by Anita Desai
Yet up and down the table the talk appeared to be about “the Huichol—peyote—Wirikúta—Hikuri—” words he had come to associate with just these people and for the study of whom Doña Vera had become renowned. Yet the three people about whom the talk revolved appeared not to be involved themselves, perhaps preferring to keep out of it. They talked only among themselves, in low voices, while they ate shyly, tentatively.
The one other person at the table who ate in absolute silence, and with a kind of disdain for the company at the table, was Doña Vera herself, majestically seated on what was surely a raised chair at the head. The persona of the grande dame clearly required some contrivance.
Eric was now able to observe her at closer quarters than he had at the lecture in Mexico City: the chandelier was so positioned as to cast a particularly bright light on her while others were in shadow. She was no longer the theatrically attired diva she had chosen to be in the city, nor quite the woman who had ridden alone, calmly at ease in the light and air and space she owned. Now she was somewhere between the two extremes: dressed in a kimono in the colors of that fabulous bird, the quetzal, over layers of worn and lumpish gray flannel underneath. She might have been a carved idol placed upon her seat of power, but like an idol, she displayed the human attributes that could undercut her power: which to believe, to trust? Her nose certainly remained that of a bird of prey, an imperial beak that protruded from her sunken cheeks, but her mouth worked weakly at food that was clearly difficult for her to masticate.
She was concentrating upon that with a kind of withdrawn, inward preoccupation when, out of the general chatter—still of Huichol, peyote, and Wirikúta—a question arose, addressed to her by an older member of the gathering, a small-boned, hunchshouldered man in glasses and a bow tie knotted over his Adam’s apple, someone who could not be dismissed as easily as the youngsters. Eric had not heard the question, but he had picked out a word or two: shaman—vision—dream—trance—ecstasy . . .
The active exercise of forks and knives gradually lessened and came to a halt. In the silence, the intruding voice pursued: “Doña Vera, can any one of us share that experience with them, do you think?”
Everyone waited, holding their implements above their plates, while Doña Vera crumbled a roll of bread and considered her reply. Then it came, as ominous as a rumble of pebbles in a dry arroyo, heard at first from a distance, then gathering strength as it approached, finally crashing upon them.
“No one,” she pronounced, “no one who sleeps under a roof, in a bed, and eats three meals a day at a table, can understand the Huichol experience. Is that not so, maestro?” and she smiled her rare smile at the quiet man at the foot of the table. He became aware he was being addressed, fell silent, and looked at her inquiringly. It was not clear if he understood her question but then he too smiled, and nodded.
Everyone else at the table was excluded from their exchange, their communication.
Fortunately the maids came out of the kitchen just then and interrupted it by serving everyone from the trays full of hot food they had brought. The sound of knives and forks began again, filling everyone with relief.
Doña Vera herself, however, rose from the table, pushing back her chair, and called to the maids to bring her coffee. Everyone paused, forks lifted in the air, waiting for the royal departure. She had taken her favorite pug with her; now the others became aware of her absence, stirred underneath the table as if they were a heap of suede gloves and velvet scarves being collected, scrambled to their feet, and followed with a hasty clicking of claws on stone tiles.
Watching her leave, Eric was struck by how small she was, shriveled and slight, for all the height she accorded herself. Also, he noticed, she had felt slippers on and those were flannel pajamas she was wearing under her splendid kimono. How much of it all was a costume drama, he thought, dependent on style and setting. For all that, it was still her home.
“She always takes coffee in the library,” the man with the bow tie and the rimless glasses said to Eric, acknowledging the newcomer at last.
“The library? There is one?”
“It is my—it is where I work.” A small wisp of a woman with glasses and close-cropped hair smiled, also daring to be friendly now.
“Ah, may I come and look at your books tomorrow?” Eric asked eagerly, scarcely able to believe his luck. “And if you have maps, documents too, perhaps?”
