When mountains walked, p.5
When Mountains Walked, page 5
“Shh, he’ll understand your tone of voice.”
“The soup’s cold,” Carson announced, putting down his spoon.
“How can it be cold?” It was lukewarm. Alone, Maggie would have eaten it without complaint.
“Hey, kid.” He signaled for the boy.
“Disculpen,” the boy said, excuse me. Maggie wanted to apologize too, but instead she pushed her bowl along with Carson’s to be reheated.
They stared at the table catatonically. Their last meal had been in a previous eon, hard rolls and coffee in the Cajamarca bus station. Even longer ago, Maggie thought, she’d believed that Carson knew how to live well anywhere in this world.
“Gringos, no lo creo!” Gringos, I can’t believe it! Silhouetted in the doorway stood a local woman, medium height with long iron-gray braids. She wore a faded aqua shift and canvas pumps. Night had fallen, closing the world behind her. Advancing into the room, she said she’d come to confirm a rumor that norteamericanos had arrived in Piedras.
“Buenas noches!” Maggie said, and stated the obvious. “Yes, that’s us.”
Encouraged, the new customer sat down at their table and, turning her chair toward the kitchen, yelled for Nasir. She was in late middle age, with a thick waist and stout hard body. Below the hem of her skirt, her calves were smooth and muscled like a gymnast’s—from walking up and down the mountain trails, Maggie decided.
“Qué es esto?” Nasir came out in an undershirt and jeans. “Doña Fortunata, what a joy to see you!” Fortunata was an important personage, he told them. This day could never have finished without Fortunata registering their arrival.
“Why?” Maggie asked. Did she hold some official position?
Both Peruvians ignored her. Fortunata was feigning a further convulsive shock. “Nasir, by God, but these are gringos!” she cried. “Bring them some bread at least. Gringos, are you lost? Are you Germans? Have you taken the wrong bus?”
Nasir said, “These are our new doctors. They are going to reopen the clinic.”
“Gracias a Dios! We miss our nurses, even though they were useless.”
Maggie asked how many gringos had come here in the past.
The boy set down a plate of the same cementlike rolls they’d eaten in Cajamarca. Carson made a sandwich of margarine, salt, and raw hot peppers. While Maggie watched in admiration, he bit into it, wiggling his eyebrows at Maggie, who hurried to translate everything that had been said.
“I knew you were not turistas,” Fortunata went on with authority. “Turistas are afraid of us. They think we are terrorists and savages. They don’t know that today we want capitalism and progress! The only tourists we ever saw in Piedras were some Californians. Your compatriotas, yes?”
Yes, but, said Maggie. California was far away, another coast, another country.
Fortunata agreed. The Californians had been large and golden, beautiful and very spoiled. (Not dark and long and earnest like us, Maggie thought.) They’d stayed at Nasir’s for weeks, eating vitamins and playing in the rapids in their kayaks while people stood watching from the shore. They’d loved the dangerous waters so much, they’d decided to set up a rafting center here in Piedras. “We’re still waiting for them to come back with all the money they said they’d bring. Why are you not their representatives!” She laughed mockingly and said, with real suspicion, that some people believed the Californians had secretly panned for gold, and had exported enough gold dust so that they did not need to return.
After this there was a silence, into which Maggie was tempted to utter denials.
Her name was Fortunata Rosas de Carrión, and tonight her husband had gone to get drunk at a party up the mountain, and she did not expect him home. In revenge, she would get as drunk as he. “Beer! Don Nasir, bring that frigid blonde!” Nasir said he’d see her money first, and Fortunata put her hand into the furrow between her breasts, drew out a knitted bag, and disdainfully dropped a few soles into Nasir’s outstretched hand.
“What’s she saying?” Carson had finished all the bread. “‘Bod-racho,’ I recognize that.” He mispronounced the word for drunk, but Maggie praised him anyway.
Fortunata said, enunciating fully, “I am not borracha, sir, not yet.”
Carson looked at Fortunata, then at Maggie, and then he began to laugh.
Fortunata laughed with him. “Welcome to Piedras, Doctor Calzón! What a rare name you have! When is the inauguration?”
“Carson,” Maggie translated in two directions. Fortunata had just offered him his new nickname: Doctor Underwear.
