by Anita Desai
AFTER SUCH A NIGHT, morning could only come as a relief. Not disappointment at finding herself where she was, this place in which she had confined herself, but relief at being here, nowhere else, and that she was flooded by the daylight of everyday. She had never imagined that one day, that would be all she wanted of life. Perhaps age made it seem almost sufficient.
Almost, but not quite: that would not have been Doña Vera’s way. Easing herself out of bed, she went in slippers to the window to feel the sun that blazed on her with such force. Her eye fell, unluckily, on the figure of her new guest seated beneath the jacaranda tree, turning over the leaves of a book. No doubt a book from her library. Annoyed at seeing him, she muttered to herself as she washed and dressed: Have you nothing better to do but sit in my garden and amuse yourself with my books? Do you think my role is to be your provider?
When she went down, she shouted through the kitchen door for coffee and rolls to be brought, then gave orders for all the silver to be polished. “Today?” asked the maid, dismayed. It was el Día de los Muertos and she had planned to go with the groom to the panteón—
“Today! Now!”
UNAWARE THAT HE had been observed, Eric sat under the feathery tree and read Carl Sartorius on the Indians who worked the mines:
Frequently they have to ascend a thousand or fifteen hundred feet, not by ladders but by means of the trunks of trees in which steps have been hewn. As tallow candles only are allowed in mines, the workman must shelter his light with one hand, so that the draught may not extinguish it, and have therefore only slight hold on the other. He thus moves upward with his burthen, the trunk being slightly inclined, and secured by props every fifteen feet, the abyss on either side, into which a false step precipitates him. Indians have been known to carry up from five hundredweight in this manner, in leather sacks.
Looking up at the mountains that stood in the pure light of the milk-blue sky as if they had never been trodden upon by man or beast, Eric failed to relate them to such toil. Nor could he see where his grandfather stood in relation to them, that small neat man in the brown cardigan with the leather patches who had shown him a toy train. Certainly he would not have labored as the Indians did. Nor had he possessed any share of the mines, although he must have profited. How much of what had driven him to come here was sheer necessity and how much adventure? His motives and his role were to Eric an anomaly, a disturbing one. Placing a finger between the leaves of the book to mark his page, he turned instead to watching the flight of white birds appearing from nowhere and sailing down through the gauzy air to the glistening lake below.
IN THE LIBRARY, Miss Paget, red-faced, was confronting Doña Vera about lending books to an overnight visitor. He had asked for a book on the mining history of the town, she explained, and since they had none, she had found him von Humboldt’s Essay and Carl Sartorius’s account. Was that not right?
Doña Vera was too angry to speak for a while. When she did, she sputtered, “A book on mining, did you say? What? What? We are not a mu-se-um of min-er-alogy here, are we? Did you tell him he has made a mis-take? I will tell him so—”
Miss Paget was both frightened and remorseful. They had had such visitors before, innocent tourists who imagined this was some inn where they could pause before climbing the mountain to the fabled ghost town above, unaware of what Doña Vera had created here, a center of research and show place of Huichol art. This young man had seemed a more serious tourist, but she had been mistaken, and Doña Vera had found her out. So early in the morning . . .
The students who sat at the long tables looking through books (and writing post cards home) watched and listened as discreetly as possible, but on hearing Doña Vera’s opinion of the visitor, could not help small smiles and glances at each other (there was not much other entertainment after all).
Then they lifted their heads and watched as she marched out of the library into the garden beyond and called loudly for the gardener so she could give him a dressing-down too. So, this was to be one of those days at the Hacienda de la Soledad, was it?
But when they assembled for lunch, with Doña Vera presiding over the great tureen of soup and seeing to it that the basket of rolls was passed up and down the length of the table, her mood had changed again. No one could know this but it was as if the last black, bitter shreds of the night had finally receded; she had driven them out—with her temper, and her authority—and now they cowered in a corner, presumably rallying themselves for their next assault but at least for the time being, for the day, the triumph was hers.
Also, she appeared to want to put on something of a display—not for this usual lot of visitors, students from some university or the other, she did not even remember which one—but for the new guest, who was not sufficiently apprised, evidently, of her work. This she could not tolerate. She demanded respect from him, from everybody; no one could leave her presence without her having wrested that. So, over the soup, she gave one of the talks of which they had heard, they were so legendary, but that she seldom delivered nowadays. She spoke like one inspired, of the Huichol trinity of peyote, deer, and maize, of the wolf shaman and the rites he undergoes to get in touch with his animal spirit and become a wolf with a wolf’s knowledge of the world, and of the hunting of the deer on foot, the sacrifice accompanied by the imbibing of peyote, the Huichol knowledge of plants, their pharmacology of plants and their uses in the treatment of diseases and ailments, and how they had discovered inoculation against the dreaded smallpox long before any European had dared to make the experiment—“Am I right, Professor Wainwright?” she called across the table.
He knew better than to be drawn in, and letting his soup spoon pause in its regular passage between mouth and bowl, he smiled and nodded and refrained from speaking.
