When mountains walked, p.7
When Mountains Walked, page 7
Meetings often ended with a public whipping. In this way crime soon disappeared. Bad elements departed or learned to control themselves. Even wife beating was punished.
Comandante Oquendo had brought prosperity and order. His great act as a leader was to persuade all of the canyon’s villages to cooperate in rebuilding the road, which had fallen into such disrepair that only mules and people on foot could use it. It was Peru’s misfortune that he was now a fugitive.
“It sounds like a paradise,” Maggie said. Nasir’s description of the Black Rainbow reminded her sharply of old friends in El Salvador. Such humble beliefs and wishes, so much firepower aimed at crushing them. The men and women killed at the roadblock had probably been university students. Unbidden, she imagined herself, sexy in crossed bandoliers.
“There was a proposal to rename Piedras Paraíso, Paradise,” Nasir said. A corner of his mouth lifted ironically. “The two have letters in common. But there are things missing, and others left over.”
“Tell Nasir you were wondering if Fortunata was a spy,” Carson said.
Nasir shook his head. “Señores Doctores, speak to her of those days if you want to spend hours listening to a hymn of glory. She will always spy, it is her nature, but nowadays she can only report to other, gossiping women.” He simpered and, turning his head to one side, said in a thin, high voice, ’“And what little thing does the male gringo use for underwear?’”
…
Their cook was asleep in the shade of a thorn tree across the road from the clinic, lying on her side with her knees drawn up. When she heard the gringos’ footsteps she covered her face with her hands, rubbed her eyes, then sat up.
Maggie apologized for being late, and asked Fortunata to speak with the Señora upstream.
Fortunata stood up heavily, slapping the dust from her dress. That woman lived alone with her children, two big sons who didn’t help. They took after the husband, a drunken desgraciado who had run off with a fifteen-year-old.
“That explains a lot,” Maggie said.
She would have liked to go along, enter the house overgrown with watermelons. Instead, she followed Carson inside to finish yesterday’s jobs. He was setting up a filing system while Maggie cleaned the floor. Yesterday, she’d spent all her psychic energy trying to hold on to the conviction that washing the floor was as important as Carson’s paperwork. The floor was unsanitary and unsafe, a threat to patients—so even Fortunata had said, and Maggie had confirmed it a thousand times as she crawled around, scrubbing at nameless smears that released shitty, decaying reeks when wetted. Meanwhile, Carson towered above her on a stool. With great effort, she’d refrained from reminding him that paperwork was officially her job; that she was the one who’d invented the filing system, modeled after a database she’d used at Harvard; and most of all that Carson had once used floor scrubbing as a criterion of existential value, back when he’d been tired of Harvard and had said—remember?—he’d feel more useful scrubbing floors at a homeless shelter. She’d begun to wonder how she’d adopted this trivial remark of his. On top of everything, this morning Nasir had offered floor cleaning as an example of a punishing, humiliating task.
Walking back from the store, she got a minor inspiration. She took off her shoes, tied a large rag to the bottom of each foot with string, daubed the rags with orange wax, and began skating up and down. She embraced the air with her arms, pantomimed singing.
“What are you doing?” Carson asked, looking up from his folders.
“Waxing. My new method.”
“It’s kind of distracting.”
“Then go in the kitchen,” she said. “I can’t exactly move the floor.”
“I’m done anyway,” Carson said, slamming the folder. “What we need now is a patient.”
“No kidding.”
Maggie heard him crash onto the bed, and felt guilty for her pettiness. Only briefly. Then she moved the stool and examining table outside, and strode up and down like a speed skater. Why was this method not widely known? She was pushing her toes into corners by the time Fortunata returned, accompanied by the water thief. This woman had the same blocky silhouette as Fortunata, but her cheeks were soft and brown, not hard and pink. She might have been as young as forty: there was no gray at all in her coarse, wavy black hair. Fortunata introduced her as Doña Ema, her comadre. Maggie was afraid to ask what a comadre was. It resembled the word for “weasel,” but perhaps it meant sister-in-law, or midwife.
Carson came in, rumpled from lying down. Maggie could see his brightness fading when he recognized the woman who’d yelled at him. “What’s her problem?” he said. In Maggie’s translation, he offered a warm welcome.
