The Zigzag Way (20 page)

“No,” he told her sadly, “I'm not. Paul is my father. I'm Eric, his son.”

She gave no indication she had heard or understood. Stroking the silvery gray leaves of the nosegay in her hand, she said, almost shyly, “You are just as I thought you would be. Dark, like Davey, and all the men in Davey's family. They say the Cornish aren't English at all, that they come from somewhere else. Have you heard that?”

“Yes,” Eric admitted, but anything he had ever heard or read on the subject went clear out of his mind in her presence. “I think, I think they may have come from Spain—or somewhere.”

She was not too concerned with accuracy. “Everyone comes from somewhere else,” she said, nodding toward the shifting, moving shapes and shadows behind the chapel, and added, “Like Mexicans. They say they came from Asia, across the—the—”

“The Bering Strait,” Eric put in, relieved to remember something, to know that his mind was intact and had not been swallowed up by the eeriness of the night on the dark hill.

The name clearly meant little or nothing to her. She went on picking at the leaves in her hand and at the thread of her thoughts while Eric watched and listened, scarcely breathing. The thread she picked at seemed to waver and wander. “Like us, from Cornwall. Such a long way to come.” Her eyes widened and Eric could see their gray, transparent glaze.

“Quite a journey,” he agreed, trying to encourage her to say more.

But she had come to the end of that thread. “And ending here,” she said, tapping the wall she sat on so lightly.

“I couldn't find—” Eric began, then stopped short: it would be tactless, tasteless to mention the cemetery to her, and graves; how could he?

She, on the other hand, had no hesitation in doing so. “Our graves?” she asked, quite blandly, and pointed to the hill she had descended. “We're there. D'you know what they call it? Jews' Hill,” she told him with a laugh. “It was the place where they buried everyone not of their faith.”

“Were there many?” Eric ventured, hesitantly.

“Oh,” she said, tilting her head and counting. “Tough Tansy's little sister who came to help her with all the babies, and died of the cholera. Miss Lily and Miss Minnie's brother who died falling down a shaft, his foot missed its hold. Then, when the troubles began, many more. Mr. Ashworth from La Malinche was shot, and Mr. MacDuff died in the fire when they burned down the warehouse, he was hiding in it, and lots more—” She broke off. “That made people leave. Davey—?” she ventured, looking up at Eric as if in search of a resemblance, and reassurance.

“He returned to Cornwall, to be with Paul,” Eric tried to explain the abandonment to her. Perhaps she came here every year, on this night, in the hope of seeing him. The thought was painful.

Clearly she was still hurt. Determined, too, not to dwell on it or show it.

“And you've come back,” she said, choosing to misunderstand. “I knew you would.”

Eric wanted to ask her what he could bring her. He thought of everything the Mexican families came equipped with to provide
los muertitos
for the afterlife—tequila for the drunkards, cards for the gamblers, guitars for the musical, sugar lambs and chicks for
los angelitos
. He suddenly felt the limpness of the flowers he was still clutching and awkwardly proffered them. “I brought you flowers,” he mumbled shamefacedly: they did not seem at all the right ones for this young girl in her dress of pale blue tulle with its hem of pink roses—rather torn and tattered, he now noticed in the increasing pallid dawn light.

She took them but seemed to agree with him about their unsuitability, giving a small formal smile like one who is accustomed to the obtuseness of men. Putting them down on the wall beside her, she went on, “Sometimes the Indians come, you know. They are pilgrims. They climb the mountain to pick the peyote cactus. It's very special, they say. It grows only here,” she motioned at the mountain at her back, “so it's sacred.”

“I've heard of it—of the pilgrimage.”

“And one crazy old woman—not Indian, from elsewhere—she comes, too.”

“I know. I met her.”

Again she appeared to take no notice of this news from the present world. “But the peyote gives her bad dreams, very bad. She doesn't come anymore.”

“But she talks about it a lot, the pilgrimage.”

“Yes, and the Indians still come. They spend the night on the mountain. They collect peyote and eat it; it makes them dream.”

“I'd like to try.”

She gave him a slightly mocking look. “Then come,” she said, “come,” and rising from the wall, turned and began to walk up the path, which was now a gray stream pouring through the dark volcanic rubble in that early light.

Eric tried to follow. The wall stood between them. He intended to climb over and follow, but as he looked down for a foothold in order to do so, she disappeared. When he looked up to call and ask her to wait, he saw that she was gone. Although there was more light now than there had been before, he could see her nowhere on that barren hillside. She had left behind the chrysanthemums and they lay limp on the wall, devoid now of fragrance.

There was only the melancholy tinkling of bells and a movement of the speckled stones that proved to be young goats that had come to graze. A shepherd boy, appearing among them, gave a long sharp whistle, which made them skip and skitter on their little hoofs.

Below, in the town, the church bells began to ring. They rang and rang insistently, calling the dead back to their graves. The light grew brighter, the sun appeared, and everyone went streaming back to where they had come from.

T
HE AUTHOR IS GRATEFUL FOR TRAVEL GRANTS FROM THE
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for hospitality from two writers' retreats in Italy, the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Donnini (Firenze) and the Centro Studi Ligure in Bogliasco (Genova).

 

Thanks are also due to the following publications for epigraph quotations.

 

[>]
: Charles Macomb Flandreu,
Viva Mexico!
, D. Appleton & Co., 1908 and 1937. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, © 1964 by the Board of Trustees, University of Urbana.

[>]
: Interview with Andre Breton by Rafael Heliodoro Valle in
Universidad
, no. 29, June 1938. Reprinted in
Mexico en el Arte
, 1986, and in a foreword by Susan Kismaric to a catalog of Manuel Alvarez's photographs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997.

[>]
,
[>]
,
[>]
: Carl Sartorius,
Mexico and the Mexicans
, Darmstadt, London, New York, 1859, and F. A. Brockhaus Komm., Stuttgart, 1961.

[>]
,
[>]
,
[>]
: Bernal Díaz,
The Conquest of New Spain
, 1519, 1568, translated and introduced by J. M. Cohen, Penguin, Harmonds-worth, 1963.

[>]
,
[>]
: A. C. Todd,
The Search for Silver: Cornish Miners in Mexico
, 1824—1947, Lodeneck Press, Padstow, Cornwall, 1977, © A. C. Todd 2000.

 

A
NITA
D
ESAI
is the author of
Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner's Bombay, Clear Light of Day,
and
Diamond Dust,
among other works. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Desai was born and educated in India and now lives in the New York City area.