Eric too held his tongue and did not enter into any discussion that might expose his ignorance and call for further instruction.
She threw him a sharp look every now and then to see if she was making an impression on him. “So then,” she wound up, “we do what we can to pre-serve their way of life, the sa-cred way, and not de-stroy it. Who wants to see de-struc-tion may go”—she pointed a finger in the air—“up the mountain,” and flung a triumphant look around the table. When the students burst into spontaneous applause, she looked as gratified as a cat and fingered the heavy pendant dangling on her chest.
OUT IN THE COURTYARD, the señora’s three Huichol guests—two cousins and a nephew of Ramón’s—sat in the shade of the corridor with their handicrafts displayed on a table. Day after day they spread them out although there were few customers apart from the occasional batch of these students, on summer internships, who came and bought the cheapest souvenirs to take home, and practiced on them what little they had picked up of the Huichol language.
So they kept themselves occupied with making more and more of the bead wristlets and the yarn paintings of the deer hunt and peyote, hoping Doña Vera would take another carload to be sold in the city or, even better, take them with her to the city one day.
It was hot at midday. Little doves ran about on their curled pink toes in the blue shade of the jacaranda tree, searching among the fallen twigs and scattered leaves as if they had mislaid something. Their wings were speckled as eggs and they blended in so well with the pebbles that they would not have been visible had it not been for their movement, constant and hurried, or their voices, conversing among themselves in soothing undertones.
“Look,” one of the craftsmen said drowsily, brushing aside the straw emblems that dangled from his hat. “A car comes.”
The other two looked up in hope, following the banner of dust as it unfurled along the dirt road rounding the lake. Then, “It is only the priest,” another said in disgust, “he never buys,” and they returned to their beads and yarn and beeswax.
The maids too had seen the car approach from the kitchen window as they washed up. They wiped their hands and hurried to let in Fray Junípero, nearly as dusty and decrepit as his car in
his rusty old cassock that smelled of all the years of service it had given him. But they bent their knees and crossed their aproned chests dutifully, and escorted him into Doña Vera’s room off the library.
She took her time before appearing: Fray Junípero was one of the afflictions that she put up with and she did so with scant grace. She did call for coffee, however, and did not have to tell them it was to be accompanied by brandy and cigars.
“You look as if you have been batt-ling the pagans again, father,” she said to him dryly, filling both a cup and a glass for him. “Have Christ’s forces still not tri-umphed?”
“The battle is perpetual, daughter,” Fray Junípero replied, mopping his face with a handkerchief as large as a kitchen towel before he drank down the tiny cup of coffee and turned gratefully to the goblet of brandy. “No sooner is my back turned than they bring in their little pieces of string and wax and claws and feathers and Heaven alone knows what else in their bundles to offer to our blessed Virgin.”
“And does she accept?”
“She accepts all, in her grace and generosity,” he admitted. “It is left to me to chastise and to teach. You may bring candles and light them, and flowers, I tell them—and they do, bless them, in armfuls, in mountains, even if they go without shoes—but bring in none of your objects of black magic, I beg, remove them if you do not wish to be punished.”
“And do they?”
“Ah, daughter, do they? You know as well as I do their little tricks.” He sighed, and took a sip of brandy for consolation. “When my back is turned, they will even bring in a chicken or a rooster or a bottle of tequila as an offering. Then I have to sweep them out of the Lord’s sacred home, these pagan offerings.”
“Give up, father,” she told him, “give up, and let the old gods back. It is their land, you know.”
He looked at her with mild reproach in his little faded eyes, not really allowing her mockery to distract him from the pleasures of her fine brandy Thanks be to Don Roderigo for his cellar and to the soldados for sparing it in their wars. “You do not really mean that, I know,” he murmured, forgiving her.
She leaned forward in her chair, holding onto its arms so that she nearly doubled over her pet pug, who gave a squeal of protest. “And you know that I do, I do. They are my gods too—I ac-cept-ed them when I came here, and they are more po-wer-ful than yours, you know.”
He wagged his finger at her, reprimanding. “You are teasing, daughter, as you always do. But it is not a joke. Let us not joke about matters of such seriousness.”
“Ah, father, you know as well as I do that they bring these offer-ings to the Virgen María because to them she is not that, she is their own goddess To-nant-zin, and that is why they bring her the vo-tive of-fer-ings that she prefers.”
Now he was genuinely shocked and offended. Drawing his rusty skirts about him, he spoke as sternly as the brandy permitted him. “No, no, no,” he said so sharply, in staccato, that the pugs rose to their feet out of their sleep stupor and uttered shrill yips, sensing danger. “That statue was removed. We brought them a new image of the blessed Virgin—”
“And it was so ugly, they refused to worship it,” she reminded him. “They in-sis-ted they have the old one back—she was beautiful as old things are. And your own bishop a-greed to re-turn her to them.”
“Yes, yes, she is there too,” he admitted irritably, “in a corner. They can have her too if they want. What is one to do with these paganos?”
