When Mountains Walked, page 6
The mother tightened her grip on Ofelia’s head. The child emitted a whimper.
“It’s easy.” Maggie spoke to a fear she saw behind the mother’s eyes—the same black eyes as Julia’s, the same fear as Maggie’s own. “You pierce the skin shallowly, as if lancing an ampolla. Anyone can do it.” She held up the needle. Ofelia’s mother shrieked “No!” and let go of Ofelia’s head to wave both hands frantically in front of her face, whereupon Ofelia fell off the table. Her mother scooped her up just before she hit the floor. Now they clung to each other at the edge of the examining table like victims of a shipwreck, the mother babbling, “No, no, no, Doctora. I cannot, you give the injection, you, that is why I came.”
Carson grabbed the needle out of Maggie’s hand. “Here.” He pried mother and child apart, pushed Ofelia flat on the table. “Lie down,” he commanded in English. “Maggie, grab her legs.”
The mother, instantly calm, sat on the stool and took her daughter’s hand.
After the anesthetic had taken hold, Carson directed Maggie to squirt saline into the wound while he gently sponged. The damage to the calf muscle went surprisingly deep. He’d put in stitches and a cannula. The mother was looking calmer now, so Maggie explained to her, in case of any future accidents, that boiled water with salt was the best way to clean any wound.
Not looking up, Carson said, “Maggie, shut up for just one second, please.” He threaded the long, curved needle. As it entered flesh, the child stared at the wall, reporting that she felt a pulling sensation. Her mother inhaled sharply, but didn’t speak.
Finally Carson held the black thread taut above the puckered seam. “Snip this here. No, I said lower down, goddamit!”
Maggie snipped, resentfully. Carson was speaking to her the same way her dentist back in Cambridge spoke to his assistant, a way she very much disliked. She reminded herself that Carson was her boss, that this was surgery, that planes crashed when pilots didn’t bark their orders.
“Tell them to come back in five days,” Carson said. “Scare ‘em a little. You know, keep the bandage on, keep it clean, or else her leg falls off.” He left the room. They could hear him in the kitchen, washing his hands.
When Maggie walked Ofelia and her mother to the door, the child looked up at her with shining eyes, boasting that the needles hadn’t hurt. Maggie couldn’t resist patting the top of her head. “You’re a woman of coraje,” she told the child, not looking at the mother. After refusing the faintly offered payment, Maggie gathered up the instruments. In the kitchen she began rinsing them and putting them into an enamel box which she would later seal, place in a pot, and boil on the cooktop. Her heart was pounding. Coraje, she told herself.
Carson was writing his report at the kitchen table. He said, “I am sorry to say this and I know it will be hard to hear, but if you can’t behave more like a doctor . . .”
“If you’d waited one more second,” Maggie blurted out, but from his blank, angry stare she decided her best hope lay in appealing to his indulgence. It was only her first time, she said. She’d learned a lot by watching Carson. She hoped he’d give her another chance.
He shrugged, shut his notebook, and walked toward the front door. On its threshold he turned around. “You. And they. Are not. The same!” Then he walked outside.
4
INSIDE MAGGIE’S HEAD a furious conversation began, which lasted, off and on, until Ofelia’s next appointment. Was Carson turning all authoritarian now that he was responsible for a clinic? Or was she overreacting? His behavior was justified by its results—as soon as he’d taken over, Ofelia’s mother had calmed down. But was it necessary to flatten a child so roughly?
Carson was right, she needed to maintain a distance. But how? And really, why? She wanted to be one of them; he’d seen that. Was that so bad? She felt ashamed. If her desire was illegitimate, she couldn’t think how to change it.
Had she been living in Cambridge, she’d have telephoned a friend, and they would have talked for an hour, dissecting everyone’s motivations and stress levels, establishing what Maggie might productively say to Carson next time. Had she still been married to Larry, they would have chewed at the Ofelia incident until they were exhausted, ending up feeling worse than ever.
