by Anita Desai
‘I am sure that has not occurred to anyone who knows you, Aunt,’ Luis said kindly, seeing her distress and beginning to feel a little amused in spite of himself.
‘Yes, and what of all those who do not know me? Do you think Tepoztlán is the place it once was? Haven’t you seen how it has been overtaken by hordes of newcomers, from Cuernavaca, from Mexico City, from God knows where …?’
‘It’s now got a good road and good transport – it’s more lively now,’ Luis reminded them, although it was clear liveliness was not to them a quality: they would have preferred it a morgue.
‘Yes, yes, lively – we all know about lively. Men come to our street corner to drink. All afternoon you hear them drink and gamble there under the bamboos, and by evening you may see them lying stretched out in the road, dead drunk – so lively has it grown,’ Doña Celia said bitterly.
‘Why, is there a bar now at the corner?’ Luis asked with interest.
‘A bar! I should think not! I am sure it is that vile woman – that pigsty owner’s wife – who supplies them with liquor. Home-brewed. Oh, we would go to the police, inform them – but do you know what we can expect of the police of Tepoztlán? If people go to them with an honest complaint, and ask for justice, they are first asked “And how much will you pay us?” Do you think Nedy and I should submit to—’
Luis could not help laughing at the idea of his aunt and cousin visiting that most disreputable department in the town hall by the zocalo where policemen sat playing cards in the sun and their families cooked meals over open fires. ‘No, of course not, Aunt – but perhaps Cousin Heriberto could go along—’
‘Heriberto!’ Doña Celia threw up her hands. ‘That one! If you only knew—’
‘I thought I’d go and visit him.’ Luis scrambled quickly to his feet. ‘Is he still at the old place?’
‘His old place? You don’t know what he did with it?’
Luis began to back out of the room. ‘And – and Don Beto – I need to see him – about my thesis – ask his advice—’
The two women, still seated at the table, still seething and quite capable of continuing through the afternoon, found their audience disappearing at such speed that they were cut short in midstream. ‘Thesis!’ Doña Celia snapped as he turned and ran. ‘I should like to know what thesis! Does he think he can deceive us as he does his parents!’ And Nadyn shook her head exactly as her mother did, at the foolishness of such a notion.
Making his way out of the house, Luis ran into Teresa returning from the mercado, her market bag bulging with the produce for the day’s cooking. ‘Ah, eh,’ she greeted him delightedly – how was it that his aunt and cousin could not muster such a display? he wondered – and showed him the vegetables she had bought to prepare for him, and the corn to make the pozole, his favourite, she knew, then gestured at the lane outside, making a face and warning him, ‘Basura, basura everywhere.’
It was as she said – the basura collector’s truck was parked outside the door, and bits of plastic bolsas and newspaper and vegetable peel blew off it and littered the cobblestones. He carefully stepped over them and, at the corner, where the great clump of bamboos leant over Doña Celia’s garden wall, there were the men she’d spoken of, leaning against the adobe, their sombreros pulled low over their foreheads, and every one with a beer bottle in his hand while empties littered the earth around them. Luis could not help feeling amused to find the town had crept up this far and was even daring to assail his aunt’s fortress. Perhaps one day she would be brought face to face with the modern world. The confrontation would be worth witnessing.
He rounded the corner and crossed Avenida Galeana, then started to climb the humps and hillocks of Calle de Cima towards Barrio Santa Cruz, keeping his eyes on the ground and picking his way from one cobblestone to another, avoiding the trickles and runnels of drainwater in between. The sun struck at the back of his neck and he wished he had bought a hat from the woman with a stall at the corner on Avenida de Tepoztlán, but it was too late to go back for it now.
