by Anita Desai
Caught in that illumination, the truck driver sprawling there rose calmly to his feet, dusted the seat of his pyjamas and wound up the bandana round his head, while everyone watched open-mouthed. Placing his hands on his hips, he called to the police, ‘Get them all moving now, get them all moving!’ And, as if satisfied with his role of leader, the commander, he leapt lightly into the driver’s seat of his truck, turned the key, started the engine and manoeuvred the vehicle into an onward position and, while his audience held its disbelieving breath, set off towards the north.
After a moment they saw that he had switched on his lights; the tail-lights could be seen dwindling in the dark. He had also turned on his radio and a song could be heard like the wail of a jackal in the night:
Father, I am leaving your roof,
To my bridegroom’s home I go …
The police, looking baffled, swung around, flourishing their canes. ‘Get on! Chalo!’ they bellowed. ‘Chalo, chalo, get on, all of you,’ and they did.
Tepoztlán Tomorrow
Luis was let in at the big door by the old workman who had married one of the maids. He greeted Luis with becoming joy and affection, then led him through the courtyard which was quiet now, the maids having finished their work and gone. Luis had to duck his head to make his way through the rubber trees, the bougainvillea, the shrubs of jasmine and hibiscus and plumbago that had tangled themselves into a jungle, leaving barely enough room to pass. The evening air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and lemon blossom. As he remembered, every branch was hung with a cage – he had memories that were still sharply etched of daylong screeches and screams that would ring through the courtyard and every room around it: the maids, doing the laundry at the water trough in the centre of the courtyard, crying, ‘Pa-pa-ga-yo?’ and being answered by twenty screeches of ‘Pa-pa-ga-yo!’ hour upon hour. But at this hour all the cages were covered with cloth and there was silence. A thought struck him: were they still alive? Perhaps they had all died: he imagined their skeletons clinging to the perches inside the shrouded cages, all beaks, claws and bones, dust and dried droppings below. ‘Papa-ga-yo? Pa-pa-ga-yo!’ he whistled softly.
The house, to him, was a larger cage, shrouded and still. It seemed equally dead. There was one light on, deep inside; the other rooms were all shadowy, except for the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her gown of dusty net and tinsel, illuminated by the glow of a red light bulb suspended over her head.
The old man was hobbling along the dark passages as if he could see perfectly in the dark. Perhaps he was blind, and accustomed to it. Luis bumped into a sharp-edged table and suddenly all the picture frames on it clattered in warning, and a voice called out, ‘Quién es?’
As Luis approached the innermost rooms – actually the ones that fronted the street, but they could not be approached from it – the scent of lemons and jasmine in the courtyard and the heavy perfume of incense burning perpetually at the shrine receded and were replaced by an overpowering odour he remembered as being the distinctive smell of the house on Avenida Matamoros: that of mosquito repellent.
And there they were, Doña Celia on her square, upright, wooden-backed and wooden-seated throne, strategically placed so that she could look out of the window into the street and also, just by turning her head, into the house all the way down its central passage into the courtyard; and Nadyn beside her, poking with a hairpin at a Raidolito coil which was smoking ferociously and yet not enough to keep the evening’s mosquitoes at bay.
Whereas Nadyn appeared stunned by the sudden appearance of a young man out of the dusk, and stepped back almost in fright, Doña Celia recognized him without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Ah, Teresa’s son, eh? Luis, eh?’
Of course they were expecting him – his mother had telephoned, he too had spoken to them on the phone, all the while imagining it ringing through the empty house and the fluster it would cause in those silent rooms – but he was late, very late.
Doña Celia reminded him of this immediately. ‘You are late,’ she accused him. ‘We have waited all day. What kept you, eh?’
He tried to explain, laughing falsely: he had hoped to get his father’s car and drive up; he had waited, it hadn’t turned up; he had made his way to the bus terminal but met friends on the way who insisted he stop, who delayed him. It was true, he admitted, taking off his hat and wiping his face, true that he had only managed to get away and catch a bus hours after he had said he would. That was how it was, he laughed.