Doña Vera began to laugh. The pugs looked up at her, wagged the little smiling curls of their tails, and settled back around her feet, happy that she was laughing. “The Church of the Two Virgins,” she mocked him.
“Ah, I tell you,” he muttered, and lit himself a cigar. “That is bad enough but even worse are these aleluyas that have arrived in our midst.”
And now the two were in complete accord. The rest of the visit was spent in the greatest cordiality in condemning the Protestant missionaries who had lately begun to arrive in droves—from Kansas, from Ohio, from Iowa—with so much cash and so much in the way of food, medicines, clothing, and tools as enticement that there was no stemming the flood of conversions.
Fray Junípero, beginning to feel the effects of the brandy and the cigar in this midday heat, sighed and comforted himself with the thought, “What they do not know is that, in secret, these indios still worship the Virgin in the old way.”
Doña Vera, who was not and never had been affected by the heat, shouted out in triumph, “The old way, yes! What did I tell you? Was I not right?”
He sank back in his chair, his eyelids slipping like a turtle’s over his eyes, and grumbled petulantly, “You are always right, daughter, always, are you not?”
Seeing she could no longer get a rise out of him, she got up briskly—what triumph did for her!—announcing, “And now it is time for me to go riding.”
“Ah, ah,” he groaned, failing to see how anyone could choose such activity. He had no option but to get to his feet and follow her into the hall, where he saw the maids setting out a blasphemous altar of paper and wire skeletons, who looked to be strumming guitars and drinking tequila, on a heap of bright marigolds and other ritual objects of their pagan celebration. “Tch, tch, tch,” he clicked his tongue, thickened with brandy, and lifting up his skirts, carefully stepped around and past it. They were too occupied and excited to notice his departure.
IN THE LIBRARY, the scholars at their tables looked up to see Doña Vera cross the courtyard, dressed now in khaki britches, her riding boots, a hat on her head, all old, all worn, so that now they could see that legendary character in action, the European woman who had gone into the field before any other. There had been evenings at the dining table when they had dared to ask, “What was it like then?” and “Is it still as it was?” only to hear her snap back, “Why not go and find out?” and then add, with a brittle laugh, “Ah, I see. You want a van, eh, air-con-dition-ed, and plas-tic bot-tles filled with water, and med-i-cine for every mos-qui-to bite you get. No, that is not how I went. Now you can only see the films and read the books about it. Easy, eh? That is what mat-ters.”
The books they read in the library, however, were not written by her. She had left it to others to write them. Her legend was not reduced and restricted to print and paper.
They did not guess—glancing at them through the window as she passed, she was certain they did not guess—that she had no education beyond elementary school, that she had not been to a university or acquired a degree (other than the honorary ones that had been conferred on her later) and feared to write so much as a monograph lest it give her away. Besides, which language could she have written in? Neither English nor Spanish, both spoken languages to her, not literary ones. The only one she could write with any ease was one she would never use: she had crushed it out of herself. No tracks, no tracks.
THE CRAFTSMEN on the veranda looked up from the beads they were arranging, delicately and patiently, into deer, maize, and peyote symbols. They prepared to smile if she stopped to see what they were making—deer, maize, peyote . . .
She did not. Walking past, she only grimaced and waved. The craftsmen were perhaps the only people who saw that particular smile, an embarrassed, ingratiating smile no one else caused her to make.
She did turn her head and shout at the maids to bring them a carafe of te de Jamaica. So they smiled, bowed their heads in acknowledgment, and went back to the beads in colors of sea green, quetzal blue, gold, gray, and silver.
Perhaps another day they would broach the matter of a trip to the city—and escape.
She made her way down the cactus-lined path to the corral below, her boots sinking into the soft white wool of dust. She hummed to herself and switched the whip at her side to dispel the sense of guilt she felt in passing them without a word: she ought to be doing more for them, making more of an effort at marketing their wares. The truth was that few buyers ever came to the Hacienda de la Soledad. She would have to carry it all to
the city to be sold, and the very thought of their wares spread out on pavements along with handbags and watches and tin toys and plastic sandals upset her, conjuring up the streets of her childhood, lined with the shops of butchers and bakers and greengrocers, with merchant fists and merchant faces inhabiting them. It was what she had struggled to escape. Roderigo was supposed to have rescued her from all that, but wasn’t it what he too had been occupied in, if more grandly, as baron of silver?
She turned upon the pugs, threatening them with her whip. “Go back, go back,” she shouted, and for a brief moment a vision from last night rose up, surrounding and nearly suffocating her again. “You are not to fol-low, hear? Go back! Now! At once!” She slapped her whip against her thigh and when that made them cower but not turn, she kicked out her foot and caught one with the tip of her boot. It gave a squeal, the squeal of a pig facing slaughter, and that made them all turn, the curls in their tails coming undone and drooping, and flee back up the path.
Opening the gate to the corral and then shutting it carefully behind her, she saw the groom waiting with her horse, and waved, “Ho-la-a,” not with false joviality but with a genuine lifting and expanding of the heart and spirits at the thought of being free now and by herself again.