The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  The woman at his side spoke to him again, with asperity, and he replied to her out of the corner of his mouth, then took her elbow and turned away from Eric in search of a group with whom conversation might flow more freely.

  Eric helped himself to more hors d’oeuvres. If Em were here, he thought, she would have understood and grasped the whole situation in no time.

  The little hors d’oeuvres were delicious but the thought of Em made him deposit his plate and glass and make his way toward the wrought-iron gate that opened onto the street. As he did so, he passed the bookshop where he had begun the evening and saw the lecturer seated there with a plate on her lap and a cup in her hand. Several people hovered around her, conversing in respectful tones, but she herself was occupied in devouring a large cream cake. A bit of the cream adhered to her upper lip and as Eric slouched past on his way to the gate, he could not help thinking she looked like an aged and very spoiled cat being fed by her devoted keepers, for whom she had the utmost disdain.

  MAKING HIS WAY back to the hotel through the crowds, Eric for once found no distraction in the food stalls where pepper flakes sputtered in hot oil and office workers paused for a snack on their way home, or the sharp young men peddling designer watches, bottled perfumes, and pornographic comic books. Instead, he was trying intently to pursue those words and names heard twenty-odd years ago in a cottage in Cornwall that had now reappeared only to escape and flee from him like so many goldfish darting into the turbid waters of Mexico City’s evening streets.

  He tried to capture the links and present them to Em like the trophies they were to him while she packed in readiness for an early flight next day to Merida but she seemed not to be listening with her usual attentiveness. Barefoot, clad only in a brief petticoat, her hair in wet wisps from a recent shampoo, she went about her packing with a preoccupied air.

  “Well, if it’s true that your grandfather was a miner in Mexico once, you surely couldn’t have forgotten that, could you?” she asked, a little exasperated because he was in her way as she went back and forth between the suitcase open on her bed and the brushes, combs, bottles, jars, and still-damp pieces of clothing that were scattered about the room. What with packing, an ending and a beginning, she was distracted.

  “Well, I had,” Eric insisted. “I had because I saw him on just that one visit. People didn’t fly back and forth across the pond the way they do now, and that’s the only time my dad took me to England. He left me in Cornwall and took my mother off on a motor trip through the old country, or something of the sort, I don’t know, I was five, maybe four years old. I must have been too young to take along, I suppose. I really don’t have any other memories of the visit—just that one.”

  “But surely you’d have heard your dad speaking of his father? Didn’t he say anything the time he told you he was born in Mexico?”

  “Not really,” Eric said. He was lying now against the pillow and absently running his fingers through the vines and tendrils carved into the mahogany forest of the bedstead, moodily giving thought to things he had not previously given any. “He did tell me there were some letters I could look at when I wanted, letters his mother wrote home to Cornwall.”

  Em stopped her constant movement between bags and boxes, bed and armoire, and stood with a pile of fresh laundry in her arms. “Couldn’t you ask him for them?”

  “I could,” Eric agreed, “I will. I think his mother died here because he told me another thing I hadn’t known: the woman I met in Cornwall when I was a child, she was not his mother, she was his stepmother.”

  “Well, you English—” Em said, going back to her packing. “No one ever knows what goes on in your families.”

  He was angered suddenly and sat up. “You know I’ve never even lived there, and he left the country himself. But now that I’m here, perhaps I can find out more.”

  “That’ll be interesting,” she said as if she were encouraging a child to run out and play.

  He kicked aside her shoe bag and marched across to the window to open the shutters. “This could be just what I need—for my book,” he announced, letting in the view of the plaza and the evening sky above it. He expected this reference to his “book” to make an impression on her if nothing else did. “I’d never thought my family could ever be of help—but they might have something to give. I’ll have to find out.”

