The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  “Em, you never told me it would be like this,” Eric said, tearing his eyes away from the scene to her at last. She had never seemed so pale, so Nordic as here with her gray eyes, her fair hair, and her white dress.

  Instead of seeming pleased with his response to the scene to which she had brought him, Em appeared to grow more apprehensive. She frowned slightly and said, “But what will you do here, Eric?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, while I am away.”

  Eric had been picking up grains of salt from the rim of his margarita glass; now he licked them and looked at the oversized goblet with its blue rim and its wedge of lime and crust of salt as if it were an object in a museum, requiring his serious attention and measured opinion. He was considering, too, the fact already known to him, of course, that Em would be going away with her colleagues to carry on their research “in the field.” He knew it would be foolish to tag along, that it was not for him, he would be in the way, but somehow he had neglected to give this fact sufficient thought. Of course in Boston they worked separately too, coming together in the evenings to cook their pasta and listen to Mozart or to Schumann. He was quite capable of spending the day alone even if Em seemed to need reassurance on this point and would anxiously ask, “Did you get any work done today? Did you start with the book?” He would protest, “But, Em, writing is not a nine-to-five job in the city. One doesn’t just sit at a desk and type ten pages a day, you know.” Now he began to doubt his ability to sit at a desk and write two pages, or one, while in this giddy state with so much around to be experienced and regarded. Nor had he thought about where he would go or where he would stay in her absence. He said the only thing that occurred to him at this moment of pressure: “D’you think I could come with you to Yucatán?”

  “Of course not,” she said immediately, and he looked at her and smiled: it was what she would say and she was quite right to do so, of course. How foolish to think he could join the company of the sure and the certain, those who knew what to do with themselves from morning to night every day of the year and everywhere. Just when he himself had lost his way and was in search of one. Had he not always been the misfit? It was his role; she knew it.

  “But don’t you have any plans at all?” she asked, sounding worried and making the straw in her margarita glass bob up and down to show it.

  “Only the vaguest one, Em. I’m hoping it will become clear. I have to wait for the ‘Eureka’ moment.”

  “Oh, Eric. I know what you’ll do with yourself—stroll and chat.”

  “That’s what a writer does.” He smiled at her, he thought winningly.

  THIS EXCHANGE, not at all atypical of their relationship, did not quite cast down Eric’s spirits. Rabbitlike, these wriggled free from under it and went out to meet the city, a city that strewed its sights before him as a carpet seller might his carpets, a jeweler his gems—the immense plaza where bird-shaped kites rose into the sky to meet the eagles circling there, the arcades alongside with their jewelry stores filled with gold ornaments of Mayan or Aztec design and guarded by armed police and police dogs in chains, the sweetmeat shops where the sweets resembled gems, the restaurants where waitresses floated in balloonlike skirts and winglike caps, the pavement vendors outside proffering lottery tickets, safety pins, or songbirds in stacked cages, the Zapotec women from the country who spread out their bunches of dried herbs, their shriveled scorpions and fried grasshoppers on little mats they rolled up and made disappear as soon as the city police roared up in white jeeps, the stalls where creams and lotions were sold in seashells and jumping beans jumped on trays; and leading off from the plaza, streets of the old quarter, where there were stately mansions with blackened façades, drooping wrought-iron balconies, strings of laundry and leftover Christmas tinsel, and the dark rooms beyond from which television sets flickered with blue and violet images, intermittently lighting up the family groups gathered to watch the telenovelas; and the shops below, which displayed white satin wedding gowns and wax orange-blossom tiaras for brides and little girls at their first Communion, ecclesiastical artifacts of purple and plum-colored satin, velvet skirts fringed with tinsel to drape around the heads of Madonnas or around the lower regions of saints whose exposed hearts and wounds oozed crimson paint, or party gifts, masks, and costumes from which you could choose to dress up as a Zapatista or a witch, underwear shops with naughty panties and lace socks, stalls selling household goods like tin and plastic buckets and pans and bowls . . . and down the street an old man would come, banging a great drum with one hand and blowing a brass trumpet held in the other while at the corner outside the cathedral fleshy dancers in costumes of brilliant feathers and anklets of jangling bells danced and whirled the Aztec dances for tourists with cameras, purses, and pesos.

