The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

COMING OUT OF THE CATHEDRAL, HE HAD TO steady himself at the top of the stairs before he could descend them: the afternoon light had struck him such a blow and blinded him too. The plaza was quiet at this hour, the white dust disturbed only by the wind that lifted and dispersed it. All around the great houses of the rich stood, shut-faced and grim because now they were not great and not rich. Only the height of the stone walls and the width of the doorways made them seem so but the carved oak doors were gone and so were the shutters, their place taken by iron bars or wooden planks. Windows gaped and doors opened onto darkness now. Built to cast all other buildings into eclipse, they were themselves eclipsed and the museum that supposedly recorded these vicissitudes was shut too—for the afternoon, or the holiday, or both.

  There was no food to be had here and Eric felt in need of some as did the thin, silent dog that had waited for him at the door and now followed him again with hopeful loyalty to the nearby smaller plaza. Here there were trees, a bandstand of filigree ironwork, and stalls where tortillas were being patted out on hot griddles and meat stirred into rich mole sauces in great earthenware pots. Eric slid onto a bench at one stall and had an enamel plate passed down the long table to him along with an assortment of dishes to which he helped himself, while the dog crawled under the table, out of sight, hoping to avoid confrontation with larger, sturdier brutes prowling around for bones.

  People had come in from surrounding villages for the festival, and at the stalls around the plaza were buying themselves straw hats and baskets, kitchenware and shoes. A photographer had set up a booth and was posing families against a canvas backdrop painted with scenes of flowering gardens, moonlit lakes, and palatial mansions. Sometimes they adorned themselves with the striped serapes and the velvet sombreros trimmed with silver that he lent them and sometimes they strapped on bandoleers, held wooden guns, and mounted wooden horses, but some posed simply as themselves, barefoot and bareheaded in the midst of all the painted splendor.

  He was doing much more brisk business, Eric could see, than the painter of retablos in his wooden shack; only a few customers stopped to tell him their tales of miraculous recoveries from snakebite, fire, smallpox, and accidents or escapes from stampeding horses and runaway buses, which he painted for them on small tablets of tin and wood that they could take to the cathedral as offerings.

  Eric strolled across to watch for a while and wished he too had a dramatic tale to tell that the painter could record for him. Lacking one, he considered undramatic scenes from his life he might have enjoyed seeing the man paint: the kitchen in Boston, Em and himself at the table under a yellow lamp, the cat Shakespeare seated beside them with his white paws tucked into his black fur, or of his father and himself picking their way around the rock pools of the Maine coast with their heads lowered to the salt sea spray, or himself as a child, kneeling before a fireplace in Cornwall . . . But you couldn’t hold together these disparate scenes, or meld them into a coherent whole. He mentally added a Mexican background, ocher and dun, with a mountainscape in dramatic purples and crimsons. The painter would certainly be able to provide that, in confident brushstrokes, and yet—something would still be lacking. Eric could not place his finger on it but could clearly see a gap in one corner, like a smudge or a blur. He moved away, as if in search of what might fill it.

  He considered giving some custom to the old potter whose simple earthenware pots seemed to be doing less brisk business than another vendor’s tin and plastic kitchenware. Em would surely appreciate something handmade, possibly one of the coffee-colored coffee mugs decorated with a wonderfully free swirl of paint; he could see it placed companionably by her elbow on her desk as she worked and suddenly felt that he could hardly bear to wait to resume that life, to bask in her calm, assured company again and not be solitary and adrift anymore. The coffee mug acquired a talismanic quality before his eyes. It would be difficult to carry such an object safely back to Boston but, after a brief hesitation, he decided to take the risk and had the old man wrap one up in a sheet of newspaper for him. Then the price he asked, so low, so humble, shamed him and he wished he could have purchased more but, carefully putting away the package in his backpack, he moved on, knowing that now he must buy something to take to the cemetery, an offering to his ancestors: that was why he was here. What should it be and where would he find it?

