The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  Putting down her knife and fork, she exploded, “And isn’t any of you standing up for him? For shame!”

  When Davey kept silent and did not openly agree with her, she went on, “Don’t you think it’s wrong? These poor people being made to hand over what they earn back to the Company? By order?”

  “It’s not as simple as that, Betty.”

  “Oh but it is,” she insisted, “it is.”

  IN MEXICO CITY the centennial of the Revolution was inaugurated by President Díaz. They heard of banquets at the Palacio Nacional where French cuisine was prepared for the guests and an orchestra of more than a hundred musicians played the president’s favorite waltz, “El Abandonado,” under thousands of electric lights. At one such ball, he announced his intention to stand for a ninth term as president. At the same occasion he handed out ninety-nine-year concessions of copper, oil, and lead to the Americans Morgan, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Hearst.

  Such news reassured all the foreigners who had begun to grow worried, and so celebrations came even to their dusty scrapheap of a town. The miners and their families were taken down to hear the grito, the stirring call for independence that had been made by the priest Miguel Hidalgo way back in 1810. It was read out now on the balcony of the town hall by the mayor in his polished and buttoned and gleaming best. A band played, there was a parade of floats from which beauties in Spanish dress tossed roses to the crowds, buntings and streamers blew from every lamppost, and in the evening there were fireworks in the plaza for which the entire town turned out, Mexican and Cornish alike. When they came to an end, in drifting parasols of smoke, the night sky, clearing, revealed a pale band that seemed to be the ghost of a streaking rocket. Only it did not speed away and die. It remained because it was Hailey’s comet. Everyone had heard what it portended but no one wished to say on that night. Even the mines were shut and silent, no whistle blew to remind them they were there. Instead, all turned to tables loaded with great earthenware bowls filled with food simmering in sauces and gravies.

  Betty turned away and asked to be taken home. Davey was concerned because it was not like her to refuse anything unusual or pleasurable. He suggested, at home, that she have a glass of milk or a slice of fruit. Pulling a face at the pineapple in the bowl on the table, she turned away, saying, “I’d give a lot for a fresh juicy apple off a tree.”

  “Why, what’s wrong?” Davey asked in surprise. “I never heard you say no to a pineapple before.”

  She merely shook her head. The truth was that she had even stopped going to the market—its sights and aromas now made her feel quite ill. There had been a time she had wandered by mistake into a lane lined with booths where herbal remedies were sold. The bunches of dried herbs and roots had not been so bad but there were objects that mystified her—raccoon tails, squirrel pelts, dried puffers and devilfish, even a stuffed alligator and a string of emerald hummingbirds. These were all very dead and harmless but under the tables some sacks moved with mysterious life and the tail of an iguana protruded from one, the snout of an armadillo from another, making her rush away, with Lupe laughing at her squeamishness.

  Davey reacted with his usual equanimity, explaining these were the ingredients used by the witch doctors to cure various sicknesses and ailments. “There’s no hospital around here, you know.”

  “I hope I’m not ever ill here, Davey,” she said, shuddering.

  “Just don’t go there again,” he advised reasonably.

  “I won’t,” she said, but there had been the boy who had followed her, holding in one hand a lit candle, in the other a bottle. When he saw her looking at them, he held the lit candle under the bottle and that was when she saw it contained a live scorpion. Shocked as she was, she could not tear herself away and watched, in horror, as the scorpion raised its tail over its head and stung itself to death. Laughing into her face, the boy held out his hand and demanded a peso before Lupe could push him away.

  She neither told Davey nor wrote home of it.

  The tempo, the tenor of life on the mountain and around the mine began to change as news filtered in—that a General Madero had declared an end to thirty years of Porfirio Díaz’s rule, that the president had fled to the United States. All of this was incredible to those who had not known anything or anyone else in power for all or most of their lives. Then stories began to buzz like swarming bees, of Emiliano Zapata in the south, and Pancho Villa in the north. Zapata had once cleaned horse dung from floors of Carrara marble in President Díaz’s stables, it was said, and now led a troop of mounted Indians against his troops. As for Pancho Villa, he was never without a gun at all, saying, “For me the war began when I was born.” New heroes for new times: their stories began to acquire a reality, and immediacy.

