When Mountains Walked, page 40
Each person received part of a mule’s load. Maggie’s was lightest, five kilos each of rice and sugar. She’d brought no toilet paper, no toothbrush, no change of clothes.
An old Black Rainbow member led the mules away, disappearing one by one into the white fog. At the pass’s open top, Don Sixto ran back and forth like a beagle sniffing for the downward path. At last he led them around an outcrop, down through a valley of sharp white stones and ledges that became cliffs. The grass was an acid yellow, covered with dew.
Hard travel, down the fields of wet grass, knee high, shoulder high, with tips sharp and transparent as spun glass. As soon as night fell, they rolled themselves in sheets of plastic to lie shivering, awake. At three A.M. they moved on; by dawn they’d left the black lagoon behind. Maggie saw why Ignacio’s guides had been afraid of it, expressionless as Lady Maggy’s eyes.
Down the back of another pass they tumbled, then the length of two more grassy valleys. Boris, Doña Ema’s older boy, walked last, behind Maggie. He seemed happy in the wilderness, though he said he’d never been so far out before. He loped easily along, occasionally brushing the muzzle of Don Sixto’s old gun over the tips of the tufted grass, letting himself fall behind at the pace of Maggie’s struggles. For a time she amused them both with shocking tales about the United States, where even the poorest young men wore sneakers that cost a hundred dollars, and winter snows were so deep that cars had to be dug out with shovels, and you could furnish an apartment entirely by scavenging from the sidewalks on days when garbage was collected. Boris had seen such things on la tele, but he’d believed most of TV to be a fairy tale. As they began to discuss what was real, what was needed in life, and what was not, Comandante Oquendo entered the conversation. From the way Boris spoke his name, Maggie could tell that Boris loved him almost as much as she did. Hearing Boris go on about him gave her a secret fuel.
Meanwhile, though, her pack straps cut at her shoulders, the burden swinging her off balance. She peered at the roots of grass tufts, where deep limestone holes lurked, some big enough to swallow a mule, others small enough to take hold of Maggie’s boot. How could the men stride ahead so quickly? Just as she was thinking this, Boris said, “Don’t worry so much, Señora.” His encouragements only confirmed her awkwardness.
Soon, they’d lagged so far behind the others that she persuaded the boy to go past her. He loped on by, and she saw how ashamed he’d felt to keep pace with a woman’s weakness. It was a relief to let them all go on. She pretended she didn’t know them, that she was wandering through this mist by herself.
Invisible ahead was everything, including the moment when she’d be able to see Vicente alone. We must have faith, she told the child inside her, even if we can’t see why.
She came on the men abruptly as they rested, sprawled on a clutter of stones. When they’d reached the wall of green they’d stopped. The trail was a hole into the thicket, low, as if tunneled by small animals. Maggie stood at the edge of the group, her knees wavering with fatigue. The grass was wet and there were no stones left to sit on. Vicente and Carson sat together on a large, flat rock, sharing a bag of coca leaves, the peasants’ endurance drug. She wanted to shove in between them, beg for a pinch of what they had.
Don Sixto noticed her and got slowly to his feet. “Ya,” he said. They had to reach the confluence before dark.
“Estás bien?” Vicente asked her. She nodded yes. Her mouth tasted of zinc, and her breath had not stopped roaring in her ears. She would not have thought she could run all day at this altitude, but she was doing it. She prayed that the fetus was not getting overheated. No chance to ask Carson, nor consult a pregnancy manual, nor ask for extra rest.
Boris and Limbert pulled out their machetes, since as Don Sixto said, this trail had not been refreshed in several months. She could see the scars where branches had been cut last year and the year before. The gray, cut ends were sharp as killing stakes. To avoid detection, for the first few yards they’d make no fresh cuts. After they’d all gone through, Don Sixto would stay behind to pull bushes across, to close the door behind them.