  Around and around the plaza he wandered, the same people looking up to see him pass again and again, wondering at his purpose—and purposelessness. Of course he had to make an offering—“Claro!” he heard a chorus of voices ring out in his head as if he had gathered a crowd of spectators around him, and their voices rose in a crescendo, so he reached out for a spray of white chrysanthemums and heard a deep sigh of satisfaction at his purchase, his dutiful observation of the rituals, and felt their relief enter into him.

  As he handed over the pesos in payment and carried away the bouquet, the church bells rang out to announce the hour, three o’clock, and at that instant rockets shot into the sky, long whining shrieks followed by explosions that echoed back and forth between the hills. In the brilliant light of day, they could not be seen, only heard, and heard they were: they were the announcement for los muertitos to return home and for the living to go to the cemetery to receive them by washing, cleaning, and decorating their tombs, lighting candles to show them the way and welcoming them with flowers.

  He joined the procession of people, family groups mostly, out of the plaza and onto the dirt road that wound uphill past houses of adobe and tile that were clearly abandoned and in ruins, doors hanging from their hinges, barred windows opening onto scenes of fallen walls, painted plaster turned to flakes of dust, cacti and convolvulus growing where floors had been. Perhaps these were the houses where the Cornish miners had once lived? Turkey buzzards hovered over them in the livid air, with their wings outstretched and their wingtips lifted to catch the currents that bore them up, then swirled them slowly around. On the rocks, lizards—gaunt, withered—skittered away at the sound of footsteps on the stones and disappeared into cracks or slipped around the baking stones. Grasshoppers shot out of the way like seeds exploding and scattering.

  A man and his wife sat in the sparse shade of a mesquite tree eating the tortillas they had brought with them; their burro, tethered to the tree, seemed asleep on its legs except for the ears that remained alert and twitched away flies.

  Someone had put up a stall of reeds and planks and was selling bottled drinks, orange and red and green, for the thirsty.

  They shuffled on through the dust, passing the stone walls and entrance to the palenque that Eric had been told was where bets of many thousand pesos had once been won and lost, not to speak of ranches and mines, but that was now closed. Yet he could have sworn it was full of people for he heard voices rising in a state of hysteria as spectators bet on and cheered the brilliant, spurred roosters. Even the dog at his heels lifted its small stumps of ears as if at the noise. Dust flew and Eric could sense the great crowd packed into a small space even if he saw no one.

  Of the mine there was no trace. Perhaps the cave gouged into the hillside had once been an entrance to it, and perhaps the tumbled remnants of a stone wall around a bare and thorny space had once been a hacienda de beneficio, but the shafts had fallen in, back into the rubble, or else had been blown down and dispersed by the wind.

  The cemetery lay on the flank of the hill, below the summit. The entrance of two pillars of stone set in the low whitewashed wall of adobe was hung with banners of white and yellow paper perforated with figures of dancing skeletons that rustled and rattled with macabre life in the wind that blew here unimpeded. People were passing through it, carrying sheaves of flowers, baskets of food and drink, bundles of candles and pots of copal, blankets and children. In the cemetery they dispersed, each in the direction of the graves they had come to tend.

  Eric, not knowing where to go, stayed by the entrance where a single cypress tree grew, so long and spindly that it looked like a pole thrust into the groun
d; it cast practically no shadow. No one paid him the least attention: he might have been another pole, or cypress, planted there.

  People were slipping silently up the path in all directions, their feet shuffling through the gray suede of the dust. The families that had already arrived were at work washing and scrubbing what tombstones there were, straightening the crosses that were listing to one side, filling rusty cans with water from a tap for the fresh flowers they had brought, lighting copal and candles whose flames bent and wavered and twisted grotesquely in the wind.

  Eric became awkwardly aware that he alone was doing nothing, just standing there with a sheaf of flowers in his hands. He had no idea where to place them. Somehow he had assumed his grandmother was buried here and that he would recognize her grave when he came upon it, that it would have her name carved on it as neglected as it might be, and would offer her his flowers. Now it occurred to him it would not be so: she could not be buried here, in a Catholic cemetery in the shadow of their chapel, which stood on the rock above.

