The Zigzag Way (8 page)

 

H
E OUGHT
to have paid more attention. Even now, with Roderigo long since dead and buried in the family vault, where no one visited him, it gave her satisfaction to think how mistaken he had been and how much he must have regretted it when, leaving him to a family council in San Luis Potosí to which he had insisted she come, she had slipped away, scandalously alone, and visited for herself the Hacienda de la Soledad, the house at the foot of the mountain from which the silver had been extracted that made the family wealthy, wealthy enough to own this hacienda among so many others. The others, however, being occupied by his mother, his aunts, his sisters and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, uncles and cousins, had been so many extensions of the prison house in “the best locality” in Mexico City to which he had brought her, while the Hacienda de la Soledad was from the very first her own: no one else wanted it.

In all her European years, she had never had solitude or space. No one in Roderigo's family or circle could know how she had lived—the small, cramped apartment at the top of a building of stained and peeling stucco, its dripping walls, torn linoleum, and its battered stove and pots, smells of lavatories down the hall and cabbage cooking in the kitchen, and the fear of losing even that.

She had made her way out of it, first by catching the eye of one of the men newly arrived in their city who dined nightly in the restaurant at a table on which she waited, then by persuading him to pay for dancing lessons, something her own parents could not afford to give her. This had led to small roles in musical shows put on in theaters scattered across the city, but she had made the most of them, she had not gone unnoticed. There had been rewards—bouquets sent around to the stage door, invitations to parties, the occasional weekend in a country villa. Of course there was the unavoidable return to the family, its querulous needs and demands and criticisms, but these ceased mercifully once she was able to find positions through her new friends and patrons for her father and brothers—lowly ones, true, but in these difficult times even those were welcome. If they did not last, she was not to blame (although her mother clearly did: “I told you so—” she shrieked the night Vera's father came home bloody and beaten by a group of anti-Nazis, “I told you so!”). Next it was the director at the theater, polite and circumspect Herr Schmidt with his spotless white cuffs and cashmere scarf, beckoning her into his office as she went by in her costume and makeup and perspiring from her dance, to warn her to be careful of her friends “because we cannot protect you out there.” Coming from him, the words had authority. She had not been unaware of the rumors and fears swirling thick and dark around them, making everyone realize that the bright lights were about to go out, only she had so much wanted it all to last.

It was then, in the hotel where she went to see if one familiar face could be found to reassure her of the protection she had enjoyed, that Roderigo appeared instead—large, foolish, and fumbling, but all fresh linen, gleaming leather, and the smell of bay rum. An outsider, a foreigner, presenting an opening to a foreign world. Not that she had ever craved one before, or had any idea of what it might be—the places and people he named were unknown to her—but compelling for precisely that reason.

A graveyard of history—that was what she found herself surveying when she first saw the Hacienda de la Soledad, a ruin of blackened stones, fallen beams, and cavernous halls where her footsteps sounded like hammers tapping on the great stone tiles. All around parched land with the wind roaring like an unimpeded flood through its emptiness. She had herself driven up the mountain and followed streets silenced by white dust and lined with doorless, windowless, and often roofless houses in which lizards hid among weeds. On the steps of the cathedral, so immense and so grand as to seem like a mirage in the blinding light, some Franciscan priests wrapped in shadowy robes watched her pass. She asked the chauffeur to continue along a dirt track, where a few adobe walls stood among the thorn trees and cacti, up to the scarred and flattened mountaintop. Here she ordered him to stop outside the whitewashed walls around a silent cemetery and its desolate chapel on a rock, and got out to walk. He came out after her with her linen hat and she put it on irritatedly, and waved him away, then set out to find some trace of the mines that had once belonged to Roderigo. Except for a few abandoned excavations and ruined entrances to shafts and tunnels, there was none. The silence was so intense that she could hear the wings of the
zopilotes
circling watchfully above on currents of air; she had to imagine the sounds the mountain must once have contained—explosions of dynamite, small avalanches of gravel followed by the thunder of falling boulders, the rumble of metal trolleys along rusty tracks, jackhammers, whistles and sirens. She felt certain their echoes must still resound, and seeing the dark eye of a cave in the mountainside, entered it in the desire to hear that pounding and beating for herself. Perhaps even the hoofs of Zapata's horses, carrying the message of the Revolution:
“Tierra y Libertad!”
Taking a few steps into that darkness, she was brought to a standstill by the total absence of light. Not a chink, not a shaft, and not the possibility of one: it could only grow darker, blacker, more totally. Still, she stood waiting to see if something would materialize—an eye that watched, a movement.

