short stories

Time's Melodious River

We live in Lauricocha which is near a village called Antacolpa in the centre of the highlands of Peru. Antacolpa is good. There are three shops, and you can buy cola and sweets. The nearest town is Yanahuanca which takes a day to get to on horseback, and that is very big, maybe four thousand people. You can get anything you want there.

Lauricocha is more like a little parish than a village: there are no streets, only fields, and the houses are scattered here and there, only half a dozen. Most of them are family. Our home is as good as any. There is a stone house with the kitchen in one half and a sitting room in the other, with blocks of smooth adobe cemented to the foot of the wall to make a bench all round. The baby sleeps on this during the day, so does Maria Ana if she needs a nap. She curls up in the sheepskins and I pretend not to know she's there and sit on her. There are three adobe outbuildings for storage. Because there are many bad men in the area we do not sleep in these. Daddy must be able to listen, in case rustlers come to steal our animals, and be able to go out straight away and chase them away. We lock them up and sleep in little shelters made of small branches and the same ichu grass thatch that we have on the house and outbuildings. We are told to listen hard too, but, if we hear anything, we must tell Daddy, and never go out ourselves. We are too young.

In the morning I take the cows out from the round stone corral and take them up to the high pasture. My dog Pepe comes with me, and I take a catapult and kill birds to feed him. Otherwise he just gets potato skins, and the bones when we have meat, which isn't often, and the skin and bones from fish, which Pepe really likes. That's what I was doing the day Mariano was born. I had left the cows and gone down to Lake Lauricocha, which is very long, and the most beautiful lake I have ever seen. My Uncle Nicolás was fishing for rainbow trout with a weighted net in the river that comes down into the lake. It's very heavy, over twenty pounds, I can't even lift it. He does it every day, and always catches something, but they are all very small, five or six inches. It's my job to gut them, rub a little salt on them, and put them in buckets of water in the shed. They keep for ten days, easy.

That day he suddenly he picked up his net, folded it over his shoulder and shouted me to follow him back to the house. He was early, Mariano, took everyone by surprise, and not very big. I said 'He looks all wrinkly and old!' and my dad gave me one of those shut-up looks, and said, 'All babies are wrinkled, you were, you all were,' but my mum kept crying and covering her face in her hands. He was right. In a few days they were mostly gone, but he still looked old for a baby.

My gran helped deliver the baby. It's also her job to read the afterbirth; old women can tell the baby's future just by looking at it. She looked at it hard, but she wouldn't say a word to anyone, not even Mum. I think that upset her more than anything. My mother had a blood infection after the birth. She wasn't very well for nearly a year. Lots of the plans I had heard them talk about, for more cows, a second horse; they stopped talking about them. The money was needed for medicines. Mariano was funny, I liked him from the start; not like Maria Ana who looks so cute but spends most of her time trying to catch the cat, or one of the chickens, and poke it, just for fun. We had the christening as soon as mum was well enough. My aunts and their daughters were chewing maize to make chicha beer and pulling out hidden purses from deep in their petticoats to buy liquor in Antacolpa, which they hid from the men until the day. They hid it from us too, because they knew the men would bribe us to tell. They had to buy it in advance because the miners who have moved in to work the new mine above Antacolpa drink it all up every weekend.

On the morning of the christening, Dad and Uncle Nicolás, his brother, were up early, saddling the horses, and taking nips of anise, their breath steaming in the cold. The women rode with the small children on their laps, and the men walked. I rode a donkey with two of my cousins. In Antacolpa there was a band with a fiddler, a harpist, a drum and a cowhorn trumpet. The men bought a crate of beer and passed the bottles from mouth to mouth, moving their feet in rhythm with the drum. There were two other babies being christened but when the priest saw Mariano he stopped a moment and looked hard at him and took his time, so I think my baby brother is doubly blessed.

It wasn't long after that other kids started to notice. He was nine months old, but he hadn't grown much, and didn't have any hair, just a few wisps. His skin always seemed to be dry like a really old lady's. By the time he started walking you could see he was much smaller than the kids who were baptised the same day - and one of those was younger than him. His nose was thin, as if someone had pinched it and it had stayed pinched. As he got older, his face started to look like that too.