  This led to what was an evening of almost total silence and disappointment. They canceled their reservation at the Café Tacubaya and instead ate in the sepulchral hotel dining room, watched over by waiters in funereal uniform, talking, if at all, of travel agencies and banks and postal services; then they retired to lie at opposite sides of the so-called matrimonial bed, pretending to sleep till Em rose quietly at dawn to leave, and Eric, wide-awake, watched her in the semidark.

  He found he could not let her slip away without a word. Sitting up in a swaddle of bedclothes, he put out his arms and embraced her. “Oh Em,” he said, “dear Em. Don’t go.”

  She leaned into him, stroking his hair, trying to calm the anguish she sensed in him and to some extent felt herself. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered.

  “How? How?” he asked, pressing his face into her.

  “You’ll see,” she said, more firmly, putting her hands on his shoulders and pressing him away. “When you’re with me, you’re—we are—too close. When you’re by yourself, you’ll find so much more than you would with me—”

  “That’s not so, Em,” he argued, trying to make out her expression in the pallid light of daybreak.

  “You’ll see, you’ll see, it’ll happen,” she said, trying to reassure him, and twisted gently out of his grasp, lifted her case, and turned toward the door.

  3

  When at the beginning of the sixteenth century the Spaniards landed in Mexico, they first met with the natives of Sempollan, not far from the sea . . . the chiefs wore silver and gold ornaments that attracted the rapacious glances of the white adventurers. Their first question was “Whence comes this?” The natives pointed to the west. When, soon after, the ambassadors of Montezuma brought rich presents of the precious metals, adorned with emeralds, in order to induce the unbidden guests to turn back, they were confirmed in their opinion that there were literally golden mountains in the interior, and the cry was “Forward!”

  —CARL SARTORIUS, Mexico and the Mexicans, 1859

  PAINFULLY, CREAKILY DISMOUNTING FROM THE train at Matehuala, as mottled as a moth with the grime and soot of the journey, Eric inquired about transport to take him into the Sierra Madre Oriental, which he had been making his way toward with decreasing hope and ambition. The driver of a truck heard him forlornly voice his destination and unexpectedly offered a ride. He had only to pick up a sick dog at a veterinarian’s, he said, and then he would be on his way. Barely refreshed by a warm and rather flat soda bought at a booth, Eric climbed into the seat next to the driver. He had a moment of terror when the truck veered off the paved road and bumped its way over the desert to what looked like an abandoned shack, certain he was being kidnapped and would be robbed. But instead a young woman in a white lab coat came out with a limp and dispirited animal in her arms and helped the driver lift it into the truck, then smiled and waved goodbye. Now they set off on a highway that was drawn with the precision of a geometric diagram over the rubble of worn and ground-down hills, rattling over cobbles the shape and size of human skulls. The only other sight along the journey was an occasional giant maguey reaching its thorn-tipped leaves into the evenly metallic sky above. There was no sign of their destination; in every direction the dark stony land stretched out, the stands of maguey rising as stiff and gray as the stones themselves, and over it the sky and the light, both so immense that it did not seem there would ever be an end to them.

  This was no longer the Mexico of color and romance, Eric noted, and yet its emptiness and petrifaction were undeniably Mexican too.

  Hearing Eric sigh in spite of himself with weariness and hopelessness, the truc
k driver glanced sympathetically and pointed his finger through the smeared and dusty windshield. “Allá arriba,” he said, “la Hacienda de la Soledad.”

  Eric straightened up to peer where he pointed. He could neither see roof or homestead nor believe that anyone could, or would, live on this desolate altiplano. But as they drew close enough to make out the first range of bullet-colored mountains, a crater suddenly opened up in the earth as if a meteor had fallen and formed it; a wide, basinlike depression appeared that had not been visible from a distance. Around a still sheet of apparently shallow water, dry yacaté grass waved and susurrated, responding to a breeze so imperceptible that nothing less delicate or sensitive could have detected it. There were a few desiccated mesquite trees on its bank and the more graceful, drooping pirul. Egrets and herons stood stock-still in the shallows as if they were roots or branches anchored to the clay below. Everything seemed fossilized except for the ripple of light that ran through the scene as it might in a mirage.