  The truth was that he had no idea where she might be buried. He had merely assumed it would be here where she died. Em’s face with a familiar expression of worried solicitude flitted past him like one of the pale moths blundering through the dusk.

  He detached himself from the trunk of the cypress tree that was now casting a shadow across the white hillside, more like the shadow cast by a sundial than by a tree, and began to stumble up the path in the direction of the chapel, where he might meet a priest he could ask where the foreigners were buried who had once lived here and worked in the mines.

  As the dusk thickened with the addition of the smoke of copal, candles shone everywhere in the walled enclosure of the cemetery, hundreds of them, bending and righting themselves and then bending again, now illuminating the groups gathered around the graves, now casting them into shadow.

  As he drew his jacket close about him, someone seated by the path extended a bottle to him. “Have a drink,” he invited in slurred tones, and Eric, taking the bottle and suppressing a quaver of squeamishness, drank. “It seems you needed it,” the man said, watching him. And it was strange but Eric, who understood so little Spanish and no Indian tongue, understood every word spoken to him, and it seemed that he too was understood when he spoke, with no trouble at all, just as if he were in a trance.

  “I did,” Eric agreed, handing back the bottle.

  “You have come from far? You look like those men who used to run the mines here, the Cousin Jacks as they called them in my father’s and grandfather’s day.”

  “They worked in the mines? So did mine—my grandfather.”

  “But yours left. Ours stayed, and died.”

  Eric looked to the side of the man to see if there was a gravestone with a name on it but there was none, just a mound of earth and a cross stuck into it on which initials and dates were carved roughly with a knife. Pickle jars filled with flowers, the spokes of red gladioli and sunbursts of yellow chrysanthemums, perched on the mound. A woman and a boy were lighting candles and planting them in the earth.

  “I know one who did stay, and died,” Eric said.

  “Here?”

  “I think so. I believe so,” Eric said, then thanked him for the drink and moved on. He was both surprised and shamed by the ease with which the words came to his mouth, how readily he had imparted so private a matter to a stranger.

  But then, there was this curious sensation of not being among strangers at all.

  At another group he lingered to breathe in the aroma of warm, baked food. The woman who was engaged in feeding her children as well as the dead, seeing his look, held out her basket and asked if he would like a pasta, she had brought extra in case her children turned hungry.

  “A pasta?” Eric asked, accepting a warm pastie that fitted into his palm like a soft little dove. He bit into it and as his teeth met with the meat and potatoes inside the crust, he thought he had never eaten anything so good. He did not think she would expect payment from him here in the cemetery so he only thanked her but she had already turned aside and was bringing out more pots and dishes from her basket, her children crawling closer to this source of nourishment.

  There were not large family gatherings around every grave; some had only one person alone come to clear the place of a year’s worth of weeds, discard the offerings of the year before, and fill a rusted tin can with fresh flowers. Some graves had no one at all attending them, and other visitors to the cemetery, out of pity, left a few marigolds or a stalk of amaranth so the dead would not feel forgotten, or excluded. By including them they seemed to befilling in the empty spaces in their lives. Eric wondered if by performing such an act he too could fill in and complete what had seemed incomplete in his own life.

  Under a dust-colored, skeletal mesquite tree, a man leaned, his arms folded, and from under the brim of his hat he stared sorrowfully at a grave a small distance away. Eric stopped to keep him company although he did not appear to want any. The man did eventually notice him, however, for he sighed and said, “So there she lies, alone, and she was always, always afraid of that.”

  “Your wife?” Eric found himself asking.

  “My Ana,” the man said as if no other label were needed. “Her father gave her to me when she was fifteen years old and said, ‘Take care of her.’ See, that is how I took care—left her alone here—” and he shuddered with a great, dramatic sigh.

