When Mountains Walked, page 43
Depending on what happened, she might stay in Peru, or else get another job in a clinic, maybe far away, in la India. Boris could visit her there. She’d find a way to bring him, pay his ticket. In la India, men wore dresses and women wore pants. Would he like to see that? She would.
Boris said yes, only to please her, and then volunteered to get water from the stream. He suggested Maggie rest. She agreed, and went back a bit farther into the tomb, and lay down under the overhanging cliff, saying the sand was warmer there.
When the boy was gone she rested for a while without a thought in her head. Then she got up, left the little square building, and walked down the ledge to begin gathering dry sticks. She put them in several piles, planning to consolidate them later. Why was Boris taking so long? Maybe he was busy devising something to carry water in.
She regretted advising him to leave. Staying by her side hardly guaranteed his safety, but she hadn’t realized how much more she’d worry when he was out of sight. She supposed she’d been relying on him, judging from the conviction she felt now, that their conversation had been truncated. She did want to talk more, especially about Vicente. Boris was one of the few people who would understand her feelings. He loved the Comandante about as much as she did.
Momentarily, she was visited by a fear that she’d driven him off. Could he have thought she didn’t want him near her? What a speech she’d given him! Where had all that come from?
As she walked from one end of the ledge to the other, toting this and that twig and sorting them into piles by size, up to a small log that would have to be fed into the fire lengthwise (she was trying to accumulate enough wood to burn all night), she began to acknowledge a slight, odd feeling of confidence. Everything she’d said to Boris had been justified.
Now she had one of those weird retrospective experiences, discovering a translucent solidity inside herself. It had appeared, unnoticed, hours or days ago. It was subtle, but it was definite, which made it different from nearly all of Maggie’s other feelings, which tended to be as turbulent as they were uncertain.
She’d had a similar experience back in August, but in reverse, when she’d felt a deep pull in her chest and belly upon seeing Vicente, Luz, and Lady Maggy standing together in the middle of the clinic’s floor. At the time, she’d identified it as sheer dread, suppressing it, then forgetting it. The sensation had surprised her by resurfacing hours later, nudging at her consciousness as if requesting further attention. Weeks had elapsed before she’d recognized it fully: not simply dread, nor a terrified responsibility, but also desire, her first attraction to Vicente.
Today she could probably trace the instant this new solidity had been born—down on the riverbank, in the stillness just after Carson’s gun went off. Now that it had returned, she could articulate it: she was there as a consequence of her own acts and thoughts, for better or worse. For some reason, this was freeing.
Clearly she’d brought herself to Piedras. She’d made choices all her life, but never felt before that she was a cause, even an influence, really on anything at all, not even on things inside herself. It was horrible to consider how she’d lived, so tractionless, until today when her existence had come together all at once, and out of the resulting thunderclap she’d created a turning point as concrete as any decision of Carson’s. She’d sent Vicente and Carson off together, leaving her alone. She would have been amazed that they’d obeyed her, except that her decision had emerged from a logic so economical, swift, and complete that her mind could no longer repeat its path. In one gesture, she had overturned her previous life. She now understood that she’d lived as if she’d been a zombie, guided by someone else’s thoughts. She’d adopted Althea’s biography, because she couldn’t find her own and was afraid of being swallowed up by Carson’s.
Where this tendency had come from wasn’t worth making the effort to determine. It had been a form of blindness. It had led her to do evil, pile mistake upon mistake. Because of it, she might never see Vicente again. She might soon have contributed to his death and Boris’s and Carson’s and at least a dozen more people, if she included herself and the settlers. She might be bringing to life a creature already poisoned, doomed to die before it would be born.
These things hadn’t happened yet, she reminded herself. When, if, any of them did come to pass, she hoped someone or something would be able to forgive her. Just now she had to hold on to herself, keep moving forward, and not look back. The amazing thing was that she knew she could.
You might be able to trust me now, she told the child.