“It is a great resource, a great resource,” the bow-tied man assured him, patting his lips with a napkin and making the small, short-haired woman flush with pride. “We are just about to show a film about Doña Vera’s life, in the museum. Would you care to see it? I’ve asked my students to attend.”
Eric wanted to point out that he was not one of them but was too polite to do so. He found himself going along with the pedagogical group, shuffling across the courtyard once more, past the fountain spouting in the dark, to the hall known as “the museum.”
SITTING THERE, on an uncomfortably upright chair in a draft from the door, and waiting for the students to set up a screen and a projector, Eric castigated himself for the way he always let himself be led by autocratic people with strong opinions. Em might so far have been the strongest of them, even if the least ostensibly so, but before her there had been Rosa. The situation he was in now inevitably caused him to remember how he had been led to take courses he never would have, if it had not been for the pleasure of gazing on Rosa’s head of long, glossy black hair or brushing his fingers, as if accidentally, against it. Poetry, to begin with: she wrote it, and insisted he take the course with her and experience the thrill she felt from being in the presence of her teacher, a “real poet”—an old man whose white hair had fallen out in patches, leaving only tufts, and whose lean, bony face twitched as if in pain when he listened to her read, which she thought quite appropriate since she wrote about bombings, nuclear holocausts, death by fire, and the grieving of survivors. Eric attempted a few verses at her urging, but the “real poet” himself provided none; his face twitched, his lips parted as if for air, then shut, and he kept his eyes averted as Eric did from him, out of embarrassment and apology.
Next Rosa lured him into an even more difficult course, of feminist studies. There he found himself the sole male student. He held on through the semester even though Rosa would grill him after every class, seize his notebook to see what he had thought worth putting down on its mostly pristine pages, then throw it at him if she found no more than the occasional doodle, and challenge him to match her own fervor. Eric thought she went too far; he could not possibly follow where she wished to go but was flattered that she should want his company.
During a film they were shown in class, he finally gave up, detaching his fingers from hers. She held on as tightly as she could but it was a hot afternoon and the blinds were drawn, making the room oppressively still and stuffy—actually even smelly—and he slipped away with an apologetic murmur. When she demanded angrily later to know why he had left, he finally told her the truth: “I couldn’t stand it,” he said simply. She was furious; if it was a film by Margarethe von Trotta, she expected him to stand it. But Eric grew stubborn. He stopped taking the classes she wanted him to take or where he was likely to run into her. Eventually they met only in the cafeteria, if their schedules permitted it, and now that they had less to discuss, they made fewer appointments to meet and so became figures in the distance, crossing the campus from sunlight into the oak trees’ shade, waving minimally till winter drew a curtain of snow between them.
Then, in graduate school, he met Em and once again submitted to the spell of a woman who received such certainty and confidence from her work. It perplexed him that he should be drawn to this “type” but he was, so there had to be a serious side to him in spite of their accusations of frivolity and shallowness: he hoped so. Or was it because he saw how happily, gratefully, his father submitted to work in the business his mother’s family owned as if he had not really known, in the new country to which he ha
d come, what to do with himself till she showed him? And because Eric too was used to letting his mother make up his mind for him, ordering his life, telling him what to do with it? Only, while his father appeared to be the most contented of men in his little cubbyhole of an office, keeping the accounts for O’Brien’s, Eric did not feel he had found an equivalent niche yet. He wondered if this was what Em wanted him to find, by himself. Then, if he would find it in actually unraveling the intricate cat’s cradle of the voyages of his own family. Were they actually relevant? Did he even believe in the pursuit? Was this what Em had urged him to do?
As he sat in the dark, once more submitting to a film he did not wish to see, he felt a headache starting to clamp itself to his temples as it often did at moments of anxiety and unease.