But she was no longer in Cambridge, nor married to Larry. She was here, with Carson, living at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the world. There sat her husband, eating a stew of goat, tomato, and onion by the light of one bare bulb that left all corners of the room in shadow. If she looked at him with a naive, painter’s eye, he was laughably scary, eyes glittering at the depth of two inky hollows. She could assume that her own face looked just as wild.
Who was he? She’d thought she’d brought him here, but now everything had tilted and reversed itself, so that she was living in her husband’s shadow. She’d thought they shared one common purpose, but now it seemed clear that the purpose was Carson’s and that she, Maggie, must find one of her own, or else stifle in the bell of solitude available at his side.
She refused to let her marriage be ruined within three days of arriving. How had her grandmother Althea followed a man all over the world?
Carson and Johnny Baines had much in common, she had decided this already. They both were men with missions. On the surface, Maggie’s grandfather had seemed more driven and fanatical, especially from the point of view of the child Maggie had been when she knew him. Everybody said how he adored his wife, though; and his half-mad dream of predicting earthquakes showed how deeply he’d felt the death of his and Althea’s first child, a son. That baby had not been discussed too often. Maggie had only confirmed his existence during her junior year in college, when she’d learned his name was Christopher and that he’d died of cholera after an earthquake in Huaraz, Peru. She’d have visited the grave this year, with Carson, had the cemetery not been buried in a landslide sometime in the fifties. Thus Johnny’s mission was intimately connected to Althea, less ingrained in his character than Carson’s drive to heal the sick and suffering in Godforsaken places, an inclination that seemed to have been born inside him and had then been fed and watered by his Catholic upbringing—martyrdom, transcendence, the first last, the last first. Maggie had practically worshiped it up to this morning, when it had suddenly shown itself capable of becoming her most implacable enemy.
Enemy? That might be too much. She must learn to take Carson’s corrections at face value—he was her boss, after all. Even so, he was a more modern husband than Johnny Baines, who’d never let Althea accompany him on field trips. Once, Althea had locked herself into a convent for nine months while Johnny traipsed off to Mongolia. Whatever had that meant?
Maggie had always believed that her grandmother had done exactly as she pleased all her life; now she began to wonder what daily bargains Althea had made. Perhaps it had never been that easy to be somebody’s wife, not even fifty years ago.
Carson gestured with his fork, talking about endemic malaria and hepatitis, extending to her the same cordial assumption as usual, namely that she wanted to learn about diseases. And she did. Knowing about diseases was fundamental to this life she’d chosen.
He was superior, she decided. Nothing was grinding away at him from the inside.
“Do you adore me, Don Calzón?” she interrupted him.
“What? What brings that on?”
“I want to know if you adore me.”
“I adore you. Sure, of course I do, of course, but Jesus! Are you okay?”
After dinner, she said she wanted a breath of air. It was hot inside the clinic, but Carson was tired and didn’t want to come. He would if she insisted; she didn’t want to insist. She walked a little way down the road, out of range of the light from the clinic’s door. The walls of the canyon were darker than the sky, towering and towering, imprisoning even the sound of the river.
That night it was Maggie who crawled under Carson’s mosquito net. She felt lucky when he took her, squeezed her in his rugged arms.
…
In the afternoons, it was usually too hot to stay inside, so the men and women of Piedras would find a tree, sit down in the dirt with their backs to its trunk, set fire to a little pile of dry horse or cow dung in a hubcap or a flattened tin can, stretch their legs out straight, and, safe from horseflies, enter a state of consciousness Maggie wasn’t sure was sleep.
“Why can’t you just laugh at them,” Carson said. “So what? You aren’t going to hell for it. Or do you think so?”
Maggie didn’t want to give herself the right to think that the people around her led pointless, wasted lives.
“Christ, you’re hard on yourself,” said Carson. “In the end you’re hard on them. Maybe it’s true, they have nothing better to do.”
“You’re preaching again,” Maggie remarked.
“What about the way they blow their noses?” Carson imitated the local gesture, pressing one nostril closed, honking out the other. “What about the way they shit in corners? Let babies crawl around eating dirt?”