Doña Celia’s long face swung in the dark like a cow’s. She shifted on her chair, wrapping her shawl about her throat – a shawl, on such a still, warm evening indoors; that too he remembered. All her movements expressed her displeasure. ‘Well, we have eaten. Finally, we ate, Nedy and I. But Nedy will show you to the kitchen and you can help yourself before you go to bed.’
‘Oh, is it bedtime?’ he blinked. Already?
This was taken as an impertinence. She was not going to reply. A young nephew to speak to his aunt so, and tell her what should and should not be the hour for bed? Her face set into its deeply cut folds. Luis could hardly believe this sour old lady could be the sister of his laughing, plump, brightly dressed mother. A much older sister, it was true, and the daughter of their father’s first marriage, more like a mother to her younger sister by a second marriage, but still, there was not the faintest resemblance. Perhaps it was the difference between the old family home in Tepoztlán which the old lady had never left, her own husband having entered it when they married, and left her there when he died, while Luis’s mother had married into a family that lived in Mexico City.
Following Nadyn into the kitchen for a bowl of sopa da tortilla she said she had kept warm for him, he sighed. Yes, Mexico City was very far, in a sense, not geographical, from Tepoztlán.
The bowl of soup Nadyn promised him turned out to be only one course of a succession of dishes she kept placing on the table and watching him eat his way through out of politeness, not hunger. She placed her elbows on the table, her chin on her cupped hands, and let her eyes wander. Why did she not put the light on? he thought querulously, peering into the dishes in the gloom, not even certain what he was eating although Nadyn assured him each time ‘Your favourite.’ ‘It is?’ he asked doubtfully, lifting a spoon and stirring. ‘Of course,’ she replied, ‘we remember.’
What else do you remember? And what do you do besides remember? he wanted to ask her, bad-temperedly and unfairly, since she was telling him, in some detail, all the events of their lives in the time he had been away in the USA, quite as if she were sure he had heard nothing about them, living as he did in exile. As she mentioned this uncle, that cousin, or the other nephew or niece, he drooped over his plate gloomily, wondering if he dared light a cigarette and indicate he would not eat any more.
But now she was bringing out the pièce de résistance of the meal, carefully preserved in an ancient icebox that stood grumbling in its corner, and even in the gloom the colour of the jelly that wobbled in its dish was such that it made him cringe. ‘Your favourite,’ she challenged him as she set it, trembling, before him. How could he tell her that he had long since outgrown green and red jelly puddings?
‘Only if you share it with me,’ he said, inspiration having suddenly struck. By the brevity of her hesitation, and the eagerness with which she brought across a glass dish for herself, he remembered how Nadyn had always been the one with the sweet tooth.
‘So, Nedy,’ he decided to tease her, passing over all but one spoonful of the jelly to her, ‘que pasa, con Pedro? – is he still around?’
She collapsed against the table, as if she had been struck. He had been unfair: he should have let her finish her jelly before bringing up the matter which he knew to be unpleasant, had a long history of being unpleasant. Now she would not be able to enjoy her pudding.