Up at the top, he paused by the church with the faded, mottled pink stucco walls and tower that looked like something made by a potter, then left out for decades in the rain and damp. He had arrived at Calle Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. He stood there catching his breath and remembered the times he had run up so lightly and eagerly, on his way to converse with the one man he held in esteem, the man whom he thought of as his mentor, and who had persuaded him to postpone entering his father’s firm and go to university instead. He hesitated now because he was not sure if Don Beto would admire the way he was proceeding – Luis knew there was little cause for admiration – or even if he was still interested. It was such a long time since Luis had gone away to university in the States, and it was true he had been neglectful of writing letters to the old man or visiting him but, at the same time, if Don Beto were as he remembered him, then seeing him would surely give his work the impetus it required: lately it had foundered and stalled, leaving him wondering if he was really made for an academic career, if he hadn’t better give up and enter Papa’s firm. After all, his entire circle of friends appeared to have done just that, falling out of university one after the other, disappearing, then re-emerging as elegant young dandies, owners of sleek cars. Their social lives revolved on a higher plane to which Luis was invited whenever he visited from Texas but on which he felt like an interloper. It was one such invitation that had driven him back to Tepoztlán and to Don Beto: Marisol dressed in skin-tight pink silk and black lace, giggling, ‘Paz? Octavio Paz and Hindoo philosophy? Oh, Eduardo, you didn’t tell me your friend is a Hin-doo!’ and making enormous eyes, while Eduardo called loudly from the bar, ‘Luis? He was always a philosopher! Better give up trying to lure him, Marisol.’
He was resting in the shade of the church wall and thinking of that evening when he heard his name called and looked up to see his childhood friend Arturo parting the vines of a flowering squash plant on the hillside and peering at him. ‘Luis, hola! Hola, Luis! What are you doing here? Thought you were in Houston or somewhere.’
Luis blinked up at him and answered as lightly as he could: he was not at all certain he liked encountering this apparition from a past life – schooldays, days when his family had all lived together here in the old house, before his father had taken them away to Mexico City. He and Arturo had played basketball together after school, in the court on Avenida Tepoztlán, looking out over the valley. Arturo had sisters he had been fond of, quite sentimentally, taking care never to betray those feelings when they were together. They had given him a present when he left, declaring he was sure to forget them otherwise. Actually, he’d lost it even before he got to Texas. He had not forgotten them, however, even if he had not particularly remembered. Now he shaded his eyes from the sun, chatting with Arturo, trying to say as little as possible about the university or Texas: it did not seem right when Arturo had gone nowhere, was probably helping his mama run the little abarrote down the street – what else was a young man with little school learning to do in Tepoztlán? But Arturo seemed not to share his embarrassment at all; standing there on the hillside with his hands on his hips, he called down to Luis, ‘You chose a good day to visit. Come along to the zocalo this afternoon – you’ll see some fun.’
‘What kind of fun?’ Luis asked warily. His family had never approved of the fun boys could be expected to think up in Tepoztlán.
‘Ah, it’s a show we’ve put together, to show those bandits from the city what we think of them and their plan for a golf club—’
‘A golf club?’ It was the last thing Luis expected to hear. ‘A club de golf, here in Tepoztlán?’
‘That’s right. It’s a pretty place, no? Green hills, streams, nature – so why not come and spoil it all, make a playground for the rich so they can come up on weekends to play, and who cares if the green hills and the pure streams all vanish? Plenty of boys doing nothing who could caddy for them, too. But we’re going to teach them a thing or two – we�
�re putting up a real fight. Come along for the show – you’ll meet the old gang.’
Luis wondered who the others were who had stayed back and were now members of this curious group he had never heard of, and even Doña Celia had not mentioned in her zeal to bring him up to date. He raised his hand in a wave, promising to come along ‘after I’ve been to see Don Beto. He still lives up this way, doesn’t he?’
Arturo beamed down at him. ‘Oh yes, where would he go? He’ll die here under Tepozteco – he’s willing to die for the movement, you know. Just ask him about it.’