  Then the mineros began to disappear from their own mine, without a word. When the manager sent for them, it was to find their huts abandoned, thorn bushes stacked in the open doorways. They had been recruited—some by the rebels, others by the federals—and gone to fight for their country. Their women had gone with them, soldaderas of the Revolution. The village on the hill below the Cornishmen’s cottages had only a few old people left in it, to mind the children and some whining, hungry dogs.

  The railroad trains that President Díaz had only lately inaugurated still creaked and rattled over the vast plains of Mexico. They had escorts of armed guards, but were watched by men in sombreros from behind the red and purple rocks of the sierra. Whistles sounded in the stillness, accentuating the silence.

  Tiqui-taca, rucu-raca...

  THEN THERE WAS a night when the hills, usually silent mounds of darkness, echoed with a sudden volley of shots, shocking and splintering. When the men went out to see what was happening, they saw flames leaping up over a neighboring mine on a distant hilltop—it might have been a celebratory bonfire. At dawn the news came that the rebels, the insurgentes, had looted the warehouse, emptied the vaults, and, after tying up whoever they found on the premises, vanished along with the Company’s mules. There was panic at the news. “Insurgentes?” people asked. “From where?” And some went over to release the trussed manager and supervisor and assess the damage. A party of federáis rode into the town soon after—grim, dusty, saddled officers of the government—asking for leads. Had anyone seen the rebels? No? They were warned to be on guard and report.

  Everyone watched constantly. By daylight, a cloud of dust raised along a path could give away the approach of troops—rebels or federáis—but by night there was no such sign; they could only strain their ears for the telltale clatter of hoofs or a shot and the hiss that followed a bullet. Men stayed up at night, smoking, drinking, playing cards, waiting.

  They were to wait for the hoot of an owl. “An owl?” Betty asked when told. It would be a man, Davey informed her, with the message: “La muerte viene con el tecolote.” Betty thought that the foolishness of grown men playing boys’ games. “Death comes with an owl!” she sniffed.

  Older men, who had been in the mining towns in the desert and the sierra for decades already, recalled the raids of the Comanches and the Apaches. This, too, made Betty sniff. “Comanches! Scalp hunters! They’ve been hearing too many of those Wild West stories, I think.”

  Ignoring her scorn, when he was put on a night shift, Davey engaged a boy, Lupe’s brother, to keep guard over the house. Betty could not sleep for the awareness of his presence on their doorstep.

  She begged Davey to send him away. “Then I’ll have to send you to San Luis Potosí for safety. Some of the women have already gone,” he told her, and when she opened her mouth to protest, added, “You can’t take risks, Betty, in your condition.”

  It was the first time they had referred to her “condition.” Betty shrank from the word, and recovered only to say, “And you? What about you taking risks? Aren’t you the father?”

  They stared at each other in bewilderment, each wanting to make something of this moment, something memorable. Instead, neither could make the gesture: it was not the momen
t for one so private.

  THE PACE OF LIFE, once a steady jog through the familiar routine, underwent a change, now seeming to race as if to a finish. Only no one thought about the finish because it was unthinkable. Something had been exposed—the stupidity of their presence here—and it was like a new rift, open and raw, that had been suddenly revealed at their feet.

  Yet when the attack came, no one was in the least prepared. Horses galloped over the cobblestones in the night, there was a wild banging at the doors, but if anyone dared open their shutters a crack to look out, only shadowy figures wrapped in blankets were to be seen and no one could tell if these were their own mineros in rebel dress or strangers from the outside. Lighting flares, they moved on up the hill to the mine. Once there, the flares emerged and multiplied, fire springing up and spreading like a lighted screen.

  The men, pulling on their boots, ran up the hill too, cursing at the shortage of firearms among them. Women were ordered to remain indoors and open the doors to no one before daylight.

  By dawn, the rebels had left. The works on the hill were smoking. The men were attempting to put out the fire. They returned later, black with soot and ash. Davey, one of them, sat down to pull off his boots while Betty and Lupe boiled water in cans for his bath, then began to laugh although he so rarely did. Betty, scandalized, standing by with towels, asked how he could think to laugh. Davey reported how they had passed Tough Tansy’s house on their way up in the dark and seen her seated on the porch in her pink flannel nightgown, a gun across her knees, defying the rebels to approach. “And Fred?” “We found him this morning, under the bed,” Davey told her, then stopped laughing to add, “They got the wrong house: they thought it was the overseer’s.”

