When mountains walked, p.35
When Mountains Walked, page 35
The corpse was starting to stink. Carson photographed it as it lay on the medical table in the clinic, practically faceless, its head caved in like a soft doll’s. Maggie volunteered again to fetch Don Zoilo. Trudging uphill, her thighs still sore from dancing, she realized she’d be spending the rest of this week’s salary on another coffin. What was she supposed to understand by this? She was right to wonder, for what had begun to happen was barely under way.
22
MAGGIE AND ALTHEA were alone in Althea’s bedroom, in the house on Ash Street. The day nurse was reading last April’s Glamour in the sunroom at the end of the hall, where Althea kept her dead husband’s fossil collection. Julia had just called to say that she and Calvin were safe, home in Connecticut; she thanked Maggie for taking over. It showed that Maggie cared, but Julia still couldn’t understand the two-week delay in coming. How could Maggie have ignored the radio summons? She was lucky Althea hadn’t died.
Returning after a fervid ten-minute wrangle with her mother, every phrase of which had been repeated dozens of times in the past few days, Maggie saw that Althea had fallen asleep, her torso stiffly tilted across all the pillows of her bed. She couldn’t help finding the family resemblances around Althea’s mouth and eyes.
She sat down in the straight chair by Althea’s bed, resolved to banish Julia from her mind. With parents gone, she could release herself into her own luxuriant, full-blown worries. Was her period due, or overdue? How long since she’d burned her last bloody pads on the rocks behind the clinic? And what was happening in the valley now? Each night when she and Althea and her parents had watched the TV news together, Maggie had half expected to see someone she knew, standing at the head of a crowd of miners. For the night before she’d left Peru, Klaus and Carson and Vicente had scheduled a demonstration at La Tormentosa. If it had taken place last Saturday, as planned, then U.S. television had failed to cover it. That was good, since a strike at La Tormentosa would be worldwide news only if the army started shooting. Even then, Maggie reasoned, they’d have to kill at least twelve people to merit the coverage.
Now that her parents were gone, she must call Liliana.
As if she could hear the high whine of Maggie’s anxiety, Althea woke up. Her neck strained, her gray eyes shifted, blinked, then fixed on Maggie. “Get me a drink,” she commanded. “A martini. A Pisco sour. Jackal urine. I don’t care.”
Maggie said, “You know they don’t let you drink on painkillers. Would you like some orange juice?”
“No!”
“Water, then?” Maggie lifted the half-full pitcher on her grandmother’s night table.
Althea’s chin pulled up toward her nose.
Maggie stood, emptied the pitcher into a potted dracaena. “It was getting old,” she said in self-justification, and sat down again.
“Old,” Althea said. She pronounced it “ow-wuld.” It was an accusation.
“Julia called,” Maggie reported. “She got home fine, and she’ll be back to see you next week.”
“Well, Ah won’t be here to see Julia,” Althea said.
Maggie sighed. “Grandma, please don’t talk like that.” She sounded just like Fortunata, who often said the same to Maggie. Here’s where I got my shocking tongue, she thought.
“Talk like what? I may be unavailable.”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t come sooner.”
“Why? I told you not to!”
Deep in the basement, metal clunked and the heating came on, forcing hot air through the floor grates. The Rosario’s rapid, running behind the clinic, made exactly the same sound.
…
In the wee hours of last Wednesday it had rained, a scatter like pebbles on the corrugated roof followed by a blasting, vicious roar. Maggie and Carson sat up terrified. “Landslide,” Maggie guessed. Then she felt a drip coming through the mosquito net, and both of them smelled the rain.
The noise on the roof was unabating. The sky seemed to wish them harm. Drips began immediately, all over the house. The chorro onto their blanket was strong enough that they had to move the bed, thus losing the mosquito net. Luckily the mosquitoes were stunned and sluggish, barely able to maneuver through the thickened air, so they were easy to kill.
