by Anita Desai
Louis felt his eyelids weighted as if by lead with the repetitiveness of Nadyn's complaints. He could postpone the cigarette no longer. 'One day she will,' he sighed, without the least conviction, knowing as well as Nadyn that only over Dona Celia's dead body would Pedro cross the threshold of their home. His eyelids twitched with a sudden spasm of sympathy. People like Dona Celia took a long, long time to die—he did not need to tell Nadyn that: she knew.
He took his cigarette out into the courtyard to smoke. This was only partly in order not to offend his aunt's and his cousin's nostrils—they were used to the heavy coils of smoke of Raidolito and of incense but not of tobacco—but also because he could not help feeling absurdly hurt that Nadyn had not asked him a single question. Instead she had taken for granted that he would want to hear her news, their news, without the faintest suspicion that he might have some of his own. It made him feel ridiculously childish—no one ever imagines a child could have anything of interest to say. So it was with a somewhat sulky air that he strolled out into the dense jungle of the courtyard, thinking to sit down on a bench beside the water trough in the ferny centre and brood silently upon his own affairs before going in to bed. For a while it was as he remembered: the scents, the sound of water dripping, the howling of dogs in the lanes of Tepoztlan in voices more human than canine, so full of despair, desire and woe, and in the distance the wail of similar human laments on a radio, broken into by the raucous gaiety of a mariachi band playing on another, and overhead the night sky so deep and so dark that it was like being upside down and peering into a well. But very soon not only did the cigarette dwindle to its end and the bench grow distinctly cold under him, but what he remembered and what he reaffirmed began to have a profoundly depressing effect on his spirits. He saw the light go off inside the house, only the red glow around the Virgin of Guadalupe left throbbing, and then it became too much for him and he got to his feet and withdrew as if afraid this might be the stage, the setting for his life as well.
When he woke, much too late—the sun was already smashing in through the windows he had left unshuttered—it was to find the mood of Dona Celia's house unchanged. The courtyard was still uninhabited, there was no longer a team of maids and manservants to labour there, and although someone had drawn the covers off the cages, a number of them did turn out to be empty while the few that were inhabited contained only very aged, disgruntled birds that glared at him out of a single eye as he made his way past them to the main wing of the house for his breakfast, and did not bother to squawk a greeting or whistle back. In the house things were as usual. Nadyn appeared to have her arms deep in tubs or basins or buckets of housework, and Dona Celia, whom he went to greet, was seated as always upon her comfortless throne and, even if it was a summer's day and the sun beating up from the white dust in the street outside, she was wrapped in her shawl, holding it about her throat as if to keep every sort of danger at bay—draughts, chills, unsuitable suitors for her daughter's hand, whatever. Kissing her cheek, Louis actually found it chill to his lips—chill and mouldy, as if disintegrating.
But, while he sat over his café con leche and his pan dulce, he learned about the changes that had occurred during his absence. The house was no longer the barricaded fortress, the safe retreat it had been for previous generations of Crazes: the fortress was threatened on every side. Dona Celia filled in the news into his left ear, Nadyn into the right, since he had noticed nothing for himself. In a way Dona Celia had herself brought it all about—and Nadyn was full of sharp little barbs to remind her—but having already sold off orchards and farmland lower down in the valley, she had finally resorted to disposing of bits and pieces of their own compound. Did Louis remember the row of sheds at the far end of the courtyard? Yes, he did and he also knew they had been bought up by an entrepreneur who had rented them to shopkeepers so that now there was an abarotte in one, a video parlour in another, a lavendaria in a third ... What was wrong with that? he asked, irritated. Not only was it old history but it brought in an income off which the two of them lived, so what was their complaint? First they brought change to Tepoztlan and then they complained of it. He pushed aside the basket of rolls Nadyn kept nudging towards him, and swept his hand over the dish of memelade about which a very large, fat fly hovered.
But now they were coming towards the true horror they had to face, its pit, its bottom: that end of the courtyard, round the corner from the row of rooms now kept shut, they had had a piece of land planted with avocados and lemons, did he remember? Well, they had sold it to a man who had come to them with cash in hand, and a suitably respectful manner of speech, telling them he wished to build a house for his family which had only recently moved to Tepoztlan. Being who they were—a shawl was fingered, a brooch nervously touched—they had not thought to question him regarding his profession or the size of his family. After all, if they had sold their land to him, they had no right to do so (and of course they couldn't wait to sell it and have the money in their pockets, Louis thought viciously; had they not always been money-grubbing, was not the whole family so?) and now they had for a neighbour a man who was a garbage collector by profession—
'What? What by profession?'
Louis' reaction satisfied them deeply: it set them off on an even higher pitch of complaint. The man owned a truck that he parked in front of their front door, often right under their windows so they could smell its contents, and even when the maid went out and persuaded him to move it down the street a bit, it left behind a trail of stray bits and leavings of garbage scattered all over their threshold. What was more, behind the high wall he had built around his piece of property before he had even erected a shack upon it, they suspected he stacked and sorted his garbage—
'What do you mean? He doesn't go and dispose of it, he stores it?'