But somehow she managed to combine two emotions and two activities – and he watched with fascination as the woman with the long grey face and the two pigtails who s
at across from him in her grey dress managed to spoon the sweet into her mouth avidly, relishing each chill, slippery mouthful as an armadillo might enjoy slipping slugs down its throat, and at the same time emitting an endless flow of complaint and grumbling, all bitter as ash, raw as salt. There was such a long, long history, after all, of Doña Celia’s opposition to Pedro as a suitor, and her objections: that he was muy sucio, dirty, not fit to enter their house, and just because he ran a business in town. A business? queried Luis, was it not a truck? Oh yes, a truck was a part of it, how else was Pedro to deliver those tanques de gas if not by truck, but did Luis know how the people of Tepoztlán now relied on those tanques for heating and cooking, how good, how thriving a business it was? It was not that Pedro was not doing well, or that he did not work hard. Then what was it? Luis enquired. Here she threw up her hands, then clutched her head, then clasped her arms about her, and went off on another tack: that of Doña Celia’s stubbornness, her adamant attitude, her rejection of Pedro’s family – for how could she object to Pedro? No one could object to Pedro, it was his family – and here Nadyn became dejected, her mouth and shoulders and hands all drooped. She tinkled a spoon in the empty glass dish, making a forlorn sound: even Nadyn could not speak for Pedro’s family. She had visited it, after all, and had to admit – and had told Pedro, too – that it was not the kind of home she had grown up in, that anyone could see. Pedro’s home and Pedro’s family could not be described as anything but sucios, not even by Nadyn. And she had not been given such a welcome by them either: they were not used to cultivated and aristocratic women such as the women of their own family, said Nadyn with a shrug, and their way of living – well, it was little better than pigs’. After all they had only recently made the move to Tepoztlán from the hills where they had raised pigs, turkeys, and scratched maize from the fields, but how could Pedro help that? He had worked hard to rise above that himself: only Mama would not see that, being of the old school – old-fashioned and stubborn.
Luis felt his eyelids weighted as if by lead with the repetitiveness of Nadyn’s complaints. He could postpone the cigarette no longer. ‘One day she will,’ he sighed, without the least conviction, knowing as well as Nadyn that only over Doña Celia’s dead body would Pedro cross the threshold of their home. His eyelids twitched with a sudden spasm of sympathy. People like Doña Celia took a long, long time to die – he did not need to tell Nadyn that: she knew.
He took his cigarette out into the courtyard to smoke. This was only partly in order not to offend his aunt’s and his cousin’s nostrils – they were used to the heavy coils of smoke of Raidolito and of incense but not of tobacco – but also because he could not help feeling absurdly hurt that Nadyn had not asked him a single question. Instead she had taken for granted that he would want to hear her news, their news, without the faintest suspicion that he might have some of his own. It made him feel ridiculously childish – no one ever imagines a child could have anything of interest to say. So it was with a somewhat sulky air that he strolled out into the dense jungle of the courtyard, thinking to sit down on a bench beside the water trough in the ferny centre and brood silently upon his own affairs before going in to bed. For a while it was as he remembered: the scents, the sound of water dripping, the howling of dogs in the lanes of Tepoztlán in voices more human than canine, so full of despair, desire and woe, and in the distance the wail of similar human laments on a radio, broken into by the raucous gaiety of a mariachi band playing on another, and overhead the night sky so deep and so dark that it was like being upside down and peering into a well. But very soon not only did the cigarette dwindle to its end and the bench grow distinctly cold under him, but what he remembered and what he reaffirmed began to have a profoundly depressing effect on his spirits. He saw the light go off inside the house, only the red glow around the Virgin of Guadalupe left throbbing, and then it became too much for him and he got to his feet and withdrew as if afraid this might be the stage, the setting for his life as well.
When he woke, much too late – the sun was already smashing in through the windows he had left unshuttered – it was to find the mood of Doña Celia’s house unchanged. The courtyard was still uninhabited, there was no longer a team of maids and manservants to labour there, and although someone had drawn the covers off the cages, a number of them did turn out to be empty while the few that were inhabited contained only very aged, disgruntled birds that glared at him out of a single eye as he made his way past them to the main wing of the house for his breakfast, and did not bother to squawk a greeting or whistle back. In the house things were as usual. Nadyn appeared to have her arms deep in tubs or basins or buckets of housework, and Doña Celia, whom he went to greet, was seated as always upon her comfortless throne and, even if it was a summer’s day and the sun beating up from the white dust in the street outside, she was wrapped in her shawl, holding it about her throat as if to keep every sort of danger at bay – draughts, chills, unsuitable suitors for her daughter’s hand, whatever. Kissing her cheek, Luis actually found it chill to his lips – chill and mouldy, as if disintegrating.
