The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  AROUND THE IMMENSE MAHOGANY TABLE UNDER the Venetian chandelier where they entertained, the gentlemen were sometimes heard to mention the Hacienda de la Soledad. Not as often as they mentioned the mines of Cinco Señores, La Joya, Guadalupe, Santa Ana, Valenciana, or the companies—Compaña Anglo-Mexicana, Bolaños, Real del Monte, Restauradora—but once in a while someone would talk of having stayed there, spent a night there on his way up or down from the mines—in their glory days. Now, Don Roderigo assured her, it was uninhabited and uninhabitable.

  Vera tired quickly of the social flutter in which she was required to participate in Mexico City. She told Don Roderigo that if that was what she had wanted from life, she could have stayed in Vienna. Of course she did not confess that she felt at a disadvantage among ladies who had lived here for so much longer than she had and were so free with advice on how to handle the maids so they would not grow slovenly or thievish, where to order a pudding or freshly baked rolls for a party or silk stockings from Paris. Nor her chagrin at their constant questioning about her past and her background and how she had come to be here among them. Her discomfort and restlessness had not the slightest effect upon her husband, who simply continued with his routine of running through the family fortune at the races and the casinos, and ignored her suggestion of a visit to a place that intrigued her because of its distance from everything that made up their lives: its very name promised a refuge.

  She had quickly given up being the delightfully coquettish woman he had brought back from Europe after his frail and highly bred first wife’s death. She soon began to complain loudly of boredom and disappointment. “I am not one of these silly card-playing women of your circle,” she told him since he obviously failed to see this fact for himself. The next step was voicing her desire, at first in company and then when she was alone with him while he was digesting a gigantic meal, having his coffee and smoking his cigar, to travel outside Mexico City and see something of this land to which he had brought her.

  He raised his eyelids with difficulty (she suspected something seriously wrong with them, it could not be natural for them to droop so in broad daylight even if he was twice her age). He mumbled, chewing at the idea and finding it tough.

  “Can we not go on a journey?” she cried, waving her hands at him as if to attract and hold his attention. “I have been here already a year and seen nothing, nothing at all!”

  He gestured tiredly, making his cigar sweep in an aromatic circle that she found suffocating. “Tell the chauffeur,” he mumbled, “to take you to Teotihuacan, the pyramids . . .”

  “Oh mein Gott, Roderigo, I have seen the pyramids of Teotihuacan, how many times! Taken all our visitors there, don’t you know that? I am as good as a paid guide already to the pyramids of Teotihuacan. Has Mexico nothing more to offer?”

  He began to look annoyed. He chewed on his cigar. He did not trouble to raise his eyelids. “Xochimilco, then,” he offered, “the floating gardens . . .”

  “The floating gardens!” she shrieked. “What next?”

