Cloud Seeding in the Andes

I wasn’t supposed to go down by the cemetery, but I wasn’t with a boy. I was with Ana Inés and her cousins — we were looking for unguarded guavas — and then I was alone. So I was the only one who saw the plane, weaving and wobbling with a sound like a hive of bees about to explode or a lawnmower pushed way beyond its limits — a sound too small for an aircraft, even a puny little two-seater, but a noise that signaled engine-in-trouble even to me.

Fly Alone, digital collage by Joseba Elorza

It was cold that day and the air smelled like oranges, the sky gray as if it might finally rain. Once, after a heavy rainstorm, an irrigation ditch broke its channel and ran straight down the hillside below town, cutting the road fourteen times. That was back when it rained in December, when the wet season was predictable and strong. The year we lived in Miguel Vera, it didn’t rain at all. By Christmas, the beans should have been flourishing, but the powdery dust had given way to grit, the soft talc of the first layers already blown down the mountain. Men folded handkerchiefs into perfect squares to cover their noses and mouths. The Minister of Agriculture promised rain by the end of the month. We heard rumors of cloud seeding, of impeaching the minister if he failed to deliver. Mothers tried to keep children indoors.

My friends heard the church bell, realized catechism class was starting, and ran up the hill, all swirling dust and wavy lines. “See you after Mass,” Ana Inés called, but Marcia and Bayardo didn’t even pause.

I dawdled. I liked walking down there, if the wind was quiet. The fields were fenced with agave plants or skinny trees strung with barbed wire. You could see the province spread all the way to the mountains with their cap of glacier shrinking in the drought. A weird gringo lady lived down there, next to the cemetery, but I’d never seen her.

I’d barely been into a cemetery before January, when we went to a baby’s funeral, the son of my mother’s friend. Mom put me in my blue corduroy jumper and knee socks. She wore a blue dress, too, a shade lighter than mine, and my father wore a jacket and tie. I was surprised he’d brought one, but he was always dressier than the rest of us. My brother wore khakis — it was the best they could do.

Even walking protected between my parents, I felt too visible entering the church. We looked stupidly for a place to sit, then sat near the front with the family. The only part of Mass I understood was when we shook hands and wished each other peace. Beyond that I stood up and sat down with everyone else, always a beat or two behind. The priest wore a white cassock, like an angel in a church painting. One by one, the family and then the neighbors went up to receive communion. Then we all walked to the cemetery. Someone gave me a bunch of lilies to hold.

I carried my lilies and placed them on the grave, and I felt like part of the family and also like a gracious foreigner condescending to take part. But there was something glamorous about the run-down cemetery. The cypress around the walls were pointed as steeples. People said Don Ramón, the caretaker, spoke with the dead. They would take him photographs or scraps of clothing, and he’d light candles and pray. Sometimes, people did hear voices. Ana Inés said it wasn’t real, not like church, but people went anyway. Most of the graves had slick ceramic tiles laid out to mark the edges. They looked like bathroom tiles. Sometimes there was an upright slab with a niche or a statue. One man had a bust of himself on his headstone, a fierce, wild-eyed face molded by his brother.

I wasn’t going to pick guavas on my own, but I thought I might see if my lilies were still there. Then the noise started. There was panic in that noise, a sharp buzzing hum, maybe hornets trapped in a silo. It was a warning of something about to go terribly wrong. The pilot must have done what he could to pull out of the dive, but gravity gave the crash the look of inevitability, even of purpose. Auto-pilot become auto-destruct.

For a moment, those trapped hornets seemed to signal another threat, as if auto-destruct weren’t limited to planes, but I couldn’t pinpoint the danger. I just knew something was coming.

And that falling plane, the impossibility of flight made manifest: I was transfixed. I should have thought about fire, flying wreckage, fuel or sparks. I hardly thought at all. It was terrifying. And in another way, it was beautiful. Nose first, the plane caved into the wall of tombs in the center of the graveyard, crumpling accordion-style before it settled back on its haunches. The wings folded under, like a crushed paper crane; the cockpit collapsed over them like a poached egg.