'Yes, yes,' screamed Dona Celia and Nadyn together, in agitation: they were convinced, they had evidence, the maid had climbed up a ladder and peered over the wall and seen there all the empty bottles of agua purificada, the beer cans, the flattened cardboard cartons, that his family sat sorting into bundles for resale. And the family! By the rising crescendo of their voices, Louis knew he was in for a long saga. He began to squirm, to indicate that he was done with his breakfast, but they paid him no attention whatsoever, they were carried along by the tide of their indignation regarding the family because the man had not informed them that he had no fewer than seven children, boys and girls of all sizes, all in rags, and all day that was what they occupied themselves with, rag-picking, while their father drove around the town in his truck, loudly ringing a bell and collecting garbage to bring home to their doorstep. That was what the Avenida de Matamoros had come to, and there was no way of ignoring it: hot only did the most noxious smell rise from the foetid garbage pile that was his compound, but day and night the place rang with the abominable music from the radio and TV—had Louis not heard it last night? They had been kept awake, always were. The man had not yet got around to building his family a house—well, yes, he had built some walls and a roof, but not a door or a window, not fit for habitation, yet a radio and TV had been set up in it to entertain the family while it sat sorting garbage. All day that ungodly music thundered through their compound—Dona Celia drew her shawl about her and shivered with fury. But the shawl was worn thin, no one cared how she shivered, such was the sorry state of affairs that Louis could see for himself.
He thought of rising from the table on the pretext of going and examining this den, this pit, this abomination, for himself but the two women were already onto the next disclosure of iniquity. Could Louis imagine such a thing: the garbage collector's wife, she put a table outside their door, their front door, every evening, and thereon boiled a tubful of corncobs and stood there, impudently as you please, slathering them with mayonnaise and chillies, selling them to passersby, as if Dona Celia were growing maize in her garden and posting her maid out there to sell it!
'I am sure that has not occurred to anyone who knows you, Aunt
,' Louis said kindly, seeing her distress and beginning to feel a little amused in spite of himself.
'Yes, and what of all those who do not know me? Do you think Tepoztlan is the place it once was? Haven't you seen how it has been overtaken by hordes of newcomers, from Cuernavaca, from Mexico City, from God knows where...?'
'It's now got a good road and good transport—it's more lively now,' Louis reminded them, although it was clear liveliness was not to them a quality: they would have preferred it a morgue.
'Yes, yes, lively—we all know about lively. Men come to our street corner to drink. All afternoon you hear them drink and gamble there under the bamboos, and by evening you may see them lying stretched out in the road, dead drunk—so lively has it grown,' Dona Celia said, bitterly.
'Why, is there a bar now at the corner?' Louis asked with interest.
'A bar! I should think not! I am sure it is that vile woman—that pigsty owner's wife—who supplies them with liquor. Home-brewed. Oh, we would go to the police, inform them—but do you know what we can expect of the police of Tepoztlan? If people go to them with an honest complaint, and ask for justice, they are first asked "And how much will you pay us?" Do you think Nedy and I should submit to—'
Louis could not help laughing at the idea of his aunt and cousin visiting that most disreputable department in the town hall by the zocalo where policemen sat playing cards in the sun and their families cooked meals over open fires. 'No, of course not, Aunt—but perhaps Cousin Heriberto could go along—'
'Heriberto!' Dona Celia threw up her hands. 'That one! If you only knew—'
'I thought I'd go and visit him.' Louis scrambled quickly to his feet. 'Is he still at the old place?'
'His old place? You don't know what he did with it?'
Louis began to back out of the room. 'And—and Don Beto—I need to see him—about my thesis—ask his advice—'
The two women, still seated at the table, still seething and quite capable of continuing through the afternoon, found their audience disappearing at such speed that they were cut short in midstream. 'Thesis!' Dona Celia snapped as he turned and ran. 'I should like to know what thesis! Does he think he can deceive us as he does his parents!' And Nadyn shook her head exactly as her mother did, at the foolishness of such a notion.
Making his way out of the house, Louis ran into Teresa returning from the mercado, her market bag bulging with the produce for the day's cooking. 'Ah, eh,' she greeted him delightedly—how was it that his aunt and cousin could not muster such a display? he wondered—and showed him the vegetables she had bought to prepare for him, and the corn to make the pozole, his favourite, she knew, then gestured at the lane outside, making a face and warning him, 'Basura, basura everywhere.'
It was as she said—the basura collector's truck was parked outside the door, and bits of plastic bolsas and newspaper and vegetable peel blew off it and littered the cobblestones. He carefully stepped over them and, at the corner, where the great clump of bamboos leaned over Dona Celia's garden wall, there were the men she'd spoken of, leaning against the adobe, their sombreros pulled low over their foreheads, and every one with a beer bottle in his hand while empties littered the earth around them. Louis could not help feeling amused to find the town had crept up this far and was even daring to assail his aunt's fortress. Perhaps one day she would be brought face to face with the modern world. The confrontation would be worth witnessing.
