When Mountains Walked, page 42
Why had the settlers not restored this building, Maggie wondered, far lovelier and more permanent than their log cabin. Maybe they’d been afraid. They called all previous inhabitants gentiles, which seemed to indicate something demonic, like “unchristians.”
Tumbled cubical stones lay scattered and half buried in the thick grass. All the walls were softened by purple moss and garish lichen. A few cows grazed the ruins, boxed in by the fallen trees. Here was a reddish plant with three-sided stems; there a strawberry with one wee, rotting fruit. Herbs used to treat stomachaches and headaches, planted by the gentiles, the settler women had said last night.
Maggie pawed the grass, searching for ruda. There was none. It must grow in drier, sunnier places. Ruda, blue-green and stinky. It had brought a costly happiness to Doña Ema. Months ago, Fortunata had given Maggie a cutting from her garden, and Maggie had planted it in front of the clinic, to attract business. Just before leaving on this expedition, she’d noticed it thriving. She’d considered, and then forsworn, bringing a tuft of it in her backpack, hidden from the men, to be boiled in milk just in case she needed not to have this baby. Little had she known how difficult it would become to find fire, or milk, or enough privacy for boiling any potion. She wondered if chewing ruda raw would work, or if the herb had worked at all, ever. Not knowing the dosage, she could have guaranteed herself a monster.
She’d come this far in order to lose that option, had she not? She just hadn’t anticipated how completely everything else would fall away.
26
PAIN, as she hurled herself at boulders the color of a ginger cat, over fallen logs, up mudbanks and rock ledges slick with rain, with water running off them. Some ledges were tall and overhanging, so she had to kick her legs and belly up over. Muscles screamed in her thighs, chest, stomach, ribs, and arms. Her hair hung in her face, and the rain ran into her mouth salted by the sweat trickling out of her hair and down her forehead. There were tears, too, but she was almost too wet to know it.
Boris was behind her, pushing. As if with a whip he lashed her on and on. He was in a rage, obviously. She knew how he must be feeling, that everything was confusing, humiliating, and sudden. It had to be worse for Boris, who didn’t have a clue why this was happening, merely that he was outside the reasons. Maggie knew how that felt, too. She’d tried to help him by starting to explain, but her throat had closed like a fist when she’d tried to say Vicente’s name. Besides, the trails ran uphill and she needed her breath for fleeing. She’d promised to tell him everything later, tonight, when they could rest.
Forgive me, she thought, worried about Boris.
…
He had been angry since the morning, when Doña Maggie’s loco husband had shot off his pistol, and within a quarter of an hour all the other men had vanished into the forest, leaving him behind with Maggie. Comandante Oquendo had delegated him to escort the woman back to civilization. He’d even taken Boris’s gun away and given it to Limbert.
Though he knew he was a soldier under orders, Boris could not understand why he’d been singled out for this inglorious errand. It smarted like a punishment, irrational, unjust, the last kind of treatment he’d expect from the Comandante. Wasn’t Doctor Calzón responsible for Doña Maggie, was he not her husband? Had the Doctor not attacked the Comandante? That was treason. How could a traidor be permitted to remain with the expedition?
To make a bad thing worse, Doña Maggie, whom he liked, was crying and breaking down, just like his mother, Ema. Boris had hoped never to have to endure such racking tears again. Doña Maggie, who was usually good at explanations, at understanding people’s feelings, and at making sense of things, had told him she could not yet explain what happened by the river. It had to do with sex, Boris knew that much. Maybe he didn’t need her explanation.
Up to now, he had respected her. He’d asked her for advice. He’d even admired the way she’d wanted to come on this dangerous trip, then suffered without complaining, refusing to slow the men down. He would never make such a mistake again about a woman, Boris thought. The Rainbows never should have let her join them. Just as Don Sixto had said from the beginning, females were bad luck. They brought on jealousies and fights, just by their smell. True, and now Boris was her victim, while his brother, stupid little Limbert, had been permitted to go on and nobly risk his life.
Even the mine director had given him a look of pity.