I waited. A red light was blinking on the tail, but there was no other movement. There should have been sirens, but I was the only person there. It was almost dark. I should have been home already, setting the table.

I called out, Hello? Hola? Aló? As if it were a telephone. I waited, called out again. Nothing was quiet — the metal hissed and sighed — but no human voices. And there would be blood — blood everywhere, probably. No way was I going any closer. I ran all the way up the hill.

Rosa’s store was still open, waiting dinner for the catechism kids, and I panted out my report. Not that anyone believed me. We seldom saw planes, only jet trails higher than high, and not all that many of them.

My Spanish wasn’t yet up to the task. I could manage cementerio, avión, and I tried to give my sound effects a Spanish accent. But complicated verbs like estrellar were way beyond me. “What airline?” someone asked. “What company?” I thought it wasn’t a passenger plane, but it was too dark to see if there was writing on the side. Finally Ana’s brother Vladimir agreed to go look, and I was sent home to my parents, who must be worried.

My father was always worried. He started worrying before we ever got to the airport — before he even let Mom apply for the visas — and he started worrying double-time when I told him about the plane. “See, Linda?” he kept saying. “You see what I mean about transportation safety? Or maybe it’s political.”

My mother shrugged. “Maybe it is political,” she said. “What isn’t?” There had been rumors of domestic flights hijacked to capture workers for the coca plantations in the jungle. A plane had disappeared the year before, maybe two of them, and if the wreckage wasn’t found, well, who was to say where they’d gone? There were plenty of ravines that might be filled with torn bits of fuselage; without hard evidence, anything was possible.

My mother had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Miguel Vera before she met Dad. She wanted to take me, too, when I was a baby, but Dad had a list of catastrophes as long as the sky — dysentery, typhoid, earthquakes, malaria, unrest. Now I was twelve, my brother was eight, and my father had given in. We were durable, my mother said, we had stamina, and she had research to complete. Dad worried like crazy. He even listened to us breathe at night, standing in the bedroom doorway as if we were babies again. I’d hear him out there some nights — maybe his footsteps woke me — and it was comforting, but also creepy. But he liked the fresh mangos, the way everyone in town wanted to be his friend, the excuse to quit his job. My father taught high school math, but he hated it. When he gave his notice, he said he’d never go back. And he liked admiring my mother — or I thought he did — and he liked hiking with my brother and me, looking for plants. He bought books in English on bromeliads at the international bookstore in the capital. He talked about breeding orchids. He practiced his verb forms at the kitchen sink.

But he could never get the stress right. “Miguel Verá,” he’d say, as if he were announcing the future visions of our beloved Miguel. It might have even been a threat — you wait and see, Miguel! For my mother, it was a joke, one she repeated until it became a family standard. “What will he see?” she’d ask, and my father, trying to be a good sport, would fill in the blank.

We arrived in 1978, between the elections, before the run-off that would determine who won the presidency after years of military rule. The visas had been more difficult to obtain than Mom anticipated because the generals were uneasy about the transition. “Momentous times,” my father said, but I had no idea what he was talking about. The transition to democracy proceeded without me. My friends watched the soaps — Los ricos también lloran — and if their parents watched the news, I didn’t watch with them. I fed the pigs with Ana Inés, I pestered the postmaster for a letter from home. I listened to all kinds of rumors, but I didn’t know what they meant.

The plane that went down in the cemetery must have been filled with rumors, numerous and mobile as confetti or fleas. It was a spy plane, a drug lord’s jet, they were kidnapping children for sale, it was an obscure European prince with a fortune to hide, or maybe a bank robber. There had been a crash further north, in the forties or fifties, and the locals who knew enough to move fast were instantly rich, cash and jewels and pure, heavy gold bars. So maybe it was our turn. Vladimir was convinced it was a cloud seeder, blown off course or weighed down with the wrong fuel. It hadn’t rained in nearly a year and there were all kinds of schemes to break the drought. It didn’t rain after the crash, so if it was a cloud seeder, the pilot died before completing his work. I never heard the pilot’s name. One thing, though: the wreckage wasn’t there long. The government or the owners or somebody came with a truck in a matter of days. Don Ramón said they’d raked the dirt and spread new gravel and everything. Half the town thought that meant cover-up, half saw it as respect for sacred ground.