The film was even worse than he expected. Perhaps the low voltage that was the rule in that area gave it its agonizingly slow momentum and dismal shortage of lighting. There, on the screen spotted with night insects, was the young Doña Vera riding a horse through a sepia landscape of stone and thorn while the background music ground ever downward. Then Doña Vera posing with a group of Indians in ceremonial dress of which the colors were naturally not visible in a black-and-white film. Doña Vera interviewing a man whose face remained shaded by a conical hat and who seemed to answer her animated and long-winded questions with the merest monosyllables. Doña Vera walking across the desert in long strides, the sequence interspersed with stills of tarantulas, serpents, scorpions, and other such creatures she might—or might not—have encountered there. Doña Vera seated at a heavy, carved table, lifting up the objects on it one at a time, describing their symbolic significance.
During this sequence, the younger members of the audience began to lose patience; they started to talk to each other, quite loudly, and even laugh. The older ones in the audience concentrated with fierce attention meant to be admonitory. The music swelled to a climax, which collapsed in a way that instigated involuntary laughter, and then the title unfurled across the screen in cursive script: Queen of the Sierra, it read, with a flourish of trumpets.
One trick such experiences had taught Eric was to get to his feet quickly and make his escape before the lights came on and someone in the front row—or the last—rose to “initiate a discussion.” That he would not have. He let himself out through the open door before he could be seen to flee.
THE LIGHTS in the dining room had been turned off but there was still one on in the room to which Doña Vera had retired for coffee. In addition, there was the sound of the piano being played—very delicately, very tenderly, Eric thought. He stopped outside the window to listen and light a cigarette and found, twirling up to him along with the smoke, fragrance from the white flowers of a bush of night-flowering tobacco. The music—was it a Chopin nocturne?—twirled just as delicately, seeming to accentuate the silence of the night at the foot of the mountain that loomed over the hacienda, and made it poignant and profound, even if the piano was badly out of tune so that some of the notes jarred and made the pianist falter.
Putting out his cigarette on a stone, he decided to look in on the lighted room; he could not restrain his curiosity about the piano, how it could have been brought here to this remote altipiano, or who might be playing it—Doña Vera, perhaps?
No, it was not, he saw at once, for the Queen of the Sierra was seated by an empty fireplace in a wing chair, with her pugs. He coughed to let her know of his entrance but she made no acknowledgment unless it was in the wave of the lighted cigarillo she held.
“I thought,” he stumbled, “I should tell you, I’m not sure how long I’ll stay. I planned to do a little research but I don’t know yet—”
As he might have known, the word “research” brought her to wakefulness out of the dreamy half-sleep in which he had found her. A mocking glint appeared in her hooded eyes as she slowly turned her head to look at him.
“So, then you are from one of the u-ni-ver-sities. Tell me which one—Tex-as? O-hi-o?” she drawled, somehow making these names sound slyly insulting.
“I’m not, no,” he was able to defend himself. “No, it’s not any formal research—yet.” Since she had not offered him a seat, he found he had to draw up a chair in order to continue. “Really, it’s just a private—quest,” he went on, then stopped to see how this word might affect her.
She drew on her cigarillo, studying him. That at least was encouraging.
“You see, my grandfather came out to Mexico to work for a mining company. He was Cornish, from a mining family and, you see, the mines in Cornwall failed. I’m not sure of the date—it would have been the early part of the century—the tens or twenties”—he felt ashamed, he knew so little—“but definitely in this area,” he insisted, “because I recognized the names you mentioned in your lecture in Mexico City, the one I attended, I told you I attended. That’s when I heard that you run this center for studies of this area, so I thought I’d come here to see what I could find out. I heard your family too had a connection to the mines—”
She reared out of her wing chair, a bird of prey swooping. “Who told you that?”
