When Mountains Walked, page 9
A faint track forked downhill toward the river. Following it, Maggie came to a bend protected from the worst currents: a pool below two rocks that had accumulated a stack of driftwood the size of a small house.
She took off her dusty sandals and, hanging on to a tree’s bare silver arm, stepped into the shallow water. It pulled coolly at her insteps, inviting her to risk her life.
Had Althea depended on the fiery particulars of this world as acutely as this?
She stepped forward, fully clothed. The sandy bottom suddenly dropped hip-deep into a lenticular depression. The current was green here, solid, and far stronger than she’d expected; it frightened her with an instantaneous, invincible pull, forming an audible suck-hole behind her waist, pulling her feet up from the bottom, so that she had to grip the branch for all her life as legs and feet swung out toward the stream. Making sure of her grasp, she dipped her face into the water, past her ears. The roar was as loud as she needed it to be. Opening her eyes, she saw nothing but a grayish blur. After a few seconds she raised her head, to calculate how to get out. She swam her legs over to a shallower spot, near the bank, and stood up quickly, crookedly, gripping at stones with her toes.
A grasshopper clicked, thrummed. Pebbles slid down from the hill. Someone watching, maybe. Afraid to look, she bolted uphill, dust sticking to her pants legs so that they thickened, slowed her, like trying to escape from terror in a dream. In the middle of the dwarf’s boulder field it became obvious no one was chasing her. She stopped, stood panting. Ahead the trail ran like dry white woolen yarn amongst the boulders, so opaque and burning that they reminded Maggie of the fake asbestos rocks in the bottom of Calvin’s gas grill in Connecticut. It was roasting hot. She wished she had somewhere else to go, another home besides the clinic.
…
By mid-June they had treated a total of eleven people. Six were repeat visits by Fortunata Rosas de Carrión, who was susceptible to headaches and sour stomach. The rest were coughs and colds, cuts and bruises, the pig bite, an earache, and a sprain. Maggie searched the Merck Manual and wrote down the worst-sounding diagnoses, but she wasn’t going to fool Catholic Charities. Eleven patients was not enough; if the dearth continued, their contract would not be renewed and they’d have to find work elsewhere, and Carson would have failed at his first responsible post.
…
“Why don’t you bring your children for lunch?” Maggie had asked this of Fortunata many times, each time hearing a different excuse. Each time, Fortunata swore and promised they’d come, and Maggie encouraged her to make extra food, and again the children never arrived. Then, on one such day, when Carson had gone to Nasir’s for something or other, Doña Erna arrived instead, at three P.M., with her sons, Boris and Limbert, aged seventeen and fourteen.
The boys had wide, soft jungle faces; their father was from Pucallpa, in the lowlands. They stood hulking in the kitchen until Maggie offered them the lunch leftovers, half the enamel pot full of cooked spaghetti. Doña Ema heaped her own plate. After eating, the younger son strode down the hall, peed long and loud into the Jewel of Piedras without closing the door, returned, and sat down as if daring Maggie to object. Soon both boys left without having said a word. Doña Ema hung back, so Maggie offered coffee.
Tilting the can of condensed milk over Doña Ema’s cup, Maggie asked how the prayers were going. Doña Ema cocked her head sideways and put out the tip of her tongue as she watched a thick column of sperm-colored sweetness flow into her coffee.
Only when Maggie stopped the flow of milk did Ema tell her story. She was well and truly pregnant, by God’s grace, and praying for a girl. Last week, in a dream, Jesus came to her wearing a brown dress saying, “Doña Ema, thou hast prayed upon thy knees for a year, thou hast drunk, hast bathed in herbs, and hast cleaned thy heart and womb. Thy promesa is fulfilled. Now cometh my obligation.”
Maggie strained her chin toward one corner of the ceiling so as not to break into a giggle. “And so?”
“My husband returned,” she said. “The next day.”
“Qué bueno! Everything is good again between you?”
Doña Ema hugged herself, describing the miracle of renewed affection.
Maggie saw that Fortunata was suppressing a smirk, so she asked how Doña Ema could be sure that she was pregnant. Wasn’t it rather soon?