  Eric looked away but could not resist asking, “Was it an illness? Or an accident?”

  “She gave birth,” the man said. “Her last act.”

  “And the child?” Eric murmured, scarcely parting his lips. He would not ordinarily have dared question a stranger so but there was a sense here, on this hillside, in the dark and with the fumes of copal blowing like mist over it, that they were not strangers but kith, communicating in a language they would not ordinarily use. It belonged to this night, a country in itself. “And the child?” he repeated.

  “The child,” the man turned to him with a smile, “she is an angelita in heaven and will never know the grief of life.”

  That thought seemed to lighten the man’s sorrow, at least momentarily, and he detached himself from the tree trunk and approached the grave. Eric said after him, “My father—was born—and lived—” but the man did not seem to hear.

  Someone on the hillside was playing a guitar; the notes fell one after the other, like drops, or days. A voice was singing a mournful ballad although not mournfully.

  Eric, moving toward the sound, saw a group of men seated on the rocks and gravel, passing around a bottle of tequila as they listened, sometimes joining in the refrain. One of them, seeing Eric, turned around to tell him, “It’s for that old rascal, Perseverancio, from the Malinche mine. Good-for-nothing, worked just enough to earn a bottle of tequila and drink it, but he liked to sing, he did,” and he laughed to think of the good times. “Quite the voice he had, that borracho, he did.”

  “Ah, not anything like mine,” the guitarist broke off to contradict, then launched into another song.

  Perhaps later they would be too drunk even to walk down the hill but at the moment they seemed to be a wonderfully contented band of men, sitting on the ground with their bottle of tequila and their memories of other times, drinking. When they opened a fresh bottle, one of them sprinkled some from it in a sign of the cross over the grave so the dead Perseverancio might have his share.

  Eric, beginning to feel the chill of the darkened hillside, sank down on a mound of earth—at a slight distance so they would not think they had to keep passing the bottle of tequila to him—and huddled in his jacket, clutching the chrysanthemums to him; they smelled more than ever of funerals. He watched the figures that rose up and sank down like the shadows cast by candles and wondered if any of them might tell him something of his grandparents’ time.

  Stars began to flower in the sky like jasmine opening in the dark, and jasmine was surely flowering in the cemetery because he could detect its fragranc
e even over the heavy perfume of copal burning in censers over the graves.

  But perhaps it was only the perfume used by a woman, more expensively dressed than the others, who sat beside a grave where a headstone was decorated with an enormous tinsel wreath that caught the flickering candlelight and glittered like a wreath of bluebottles.

  She saw him staring and said, “Big, eh? Ex-pen-seev, eh?” nodding at that gaudy ring. “The most costoso I could find in the stinking little town down there.”

  He was taken aback by her tone, so out of keeping with the atmosphere of the night and the place. Her voice too was raucous, with the flame of liquor lit in it.

  “It’s what he deserves, you see,” she said, and made a gesture at her own outfit, the shiny purple satin of it, the ruches, the frills and the flounces of it. “He was a puto and I’m glad he is in his grave but he did leave me something, after all,” and she laughed and jangled the bracelet on her wrist.

  Eric had no idea what to say—he had never met anyone like her—but she clearly wanted conversation.

  “Do you live here—in this town?” he asked, clearing his throat.

  “Not I.” She laughed. “Left it the day after the funeral. I have traveled from far to do this. Otherwise, I knew, he will send his ghost, his sombra, to—” and she put her finger to her temple and made the clicking sound of a gun. “Puto,” she cursed—but almost fondly.

  Eric became aware that she had a bottle with her because now she lifted it and drank. He marveled at her, at the difference between her and the other women gathered around other graves and their domestic ways: he could not help a slight quiver of admiration.

  She passed him the bottle of beer. “Here,” she offered, wiping her mouth, and smearing lipstick across her cheek like a scar as she did so. “This is the first and the last time I come,” she said, “because now I leave for Tijuana. They say it is a place you can have luck. You know it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But you are americano?”