The Zigzag Way (12 page)

“But she was living on his property, and with his wealth. Weren't they divorced?”

“No, no, no. In such families that does not happen. There may be scandal about their business, their bank accounts, their dealings, but not about the family. That is not permitted. No scandal. And Doña Vera was already something of a scandal.”

Eric watched over Andrés shoulder as his pretty wife came out of the kitchen with a pot of coffee and went around refilling cups, while her husband told tales to the visitor. André went on, “No one knew anything about her, you see. And in such families it is important to know. But she was just a young woman who had fled Europe when war broke out. Who was she? Why did she flee? No one knew.”

“Many Europeans came at the time, didn't they? Refugees?”

“True.” André grew more grave, folding his hand around his coffee cup. “Refugees from many countries and many pasts. Politics of all kinds.”

“So what were hers?”

He shrugged. “One more mystery. Many more rumors. Some have said she was a collaborator who got out before it was too late. Some say the opposite—that she was in the resistance, about to be betrayed. That is the story she herself encourages, I am told. For that reason, I think it was the opposite.”

Eric was surprised by Andre's shrewdness; he had not expected it. But that did not mean it was to be trusted. “Is there proof?” he asked. “Evidence?”

“Not here. She has hidden herself very well, has she not? Who will find her here? But they say there are archives in Europe—in Austria and in Germany—where there are letters, documents that could tell us something.”

“Hasn't anyone done research into them?”

“No one over here. Perhaps in Europe—but in Europe they don't know her Mexican life. I don't think she was so important, only that she maybe knew people who were. You know? Her story has many chapters—European, Mexican, Huichol . . .”

“And what do you think of that?” Eric asked, suddenly curious about Andre's interest in this story.

“Of–?”

“Of walking away, leaving behind one chapter, starting another?”

André did not reply at once. He drew on his cigarette, pursing his lips and releasing spirals of smoke. Watching them uncurl and disperse in the air, Eric wondered if that was his comment. Eventually, though, he crushed his cigarette in a saucer with the name of the inn painted in curlicues on a brown glaze, and clasped his hands on the tabletop. Eric could see that the question had made him uncomfortable. Perhaps he was thinking of his own story, and its different chapters. He might also be thinking of his country's story. Certainly his face had taken on a melancholy look.

“I think that, on one level or another, it is what we do,” he said finally. “People, countries. If we think about our sins, our guilt, it is a heavy baggage we carry.” He scratched his head. “It is why, over here, people go to church so happily—every day, many times a day, whenever they pass by one. They go in, make a sign of the cross, so, pray a little, light a candle, and come out—forgiven, ready to move on.”

“And those of us who are not believers?”

André shrugged. “Perhaps we must forgive ourselves.”

“Do you believe one can?” Eric asked in surprise.

“No
. I think more is required,
much
more. Sacrifice, perhaps. Like in the old days—animal, material, even human.”

They thought about that: everywhere in this country one saw the stains of sacrifice; blood was inextricable from history.

“How do you know when you've sacrificed enough—goats, chickens, boys, virgins? Gold, silver, jewels? How much before you're forgiven?”

“Perhaps the priest tells you. Or you tell yourself. You forgive yourself. But that is not enough. It is others who must forgive you. You must earn it.”

“Can there be forgiveness for killing, for taking life?”

“No, I don't believe that.”

“I don't either.”

“So perhaps one must live a life of penance. Of service.”

“Do you think Doña Vera's life is that, of penance? By trying to serve the Huichol? An interesting idea. She does have them stay in her house.”

André sat back, his posture relaxing as if a certain danger had passed. He even laughed. “A good trophy, eh? Something to show off with, no?” Eric suddenly found that he had placed his finger on something that had troubled him. “It is strange, but she never speaks
to
them, only
of
them to the foreigners who are present.”

