The Zigzag Way (7 page)

 

T
HE LIGHTS
in the dining room had been turned off but there was still one on in the room to which Doña Vera had retired for coffee. In addition, there was the sound of the piano being played—very delicately, very tenderly, Eric thought. He stopped outside the window to listen and light a cigarette and found, twirling up to him along with the smoke, fragrance from the white flowers of a bush of night-flowering tobacco. The music—was it a Chopin nocturne?—twirled just as delicately, seeming to accentuate the silence of the night at the foot of the mountain that loomed over the hacienda, and made it poignant and profound, even if the piano was badly out of tune so that some of the notes jarred and made the pianist falter.

Putting out his cigarette on a stone, he decided to look in on the lighted room; he could not restrain his curiosity about the piano, how it could have been brought here to this remote altipiano, or who might be playing it—Doña Vera, perhaps?

No, it was not, he saw at once, for the Queen of the Sierra was seated by an empty fireplace in a wing chair, with her pugs. He coughed to let her know of his entrance but she made no acknowledgment unless it was in the wave of the lighted cigarillo she held.

“I thought,” he stumbled, “I should tell you, I'm not sure how long I'll stay. I planned to do a little research but I don't know yet—”

As he might have known, the word “research” brought her to wakefulness out of the dreamy half-sleep in which he had found her. A mocking glint appeared in her hooded eyes as she slowly turned her head to look at him.

“So, then you
are
from one of the u-ni-ver-sities. Tell me which one—Tex-as? O-hi-o?” she drawled, somehow making these names sound slyly insulting.

“I'm not, no,” he was able to defend himself. “No, it's not any formal research—yet.” Since she had not offered him a seat, he found he had to draw up a chair in order to continue. “Really, it's just a private—quest,” he went on, then stopped to see how this word might affect her.

She drew on her cigarillo, studying him. That at least was encouraging.

“You see, my grandfather came out to Mexico to work for a mining company. He was Cornish, from a mining family and, you see, the mines in Cornwall failed. I'm not sure of the date—it would have been the early part of the century—the tens or twenties”—he felt ashamed, he knew so little—“but definitely in this area,” he insisted, “because I recognized the names you mentioned in your lecture in Mexico City, the one I attended, I told you I attended. That's when I heard that you run this center for studies of this area, so I thought I'd come here to see what I could find out. I heard your family too had a connection to the mines—”

She reared out of her wing chair, a bird of prey swooping.
“Who
told you that?”

“Oh,” he drew back, alarmed; he might have been bitten, or stung. “Oh, someone in the audience—”

“You are mis-in-formed, señor. I may be run-ning this center and it may be fam-i-ly property, but the mines, they were before my time. I did not arrive here till the forties, and I am myself an eth-no-graph-er,” she spaced out her syllables as if for someone of lesser intelligence, “and trained as an an-thro-polo-gist with some of the great-est teachers in the field. I have worked among the Huichol Indians, the first, the first Eu-ro-pean woman to do so. I founded my center to pro-tect them, their en-vi-ron-ment, their his-tory, and re-li-gion. I am not one of those who took their land and ru-ined it with mining and made them slaves. Whoever tells you this,
lies.”
The word exploded with a clap of thunder. The little pugs shuddered in their sleep, some even gave small yips to prove their vigilance. She pressed them back to sleep with her ringed hand.

Eric, hiding his own hands between his knees, wondered if he should flee but she continued imperiously. “If it is mines you are interested in, then it is not to me you should come. Not to my center. Here we work to keep the cul-ture and re-li-gion and art of the Huichol a-live that the min-ing in-dus-try near-ly de-stroy-ed. On the one hand is greed, señor, on the other—respect! Did you not see the film tonight?”

“I did, I did,” Eric hastened to assure her. “Fascinating!”

She pursed her lips, clearly expecting more.

“The work you have done here, so important,” he went on, “so wonderful—” But why was she so defensive? If her work was as renowned and respected as she insisted it was, where was the need to constantly assert this?

