The Zigzag Way (9 page)

The younger of the academics had even stayed on to make a film about her life. Being the star of a film—how could she have resisted that? It had seemed as if, in the most bizarre and unexpected way, her past had found a way to fuse with the present. Posing for them on horseback amid the cacti or in her courtyard with her arms around her Huichol friends, she flashed a smile at the camera such as she had always been meant to but never had before.

 

P
ERHAPS IF
she had known then what it would all lead to, she would never have begun. If she had known, she would not have shared her Huichol with anyone, but joined them in the mountains, alone. As it was, she now had pathetic creatures like the young man she had just dismissed come and sit at her table, waiting for some crumbs to fall. There they sat, worrying—she could see how they worried—about their research papers, their dissertations, their careers, their little pining lives. Coming out to the sierra in the hope that she, and of course the Huichol, would open doors to vaster, richer worlds. They reminded her of the
mineros
searching in desperation for less and less productive veins of gold, or the missionaries who infiltrated everywhere in search of souls to collect for the Lord. Now these souls had to be collected for another institution, the university. Doña Vera despised all equally.

She remembered one silly woman she had had as a guest, a very silly woman indeed who clasped her hands to her bosom and exclaimed, with shining eyes, “Oh, I wish I had been born a Huichol woman! Perhaps in my next life I will be born one!” to which she had snapped—quite aware that she had had such moments and aspirations herself once—“Yes? You think you will be able to grind corn and light the fire and make tortillas for your men while they are sleeping off a night's drinking? And have a new baby every year tied in your rebozo to nurse?” and the woman had cringed.

Many years later it still pleased her to think of putting that woman in her place. Not up in the clouds but down, at her feet. You had to have lived in Europe in the times when she did, to have survived and succeeded where people around you were falling to pieces, starving, going off to prison—or somewhere—never to be heard from again, to know what it took.

The old irritation and scorn returned. She called after Consuela, half asleep on her feet as she carried away the coffee tray, “Have you cleared the dining table? Have you set it for breakfast? Have you remembered the fresh napkins?” and she waited, her hand on the banister, to see Consuela put out the lights, one by one, leaving just the one on the staircase for her to go up to her own apartment, leaving the house below in darkness so that the crickets could come out and begin to chirp and the owl in the tree outside to call: they knew their roles in her house.

 

E
RIC, LEFT IN
semidarkness, could not resist peering into the library, where a light was still on. He both surprised and was himself surprised by Miss Paget, who had not retired but appeared still at work behind a pile of books at her desk. “I didn't mean to startle you,” Eric at once said on seeing her put her hand to her mouth in alarm. “I—um—I just hoped to pick up something to read in bed. But—”

She rose at once, smoothing down her collar and straightening her glasses. (Eric could not help wondering if she had been having a drink behind her books.) “Can I help?” she offered, as if it were ten in the morning, the library open, and she on duty.

Eric wandered around, stroking desktops and book spines as if reacquainting himself with a familiar world, which, in a way, he was. “Um—a history, perhaps? Is there one of the mining town above? It's what I've come to see.”

Miss Paget pondered, then shook her head. But she did find him two books she thought provided information on “modern” Mexico. “Most of what we have here is on pre-Columbian Mexico,” she explained, and handed him Alexander von Humboldt's
Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain
and Carl Sartorius's
Mexico and the Mexicans
. “But these are nineteenth century,” she said, “so there's sure to be much on the mining industry.”

“Just the thing,” he assured her, and thanked her profusely before he left. From the weight of the books, their dustiness, and the dates they bore—1811 and 1859—he was certain they would help to put him to sleep.

 

P
ROFESSOR WAINWRIGHT
, lowering himself onto his bed, bent to unlace his shoes. Mrs. Wainwright studied him over the top of her book. She could not keep a somewhat smug expression from her greasily lotioned and rose-scented face: she had slipped away before she could be made to see
Queen of the Sierra
yet again, and spent a happy hour in bed with a thriller instead. “So, what did the students think of it?” she asked because she could not refrain from rubbing it in, her little triumph.