  On the other side of the lake, against the flank of the mountain, there was a long, low building of stone, on three sides surrounded by an adobe wall that blended in so perfectly with the land that it could easily have been overlooked.

  As they rounded the lake and drew closer, Eric made out horses in a corral below the hacienda, unexpectedly alive and mobile.

  “That is where Doña Vera lives?” he murmured, more to himself than to his companion. “It is—incredible.” Of course: just as Doña Vera herself had been incredible.

  The driver laughed, pleased with the effect it had on his passenger, and changed gears with a triumphant shriek as he turned onto a dusty track that ascended the mountainside at an angle from the highway. It brought them around to the entrance to the hacienda set in the adobe wall. He looked both amused and sympathetic as he handed Eric’s bag to him and let him off. “Hasta luego,” he called, and the bandaged dog, suddenly revived, sat up and echoed him with two short barks. Then they turned back to the highway, the truck taking to the silence as a jackhammer to stone.

  Eric used a knocker shaped like a woman’s hand, its tapering fingers holding a brass ball that beat upon the worn wooden panel. When a maid limped up to let him in, he felt duly apologetic, saying, “I had booked a room here, were you expecting me?” At her uncomprehending look, he decided to try another tack and simply ask “Is Doña Vera in?”

  No, he was told by a shake of the head, and after he had taken in his bag and deposited it on the tile floor of the entrance hall, he wandered out to wait for her in the great courtyard formed by the three wings of the house. In its center was a fountain with a twinned pair of stone dolphins spouting into mossy jars. Beyond it, the land sloped down toward the corral. Chairs were set out under a feathery-leafed tree on that slope. He strolled down to it and stood looking, from a new angle, at the depression below filled with bleached grasses and still water. The sun was going down behind the mountain at his back and its shadow was slanting across the valley he had driven over to arrive here.

  He stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at the horses in the corral that were pawing the earth and rubbing their flanks against the wooden fence in a blur of dust and chaff. Then, breasting the tall grasses like a swimmer emerging from a lake, another horse appeared; mounted on it was a slight, shrunken figure he scarcely recognized from the salon in Mexico City. No longer the fantastically attired and theatrical creature she had appeared there, she was merely a small wiry figure in nondescript khaki who barely stood out in that overwhelming landscape. Yet there was no denying that in the way in which she appeared a natural part of the scene, she had made it her own, and Eric found himself helplessly submitting to the notion of her as the mythical figure she was made out to be by those who knew her reputation.

  A young boy came out of one of the tile-roofed stables by the corral and helped her dismount. They talked, patting the horse’s neck and flanks and steadying the animal on its impossibly long legs and delicate hoofs before it was led away. Now that Doña Vera was standing on solid ground, dressed in jodhpurs and boots, her white hair tucked under a hat, she seemed so much less formidable a being that Eric dared to step out from the shadow of the tree so she could see him.

  Coming up the path between the crackling grasses, holding them aside with her whip, she called, “Have you brought pastries?”

  Eric, taken aback, not aware that he was supposed to have brought pastries, raised his hand to smooth down his hair as he always did when embarrassed, and mumbled, “Umm, no—I’m sorry—”

  She shot him an irritated look as she walked past, switching her whip. Eric reminded her that he had telephoned to request accommodation, which he had been told was available at her hacienda.

  “Why?” she asked, sharp as a crack of the whip in her hand.

  He struggled to form an answer. Clearly, she was demanding one that lived up to her standards and expectations. And they were so high, she seemed to say by lifting her nose into the air and looking down it at him. Just then a maid came out of the house toward the tree and the garden chairs with a glass of lemonade on a tray; she was followed by a flock of small pug dogs, tripping along hurriedly on their toes and yipping with excitement at seeing their mistress.