“I have sensation,” said Doña Ema, placing a palm across her bulging lower belly. “Does this clinic have a test?”
“No,” Maggie said. “Come back in two weeks.”
She put Doña Ema on her list, patient number twelve. Doing well in the first trimester of pregnancy.
Fortunata howled with laughter as soon as Ema left. How her comadre lied! Surely she was pregnant—women always knew—but did Maggie want to hear the true story?
Doña Erna had followed the Doctora’s good consejo and found herself a lover, a young truck driver who took supplies to the mine. For weeks they’d carried on, trysting shamelessly in Ema’s house, the truck parked on the road, until one day the truck driver had spoken sharply to Doña Ema’s son Boris. Boris had run to El Mirador to complain to his father, who had already been trying to ignore the rumors. All he needed was one spark of confirmation to set fire to the jealousy that had been seething. Half out of his head, he’d saddled his mule and galloped to Piedras, stopping at Nasir’s to buy a liter of cane spirits which he drained in two gulps. At his old home, his wife saucily announced that if he had the right to take a young lover, so did she. Unfair! The husband went out of his head. He decided to commit suicide. He ran outside, determined to throw himself from the bridge into the river. It was a long way to run, but he was very determined, for he was still in love with her. When he reached the bridge he ran breathlessly off the center span, thinking to land where the water was deepest, but he’d forgotten the large pylon of stones there, supporting the bridge’s legs. The carcass of a pig happened to be stuck on these rocks. It must have died of disease, and its campesino owner had pitched it in upstream. A miracle indeed, for upon this pig the husband fell. Rotten and filled with gas, the carcass saved his life. As it exploded, he came to his senses and returned to Doña Ema.
…
“What is the name of the herb she bathed in?” Maggie came into the kitchen with her notebook a few minutes later.
Fortunata was husking corn, holding the tin palangana between her knees. “Ruda. Do you want some? I have it in my garden.” When she described it, a blue-green herb with a rank smell and a little yellow flower, Maggie recalled seeing some in a glass on Nasir’s counter.
“Ruda does everything a woman wants,” Fortunata declared. “For a business it attracts money.” Ruda increased fertility; boiled in milk, it also induced abortions. Fortunata looked up from her task to gauge Maggie’s expression. “Which is your purpose?”
“Well, if ruda does whatever a woman wants, then I want ruda” Maggie joked.
“We always believed you used birth control, Doctora,” Fortunata said. “Do you have the other problem? Why don’t you have children?”
Maggie shrugged. “My husband . . .” She was starting to explain that she and Carson had agreed not to be parents because they believed there were already enough children in the world, and that people should take care of the ones who were already here.
“Your husband? Who is he? Are you not the woman?” Fortunata wanted to know. “Who will have the baby, him or you? Don’t you like children?”
“I adore them,” Maggie said firmly. Time to change the subject. “Why don’t you ever bring your children here?” While Fortunata dished out lame excuses, Maggie ran through the chilling implications of her line of questioning. What if Fortunata was spreading a rumor that the gringos were cold and heartless? Child-devouring Pishtacos?
That would be unfair, since maternal feelings had blossomed in Maggie since arriving. More precisely, they’d roared through her, laying waste to her ideas of herself. Whenever she saw the families of Piedras walking on the road, father, mother, little ones, she felt a pull as strong, as mindless as the river. The whole world changed at the sight of a young father carrying his daughter on his shoulders, home from the soccer field. In this, Maggie saw life’s meaning, a beauty most exquisite.
Some nights she lay in bed quivering with a strange and inconvenient kind of lust, knowing from the calm odor of his body that Carson did not share it. She had vowed to understand him and to love him as he was. When once she’d experimented with a veiled allusion to her new vision of the world, he’d shrugged and said that bliss was hardly the definition of the family lives she’d learned about so far. Why imitate the Piedrasinos? He was right: she’d had the same thoughts herself.
Besides, her feelings were so overwhelming that she resented and mistrusted them on principle. They invaded her like a curse, or spell, exhaled from the very earth. No wonder you want to reproduce, she’d told herself, now that you’re feeling bored and superfluous in this Catholic valley.