Carson said, “Tell her I don’t wear underwear. Underwear is for sissies.” Fortunata was delighted. “Now just tell her our doors are open. Anyone can come, no charge.”
Maggie did.
At this, Fortunata was disappointed. “You will have no act of opening? I can supply cooked foods. Chickens, any number, at one day’s notice. Papas a la Huancaina, suckling pig? Not just to say so, but I have fame as a cook.” Her voice lowered. “Doña Albita is a terrible cook. Even Nasir admits it. Claro, they can sell you the beer. Everyone will come!”
Carson shook his head. “They’ll say we’re getting peasants drunk so we can sterilize them. We’ll be kicked out,” he predicted. He wagged his finger at Fortunata. “No way.”
“Qué esta diciendo?” Fortunata asked. What is he saying?
“He hates parties,” Maggie told her. Carson had never wanted to be the head of a program. Heads of programs spent all their time kissing babies, making sure their funding got renewed. Carson would rather lance a boil. Lately, though, he’d realized there was one reason to run your own outfit, which was to avoid being supervised by some idiot like his last boss, Suzette Fauchon.
Remembering things her father had said about not neglecting protocol in South America, Maggie asked Fortunata whether they should present themselves to the mayor, but Fortunata explained that the town council had voted itself out of existence.
So that was that. The beer arrived in a tall brown liter bottle. Fortunata poured a tumblerful and handed it to Carson. “Here, Señor, drink with a Peruvian. Sit down, Nasir, drink with us!” Nasir pulled up a chair.
Carson took a sip, set down the glass. “Gracias. I still wonder, where’s our soup?”
“Ya, ya, it’s coming,” Nasir said, while Fortunata instructed Carson how to drink: “No, Doctor, seco, drink it down.” Carson obeyed, slamming the tumbler on the table. Fortunata cried out, “Yes, like that!” and refilled the glass for Maggie. “Salud, Doctora!”
The soup arrived, steaming fiercely.
“Now but I can make a soup,” boasted Fortunata, peering into the bowls.
Thus they acquired their cook.
…
During their first week in Peru, when they’d gone to register at the U.S. embassy in Lima, a man behind a bulletproof window had warned them against visiting the Rosario Canyon. He had shown them a photocopied map where Piedras lay under heavy, blurred crosshatching, an unpacified zone. He’d said, “I hope we don’t have to send in a Marine division after you.”
As they left the embassy, whose thick cement walls were obviously designed to withstand a small missile, Carson had fumed, “He enjoyed scaring you. They all do that. Sadists. I’ve been warned against every country where I’ve ever worked.”
Having seen the look in the man’s pale eyes, Maggie knew Carson was right. Still, the official had succeeded in frightening her, at least temporarily. She’d wanted to blurt out that she’d changed her mind, but it was much too late for that.
…
Shovel, broom, mop, bucket, machete. Soup pot, laundry soap, dishrag, mousetrap, insecticide, disinfectant. Salt, sugar, oil, instant coffee, canned milk. Bags all sticky with cane syrup from the shattered jar. Kerosene, gasoline, matches, butcher knife. Fortunata was helping Maggie unpack the supplies she and Carson had bought at the Cajamarca market.
She was disappointed that the gringos’ boxes contained nothing but familiar, Peruvian goods. “How much did all this cost?” she nonetheless wanted to know.
“A lot, because we had to buy it all at once,” Maggie prevaricated. It was strange to find herself managing the servant. Neither her mother nor her grandmother would have hoped for Fortunata’s friendship, nor cared about her good opinion.
“How much?”
“Six hundred soles.”
Fortunata sucked air through her teeth, though six hundred was a gross understatement. Maggie was grateful for Carson’s decision to own nothing that would draw attention to their privileges. She’d already hidden their air tickets between two overlapping roof sections in the bedroom, and Carson’s guns under a floorboard by the wall.