Her lips relaxed a little. It was transparently easy to mollify the old bird, Eric saw, and went on flattering her in that vein for a bit. (Em would have despised him, he knew.) He wondered if he could put a question to her about the enigmatic presence of the Indians at the foot of her dinner table but just then, tapping the ash off the end of her cigarillo, she provided him with the answer as if she had sensed it. “It is a liv-ing cul-ture, you see. I have guests in my hacienda that can prove to you its ex-is-tence. Their way of life ex-ists. That is my purpose, señor, to keep it alive. Post-Columbian Mex-ico,” she pronounced, straightening her back, “interests me not at all. Once those poor people were con-ver-ted by the Span-iards, it was the end, the end! And if that is the pe-riod that in-ter-ests you, señor, go up the moun-tain.
There
you will see what the mining in-dus-try did to Huichol country.”

He nodded enthusiastically to assure her he would, and she continued, “You have come at ex-act-ly the right moment, the cel-e-bration of el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Go, go and see it, please. It is right-ly named, after the dead. Here,” she tapped her cigarillo, making the ashes scatter, “here at my center, you find
life!
Ar-tists come to my center, and scho-lars, and seek-ers. Not his-tor-ians, and not—” she fixed him with a fierce eye, “not
mineros!”

As he wondered how he might make his escape from further denunciation, he heard a rustle from behind the piano, which was actually on the other side of the stone arch that divided the room, he now saw. Someone there, under a dim green-shaded light, was folding up the music sheets as unobtrusively as possible. The pianist rose and came forward: it was the spectacled woman with the short gray hair who had introduced herself at dinner as the librarian. It seemed she also held the position of official musician at Doña Vera's establishment. But Doña Vera made no acknowledgment of her presence or her performance and Eric had to rise to his feet and take it upon himself to say, “Thank you, that was just beautiful.” She gave an awkward little bow, her glasses glinting in the subdued light, and slipped away.

“Margaret,” Doña Vera suddenly bellowed after her, “send Consuela. I go to bed now,” and at that word, as if at a bell, the heap of sleeping pugs around her stirred and scrambled to their many feet.

 

 

 

Vera Stays

 

“You are looking on rich lands. May you know how to govern them well.”

—
ALONSO HERNANDEZ PUERTOCARRERO
to
HERNANDO CORTEZ
, 1519, from
BERNAL DÍAZ
,
The Conquest of New Spain
, 1568

After the fall of the Aztec empire, the conquest of the country proceeded with wonderful rapidity, chiefly because the invaders hoped to meet with greater treasure in every mountain they beheld. The manner in which the Indian was forced to labor in the mines is well known, and how, accustomed to the gentler pursuit of agriculture, their numbers rapidly diminished.

—
CARL SARTORIUS
,
Mexico and the Mexicans
, 1859

 

A
ROUND THE IMMENSE MAHOGANY TABLE UNDER
the Venetian chandelier where they entertained, the gentlemen were sometimes heard to mention the Hacienda de la Soledad. Not as often as they mentioned the mines of Cinco Señores, La Joya, Guadalupe, Santa Ana, Valenciana, or the companies—Compaña Anglo-Mexicana, Bolaños, Real del Monte, Restauradora—but once in a while someone would talk of having stayed there, spent a night there on his way up or down from the mines—in their glory days. Now, Don Roderigo assured her, it was uninhabited and uninhabitable.

Vera tired quickly of the social flutter in which she was required to participate in Mexico City. She told Don Roderigo that if that was what she had wanted from life, she could have stayed in Vienna. Of course she did not confess that she felt at a disadvantage among ladies who had lived here for so much longer than she had and were so free with advice on how to handle the maids so they would not grow slovenly or thievish, where to order a pudding or freshly baked rolls for a party or silk stockings from Paris. Nor her chagrin at their constant questioning about her past and her background and how she had come to be here among them. Her discomfort and restlessness had not the slightest effect upon her husband, who simply continued with his routine of running through the family fortune at the races and the casinos, and ignored her suggestion of a visit to a place that intrigued her because of its distance from everything that made up their lives: its very name promised a refuge.

She had quickly given up being the delightfully coquettish woman he had brought back from Europe after his frail and highly bred first wife's death. She soon began to complain loudly of boredom and disappointment. “I am not one of these silly card-playing women of your circle,” she told him since he obviously failed to see this fact for himself. The next step was voicing her desire, at first in company and then when she was alone with him while he was digesting a gigantic meal, having his coffee and smoking his cigar, to travel outside Mexico City and see something of this land to which he had brought her.

He raised his eyelids with difficulty (she suspected something seriously wrong with them, it could not be natural for them to droop so in broad daylight even if he was twice her age). He mumbled, chewing at the idea and finding it tough.

