Dear Clem, you mustn’t think your father doesn’t write to you because he isn’t thinking of you. He thinks about you all the time, and you should see the way he talks about you—the way he shakes his head with admiration. I’ve begged him to write and let you know how proud he is, but he’s convinced that he let you down as a father, and he’s afraid a letter would be unwelcome. I don’t want to burden you with a second request, but, if you’re ever inclined, you might let him know that you’d be happy for a word from him.
It’s cold and late here, and I want to put this in the mail in the morning. Your father just went upstairs to bed and asked me to send you his love. You needn’t worry about us—God never asks for more than we can give. Just know that nothing in the world could bring us more joy than to see you again. Please take very, very good care in the mountains.
All my love,
Mom
P.S. Now that I have a good safe address for you, I’m sending a very belated little Christmas present and the last of the money from your savings account, which might help with your trip home. （Do you know when that will be?）
Maybe it was the twenty-dollar bills in the envelope, the impending return they represented, or maybe the image of his father broken and remorseful, his weakness merely pitiable, not embarrassing, but the letter didn’t anger Clem. It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.
Whatever else Becky was, happy or unhappy, she’d always been straightforward—sincere to the point of na?veté. It was hard to imagine a person so clearhearted giving phony smiles to her mother, a person so naturally guileless calculating how to stab her parents without leaving prints on the knife. Ever since he’d learned of her marriage to the lightweight, Clem had done his best not to think about her; a baby was a baby, and there was nothing to be done. He’d been disappointed in her, but he’d lacked the empathy to imagine her own disappointment. How miserable she must have become, to be cruel to a person as harmless as their mother. And this, yes, was the source of his anxiety, this was the thing he was late for, this was the vital matter he’d forgotten: he loved Becky.
He went back to the postal clerk and parted with some coins. Standing at the end of the counter, with a pen borrowed from the clerk, he covered an aerogram with tiny handwriting. He apologized to Becky for having criticized her, he described his daily life in the hamlet, and then he paused. He was in the same position as his father, afraid that an avowal of love would be unwelcome. It might seem inflated to Becky after such a long silence, and so he went at it sideways. Using terms in which he hoped love would be implicit—she was a person of strength, clear of heart, a shining star—he asked her to consider the trouble their parents were in, consider her many advantages, and try to be a little kinder. Without rereading the letter, he wrote his parents’ address and PLEASE FORWARD on the aerogram and gave it to the clerk. Then he put on a pair of new socks （much needed） and walked back up the valley.
It was generous of his mother to suppose he’d developed greater empathy in South America. Empathy was a luxury a day laborer couldn’t afford. When a truck pulled up at dawn and fifty men fought for space on it, empathizing with the man trying to yank you off the tailgate could result in having nothing to eat that day. If Clem had developed anything in Tres Fuentes, it was simply admiration for the men who tilled the unforgiving puna, the women who rose at the night’s coldest hour to boil their mote and their mate. He didn’t have to empathize with Felipe Cuéllar. It was enough to know that he was durable and trustworthy.
Having taken action against the anxiety, Clem returned to his elemental existence. He woke and worked, drank chicha and slept in a shed with the Cuéllars’ donkey. The month of March brought finer weather, dense nitrogen-fixing growth on the bean slopes, alpacas fattening themselves with ceaseless chewing. Lacking the finer skills of farming, he earned his keep by rebuilding a pen for the hamlet’s livestock, repairing stone walls, and gathering firewood. The donkey was old and tolerant, and he did it the favor of leading it up to the forest, rather than riding it. He was amazed that hardwoods could survive at all at such an altitude, far higher than a temperate tree line, and he felt bad about hacking at them with a machete. They had small, silvery leaves, twigs encrusted with lichen, branches hairy with epiphytes and tortured in their angles, as though they’d been thwarted at every turn by the harshness of their environment. He suspected they grew too slowly to keep up with the demand for firewood, but the hamlet had no other source of fuel. He tried to cut judiciously, taking only dead limbs, but every branch seemed half dead and half alive. Even as the bark peeled away, exposing xylem to the weather, it managed to convey nutrients to an outpost or two of fresh leaves. Each tree, indeed, was like a miniature of the highlands. The branches resembled the ancient, gnarled pathways that led to the patches of arable land, leaf-green, that were scattered among stony fields and bogs of tannic standing water. The half-dead trees recalled the human settlements as well: for every dwelling in good repair were several in a state of ruin, some no more than heaps of rock, possibly dating from the Incas; the birds he flushed from the trees were like the ponchos of the women of the hamlet, gold and blue, black and crimson. When he’d cut as much wood as he and the donkey could carry on their backs, they made their way down a slope already cleared of trees. He noticed that its soil was badly eroded, less water-retentive, than the loam in the forest, but the nights here were frigid and the almuerzo waiting for him at the Cuéllars’， a thick soup he never tired of, could not have been cooked without firewood.