One thing her friends would never understand was how Carson, the healer of humanity, could possibly be into guns. Maggie rather enjoyed their discomfiture. Carson came by his interest honestly, hunting muskrat and deer with his father and his uncles in the Mississippi Delta as a boy. Plus, she could see how firearms could be a comfort in most places Carson had lived and worked, now including Piedras. He’d never had to shoot at anyone, but he’d cemented friendships going hunting with chieftains and officials. He tried to have a gun in every place he worked, prevailing on embassy friends, shopping locally, or simply smuggling. In Peru, incredibly enough, he’d learned that incoming baggage wasn’t x-rayed; he’d packed a pistol and a shotgun into one of his aluminum medical supply trunks.
“How much was this machete?” Fortunata slid it from its leather scabbard. “Ah, Bolivian. It is superior. Fifty soles. What about the refrigerator? Why don’t we place it in the kitchen?”
“It’s not personal,” Maggie said. “It’s for antivenin, and vaccinations.”
“We have no vipers here.”
Maggie filed this away to tell Carson. “The refrigerator is for medical uses.”
“Beer is curative,” Fortunata argued. “Milk, eggs, butter feed the bones.”
“True, but this nevera belongs to the Catholic Church.”
“You condemn it to be like a nun. Empty and cold inside. What about vitamins, did you bring some? Those Californians ate capsules full of seaweed, and live bugs.”
“No.” Maggie laughed, recognizing spirulina, acidophilus. “Fortunata, is this what Nasir meant about how you register everybody? Or was it something more official?” She’d been waiting to ask this question.
“I am always counting,” Fortunata replied, rummaging in the next box. “Counting things and people. Doctora, you forgot floor wax and a scrub brush. The clinic floor is inmundo, filthy. You will buy those things from Nasir.” She got to her feet and bustled off, saying she would now help Maggie’s husband.
…
The electricity went off at eleven. Maggie and Carson each lay under their own mosquito net, watching the filaments turn orange, fade, and disappear. Soon their bedroom was dark as a cavern. Maggie could smell the dust of the mosquito net, filtering all her air. She experimented with her hand in front of her face: an inch or a foot away, there was nothing to see.
She began relating the day’s events. In such a darkness she sensed all the edges of her voice; if Carson stopped listening or fell asleep, she’d know immediately. “Fortunata is so nosy. Could she be planning to rip us off?” She hated to impugn the cook, but felt a duty to report misgivings to her husband.
His voice came, oracular, from the dark. “People always want to know what things cost. It’s no sin to lie, but you’ve got to let the servants steal a little. If you’re too strict, one day they run off with everything.”
His reasoning astonished Maggie, but she saw its logic. Her mother had always said the opposite, that you couldn’t let them get used to thievery or they encroached more and more. Maggie preferred Carson’s attitude, cynical on the surface but generous and soulful underneath. She went on: she didn’t want to be paranoid, but she worried that Fortunata had been sent to spy on them or set them up. Did he remember Nasir saying she was an important personage?
“If they feel like killing us, they’ll just swoop down and do it.”
Maggie reflected silently on this possibility.
“I’m joking, honey,” Carson said. “Sort of.” Everyone in town must have been implicated in some way or other with the terrorists. If Nasir was still alive, they couldn’t have been too bloody. Nasir was a foreigner and Piedras’s official capitalist. Maggie could ask him for a character reference on Fortunata, if she wanted.
She was reassured. “She wanted the Californians back, remember? That’s a good sign.”
Without warning, Carson came crawling under the edge of her mosquito net, breathing and hairy, like some animal. She couldn’t see even an outline of his body. “Who are you?” For an answer, he clamped his teeth onto her earlobe and pulled her T-shirt up. Their bellies rubbed against each other, rosinous with today’s dried sweat. Their smells mixed together, salt and bread and vinegar.
The best sign, Maggie believed, was that she was still so attracted to him after a whole year. With Larry, it had taken only a few months before she’d begun to dislike the shape of his upper lip, among other things. Carson had been shocked that she’d stayed married seven years to a man she didn’t like to sleep with. He’d made her vow that with him, passion would never be replaced by more mature emotions.
Whatever the reason, her body kept trying to reach him, as if closing an indefinable gap that she hoped would never disappear. The gap was love, she thought. Still, she knew that on the scale of things, even on the scale of marriages, a year was not very long.
Afterward, he rolled away to lie on his own bed, under his own mosquito net pavilion. “G’night.” Seconds later he was snoring.
