’ve got God and the Pachamama on our side.”
Maggie knew that the fetus was still in communication with its deepest origins. Love, the love of life. Yet as she and Carson walked out into the white glare of sun and dust, she felt the earth pulling down on her belly, pulling her toward itself. There was another way of understanding what Vicente and his mother always said, that with love you could go anywhere. You could even let yourself disappear, back into the belly of the earth.
Vicente rummaged through Maggie’s pack and threw out the ceramic water filter. “Too heavy. In the forest the water is pure.”
25
THE BLACK RAINBOW had an established escape loop that led into the forest, then from cabin to cabin to cabin. If the rains held off, in twenty days they’d come out in another departamento where no one would expect them to be. They could hide, a day’s walk from the town of Mollepata, where they had friends. These friends had proven their loyalty in the old days of cocaine paste and the landings of the small, green-striped planes. Boris and Limbert could saunter into town, listen to the radio, evaluate rumors, buy food. The friends still had one plane that could be made to fly, and was big enough to carry six people to Bolivia. One seat would be empty, since Boris and Limbert could go home on a bus. They were still boys. No photograph existed of either of them.
…
Seven people—Vicente, Carson, Maggie, Boris, Limbert, Don Sixto, and their prisoner, Ignacio—all ran eastward, in the unthinkable direction. It was a fox’s strategy, designed by Don Sixto, to escape into the mouth of danger, toward the mine and then into the forest which everyone believed to be impassable, uninhabited, a place of death.
They stopped in El Mirador long enough to write a press release and send it back to Klaus. Not by bus, not by road at all, but by trails, a messenger on foot. Next, on borrowed mules, they rode up toward the mine. Just before the crest of the mountains they stopped climbing, turned onto an Inca highway that led south, behind the mine, then east to a yellow-green pass called Abra Vaivén. Here the stones of the highway dispersed, and the land became too rough for animals.
Vicente untied the mine director’s hands. “Lean down,” he said, and Ignacio inclined his head for the blindfold to be loosened, and looked sharply around himself, as if recognizing the landmarks of the last moments of his life. Dismounting, he shook out his legs and stretched his body in a kind of satisfaction. “I know where I am,” he said, and laughed a little. “On that pass above the Rio Yatiri. Correcto?”
“How do you know that?” Don Sixto growled, unloading Carson’s shotgun from the buckskin mule mare.
“I know well. I know also that no one will find us, jamás, if down there is where we’re going,” the mine director said. He’d once walked half a day’s distance below this, as far as the lagoon, hunting deer and foxes. His men had refused to camp at the lagoon, the source of the accursed Rio Yatiri. They’d lied, saying there were no trails onward. Ignacio had not forced them, knowing they were terrified of the unearthly rainbows and lightning bolts that had protected these valleys ever since the Incas had dumped their treasures here.
“There are trails,” Don Sixto told him. “We hide the entrances.”
“Claro,” Ignacio said.
“We enforce the ancient prohibitions,” Vicente added, “but even without our help, all strangers who go in there die.” In the forest a man could step on a patch of ground, and it would not be ground but matted creepers. These would part, and he’d fall into a vacuum of a thousand feet. A man could approach a cabin and be greeted with a bullet. He could become lost, and no one could retrace his steps, for even if he’d cut his trail the plants grew back within days.