At six A.M. Carson got up to look out the door on a gray and limited world. Rain fell in a thick fringe from the edge of the roof. Water rushed in two directions, both up and down the road. The thorn bushes looked green as a jungle. Again Maggie’s zinnias had been pounded flat; the flower bed was calf-deep in muddy water. This rain deserved a bigger reputation. It was ten times worse than the famous monsoons of Asia, Carson said, bringing coffee in bed to Maggie, who drank it wishing rain really could shut off the world.
All day Wednesday it had poured. No bus came by, nor did Fortunata appear, nor Vicente, nor the miners’ delegation. No one. Maggie was glad, glad.
Just before sunset, when the downpour had stopped and a fragile golden light fell between the mountains, Luz Maria had arrived lugging a bucket covered with an enamel plate. She lifted the plate, which ran with condensation from a bean drink she had made, pink and white in color, shot full of liquor and sugar. She asked permission to warm it on the stove, right in the bucket. She wanted to ask Carson and Maggie to be the godparents of her next child. They’d been so good to Lady Maggy.
Maggie refrained from asking where, when, and from whom Luz expected to get this next baby. She and Carson drank cups of bean liquor while Luz Maria laid out her offer: a permanent free room in her mother’s house, and a feast, one of her mother’s suckling pigs. Or a chicken, even a calf. “What food do you like best?”
Carson grimaced.
“Should we do it?” Maggie asked him in English. She felt halfway responsible for Lady Maggy’s fate, having demurred on becoming her godmother. Unbaptized children were unprotected, she’d learned from Fortunata.
“Absolutamente no!” Carson forbade Luz to have another baby. Luz, cowlike, asked him why, and he snapped out at her. As long as the river was contaminated, she risked having another one like Lady Maggy. At this, Luz began to cry, and so did Maggie. “Sorry,” Carson said, twisting in his chair. “Tell me how else I could have said it.”
Next, Vicente had arrived at the front door, wrapped in a shower curtain and wearing rubber boots. His hair was dripping down his forehead. Luz María greeted him eagerly but he talked right past her, to Maggie. “Your German friends are stuck up on the mountain.”
“Who? What? Did you hear it on the radio?”
“No, you can see their Jeep from here.”
“He knows their Jeep,” Maggie said quietly to Carson.
They all went outside and Vicente pointed up the mountain. The Jeep was stuck where a stream came out, he said. Halfway up, next to that pale road cut, did they see it?
Luz María did. The car was black and looked like a camioneta, a small truck. When Carson and Maggie still couldn’t find it, she consoled them saying it was tinier than a stinging ant. “Follow the line of the road,” she said, sweeping her forefinger.
“People are helping,” Vicente said. “A dozen.”
Carson went for his binoculars. With them, they could see the scene: Klaus and Liliana and their driver—Suárez? Sánchez? by now they’d forgotten his name—standing around while farmers pried at the Jeep’s back wheels with long poles. “Barretas.” Carson had recognized the implements. “Barretas,” Vicente affirmed, without binoculars.
“My grandmother is dead,” Maggie had said, going inside to pack her bag. Her hands shook as she smoothed out the creases in her good black skirt.
…
Althea had broken her right hip, driving her blue Ford forty miles an hour through an intersection. Braking, skidding, she’d collided with the side of an elephantine white recycling truck. She claimed its driver had backed out of a store parking lot without looking. The truck driver, along with his helper and everyone else in the world, knew that Althea’s license should have been revoked long ago. For years she’d been carving her half of the road out of the middle, but no amount of reasoning or pleading could stop her from taking the car out whenever she felt like it.
She would never do it again.
Elevated mortality rate, the doctor said, within the year. Julia had already invited a minister to drop by, some old chum of Lester’s. Althea hated churches; still, Julia believed that a minister should meet her before he composed her eulogy. No one knew quite how to announce the visit, scheduled for next week. Even Lester had suggested a white lie, that the minister was a history buff interested in Johnny’s mapping of the Burma Road. No one was sure Althea would be fooled, but only Maggie had argued for full disclosure.
“Warn him,” Julia said, “to check all facts with me.” Half the time Julia argued that Althea had always been like this and it was only now that others noticed; the other half she expostulated with her: “Mother, please, get hold of yourself!”