“Can we not go on a journey?” she cried, waving her hands at him as if to attract and hold his attention. “I have been here already a year and seen nothing, nothing at all!”

He gestured tiredly, making his cigar sweep in an aromatic circle that she found suffocating. “Tell the chauffeur,” he mumbled, “to take you to Teotihuacan, the pyramids . . .”

“Oh
mein Gott
, Roderigo, I have seen the pyramids of Teotihuacan, how many times! Taken all our visitors there, don't you know that? I am as good as a paid guide already to the pyramids of Teotihuacan. Has Mexico nothing more to offer?”

He began to look annoyed. He chewed on his cigar. He did not trouble to raise his eyelids. “Xochimilco, then,” he offered, “the floating gardens . . .”

“The floating gardens!” she shrieked. “What next?”

Then he did lift those lids to give her a withering glare: she was growing shrill, this blond butterfly of a woman, his European trophy—“the fresh rosebud in his lapel,” someone had called her—whom he had met on his last European tour undertaken, disastrously, just before the outbreak of World War II. The family had dispatched him to get in touch with former business partners: the price of precious metals had risen, other mines were being revived—why not theirs? But although Roderigo knew the racecourses and the clubs of Europe, he knew little else and understood nothing. Bewildered by the way his former business partners seemed suddenly to be distracted or even to have gone underground, he had little to do but search for distraction himself. Then the attractive blond girl he had spotted earlier on the arm of one of those uniformed and bemedaled military men who were suddenly ubiquitous, and again on the stage as a dancer in the chorus of a lively musical show in a theater he had wandered into, reappeared in the lobby of his hotel. When he went into the dining room for his daily consolation of Wiener schnitzel and
apfelstrudel
, there she was again, alone at a table, casting him flirtatious looks. Flattered, charmed, he responded with all the gallantry he could summon. When it finally dawned upon him that no business was to be done that summer in Austria, or in Germany, and he regretfully informed her that he had to return to Mexico, she conveyed such an all-consuming interest in his home and family and business in that faraway land, their sugar-cane estates, their timber holdings, and the property they owned in Mexico City and the “silver cities” of the north, such a curiosity and enthusiasm, that he began to consider her as a replacement for the dear departed Doña Josefina. The speed with which she agreed to be his wife and with which she packed and prepared to leave did fluster him: it was not the way he was used to acting himself, even if he could see that circumstances had changed and called for changed behavior. It was she who searched for berths on an earlier boat than he had managed to find, insisting that they travel to England and catch one from Liverpool that would take them to New York and from there to Veracruz. Dismayed, he asked if this was really necessary, upon which she became nearly hysterical, demanding to know if he did not
understand
. Of course he did, he assured her, but clearly did not since he asked if she did not wish to spend some time with her family before she left. She assured him she had none. No family? That did give him pause for thought but before he could inquire further, they were boarding the boat for New York. During the entire voyage she was prostrate with seasickness and nerves and unable to come out on deck or into the dining room to meet other passengers. “It might do you good,” he tried to persuade her. “You would enjoy the company of a charming Herr Levi I have met. Or of Herr Wolfowitz and his wife . . .” She practically fainted then, begging him not to speak to them of his poor, sick bride.

He remembered that now, as he regarded this shrill, shrieking woman whose cheeks were no longer porcelain white but red as a cook's with anger, her blond curls damp on her forehead. No longer attractively dressed in pale blue or pink tulle or crépe de Chine but still in her nightdress and slippers, and without cosmetics or perfume. Doña Josefina would never have appeared thus at table, he reflected bitterly, never. She continued to complain—of boredom, of uneducated company: “merchants, shopkeepers, ranchers! And once I dined with generals, governors, statesmen!”—till he heaved himself to his feet, shouting, “And why were you so eager to leave them, their company, your glorious country, and come here?” She stopped her harangue then and looked at him, appalled. “Because it was all destroyed,” she said at last, in a much lower, less confident voice. “You didn't see it but I did—how it was all up, finished.” “So then you are lucky, are you not,” he demanded, “to have come away?” and lurched off himself, to his study and the soothing company of his Great Dane, El Duque, and the silver flask of brandy behind the leather-bound volumes of the encyclopedia. He sat in his great leather chair and El Duque laid a drooling jowl upon his slippered foot with a groan of sympathy. Fondling the dog's ears, he grumbled at himself under his breath for not having made inquiries about the woman he was to marry and her mysterious lack of family or means.