When Mountains Walked, page 8
Althea always tried to compensate for the inconvenience they caused. She’d start frangipani cuttings in glasses of water, dust and vacuum endlessly, take Maggie to the park and her sister to the movies, and shoo Julia out of the kitchen, saying, “You, rest!” Althea made each recipe only once, never learning from her mistakes. Tomato aspic, pheasant in sauerkraut, beef and peaches stewed inside a pumpkin. Julia complained about one bean dish that had left the kitchen reeking of skunk or armpits. Althea had retorted that she’d learned the recipe from the man whom Julia ought to respect more than anyone in the world, Brother Jesunanda, without whom Julia would never have existed.
Julia had screeched and left the room, saying her mother was a crackpot, a religious nut.
That was the day Maggie learned that her grandmother had once locked herself up in a convent. It was in India. Priests and nuns in robes fed the naked, shoeless poor; they taught them to grow bananas, make rope, and raise milk cows. Althea had lived there while Grandpa Johnny had gone off to feel the earth shake, then gotten trapped in Russia and Shanghai by the war. The priest of this convent had been the most wonderful man on earth, after Grandpa Johnny, according to Althea. How she wished her granddaughters could have met him! “Brother Jesunanda used to wash the beggars’ feet every morning.”
That did seem a sign of goodness. “Did Mommy know him?”
“She wasn’t even a twinkle.” Althea explained Julia’s evolution, from nothing, to twinkle, fetus, infant, child, teenager, woman, wife, and finally mother of Sonia and Maggie. Between nothingness and twinkle, the priest had intervened, gladdening Althea’s heart so she could have another baby. “You’ll be mothers one day. Then you’ll understand.”
“Never!” Maggie’s young mind had reeled.
“Nonsense,” Julia had said minutes later. “A child comes from its parents.”
Maggie’s imagination had gotten caught in the time before Julia had been a spark, a time when Althea’s priest had been the illustration of an angel. His flowing hair was black, he wore a peach-colored belted gown; and though he lacked wings, he sometimes had a silver sword and helmet. He knelt before Grandma’s chair holding her bare foot, as the prince held Cinderella’s. “Did that priest ever wash your feet, Grandma?”
“Do I look like a beggar to you?”
5
WITHIN TWO WEEKS, they’d given up fabricating work for themselves in the afternoons and began taking naps like everybody else. After all, it was roasting hot, and they were in South America. Of course, it would have been preferable to loll outdoors like most people, wreathed in cow dung smoke. The smoke was like incense, plus they could have taken advantage of whatever microscopic breezes were available. Unfortunately, the gringo doctors had dignity to uphold, so they sweltered indoors, breathless and naked under the mosquito nets.
They couldn’t bear to touch each other, nor even sleep with their own legs together.
Pulsing, vivid heat emanated like another wall from the wall at her side. Maggie began to hear the river rapid, roaring and breathing like a burning furnace. The very sound was stifling. She felt herself underwater with her grandmother, fighting for air in this same river. “I’m hearing it,” she’d eventually say, knowing she’d cause Carson to begin to hear it too. Strange how quickly they’d learned to ignore the sound; strange, when hearing it, that they’d ever been able to ignore it at all.
Carson said you simply had to forget the noise. It was too goddamned loud.
She envied his economy of mind.
Her own mind was more like the river. Everyone warned her not to go in past her knees. Nasir and Albita’s son had drowned at age eighteen. His tomb was behind the store, a hump of river cobbles cemented together, painted blue and white, with sad plaster lambs and a marble plaque and a small round window like a submarine’s, to look in upon his coffin. The Rosario became safe only two days downstream, below the hydroelectric plant. At Piedras it was full of whirlpools and rapids and deceptive smooth spots where the surface roiled with deadly currents. The water was opaque, a brownish gray that changed to slate at twilight, yellow in strong light. People got sucked down, swept away. Rafts broke in pieces, boats got dashed on rocks.
The river carried many secrets, Fortunata said. Maggie was proof that one, at least, was true. Her grandparents had swallowed its water fifty years ago, and this was why she’d been drawn to return. Now, though it was boiled and tamed, she drank nothing but river, river, every day.