It would be easy enough to push her off a rock, smash her head or something. He had not been able to do it yet, because of Comandante Oquendo’s parting orders. “Take care of this woman. Respect her as if she were mi propia persona, my own person. Give your life for her, as I have already done.” He’d smiled and clapped Boris on the back, chuckling as if Boris were a child who could not understand what was hidden behind his words. At first Boris had heard a prediction that all of them would die, because of the gringa. Then a flowery lie, a sweet sop. Finally he’d decided that the Comandante had been talking to himself. This was sufficiently mystifying that Boris had decided to obey, at least until he understood more clearly.
Maybe the Comandante did expect Don Calzón to shoot him in the back, and wanted Boris to save the woman. He’d spoken hurriedly, secretively, taking Boris aside amidst the handshakes and parting embraces, then immediately turned away and slipped out the cabin door into the rain, followed by the mine director, Limbert, the Doctor, and Don Sixto last. With their backpacks protected by plastic rain sheets, they’d looked like a parade of jorobados, hunchbacks, crossing the stream. But they’d disappeared into the forest as swiftly as a snake into its hole.
Minutes after that, a child, Roosevelt’s eight-year-old son, Lenin, had led Boris and Maggie around the hill and to the far edge of the corn fields, to set their feet upon the trail. In two hours, on the right, they’d see another trail leading up to the Inca highway, Lenin said. Reaching that pavement, they should turn left, northwest. Given good weather, they’d emerge in three days in a settlement whose Quechua name meant Plain of Slime. Plain of Slime had no police post. People were unkind there, but they could mention Comandante Oquendo to an old woman at the edge of town. Her name was Maria Gracia Aliaga; she was Lenin’s grandmother. She sold chicha, so her house was marked with an empty plastic bag on a stick.
After four hours, though, Boris and Maggie had to conclude that Lenin had overestimated their speed of travel. They hadn’t found the second trail. Worse, they’d lost their own trail and been forced down onto the rocks of this riverbed, whose rocks were growing larger, more dangerously vertical. Water poured into their eyes and mouths. Often they had no choice but to wade in the torrent. It roared louder and louder, swelling with the rain, which had started again around noon, along with Maggie’s tears when, after her bath, again and for the last time climbing the log fence into the foul muddy barnyard, she’d slipped and gotten more turkey shit on the heel of her right hand, which did not easily come off.
The tomb was a hundred yards straight up, held in a crack in the gray, stained cliff. Beside it was a reddish petroglyph, fifty feet across, a condor with spread wings. Silently she thanked Johnny Baines for training her to examine rock faces. The blurred drawing could have been a stain of iron oxide, the tomb a pile of broken stones.
“Subamos,” she suggested, pointing. “We cannot keep doing this.” Boris hated the idea of resting, but in a few hours it would be dark, and finding any other dryness was unlikely. He offered his hand to help her climb, but she refused it.
Why had the settlers not mentioned this place, Maggie wondered as they scrambled up a tilted fault, covered with silt as fine as talcum. Perhaps it was a secret. The ledge was completely dry, hidden by plants and sheltered by the overhanging cliff. Yet turbulent footprints proved that the settlers must stop here, hunting or caught by rain. This trail to Plain of Slime was easier than the one up the Rio Yatiri, so they usually came this way when they needed salt, batteries, alcohol, or medicine.
Boris pointed out a curled black bear turd, luckily dry and old. There was a long fire scar on the wall. Below it, cubical stones from the tombs had been set in a ring. More stones lay scattered down the slanted ledge. Cracks in the walls were filled with the sharp leaves of dead bromeliads. It was marvelous to find all this up here. Boris was surprised she’d seen the place, and said so. She’d always had good eyes, she answered, rather sharply.
At least she had stopped crying.
They took from their shoulders the squares of blue plastic that had so poorly sheltered them from the rain, and spread them over sticks to dry. Their packs were sagging, light. They’d given most of their food to the five men, whose trail was ten times longer and whose mission incalculably more dangerous.
