The Zigzag Way

by Anita Desai

  “And food with a strong aroma,” André prompted her.

  “Oh yes, and after the dead have eaten, that aroma will be gone because the dead will have taken away its spirit.”

  “To last them a whole year.”

  “And for the angelitos, the little children who died, we put out little things—little pieces of chocolate, Chiclets, peanuts, and of course azücar—sugar birds and lambs. If we make sopa, or stew, it is mild for the children, not spicy.”

  “Families say they can hear the dishes clinking when the children are there,” André broke in.

  “And among the campesinos, the peasants, people put out brooms and tortilla presses for their daughters and spades and hoes for their sons so in the world they have gone to, they can continue the lives they had here.”

  That sounded so terribly sad to Eric that he wondered now if, as a child, he had not sensed the shadow behind the Hallowe’en masquerade, a shadow others chose to ignore, cast by the gnomon between night and day, life and death. It wavered before him once again, and he was unsettled and had to make an effort to listen to what the young pair so animatedly told him.

  “On this day you visit homes where you knew the ones who died, and you bring offerings, and stay to eat with the family.”

  “You must do that. There are stories told about what happens to people who don’t. Tell him.”

  “Yes, one man who did not believe all this, he went out drinking, all night long. When he walked home in the morning, he saw a crowd of dead people returning to their world, and his parents were there too. They were empty-handed. Others were taking back armfuls of offerings and his parents had only clay in their hands and it was burning. When he returned home, he fell ill and died.”

  “But the dead do not always like to go back. The angelitos, who come at midday on the thirty-first of October, have to leave on the first of November, at noon. Then the elders arrive and must return on the second. At three o’clock fireworks will be lit as a signal for them to leave. Also, a priest will walk through our town, ringing a bell and chanting. When the dead hear that, they leave for the panteón, and we go too to wash and clean and decorate the tombs, make them ready to receive them.”

  “You should go to the panteón to see this. It is at the top of the road—in the cemetery on the mountain. It is a good day you have chosen to visit your countrymen who lived here once.”

  Yes, Eric assured them, shaking off the shadows of that old fear, that was what he would do and now he would set off before it grew hotter.

  Suddenly the dining room with its bright checked cloths, the kitchen with its clinking sounds, the chatter and laughter of the maids, passed into another mood. Everyone, everything seemed to gather around as if they shared what he was surely thinking, and feeling, on this day. “Adiós,” they called, and watched him go.

  ERIC CAME OUT of the inn by the front door so that he could cross again the square where he had arrived in the dark and see by daylight the casuarina trees that had made the sound of a stormy sea outside his window all night.

  A man in a straw hat was sweeping the paths clean with a long twig broom. The dust swirled around in the beams that slanted through the trees and made the sunlight seem hazy and soft like very fine, silken fur.

  The store where he had stopped last night to ask for directions was now doing a brisk business in breakfast rolls; people were coming by to help themselves from the trays with tongs and filling their baskets. The air smelled of biscuits.

  Eric had the map drawn for him by André on a paper napkin and his backpack was still light on his shoulders. The cathedral appeared to be on another, higher level: he could see its dome from here, above the flat-topped roofs that rose in tiers. He made his way toward it up a steep lane where booths were being set up to offer the holidaymakers what they might need for the celebration: tallow candles and buckets filled with amaranth, marigolds, and gladioli, trays full of sugar skulls and freshly baked rolls, sprinkled with colored sugar, the pan de muertos. Since visitors had come into town, even the shops behind the booths were taking advantage of the extra custom, and putting out displays of ladies’ underwear, leather belts and sandals, plastic and aluminum kitchenware. Women had set up their stalls and were flipping tortillas, stirring gravies in earthenware pots, serving the men who sat waiting on benches. A dog ran past, followed by a whole tribe of them, their tails aloft like flags. Donkeys labored uphill with loads of firewood, edging Eric into the drain alongside.