Althea had become a notoriously bad patient. Outraged to find herself in a nursing home, she had pressured Julia and the doctors into releasing her only four days after hip surgery. Here at home she had nurses day and night, and a physical therapist who came three times a week to force her to put weight on the leg. She was cordial enough to her family, but beastly to the staff. One of the day nurses joked that she was going to write a book about Althea. Her demands to be dressed in tennis whites or evening clothes for the visits of the physical therapist. Her complaints of abuse, including accusations that the caretakers were stealing painkillers in order to drug their children for perverted sex. “Such a character,” they had begun to say of her.
All her life, Althea had seemed a rather shy woman, a plain dresser, stubbornly subdued: a use of stubbornness that Maggie disapproved of, Maggie who had always wanted better examples from her family than she’d received. Whatever was happening to her grandmother now, it seemed too late for grand reconciliations and gifts, any family scene illuminating the surrounding darkness. Althea was slipping into senility, or a kind of grand uncaring, as blithe as it was sinister. Yesterday she was ranting about white slavers surrounding the house, ready to kidnap her and cart her off to the Casbah. Julia had kept correcting her: “Motherr!”
Maggie was glad Julia had left. Lurid sex fantasies could keep a person alive, she believed. Something was needed to combat this sickroom architecture. The walker’s chrome bones, the blue kidney pan, the toilet on its frame, a tray holding a half-gnawed chop. Things utterly out of whack with all the other objects that had furnished her grandmother’s life, things of stone, wood, wool, straw, leather, clay.
…
The Jeep had surged up to the clinic door just after midnight. Klaus stepped out, announcing he’d brought the results of the water test and urgent information. Maggie and Carson ushered Klaus, Liliana, and the driver straight into the kitchen, where they’d set out a simple meal, roasted potatoes with oregano, cheese, and hot peppers. They’d had hours to prepare this food, watching the Jeep’s slow zigzag down the canyon’s far wall, halogen headlights stabbing the darkness.
“Mmm! I am starving!” Liliana sat down, spreading her thighs slightly to get closer to her plate. Maggie felt a great affection: somehow, in the weeks apart, she and Liliana had become closer friends. “But Maggiecita, why don’t you come when I called for you by radio?” Maggie explained how confusing the message had been. Liliana interrupted, “You knew it was for you. Your grandmother again went in the hospital. Now she has come out, but your mami says she is not good in health, and she might die. I think you have to go. I myself think so, and so I am having trouble finding any more excuses for your mami.” At that, Carson put in gallantly that Maggie had been on the point of going, but since the message had not conveyed a clear emergency, she’d chosen to stay with the water campaign. Apologetically, Maggie asked Liliana why she hadn’t repeated the message, if it was so urgent. “But we did. We told him, repeat it all the week!”
“Speaking of the water,” Klaus began, “I’ve been hearing things about you, Carson. Where is our friend Vicente Quispe Cruz? You and I and he must talk.”
Liliana made faces at Maggie to indicate she’d explain more later.
…
As for Maggie, if she was pregnant, no fantasy could stop the baby from growing bigger and eventually coming out. How did so many women survive this terrifying process? She supposed they tried to lean on their men, to help them feel less scared. Maggie thought of Vicente, and as usual felt a little better. Except, except, except. And besides. Maybe, because of the water, she ought to stay in Cambridge. That was safest, yet she could hardly bear to consider it.
“I’ll make coffee,” she suggested now.
Althea’s windy whisper gathered steam, became a voice that rose above the sounds of the heating system. “I’d never get to sleep. Sun’s over the yardarm. Time to name your poison. Ah. Poison. That’s what I really want. An asp.” In her dry mouth the pointed tongue clicked, protruded.
“I’m sorry, Grandma.” She reached for her grandmother’s knuckly hand. “Wish I could bring you what you want.”
“Ya cain’t.” Althea jerked the hand back, slithered it under the mess of sheets, crumpled towels, newspapers, detritus that littered the bed. “Leave me alone. I got to prepare to meet my goddamn Maker.”
“You’re not dying.”
