The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  Vera, who despised Jaime and his slatternly wife and their numerous snuffling children and thought of them, privately, as half-caste, found her curiosity aroused by the aloofness and selfcontainment of the Huichol she had seen, characteristics, she thought, of a higher level of being, but she was cautious. She knew she would have to be patient and wait, not make any hasty or overt attempt to engage them till they became used to her following them on their route, at a discreet distance, and came to see her as unthreatening. (Jaime had told her they were afraid of running into local farmers or ranchers who would chase them off their property and have them arrested for trespassing.) So it was a long time before she even attempted to convey to them, through gestures and a little Spanish, on finding a group so fatigued and dehydrated that they had sunk onto their haunches in the midday blaze of heat and seemed hardly able to proceed, that her hacienda was open to them and they could come in and refresh themselves. She had tables set out in the courtyard and pitchers of water and te de Jamaica brought out to them by her supercilious maids, who expressed resentment at having to serve them till she was able to teach them better. She had her visitors show her their embroidery and beadwork and the decorated pots they had brought with them, and bought pieces to display on the walls and tables of her huge, echoing rooms. When Roderigo came and brought an occasional visitor, it was clear they thought her crazy to collect such objects, but when she insisted on their taking some back to the city for display and sale, they were equally amazed to discover that folk art had become fashionable, thanks to such flamboyant leaders of the art world as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and could actually be sold. Vera saw to it that the Huichol received the profits. Their gratitude gave her an inkling of what it might be not to be the recipient but the distributor of largesse.

  A LETTER ARRIVED inquiring about her growing collection. It bore a stamp and a name that were recognizably German and made her heart clench as if it were locking itself up. She did not reply. But the author of the letter—which had the letterhead of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin-Dahlem—did not give up and enlisted other Mesoamericanists to plead with her to share what she knew of Huichol lore and legend, artifacts and objects.

  At that time, she knew nothing, and how could she confess that? She wanted nothing to do with academics who would only expose her ignorance: she had no book learning to speak of. What was she to tell them—that she had learned to act and dance instead?

  So she held out till it dawned upon her that her position was a unique one and she could make something of that. Something that would either impress or appall Roderigo and his family—probably the latter. At the end of a particularly long, arid day when Jaime and his family and the kitchen staff were all away at a fiesta, and the silence rang in her ears as if she were the only living person on earth, she relented and agreed to a visit by a pair of scholars, from the Instituto Nacional Indigenista. It was a very long way for them to come but, once there, they were sufficiently impressed to declare it was the perfect setting for a conference of Mesoamericanists. That was when her defenses truly collapsed. She whirled around—and made her resistant staff whirl too—to have the hacienda polished, buffed, furbished and refurbished to receive her guests. In a panic, she even begged friends in Mexico City (never considered “friends” before) to send help—and they sent her Maggie Paget, a young English girl in need (an orphan serving as a companion to her godmother in Yucatán, she had been left stranded by the old lady’s death), who brought with her, in a cart filled with hay, a Bösendorfer piano, and from the first day made herself indispensable. The conference was a success—and the legend of Doña Vera was launched.

  The younger of the academics had even stayed on to make a film about her life. Being the star of a film—how could she have resisted that? It had seemed as if, in the most bizarre and unexpected way, her past had found a way to fuse with the present. Posing for them on horseback amid the cacti or in her courtyard with her arms around her Huichol friends, she flashed a smile at the camera such as she had always been meant to but never had before.

  PERHAPS IF she had known then what it would all lead to, she would never have begun. If she had known, she would not have shared her Huichol with anyone, but joined them in the mountains, alone. As it was, she now had pathetic creatures like the young man she had just dismissed come and sit at her table, waiting for some crumbs to fall. There they sat, worrying—she could see how they worried—about their research papers, their dissertations, their careers, their little pining lives. Coming out to the sierra in the hope that she, and of course the Huichol, would open doors to vaster, richer worlds. They reminded her of the mineros searching in desperation for less and less productive veins of gold, or the missionaries who infiltrated everywhere in search of souls to collect for the Lord. Now these souls had to be collected for another institution, the university. Doña Vera despised all equally.

