Kate thinks of her father. A hot toddy was always his favorite cure for a cold or the flu, or even for the desolation of a windy February night. “Thanks. May I help?”
Unsure of protocol, Kate sits clutching her glass of whiskey. After a sip, she feels the warmth invade her empty stomach.
Peter serves the soup carefully and sits down across from her. He pushes his chair back from the table and lights a cigarette. “You don’t mind?”
“Of course not.”“ Kate knows she is devouring the soup greedily, but doesn’t care. There are biscuits, too, hard but filling.
“Well, Sister Mary Katherine, you frightened me a bit when I saw you all white and ghostly in the moonlight. I thought you were a spirit. The Aymara talk about the mountain gods who sometimes appear in the form of animals, birds, often the condor, but also as people—even as foreigners.”
Kate remembers the condor she’d seen over Lake Titicaca. She grins at him, relaxing for the first time that day. Fortunately, this cool, middle-aged Englishman doesn’t seem shocked by an American nun sitting by his fire in his pajamas, enjoying his whiskey and soup.
He squints through the cigarette smoke, and asks abruptly, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Ah, a little young for the solitary life of the Altiplano, I suppose.”
Solitary? Since she’d left St. Louis she hadn’t been alone for a minute, and yet she realizes with a jolt that there is a deep core of loneliness inside. She answers slowly. “Well, I suppose I am still pretty green. I came to Peru from our Motherhouse in St. Louis a year ago. Then a month in Lima, followed by five months in Cochabamba at the Maryknoll Language Institute. I’ve been here in Juliaca since January.”
“Did you study Aymara in Coch?”
“Very little—most of the course was Spanish. I had about three weeks of Aymara.”
Peter gets up abruptly and paces across the room. “I must say, you Americans can be damned naive at times. Green, happy, middle-class innocents flocking in droves to do good—not understanding the people or the culture, putting up buildings, bringing in U.S. dollars and medicine.” He glances over to see if she is offended. “What do you do up here anyway? You’re a nurse, I suppose?”
“No, but I wish I had studied nursing.” Kate shoves her empty bowl away and takes another drink of whiskey. “At least then I could be sure I was really doing something useful. Of course, Sister Jeanne Marie—she’s our nurse—says that by the time she sees the patients it’s usually too late to do much—T.B., cholera, dysentery.” Kate knows she is rattling on but is unable to stop. Is it the whiskey? she wonders. “Anyway, my job is teaching the children to read in Spanish, and I give catechism classes to the women and teenagers, with an interpreter who translates my halting Spanish into Aymara. God knows what message comes out!” She falters, “Actually, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
She looks up to find his eyes on her; they are green, she sees, fringed by thick dark lashes, like a girl’s. “What made you want to be a nun in the first place?”
Kate stares into the fire for a few moments. “I felt called somehow.”
He laughs at this. “Okay. Second question: What are you doing wandering around the Altiplano alone at night?”
She looks up, catching his ironic stare. She looks away. Because I’m burning up with love, she wants to say. She thinks of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “Burning, burning, so I came to Carthage.” Would he recognize the quote? In the firelight she sees a face—Father Tom’s as he had appeared that morning in his gold and white vestments at Mass. His dark, unruly hair slicked back, his eyes closed as he raised the Host at the consecration. His hands had gripped the Host as if willing God’s presence into the damp old church. And she, a nun, drowning with love and desire for him.
Peter waits. The music rises and falls, a stream rushing out to the sea.
“I had to get away. I was suffocating.”
“Do the other nuns know where you are?”
“No.” She doesn’t even know where she is.
Kate watches him as he gets up and walks over to a table beside the front door. He picks up his keys. “I’ll take you back now, if you like.”
She begins to shiver. The warmth of the fire cannot reach the cold within. He walks over and stands in front of her. “Sister Katherine—whatever your name is—they’ll be worried about you.”
She rises to face him. She forces herself to speak calmly; he must not think she is crazy. “Peter, I’d be so grateful if I could stay here tonight.”
“Look, I have to leave in the morning. I’m going in to Arequipa to stock up on some film, get my mail, and see a few friends. Then on Saturday I go to Lima for the flight to London.”
“Do you think I could catch a ride with you to Arequipa?” Kate strives for a light tone—as if she were a college girl going away for the weekend.
Peter gazes into the fire, avoiding her eyes. “You really ought to go back to Santa Catalina, you know. They’ll be worried about you.”
“No, I can’t.” She tries to keep the edge out of her voice. “I just need to get away so I can think. I’ll let them know somehow that I’m all right. Please, Peter, you’ve been so kind.” She stops, afraid to say more.
He comes toward her. “All right. I’ll probably be arrested for abducting a nun. We’ll leave here in the morning at six thirty sharp, when the fog’s burned off. I want to make Arequipa by nightfall.” He reaches out as if to touch her hair, then drops his hand. “Good night, Sister,” he says with just a touch of mockery.
After the warmth of the fire, the guest room is freezing. Kate flings the bathrobe on the foot of the bed and
