At the Base of Ausangate

Fiction by ​​​Maggie Hart

Morning light spills across the Plaza de Armas, gilding the looming cathedral’s spires and casting long, sanctified shadows over Nina as she watches the boy do cartwheels over the cobblestones. Pigeons pick at crumbs left behind by tourists, and the scent of roasted corn and tamales float from a vendor’s cart nearby. Nina bites into a pear. The juice dribbles down her chin and she wipes it away with her hand. She’ll be sticky now. 

Across the plaza, the boy begins a cartwheel, stumbles, falls. “Estas bien?” Nina calls to him. He scurries to his feet and dusts off his knees. 

“Niña!” he shouts, crouching suddenly near a bench. “Ven a mirar!” 

She hesitates, squinting into the light. The boy is huddled over something, his small body folded, bottom balanced on his heels. 

“Pájaro,” he yells she jogs to him. “Muerto.” 

Muerto. The word snags in her mind, like a name she knew once but can’t quite place. When she finally reaches him and sees the bird, crumpled, one wing twisted beneath it, she remembers. Muerto. Dead. 

“Poor thing,” Nina mutters, crouching next to the boy. He reaches his index finger out as if to poke the matted feathers. She yanks his hand away, her pear-juice fingers briefly sticking to his palm. 

“We pray?” the boy asks. His English is tentative. They have traded words, the two of them, every night at dinnertime, sit on either side of his father; he teaches her Spanish words, and she teaches him English ones.

She blinks. “Pray? For the bird?” 

He nods and crosses himself. 

Nina glances at the cathedral, looming over them. The boy prays often with his father—before meals, at bedtime—rituals that are always just theirs, like speaking Quechua, something she frequently overhears but has never understood. His father always invites her to pray with them, with quiet, hopeful persistence, and sometimes she does, but it is never true; just her bowing her head and closing her eyes. There are things she could study and practice and come to understand—Spanish, for one--but there are other things, more sacred things, that do not belong to her. Things like Quechua, the language of indigenous peoples of the Andes, and things like prayer, the language of believers, a language which evades her despite her childhood filled with Sunday dresses and hymnals.  

“Por favor, mamá,” the boy says, nonchalantly, as if it were easy, any of this; broken birds, prayers, a little boy calling her “mama” for the first time. Nina looks up at the sky. She remembers, the word mama echoing in her ears, a hazy morning with her own mother, many years ago, in the thin air of the mountains of Colorado. Her mother had taught her how to breathe.

“In through your nose,” her mother had said. Nina’s hair was in pigtails, it almost always was back then, and she’d been freckled and bundled up in a bright pink coat. “Hold it. Count to three. Then breathe out, as slowly as you can, like this.” And then her mother had shown her—breathed in through her nose, counted to three, and softly exhaled, her breath fluttering Nina’s wispy, white-blonde bangs—how could she remember that so clearly? Nina felt the phantom tickle of the hair she’d had as a little girl against her forehead. “You have to slow down,” her mother had said. “Your lungs are getting less than what they’re used to.” 

Now, fifteen years later, Nina lives at a high altitude. She’d moved to Cusco, Peru, a city with extremely thin air, to live with a man she loved and his son. Her lungs adjusted; she did not need her mother to show her how to breathe, not anymore. 

Nina, still holding a half-eaten pear, sits on the bench. “You pray,” she says to the boy. “Voy a esperar.” He sticks his bottom lip out and pouts, but Nina pulls her gaze from his and looks at the bird. She hears him start to whisper to himself. 

Mamá. 

That word, directed at her, from a boy she loves—yes, she loves him. Of course she does. But that word, that title—was it hers? Is that what she was? Was it possible to become something so innately and intimately consequential, without fully realizing it, or noticing it, even? 

After his prayers, they carry on. She doesn’t know what to say about him calling her mama, or if she should acknowledge it at all, so she says nothing. She says nothing when the man greets them at the door and kisses her once on each cheek and twice on the mouth. She says nothing about it during dinner, either, during which the boy teaches her the Spanish word for wing, ala, and she teaches him the word “sky.” She says nothing to the man as they sip glasses of wine on the balcony, the glittering lights of Cusco sprawled beneath them like stars, and she says nothing as they undress each other and collapse into bed.  