“Oh, shut up. Of course I am. This is the end. Look.” Althea tossed back the top half of the blanket, opened both legs so that the knees fell sideways, exposing her inner thighs. The left thigh was silver-skinned, a fine fresh salmon; the right one looked small and dead, with banana bruises around the knee. An edge of gauze dressing peeked out below the Christlike diaper taped across Althea’s belly.
She was wearing Johnny’s socks and pajama top, ten years after his death. One sock had a hole in the toe. The shirt was faded black-watch flannel, missing one button, another fastened wrong. Half of Althea’s chest was visible. Like her left leg, the inside edge of her breast looked young and shapely, almost girlish.
“It’s freezing in here.” Maggie leaned forward to get the blanket off the floor. The thermostat was set at sixty-two, still Althea’s maximum.
“I’m not cold,” Althea said. “I want you to look at my laigs.”
“I see.” Maggie did see: humiliation, finality, and the lack of any reason for this and any other human damage. “And I’m very sorry.”
“Good,” said Althea, almost gently. “I kept them out of the sun for nothing all these years. You, you’re young. Might as well give up now. Make it easy on yourself. The only good thing about old age is that nobody cares, including you.”
“You had Johnny,” Maggie suggested. “You had my mom. Doesn’t it give you satisfaction to look back on all that?” Drat. What business did she have cajoling Althea to appreciate things she had already lost?
“Everything is a mistake,” said Althea extravagantly. “Johnny was useless when I lost my firstborn. I had hopes for Julia, but you see what she came to. Trying to see her face in the dinnerware. And that husband she adores, that Calvin. God! He’s rigid as a plank. If my daughter had any gumption, she’d have an affair.”
“Julia’s my mother,” Maggie said. “Calvin’s my father. Those are my parents.” Did Althea really regret her life?
“Sorry,” said Althea. “I thought you’d agree with me.”
“Do you approve of affairs, in general, Grandma?” How nice it would be to confide in her grandmother about Vicente. Althea might sympathize. Might blab to Julia, too. Obviously she was no longer into suppression. Julia could easily be persuaded to disbelieve her, but Maggie never wanted to side with her mother in questioning Althea’s sanity.
“Trying to avoid mistakes is the worst mistake of all,” Althea pronounced.
“I’ve been wanting to know whether you had any advice for me. Anything you feel great about, or that you still regret.” Maggie should try to find out what a person did when her mistakes all fell on her at once.
Her grandmother’s mouth worked. “Famous last words, eh?” she said. “You’re my favorite offspring, you know. I certainly want you to know that, now that we’re alone.”
“Why thank you,” Maggie said.
“You do take after me,” Althea reflected. “You’ve got my high forehead. I see you running all over the world. That’s good. Opening new roads. Your big sister, she’s more cautious, like your mother. Your mother’s always been a frightened person, deep down.”
“I know the reason, Grandma.”
Althea pulled the covers up to her chin and glared at Maggie, who had a fleeting impulse to say, Grandma, what big eyes you have!
“You know what I’m talking about, Grandma, don’t you?”
“Don’t you have any better things to worry about?”
“Yes, Grandma, actually, but . . .”
“You think I’m going to die,” Althea said. “That’s fine. Let’s talk about Julia, then. I could have loved her so much more if she weren’t so afraid to be a nigger. Afraid to be herself. Every day she wishes her face weren’t so round.” This was probably true. Julia had often praised Maggie as a child, saying what a pretty heart-shaped face she had.
Althea slid down flat in the bed, still holding the sheet up to her chin. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Sssh!” Maggie said. The nurse, in a room fifteen feet away, was black Vietnamese. “Please don’t use racist terms.”
“Nigger-nigger-nigger. It’s a good old-fashioned word.” But Althea was whispering.
“Stop it, Grandma! I don’t care how old you are.”
“You’ll never know what it’s like when your children reject you. She didn’t have to be, you know. She didn’t have to exist. I made her!”
“If I didn’t exist, I wouldn’t care,” said Maggie.
“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve said so many times. But you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Althea’s eyes closed tightly, preventing Maggie’s answer.
“What if I do know?” Maggie said. “What if I’ve figured out about your priest!”
