The Zigzag Way (6 page)

He watched the entourage as it turned its back on him and made its way to the house. Above, the pale disk of the sun had slid over the ridge of the mountain and below, the grassy basin had filled up with darkness. Only the lake, a tarnished mirror, refleeted whatever light remained in the sky, dully.

Unenthusiastically, he followed the grande dame and her retinue of masked miniatures at a safe distance, and saw that up and down the length of the corridors, lanterns of perforated tin had been lit, casting more shadow than light. Doña Vera must have given some instruction because the limping maid came out and picked up his bag and conducted him to a room at the end of a long corridor. From the sounds that reached him, it appeared that preparations were being made for dinner. Perhaps he could have a bath beforehand. Turning on the tap to fill the rusty tub in the tiled bathroom, he asked himself dejectedly why he had made the error of stopping at her malevolent establishment and not gone straight up the mountain to the mines. He lay back in the tepid water, floating in doubt, till the dinner gong boomed.

 

G
OING THROUGH
the crepuscular entrance hall to the dining room with its single refectory table under a chandelier made of stags' antlers—many stags' antlers—he found most of the seats already taken, so he had to sit at a long distance from the head, where Doña Vera presided. He was irked and relieved at the same time: sitting closer to her might have been rather like being close to a coiled serpent, but after all, he had come this long way to have a conversation with her and could not afford to be the timid mouse now.

Glancing up and down the length of the table, he saw that most of the guests were very young, practically children, and from the talk that was flying around in a carefree, even oblivious fashion, they appeared to be students from American universities, universities in the western states, he guessed. This was surely not the company Doña Vera had chosen for herself. It must have to do with her turning the hacienda into a center for “serious” studies, and she must surely have her doubts, at such times, regarding her generosity. His ears ached already. It had been some years since he was an eager undergraduate. He hoped Doña Vera would appreciate that. He began to spoon up his soup from the bowl placed before him and felt it beneath him to join the chatter.

As he ate his soup, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the diners in front and to either side of him, he became aware that there were other totally silent guests present at the table. At the very foot of it, leaving a few seats vacant between him and the rest of the company, sat an Indian who was, in every way, not only physically and in dress, different from anyone else at the table, awkward with his hands and expression. After a while, another man, younger but dressed in the same fanciful costume as he—embroidered, beaded, and beribboned—came and slipped quietly into a chair beside him; so did a woman with long braids and a colorfully embroidered blouse. They occupied the three seats at the foot of the table, murmuring quietly to each other as they ate, resolutely avoiding looking at anyone else.

Eric tried not to be impolite but found himself glancing again and again at their costumes, which seemed so at odds with the gravity of their manner, decorated as they were with the most vivid colors and a variety of motifs—butterflies, deer, snakes, flowers, peyote, and maize. Each time he looked quickly away, equally embarrassed at not being able to speak to them and by the way no one else did either.

Yet up and down the table the talk appeared to be about “the Huichol—peyote—Wirikúta—Hikuri—” words he had come to associate with just these people and for the study of whom Doña Vera had become renowned. Yet the three people about whom the talk revolved appeared not to be involved themselves, perhaps preferring to keep out of it. They talked only among themselves, in low voices, while they ate shyly, tentatively.

The one other person at the table who ate in absolute silence, and with a kind of disdain for the company at the table, was Doña Vera herself, majestically seated on what was surely a raised chair at the head. The persona of the grande dame clearly required some contrivance.

Eric was now able to observe her at closer quarters than he had at the lecture in Mexico City: the chandelier was so positioned as to cast a particularly bright light on her while others were in shadow. She was no longer the theatrically attired diva she had chosen to be in the city, nor quite the woman who had ridden alone, calmly at ease in the light and air and space she owned. Now she was somewhere between the two extremes: dressed in a kimono in the colors of that fabulous bird, the quetzal, over layers of worn and lumpish gray flannel underneath. She might have been a carved idol placed upon her seat of power, but like an idol, she displayed the human attributes that could undercut her power: which to believe, to trust? Her nose certainly remained that of a bird of prey, an imperial beak that protruded from her sunken cheeks, but her mouth worked weakly at food that was clearly difficult for her to masticate.