“Oh,” he drew back, alarmed; he might have been bitten, or stung. “Oh, someone in the audience—”
“You are mis-in-formed, señor. I may be run-ning this center and it may be fam-i-ly property, but the mines, they were before my time. I did not arrive here till the forties, and I am myself an eth-no-graph-er,” she spaced out her syllables as if for someone of lesser intelligence, “and trained as an an-thro-polo-gist with some of the great-est teachers in the field. I have worked among the Huichol Indians, the first, the first Eu-ro-pean woman to do so. I founded my center to pro-tect them, their en-vi-ron-ment, their his-tory, and re-li-gion. I am not one of those who took their land and ru-ined it with mining and made them slaves. Whoever tells you this, lies.” The word exploded with a clap of thunder. The little pugs shuddered in their sleep, some even gave small yips to prove their vigilance. She pressed them back to sleep with her ringed hand.
Eric, hiding his own hands between his knees, wondered if he should flee but she continued imperiously. “If it is mines you are interested in, then it is not to me you should come. Not to my center. Here we work to keep the cul-ture and re-li-gion and art of the Huichol a-live that the min-ing in-dus-try near-ly de-stroy-ed. On the one hand is greed, señor, on the other—respect! Did you not see the film tonight?”
“I did, I did,” Eric hastened to assure her. “Fascinating!”
She pursed her lips, clearly expecting more.
“The work you have done here, so important,” he went on, “so wonderful—” But why was she so defensive? If her work was as renowned and respected as she insisted it was, where was the need to constantly assert this?
Her lips relaxed a little. It was transparently easy to mollify the old bird, Eric saw, and went on flattering her in that vein for a bit. (Em would have despised him, he knew.) He wondered if he could put a question to her about the enigmatic presence of the Indians at the foot of her dinner table but just then, tapping the ash off the end of her cigarillo, she provided him with the answer as if she had sensed it. “It is a liv-ing cul-ture, you see. I have guests in my hacienda that can prove to you its ex-is-tence. Their way of life ex-ists. That is my purpose, señor, to keep it alive. Post-Columbian Mex-ico,” she pronounced, straightening her back, “interests me not at all. Once those poor people were con-ver-ted by the Span-iards, it was the end, the end! And if that is the pe-riod that in-ter-ests you, señor, go up the moun-tain. There you will see what the mining in-dus-try did to Huichol country.”
He nodded enthusiastically to assure her he would, and she continued, “You have come at ex-act-ly the right moment, the cel-e-bration of el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Go, go and see it, please. It is right-ly named, after the dead. Here,” she tapped her cigarillo, making the ashes scatter, “here at my center, you find life! Ar-tists come to my center, and scho-lars, and seek-ers. Not his-tor-ians, and
not—” she fixed him with a fierce eye, “not mineros!”
As he wondered how he might make his escape from further denunciation, he heard a rustle from behind the piano, which was actually on the other side of the stone arch that divided the room, he now saw. Someone there, under a dim green-shaded light, was folding up the music sheets as unobtrusively as possible. The pianist rose and came forward: it was the spectacled woman with the short gray hair who had introduced herself at dinner as the librarian. It seemed she also held the position of official musician at Doña Vera’s establishment. But Doña Vera made no acknowledgment of her presence or her performance and Eric had to rise to his feet and take it upon himself to say, “Thank you, that was just beautiful.” She gave an awkward little bow, her glasses glinting in the subdued light, and slipped away.
“Margaret,” Doña Vera suddenly bellowed after her, “send Consuela. I go to bed now,” and at that word, as if at a bell, the heap of sleeping pugs around her stirred and scrambled to their many feet.
PART TWO
Vera Stays
“You are looking on rich lands. May you know how to govern them well.”
—ALONSO HERNANDEZ PUERTOCARRERO to HERNANDO CORTEZ, 1519, from BERNAL DÍAZ, The Conquest of New Spain, 1568
4
After the fall of the Aztec empire, the conquest of the country proceeded with wonderful rapidity, chiefly because the invaders hoped to meet with greater treasure in every mountain they beheld. The manner in which the Indian was forced to labor in the mines is well known, and how, accustomed to the gentler pursuit of agriculture, their numbers rapidly diminished.
—CARL SARTORIUS, Mexico and the Mexicans, 1859
