Anita Desai

THE ZIGZAG WAY

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Epub ISBN: 9781409015390

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Published by Vintage 2005

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Copyright © Anita Desai 2004

Anita Desai has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Limited, Reading, Berkshire

TO KIRAN, WITH THANKS

FOR HER COMPANIONSHIP

After half an hour’s silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed:

‘What agreeable people one runs across in queer, out-of-the-way places!’

‘Who on earth are you thinking of now?’ I enquired.

‘Why, I was thinking of us!’ he placidly replied, and went on with his reading.

Charles Macomb Flandreu, Viva Mexico!, 1908

Contents

PART I:     Eric Arrives

PART II:    Vera Stays

PART III:   Betty Departs

PART IV:   La Noche de los Muertos

PART I

Eric Arrives

The ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past.

Chapter 1

. . . Oh, tourist,

is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately . . .

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Arrival at Santos’, 1952

‘There is only the one inn,’ he was told when, on getting off the bus, he asked where he might stay.

Since the inn was directly across the square from where the bus had stopped, he could not have missed it even in the dusk. The wind that had scraped and scoured the hills around till the stones gleamed white now struck the tin signboard against the wall of the inn with the sound of a bell striking the hours, drawing his attention to it.

He buttoned up his jacket, sank his chin into the folds of his scarf, picked up his bag and set off towards the house on a path under the casuarina trees, passing an empty fountain with a broken spout. The houses around the square were all shut and dark, no window or door to let light fall across the pillared arcades except for the store at the corner where a few men had gathered under a bare electric bulb as if for warmth; it was from them he had enquired about lodgings. Now they watched him as he crossed the square to the inn and continued to watch as he knocked again and again at the door. If they said anything to each other, he could not hear them for the sound of the wind coming through the casuarinas and the tin signboard beating.

Finally, a woman let him in. She was engaged in conversation with someone in the room behind and did not stay but withdrew, leaving him in the darkness of the hall. He could make out a desk, a massive carved one like a house with many doors, all shut, but no one attended it. A row of keys hung from a shelf above it on which some short stout candles flickered and poured out pools of soft tallow. They cast their uncertain light on a skull with green sequins for eyes and a circlet of gilt marigolds for a crown. Above this, on the wall, whole skeletons danced and cavorted, rustling in the draught from the door, for they were cut out of paper.

He watched them and listened to a clock ticking somewhere, mesmerised. In the room beyond he could see light and a fire, people and movement – real, living, not papery or skeletal or funereal. The clattering sound of metal pans and earthenware told him it was the kitchen. That was promising, but no one seemed interested in the appearance of a stranger.

Eventually someone, someone else, did come down a staircase from the upper regions of the house and greeted him, a young woman with her dark hair tied back in a ribbon. She pushed up the sleeves of her red sweater as if for business and when he asked if she had a room, slid a form across the desk for him to fill in. ‘How many nights?’ she asked, but when she saw him hesitate, shrugged, indicating he could put down what he liked, it did not matter. Unhooking an iron key eight or ten inches long, she offered to show him a room.

He followed her down a dark stairwell which had dim lamps attached to a stone wall at such long intervals that there were stretches of stone steps where no light was cast at all. Deeper and deeper down she took him, her felt slippers making no sound, and it was as if they were going further and further back in time, finally reaching a period that was surely medieval, for the door they arrived at seemed hewn with an axe; when she turned the immense key in its immense lock, it creaked open on what he feared would be a cellar if not a dungeon.

Instead, when she switched on an electric light, the room blazed into colour, proving improbably cheerful. There was a vast bed heaped with red cushions on a white counterpane, a sheepskin rug on the floor and white cotton curtains at a high, small window. She spun the tap at the washbasin to show him it worked and water flowed, and smiled to see him smile with relief, lower his bag on to a chair and nod to indicate he would take the room.

‘Upstairs is the restaurant where you may eat,’ she told him and, laying out a clean towel for him, disappeared.

