When Mountains Walked, page 4
As he spoke, she saw the room’s ugliness and filth. She let Carson drag her by the hand across the room, not pausing to inspect a single thing. They passed through an opening in the far wall, into the living quarters, the back half of the house. Nasir opened a barred window at the end of the hallway, admitting light and the roar of the river.
In the kitchen lay a mouse’s bones, a black, exploding aureole of decay.
Nasir preceded them into the bathroom. The toilet was a tall box painted red, with a seat and cover. “The jewel of Piedras,” said Nasir, lifting the lid.
Maggie couldn’t resist peering over his shoulder. She saw a dry cement trough with a fossilized human turd sitting at the bottom.
“Mierda!” Carson uttered his new vocabulary word.
“Correcto,” said Nasir, letting the lid slam shut. River water should be flowing here, but someone must have diverted it. The toilet was a luxury, a sanitary achievement; Nasir wanted one, too.
“Not sanitary! Sucio, dirty,” Carson said. He was standing in the shower. “Tell this guy about fecal-oral transmission downstream.”
“Ugh, do I have to?”
Carson glared. “Please, that’s the point.” According to Catholic Charities, education and prevention were duties equal to the treatment of disease.
As she began, uncomfortably, to explain to Nasir (taking refuge in the formula “My husband says . . .”), Maggie inadvertently stepped back and kicked over a plastic wastebasket which spilled out liver-pink screws of toilet paper and an ancient sanitary napkin. Her stomach contracted painfully. She turned and left the room.
Nasir hadn’t been listening anyway, she told herself in the hall.
Carson came out. “You okay?”
“A little queasy.” Her stomach clamped again.
“You’ll get used to squalor.” He put one cool palm on the nape of her neck. “We’ll get the place cleaned up. I’ll dig a toilet outside.”
She said she was fine, happy; she didn’t really mind. It was true: even nauseating filth was interesting, far better than the subtle dread she’d grown familiar with in Cambridge, a feeling that she must have done or said something reprehensible quite recently but couldn’t remember what it was.
“It’s okay even if you do mind,” Carson said.
“I do mind, a little bit,” she said to please him.
In the bedroom more dust, the color of ground bones, covered everything: the wooden chair; the metal armario for clothes; and the two uneven iron bedsteads, with their rolled mattresses and knotted, clubbed mosquito nets. Here the floor was wood, darkened by the kerosene that was used to wash it and prevent termites. A faint reek still pervaded the room; its walls were so hot, Maggie wondered why the clinic had not caught fire spontaneously.
“Reminds me of summer camp,” said Carson.
“Really?” Maggie said. The beds should have had skeletons in them.
“Camp Gimme My Mommy.”
It took her a few seconds to realize that Carson had never gone to such a camp. During that time, he and Nasir left the building to unload the truck, leaving Maggie to perform female tasks inside the house. Instead of airing the mattresses or starting to sweep with the evil broom, she selfishly went into the kitchen, hoping to open the back door and admit the sight and sound of the river. This door, too, was locked. She kicked at it, not hard, for it was massive, some rain forest hardwood, more solid than the wall.
There was a window, though, high up. Small and square, it was just the size to lead Maggie to wonder whether her hips could fit through in an emergency. Standing on one of the kitchen chairs, she opened its brass latch on half blue infinity, half canyon wall.
She went back to the bedroom, unhooked the dire mosquito nets, and dragged them outside to air. Next, the mattresses, but these were stuffed with extremely heavy, rotting foam rubber, so when she tried to embrace the first one, it slipped from her arms and bounced back onto the bedsprings. How she hated the intractable weight of large objects, the nightmarish sensation that she could not hold on.
She plunked herself down abruptly on the edge of the metal bed frame, and might have burst into tears except that when she hung her head she spied, down through the spiral grid of bedsprings, a comic book on the floor. Its hot-pink cover was laden with soft furry dust. She made out a busty woman kneeling on a bed, fully clothed, hands pressing at the sides of her screaming mouth as a dark man fled the room with a pistol in his hand.