“What’s cloud seeding?” I asked my parents.

“Artificial attempts to make it rain,” my mother said.

“I don’t really know how it works,” my father said, then went ahead and explained. “They drop something into the clouds to precipitate out the moisture. I think they use super-cooled water, or maybe just dust,” he said.

“Like seeds.”

“Right. Sort of giving a potential rain cloud a boost.” I imagined dandelion seeds, whole clouds of them, clustered and fluffy and parachuting down to the ground. A silent seed-rain, even a thudding hail of milkweed pods; nothing like the loud stutter of the plane’s failing engine or the metallic huff as metal met stone.

But even as my father held himself aloof, I settled in. Sprung from my own pod, I began to take root. My Spanish got better. I told stories along with everybody else. After all, I’d really seen the plane, though people forgot that. So I had that leg to stand on, and I milked it, if I was feeling brave. Or I just let myself be one of the speculating crowd. I pretended I was born there.

Every afternoon, Ana and I fed the pigs her mother kept in a plot above the market, picking sweet ubillas in their yellow membrane tents like Chinese lanterns. Her boyfriend’s father had a field out that way and Bolívar used to irrigate it every afternoon. There was still water in the ditches, though never enough. We paced ourselves so we could just happen to finish with the pigs as Boli just happened along the road. We’d chat a few minutes, I’d slip to one side, then we’d hurry home, park the bucket, and make a quick excuse about getting an ice cream or needing to buy something for Mom. We’d dash over to my house just in time to watch Camilo pry the wad of grass and rocks out of the irrigation channel at our corner, a process we observed from an upstairs window. Sometimes he’d wave.

Camilo studied bookkeeping at the nuns’ school up the road; his mother thought it was more practical than the physics or biology he could choose at the public school in town. He got off the bus in his blue and white uniform, blue sweater tied stylishly across his shoulders, and walked up my street toward his house. He was fifth of thirteen children, and when he returned from school, he’d change clothes, have a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, and walk back to where the ditch branched down a narrow street that formed a T with our wall.

I thought he was beautiful, taller than me, older, just shy enough to be sweet. After a month or two, we’d time our arrival on my doorstep to coincide with his. He was too smooth for irrigation duty — he wasn’t going to be a farmer — but he couldn’t get out of it, so he hummed under his breath and managed to look cool even with an old hoe on his shoulder. He was the disco king of the ditches. And finally he declared his full devotion, or something like it, and I hit cloud nine.

“I don’t want you down by the cemetery,” my mother had said more than once. She knew what went on down there. But my father didn’t last out the year and after he left (a departure that was publicly explained as a need to return to work — no mention of divorce, not outside the family) Mom was speechless with anger, or just keeping busy, or firm in her belief that Dad was over-reacting. Anyway, her guard slipped. On a day when no one was paying much attention, I went down to the cemetery again, this time with Camilo.

Nothing truly worrisome happened. His kiss was so sloppy and engulfing that I panicked and pushed him away. I was sure I could take care of myself, but my heart broke in half when Camilo accused me of being different, but not different enough.

It took me a while to realize what was going on. He put his arms around me, hands at my waist — not exactly resting on my hips, more like poised. I felt him slowly pulling my shirt out of my waistband and took a step backward. I was wearing my favorite shirt, a light blue polo with a dark blue collar. It wasn’t something any of the local girls would have worn, except maybe as part of a uniform, on sports day.

He looked at me with such catastrophic sadness in those heavy brown eyes, I might have stripped down to my skivvies right there in the street if he’d asked. He leaned in. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear in fulfillment of my most perfect girly fantasy, and then I pushed him away.

“I thought you were different,” he said.

And I thought, damn right. “Sí,” I said. “Lo soy.” He never liked me for myself. He wanted to be seen with me, he wanted to see how far he could get.

“Hasta siempre,” he whispered as I stomped off.

