by Anita Desai
A few days later Betty Jennings and Davey Rowse were married by Edgar Butler, a lay preacher, before a small Methodist congregation gathered to witness the ceremony. Mrs. Moran of the boarding house provided the wedding breakfast, Davey having been a lodger of long standing and always an abstemious, quiet, and well-behaved young man, unlike many others in the town. She gave Betty a china butter dish from her collection, scarcely used, and a set of baskets, quite new, that she would find useful.
In a letter to Miss Frances in the chapel school, Betty described her new home in careful detail.
“We have moved into our own home in a row on the hillside among the other miners’ cottages. They are not so unlike the ones at home in Cornwall,” she wrote, “except they have red tiled roofs and the walls are as colored as a rainbow—bright blue next to yellow, and pink or orange next to green. The windows that open onto the street have wooden shutters and iron grilles too. At the back there are no windows but only doors that open onto a courtyard. It is not so grand as the houses in Mexico City and there is no fountain but there is a stone trough for washing in, and along the wall are trees with lemons and oranges and a dark fruit like a pear that they call the avvycado. The kitchen is quite small and a bit dark, not like the bright sunny one at home, but Davey has put in all the shelves I need and pretty painted tiles around the sink so it is a treat to do the dishes here.”
She wrote, too, of “the boy who fetches water on the back of a little donkey and pours it into a big stone filter by the door where Davey has set up a wooden frame to hold it,” and of the Mexican women who “carry baskets of laundry down the street to the foot of the hill where they scrub their clothes together in stone troughs, which must be a lot nicer than doing it alone at home. Then they spread them out on the rocks alongside a little stream and while they wait for them to dry, they sit talking and combing out each other’s long black hair and braiding it with bright ribbons. I wish I could paint it all for you, it would make a pretty picture.”
To her sisters she proudly reported, “I baked my first batch of pasties today in a little clay oven and Davey said the men at the mine would envy him. Now he wants me to bake him a saffron cake but there is no yeast to be had. Mrs. Moran told me the women use ‘pulque’ instead. That is a kind of spirits they make out of the juice of the cactus. I don’t like to touch it but better to eat it in bread than drink it in the tavern, for sure.”
Those who read her letters might have thought her a child playing at keeping house but that was because there were less happy aspects of her life she omitted to mention. She did not write of watching the Cornish children go up the hill to the little school run by the sisters Lily and Minnie Bennett of Helston, who had come out to keep house for their brother only to find, on their arrival, that he had died in a mining accident and, lacking the money for a return passage, stayed to make a living for themselves with the help of the Cornish community. Nor did she write of the drunken brawls in town or the sights to be seen outside the tavern on a Saturday night. Sundays were not a day on which it was wise to step out of the house either. The miners, released from work on that one day of the week, reveled with the money they had made, spending it at cockfights where fortunes were gambled away, and in the taverns. By nightfall the streets were littered with the drunk and on Monday morning there was a surly, taciturn return to work. Once again the whistle blew to mark the shifts at the mine and the miners’ boots tramped up the cobblestoned way to work, to Betty’s relief. She missed prayer meetings at the Methodist chapel, for such gatherings could only be held on those Sundays that Edgar Butler was visiting their village. Instead, she sang hymns to herself while washing up or baking pasties for Davey to take in his lunch box to the mine.
There was her first scorpion, an occasion that made her scream. Davey was at work, and the little maid, Lupe, swept it out with the broom, laughing. But then there was a second, a third, and a fourth, making her fearful, wondering where the next one would drop from or crawl out from, and once there was a whole nest of infant scorpions, so tiny that they seemed like little red ants clinging to their mother’s back, falling off, scattering in all directions because of Betty’s frenzy.
Davey, tired, his hands raw, his hair dusty, sat at the table, watching her, and after a bit said flatly, “We all live here together, Betty—the scorpions, and us. It’s home to them, home to us.”
His words silenced her screaming and made her stare at him in bewilderment.