After, the man falls asleep quickly, his arm flung across her bare chest. Nina stares at the ceiling. She cannot seem to catch her breath, not even when she slows down, as her mother taught her to do, many years ago atop a mountain thousands of miles away. Mamá. Ala rota. Mamá. Sky. Mamá, Mamá, Mamá.   

The next morning, Nina wakes as the man heaves out of bed. “Buen día, mi cielo,” he whispers, pulling on a sweatshirt. “We are going to the market. Do you want to come?” 

“No, amor, I didn’t sleep well. I think I’ll keep trying.” 

After she hears the door click shut behind the man and the boy, on their way to the market to buy avocados and eggs and baguettes for their breakfast, Nina calls her mother. 

Her mother picks up after the phone rings once. “Are you okay?” she asks, without saying hello. 

“What?”

“Are you okay?” her mother repeats, sounding slightly panicked. 

“Yes, Mom, I’m okay. I just wanted to hear your voice.” 

“Oh.” She is quiet. “Well, it’s good to hear from you, Nina.” 

“Yeah, Mom. It’s…I miss you.” Nina tries to say this casually, but the words feel weighty. They fall from her mouth and thud into the phone.  

“Well, you don’t have to do that, you know. Miss me. You can always come home, Nina.” Her mother’s voice is taut, laden with barely-contained urgency, as if Nina were a skittish animal that would either run or pounce.     

“Mom—” 

“It’s time, don’t you think? It’s time to get back to living a real life. I’m your mother, and I don’t even know what you’re doing down there.”  

“I’m working, Mom. Online. You know that.” 

“And shacking up with that—” 

“Oh my god, Mom, I’m not shacking up with him,” Nina interrupts. “We live together.” She scoots up and leans against the headboard, rubs her eyes. 

“Do not say the Lord’s name in vain, Nina.” Nina hears her mother swallow. “And…I wish you weren’t living with him, honey. Despite it being a sin—” 

“We’ll be married soon, Mom. And then we won’t be living in sin, and I won’t need to keep crossing the border into Bolivia to avoid overstaying my visa…It makes sense, really, for us to get married.” 

Nina hears her mother inhale, hold her breath for three seconds, and exhale loudly. Nina does the same. 

“You just met him, Nina.” 

“A year ago.” 

Nina’s mother sighs. “You’re a smart girl, honey. And I trust you to be able to make your own decisions—” 

“Really?” Nina snaps. “It really doesn’t seem like you do, Mom.” 

“I just want you to be sure! That’s all. I just want you to be sure that this is…well, this is what’s best for you. That this is the right choice.” 

Nina searches the floor for her clothes. “I am sure, Mom. We’re in love. This is happening.” 

“Are you sure he loves you? He doesn’t just…I don’t know. Want a green card, or something?” 

“Jesus, Mom—” 

“Nina! Again, with the Lord’s name.” 

Nina clenches her teeth. She spots a pair of her leggings on the floor, stands, and begins yanking them on. “Mom. We’re staying here, in Peru. He has no reason to want a green card. He is marrying me because he loves me.” 

Nina’s mother breathes again, slower than before, holding it for closer to six seconds rather than three. “How do you know that, Nina? Really. How do you know?” 

We always share mangoes, that’s what Nina wants to say. We always share, even though we could easily each have our own, and he holds it for me so my fingers don’t get sticky. 

“I just do,” she says instead. “I…feel it, I guess. I believe it.” 

“Well, okay,” her mother says, her voice trembling. 

“Mom, come on—” 

“What am I supposed to tell my friends, Nina? Or the people at church? They ask about you, you know.” 

“Honestly, I don’t really care what you tell your friends, Mom. That doesn’t really have anything to do with me.” Nina pulls a sweater, her favorite one of his to steal, over her head. 

“Of course it has something to do with you! These are people you know, honey. This is your life, here. With people you know, with me. Your real life. You can’t just up and leave it.” 