Doña Ema had her own lie: her two sons hadn’t noticed that the clinic had reopened. They’d believed their dam was being washed away by heavy rains upstream. She’d come to apologize, to ask permission to dig a branch from the clinic’s main ditch. It would take only a little of the flow. As she promised this, Doña Ema took small steps back and forward, leaving pale dusty shoe prints on the fresh wax, like a cha-cha diagram in a book.
“Forget it,” said Carson.
“He says, ‘How could it be worse than now?’” Maggie translated. As the women laughed, she argued to Carson in English, “If we get rid of the toilet, like you say we should, we’ll only need half our water.”
He grimaced. Maggie insisted: Ema was a single mother.
“Suit yourself,” said Carson.
Maggie told the women that her husband felt great sympathy, and he even invited Doña Ema to see the clinic’s famous sanitario. Doña Ema and Fortunata both giggled and said yes, Doña Ema would love to see the Jewel of Piedras. Her sons had seen it years ago.
“She wants to see our toilet,” Maggie told Carson.
“Our main attraction,” Carson said gloomily. He ran his fingers quickly through his hair, a gesture Maggie had often seen at Harvard. She still found it appealing; it made her wish he’d brought his leather jacket.
Ema and Fortunata giggled like schoolgirls going to the bathroom together. Maggie decided not to follow. Left alone with Carson, she couldn’t think what to say. Luckily, the time was short before a door slammed and Fortunata came back. “Doña Ema wanted . . .”
“Christ,” Carson said. He went over to the counter and began flipping nervously through the pages of Where There Is No Doctor, looking for a cartoon to illustrate germ theory.
Fortunata cried, “Oh, what a floor! The Doctora is a super housewife. Those nurses never cleaned. They were coastal girls. Flies.” She made rapid, nervous hand movements. “They didn’t know anything. They hated Piedras. They killed one baby, giving it seven shots of penicillin. Everyone rejoiced when they went back to where they could talk on the telephone and look for husbands and buy tunafish in cans.”
This cheered Carson up. With Maggie’s help, he and Fortunata held a brief conversation about the corrupt stupidity of government-service nurses. Then he flipped through the manual to show Maggie how to diagnose pneumonia. Fortunata peered over their shoulders, moving her lips to the English text. Eventually Doña Ema came back, sparkling with amusement, arms wet to the elbows. Carson wanted to teach her sons to dig pit toilets, but Maggie didn’t translate. “Can I invite her to stay for coffee?” she asked instead.
“Go ahead,” Carson said.
“Care to join?”
“Nah.”
But Doña Ema could not stay.
“She will return,” Fortunata predicted. “Every day she passes twice, going to pray at the chapel in Piedras Baja and coming back.”
“So religious?” Ema didn’t seem the type.
Fortunata explained that Doña Ema asked for a miracle, that her husband would leave his teenage lover, return to her, and give her a child. She and the husband had wanted one more baby, but after a year of trying, he’d run off. Now he lived with the girl and her parents up in El Mirador. Doña Ema prayed and took herbal baths every day to improve her womb in case he ever came back.
Maggie asked whether the fifteen-year-old was pregnant.
“No.”
“Do they use birth control?”
“He would never!”
“Why does Doña Ema assume she is the infertile one?”
Fortunata’s eyes grew round.
“I can think of a solution more direct than prayers. I’m not recommending it, I’m only saying it exists,” said Maggie. There, she’d accomplished something at last.
“Not recommending, only saying,” Fortunata repeated.
…
On the appointed day, Ofelia did not appear for her follow-up visit. Maggie suggested a house call, but Carson said it was better for the patient to come to the clinic. Maggie didn’t argue; Ofelia remained a delicate topic. She knew Carson would prefer to keep digging at his pit, a job that offered unambiguous progress. In two days it was already half done, a meter square and a meter deep, with a large pile of rocks beside it. He’d bought a twelve-foot crowbar from Nasir, in order to pry out boulders, and he’d refused Maggie’s offers of help, saying there was not enough room in the hole for two. Even standing next to it was dangerous, the way he flung out dirt and stones without looking.