One day we were in Antacolpa and dad was asking when the doctor would next come. A man from the mine was there, an engineer, dad said, called Mr Trudeau. He worked for a Canadian company, three weeks here at the mine, then home to Lima for two. He had a fantastic Japanese four-wheel drive as shiny as a mirror. 'Is it urgent?' he asked my father, 'Come and see the nurse up at the mine.' My father wasn't embarrassed about Mariano with family but this was different. The man was not indigenous like us, he was an outsider, a Gringo. 'It's the little boy, he's - '

Mr Trudeau looked at Mariano. 'Don't tell me,' he said, opening the doors of his car, 'tell the doctor.' It was because of Mariano that I got to ride all the way to the Altamina mine in a fifty-thousand dollar car. The doctor's offices were the cleanest place I had ever seen. I was left in a room with some brilliant colour comics. Dad was very quiet on the way back. The doctor asked us to go again in a month. Mr Trudeau was there again. This time my father came out looking proud although he was shaking a little. In fact he looked quite like he did when mum had a baby. He was holding Mariano's hand in one hand and a beautiful cream-white envelope in the other. It was an envelope which looked as though it could make anybody better, no matter how sick they were. It was addressed to a doctor in Lima.

Mr Trudeau said 'I've arranged it so you can come with me when I go home in a fortnight's time. You two can either stay with me until I come back to Altamina, or get the coach back as soon as you're ready. Not everyone likes Lima. By the way, do you fish in the river, not the one coming from the lake, the one which runs through Antacolpa.'
'Sometimes, why?'
'Take a close look at the fish you catch, if they are sick, or they don't look right for any reason, throw them right back.'
Mariano was very excited about going to Lima, although he didn't know what it was, he was only three. My father had only been there once, to stay with a cousin and look for work. He didn't find work and he didn't like Lima. I remember how happy he was when he came back. The first thing he did was walk round all our land looking at the animals, and take a drink straight from the river.

Mariano already had a face like a little old man. He was usually happy. He loved looking after the animals. Even Maria Ana left them alone when he was around. Every day he talked about Lima. Dad put on granddad's pocket watch because you needed to know the time in Lima. You needed to know it all the time, and the doctor wouldn't see you if you went at the wrong time. I kissed Mariano on the head before he went, and found that little soft spot where it didn't feel bony underneath.

The doctor watched them come into his surgery, the burly Canadian engineer, the anxious peasant farmer, and the little munchkin of a boy. He knew from the mine doctor's note that this was some form of progeria, probably Werner's Syndrome, the commonest of these genetic disorders of ageing. The boy was bright, cheerful, otherwise in reasonable health. The father's face was far more troubled, attributing the condition, no doubt, to some offence against fate, some sin of the fathers being punished through the son, or blaming his wife for sleeping with a devil. He'd heard such nonsense before.

He examined the boy, there were no tests for these disorders, not even in the United States, just old-fashioned examination and diagnosis. The boy was very small for his age, with a wizened face, and little hair. He was losing his eyebrows and eyelashes. The head was disproportionately large, except for the small jaw. He fingered the dry scaly skin, it felt thin. Teeth were delayed and underdeveloped. At the back of the head, the growth of the skull was incomplete; the anterior fontanelle was still open. Limbs already had a limited range of movement. It wasn't Werner's Syndrome, which would see him ageing at twice the normal speed, it was something much rarer. 'Nurse!' A wafer-thing Hispanic girl appeared. 'Here's some money to take this very special boy to the shop to buy some chocolate.'

He looked at the father and saw the hope in his eyes that he would now write a prescription and his son would get better. 'Your son has something very rare. It has a fine long name, Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. Often, with rare diseases, the longer the name, the greater our ignorance of it. Let me try to explain what is happening to your son. It is something which he was born with. You know our bodies are made up of many tiny cells?'

The father nodded but his eyes retreated and he blinked. He had been educated in a country school to the age of eleven. He knew no such thing. He pictured the only cells he knew, in a jail: a great adobe prison in the shape of a body with many, many cells.