She was concentrating upon that with a kind of withdrawn, inward preoccupation when, out of the general chatter—still of Huichol, peyote, and Wirikúta—a question arose, addressed to her by an older member of the gathering, a small-boned, hunchshouldered man in glasses and a bow tie knotted over his Adam's apple, someone who could not be dismissed as easily as the youngsters. Eric had not heard the question, but he had picked out a word or two: shaman—vision—dream—trance—ecstasy . . .

The active exercise of forks and knives gradually lessened and came to a halt. In the silence, the intruding voice pursued: “Doña Vera, can any one of us share that experience with them, do you think?”

Everyone waited, holding their implements above their plates, while Doña Vera crumbled a roll of bread and considered her reply. Then it came, as ominous as a rumble of pebbles in a dry arroyo, heard at first from a distance, then gathering strength as it approached, finally crashing upon them.

“No one,” she pronounced, “no one who sleeps under a roof, in a bed, and eats three meals a day at a table, can understand the Huichol experience. Is that not so, maestro?” and she smiled her rare smile at the quiet man at the foot of the table. He became aware he was being addressed, fell silent, and looked at her inquiringly. It was not clear if he understood her question but then he too smiled, and nodded.

Everyone else at the table was excluded from their exchange, their communication.

Fortunately the maids came out of the kitchen just then and interrupted it by serving everyone from the trays full of hot food they had brought. The sound of knives and forks began again, filling everyone with relief.

Doña Vera herself, however, rose from the table, pushing back her chair, and called to the maids to bring her coffee. Everyone paused, forks lifted in the air, waiting for the royal departure. She had taken her favorite pug with her; now the others became aware of her absence, stirred underneath the table as if they were a heap of suede gloves and velvet scarves being collected, scrambled to their feet, and followed with a hasty clicking of claws on stone tiles.

Watching her leave, Eric was struck by how small she was, shriveled and slight, for all the height she accorded herself. Also, he noticed, she had felt slippers on and those were flannel pajamas she was wearing under her splendid kimono. How much of it all was a costume drama, he thought, dependent on style and setting. For all that, it was still her home.

“She always takes coffee in the library,” the man with the bow tie and the rimless glasses said to Eric, acknowledging the newcomer at last.

“The library? There is one?”

“It is my—it is where I work.” A small wisp of a woman with glasses and close-cropped hair smiled, also daring to be friendly now.

“Ah, may I come and look at your books tomorrow?” Eric asked eagerly, scarcely able to believe his luck. “And if you have maps, documents too, perhaps?”

“It is a great resource, a great resource,” the bow-tied man assured him, patting his lips with a napkin and making the small, short-haired woman flush with pride. “We are just about to show a film about Doña Vera's life, in the museum. Would you care to see it? I've asked my students to attend.”

Eric wanted to point out that he was not one of them but was too polite to do so. He found himself going along with the pedagogical group, shuffling across the courtyard once more, past the fountain spouting in the dark, to the hall known as “the museum.”

 

S
ITTING THERE
, on an uncomfortably upright chair in a draft from the door, and waiting for the students to set up a screen and a projector, Eric castigated himself for the way he always let himself be led by autocratic people with strong opinions. Em might so far have been the strongest of them, even if the least ostensibly so, but before her there had been Rosa. The situation he was in now inevitably caused him to remember how he had been led to take courses he never would have, if it had not been for the pleasure of gazing on Rosa's head of long, glossy black hair or brushing his fingers, as if accidentally, against it. Poetry, to begin with: she wrote it, and insisted he take the course with her and experience the thrill she felt from being in the presence of her teacher, a “real poet”—an old man whose white hair had fallen out in patches, leaving only tufts, and whose lean, bony face twitched as if in pain when he listened to her read, which she thought quite appropriate since she wrote about bombings, nuclear holocausts, death by fire, and the grieving of survivors. Eric attempted a few verses at her urging, but the “real poet” himself provided none; his face twitched, his lips parted as if for air, then shut, and he kept his eyes averted as Eric did from him, out of embarrassment and apology.