I wavered, just for a moment — he sounded so sweet and sad. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding. He probably was the love of my life and I was leaving him on the dirt road in the shadow of the giant obelisk the former village president had erected in honor of his late wife, a stalk of rosy marble so polished it practically glowed. Everyone said it looked like skin, the skin under a fingernail, but everyone was thinking something a lot more vulgar that they couldn’t bring themselves to say out loud. It was a polite town; I only learned to curse in Spanish when I got to college.

My father had struggled with the language, the dust, with the heat in the afternoons, though it wasn’t that hot at 7500 feet, even smack on the equator. He might have been happier in a more foulmouthed town, one where those coy books that promise you the “real French” or “unvarnished Spanish” you could never learn in school might really come in handy. Somewhere he could learn something rude, esoteric, naughty. Not a dozen formal greetings plus the restricted food vocabulary of a town with one restaurant, and that’s using the term loosely: a dim front room where girls served rotisserie chicken on weekends. Two words for onion (skinny green cebolla; fat red paiteña) and five different types of banana — learn those, and the town was your oyster. There really wasn’t much else to buy.

But I was different.

I pushed Camilo away and started up the hill and of course I tripped. I don’t know if he saw me fall. It was all slow motion blurry, tears and the usual dust, and now blood on my elbow and a beckoning smile at the gate.

There was an old adobe house next door to the cemetery. Ana had said, “There’s another gringa here. Since your mother left before. But nobody knows her.” She lived under that low, tiled roof behind a green steel gate and a many-paned window, a grid of glass and wood that became an unrevealing mirror in the afternoon sun. Everyone knew her husband and her daughter had disappeared, years ago, mountain climbing. What kind of a mother lets her daughter — her daughter — climb mountains? I thought she might be in hiding. She’d have to be, with a reputation like that.

She pulled open the heavy gate with its thick scrollwork of bent rebar. “I was washing,” she said. “Come in.” The laundry sinks stood on a concrete platform to one side of the patio. An orange plastic tub balanced on the inclined washboard. If she was anything like us, lost and lazy without our washing machine, she just sloshed her clothes around in detergent and called it good; my friends were too polite to mention that my socks were never as white as theirs. Mom thought a little gray was just the natural aging process for socks. She hired a woman to do most of our wash, and when Beatriz beat our jeans against the stone, it sounded like horses on the road.

The woman at the gate looked about a hundred years old. Her back curved like a hoop, like a turtle’s shell, and her glasses were the kind librarians wear in old movies, with a chain down the back; the kind my great aunts wore in the sixties, glasses I’d only seen in pictures, rising at the corners like questions dotted with rhinestones.

Still damp from the washtub, the hand she offered was calloused, not at all soft. “Eleanor Milton,” she said quietly.

“Mucho gusto,” I said, as if I belonged there. She gave me a glass of cold water from a pitcher on the porch and a clean sock off the line to press against my elbow. She had geraniums in tin cans blooming against the sunny wall, like every other lady in town, and a wooden bench with a burlap sack for a cushion. She had on a baby blue warm-up suit and sneakers. She edged the bench toward me with her toe, then she went inside to look for a real bandage.

It was hard to drink the water and hold the sock against my elbow. I wondered if Camilo had seen me go in. There were no other houses down there, though the village president had put in his obelisk in preparation for a promised road that never got built. The patio was big enough for a truck and a chicken coop, but it was bare, swept and empty. Just a wheelbarrow, red, that maybe she used for avocados. The house was surrounded by orchard. The branches curved up almost from the ground, heavy with fruit the same color as the leaves. Chickens pecked at the dust, gold-amber in the shade.

Bored with the hens, I got impatient and followed Eleanor Milton inside. Blood had soaked through the sock and was seeping out between my fingers.

Eleanor squeaked when she saw me in the doorway. It was a little eek of alarm, like a mouse. But I only half heard the eek, because her face was lost in a fuddle of wings, iridescent as oil on water, never still. I blinked and blinked and blinked, and still everything was moving, out of focus.

She had a net out, her arms were flapping, and she had put a white smock on over her clothes. She was trying to hide the butterflies.