All around there were sights and sounds that nothing had prepared her for—the rough wooden crosses erected on hilltops, to her mind like gallows, and sinister. Who had climbed up there to do that, and why? A donkey braying on the hillside, sounding like a rusty pump being worked up and down, up and down, with a vengeance. Not a sound that could be ignored or shut out, any more than the crowing of roosters in the dark, long before daylight, one crow leading to the next, from hill to hill and village to village around the valley till sunrise, when sound merged with light, ringing and blazing together.
The turkey buzzards hovering in the sky, their wingtips like fingertips tilted against the currents as they circled, languidly, watching out for a lamb that had fallen down a barranca or a mule that had drawn its last load and spilled its guts on the stony paths, too weak to resist their beaks or talons.
Betty would climb the slope of the hill behind the cottage and sit there on a rock, clasping her knees and watching for signs of life in the flat plain below and find herself waiting for the sight of the train that made its way slowly to the foot of the hill to unload machinery or timber to be taken by carts up to the mines or to be loaded with ore for the smelters. As it crawled around the boulders and hillocks of the plain, now appearing and now disappearing from sight, Betty played with the gravel at her fingers and found herself chanting the rhyme she had heard the village children sing, “Tucu-tucu, tiqui-taca,” and no one could have said if she was so pensive because she was thinking of her arrival, or her departure.
There were aspects of their world that were too strange to be conveyed to those at home—the way Davey told her they started the day at the mine, for instance: how the men lined up in pairs, had their names entered in a big ledger, and took the tools and powder handed them, then followed the overseer to the entrance, where they stopped in front of a crucifix that hung there to make a sign of the cross. Singing the Ave Maria, they entered the mine, the voices of those who went in first growing fainter as the ones who followed sounded louder, then fainter too, as if they were descending a well. On a landing below they had erected an image of the saint they worshiped, the saint of trabajadors, workmen, decorated with fresh flowers or branches, and they would light candles to him before going in different directions to start work. When Davey first described the scene to Betty, she was shocked by such popish rites but he assured her that the Cornishmen took no part in them and that, on emerging from the mine at the end of the day, it was their own good Methodist hymns they sang on the way home.
She did write of the market that was held in the open on Saturdays and to which she liked to go. She could have obtained the goods she needed at the Company store as the other miners’ wives did and was in fact taken along to it, sometimes by Mrs. Moran and sometimes by their neighbor’s wife, Ida Hoskin, a pale sad woman whose husband was a heavy drinker, a champion wrestler, and a brute. But Betty drooped in their company, finding Ida Hoskin “boring” and Mrs. Moran “a bit too fussy and old-fashioned,” inquiring into her household and housekeeping habits as if to make sure Betty was taking good care of Davey, her favorite. She much preferred her visits to the Saturday market with Lupe although she had twinges of guilt when she thought that Lupe ought to be in school instead. She fantasized about giving her lessons, but in what—English? To what end? Have her memorize the Lord’s Prayer when she could tell her rosary as well? Besides, she appeared to know all she needed to know as she bargained over the price of eggs or picked the plumpest chicken out of a basket of indignant brown feathers and sadly
limp necks and beaks. So Betty assuaged her guilt by buying ribbons for her braids or a sack of oranges for her to take home to her family.
Loaded with their market baskets, they found the way back up the hill much slower. Betty preferred not to walk along the dirt road where mules and carts churned up the dust. She let Lupe take her along a path over the stony hillside that led past the potter’s hut, a poor thing of adobe with a sheet of tin for a roof, and outside, a corral fenced with thorns for his herd of three goats and a cow, and a brick kiln. If he was firing his pots, a thread of smoke unspooled from it, but he did not do this often and on most days he was to be seen wandering in the gullies below with his cattle, searching for something to graze them on. There was not much, the vegetation had long ago been destroyed by the mines and their effluents. Sometimes he could be seen all the way down where the stream ended in a shallow, stagnant pool with mesquite trees standing in it, gray-legged and ghostly While his beasts waded into the water and seemed to be imbibing moisture through their hides and hoofs, he collected clay in a pail and dragged it uphill after them. Then he would disappear into his hut and it would be his wife who would go out with the cattle and return with branches of mesquite or cacti that had died and turned to skeletons that she would feed into the fire in the kiln. That was when the smoke emerged and announced that pots were being fired for the Saturday market.
