The Zigzag Way by Anita Desai Read Free Book Online

into the Sierra Madre Oriental, which he had been making his way toward with decreasing hope and ambition. The driver of a truck heard him forlornly voice his destination and unexpectedly offered a ride. He had only to pick up a sick dog at a veterinarian’s, he said, and then he would be on his way. Barely refreshed by a warm and rather flat soda bought at a booth, Eric climbed into the seat next to the driver. He had a moment of terror when the truck veered off the paved road and bumped its way over the desert to what looked like an abandoned shack, certain he was being kidnapped and would be robbed. But instead a young woman in a white lab coat came out with a limp and dispirited animal in her arms and helped the driver lift it into the truck, then smiled and waved goodbye. Now they set off on a highway that was drawn with the precision of a geometric diagram over the rubble of worn and ground-down hills, rattling over cobbles the shape and size of human skulls. The only other sight along the journey was an occasional giant maguey reaching its thorn-tipped leaves into the evenly metallic sky above. There was no sign of their destination; in every direction the dark stony land stretched out, the stands of maguey rising as stiff and gray as the stones themselves, and over it the sky and the light, both so immense that it did not seem there would ever be an end to them.
    This was no longer the Mexico of color and romance, Eric noted, and yet its emptiness and petrifaction were undeniably Mexican too.
    Hearing Eric sigh in spite of himself with weariness and hopelessness, the truck driver glanced sympathetically and pointed his finger through the smeared and dusty windshield.
“Allá arriba,”
he said, “la Hacienda de la Soledad.”
    Eric straightened up to peer where he pointed. He could neither see roof or homestead nor believe that anyone could, or would, live on this desolate altiplano. But as they drew close enough to make out the first range of bullet-colored mountains, a crater suddenly opened up in the earth as if a meteor had fallen and formed it; a wide, basinlike depression appeared that had not been visible from a distance. Around a still sheet of apparently shallow water, dry
yacaté
grass waved and susurrated, responding to a breeze so imperceptible that nothing less delicate or sensitive could have detected it. There were a few desiccated mesquite trees on its bank and the more graceful, drooping
pirul
. Egrets and herons stood stock-still in the shallows as if they were roots or branches anchored to the clay below. Everything seemed fossilized except for the ripple of light that ran through the scene as it might in a mirage.
    On the other side of the lake, against the flank of the mountain, there was a long, low building of stone, on three sides surrounded by an adobe wall that blended in so perfectly with the land that it could easily have been overlooked.
    As they rounded the lake and drew closer, Eric made out horses in a corral below the hacienda, unexpectedly alive and mobile.
    â€œThat
is where Doña Vera lives?” he murmured, more to himself than to his companion. “It is—incredible.” Of course: just as Doña Vera herself had been incredible.
    The driver laughed, pleased with the effect it had on his passenger, and changed gears with a triumphant shriek as he turned onto a dusty track that ascended the mountainside at an angle from the highway. It brought them around to the entrance to the hacienda set in the adobe wall. He looked both amused and sympathetic as he handed Eric’s bag to him and let him off.
“Hasta luego,”
he called, and the bandaged dog, suddenly revived, sat up and echoed him with two short barks. Then they turned back to the highway, the truck taking to the silence as a jackhammer to stone.
    Eric used a knocker shaped like a woman’s hand, its tapering fingers holding a brass ball that beat upon the worn wooden panel. When