But she could, couldn’t she? She, in fact, had, when she broke her paralegal services agreement at the law firm, when she booked a one-way flight to Colombia, when she packed a backpack with only the necessities for a few months in South America. She’d decided to go, so she did. And part of the reason she wasn’t so worried about her commitment to stay, now, with the man and his son in a Peruvian city, in its thin, high-altitude air, was that she could, if she wanted to, decide to do that again. Although, there was the man and the boy to consider. A complication. She was an almost-wife, a kind-of mother. The boy had called her mamá, christened her. 

The ache of being loved, the responsibility of it. 

She wants, sometimes, to exist somehow outside of these entanglements, the weight of consequence, and move through the world untethered, doing whatever she pleases without changing anyone else’s life at all. To exist like mist, present but never pressing. That kind of being would be lonely, she knows, but she thinks it might be a manageable kind of loneliness, preferable, at least, to this responsibility she stumbled into. 

You have to slow down, her mother had said to her, atop the mountain, many years ago. Her mother. Nina had, of course, always been loved; the responsibility had always been hers.  

Mamá, Mamá, Mamá. 

Nina squeezes her eyes shut. “I love you, Mom,” she says, because she cannot think of anything else to say, and because it is true. 

Nina’s mother is silent for a moment. Then, “I love you too, Nina.” 

“I know,” Nina says. “I have to go, Mom.” 

After she hangs up, Nina hears the shuffle of sandals on stairs, along with faint murmurings of Quechua and the rustling of plastic bags. She walks out into the kitchen, fully awash with sunlight. The door swings open and she sees the boy first, his dark eyes brightening as she holds her arms out to him. He bolts forward on small, sure feet, and flings his arms around her. His plump cheek presses into hers.  
​
Behind him, his father ambles inside the apartment at a much easier pace, steady and unhurried as always, a bag of fruits and bread swinging gently in his hand. His forty-one years have traced themselves into his face, carving deep lines around the corners of his eyes and mouth, which Nina, only twenty-three, likes to tease him about, though she loves them. She loves everything about him. During their giggly, love-soaked nights together, she likes to trace these lines with her fingertips as he begins to drift to sleep, as though doing so could tell her about the years he lived before her, and the years before they met.  

“Hola, Niña,” he says when he reaches her, leaning over the boy to press a kiss to her nose. He pulls a mango out of the bag. “Quieres compartir conmigo?” 

This, Nina knows, is a blissful life—a man who is devoted to her, a boy who adores her, a shared mango on a sunny morning. The man grabs a knife and begins peeling the fruit, and she ruffles the boy’s hair, the gold band on her left ring finger glinting in the morning light. She tries to let it seep into her—the love, the sunlight—and she tries to ignore the shallowness of her breaths, the thinness of the air encompassing them. 

A year earlier, Nina met the man on the bus from Cusco to Mahuayani, the gateway town of the Ausangate glacial valley and the starting point for the overnight pilgrimage to the sanctuary at the foot of Ausangate Mountain. She’d decided to attend the Qoyllur Rit’i festival with a Dutch couple she’d met at her hostel, and she sat alone on the bench in front of them when the man and his son, asleep in his arms, boarded the bus. 

“May I?” he asked, looking at the empty seat next to her. She felt a twinge of attraction despite the obvious age difference—it had been his unwavering eye contact, maybe, or his self-assuredness, or, if Nina was perhaps a bit more honest with herself, his muscular arms, covered with vibrant tattoos, swirls of bright reds and blues and purples. 

“Of course.” She scooted over to make room. 

“You are not Peruvian,” the man said, once he’d settled next to her. The boy slept, his little arms wrapped around his father’s neck.  

“What gave me away?” 

The man smiled, deepening the creases around his mouth. “Maybe this,” he said, poking Nina’s white arm. “Or this,” he said, gently touching her blonde hair. “Or your accent.” 

Nina laughed. Her skin buzzed in the spot he’d poked it. “You got me. I’m American.” 

“I’m American too, señora. South America is still an America.” 

Nina felt a flush of shame. It seemed like a very United-Statesean blunder. “Right, sorry,” she said. “I am from the United States. Soy de los Estados Unidos.” 

The man perked up at the Spanish. “Hablas español?” 