The professor removed his glasses and put them carefully away. “I did not ask,” he replied after a moment. “I did not want to hear.”

She chortled.
“And
she got in that line about not understanding anything unless you sleep on stones and freeze.”

“Well, yes,” he agreed, sliding a finger under his bow tie to loosen it. “She always does.”

“I guess it was for the benefit of the new guy,” said his wife, the thriller having made her wide-awake and alert. “Couldn't be for
us
, we've heard it too often.”

He rose to his feet and stretched, snapping his suspenders and yawning.

“One year,” she said, and she too had said it before, “just
one
year, we should go to Acapulco instead,” and turned back to the thriller.

 

E
RIC, RETURNING TO
his room and feeling a wave of tiredness take him up and roll him over, was undressing listlessly when he became aware that the room was unusually warm and stuffy: a fire was burning in the grate. It irritated him somehow unendurably: Why, on a warm night, should anyone light a fire? And who was it that so freely used the poor, diminished resources of this land in order to provide it to foreign tourists, even if unasked for and unwanted? What would
Em
think? And what, too, would she say about it to Doña Vera?

He threw open the window to let out the smoke, lowered himself onto the bed, and let the cool night air enter and wash over him. He soon found that it had the effect of making him wide-awake again. Although his bones were aching from the journey, his head was suddenly clear. He picked up the
Political Essay
and read:

 

The Indian tenateros, the beasts of burden in the mines of Mexico, remain loaded with a weight of 275 to 300 pounds for a span of six hours. In the galleries of Valenciana, they are exposed to temperatures of 22° to 25° (71–75° F) and during this time they ascend and descend several thousands of steps in pits of an inclination of 45°. The tenateros carry the minerals in bags made of the threads of pité. To protect their shoulders (for the mineros are generally naked to the middle) they place a woolen covering under this bag. We meet in the mine some 50 or 60 of these porters, among whom are men above sixty and boys of ten or twelve years of age. In ascending the stairs they throw their bodies forward and rest on a staff. They walk in a zigzag direction because they have found from long experience that their respiration is less impeded when they traverse obliquely the current of air which enters the pits from without.

 

At this point he laid the book across his chest to face unimpeded that same current of air as had met the miners, forcing them to adopt the lurching, zigzag motion that he felt he had been, throughout his journey, imitating. Was this the world his grandfather had found when he crossed the ocean and sought out new territory where he might stake his claim? The effort to enter that past, as if it were a mine that no light pierced and where no air circulated, exhausted Eric and he gave himself up to sleep, gratefully.

 

I
N THE LIBRARY
, Miss Paget turned off the last of the green-shaded lamps, having first made her desktop clear and tidy for the morning. She knew Doña Vera did not like the lights kept on after she retired. In fact, one of her duties was to walk down the length of the corridor and make sure the resident students had switched off their lights, too. This Doña Vera had instructed her to do but, although she did walk down the corridor on her way to her small room at the end of it, she could not bring herself to tap on anyone's door and call out. There were things that Maggie Paget would not do, not even for Doña Vera. She comforted herself by saying softly, “Shh, shh,” outside doors where she heard voices, and laughter, and by the thought that they would not hear her. Silence and invisibility were
her
life's lessons.

 

I
N HER ROOM
, Doña Vera removed her kimono, dropping it where Consuela would pick it up in the morning. It was shot silk in the colors of the quetzal and when it fell away, she was reduced to an inner layer of gray cotton so that a reverse cycle had been performed from that of chrysalis to butterfly or fledgling to peacock. In that drab garb, she went across to the painted armoire. It creaked as she opened it so that she could look at the leather-framed photograph on the shelf of Ramón, the first, dear, dearest, dearest of all Huichol friends she had made—oldest, dearest, most beloved. Here he was, Ramón, when young, dressed in snow-white cotton, a wide belt of embroidery, and a straw hat from which small emblems of the peyote cactus dangled like six- or eight- or twelve-petaled flowers. He was smiling; she too smiled, and they were young together, younger. Soon it would be el Día de los Muertos, and she touched his face in the photograph—black blending with sepia—and said, “Ramón,” her lips parting with the crackling sound of paper being torn. “Ramón, if I put out tequila for you tomorrow, and a cigar, and tamales, then, will you come? Will you?” But the face in the photograph looked past her, smiling, while she caressed the feather-tipped arrows he had given her, and felt the feathers caress her in return. She tried to make him meet her eyes but she had taken the photograph in slanting light, he had trouble looking directly at her, he squinted and looked into the distance, smiling as if he did not hear her. She had asked him year after year and he had not come—the tequila was left untouched, the cigar unlit, the tamales uneaten.