Maggie went into the kitchen, where Fortunata was chopping a pile of small pink onions. “Do you know where Ofelia lives?” As a child, she’d cringed when Julia had ordered servants about. This hinting, though, was almost worse.
“Claro!” Fortunata wiped her hands on her apron, happy to interrupt her task.
Across from Nasir’s, Fortunata led her up a stairway embedded in the stone retaining wall, laughing at Maggie’s speculation that the stairs were Inca stonework. The steps and walls had been built under the rebel government. “We made many improvements,” she said. “We were similar to the Incas, yes.”
This was the path to the heart of Piedras. No dwellings were visible from the road, but after passing through a deep band of thorn brush and fruit trees gone wild, they came to a warren of houses connected by dirt trails. The main path, wider than the rest, wound up and up. Fortunata walked fast, and Maggie had to concentrate on keeping pace. The path was six feet wide, with a runnel down its center eroded by the rains; in this season it was only occasionally dampened by dishwater or urine. Junctions and switchbacks were reinforced with stones to prevent them from washing away. Small fuchsia-colored cantú flowers overhung the bamboo fences. The poorer houses were of wild cane plastered with mud, the richer ones of rammed earth or adobe; the richest were plastered and painted in colors.
Why couldn’t Maggie and Carson live up here instead of on the deserted highway? Here children stood tongue-tied on the path, wearing no pants. Men sat on rocks, and women spread clothing on grass to dry. Though the hill was steep, somehow the cook had breath for laughing and waving and telling everyone who Maggie was. Her affability reminded Maggie of certain people back in Cambridge who walked expensive dogs on leashes, and were only too glad to explain their provenance to anyone caring to listen, or even those who didn’t. This trip was good P.R. for the clinic, she decided, waving at people who gave back no more than stony glares.
After twenty minutes’ climb, Fortunata finally stopped at an open, dark doorway and yelled inside that they were looking for Ofelia. A woman’s voice cried, “Más allá!” They climbed a hundred yards more, crossing paths with two people who stared at the stones at the edge of the trail, letting them pass, not offering any greeting. Maggie’s skin prickled with rejection. Had Fortunata not been with her, she’d have fled, choosing all downhill paths. She could never have come here alone, nor without Ofelia as justification.
They came at last to a woman sitting on a bench under a papaya tree, suckling a baby. This was Ofelia’s aunt. Behind her was a house surrounded by a sturdy, pretty bamboo fence, its top half draped with heavy vines. Below the vines Maggie could see the faces of several young pigs peering out between the close-set bamboo, their foreheads comically encrusted with mud.
“Ofelia is not here,” the aunt said guardedly.
Fortunata gave Maggie a look. “Wait for me, Doctora.” She disappeared around the corner of the fence.
Maggie stood awkwardly for a few seconds before venturing to admire the baby’s abundant hair. To her surprise, the aunt invited her to sit down, rest, rest. She had a piping voice and no teeth at all.
Maggie sat down at the far end of the bench. It commanded a beautiful view of river and canyon walls, which helped her not to stare at the woman’s translucent melon-colored breast, the sheen of saliva as the child turned around to see who had come, then turned back to the breast with a rejecting finality. It was a girl, too old for breast milk, Maggie thought.
“Why are you looking for Ofelia?” the woman asked.
“Her leg,” Maggie said, pointing at her own calf.
“Yes, yes, her leg,” the woman said, resettling her haunches on the bench.
“How is it?”
“It got bad. Her father is curing her.”
Maggie hoped Fortunata was getting to the bottom of this situation. She admired the suckling child anew. Hearing itself spoken of, it turned and gaped, showing a complete set of teeth stolen from its mother’s body.
This baby was two years old, the mother said. “She is my last, my benjamina. I can’t harden myself to wean her.”
Calcium, Maggie thought, unable to think of any food to recommend.
Fortunata came bustling out. “Let’s go, go.” She ran just ahead of a man who must be Ofelia’s father. He was carrying Ofelia over one shoulder. Maggie could see the back of Ofelia’s leg, where the thick gauze bandage was deeply stained with black dirt and brown blood. It sagged messily. Clearly it had been removed and replaced. No sign of the cannula.