Walk out of the forest, get to the U.S. embassy in Lima, call journalists. She sat down again with her back against the cliff. The layers of mud under her feet had begun to suck her socks down. She unlaced her boots, pulled them off, and turned them over. A pint of water drained from each one, making Maggie almost proud. Next, she wrung out her socks, again producing an abundant juice, this one smelling of wet dog. It ran out in thin braids, dark brown with a yellow tinge, and disappeared instantly, drunk up by the earth. The water was mixed with blood, from that old blood blister she’d gotten dancing at the festival. It had never healed; now it had burst again. Good. The Earth Mother was always hungry, and was fond of blood, according to Fortunata.
Eat this, Maggie thought, and be satisfied.
It was becoming obvious that Boris would not return. In her mind she watched him running after the Rainbows. Slipping, jumping down ledges, running to join them, returning to their plan from which she had now been freed.
Good, she thought again, as solitude settled around her. He’d left her here, as she had asked, to go where he was most needed, where he wanted to be. That had been her lesson to Carson, too. Like a bad preacher, she’d been able to convince Carson of something she needed to learn herself. He was acting on it now, still being true to himself, the only way he would ever have of being true. She still loved him for that, but not in the way she would have liked to love him, not in the way she had loved Vicente. She’d loved Vicente completely.
Now they’d both slipped away from her. The idea that she’d never see Vicente again was leaden, hard to bear.
Their passion would always stay fresh and perfect, like Uncle Christopher, who would forever be a baby; like Althea’s love for her priest, still blooming on her deathbed. There was something creepy about that. Maggie would have preferred to find out what would have happened next between them. Now there would be no next. Vicente had betrayed her—chosen a path that had been mapped for him, and glorified it with the name of destiny. She forgave him, though, considering. Just now she was unable to imagine ever loving anyone else.
He was still alive, she thought, wrenching back her thoughts. Alive, alive. She pushed Vicente on into the forest. Faster, she thought.
She wondered whose child hers would be.
She sat staring at the rain until she heard a shout, hollow and reverberating, then three quick, booming gunshots in the near distance. She snatched her blue plastic rain sheet off the twig just before the uniforms came into view, moving toward her. The soldiers were only a couple hundred meters away, downstream, walking toward her on the trail that she and Boris had strayed from. At this distance they looked toylike. She had a wacky impulse to jump out, let them kill her or forgive her.
If she stayed out of sight and didn’t move, they’d pass right under this ledge and never see it. She was on the west side of the stream, directly above their heads; they’d be scanning the opposite hillside. As soon as they spied the Inca road, and the trail that led to it, she’d be safe.
Her cheek against the ground, she lay shivering, still, like a baby rabbit in a shallow burrow. She prayed for invisibility. May all of the confusion I have ever felt leave me, and surround Juan Carlos Yanez and his men. Please let Boris not be dead. May all of them not die.
She prayed to saints and mummies and to God, and to all her ancestors and friends, and to the rocks and the dirt beneath her cheek. She squeezed the little claw in her pocket. The gold chain around her neck had snapped sometime today, probably when she’d been heaving herself up those ledges. It had slipped off, releasing Althea’s ruby ring. Maggie tried to imagine where the ring lay now, glinting pink and gold in water, mud, or amongst green leaves. An offering.
Please let me live too, she added, and heard the men pass under where she lay, talking in urgent grunts and whoops among themselves.
…
She’d never know what happened to Boris. The shout had sounded like his raw, young voice. Again and again she replayed this cry, trying to hear whether it expressed terror, triumph, agony, or warning. Perhaps he’d yelled to warn her from a hidden place, and then escaped into the greenery, zigzagging and dodging bullets. In her mind’s eye she could see his thighs pumping, his feet in rubber-tire sandals scrabbling, leaving skids and tread marks in the steep mud of a hillside. She gritted her teeth against other images. Yet if they hadn’t succeeded in shooting him, why had the soldiers continued marching in such good order? Had they left others behind to search for Boris? In her fleeting glimpse of them, she had not registered Juan Carlos Yáñez. The first man in line had been tall and gaunt, with a mustache like a brush for scrubbing floors.