  Eric could not have enough of it. It was as though he had been starving throughout his northern existence and now, reborn a traveler, could feast and gourmandize without restraint till he was so replete that he had to sink down onto a bench in an allée of low and shady trees that undulated with flocks of glossy and loudly shrieking starlings, and ask himself if he should not be putting all this down on paper in a handy notebook that would swell with his insights and impressions and bring to Em’s sober gray eyes a flicker of admiration or, at least, approval.

  Then some wonderfully dark-eyed urchin would wander up with a shoe box strung over his shoulder and offer to give him a spectacular display of shoe-polishing skill, and how could he deny he was in need of that? So he would stretch out his legs and submit and find the exercise as blissfully soothing as a massage, so tilt his head back and fall into a reverie, seeing the white icing-coated dome of the Palacio de Bellas Artes upside down and the fountains spouting downward into beds of scarlet flowers, and think the scene, the setting, sufficient in itself: why would anyone ask for more than simply to observe, imbibe?

  Of course that very question would summon up the dark frown on Em’s clear brow like the brown haze issuing from the lanes of crawling traffic on either side of the Parque Alameda. He would empty all his change into the shoeshine boy’s palm, rise from the bench, turn his back on the city’s architectural and occupational excesses, and walk off, chewing his underlip and wondering how to assuage and erase that frown so that the city could once again become the Ali Baba’s cave of curiosities it had been.

  SO IT HAD BEEN serendipitous that, while browsing through the bookshop of a cultural center in the Colonia Roma on a somnolent afternoon, he had seen a notice pinned up announcing a lecture to be given by a woman with a Teutonic name, on the Huichol Indians and their belief in the powers of the peyote cactus, to be followed by cocktails in the garden conveniently laid outside the bookshop. Of course he lingered on for the event, preferring that to returning to the empty hotel room and waiting for Em while hanging over the balcony rail and displaying the capacity for enjoying idleness that she so deplored.

  The small circular auditorium under a gilded and painted ceiling that might have done credit to a baroque chapel was full, and Eric, at the door, stood looking at the way the afternoon light streamed from the skylights onto all the expectant faces. Many of them were obviously American or European, and many he could not identify as one or the other. He knew by now that in Mexico all foreigners took to dressing flamboyantly, in vivid blues and scarlets, with heavy embroidery and broad belts, and to wearing a great deal of elaborate jewelry. He became aware that the audience was made up almost entirely of women. Was it because the lecturer was a woman, he wondered, or that men were at work at this time of day? The few who were present did not look as if they ever worked; their assurance and elegance were impeccable. Eric slid onto a vacant chair next to one, he hoped unobtrusively.

  When the lecturer appeared on the stage, held up at the elbow by a younger woman whose task it was to introduce her, what was immediately noticeable was her air of authority as well as, even for this gathering, an extraordinarily extravagant costume. She was draped in Indian garments, striped
and flowered, trimmed and embroidered, red and green and blue and yellow like the feathers of a macaw, and silver jewelry from her neck to her knees. Her head was long, elongated like the skulls one saw in museums depicting various forms of torture undertaken for the sake of achieving a particular ideal of beauty, now more likely to be considered grotesque. Its upper portion was swathed in a silk turban fastened with a great brooch of Mayan, or Aztec, design. Under it, the eyelids drooped like a weary hound’s and were painted a deep purple.