All around were human bones, skulls, and shreds of white fabric with brown designs. “Gentiles,” Boris whispered. “Don’t be afraid, they’re well dried,” she told him briskly. She looked at the dead things curiously, turning over an arm’s connected bones, then walked up to the top of the ledge to see the tombs they had been taken from. The tombs were empty, stone houses full of wind. Their doors faced east.
From above, she watched Boris sit down on a cut stone, sticking his legs straight out, staring back the way they’d come.
The settlers’ mummy might have come from this place. All last night it had watched them sleeping in the attic. Maybe it had guided them today. The settlers said the cliffs were full of tombs. They’d found feather crowns but they had dropped them, pots but they had broken them, and wooden carvings but they’d sold them one lean year. No gold. The mummy was all they had left. One day they’d sell it, too.
She wondered whether the settlers’ mummy was a man or a woman. She stood inside its last house, looking out the window. Framed in the small stone cutout, the dreadful, steaming forest was suddenly a view. “Mira,” she called to Boris, “we’re higher than the trail.” From this tip of the ledge one could see the trail starting a hundred feet below, on the other side of the stream, a cut slanting upward through the bushes. And there, high up, was the Inca road running flat across the verdant mountain, like a crease in fat.
Boris came up to look. “Qué bien,” how great, he said grudgingly.
“Qué pasa?”
“Nada, Señora.” He was still angry with her.
“Let’s sit down,” she suggested. “We’ll talk.” To her relief, he agreed.
Their shoulders touching, they sat in the tomb’s door and stared across the narrow valley, now clogged with fog and rain. Though it was not cold, steam rose from their pants and shirts. Maggie began to shiver. Nu nununu, her lips mumbled of their own accord, unwilling to form any better words. The backs of her hands were purple.
Boris took out the bag of fried corn kernels they’d been given at the cabin and silently offered its open mouth to Maggie. She ate two handfuls, then stopped herself. Boris ate one handful, then shoved the bag back into his shirt front. They stared at the rain a while longer. Maggie imagined them having escaped and celebrating, facing each other at a hotel restaurant, with a white tablecloth, a flower in a cut-glass vase. There would be piano music and, although it might be raining, the rain would be falling on a flagstone patio outside French windows. “Thank you for all you did for me,” she’d say. “Now I will tell how everything came to pass.” A chant began in her mind, the rhythm of a nursery rhyme. Because of a secret, because of a loss, because of two men. None of it was true anymore.
Instead, she told Boris, “Do not walk with me. I know you do not want to.”
“I must, Señora. The Comandante said to keep you safe.”
“I am safe. See? We found the trail, this ledge.” She giggled. “What if I order you? Whom will you decide to obey? Me, the Comandante, or yourself? It’s always your decision.”
Boris was not sure what he would have said next, but instead the gringa told him that she was bearing Comandante Oquendo’s child, and she had to save herself because of that. Didn’t that make some things clearer? She loved the Comandante. She had never intended to betray her husband, because she loved him also, but in the end she had been forced to choose, not between two men, but which thing was most true inside herself. That was what she wanted to communicate to Boris. Did he know what she meant? Boris should feel free to do whatever he felt he must do. Stay. Go.
“I didn’t know,” he said helplessly. Though he was glad she’d clarified things, now he wished she would stop talking. Not only was he embarrassed to have this kind of conversation, but to speak of that which must be done had caused him to recall his father.
She continued, saying she’d always recognized this duty or mission in other people, but from the outside. She’d never believed it could exist in her. “A force in you that will never go away,” Doña Maggie was insisting. “Which thing in you will never disappear, Boris?”
“My soul?”
“No,” she told him flatly. “Not a word you memorized from some stupid priest. What part of you will be there, unchanging, till you die?”
Boris thought of the nameless rage that had made him search for vengeance, and train his little brother to do whatever Boris wanted. But that rage had diminished. Maybe he’d felt something eternal in those days at the clinic, long before the Doctores had arrived, when the older nurse used to take her clothes off, showing Boris her brown breasts hanging like two soft bells. “No sé,” he said, shrugging, I don’t know.