  Later in the day they discovered that all the rebels had not left so quickly; one band had gone down into the town, where they did find the overseer and trussed him up and demanded a “loan” of cash, which he had been compelled to let them have; after cutting the telegraph wires, they had released him but also sacked the police station and broke open the jail, freeing all the prisoners. They had been rounding up all the mules and the arms they could lay their hands on when the cry of “Los federates!” had gone out and it was as if a whirlwind swept them along in a storm of dust.

  The villagers went down to drag away the dead and bury them before the heat and the turkey buzzards made the task too foul. They discovered that not all the rebels had escaped; the federals were lining up some stragglers they had caught against the wall of the Casa de la Moneda and were shooting them one by one.

  Lupe’s brother had watched and when he returned that night, told them how he had seen one rebel bend to remove his shoes and hand them to another before going to be executed. “He was valiente, valiant,” he said, his eyes shining with admiration and awe.

  The management of the mines had gone into a huddle and tried to find a way of sending a message to the headquarters to apprise them of their losses and the need to arm and protect themselves against future attacks.

  Instead, word came that the women were to pack essentials and prepare to be evacuated as soon as transportation had been arranged for them. They were to be taken down to the Company’s hacienda below to wait. Once a train could be commandeered and an escort of guards provided, they would be taken to San Luis Potosí and from there to Mexico City.

  “And the men?” Betty asked. “You?” She held onto a chair and stared at Davey. “Betty,” he replied, “it’s only till things settle down again. They will,” he assured her, but she seemed stricken and would not move. It was Lupe who ran around, gathering up the small garments they had been preparing for the child and packing them in baskets, then knelt to take the slippers off Betty’s feet and push on her walking shoes. Betty had never let her do that before.

  The families had been ordered to gather at Mrs. Moran’s since she alone had living space large enough for the Cornish community. It was not large enough for comfort though, and no one slept except for some of the small children who lay across laps or on shoulders, unconscious of the pandemonium around them. The men stood at the windows with whatever arms they could muster, in heroic attitudes they themselves found somewhat ridiculous, while some of the women tried to be helpful to Mrs. Moran, beside herself with anxiety, crying, “And I’d just put a batch of bread to rise, it’s baking day tomorrow. Oh, will it all go to waste?”

  Davey lost sight of Betty in the crowd that resembled an anthill someone had stoned, ants running crazily in all directions, but when the wagons the manager had obtained drew up at the door under cover of darkness that evening, he went in search of her to make sure she got on one. He found that she was lying in Mrs. Moran’s bed upstairs, surrounded by panic-stricken women. She was paler than Davey had ever seen her, biting her lips and drenched with perspiration. When he touched her hand, she did not seem to see him; her eyes were glazed with pain, her yellow hair tangled about her head.

  “Her time’s come,” Mrs. Moran informed him. The emergency had brought her to her senses; she spoke quietly.

  “It can’t. It’s too early.”

  “Early it is.”

  As they tried to bring Betty some relief by wiping her face with a wet towel and giving her water to drink in sips, the crowd in the room below began to pile into the wagons; the drivers were urging them to hurry

  “I can’t,” Betty wept, “I can’t go, Davey.”

  “You must. We must,” he told her as gently as possible. With Mrs. Moran’s help, he rolled her in blankets and carried her out to the last wagon to leave the village. They made room for her on a bench as best they could but there was no comfort to be found for Betty. She cried out for a doctor, her sisters, her father, and it was a sad thing that they could bring her no one. Once the wagons began to lurch their way downhill over the cobblestones, her pain grew intense. She clutched at Davey’s hands, digging her nails into them so that she drew blood. She was bleeding herself, copiously. “Slowly, slowly,” Davey begged the driver, but the cart wheels trundled over the stones heedlessly.

  8

  “Sad it is to live in the midst of revolutions.”