  She remembered one silly woman she had had as a guest, a very silly woman indeed who clasped her hands to her bosom and exclaimed, with shining eyes, “Oh, I wish I had been born a Huichol woman! Perhaps in my next life I will be born one!” to which she had snapped—quite aware that she had had such moments and aspirations herself once—“Yes? You think you will be able to grind corn and light the fire and make tortillas for your men while they are sleeping off a night’s drinking? And have a new baby every year tied in your rebozo to nurse?” and the woman had cringed.

  Many years later it still pleased her to think of putting that woman in her place. Not up in the clouds but down, at her feet. You had to have lived in Europe in the times when she did, to have survived and succeeded where people around you were falling to pieces, starving, going off to prison—or somewhere—never to be heard from again, to know what it took.

  The old irritation and scorn returned. She called after Consuela, half asleep on her feet as she carried away the coffee tray, “Have you cleared the dining table? Have you set it for breakfast? Have you remembered the fresh napkins?” and she waited, her hand on the banister, to see Consuela put out the lights, one by one, leaving just the one on the staircase for her to go up to her own apartment, leaving the house below in darkness so that the crickets could come out and begin to chirp and the owl in the tree outside to call: they knew their roles in her house.

  ERIC, LEFT IN semidarkness, could not resist peering into the library, where a light was still on. He both surprised and was himself surprised by Miss Paget, who had not retired but appeared still at work behind a pile of books at her desk. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Eric at once said on seeing her put her hand to her mouth in alarm. “I—um—I just hoped to pick up something to read in bed. But—”

  She rose at once, smoothing down her collar and straightening her glasses. (Eric could not help wondering if she had been having a drink behind her books.) “Can I help?” she offered, as if it were ten in the morning, the library open, and she on duty.

  Eric wandered around, stroking desktops and book spines as if reacquainting himself with a familiar world, which, in a way, he was. “Um—a history, perhaps? Is there one of the mining town above? It’s what I’ve come to see.”

  Miss Paget pondered, then shook her head. But she did find him two books she thought provided information on “modern” Mexico. “Most of what we have here is on pre-Columbian Mexico,” she explained, and handed him Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain and Carl Sartorius’s Mexico and the Mexicans. “But these are nineteenth century,” she said, “so there’s sure to be much on the mining industry.”

  “Just the thing,” he assured her, and thanked her profusely before he left. From the weight of the books, their dustiness, and the dates they bore—1811 and 1859—he was certain they would help to put him to sleep.

  PROFESSOR WAINWRIGHT, lowering himself onto his bed, bent to unlace his shoes. Mrs. Wainwright studied him over the top of her book. She could not keep a somewhat smug expression from her greasily lotioned and rose-scented f
ace: she had slipped away before she could be made to see Queen of the Sierra yet again, and spent a happy hour in bed with a thriller instead. “So, what did the students think of it?” she asked because she could not refrain from rubbing it in, her little triumph.

  The professor removed his glasses and put them carefully away. “I did not ask,” he replied after a moment. “I did not want to hear.”

  She chortled. “And she got in that line about not understanding anything unless you sleep on stones and freeze.”

  “Well, yes,” he agreed, sliding a finger under his bow tie to loosen it. “She always does.”

  “I guess it was for the benefit of the new guy,” said his wife, the thriller having made her wide-awake and alert. “Couldn’t be for us, we’ve heard it too often.”

  He rose to his feet and stretched, snapping his suspenders and yawning.

  “One year,” she said, and she too had said it before, “just one year, we should go to Acapulco instead,” and turned back to the thriller.

  ERIC, RETURNING TO his room and feeling a wave of tiredness take him up and roll him over, was undressing listlessly when he became aware that the room was unusually warm and stuffy: a fire was burning in the grate. It irritated him somehow unendurably: Why, on a warm night, should anyone light a fire? And who was it that so freely used the poor, diminished resources of this land in order to provide it to foreign tourists, even if unasked for and unwanted? What would Em think? And what, too, would she say about it to Doña Vera?

