The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  At the railroad station they caught up with the other Cornish families, who could not believe their eyes when they saw Betty’s child at the swarthy cirquera’s breast. Women held their handkerchiefs to their mouths in shock, men found no words to speak to the bereaved father. But once seated in their carriages, flying British and American flags prominently, they found the novelty of it all soon dwindled beside the terrors they were certain faced them as they made their way across the plain under threat of raids by the rebels.

  For fear of finding the tracks blown up, the driver took the engine at an excruciatingly slow crawl, and at one point, when the coal gave out, it shuddered to a halt. The men swarmed out into the canyon, searching for brushwood as a substitute. Steam hissed from the exhausted engine, and the families, now quite silent, waited for raiders to appear from behind the ridges or out of the arroyos. When the men returned with wood and the engine was fueled, they moved on, but that very night they were halted by raiders who were waiting behind a hill. Shots rang out and when they came to a standstill, figures out of their nightmares entered the carriages. They were strung with bandoleers and dressed in cotton pajamas and khaki coats; most were barefoot, or in rope sandals, giving away their peasant origins. Some had a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in their straw hats. They walked calmly through the carriages, politely asking for “loans” to pay for the army of the Revolution. When they came across la Bella Isadora and her fair babe, they smiled and passed on but stopped to shake hands with el Gran Hernandez’s two tiny monkeys, who seemed both awed and flattered, clutching at their fingers and baring their teeth in little, frightened grins. The men and women in their seats were searching their pockets and bags for coins and watches when they heard the whistle of a train approaching at speed. It was a troop train and the raiders leaped out, springing onto their horses—some horses of blood, some nags, most without stirrups or saddles—and went streaming up the gaunt hillside from which an avalanche of pebbles and gravel poured down, deafeningly. The miners’ families, seeing that the federáis had arrived, leaned out of their windows, waving hats and scarves and calling, “Hurrah!”

  But the engine driver had run away and hidden and they had to wait while the troops fanned out to search for him, so they allowed themselves a break in which to step out of the suffocating carriages and boil tea in a billy and eat the bread they had brought with them, meager and gritty with sand as it was. Davey was handed some but seemed not to know what to do with it, staring at it uncomprehendingly. Around him was nothing but the sun-seared plain and its invisible cracks and rents. Night fell, and in that uninterrupted darkness, the stars surged downward till they seemed close enough to touch, and burn. Silenced, they waited, only the whimpering of the newborn and the wailing of coyotes to voice their fears for them.

  At daybreak a new team of engine driver and fireman arrived, and with a roar of the smokestack and the shriek of a whistle, they were able to move on, smoke and cinders flying backward into the carriages.

  TIQUI-TACA, RUCU-RACA . . . through the plains of flat brushwood and gray rubble, unbroken except for a lonely hut of adobe in a desiccated cornfield or a corral of thorn trees where a few beasts stood with their heads hanging low. And once they passed, without stopping, a railroad station that was more like a stage setting or a mirage than anything real so that they could never later vouch wholeheartedly for the authenticity of what they remembered seeing there. In a totally sere and empty landscape, a train was already standing, its carriages and engine battle-weary in the dust, armed men in sandals and sombreros sprawled on the roofs of the carriages, but seated on a flatcar painted a startling red and embellished with gilt was their captain upon a barber’s chair, resplendent under a sombrero the size of a cart wheel, and his feet extended toward two bootblacks, one for each boot, polishing the cracked and filthy leather with enthusiasm. In his left hand he held a bottle of beer and the right clasped the waist of a woman in a bridal gown and a Spanish shawl. They were ringed by a band of musicians fiddling away madly what some recognized as “Adelita,” known to be Pancho Villa’s favorite song.

  As their own train passed slowly, cautiously by, they asked each other if that had been Pancho Villa himself—Pancho Villa who was said to wage war by rail, moving his men, his stores, even a field hospital and gallows for traitors, along the tracks laid by President Porfirio Díaz, now fled—and if this was a presentiment of the new Mexico, the one they would not stay to see. To Davey these were all scenes out of an evil dream that he had to endure without knowing if he would wake from it and life be restored to normality again.