  Then there was the flight of stairs to climb, even steeper and stonier than the lane, and beggars had posted themselves along it as in some medieval painting—the old women with their heads wrapped up in black shawls, younger ones with sleeping babies tied up in rebozos strapped to them, sightless beggars playing reedy mouth organs, lame ones, ancient ones and infants, chanting, caps and palms of hands held out. One had to make one’s way past them as though this were Calvary itself before one could reach the sudden open space of the plaza and, soaring from there into a sky that shouted out light, the great rose-pink cathedral of carved cantera stone. It must have been visible for miles to anyone who approached over the baked, brown hills that lay all around. Built to the glory of God—or to the mines and the silver that had once been hidden in them? It was for the latter his grandfather had come certainly, yet he would never have set foot in the cathedral; to a Cornishman it would have represented medieval ignorance and superstition—Eric felt sure of that.

  This was clearly not what it meant to the people who were streaming into the building, and Eric, shading his eyes from the glare and wishing he had a straw hat to wear, lowered himself onto a bench to watch them from the shade of an allée of laurel trees: an old woman in black carrying an armful of calla lilies like a bridal bouquet, a boy and a girl holding hands and smiling smiles of hopeful, timid love, an old man in cotton trousers held up by string and the rope sandals of a peasant, inching his way on his knees across the cobbles to the flight of rose-pink stairs, then crawling up them while a young woman with an expression carved in stone like a saint’s followed him with his hat in her hands.

  A barefoot bootblack with a toolbox strung over his shoulders circled Eric imploringly, throwing covetous looks at his dust-caked boots, making Eric rise uneasily to his feet and decide there was no reason why he should not go into the cathedral. A thin dog that had been sleeping under the bench was disturbed, began to scratch itself furiously, then came limping along behind him. Together they made their way up the stairs that were long, curved, and soft under their feet, and Eric went through the carved oak doors into the echoing, coffin-dark interior, leaving the dog behind.

  The darkness had a kind of gelid solidity to it, a thickness as of blood, or drugged sleep. Here and there a flake of gold or silver glinted when someone struck a match and lit a candle, giving Eric a faint glimmering of the proportions of the place. He made his way carefully up an aisle to the side, taking in the sight of the saints in their glass cases, pierced with arrows or with swords, bleeding into satin skirts with tinsel fringes or garlands of paper roses. Finally he arrived where Saint Francis was seated upon a golden throne, his roughly woven, dark garment stitched with myriads of silver tokens as tiny as minnows—legs, arms, hands, and eyes—attached with safety pins by the devout and the desperate. Out of the muddy coloring of the walls, gleams of pink and gold murals revealed themselves like tantalizing glimpses of an improbable paradise.

  The stone tiles under his feet had been rubbed soft and uneven by centuries of shuffling footsteps, and when Eric paused, he saw the old man had finally arrived on his knees and was making genuflections in all four directions, one after the other, meticulously, while his daughter, if that was who she was, went up to the altar to light a candle.

  A kind of indistinct murmur congealed into a single, massed hum and Eric guessed it was the prayers and confessions being mumbled by all assembled in the comfortingly dark shadows. Remembering the morning’s conversation, he wondered if all the confessions and all t
he penance for the world’s sins were not being released here, in the murky darkness, and humming around him in an endless spiral. In the bright, bleak chapels of the north, guilt and sin were not permitted, but they seemed to have gathered here for refuge and to live on, an unquiet, numinous, and murmurous life in the forgiving dark. The past was alive here—crepuscular and underground, but also palpable.

  Without meaning to make any gesture of the sort, he found himself following the woman to the tray from which she had picked a candle to light, and selecting two himself. Taking his cue from her, he went up to the altar and lit them from the candles already lit and flaming there, then stuck the first, and after that the second, into the bed of warm, melting wax, saying aloud as he did so his grandparents’ names: “David Rowse.” “Betty Jennings.”