Sometimes he even glazed them so that they looked like the burnished chestnuts Betty had collected at home with her sisters in the autumn. He would draw patterns on them, swirling free shapes, all in a kind of dark dye. Betty wondered where the paint came from—she had seen none in the market—and one day found out when she saw him up at the mine, his ragged trousers held up by string and his bare feet so callused that they looked like shoe soles, picking his way along the tracks where wagons traveled with loads of ore. He had a rusty can in his hand in which he was collecting cinders that he bent down to pick. Perhaps that was what he ground on those flat stones outside his hut, mixed in a pot, and used for paint. A twig of mesquite would have done for a paintbrush, she thought. That must be how he drew the patterns along the rims of his bowls, and occasionally, if the spirit moved him or he had enough paint, might even do a funny sketch of a woman taking a pig to market or a fish with a mermaid at the end of its fishing line.
Those were the ones that Betty looked out for if she found he had brought in an assortment to spread out on a rush mat at the market. She greeted him, eager to know him, but his face remained in the shadow of his sombrero and he said nothing as she picked out a soup bowl or a mug for coffee and paid him. Lupe stood with her hands twisted in her apron, embarrassed. She tried to direct her mistress’s attention to the store where china cups could be had, with flowers painted on them, the kind she had seen in other English homes. And here was her mistress buying cheap earthenware from the village potter, losing face thoughtlessly.
Curiously it was the same expression Betty caught on Davey’s face when she gave him his tea in such a mug. Clearly he did not think it fit for a miner.
7
Laboring constantly in dark passages, secluded from the world, hardens their characters . . . and they are inclined to superstition and fanaticism. They believe in mountain-spirits and hear them hammering far down in the bowels of the earth. They also have presentiments, and refuse to admit women in the mine, as the ore would then disappear.
—CARL SARTORIUS, Mexico and the Mexicans, 1859
The Cornish miner had his own version of sprite, the tommy knocker which gave him a warning of a cave-in.
—A. C. TODD, The Search for Silver
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN DAVEY DID MAKE clear to Betty what he thought of her free ways. There was the occasion when the circus came to town, one of the many small, mangy circuses that traveled from village to village with its creaking wagons and brass band. The striped tent went up in a dusty field, the cages with their shabby lions and bears drawn into a circle. The hurdy-gurdy played its tunes excruciatingly, and spun sugar billowed out of a booth in sweet cumulus clouds of livid pink. A man in a clown’s costume rode a donkey through the town, shouting, “See el Gran Hernandez pull a loaded wagon with his teeth! See la Bella Isadora ride a mighty elephant!” and Betty grew as excited as a child, as Lupe. “Oh, let’s go,” she cried, because at home, wouldn’t she have caught her friends Agnes’s and Sally’s hands and gone running? But it appeared that in Mexico a Cornishwoman could not do that, go down to the Indian village and sit there with brown Mexican crowds. Davey’s appalled look made that clear.
It was only the woman known to them as Tough Tansy, wife to the carpenter at the works and mother of five, who dressed her children up in their best and took them down as bold as could be, asking no one for permission. She kept her chin up and marched down the lane, herding her brood before her like a flock of goslings, and calling out to the women who watched from their doorways, “We’re going to the circus—to see el Gran Hernandez eat fire and Issydora ride the ellyphant, aren’t we, chicks? Come along!”
Davey said that it served Fred Barnstaple right for picking up a woman here in Mexico for a wife instead of fetching a proper one from Cornwall, and when Betty sulked over the sink and the dishes, he pointed out to her all the social activities provided for the miners’ families by the Company, “like the picnic on the Duke of Cornwall’s birthday.” He was taken aback by Betty’s fiery outburst at that.
“Oh yes,” she said, hands on her hips, “that’s one day your fine manager and his wife think of the miners up on the hill. Give us a tea treat with bacon sandwiches and feel proud when they see us fall on them like beggars. Then they can go back to their Casa Grande where none of us has ever so much as set foot.”