She hurled the door to the armoire shut, almost splitting it, causing her pugs to yelp with alarm, and went over to her bed and lay down, crossing her arms on her breast and closing her eyes on the luminous image of him.

He had been brought to her as a boy who had hurt his arm while on the pilgrimage, the youngest member of a group from Nayarit. They had all been weakened by that long journey, and the fasting that went with it, and the trek over the stony terrain. She had ordered the kitchen staff to provide them with food straightaway and invited them to stay. They refused, but when she saw they had a young boy with them who held his arm in such agony and yet held back his tears, she brought out her box of medicines and bandages, and treated it.

Any other child would have winced and cried. Instead, he kept his eyes wide open, gazing around him as if the objects he saw compensated him for his pain. At the end of the painful procedure, he ran across to what had clearly captivated him—the pug that a Franciscan father had presented to her on a visit just that afternoon, so small and so bizarre with its dark frown drawn down over its head like a stocking mask. Lifting it onto his lap, he had cradled the dog and made its little curl of a tail wag for the first time since it had entered her house. Watching, she felt certain that this was the place for the child to be—in her home, with her. Yet, when the family left and he with them, she was struck by the fear that she and her little pug would not see the boy again, he would surely die on the way. They promised to stop next year, and when they did not, she was certain he
had
died.

He reappeared three years later, grown into a youth, agile and fit, springing down the mountain from rock to rock to greet her. He was cured—he showed her the scar on his arm, healed and pink and silken to touch—and he was older, aware—as not before—of his beauty and charm. Unlike his family, who had been made nervous by her house and all that she owned and offered them, he was eager to see it again and accept what she had to give. Where was Bandido? he asked, remembering the pug dog's name. It was the beginning of a legendary friendship, irregular and infrequent but revived over some ten years, again and again—till, abruptly it ended.

Now, supine, she felt that loss again, the black coyote that hunted her down at night. She nearly broke out again into the howl she had uttered on hearing of his death—senseless, pointless, falling from a roof he was repairing in his village (so his family said, while others maintained it was in pursuit of a girl who lived nearby, and still others that it was when he was being chased by someone with a knife after a drunken brawl and that he had taken too much peyote and run out of control, but what did it matter what they said?)—throwing open her arms to catch him when he fell. She had promised to take care of him—why had she not?

If she did howl out loud, no one heard—or, if they did, they would have taken it for a dog baying on a rancho in the dark, or even a coyote on the mountainside.

If they had looked out of their windows, they would have seen the heaving mass of the tree outside, the outline of the mountain against the night sky, interrupting those profound depths pierced by stars.

 

T
HE ARMOIRE CREAKED
open, waking her, and in the dark, Ramón the god appeared, no longer flesh and blood but paint and mask and feathers, a wooden idol whose eyelids moved. They lifted, and the eyes that looked out were real and alive. They stared at her, lying on her bed, old and ugly and shrunken—because she too was real and alive. His wooden lips parted to smile, but instead of smiling, they uttered a caw. The lips were beaks, painted beaks that cawed. It was not Ramón but a
zopilote
pretending to be Ramón, and it was leading an army of
zopilotes
that was emerging from the armoire, two by two, in perfect formation. They were not flying but walking, marching, kicking out their big clawed feet and stiff booted legs that might have looked wooden if they had not also looked military.