  After wavering a bit, the flames sprang up, brightly and playfully, each a wheel of bright spokes, blinding him. He stepped backward and as he did so, he heard laughter, the laughter of a young girl, ringing out clear and lighthearted in the dark.

  He twisted around to see who it could be.

  PART THREE

  Betty Departs

  And next morning we came to a broad causeway and continued our march . . . And we saw all those cities and villages built in the water . . . and we were astounded . . . [These] seemed like an enchanted vision . . . Some of our soldiers asked if it were not all a dream . . . I say again that I stood looking at it, and thought no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world . . .

  —BERNAL DÍAZ, The Conquest of New Spain, 1568

  6

  A great number of our miners have been engaged by the foreign mining companies and are now assembled at Falmouth waiting to embark for various destinations. Several captains, we understand, have lately accepted situations in the Mexican mines at salaries from £700 to £1700 per annum.

  —Western Luminary, February 22, 1825

  During the embarkation a band of music played airs and the hardy adventurers were saluted with the firing of cannon.

  —West Briton, April 1, 1825

  IT WAS BETTY WHO WAS LAUGHING, RUNNING UP the wet garden path between the dripping fuchsias and bursting into the house to tell her sisters of the letter she had had from Davey Rowse asking her to marry him—go to Mexico and marry him! Gertie and Sarah stopped their washing and ironing, their sweeping and cleaning, wrapped their hands up in their aprons, and laughed, thinking she had gone mad, and, laughing, she declared that was how she also felt and it was a grand feeling.

  IN 1910, on a day of high wind and leaping waves and the stink of fish rotting in the sun and on the sand, Betty Jennings of Delabole, Cornwall, came off the boat Mary Ward with the Hammer family that had engaged her to be a maid for their children during the voyage from Liverpool to Veracruz. The sea was so rough at high tide on that glittering morning, she had to be carried to shore on the shoulders of a Mexican, who waded through the waves as through silver fish scales. She shaded her eyes and saw palm trees along the beach and women in long skirts and white blouses with baskets of fish and fruit on their heads.

  “It’s just like in a painting,” she wrote her sisters and her father, who sat nursing his arthritic wrists and knees by a fire in the cottage at the edge of the quarries. It was the house where Betty was born and had lived till she promised her hand to Davey Rowse. They had met at a service in a Methodist chapel he had come to one Sunday before he set off to work in the silver mines of Mexico like so many others who had lost their jobs when the tin mines went out of business. Then he heard that the Hammer family who lived in a grand house up the hill from Padstow was returning to Mexico after the birth of another child and needed a girl to help on the voyage. They would pay good money for “a willing girl, healthy and clean.” Betty was that and more as she presented herself on their doorstep in her Sunday dress, for she brought with her a letter from the chapel school in Delabole to praise her diligence in studies, the neatness of her penmanship, and her satisfactory grasp of arithmetic. When she came out to her father, who waited in the cart by the gate, she could tell him she had been engaged.

  She had young Tobias and Ned to teach their letters and numbers, and baby May to take care of while Mrs. Hammer promenaded on the deck in fine weather and wilted on her bunk in the cabin when it was rough. Betty proved to have good sea legs and was not sick once even if sometimes a little pale. Still, she was extremely happy to step onto sand, frothing with foam and brittle with crushed shells, and, she later told Davey, had never before known that the world was so wonderful a place.

  They did not stay long in Veracruz. Mrs. Hammer could never remove her linen handkerchief from her nose for the smells from the open drains that ran through the city, keeping her in mind of the dread vómito that had claimed so many lives, and she feared for her children’s health. She would not let Betty take them out of the enclosed courtyard of the hotel, where the mass of flowers in full bloom and the lemons and oranges on the trees provided some cover for the smells, so that all Betty saw of the city was on the carriage ride to the railway station where they embarked for Mexico City.