As he washed his face with a block of soap, then scrubbed with the thick, dry towel, he thought of the days and nights he had spent on the train, slowly, sadly rattling over the lonely plains, struggling to achieve the horizon where hills rose to break the oppressive flatness only to find them mysteriously receding and remaining elusive, and then the hours on the bus through the valley with its strange twisted forms of cacti rising out of the volcanic rubble like stakes rising from secret graves. He had almost ceased to believe the town existed, that it was anything more than a legend, this ghost town of the sierra.

This perception had been magnified on entering the inn; now he felt slightly ashamed of his lack of faith, the many weak moments of panic he had had. He thought of himself cutting the figure of a timid pilgrim who sinks down in despair again and again along the way, needing to be coaxed and assisted into rising and going on, and avoided looking at himself in the tin-framed mirror as he rubbed his hair dry.

Upstairs, in the restaurant, the door to the kitchen stood open. Light streamed in as well as the sounds of pots rattling and voices animated by food, drink and company. The aroma of food being prepared over open fires was enough to raise his wavering spirits and make him anticipate the comfort of a meal and a drink. Some of the tables were already occupied. Two men who looked like officials sat drinking beer and eating nachos, expansive in their gestures and speech as if pleased with themselves and how profitably their day had passed. At another table, some young men, still boys, alternately brushed back their hair and drank from bottles of Coca-Cola, then got up to go into the kitchen and returned with plates of food. In a corner, an elderly couple sat trying to feed a small boy who knelt on the bench beside them but seemed more interested in playing with his bowl of soup than in eating from it. They coaxed him; he turned his head away and splashed the soup with his spoon.

Then a young man came out of the kitchen where he had been laughing so that the after-image of his laugh lingered on his face, and crossed the room to their table, took the spoon away and sat down, taking the child on his lap and indicating that he would feed him.

It was a domestic scene and Eric was not particularly drawn to domesticity but, deciding there was enough evidence of nourishment, chose a nearby table and waited for a menu to be presented. One of the women in the kitchen came out and handed him one and he ordered a bottle of red wine straight away, with food to follow. As he expected, most of the items on the menu proved unavailable – they had, in fact, seemed a bit improbable – only one dish was actually available and it was brought to him, undeniably hot and reviving. He drank, ate and watched the family at the neighbouring table more tolerantly: domesticity clearly had its points.

But now the child slipped off the young man’s lap and ran about the room, shouting in triumph at his escape. The elders all laughed. The child had the transparent grey-blue eyes and head of silky golden curls that make anyone popular at first glance. The young man possessed a slightly more worn version. The older couple was short and dark which made the child’s fairness the more distinctive.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, he darted across to Eric’s table and began to bang his spoon on its edge as if aware he was both naughty and pretty and would attract attention but not censure. The young man, the father, came rushing over to pick him up in his arms and kiss him, laughing. Then he apologised to Eric and sat down at his table, holding the child on his lap.

‘He has only just learned to run – and so he runs everywhere. He makes us run too,’ he explained. ‘If we don’t catch him, he will run out on the street, he is so quick.’

‘It seems safe,’ Eric replied. ‘There is no traffic.’

‘Oh, it is coming, coming soon, more every day – for the festival, you know,’ the young man said. ‘Many come for the Día de los Muertos here. It is – it is –’ he rolled his eyes and held a hand in the air to indicate its importance.

He had an accent Eric could not place precisely: it might have been German, Austrian – perhaps Swiss? As if aware of this speculation, the young man held out his hand and introduced himself. ‘André Bernstein,’ he announced, and of course that could be from any one of those countries, thought Eric.

‘Have you been here long?’ he asked, not being able to think of a more original opening to a dialogue in a Mexican inn in a town visited by tourists.

‘Here? Four years now. I came to spend one night in the inn, met Paola, never left,’ he laughed, happily. ‘She cast a spell – like in a fairy story, no?’