Had she believed in ruda’s omnipotence, Maggie would have eaten a whole bush, only to be returned to the simple way she’d felt before.
And then the wish would whisper once again, insidious, intelligent, compelling arguments. Motherhood must be a richer, warmer life. Why fight desire?
She’d have liked to confide in someone—but Fortunata was hardly unbiased, and besides, conspiring with a servant against a husband seemed to violate an obvious rule of life.
Fortunata pursued the issue. “Pero Señora, what kind of a husband is he?”
“He’s good,” Maggie said. “He’s my Don Calzón,” and she explained all that Carson’s nickname had come to mean, the romance and futility of good intentions.
…
In July, three more patients came in, sprains and cuts and bruises. A review was due in September; more and more, Maggie began to want to fudge the numbers. With an effort of will, she left out Doña Ema’s frequent visits, because Carson so disliked her, even though Ema almost counted as a legitimate patient, proudly recounting each twinge of early pregnancy, beginning with headaches and nausea. The soul of the child had landed from above, and would descend slowly over nine months, causing discomforts all the way, especially at the end.
Maggie diagnosed herself with amebiasis, and treated herself with Flagyl, carefully noting in her folder that she was clinic staff. The pills made her mouth and breath taste of metal, yet she wondered whether she’d diagnosed herself correctly or whether she was merely entertaining herself, fattening her lists. When she mentioned this doubt to Carson, he laughed and said anyone who would take Flagyl recreationally belonged in an asylum.
“This whole canyon’s an asylum,” she said, voicing a judgment she was sure was his. Sometimes it scared her how many of her thoughts consisted of conversations with him that weren’t occurring in real life.
Carson agreed. They both felt a sneaking, existentially unhealthy sensation. They’d lived openly, as if on stage, letting people decide whether to trust them, but there was no audience to justify their efforts, so their play grew falser by the day, until it seemed by now that no one should ever be convinced. They weren’t fighting, yet Maggie felt a forced, superficial quality in their conversations. She teased Carson; he responded in a silly falsetto, as if to announce that his real self had retreated far inside, leaving a small, kind imp behind. He never raged, never blamed her for dragging him to Piedras. Maggie supposed she should be grateful, but she wasn’t.
At last she asked why he never got upset. Didn’t he care?
“I’m giving it until September.” Carson’s nose looked straighter than usual, as if he were smelling something bad. Perhaps she’d offended him with the very question, whether he cared. “But we were told there were forty-eight thousand people who needed health care,” she cried, outraged on his behalf. “Where are they?”
“Somebody’s keeping them away,” said Carson.
“Do you really think so? Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
He shrugged. “Just a theory.”
She kissed the back of his neck, kissed it again because he’d cringed a little, hunching his shoulders to get away from the sensation. Maybe the canyon was stripping them of all of their illusions. Only when they’d both been reduced to nothing would it lift them up again.
…
“You see my husband, Fortunata, see he’s desesperado? No one’s coming to our clinic. Help us. You are our only friend. Why do they not come?”
Fortunata’s eyes rolled up under her lids and fluttered, showing only the whites, the way the eyes of a friend of Maggie’s, who had gone to Smith, rolled back when she expressed a superior conviction. “I explain to them,” Fortunata said, “but they don’t listen. Perhaps they are afraid.”
“Afraid? Of what?”
“Of the foreigner. The Pishtaco.” Fortunata recounted a rumor about forced sterilizations at one gringo hospital she’d heard of.
Maggie groaned. She told Fortunata about El Salvador, where everyone had seen rapes, kidnappings, torture, murder. They’d all been hurt by the cruel war the U.S. government was sponsoring, and yet they never saw Maggie as a representative of violence. People had opened their hearts to her; they’d met her at the simplest human level, without false humility or pride.
She tried to keep the preaching and the yearning out of her voice, describing how it had felt to sit around a table with Dorotea and Santiago. Fortunata wanted to know whether Maggie had returned to see those people.
No. Returning was impossible. Coming to Peru had been her way of returning.
“What did you think about their revolution?” Fortunata asked.
“I wanted them to win,” Maggie said. “Had I been born in Peru or El Salvador, I wonder what choices I would make. I might have joined the Sendero Luminoso. Often I wonder why the poor don’t all rise up to kill the rich.”