  Traveling through the great basin of arid land beyond which hills of mauve and ocher rose and fell into fissures of violet and indigo as endlessly as the waves of the ocean, Betty was made breathless by the vast space and by the snow-topped volcanoes that appeared and disappeared like fickle moons in the sky. “A volcano covered in snow—” she never ceased to marvel at that. She held the baby May wrapped in a shawl and looked out and imagined she could see Davey Rowse come riding on a steed to meet her. She lifted the corner of the baby’s shawl to conceal the flush on her cheek.

  FROM MEXICO CITY, Betty wrote to her father and sisters on the fine white letter paper given her by the schoolmistress at the chapel school as a parting present. “The Hammers have a house here that is even grander than the one they have at home in Padstow. It is on two floors around a big open court with a fountain. The rooms all have a porch running outside them and there are flowers growing everywhere and cages full of songbirds. They have a carriage of their own and in the evenings we go for rides in Chapultepec Park and along the broad road they say is just like a street in Paris, with marble statues and fountains and rows of trees, but I’m certain Paris never saw such sunshine as we have here every day.”

  Another time she wrote of a party the Hammers gave:

  “Mrs. Hammer let me have a gown of her own to wear, light blue with roses round the hem, she said after three babies she could not wear that anymore,” and music was played and old English songs sung by the guests around the piano in the big salon. Then they began to dance and she went up to watch them from a gallery above till she fell asleep.

  She described the hot chocolate brought to her room in the morning by a maid and the basket of fruit placed on the dresser for her to pick grapes and bananas from whenever she chose.

  Then she wrote:

  “Now Davey has come to fetch me and my bag is all packed again and we are to take the train north. We will go straight to the chapel from the boarding house and be married there. Davey says the chapel is just like the one at home and we will have his Cornish friends as witnesses. Mrs. Moran who runs the boarding house will give me away, Father, and she is like a mother to Davey so you need have no fears. I will think of all of you at home in Cornwall and in my heart I will be with you even if I am here in Mexico. Mrs. Hammer gave me the blue gown with the pink roses as a wedding dress and also a pretty work box of inlaid wood in which to keep pins and buttons and needles and threads to keep Davey and me neat and tidy, she said.”

  THEY TRAVELED northward through the Sierra Madre, where even the valleys were higher than any mountains Betty had ever known, and the air was as sharp as glass cut into splinters, flashing. The earth stretched out pale and dun except where the maguey grew here and there between red, raw rocks, spear-tipped around the shooting central stalk. In the evening, darkness spread in pools at the bottom of the valleys, then rose up over the hills so that
what had been pastel earlier became gradually somber as night.

  Occasionally they saw in the distance the white bell tower and dome of a church in the shadow of a mountain, or a man riding a burro bareback across the valley, or a pair of wild horses grazing where a hidden barranca was marked by a sheath of green.

  Betty did not say if what she saw awed or frightened or enchanted her but she did, in every line, express her trust in Davey and her joy in being with him.

  He had no close family to whom he wrote of his feelings.

  “WE TRAVELED three days and nights and when we arrived we were little better than dust mops and badly in need of hot water and soap,” Betty wrote to her sisters. “This we did get at Mrs. Moran’s boarding house and ate a good Cornish tea with saffron cake she had herself baked. I wished I had been able to stay up and ask her the many questions I have but I was so tired that I went up to bed and slept a longer, deeper sleep than any I have ever had.

  “Mrs. Moran, on taking me into the village to buy provisions, told me that when the first ‘Cornish Jacks’ came to work in the mines, the villagers received them with the ringing of bells and thronged the church to offer prayers for their success, but that many proved a disgrace with their drinking and fighting, and some had to be sent back! Of course if anyone in her house is found drinking, she has them leave. Then she showed me the store that is run by the Company where I might buy whatever I need for my house. The prices seemed to me high but she explained that was because all the goods come a long way from elsewhere. Nor is there much stock but it will do, I’m sure.”