It was not at all what Luis expected to talk about to the old scholar, but the conversation with Arturo left him uncertain of what he might and might not find. Don Beto’s house was exactly as he remembered it, built into the hillside under the forests and crags on which the small pyramid of the Aztec god Tepoztecatl stood perched, and invisible from the road and the wrought-iron gate. The rusty, cracked bell still hung from the branch of a mango tree, its rope draped casually over the gate for visitors to pull. Beyond, he could see the ruins of the former house, the one Don Beto had grown up in, at the back of the grassed-over cobbles of the courtyard, only one step and a broken arch left standing with a ruined wall for a backdrop. A canvas hung on that wall, incongruously – a painting of underwater blues and greens with piscine shapes faint in its wash. A piece of clay moulded into a curious shell shape lay on the step.
It certainly seemed like a gateway to the past, and Luis gave the rope a tug. Immediately a dog sounded a warning howl but did not make an appearance. Eventually Don Beto’s daughter, Marta, came hurrying down the path between the avocado and citrus trees that grew at the back. She did not recognize Luis at first, and pushed a strand of grey hair out of her eyes to peer at the figure on the other side of the gate, but when he greeted her she opened the gate, shook his hand, remembering, smiling. What did she remember of him, Luis wondered.
‘You didn’t recognize me,’ he complained.
‘Oh, we are growing old, old – our memories are going,’ she laughed, making an excuse.
‘But still painting,’ he said, gesturing towards the canvas on the wall and the shell sculpture on the step as they passed around to the back of the ruin and faced the house that Don Beto had moved into after his wife’s death, nothing more than a small cube of concrete, weathered and mildewed, but a veranda in front where flowers grew in rusty old jalapeño cans.
She preceded him into the house from which she fetched her father out onto the veranda. (Was this town peopled by ageing daughters taking care of their aged parents? Luis wondered.) Don Beto was more bent than before, like a woodland goblin, with a face like a knot in an ancient tree, and he had a stick like a twisted root to help him move. Both his daughter and Luis tried to help him settle into a chair but he waved them away and perched on a bench, insisting that Luis have the chair instead. This produced in Luis a discomfort that lasted throughout his visit. Don Beto, unlike everybody else he had met so far, questioned him closely on his life at the university in Houston, on how work was progressing on his thesis, showing the same intense interest in what Luis was doing as he had always had. Luis had corresponded with him over the years and Don Beto had recommended books and writers to him all along but, to Luis’s disappointment, he appeared not to have any suggestions to make now. For such a young man to be paid such attention by an old scholar had been a heady experience and it had led Luis to believe he could and should go to university and pursue a scholarly life himself, but now he sensed a certain remoteness in Don Beto, as though this pursuit was not a joint one as Luis had fondly imagined. It made him feel the loneliness of academic labour, the hardness of such a pursuit.
Marta brought them té de manzanilla in pretty cups, and a plate of pastries. Then, as they sat crumbling the pastries with their fingers and watching out of the corners of their eyes a minute hummingbird hover over a plate-sized hibiscus in a pot, Don Beto changed the subject abruptly, and made a wholly unexpected suggestion: perhaps Luis should turn his mind, temporarily of course, to another kind of writing. Polemical. Why not use his pen and his gifts to address the matter that concerned all of them so urgently? And what was that matter? Ah, had he not heard of the club de golf that a consortium of wealthy developers wished to create here, having robbed the country of enough and now having to find ways to spend that wealth, here in this unlikely, unsuitable setting of Tepoztlán, drawn as everyone was to its mountains, its sweet water, its flora and fauna, its allure … He gestured passionately; the hummingbird fled.
Stillness
not on the branch in the air
Not in the air
in the moment
hummingbird
‘Is this true?’ asked Luis. ‘I did hear – from Arturo—’
‘You have heard? You have?’ Don Beto questioned, and seemed astonished that Luis had heard and yet not spoken of it, or acted. ‘Of this scandal? Then you must inform the world of it, you must turn your pen into a sword and fight …’ The old man lifted his hand from the knob of his walking stick and held it up in the air, steady with command.