There was a scramble of footsteps on the gravel, the panting breath of someone quite distraught. “Señora, señora,” the chauffeur called, “come back, instantly, I beg you.” When she did, she found him whey-faced and listened to his scolding. “There are rattlesnakes there, scorpions as big as your hand. Shafts you could fall through. Please, please, what would the señor say to me?”

She gave him a disdainful smile and had him drive her back to the hacienda, telling him to go and find the caretaker while she took another look around. She went down to a jacaranda tree on the slope below from where she could look out over a shallow lake on fire with afternoon light, and the mesa beyond, taking on the purple and crimson brushstrokes of evening.
“Tierra y Libertad,”
she said to herself and then, realizing there was no one to hear, shouted out,
“Tierra y Libertad!”

The chauffeur, sitting on a bench outside the caretaker's hut with the mug of
café con leche
he had been given, muttered to himself that he had always suspected she was
una loca
.

 

O
NCE SHE HAD
moved in, Vera engaged the man who acted as caretaker of the hacienda, and lived below it in a shed enclosed by a fence of cacti and thorn, to lend her one of the horses he kept among the more useful burros, pigs, and turkeys, and teach her to ride it. The first time she mounted it and set off, she said to herself that this was how she would make the land hers.

She knew she would have to be strong to live here: she had to kill scorpions daily in the ruins of the house before it was repaired, and sometimes the silence was so intense that she could hear the termites' tiny jaws gnawing at the beams above her while sawdust rained down on the furniture, the floor, her bed, her hair. Once, on a hot, still night, she left the windows of her room unshuttered as she fell asleep and in the night was awakened by a searing pain on her shoulder. There was no one to call for help till morning, when the caretaker's wife came, looked at the blister growing there, and told her it was surely caused by the urine of a bat. Vera remembered that some had swooped in and around at dusk, and screamed at the woman for help. She did eventually bring it—there was no doctor or hospital for miles—in the form of an old sorceress, and Vera had had to submit to her potions and poultices, which, it had to be admitted, did bring down the swelling, although the scar never vanished.

On another occasion, a half-starved man appeared in the courtyard long after the door to the road had been locked for the night. She sent him around to the kitchen for bread and told her reluctant maids to let him stay the night on sacks in the storeroom where supplies of maize, rice, beans, sugar, coffee, and tobacco were kept. As they predicted, he was gone by morning, along with the silver candlesticks from the table and the ornate gilt clock she had brought from Mexico City. The caretaker came that afternoon to inform her that the police were inquiring after a man who had escaped from prison, where he was held on a charge of murder. “Still, he was a beggar,” she said to Jaime, “should he have been sent away hungry?” and she said nothing to Roderigo when he came on one of his rare visits.

 

E
VERY DAY
she made herself ride miles out alone and learn how to endure the sun and thirst and solitude. She rode over the mesa, where a stranger could easily be lost in the featureless monotony of rubble, and learned that it had secret features and contours for those who looked. There were invisible arroyos marked only by the unexpected stand of drooping
álamos
or
ahuehueté
trees, and an occasional isolated rancho with flat-topped adobe huts where dogs barked to see her pass and women stopped pounding maize or scrubbing laundry in shallow troughs to gaze at her in silence. These ranchos would be fringed with dry cornstalks that seemed to mutter and murmur to each other conspiratorially, in a language she had to master.

The sun followed her through the day, a fierce and watchful eye. She found the evenings best, when the sky paled, the earth darkened, and the air ceased to be as sharp as a glinting knife and turned gentler, mild. Occasionally she stayed out so late that she would decide to camp for the night instead of returning home; she would light a small fire of brush in the lee of some boulders and lie rolled in a blanket to listen to her horse pawing at the stones and watch the stars wheel overhead.