  Doña Vera scooped up one in her arms and seated herself. Accepting the glass of lemonade, she drank thirstily, keeping the glass away from the eager, wanting pug, and did not seem to think it at all necessary to ask Eric either to sit or to drink too. The little dog leaping about her face, tickling her chin with its velvet folds, made her laugh delightedly and spill some of the lemonade down her front.

  Knowing himself entirely irrelevant to the scene, Eric tried to explain. “I heard your lecture in Mexico City last week, you see—”

  She allowed herself to be distracted from her pleasures, although with irritation. “You have an interest in an-thro-pol-ogy? In the Huichol Indian?”

  Eric could only lie to be polite and avoid inflicting pain, not for any boastful reason. “Not really,” he muttered, hoping the yipping of the pugs would drown out his craven response. He found himself actually shuffling his shoes. Now, if he had been the delivery man of a patisserie, he thought ruefully. Instead, he had to admit, “It’s for a personal reason . . .”

  But she had already decided he was of no interest and no importance. Rising from her chair with one pug in her arms, the others milling at her feet, she started toward the house, calling over her shoulder, “Here, we conduct se-rious studies, señor.”

  He watched the entourage as it turned its back on him and made its way to the house. Above, the pale disk of the sun had slid over the ridge of the mountain and below, the grassy basin had filled up with darkness. Only the lake, a tarnished mirror, refleeted whatever light remained in the sky, dully.

  Unenthusiastically, he followed the grande dame and her retinue of masked miniatures at a safe distance, and saw that up and down the length of the corridors, lanterns of perforated tin had been lit, casting more shadow than light. Doña Vera must have given some instruction because the limping maid came out and picked up his bag and conducted him to a room at the end of a long corridor. From the sounds that reached him, it appeared that preparations were being made for dinner. Perhaps he could have a bath beforehand. Turning on the tap to fill the rusty tub in the tiled bathroom, he asked himself dejectedly why he had made the error of stopping at her malevolent establishment and not gone straight up the mountain to the mines. He lay back in the tepid water, floating in doubt, till the dinner gong boomed.

  GOING THROUGH the crepuscular entrance hall to the dining room with its single refectory table under a chandelier made of stags’ antlers—many stags’ antlers—he found most of the seats already taken, so he had to sit at a long distance from the head, where Doña Vera presided. He was irked and relieved at the same time: sitting closer to her might have been rather like being close to a coiled serpent, but after all, he had come this long way to have a conversation with her and could not afford to be the timi
d mouse now.

  Glancing up and down the length of the table, he saw that most of the guests were very young, practically children, and from the talk that was flying around in a carefree, even oblivious fashion, they appeared to be students from American universities, universities in the western states, he guessed. This was surely not the company Doña Vera had chosen for herself. It must have to do with her turning the hacienda into a center for “serious” studies, and she must surely have her doubts, at such times, regarding her generosity. His ears ached already. It had been some years since he was an eager undergraduate. He hoped Doña Vera would appreciate that. He began to spoon up his soup from the bowl placed before him and felt it beneath him to join the chatter.

  As he ate his soup, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the diners in front and to either side of him, he became aware that there were other totally silent guests present at the table. At the very foot of it, leaving a few seats vacant between him and the rest of the company, sat an Indian who was, in every way, not only physically and in dress, different from anyone else at the table, awkward with his hands and expression. After a while, another man, younger but dressed in the same fanciful costume as he—embroidered, beaded, and beribboned—came and slipped quietly into a chair beside him; so did a woman with long braids and a colorfully embroidered blouse. They occupied the three seats at the foot of the table, murmuring quietly to each other as they ate, resolutely avoiding looking at anyone else.

  Eric tried not to be impolite but found himself glancing again and again at their costumes, which seemed so at odds with the gravity of their manner, decorated as they were with the most vivid colors and a variety of motifs—butterflies, deer, snakes, flowers, peyote, and maize. Each time he looked quickly away, equally embarrassed at not being able to speak to them and by the way no one else did either.