Next Rosa lured him into an even more difficult course, of feminist studies. There he found himself the sole male student. He held on through the semester even though Rosa would grill him after every class, seize his notebook to see what he had thought worth putting down on its mostly pristine pages, then throw it at him if she found no more than the occasional doodle, and challenge him to match her own fervor. Eric thought she went too far; he could not possibly follow where she wished to go but was flattered that she should want his company.

During a film they were shown in class, he finally gave up, detaching his fingers from hers. She held on as tightly as she could but it was a hot afternoon and the blinds were drawn, making the room oppressively still and stuffy—actually even smelly—and he slipped away with an apologetic murmur. When she demanded angrily later to know why he had left, he finally told her the truth: “I couldn't stand it,” he said simply. She was furious; if it was a film by Margarethe von Trotta, she expected him to stand it. But Eric grew stubborn. He stopped taking the classes she wanted him to take or where he was likely to run into her. Eventually they met only in the cafeteria, if their schedules permitted it, and now that they had less to discuss, they made fewer appointments to meet and so became figures in the distance, crossing the campus from sunlight into the oak trees' shade, waving minimally till winter drew a curtain of snow between them.

Then, in graduate school, he met Em and once again submitted to the spell of a woman who received such certainty and confidence from her work. It perplexed him that he should be drawn to this “type” but he was, so there had to be a serious side to him in spite of their accusations of frivolity and shallowness: he hoped so. Or was it because he saw how happily, gratefully, his father submitted to work in the business his mother's family owned as if he had not really known, in the new country to which he had come, what to do with himself till she showed him? And because Eric too was used to letting his mother make up his mind for him, ordering his life, telling him what to do with it? Only, while his father appeared to be the most contented of men in his little cubbyhole of an office, keeping the accounts for O'Brien's, Eric did not feel he had found an equivalent niche yet. He wondered if this was what Em wanted him to find, by himself. Then, if he would find it in actually unraveling the intricate cat's cradle of the voyages of his own family. Were they actually relevant? Did he even believe in the pursuit? Was this what Em had urged him to do?

As he sat in the dark, once more submitting to a film he did not wish to see, he felt a headache starting to clamp itself to his temples as it often did at moments of anxiety and unease.

The film was even worse than he expected. Perhaps the low voltage that was the rule in that area gave it its agonizingly slow momentum and dismal shortage of lighting. There, on the screen spotted with night insects, was the young Doña Vera riding a horse through a sepia landscape of stone and thorn while the background music ground ever downward. Then Doña Vera posing with a group of Indians in ceremonial dress of which the colors were naturally not visible in a black-and-white film. Doña Vera interviewing a man whose face remained shaded by a conical hat and who seemed to answer her animated and long-winded questions with the merest monosyllables. Doña Vera walking across the desert in long strides, the sequence interspersed with stills of tarantulas, serpents, scorpions, and other such creatures she might—or might not—have encountered there. Doña Vera seated at a heavy, carved table, lifting up the objects on it one at a time, describing their symbolic significance.

During this sequence, the younger members of the audience began to lose patience; they started to talk to each other, quite loudly, and even laugh. The older ones in the audience concentrated with fierce attention meant to be admonitory. The music swelled to a climax, which collapsed in a way that instigated involuntary laughter, and then the title unfurled across the screen in cursive script:
Queen of the Sierra
, it read, with a flourish of trumpets.

One trick such experiences had taught Eric was to get to his feet quickly and make his escape before the lights came on and someone in the front row—or the last—rose to “initiate a discussion.” That he would not have. He let himself out through the open door before he could be seen to flee.