But, while he sat over his café con leche and his pan dulce, he learned about the changes that had occurred during his absence. The house was no longer the barricaded fortress, the safe retreat it had been for previous generations of Cruzes: the fortress was threatened on every side. Doña Celia filled in the news into his left ear, Nadyn into the right, since he had noticed nothing for himself. In a way Doña Celia had herself brought it all about – and Nadyn was full of sharp little barbs to remind her – but having already sold off orchards and farmland lower down in the valley, she had finally resorted to disposing of bits and pieces of their own compound. Did Luis remember the row of sheds at the far end of the courtyard? Yes, he did and he also knew they had been bought up by an entrepreneur who had rented them to shopkeepers so that now there was a tiendita in one, a video parlour in another, a lavandería in a third … What was wrong with that? he asked, irritated. Not only was it old history but it brought in an income off which the two of them lived, so what was their complaint? First they brought change to Tepoztlán and then they complained of it. He pushed aside the basket of rolls Nadyn kept nudging towards him, and swept his hand over the dish of mermelada about which a very large, fat fly hovered.
But now they were coming towards the true horror they had to face, its pit, its bottom: that end of the courtyard, round the corner from the row of rooms now kept shut, they had had a piece of land planted with avocados and lemons, did he remember? Well, they had sold it to a man who had come to them with cash in hand, and a suitably respectful manner of speech, telling them he wished to build a house for his family which had only recently moved to Tepoztlán. Being who they were – a shawl was fingered, a brooch nervously touched – they had not thought to question him regarding his profession or the size of his family. After all, if they had sold their land to him, they had no right to do so (and of course they couldn’t wait to sell it and have the money in their pockets, Luis thought viciously; had they not always been money-grubbing, was not the whole family so?) and now they had for a neighbour a man who was a garbage collector by profession—
‘What? What by profession?’
Luis’s reaction satisfied them deeply: it set them off on an even higher pitch of complaint. The man owned a truck that he parked in front of their front door, often right under their windows so they could smell its contents, and even when the maid went out and persuaded him to move it down the street a bit, it left behind a trail of stray bits and leavings of garbage scattered all over their threshold. What was more, behind the high wall he had built around his piece of property before he had even erected a shack upon it, they suspected he stacked and sorted his garbage—
‘What do you mean? He doesn’t go and dispose of it, he stores it?’
‘Yes, yes,’ screamed Doña Celia and Nadyn together, in agitation: they were convinced, they had evidence, the maid had climbed up a ladder and peered over the w
all and seen there all the empty bottles of agua purificada, the beer cans, the flattened cardboard cartons, that his family sat sorting into bundles for resale. And the family! By the rising crescendo of their voices, Luis knew he was in for a long saga. He began to squirm, to indicate that he was done with his breakfast, but they paid him no attention whatsoever, they were carried along by the tide of their indignation regarding the family because the man had not informed them that he had no fewer than seven children, boys and girls of all sizes, all in rags, and all day that was what they occupied themselves with, rag-picking, while their father drove around the town in his truck, loudly ringing a bell and collecting garbage to bring home to their doorstep. That was what the Avenida de Matamoros had come to, and there was no way of ignoring it: not only did the most noxious smell rise from the foetid garbage pile that was his compound, but day and night the place rang with the abominable music from the radio and TV – had Luis not heard it last night? They had been kept awake, always were. The man had not yet got around to building his family a house – well, yes, he had built some walls and a roof, but not a door or a window, not fit for habitation, yet a radio and TV had been set up in it to entertain the family while it sat sorting garbage. All day that ungodly music thundered through their compound – Doña Celia drew her shawl about her and shivered with fury. But the shawl was worn thin, no one cared how she shivered, such was the sorry state of affairs that Luis could see for himself.
He thought of rising from the table on the pretext of going and examining this den, this pit, this abomination, for himself but the two women were already onto the next disclosure of iniquity. Could Luis imagine such a thing: the garbage collector’s wife, she put a table outside their door, their front door, every evening, and thereon boiled a tubful of corncobs and stood there, impudently as you please, slathering them with mayonnaise and chillies, selling them to passersby, as if Doña Celia were growing maize in her garden and posting her maid out there to sell it!