“Don’t talk like that, Doctora,” Fortunata warned her. “You don’t know what you say. The Shining Path was sangriento, sin piedad.” Bloody, heartless. “They would have hung you up, the day of tomorrow, just for your blond hair.”
“It’s brown, dark brown,” Maggie insisted, as she’d done many times before. In Cambridge, people had even called it black.
Blond, repeated Fortunata, and still the Black Rainbow Movement would not have hanged her. The Rainbow had been good, good for the people. If the Doctores were interested, one day they could meet the former leader. Comandante Oquendo lived a few hours’ walk upriver, past El Mirador. People maintained respect for him.
“I wish he would advise us,” Maggie said. She told Fortunata that she, herself, Maggie, would happily meet the Comandante, but she’d need Carson’s permission. As foreigners, they had to be careful not to become involved in any way with revolutionary groups, or the Peruvian government would deport them. At the same time, Maggie wished it known in Piedras that she and Carson both understood how the definition of a terrorist often comes from a corrupt and violent authority. In Maggie’s mind, the Black Rainbow wasn’t terrorist, since nobody had been terrified. “If we met, I think Comandante Oquendo would see that he can trust us,” Maggie said. She scooped up the sugary, undissolved condensed milk from the bottom of her coffee cup and savored it on her tongue. Then she ran outside to share the news. Carson shrugged, again, but at least he didn’t disagree with what she’d done.
6
“DREENK,” Don Héctor Saavedra Ibáñez said in English. The Baineses were sitting in his astonishing parlor, full of antique spotted mirrors and furniture with curved legs. The hacienda owner poured hot yellow water from a chipped enamel kettle. “In the keetchen they are giving thees to your boy.” He served Johnny first.
“What is it?” Johnny asked, making a face before he touched his lips to the glass.
This tea was the color of urine, Althea saw. She drank a sip, and then another. Mint had been added to cover the taste of roots, musky and bitter. Her thighs began to quiver all over again with cold. She hadn’t been able to say much since arriving here, so she finished the cup without asking more about its ingredients.
Herbs for removing shock, for restoring warmth to the heart, Don Héctor explained, as if he’d heard her wondering. Valerian from the high passes; and another herb, a bitter reddish succulent that grew only in ruins. The ancients had planted it. He waved a small, dark hand and told how he walked everywhere, all over these hills, gathering plants and specimens. Talking to people about their cures. He tested most remedies on himself, except for those that had to do with childbirth and retrieval of the soul. Most were very effective. Others, like rubbing a sick person with a black guinea pig, or tying a puppy onto a broken bone, relied perhaps on faith. Don Héctor was reluctant to discount them entirely. A power was required that he did not possess.
He was a small man with a long, creased face and the hairiest arms Althea had ever seen. She thought he would easily fit into one of the wee suits of conquistador armor she had marveled at in Lima.
She drank the bad-tasting liquid in two gulps, then set down her teacup on the oval mahogany table. It was calming her, she thought. Whatever her eyes fell upon, she felt she was seeing it quite clearly. The table, now. She felt a vague wonderment about where it had come from, how it had arrived here, but mostly she saw the way the light ran in a long finger along its top. Light with dust in it, light so white it was almost bluish, as if it had been washed.
This parlor might have been a delirium of Heaven. A Venetian mirror, horsehair sofas, portraits of Don Héctor’s family hanging near the ceiling in oval frames. One old lady with a trap mouth: Althea tried to be charitable and suppose it had set that way during the endless photographic sitting. A lot of color had been added to her cheeks, a failed attempt to make her look more pleasant. No wonder he wanted to live here, if this was his mother-in-law. Then there was a prosperous family posed against a background of urns and busts and boats traversing lakes. The wife filled a large chair, the mustachioed husband pressed one hand down on her shoulder, while two little sons in striped socks sprawled in coy poses at their feet pretending to play with two toy dogs on wheels. Could these have been Mr. and Mrs. Saavedra in their youth? The strangest photo was one of an infant in a long white dress, held up by its Indian wet nurse: she stood behind the child with a black shawl over her face, so that only her brown hands were identifiable.