  In this manner, they arrived eventually at San Luis Potosí, and here Davey roused himself to send a telegram to the Hammer family in Mexico City. They had heard nothing from Betty for so long and now they received the news. They had heard of the troubles in the mining country and feared for Betty’s safety but had not been prepared for calamity of this order. When Davey arrived with the child, they were still shaken but determined to help as best they could. They had not expected Mrs. Moran, however, still less the cirqueros; the latter created a great stir in the household. The nursing mother was led to the kitchen for a bowl of soup while Mrs. Moran took tea in the parlor with Mrs. Hammer and described the journey When la Bella Isadora left, she made a request—“Name the child Pablo,” she said, “for the child I had”—while Mrs. Moran was escorted to a boarding house in the city that was run by a friend of hers. As for the baby, he was taken into the Hammers’ nursery in the care of their nursemaid. The Hammers assured Davey they would take the infant with them—the situation in Mexico having finally persuaded them it was time to close up home and business here and return to Cornwall, where they would convey “Pablo” safely to Betty’s family.

  After making preparations to return to the mines, Davey went in to look at his son asleep in a cradle full of flannel and lace and found himself in such a tangle of emotions, all of which had as much to do with Betty as with their son and which he found impossible to articulate or to convey, that he left the house and went out onto the street without a word, certain he would never be able to speak of this to anyone.

  BETTY’S FATHER did not survive her for long and it was Gertie and Sarah who took charge, now committed to remaining unmarried and raising the child. The air of self-sacrifice and duty was as palpable in their house as the bleakness of the surrounding quarries, the nearby red-brick chapel, and the need to economize on food and coal fires in a household with no income but what the child’s father was able to send them. It was what the child would grow up with, an austerity like a chill in the blood. He suffered continually from colds and chilblains. “The poor mite,” everyone called him.

  Davey himself returned to the mines although they were almost completely abandoned, the miners’ village more or less deserted; he had need of employment after all. But the Revolution was by no means over: there were no supplies to be had and no way of transporting the ore to the smelters or the product to the mint. The trains did not run according to any schedule; there would be a ringing silence, then the shriek of a whistle and rattle of wheels along the tracks when they were least expected, and a train might appear on the plain below but whether it was the federals protecting it on its way with their arms or rebels who had commandeered it, no one could tell. When horses were heard riding into a village, everyone went into hiding, doors were locked and windows shut till it was safe to emerge and see what had been looted, what remained, who was still alive and who dead, swinging by the neck from a telegraph pole in a net of flies.

  At the mines, shafts were allowed to fall in and water to accumulate and rise. The machinery was gradually looted and pilfered and sold for scrap in the markets of Guanajuato and Mexico City. Davey and the few other men who remained spent their nights in playing cards and drinking (Davey, who had never touched a drop, now drank heavily), their days in sleeping for lack of any work to be done. Some of them began to wonder if the time had not come to return home, and so it was almost a s
troke of good fortune when war broke out in Europe, giving them an active reason to do so. The news had been slow to reach them—it was brought back from San Luis Potosí by the man who had gone in an attempt to collect their wages, unpaid for months. Davey, together with the others, left immediately to book a passage to England, and on arriving in Liverpool, found the country caught up on a wild wave of patriotism. Men were volunteering in masses, and he joined them. After receiving basic training in a camp in Norfolk, he was sent with a division of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army to France. To die there would have been a release, but he was only wounded, in the battle of the Somme, and shipped back to England to recover.

  Madge Richardson, who also found the war a relief from the tedium of life, nursed him at the hospital set up in the manorial hall of her village in Gloucestershire. Fie shocked the young woman by begging her to bring him some brandy to ease the pain in his legs; the daughter of a clergyman, she had never touched spirits in her life and would not have for anyone less handsome and romantic than this widower from Mexico. When he was released, she set herself to reform him. She did this by marrying him, which soon returned Davey to sobriety.

  On setting up house in a pebble-dashed cottage by the sea, Davey found work at a fish market in the village and they fetched Paul to live with them. Betty’s sisters had worn themselves out with their care of him through his infancy but saw him leave with reluctance; they agreed that his place was with his father of course but privately confessed their doubts as to Madge’s fitness for the role of stepmother. “She’s not had to do with children ever,” they sighed, “the poor little mite.” As for Paul, he felt he had entered a house of strangers; he could form no relationship with his father, a man who suffered from having once known the wildness and space of a mining country in the New World and who now became no more than a shop assistant in a seaside village, said little, and frequently, even in the wettest weather, went for long walks along the cliffs under lowering clouds and spitting rain, refusing any company. As for Paul’s stepmother, she washed and she cleaned and she polished as if their lives depended on it, and watched out for any alcohol that Davey might resort to or bring into the house. She could not see Paul or his father as anything but agents of possible weakness and trouble.