  The younger woman assisted her to a seat as if she were an object of great price and fragility, then turned to give a dazzling smile followed by a sparkling talk in what was, unfortunately for Eric, Spanish. He could only sit back with folded arms and admire her—a type of Mexican woman who seemed to him the epitome of elegance and beauty with a vivacious manner to match. Eric studied her from the top of her glossy head to the tips of her very high heels and could not help a smile at the thought of this paragon of femininity beside his sober Em: what would they have made of each other?

  By the time she concluded her introduction with a flutter of her manicured hands and a flash of their silver tips, Eric had come to no convincing answer to that question. But now the old crone on her carved throne began to speak, and although it was a shocking transition from the grace and attractiveness of the one woman to the deliberate eccentricity of the other, the latter commanded no less attention. If anything, she commanded rather more because in addition to her bizarre appearance, she had a voice so low and deep that it forced one to lean forward and strain to catch her every word till one grew accustomed to its peculiar register, slightly hoarse and rasping.

  This took Eric several minutes and then the mixture of several languages and vocabularies that she employed caused an even further delay before he could conclude that her lecture was, in the main, in Spanish too. He now regretted his minimal acquaintance with the language. The pronounced accent she brought to it caused further confusion. Eric gave himself up to riding its waves or, rather, floundering in them.

  AND THEN SOMETHING unexpected happened. Eric was later to describe the experience, to Em, as like stumbling into a rabbit hole—falling, falling, he said, till all was a welter of strange words, strange names churning around him. Then, with a bump, landing upon the startling awareness that many of them were actually familiar to him. It was like being in a crowd of swiftly moving strangers and finding that there were faces among them that you recognized. Or like walking, with difficulty, through a bed of gravel and coming across veins of liquid brightness running through it. Golden, dramatic words unfurling through the rubble, words like Sierra Madre Oriental, Sierra de los Catorce, Real del Monte, La Purísima, La Asunción, Los Lorenzos, La Luz, Valenciana . . . and he had heard them before; each had an image, a memory linked to it that he struggled to resurrect. It was as if they were the words of a song he used to know, or had heard sung. His mind scrambled, as if on its knees, to recover the images they had once conjured.

  Strangely, the images were not of gold or silver, rocks, canyons, or mountains—but of the tiled hearth of a fireplace in an English cottage, and brasses and chintzes, china and tapestry. The colors were dull; brown dominated, orange intruded. At the window great clouds of moisture were being flung with the sound of pebbles, or gravel—rain, together with the waves of the sea.

  But indoors a fire was lit, and it shone on the bald pate of a small, neat man in a brown wool cardigan with brown leather patches at the elbows. He was waving about the pipe he had been smoking as he talked to Eric about places with the same mellifluous names, about mines where he had supervised the bringing up of ore to the surface through shafts sunk into the mountain, and how it was treated till the precious stuff was separated from the dirt. He took down from the mantelpiece, from behind the silver-framed photographs of family weddings and christenings, a little replica of a string of railroad cars filled with tiny pieces of glittering metal. “Is that gold?” the child Eric asked, in awe, “is that gold, Granddad?” with his knees digging into the nubbly wool of the rug by the fire. The old man rubbed the glinting fragments and chuckled, “’Course it is, boy, course it is.” Just then a tall and gray-haired woman in a pink cardigan came out of the kitchen holding a teapot that wore a knitted skirt and a flowered bonnet on its knob, and said, “Don’t fill his head with that nonsense, Davey. We don’t want him running off to the back of beyond to look for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow like you did.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t do that, Madge, and I didn’t either. I found it at the end of a mineshaft, in the ground,” Granddad said, and began to recite the names of the mines from where the fabulous stuff had come—La Luz, Valenciana, Los Lorenzos, Real del Monte, Real de Catorce, Sierra Madre Oriental—words that made the boy tingle as if the pins and needles in his knees had spread all through him while he knelt there, listening. “Again, Granddad, tell me again!” he cried, but the woman was cross, saying, “Now, see, you’ve got him all wound up and he won’t go to bed.” She made him put away the little toy train—it vanished behind the framed photographs, the brides and the babies drew their wedding and christening gowns over it—and Eric never saw it again. Teacups were filled—with milk for Eric—and at the window the clouds and the waves hurled themselves, beating and drowning out the golden names and images.