“You know why?” Andre's eyes were twinkling. He seemed capable of a good deal of mischief. “I tell you why. I believe—I believe—she does not know the language! That is why. She has never learned the language! Such ‘experts' are to be found here, in Mexico, you know. Difficult for her to keep up the pretense. Did you not find it so?”

His laughter made his wife come over to them, with her coffeepot. “What stories are you telling our guest?” she asked him, and stood ruffling his hair with one hand, affectionately, leaning into his shoulder. “About the ghost who haunts our inn? Or the bandido who was running from the law and slept here one night,
the federates
in the next room? You see,” she told Eric, “André is our official storyteller.”

“This is a story about a neighbor, Paola. The Queen of the Sierra down below. Eric spent a night at her place.”

“Ohh,” she said dismissively. “I have seen that when two foreigners meet, they only want to talk about other foreigners. So much they like to hear gossip and tell gossip about themselves.”

“True,” Eric had to admit; what else had they been doing after all?

Her level, dark gaze made him feel somehow ashamed. She made him think of Em; Em would have shared her attitude. “Actually,” he said to change the subject, “it isn't Doña Vera or her center I came to see. It was really the ghost town that interested me. It doesn't look much like one,” he added, glancing out of the open door at the side street, where customers were beginning to cluster around the food stall and people were going up and down with their market bags.

“Oh, today is a special day. At other times, it is empty. During the Revolution, you know, the mines collapsed and they were not revived. There is no living to be made. It is sad.”

“But you came here to live,” Eric reminded them.

“Because there was so much space, and it was free,” Paola explained. “My father, he came from a mining family but he could not find work himself. He did a little on his own, like so many of the people left here, but it didn't bring in enough. So when he found this house empty, its owners gone, he moved in, and with my mother's help, he started the inn.”

“Do you have enough guests to stay?” Eric could not refrain from asking.

“Unos pocos,”
she replied. “A few. Pilgrims come for the feast of San Francisco. Also for el Día de los Muertos, as you see. And now, a few artists too—like André.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh yes,” she said, beaming. “He has his studio upstairs and he is painting there. You must come and see.”

André, embarrassed by her suggestion, brushed it off. “Eric has come to see the mines, Paola. His father worked in them, can you imagine?”

“My grandfather,” he said hastily. “It was many years ago. Those were bad times in England. People were looking for work. I thought I would look for the graves of those who died here.” They looked distressed now and André stood up, saying, “You did not tell me. That is a very different reason for coming.”

“Yes, well, I'm not sure if I shall find any sign of them.”

Now both began to speak together. André wanted to draw him a map of the town on a paper napkin Paola had made available. “Here, the plaza. Here, the
museo
—”

“Closed today because of the holiday.”

“And here the
cateiral
. It is grand, built by the priest who found the first silver here. You must see it.”

“Also the grand houses around the plaza where the managers and so on lived—”

“Yes, some held banquets and balls when President Díaz visited—”

Eric assured them his grandparents could not have lived grandly at all so André drew another road on his map, the one that led up to the mines where the Cornish miners had had their cottages. “They were called Jack, all of them—Jack. They made a football field, they played the first football in Mexico—”

But, they admitted together, there was little left to see. The
palenque
, the
plaza de toros
, abandoned. “You see, it
is
a ghost town. In ruins.”

That, Eric said, was what he had come to see.

“Only today is a festival so it comes to life. You have never seen this festival of the dead?”

“We do have one kind of like it at home,” Eric reluctantly divulged. “Halloween, the night before All Saints' Day.”

“You do? Ohh?”

He tried to describe it to them, the pumpkins carved into lanterns, the children going up and down the street at night, dressed in costumes and masks to beg for candy—but gave up in the face of their incomprehension. “I was always frightened of it myself,” he confessed. “I used to hide, not go out.”

“Oh, but here it is not like that. We scatter the petals of the
zempasúchtl
on our doorsteps, to help the dead find their way home, and put their photographs out so they can see they have come to the right house, and candles to see the way because if we do not, they will have to light their fingers and burn,” Paola explained. “Also copal, incense, and flowers with a strong scent.”

