Free The Zigzag Way by Anita Desai Page A

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