Eric thought that if it were like a spell in a fairy story, then it was bound to break one day which would be sad for the father who was playing so delightedly with his son, capturing him every time he tried to slip away. Eventually the child did wriggle free and escape, choosing the moment when the father launched upon his story, one he clearly enjoyed telling. It was a fairly commonplace story for these times – about a boy who had grown up in a small town in the Alps, developed the ‘wanderlust’ he said, made his way on a cargo ship to Costa Rica, then gone backpacking north into Guatemala and to Yucatán where he ran into the rainy season and with it the swarms of mosquitoes that found his blood sweet to devour, came down with malaria and began to pine for mountain air. Northwards, then, to the high sierra where he recovered his health – and, in Paola, so much more. His expression melted like butter, in uxurious bliss.

‘Other foreigners have come here and stayed too, have they not?’ Eric probed, his tiredness combining with the red wine to make him less nimble, less discreet than he was by nature.

He saw at once that he had been clumsy and too abrupt by the way the fair-haired man’s expression altered as if the soft butter, the melting wax of it, had suddenly stiffened. He no longer looked so pleased as when he was telling his ‘fairy story’. Eric was clearly suggesting that it was not an uncommon story, that it was much the same as that of others – and no one cares to hear that. Each stranger, each traveller needs to think his story unique.

But having blundered, Eric felt helpless to stop himself. ‘Doña Vera who lives in the Hacienda de la Soledad below, that is her story too, perhaps?’

Now the young man looked at him, astounded. Then he bent over with laughter. He tipped back his chair and roared with it, his face flushed with it. As he laughed and continued to laugh, Eric found himself flushing too, with annoyance. He failed to see the joke and was about to say so when André spluttered, ‘So, you are one of those, eh?’

‘One of –?’

‘Those who travel to her hacienda – de la Soledad, ha! – to pay homage –’ he began to chuckle again, helplessly – ‘homage to la Reina de la Sierra. Is that not how she is known to all of you?’

‘I had never even heard of her a week ago,’ Eric protested, ‘and did not come for her sake but for the mountain –’

‘Oh. Ah. The magic mushroom then, the peyote?’

‘No,’ Eric protested with force, and was wondering if it would be a good idea to confide in this light-hearted listener what had really brought him here, when it became evident that the listener had lost interest, or become distracted, having suddenly remembered his son and noted his absence.

‘Sebastian,’ he cried in alarm, looking about him wildly, ‘where are you?’ and he darted out of a door that opened not into the square that Eric had come through but on to a narrow side street.

Of course that was just when the child’s mother appeared – the woman with the dark hair in a red ribbon who had let him in. Looking around, she too began to call, ‘Sebastian! Sebastian!’ and Eric felt compelled to point at the open door and peer out of it himself.

On that side street where only one lamp hung, casting all else into darkness, they saw the child sitting on the kerb, holding a puppy in his arms. Sometimes, when it struggled and yipped, he set it down where it snuffled among bits of paper, rags, empty cans. The child, too, got down into the drain so they could explore the debris together. The puppy had seized something it found particularly tasty – a shoe sole, perhaps, or a stained rag – and the child tried to tug it away. Both pulled and struggled. The child was laughing to feel the puppy’s small, fierce strength and tried to match it.

Then both of Sebastian’s parents converged on the pair and picked their son out of the drain. He kicked his legs and protested loudly but they kissed his cheeks and stroked his hair and carried him back into the inn.

Eric saw there was to be no more conversation tonight; he was to be left to turn things over in his mind as if they were cards in a game of solitaire and to watch the bustle in the kitchen gradually close down for the night.

By then he had drunk a whole bottle of red wine. That, on top of his exhaustion and the doubts and discomforts of a journey undertaken on a whim. So, when he finally went down to bed – down, down the stone stairwell, one pounding step after another, in semi-darkness, the last journey of the day – he felt his head, his brain, his mind come crashing down together. Bits and pieces, shreds and shards, all cluttered and confused and rattling as he threw himself on the bed. He lay against the red cushions, under the white wool rug, and tried to steady the swinging of his mind.