“And food with a strong aroma,” André prompted her.

“Oh yes, and after the dead have eaten, that aroma will be gone because the dead will have taken away its spirit.”

“To last them a whole year.”

“And for the
angelitos
, the little children who died, we put out little things—little pieces of chocolate, Chiclets, peanuts, and of course
azücar
—sugar birds and lambs. If we make
sopa
, or stew, it is mild for the children, not spicy.”

“Families say they can hear the dishes clinking when the children are there,” André broke in.

“And among the
campesinos
, the peasants, people put out brooms and tortilla presses for their daughters and spades and hoes for their sons so in the world they have gone to, they can continue the lives they had here.”

That sounded so terribly sad to Eric that he wondered now if, as a child, he had not sensed the shadow behind the Hallowe'en masquerade, a shadow others chose to ignore, cast by the gnomon between night and day, life and death. It wavered before him once again, and he was unsettled and had to make an effort to listen to what the young pair so animatedly told him.

“On this day you visit homes where you knew the ones who died, and you bring offerings, and stay to eat with the family.”

“You must do that. There are stories told about what happens to people who don't. Tell him.”

“Yes, one man who did not believe all this, he went out drinking, all night long. When he walked home in the morning, he saw a crowd of dead people returning to their world, and his parents were there too. They were empty-handed. Others were taking back armfuls of offerings and his parents had only clay in their hands and it was burning. When he returned home, he fell ill and died.”

“But the dead do not always like to go back. The
angelitos
, who come at midday on the thirty-first of October, have to leave on the first of November, at noon. Then the elders arrive and must return on the second. At three o'clock fireworks will be lit as a signal for them to leave. Also, a priest will walk through our town, ringing a bell and chanting. When the dead hear that, they leave for the panteón, and we go too to wash and clean and decorate the tombs, make them ready to receive them.”

“You should go to the panteón to see this. It is at the top of the road—in the cemetery on the mountain. It is a good day you have chosen to visit your countrymen who lived here once.”

Yes, Eric assured them, shaking off the shadows of that old fear, that was what he would do and now he would set off before it grew hotter.

Suddenly the dining room with its bright checked cloths, the kitchen with its clinking sounds, the chatter and laughter of the maids, passed into another mood. Everyone, everything seemed to gather around as if they shared what he was surely thinking, and feeling, on this day.
“Adiós,”
they called, and watched him go.

 

E
RIC CAME OUT
of the inn by the front door so that he could cross again the square where he had arrived in the dark and see by daylight the casuarina trees that had made the sound of a stormy sea outside his window all night.

A man in a straw hat was sweeping the paths clean with a long twig broom. The dust swirled around in the beams that slanted through the trees and made the sunlight seem hazy and soft like very fine, silken fur.

The store where he had stopped last night to ask for directions was now doing a brisk business in breakfast rolls; people were coming by to help themselves from the trays with tongs and filling their baskets. The air smelled of biscuits.

Eric had the map drawn for him by André on a paper napkin and his backpack was still light on his shoulders. The cathedral appeared to be on another, higher level: he could see its dome from here, above the flat-topped roofs that rose in tiers. He made his way toward it up a steep lane where booths were being set up to offer the holidaymakers what they might need for the celebration: tallow candles and buckets filled with amaranth, marigolds, and gladioli, trays full of sugar skulls and freshly baked rolls, sprinkled with colored sugar, the
pan de muertos
. Since visitors had come into town, even the shops behind the booths were taking advantage of the extra custom, and putting out displays of ladies' underwear, leather belts and sandals, plastic and aluminum kitchenware. Women had set up their stalls and were flipping tortillas, stirring gravies in earthenware pots, serving the men who sat waiting on benches. A dog ran past, followed by a whole tribe of them, their tails aloft like flags. Donkeys labored uphill with loads of firewood, edging Eric into the drain alongside.