  —JAMES SKEWES in The Search for Silver by A. C. TODD

  THE PARTY OF CORNISH FAMILIES THAT LEFT that day often told the tale of their journey—how they were taken down the hill in darkness to the hacienda below where none had ever set foot before and found that what had been spoken of in tones of awe was now little more than a blackened shell. It had been occupied by alternating troops of rebels and federáis; both had participated in its destruction: the courtyard had been used as a stable for their horses and mules, and the men had slept on soiled bedding or straw, their firearms and boots under them so they would not be stolen by their comrades, while the soldaderas lit fires with the furniture to cook them their stews and make them their tortillas. There had evidently been drunken brawls; shattered glass lay everywhere and had to be swept up so the refugees could spread out their blankets for the night. Fires were made of twigs and brush so they could brew tea. As they sat or slept on stone floors thick with animal droppings and dirt, they felt themselves for the first time no different from the Mexicans they had lived among.

  Into this encampment, Betty’s almost lifeless body was carried, causing a hush to fall upon the pandemonium. Some of the women hurried their children away so they would not see or hear, others tried to erect a screen around her of blankets and shawls so she would not be seen at all in her distressing state, and to draw Davey away from her side. Some tried to help, and by the ashen light of dawn, finally delivered Betty of her child, in the course of which they lost her, saving only the infant.

  Everything appeared to happen at one time: the vehicle to take them to the nearest railhead arrived and so did the minister, Edgar Butler. Too late to minister to Betty, he led Davey away while the women washed and prepared Betty for burial, then tried to persuade him to proceed with the party and the infant, but Davey would not relinquish what he saw as his last duty to Betty and ins
isted on preparing a coffin for her out of crates that some of the families gave for the purpose.

  Together with the minister he returned to the abandoned miners’ village and from there uphill in the cart to the stony graveyard. The wheels ground over the cobblestones with an iron sound that seemed to lament the harshness of Betty’s fate. They met with no one on the way but on looking back over his shoulder at the empty cottages, Davey did see a small figure slipping along the side of the street after them as unobtrusively as possible. It was Lupe, who had come out to see who went by in the cart and followed it as though she sensed what it contained. Davey halted, beckoned to her, and helped her in. So it was the three of them together that dug the grave outside the walled precinct of the cemetery with pickaxes and shovels they had brought with them. By dusk it was ready and they buried her before dark, piling rocks upon the grave to guard it from coyotes.

  After leaving Lupe in the village with her family—she threw herself at her mother and they saw her being drawn into the woman’s shawl for comfort—Davey seemed not to know what to do or where to go next and stood staring at the empty street as if waiting for it to fill with people again. The minister took him by the elbow, reminding him he now had a child to take care of, and escorted him down to the Hacienda de la Soledad. They found the Cornish party had left except for Mrs. Moran and the infant, who waited for his return, and that they had been joined by a circus troupe in search of shelter, all huddling around a fire made of whatever furniture remained and draped in curtains for warmth. They had abandoned their elephant, their lions, and their bears but el Gran Hernandez had brought his monkeys with him, dressed in their little frilled dresses and vests stitched with little bells that still rang. And, most fortunately for Betty’s child, la Bella Isadora had given birth a short while ago herself, to a stillborn baby, and on seeing the tiny infant wrapped and mewling in Mrs. Moran’s shawl, took it to her own full breast, pressing a brown nipple to its blindly searching mouth. When the unnamed child first opened his eyes, it would have been the two painted eyebrows above her dark eyes and the head of black ringlets caught up in a bright ribbon that he would have seen, and her breast in its bed of yellow satin and lace that he would have reached for. Davey was brought to a halt by the sight, and the minister and Mrs. Moran had to come to his side to assist him to a seat and assure him it was for the best. Then, keeping in mind their situation and the urgent need to join their party, they collected their belongings and helped each other into the cart that took them to the railroad station. Here they found that British or American passports were required for each traveler; the cirqueros had neither but when the officer in charge saw the English child being suckled by one of them, he dropped his eyes and silently allowed them onto the vehicle. Hernandez even managed to keep one monkey on each shoulder, clutching at his ears for security and hovering anxiously around Isadora and the babe as if they too would have liked to climb into her lap for sustenance.