More shame. Nina hadn’t taken Spanish in school, and though she’d tried to learn as much as she could before she left for Colombia, there was only so much Duolingo could accomplish. She could get by, for the most part. She could buy bus tickets and meals and check into hostels, but the language still felt funny in her mouth.  

“Not really,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I really just know the basics. You know, hola, adios, baño, cerveza.” 

He smiled. “You’ll learn, señora.” 

More people shuffled onto the bus. It was late, nearly midnight already, those who were awake seemed weary, their eyes glazed and blurry. Except for him, the man next to Nina. His eyes were quite lovely, Nina decided, and clear, not blurry at all.  

“Señorita,” she corrected, after a few moments had passed. 

“Que?” 

“I’m a señorita,” she said. She knew this, at least. “Because I’m not married. Or, you know, with anyone.” 

“Ah,” he said. “Señorita, then.” 

The bus still hadn’t left, despite it being so full people were squashed against one another, with children too old for laps perched on them anyway. Nina turned to introduce the Dutch couple to the man and found them asleep, the woman’s head on her husband’s shoulder. She turned to face the front again, feeling the presence of the man next to her even more acutely than she had before, the way her arm pressed into his, the way she could easily rest her head on his shoulder if she wanted to. She did, of course. 

Nina turned to him and said, “Nina.” 

“What?” he asked. 

“Sorry, my name. It’s Nina.” 

He looked puzzled. “Girl?” 

She laughed. “No, not niña. It’s spelled the same, just without the squiggly over the ‘n.’” 

“Ah,” he said. “Nina. Niña. For me, Niña--it is easier. With a…how did you say? Squiggle?” 

Nina laughed. “Your English is great.” 

“Thank you,” he replied. “I am a tour guide. I lead tourists on their hikes to Machu Picchu. Have you visited?” 

“Oh yes.” Nina had finished the Salkantay trek just a few days prior. “It’s an incredible place.” 

The man nodded. He seemed suddenly far away, wistful. 

“Do you ever get tired of it?” Nina asked. “I mean, you have to do the same hike to the same place all the time. Do you ever get bored?” 

He looked at her then. His gaze was steady, unwavering. Nina felt that twinge of attraction again, stronger. “The mountains are my home,” he said. “Machu Picchu was built by my ancestors. It is also my home. I could never tire of it. It is an honor every time.” 

Finally, the bus moved. The lights flickered off, and Nina felt her head begin to droop towards the man. His son stirred but settled back into sleep after a few minutes of the man’s hushed coos. 

“Are you Catholic?” the man whispered, a half hour into the drive. 

Nina didn’t know how to answer. To say she wasn’t was more correct, because she hadn’t been Catholic for a few years, but to deny it outright felt too extreme. She’d grown up in the faith, attended Catholic school and gone through her first communion and confirmation, and her mother, the person Nina loved most, was deeply devoted to Catholicism, and Nina’s straying from the church was still a point of tension between them, a bruise they both tried not to press.  

“I grew up Catholic,” she answered. True, safe. “Are you?” 

“Very,” he said. “I also am spiritual. I worship the mountains, I worship Pachamama. And I worship God.” 

“Pachamama?” 

“What you call Mother Earth, we call Pachamama.” He took a baggie of coca leaves out of his jacket pocket and offered her some. She refused. She knew the leaves would help with any headaches from the altitude, but she loathed the taste. 

“I know this is a Catholic festival,” she said. “For the Lord of Qoyllur Rit’i.” 

“Yes,” the man said. “Although it also celebrates the reappearance of the Pleiades constellation, which brings the harvest.” 

“And we walk?” 

He smiled. “Yes, we walk, through the night, so we are at the sanctuary at the base of the Ausangate, in the glacial valley. There are priests, and blessings, and dancing, and food, and the market.” He paused, then, and looked at her. “You will love it.” 
    
She had loved the festival, but mostly because she’d quickly ditched the Dutch couple and spent the entire night and morning with the man and his son, an energetic little boy who did not seem to know what to make of her and her inability to speak Spanish or Quechua. She’d stopped with the man at every candlelit cross on the way into the mountains, placed to guide the worshippers on their pilgrimage to the sacred valley, watching as he dutifully prayed, eyes squeezed shut, at each one. He’d seemed somehow transformed every time he prayed, and Nina felt increasingly unmoored by her careful noticing of him, someone so plainly devoted to the faith she could not force herself to believe in. She’d never known that kind of reverence, the kind this man and her mother shared.  