  Then he did lift those lids to give her a withering glare: she was growing shrill, this blond butterfly of a woman, his European trophy—“the fresh rosebud in his lapel,” someone had called her—whom he had met on his last European tour undertaken, disastrously, just before the outbreak of World War II. The family had dispatched him to get in touch with former business partners: the price of precious metals had risen, other mines were being revived—why not theirs? But although Roderigo knew the racecourses and the clubs of Europe, he knew little else and understood nothing. Bewildered by the way his former business partners seemed suddenly to be distracted or even to have gone underground, he had little to do but search for distraction himself. Then the attractive blond girl he had spotted earlier on the arm of one of those uniformed and bemedaled military men who were suddenly ubiquitous, and again on the stage as a dancer in the chorus of a lively musical show in a theater he had wandered into, reappeared in the lobby of his hotel. When he went into the dining room for his daily consolation of Wiener schnitzel and apfelstrudel, there she was again, alone at a table, casting him flirtatious looks. Flattered, charmed, he responded with all the gallantry he could summon. When it finally dawned upon him that no business was to be done that summer in Austria, or in Germany, and he regretfully informed her that he had to return to Mexico, she conveyed such an all-consuming interest in his home and family and business in that faraway land, their sugar-cane estates, their timber holdings, and the property they owned in Mexico City and the “silver cities” of the north, such a curiosity and enthusiasm, that he began to consider her as a replacement for the dear departed Doña Josefina. The speed with which she agreed to be his wife and with which she packed and prepared to leave did fluster him: it was not the way he was used to acting himself, even if he could see that circumstances had changed and called for changed behavior. It was she who searched for berths on an earlier boat than he had managed to find, insisting that they travel to England and catch one from Liverpool that would take them to New York and from there to Veracruz. Dismayed, he asked if this was really necessary, upon which she became nearly hysterical, demanding to know if he did not understand. Of course he did, he assured her, but clearly did not since he asked if she did not wish to spend some time with her family before she left. She assured him she had none. No family? That did give him pause for thought but before he could inquire further, they were boarding the boat for New York. During the entire voyage she was prostrate with seasickness and nerves and unable to come out on deck or into the dining room to meet other passengers. “It might do you good,” he tried to persuade her. “You would enjoy the company of a charming Herr Levi I have met. Or of Herr Wolfowitz and his wife . . .” She practically fainted then, begging him not to speak to them of his poor, sick bride.

  He remembered that now, as he regarded this shrill, shrieking woman whose cheeks were no longer porcelain white but red as a cook’s with anger, her blond curls damp on her forehead. No longer attractively dressed in pale blue or pink tulle or crépe de Chine but still in her nightdress and slippers, and without cosmetics or perfume. Doña Josefina would never have appeared thus at table, he reflected bitterly, never. She continued to complain—of boredom, of uneducated company: “merchants, shopkeepers, ranchers! And once I dined with generals, governors, statesmen!”—till he heaved himself to his feet, shouting, “And why were you so eager to leave them, their company, your glorious country, and come here?” She stopped her harangue then and looked at him, appalled. “Because it was all destroyed,” she said at last, in a much lower, less confident voice. “You didn’t see it but I did—how it was all up, finished.” “So then you are lucky, are you not,” he demanded, “to have come away?” and lurched off himself, to his study and the soothing company of his Great Dane, El Duque, and the silver flask of brandy behind the leather-bound volumes of the encyclopedia. He sat in his great leather chair and El Duque laid a drooling jowl upon his slippered foot with a groan of sympathy. Fondling the dog’s ears, he grumbled at himself under his breath for not having made inquiries about the woman he was to marry and her mysterious lack of family or means.

  HE OUGHT to have paid more attention. Even now, with Roderigo long since dead and buried in the family vault, where no one visited him, it gave her satisfaction to think how mistaken he had been and how much he must have regretted it when, leaving him to a family council in San Luis Potosí to which he had insisted she come, she had slipped away, scandalously alone, and visited for herself the Hacienda de la Soledad, the house at the foot of the mountain from which the silver had been extracted that made the family wealthy, wealthy enough to own this hacienda among so many others. The others, however, being occupied by his mother, his aunts, his sisters and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, uncles and cousins, had been so many extensions of the prison house in “the best locality” in Mexico City to which he had brought her, while the Hacienda de la Soledad was from the very first her own: no one else
wanted it.

  In all her European years, she had never had solitude or space. No one in Roderigo’s family or circle could know how she had lived—the small, cramped apartment at the top of a building of stained and peeling stucco, its dripping walls, torn linoleum, and its battered stove and pots, smells of lavatories down the hall and cabbage cooking in the kitchen, and the fear of losing even that.