…
Nobody came to ask for help. Maggie tried feeding the neighbors’ dogs, Bobby, Chocolatín, and Bestia, buying friendship to replace their snarls. Once, as she turned to go back inside, Chocolatín ran up behind and tried to bite her.
She wrote no more letters. During the days, she read every adult comic book in Nasir’s lending library and told the far-fetched plots to Carson, who scoffed at her addiction to crime and romance. She sat on a rock beside the river, staring at the watery at the canyon walls. Watched the haze of morning give way to the stark, killing sun of noon. She asked the natural world whether it was friendly, and she thought it said it was.
For two hours each morning, she studied medical manuals, memorized the symptoms of diseases, and took notes to educate herself. When the matrimonial bed arrived, she sewed a double mosquito net with bright yellow fabric bought from Nasir. Then she and Carson slept together^ like pies on display at a roadside café.
Doña Ema’s irrigation ditch reduced the clinic’s water to a trickle, some days to nothing, but Maggie insisted they must tolerate this. Don Calzón, as he’d occasionally begun to call himself, finished his toilet pit and enclosed it in a screen of leafy branches that quickly dried, becoming a rattling, fragrant bower. Using rocks he’d dug out, he built a low wall in front of the clinic, to keep out road dust from the buses and trucks that went by, bearing passengers and cargo but never stopping at the clinic. Behind this wall, Maggie planted flower seeds guaranteed by Nasir to sprout. They did, but fell flat overnight. Carson plastered the kitchen and painted the whole building stark white inside, freshly government-sea-green outside. He made a plywood tent sign and propped it in the road. Then he dragged a chair and table to the clinic door and sat facing outward, daring people to come in.
Days passed slowly, slowly, like crawling across a plain of gleaming knives. Maggie wanted to kiss the nights when they descended, bringing coolness, the scent of leaves, wet dirt, and flowers, and dissolving the canyon walls. Often she couldn’t sleep, and she’d sit in the kitchen until four A.M., staring at the stars in the square window, finding shapes in the monstrous shadows cast by a single candle.
…
She told Fortunata about her grandparents’ visit to Piedras, and their meeting with the eccentric hacendado who owned a mummy and had written a book about herbs and cures. Before coming to Piedras, she and Carson had agreed that finding the hacendado‘s herbal encyclopedia would be a nice project for Maggie. She might even publish a little article in some magazine back home.
“Nasir is educated, Nasir might know,” Fortunata said.
“I did ask him.” The shopkeeper’s incuriosity had been complete. “I even said there might be money in it.”
Fortunata guffawed. The mummy had been sold, had it existed, but perhaps she and Maggie could find a book. It might prove useful for humanity. Next, Fortunata wanted to know why Maggie’s grandparents had come to Piedras. Had they been doctors too?
“My grandmother was just a woman, my grandfather a geologist.”
“A geologist. That explains it. He was looking for gold, like all foreigners.”
“Not me and Carson!”
“Doctora, you are not a foreigner. You have an uncle buried in Peru.”
Maggie invited Carson to come along on the Don Héctor expedition, but failed to persuade him to close the clinic even for a few hours. How could he take time off when he had not yet worked? Walking out the door, Maggie was angry with him for agreeing that she was superfluous. Still, they both knew it was dumb for two people to sit there waiting for no one; and if one had to stay, it was obvious which. Maggie told herself she must enjoy her freedom, since it was hers, and it was all she had.
She and Fortunata headed north, up the rutted dusty road. Crossing the bridge, walking onto the grounds of the hacienda, Maggie felt time ratcheting backwards, displacing her arrival into the past. The yellow dust had a strange smell, like roasted rotting beans.
In the dappled shade of the enormous mango grove, it was cooler, and there were clouds of mosquitoes. All walls were dyed bright ocher halfway up, from being splashed with mud during the rainy season. Here it seemed everything could be true, and that a young Althea could be hiding among the thick green lizard-skinned trunks of the mango trees. When her grandmother had come to Piedras, she was younger than Maggie was now.