“Now, Betty, I didn’t think you’d care to visit them.”
“I don’t,” she said, stamping her foot, “I don’t. That is not what I meant and you know it, Davey Rowse.”
But she gave her family an account of the occasion that sounded happy enough. “Did you ever think,” she wrote, “that here on a mountain in Mexico we would be celebrating the Duke of Cornwall’s birthday?” They had been taken in wagons decorated with streamers down the steep hillside to a ledge where the picnic had been spread out under a great mesquite tree and games arranged for the children, races for the adults. When the sun began to sink, Davey came and pulled Betty to her feet, asking her to come and look at the view with him. It was one of those rare days when work and responsibility did not seem to weigh on him and make him dour, and Betty, delighted to see it, agreed.
They walked down to the edge where the land fell away in a sudden precipice to the valley and a lake where egrets stepped among the reeds, herons spread their wings to dry, and pelicans sailed along as if sliding across glass. He was pointing out the different birds to her when she noticed a large solitary hacienda built against the flank of the mountain already in shadow and so dark as to be barely discernible.
“And that?” she asked.
“Oh, that was a convent built by the Spanish priests who came to convert the Indians. The Mexicans threw them out after the War of Independence.”
“So, is it empty? Did no one move in?”
“Actually, the Company did. They bought it and turned it into a kind of guesthouse for people on the board when they come to see the mines. ’Course, no one does. Come out here to the back of beyond to see the muck their fortunes come from? Not them,” Davey said, looking at her because he knew she would approve of his tone. “It just lies empty. But when the president of Mexico came to open our electrical installation, he stayed there and the owners threw a banquet for him. They had chefs come from Mexico City to prepare his meals,” Davey went on, providing the details he knew Betty enjoyed so much, “and an orchestra to play for him so he could dance with the ladies. Then he came up here to the mines and they lined the road with lanterns and trees hung with paper flowers. They lit bonfires on every hilltop and had a fireworks display to beat all fireworks. Just as if he was a king.”
“A king in a fairy story,” Betty said wonderingly. “We should go there one day.” Glancing over her shoulder at the gathering under the tree, she added, “Just us, you and me.”
He smiled and plucked a grass stalk to chew on. “How? We’d have to get a horse to take us. Shall we ride a horse together, Mrs. Rowse?”
The picture amused her. “Let’s.”
Holding hands, they strolled back to where the gathering had begun to sing Cornish songs, and when they got back and rejoined them, a toast was drunk to the duke—beer for the men, lemonade for the women and children. Then Betty helped the women pick up and fold and tidy away and the men got the wagons ready to take them back.
The occasion for that excursion never did arise, and shortly afterward Davey forbade Betty to go for walks alone on evenings when he was kept late at the mine, and he actually laid down the limits beyond which she must not go, even with Lupe.
Betty was puzzled. “What do you think might happen if I did?”
“I cannot tell and that is what I don’t care for, not to know what might happen. All I know is it’s not safe.”
“And who told you that?”
“There’s talk,” he said. “Don’t think everyone is so friendly as you think.”
It displeased her that he should be suspicious of the people they lived among and whom she knew to be friendly and kind, for they unfailingly wished her a “Buenos días” and a “Buenas tardes” when they passed her and never pulled a face or made a gesture that could be thought hostile. It made her wonder at Davey’s new attitude—he was often dour but never unfair—and she demanded a reason for it.
He explained that there had been trouble at the mine: one of the mineros, Julio, was found to have gone down the hill into town to buy kerosene for his lantern and corn for his family at the general store, not at the Tienda de Raya run by the Company. The manager, a Scotsman named MacDuff, had him hauled up and warned. When he defied the manager and did it again, saying he would go wherever the prices were fair, he was discharged and a wave of anger and resentment went through the community that Betty imagined was so harmonious. Did not all the men play football together, Scots and Cornish and Mexican? Were they not equally excited about the centennial celebrations to come? Now this was shown to be a sham, nothing but a front for what was unacceptable.