She lay with her cheek against the soft powdery silt. Never had she loved the earth so much; it seemed to love her back. She decided not to stand up until nightfall, to stay pressed against the sweetness of the ground. She peed quietly, warmly, into her trousers.
Hours passed, during which dozens of versions of Boris’s fate swept through her mind. Sometimes he escaped, and left the forest, and found love in Mollepata with an apple-cheeked campesina who bore a resemblance to Maggie’s first patient, Ofelia. They lived a long and fruitful life.
…
Boris jumped down into the streambed to hide behind a rock, wondering what to do. They were coming from the direction of the cabin, four of them. Sinchis, anti-terrorist commandos. They’d extracted information from Marisol or Roosevelt. It would have been easy for them. Boris knew about Sinchis; that was the kind of unit his father had retired from. When he drank, Boris’s father had raved about tearing out fingernails, setting fire to locked houses full of people, beheading little children in front of their parents to get one piece of information. As he beat Boris’s mother, he’d always told her: “Be glad, woman. Thank me for this, my kindness. You don’t want to know my wrath.”
Sinchi platoons consisted of a dozen men. This group was only four. The rest must be chasing the Comandante. At least the other Rainbows all had guns, except Ignacio. Boris prayed for them, glad at last that Limbert had a weapon. Lord Jesus, help them. Help them to escape or kill the enemy. And please, make Limbert push the gun’s bolt all the way to the bottom. Don’t let him be nervous or the shell will blow up in his face.
He could have hidden there until they all had passed, but he remembered Doña Maggie, who had left her blue plastic drying on that stick. The Sinchis would surely see its bright, artificial color. Or what if she had left the ledge to look for Boris by the stream? He should have told her he was leaving her, but he’d felt a little bit ashamed. He was more ashamed now, of his petty cowardice.
The trail turned up, momentarily taking the Sinchis out of sight. Boris darted from rock to rock, trying to get ahead of the soldiers, to get back up and warn her. Too soon, they came out again into the clear. They were still five hundred meters off, but they were walking like machines, not men. Evidently they’d fought in the Huallaga. Two carried rifles; one a light grenade launcher. The one in front was armed with a pistol only, flat and black, still snapped into its leather holster. He was fat, with sunglasses, a sauntering, cruel little father’s son from Lima—obviously that same malvado who was looking for Maggie in particular.
Give your life, the Comandante had said. As I have done already. Love, Boris realized. That was clearly what the Comandante meant. Love was expressed as sacrifice, and the Comandante loved that thing in Maggie which she’d just described to Boris. The soul, or something. Her words had been better, but to Boris finding a word for the thing was not important. Whatever you wanted to call it, he knew it was alive in all three of them.
He thought of shouting “Save yourself!” and running, but then the soldiers would know that Maggie was nearby, and they’d probably manage to shoot him too.
If she heard gunshots, she’d recognize the danger.
Stealthily, swiftly, he advanced. From the stream, a rock the size of a melon came to his hands. With it he surely weighed a hundred kilos. Creeping farther along the streambed, he found a fallen log to shield him. Behind this he crawled up, until he was above the trail. He chose his place, and waited. All too soon the evil one came walking, crossing into the invisible circle Boris had drawn upon the dirt. The top of his head was there, exactly.
Boris drove his soul into the center of what it knew. I am not I, he thought, I am that instead. Inside a blinding shout he dropped, and smashed Juan Carlos Yanez’s skull.
…
Yes, that could be, Maggie thought. That story didn’t contradict any of the evidence she had so far. It combined her highest hopes, her lowest impulses, and her worst fears. Boris probably hadn’t actually killed Juan Carlos Yanez, but if Boris had died, she wanted him to have had some kind of victory. His shout could very well have been intended to save her. Whether warning her had caused his death or not—that was a crucial question, but it came after other questions, all unanswerable just now. No matter what, Maggie reflected, she had no right to ask Boris to sacrifice his life, even in her imagination, solely to satisfy her need for logic.