Peering around corners, through holes in the broken walls, they soon spotted the old man with cataracts, the same man she and Carson had seen from the bus window on their first day. He still sat on his verandah, wearing his suit of dun-colored river water. His jacket sleeves were composed entirely of patches, his ancient shirt buttoned tightly at the neck. In a tender, drifting voice he said, “No, little gringa, no gringos, never, no.”
His cataracts facing the sky reminded Maggie that she would one day be wiped from the earth.
This anciano was more than old enough to remember the days before the agrarian reform, but he claimed not to know the hacienda’s name. Anyway, it was no longer an hacienda, it was just a place. Now its name was Piedras Baja.
“I know,” Maggie said. “Do you live here, in Don Héctor’s house?”
“Yes,” he said, “yes.”
“Are there things inside? Books?” Maggie asked.
The anciano’s hand waved in no particular direction.
“Who else lives here now?” Fortunata prodded.
“In this house,” he began. Then he closed his lips and chewed once, silently.
He had lived all his life in slowness, Maggie decided.
She walked over to the French doors and peered inside. The room had a floor of patterned tiles, yellow and red and black and white. It was vacant except for a pile of mules’ pack-saddle frames and braided rawhide reins. Maggie stepped inside, thinking that even now the hacienda would make a nicer clinic than the low, bleak building where her husband sat waiting for no one.
The next room was also tiled, and it had plaster garlands all around its upper walls. What must its furniture have been, mirrors and clawfoot sofas? Through its doorway Maggie spied a small, ornate marble fireplace and, in the far corner, a straw mattress. From under messy blankets, a man’s bare foot peeked out.
“There is no one,” Fortunata declared.
“But yes, someone is sleeping,” Maggie whispered. “See his foot?”
“Let’s go to the chapel,” Fortunata insisted.
“But who is it?”
“Oh, someone,” said Fortunata. “Anyone. Let’s go.”
They walked to the chapel, their feet swishing up a moldy, rainy smell from the dry leaves. Its lower walls were stones held together with mud, a foundation bowed and crumpled outward, like a stomped-on shoebox. The windows were shuttered, too high for looking into. Fortunata described the blue walls and huge gilded altar full of columns and compartments. If Maggie wanted to join the Pentecostals, she could see all this. Otherwise, no priest would come until the saint’s day in October.
“I could come and pray with Doña Ema,” Maggie joked, giving rise to a sharply curious glance from Fortunata.
“Pray for what?”
Maggie didn’t answer.
The hacendado’s tomb, in the cemetery behind, was a low tunnel the size of a doghouse. Inside the chamber was a framed portrait of the man at thirty. His skin was dark, and there were water stains under the glass, so his features were unclear, but Maggie could tell he had been civilized, thick hair combed back. In her imagination she’d never seen him young. She caught herself hoping that these might be the wrong bones, that her grandmother’s hacendado had borne a different name: Don Enrique, Don Fernando. Years ago, in Rome, she’d felt a similar disquietude inside the main cathedral. It hadn’t seemed right for Saint Peter to be confined, even in that most splendorous tomb.
She and Fortunata walked home, Maggie yakking about how medical researchers in the United States were learning to respect herbs and traditional cures. “Yes,” Fortunata agreed, “before the Spanish ruined us, we had our own medicine, our own science.”
Maggie’s legs felt limp and heavy in the heat. Had Fortunata tried to steer her away from that innocuous, slender foot? She’d forgotten how to reach conclusions, just like everyone else in Piedras.
Don Calzón greeted them at the clinic door, asking if they wanted to hear great news. “No news is good news, right?” No patients had come in.
…
Carson told Maggie that everything felt regurgitated, days chewed over one by one, without refreshment. “Join us in the kitchen,” she invited him. Fortunata was always ready to interrupt her duties for coffee and a chat, but Carson said this wasn’t appropriate. His self-importance irritated Maggie.