He Killed to Save Her Honor.
She shook it, and, holding it from its spine, carried it to the doorway where there was light, and read it from cover to cover. Men in turtlenecks argued with each other. Women wept, and kissed them. Maggie felt lifted into another life, simpler and more fantastic, where it was no longer necessary to be herself.
Now Carson and Nasir came tromping back inside, shouting for her help. They were carrying the refrigerator and needed her to dust the counter so they could put it down.
…
The first important thing Carson had said to Maggie was that she did not seem to belong in the United States. How had she gotten trapped in Cambridge? At first, she’d been embarrassed to admit that she’d never considered settling anywhere else. As she spoke to him, however, she realized she hadn’t felt entitled just to go and live in someone else’s country. Carson had replied that, in his opinion, she’d closed the door too firmly behind her. If a missing piece of her soul resided in South America, why not go reclaim it?
Soon she’d returned the favor, pointing out that Carson should listen to himself, and go back to the work he’d been born for, the life he knew was real.
He’d been one of her ex-husband’s graduate students. Older than most, he was part of a special program for people who’d run upon the rocks and shoals of life and needed time to think. They spent a year, or two, writing a long paper about the reason for suffering, or where was God in an imperfect world. At the end they had master’s degrees in divinity but were discouraged from leading congregations. Maggie worked in the divinity school administration, and for some reason she had identified with these students and looked forward to their visits to the office. One man, whose brain had been damaged in a car accident, could not stop himself from sharing his deepest emotions with strangers. A black M.D. had a son who’d disappeared. The daughter of an infamous billionaire had changed her name, renounced her fortune. Even the aging ladies who’d left their husbands after thirty-three years, hennaing their pageboys, were full of a sense of adventure.
Like all other first-year students, they were required to take a course in Religion and History, taught by Dr. Larry Fabularo, Maggie’s ex-husband, Larry designed his curriculum to destroy a broad spectrum of wrong thoughts. He punctured creationists, materialists, and idealists with equal glee, brought empty nesters up to academic speed. In the case of older students, Larry felt a special mission to disabuse them of the idea that life should have a meaning. To wish for meaning was a source of torture, Larry believed. Maggie had observed that this belief was at least an equal torture to Larry, but that he felt less pain when he was inducing others to adopt it.
Larry often said he envied his wife because she had a passion for experience, experience for its own sake. One of his pet theories, based on a study of infants grabbing toys, correlated the highest intelligence with a lack of ambition, pure curiosity. Maggie was flattered by his analysis, but when she turned thirty, she’d begun to wonder what she was becoming. It wasn’t Larry’s fault that she’d adopted his opinion of her; yet as long as she was with him, she didn’t know how to figure out whether or not she was the person they’d agreed on.
She’d married him right after graduating college, taking this job he’d found for her, to pay bills while she chose a graduate school. First she’d tried counseling psychology, but soon it was clear she’d lose her mind if she were to be locked in a small room with one neurotic after another for the rest of her life. In reaction, she’d gotten certified in massage. She’d loved feeling the ghostly sensations of her fingers on her own legs and shoulders as she kneaded her patients’ flesh, but then afterward, for a few unnerving hours, she became the person she’d been touching: she smelled, felt, thought as they did. Often her clients dreamed of her on the night after a treatment. Kinesthetic possession, Larry called it.
Another year she took up night photography, long exposures in the dark with a moving penlight, but this was not a career.
Everyone in the divinity school office was similar. Overeducated, or anyway too intelligent for the third-grade skills required, they’d unofficially decided it took ten years to give up the idea of ever becoming anything. Their salaries were nearly as good as the professors’. Shoats locked on to the teats of Mother Harvard, they shared an airy, pleasant pen, an office with high ceilings, and windows looking out on a tidy oak-treed lawn. Boredom and lack of prestige were the main job stressors; otherwise, working there was a bit like playing “school,” licking stamps and answering the phones.