Usually it was steadying to think of Em, so he did. Although he had no idea how far along she was with her journey, he could be certain that wherever she was, she was Em. Down to the shadow of a disapproving frown on her brow as she observed him sprawling there, idle. It would creep across her face whenever she came back from a long day at the lab and found him at home, in Boston, listening to Mozart or to Schumann, with the cat Shakespeare ensconced on his lap and his book held slightly to the side. Her disapproval would never really cast a shadow on his mood which tended by nature to be halcyon; besides, it was more like a cool, grey cloud than a threatening storm. He would tell her of his day at the library, pass on amusing bits of information he had extracted from his reading and describe the scenes at the café where he had his tea and scone overlooking Harvard Square and from where he watched the tramps, the musicians, the chess players and students who provided it with movement and amusement. He carefully refrained from letting her know how bored he had been during those long hours at the library, how he could scarcely bear to look at the thesis he had written on immigration patterns in Boston in the 1900s and then proposed to expand, for lack of a fresh idea, into a study of immigration in general. He had received a generous grant to do so but that did not help to inspire him. Dispersing the particular into the general seemed to cast it far into space and his intention of pursuing it faltered and dwindled and threatened to fail. He would have gladly thrown it into the trash can at the door to the café and been rid of that last link to tiresome student days, but he was not prepared to confess this to Em. Her interest in his ‘studies’, perhaps a polite reciprocation of his interest in hers, was still of importance to him. It had astonished him, to begin with, that the young woman he had noticed for her somewhat aloof and preoccupied air, setting her apart from the groups crowding the hallways of their dormitory with their clutter and noise, could show such an interest in a subject and field other than her own. Yet she was willing to stroll with him across the campus to their classes, earnestly talking, and when he searched her out in the cafeteria, to eat her sandwich and her soup with him rather than with anyone else. He was to learn that it was Emily Hatter’s gift to give her entire and serious attention to the subject at hand, so much so that it bolstered his own rather uncertain confidence in it. After their graduation, almost without any discussion about the matter, they moved into an apartment together and were not surprised to find the arrangement entirely comfortable, even Em’s cat adjusting to it without protest. (The idea of ‘shelter’ often came to Eric’s mind even if he never spoke of it.) After a day spent in separate academic pursuits, they would come together to cook a dish of pasta and make a salad and eat to the melodious outflow of sound from piano, horn and clarinet, compositions that seemed to express their own harmony. Even the crease between Em’s even eyebrows would gradually soften and smooth over. They seemed already to have arrived at a stage that many couples require thirty years to achieve, although both were still graduate students and had not spoken once of marriage; there was often an atmosphere of self-congratulation hovering over these perfect occasions.

It was not his increasing loss of faith in his own studies that finally upset the safely even keel and security of their lives together in the apartment they shared in a red-brick block of student apartments on a street lined with many more such blocks. Unexpectedly, it was Em who announced one evening towards the end of a long, sorry winter that it was now unavoidable that she carry her research into ‘the field’. Her field was the forests of Yucatán where mosquitoes teemed and malaria was rife. Boston had become too limited for her, she had outgrown its resources and needed to proceed.

That evening she sat quietly, running her fingers over and over again through her cropped hair – so fair as to seem almost ashen – committed to the next stage of her work but aware of its significance to their relationship. ‘I’ll be away in the field with my professors,’ she kept explaining as if afraid he did not understand the implications. It appeared he did not because, instead of turning apprehensive or worried as she expected him to be at the announcement of her departure, he seemed stirred and excited by the news. ‘But, Em, it’ll be just the thing for me,’ was his unexpected response, in a voice that had risen by several decibels, and with his spectacles flashing his enthusiasm. ‘You know how stuck I am for ideas.’

She had not known. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I’ve done all the work on that thesis I ever wanted to do. I haven’t really the least interest in taking it any further –’

‘But your fellowship? You were given it to work on a book.’

‘I just can’t – you see, I haven’t the right kind of mind for theory. I’ve always worked with detail, Em. And I can’t seem to find the one I need.’

‘Have you spoken about this to your professors?’

‘No, no, not yet. But I’ve considered making a fresh proposal.’