  She had made her way out of it, first by catching the eye of one of the men newly arrived in their city who dined nightly in the restaurant at a table on which she waited, then by persuading him to pay for dancing lessons, something her own parents could not afford to give her. This had led to small roles in musical shows put on in theaters scattered across the city, but she had made the most of them, she had not gone unnoticed. There had been rewards—bouquets sent around to the stage door, invitations to parties, the occasional weekend in a country villa. Of course there was the unavoidable return to the family, its querulous needs and demands and criticisms, but these ceased mercifully once she was able to find positions through her new friends and patrons for her father and brothers—lowly ones, true, but in these difficult times even those were welcome. If they did not last, she was not to blame (although her mother clearly did: “I told you so—” she shrieked the night Vera’s father came home bloody and beaten by a group of anti-Nazis, “I told you so!”). Next it was the director at the theater, polite and circumspect Herr Schmidt with his spotless white cuffs and cashmere scarf, beckoning her into his office as she went by in her costume and makeup and perspiring from her dance, to warn her to be careful of her friends “because we cannot protect you out there.” Coming from him, the words had authority. She had not been unaware of the rumors and fears swirling thick and dark around them, making everyone realize that the bright lights were about to go out, only she had so much wanted it all to last.

  It was then, in the hotel where she went to see if one familiar face could be found to reassure her of the protection she had enjoyed, that Roderigo appeared instead—large, foolish, and fumbling, but all fresh linen, gleaming leather, and the smell of bay rum. An outsider, a foreigner, presenting an opening to a foreign world. Not that she had ever craved one before, or had any idea of what it might be—the places and people he named were unknown to her—but compelling for precisely that reason.

  A graveyard of history—that was what she found herself surveying when she first saw the Hacienda de la Soledad, a ruin of blackened stones, fallen beams, and cavernous halls where her footsteps sounded like hammers tapping on the great stone tiles. All around parched land with the wind roaring like an unimpeded flood through its emptiness. She had herself driven up the mountain and followed streets silenced by white dust and lined with doorless, windowless, and often roofless houses in which lizards hid among weeds. On the steps of the cathedral, so immense and so grand as to seem like a mirage in the blinding light, some Franciscan priests wrapped in shadowy robes watched her pass. She asked the chauffeur to continue along a dirt track, where a few adobe walls stood among the thorn trees and cacti, up to the scarred and flattened mountaintop. Here she ordered him to stop outside the whitewashed walls around a silent cemetery and its desolate chapel on a rock, and got out to walk. He came out after her with her linen hat and she put it on irritatedly, and waved him away, then set out to find some trace of the mines that had once belonged to Roderigo. Except for a few abandoned excavations and ruined entrances to shafts and tunnels, there was none. The silence was so intense that she could hear the wings of the zopilotes circling watchfully above on currents of air; she had to imagine the sounds the mountain must once have contained—explosions of dynamite, small avalanches of gravel followed by the thunder of falling boulders, the rumble of metal trolleys along rusty tracks, jackhammers, whistles and sirens. She felt certain their echoes must still resound, and seeing the dark eye of a cave in the mountainside, entered it in the desire to hear that pounding and beating for herself. Perhaps even the hoofs of Zapata’s horses, carrying the message of the Revolution: “Tierra y Libertad!” Taking a few steps into that darkness, she was brought to a standstill by the total absence of light. Not a chink, not a shaft, and not the possibility of one: it could only grow darker, blacker, more totally. Still, she stood waiting to see if something would materialize—an eye that watched, a movement.

  There was a scramble of footsteps on the gravel, the panting breath of someone quite distraught. “Señora, señora,” the chauffeur called, “come back, instantly, I beg you.” When she did, she found him whey-faced and listened to his scolding. “There are rattlesnakes there, scorpions as big as your hand. Shafts you could fall through. Please, please, what would the señor say to me?”

  She gave him a disdainful smile and had him drive her back to the hacienda, telling him to go and find the caretaker while she took another look around. She went down to a jacaranda tree on the slope below from where she could look out over a shallow lake on fire with afternoon light, and the mesa beyond, taking on the purple and crimson brushstrokes of evening. “Tierra y Libertad,” she said to herself and then, realizing there was no one to hear, shouted out, “Tierra y Libertad!”

  The chauffeur, sitting on a bench outside the caretaker’s hut with the mug of café con leche he had been given, muttered to himself that he had always suspected she was una loca.