  He threw open the window to let out the smoke, lowered himself onto the bed, and let the cool night air enter and wash over him. He soon found that it had the effect of making him wide-awake again. Although his bones were aching from the journey, his head was suddenly clear. He picked up the Political Essay and read:

  The Indian tenateros, the beasts of burden in the mines of Mexico, remain loaded with a weight of 275 to 300 pounds for a span of six hours. In the galleries of Valenciana, they are exposed to temperatures of 22° to 25° (71–75° F) and during this time they ascend and descend several thousands of steps in pits of an inclination of 45°. The tenateros carry the minerals in bags made of the threads of pité. To protect their shoulders (for the mineros are generally naked to the middle) they place a woolen covering under this bag. We meet in the mine some 50 or 60 of these porters, among whom are men above sixty and boys of ten or twelve years of age. In ascending the stairs they throw their bodies forward and rest on a staff. They walk in a zigzag direction because they have found from long experience that their respiration is less impeded when they traverse obliquely the current of air which enters the pits from without.

  At this point he laid the book across his chest to face unimpeded that same current of air as had met the miners, forcing them to adopt the lurching, zigzag motion that he felt he had been, throughout his journey, imitating. Was this the world his grandfather had found when he crossed the ocean and sought out new territory where he might stake his claim? The effort to enter that past, as if it were a mine that no light pierced and where no air circulated, exhausted Eric and he gave himself up to sleep, gratefully.

  IN THE LIBRARY, Miss Paget turned off the last of the green-shaded lamps, having first made her desktop clear and tidy for the morning. She knew Doña Vera did not like the lights kept on after she retired. In fact, one of her duties was to walk down the length of the corridor and make sure the resident students had switched off their lights, too. This Doña Vera had instructed her to do but, although she did walk down the corridor on her way to her small room at the end of it, she could not bring herself to tap on anyone’s door and call out. There were things that Maggie Paget would not do, not even for Doña Vera. She comforted herself by saying softly, “Shh, shh,” outside doors where she heard voices, and laughter, and by the thought that they would not hear her. Silence and invisibility were her life’s lessons.

  IN HER ROOM, Doña Vera removed her kimono, dropping it where Consuela would pick it up in the morning. It was shot silk in the colors of the quetzal and when it fell away, she was reduced to an inner layer of gray cotton so that a reverse cycle had been performed from that of chrysalis to butterfly or fledgling to peacock. In that drab garb, she went across to the painted armoire. It creaked as she opened it so that she could look at the leather-framed photograph on the shelf of Ramón, the first, dear, dearest, dearest of all Huichol friends she had made—oldest, dearest, most beloved. Here he was, Ramón, when young, dressed in snow-white cotton, a wide belt of embroidery, and a straw hat from which small emblems of the peyote cactus dangled like six- or eight- or twelve-petaled flowers. He was smiling; she too smiled, and they were young together, younger. Soon it would be el Día de los Muertos, and she touched his face in the photograph—black blending with sepia—and said, “Ramón,” her lips parting with the crackling sound of paper being torn. “Ramón, if I put out tequila for you tomorrow, and a cigar, and tamales, then, will you come? Will you?” But the face in the photograph looked past her, smiling, while she caressed the feather-tipped arrows he had given her, and felt the feathers caress her in return. She tried to make him meet her eyes but she had taken the photograph in slanting light, he had trouble looking directly at her, he squinted and looked into the distance, smiling as if he did not hear her. She had asked him year after year and he had not come—the tequila was left untouched, the cigar unlit, the tamales uneaten.

  She hurled the door to the armoire shut, almost splitting it, causing her pugs to yelp with alarm, and went over to her bed and lay down, crossing her arms on her breast and closing her eyes on the luminous image of him.