‘Have you? You never told me about it.’

‘No, well, I haven’t any fresh ideas yet,’ he confessed, ‘but if I came with you to Mexico, I’m sure ideas would just come flooding in,’ and he smiled as winningly, as persuasively, as he could, refusing to be discouraged by the doubt in her grey eyes.

As she ran her fingers nervously through her hair, he ran his through Shakespeare’s.

Outside, Boston lay like a lumberyard, incapacitated by winter, knee-deep in slush, ice and mud, its houses sagging under their sodden weight. Gutters awry, window frames mouldy, wood piles and metal junk protruding from the soiled snow. As if to emphasise its plight, a branch of the bare tree at the window cracked and plunged downwards with its burden of ice. One glance through the curtains – he could never get them to meet – at the traffic crawling in the street below, and Eric resumed his pleas.

‘I might come across – um, something in Mexico that would put me on the right track,’ he said in what he hoped was a confident tone.

‘Or not. You don’t know Mexico, you’ve never been there, it might not prove the right place at all. You’re an Americanist after all.’ Em could not see how her Mexico, and its mosquitoes, could possibly provide him with ideas for a book on American immigration.

But in the subsequent months of preparation for the field study, it became clear that Em would be away in Mexico for a considerable amount of time, and she began to give way to Eric’s persuasions; they found themselves discussing such details as where Shakespeare was to be housed in their absence and arranging to take him to Eric’s parents before they left.

Visits to Eric’s family were always hasty, improvised, scrambled affairs, infrequent and rarely satisfactory. Em, who came from a solid phalanx of doctors, dentists, optometrists and surgeons in Philadelphia and its environs, so that her own choice of a medical profession seemed not only logical but inevitable, never could find such a link between the Eric she knew and his family which was, effectively, his mother’s side of it.

There they were, all over the great muddy yard by the sea, at one end the fish shop and at the other the restaurant that carried the family name, O’Brien’s, on its great wooden signboard with its painted image of a fiery-red lobster, and down below the docks where the boats drew up with the daily catch. The collection of white clapboard houses they lived in were scattered up and down the slope of granite with its crown of tough, stunted fir trees at the top. In one, dogs barked, in another babies squalled, smoke billowed from the chimney of a third and laundry flapped on a line outside a fourth. Men and women dressed identically in blue jeans, plaid flannel shirts and gum boots climbed up and down between them, bearing lobster pots and tubs of fish or dragging lengths of fish netting. Some were setting out in their boats, others returning. The smells of diesel oil from boat engines, of fish from the sea, of brine and seaweed, swirled as thick as steam in the chill autumnal air, and gulls hovered, shrieking with unappeased greed.

Em hung back, letting Eric go before to find his parents within the crowding clan. How could he, her Eric – scholarly and spectacled – have emerged from out of it? she wondered, as always. She held the cowering, apprehensive Shakespeare in his box in her arms, protectively, but it might have been Eric she was protecting.

He had explained to her, often, his parents’ recognition of the awkwardness of having such a misfit for a son, this pale, frail scholar within a clan of hearty Maine fisherfolk. Eric’s father had always gamely accepted the blame, as an Englishman and an intruder on their Irish Catholic tribe, but it was his mother who had, in her direct and practical way, dealt with the problem by plucking him out of the turmoil of a high-spirited family bred for the outdoors, and sending him to a boarding school for an education. This went totally against the family tradition – it was not even a parochial school run by the Irish priests, which she might have chosen if she had wanted, and which would have been quite acceptable, but a small, progressive school run by an old school friend of hers from the convent school, who had rebelled against their own education and created an alternative in the hills of New Hampshire. Here they taught Eric according to the precepts of Rudolf Steiner and after years of dancing barefoot to the music of a piano, painting with oils in airy studios, playing the flute and attending classes on wooded hilltops, he found himself totally unfit for life in the family’s boatyards and fishing boats; lobster as food totally repelled him. The one direction he could take was to the universities and libraries of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Returning to the clan remained as daunting and bracing as a plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.