The fall Carson arrived, two people in the office decided to have crushes on him. He stood out, a craggy, self-conscious, almost comically louring romantic presence, the overseas health worker now stalking the long, wainscoted hallways in his battered leather jacket, jeans, and boots. His hair was dark. His skin was pale. His nose was thin. He spoke with a slight accent, Southern, mixed with the kind of forgivable affectation people picked up overseas. He looked either Dutch or French. The head administrator, Brian (he edited gay porn videos on the side), and the departmental secretary, Rita (she had a black belt in tae kwon do, two kids, and a restraining order against her husband), both found devious ways of summoning Carson into the office to fill out forms or straighten out his scholarship. He’d lean over the counter and play with the doodads on Rita’s desk, guessing which was a gift from which professor.
Maggie took the scoffer’s position, saying Carson was too conspicuous—too, too something. But she noticed his hands, the long fingers fitting together as if never to let anything run through them uselessly. Rumors said he’d been under bombardment in Angola; his girlfriend had recently died of brain cancer; he’d been cured of leprosy, of exposure to chemical weapons. Bit by bit, Brian and Rita drew him out, proving most of the rumors true. He’d worked in seven countries, seen famines, wars, epidemics, refugee camps, the worst poverty. His British girlfriend, Maxine, had died—of breast, not brain, cancer. He’d held her in his arms at the end.
Carson entertained them with his wicked opinions. Women in Boston had the worst hairdos on earth. The summer heat reminded him of Bangladesh. But Harvard! He’d feel more useful mopping floors at a homeless shelter. The main thing taught here was that education took away your right to speak. Even if a hundred people agreed a cat was gray, none of them could say so. They had to ask the cat. If the cat didn’t feel like answering, too bad. Obviously if those same hundred people confronted a gray building, they were in deep, deep troublé. This way of thinking was a disguised intellectual blight, death to compassion and imagination, and its chief perpetrator was Professor Larry Fabularo. Fabularo’s stance was forgivable only because he was clinically depressed. “Untreated,” Carson called him.
That day Maggie hid her face behind a ream of laser printing paper, recognizing her husband’s cat lecture, one of his most provocative. When, later, her co-workers had commiserated with her, she’d said Carson wasn’t the first to have such thoughts. Lately Larry had fallen away from himself in some deeply dismaying way. His book was five years overdue; he couldn’t resolve the last chapter. He’d smoke pot for inspiration and end up losing heart, let the sun set without turning on the lights, then play computer games so obsessively he’d had to get a wrist brace. Maggie hated walking past his office door in the evenings, seeing him silhouetted in the sick glow of the screen. Once she’d asked him to consider getting help, and he’d retorted that her request was self-centered. After that, she’d been unable to consider leaving him.
He always gave a cocktail party in the middle of the fall semester. For days beforehand, Maggie cooked, arranged flowers, and ironed tablecloths, the way her mother Julia had taught her. Maggie’s spread was famous. Everybody came; useless to expect Carson not to. Larry had aimed him right at Maggie, saying, “You’ll be interested in talking to my wife. She grew up in South America. Maggie, this is Carson. Carson has lived everywhere.”
She began by apologizing for not identifying herself in the office. In turn, Carson said he hoped he hadn’t been insensitive, but Maggie should know he’d said all the same things to Larry’s face, in class. Now, if it was okay to change the subject, he would like to hear about South America, a place he’d never been. How had she felt growing up there? Didn’t she find the United States harsh and hellish in comparison? Here, the myth of progress poisoned everything, Carson believed. You could never be satisfied because you always had to be improving. “This myth of the successful self,” he said. “My God, it’s narcissistic!”
Maggie wanted this man to know she’d gone to El Salvador, two years ago, with Larry. They’d lived six weeks with a village family, part of the Witness for Peace program. The man they’d been escorting, supposedly protecting with their presence, was assassinated a month after they left. He’d come out in the newspaper, dead, with a sign around his neck.
“You kept him alive as long as you were there,” Carson interrupted.
“Our intervention killed Santiago, that’s what Larry thinks.”