Now they were in the forest, where it was dim evening all the time. A drizzle began immediately, pattering and dripping from the leaves. Don Sixto barreled past, almost knocking Maggie down, and not apologizing. He disapproved of her presence and had said so more than once. She didn’t care. Here she needed her hands as well as her feet to clamber up and down the knife-edge ridges as the trail struggled to stay out of the slicing chasm of the Rio Yatiri, which could be heard but not seen. Where the hillsides flattened there was still no mercy, for the party waded through mud lagoons strung with prickling vines for handholds. There were steep, raw, red landslides, vertical swamps, networks of roots slippery black above the surface of rotting waters. Maggie tripped, grabbed ant-covered branches, fell down dozens of times. Once, deceived by a solid, floating carpet of bright green shamrocks, she stepped into a neck-deep pool of chilly mud the texture of diarrhea.
For love, she chanted in her mind, for love I’m doing all this. The words whirled and slipped, turned meaningless, until she realized that the only reason not to turn back was that she couldn’t face the journey in reverse. The treacherous valleys, the rocks scattered like teeth, the accursed lagoon. Forward was preferable, even if it was worse.
At least this country justified the Rainbows’ claims that they would never be followed, and if followed, never caught.
She got used to seeing the men only when they rested, practically falling over them in the clearings where they sat, crowded together. Everyone was more relaxed now, knowing the mine director could never escape. Don Sixto never even waited for her to sit down before stubbing out his cigarette and saying, “ Ya, seguimos.”
He had no mercy for her, for anyone. This was his nature.
The full name on his birth certificate was Sixto Bastardo, his surname chosen by the priest to punish his mother for not being married to any of her children’s fathers. Maggie was still a little shocked, still slowly absorbing the mores of this Catholic country which now seemed to her insanely cruel, deluded. At last she’d found a limit to her cultural tolerance, here where so many children were abandoned by their fathers, and the fathers were hardly blamed for turning their women into fools and whores, their children into bastards. That was what a man was, a beast who needed sex. Knowing and agreeing what he was, a woman should be loyal to him, and desire to be a mother to his children, proving her good heart. Better a whore than a frozen hag—and then all the little boys and girls grew up and did it over again.
Everyone except Vicente, Maggie thought, fighting off her own dread, which roared inside her, loudly articulated in her parents’ voices and vocabulary. Since she hadn’t stayed to listen, she told herself, she could ignore them now. She’d known Vicente in her soul, as deeply as she’d ever known anyone or anything. If she was wrong, and he was not true, she might as well be dead.
Besides, he’d promised. She’d felt embarrassed at the time, as if she were dishonoring them both. Now she was glad she’d asked him about a baby. “I want everything with you.” He’d said that, and that should be enough. She had to trust him, and stop thinking about it.
He’d hidden in this forest for weeks, when he’d been a fugitive. Back on that hillside above Piedras, he’d loved telling her about it. She put one foot in front of the other, now, to the tune of his resonant voice, swinging through his favorite words: “La selva verdenegra, donde no hay nada.” The black-green forest, where there is nothing. He’d talked about the scarves of mist, garlanding the trees; about how ferns and red-tipped bromeliads grew up from the tops of branches, trees upon trees. Of the flights of toucanets bursting from the trees to fly across a clearing or a river. Of the buried bones, buried stones under this world of tangled green. And the cliffs, covered with red glyphs of condors, suns, and pumas. The hidden settlers’ cabins, unknown by any law. The settlers, poor, illiterate, walled off from the world by trees, and fear, and superstition; and by the crimes they had committed on the coast. By old and new prohibitions, and by the harshness of this wet, terrifying land. And by rain, during the long season that was to begin soon.
“That forest is the most beautiful place in the world,” Vicente had said. “I wish I could take you there.”
…
They arrived at the cabin just as darkness was rising from the ground to meet the darkness lowering from the sky. Don Sixto dropped his pack, whistled sharply twice, and walked forward into the log-jammed clearing. He pushed his palm back at them, reminding the rest of the party to stay hidden. Strangers would be shot, but Don Sixto’s niece Marisol lived here with her husband and children, and her husband’s older brother’s family.
“Here I stayed,” Vicente said, describing with affection the small Inca ruin over the crest of the hill, and Marisol’s breakfasts of corn fried with pork rinds. Maggie and the boys shouldered forward in order to see out the trail’s mouth.