She’d probably have to live with never finding out. Yet her story had one moral use: along with all the other things she was going to be responsible for facing, she might have to try to live up to this version of things, in case it was the real one.
There was comfort in not knowing. If she and the child survived, one day she’d tell the child that story. But she could also tell it another one, the tale that ended happily.
She could hear her child’s piping voice, asking why she’d never bothered to learn the final facts.
I did all I could, she promised. If you aren’t satisfied, then it is your turn to try.
Slowly, the roar of the small river again became inhuman, part of the silence of the forest. Maggie shifted onto her back, to gaze up at the softly clouded sky. She began to make a list for the child of things that contained the same tones of gray. The hindquarters of a circus horse, the lining of new sweatpants. The North Sea frozen solid, ten feet beneath the surface. Each item took a long time to explain, since the child had not yet seen anything whatsoever.
Much later, in a moonless darkness, hidden in an added density of fog, she would crawl up the inclined ledge toward the tomb, feeling her way in the dust until her dry fingertips touched cut stone. She would be so exhausted and numb that she’d be able to devise no better strategy than to knock her head gently and systematically against the stone wall of the tomb until she found a place of no resistance, a door. She would crawl through it, fall asleep.
She would live for several days and nights on this ledge, creeping down to the stream to drink, as furtive as an animal; eating fried corn grain by grain. At last she would dare to walk, cautiously, weakly, toward Plain of Slime. On its outskirts, Maria Gracia Aliaga would be waiting, pretending to hoe a potato field. She’d dress Maggie in a skirt and shawl woven from the wool of her two black llamas, and they’d walk into town. The soldiers would have marched in and out, leaving Plain of Slime wrapped in its ancestral silence, its inhabitants having offered nothing beyond the same bad impression they’d been perfecting for centuries. Maria Gracia’s hut would be windowless, containing not a stick of furniture. In it, by the light of an alcohol lamp, Maggie would tell a group of Maria’s friends what had happened to Comandante Oquendo; she’d hope they had no news for her in return. When she’d recovered from fatigue and sadness, enough to be able to walk, Maria Gracia would give her a handful of dirt to disguise the pallor of her face; and a filthy hat, mushroom-shaped and mushroom-colored, with two braids of real human hair sewn under its brim. Then she’d show her the trail for the coast.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, and I hope it will be read as such. With the exception of Atahualpa, no character or plot element in this book is intended to resemble any real person or event, living or dead, present or past. Some things in the book are based on real-life objects, but still I intended for them to be the objects in a fiction. Thus, for example, criticisms of governments, political movements, and institutions are not to be read as the author’s opinions, but as those of given, invented characters.
For all errors of verisimilitude, fact, or feeling, the author holds herself solely responsible. However, details were invented and distortions deliberately perpetrated. There is no Rosario River. There is no Black Rainbow Movement. Dates of known earthquakes have been changed. The festival of Saint John’s Beheading, though it does occur on a Sunday in late August, is not celebrated as described. Other cultural practices have been altered or reinterpreted as well. Atahualpa’s death stone lies in the main plaza of Cajamarca, but no plaque describes the manner of his execution. What may seem melodramatic in this book is intended to be so.
I am indebted to the work of John Hemming, Mercedes López-Baralt, and David M. Guss for information about Atahualpa, and to Lopez-Baralt for the Quechua text and the translation into Spanish of Atahualpa’s poem in chapter xo. The translation into English is my own. For information on geologic theory, and facts and stories about earthquakes, I consulted books by Haroun Tazieff and Nicholas Hunter Heck and asked questions of my father, Charles B. Wheeler. From John Simpson’s book In the Forests of the Night, I gathered information and impressions about the cocaine business in Peru.
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