The doctor tried again, 'Just as houses are made of bricks, the body has its own little building blocks, made of flesh.'
But the father's first image intensified, of the body as a prison full of endless cells full of evil things.
'You have to replace parts of your house when they break or wear out. The body is much cleverer, it repairs itself every minute of every day. But Mariano's body is not good at this. It repairs slowly and makes mistakes. Now your body and my body make mistakes too but very few until we get older, when we will make more and more. That is what we call ageing. Your son's body was doing this from the day he was born. God is calling him home a little faster.'
The doctor had finished. The father sat in silence. Trudeau asked, 'How fast? How long might Mariano live?'
'Eighteen is old for someone with Hutchinson-Gilford,' and, anticipating the next question, he added 'there is no cure.'
Trudeau asked the father, 'Is there anything you want to ask?'
He shook his head. Trudeau said 'Wait for me outside, I will be with you in a minute.' He did so, in a quiet, dignified way, his hands, as they had been for all the consultation, crossed on the brim of his hat, as if in church. Before he closed the door he lowered his head, half nod, half bow, 'Thank you doctor.'
Trudeau took out his cheque book. The doctor put his hand on his arm. 'There's no charge for telling a father what I just had to tell him. But tell me, Mr Trudeau, if you don't mind my asking, why did this mean so much to you, to help them. Aren't they just another penniless family?'
Trudeau looked out of the window at another Lima building site, the bricklayers on open scaffolding with no safety rails. 'I am a mining engineer. My company obeys every letter of its contract with the Government, and our Peruvian partner company. We follow all Peru's environmental laws completely. But I am used to Canadian laws. I don't like mercury getting into the rivers, but it does. Half the protein they eat is fish, but the ones they catch now are all small, almost stunted.'
'And you thought maybe the boy's condition … ?'
He nodded.
'No connection at all.'

When Dad and Mariano came back from Lima, we found out that Mariano's condition had a huge name and was very rare. Maybe only forty people in the world have it, but part of the reason there are so few is they don't live long. In the morning, Dad took me out for a long walk along the lake shore and told me what the doctor had said, and how God was calling him home quickly, and we must love him while he is here with us. The lake is long and narrow, and tall mountains come straight up from the shore all the way along until it bends left and out of sight. When I look at it, I always feel like the bend in the lake is calling to me to go and look beyond and far away. It is a funny feeling; sad, but in a nice way, if sad can ever be nice. Today it made me feel lonely.

When we walked down the river bank, Nicolás was there with his long cane rod. He held up some tiddlers. 'You want to give it a rest!', my Dad called, give them time to grow!' Nicolás has a funny shrug when he is embarrassed and can't think what to say back. He isn't married, and I think he has stayed a little like a child, he can go and fish for fun with a rod, like kids playing. I like him a lot.

Dad took my hand. 'You see time is like great river in which we all swim, it is sweeping us all along until we reach heaven. Mariano's part of the river is running faster than ours, he will get there first.'

We walked in silence and I gazed at the rushing water and the cold blue pools where the rainbow trout lay rippling their bodies in the current. 'If it is a river, I want to stand on the bank.'

My father stopped, 'You must never say that, because the river will take you to Jesus and the angels.'

I shook my hand out of his, 'I want to go with Mariano.' I ran down the hill and hid in the old ruins where there are hidden cellars under the chimney which only a child can get into. I lifted a stone and took a out a bundle wrapped in a rag. My grandfather's watch filled my hand. I got my nail under the cover and lifted the glass. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. I like that time. The coldness has gone out of the ground, but it hasn't yet got hot and uncomfortable. It was my favourite time of day. I thought of little Mariano trying so hard to swim, his skin like tiny fish-scales, being swept along much faster than us, soon he would be away out of sight, somewhere beyond the bend in the lake. I would claw myself out of the river and stand on the bank and put an arm out for my brother.

I put my finger out and pinned the second hand to the face of the watch. When I took it away, the tip was flattened into a tiny curl of metal, which stayed in the same place quivering, and it will be eleven o'clock in the morning for ever.

© John Harrison 2004

Footnotes