“Wow,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. “They are so beautiful.”

She looked proud as a mother of a new baby. “Aren’t they? A few years ago, they were so scarce most people said they didn’t even exist, never had, but I’ve managed to breed them. You can see, I have dozens.”

Years later, I went into a butterfly house at the Portland zoo, where the exhibit was full enough, varied enough, that it was like walking through a flying bouquet, yellow and green and blue and red and orange. But the zoo had airlocks and cautious, determined keepers and paths of deep, shifting gravel between exquisite artificial pools. Eleanor’s house had a wall of windows, dozens of six-inch square panes, and a hunched old lady a million miles from home trying to shoo her charges back indoors.

Or maybe she wasn’t all that old. Her hunch seemed to be lifting, as if she’d been straightening up, millimeter by millimeter, the whole time I was there. All her butterflies were blue — powder blue, sky blue — and all of them shimmering, hovering, so quiet it was almost like noise.

She shooed me in along with the butterflies and closed the door. “Let me get the bandage for your arm,” she said, and I saw my scraped elbow was dripping onto the floor.

“Why are you here?” I asked when she came back. She was already busy doctoring my scrape, dabbing at it with purple disinfectant ointment. I felt that gave me some right to ask questions, even things that were none of my business. We were still standing near the door, as if there were not another moment to lose.

“I came looking for my daughter,” she said, wasting no time. “She came down here climbing with her father — my husband — and they didn’t come back.” She twisted my arm a little, to get a better look at the elbow.

“Ow!” I said. And then, “That’s sad.”

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “Sit down.” There was only one piece of furniture in the room, the same red Naugahyde loveseat most people had. She had nearly mummified my elbow with fluffy white gauze, but I didn’t interrupt.  “I haven’t talked about this in a long time. I had a daughter about your age. Rachel was much more physically brave than I. Her father was an economist with a daredevil streak. They went on climbing trips, all over the world. It’s just this was the last one. I could have ended up in Nepal.”

“You came here with them?” We sat side by side, looking not at each other but at the butterflies that had begun to settle back on the walls and the potted plants.

“No.” She was impatient, then caught herself and spoke more slowly. “I came here looking for them, remember? I never went on those trips. I liked my life at home.”

“That’s my dad,” I said. “He liked his life at home. But Mom dragged him down here. Only now, he’s gone back.” I resented my mother for forcing the issue, my father for being a wimp — brittle, balky, unable to adapt.

Eleanor nodded. She didn’t tell me what to do about my father. She said, “I didn’t really choose this place. I landed.”

“But what if you could choose?” I would choose her house, I thought. I would choose the butterflies and that window and the trees.

Eleanor didn’t answer directly. “I found a restaurant, kind of a hippie hangout,” she said. “I asked there, because it was close to where they started hiking. If anyone had seen them, you know. They gave me a map. I felt I could trust them.” She smiled. “They had peanut butter,” she told me, as if that explained everything, and it did, because you couldn’t get peanut butter in Miguel Vera, or anywhere else, really, except the Californians’ Cuerpo Eléctrico Café. I’d eaten there, too, with my parents. “It’s from a poem, the restaurant name is,” Eleanor added. “You could look it up.”

I nodded, as if I really might. I almost asked if she had any peanut butter now.

“So after a few days, studying my map, getting used to the altitude, I hiked up the same mountain,” she said. “Not far. It’s beautiful, you wouldn’t believe, all frailejón in the mist. And then I found the butterfly, my first one, quite accidentally. Maybe it was one of those creatures so unaccustomed to humans that it had no fear.”

“Butterflies don’t really feel fear, do they? Do they even have brains?” Though I knew that was wrong, because you could obviously scare them away.

Eleanor said, “It sat on that fuzzy green leaf, like the velvet backing in a museum display, and it didn’t stir when my camera shutter clicked, even when I leaned in close. Maybe it was just ready to let someone know it was out there. Maybe it was time. I identified it later, from those photographs.”

“But why did you stay here?” I asked.