“Stop it!” Maggie was laughing, outraged. That morning they’d seen a baby cramming dirt into its mouth with both fists, not because it was hungry, just because it was curious. Its mother had been gazing off in the other direction.
“It’s cultural,” she said lamely. Strange that Carson should mention that baby, since when she’d seen it, she’d been pulled by a weird new desire to release one of her own, to crawl around eating dirt beside the first.
Carson was reminding her to respect her own opinions, claim her feelings. It was a helpful lecture he often gave her. Maggie considered her own insight, that feelings were conflicting and misleading. It was easy to feel someone else’s emotions, or to be indoctrinated by an evil government. That seemed important to remember.
“Oh, so what. It’s us who are wasting our lives.” Carson sighed. “They don’t want us.”
She scratched his scalp. “Don’t worry.” Trust would come, but until it did, all they could do was to live blamelessly in the presence of the people of Piedras.
…
Her earliest memory was of flying up through the air toward something white and full and soft, like a spinnaker. No words in her mind at all; her mind was not yet divided into words. Mystery, ecstasy, safety, risk, love were united in one lifting movement, up toward white. Years later, Maggie saw a photograph of her family—her parents, her sister, herself—on the steps of the house in Mexico City where she’d lived the first years of her life. Behind them, as in photographs from the nineteenth century, were all of the people who worked for the Goodwin family: a cook and a maid and a gardener, and Maggie’s father’s driver with his brushy mustache. The cook wore an apron, which Maggie had immediately identified as the spinnaker of her memory.
Her name had been forgotten. “We fired her, though,” said Maggie’s mother. “She threw all the kitchen scraps behind the stove and we ended up with rats.”
…
On the third day when there was no water, Maggie went along with Carson to dig out the channel, blocked each night by the family upstream. Since the nurses left, they must have gotten used to irrigating their peppers and tomatoes. Yesterday the lady of the house had come out to yell and shake her fist, surely protesting that the gringos were wasting good water just to wash away their shit.
“Thief, jerk,” Carson called her.
“But you basically agree,” Maggie argued. “You say you’re going to dig a toilet.”
“The clinic needs water,” Carson reasoned. “I can’t dig ditches. I have to be the doctor.”
You’re not a doctor, you’re just a physician’s assistant, Maggie thought, even though she knew what Carson meant. “Let’s go talk to her.”
Today, when they arrived, the little house was padlocked from the outside. No one answered Maggie’s knock. Made of rammed, unpainted earth, it qualified as a hovel, but it was beautiful, too, harmonious with the landscape, composed of nothing besides mud, grass, stones, and water. Its roof was dark grass thatch, two feet thick, with watermelons trained to ripen on it and a spattering of orchids never planted by human hands.
Carson dug and swore, removing the messy dam of earth and stones that had been pitched into the channel.
“We could let her take the water just at night,” Maggie suggested.
What if a stab wound came in at midnight, Carson wanted to know.
Maggie saw the victim, staggering out of Nasir’s. “I’ll help her dig her own channel.”
“That’s insane.”
“Let’s consult Nasir,” Maggie suggested when the ditch flowed freely again.
They hiked up to the road on a path beaten by the water-stealing family. Where the terraces grew steep and the path got narrow and rocky, Carson slid wordlessly ahead. Maggie resented him at first, and then decided it was not all bad, being second. All she had to do was to place her foot where Carson’s heel had been.
…
Nasir served hard rolls and enamel mugs of instant coffee, and sat down to discuss their problema. Both wrists on the table, he leaned forward so that his hairless, concave chest was visible all the way down his shirt. His fingers moved constantly; if he’d been an animal, he would have been a fox or a lemur. He said that woman was a desgraciada, capable of anything, but maybe she’d listen to Doña Fortunata.
Why Fortunata, Carson asked.
“Fortunata knows her,” Maggie answered.
“Translate,” Carson insisted.