The air in the clearing was green, jellied with moisture. Two hundred yards away was the cabin, small, black, and wet-looking. Its corrugated roof glinted dully. Beyond it, the ground sloped down toward a stream whose far bank was a vertical mountain wall.
Carson remarked that this cabin was just like what his and Maggie’s ancestors must have built, arriving in the New World. In a couple hundred years, he predicted, a shopping mall would occupy this spot.
For now, Maggie thought, the balance between the forest and the people seemed uncertain. All around the cabin, trees had been felled haphazardly and lay rotting in a maze of stumps and treacherous crossed boughs. Was it a trap, a device to keep people away? No, Vicente said, the trees had been slashed down ten years ago, when the settlers had first arrived, but because of the rain and fog, and the settlers’ inexperience, the wood had never dried enough to burn successfully. By now the two blended and extended families who lived here had cleared more fields on the other side of a ridge, where it was sunnier. Each morning the men and boys walked over there to work.
These limestone mountainsides, cut by torrential streams and rivers, were so nearly vertical that this confluence was the only place within three days’ walk, in any direction, where it was marginally possible to farm or build. Therefore it had this Inca ruin; therefore the settlers, too, had chosen it. The Incas had known where to live and how to walk in the mountains. All that was necessary was to find and follow their traces. This confluence had also been a junction of Inca highways. The Rio Yatiri’s had been small, and its stones had long ago sunk into the swamps. Tomorrow, if the fog cleared, they’d see across the valley the great north-south trunk road that had linked Cuzco to Quito. When they reached it, in two days’ time, they could really run. The Black Rainbow always used Inca trails to escape.
This valley had lain uninhabited for centuries, Boris mused. “Ten years ago, two families arrived. Tonight, seven guests. Who knows about tomorrow?”
Don Sixto’s whistle came, and then the man himself, swinging leg by leg over the felled trunks. He was accompanied by Roosevelt, his niece’s husband, a lanky, humorous man who was wanted for his involvement in the drug trade. Roosevelt had a long, unshaven chin and a scraggly smile, which somehow reassured Maggie that this errand might still turn out all right.
Roosevelt and his older brother, Wilson, had built this cabin by hand. It had no chimney, no real walls, just logs with spaces between them for smoke to escape. Its fence was of cedar logs, as wide in diameter as Maggie was tall, with brambles laid all along the top, except at certain entrances, to keep out jaguars. The logs had machete-cut handholds and footholds. Roosevelt put his toes in the lowest and sprang over. One by one, the men imitated him.
Standing momentarily atop the gigantic log, Maggie understood Vicente’s feelings about this forest. It formed a circular wall around them all, elaborate, ornate, complete, pressing inward until she hovered in a timeless transparency. No need for human fears.
Outside this silent clearing the world was making a tremendous noise about her. Her parents had surely heard it, as Maggie would have, if she’d been anywhere other than here. Four days ago, half jokingly, she’d told a friend in Cambridge to send the army into Piedras if he didn’t hear from her. She prayed he’d forgotten. How could she have made such a disastrous remark, not specifying which army?
They crossed the yard, an ocean of churned purplish mud, with puddles in tracks, littered corn husks and shreds of plastic, and a broken rubber boot—reeking, rotten mud full of the green, white, brown, yellow, curled and piled, fresh and dissolving excretions of babies, turkeys, pigs, and chickens. Passing the door of the ground floor, they greeted an indeterminate number of adults and children who sat in the dark around a fire that must have been burning all the time. Its smoke was why the cabin’s logs were black—smoke would protect the wood from bugs and moisture, too. Deciding on these links reminded Maggie of her first day in Piedras, the joy she’d felt burning garbage by the river, figuring out how things fit together, leaving room for her among them. How had that day led to this one?