Carson gripped her arm. “When you do this work, you have to believe your intentions count for something.”
Maggie quoted Larry on naive, imperialist do-gooders.
Carson said, “Whose opinion matters more, yours or his?”
“We’re exactly the same,” Maggie said, too quickly.
“You should listen to your own opinions a little more, I think.”
“Now there’s a scary idea,” Maggie told him, laughing.
She’d considered all this to be high-level party chat, no deep soul-baring—until the next morning, when she’d awakened on fire, as if a spark had smoldered while she slept. Larry’s shoulders had been hunched and still, turned away from her as usual, a monadnock under the blanket.
She didn’t belong where she was.
Strange how words of insubstantial breath, long since absorbed in silence, could have revolutionized her life.
…
Going to pee behind the clinic, she ran across a dirty, wide-mouthed basket in which the nurses must have collected their trash. Garbage here must be burnt, unless fed to livestock or buried. She was surprised at the depth of her pleasure in figuring out how things worked. When she was younger, hearing her grandmother speak about tombs, ruins, and mummies, she’d wanted to become an archaeologist. This must be the pleasure archaeologists felt, yet hers was deeper, proving she belonged here, in this place.
She filled the basket with detritus, rummaged in boxes until she found the blue-headed wax matches. A widespread Peruvian brand, they could easily be the same matches her grandmother had used. With everything assembled, Maggie walked out, around, down toward the river rapid. The water was past fifty yards of waste ground littered with eroded rocks and jimsonweed. The shore was irregularly terraced by past floods and still had no permanent vegetation. Between the bigger boulders were jams of driftwood draped with dried grass like long, dun-colored wigs. When she came upon the ring of blackened stones where the nurses had burnt their garbage, five little birds flew up, startled at her approach.
The trash lit with a single match. Barefoot on a rock, Maggie watched transparent orange flames devour the toilet paper and cardboard boxes and balls of human hair, finally reducing all of it to ash. Things were simpler here, fewer, and from the space between them an invisible light shone forth. Was this feeling the definition of home? A place where things fit easily inside you? Or was her exultation proof that she was just a tourist? People in Piedras would never exult in burning garbage; surely they’d prefer it to disappear from the curb without their intervention. Unless they understood all the other things they’d have to put up with—but by the time they’d found out, it would be too late.
This was an illogical train of thought.
She heard Carson’s faint voice, calling from the other side of the clinic.
She ran to him, leaving her shoes on a rock.
“You’re awful chipper,” he teased as she twined one leg behind his thigh, reporting her deeds of housework. Mattresses beaten, airing. Rooms all swept. Trash burnt. “Honey, you ought to keep your shoes on.” There could be Strongyloides in the sand, worms that sneaked in through bare soles. First they gave you a dry cough, then ate holes in your guts, and you died of a massive infection.
“Don’t be a bossy doctor.”
“If you died, you’d mess up my life.”
“I’m not planning to die.”
“It’s part of my job to stop you.” His face looked etched. He must be thinking of Maxine.
…
“There’s chicken soup,” Doña Albita said, her voice trailing off, discouraged.
“Great!” said Maggie.
Carson scowled.
Under the next table sat an orange dog with yellow eyes, watching all their moves.
They ordered chicken soup and a liter of Coca-Cola which they drank immediately. Through the half-open door of the kitchen, Maggie watched Doña Albita ladling up the soup, her arms shining in the heat. The shave-head boy came out with two flat bowls, setting them down so carefully he spilled them both.
Yellow liquid with pale, hairy boiled chicken parts submerged. Hulks of yam, white potato, and hominy corn on the cob stuck up from the surface, where flecks of blackish-green cilantro jerked about like water insects. The dog ventured forth, sniffing the air above its head, until the boy swatted it with a broom and it slunk behind the legs of a chair.
The boy returned with a plastic saucer of condiments: small round limes cut in half, raw hot peppers, and a mound of coarse damp salt.
“Oh, God, I’d forgotten Third World cuisine,” groaned Carson.