  ONCE SHE HAD moved in, Vera engaged the man who acted as caretaker of the hacienda, and lived below it in a shed enclosed by a fence of cacti and thorn, to lend her one of the horses he kept among the more useful burros, pigs, and turkeys, and teach her to ride it. The first time she mounted it and set off, she said to herself that this was how she would make the land hers.

  She knew she would have to be strong to live here: she had to kill scorpions daily in the ruins of the house before it was repaired, and sometimes the silence was so intense that she could hear the termites’ tiny jaws gnawing at the beams above her while sawdust rained down on the furniture, the floor, her bed, her hair. Once, on a hot, still night, she left the windows of her room unshuttered as she fell asleep and in the night was awakened by a searing pain on her shoulder. There was no one to call for help till morning, when the caretaker’s wife came, looked at the blister growing there, and told her it was surely caused by the urine of a bat. Vera remembered that some had swooped in and around at dusk, and screamed at the woman for help. She did eventually bring it—there was no doctor or hospital for miles—in the form of an old sorceress, and Vera had had to submit to her potions and poultices, which, it had to be admitted, did bring down the swelling, although the scar never vanished.

  On another occasion, a half-starved man appeared in the courtyard long after the door to the road had been locked for the night. She sent him around to the kitchen for bread and told her reluctant maids to let him stay the night on sacks in the storeroom where supplies of maize, rice, beans, sugar, coffee, and tobacco were kept. As they predicted, he was gone by morning, along with the silver candlesticks from the table and the ornate gilt clock she had brought from Mexico City. The caretaker came that afternoon to inform her that the police were inquiring after a man who had escaped from prison, where he was held on a charge of murder. “Still, he was a beggar,” she said to Jaime, “should he have been sent away hungry?” and she said nothing to Roderigo when he came on one of his rare visits.

  EVERY DAY she made herself ride miles out alone and learn how to endure the sun and thirst and solitude. She rode over the mesa, where a stranger could easily be lost in the featureless monotony of rubble, and learned that it had secret features and contours for those who looked. There were invisible arroyos marked only by the unexpected stand of drooping álamos or ahuehueté trees, and an occasional isolated rancho with flat-topped adobe huts where dogs barked to see her pass and women stopped pounding maize or scrubbing laundry in shallow troughs to gaze at her in silence. These ranchos would be fringed with dry cornstalks that seemed to mutter and murmur to each other conspiratorially, in a language she had to m
aster.

  The sun followed her through the day, a fierce and watchful eye. She found the evenings best, when the sky paled, the earth darkened, and the air ceased to be as sharp as a glinting knife and turned gentler, mild. Occasionally she stayed out so late that she would decide to camp for the night instead of returning home; she would light a small fire of brush in the lee of some boulders and lie rolled in a blanket to listen to her horse pawing at the stones and watch the stars wheel overhead.

  It was there that she had her first encounter with the Huichol. Winding uphill in single file like pilgrims from an earlier, primal world, some barefoot, some in soundless sandals, they had bows and arrows with them and carried bags slung over their shoulders, clearly still hunter-gatherers. Although they politely returned her greeting, they did not pause or show the slightest interest in her foreign presence: she might have been a cactus to get around or a stone they had stumbled upon. She could not make out who they might be: she could see from their dress and appearance that they were not local people, who were all farmers or herders. On returning to the hacienda, she asked Jaime, when he came to help her dismount, if he knew. “Huichol, Huichol,” he told her. It was the first time that she heard the word. He went on to tell her that it was the time of year when they came on their long pilgrimage from as far away as Nayarit and Jalisco in search of the peyote cactus that grew only in this region. He described it to her but she could never see it, it blended in so completely with the pebbly rubble of the soil. Why would they want it so much as to come some three hundred miles on foot to collect it, she wondered, and Jaime, laughing, told her how it gave them visions that made them see the spirits they worshiped. “So they’re not católicos?” she asked. “No, no,” Jaime assured her, and called them, derisively, paganos, heathens.