  He had been brought to her as a boy who had hurt his arm while on the pilgrimage, the youngest member of a group from Nayarit. They had all been weakened by that long journey, and the fasting that went with it, and the trek over the stony terrain. She had ordered the kitchen staff to provide them with food straightaway and invited them to stay. They refused, but when she saw they had a young boy with them who held his arm in such agony and yet held back his tears, she brought out her box of medicines and bandages, and treated it.

  Any other child would have winced and cried. Instead, he kept his eyes wide open, gazing around him as if the objects he saw compensated him for his pain. At the end of the painful procedure, he ran across to what had clearly captivated him—the pug that a Franciscan father had presented to her on a visit just that afternoon, so small and so bizarre with its dark frown drawn down over its head like a stocking mask. Lifting it onto his lap, he had cradled the dog and made its little curl of a tail wag for the first time since it had entered her house. Watching, she felt certain that this was the place for the child to be—in her home, with her. Yet, when the family left and he with them, she was struck by the fear that she and her little pug would not see the boy again, he would surely die on the way. They promised to stop next year, and when they did not, she was certain he had died.

  He reappeared three years later, grown into a youth, agile and fit, springing down the mountain from rock to rock to greet her. He was cured—he showed her the scar on his arm, healed and pink and silken to touch—and he was older, aware—as not before—of his beauty and charm. Unlike his family, who had been made nervous by her house and all that she owned and offered them, he was eager to see it again and accept what she had to give. Where was Bandido? he asked, remembering the pug dog’s name. It was the beginning of a legendary friendship, irregular and infrequent but revived over some ten years, again and again—till, abruptly it ended.

  Now, supine, she felt that loss again, the black coyote that hunted her down at night. She nearly broke out again into the howl she had uttered on hearing of his death—senseless, pointless, falling from a roof he was repairing in his village (so his family said, while others maintained it was in pursuit of a girl who lived nearby, and still others that it was when he was being chased by someone with a knife after a drunken brawl and that he had taken too much peyote and run out of control, but what did it matte
r what they said?)—throwing open her arms to catch him when he fell. She had promised to take care of him—why had she not?

  If she did howl out loud, no one heard—or, if they did, they would have taken it for a dog baying on a rancho in the dark, or even a coyote on the mountainside.

  If they had looked out of their windows, they would have seen the heaving mass of the tree outside, the outline of the mountain against the night sky, interrupting those profound depths pierced by stars.

  THE ARMOIRE CREAKED open, waking her, and in the dark, Ramón the god appeared, no longer flesh and blood but paint and mask and feathers, a wooden idol whose eyelids moved. They lifted, and the eyes that looked out were real and alive. They stared at her, lying on her bed, old and ugly and shrunken—because she too was real and alive. His wooden lips parted to smile, but instead of smiling, they uttered a caw. The lips were beaks, painted beaks that cawed. It was not Ramón but a zopilote pretending to be Ramón, and it was leading an army of zopilotes that was emerging from the armoire, two by two, in perfect formation. They were not flying but walking, marching, kicking out their big clawed feet and stiff booted legs that might have looked wooden if they had not also looked military.

  It would be best not to be there when they arrived. She rolled over in bed and tried to crawl out of the room unnoticed but found every exit blocked, crowded now with people. She pushed at them and screamed at them to let her pass. They turned faces to her that were bird masks, with beaks shut and eyes closed, and they pushed back, pushing her farther and farther into the center of the room, where a cage stood in place of her bed. She realized they were trying to put her into it, but she could not let them. She fought them as best she could, and the closer she was pressed toward the cage, the more fiercely she fought. Only they were so very many, and their hands were merging into one solid bank of hands that were made of stone. The stones were being set up all around her. If she would not get into the cage, they would enclose her within stone walls instead, because the truth was this was no magical mountaintop refuge: she had tricked herself into it and was a prisoner here, there was no escape. She was being slowly suffocated to death—screaming, struggling, and suffocating. Her hands tore at the stones, and she panted—let me breathe, let me breathe, let me breathe—while heaving for breath.