They hurried downhill as if Ofelia’s father were in danger of changing his mind.
At a wide spot in the trail, Maggie hung back to get a look at Ofelia’s face. It was stiff, thinned by pain and fever. Still, the child grinned at Maggie. “It swelled, so they tied a lizard on me. The lizard died but my leg stayed hot so they put mud.”
…
That night, Maggie told Carson she wanted to write a letter to her friend Vivian after dinner. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll lie in bed and read.”
She sat at the kitchen table, lit a candle to even out the gaps in the wavering electric light. The kitchen wiring was faulty, gnawed by mice or something. Maggie began by describing this room, where her shadow palpitated on the uneven mud-brick walls. Since she liked getting letters that described the immediate surroundings, she put in the rushing sound of the Jewel of Piedras, the grain of the kitchen table. “Everything here is alive.”
Then she wrote about Ofelia. Tablespoons of pus, the color of French mayonnaise, had burst out when Maggie pressed her leg with the back of a spoon. Far from being disgusted, Maggie had felt exultant, tender, fierce. “My first true medical moment,” she wrote, speculating that at last she understood the emotion that drove most of Carson’s personality.
A little later, he came in, asking if she was interested in going to bed. Curled over her letter, Maggie said, “I’m almost finished.” She was writing about how Carson had scolded Ofelia’s father, yelling with a vehemence no false translation could ever have disguised. She twisted a bit in her chair, to look at him standing there, his pajama pants barely hanging on below his belly. “He could have killed her,” Carson said.
“I know!” Maggie said, deciding this was his apology. She promised to come to bed in a minute. After he’d left, a doom of tenderness struck her heart. She thought of her husband, the quixotic Don Calzón, a knight in cardboard armor, fighting ignorance and all the other windmills that turned in the wind whistling up and down this canyon.
She sealed the envelope, carried it to the sink, and put a match to its corner, watching the long orange flame sear up toward her fingers, releasing her complaints into the darkness. She dropped the burning thing at the last instant, rinsed flat black flakes of ash down the drain, into the river. Lastly, standing on a chair, she opened the square window to let out the bitter smoke.
A gust of fresh damp air heaved in, then out, as if the house had breathed.
The hallway felt humid, intimate, as she felt her way down one wall to where Carson lay asleep. It had been good to burn that letter. This was only the tenth day in Piedras. The letter would not have been mailed for months. By then, different things would be true.
She lay down quietly in her own bed, slid her hand under the nets, and touched Carson’s hand in the darkness. A silky red edge of her heart unfolded toward him, like the mantle of a shell underwater when the tide is right. She hoped she could continue to extend her mercy toward her husband, that it was responsive to her will. Never forget, she told herself, seal it with lead and cement. As she began to sink toward sleep, though, certain images floated into her mind, illustrations she’d cultivated as a child, flat and bright and rimmed with a definite edge of black. Rather than slipping quickly down into nothingness, as she’d hoped, the brightly colored pictures entranced her and disturbed her for a while.
…
Althea and Johnny Baines had visited the Goodwin family once a year at least. They clattered and shouted their way into the house, bearing many heavy bags full of Johnny’s instruments and books and blasting caps, clothes for all weathers, gifts from overseas. If Johnny was between grants, they’d stay for weeks or months. Maggie was a little afraid of her grandfather Baines, with his thick black-rimmed glasses, his opinions expressed in a booming voice that grew louder as Johnny aged. He claimed he needed to hear himself think. He spread his notebooks all over the house—in case he had an idea, he could write it down immediately. Everyone in the family knew Grandpa Johnny was trying to find a formula to predict earthquakes, and that it was a secret, because if his colleagues found out, they’d say he was insane. Earthquake prediction was placed on a par with witchcraft, but Grandpa Johnny still wanted to make it scientific. There were forces in the earth. Rocks had a breaking point. When force was divided by breaking, the result would come out as a number. His problem was defining the quantities; they were huge and hard to measure. There was a third factor, which he called “the coefficient of creep.” “Creep” was an activity, not a kind of person, but after his explanation Maggie never could remember what he’d said it was, nor where “creep” went after being turned into a number—above, below, or beside the fraction line.