It was there that she had her first encounter with the Huichol. Winding uphill in single file like pilgrims from an earlier, primal world, some barefoot, some in soundless sandals, they had bows and arrows with them and carried bags slung over their shoulders, clearly still hunter-gatherers. Although they politely returned her greeting, they did not pause or show the slightest interest in her foreign presence: she might have been a cactus to get around or a stone they had stumbled upon. She could not make out who they might be: she could see from their dress and appearance that they were not local people, who were all farmers or herders. On returning to the hacienda, she asked Jaime, when he came to help her dismount, if he knew. “Huichol, Huichol,” he told her. It was the first time that she heard the word. He went on to tell her that it was the time of year when they came on their long pilgrimage from as far away as Nayarit and Jalisco in search of the peyote cactus that grew only in this region. He described it to her but she could never see it, it blended in so completely with the pebbly rubble of the soil. Why would they want it so much as to come some three hundred miles on foot to collect it, she wondered, and Jaime, laughing, told her how it gave them visions that made them see the spirits they worshiped. “So they're not
católicos?”
she asked. “No, no,” Jaime assured her, and called them, derisively,
paganos
, heathens.

Vera, who despised Jaime and his slatternly wife and their numerous snuffling children and thought of them, privately, as half-caste, found her curiosity aroused by the aloofness and selfcontainment of the Huichol she had seen, characteristics, she thought, of a higher level of being, but she was cautious. She knew she would have to be patient and wait, not make any hasty or overt attempt to engage them till they became used to her following them on their route, at a discreet distance, and came to see her as unthreatening. (Jaime had told her they were afraid of running into local farmers or ranchers who would chase them off their property and have them arrested for trespassing.) So it was a long time before she even attempted to convey to them, through gestures and a little Spanish, on finding a group so fatigued and dehydrated that they had sunk onto their haunches in the midday blaze of heat and seemed hardly able to proceed, that her hacienda was open to them and they could come in and refresh themselves. She had tables set out in the courtyard and pitchers of water and
te de Jamaica
brought out to them by her supercilious maids, who expressed resentment at having to serve them till she was able to teach them better. She had her visitors show her their embroidery and beadwork and the decorated pots they had brought with them, and bought pieces to display on the walls and tables of her huge, echoing rooms. When Roderigo came and brought an occasional visitor, it was clear they thought her crazy to collect such objects, but when she insisted on their taking some back to the city for display and sale, they were equally amazed to discover that folk art had become fashionable, thanks to such flamboyant leaders of the art world as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and could actually be sold. Vera saw to it that the Huichol received the profits. Their gratitude gave her an inkling of what it might be not to be the recipient but the distributor of largesse.

 

A
LETTER ARRIVED
inquiring about her growing collection. It bore a stamp and a name that were recognizably German and made her heart clench as if it were locking itself up. She did not reply. But the author of the letter—which had the letterhead of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin-Dahlem—did not give up and enlisted other Mesoamericanists to plead with her to share what she knew of Huichol lore and legend, artifacts and objects.

At that time, she knew nothing, and how could she confess that? She wanted nothing to do with academics who would only expose her ignorance: she had no book learning to speak of. What was she to tell them—that she had learned to act and dance instead?

So she held out till it dawned upon her that her position was a unique one and she could make something of that. Something that would either impress or appall Roderigo and his family—probably the latter. At the end of a particularly long, arid day when Jaime and his family and the kitchen staff were all away at a fiesta, and the silence rang in her ears as if she were the only living person on earth, she relented and agreed to a visit by a pair of scholars, from the Instituto Nacional Indigenista. It was a very long way for them to come but, once there, they were sufficiently impressed to declare it was the perfect setting for a conference of Mesoamericanists. That was when her defenses truly collapsed. She whirled around—and made her resistant staff whirl too—to have the hacienda polished, buffed, furbished and refurbished to receive her guests. In a panic, she even begged friends in Mexico City (never considered “friends” before) to send help—and they sent her Maggie Paget, a young English girl in need (an orphan serving as a companion to her godmother in Yucatán, she had been left stranded by the old lady's death), who brought with her, in a cart filled with hay, a Bösendorfer piano, and from the first day made herself indispensable. The conference was a success—and the legend of Doña Vera was launched.