In the valley, she’d eaten caldo de gallina and drank chicha morlada, and, just before they’d gone outside to welcome the sun and watch the dancers, the man prepared her coffee for the first time, with lots of milk and sugar. He’d wiped the liquid mustache that formed on her upper lip away with the swipe of his finger, and it was far too intimate an act for them, strangers really, people who did not share a home country or native tongue or even a generation, but he’d done it anyway, and she’d smiled up at him when he did. She’d accepted his invitation to make her dinner once they’d returned to Cusco, and, after a week of shuffling between her hostel and his apartment, she’d accepted a key to his place. Months later, she’d accepted a ring.  

Now, a year later, they are on the same bus to Mahuayani, on their way to the festival again, and Nina cannot breathe. The boy is asleep on her lap, and she tries to shift him so she can expand her diaphragm more, so she can try to fill her lungs instead of only her throat. 

After an hour of the bus speeding towards the mountains, at a pace that feels reckless for the darkness of the night, the man asks, “Are you going to pray with me at the cruces this time? It is important to me, Niña.” 

She imagines doing her not-prayers, the kind where she closed her eyes and pretended to feel some sort of sacred stirring, every two kilometers on their journey to the base of Ausangate, all while witnessing the man she loves devote himself entirely to something agonizingly unattainable to her, and the air feels thinner. 

She’s quiet for a long moment, absently running her fingernail up and down the sleeping boy’s arm. Her breaths are shallow. “I don’t understand it, amor. I don’t. You believe so…easily. Why do I need to? Can’t I just support you?” 

The man frowns. “You think it is easy?” 

“It’s just that…everything seems so certain to you. God, Pachamama. You don’t question them, or—” 

“No, I don’t question them, Niña. I believe in them because they are a part of me. Questioning them would be like questioning my own being.” 

She feels an ache, and she senses that he is accusing her of doing this—questioning his being. Or, at least, questioning her, her being in his life amongst this company, these entities that do not exist for her the way they exist for him. They ride the rest of the way in silence. 

The bus pulls into the town and, as they had just one year ago, the man and Nina do their pilgrimage together, the boy running slightly ahead of them until his father calls him back to stop and pray. Nina stops with them at every cross, she watches as the man and his son bow their heads and chant in Quechua, but she does not pray herself. She does not even try. She does not have the energy for it; breathing is laborious, it takes everything she has.     

They go to the same tent they did last year for breakfast, eat pan con chicarrón, drink the same milky, sugary coffee. 

“Creo que me vas a dejar,” the man says after they leave the food tent, as soon as the boy is running a safe distance in front of them. Nina, after mentally translating, I think you are going to leave me, cannot think of what to say, especially not in his language. Spanish, to her, is almost exclusively a language of love—nearly every word she knows, she knows only because he or his son taught her, words like amor and siempre and juntos, soloamente tú. They hadn’t given her the vocabulary to leave them. 

“I love you,” she starts, and these words in English, to him, feel foreign in her mouth. She realizes she hasn’t said these words in English to anyone but her mother in many years. 

And she does! God, does she love him—she feels it, the love, almost constantly—in the quiet certainty that settles between them when their eyes meet after a day apart, or when she watches him with the boy and is astonished by his capacity for gentleness and patience, or in the way their bodies are drawn to one another—a kind of hunger she hadn’t known before him.  

And yet.   

He says nothing.  

“I love you. I just don’t know if I can really be this person for the rest of my life…live here, be your wife, and a stepmother. It’s just…” Her voice catches, and she swallows. It hurts. Breathing hurts. “I’ve been away from home for so long already. My mother…she misses me.” 

“She can visit,” the man whispers.

“It is more than that, amor. I miss her. I miss…this was never the plan. I was supposed to travel for a few months and then go home. And…well, maybe it’s time I go back, start living a real life.” 