“Fortunata knows her,” Nasir said. He smiled, incapable of much sincerity.
Maggie asked how Fortunata knew this woman.
“Everyone knows everyone. But Fortunata? Everyone knows her.”
“She’s hard to ignore,” Maggie encouraged him to go on.
Nasir barked, “Character! Under the rebel government, she appointed herself an official. She sticks herself into everything.”
“The rebel government,” Carson urged. “See what he’s willing to tell us.”
Nasir didn’t hesitate. He told them the whole rollo.
…
Piedras had been lucky in its terrorists, for they were educated men who spoke to the people with respect. They never executed teachers or the mayor, and they had permitted the government nurses to return safely to their homes and families on the coast. They came down the mountain one afternoon, ten men and two women, full of weapons, hand grenades hanging from their ribs like papayas. They entered Nasir’s store, clattered their armas against the wall, and announced a people’s assembly.
Afraid to come, afraid to stay away, four hundred campesinos arrived in front of the store. The rebel spokesman was a sexy woman with big meaty hips, looking great in her uniform with many leather belts. She spoke atop this very table, dragged outside. Back then, there was no electricity for small canyon towns like Piedras. Even in big cities the light was often cut off, when terrorists bombed the transformers. That night, bonfires and torches were lit so that all could see.
The rebels raised a banner with their insignia: the silhouette of the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, cut in two, his severed head and headless body, with a black arc above. Everyone was rapt as the leader retold the legend that summed up the rebel goals. The Inca’s head and body were growing toward each other underground. When they met, the emperor would rise again. Nasir would not forget the cry: “We, all, are Atahualpa! Our hands are his hands, our heart his heart! But we have been separated! Let us come together!” Nasir had joined the roar, a great roar as if they had all been turned into lions.
The group called itself Movimiento del Arco Iris Negro, the Black Rainbow Movement, after the sign that appeared in the heavens when the last Inca emperor was murdered by the Spanish. Ever since Atahualpa’s death, Peru had been ruled by outsiders, murderers and thieves. The Black Rainbow Movement stood for Inca principles, dignity and self-sufficiency and work. The rebels invited everyone above the age of ten to vote whether they wished to participate in an experiment to revive the ancient way of life. Piedras would repudiate the central government. Peasants would establish their own laws, administer their own justice. The people had voted, overwhelmingly, yes. Nasir too, though he was influenced by certain doubts about the advisability of voting no.
The rebels had moved on, leaving one behind, Comandante Oquendo, to guide the experiment. Just two days later, word came that the others had all been killed in a police ambush. Comandante Oquendo offered to end the experiment, but the Piedrasinos refused.
In those days Peru was different. Yet another president was robbing the treasury, but there existed a hope that poor people could arise and create a new reality. Even the intellectuals in the universities were seduced by that movement called the Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso; it spoke about justice and equality and dignity for everyone. Too late they learned how the Shining Path had shot thousands of peasants in the head. Still, before the disillusionment, Peru had burned with a revolutionary idealism that gave birth to many groups. Some, like the Black Rainbow, had been more idealistic, less bloody and vicious, than Sendero. The word “love” resounded in all Black Rainbow speeches.
Comandante Oquendo sent a letter off to Lima, which caused the valley to be designated a red zone and hastened the closing of the mine. Both things were inevitable anyway, since the Sendero controlled the highways, and any place far from the capital was assumed to be under terrorist control. All those years, the rich in Lima were afraid to drive one hour to the beach.
Why not repudiate a government that only takes and never gives? The peasants of Piedras and Piedad, El Mirador, and Piedras Baja proudly formed their own indigenous government. Humble men and women exercised all charges. At the people’s assemblies, laws were created, work crews assigned, and justice done. Today’s water problem would have been decided in favor of the clinic, not because the Doctores were superior people, but because the clinic served all the community. A work crew might be assigned to help the family dig their own ditch, but the mother, as head of a thieving family, would have been forced to perform some humiliating reparation, such as scrubbing the clinic floor on her hands and knees.