Each night, she tried to entertain him with what she’d heard. She suspected Fortunata of making up half of everything she told, but her stories were good ones, full of ghosts, coincidences, thievery, infidelity, bigamy, and drownings. Under the river was another world, where the beautiful encantados lived. The mountains were full of nonhuman beings, souls cast out from Heaven at the time of Lucifer’s rebellion. Many had landed here, among the deserted crags. Flat, legless monsters flapped up from the surfaces of lakes, looking like enormous pieces of leather. Lightning bolts defended treasures; women’s voices called men to walk off the edges of cliffs. The most imposing monster was the Pishtaco, a large blond gringo who dressed up in a military uniform and stomped around the trails on moonless nights, seeking children’s fat to eat. “Doesn’t he just explain everything?” Maggie asked Carson. “Doesn’t he?” She extracted his responses, sometimes embarrassed at her need to do so—and sometimes angry, Carson’s silence proving that she pleaded with a stone. At other times she was glad she’d made the effort, rewarded with his agreement, his genuine laughter.
Fortunata must herself be one of Piedras’s scandals. Despite being Pentecostal she drank to excess, though nowhere near as much as her appalling husband. She’d converted to Pentecostalism because the congregation met on Saturday night, her husband’s biggest drinking night. Now he beat her Sundays instead. Maggie suggested the husband talk to Carson about alcoholism. Knowing the message would not be delivered, she was almost glad: she’d never meet him.
One Monday Fortunata came in saying proudly, “I gave back as good as I got. Whacked him in the forehead with a wooden ladle he had carved himself.” And she imitated the movement of her arm, rising and falling more times than Maggie hoped was true.
Fortunata never turned off the radio; batteries became a major expense. She forgot to burn the trash. She had a dream in which Maggie gave birth to a baby. She stole food, too. Bags of macaroni vanished. Anytime Maggie invested in a chicken, it was always surprising how few pieces ended up in the soup. Fortunata had a peculiar way of cutting up a bird so that no piece was identifiable. Maggie was unable to reconstruct the original chicken to determine how much was actually missing. Once, she fished out all of the chunks and put them together. They formed a heap about the size of a Softball.
“What are you doing?” Carson said.
“Trying to see how much of the chicken Fortunata steals. Look.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Carson said. “One chicken is more than enough for the two of us.” With his fork, he began picking apart Maggie’s softball, choosing the bits he wanted.
What in the world could make a person so self-contained, Maggie wondered.
He caught her staring at him, and gave her a wink.
“You’re a mystery,” she said, slightly dazzled.
“I’m not.”
…
Past the outhouse of Don Calzón, the trail meandered flat through scattered thorn scrub, then plunged across a stagnant stream and into the band of castor bushes and mesquite that marked the riverbed’s margin. Here was the fork, one tip branching southeast toward the upper fringes of Piedras where Fortunata’s cottage was. The other branch ran north, parallel to the river, sloping up sharply to come out on the open hillside where it joined a goat path knitted with cloven-hoof prints. A kilometer on, it shouldered around a ridge, descended to cross a forsaken field of stones and stunted bushes. Here lived a naked dwarf, according to Fortunata, with hot-pink skin and curly hair, in a nasty hole below the cliff. His presence explained why Maggie had always turned back, scared. She’d thought it was from losing sight of the clinic.
The boulder field did seem a good place for a cast-out soul to land. Maggie had never before dared to cross it. Again a slight fear trembled in her belly, distracting her from the scenery; but she had vowed to urge herself on longer hikes, if only to expand her life. At the shoulder of the mountain, she took one last look down toward the clinic and saw the transparent wall that had confined her within a hundred yards’ radius. Carson was inside, pacing up and down the clinic’s long empty room, his eyes rotting at the backs like a tiger’s in a zoo. Behind the building, facing the river, she discerned a tiny Fortunata sitting on her tiny bench with a sequin-sized glint beside her. She must be shelling fava beans into the dishpan.
The sound of grasshoppers or locusts accentuated the heat. Maggie crept across the haunted field, recognizing a place where unwary girls found unhappy destinies and men and women arranged to meet unseen. No one bothered Maggie. She stopped under the cliff with cheesy holes. One hole seemed to have a wall blocking its front, unless it was an old landslide. If it was a cliff tomb, Don Héctor must have sent his workers down on ropes from above, endangering their lives to bring out feather crowns, shriveled corpses, and other worthless treasures.