He rounded the corner and crossed Avenida Galeana, then started to climb the humps and hillocks of Calle de Cima towards Barrio Santa Cruz, keeping his eyes on the ground and picking his way from one cobblestone to another, avoiding the trickles and runnels of drainwater in between. The sun struck at the back of his neck and he wished he had bought a hat from the woman with a stall at the corner on Avenida de Tepoztlan, but it was too late to go back for it now.
Up at the top, he paused by the church with the faded, mottled pink stucco walls and tower that looked like something made by a potter, then left out for decades in the rain and damp. He had arrived at Calle Sor Juna Inez de la Cruz. He stood there catching his breath and remembered the times he had run up so lightly and eagerly, on his way to converse with the one man he held in esteem, the man whom he thought of as his mentor, and who had persuaded him to postpone entering his father's firm and go to university instead. He hesitated now because he was not sure if Don Beto would admire the way he was proceeding—Louis knew there was little cause for admiration—or even if he was still interested. It was such a long time since Louis had gone away to university in the States, and it was true he had been neglectful of writing letters to the old man or visiting him but, at the same time, if Don Beto were as he remembered him, then seeing him would surely give his work the impetus it required: lately it had foundered and stalled, leaving him wondering if he was really made for an academic career, if he hadn't better give up and enter Papa's firm. After all, his entire circle of friends appeared to have done just that, falling out of university one after the other, disappearing, then re-emerging as elegant young dandies, owners of sleek cars. Their social lives revolved on a higher plane to which Louis was invited whenever he visited from Texas but on which he felt like an interloper. It was one such invitation that had driven him back to Tepoztlan and to Don Beto: Marisol dressed in skin-tight pink silk and black lace, giggling, 'Paz? Octavio Paz and Hin-doo philosophy? Oh, Eduardo, you didn't tell me your friend is a Hin-doo!' and making enormous eyes, while Eduardo called loudly from the bar, 'Louis? He was always a philosopher! Better give up trying to lure him, Marisol.'
He was resting in the shade of the church wall and thinking of that evening when he heard his name called and looked up to see "his childhood friend Arturo parting the vines of a flowering squash plant on the hillside and peering at him. 'Louis, ola! Ola, Louis! What are you doing here? Thought you were in Houston or somewhere.'
Louis blinked up at him and answered as lightly as he could: he was not at all certain he liked encountering this apparition from a past life—schooldays, days when his family had all lived together here in the old house, before his father had taken them away to Mexico City. He and Arturo had played basketball together after school, in the court on Avenida Tepoztlan, looking out over the valley. Arturo had sisters he had been fond of, quite sentimentally, taking care never to betray those feelings when they were together. They had given him a present when he left, declaring he was sure to forget them otherwise. Actually, he'd lost it even before he got to Texas. He had not forgotten them, however, even if he had not particularly remembered. Now he shaded his eyes from the sun, chatting with Arturo, trying to say as little as possible about the university or Texas: it did not seem right when Arturo had gone nowhere, was probably helping his mama run the little abarrote down the street—what else was a young man with little school learning to do in Tepoztlan? But Arturo seemed not to share his embarassment at all; standing there on the hillside with his hands on his hips, he called down to Louis, 'You chose a good day to visit. Come along to the zocalo this afternoon—you'll see some fun.'
'What kind of fun?' Louis asked warily. His family had never approved of the fun boys could be expected to think up in Tepoztlan.
'Ah, it's a show we've put together, to show those bandits from the city what we think of them and their plan for a golf club—'
'A golf club?' It was the last thing Louis expected to hear. 'A club golfo, here in Tepoztlan?'
'That's right. It's a pretty place, no? Green hills, streams, nature—so why not come and spoil it all, make a playground for the rich so they can come up on weekends to play, and who cares if the green hills and the pure streams all vanish? Plenty of boys doing nothing who could caddy for them, too. But we're going to teach them a thing or two—we're putting up a real fight. Come along for the show—you'll meet the old gang.'
Louis wondered who the others were who had stayed back and were now members of this curious group he had never heard of, and even Dona Celia had not mentioned in her zeal to
bring him up to date. He raised his hand in a wave, promising to come along 'after I've been to see Don Beto. He still lives up this way, doesn't he?'
Arturo beamed down at him. 'Oh yes, where would he go? He'll die here under Tepozteco—he's willing to die for the movement, you know. Just ask him about it.'
It was not at all what Louis expected to talk about to the old scholar, but the conversation with Arturo left him uncertain of what he might and might not find. Don Beto's house was exactly as he remembered it, built into the hillside under the forests and crags on which the small pyramid of the Aztec god Tepoztecatl stood perched, and invisible from the road and the wrought-iron gate. The rusty, cracked bell still hung from the branch of a mango tree, its rope draped casually over the gate for visitors to pull. Beyond, he could see the ruins of the former house, the one Don Beto had grown up in, at the back of the grassed-over cobbles of the courtyard, only one step and a broken arch left standing with a ruined wall for a backdrop. A canvas hung on that wall, incongruously—a painting of underwater blues and greens with piscine shapes faint in its wash. A piece of clay moulded into a curious shell shape lay on the step.