  But now, this evening, they were resurrected by the improbable creature on the podium in front of a gathering of the Center for Anthropological and Ethnographic Studies. Eric had not thought about them in years, never having gone back to his father’s English home or seen his grandparents since that one, early visit. When they died, his father had gone alone to their funerals in a churchyard in the deep, narrow valley in Cornwall where he had grown up. He had spoken of it rarely, whether because he had memories that pained him or because of his natural reticence, Eric could not tell. He had brought back a few objects in a small box but had immediately put it away in the attic and not reopened it. Perhaps memories and nostalgia had to be abandoned, like excess baggage, if one was to complete the experience his father had had of emigration and a new beginning in a New World.

  IT OCCURRED TO HIM that he should take down some of the names so that he could—now grown, literate—look them up on a map and try to unearth the connections, burrow through a tunnel back into the old country to the old man and his toys in the seaside cottage with the rug on which he’d knelt by the fire, tingling. He began to pat down his pockets in search of paper and pencil. As he did so, he became distracted by a murmur that was rippling through the audience. Curious, he started to cast glances around and found a subdued but unmistakable air of consternation. Instead of listening to the grande dame, people were turning to each other with raised eyebrows, and whispering. She herself seemed not to notice this change in the atmosphere of the room, or if she did she ignored it; in fact, she raised her voice slightly as she went on to the end of her talk, then indicated that she wanted to rise from her seat and leave without inviting questions.

  Released, the audience streamed out onto a terrace lined with immense terra cotta urns in which orange trees displayed, in the Mexican way, both flowers and fruit together. At one end a table was laid with white linen and set with platters and pitchers and glasses of food and wine. Helping himself to both, Eric looked around, smiling, in the hope of finding someone who looked willing to answer his questions. The gorgeous young woman who had introduced the speaker was already surrounded by people and was talking to them with great rapidity, gesturing with her long hands and fine fingers; it was clear he was not the only one with questions. He did not feel he could approach her at this fraught moment and turned away, a glass of wine in one hand and a plate in the other, to survey the scene now cast into shadow by the ornately molded stucco of the cultural center and its exquisite dome.

  Catching the eye of the white-haired gentleman who had been his neighbor in the auditorium, and who was standing beside a woman with fine-spun gray hair and jewels so massive as to make her look fr
agile by comparison, he strolled over to them to see if they could enlighten him. “Well, that was quite an exciting talk, wasn’t it?” he asked, hoping he did not seem too intrusive.

  But he had made the right conjecture because the gentleman replied readily, in English. “About its exciting quality, I cannot say, but it certainly contained an element of surprise.”

  Eric, still curious, waited for an explanation.

  “To come to hear a talk on the Huichol and the significance of the peyote cactus in their rituals, then hear instead an attack on the mining industry was definitely a surprise.”

  His companion said something now so sharply that it too caused consternation, and Eric had no alternative but to confess his ignorance of Spanish. Translating this for the lady, who nodded the towering arrangement of spidery gray hair on her head and gave a pinched smile as if her worst suspicions had been confirmed, the elderly gentleman explained to Eric, “Doña Vera is connected—through marriage—to a prominent family whose share in the mining industry is well-known but it is the first time, as far as we know, that she has spoken of it in public.”

  “Ha!” Eric exclaimed, beginning to see. “Did she speak specifically of this family and the mines they own?”

  “No, no, no, not at all. She explained why she chose today not to speak of the Huichol beliefs and customs but instead of the industry that destroyed their habitat and made it difficult to continue their traditions such as the pilgrimage and the hunt for peyote. But she was speaking to an audience that is informed, academic, specialist”—he licked the words as if they were tiny crystals on his lips—“certainly not industrialists or businessmen, so we are all surprised, you might say.”