“It’s more, why did I come in the first place,” she corrected. “When Matthew and Rachel didn’t come back, I knew it was hopeless. I knew I wouldn’t find them. But there was a continual pressure to be searching. People would not understand that recognizing what cannot be changed is not a sign of lesser grief, and I got tired of explaining. I came here where I could just barely speak the language, and on my first try, I found a butterfly that didn’t even exist. So I tried to find it again. I knew it was foolish, but I did find it, and I bought this broken down house and filled it with butterflies.”

She had let her daughter go away, and had lost her, and she didn’t seem sorry. Or, not sorry that she’d taken the risk. She was sorry she had lost the bet. Butterflies bluer than sapphires perched on her fingers like rings, they caught in her hair, lighting on her shoulder just long enough to alter the air currents for everyone on earth. She was the loneliest person I had ever seen, yet somehow, the most peaceful.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’m sure I have crackers.”

“No, thank you.” I accepted another glass of water. I didn’t think I’d cried that much, but my mouth was as dry as the wind.

“You’ve been here since — what is it, December?”

“November,” I said, surprised she’d kept track, though I shouldn’t have been. Now that my father had gone, half the English speakers in town were present in that room.

She nodded, as if she’d known all along. “Your mother came to see me,” she said. “To introduce herself.” She tilted her head. “She doesn’t know about the butterflies.”

“No one believed me about the plane at first, either,” I said, illogically.

“That’s right. You saw the crash.” She paused, then added, “I saw it, too. I saw you run for help.”

“Dad thought it proved how dangerous it is here. But planes crash anywhere in the world. That’s what my mom says.”

“It is dangerous,” Eleanor said. She picked up my glass and poured the last bit of water into her palm, then held out her hand, as still as a birdbath, until a butterfly landed. “People speculated that my family was on one of those planes. The ones hijacked into the jungle. I’ve told them it’s not possible — my husband called me with his plans. I know they took a bus and then a taxi to get to the mountain, but I suppose they might have come down again all in one piece and gotten on a plane later.”

“I should go,” I said.

“Let me give you some avocados. I just picked them. Did you know, you have to choose ones that almost look as if they’ve been rolled in ashes, sort of dusty gray? Otherwise they never get ripe. Don Ramón gave me a lesson. This was his aunt’s house.”

One of the butterflies was caught in the threads of my shirt. I had to stretch the sleeve, pulling the stitches apart, so it could pick its way free. “I thought it was like, if you love something, you let it go. Like on the posters,” I said.

“I thought that, too.” She sounded surprised, then relieved; I had passed some kind of test. And so before she filled my hands with avocados, she let me free a butterfly, just one. I waited until one landed on my hand, then I walked outside, slowly, and waited until it took off. I didn’t even blow on its wings.

Then the gate clanged behind me and I was running again, late and breathless with that outsized bandage on my arm and a sack full of avocados. I had been asked to buy a pound of rice on my way home, but that was hours ago. I might still have time, or my distracted mother might have forgotten. But Rosa’s store was open, so I stopped, and she measured out the rice, laughing at the way I used to ask for un libro de arroz, a book of rice, trying to make everything agree. This time I said it right, una libra de arroz, and then someone said, “Look!” One of the old men who always hung around the store was pointing at my newsprint-wrapped packet. Carefully, so as not to spill the loose grains, Rosa smoothed back the top half of the sheet across the mound of rice. There was a picture of a small plane, crashed in a field of stubble. It took us a few minutes to sort out the caption. It was a crash in Peru, nothing to do with us. There was another headline, too. Two months until the voting: still no rain.

Rosa shook her head and clicked her tongue and wrapped the rice up tighter than before. I thought about ink rubbing off on our food. “You’d better hurry,” she said, as if she knew where I’d been.

I told my mother I’d tripped and fallen. I told her I was stealing guavas with my friends, and I told her the lady down by the cemetery had bandaged me up. If I had said it was someone else — Ana’s mother, or Marcia’s — she would have asked them. I said everyone ran off when the old lady came out speaking English, which might have happened, if my story were true. “Miguel Verá,” my mother said, like a promise. Together, we waited and waited for rain, and I looked for blue against the dusty white sky.