“You will sleep there.” Roosevelt pointed upward. “Alli.” Ay was the sound he made. Vicente led the way up a notched log to an attic where corncobs and strips of pork fat cured in the smoke rising through the floor cracks. There was barely room for everyone, since half the attic was full of a mountain of corn ears. On top of the pile was a three-fourths-life-sized bundle, like an enormous ball of white cotton string, “La momia,” Vicente whispered. The families had robbed it from a tomb. Maggie imagined it inside, brownish orange like a peach dried hard, with shriveled skin and empty eye sockets staring out at her with x-ray vision. Vicente explained that the settlers were afraid to unwrap it, even to check for golden ornaments. Rather, they prayed to it as if it were a saint. “La came, flesh, is more powerful than plaster.” Vicente laughed, glancing at Maggie. “Besides, it is their own ancestor, not imported from Rome or Spain.”
“Let’s ask it to curse the trail behind us,” Maggie offered.
All at once, on the roof, the rain became a cascade of nails. “Just in time,” Don Sixto said. They’d planned to spend one night in this cabin, then move on. Now he predicted this rain would last all night and into the morning. If it did, he and Vicente agreed they could stay one extra day. Tonight, the party was exhausted. They needed rest, food, and sleep. If anyone was following, the rain would stop them too. On the third day, rain or shine, the fugitives would set forth in predawn darkness, moving farther into the forest.
The image of Juan Carlos Yanez swam into Maggie’s head, pudgy in tiger fatigues. He would be stopped by rain, she hoped. The trace of his handshake still itched upon her palm.
While the men dumped their packs in one corner, Maggie kicked aside some scattered corncobs and spread her old red sleeping bag next to the outer wall. “Al sobre,” Boris quipped. Into the envelope. Her thighs were quivering, spent; she could barely flex them to crawl in. Turning onto her side, she peered out between the logs. From here you could see the Inca ruin. A few listless cows grazed inside and around it. They’d been brought in by another route, along the Inca highway.
The men went down the ladder and outside. Maggie closed her eyes and thought she could feel her uterus crawling up into her abdominal cavity, as the medical books had said it would do that week. What if her child did turn out like Lady Maggy? If Maggie were in the States, they’d look at the fetus on a TV screen, probe her body with gleaming instruments. Here, Fortunata would scan Maggie’s past for possible infractions against saints, stones, the secret nature of all things. Ema, Fortunata, pray for me.
Women’s prayers were not enough, Maggie thought. Her body was filled with the madness of pregnancy, bliss and a complicated insanity. She was a blooming red rose surrounded by parchment skin. Inside her were two hearts, both beautiful, alive. Both needed Vicente desperately.
Distant laughter woke her. The men were bathing in the Rio Yatiri, taking advantage of a break in the clouds. She spied them through the logs’ crack, shining, naked, and cavorting like schoolboys, not bothering to hide themselves. The sun on them was lurid as the light from an atomic bomb.
She must have dozed off again, for here was Carson, cajoling her. “Come down, hon, come on.” Food was a priority; she recognized this. She crept down the ladder and ducked into the darkness of the main cabin where a woman her own age perched by the fire on a split log. This must be Marisol. They greeted each other cautiously, members of different human categories.
All the men were there already, sitting on logs and eating. The mine director nodded at Maggie. The rope binding his wrists had been loosened to let him hold a spoon.
The older settler wife offered Maggie a log stool with a folded blanket cushion. The woman took Limbert’s bowl, flung the dregs outside, and refilled it with soup for Maggie. Ribs, thin as a chicken’s, and a whole yam stuck up from a broth as dark, rich, and delicious as if it had been stewed with dried porcini, truffle oil, and wine. Maggie tore at the thick muscle inside the rib cage. “What kind of meat is this?”
Vicente pointed at a cut-off scaly hind foot hanging over the fire and described a rodent, nocturnal, with a spiked tail. It ate the settlers’ corn; that was why its meat was rich, but also why it had had to die. He glanced at Marisol, who reached up and handed the claws to Maggie. Smoked, they would last forever. “Talismán ” Vicente said. She closed her fingers over the foot, whose narrow bones fit into the crook of her palm. Her belly pulsed with gratitude for Vicente’s helpfulness, his curiosity, his gentle explanations. If she had it to do over again with him, she would. Had she ever doubted it? She hoped his child would look exactly like him.