Then he was ashamed of ever disrespecting Maggie, for she spoke beautifully to him, better than any preacher, telling him that he was a man and he had to find what his mission was or else he would die. He could call it soul if he wanted to, but she meant a power or an urge that already guided him whether he knew it or not. Actually, she thought Boris already knew what she meant and was too shy to admit it. It wasn’t a concrete thing, so sometimes you needed someone else to point it out to you. She wanted Boris to know that she’d begun to observe this quality in him. Usually, she would never dare to talk to anyone in such a way, but today was a strange and extraordinary day, maybe the last day of their lives, and she believed that Boris would be interested in what she had to say.
Boris nearly invited her to go and get fucked. Normally he would have, but perhaps for some of the reasons she’d listed, today it didn’t seem worth it. Instead, he considered what she’d told him. He was ashamed to agree with her out loud, but he had to admit that she was right. He too had admired this force in other people, mostly in Comandante Oquendo, but also in Doctor Calzón and Don Sixto. He too had seen it from the outside, doubting that it could exist inside himself, nor certainly in any woman.
His soul, he realized now, had taken form after the whipping. He’d been determined to endure it nobly. Through that resolve, somehow he’d learned, instead of more rage, respect for the justice that had overpowered him. The justice of the Black Rainbow, Comandante Oquendo, and Don Sixto, whose words had come true. “He feels in the flesh the wrongness of his acts.” Afterward, rather than getting the better of the people around him, he’d desired more than anything to emulate those men who tried to do right and to enact rightness upon this earth, no matter what the cost.
He’d lacked the strength at first. Last month he’d gone to Comandante Oquendo to ask for help. His father had been lurking around the house, threatening to kill his mother. He’d beaten on the door, howling for Ema to come out. One night he’d chiseled off the lock and hinges, come in, and thrown Ema to the ground, kicking her several times in the head before the boys could stop him. She was lucky to be alive, according to Doctor Calzón.
“What can I do?” Boris had asked the Comandante.
“You know as well as I,” the Comandante had said. “But you do not have to act alone.”
Boris and Limbert had led the Rainbows to where their father had been sitting by the river, outside the shack he’d built. Drunk and drooling like an animal, he’d raised his head and regarded them all dully. “Who will strike?” Don Sixto had asked, and Boris had slowly raised an index finger. He had not wanted someone else to do this task. Don Sixto had handed him the barreta, and he’d given his father one blow on the back of the neck, direct, decisive, merciful. He’d killed a man who could not learn.
Afterward, he’d met with the Comandante, who had advised Boris to maintain a clear conscience, always remembering the necessity of what had been done. Recto, the Comandante had said, gesturing with the edge of his palm. Walk straight through all your sorrow, your regrets, your doubts. Don’t let them pull you back. This will require more strength than you imagine.
The Comandante had been right. Sometimes it required more strength than Boris could summon.
While he pondered this, the Señora got up and walked around, then sat back down directly on the sand. Seeming nervous, she spoke as if she were talking to herself, worrying because the five men were getting thin in her mind’s eye, like ghosts. She was afraid of a certain malvado, an evil person, following them, a soldier named Juan Carlos Yáñez. “Until we meet again,” this man had said to her in the Cajamarca airport. Boris reassured her, saying she must not be superstitious. She must walk straight through her fears. He showed her his palm’s rigid edge.
She knew, she said, lifting one hand limply. Tears came to her eyes, and she let the hand fall, saying that just now she felt as if she were not alive, but in the land of the truly dead.
Boris quickly asked her to stop talking in such a way. It was not good.
“Ay, disculpa,” sorry, she said. Of course she was alive, and she was going to have a child, and she hoped it would be healthy. And did Boris realize they had succeeded? Now there was no way of stopping the campaign to clean the water of Piedras. Two hostages, a doctor and a general’s son, held by the Black Rainbow. The whereabouts of the doctor’s wife unknown. The world would hear it all. Her voice trailed off.