Luis left his crumbled pastry uneaten on his plate. Don Beto was filling his ears with facts and statistics now, his voice rising to a high pencil-squeak of indignation as he detailed the losses such a project would create, the losses to what made Tepoztlán such a treasure – no, not in the eyes of the world that saw it as poor and backward, a place that should think itself lucky to be chosen for ‘development’, with the money such a club would bring in – but to what those who lived here knew to be its wealth … and as he spoke of the environment and its endangered condition, it was as if all the old interests they had shared had been swept aside to make room for what was evidently now the old man’s consuming passion. Once when Don Beto paused, Luis ventured to ask, ‘And are you writing poetry, Don Beto? Have you written any verse recently?’ only to see Don Beto set his mouth firmly and dismiss it with a wave. ‘I write what my young friends need, in language that people can read and understand. Not poetry, no,’ abandoning what he had spent a lifetime on, and towards which he had directed Luis.
Still bemused by Don Beto’s – the unworldly, retiring, scholarly Don Beto – actually having suggested he go in for journalism instead of poetry, and all in the name of opposing a golf club, Luis wandered down to the zocalo in the sun-struck heat of the afternoon, wondering if he would find anyone there at all.
In spite of Doña Celia’s complaints, he found the town exactly as he remembered it. Visitors from Cuernavaca and Mexico City were still pouring in for the Sunday market as they had always done, in their holiday clothes, to fill the restaurants from which music loudly rollicked. In the zocalo, he was sure the old couple selling pottery, their own faces as brown and seamed and cracked as if fashioned from clay, were the same he had always seen seated on a mat under the rubber tree; there were the same elderly people eagerly buying herbs and roots and seeds from the herbalist to cure them of gout, insomnia, obesity and fits, impotence and urinary problems; chillies hung in dark, leathery bunches that still set him sneezing; the florist continued to decorate his potted cacti with tiny paper flowers, and in the food stalls pans sizzled and steamed and large curs prowled around the customers’ feet in the hope of scraps.
Luis remembered all that but somehow, after his visit to Don Beto, he was not content simply to plunge back into it and wallow in nostalgia. Instead, he drifted towards the big marquee of blue plastic that had been set up in between the town hall and the bandstand, the recording and amplifying systems that were being unloaded and attached, and the crowds gathering around it, some chewing on corncobs and others licking helados. On the steps of the post office he could see some of the young men he had known. Arturo was there, in the same striped T-shirt he had worn in the morning but with the addition of a baseball cap. Reluctant to go up to him, Luis lingered to read the legends on the banners flying everywhere – El Pueblo contra el Fascismo! Tierra de la Muerte! – and study the lurid murals
that had been painted on the town hall walls: a rubicund golfer with a tail protruding from his golf pants and hooves in place of shoes, his caddy a grinning imp with pointed ears and a forked tail, together facing a group of peasants huddled in blankets, dark, weary and watchful. In another, over the shoe stall with its rows of huaraches, rufescent golfers sported golf clubs and grinningly molested frightened young women whose blouses had been torn off their breasts. Every one of the rubber and laurel trees in the little park around the bandstand, and every pillar of the post office, had smaller, printed posters pasted on them. Several depicted frogs, squirrels, butterflies and birds, each saying ‘No’ to the golf club in a different language: Niet! Nein! Na! Non!
Now the first strains of an amplified guitar rang out. People dropped the huaraches and sombreros they were examining, got up from around the roasted corncob stalls, came out of the ice-cream parlours and cafés, and began to gather under the marquee. Luis strolled across as casually as he could, but when he saw who was playing the guitar and teaching the audience the lines he had composed ‘for Tepoztlán’, his assumed composure fell apart: it was Alejandro, who had been in school with him and Arturo, and had been known for his passion for fireworks, whose ambition it had been to launch a fire balloon which, once aloft, would release a burst of rockets. Now he was standing in front of a microphone in jeans and a black tank shirt, his head shaved on all sides, leaving one cornrow to grow along the centre where it stood in jagged peaks, dyed a fiery red. When he called out a line:
‘Leave me my streams, leave me my hills,’
the crowd echoed him:
‘Leave me my streams, leave me my hills,’
and then joined him in the refrain:
‘Leave me my paradise, Tepoztlán.’