Maggie groped for their new fake-fur blanket, drew it up from the floor where it had fallen. Her bed had cooled too quickly. How could five inches of empty space (three horizontal, two vertical) sever her utterly from mental balance, human warmth, and physical safety?
“You have to love me,” she said into the darkness, glad that Carson couldn’t hear.
…
“Fortunata sent me,” the visitor said.
“Do you feel bad?” Maggie asked him in Spanish.
Behind her, Carson was trembling like a spaniel on scent. “What’s his complaint?”
“I am a carpenter.” The man looked ready to flee. His eyes were shining, triangular under a jutting brow.
“Don Zoilo made the kitchen furniture,” said Fortunata, coming out of the kitchen. “The table, the door, and the chairs.”
“He’s not sick?” Carson said.
No, he was offering to build a matrimonial bed to replace the metal torture racks on which the government nurses had slept. “You have complained, Señora.”
Much as she hated nurses’ beds, particularly the gap between them, Maggie couldn’t remember saying anything. Yet she didn’t have the heart to send away this threadbare, hundred-pound man who stood before her, twisting in his hands a pale gray hat that might have been worn by a New Jersey paterfamilias of 1950. She led Don Zoilo into the bedroom, where he took measurements with a piece of string and promised a bed in eight days.
“Trade him for the metal ones,” said Carson, suddenly appearing at the doorway.
“They’re government property!”
“We’ll leave the new bed for Peru,” said Carson. Don Zoilo was eager for the deal. He needed beds for his children.
“Tomorrow, bring us a patient instead!” Carson said to Fortunata when the carpenter was gone.
…
Ofelia was nine, the daughter of Fortunata’s female cousin. On the back of one of her skinny, sturdy legs, a pig had bitten her. Her mother half carried her in.
There was little blood. Carson scolded the mother for waiting since morning. He put Ofelia up on the table and inspected the dirty, heaved-up wound. Maggie brought a stool so the mother could sit holding her daughter’s hand, but the woman fluttered, too nervous to sit.
Carson gave Maggie’s arm an encouraging squeeze and asked if she’d like to clean the wound, inject the subcutaneous anesthetic. He’d talk her through it, and then he’d do the stitches and the antibiotics. Maggie had been studying medical manuals every day since they got married, and it was time for her to learn some hands-on skills.
Ofelia’s calf grew paler as Maggie gently washed it. She tried to keep her voice steady as she explained how they’d kill the germs outside the cut with soap, and the ones inside with another medicine. While Carson got out the lidocaine and a disposable needle, the mother watched intently. “What color was the pig?” Maggie asked the child.
“Sow. White with black spots.” The family had been fattening a sow for the fiesta. The bigger she got, the hungrier and meaner she became, fighting with her own babies over food. She’d attacked Ofelia this morning when the girl had gone out with a pan of scraps.
“Ingrata,” Maggie said. Ungrateful.
Ofelia’s father had shot the animal to stop her from tearing the child to pieces. Fortunately the fiesta wasn’t until October, so they could still fatten one of the sow’s three children for the promised feast. Maggie translated all this, requiring Carson to repeat simple words in Spanish. “Chancho, chancha,” he said, to the child’s delight. Then he got distracted, pulling liquid into the hypodermic.
“Di, dt ‘colmillo,’ di,” cried Ofelia, urging him to continue. Say “fang.” She half sat up, turned, and saw the needle. Was this the poison he was going to put inside her?
“Yes, si” said Carson, misunderstanding.
“No,” Maggie corrected. “This is medicina to stop your leg from hurting. Next we kill the germs with powder, polvo antibiótico. It’s poison against microbes, not against a person. Señora, please, help Ofelia to lie facing down.”
Ofelia’s mother grabbed her daughter’s head and, mashing it into her bosom, sank toward the floor. In a high, frightened voice she begged Ofelia to stay calm, yet she was pulling the girl’s whole torso off the table. Maggie placed one hand on Ofelia’s ankle, hoping her grip felt warm and secure. The needle in her hand began to waver as she looked more closely into her first major wound: churned, raw meat with a lot of charred-looking black stuff down inside it. Dirt? Blood? She gulped, wondering where to place the first injection.