He won’t look at her. She shivers. It’s not only thin, but cold, too, the mountain air. She feels the charged energy of daybreak, knows that the sun will soon rise, but for a moment, everything hangs in the frigid air between—the night not quite letting go, the day already stirring.

“This is a life, Niña. This is a home.” He says this not quite sadly, but with tension, as if his voice would break if he said anything more. He raises his arms and gestures around them, as if he were one of the priests in the festival ceremonies, as if telling her to behold. 

“It’s not real,” Nina whispers. 

“It is real if you believe it is. To me, it is real.” 

The sun begins to rise fully above the horizon. The first rays of morning light slip through the mountains, cloaking the thousands of people gathered there, at the base of Ausangate, in an orangey glow.

“Maybe the problem, Niña, is that you do not know how to believe in things. For me? Believing is not a problem. I guess it is easy, as you say.” 

He walks away, steady as ever, toward the large group of worshippers looking at the stretch of mountains on the horizon, awaiting the day as they had awaited the reappearance of the Pleiades, the bringer of the harvest. 

Nina feels a small, warm hand in hers, the boy’s. 

“Vienes?” the boy asks, tugging her towards the gathering. She lets him lead her. He nimbly weaves them through the dense crowd, well-practiced in this sort of maneuver, in the practice of finding his father.  

The people begin to kneel to greet the sun. 

Nina and the boy kneel too, on either side of the man, when they find him. The man bows his head, and Nina wonders if this is for holiness or for sorrow. 

The drums soften and mix into the din of the people. Most of them have their eyes closed and are murmuring, though Nina can’t make out any of the words, the Spanish too specific and soft-spoken for her to understand. She recognizes, too, that some of it is not even Spanish—she hears the familiar sounds of Quechua, the language that has always been for father and son in their home, and never for her. She feels adrift, struggling to stay afloat in this sea of the unfamiliar, trying just to understand what it is everyone else is doing, and why she can’t seem to ever know, like everyone else seems to. 

Then, the man, as if he’d somehow sensed her spiraling, offers her his arm, a life raft. She clutches it. His eyes are still closed, and he, too, is murmuring, his lips making shapes and sounds she doesn’t  know the meaning of. 

“What do I do?” she whispers to herself, and then again into the man’s ear, her lips so close to his earlobe that she goes ahead and kisses it. 

She didn’t mean for this question to feel so immense, but at a sanctuary tucked into the Andes mountains, in thin mountain air, surrounded by followers of a faith she doesn’t have, it does feel vast, encompassing everything. It’s as if every one of her possible lives is strewn before her, scattered amongst the believers, tucked beneath their costumes and skirts and twisted into their braids. A life back in the United States, with her mother. A life continuing to travel, unstuffing and restuffing a backpack for as long as she could scrape enough money together to pay for hostel bunks and street food. And the life she could have here, if she decides to honor the commitment she made to the man whose ring she wears, and to his son. All these lives—possibly hers, if she could only just choose. 

The man turns his head to look at her. His gaze is steady, unreadable at first, but the longer she holds it, the more she sees the quiet urgency there, everything unspoken between them coiled beneath his dark eyes. There is no pleading in his expression, no demand—only a quiet resolve, the look of a man bracing himself. He keeps looking at Nina, as if trying to guarantee he’ll remember her face. She wonders if he sees the doubt in her eyes, if that is how he’ll remember them. 

The man leans toward her. “You pray, Niña,” he whispers, and, after a hesitation, kisses her earlobe, and then her jaw, her chin, her mouth. She feels the boy squirm next to her.

She takes another look at the mountains, now completely aglow, the sun nearly risen. She feels almost too warm in her sweater and jacket, despite freezing just moments before. Her mouth tastes like coffee—extra milky, extra sweet—the way he always makes it for her. It’s a nice taste. She imagines a life drinking coffee made only in this way, made only by him.  

​She allows her eyes, slowly, to close. She breathes in, counts to three, exhales. She begins to pray.  

Maggie Hart

Maggie Hart is a writer and leukemia survivor from Colorado. She's currently pursuing a master's degree in rhetoric and writing studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she also teaches undergraduate composition courses. Her writing has been published in, Off Assignment, Narratively, The Blood Project, Mud Season Review, December Magazine, and The Audacity, among others.