  IT WAS CLEAR to Paul that, as soon as he left school, it would be best for him to look for work elsewhere. He found a position in Liverpool as a shipping clerk, lodged in a boarding house near the docks with several other clerks, and spent his Sundays walking by the estuary and watching the tugs draw the ships into port followed by flocks of clamoring seagulls. They planted in him the idea of flight, of escape, while the looming warehouses and the shipping and insurance firms of the city closed in and blocked him.

  When war was declared in 1939, it might have provided him with a way out but on going to volunteer, he was rejected on account of a formerly undetected—and certainly nonthreatening—curvature of the spine. He took the rejection hard and was not consoled by the job he was given instead as a storekeeper of army supplies, seeing them loaded onto ships and sent off to the far-flung battlefields where he would have preferred to be himself. Once the war was over, he returned to his old job at the shipping firm, but this was hardly satisfying anymore. Then he found he was able to get a cheap passage on one of their boats to America. It would have been fitting if the boat had sailed for Mexico but instead it sailed northward to Canada. When they halted to refuel in Portland, Maine, Paul found they would be held up longer for repairs and disembarked to travel for what he thought would be a few days, up the coast of Maine. In a fishing village where he stopped to eat a bowl of clam chowder, he saw a notice glued to the window, advertising a vacancy in a local fishing business. He had never acted on an impulse before but now he did, and went around to meet the owners. At the end of the interview, a brief and brisk one, they took him home to eat with the family and among four brothers he found one sister, Madeleine, the youngest, who, never before having met anyone from outside their village, appeared as fascinated by him as perhaps Betty had been on meeting a miner visiting from Mexico. As for Paul, he found himself engulfed by family in a way he had not ever experienced. After informing the captain in Portland that he would not be rejoining the passengers, he stayed on to work for the family. On his frequent visits to their home, Madeleine would always contrive to sit beside him. The family, noting her infatuation, stirred in discomfort: they liked him well enough but she was the baby, many years too young for this silent stranger. Besides, he was not of their faith, however irreproachable his bookkeeping might be. Each brother tried to dissuade her from her ardor, leaving her tearful but determined. What proved harder for her to alter was Paul’s own hesitation at accepting this adoration from someone he saw as practically a child. It was Madeleine’s mother who, seeing their suffering and restraint, finally gave her the encouragement she craved. “He is not one of us,” she said, “and you can never be married in church, but it seems he is the one for you.” Of Paul, she asked that he remain in their home and village so that they would not have to part with their daughter.

  They married, and Paul found his married existence a complete escape from the loneliness he had known till then but was also often overcome by the sheer numbers and noise and apt to fall silent and feel lost among them. At such moments, Madeleine would emerge from the crowd and find a reason for him to return to the small room where he kept the books and where he could disappear for a little rest from all of them. She would pat his shoulder in sympathy and he would clasp her hand gratefully, but without a word.

  It was many years before they had a child—as if they had been intimidated and discouraged by the large numbers all around them, the brothers being married and with numerous progeny all housed in cottages they had built in the family yard by the sea— and when Eric was born, Madeleine proved as protective of him as of the stranger she had married. They both personified for her the outside world that she had herself never stepped into— except on the one visit back to Cornwall that she and Paul undertook when they left Eric with his grandfather in the pebble-dashed cottage by the sea where he played with a toy train filled with sparkling flakes of ore till his step-grandmother, entering the room with a teapot under a cozy, said, “Now don’t go filling his head with all that nonsense.”

  It was the only time Davey Rowse was known to have spoken to anyone of the mines in Mexico where he had once worked, and it was in his grandson Eric’s head that he buried a flake of golden nonsense that he had once found in Mexico’s mountains.

  PART FOUR

  La Noche de los Muertos

  In the creation story of the Huichol Indians, when gods and goddesses first appeared on earth, it was in darkness. They set out to find light, led by the fire god, Tatéwari. When they arrived at the sea, they witnessed the sun rising from a tunnel in the mountains and it cast its light upon the earth for the first time.

  The last of the gods to arrive there was Kauyumari, the deer spirit. In the newborn light, the others could see that it had left round, green, rosette-like tracks across the desert.

  Tatéwari the fire god bade them to collect these green spoors and eat them for they were sacred food, the peyote that grows on the holy mountain, Wirikúta.

  First they made offerings and sang and danced in thanksgiving. Then Tatéwari the shaman fed each one some of the sacred food, and they found they were able to hear the songs that Tatéwari and Kauyumari had been singing about the pilgrimage they had come on.

  They understood that Kauyumari had left these tracks so others could follow and also experience the time of their ancestors and understand where they came from and who they were.

  That is why the peyote is never completely uprooted; the tap root is left in the soil so more peyote may grow and show the way.

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